Buried Secrets - Calle J. Brookes Page 0,44

Luther and Pauline’s children.”

“Miranda should be the one to interview him,” a male voice said from behind Clint. Jac forced herself to not stiffen. Max was back, then.

He stepped up next to Clint. They were both big men, tall, strong, hard, and dangerous-looking.

“Why?” Jac asked.

“Simple. Seeing her will throw him off. Maybe shake something free.” Max was a great profiler, one of the best in her experience. People trusted him when he spoke. Jac took a quick look at him. Max had a white bandage over his arm.

She refused to feel concern. Nothing more than she’d feel for any teammate; that was it. Her days of worrying over Maddox James Jones were done. “Where is she?”

“She and Knight are just starting with Pauline—in Della. Another reason she and Knight should handle Lesley. Expediency. They are already down there. If nothing else, he knows where the others are—and why they left so suddenly,” Max added in that deep baritone of his.

Jac still heard that voice whispering her name. She trusted him on every professional level possible. It was the personal she flipped out over.

She shivered. She was an idiot through and through.

“It’s a start,” Jac said.

“Call Miranda, give her the address. They should have time to catch this guy at his place of employment.”

30

Miranda had always hated the smell of engine grease. Probably because of the man they were there to see. She’d known Jac would come through and find the Beise children. Jac had.

Lesley Beise had probably frightened Miranda more as a teenager than she had ever been up to that point. His hands had hurt. He’d been a great deal bigger—she hadn’t hit her last growth spurt until she’d been seventeen and shot up five inches in three months—and she’d been alone.

She’d never forgotten how vulnerable that had made her feel. How flat out unsafe in a world she’d always felt secure in before that day.

Nor had she forgotten how she’d felt when Levi had driven up that day.

Pouring rain, cold, late-March wind plastering her clothes to her skin, stumbling along the road in the approaching darkness. Crying and afraid.

She hadn’t recognized Levi’s truck, at first. Had thought it was Lesley coming looking for her.

That had been the first moment she’d realized just how vulnerable she really was to the world. That she couldn’t control everything and stay perfectly safe in her nice, little world. It had been her wake up call. And probably one of the defining moments that had led to her current position with the FBI.

She’d wanted to defend the world against the bad guys—and from that moment on, Lesley Beise had been one of those bad guys.

Someone she’d known since she had been nine years old, and he eleven.

The bad guy in her backyard, practically.

She sighed, probably more loudly than she intended.

“You ok?” Knight asked, almost grudgingly.

“Just remembering the last time I saw Lesley and how it made me feel.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Mmm. Up to that point, I was used to going wherever I wanted in the county. It was probably the first moment I realized that the world I lived in wasn’t completely safe. I took up tae kwon do after that. I’m out of practice now, but martial arts helped. Until I learned how to fire my service weapon.”

“It scared you.” He spoke near her ear so they wouldn’t be overheard. Having him that close made her very aware of his clean, almost mint-toned, aftershave. Knight smelled a thousand times better than the automotive shop around them. “Yeah. It’s safe to say that was a scary night. If Levi hadn’t been driving down the highway, I’m still not certain what would have happened. It was starting to storm, the shoulder of the road was almost nonexistent, and it was getting dark. When I finally made it home, Levi and I pulled off the road to talk for a while. He calmed me down; but if he had been any other kind of guy, it could have been extremely dangerous for me. I know that now. I thought Grandma was going to explode. Had Clive Gunderson—a good friend of Luther’s—not been the sheriff then, I think Grandma would have pressed charges. I had bruises up and down my arms after. Clive said I’d asked for it—I’d gotten in the car with Lesley, after all—and then got in the truck with Levi.”

“Why didn’t she push charges?”

“Clive Gunderson was always corrupt. Terrifying, really. After Levi and I ended our relationship—we dated for about nineteen months until he