Page 26 of What a Wolf Wants
That was the thing Ethan really liked about his boss. He would do whatever it took to help his agents get to the bottom of a case, loving to get his hands into the nitty gritty of it himself in a covert way.
“You might want to watch that situation. The word is Osburn’s close to his great-aunt and when he can, he visits her every few weeks. And Kroner has gone with him on several different occasions.” Grainger sent Ethan a picture of Mrs. Osburn’s home and of her. She had short, white curly hair, and was wearing a pink three-quarter-sleeved shirt and white jeans and sturdy shoes. She was a pretty,grandmotherly type and he hoped she wasn’t involved in all this drug business.
“Do you know when Osburn visits there usually?” Ethan asked his boss.
“Sundays, if he goes at all. He takes his great-aunt to church and then out to lunch. But there’s some consensus he has been there late at night on other days. That’s why I wanted to get with you on it. Watch for him and see if he also leads us to Kroner.”
“All right, sir. I’ll sure do that.” Ethan realized Charlene was fully watching him now. He was sure she would begin to suspect something was up, and he wasn’t going to continue keeping the secret from her. He finished the call with his boss and sighed. He’d been frowning about the whole situation, and when he realized it, he smiled at Charlene.
“Do you have some kind of a problem?” she asked.
“That was my boss. Kroner, the guy I arrested and who shot me, was released from jail because of some clerical error.”
“Oh no.”
Ethan would have left it at that, but he didn’t want to any longer. He was dating Charlene now and she had a right to know. “Yeah. I want to arrest whoever the clerk was who did that because now the bastard is back out again and on the run. My boss wanted to warn me. Everyone who had a part in arresting Kroner needs to watch out for him, if he doesn’t just try to leave the area permanently.”
“Do you think he would come after you here?” Charlene asked, looking worried.
“Let’s return to the house and talk.”
She was frowning, not looking happy with Ethan in the least.
He told himself that she could be a target now that Kroner was on the loose, should he learn Ethan was seeing her, which was the main reason he had to tell her what was going on. When Kroner was in jail, Ethan had felt Charlene was safe and Kroner wouldn’t even know Ethan was seeing her or where he had ended up.
“This sounds ominous,” she said, walking with Ethan back across the slippery rocks as he caught her arm once to keep her from falling. They reached the sandy beach and finally made their way to the stairs to her deck.
“It is. Kroner and his buddies all had a hand in killing my parents, both DEA agents, for going after them. Now I’ve done the same thing as they had done by arresting him—which would have been fine if Kroner had just stayed in jail.”
They finally reached her house and went inside. He set the backpack on the dining room table, and she got them some glasses of ice water. “Okay, tell me what is going on.”
“I’m not retired.”
“What?” Charlene set the glasses of water on the dining room table, then sat down. “Explain.”
Then he explained about how he was on one last undercover mission, but he wasn’t going to be really working on it until next week because of his injury. Until the news about Kroner being out of jail upset the whole apple cart.
“If your boss staged this whole business with the retirement ceremony, does he believe someone in your departmentis consorting with the enemy? I mean, why else pretend that you’re retiring in front of your whole department?”
“Yeah. I think that’s why he has me doing this solo.” He didn’t know how Charlene was taking the news just yet.
Charlene let out her breath in a heavy sigh. “Is it because your informant gave the wrong address to my house?”
“No. There have been some earlier situations where we went to raid a place where Kroner was known to be and then voilà, he vanishes without a trace—four times in fact. My informant had nothing to do with those cases. My boss knew I was after these men for killing my parents, so he was sure I wasn’t the one who was sabotaging the mission.”
“You’re still a DEA special agent.” She seemed to be mulling that over, trying to figure out the implication. “Who else knows?”
“Leidolf and Cassie, and the red wolves who work with the Portland Police Bureau: Tori, Adam, and Sierra. Others in the red wolf pack too. They’ll help me if I need a quick backup.”
“They are three hours away.”
“Yes, but they would drop everything and be here to help me out.”
She shook her head. “They’re still three hours away. So the house you bought—”
“It’s the DEA’s. My boss had it rented for me, but no one in the department knows about it.”
“Oh, you aren’t really living here. Why did you set up here, in this specific location?”
