Finding Her Son(23)

“A red and green tattoo. Some kind of figure, I think.”

“What else did Perry tell you?” Mitch asked.

“I don’t know. I took notes. They’re at the house.”

“How about the number he yelled right before—”

Emily’s eyes cleared. “Eighty-five! His code. He talked about how when he got tidbits of information, he never wanted to be the only one who had them. He stashed them away.”

“Good for Perry. Do you know where he kept the files?”

“He told me if anything ever happened to him, to remember that a sommelier would find the files before the bad guys.”

“He hid his evidence in his wine rack?”

“I don’t know.” Panic laced her voice. “Oh, God. He never told me his hiding place.”

“What about your contract? Paperwork he gave you?”

Her vision cleared. “Maybe. He wouldn’t have just said that word without thinking I could find it, right?”

“Exactly. Let’s search for a liquor stash in his office. The guy was an alcoholic from what I gather. We’ll find it.” He glanced at his watch and held her shoulders. Mitch whistled through his teeth. “Listen to me carefully. I can’t touch the evidence in that room. Rules, you know.” He slipped on a pair of gloves that hadn’t been standard issue for him until he’d been benched from SWAT. “But your fingerprints are already on his desk. So…”

He watched her eyes widen with comprehension. She hurried back inside Perry’s office, avoiding the body on the floor, but focused. His Emily was fearless.

He followed her into the room. They rifled through papers and opened drawers, but there was nothing helpful. No wine bottles, just a half-full flask of whisky. No address of a store. He shook his head at Perry’s body. The man had a code word. That meant he had a plan. He had to have left a clue somewhere.

Sirens screamed in the distance.

“We’re out of time.” Mitch tugged Emily’s hand and started toward the exit.

She tugged one last time on a last locked drawer before grabbing a letter opener and jimmying the lock. She snagged a small box containing files, notes and an unopened bottle of wine. She gave him a challenging look. He sighed, then nodded.

“What about his apartment?” she said. “Can we go there, too?”

“The investigators’ll be all over his place. We’ll stash the box in my SUV and wait for the cops downstairs. Then we go to your place and look at the evidence and your notes. Maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ll keep an eye on the investigation. If they find liquor bottles, I’ll know about it.”

“But you won’t tell Tanner, right?”

Her voice made his skin prickle. He didn’t like not trusting his colleagues. The men he’d put his life on the line for a hundred times.

“For now.”




“I CAN’T GET PERRY out of my mind,” Emily said quietly as Mitch maneuvered the SUV up the road toward her house. The image of his faceless body chilled her far more than the winter that had taken hold, or the clearing of leafless aspens poking through the surrounding pines.

They’d spent too long giving statements to the police. After a scathing lecture, Tanner had warned both of them not to leave town, informing them they were persons of interest in Perry’s execution.

She pictured his endearing face, his ruddy cheeks, the deep crow’s-feet at the corner of his eyes, the eagerness with which he came to her to give her one more bit of news. The excitement in his final phone call.

“His last words were to help me.”

“And we won’t let him down,” Mitch said. “We’ll find out what got him killed.”

“And make them pay.” She twisted in her seat. “I want them to pay for taking the life of an innocent man. He didn’t have to die.”

Mitch squeezed her hand. “We’ll figure this out, Emily. I won’t stop until we do.”

She stared at his large, strong fingers engulfing hers. She believed him. He wouldn’t give up. Not like William or even Eric had. The Wentworth brothers had both gone down the path of least resistance—Eric by avoiding his family, William by giving into them. Mitch would never have done either. He didn’t walk away from a fight, he ran toward conflict and battled it out. He was a protector, a warrior. Perhaps that’s why she felt safe when she was near him.

She gripped him hard as a familiar stretch of road loomed around the next corner. The police had removed the signs of the roadside investigation. Only the scarred pavement where the cars had burned remained. A few hundred feet farther, a white cross rose in the gravel.

A barren cross.

“They took the poinsettias,” Emily whispered.

“Evidence. I’m sorry.”

“I need to replace them,” she said quietly as they passed the memorial. “Eric’s favorite.”

“I’ll take you to a florist’s,” Mitch said as he turned onto her street. “Whose car is outside your house?” His voice had tensed; his hands gripped the steering wheel as if he were ready to spin the SUV around.

Emily turned. A familiar black Mercedes sat running at the front curb. She didn’t need to see inside its tinted windows to know who waited for her. “Oh, no. Not today.”