Cam would look into them both, but he wasn’t convinced of their involvement, and other than those two, he wasn’t having much luck with his search. He’d handled a hell of a lot of cases over the years, had pissed off a lot of people, which meant he was in for a lot of digging.
The woman standing in front of him right now was the only person he’d consider asking for help, but he didn’t want her involved any more than he wanted his brothers asking around. If the danger was real, it was his to deal with, and he wasn’t about to let anybody he cared about get caught in the crossfire.
As casually as possible, he shut the lid on his laptop so Eva wouldn’t see the screen.
The TV was on Investigation Discovery, but he hadn’t been paying much attention to the true-crime show about a serial killer and picked up the remote to shut it off. He regretted it immediately. The sudden lack of background noise only deepened the awkwardness between them and all sorts of off-limit thoughts rushed in to fill the empty silence between his ears. He wanted to scoop her up and take her into his room. Strip her out of those day-old clothes and hold her under the spray of his shower until she relaxed. Help her wash away the remnants of what must have been a hellish day. Then fuck her until she completely forgot about it.
And he was wearing sweatpants. Perfect. No hiding the perky reaction of his cock to those thoughts. He dropped to his seat on the couch. “So what’s up?”
Genius, Wilde.
Despite his invitation to sit, Eva stayed rooted where she stood. “I need to get a statement from you.”
Cam fumbled the remote still in his hand, caught it before it hit the floor, and set it aside. Okay. Not what he’d expected her to say. “Excuse me?”
“This morning, a 9-1-1 call from a concerned civilian led officers to an empty parking lot, where they discovered a deceased white male slumped beside a Dumpster. We eventually identified him as Steven Donald Goodman, better known as—”
“Soup.” Cam’s heart plunged into his gut. “Aw, shit. What happened to him?”
Appearing more at ease in her role as detective, Eva finally moved around the end of the couch and sat down—as far from him as she could get and still be on the same piece of furniture. She withdrew a small notepad and pen from an inner jacket pocket. “There was some blood on the scene, but we’ve concluded it was from a nasty hit to the head when he fell. It appears to be a drug overdose. No other outward signs of trauma besides the head wound, and he presented all the symptoms. But, you know, unattended death. We have to investigate.”
“Goddammit.” Cam slapped his knee, mostly out of an impotent sense of frustration. But he wasn’t surprised. Soup had been on a downward spiral for a while now. It was only a matter of time until this happened.
Except…
At any other time in his acquaintance with Soup, he’d one-hundred percent buy into the death by drug overdose theory. But it was one hell of a coincidence that he’d asked Soup to dig up more information on man who wanted him dead and now Soup was no longer drawing breath.
Too fucking much of a coincidence.
He opened his mouth to tell Eva about it, but clamped his jaw shut without making a sound. If nothing else, Soup’s murder told him he was dealing with someone very dangerous, someone who had no qualms about killing whoever stood in the way. He couldn’t get her involved in this. Wouldn’t take the risk she’d get hurt.
“What I need to know,” Eva continued, drawing him back to the conversation, “is why he was wearing your old Carhartt jacket when he died.”
Shit. To a suspicious mind, the presence of his jacket on a dead man probably didn’t look too good. At least, it wouldn’t if he were investigating this case. “How do you know it’s mine?”
“Oh, don’t even. You wore that thing for how many years?” She rolled her eyes, and he had to hide a smile. This was more like it: Eva falling back into their old habit of friendly bickering, all awkwardness gone.
“I know that jacket when I see it,” she added. “The hole in the armpit. Coffee stain on the sleeve. Broken zipper that only you can work. With your connection to him and your habit of giving away your clothes…” She shrugged and crossed her legs, balancing her notebook on her knee. “Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out where the jacket came from. Since he hadn’t sold it for dope yet, I concluded you had contact with him recently. I need an official statement so I can wrap this up, go home, and finally go to bed.”
Eva. In bed. Naked.
No, not an appropriate line of thought.
Cam made himself focus on the conversation and not on how good she looked, even wrinkled and muddy, but his gaze kept wandering to her lovely long legs. He remembered the feel of those legs clenched around his hips as he—
“Wilde!” Eva’s sharp voice broke through his wandering thoughts. “Focus.”
He shook his head to dislodge the fantasy of having her wrapped around him again. But, man, he couldn’t seem to help himself.