She wanted to say more, but the RN at the intake desk called her name. Miranda bolted to her feet, far too fast, and stumbled toward the nearest exam bay. For the first time, Allan Knight had truly frightened her. On a deeply feminine, deeply personal level.
And she didn’t know what to do about that.
He shouldn’t have touched her. Knight had grossly miscalculated. He’d taken one look at the scrape on her cheek, barely more than road rash, no doubt from where she’d fallen to the floor and scraped against the chairs, and it had pissed him off. Combined with her words probing far deeper than they should have been able to, and he’d lost all sense of reason.
No doubt she’d report his ass to her boss first chance she got. Knight would just have to deal with the consequences.
Talk of what had happened to him, talk of Malachi Brockman, always made Knight act like an irrational asshole. Angry. Just flat out pissed at the world.
He’d already been on edge from Lesley Beise’s attack on her.
No doubt it was worse because he was attracted to her. And wanted to protect. He felt like he’d failed to do just that. And that made the animal in him furious. Snarling.
Ready to rip into the nearest threat.
He shouldn’t have taken that anger out on her. No matter how hard she’d pushed him, needled him. Made him realize that his words were the truth.
Knight had no one. Absolutely no one in this world truly gave a damn about what happened to him. Unlike her.
The world could revolve around her. Pulled to her like she was the very center of gravity.
He’d be a fool to even keep thinking that. He wasn’t ever putting his hands on that woman again.
34
Jac looked at Lesley Beise and tried to evaluate him based on all the information that they had gathered. Max was in the room, directly to her right. He’d be the one doing most of the questioning while Jac observed and took notes. This was a process they’d done thousands of times now, it seemed. It was routine; old and comfortable. Almost like it used to be.
With one difference.
This jerk had knocked Miranda into the wall and hurt her.
Lesley Beise stared at both of them, questions in his gray eyes. Jac just calmly straightened her notebook on the table. She was ready. She nodded at Max and started her recorder on her bureau-issued cell phone.
“Agent Jaclyn Jones…” she identified herself, the date, the location, the purpose of the interview, and who was in the room with her for the record. And then she looked at Max. “I’m ready whenever you are.”
He nodded. “Then let’s get started.”
“What’s this about?” Lesley Beise was…bland. Oily. She had seen men like him so many times before. Even personal hygiene seemed to be an optional choice Lesley didn’t choose to make. She would never understand it. Men like Lesley were nothing at all like men like Max. Or Knight, or Clint Gunderson, or Joel Masterson, for that matter.
“First, why did you attack our agent?” Max asked in that honey-smooth voice of his.
“I didn’t like the way she looked at me. She always did that. Stupid bitch.”
“Oh?” Max asked, calmly. Max was always calm. Very rarely had she seen him lose his cool. “What about it did you not like?”
“Always acted like she knew everything. Like I was too good for her. Yet she screwed around with Levi Masterson. Stupid jerk always had everything handed to him.”
“Mr. Beise, we have some questions about Masterson County, fourteen years ago.” Max started. “Can you tell us what happened to your family that made you relocate?”
“That’s what this is about?”
“What else would it be?” Jac asked.
Jac didn’t miss the way Beise’s eyes shifted, how his breathing changed just a bit. He was about to lie to them. She knew it. “Nothing. What do you want to know?”
They weren’t there for petty crimes. But if one was found during the course of their investigation—well, Jac would use that. Period. “If you are honest with us, Lesley, it’ll be a lot easier for you. We all know how this works.”
From what she and Carrie had been able to find out about him online, he worked—a collection of dead-end, oftentimes seasonal jobs, spent his free time with friends, drinking, and spent most of his spare cash on car parts for his vintage sedan. Or his old motorcycle. His social media posts revealed that he was a bit under average in intelligence, leaned politically far left, and felt the government was out to take everything it could get from the common citizens. He’d had a multitude of failed relationships with women who showed similar characteristics. He had two children—by two different women, in two different states. Records showed he paid support on one, a four-year-old two counties south of where they were. His social media showed him with that child—about once a year.
Jac wasn’t all that impressed.
“So, if I answer your questions, I just walk right out of here?”
“Hardly,” Max said, still calm. “You physically assaulted a federal agent. That’s a major problem for you. We’ll get our friend from the DCI here. I’m sure Gunderson will enjoy arresting you for battery or something like that. I mean, he and Dr. Talley are close friends.”
“So why should I cooperate?” His gaze kept darting to her. To the pen she held. Jac shifted her hand, evaluating. His eyes followed the movement. He was more interested in her that Max, then.
“So that we can answer the question we’re here to answer,” Jac said. “What exactly happened to your grandmother?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what we mean,” Max said. “We found your grandmother’s body, wrapped in a quilt. Buried in your father’s barn.”
He paled. Right there in
