She’d gone to bat for him. For no reason other than because she knew this case was important to him.
That more than anything should prove to Jacob that his relationship with Sabrina was not a disaster waiting to happen.
Jacob settled behind his desk, shuffling papers in a way that seemed designed to make Noah twitch. His brother had perfected the art of antagonizing him over the years.
“Our victim’s name is Annie Ross.” Jacob’s gaze fixed on Sabrina as if he truly meant to pretend Noah wasn’t there. “Fingerprints matched an arrest record from two years ago.”
Noah’s fingers tightened around Sabrina’s before he realized he’d reached for her hand again. She squeezed back, and that tiny gesture steadied him.
They were finally getting somewhere.
“Prostitution charge,” Jacob continued, his voice carefully neutral. “Her residence on record at the time was a small town here in Utah called Wilson. After that, she disappeared. No job history tied to her social, no phone, no address. Just…gone.”
The words hit Noah like stones dropping into still water, ripples of possibility expanding outward. His investigative brain fired up, connections forming. They were dealing with a woman who’d erased herself.
Or been erased.
“Time of death?” Sabrina asked, her officer voice a stark contrast to how she’d bantered with Jacob moments ago.
“Medical examiner puts it at twenty-four to thirty-six hours before Officer West found her.” Jacob’s gaze slid to Noah for a brief second. “Cause of death appears to be hypothermia.”
Appears to be.Noah caught the careful phrasing, Jacob’s penetrating stare alluding to more than what he could say out loud, saw Sabrina’s slight head tilt that said she’d noticed too. His brother was throwing him a bone after all. Huh.
He opened his mouth to ask a follow-up question, but Jacob’s phone buzzed. His brother glanced at the display and something in his expression shifted. The nameMae Copelandflashed on the screen.
“Need to take this. Test results from the lab,” Jacob said shortly, his tone painfully casual.
Test results? The look on his brother’s face did not scream,I’m taking a call from a colleague!The opposite in fact.
Was Jacob dating one of his coworkers? And he’d had the nerve to read Noah the riot act about being careful. Noah shook his head, his mind still on Annie Ross, the more important mystery here. A woman had vanished from the system only to reappear dead on a mountain.
And he’d landed center stage in the lead role on this story.
Jacob stepped into the hallway, phone pressed to his ear. Through the glass in the door, Noah watched his brother’s shoulders relax, his usual rigid posture softening. Interesting.
Maybe their father dating Susan had rattled something loose in all of them.
“Is your brother seeing someone in the lab?” Sabrina murmured, following Noah’s gaze.
“You noticed the less-than-professional vibe too?” He turned to study her profile, still caught off guard by how naturally she fit here, in this moment, reading his brother just as easily as he did.
“Definitely. That is not his typical smile.” Sabrina nodded toward the glass. “Which is so unlike him. He’s normally so by the book.”
Noah studied Sabrina with piqued interest. “You think it’s a bad idea to date someone you work with?”
The look she gave him had plenty of subtext. “Everyone thinks that at some point. It’s just a question of how convoluted it gets before you clue in that it’s a terrible idea.”
“We work together,” he reminded her, suddenly struck that they should have had this conversation a long time ago. Was she breaking one of her cardinal rules for him? What did that mean?
“That’s different. You freelance. So next time I need an SAR specialist, I can call someone else. Voilà. Now we don’t work together.”
Blinking, Noah processed that. It was a throwaway comment, one Sabrina didn’t even seem to realize had tripped him up. But it had. How would they work search and rescue together after Ripley was trained if Sabrina didn’t even plan to call him next time she needed him in an official capacity?
“Noted.”
Jacob came back in the room then, stalling the conversation. But not the churn in Noah’s chest.
Jacob tucked his phone away with the kind of deliberate care that suggested he knew exactly how much he’d revealed and didn’t know what to do about it. “Where were we?”
