Page 4 of Frozen Secrets

Winnie wasn’t expecting an answer. She hadn’t gotten one in ten years. Why would Adrial start now? But she wasn’t going to keep hoping for one, either, even at the hallucinated hint of shame crossing his features. It wasn’t real. Men like him didn’t allow themselves to regret. She just wished they did.

She tossed the case file with her father’s sticky note directing her to Cold Hollow Investigations on the front onto Adrial’s desk with the bag of gummy clusters. So much for them putting him in a better mood. “I’d like to see everything you have on the Lila Mercer case.”

Adrial’s narrowed gaze shot from the note to her in record time. “Last I checked, you interpret scientific journal articles for a living. You’re not law enforcement. Even if I had information on the case, you don’t have clearance.”

He knew what she did for a living? What’d he do, read her LinkedIn page? No. The job she had now was fairly new since the divorce, and she hadn’t updated her profile or her social media. She couldn’t even remember when she’d updated any of her platforms. So how had he known? Winnie forced herself back into the conversation with a shake of her head.

“My dad sacrificed the last twenty years of his career and what was left of his family working that case, and the only reward he got was an entire town turning against him in the end. All for some missing girl he didn’t even know.” She sucked in a deep breath, fighting back the surge of disappointment and loneliness, and the utter audacity of her neighbors and the department. They should’ve done better for a man who’d been committed to protecting and serving their community. Arthur Hutton had deserved better. “Please. If you cared about him at all—if you cared about me—help me finish what he started. Help me restore my father’s reputation.”

Adrial shoved to his feet, picking up the case file, sticky note and all, and handed it back. “Stay away from that case, Red. You don’t want to get involved. Trust me.”

Trust him? She almost laughed, but she held her chin high. Just like Adrial had taught her. Winnie headed for the door. Empty-handed. He didn’t want to help? Fine. She’d do it herself. “Have the day you deserve, Mr. Tucker.”

Chapter Four

He was going to regret this.

Adrial pounded his fist against the door that’d only managed to get uglier over the past decade. Because who in their right mind painted their house kelly green to accent redbrick? Arthur Hutton. That was who. Hell, Adrial had been the one to help him do it, too. The green had been the cheapest exterior paint the former chief of police could find, much to the embarrassment of his daughter at the time. Which only made this so much worse.

The door swung inward, centering the gut-wrenchingly beautiful redhead in his sights. Winnie had changed since barging into his office this morning, and was now wrapped in skintight Lycra workout clothes streaked with dust. Not to mention cobwebs in her hair. She quirked one side of her mouth to dislodge that traitorous strand that always seemed to fall into her face. “Can I help you?”

“Everything I have on the Lila Mercer investigation.” He offered the too-thin stack of paperwork he’d found shoved to the bottom of one of his desk drawers. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t shredded the file when he’d had the chance, knowing how unlikely the case would ever come to a resolution.

Winnie took it with a little too much enthusiasm. As though the limited information he’d put together outside the official investigation would be the key in getting her what she wanted. But solving this case wouldn’t restore her dad’s reputation. Not in the way she believed. She flipped through the handwritten notes and copies he’d made before resigning from his position as one of Black Hollow’s detectives. “What made you change your mind?”

Adrial shut down the growl in his chest. He knew her. Knew how far she would go to get what she wanted. Hell, there’d been times he’d admired the hell out of that stubbornness, but this wasn’t like that time she’d nagged Arthur for a special-edition birthday Barbie every day for an entire summer until the man gave in. The Lila Mercer case would only end in heartache, or with Winnie hurt. Neither of which he was willing to stand by and watch. Not again. “You want to solve this case, or do you want to interrogate me?”

After sidestepping clear of the threshold, Winnie opened the splintered front door wider in invitation. A wall of staleness drove up his nose and into his lungs, though it seemed she’d opened every window imaginable to clear out the house. The stained cerulean-blue carpet—dark in some areas and too light in others—told the sordid story of the time his former partner had gifted Winnie a dog to keep her occupied after losing her mother at sixteen. It hadn’t helped. In many instances, throwing money at Winnie instead of the affection she’d craved from her remaining parent had only made things worse between them.

This damn case hadn’t helped one bit.

