14. Case File

Riggs

Late the next morning, Riggs pushed through the door at the sheriff's department a couple minutes after Harry told him he'd be free to have a chat.

He gave a few nods to the deputies milling around.

But since all of them knew him because he'd done work on their houses, or their parents' houses, or they'd gone to school with him, partied with him, drank at a bar with him, or they just lived in the same small town, no one stopped him as he made his way back to Harry's office.

The door was open, and his friend's eyes came to him from where he sat behind his desk, but Riggs still knocked on the doorframe, since Cade Bohannan and Rus Lazarus were sitting in the two chairs in front of Harry's desk.

Bohannan was an MP native and retired FBI profiler who now did consultant work and taught courses.

Lazurus was Fret County Sheriff's new detective. Also former FBI, he'd come to town the year before to track the Crystal Killer. While doing that, he'd fallen for a local, Cin Bonner, and now he was shacked up with her.

Riggs had known Cade his whole life, though Cade had spent a lot of his living elsewhere when he was with the FBI. But Riggs had always liked the man. He couldn't say they were close buds, but there was mutual respect. On Riggs's part, this was mostly because Cade had always treated him like Doc Riggs, not John Riggs's son, and that meant something to Riggs, especially from a world-renown criminal profiler.

On the other hand, he'd only known Rus for a few months, and he called the man his friend. They'd shared beers while watching a game at Harry's more than once. He was a good man, smart, funny, and making him better, he was a good friend to Harry. He had Harry's back at work and, Riggs sensed, emotionally.

After Harry lost what he lost, he didn't let many people in.

But he'd let in Rus.

"Am I interrupting something?" Riggs asked.

"We're finishing up," Harry said. "Grab a chair and join us, unless what you have to talk to me about is private."

Riggs came in, nabbed a chair from the small conference table in the corner and turned it around toward Harry's desk before he sat in it.

"No. Actually it'd be good to have you all here when we talk about this," he shared.

The other men glanced at each other, and Riggs didn't make them wait.

"Nadia, my neighbor," he said the last just in case Cade didn't know of her, "has had someone fucking with her."

"Jesus Christ," Harry muttered in a harassed way.

"Yeah. Scratching her windows in the middle of the night and banging together some rocks by where Whitaker's stables used to stand," Riggs explained. "I grabbed some surveillance stuff, heading back to install it after this. But thought you should have that heads up."

Knowing him better than the other two in the room, it was Harry who demanded, "You get some video, you phone me."

"I'll try to stay in that frame of mind, and whoever's doing this might not know what she's going through right now. Even so, that shit is whacked. She's not happy about it, and it's arguable, but I'd argue I'm even less so."

Harry didn't take his eyes off Riggs, and Riggs got that, because, again, the man knew him well, so he knew Riggs would put himself in front of a bullet for his son, mother, sister or a good friend, but this protective streak with Nadia was telling.

Cade and Rus just exchanged a glance.

"How do you know it's not Whitaker's ghost?" Cade joked.

Riggs looked his way. "Rain washed away any tracks, but Nadia told me the scratching stopped when the storm came, and my guess is the same as hers. If there was such a thing, ghosts wouldn't feel rain, so they wouldn't give any fucks about it."

"Excellent observation," Rus muttered.

"Also gotta ask about the Whitaker investigation," Riggs aimed that directly at Harry.

His friend's brows went up. "Why?"

"Because Leland Dern was sheriff when that shit went down, and we all know Dern was a waste of space," Riggs noted.

"The man confessed," Harry pointed out.

"Yeah, after he hosed down the stables. This being after he blew holes in his wife and brother. Think that did the job, so why'd the guy burn down the stables?"

Harry again didn't take his eyes off Riggs, and again, Cade and Rus exchanged a glance.

"Rus up to speed about all that shit?" Riggs asked Harry.

But it was Rus who answered.

"Yeah, Nadia Antonov moving to that cabin, Harry filled me in."

"Being a big FBI guy, how do you feel about that scene?" he asked Rus.

"Can't say I pulled the case file, Doc," Rus replied. "Only know what Harry told me, and seeing as a man confessed and turned himself in at the scene, it sounded pretty open and shut."

"Maybe you should open that file," Riggs remarked.

"Again, I'll ask why," Harry put in. "Everyone involved in that mess is dead."

"Nadia was at my place last night…"

All the men exchanged glances at that.

Shit.

"…she's my neighbor, and Ledger is home, so we were getting to know our new neighbor," he felt forced to explain.

"I thought you two were butting heads," Harry noted, both observationally and probingly.

"We worked shit out," Riggs replied impatiently.

"Right," Harry muttered.

Moving the fuck on.

"And she made the observation that you can't see Roosevelt's cabin from any of the windows in my house. A house Lincoln helped design. A house that has a fuckuva lot of windows. And straight up, this morning, I went into every room that faced the lake, and she's right. Even in the farthest room on the third level, that part of the house is built into a hill, angled away from the cabin, so the windows are positioned toward the other side of the lake. You can't see anything but Roosevelt's pier."

