It's One of Us(37)

“You just think he’s pretty.”

She flashes him a smile. “Contrary to some people we know, I wait to make judgments until I’ve assembled all the facts.”

“Oh, you do think he’s pretty,” Osley crows, and she can’t help it, she laughs as she gets out of the car. Osley isn’t wrong. Park Bender is pretty. Sensitive mouth, square jaw, unruly hair, tall and trim. But pretty boys aren’t her thing. Never date a man who’s better looking than you, her mother always used to say. It’s not the advice she takes so much as the knowledge that most gorgeous men are wrapped up in themselves and their egos, whether obvious or not. They have something to prove. Not to mention he has a stunner for a wife, though she’s as skittish as a deer.

“Thank you for coming back,” Bender says. Polite. Non-evasive. He seems troubled; she senses the tension running through him, his lips thin, knuckles white around a steaming fresh cup of coffee. She thinks longingly back to the now empty cup in the car’s holder. Never enough. It’s never enough. But she’s wired now; more and she’ll shoot off to the moon.

“No problem. Why don’t you show us what’s happened?”

They tromp into the back yard through a wrought iron side gate—“keyed, always kept locked, the only one who can get through is the mower, and he’s done for the season”—into a fenced-in area the size of a small parking lot. Grass, still lush and green, bisected by a gravel path interspersed with wide slate slabs that leads to a charming cedar-and-stone cottage. The scent of burning leaves fills the air, one of the neighbors doing a burn.

“I didn’t realize you had so much room back here,” Joey says.

“The lot goes back into the woods, all the way to the creek.”

“Fenced all around?”

“Yes. There’s barbed wire down by the creek. We converted the shed so I’d have a place to work when school was out.” At Joey’s glance toward the Bender house, which easily runs four thousand square feet, he stammers, “I need quiet and privacy. It’s...contractual.”

“I’ll take a look around,” Will says, taking off to the right. He disappears, and moments later, there’s a frantic susurrus as the host of sparrows who live behind the cottage take flight, zooming into the air.

Joey follows Bender into the very misnamed “shed”—the small cedar-and-stone cottage has tons of light, space, and natural wood. The desk is live-edge wood and built into the wall, the bookshelves are stuffed, and the Aeron chair is original Miller.

“Olivia designed it for me,” he says, ducking his head in humility at her raised brow. “She’s an amazing designer. You could give her a cardboard box and five bucks, and she’d make it look like Buckingham Palace. This was a falling-down donkey barn when we bought the place.”

Joey takes in the disturbance—the glass shards, the open safe, the pens and papers covered in coffee.

“What did they get?”

“Money. Paperwork. Passport and birth certificate.” A pause. “A gun.”

“Registered?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Concealed permit?”

“No. Just a regular home protection piece.”

She shrugs. No big deal, dude. Don’t be so fidgety. “Good. If it shows up in a pawn shop or on the streets, we’ll be able to track it down.”

“Do you think this is a coincidence?” Bender sounds worried.

“Do you?”

He flushes and chews a nail. When he speaks again, his voice is hard and flat. “Listen. You two keep showing up, dropping bombs that end my life as I know it. Reporters are bugging us. Now I find someone’s broken into my office and emptied my safe, and earlier, I felt like someone was watching me from the woods. No, I don’t.”

“Okay. Any cameras to your security system?”

“We have a monitoring system on the front door. Nothing back here, though. Since it’s locked inside the fence and has an alarm....”

She doesn’t bother stating the obvious—people jump fences all the time—just nods.

“You might want to give it a look, just see if it caught anything out of place overnight. Any more media calls?”

“That woman from Channel Four. She came by the house after you left.”

“And you talked to her?”

Bender gives her a look of extreme loathing. “No. Though I can’t say I appreciate you telling her about my connection to this case.”

Joey holds up a hand. “I haven’t talked to any reporters. Not my favorite, you know? And the PIO hasn’t made any statements. But they have their ways, their sources. What did she ask you?”

“Just to talk. Like she did when she called. I declined.”

“It’s going to get out eventually, Mr. Bender. The media listen to our radio calls. They know when something happens that will be of interest. The Cooke case is high profile. We’ve been here three times now. Add in your ties to the case, and the fact that someone’s been digging around in your personal things? As far as the media is concerned, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, you know what I mean?”

“There is no smoke, nor fire. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Bender is clearly rattled. Interesting. “Right. But a tip can come from anywhere. Neighbors. Work. What did you say you do back here, sir? Something contractually private? Is that something that can be used against you?”