Free Fulfilling Promises (Red Starr, Book Five) by Kennedy Layne Page A

place securely. It wasn’t long before he was walking back her way and she finally answered his question.
    “The police didn’t tell me if they found anything, but then again, the Staties were expecting me to talk to them and not the other way around.” Devyn didn’t add on that she was smart enough not to say anything, but she hadn’t wanted to break down and ask for a lawyer. In these parts, had she done that, it would have been considered an admission of guilt. “Joey’s password is Alligator with a capital A, the number sign, and then his birthday month in two digits. He wasn’t very original.”
    Trigger smiled fondly as he took a seat in the chair and powered up the computer, looking to access the network drive. He quickly searched the desktop, but he wouldn’t find anything. She’d already looked this place over top to bottom when the police had released her this morning. She wasn’t expecting him to sit back though and slow the momentum of what they’d come to do.
    “Talk to me. Tell me what really happened over the last few days that I should know about, Devyn.”

Chapter Seven
    ‡
    T rigger set the k-bar Marine Corps fighting knife on the desk in front of him, not wanting it far out of his reach. He’d used it to pry open the locked bottom drawer of the desk for absolutely no return. He could only imagine that the key was part of a set inside the envelope back in Devyn’s office. There wasn’t anything of note in the drawer but a jug of old Uncle Jamey’s finest homebrewed cherry brandy. He wasn’t really anyone’s uncle, not that Trigger knew of. Jamey just ran the pick of the litter when it came to the local stills.
    Trigger had cleared the area and no one had been here recently that he could tell. Devyn had been quite tense on the drive over here and he hadn’t wanted to broach the subject. She’d been strung too tight, but she appeared more at ease now that they were away from the stares and accusing eyes of Amberton’s residents.
    “I need to know, Dev.” Trigger rested an elbow on the arm of the desk chair, so many questions running through his mind about Joey and the garage. Joey hadn’t fixed the place up like he’d said he would. Why? “I left Joey in charge of this place and yet nothing was done that we’d agreed upon. He would text me at least once a week and sometimes we’d even talk on the phone. Never once did he give me an indication something was wrong.”
    “Joey was doing a really nice business here, John,” Devyn said, pulling her hair around to one side so that she could twist a strand around her finger. She’d done that when she was in deep thought for as long as he could remember. “The customers were happy and he felt useful for once in his life. No one was here to micromanage him and he talked all the time about how he was making money for the business. This job kept him busy and away from all the bad things that had plagued him most of his adult life. He just didn’t see the need to spend money on a place where only he worked. It didn’t bother him that the glass was cracked over the office door.”
    “I didn’t plan on having him work in a pigsty either,” Trigger countered, not appreciating the conditions Joey thought he had to work in. “I could care less about the money it would take to fix this place up. This is Mac’s legacy and while he didn’t care about anything other than working on the next car he was going to restore…Joey didn’t have to come in here day in and day out to an office that had seen much better days—like in the 1970s, maybe. He could have hired some local folks to do the work and paid for it out of the profits.”
    “I don’t know what to tell you other than he was happy here the way it was.”
    Devyn gave a small shrug as she looked around the grungy office. Trigger remembered clearly this area was exactly how it appeared when Starr had come to offer him a position on her team. He was lucky she had even gone through