“Fine. I didn’t technically get us off the case. The captain said we no longer have proper clearance. It turned into some next level shit. The FBI will be here soon.”
Jesus. The FBI? Solving this case wouldn’t just save my career. It would set it on a much better trajectory. We passed the crime scene where the fire was finally being contained. I didn’t want to let this go. I had more questions to ask the cops and neighbors. I scanned the marred yellow caution tape that Sally had been fighting earlier, but she was nowhere in sight. The case had been so easily abandoned by everyone but me.
“Open the damn door, Tucker.” He knocked on the passengers’ side window of my car.
I pulled the keys out of my pocket and unlocked it. Damien had more information than he was letting on. He had been chatting with the captain for as long as I was running around in the woods. He had to have found out a lot about the case before we were called off it. I didn’t have much of a choice but to take him up on his offer of drinks now. I had already cracked this case wide open, I just needed a few more details. The more Damien drank, the more he’d talk.
***
“So you’re scared of Violet because she has obsessive-compulsive disorder?” I
asked. Damien was three beers in while I was still nursing my first. It was the perfect time to pry more information out of him.
“I never said that I was scared of her. And I have no idea what her freaking diagnosis is. I said the woods give me the creeps because they're filled with crazy women.”
I should have been getting details about the case. But for some reason my mind had decided to focus on Violet. It had nothing to do with her beauty and everything to do with the fact that she was guilty. At least, that’s what I was telling myself. I needed to know more about her to figure out the perfect plan before showing up on her property again tomorrow morning. “OCD isn’t exactly creepy.”
“It’s not about the OCD. It’s everything else. It’s about the fact that she used to be so normal and then lost her mind and decided to isolate herself from the world.”
I took a sip of my beer and waited for him to continue. I knew that he would. Once he got going on a story it was hard to stop him, even if the story was terribly boring and I desperately wanted it to end. But I was dying to hear more of this one.
He leaned forward slightly and dropped his voice. “She was a few years younger than me in school. I saw her around and she wasn’t crazy then. She was normal. Popular even. I was away in college when it happened, but apparently her whole family abandoned her. Just went poof in the night. Her boyfriend too. They left her all alone, flew to the opposite ends of the country just to get away from her. And that’s when the crazy came out. At least when it started to show to everyone else apparently. Her family probably ditched her because they already knew she was a loon.”
“So you just heard about this? You weren’t there when any of it happened?” He was as bad as nosy Sally. Rumors weren’t facts. He knew that.
“Sure, rumors spread like hotcakes. But these ones are true, I’m telling you. I mean, if the woman is sane, why does she live out in the middle of the woods in that rundown shack?”
It wasn’t a shack. The house would have been beautiful in its prime. I couldn’t exactly argue with the rundown part though. It had been the first thing I’d noticed about the place. “Well if she was alone it would be crazy. But she’s not.” I remembered how defensive she got when I implied that she shouldn’t be out in the woods alone. “She’s married, right?”
He rose both eyebrows and laughed. “Married? Are you kidding? Who would marry that whack-job?”
I took another sip of my beer. So it had been another lie. She was alone in that house. Why had she been so quick to lie to me? The question had been turning around in my head for the past hour, always leading toward one conclusion. She was hiding something. “Maybe she’s out there because she’s trying to run from something she did.”
“Not this again. We’re off the case, man.”
“Just hear me out. What if we solved the case instead of the FBI? We could do no wrong after something like that.”
He just stared at me.
“All we have to do is go question Violet again and…”
“You have the hots for her.”
I laughed. “No, definitely not.”
He slowly shook his head. “You’re smitten.”
“Who uses the word smitten? I’m not smitten.”
A huge smile spread over his face. “She was hot. I haven’t seen her in years, but I remember her being at least an eight.”
She was a ten, hands down. If Damien didn’t see that, he was blind. But the captain and Violet certainly didn’t look anything alike. Damien tended to go after curvy, powerful women who he pretended he knew how to handle. Violet wasn’t like that. She seemed…delicate. Like a violet actually. A lying, timid yet audacious, sexy as sin violet. I shrugged away the thought. “I’m not attracted to her. But speaking of women…how did your chat with the captain go?”
“Great. Pretty sure she's going to say yes to a date any day now.”
Keep dreaming. “So what did she say about the case?”
“That two cops were killed in the explosion, which is why we had to rush over there. Everyone thought there was also a civilian in critical condition. He left in an ambulance before we arrived on the scene, but they IDed him at the hospital while I was on the phone. He’s actually some hotshot agent from out of town that’s part of an ongoing investigation.”