Free Paper Bullets by Annie Reed Page B

game.
    Instead, when I looked through the narrow little window on one side of the door, I saw two men in rumpled suits.
    No one wears suits in the middle of a Nevada summer to pay a visit to a stranger’s house unless they’re on official business. The fact that their suits were rumpled ruled out that these guys were lawyers or federal agents.
    The fact that there were two of them told me it was serious.
    After the mess at my house last December, I’d had a metal security door installed in front of my front door. To the casual observer it looked like a heavy-duty screen door, but the door had a deadbolt lock fitted into a metal doorframe attached to my house by some serious-looking hardware. Not impregnable by any means, but it made me feel better.
    I always kept the security door locked whenever I was home. It definitely made me feel better now as I opened my front door to these two stranger men.
    “Abby Maxon?” the shorter of the two asked. He had about ten years on me, but where he stood on my front stoop, he was shorter than I was. The house was one step up from the stoop, so I figured he was maybe my height or just a little taller. His dark hair was shot through with gray, and his neck strained against his shirt and tie.
    Instead of answering, I lifted an eyebrow. “Do I know you?” I asked.
    “Are you Abby Maxon?” the other guy asked. He was younger and taller and blond, and I could see the hint of a five o’clock shadow glinting in the last of the summer sunlight.
    This time I didn’t say anything at all.
    The two cops—and by now I’d figured out that they were cops; between the suits and their attempt at intimidation, they couldn’t be anything else—shared a quick glance.
    The shorter, older cop was closer to the door. He took his ID out of a pocket and held it up for me to look at.
    According to his ID, he was Detective Vincent Archulette of the Reno Police Department.
    Detective?
    “And you?” I asked the younger cop.
    His expression still neutral, he held up his ID. Detective Martin Squires. Also Reno Police Department.
    I breathed a mental sigh of relief.
    They weren’t from the Sparks Police Department, which meant they weren’t here because something had happened to Kyle.
    Enough of the officers Kyle worked with knew the two of us were dating that if anything horrible happened to him, they’d let me know. The very worst notifications were always done in person, never over the phone.
    Which meant these two were at my front door about something else.
    I’d talked to a lot of police officers either through the investigations I did for Norton Greenburger or the accident investigation work I did for other attorneys. I’d never met these two before, and I wasn’t sure I liked the official tone of their visit.
    “What can I do for you, detectives?” I asked when they put their IDs away.
    Detective Archulette sighed. “You’re Abby Maxon, right?”
    Norton always pounded into his clients that they shouldn’t admit anything to police officers who showed up unannounced, but Norton wasn’t dating a police officer. I had a slightly different perspective. Archulette had won me over a bit with that sigh. It told me he’d had a long day, just like I had.
    “That’s me,” I said. “Can I help you with something?”
    “Can we come inside?” Archulette asked.
    A particularly loud and discordant noise came from the den where Samantha was still pounding away on the piano. Archulette winced.
    “My daughter’s working off some steam,” I said. “It’s probably quieter around back.”
    I unlocked the door and let the detectives inside. I offered them iced tea. They both declined, and we walked through the house and into the backyard.
    Neither Ryan nor I were big into gardening, but he’d felt it important to put in the type of landscaping appropriate to a successful lawyer.
    The backyard had a fire pit, a covered patio that was bigger than my living room, a built-in barbecue, and a water