Page 36 of Fluffed and Folded

She bit her lip, pondering that. “Maybe,” she agreed, tentatively.

They watched TV in strangely comfortable silence until an orderly came to retrieve her for surgery. They didn’t say goodbye, but Darby stared at him, doe eyed, lip between her teeth again.

“It’s going to be okay,” Eli said with certainty.

She let out a little breath, gave a tiny nod, and disappeared out of sight.

CHAPTER 20

Tristan stood outside the building thinking Josie thoughts. The insidious part of loving someone wasn’t that he thought of her constantly—though he did—rather that he began to see everything through her Josie filter. At this moment, for instance, he inspected the building before him with something like disgust. Plain concrete. Why? Would it kill them to add an adornment or some color? And that was the Josieness of it. Before her, the only thing Tristan would have noticed about a building was whether it was on fire. Now he had started to notice the aesthetics of everything. Having a girlfriend who was naturally drawn to beauty made him wonder why you would choose not to make something beautiful, if you could. If you were about to spend multiple millions of dollars to create an office space, for instance, why wouldn’t you throw in a tiny bit extra to make it visually appealing? Why would you want it to resemble a circa 1984 Eastern Block reeducation camp?

Shaking his head to dispel his cumbersome new thoughts, he instead shifted his focus to the task at hand. How did he want to play this?Straight.It wouldn’t benefit him to pretend to be someone other than he was, not with a murder in the loop. That made people edgier and more suspicious. Learning he was aninvestigator, on the other hand, would set them at ease. They would tell what they knew in their haste to help. At least that was his hope.

No one greeted him when he entered the building. He supposed if you made snow equipment for a living, you didn’t get a lot of walk-ins, not too many people veering wildly into the parking lot, sprinting in, and demanding a snow scraper, STAT! On the other hand, the security was as lacking as the friendliness. Tristan wandered to his heart’s content, winding his way unencumbered through the maze of offices while everyone ignored the hulking goon meandering around them. Maybe he would mention this to his boss, see if Ribs could reach out and convince them of the need for a security audit.Might be a whole new source of revenue,he thought, tucking the thought away for later as he located Asher’s office and paused. He raised his meaty fist, knocked, then entered and closed the door behind him.

Technically it was illegal to trespass, but if no one else seemed to care, why should he? He flicked on the light and tried to tamp down the cop part of him that still felt guilty about occasionally bending the law.You’re not a cop anymore, Evans,he reminded himself, a task made easier when his phone went off. It was a call from Josie, and the ringtone—one she’d programmed for herself, naturally, some weird song about flying kittens—reminded him that he’d better not get caught. He scrambled to silence the phone and sent Josie a text instead.

Can’t talk. Work stuff.

You text exactly like you speak, do you know that?she replied, making him smile as he tucked his phone back into his pocket.

He booted up Asher’s work computer and, while he waited for it to wake up, opened the drawers and began scrambling them, in search of anything nefarious. Everything was tidy andsparse, nothing personal, unless he counted the tin of mints he found. Somehow even though he didn’t know him, he could have guessed Asher was the type of guy who always made certain his breath was minty fresh.Appearances were important to him, as well as status.Those were things Tristan had picked up about the dead man and written in his notebook, though what bearing, if any, they had on the case was still anybody’s guess. Still, it helped to get a bigger picture, even if the picture didn’t amount to much. And the little he’d learned caused something to niggle unpleasantly in his brain, a tiny worm he couldn’t yet name. Perhaps it was what he’d just thought, that appearances and status were important to Asher. Why, then, did he continue to work an unimportant job in an unimportant company?

In Tristan’s experience, men who valued external trappings were always eager for more of them: more pay, a better job, a bigger house. Yet Asher had seemed content to remain in middle management in his moderately humble apartment. The only homage to status he owned was his collectible car, and he’d left it out in the elements full time. That part niggled, too. People who collected cars didn’t do it so they could sit in the sun, rain, and snow year-round. Why had Asher bought such an expensive toy, only to leave it sitting in the very exposed and shared parking lot of his apartment complex?

These were small questions, though, certainly not enough to be killed for. There had to be more, which brought Tristan full circle to the task at hand. After the desk search was complete, he began opening files on Asher’s computer, which had no password. It followed that nothing important would be on an unguarded computer, and that served true. No matter what he clicked, it was innocuous work stuff, uninteresting in the extreme. Certainly nothing worth killing over, unless someone was upset the third quarter profit on the new snowplows fell a third of a percentage point.

Tristan was about to call it a wash when the door opened and a woman regarded him with bright, startled eyes.

“Hello,” she said.

Tristan was good at reading people. He had to be, in order to be a cop. You had to make split second decisions about who was the good guy and who was a bad guy, who would be easily managed and who was a threat. This woman had been trained since birth to obey orders and be polite, the best kind of person for someone in authority, especially when they were up to no good.

“Hello,” he returned, but in a stern tone that made it seem like she was interrupting him.

“Uh, sorry,” she said, which would have been funny, if he weren’t intent on pressing his advantage. She started to take a step back, then paused. “Excuse me, but who are you?”

He stood and extended his hand, purposely making himself seem large and well-muscled. “Tristan Evans, I’m the investigator in charge of Asher’s case.”

“Oh,” she said and shrank back, even as she shook his hand.

He wouldn’t get anything from her, he could tell. She wastoointimidated, the type that would start confessing to every perceived wrong in her life. Ten to one she blurted that she had once ripped the tag off a mattress within eight minutes. Some people broke too easily, making all of their intel unreliable. He needed to find someone with the right mix of fear and self-preservation.

“Is there anyone you could direct me to, someone who knew Asher well?”

She blinked at that. Because she was flustered or because no one had known Asher well? “Um, my boss, I guess? Asher’s boss. Former boss.” Helplessly, her eyes darted toward the exit.

“Lead the way,” Tristan said, giving her a command her scattered brain could latch onto

“Right,” she said, jumping to action as she fled through the door. Tristan followed her to an office. She knocked on the open door.

“An investigator here to see you about, um, Asher,” the woman said, voice cracking.

The man’s eyes narrowed at the mention of Asher’s name, then widened when they caught sight of Tristan, hulking in the doorway. “Okay,” he said, and from that one word Tristan knew he’d found his mark, someone who was both wary but nosy. He strode into the room and jutted his hand, forcing the man to rise and shake it before offering him a seat.

“Adam Broden,” he introduced himself as they both sat. “An investigator, huh? Wow, that’s um, official. No uniform. You’re a detective?”

“I’m a private investigator, actually. An interested party wants an outside opinion,” Tristan said. He let that lay a bit before continuing. “Did you know the victim well?”

---