Scene of the Crime: Return to Mystic Lake

Chapter Three

Amberly Nightsong Caldwell’s coworkers at the FBI field office had little to disclose about anyone who might want to harm her. She wasn’t currently assigned to any active case. Her director knew she was in the middle of a transitional time in moving Cole into her home, and so he’d given her desk duty pushing paperwork, and regular hours until she and Cole got things settled.

Jackson had stepped back and allowed Marjorie to interview the players, since they were also her coworkers.

He quickly noticed that while the people they spoke to all appeared to respect Marjorie, none of them seemed to be particularly close to her. She was apparently a loner who didn’t require friends.

Jackson had tons of men he counted as close friends in past partners and at the Baton Rouge field office. Jackson wasn’t only considered a ladies’ man—he was a man’s man, as well.

He was the first one to invite a crew over to his place for drinks and chips and dip during a football game, or get together a group to do some horseback riding at nearby stables or head to a firing range for a little impromptu competition.

One thing had become increasingly clear to Jackson as the morning had gone on. Marjorie Clinton was one uptight woman. She smiled rarely and the few she sent his way were filled with either irritation or a strange curiosity, as if he were a species of animal she didn’t know and certainly didn’t trust.

She intrigued him. He was interested to know her background, what made her who she was today. It was unusual for him to care enough to want to know that much about a woman.

When they’d finally finished up with Amberly’s coworkers, he’d insisted they find a place where they could sit and eat lunch before beginning the next phase of interviews in Mystic Lake.

“Don’t look so miserable,” he told her when they sat down across from each other in a booth in a nearby diner.

“We could have just done drive-through on the way to Mystic Lake and saved some time,” she replied.

Jackson opened a menu and shoved it toward her. “Mystic Lake will still be there whether we take ten minutes doing drive-through or half an hour actually sitting and eating.”

“Don’t you feel any urgency?” she asked, leaning toward him, her green eyes shining brightly. Her lashes were long and dark brown and he noticed, not for the first time that day, that she smelled of the fresh scent of a fabric softener combined with a hint of wildflowers.

“Ladybug, we’re past the point of urgency. Urgency should have happened Saturday or Sunday. I wonder how the burgers are here?” He shouldn’t be thinking about how good she smelled or the fact that he’d like to see a genuine smile from her directed at him.

“Who cares? I have a case of two missing people, and a partner who only wants to know when his next meal is due.”

“Do you have many friends?” he asked.

She blinked twice and sat back. He knew she’d worked up a head of steam about taking the time out for lunch and probably was ticked off by the use of a pet name. His question had caught her off guard.

Her cheeks dusted a beautiful pink. “Actually, no. I don’t have a lot of friends. I work all the overtime I can get and I spend my free time either sleeping or visiting with my mother.”

“And your father?”

She opened her menu and lowered her gaze. “He died when I was ten.”

“I’m sorry. It must have been tough for you and your mother.”

“We got by,” she replied, and still didn’t meet his gaze.

“You’re more comfortable if we talk about the case?”

He was rewarded with a flash of her eyes as she gazed up at him intently. “Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately I don’t think this is tied to anything Amberly was currently working on. Nobody we spoke to indicated she was having problems with anyone.”

They were interrupted by the arrival of a blonde waitress with large breasts and a name tag that read June. “Hey, sweet June bug, how about you get us a couple of burgers and fries,” he said.

“And what would you like to drink?” She practically tittered the words as she blushed at Jackson.

“I’ll take a diet cola,” Marjorie said stiffly.

“And I’ll take a regular,” Jackson replied.

As the waitress left the table with a swing of her hips, Marjorie shot him a wicked stare. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

“Maybe I don’t want to help myself,” he replied, and leaned forward. “Do you know how many jackasses June bug probably puts up with on a daily basis? Bad tippers, chronic complainers... What’s wrong with giving her a little ray of sunshine. It cost me nothing and made her smile.”

She studied him for a long moment. “I’m not sure if I like you or not, Special Agent Revannaugh.”

