Sapphire Nights (Crystal Magic Book 1)(36)
“Maybe they were Mormons,” he argued, even knowing that was grasping straws.
He pulled into the gas station and took the phone when she passed it to him. The couple staring back at him possessed none of Sam’s classic—blond—beauty. They were handsome in their own way, but he could see what she was saying. Her mother looked more like him than Sam. He scrolled down, read the article, then handed the phone back to her and returned to driving.
So chances were good that Sam had never been who she was raised to be.
“What else are you remembering?” She’d been raised by a Chinese mother, as he had. What did that signify? Jia Walker had more superstitions than a house full of cranks, but she was completely, totally sane—almost painfully so.
Sam shook her head. Her hair was falling from the combs she’d used to hold it off her nape. Had Cass’s hair once had streaks of gold and ash?
“Nothing, really. There are just these vague. . . shadows. I may be remembering the restaurant where I met her. I’m not certain. But my life before, nothing. Maybe I need the Lucys to chant over me.” She said that grimly.
He glanced over to be certain she wasn’t looking as if she’d like to jump out of the car. His late wife had led him to be wary of hysterical females. Sam seemed weary but calm, so he brought the conversation around to a subject that almost made sense. “Thank you for keeping the Lucys off my back and bringing Val down. She was giving us all the willies. Was that a signal fire that had her scrambling off that rock?”
“You don’t want to know,” she assured him. “But I’d take matches and lighters away from the lot of them if I could.”
“I’ll agree with that, but even if I catch them on a no-fire day, all I can do is slap a penalty on them.” Remembering that flash of light, he resolved to investigate the ashes, but first things first. “Val has probably spread the word of the body’s identity in her death goddess role, but she doesn’t know the details. If I tell you what I know, can you keep quiet?”
He didn’t know why he would trust anything she said, but he liked it when Sam was paying attention. Her powers of observation were as keen as her hearing.
“Like you, I know how to keep my mouth shut.”
He nodded approval. “We found Juan up there, the lodge’s security manager. He’d been mauled by a cougar. He was last seen at the bar at the lodge, so I don’t know how he got out there. We’re treating it as suspicious. How did Val know he was there? We need to nail where everyone was last night.”
“As far as I know, we were all in bed, listening to his spirit howl,” she said, sounding as unhappy as he felt. “Did he have family?”
“No wife or kids. He’s a long-time local. His parents live down the mountain. They’ve been notified. I hate that part of the job.”
“I don’t even want to imagine it,” she said in a troubled voice. “But as far as the Lucys are concerned, Juan now rests in a better place and his spirit won’t haunt us. Let’s find a normal topic. Who are you and what are you doing up here?”
“Wow, that took a nasty turn.” Walker ran a hand through his hair. One thing led to another, and he really didn’t want to open up his life to anyone.
“I ran a search on you, you know. I like knowing I can trust the people to whom I’ve bared my soul.” Her voice was distant and stiff.
Shit. Of course she had. “You didn’t find much,” he said with assurance. “My firm is paid well to keep personal information out of the news when it’s of no importance to anyone but the people involved.”
“Yeah, if you’re the Chen Ling Walker from LA, your firm did a good job,” she said with a wry intonation that he deserved. “I don’t want to pry into your family situation, but it would be good to know why a CEO is working a deputy’s job. Is that part of your business?”
Shit, he was bad at explaining and she had every right to be ticked at his keeping secrets when she was an open book.
“I took time off,” he said, weighing his words. “My father started the company. He was into fraud investigations, had an accounting and a criminal justice degree. He disappeared on a case eighteen years ago. At the time, his office was ransacked. The files he was working on were destroyed, the computer hard drives smashed. Back then, cloud computing wasn’t easily available. Even flash drives were pretty high-tech, so he backed up his files on paper. Recent files, he carried on memory sticks, which he carried with him. Needless to say, none of the files were found.”
She uttered a sympathetic noise and patted his thigh—the sore one. If she thought that would make him feel better, she was mistaken. He got hard. Therapists had told him that it was far easier to get physical than explore the emotion. More pleasant, too.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You don’t have to talk about it if it’s painful.”
Yeah, this itch could become real painful if he didn’t satisfy it—especially since he wasn’t satisfying it with any more lunatics. Walker forced his dirty mind back to a subject guaranteed to cure what ailed him. “The only clue we had was a phone call. Dad called my mother every night that he was away. The last one came from Hillvale. He was staying at the lodge. The police questioned everyone in the blamed town. You know enough to understand how far they got.”