Needed By The Highlander - Rebecca Preston Page 0,2

death) he was able to put money aside to get the old house patched up. Her brother Davey came home most weekends to help out — they’d given the old place a fresh coat of paint and were working on renovating the kitchen to bring it into the twenty-first century. He needed a project, it seemed… and it was nice for him to spend some time with his son. Grief was funny like that — it would drive you to isolate yourself, but what you really needed was people around you.

A prickle of guilt ran through her as she thought about her father. It had been a while since she’d seen him — a few weeks at least, which wasn’t like her. Well, it was still afternoon. By all accounts, this ex-husband rarely came to lurk around Sarah’s door while it was still light out. She could afford to risk a phone call. She checked the time. On a Saturday afternoon, her father was unlikely to be working at the shop, but it was anyone’s guess as to whether he’d have his phone close at hand enough to answer. Most times she called her father it had been her mother who had answered. Now, it would just go to voicemail.

But this time, he picked up, and Helen smiled, pleased to hear his voice.

“How’re you doing, sunshine? Cracked any cases lately? Any dames giving you grief?”

She couldn’t help but laugh at that. Her father got all of his understanding of what she did for a living from hardboiled detective novels of the 1940s. He wasn’t alone in that thought. Since she’d quit her demanding FBI job, she’d had more time to socialize… but everyone she told about what she did drew the same conclusion, that she sat in a trench coat in some dimly lit office, smoking like a train and pontificating on the gritty nature of the universe.

Well, they weren’t completely wrong there. She had a few fairly gritty opinions on the world she’d come to know, both through her work with the FBI as a criminal analyst, and from her freelance work as a private investigator. Mostly, it was that people weren’t especially trustworthy, on the whole. She’d caught far too many cheating spouses, too many office workers with unfortunate embezzling habits, too many bitter ex-spouses to have too much faith in humanity in general. Maybe that was why she hadn’t made many friends since she’d left the Bureau. It was hard to get close to someone when you knew first-hand what they could be capable of — what they might be hiding, just beneath the surface…

“I’m on a stakeout, Dad.”

“Ooh. Mob bosses? The Mafia? The criminal underground of Huntington?”

She laughed. “Huntington’s criminal underground is a bit above my pay grade at the moment, Dad. It’s just some jerk ex-husband who’s stalking his ex-wife.”

“Oh. Well. That sounds a bit safer than mob bosses, at least. It’s your sister!” she heard him calling to someone in the background, and grinned. Just as she’d suspected — Davey was there, working on the house. It was good of her little brother to spend so much time with their dad. He’d really stepped up since their mother had passed away, for all that he was dealing with plenty of his own demons. He’d been drinking since he was a teenager — like most kids in Huntington, the legal drinking age was more of a guideline than a law — but it had only turned into a real problem when their mother had started to get really sick. He was doing a lot better these days, since he’d quit and started going to meetings regularly, but their mother’s death had put a lot of pressure on his sobriety. It was likely that Davey needed these DIY weekends as much as their father did.

“How’s the kitchen coming along?”

“Great! We’ve torn out those old cabinets, but we managed to keep the siding that your mother painted. We’re just figuring out where to install it on the new ones.”

“That’s good. Those old cabinets were basically sawdust central.”

They kept chatting — but then something caught Helen’s eye.

“Dad?” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the other side of the street. “I’ve got to go. I’ve just seen the guy I’m waiting for sneaking into his ex-wife’s garden.”

Chapter 2

She knew she had to move quickly. She hung up the phone with her dad, her other hand already on the lightweight but powerful digital camera she used for this work.