He grinned. “Don’t worry. You’ve really only known me for less than a day. I’ll grow on you.”

“Right, like moss,” she said dryly.

“Okay, just to get on your good side, we’ll talk about the case. You’re right. I think if we’re going to find answers they are going to be in Mystic Lake. There has been no ransom demand, so if they were kidnapped it wasn’t for money.”

“They were kidnapped,” she said with a certainty. “That’s the only thing that could keep Amberly away from her son.” She frowned thoughtfully. “We don’t even know for sure who the intended victim was. One was probably the victim and the other was collateral damage.”

“If Amberly was the intended victim, then we already have a suspect with a motive in John,” he replied. “We’ll see what we turn up in Mystic Lake and see if Cole might have been working on a case that caused somebody to want revenge of some kind.”

“I still can’t believe that John would do anything to hurt Cole or Amberly,” she replied.

“Yeah, but one of her coworkers mentioned that after Ed the potential killer was killed, John tried one last time to get back with his ex-wife,” Jackson reminded her.

“But it obviously went nowhere and Amberly and John remained friends. Cole and Amberly got married and everyone moved on with their lives.”

“At least on the surface,” he replied.

The waitress returned with their drinks, flashing Jackson a wink as she placed his before him. “Burgers will be right up,” she said.

“Thanks, June bug,” he replied.

“Do you suffer from multiple personality disorder?” Marjorie asked.

Jackson nearly snorted pop through his nose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When you were interviewing John earlier you were sharp, no-nonsense and on top of your professional game, but now you’re totally different. You’re a laid-back flirting machine.”

“Flirting machine. Hmm, I like that,” he said in amusement and then sobered. “Maggie, if you play this game too long without being able to compartmentalize, you burn out quickly,” he replied. “If I were to make a prediction, I’d guess that you’re going to burn out fast if you approach all of your cases with the same intensity you’re already using to attack this one.”

At that moment June arrived with their burgers, and for a few minutes they both focused on their food. Marjorie ate quickly, obviously eager to get back on the road and moving.

“So, who are we talking to in Mystic Lake?” he asked as he dragged a French fry through a pool of ketchup.

“Our point person there is Deputy Roger Black. He wasn’t at the scene last night but we’re to meet him in his office when we hit town. He’s acting sheriff until Cole is found,” she said.

“Has he managed to get us any suspects? Mentioned anything Cole was working on?”

“I’ve only had a brief conversation with him and we didn’t get into the details. I’m hoping he’ll have some information when we meet with him.” She looked at her watch and then quickly took another bite of her burger.

“How long have you been on the job?” he asked.

“Two years. I joined the FBI when I turned thirty. I was a cop before that.” She used a napkin to dab her mouth. “What about you?”

“Seven years. I was twenty-eight when they tapped me for recruitment. And like you, before that I was working as a homicide cop and working with a behavioral unit to aid in profiling violent offenders. My work there caught the FBI’s eyes and here I am.”

“But there’s no indication that what we’re dealing with here is a particularly violent offender.” Her eyes shimmered with the need to believe that.

Jackson sighed. He’d made a vow long ago to himself that he would never, ever lie to a woman, no matter how painful the truth might be.

“It’s too early to know,” he finally replied. “All we know for sure right now is that it appears that nothing violent occurred at Cole’s house.”

A look of pain tightened her features. She might appear uptight and in control, but Jackson had a feeling she was soft, too soft for the job she was doing.

“I’m hoping at least Deputy Black can give us somewhere to begin,” Marjorie said when they were once again in the car and headed to Mystic Lake.

“Have you considered the possibility that they might be dead?” Jackson asked softly.

He saw the impact of his words in the swift etch of pain that once again crossed her features, in the tightening of her fingers around the steering wheel. “It’s too early in the investigation to come to that conclusion. We have a lot of things to accomplish before we even consider that.”

“It’s been four days since anyone has heard from them.” He wanted to prepare her for whatever they might discover. He was also surprised to realize that he somehow wanted to protect her.

