Page 80 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

And Templeton didn’t take his hand off her leg until they made it to the prison.

Where everything got bureaucratic and institutional in a hurry.

“Nothing says Christmas like jail,” Kate said when they’d made it through the series of doors and gates and locks and guards, her voice dry.

Dry and almost amused.

But Templeton didn’t buy it the way he might have only a few days before. Because he knew things about Kate now.

And in any case, he was having a little trouble getting his own game face on. Because even visiting a prison, in Templeton’s experience, made a man feel like less of a human. He couldn’t imagine having to come here andstayhere.

Sometimes he thought his father had given him a gift by insisting that he never, ever visit.

“I’m not sure it being Christmas makes being in prison any worse.” Templeton kept his voice low as they followed the guard who led them down a corridor that smelled of industrial-strength cleaners and human misery. “I think prison is the problem no matter what day it is.”

“My mistake. Here I was under the impression that Christmas was the season of miracle and wonder. For everyone. Isn’t there a song about that? Resting merry gentlemen or whatever?”

“Hey.”

She turned to look at him, and her brown eyes looked troubled no matter how she tried to keep her expression blank.

“You don’t actually have to do this,” he told her.

She looked as though she was about to fire off a reply, but she blinked. Then swallowed, as if she were trying to settle herself down. “I think I have to do it.”

“Because your cousins got in your head?”

“Because I don’t know if they’re in my head or not. Whether he is or not. And I think it’s time to find out.”

Templeton couldn’t argue with that. Far be it from him to keep a person from confronting their demons head-on. He knew his demons. He knew each of them by name, he knew where they lived, and the fact that he didn’t want to go and get all up in their faces didn’t mean he didn’t handle his stuff. It was the fact that he didn’t have issues with his stuff that meant it was handled.

Stop having arguments with yourself, dumbass, he growled at himself.Especially when you’re losing.

Then the guard led them into the private visitor space that some combination of Kate’s connections and Alaska Force’s persuasion had gotten them. A table with two chairs on one side and one chair on the other. Windows for the guards to keep watch through and a panic button. Standard.

“Ready?” Templeton asked.

“Oh, sure,” Kate drawled, just like him. “You know me.”

“I do,” he said. More seriously than he should have. “But remember, he doesn’t.”

Kate smiled at him. And any hint of trouble he’d seen on her face, in her eyes, was gone now. She was fully a cop. The cop he’d first met, in fact, back at the Water’s Edge Café.

And it was that cop—Trooper Kate Holiday, investigator for the Alaska Bureau of Investigation and all around badass—who smiled at the man who shuffled in the door a moment later, flanked by two guards. They settled him in his seat, nodded to Kate and Templeton, and then left them to it.

Kate didn’t say a word. She kept on smiling, flinty and fearless, and Templeton wanted to eat her up like dessert.

Instead, he took the opportunity to get an eyeful of one of Alaska’s most notorious criminals.

Like most men, he looked diminished in jail. But inSamuel Lee Holiday’s case, it was because he’d gone gray over the past fifteen years. He didn’t sit like a man who’d been beaten down. And Templeton could see the family resemblance that Will had been talking about, no matter how much he wanted to dismiss everything Kate’s cousin had said as so much whining. Where Will had looked wild, his uncle’s hair and beard were trimmed. And the old man sat ramrod straight, as if he felt he needed to announce his meticulousness. As if it gave him power, despite the fact he was in chains.

Samuel Lee Holiday did not smile at his only child.

“Hello, Katie,” he said, his gaze alight with malice and his voice a rich sort of rasp. “I knew you’d come crawling back to me. Sooner or later, I knew you’d come.”

Nineteen

The last time Kate had seen her father, he’d hissed the wordtraitoracross the courtroom as they’d led him away, his face twisted and mottled with hatred. Today, by contrast, he looked very nearly sedate. She would have thought he really was sedated if she didn’t know his thoughts on the dangers of numbing his own genius.

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