MY MOTTO OF DUTY FIRSThad never been tested as strongly as when I was kneeling between Maegan’s parted legs tasting the pleasure that I gave her on my tongue and lips. I was moments away from sinking inside that tight, hot heat—the place I wanted to be all fucking week long—just as Wen called. I had to turn away from her luscious body so that I could concentrate on the conversation and not how hard my dick throbbed behind my zipper.
Maybe Wen’s locating Thom Renzo’s surviving uncle was fate because I was close to handing over my heart to Maegan Miracle. If this continued, I’d be looking around her antique shop for a pretty silver tray to put it on before presenting it to her. She was everything I wanted in a woman and more, but I had been tricked before into believing the woman my heart chose for me was the one I’d spend my life with. I had been more than happy with occasional hookups until I met Maegan. She made me want so much more than I trusted myself to accept. I wanted to give her more than I had to offer. That spelled disaster because one, or both, of us was going to get hurt if I allowed thisthingbetween us to continue. It was better to break off all personal ties with her before things got out of hand.
You already tried that, moron.Yeah, well, I’d just have to try harder because I really believed I could be happy in Blissville if I could tamp down the urges that my beautiful neighbor brought out in me. I could hit up a bar or club in Cincinnati if I needed some company for the night. I found it amazing at how cold that idea left me when just a few weeks ago it would’ve heated my blood.Resisting is futile, dumb fuck.
I was glad the drive to the police station was a short one so that my brain had something to focus on other than Maegan’s lush body and the sounds she made when she came. I could ignore my heart’s demand that I give her a chance to prove that she was nothing like Brandy and focus on solving a homicide. The first step in solving a murder was to learn everything you could about the victim.
“Sorry for calling you out tonight,” Kevin Wen said when I opened the passenger door of his cruiser. “I’m sure you had better things to do.”
“Catching Renzo’s killer is the only thing on my mind.” A kaleidoscope of sexy and sweet Maegan images replayed in my brain, calling me out for being a liar. Fine, but I could turn that off to focus on nailing a criminal.Then we can think about nailing…“What do we know?” I asked Wen, cutting off my thoughts.
“Thom’s uncle, Stanley Hubert, lives about twenty minutes from here in a rural part of Carter County. According to my mother, he’s a confirmed bachelor and former ladies’ man, if you will. I don’t know what kind of relationship Stanley had with his sister’s only son.”
“It’s a start,” I told him. “We’ll start there and kick over every rock until we find our guy.”
“Or gal,” Wen corrected.
“Or gal,” I conceded.
It was black as pitch in the countryside, which was nothing new to me since I grew up in rural Franklin County, but it added an element of danger when showing up at someone’s house unexpected. The last thing I wanted was to look down the barrel of a trigger-happy landowner. I was pleased when we arrived at Stanley Hubert’s house and there was plenty of exterior light illuminating our way to the front porch.
“This place isn’t nearly as creepy as his sister’s house,” Wen softly muttered before he knocked on the front door. “That place looked like something you’d see in a gothic horror story. I’m surprised there aren’t gargoyles.”
Wen was in uniform and my badge hung around my neck in plain sight for Mr. Hubert to see when he looked through the glass after I rang the doorbell. When he opened the door, I saw awareness in his eyes.
“I guess you’re here about Thom,” he said. “Is it true?”
“I’m sorry to tell you that your nephew, Thom Renzo, was a victim of a homicide. We’re sorry for your loss, Mr. Hubert,” I told the elderly man.
“Do you need me to come down and identify the body?” he asked nervously.
“No, sir,” Wen told him. “I went to school with Thom so I was able to do that for you.” What we didn’t tell the man was that our medical examiner, Dr. Melissa Chen, would also confirm the DB’s identity with dental records. Every bone in Thom’s face was broken so using his driver’s license photo for comparison wasn’t an option. Wen identified him by a tattoo on his forearm. I was glad we could spare Mr. Hubert from having to look at what remained of his nephew. “Can we ask you a few questions?”
“Okay,” Mr. Hubert replied, stepping back so we could enter his house. “I just can’t believe it.” The elderly man slowly shook his head as he lowered himself into his recliner. “Who’d want to hurt Thom?”
Wen took a seat on the sofa and angled his body toward Mr. Hubert while I remained standing, taking a minute to check out Mr. Hubert’s surrounding while Wen finished making small talk with the elderly man. Everything was dated, drab, and dreary. If I wanted to add another d word into the mix, I would’ve chosen dusty. Hubert himself dressed like Mr. Rogers and it was hard to imagine that he was once a ladies’ man. What era? The seventies? Time had not been kind to the man, and I wondered how much of it had to do with the half-empty bottle of whiskey and the cigarette smoldering in the ashtray on the table beside his chair. How often did he go through a bottle? A day? A week? A month? How many packs of cigarettes did he puff through in a day?
You’re looking at your future self if you’re not careful.I could’ve argued that I rarely drank and never smoked, but I knew that my heart wasn’t referring to his habits. The loneliness the man felt was a palpable thing that hung heavy and thick in the air. Sure, hearing that his nephew died so closely on the heels of his brother-in-law probably played a large part, but I sensed that his loneliness was an old friend, not a new acquaintance.
The thought was depressing as fuck so I quickly steered my thoughts back to the investigation. “When was the last time you spoke to Thom?”
“Not since his father’s funeral.” Mr. Hubert shook his head sadly. “I tried being closer to the boy, but he was just… odd.”
“Odd? How so?” I followed up.
“I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,” Mr. Hubert replied.
“We need to find out who killed your nephew and the only way to do that is to look at everything, even when that makes us uncomfortable, sir,” Wen told the grieving man.
“I’m not sure I’m the right person to be talking to since I feel like I don’t know Thom anymore. We used to be close when he was a kid, but he drifted away once he got to high school. He ran around with the Sampson kid, who was nothing but trouble. I wasn’t surprised at all when he was arrested for stealing drugs from the evidence locker when he was a deputy in Texas. He’d always been a sly one, and that mother of his always made excuses for him and covered up his bad behavior. Still, I don’t think any of them were up to criminal mischief back then, mind you. They formed that awful band and were convinced they’d make it big. That was all Thom talked about during high school. He drove us nuts with ‘our band’ this and ‘our band’ that.”
Wen had already explained the Sampson and Renzo connection to me at the station, but that seemed like a stretch. Sampson was arrested and turned over to the DEA two years ago, so it wasn’t likely that he knew anything about Renzo’s death. It had to be related to something else.
“As weird and as isolated as Thom had become over the last decade, it’s really hard to imagine him making someone mad enough to kill him.”
I’d seen kids get gunned down in the street for a pair of fucking shoes, so I discounted nothing. I saw no need to share my past experiences with him though. Instead, I asked, “Did your sister and brother-in-law own anything of value?”
“Something valuable enough to kill over? No, of course not. Why would you ask me that?”
