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“Detective Malley,” she relayed to Rafe. “He’s the SAPD cop I asked to have someone check on Gavin.”
Maybe the cops had done that right away, but Bree got a bad feeling about this.
And the bad feeling was right.
“Sheriff O’Neil,” Malley said once she’d answered. “I just got a report on the man you’ve been looking for. Gavin McCray. Sorry to inform you, but someone just found his body. He’s dead.”
----- ??? -----
Chapter Five
While Bree drove toward Wade’s, Rafe read the preliminary report he’d just gotten from Ruby. Detective Malley would be sending Bree one as well, an official one, but that would likely take hours. Rafe didn’t see waiting that long when it wasn’t illegal for Ruby to access the info she had.
“About forty-five minutes ago, Gavin’s wife, Patricia, called 911, saying she’d come home from doing groceries and found him bleeding and unresponsive in the kitchen,” Rafe read aloud. “EMTs responded, and Gavin was pronounced dead on the scene with a single gunshot wound to the side of the head.” He checked the timeline. “He was already dead before you asked the detective to send out officers to check on him.”
Rafe had added that because he knew Bree was mentally beating herself up right now. She was no doubt second-guessing what she should have done.
“This isn’t your fault,” Rafe spelled out when he saw how tight her grip was on the steering wheel.
“Maybe,” she muttered, not sounding at all convinced of that. “Gavin had kids. Please tell me they weren’t there when his wife found him.”
At least Rafe could give her this. “No. The wife was alone, so I’m guessing the kids were at school or daycare.”
Hell, he hoped so anyway. Rafe hoped the children hadn’t been in the house. But even if they were, they clearly hadn’t been harmed or Ruby would have put that in her report.
“I should have taken Gavin into custody after the explosion,” she grumbled. “Instead, I let him wander off from the hospital, and look where that got him. Dead.” She paused only a heartbeat. “I’m liking Buckner for this. You?”
“Oh, yeah. And Ruby agrees. She included Buckner’s home address, business address, and contact info for phones at both of those places, along with his personal cell. She figured you’d be wanting to have a word with him.”
“Definitely. A word where he tells me why the hell he’s doing all this.” She relaxed the grip on the steering wheel so she could slap it with her palm.
It didn’t surprise him that something like this would eat away at Bree. Her blood ran blue, a legacy that went with being a fourth-generation cop. Even as a kid, she’d had a strong sense of right, wrong, and injustice.
“Pull over,” Rafe said, pointing to the small parking area outside the massive wrought iron gates that fronted Wade’s estate.
“It’s not going to do any good to talk about it,” she insisted.
“Pull over,” he repeated.
He was thankful when she actually did it. Since they’d learned on the drive that Wade was home, Bree needed a minute to settle before she faced him. Wade was likely to be dealing with his own emotional mess, and Bree needed to have all her resolve gathered to handle him.
“Remember when we were eight, and you tripped Bodie Betterton in the hall at school?” He didn’t wait for her to confirm the memory. Rafe knew that was something she’d never forget. “He’d gotten pissed at me about something and jumped me from behind in the locker room at gym class. Because he was twice my size, he beat me to a pulp before the coach got him off me.”
“And while you were in the nurse’s office, I saw Bodie and stuck out my foot to trip him,” she finished. “I was so pissed off at him for hurting you that I wanted to hurt him right back.”
“You did just that.” Rafe chuckled. “Bodie faceplanted on very hard, very dirty linoleum that I’m convinced was bulletproof. He broke his nose and had to walk around school with one of those ugly face braces for weeks.”
Bree didn’t laugh. But she did smile a little. “I lied and said it was an accident, and all the eyewitnesses backed me up because Bodie was an asswipe bully.” She stopped, put the cruiser into park, and turned to look at him. “Is there a life lesson in that?”
“Several of them. First, always trip the asswipe bully if you can. Maybe not with a literal trip, but asswipes should have to pay for what they’d done.”
She gave him a flat look and tapped her badge as if to tell him that it was never a good idea to take the law into one’s own hands. Or in her case, one’s own foot.
“And the second life lesson is that sometimes even when we do the right thing, it might not feel right,” he spelled out. “Even now, you feel guilty for what you did to Bodie. Am I right?”
She cut her gaze away from him. Yeah, she felt guilty all right. Rafe not so much, but then he’d been on the receiving end of the pounding from Bodie.
“If I’d at least questioned Gavin, then we might have had some proof that Buckner is behind this,” she muttered.
