“And you know that I wouldn’t do that. Ever.”
“Yeah. So, I guess I’m taking the tactic of forewarned is forearmed.” He nodded as if to himself. “But I want you to do me another favor. I know Kyle and his men are gonna be looking into Glass because I ain’t stupid. They left here convinced that this was no coincidence. But, I’ve gotta play it like it is, understand?”
Oh. Interesting. So he did have his doubts, too.
George went on. “If you find yourself doing some digging and turn anything up, you might be tempted to tell…someone else…what you found. But come to me first, all right? They aren’t police, we are.” His eyes had gone dark and serious.
“What are you implying?”
“We have procedures for criminals, laws we follow, and so do they. But theirs might be different from ours. Watchdog might be tempted to run a little outside of the track. I don’t want to see them get in trouble for it. Or you.”
Sylvie lowered her voice, even though no one could have heard them. “You’re talking vigilante?”
He studied her for a moment. Then nodded once.
The thought of any of them taking the law into their hands and ending up on the wrong side—and of Sylvie or her dad having to make arrests at Watchdog—sickened her.
She nodded back and vowed to keep her mouth shut around Alex, even if it felt wrong. It was the only way to protect him.
CHAPTERFOURTEEN
Sylvie examined her ragged nails as she thought of that earlier conversation. She sat at her desk under the pretext of getting the last of her paperwork done and doing a little studying before going home. But, the truth was that she was going to do a little snooping instead and this had been her first real chance without raising too much attention. George wanted answers, so answers she would find.
Sylvie took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let her intuition take over, hoping it would tie threads together that she had yet to see. That niggle she’d felt earlier came back but now she realized it was tied to thoughts of Brianna and the near-miss today. She glanced at the text Alex had sent her earlier.
Did you hear what happened to Rachael and Brianna?
Her heart stuttered. She gave her response a lot of thought, then texted back:
Yes. The whole department is talking about it.
It felt wrong not to tell him that she and Carla had answered the initial call—until she reminded herself of her reasons.
Keep Alex safe and Watchdog out of it. And do not betray George’s confidence.
She was glad she didn’t go into details when he answered:
Jake’s convinced Glass set the whole thing up to hurt Rachael. Said the slime bag’s been giving her the evil eye all day today and yesterday too.
But the niggle she felt now wasn’t tied to Rachael—it was tied to thoughts of Brianna. The way Arden was concerned about her. The run-in Brianna already had with Glass the day before. Her sketchy family. Drugs moving in. Watchdog’s presence at the festival. She mentally plucked Watchdog out of the equation, thinking they came up because she was distracted by Alex.
Follow the money, find the bad guys, right?
She focused on Brianna’s family. She knew where their seed capital for the dispensary had come from—the remnants of the defunct hippie commune Brianna’s parents had grown up in. A co-op dispensary, basically. Her parents and brother were legit now, had been for a few years. Well, legit according to the state of Colorado, but not according to the Feds, which forbade dispensaries from using banks. The ultimate cash business, they had to find creative ways to keep their money safe, and that caused problems. Predator gangs were known to shake down dispensaries for protection money, no different from mobsters in the Roaring Twenties during Prohibition.
Sylvie woke up her computer. First, she dug into Jerold Glass, but didn’t read anything suspicious. She wasn’t really expecting to—he wouldn’t be able to sell cars if he had any felonies. And besides, Watchdog probably already investigated him, and if they’d found past criminal activity, would have spread the word. She did see that he was divorced several times over—not surprising.
Oh, and what is this?Several women had brought harassment charges against him through the years, but they’d all gone away without any sort of convictions. She put that on the back burner, then looked for any connections between Glass and Brianna or her family, but found nothing.
So, Sylvie went fishing in a different pond until she found cases of local dispensaries getting shaken down or flat-out robbed. Police had been dispatched, taken reports, and promised follow-ups. Some arrests had even been made. She dug deeper.
She tried to find the follow-ups. But the more Sylvie dug, the less information she found. Some of the cases appeared to have been…well, notdroppedofficially, but…orphaned. Not unheard of—leads went cold, potential witnesses got spooked and stopped talking, all sorts of things could lead to an orphaned case. But these cases weren’t that old; there were plenty of leads that looked like they’d never been followed up on at all, even as the dispensaries continued to ask for help.
And that’s when she found two things—a hole and a pattern.
The Taylors’ dispensary had not been robbed or shaken down. They’d made one call in the dispensary’s early days to report that suspicious people had been lurking after hours, waiting for them to bring out the money, but they’d evaded them. But after that report, there wasn’t so much as a single call made for harassment or suspicious persons, or…anything.
Living a charmed life. Or not.
