He stared. He couldn’t remember. His baka had cooked for him. Meats and vegetables wrapped up in something he couldn’t remember the name for anymore. “Orange drink with bubbles,” he said, feeling shy, thinking he was probably saying it wrong.
But her eyes lit up. “Orange Crush. Yes, that is good. I’ll bring you some. What about bread? Do you like bread?” She smiled happily again and his stomach flipped, all thoughts of food disappearing. But she was looking at him waiting, so he closed his eyes, trying to remember bread. Bread. Yes, he’d liked that. It was soft, and he’d eaten it with peanut butter. “Yes.”
“Okay, great. I’ll bring you Orange Crush and bread and . . . oh, I’ll surprise you. How’s that?”
Lucas gave her a small not-knowing nod. She said the word surprise with a smile, but he didn’t like surprises. To him, surprises were not good. Surprises came out of the clear blue sky and knocked your head for a loop. But she was still smiling, so he’d trust that her surprise really did only mean food, nothing else.
Harper looked at the cans. “I can heat this up for us if you don’t mind sharing?”
He nodded quickly and she smiled again, using the little ring on the can to pull the top open. He had one pot that he got for her, and she started heating the chicken noodle soup on the top of his wood stove. Lucas watched her as she moved, his eyes moving from the curve of her backside as she bent over, to the female shape of her legs under her jeans, the straight line of her back. He loved the look of her, loved seeing all the ways a woman’s body was so different from his own. He wanted to see her naked, undress all the secrets hidden under her clothes, wanted to know what a woman’s skin felt like against his own. His male parts throbbed and he turned away from her, pretending to be busy moving the cans uselessly to the other side of the table.
He wanted her to leave and he wanted her to stay, but he didn’t know what he should feel. She wanted to share food with him. She’d liked his smoked fish too. And because the girl standing at his stove was heating soup for them to share, he felt confusion, but the one thing he didn’t feel was alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Missoula Main Library was a relatively nondescript brick building, located in downtown Missoula. Mark asked for directions from the man at the circulation desk and then made his way to the area where young adult books were kept. He took a moment to peruse the shelves, noting the white stickers at the bottom of the spines indicating the author and location, and the yellow sticker near the middle with a large number on it, indicating how long the book was available for loan. Harper was right.
There was a woman standing in front of a library cart nearby, re-shelving books and Mark headed in her direction. As he approached, she looked up, removing her glasses, and dropping them so they hung on the chain around her neck. “Hello.”
“Hello, ma’am, Agent Gallagher with the Montana Department of Justice.” He opened his wallet and showed her his badge, which she glanced at quickly, her eyes widening. “I’m hoping you can assist me.”
“Oh. I can try. What is it I might help you with?”
Mark pulled out his cell phone and showed her the photos he’d taken of the books that had been on the nightstand at the Larkspur. “Is there anything you can tell me about these titles and whether they might have come from this library?”
She studied the photos, swiping between the one of the covers and the one of the spines. She looked up at Mark and handed him his cell phone back. “Yes, they did. I helped the woman pick these out myself after she asked for my help. Then instead of checking them out, she stole them.”
Mark reached in his pocket, bringing out his notebook and the picture of the woman inside that the morgue had forwarded him. “Is this her?”
The librarian peered down at it. “Yes.” She raised her gaze to Mark’s, her eyes wide. “Is she dead?” she whispered. She brought her hand to her stomach, appearing ill.
“I’m sorry to say she is. Any information you can give me on her demeanor, or something she said that seemed off to you, would be very helpful.”
The woman bobbed her head. “Um, yes, well, she asked me if I would help her choose some books for a young man. I asked for a specific age, or reading level, and she seemed not to know how to answer that, and so I chose a few of our most popular titles for mid to young teens. She seemed appreciative, but then I noticed later that the books were missing. I just got this weird feeling, you know, so I checked the computer and found that they’d never been checked out.” She paused. “Are you able to tell me what happened to her, Agent?”
“Unfortunately, she was murdered.”
“Oh. Oh, that’s terrible. My goodness . . .” She trailed off and Mark nodded.
“Is there anything else at all you can tell me about her?”
“Oh, um . . . oh yes, one thing. She used the computer right over there.” She pointed to a couple of monitors. “She was sitting at the computer, actually, right before she asked me for help, so that’s why I noticed. She stood up from the monitor and came toward me where I was re-shelving books.”
“Does the library have security cameras?”
She shook her head. “No, no cameras.”
Mark nodded. “Okay. Would the history still be on that computer?”
“If she was using the Internet, I think so. Or at least, we don’t delete the history regularly. That was what . . . two weeks ago?”
“Yes, about that.”
The woman came out from behind the desk and Mark followed her to the computer monitor where she sat down and logged in, bringing up the Internet, and then going to the browser history. “Let’s see,” she said softly, “that would have been Monday . . . no, Tuesday.” She smiled up at Mark. “I’d come back from lunch with my sister earlier, and we always do Taco Tuesday down the street.” She turned back to the monitor. “Okay, hmm . . . there wasn’t a lot of activity on this computer but visits to pages don’t have time stamps. However, it looks as though all these entries are related to Ancient China . . . probably a research paper of some sort . . . and then there’s a visit to the contact page of Fairbanks Lumber Company, and then . . . to the contact page of the CEO of the company, Halston Fairbanks.”
“Could you print the entire history out?”
“I can take a screen shot and print it for you.”