Amazing how much a simple favor could cost you. FBI explosives expert Sophia Rivas waited for her escort to finish introductions. She held her tight smile firmly in place as she shook hands with the chief of tribal police, Wallace Tinnin. The man looked well past the age of retirement, judging from his deeply lined face. He ushered them from the station floor, such as it was, into his small, stuffy office, where everything seemed as old and worn-out as their chief.
Her gaze flashed to the CRT monitor on his desk that looked straight out of the 1990s. Those things still had cathodes and vacuum tubes inside.
Her escort, FBI agent Luke Forrest, had moved into the office and now gave her a look of warning.
Sophia met Luke’s gaze. He was her cousin and the reason she had been recruited into the Bureau. She owed him a lot, but that didn’t mean she agreed with him. This entire thing continued to feel like a bad idea.
She opted to remain standing in the chief’s office rather than sit in either of the stained chairs facing his overcrowded desk. Chief Tinnin headed the Turquoise Canyon Tribal Police Department, which consisted of nine officers, all male, and one dispatcher, female.
“He should be here soon,” the chief assured them.
Who were they waiting for again? Luke told her she’d be working with their best man. Best of nine, she realized. What was his name? Bear Trap. Bearton. Something like that.
With luck he could take her to the reservoir and she could give her opinion and be heading back to Flagstaff by dark. It was midafternoon on Friday and the days were still long. She’d be leaving well after the rush-hour traffic, but would still be heading back to the refuge of her little apartment after the longest week of her life. She usually loved the sanctuary of her place, but this week, on leave, it had become a kind of holding cell, where she paced and obsessed over the review team’s findings on her use of deadly force.
Forrest was more than a decade her senior and his short black hair and pressed suit did not hide the fact that, like her, he was Apache. But not of the Turquoise Canyon tribe. They were both Black Mountain, both spider clan, making them kin. They also shared a grandmother, so the connection was especially close. And even though Luke worked in the Phoenix field office, he had heard she was on leave during the investigation.
Had she made a mistake that night, one that could cost her the thing she valued most in this world—her job? No. They would clear her.
She glanced from her cousin to Wallace Tinnin, who moved behind his desk. She wondered why he used an old rusty spur as a paperweight. Had he once ridden in the rodeo? That would account for the limp.
What was happening back in Flagstaff? She knew the protocol because they’d explained it all to her. But she didn’t know how long the investigation process would take. “As long as it takes” was not very helpful, but was the only answer her supervisor provided before placing her on mandatory leave.
This was the process. She had to trust it. But she didn’t. She didn’t trust anything that threatened her job.
Tinnin set down a cup of water before her and asked her to take a seat. She politely declined both.
“Coffee?” asked Tinnin.
She glanced at the well-used drip coffeemaker on his sideboard.
“Maybe just water.”
It was delivered in a Dixie cup instead of an unopened bottle. Her smile remained but she cast her cousin a certain look. He seemed to be enjoying himself, judging from the smirk.
The chief opened the top drawer of his desk, drew out a silver foil packet that she recognized was for nicotine gum, popped a white cube into his mouth and chewed. The pouches beneath his eyes spoke of a man running a department that she knew must be understaffed and underfunded.
There was a polite knock and her cousin opened the door. In walked a mountainous man who surveyed the room with a quick sweep before he fixed his stare on her.
“Sophia?” said Forrest, motioning toward the new arrival. “This is Detective Jack Bear Den.”
The first thing she noticed—that anyone would notice—was how damn big he was. Big, tall and broad-shouldered, with a body type very unlike the men she knew from her reservation on Black Mountain. The second thing that she saw was the cut across his lifted eyebrow—not a cut really, but more like a blank spot where a tiny white scar bisected the brow and made him look roguish, like a pirate.
What he did not look like was Apache.
Was their best detective really from off the rez?
“A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Rivas. I’m roadrunner, born of snake.”
She answered automatically, giving her clan affiliation. “I’m butterfly, born of spider.”
Since the Turquoise Canyon people were Tonto Apache and she was Western Apache, they did not share linguistic roots, so she spoke in English, her second language.
Her brain was still sending her signals that he was not roadrunner or snake or Apache. He did not fit. Did not look like any other Apache man she had ever met. Still, she extended her hand.
He stepped forward, meeting her gaze. She saw his eyes were hazel with a shift of color toward brown near his pupil, which blasted outward to give way to a true green at the outer rim of his iris. Most Apache men did not have green eyes.
The rest of him was equally appealing, particularly his strong square jaw and welcoming smile, which disappeared as their hands brushed. Tingling awareness zinged from their melded palms all the way up her arm. His eyes glittered and his brows descended. Then he broke the contact as if reconsidering the wisdom of a custom of the white world and not of theirs. He drew back, wiping his palm across his middle as if the touch was somehow dangerous. He left his hand stretched across his flat stomach for a moment, his long fingers splayed on the blue cotton fabric of his button-up shirt. Her stomach did a nervous little flutter as her senses came alive. His fingers were thick with a dusting of hair near each knuckle. His fifth finger brushed the top edge of the silver belt buckle bearing a medicine wheel inlaid in black, red, yellow and white. The four directions, the circle of life, the seasons and a compass to guide a man as he walked through life. Why did he wear that symbol?
Her attention dipped below the buckle and stayed fixed long enough for the room to fall silent. The detective’s hand shifted toward his personal weapon. Holstered at his hip was a .45 caliber. Then his hand dropped to his side, at the ready.
They’d taken her Glock for the investigation and offered a replacement weapon—a .45 caliber, just like his. She didn’t like the stronger recoil. It affected her aim on multiple discharges.
Tinnin cleared his throat and motioned Jack forward. He took a position near her, in front of the desk between Tinnin and Forrest, in only three strides.
Her hand continued to tingle as if she had touched the hot wire of a horse pasture.
She wasn’t attracted to Jack Bear Den. She couldn’t be. She didn’t mix business with pleasure and she wasn’t planning to stay one minute more than it took to deliver the bad news.
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