He chalked it up to the fact that she was a relatively new agent while he was a seasoned veteran who had seen the horrible things people were capable of doing to each other.

“I know, but we have absolutely no evidence to support that they’ve been murdered.”

“Right now we don’t even have the evidence to support that they’ve been kidnapped,” he reminded her.

“All I know for sure is that something bad has happened to them and we need to figure out what it was, who it is who’s kept Amberly away from her son.”

Jackson didn’t want to remind her that the case he’d been working on in Bachelor Moon had involved three people who had gone missing and had yet to be found. No answers, no closure...nothing.

Still, he couldn’t imagine how this case in Mystic Lake, Missouri, would be related to the case in Bachelor Moon, Louisiana. The two small towns were about a thousand miles away from each other. It had to be some sort of strange coincidence.

He hoped it was just a coincidence, because if the two cases were tied together he knew with certainty that they were way over their head.

* * *

“I’VE GOT A COUPLE OF NAMES of people for you to check out, although I don’t have any evidence that either of them were involved.” Roger Black looked ill at ease seated in the chair behind the large oak desk that belonged to his boss.

“What I’m hoping is that Cole decided to surprise Amberly with an impromptu late honeymoon and they’re off on some exotic island enjoying their time alone,” he added.

“Did Cole mention a trip?” Marjorie asked, hoping that there might be a possibility of a happy ending, after all. Maybe John had forgotten plans for a honeymoon that the couple had.

“Nothing specific, but it wasn’t too long ago he said he had a mind to surprise Amberly with a trip to the Bahamas,” Roger replied.

“Have you checked financials? Talked to airlines?” Jackson asked.

Roger swept a hand through his brown hair. “To be honest with you, we haven’t done much of anything since we heard the Feds were being called in. According to the mayor, you are in charge. I’ve got my men ready to cooperate and do whatever you tell us to do.”

“We’ve already lost a lot of time,” Marjorie said.

Roger shrugged. “We didn’t really get worried about them until last night. It’s not a crime for two consenting adults to take off somewhere or not be where they are supposed to be.”

“The first thing we want you to do is assign somebody to look at both Cole and Amberly’s financials, see if anything has moved since last Friday night,” Jackson said. “Check back over the last three months or so. If Cole bought tickets to an exotic island, then we’ll find proof of that.”

Roger nodded. “I’ll get Deputy Ray McCloud on it right away. He’s our techie freak. If there’s a paper trail, so to speak, of anything like that, he’ll find it.”

“I also want you to assign a couple of officers to walk the streets, ask questions and see if we can find anyone who had any contact with the missing couple after Friday night. And you mentioned a couple of names for us?” Marjorie asked.

She wanted action. She needed to be doing something to move the investigation forward as quickly as possible. Jackson was right—she worked like a dog until conclusions were reached and bad guys were arrested. She was a hare, not a tortoise.

“I know Cole was having some issues with Natalie Redwing,” Roger said.

Jackson pulled out his notepad and pen. “What kind of problems?”

“She was kind of, like, stalking him.” Roger gave a dry laugh. “Cole thought she was harmless, but irritating.” He gave them her address.

“Who else?” Marjorie asked.

“Jeff Maynard. He’s a bartender at Bledsoe’s on Main Street. He didn’t like Cole and he definitely didn’t like Amberly. He’s a hothead loser, although I doubt he has the brains to kidnap a couple of people and not leave any clues behind. Off the top of my head those are the only two I’ve ever heard about Cole having any issues with.”

Minutes later, armed with address information, Jackson and Marjorie left the small sheriff’s office and headed out to interview both new suspects.

“You can do the interviewing with Jeff Maynard and I’ll take Natalie Redwing,” Jackson said.

“Why doesn’t it surprise me that you’d want to talk to the woman and assign me the hothead loser?” Marjorie said dryly.

Jackson gave her that slow, lazy slide of his lips into a smile that heated places inside her that had never been warm before. “I’m hoping you can find a little charm and twist that hothead loser right around your little finger.”