The mood coming from Bohannan had them all looking at him.

"What?" Harry pressed.

"Gotta say, that's another excellent observation," Cade said. "Got all my kids living close on our land, though not that close, and I can see all their houses from mine, to the point I had some trees removed around Jace's place so it wasn't so secluded. Not that me and Larue spy or anything, but you just keep an eye. And Larue and I both felt off about Jace's place, until those trees were removed. Further, it isn't like my boy can't take care of himself, it's just a family thing."

"That's pretty thin to pull a file on a closed case," Harry noted.

"Not if you're a profiler and you got some guy going overkill on murdering his wife and identical twin brother," Cade returned. "With this new information, gotta admit, it's hinky, Harry. The wife is already a thing. Though, last I read, eighty percent of female homicides are done by their partner or an ex, so it's a thing to men like us who would never do it. But an identical twin?" Cade shook his head. "They got a bond. I've got a pair of my own, and I've read a lot about it. Think it'd take a lot for a man to pull that trigger. And even more to burn his body to ash. From what I understand, and seen with my own eyes with my sons, that would be akin to destroying himself."

"Which would explain why he entered a fugue state after shooting them and while hosing down the area around the stables and setting them on fire," Harry threw out.

"Maybe. It's not like wildfires are common here, though," Cade retorted. "It's too wet. That's going the extra mile, and it takes some synapses firing to think, fire, trees, I just killed my wife and brother, but I don't want to be responsible for burning down a few acres of forest. If synapses are firing, you aren't in a fugue state."

"And again, the man who did it is dead after doing time for the crime. It's not like I can recharge him," Harry pointed out. "I couldn't even do that if he was still alive."

Riggs knew Harry was thinking about his department and the resources at hand, and not being a lazy ass. That wasn't Harry's style.

Still, he was beginning to piss Riggs off.

"Though, you could charge someone if they're still around, and this guy didn't do the crime," Rus piped up.

Now Harry was interested, and Riggs knew when he demanded of Rus, "Talk me through that."

"Wasn't here, but say this guy didn't actually do it. Why would a man confess to a crime he didn't commit, and set a fire that would destroy all evidence?"

"Taking the fall for someone else," Harry answered.

"Someone he loves a whole fucking lot," Rus replied. "This guy have kids?"

"He did. If I remember right, they were in Seattle," Harry told him.

"How old were they?" Rus asked.

"No clue. I wasn't in the department when that happened," Harry shared.

"The old sheriff do due diligence?" Rus pushed.

"Again, I wasn't on the force then, but I could guess, and my guess would be a good one that would be a big fat no," Harry answered.

"So maybe it was someone else," Cade put in. "Someone else who's still around."

"Shit," Harry muttered.

"So maybe we pull the case file?" Rus suggested. "Just to have a look for curiosity's sake."

Harry nodded.

"Why are you opening this can of worms, Doc?" Cade asked Riggs.

Riggs looked to him.

"There's this shit, and there's also the mess of both Whitaker brothers' estates," Riggs said. "There's also Lincoln doing seven years' time, only to get out and then kill himself. Why would he wait to do that? Why would he do it at all? Why are the estates such a mess? And we all know there's no such thing as ghosts, but not everyone who's ever tried to stay on that land got creeped into believing a ghost story. Shit's been going down. Real shit. The kind that runs people off. This tells me, fifteen years, someone has worked hard to keep people away from that cabin, my house, and the whole lake."

"You have any incidents occur while you've been there?" Rus asked.

Riggs turned to him. "One, no. Two, I'm known as a man you don't mess with. Three, I'm known as a man who doesn't believe that ghost story shit. And four, I'm out of that house more than I'm in it."

"So, someone could need the place clear because they're looking for something they haven't been able to find, or they know something is there they don't want someone to find," Harry deduced. "Someone who might have killed two people and got away with it."

"That was what I thought," Riggs said.

"You remember any of this?" Harry asked Cade as Riggs felt his phone vibrate against his ass with a call.

He pulled it out as Cade answered, "Heard about it, but I didn't live here then."

"You got time to go over that file with me and Rus?" Harry asked Cade as Riggs checked his phone and saw it was Nadia.

Immediately, and without a word, he got up, walked across the room and took the call.

"Hey. What's up?" he asked.

His stomach dropped when he heard the panic in her voice as she said, "I'm in my car at your house, but you're not here."

"Why are you at my house?" he asked, and he felt the room go wired at the vein of urgency that snaked through his words.

"Because I went into town to experience that Aromacobana place, got back, and someone had broken into the cabin."

He put his hand over the phone and announced, "Someone has broken into Nadia's place."

He didn't wait to watch Harry, Rus and Bohannan finish bolting from their chairs.

He was hoofing it to his truck.

"On my way," he told her.

"Thanks, Riggs," she whispered, still sounding freaked.

"Be there soon, honey."

"Okay."

He disengaged, angled into his truck, and hauled ass to his house.