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  The revulsion she felt was for the crime, not Mitch, who couldn’t possibly have done it, but would he be able to tell the difference?

  “Let me know when you have a warrant.” Mitch turned on his heel and sauntered out of the lobby, appearing completely unbothered. But his gait was slightly stiffer than normal, his jaw set more firmly. Anyone who’d spent as much time studying Mitch as she had could notice these things.

  Had he fooled his own half brother?

  Dwayne looked first at Celeste, who stared back with open challenge, then switched his gaze to Beth, perhaps seeking someone with a more open mind. “It’s in his best interest to cooperate,” he said. “There’s gonna be a warrant, and I’ll have to come back with it tomorrow.” He turned and exited to the street.

  By the time Raleigh arrived, whooshing into the hall with her pen, notebook and digital recorder ready for battle, it was all over.

  “You’re too late,” Celeste said. “Missed the show. Did you know our Mitch has a half brother? And a cop, at that?”

  “No, I didn’t. What happened here?”

  “I’ll explain,” Beth said. “But let’s go to the ladies’ room where I can have a meltdown in private.”

  Raleigh said nothing until they were safely inside the ladies’ lounge on the second floor. Raleigh and Beth had held quite a few cry fests in here over the past few years. It was furnished with tufted sofas and gilt-framed mirrors, but its best feature was a big box of Kleenex.

  “He said no?” Raleigh guessed correctly.

  “He said he was busy.” Beth slumped onto a sofa, swallowing back the tears that threatened. What if Mitch got arrested?

  “He didn’t issue a counteroffer?” Raleigh sounded genuinely perplexed.

  “Never mind the date. His half brother was there asking a lot of questions about something that happened years ago when Mitch lived in… I can hardly say it. Coot’s Bayou. Did you know he was from a place called Coot’s Bayou?”

  “Seems I heard about it at some point.”

  “Did you know he stole a car?”

  “He was a teenager at the time. The charges were dropped.”

  “So you did know. You should have told me.”

  “It’s not like he’s a criminal. He’s a good person, Beth.”

  “Maybe.” Deep down, Beth felt that Mitch was good, not that she could trust her own instincts where men were concerned. “But now he’s being accused of murder. His own half brother seems to think he might have killed the guy—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Murder? Start from the beginning.”

  Beth recounted the conversation between Mitch and his brother as best she could. Raleigh listened attentively, taking quick notes, firmly in lawyer mode.

  When Beth was finished, Raleigh pulled off her glasses and massaged her temples. “He needs to cooperate. He needs to clear this up.”

  “That’s what I told him. But instead he got angry. I never saw Mitch get angry before.”

  “Everybody has buttons. Obviously Mitch and his brother have some issues.”

  “You have to talk to him, Raleigh. Convince him to hire himself a lawyer and go to Coot’s Bayou and answer the questions.”

  “I can try. But honestly…you’re the one who knows him better.”

  “And you’re the lawyer. You know how to persuade juries and get witnesses to admit stuff.”

  “We’ll talk to him together,” Raleigh said decisively.

  Beth nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it now.”

  They exited the bathroom, but in the hallway Raleigh paused as if something just occurred to her. “Why do you think the half brother showed up with the news?”

  “He said he thought it would go down easier if Mitch saw a friendly face. But that guy’s face was far from friendly. He was loving every minute of the exchange. There is bad blood between those two.”

  MITCH WAS SO STEAMED about his brother’s high-handed prank that he didn’t return to the bull pen. He needed quiet, not the controlled chaos of the large, open area, where the Project Justice junior investigators and interns worked. He headed upstairs to his private office, shut the door and collapsed into the leather chair behind his desk.

  He didn’t want to see or talk to anyone.

  He was supposed to be searching for a missing witness pertaining to another investigator’s case, but not even the prospect of losing himself in online research could distract him from his irritation.

  Dwayne could have called. He could have emailed him or texted. He could have showed up at Mitch’s house. Walking into Mitch’s place of business and announcing to everyone within earshot that he was a murder suspect was the kind of cruelty Dwayne had always gone for.

  He’d done it on purpose, of course—to humiliate Mitch as thoroughly as possible.

