Free Dying to Read by Lorena McCourtney Page A

What she’d seen in Beverly’s kitchen showed he did good work. “Do you have a business card I can give my uncle?”
    “No. But I’ll give you my phone number.” He tore a scrap off the flap of the envelope, wrote a number on it, and slid it across the table to her.
    “So why didn’t you go to work for the uncle in Tennessee? Why come out here to Oregon?”
    “Look, I think it’s my turn to ask questions. And I have a big one.” He leaned forward, arms on the table, blue eyes intent. “Your employer, this Joe Belmont, he sends you out to these strange places by yourself? Where you don’t know what kind of situation or what kind of people you might run into?”
    “Actually, Uncle Joe doesn’t know I’m doing this,” she admitted. “All I was supposed to do was go to a certain place and find out if that was Willow’s current address. But she wasn’t there anymore, and I didn’t want to tell him I hadn’t found her, especially when he has . . . other problems.”
    She also didn’t want to admit failure. Failure as a PI might not be something she’d have to add to her written résumé, but it would go on her mental list. “So I’ve kind of expanded the search on my own.”
    “A search that might well be dangerous.”
    “So far, the biggest danger I’ve run into has been you,” she pointed out.
    “Yeah, but there could be a lot worse guys than me out there. Maybe that’s why I don’t like to see you chasing around alone and running into them. And women can be dangerous too. What do you know about this Willow? Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Maybe she’ll strongly object to being found. She left Beverly in a suspicious hurry, if you ask me. I’m not even convinced Beverly wrote that reference letter. Maybe Willow Bishop is a forger and a thief and who knows what else.”
    “Actually, she left the other employer rather abruptly too,” Cate admitted. With a dead body in her wake. And more missing jewelry.
    “I could go with you to find Lexter Drive tonight. Unless there’s that husband or boyfriend you have to get home to.”
    Cate glanced up. That definitely sounded like fishing. But with Mitch Berenski she wasn’t sure. “I live with my uncle and his wife. He’s Joe Belmont. Belmont Investigations. But you were right when you said I haven’t been a PI long,” she admitted. “I haven’t been able to find a steady job here, so Uncle Joe hired me temporarily.”
    “Then let’s go to this address together tonight. I just don’t think you should be chasing around to strange places where you don’t know what you’ll run into. I mean, what if I’d been a serial killer yesterday? And you had just wandered into my clutches? Anything could have happened.”
    “Why do you care?” she asked, bewildered by what seemed an unexpected concern about her welfare.
    “I don’t know.” He leaned back, took a bite of sandwich, and chewed as if he were angry at it. “Maybe I have some kind of knight-on-a-white-horse complex. Subconscious need to save beautiful damsel in distress.”
    “You make a habit of damsel saving?”
    “No. It’s brand-new.”
    Mitch connecting with his inner knight-on-a-white-horse, the same as she was connecting with her inner PI? And not a connection he wanted to make, if his grumpy stab of curly fry into ketchup was any indication.
    Still, it might not be a bad idea to have a male with a strong arm along when she visited a strange address. He’d made a good point about Willow perhaps not wanting to be found.
    “I’ll have to make a phone call first.”
    She left the table and pulled out her cell phone. Rebecca answered immediately. She said Joe was awake now, cranky as a bear with a thorn in his paw, but he’d like to talk to her.
    When he came on the phone she asked how he was doing, but Uncle Joe was not interested in giving a medical report and immediately asked about the Willow Bishop case. Cate gave him a highly condensed and edited version of her