of all the Hamren estates—along with some sort of entourage.
Dev had yet to meet the man. Brody had made contact, casually questioning him and his party as he escorted them to and around the closed-down mills. The sites where the most recent incidents had occurred were still considered crime scenes. Only the site where Duff had been hurt had been fully assessed by the insurance company and cleared for construction.
“I don’t trust ‘em,” Brody announced for at least the fifth time. “Something about that Don Packard Jr. and his lackeys just isn’t right.”
Dev took the assessment with a grain of salt. Brody would be a great cop one day. He was thorough. But he was too reluctant to exonerate anyone from suspicion. At any chance to focus on Don Jr., he’d been hot to trot.
“Problem is, he lives 1,800 miles away. He isn’t involved in day-to-day mill operations, and—as far as anyone can tell—this is his first time setting foot in town. Even if you have a hunch that he’s involved, what grounds do we even have to bring him in?”
“He’s after the insurance money,” Brody claimed with conviction. “That’s your motive right there. The mills are losing money and Packard wants to collect.”
The thought had crossed Dev’s mind as well, but it wasn’t so simple as that.
“Packard Industries the company, or Don Jr., the individual?” Dev quizzed. “It’s the company that owns the mills. We don’t even know that Junior would benefit directly. To make a person a suspect, you need individual motive.”
“Still, I’d like to get him in the interrogation room and ask him a few questions,” Brody said with a darkly dramatic flair, convincing Dev yet again that the young deputy watched too many cop shows.
“We need to tread lightly,” Dev warned in the authoritative voice he used when Brody needed to be reined in. “If we even look at him sideways, he’s gonna shut his mouth and lawyer up. You want to keep him talking and get something out of him? Don’t let on that he’s a suspect. Keep him nice and relaxed.”
Brody nodded with some disappointment, but Dev knew he would follow the order—yet another quality that would make Brody a great cop.
“There’s still a question needs answering,” Brody said a minute later. The two of them stood side-by-side, watching the diminishing fire.
“If it’s like you said, with all his lawyers to take care of things and with him never once having been in town, what is he doing here?”
13
The Big Spoon
Shea
“What can I get you?”
A bartender who Shea had seen before but had never officially met dropped a cocktail napkin at her place at the bar. At two o’clock in the afternoon on a Monday, The Big Spoon was dead save for a table of three men at the tail end of a leisurely lunch.
“Oh, nothing—thanks,” Shea said politely, trying to be inconspicuous as she searched for signs of either half of the Kingston brood. “I’m waiting for Delilah. She’s supposed to meet me here.”
The man turned his gaze off to the right—toward a clock behind the bar. “Yeah … she must be running a little late.”
Craving an eyeful of Dev, who might just happen to be at The Big Spoon by virtue of owning it, warred with her sense of self-preservation. Shea had to teach herself how to stay away from that man.
She’d changed her mind no fewer than ten times over the course of the weekend. Seeing this through gave her absolutely no room to slip. She tried to reconcile the part of her that was terrified by this with the part that was eager to rejoin the real world. Friday had been the first time in two months that she hadn’t eaten alone.
It was also the first time in two months that she’d talked to anyone about food and gotten that rush she sometimes did when she got to use her culinary skills. All day, every day was too long to focus on her film project, and having more to her day brought her joy. Life had been damn-near perfect in the moments before she’d found out Dev was the sheriff.
“I am so. Sorry. I’m late.” Delilah’s staccato apology came from behind Shea’s back before the woman herself came into view. A slow-moving Delilah was laden with bags of bread—two hung on her elbows and two in her hands. She even had a pink box under her chin. As Shea rushed to relieve her of some of her load, it suddenly