“If you have something to tell us, say it,” Annie snapped, glaring up at him from her chair. “We’ve got a lot to do today.”
Ian turned to her then, smiling, though his eyes remained cold and hard as ice. “I’m getting to it.” He turned back to Jake. “Did you know Jamie Boyd worked down at the pool?”
Jake folded his arms across his chest. “Of course. So?”
“So, she had a little group of friends that gathered down there on the weekends, and you know how girls like to talk to one another. Sharing all the dirty details of their lives.”
Jake’s fingers were tapping rapidly against his arms now, and Annie could tell it was with great restraint that he was still behind the counter, and not on the other side of the desk, slapping whatever information Ian had right out of him.
“And?”
Ian pulled another cigarette from the pack in his pocket and wagged it between his fingers. “Honestly, Jake, here I was thinking you were smart. Who owns the pool?”
“Your parents,” Jake said without inflection.
“I do,” Ian said sharply, pointing a thumb at his chest. “I own it.”
“Okay, your parents gave it to you. What about it?”
Ian ignored the jab and continued to flick the unlit cigarette back and forth. “Being the owner, I usually work in that little office around back, that room behind the lifeguard stand, and with my window cracked open, I can hear what goes on outside. Jamie’s friends come down there almost every day, and the way them girls talk”—he laughedand shook his head—“it’s like they haven’t seen each other in years. They talk about boys, mostly. Their love lives. Heck, sometimes they even tell me directly if I’m out on deck. Kinda dropping hints here and there if they’re available, I figure.”
Annie barely managed to keep her face from folding into a cringe. She could just picture it, this man in early middle age sidling up to the teen girls beside the pool. There was a specific breed of man, a specific breed of snake, that specialized in mistaking the innocent conversations of young women for an invitation.
“So, you overheard something about Jamie’s love life,” Jake said, steering Ian back to the point at hand. “What was it?”
“Not overheard,” Ian corrected. “Just heard.”
“What was it?”
“Well, as of a week ago, Jamie was dating a guy from up on her road in the briars. Older than her, I gathered from the conversation. Jamie told her friend Stephanie that she was thinking of calling it quits on him; so, we’ve got us a dead girl and a spurned lover on our hands. I’ve seen enoughLaw and Orderto know that’s something worth looking into. Or, at least, I would… if I were you.”
Jake dropped his gaze to the desk and shuffled the stack of papers there.
“We’ve been made aware of that already, thanks.”
There was dismissal in his tone, but Ian didn’t seem to notice.
“Now, she never said outright that it was Daniel Barela, at least not that I heard, but thisisa small town, and there ain’t many single men in it, am I right?”
“You’re single,” Annie pointed out, failing to keep the haughtiness out of her voice.
Something like surprise flickered in Ian’s dark eyes, and one corner of his mouth twisted sourly.
“By choice,” he retorted. “It’s not like I couldn’t have any one of those girls if I wanted to.”
Jake’s hands clenched into fists on the desk. “Be careful, Ian. Some of those girls you’re talking about are minors.”
“Jamie was nineteen.” Ian turned for the door and pushed it open with a flat hand. Halfway out, he paused to look back over his shoulder. “And trust me when I tell you this: She was no child.”
He was out the door and gone before either of them could respond.
“What a creep,” Annie breathed as Jake sank heavily into his chair.
The phone rang again, and this time Jake was the one to lift it from the cradle and slam it down, yanking the cord from the back for good measure.
A full minute passed, Annie staring at Jake, and Jake staring at the phone.
“I need to go to Vancouver,” he said at last. “That’s the closest circuit judge from here.”
