Page 81 of Catch Me When I Fall

Five hours later, the orange cat and Carrie both still passed out, Dominic and Jake arrived. I pulled open the front door to find death lingering in both pairs of eyes, anger coating their faces.

“He’s out back,” I informed them gruffly, stepping aside.

Jake pushed back the hood of his coat, running a hand through his thick red hair, his eyes scanning the ceiling. “You need two more cameras in here, Gray.”

I agreed, though I didn’t have the supplies when I installed the few I did have. “You got some?”

He looked at me, his mouth in a hard line, nodding once.

I turned to Dominic as he said, “Need demographics and history.”

I walked over to my bags, pulling out my tablet and tapped the screen. Leo’s background popped up, and I handed it to him. “No parents. No past partners. No home address,” he read aloud. “He lived on his boat.”

Jake shot me a look. “Could’ve done that for you, you know.”

I folded my arms over my chest. “I needed something to do,” I admitted. I could pull a simple background check instead of chopping up the fucker’s body in Carrie’s kitchen.

“There’s something else, boys,” I noted. Both of them looked at me, standing in the middle of Carrie’s cozy living room, dressed in all black with guns strapped to their thighs.

“What?” Jake asked.

I jerked my head to the back door. “He’s good friends with the sheriff.”

Dominic chuckled, shaking his head as he looked up to the ceiling. “Fucking hell.”

“This needs to be an accident,” I stressed for Carrie’s sake. She’d already been through enough.

Jake nodded. “Understood.”

“Is the fucker outside?”

I nodded.

Dominic slapped Jake on the shoulder. “Your turn.”

Our tech specialist grumbled under his breath as he dropped his backpack to the floor, pulling out two different packs. He handed one to me. “I’ll need a blood sample from Carrie to do the screening,” he informed me.

“How soon can you have the results?” I asked as he carried the rest of his things to her small kitchen table.

“In an hour,” he answered. Aside from being our tech specialist, he also had a solid medical background.

I looked to Dominic. “Leo’s boats are at the docks, slots twenty-three and four.”

His eyes dropped back down to the tablet. “Any employees?”

“Only one. He’s out of town visiting family,” I answered.

Dominic’s eyes flicked to mine; his jaw tight. “How convenient for me,” he muttered.

I pulled out my phone and called Hayes. When he answered, I asked, “Need a chopper. Do your friends have one in that hanger?”

He’d landed the jet on an airstrip outside of Portland that was owned by an old friend. The good thing about Hayes being in the Air Force for fifteen years was the friends he made. Our military contacts were valuable to Red Snake Investigations, but Hayes was the only one with aircraft connections.

He sighed. “How soon?”

“An hour.”

“The weather might be a problem,” he warned me.

---