Page 25 of Bait and Switch (Subtle Deceptions #2)

Stevens stared up at him.

“There’s something else,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“More? Worse than what you’ve already confessed to?” Gabe crossed his arms over his chest and wrinkled his nose at the guy like he was a bug. “For fuck’s sake, how fucked up can a fuckup fuck?”

The man winced. Gabe was just going to assume it was a pretty major fuckup.

“I did see Peter last week, briefly.” Again, he didn’t appear to be seeing Gabe or Elton as he spoke. Maybe he was looking to his past, wishing for something different. “He showed up at the house. I was in my office looking over some paperwork.”

“I take it you didn’t have the joyous reunion you’d imagined. Not a shocker, seeing as you kicked him out. Peter never was good at forgiveness. I see where he got it from.”

Stevens narrowed his gaze at Gabe before continuing. Gabe ignored it; that stare was child’s play.

“He got a look at some documents I was working on. I’m a paper-and-pen man, too old to trust everything to computers.” His laugh was weak, self-mocking.

“Did he figure out what you’d been doing all these years?” Gabe asked.

“No, nothing like that. He thought he might be interested in investing in a project, getting involved. We talked for a while, buried the hatchet so to speak, and decided it might not be a bad idea to have more than one pair of eyes on it.”

“And?” Elton asked.

Stevens shook his head. “And? He left. Said he’d be in touch with me soon. A week later, the sheriff was calling to say that Peter had been found dead.”

“You don’t know where he was last week? He didn’t tell you anything?” That wouldn’t surprise Gabe, Peter had liked to keep his movements during a con under wraps. “Why are you here? How do you think Elton can help you?”

“I don’t really know, you were the only person I could think of, Elton. And I knew from island chatter that you were here too,” he said to Gabe. “It was foolish of me to think you might have an answer or a solution I haven’t already come up with.”

With a grimace, the man pushed himself to his feet and started for the door.

Halfway across the room, he twisted around to look at Elton and Gabe.

“For what it’s worth, I am sorry. My own son was dead to me for many years, and now he really is dead.

Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents, and I have no one to blame but myself. ”

“John,” Elton said his name quietly, a plea with an edge of anger.

Stevens didn’t answer him—or simply had no more to say. With a shrug, he pulled the front door open and slowly made his way to his car, the same car Gabriel had seen in the Sheriff’s Office parking lot earlier.

Gabe started to say something to Elton, clear the air of the stench of remorse, but the phone rang before he could come up with anything remotely appropriate.

“Casey?” Elton said into the receiver.

The words were muffled, but Gabe recognized Ranger Man’s deep grumble on the other end of the line.

“Yeah, Stevens is gone. Put you on speaker? Crikey, as if I know how to do that sort of thing.” Elton poked around on the handset for a minute. “Aha,” he said triumphantly. “Casey, you are on speaker. Damn, I’m good. What were you telling me?”

“Why the hell did Stevens show up at your place, Elton? What did he want?” The tinny sound of Casey’s voice filled the room.

“Let’s skip back to why the hell did you blab my location to some rando?” demanded Gabe. “That’s the issue I’d like to better understand.”

An audible sigh reached their ears before Casey spoke again.

“It’s one of those six-degrees-of-separation things.

As it turns out, my friend who did the background check on Gabe is Peter Vale’s cousin.

Stevens is her uncle on her mother’s side, so I never suspected a connection there.

Apparently, Vale had the same great idea I did and called her to see if she would look up Karne.

She thought that was a remarkable coincidence and mentioned she already had done so when she talked to Peter. ”

Elton made an I told you so face at Gabe.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Gabe said.

“Do I kid around, Karne?”

Yeah, no, Ranger Man did not fuck around.

“Elton wondered if that was how he’d found me. That explains how Peter tracked me down, but it doesn’t explain why his body was dumped at the marina. Or why the boats were torched.”

