ridiculous handcuffs off him!”
Trent watched the staff sergeant approach as the female officer removed his cuffs. Butler was an elder by cop standards, with short-cropped white hair, a healthy outdoor tan and the kind of athletic build that looked like he could easily take on men a third of his age and win. But he was jittery, too, with a slight but telltale shake to his limbs that Trent usually associated with people who had something to hide. “It’s Coach Henri, from Trillium, right?” he said.
Trent nodded. “That’s me.”
“I’m Frank Butler, Brandon’s grandfather,” the staff sergeant said. He stretched out his hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced.”
The handshake was a little too firm and Trent couldn’t help but notice that Constable Nicole Docker had seemingly evaporated.
“It’s nice to finally meet you,” Trent said. Despite nodding to each other at hockey games, Trent and the staff sergeant had never actually had much of a conversation. That was on purpose. Trent had learned long ago that when he was trying to maintain a cover, the less time he spent talking to local cops the better.
“I apologize for all that.” Butler frowned. “I imagine that was your first time in handcuffs. Must’ve been quite the shock to the system.”
Trent laughed. It was a safe, noncommittal response. He’d been handcuffed and arrested more times than he could count. It had usually been as part of his undercover work. But the first couple of times he’d been an out-of-control teen, just on the edge of the Wolfspiders gang’s grasp and dealing with the fact that his twelve-year-old sister had been killed when he’d failed to show up to walk her home from school.
“They were under orders to be on the lookout for someone matching your description,” Butler continued. “We saw someone in a mask and mistakenly thought it was a threat. But Detective Brant explained that it was all just a silly misunderstanding and that you’d been trying to help. Next time, keep your head down, stay out of trouble and leave matters to the professionals, all right?”
“Understood,” Trent said. He wondered if there was a reason Butler was pushing him away from the case, beside the fact that he presumed he was a civilian. “Brandon and the other third-line players got out okay?”
“They did, thankfully,” Butler said. “Thank you for telling them to hide.”
“You must’ve been worried sick,” Trent said.
“To be honest, I had no idea he was even in there until he came running out the front door. The young men are saying you stayed behind to fight the gang members?”
“Well, they jumped me, so I fought them off the best I could.” Trent chuckled self-consciously. “Guess my inner hockey brawler came out. I was a bit of a fighter in my youth. Not the kind of stuff I’d ever tolerate from my players, but handy in a situation like that. My dad always said I was all instinct and no common sense. Told me I’d get myself killed one day.”
That was more truth than he liked admitting, but he’d always believed truth made the best cover. His dad was a farmer who hadn’t quite known how to handle his second eldest son. What he’d actually told him, more times than Trent could count, was that if he didn’t learn to take a breath instead of flying off the handle, he’d get himself or somebody else killed. Then, a teenaged Trent would come within an inch of shouting back, “You mean like I killed my sister?” before running off and doing something stupid like punching a hole in the barn wall.
He shook off the ugly memory.
“One of the masked men asked me if I knew where he could score some drugs,” Trent added. “The name sounded a bit like ‘pariah’ or ‘piranha.’ But, like I told him, I honestly have no idea what that stuff is made of, let alone where to get it.”
“Just remember to leave things like that to the police in the future,” Butler said again. “The last thing we need is civilians running around the place trying to be heroes. Now, if you can please head outside, somebody will take your statement.”
Dismissed, Trent walked outside. Cold, wet air hit him like a wave. The sun would be rising soon, but snow was now pelting down in sheets. Emergency vehicles and camera crews filled the parking lot. People huddled together in pockets around a tall fir tree decked in Christmas lights. They were so shrouded by winter gear and emergency blankets he could barely tell who was who. More specifically, he couldn’t see Chloe anywhere.
A slender hand came out of nowhere, grabbing him firmly by the arm and pulling him under an overhang. He blinked. Chloe had pulled the furry hood of a jacket up over her head. It framed her face perfectly and made her look years younger. Wisps of red hair flew around her face. The overall effect was kind of adorable.
“You infuriate me, Henry,” Chloe said. “You really do. You’ve been calling me for days and you didn’t once think to mention what you were calling me about? Why were you even calling me if you didn’t want me involved with this investigation?”
He was beginning to think it might actually have been because he’d missed her.
“I told you,” he said. “I’m undercover at your old college. Bobcaygeon is your hometown. You worked with Butler and you live half an hour from here.”
“Trillium is not my college.” She frowned. “It’s just a community college I happened to go to, before getting into the police academy. Bobcaygeon is not my hometown and owning a house somewhere I crash at between cases isn’t the same as living there.”
Well, obviously that bothered her. But he had no idea why. “So, you’re not from here, then?”
“I thought you knew me better than that, Cop Boy. I’m not from anywhere.”
“Cop Boy? I can’t call you Lady Cop, but you can call me Cop Boy?” Despite himself, she’d just made him laugh. Yeah, he had missed her. He’d missed this. The light teasing. The verbal sparring. The sense that he always had to be on his toes around her. “How can you possibly be from nowhere? Everyone’s from somewhere.”
“Not me. My little sister, Olivia, and I grew up in the back of a station wagon, squished between suitcases. I don’t know if our dad’s intentionally a con artist, or just the kind of man who’s really good at temporarily hiding the fact that he’s a jerk and convincing people he’s good at things he’s not. But he has the kind of attitude problem that makes him think that nobody is ever treating him well enough. His charm makes him great at landing jobs. But his sense of entitlement makes him terrible at keeping them.
“So we’d land somewhere new, get settled in, live there for a few months, and then he’d get into an argument with someone and back into the station wagon we’d go. Bobcaygeon happened to be where I was for the last three months of high school and I entered Trillium because moving twice in grade twelve had killed my ability to get a student loan for university. That doesn’t mean I belonged here.”
That had been a defensive monologue he hadn’t expected. What had gotten under her skin? “Then why do you own a house half an hour from here?”
“When my mother finally decided she’d had enough of my father, she had no bank account of her own and a divorce lawyer wasn’t much help in taking half of my father’s nothing. She begged me to cosign on a mortgage for her. So I did. I was twenty-two.” She crossed her arms. “A few years ago, she decided she wanted to move into a retirement
