No Quick Fix (Torus Intercession 1)

“Yeah. I think they want him to be their nanny, but I’m keeping him so he can’t go.”

“I think that’s good thinking, Ollie.”

She looked very pleased with herself.

Eight

Back at the original place I’d rolled up on hours before, the log cabin mansion didn’t look any more inviting the second time. Lydia had insisted Emery bring the girls and me, for dinner at her home. I, of course, thought that eight was a strange time of the evening for the girls to be eating, but Emery said it was fine since it wasn’t a school night.

There were two men in uniform walking down the steps as we started the climb up, and I recognized Tavares instantly.

“Sergeant,” I greeted him.

He stopped, and I watched the way his face went from wary and strained to relaxed when he saw me. Facing me on the steps, he offered his hand, which I grasped quickly.

“Calder.”

“What’re you doing here?” I asked him and the other officer with him.

“We’re out here asking Mr. Cahill questions about a geologist who—” He stopped and considered Emery and the girls. “—just turned up and was last seen on his land.”

“His land?” I asked, because my understanding was that there was a lot of it, so the question made sense only if Mr. Cahill knew what was happening on every acre every second of the day.

“Oh, sorry,” he amended quickly, gesturing at Emery, “on your land, Mr. Dodd.”

“On my land?” Emery seemed confused, taking a step forward. “Are you sure?”

Tavares cleared his throat and gestured for Emery and me.

“Stay right there, you guys,” I told the girls. “This’ll just take a second.”

April nodded, still too happy with me not to agree with whatever I said. Even when I’d told her to clean her room earlier, vacuuming downstairs while Emery got the bathrooms, she had done so without any of her usual, her father said, kvetching.

Tavares waited until we were close and tipped his head at the other officer, who pulled his phone and read from the screen.

“He was on your land at some point, Mr. Dodd, because Mr. Cahill hired him to survey a small portion of it.”

“What portion?”

“It’s that small parcel where the Kingman stream forks off into that ravine that butts up right against Mr. Cahill’s property.”

“Oh, I know where you mean.”

“Well, about a week ago, park rangers were called out by a couple of ranch hands who found a man chewed up by a mountain lion there, and when they took him to the morgue in Whitefish—because Ursa doesn’t have one,” Tavares explained to me. “—Lauren Tate, that’s our ME, she says that the cause of death was not an animal attack but that someone severed his carotid with a blade.”

“Cut him and left him bleeding, which is what drew the animal,” the officer explained for our benefit.

“Oh my God,” Emery gasped, glancing around at all of us. “We have a murderer here in Ursa? That’s––”

“We have someone who had a reason to go after the geologist,” Tavares said brusquely, hand up to stop Emery. “Don’t make assumptions about anything beyond that.”

Emery glanced behind him at his daughters, and I understood what he was thinking, so I reached out and took hold of his shoulder, grasping it tight until he turned and met my eyes.

“I’m here, yeah,” I reminded him, my gaze steady, my voice level, hard, unflinching.

After a moment, he took a breath.

“Between your girls and the whole wide world,” I said gruffly. “Keep that in mind.”

He nodded quickly, and the way his shoulders dropped and his hands fell out of the clench, his tongue wetting his lips, and his eyes closing for a moment and then opening, all of that filled me with a surge of protectiveness that made my heart swell in my chest.

He trusted me. He trusted in me. What was better than that? What meant more?

“So now of course we want to know two things,” Tavares continued, returning my attention to him. “Can you guess what those are?”

“First,” I began, “what was the man doing on Mr. Dodd’s land, and when was the last time Mr. Cahill saw him?”

“Precisely.”

“So tell me something; if the geologist was in fact on Mr. Dodd’s land, why didn’t you consider questioning him?” I asked Tavares, getting a weird feeling.

“Because when we checked with the deceased’s wife, she provided us with an email sent from a satellite phone that we have not been able to locate, that he was out here on Mr. Dodd’s land at the request of Mr. Cahill.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t know. Like I said, all she had was the email from Mr. Cahill asking her husband, Peter Bannon, to survey a piece of Mr. Dodd’s land.”

I turned to Emery. “Why would he do that?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea. Andrea told me years ago that when her grandfather had the land surveyed, there was nothing on it besides a tiny deposit of iron oxide. Apparently it was so small that when it was time for her father to make a decision about mining, he decided to let it be just as his father had.”