“Sorry about the mess.” Winnie closed the protesting door behind them and pushed into his peripheral vision. The living room—easily the largest room in the old rambler—looked the same as it had ten years ago. The floral couch against the longest wall still held the imprints of someone who’d taken to sleeping on it instead of shuffling down the hall toward the bedrooms. It was easy to imagine Arthur locking himself in this house, living off processed foods with the case spread in front of him. The rest of the furniture, including the oversize round dining table that had been cut off at the legs to make a coffee table, had somehow survived under layers of dust and water rings.

Framed photos that hadn’t been touched since Mrs. Hutton had been alive decorated the walls behind a two-deck leather-lined rolling bar that had been pushed into the corner where the Christmas tree used to go, stocked with VHS Disney movies, old laser disks in their original packaging, bronze elephants and Winnie’s mother’s old bible. He had a feeling the giant flocked Christmas tree hadn’t gone up since Winnie had insisted that year she and him were supposed to get married the following January, and he’d learned she used to eat the salt dough ornaments off the tree as a kid. Hell, he’d bet Arthur never bothered celebrating any holiday with what was left of his family, always putting his work first.

“I’ve been working on it since I got into town, but he wasn’t great about staying on top of the cleaning.” Winnie swiped her hand across the coffee table and wiped the residue down her thigh, creating new streaks over lean muscle straining under black fabric. She’d always taken good care of herself, apart from her addiction to a very specific chocolate bar she liked to unwrap in front of the TV more than few times a week, but these past few years had done wonders for her. Her skin had cleared up, her hair had grown in thicker, muscles flexed where they hadn’t before and her teeth were much whiter. Marriage had obviously done wonders for her, and he was happy to see it. Really. “Would you like something to drink?”

“I’m good.” Adrial tried to breathe through the staleness, but there was no escaping it. “You’ve been through your dad’s case file?”

“Not all of it. No.” She glanced toward the bare wall on the other side of the barely held together entertainment center stuffed with more dust, more photos and more blue-and-white patterned china, and Adrail caught the outline of paper-size rectangles on the wall. Given the pinpricks in the textured drywall, something had been pinned there long enough for the sun to change the color of the cream-based paint. “There are a few boxes I haven’t opened. I’m honestly not sure where anything is, or if what I found is the full investigation. If he had a system, he was probably the only one who knew what it was.”

He hadn’t heard her right. “Boxes.”

“Yeah. Boxes.” Winnie crossed into the kitchen at the back of the house, bright yellow linoleum threatening to trip her along the way. She hauled a paper box without any clear label from the struggling kitchen table and set it on the coffee table between them, then removed the lid. “Most of them are in the office, but I pulled this one from under his bed. There’s a lot here, but I have a hard time believing there are this many boxes dedicated to one case.”

“Your dad was known to be a bit obsessive.”

“You think?” Her mouth tugged up at one corner, almost convincing him there was a smile somewhere underneath her dark lip stain, but it was gone just as quickly as it’d appeared. A figment of his imagination.

Adrial flipped through the first few items stacked in this one box. “I mean he had a tendency to write a set of notes and then rewrite them again and again until something came of them, or he found something useful. And he kept every draft. Entire notebooks filled with the same information stacked in his desk. I’m betting a lot of these are duplicates.”

“His desk.” A groan slipped free of her control. “I didn’t even think to clean out his office at the station.”

Adrial siphoned off the first few sheets of notes. Scribbled and scratched through in that familiar handwriting. He’d instantly recognized Arthur’s slashing g’s and a’s—as though the man had needed to punish the paper for its existence—on the sticky note with Cold Hollow Investigations’s name on the file Winnie brought in. Why his former partner had left it to begin with—directing whomever would be going through his files to CHI—Adrial didn’t know. He and Arthur hadn’t spoken in close to a decade despite working some of the same cases in the same small town. “One of the other officers has most likely already gone through it. They’ll want to make sure nothing leaves the station that isn’t supposed to.”

“You mean like case files?” She motioned to the entirety of the house.

He couldn’t stop the answering laugh that took him by surprise, and set aside the first few pages of this box. “Yeah. Like case files. Evidence. Crime scene photos. Witness statements. Office supplies.”