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Bright blinked. “There aren’t any towels in there.”
Val raised a brow at him, but it was the one I thought was Zip who said, “You do realize that your hands can dry on their own, right?”
“Whatever,” he grumbled and walked back into the bathroom.
Then he came back out with a towel.
The lying fuck.
“Everyone in the cells. I’ll come get you one at a time to get your story,” Bright said.
“I think the fuck not,” I barked. The way this had all been handled was sketchy. “You take our statements, and unless we’re under arrest, there’s no need for cells.”
“I think I know what does and doesn’t need to be done. I am the officer of the law. You’re what…a chef?” he scoffed.
The way he sneered at the thought that just because I was a chef, I wasn’t “more” made me want to snort.
I held it in check, though, and barely caught the way his eyes glinted, as if he was trying to provoke me just to get a reaction.
“He’s Navy,” Simi pointed out. “And he hasn’t always been a chef, Sheriff Bright.”
I caught her by wrapping one hand around her hip and pulling her into me.
She grumbled something under her breath just as Bright asked, “Are you two together?”
Neither one of us hesitated to say “yes.”
“How long?” he asked. “Long enough for y’all to lie to an officer of the law, saying you were with each other when you weren’t?”
Keene sighed. “Do you have a superior?”
I nearly didn’t catch the snort in time again.
“No,” Bright barked, then turned to me.
“It’s just funny that you show up right when a dead body does,” the sheriff suggested.
I narrowed my eyes. “I’ve been on the road for the last twelve hours. I stopped in Texas last night, got up this morning, and kept driving. I’d like to point out that it takes a solid eight hours in a passenger vehicle to get from where I was to where I am now. You can add another ten hours for the trucks and trailers.”
“Well, then I’ll just have to call and confirm these alibis,” he sneered. “Who wants to go first?”
I was one of the last ones to go.
Keene was dead last.
When I came out, I was overly frustrated and knew that this investigation wasn’t going to go our way.
Simi came out of the room almost at the same time as I did, her having to deal with a deputy and not the sheriff. Which I thought might be a good thing because at least she didn’t look like she wanted to commit murder like me.
Not that I had anything against killing when it was deserved.
I’d done a lot of it in my time in the Navy. Did some things I wasn’t too proud of, too.
But ultimately, the things I’d done, I’d done to bad, bad people.
And Bright… was a bad person. He may be pretending to be a good one, but it was overly obvious to me, after ten minutes of being in a room with him, that he was going to do something I wasn’t going to like.
“Let me go talk to the others,” the lawyer that’d been with me said. It was one Keene had brought in. I’d gotten a junior partner while the senior partner that’d come in had gone in with the sisters.
Needless to say, the lawyer, Stratt, had suggested that I not say anything to Bright at all. So for the last thirty minutes after giving my statement of “I wasn’t here and here’s my alibi,” Bright had made up more and more worrisome stories about what happened and why.
Needless to say, his first eight suspects were us. And Simi was the main one.
“Everything go okay?” I asked her as she got closer.
She looked at the lawyer, then at Bright, who appeared at the door, and said, “I’ll tell you later.”
So not all right. But likely not as bad as my experience.
At least it was Keene and me that had to deal with Bright.
Stratt and Mac—the other lawyer—came out to the waiting area and said, “Y’all are free to go.”
“I didn’t release them,” Bright grumbled.
“The deputy did,” Mac, the lead lawyer, replied. “Are you contradicting his words?”
Bright sighed. “Don’t leave town.”
“My clients leave town in four days,” Mac said. “Which you know. They have no choice and have seven booked-out shows. They’ll lose thousands and thousands of dollars, which I’ll then sue you for if they miss it. They can leave, or they can stay, but that decision is up to you and your department and whether or not you think you can afford it or not.”
“You can leave,” he amended quickly. “But make sure they stay in touch.”
“They’re very hard to hide,” he said. “You can see where they’re going to be for the next eight weeks if you look at their schedule online. And, like I told you before, since the murder happened in Mississippi, this is now a federal matter since it crossed state lines.”
