“Well?” I asked. “What do you think we should name her?”
Cole looked over at me and my girl, then shook his head before admitting defeat. “Nazboo.”
“Thanks for coming up.” Dad leaned his forearms on his desk. “Ready when you are.”
Matt, in the chair at my side, dove into his update for Dad on the liquor store murder case.
“We’ve gone through the video footage and narrowed our search down to six vehicles in the shopping complex at the time of the murder. All were driven out of the complex by women fitting our rough description. We weren’t able to get all of the plates from the security camera footage, so we crosschecked the ones missing plate numbers with stoplight cameras. Before we came up here, I sent a request to the DMV to get registrations. Hopefully by Monday we’ll have names and I’ll start bringing people in for questioning.”
Dad nodded. “Good. I hope you two are onto something.”
“Me too,” Matt and I both said in unison.
It had taken nearly two months—two long months—of digging through the camera footage to get this far. Ever since the night in the garage when I’d shown Poppy my gun, Matt and I had looked at the case from a new angle. This time around, we’d searched the footage for a woman.
It hadn’t been easy. Between balancing my work on the drug task force, my normal caseload and everything else that was happening in my personal life, the last thing I wanted to do most mornings was lock myself in the conference room and scour camera footage for a couple hours before a full day’s work.
But if this paid off—if we actually found Jamie Maysen’s murderer—it would all be worth it. It would be worth every minute if we could give Poppy some peace.
It had been a month since we’d officially gotten together up at Glacier. A month and we hadn’t spent a night apart. She’d get up early and go to the restaurant. I’d get up early and come to the station. We’d text throughout the day, and if I had free time, I’d stop by for lunch. And in the evenings, I’d spend a couple of hours working on that old truck while I waited for her to finish up at the restaurant.
Basically, we’d both work our asses off until we could quit for the day and meet up at my house. Then we’d spend the rest of the night unwinding in my bed.
Our bed.
One thing I’d learned this past month was that Poppy belonged in my house. With her there, it felt like home.
“Where’s Nazboo?” Dad asked.
“I dropped her off with Mom after lunch.”
Dad grinned. “She loves that puppy.”
“Yeah.” I grinned back. Nazboo was a keeper, even if she did have a dumbass name.
A dog like her should have a name like Sadie or Bailey. Instead, she was named after some weird pet dragon from one of Kali’s cartoons. But I seemed to be the only one who thought Nazboo was a ridiculous fucking name. Everyone else loved it, especially Poppy. So I hadn’t put up much of a fight and started calling her Naz, which was easier to swallow.
“I think she might be the best puppy I’ve ever seen,” Matt said. “I told my wife I’d consider getting one too if I could guarantee she acted like Naz.”
“We lucked out, that’s for sure.” Naz rarely had an accident, she didn’t nip at fingers, and she’d only chewed one of Poppy’s shoes. After that, we’d made sure to always have a rawhide nearby, and from then on out, Naz had never chewed on anything else. But it was her personality we all loved the most. She was mellow—for a puppy—and as sweet as sugar cane.
Naz had become my sidekick during the day, hanging out with me at the station or riding around in my truck if we were doing fieldwork. Bozeman was a dog-friendly town, and a couple of years ago, the station had started allowing senior officers to bring their dogs to work. Naz was now one of three dogs in the bull pen on a regular basis, and the times that I couldn’t bring her with me, she stayed with Mom.
“All right.” Dad checked his watch. “I’ve got another meeting in five. Keep me posted on how your interviews go.”
Matt nodded. “Will do.”
We all stood and Dad shook Matt’s hand. “Nice work, Matt.”
“Thanks, but I can’t take all the credit.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “This guy has been doing most of the work.”
I scoffed. “I don’t know about that.”
I’d been the one to watch the majority of the camera footage, but Matt hadn’t been sitting idle. He took his role as lead seriously and he’d done a lot of fieldwork while I sat behind the scenes. He’d interviewed all of the original witnesses again. He’d spent hours at the shopping complex, learning all of the ins and outs of the area so we could zero in on potential blind spots the suspect could have hidden in. Matt had even spent hours going over the case with Simmons.
Surprisingly, Simmons had memorized a lot from the case. He might have delegated things too far down the chain and his documentation skills were shit, but what he hadn’t written down, he’d kept in his head. I was still pissed at Simmons for being lazy these last few years, but he wasn’t the one to blame for letting Jamie Maysen’s killer walk free. He’d just looked at the investigation like the rest of us had.
For a man.
Female killers were rare, and even though we’d been trained to keep our eyes open to any possibility, I couldn’t blame Simmons for spending his time focusing on a male suspect. The camera footage from the liquor store was deceiving. The killer looked like a man.
But maybe we were finally getting somewhere.
“It’s been a team effort,” Matt said. “I’d better get back to it. Bye, Chief.”
“Bye, Dad.” I turned