The fire, Gabriel now had the feeling, somehow belonged squarely at the feet of John Stevens and whatever no-good shit he was involved in.

“Nope, it doesn’t. I gotta go, I’ll check in later. Don’t do anything stupid today.” With those uplifting words, Casey clicked off.

“Don’t do anything stupid? That’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Too bad he’s off doing important ranger stuff, leaving us to our own devices.”

Gabe briefly envisioned Casey behind the wheel of the banged-up Forest Service truck bumping up The Valley, heading into danger, ready to help search for a couple of hikers who’d gotten themselves into trouble.

Even if the trouble was the hikers’ own fault.

Casey Lundin may act tough, but Gabe was starting to figure out that there was a soft center to the man.

Maybe one he didn’t want people to know about.

Elton snorted.

“Lundin is nothing if not economical with language,” Gabe griped, steering himself out of his kind and soft Ranger Man train of thought. “I’d still like to know more about this friend of his who blabbed my existence.”

“I’d like to know what the hell is going on around here. A missing person yesterday and two more today? The mountains are no place to mess around but this is a lot for the time of year.”

“Add in Peter’s murder. And the fires. Dwayne Perkins too.” Gabe shuddered. He did not want to think about his last sighting of Dwayne.

What the hell was going on around Heartstone?

Christ, was it only two weeks since he’d had that run-in with the Perkins brothers?

Was it possible that there was more to the killing of Dwayne Perkins than the also-dead sheriff’s deputy supposedly “going off the rails”?

New guy to the island or not, he couldn’t help but connect dots that faintly led from the Perkinses to the Twana County Sheriff’s Office to the retired Twana County Prosecuting Attorney to Peter and possibly beyond.

Had Gabe’s discovery of Dwayne’s body only been the tip of the iceberg?

What would have happened if he hadn’t gone on a failed mission to find Gordon that day?

Maybe Dwayne would’ve just disappeared. His questions were piling up like traffic on 1-5 during construction season and a Mariners game, and a Taylor Swift concert was happening somewhere in there too.

At the hospital, when Deputy Nolan had almost managed to force Gordon into his cruiser, Gabe’s impression had been of a man at the end of his rope.

The thought had been fleeting, and the next thing Gabe knew, the deputy was dead, shot by Sheriff Rizzi.

And Nolan had been an unknown, so he hadn’t said anything when he’d been questioned.

But what if— what if —Rizzi had murdered Nolan in cold blood to keep him from…

From what? From talking about what? In Gabe’s mind, everything kept coming back to The Valley.

Questions started flowing out of his mouth.

“Did you ever hear back about the land around Gordon’s property?

I mean, the brain trust is still AWOL, but could there be a connection between what’s going on now and what happened with Gordon, Dwayne, and the deputy?

Not sure how that would involve Peter, though.

But what if he saw something else in Stevens’s paperwork, more than Stevens thought he did? ”

Even in his head he wasn’t going to call that sack of water and oxygen Peter’s father. He doubted the claim that they’d buried the hatchet. More likely Peter’d had an inkling of what Stevens was up to and wanted to derail it or direct the proceeds to himself.

Elton was quiet for several minutes, clearly going over what Stevens had told them and probably trying to figure out what he hadn’t. Gabe sipped his too-cold coffee and waited.

Finally, Elton spoke. “What do you think about going to have a chat with Kelly Perkins?”

“Who’s that?”

“Calvin and Dwayne’s mother, Rizzi’s sister.

I should probably drop by and give her my condolences anyway, even if I always knew those boys would come to a bad end.

My thinking is that if the brothers were somehow involved and Dwayne’s death is related, she might have an idea about what it this all is, or she might not. Hard to tell with her sometimes.”

“Let’s do it. We’re just spinning wheels here anyway.”

Elton slowly rose to his feet, and Gabe could almost hear his joints popping. Bowie scrambled out from behind the recliner and headed for the door.

“You too?” Gabe said to the dog.

Bowie just looked at him with a decidedly duh expression.