Sunset Point: A Shelter Bay Novel Read Free

ways—Eric trudging back to the office, Tess racing toward the doorway leading to the stairs. She was nearly there when a fiftyish man called to her from down the hall. “I heard you were headed down the coast,” Jake Carter said when he caught up with her. “ Alone. ”
    “I’ll be fine,” she assured him.
    “You’ve received threats.” Pewter brows dove toward a nose that had been broken more than once. If faces were maps of people’s lives, Jake’s revealed a rough and rocky road.
    “That comes with the territory.”
    “Tell that to Martin Phelps,” he retorted. “Oh. Wait.” He held up a beefy hand. “You can’t. Because the guy’s dead.”
    Martin Phelps had been a deputy district attorney in Salem who’d disappeared two weeks ago after leaving the office to interview a witness in a trial of a dealer who belonged to a Russian mob whose kingpin Tess had helped convict. After an intensive search, his body was finally found in a heavily wooded area off I-5 by hikers.
    “That was tragic,” she allowed. Even more so, given that Phelps had left behind a wife and two children. “But I’m never going to allow anyone to make me afraid of shadows again.”
    It was the truth, but she realized she’d hit a nerve when his neck above the shirt collar flushed red. “I’m sorry, Jake.”
    She put a hand on the sleeve of his navy blue sport coat, which like the rest of Jake’s clothing, always seemed to rumple the moment he put it on. A bit like Columbo’s raincoat. It humanized him in a way that she suspected made leery potential witnesses more willing to talk with him.
    He scrubbed a hand over the buzz cut he’d had as long as she’d known him. “I screwed the damn pooch on your case back then.”
    Jake had been Yamhill County sheriff when eight-year-old Tess had been kidnapped walking back to her maternal grandparents’ house after having attended a friend’s sleepover party. At the time, in the small Oregon wine country where everyone knew everyone else, no one ever locked a door. Evil was something for Sunday sermons, bad guys only skulked the streets of cities, and boogeymen were limited to horror novels and movies.
    Until that day Tess’s kidnapper had single-handedly destroyed the close-knit community’s innocence.
    Although Jake and her dad, working together, had found her hidden in a room beneath the floor of a cabin in the hills, Tess knew Jake was still carrying around a boatload of guilt for having taken two long weeks to locate her. Weeks that must have seemed like an eternity to her family and all those professional and volunteer searchers.
    Not that she’d been all that aware of the passing of time, due to the memory-stealing drugs the doctors later determined the kidnappers had used to keep her quiet and semi-conscious. Drugs that included the compound more recently used in date rapes Tess had prosecuted.
    After her rescue, burdened down by that guilt that followed him around like a dark cloud, Jake had gone into a tailspin, suffering depression and alcoholism, which had led to a messy divorce. He’d ultimately chosen to retire rather than run for an election that, by then, he couldn’t have possibly won, only to discover that having nothing to do but fish only allowed more time to drink.
    Refusing to give up on the man who’d become a friend, Mike Brown had convinced Jake to get help, and although the former sheriff considered therapy too touchy-feely for comfort, he had joined AA, sobered up, and moved across the border to Washington State, where he’d worked his way through the twelve steps and landed a job as a fugitive recovery agent working for a Vancouver bail bondsman.
    Two years ago, having cleaned up his act and seeming to have, if not vanquished, at least quieted his demons, he’d driven back across the Columbia River and gone to work in the Multnomah County district attorney’s office. Which had united victim and rescuer yet again.
    “You found me,” she reminded