Page 45

“Were there any signs of that?” Callum asked, and she heard the new tone in his voice. The FBI agent.
She straightened, disentangling herself from him. “Why are you asking?”
He shook his head, a dog shaking off water. “Sorry, ignore me.”
“Tell me,” Shay said, making sure it came out a plea instead of a demand. She plastered herself against him, looking up through her lashes. “What are you thinking?”
“It’s not unusual for someone to relapse, of course,” Callum said. “But it also strikes me as an effective way to get rid of someone with a history of alcohol abuse.”
Shay’s brows drew together. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s stupid—ignore me,” Callum said, trying to brush it off again.
“No,” Shay said, pulling him in tighter. “I’m not calling you crazy, I’m just not following.”
Though maybe she was. Maybe she was following too closely.
He pursed his lips. “Where was he driving to?”
“What?” She felt so stupid, like a parrot who only knew one word.
“He’d drunk two bottles of Jack, you said?” Callum asked. “For a guy who hadn’t had a drop of liquor in five years, why didn’t that lay him out flat?”
Shay blinked up at him. No one had ever questioned that before.
“And why were the bottles in the car with him if not to paint a picture of someone on a binge?” he asked, and then he shook his head again. “Or he was slipping for a while and they were old and weren’t actually what he drank that night.”
“Beau swears he wasn’t,” Shay offered. “Slipping.”
“Alcoholics learn to hide it really well.”
“Not if he was leaving bottles around in the footwell of his car,” Shay pointed out.
“True,” Callum said, his eyes sliding past as if trying to assess the guests in the other room. “Did he have any enemies?”
Shay sucked in a breath. Because she’d known that’s where this conversation was going, but his asking it outright made it all seem more real.
“You think he was killed?” It came out a hushed, too-gossipy whisper.
“No,” Callum said slowly. “No, I don’t. Parts of the story strike me as odd. Was there even an investigation?”
“No,” Shay said, and wanted to addOf course not. But Callum was used to working with the FBI, not a stressed-out sheriff’s department that saw a truck wrapped around a tree, a few bottles of Jack, and called it a day.
“Hmm.”
She slapped him lightly on the chest. “You do think he was murdered.”
He shook his head, but then asked again, “Is there anyone who would have wanted to get rid of him?”
The answer came before she even really had to think about it. Hillary.
Hillary.
This made ex-husband number two who had wound up dead. Some of that had to be attributed to the type of people she married—men who courted violence and/or made dumbass decisions because they were idiots. Her husbands tended to be men who put themselves in terrible situations, had terrible associates, and did terrible things for money and drugs.
She said all that to Callum and then asked, “Do you think it’s related?”
“I don’t know,” Callum said quietly, but he sounded like he did.