I was facing a desk job in the Navy and not looking forward to three years staring at intel reports and sitting in on briefings.”
“Worth a shot,” Jason muttered. “And since you hate intel reports, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but Dylan was putting a file on your desk when I passed by your office.”
“The case Ethan punted us,” I offered. “I asked Dylan to run some of the names again.”
Ethan was another Lenox. He was a detective and one of the last holdouts. He and Jackson Clark weren’t ready to come aboard and work the family business. Though if I had to guess, Ethan would make the move before Jackson, who was living his childhood dream of being a fire fighter.
“The cold case?”
“Yeah. After reading the reports, I agree with Ethan. The original investigation was botched. The detectives were so focused on the family they didn’t look at much else.”
“The girl was taken from her bed—no signs of forced entry—and found buried in the backyard of a vacant rental property the parents owned,” he told me something I knew.
And Jason knowing it meant he’d read through the files as well.
“Didn’t say the family wasn’t a good place to start, just that the investigation shouldn’t have ended there.”
Jason’s phone chirped again and he sighed.
“I gotta go. But I wanna see what Dylan came up with.”
“We’ll talk later.”
As soon as Jason left the gym, my thoughts wandered back to Shiloh. Not the news her dad’s a cop killer. Not that she has a six-foot-five brother named Echo and two other brothers besides. I didn’t wonder about the four Kent siblings and how they all are in law enforcement.
Nope. My thoughts went to where they’d gone every time I’d thought about Shiloh in the last few days—to how my palms had itched to linger a little longer when I was straightening her hips. Her quick quip about buying her dinner first. How nicely her ass would fit in my hands when I cupped it as she rode me. Dirty thoughts that invaded and made my cock twitch. Fantasies that would go unfulfilled.
I shoved all thoughts of Shiloh back into the closet marked Do Not Enter and went back to my workout. An hour later I was in the shower when pretty blue eyes and gleaming blonde hair came to mind. The way the honey locks would look against my black sheets. How those pastel-colored eyes would darken with lust. My imagination was running wild with possibilities, my cock thick and ready. With no relief in my future, I slapped the spigot to cold and endured an icy hell until my dick was soft and my balls had crawled up to find warmth. Only then did I exit the shower, dress, and get to work.
Six hours later my desk was covered in background checks Dylan had run. I was reminded how much I hated intel reports. This was not my specialty. I was a door kicker, then I was a sniper. I had zero patience for reading reports. Send me out into the woods and I could lie motionless for hours. Silently stalk my prey for days if necessary. But sit me behind a desk for eight hours and I’d come out of my skin.
Luckily for me, it didn’t happen very often. As in rarely. But Ethan had been hung up on this case since another detective in his department had retired and the cold case hit his desk. Ethan seldomly reached out to Triple Canopy. That wasn’t to say TC hadn’t in the past contracted with local law enforcement from time to time but Ethan didn’t like to use the family resource unless he truly needed to.
And after combing over everything he’d given us I could understand why he needed help. The case was ten years old. No suspects were identified other than the parents. It was Ethan’s belief the parents were innocent. But the glaring question remained; how did the parents not hear an intruder? The mother’s reason satisfied the detective. She was under the care of a sleep doctor, had been for years. Her medical records showed she’d had insomnia going back to childhood. Two years prior to her daughter’s death she stopped driving after she was in a car accident that was her fault. She’d fallen asleep behind the wheel. The night the little girl was taken, the mother had taken a heavy dose of a sleeping aid that was prescribed by her doctor. But