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She stared at him for some snail-crawling moments, and he had no trouble reading her expression. Resignation. He saw it. And felt it in himself, too.
Yes, they’d be on this together.
“You’ve been texting and reading replies since we got here,” Bree commented, clearly shifting gears. “Do you have anything that’ll help make sense of this?”
Using his phone, he fired off copies of Ruby’s emails to Bree. “Those are preliminary reports from the gas company and the initial assessment of what caused the explosion. There’s also the deep dive on Gavin McCray.”
Her mouth went into a flat line, and her amber-brown eyes narrowed a bit. Still, she opened the reports. “Ten grand a day,” Bree grumbled. “I don’t make nearly that in a month.”
“Then, you’re way underpaid.”
He had to stop himself from adding a sales pitch for her to join the Maverick Ops team. Bree wasn’t former military, a preference of Ruby’s, but there were a couple of other non-vets in the group.
“Look, my specialty isn’t crime scene investigation,” he spelled out for her. “I’m Maverick Ops’ search and rescue guy. But we do have a former investigator on the team. He’s ex-military, an agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigation, which is sort of like FBI. He was also raised by hardcore doomsday preppers so he’s, well, resourceful when needed. His name is Jericho McKenna.”
Her head whipped up. “The guy who solved those four cold case serial killings in Waco?” she asked.
Rafe nodded. The case had made national news, along with making Jericho somewhat of a celebrity. Rafe and the other team members made sure Jericho got a whole lot of ribbing about that, too, including the mockSexiest Man Alivemagazine cover they’d had done up for Jericho. That was after he’d gotten fan mail from women who wanted to marry him and have his babies.
“I doubt even the town council would spring for a second consultant,” she admitted. Again, she made the wordconsultantsound like something down and dirty. “Wade’s town council friends want you because they believe your love for Tessa will make you work hard to find justice for her.”
“Iwillwork hard,” he verified. He shouldn’t have paused. And he sure as hell shouldn’t have added, “But I haven’t loved Tessa for a very long time.”
Bree studied him as if looking for an obvious lie. She wouldn’t see one because it was the truth.
Finally, she nodded and opened the reports Rafe had forwarded to her. Her jaw did more tightening as she read them.
“You think Gavin McCray could have had something to do with this?” Bree came out and asked.
“Possibly.Possibly,” he emphasized, “and it’s a thread that’ll obviously need to be tied off. I can ask my boss to put some boots on the ground to subtly question Gavin’s friends and work associates.”
Bree looked ready to nip that in the bud, but then she nodded. “I want to close this fast. If there’s a killer out there, I want him or her caught and tossed in jail.”
The silence came, settling like dead weight between them, before Rafe broke it. “The inn isn’t on any of the main roads, which was likely the reason it went out of business.”
She nodded, and while she no doubt had already come to the same conclusion, it was clearly eating away at him. “Which means the killer is probably local.” Bree stopped, cursed. “Which means we have to dig through every detail of Tessa’s past. Your past,” she tacked onto that.
“In part,” Rafe agreed. “But after we all left for college, Tessa must have seen other men.” He mentally took out themust have. She had, period. “Tessa and I hooked up in high school,yes, but you’re probably aware we drifted apart while I was at A&M and she was in Austin at UT.”
Yeah, Bree was aware all right even though she’d attended college in San Antonio. It might have been less than a two-hour drive between College Station where A&M was located and where Tessa was attending the University of Texas, but at most Tessa and he managed a night or two per semester and during the holidays. Then, it became even less than that once Tessa had realized she wasn’t going to be able to talk him out of going into special ops in the Air Force.
“Don’t put yourboots on the groundconsultants onto a deep dive into Tessa,” Bree insisted, going with the lingo he’d used. “We’ll do that one.” She continued to look at him, probably trying to see if it was going to bother him when they learned Tessa had been with other men.
It wouldn’t.
Rafe didn’t get a chance to vocalize that though because Bree continued before he could speak. “I’m guessing we need Tessa’s DNA to compare to the bones. It’s not on file,” she quickly let him know. “That leaves maybe getting it from a hairbrush or something personal.”
“Or from Wade,” he said, and Rafe wished this was something he’d already told her about.
Then again, they’d had a lot going on since the explosion.
“Wade’s head was bleeding while he was waiting to be tended to by the EMTs, and he used his handkerchief to wipe the blood,” Rafe explained. “He threw it into the trash, but I asked him if I could put it in an evidence bag that I got from one of the EMTs.”
Oh, yeah. He should have found a way to tell her this sooner.
“And?” she prompted, her mouth set in a hard frown.
“And Wade agreed, though I think he was too dazed to realize what it would be used for. Then, while you were busy with your deputies, I had a courier pick it up to take it to my boss.”
