It was less painful to look at these days, but he would be glad when the insurance claim finally went through and he could rebuild. It would be good to start something new.
Fenrir whined, pressing his nose in a most pathetic way against the rear window, adding another smudge to the mural of nose prints already there. Rolling his eyes, Niall opened the back hatch. Grinning, tail high, Fenrir raced down to the beach, sure of where they were headed. Niall took the time to grab his coat and shrug into it. The night was clear but the wind off the water cold, just what he needed to clear his head.
At the beach, Niall claimed his favorite log and let his thoughts wind out into the dark, amusing himself watching the dog prance and tease the waves. The anger he’d felt at Lulu’s slowly seeped out from underneath his skin, absorbed by the wind, the waves, and the stars shining above his head.
Even though the cabin was gone, Niall could still hear his grandparents’ voices, especially Od’s.
“Life is hard enough, son. Don’t go making it harder,” he’d say in his gravelly voice with its heavy Norwegian accent, commenting, maybe, on something that had happened at school that day.
Then most likely he’d launch into a drawn-out tale involving Tyr or Odin. Niall didn’t know how many of the stories Od had told were made up on the spot and how many were handed down through generations of Hamarssons. He supposed it didn’t matter. They were his stories now.
The wind picked up, its wicked fingers slicing through the fabric of Niall’s coat—no match for Njord’s power—and even Fenrir abandoned chasing the waves to sit at Niall’s feet. He wondered if his grandparents had known about Ana and David Delacombe and quickly decided they hadn’t. David had been much older than Ana, and he would’ve been married to Shay’s mother at the time. His grandparents definitely wouldn’t have approved.
“You cold too?” Niall asked.
Fenrir’s tail thumped once against Niall’s leg in response.
“Come on.”
In the warmth of his motel room, Niall untied his boots, tugging them off while Fenrir flopped elegantly onto the dog bed Niall had sprung for; motel management did not approve of animals on the furniture. Likely another reason they were giving him the boot.
Scooting forward in the remarkably uncomfortable desk chair, he powered up his laptop, idly wondering if the chair had been constructed this way on purpose—just another reason for guests to keep their visits limited to a week or weekend. He opened his email, checking to see if his insurance company had forwarded the paperwork yet. Nope.
But there was correspondence from a former colleague. Niall’s first instinct was to hit the delete button, but the subject line grabbed his attention: “Consulting services?”
Leo Zelinsky had been a fellow homicide detective. He’d left SPD a few years ago after a stellar career, and even though Niall had made all the right noises at the time about keeping in touch, he’d never intended to—so Leo’s email came as a surprise. Leo wanted to let Niall know the company he was working for, a private crime scene/forensic specialties consultation group, was actively recruiting, and was Niall interested?
Was he interested? And was it merely coincidence Mat had brought up that very thing earlier that day? He didn’t think Mat and Leo had any kind of connection, but who knew?
A part of himself stirred, a buzz he recognized as subdued excitement. He didn’t want to go back to day-to-day police work. That part of his life was truly over. But after a lifetime of being a homicide cop in a fairly large city, he had a lot of experience under his belt. How else would he put it to use?
Niall closed the laptop’s lid. He’d see how he felt about Leo’s email in the morning; he wasn’t making any snap decisions one way or the other. On top of the photos from Shay and the paperwork from SPD, he didn’t have room for anything else.
Instead he’d spend what was left of the evening feeling guilty about ditching Mat and coming close to clobbering Martin Reynolds. Martin deserved clobbering, there was no doubt, but not by him. Justice would find Martin eventually, and Niall would be on the sidelines handing out popcorn.
Regretting how the evening had ended, Niall began to get ready for bed, stripping off his sweater and T-shirt and tossing them into a pile on the chair.
A light tap on the door sent his