and rode upstairs to the executive floor. Craig Warner’s secretary looked surprised to see her, almost as surprised as Rachel was for being here. The woman passed Rachel into the next office, occupied by Lester Atkins, Mr. Warner’s personal assistant. Rachel wasn’t exactly sure what a personal assistant did, but the guy looked both busy and annoyed at her interruption.
“Hi, Mr. Atkins. I need to speak with Mr. Warner if he has a minute.”
“He has an appointment in about five minutes. You’ll have to schedule something for later.”
Disappointed, she turned to leave, but she was intercepted by Mr. Warner’s secretary standing in the doorway. “If you keep it quick, I’m sure Mr. Warner won’t mind if you slip in.”
Rachel felt like ducking as the secretary and Lester traded venomous looks. She muttered, “I’ll make it fast.”
Actually, she loved the idea of not getting into a long, drawn-out discussion with Mr. Warner. She’d just float a teeny trial balloon to see where the winds blew around here and then she’d bail out and decide what her next move should be. In her haste to escape Lester’s office, she ended up barging rather unceremoniously into Mr. Warner’s.
He looked up, startled. “Rachel. I didn’t expect to see you this soon.”
She smiled weakly. “Well, I’ve hit a little snag and I wanted to run it by you.”
Craig leaned back in his chair, mopping his brow with a handkerchief before stuffing it in his desk drawer. “What’s the snag?”
“I was comparing the original receipts against the financial statements of the oil-drilling company like you asked me to, and I found a few discrepancies. I’m afraid I don’t know much about Walsh Enterprises’ procedure for handling stuff like this. Do we just want to close the books on it and move on, or do you want me initiate revising the financial statements?”
Craig frowned and she thought she might throw up. “How big a discrepancy are we talking here?”
She squeezed her eyes shut for a miserable second and then answered, “Big enough that the one person whose signature I can read would be in trouble if he weren’t already dead.”
“Ahh.” Comprehension lit Craig’s face. She thought she heard him mutter something under his breath to the effect of, “The old bastard,” but she couldn’t be sure.
The intercom on his desk blared with Lester announcing, “Mr. Warner, your eleven o’clock is here.”
Rachel leaped to her feet with alacrity. Her need to escape was almost more than she could contain. She had to get away from Warner before he fired her.
He stood up. “I’ve got to take this meeting. We’ll talk later.”
She nodded, thrilled to be getting out of here with her job intact.
“And Miss Grant?”
She gulped. “Yes, sir?”
“Keep digging.”
He was going to support her if she found more problems. Abject gratitude flooded her. God bless Craig Warner. Weak with relief, she stepped into Lester’s office. And pulled up short in shock. The last person she’d ever expect to see was standing there. And it was not a nice surprise. “Finn!” she exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing here?”
He arched one arrogant eyebrow. “Since when is what I do any of your business?”
Good point. But had she not been standing well within earshot of her boss, she might have told him to take his attitude and shove it. As it was, she threw him a withering glare and said sweetly, “Have a nice day.” And go to hell, she added silently.
“Finn. Thanks so much for coming,” Craig Warner said from behind her. “I know it’s strange in this day and age to ask a doctor to make a house call—”
Lester pulled the door discreetly closed and Rachel heard no more. Was Craig Warner sick? He looked okay. Maybe he was a little pale and had been perspiring a bit, but the guy had a stressful job. And why call a specialist like Finn? Last she heard, he was an emergency internist—not a family practitioner.
She started back to her desk, her thoughts whirling. Keep digging. What exactly did Warner expect her to find? And why had Finn agreed to see Craig in his office? Why not tell the guy to call his own doctor? Maybe Finn had come over here to wreck her new job. After all, he’d successfully wrecked just about every other part of her life. Without a doubt, the worst part of living in a small town was the insanely long memory of the collective populace. You made one mistake and it was never forgotten, never forgiven.
She worked feverishly through the afternoon and found more and more places where money had been skimmed off of the profits of the oil-drilling company and disappeared. She’d have stayed late and continued working if tonight she hadn’t volunteered down at the senior citizens’ center. It was bingo night, and the retirees didn’t take kindly to any delays in their gambling.
Finn rubbed his eyes and pushed back from the computer. He’d been searching various medical databases for symptoms that matched Craig Warner’s but so far had come up with nothing. The guy was definitely sick. But with what? His symptoms didn’t conform to any common disease or to any uncommon diseases that he could find, either. He’d begged Craig to go to Bozeman and let him run tests there, but Craig had blown off the suggestion. He’d said he just needed some pills to calm his acid stomach and wasn’t about to make a mountain out of a molehill.
But in Finn’s experience, when a non-hypochondriac patient thinks he’s sick enough to seek medical advice, it usually isn’t a molehill at all.
He dreaded going home to face more of Maisie’s grilling over his latest encounter with his ex-girlfriend. For she’d no doubt heard all about it. She had a network of informants the FBI would envy.
It had been a nasty shock running into Rachel like that today at Walsh Enterprises. The woman was sandpaper on his nerves. As if he fell for a second for that syrupy-sweet act of hers. He knew her too well to miss the sarcasm behind her tone of voice. Once it would’ve made him laugh. But now it set his teeth on edge. He’d been prepared to act civilized toward her when he’d come back to Honey Creek, but if she was determined to make it a war between them, he could live with that.
Muttering under his breath, he pushed to his feet and headed out of Honey Creek’s small hospital.
“What’re you doing here, bro?”
Finn pulled up short at the sight of his brother, Wes. It still looked funny to see him in his sheriff’s uniform and toting a pistol. Wes had been as big of a hell-raiser as the rest of the Colton boys. Finn supposed there was a certain poetic justice in Wes being the guy now who had to track down wild kids and drag them home to their parents.
Belatedly, Finn replied, “I was just using the hospital’s computer to look up some medical information on their database.”
“Trying to figure out how to poison certain of the town’s females, maybe?”
Finn snorted. “Yeah. Maisie. That woman gets nosier every time I see her.”
Wes shook his
