Page 26 of Barbed Wire and Burglary
Aaron glanced worriedly at his sister. “Honestly, I don’t know what to think about a lot of things right now. According to the doc, I was poisoned.”
That didn’t sound good. “You mean in addition to the gas leak?”
Aaron nodded gravely. “Which may explain why I lost my balance and fell into the crime scene before you arrived yesterday.” He pulled his bandaged wrist out from beneath the blanket and held it out for A.J. to get a better look at it. “This is the souvenir I took home with me.”
A.J.’s brain raced to connect the dots. If he was understanding everything correctly, Aaron was confessing to contaminating the evidence. No wonder the details hadn’t added up!
“I documented everything with before and after photographs,” Aaron continued gravely. “But if you want to turn me in?—”
“I don’t,” A.J. said flatly. It was the truth. Tampering with evidence might cost Aaron his job at the police department, but it wouldn’t get him indicted as the mastermind behind a long list of jewelry heists.
“See?” Aurora declared in an aha voice. “I told you we could trust him.”
A.J. swung in her direction, unaware she’d ever considerednottrusting him.
“Don’t look at me like that.” She blushed and clasped her hands beseechingly at her brother. “Please, please, please tell him what’s going on!”
“Can’t.” He shook his head balefully. “Not without checking in with Uncle Cary first. Without a green light from him, our heads could roll over this.”
Uncle Cary?A.J. couldn’t believe what he was hearing.What were the odds their Uncle Cary was the same Cary Cannon serving as the newest member of the JSA Board of Directors?It would certainly explain the logo on the lockbox in Aaron’s closet. Did it mean he was a member of Diamondback’s team of elite security consultants? If he was, it was a clear conflict of interest with his duties as a deputy.
Even more concerning was the diagram the JSA had shared with A.J., showing an uptick in jewelry heists in concentrated areas across the country. Each of the upticks lasted about a month and involved three to five heists before moving on to another area, keeping the law enforcement community baffled. They could see the pattern, but they’d been unable to connect the pattern to any names thus far.
What if it was because the heists were an inside job like the JSA feared? One way to prove it would be to compare Aaron Cannon’s whereabouts during each of the upticks in robberies. If his transfers from police department to police department coincided with them, well…
There’s our guy. Case closed.
Sadly, the feeling that A.J. was finally on the right track wasn’t accompanied by the usual burst of elation. Linking Aaron to the heists would also link Aurora to them, at leastindirectly. He knew for a fact she’d visited her brother in Pinetop, and she was present in Heart Lake now.
No matter how much A.J.’s heart wanted to protest the connection, his analytical mind couldn’t deny the growing likelihood she was involved.
Somehow.
Some way.
Even if she didn’t know it.
The possibility that Aaron might be using his own sister as a distraction to A.J.’s quest for justice sickened him all the way to his soul. Was Deputy Aaron Cannon capable of that kind of evil—purposely blurring the lines for A.J. between love and duty?
Only a very dangerous man indeed would force another man to make that kind of choice.
Chapter 5: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Next morning
“You were poisoned.” Sheriff Luke Hawling walked into the ICU room where Aaron had been transferred the night before. “Twice,” he continued in a low voice for Aaron’s ears alone. It was daybreak, so the scarred side of his face was concealed partially by the shadows in the room and partially by the brim of the Stetson he was rarely seen without. He was the burn victim of an arsonist who’d never been caught.
“Twice?” Aaron waited for him to explain.
“Yep, we’ve confirmed that your gas line was sabotaged. Also, the bottle of multivitamins in your medicine cabinet was tampered with.”
“Ouch!” That meant an intruder had breached the rental home’s security system—not once, but twice. “What do you mean bytampered withmy vitamins?” Aaron was still fighting the sluggish after-effects of what he’d endured, so it was taking longer for his brain to make senseof everything.
Somebody wants me dead.Of that he was certain. As for the who, what, and why, not so much.
“They were laced with snake poison.” The sheriff watched him closely. “Does that hold any significance for you?”
As a matter of fact, yes.Aaron had to assume it was because of his ties to Diamondback Corporation. More specifically, it was about revenge, either for the heists Diamondback had thwarted or because of the criminals they’d helped bring to justice. He was a dead man walking if he couldn’t figure out who was targeting him before they returned to finish the job.
