Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 127715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 639(@200wpm)___ 511(@250wpm)___ 426(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 639(@200wpm)___ 511(@250wpm)___ 426(@300wpm)
“You suck,” she lied wispily, still recovering from the kiss. “And anything. Mint. Chamomile. Hibiscus. Passionflower. One of their herbal blends.”
“I’ll get decaf too.”
“And you suck even more.”
He grinned at her.
She frowned at it. “Stop being hot.”
“I’ll try.”
Her eyes lifted to his. “You’ll fail.”
He shrugged.
She rolled her eyes, touched her mouth to his and demanded, “Get me cake.”
“As you wish, Marie Antoinette.”
Another eye roll, but she ended this one smiling.
He put her back into his couch.
Smokey stayed with her, but Lucy and Linus came with Harry as he got his girl some cake.
FIFTEEN
Parental Link
Harry
Late the next afternoon, returning from Aromacobana with a bag full of herbal teas and a pouch of fancy decaf, his mind on the conversation he’d just had over coffee with Cade, he hit his office to see Rus on his way out of it.
His gaze went down to the bag in Harry’s hand, then came up again to Harry’s face, and he left it at that, even though Harry had been getting stick from everyone in the department for two days about that fucking tin of cookies.
Needless to say, if she was going for it, Lillian got his men’s and women’s approval through sugar, butter, oatmeal and cinnamon.
“Left you a note, was going to my desk to email,” Rus explained why he was in Harry’s office, even if Harry had an open-door policy.
The office wasn’t his anyway, it was owned by the county.
“What’s up?” Harry asked.
“Brief on Ballard…and the Dietrichs.”
He read Rus’s face, noting this detective dog had found a juicy bone, and Harry moved to the chair behind his desk.
Rus sat opposite him and waited for Harry to stow the bag before he launched in.
“Ballard’s mother gave me an earful. And his friends gave more. Apparently, this guy was a sad sack. If life didn’t bring him low on the regular, he made stupid decisions to get brought low. Kept losing jobs. His wife cheated on him. Then she left him and cleaned him out when she did. He’d regularly make shitty investments on dubious projects that didn’t pan out. The thing was, he didn’t let it get him down. He was well-liked. He was, according to more than one friend, ‘that guy.’ The one who’d help you move. The one who’d watch your dog while you were on vacation. The one who’d take you for a beer if your girlfriend dumped you.”
“So suicide didn’t jive with them,” Harry deduced.
“Not at all,” Rus replied. “It rarely does. People miss the signs loved ones are sending, or those loved ones do everything they can to mask the signs. But honest to God, Harry, that doesn’t sound like what this is. This guy had lived through a lot and kept on rolling. He didn’t hide any of it either. He was a talker. He shared. He bitched. When he had sorrows to drown, he did that publicly.”
“Does anyone know if he was going through anything around his death?”
Rus shook his head. “He wasn’t living the big life after his wife cleaned him out. One bedroom apartment. Job working for Stormy at the tire store. He wasn’t dating anyone. But he’d just been to a friend’s fortieth birthday party the day before, and several of the attendees remember he was what he usually was. The life of the party.”
“Was he banged up when he went to this party?”
Rus shook his head. “Nope.”
“Anyone have any idea about that?”
“All anyone could guess was that he was excited about some new scheme he said was going to make him rich, and it might have gone bad. They didn’t know what it was or who was involved, but he swore he’d be buying lakefront property and a boat. No one thought anything about it at the time, because this was Muggsy’s gig. He threw good money after bad constantly. Some even said this was why his wife strayed. He was so sure he was going to get rich quick, he got poor quicker and dragged her down with him.”
Harry left the truth unspoken. That the woman could have left him without kicking him when he was down by cheating on him. But Rus knew that better than him, seeing as Rus’s ex thought Rus needed a lesson about how little attention he was paying her, and she used fucking another man in their marital bed to teach it.
“The only thing that grabbed my attention from what they were saying,” Rus went on, “whatever this new scheme was, it was different. He wasn’t investing his own money. Whatever it was, he bragged he didn’t have to lift a finger or hand over a dime, and he was going to be rolling in it.”
He and Rus stared at each other then, because if something sounded too good to be true in that way, it was usually illegal.