AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Holy shit. Are you okay!?”
Megan nodded and laughed, but her dress was soaking up more water by the second. She pushed herself up and grabbed Troy’s outstretched hands, tugging her back upright and ashore.
“That’s embarrassing,” Megan said, looking back at where she had planted her butt moments before. Something caught her eye in the moonlight.
“Here, let me—”
Megan stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Troy?”
“What? Are you hurt? Want me to call Laura or Buzz?”
Megan didn’t respond, but crouched down to where she had just fallen in the water. She plunged her hand into the icy water again, going all the way down until her elbow was submerged, and dug her hand deep into the silt.
Troy was right next to her as a brace when she turned her palm upward out of the water, revealing a palmful of mud with moonlight glinting off flecks of golden sparkles.
“Holy Mother of God,” Troy said on a complete whisper.
Megan didn’t answer again, but took her other hand to root around the silt until she found the thing that had caught her eye. She brushed the dirt away and angled it more into the moonlight when she heard another gasp from Troy as he laid eyes on what she had seen.
There in the palm of her hand, Megan and Troy stared at a nugget of gold.
Megan slowly turned to him and grinned. “I think we might be able to get a new barn sooner than we thought.”
Troy wrapped his arms around her and kissed her until they both were laughing so hard, neither could speak. All they could feel was joy.
CHAPTER53
Ash had stayed too late at the party and should’ve gone straight home. Megan and Troy’s grand opening should’ve ended at ten, but when they had come back revealing their discovery, everyone had lost their damn minds, and it had spun out of control into a total rave, lasting until two and probably beyond.
Laura and Carter had to carry Holden fast asleep out at eleven, which everyone expected. Mr. Chapman and his new friend Sherry were right behind them, but everyone else hung out, eventually helping to set everything straight.
She had waved goodbye to the guys from Station Three, giving Megan a huge hug before rolling out herself.
But she wasn’t going home.
Megan had asked her how she was doing earlier with that look of worry Ash had always hated. No one knew how much she was working. The only ones who might be able to pick up on it were Laura and Megan, and both had been busy with their own things. Not that she minded. Ash had something else on her mind too.
She keyed herself into her new office and fired up her computer again, opening the files she had been working on for months now.
There had been a string of attacks on women throughout the area. The other guys in her department thought they had the collar with Troy, which Ash had never agreed with, but there was no stopping them. While they wasted their time with him, she had been going back to the evidence again, looking for any kind of thread to pull. There was something. She could feel it. Ash knew, like she always did. She justknew.
Ash clicked on Troy’s file again and read the circumstantial evidence and eyewitness accounts from the scene of the attack on Keira McKinney, and then opened the one from the wreck she had responded to. She had looked at these countless times by now, so she had them memorized, but still there was something she was missing.
The only connection she could see was that the one from the wreck had security experience. The other guy looked military. That plus the connection was why they went after Troy, but there was something bigger about that—Ash could feel it.
If she could just figure this out and find the guy who did attack Keira, maybe that would free something up and lead her to the other attacks both in Goldvein and the neighboring towns.
She studied the picture again and looked even closer at the arrest from the wreck. The guy was clearly out of his mind, but toxicology came back clean. The notes from the sergeant read mental health issues, but something about that didn’t sit well. It was too perfect.
She eyed him again and pulled up a different file from the courts to find where he currently was serving his sentence. Maybe she needed to pay him a visit and try to see if he remembered anything new.
Ash kept at it until the smell of coffee found its way past her door and pulled her like a siren song. The early risers on morning shift fought over who was the first to fix the pot.
She leaned back to rub her eyes, when on a whim she checked one more thing before she had to go make nice with people.
Seeing Laura had been a reminder to check that weird ping again. It hadn’t moved since that one time, so as the weeks had passed, she had stopped checking.
Tonight was a different kind of night though.
Ash leaned into the screen to make sure it wasn’t her eyes deceiving her. Nope. Guess who had come back.
“Well, shit.”
