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“Call me if you need anything or if you change your mind. Maybe when this is all over, we can grab dinner.”
A snort escaped Dante. This was uncharted waters for him. He had no idea what the future held—dinner plans were the least of his worries.
THREE
André – Late September
What the actual fuck?
André did not say those words out loud, but he thought them. Then he thought them again, louder, at the apparition standing at the back of the room.
What. The. Actual. Fuck?
Narrowing his eyes, André squinted over the heads of the Cooper Springs locals who’d filled The Steam Donkey that afternoon. All of them wanted an update on remains found near a popular hiking trail outside of town that morning. News traveled fast here. Wildfire fast.
Seriously, did he need a new eyeglasses prescription? The man standing at the back of the room with thick arms crossed over his chest and hair dark as a crow’s wing gleaming under the lights couldn’t be Dante Castone.
Could it?
No. It couldn’t. This guy was a doppelgänger. The dim lighting around the doorway was making a man out of shadows. That’s all it was.
“Chief Dear?” someone called from the audience. “What else can you tell us?”
Turning slightly, André forced his attention back to the crowd—and very much away from the possibility that someone who looked a lot like Dante Castone was leaning against the back wall. By the time he glanced toward the exit again, whoever it had been was gone.
Shadows playing tricks on him.
He’d either imagined him or André’s subconscious was working overtime wishing for something it couldn’t have.
Fifteen minutes later, André was back at the CS police station, sitting behind his desk and staring at the fake walnut-brown 1970s paneling opposite. The paneling had no answers for him and soon enough he’d be covering it up with his own André Dear-style murder board.
A quick search for Dante Castone had brought up nothing. At least, not for a Dante Castone living in the United States; there were a few in Italy. Calling the DEA and asking around for one of their undercover operatives would get him nowhere. The DEA was fiercely protective of their operatives and rightly so.
Memories from the last night he and Dante had spent together bloomed in his mind.
After not seeing him for weeks, André had figured they’d used up their time together. He’d berated himself for being upset about the end of something that had never had a label on it.
That last rainy evening they hadn’t talked before falling into André’s bed and sliding restlessly against each other’s skin, aching for the physical pleasure they gave each other. He would never deny that the physical with Dante was good. Very good.
The reality was that an undercover DEA agent and U.S. Marshal were not long-term relationship material. André was not the type of person to demand someone change their career and Dante was not the type to just give up what he was driven to do.
The fact they’d gotten together at all was pure chance.
Opening his eyes again, André returned to the present, breathing in through his nose and letting the air back out slowly. He couldn’t think about Dante Castone. He had a town to calm down. Murder was not what he’d expected when he’d decided to take the job, but maybe he should have.
Whose brilliant idea had it been to move to a small town and take over the vacant chief of police position anyway?
His. André had no one to blame but himself.
The thing was, he loved his new job ninety percent of the time. Being the chief of police in Cooper Springs was more fulfilling than he’d ever imagined. Sure, he spent a fair amount of time responding to calls about lost chickens and other animals—even horses, just like Jensen had said at his going-away party. Which was plain annoying because he hated that Jensen had called it. And domestic calls were never fun—unless he counted the time Hardy Phinney and Eustis Kurr got into a heated argument over the fact that Hardy had taken the batteries out of his hearing aid so he didn’t have to listen to his equally cantankerous neighbor complain about the state of his front yard.
Furious, Eustis had dragged his push mower across their shared property line and proceeded to shorten the weeds enough that Hardy could see through his front window. Spotting his archenemy trespassing in his yard, Hardy had called the station, demanding someone come out and arrest Eustis.
Deputy Lani Cooper had filled André in before they’d arrived at the address together.
“You know those memes? ‘He never married. Instead, he lived next to his best friend, and they did everything together?’ That kind of thing?”
André nodded. He didn’t spend much time on social media, but he had seen a meme or two like the one she was describing, the ones that pointed out gays, lesbians, and trans people had been around forever and living in plain sight.
