Royce stepped past her toward the window so he could keep an eye on the road.
“Dammit,” she muttered. “What was going on here?”
Royce shook his head. “I have no idea, but I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
Briar’s lips pressed into a thin line as she glanced back at the DB, her gaze lingering on the man’s corpse.
She wasn’t telling him something, of that Royce had no doubt. The single most important thing he had learned while he’d been in the army was how to read people. He wouldn’t have been successful as an investigator if he couldn’t tell when people were hiding something.
He mulled over her reaction.
It was the body. Until they’d found it, she’d been solid, but he’d seen her start when she saw it. The guy had been shot in the head and he lay on his back, the top of his head facing the window as if he’d been looking toward the bedroom door when death found him. It wasn’t the worst scene Royce had ever stumbled upon. There was blood, but not as much as Hollywood liked to think. The guy had likely died instantly, so there hadn’t been much time for the heart to keep pumping blood around.
Except… being freaked out by the scene didn’t seem right either. As an ATF agent, Briar Nilson was more likely to have seen DBs than the average Joe. So, it wasn’t the DB so much as something about this specific dead body.
Royce was tempted to get in Briar’s face about it, demand that she tell him what had her spooked, but he figured she wouldn’t and if she did, it likely wouldn’t be the truth.
She’d definitely lied when she’d said she didn’t recognize the corpse. Why?
Royce would be talking to Bishop once he dropped Briar back at the Utopia. If what he wanted to know was on the internet, Bishop would find it. And there was no way Briar would want to stay at the house now, not after another body had been found.
He hoped not, at least.
The Utopia was better kept up than it had been when they were growing up, but it still wasn’t a five-star hotel. Hell, in his opinion, it wasn’t even a three-star hotel. It was a kitschy 1950s drive-in motel run by Daisy Stone and her son Kyle. Daisy was on her own mission to, as she called it, upgrade Rexville, and she’d started with the motel she’d inherited from her father.
He mulled over asking Briar if she wanted to stay at his place instead of remaining at the Utopia. Then he asked himself what his motivation for that thought was because he was fairly certain Briar’s answer would be a hard no. And he admitted to himself that his motivation was definitely personal.
It wasn’t as if she knew him. At all. They weren’t old friends—if anything, they were closer to old enemies. Maybe not, though, because after hanging out with her at the Crown last night, he felt like maybe they’d gotten past the awkward teenage memories.
He was attracted to this prickly, not quite beautiful, obviously smart woman from his past. But attracted wasn’t a strong enough word. Captivated, beguiled… spellbound? Whatever it was, it had Royce running through his mental thesaurus.