“You’re the one who wanted to reopen the old case file,” Wade pointed out. “I’m just asking the questions I might have asked if I’d been in charge of the investigation.”
“Just be glad you weren’t. Because if you’d started trying to pin something like this on Rachel...”
“What would you have done, Lucas? Pushed me off a cliff to protect her?”
Lucas slammed both hands down on Wade’s desk and glared directly into his future brother-in-law’s eyes. “I did not kill Roger Jennings. And neither did Rachel.”
“So who did?”
“I don’t know!”
“Just an accident?”
Lucas straightened, chagrined by his momentary loss of control. “I don’t know,” he repeated more quietly.
“You came back here because you heard about the break-in at Emily’s house. You thought it had something to do with Roger’s death. I want to know what the connection was.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You asked me very specifically what was taken in the break-in. You seemed particularly interested in the bracelet she was wearing. Why?”
Lucas looked pointedly at his watch. “I have to go. Thanks for letting me look through the files.”
Wade stood slowly, and his usual affable, innocuous expression had hardened into one of steely determination. “If Emily is in some sort of danger, I have as much right to protect her as you do—more even. I want to know what’s going on, Lucas.”
“If I thought there was anything you needed to know, I would tell you. As far as I can tell, Roger took a tumble all by himself fifteen years ago, and Emily was the victim of a crime ring operated by a couple of bored teenagers.”
“Damn it, McBride...”
The outdated intercom on Wade’s desk crackled. “I hate to interrupt, Chief, but Martha Godwin’s on line two and she insists on talking to you. She claims the mailman peeked up her skirt while she was bent over her flower bed, and she wants you to arrest him.”
Lucas pictured the scrawny, dried-up woman he’d known fifteen years ago. Martha Godwin had to be pushing seventy now. His mouth quirked. “You’ve obviously got a serious situation brewing here. I’ll clear out and let you get to it. And be careful out there. It’s a real jungle.”
He stepped out of the office and closed the door on Wade’s mild obscenity.
RACHEL SHIVERED as she stepped out of her grandmother’s kitchen door into the backyard. It wasn’t bitterly cold, but the heavy gray clouds rolling in from the west made it seem colder. It was supposed to rain later.
It had been raining the night Lucas left Honoria.
“Here, boy,” she said, rattling dry dog food against the sides of the stainless-steel bowl in her right hand. “Want your dinner?”
“I’ve already eaten, thanks.”
Lucas stepped out of the shadows at the same moment the dog bowl fell from Rachel’s suddenly nerveless fingers. Kibble scattered on the ground at her feet. A hungry mutt of indeterminate heritage appeared to start gulping it down.
Rachel stepped out of the way before Gomer could mistake her shoelaces for dessert. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack before Christmas?” she asked Lucas irritably. “Can’t you just pick up the phone like other people?”
“I’ve never been quite like other people.”
She couldn’t help smiling a little at that. She pushed her hands into the pockets of the oversized black cardigan she wore over a red tunic and black leggings. “What are you doing here?”
Instead of answering, Lucas nodded toward the noisily eating dog. “I take it your grandmother didn’t get the mutt for protection.”
“Actually, she did. Unfortunately, she forgot to tell him that she wants him to bark at people, not at cats and squirrels.”
Rachel paused to clear her throat, then asked again, “Why are you here, Lucas? After the scene my uncle caused in the café, I’d have thought you’d want to stay away from the Jennings family.”
“I always had trouble staying away from one member of it.”