Blind Faith - Sharon Sala Page 0,75

blue on her mouth. It was still her, but without the costumes of leather and the mask of bright paints. She wouldn’t exactly say she was in mourning, but it was her version of paying respect.

She grabbed her bag and locked up on her way out, then took off out the main gates, taking care to close them behind her.

* * *

Charlie’s steps were dragging as he approached the office door, but when he saw the lights already on and smelled fresh brewed coffee, he sighed.

She’s here.

He opened the door and then froze when she stood and faced him. She’d never come to work this stripped down, and he wasn’t sure how to take it.

Then she started talking, and he got it.

“Merlin died yesterday. I got there in time to say goodbye. Ironic, isn’t it? I treasured the friendship, and the last thing I needed was more money. But I got more money and a mansion, and lost my friend. Life’s a joke and then we die.”

Charlie felt the gut punch of that last sentence, and for the first time since he’d known her, he saw her for the lonely child she’d been, and the lonely woman she was. But before he could respond, she changed the subject.

“Are we here to work a new case?”

Charlie shrugged. “Depends on the requests, but I’d like to stay away from national parks for a while.”

Wyrick frowned. Something must have happened while he was at Robbers Cave that she didn’t know about.

“I’ll go through the emails and send you some notes. They were out of bear claws. You have Danishes this morning,” she said. Then she got the coffee cup from her desk and went to refill it, before going back to work.

Charlie went into his office, hung up his hat and his coat, and then got a cherry Danish to go with his coffee and sat down at his desk.

He could hear Wyrick’s keyboard clicking, assumed she was typing up the notes, and took a bite of the sweet roll.

But he was wrong. Wyrick was looking for recent stories relating to Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma, and when she found the one with the escaped prisoners and then realized they’d shut down the park with everyone in it during the manhunt, she rolled her eyes.

God only knew what he got himself into while all that was going on, but whatever it was, it was over and he’d come home in one piece.

So she exited that screen and then pulled up the info on two of the six requests that had come in, and began typing, and then the phone rang. The call was for Charlie. She put it through and then kept working until he came out of his office and handed her a piece of paper with some notes on it.

“Just put a hold on starting anything new,” he said. “I’m going to be deposed regarding my part in the cases against Randall Wells and Justin Young. The prosecution wants the videos we have of your interviews with both boys during our search. Can you make copies and email them to their office?”

“Yes.”

“They’re going to have a pretrial hearing to decide whether the cases stay in juvenile court or if they’ll be turned over and tried as adults. I wouldn’t want to be their parents,” Charlie said.

Wyrick glanced down at the paper he handed her, then nodded.

“Something went wrong somewhere for them to be so unemotional about human life. I’ll upload the videos to the prosecutor’s office now.”

“I’m going to run a couple of errands,” Charlie said. “I’ll be back in a few.”

Wyrick glanced at the clock, then got a cheese Danish from the coffee bar and went back to her desk. Now that he was out of the office, she dug back into the incident at Robbers Cave, and then found a story in the local paper about the family who’d been taken hostage, and found the rest of his story within the telling of theirs. She read it, then read it again.

So Charlie Dodge saved a ten-year-old girl named Shelby, then took the convicts down and rescued the parents. Now she understood why he said no more jobs involving parks.

She had finished her sweet roll and was cleaning up her desk when the office door opened. Two fiftysomething women with the same faces walked in, both with hair in varying shades of blond and both wearing diamonds and fur-trimmed coats.

Identical twins, and Wyrick already had a read on them.