“Yeah, right, I’ve been holding out on you with the charm thing,” Marjorie replied sarcastically.

She was aware of Jackson’s gaze lingering on her as she focused on Main Street and searched for Bledsoe’s tavern. It was late enough in the afternoon that Jeff Maynard should be working.

“I think you might be hiding a little bit of charm under a basket and I’ve decided it’s my goal in life to figure out how to get that basket off your head.”

Marjorie couldn’t help herself—laughter bubbled to her lips and she shook her head. “You’re a funny man, Agent Revannaugh.” She pulled into a parking place in front of Bledsoe’s, a long, low building at the edge of town.

“You know, that’s the first time I’ve seen a genuine smile on your lips or heard laughter from you. You should do it more often. It definitely becomes you.”

“I’m not a laughing kind of woman,” she replied as she turned off the car engine. “I haven’t had much to laugh about in my life.”

“Then my second job is to change that,” he replied.

“Duty calls.” She got out of the car and slammed the door, more touched by Jackson’s words than she wanted to admit. She couldn’t let him get to her. She’d seen what men like him had done to her mother’s life, to her life, and she was not going to be one of those women who fell for the charm and never saw the callous calculation beneath.

At just after four in the afternoon, Bledsoe’s already had a few customers seated on stools at the long bar. It was semidark inside and reeked of booze and a faint underlying hint of urine.

It was the kind of place where the clientele was tough, bar fights occurred on a regular basis and nobody came for a social event. A jukebox played an old country song about a broken heart and a Texas man, but Marjorie was beginning to think it wasn’t the tall, handsome cowboys you had to watch out for, it was the smooth-talking Southerners.

As she approached the bar, she pulled out her official identification from her purse, careful to keep the side of her purse that had a built-in gun holster against her body. She went toward the dark-haired bartender, feeling no need to show any more authority than her badge, but she was prepared, should that change.

“Smells like Feds to me,” the bartender said as he slowly wiped a glass dry.

“Ah, nice to know you have a good sense of smell,” Marjorie said, forcing a pleasant smile to her lips. She almost felt as if she had something to prove to her partner, that she could be as charming as she needed to be while talking to a potential suspect.

“You’re cuter than your partner.” He set down the glass and jabbed a finger in the direction of Jackson, who stood a couple of inches behind her.

“Thanks. I’m smarter, too. But I let him think he’s smarter because he has a huge ego.”

Jackson cleared his voice as the bartender barked a dry laugh.

“We’re looking for Jeff Maynard,” she said.

“You found him, sweetheart, but as far as I know I haven’t done anything to get special attention from the FBI.” His eyes were dark with more than a hint of wariness.

“What do you know about Cole and Amberly Caldwell’s disappearance?” Marjorie asked.

“Only that I’m not gonna cry in my beer tonight over it.” He picked up a wet cloth and gave the bar a desultory swipe. “Look, I know you’re here because everyone in Mystic Lake knows I don’t like Cole. I have a problem with authority figures,” he added with a smirk.

Marjorie leaned closer to the bar, closer to the man she knew might possibly have had something to do with Cole and Amberly’s disappearance. “All authority?” she asked with a teasing lilt to her voice.

She sensed Jackson leaning closer behind her, but she kept her gaze focused on Jeff, as if he were the most important person on the face of the earth. A small, lewd grin curved his lips. “Well, maybe not all. I wouldn’t mind getting over it by maybe handcuffing you to my bed.”

Marjorie blinked in shock and leaned backward, bumping into Jackson’s firmly muscled chest. “I must protest,” Jackson said in his pleasant Southern drawl. “If anyone is going to handcuff this little lady to his bed, it’s going to be me.”

Marjorie felt as if she were having an out of body experience. “Where were you this past weekend?” she asked Jeff, trying to get her feet beneath her and get the conversation back on track.

The smirk disappeared from Jeff’s face. “Friday is my night off. I was out with buddies. Saturday night I worked my usual shift here, from four until close.”

