on right away. It looks pretty cut-and-dried. Should be no problem.”
“Thanks, Rick. I owe you.”
“Hell no,” the man said. “I owe you times a hundred. Caro is doing great at school. My girl’s going to make it through college with honors.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Wouldn’t have happened if not for you. You really got through to her, like I never could.”
“She’s a good kid. She just got a little lost for a while.”
Rafe was studying him anew as he ended the call. “His daughter?”
Brett nodded. “It was a close one. She nearly got sucked up into something really bad.”
“Ever get to you?”
“All the time. It’s a rough world for kids these days. For every Caroline Alvarado, there are three who don’t make it. It wears on you.”
Rafe looked at him consideringly. “You know Quinn would take you on here in an instant if you wanted.”
Startled, Brett blinked. “What?”
“Only reason he hasn’t mentioned it to you himself is he’s pretty sure you wouldn’t give up being a cop.”
Recovering, Brett admitted, “I came close, once. But it’s kind of in the blood.”
Rafe nodded in understanding. “Figured. But thought it might be good to know there’s another option.” He smiled crookedly. “Assuming, of course, you could live with the fact that we don’t always follow the book.”
“What you do,” Brett said, “is get results.”
“There is that,” Rafe said, and grinned. “Besides, you’re kind of handy where you are.”
He’d barely seen the man so much as crack a smile before, except at the wedding, so this was something.
“Thanks. I think.” He shifted his gaze to Cutter. “So what do you want, dog? Go or stay?”
The dog looked up at Rafe. “Up to you, mutt,” he said. “Nice of you to visit, but I’m good. You don’t need to stay.”
The dog reached out with his nose and nudged Rafe’s hand. Then he turned and trotted over to Brett.
“Guess he’s all yours for the duration,” Rafe said. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” he said wryly, thinking he might just need it.
He spent most of the drive back to his place wondering if he could spare the time to stop by Sloan’s aunt’s place and let her know what Rick had said. But he was still a little too ashamed at his reaction to learning about her husband to do it. Relief sparked by a good man’s death was not something to be proud of, no matter the reason. And the thought of how much she must have loved her husband, to do what she’d done, and how much pain she had gone through made him feel worse than useless. He knew all too well no words could ease that kind of pain.
So instead he dropped Cutter off at the house, spent ten minutes throwing the tennis ball for him, ten minutes that barely took the edge off the dog’s seemingly endless energy, promised him more tonight and headed back to work. He would call from there, he told himself. Safer.
And he would finally get around to marking out another running route. One that didn’t pass the path that led to the big Craftsman house.
Sloan put the last dishes in the dishwasher. She considered the meal a success. Uncle Chuck was under strict dietary restrictions and claimed she was the only one who could make those meals palatable. Sloan suspected that was as much to take some of the load off of his wife, but since that was her goal as well, she happily went along. And it didn’t hurt that they were all eating a bit healthier, she supposed.
She stopped herself from looking at the clock again. It would be five minutes later than the last time, she told herself, just as it had been all evening. Instead she got her aunt and uncle settled in with a movie selected from her streaming service, a concept they had taken to with enthusiasm.
She’d take this time to check the website and catch up with email. Her inbox had been too full for too long. She needed to get back on track. Her compatriots across the country were good people and had stepped up when they’d learned of her uncle’s ill health, but Accountability Counts was her baby, and she had neglected it for too long.
After her initial sort she had two updates on current situations, four inquiries she would refer to the appropriate military offices—no doubt after having to reassure each that most of the rank and file were honest and true—and three cases she would direct to regional coordinators, mostly concerning other family members affected in ways similar to her own. One more was local, so she would look into that herself. Then came the standard batch of praise and threats.
Thankfully, today the praise outnumbered the threats two to one. She filed the good ones to read when she had time or needed the lift and moved the threats to the library she’d created just for that. If nothing else, she’d learned that early on. Document, document, document, the mantra of anyone dealing with large entities. She read them only for tone, to see if anything unusual jumped out, anything to indicate the twisted psyche behind them would do more than just spew venom from behind the safety of an anonymous internet. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was necessary. She had ruffled some lofty feathers, and some were on birds in a position to do her great harm in many ways.
The rest were spam, scams or phishing, and she deleted them unread. That chore done, she wrote a quick blog post on the updates, ending it with her usual encouragement.
“Don’t give up,” she wrote. “There are so many good people out there, steadfast and loyal. You just have to find them.”
Before she even clicked on the publish button, her mind was back on Brett Dunbar. She told herself he kept popping into her thoughts because she was anxious for him to call and tell her if he’d found anything out on the application.
Okay, she admitted, also because he was one of the good guys. She didn’t know why she was so certain—these days it usually took her a while before she trusted someone—but she was. Something about him, maybe the shadows that darkened his eyes, told her this was a man who understood.
It was not because he was, as Connie had said, nice looking. She would have put him a bit beyond that, but still, she wasn’t in that market anymore. She doubted she ever would be.
On that thought her cell rang. She picked it up, already irritated at the way her mind had instantly jumped to wondering if it was him. As if it were spelled with a capital H.
But that was nothing compared to how her heart leaped when she saw the number she’d seen only once before.
“Sloan?”
The way he said her name when she answered sent a little shiver through her and made an image of him, tall, lean, with those eyes and that touch of gray in his hair, snap into sharp focus in her
