She was impressed by the way Trent instinctively knew what to do. Perhaps from years of sneaking up on prehistoric creatures.
She pushed herself against the wall near the opening of the kitchen. Trent was on the opposite side. “Ready,” she said softly.
He nodded.
Easing into the room, she scanned every inch with her heart in her throat. She’d done this a million times, but it had never been this personal.
Every cabinet open. The contents swept from the shelves and onto the floor—canned goods rolled to the baseboards, the box of pasta she'd bought last week split open and spilled across the linoleum. The coffee maker on its side, the carafe cracked. The bourbon she kept above the refrigerator—the good bottle, the one she'd been nursing for six months—was shattered against the baseboard, and the smell of it filled the room, sharp and sweet and wrong, mixing with the damp heat coming through the open door.
“Clear,” she managed with a thick lump in her throat. “My bedroom next.” She inched down the small hallway, one foot in front of the other, placed softly on the floor as not to make a noise. She held her breath as she pivoted and the room crossed her line of sight. “Fuck,” she muttered.
The mattress was dragged off the frame and left at an angle, the box spring exposed. Closet emptied, her clothes in a pile on the hardwood, hangers bent and broken. Every box she'd stored on the closet shelf torn open—winter gear, tax documents, an old go-bag she'd never gotten around to tossing—contents spread across the floor in a forensics pattern that told her exactly how systematic this had been. Methodical. Room by room. Not rage. Purpose.
Her go-bag—the current one, the operational one she kept loaded and ready—unzipped and dumped against the far wall. Spare magazine, medical kit, backup phone, the folded emergency cash she'd carried since her second year in the Army. All of it scattered.
She catalogued the violations with the part of her brain that did that, and she let the rest of her feel absolutely nothing about it. There would be time to feel later.
This time she didn’t bother saying clear. There was no point. No one was in the house. If they were, they would’ve come at them or bolted. But she remained at the ready because the one thing she’d learned over the years was to be prepared for the unexpected.
With her heart hammering in her chest, she turned her attention to the guest bedroom across the hall.
Stood in the doorway, tears threatening to break free. She’d handed her uncle a cup of coffee right here in this hallway. She’d laughed at one of his stupid jokes, and she’d blushed just a little when he’d made a comment about Trent and her spending the night the morning she’d come back to get a change of clothes, and her uncle had left to visit a friend.
That was the day he’d been murdered. The last time she’d seen him.
Trent came up behind her, resting a gentle hand around her waist, thumb rubbing softly on her hip. They’d gotten off to a really bad start months ago. She wasn’t in the right headspace to be anything other than a good time, and he used his alligators as a form of female repellent.
Damn, things were growing on her.
She sucked in a breath and focused on what the job called for and she needed to treat this as a job. She could fall apart later.
“This room is worse than the others,” Trent said.
The mattress hadn’t just been dragged off the bed—it had been slashed across the middle in two long cuts, the foam batting pulled out in handfuls and scattered. The pillow her uncle had slept on, still in the case she'd washed after he left because she hadn't been able to bring herself to launder it before he died, was torn open, stuffing pulled loose and dropped on the floor without ceremony.
The nightstand drawers were gone. Not emptied—gone, ripped from the housing and taken entirely, or thrown hard enough that they'd broken apart and she couldn't find the pieces in the mess.
The desk had been upended, its underside examined and discarded. The closet rod was yanked from the wall. The baseboards on the left side had been pried away from the wall—she could see the tool marks, the raw wood beneath the paint—and shoved back imperfectly, not quite sitting flush anymore.
Someone had taken this room apart with the focused, systematic intensity of a person who knew what they were looking for and had searched every place it could be hiding.
She looked at the mattress her uncle had slept on, which had been slashed. The pillow torn and the stuffing littered on the floor. She gave it one full second. Let it hit her the way it needed to. The violation. The hands on his things. Someone had stood in this room—the room that still smelled faintly of Old Spice and coffee—and had torn it apart looking for what he'd tried to protect.
“What the hell was he hiding?” she whispered the question. “Why couldn’t he have trusted me?”
“I get the feeling he didn’t trust anyone with it.” Trent rested his hand on her shoulder. “But whatever they were looking for, it had to do with the empty folder with my father's name that we saw at your uncle's townhouse.”
She holstered her weapon.
“The question is, do they have it?” She turned and held Trent’s gaze. “Or did my uncle hide it somewhere else, and now it’s up to us to find it?”
Chapter Eighteen
The parking lot outside the town hall smelled like exhaust, cut grass, and the charged tension that settled over a crowd when nobody wanted to be the first one to go home.
People stood in clusters under the lights, voices low, most of them still holding whatever printed materials the Sovereign Resources team had handed out. Glossy. Professional. The kind of thing that took money to produce. The kind of thing this town wasn’t used to.
Trent had folded his into quarters and shoved it in his back pocket, and every time he shifted his weight, he could feel the sharp edge of it pressing into him. A reminder of the past. And a kick in the ass about what he needed to fight for in the present in order to save the future.
