Page 46 of Fatal Deception
She’d been in long-term relationships before and nothing had ever felt like that. It wasn’t just the physical part, though—wow.It wasn’t that she’d felt like she’d uncovered something, discovering the coin-size tattoo on the front of his shoulder, in the shape of a police badge. It was that it had beenmorethan all of that.
More than her usual trying to make a relationship last, work, be theend. It wasn’t about relationships at all. It had just been about waking up to him holding on to her, knowing that he was…a good man. And she’d wanted some piece of that.
The weight of it had been important, somehow. And it was one thing to try to work through allthat, but for hiscoworkerto show up… To see it. That was something else entirely, even if Detective Delaney-Carson was being very nice and pretending like she didn’t know what was going on.
Audra stood at the coffee maker, discarding the remnants of last night’s decaf and getting it set up to brew. Copeland reappeared with his shirt on before she finished.
He gruffly ordered her to sit down. Audra didn’t miss the considering gaze the detective gave Copeland, but she pretended she did. She sat, not bothering to tell Copeland her ankle was feeling better. He’d just argue with her.
“Sorry to interrupt your morning,” Laurel said, giving Copeland a pointed look when he put a mug of coffee in front of her. She moved her gaze to Audra, and it was kind. “But all the ranchers I know are up at the crack of dawn and I have a meeting in Sunrise in an hour. I figured I’d stop by instead of having you two come out to the station, because we’ve got something of a lead.”
“You could have called,” Copeland muttered. He put a full mug, with a dash of cream, like she always took it, right in front of Audra.
“I did,” Laurel replied. “Left you a message. I guessyoucould have checked your phone.”
Copeland’s gaze flicked to Audra, and she couldn’t stop the heat from creeping into her cheeks, because obviously they had beenbusywhen that call came in.
“What kind of lead?” Copeland said, his attention back on Laurel. He grabbed his own mug of black coffee and sat down in the chair between them.
“We still don’t have any suspects, but we’ve managed to trace the payment to the funeral home that made the arrangements for the cremains. Unfortunately, the payment was made from a fake identity, but the money still had to come from somewhere. We don’t have an answer to that just yet, but we do know the payment came from Florida, and we’re working on the theory that the person, regardless of fake identity, is somewhere in Florida. Or was. Florida feels like where a lot of this is originating from, even if someone is here now doing these things.”
Florida. Audra heard a strange buzzing in her ears, like she’d been transported somewhere else. Florida.
A coincidence. It had to be a coincidence. Florida was a big state. It wasn’t… Whywouldit be?
But when she came back into herself, certain it was a weird coincidence, Copeland was frowning at her.
“Do you have any connections to Florida, Audra?” Laurel asked.
But Audra couldn’t look away from Copeland.
“You know someone in Florida who might be out to get you?” he asked grimly.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t know anyone who’s out to get me.” Not here. Not anywhere. Whywouldshe?
He narrowed his eyes. “Audra, who do you know in Florida?”
She managed to find her voice, though it was a hard-won thing. She couldn’t look at Copeland as she spoke, so she looked at some vague point on the wall. “Only one person. My mother.” She tried to smile. “Obviously mymotherdoesn’t have anything to do with this.”
But Laurel and Copeland exchanged a look that said “not so obviously.”
“My mother doesn’t want the ranch,” she continued quickly. “Or to hurt me. She’d have to care about either. She left the minute she could. She wantednothingto do with this place once she found out about Dad’s other family. She wanted nothing to do with…” Me. Us.
“And before that?”
She looked at Copeland helplessly, because this wasn’t a lead. It couldn’t be. “Before what?”
“Before she found out about the other family. Before his death. What did she feel about the ranch before that? Because you guys were here, so she had to have some feelings. Why did she leave?”
Audra couldn’t find any words. Maybe because as impossible as itseemed, she… She knew how angry her mother had been. Understandably.Rightfully. But it had turned against everyone, and for so many reasons, the experience with her father waseasier to deal with. He’d lied, cheated, betrayed. Died. It was easy for Audra to hate him and be done with it.
Everything she felt about her mother was a jumble. She couldn’t blame Mom’s bitterness on anyone but Dad. Couldn’t blame Mom for leaving her and Rosalie to clean up the mess. He was their father, their blood. Not hers. To her, Dad was just a mistake she’d made for too many years.
Maybe Audra had thought…a good mother stayed for her kids, supported her kids, regardless of the father, but she also couldn’t pretend to know the level of betrayal from the man you were married to having a whole other family he left things to.
So she tried not to blame Mom too much. She tried not to expect anything out of her either. She tried to be neutral. Maybe she’d been leaning closer to anger when Mom had refused to come to Rosalie’s wedding, but Audra didn’t think Mom knew that. Or cared.
And none of this was…right. “She left because she hated this place,” Audra told Copeland. “She wouldn’t come back just to…mess with me. She doesn’t care about anything here. Florida is a coincidence. It has to be.”