“And where did you go with these buddies on Friday night?” Marjorie asked. She didn’t bother to pull out her pen and pad. She knew instinctively that Jackson already had his out.

“We were at Jimmy Tanner’s place, playing poker. He’s newly divorced, thanks to Cole and Amberly and their prying into private lives when they were investigating the murders of those women last year.”

“Jimmy Tanner, what’s his address?” Marjorie asked, realizing she’d just added another name to a potential suspect with a motive of revenge.

“At the moment he’s living at the Mystic Lake Motel on the south side of town,” Jeff replied. “His wife really took him to the cleaners in the divorce.”

By the time they left Bledsoe’s, they had not only added Jimmy Tanner’s name to their list, but also Raymond Chandler, who had also been at the supposed poker party on Friday night.

“I’m impressed, Ms. Maggie. I think there’s a bit of naughty woman trapped inside you,” Jackson said once they were back in the car.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scoffed, cheeks far too warm. “There’s no naughty inside of me. I’m by the book, rigid and uptight. Trust me, Jackson, I know who I am.”

“I wonder,” he mused. She kept her mouth firmly closed, not wanting to know what he wondered. “Let’s head on back to Kansas City,” he said. “We can drive back out here and start with this Natalie Redwing first thing in the morning.”

“Why not do it now?” Marjorie asked.

Jackson looked at his watch. “It’s going to be close to six by the time we make it back to Kansas City. I say we order a pizza and sit down and go through what we know, figure out who needs to be interviewed next and get a general idea of where we are.”

“Right now it feels like we’re nowhere,” she replied.

“Exactly. It might surprise you to know that I can be a by-the-book kind of guy despite my huge ego.”

She glanced over to catch him smiling that sexy grin of his. “So, what does that mean?”

“It means I’d like to feed my notes into my laptop and see if we really have nothing or if we’ve already made any connections that might lead somewhere. I also want to utilize some resources I have with the agency to double-check bank records, travel and anything else that might pop up with Amberly or Cole’s names.”

“But you just assigned that task for Deputy Black to take care of,” she replied.

“You know our resources are better than theirs.”

“Okay, sounds like a plan,” she replied somewhat reluctantly. She had a feeling being in a motel room with Jackson Revannaugh for any reason probably wasn’t the best idea.

Chapter Four

He couldn’t get the vision of her smile, the sound of her laughter, out of his head. Something about Marjorie Clinton was getting under his skin, Jackson thought as he paid the pizza delivery boy an hour later.

He carried the box to the table and chairs that sat in front of the windows in the motel room. His laptop was open to a file labeled Mystic Lake/Kansas City.

While they had awaited the food delivery, the two of them had sat side by side as he fed into the file the bits and pieces of information they had attained so far in the case.

He’d tried not to notice how shiny her hair was beneath the lamp that hung from the ceiling over the center of the table. He’d tried not to draw in the sweet scent of her that made him think of tangled sheets and slick bodies.

The pizza was a compromise. His half was spicy pepperoni and sausage, and hers was mushroom and green pepper. It was just an indication to him that they were complete opposites and he had no business thinking about what she would look like naked, how her lips would taste or if he could evoke any passion that might be hidden beneath her emotional walls.

Surely these thoughts were only because they were in a relatively intimate setting and there was no question that he was physically attracted to her.

She looked relaxed for the first time since they’d met. Her blouse was unbuttoned at the top, revealing her delicate collarbone, and her body appeared to hold none of the tension of the day.

“So, tomorrow we check out the names we have of people from Mystic Lake,” she said as he opened the box and handed her several napkins. She leaned closer to him to look at his computer screen. “Jimmy Tanner, Raymond Chandler and Natalie Redwing—we should be able to have those interviews finished by noon, and maybe one of them will give us more information.”

“We also need to check back in with Deputy Black and maybe interview some of the other deputies who worked with Cole.” He waited until she took a piece of the pie and then he grabbed a piece for himself. “It’s possible that somebody who worked for Cole didn’t have his back.”