Page 11 of K-9 Confidential

Charlie swung the screen door open. Old hinges screamed in protest, but it didn’t stop her from shouldering inside the house. “If I followed every order my father gave me, Granger, I’d be buried next to my sisters’ headstones in the backyard.”

She didn’t wait for his response, letting the house consume her.

Wind shifted through the trees protecting the property from the rest of the town with a false sense of privacy. Large thin trees that had no business growing here in the middle of the desert. Granger stared past the house, through the trees as an uncomfortable weight of being watched hitched his pulse higher. He didn’t have a choice. Because a stranger standing outside Henry Acker’s house was sure to attract attention. And not the good kind.

“Come on, Zeus.” He and the bull terrier followed after Charlie up onto the porch, though Zeus had far more trouble than usual. Damn dog had probably gotten into something else he shouldn’t have. Old boards creaked with his additional weight as a pair of rocking chairs—most likely hand hewn—shifted back and forth from the breeze. He had a perfect view of the driveway and the barn from this angle. Less chance of an ambush. Granger worked his way inside, instantly confronted with wood paneling, orange drapes and a wood-trimmed bay window looking out into the side yard. A thin layer of dust coated decades-old family photos, and cracked leather couches hinted at the stark difference between the outside of the home compared to the inside. Strong and pulled together on the exterior. Suffering on the inside. Granger catalogued everything within sight as he moved through the squared-off wood-trim arch into the kitchen. “Charlie?”

Old cabinetry stuck out. Old appliances. Wood countertops. A table with six chairs stood alone in the oversized space of the kitchen. The dining room looked as though it hadn’t gotten any use in years. No new scratches against the linoleum. What the hell were they doing here? What was Charlie hoping to find? A stack of boxes stuffed behind the dining table threatened to tip over at any second. Overpacked. Granger rounded the end of the table and pried the lid of the top box open as Zeus sniffed his way around the kitchen. Most likely looking for crumbs off the floor.

“It’s meticulously inventoried.” Charlie’s voice had lost some of the power it’d had as they’d witnessed a man beaten to near death, and Granger couldn’t help but take it in. The vulnerability, the pain that came with coming back here. She crossed the kitchen from the family room and pried the other lid open, pointing out the handwritten numbers on the underside of the cardboard. “Every week for the past twenty years. See these?”

She slid her finger closer to the beginning of the numbers where the handwriting had changed.

Granger pulled himself up taller, having not really come to terms that this place was where Charlie and her sisters had been raised. Until now. “Is that your handwriting?”

“One of my weekly jobs. I was in charge of inventorying all of our supplies. Here in the house and out back in the bunker. I had to make sure nothing was unaccounted for. Doesn’t look like much has changed in that regard.” She studied the kitchen as though seeing it for the first time.

“And if the numbers didn’t match up?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer, but these were the kinds of things he and Charlie had kept out of their short relationship. The stuff she hadn’t wanted to give up to the man looking for a way to arrest her father. Not out of any kind of loyalty to Henry Acker but as a way to move on. To distance herself from the life she would be leaving behind.

“Then I would have to replace it with my own wages. If it happened enough times, I paid for it in other ways, but when you’re trying to escape an extremist group, you make sure that never happens.” She folded the lids back into place, sealing the inventory inside. “You know, I was here last night, but it was so hard to see. In the daylight, it’s almost like…”

Granger couldn’t look away from the familiarity softening her face. It was nothing like that invisible armor she insisted on presenting to the world. Here, in her childhood home, she reminded him of the woman he’d known ten years ago. “Like what?”

“Like I’m home. I haven’t felt that way in a long time.” She shook her head, snapping herself back into the moment. “If my father catches us in here, his warning won’t matter. He’s very protective of his property. No one outside the family is allowed to even know this stuff exists.”

She was right. They were running out of time. Acker’s supplies, the house, her childhood—none of it had anything to do with her sister’s death. “Did you find anything during your search?”

“I went through Erin’s room again, but it’s the same as last night.” Charlie threaded her dark hair out of her face, highlighting the terra-cotta coloring of her skin. Henry Acker was the epitome of an angry white man determined to protect his constitutional rights in the extreme, but somewhere along the way he’d fallen for a woman of Cameroon heritage. Charlie had never told him about her mother. Another one of those pieces of her childhood she wanted to forget. “My father has an office at the end of the hall. He always kept it locked, even when I was a kid. Going in there was forbidden, and I wasn’t masochist enough to break that rule. If there’s something tying him to Erin’s death or any of the attacks you suspect him of being involved in, it would be in there.”

Granger crossed the kitchen to the window above the sink. Only this window didn’t give him a visual on the barn or the front of the house. A cement bunker took up most of the view. It wouldn’t take long before someone found the men they’d knocked unconscious. “We better move fast. The sun is behind the trees now. It’ll be ten times harder to get out of town if we can’t see where we’re going.”

“I’ve got that covered.” Charlie didn’t wait for him to catch up as she vanished back into the family room. Zeus took it upon himself to follow her. Traitor.

Granger tracked her past worn couches, an old box TV and a crocheted rug that’d seen better days. The house wasn’t large, making it easy to navigate down the hallway where Charlie crouched in front of the last door in the hall. “Any idea where we’re supposed to get a key?”

“I don’t need one.” The door fell open. Only as she stood did he recognize the miniature lockpick set she was sliding back into her jacket. Shoving to her feet, she smiled, with victory etched into her face.

“Another one of your weekly tasks when you were a kid?” he asked.

“No. That one I picked up on my own.” She grabbed the doorknob and pushed inside the too-small office taken over by the massive desk in the center of the room. Charlie didn’t wait for permission, rounding the other side of the desk. She tested drawers and went through papers as Granger surveyed the rest of the room.

A closet stood off to his right, pulling him toward it as effectively as gravity held him to the earth. He dragged the door open. And stepped back. Guns. Lots of guns. Granger lost count after he hit twenty, and that was just the rifles. Reaching for one dead center of the lineup, he tested the modifications. High-powered and definitely not used for hunting. At least not the legal kind. Boxes of ammunition stacked along the overhead shelf nearly reached the ceiling. “He’s got enough guns here for an entire army.”

Though he guessed that was the point.

“Granger.” Charlie’s voice had taken on that wispy quality again. “I found something.”

He replaced the weapon on its mount and shut the closet door behind him. “What is it?”

She flattened what looked like a blueprint across the desk with both hands. “Plans.”

“These are dated two weeks ago.” Granger took out his phone and took a photo. Handwritten notes took up the margins, with lines cutting across the page. He sent the photo to Scarlett Beam, Socorro’s security specialist. If anyone could get them an answer, it was her. “Looks like the layout of a building, but I won’t know from where until I get one of my teammates to look at them.”

“You don’t need to. I already know where these blueprints are from, and I know what my father is up to.” She took a step back, though she didn’t take her attention off the blueprints in front of her. “He’s planning to attack the state capital.”

CHAPTER FIVE

This couldn’t be right.

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