  Mitch slammed his fist into his left palm. Hell, why was this happening now? He had a fight scheduled for Friday night, and he couldn’t afford to lose focus, not if he wanted to continue his winning streak.

  He needed to sweat, to work out the anger and frustration. Beating the crap out of a punching bag, pushing his body until every muscle burned, was the only sane way he knew how to deal with stress. It sure as hell beat joyriding in stolen cars, or downing a case of beer.

  After a futile hour, he decided concentrating was impossible. He closed his laptop and loaded it into his backpack. No one would notice if he cut out a couple of hours early, and he could put in a few more hours of research tonight at home. Right now, he had to get out of here.

  He was heading for the door when someone knocked. Damn, no clean getaway. He yanked the door open.

  Beth and Raleigh. Neither of them was smiling.

  “Hey. I was just on my way out—”

  “This will only take a few moments.” Raleigh pushed her way inside his office without invitation. Beth followed, and Mitch inhaled deeply as she brushed past him. Today’s scent was green-apple. She liked to wear all different kinds of perfumes, mostly botanical scents like kiwi and watermelon and vanilla. He’d made a game out of trying to guess the scent of the day.

  But the stubborn expression on her pretty, feminine face told him this was not the time for games. He knew that expression. He was in for a fight.

  Mitch smiled his best good-ol’-boy smile. “Ladies, I have a dentist appointment—”

  “So you’ll be five minutes late,” Raleigh said. “As chief legal counsel for Project Justice, I have something to say. Now, you might not care if a posse of Louisiana cops shows up tomorrow with sirens and bullhorns and guns flashing, but I do. If you get arrested for so much as littering, it reflects badly on the foundation, and I can’t let that happen.”

  “That won’t happen,” he assured her. At least, he didn’t think so. “My brother was just trying to piss me off. They don’t have any evidence.”

  “They do have evidence,” Beth nearly exploded. “If you were the last person known to see the victim alive, that’s plenty of evidence to bring you in for questioning. You’re only making things worse. If you keep sticking your head in the sand—”

  He held up one hand to stop the tirade. “I’ve got this under control, okay? I know how the local cops operate in Coot’s Bayou. I worked for them for a few years. They’re just shaking the bushes, hoping something will fall out.

  “I’m not falling out. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned his back on them, daring them to try and stop him from exiting his own office. If he didn’t find a punching bag soon, he was going to lose it. But he heard no steps behind him, no clatter of high heels on the polished wood floor.

  It was a fine spring day, cool and crisp in a way perpetually muggy Houston seldom saw. He’d ridden the Harley to work, and as he settled into his eight-mile commute home, he hoped the wind in his face would clear his mind. But when he pulled into his driveway, he was every bit as tense and angry as when he’d left work.

  He didn’t bother putting his bike in the garage. He stepped inside his small ranch house long enough to shed his
jeans and golf shirt and throw on shorts and a T-shirt with the arms ripped out. Barefoot, he headed outside again, straight through the backyard to the gate that led to the adjacent property.

  Mitch lived next to a played-out oil field. He’d bought the little house out near Hobby Airport for a song because most people didn’t care for the sound of pumps and the occasional smell of raw petroleum. That was three years ago, and now the pumps were silent and still. The oil reserves were empty.

  The quiet wouldn’t last forever. Even now, the oil company that owned the mineral rights to this two-hundred-acre chunk of land was in the process of acquiring more sophisticated drills and pumps that could go deeper into the ground. But for now the field was still and peaceful except for the breeze rustling through weeds that had reclaimed the ground and the occasional bird chirp.

  Most of the old machinery had been removed, but one rusted grasshopper pump was left, abandoned, and Mitch had turned it into his private gym. It had just the ambiance he needed to train for a cage fight.

  Mitch normally started his workout with some general fitness training—push-ups, jumping rope or agility drills with resistance bands wrapped around his thighs. But today he skipped all that. He tugged on a pair of four-ounce gloves, which offered minimal protection for his hand but left his fingers free, then went to work on the heavy punching bag he’d suspended from the pump.

  Jab. Jab. Left hook. Right uppercut. Knee to the solar plexus. Head shot. Body shot. Like always, he imagined an opponent. Usually, he visualized the guy he was scheduled to fight. He would study any videos he could find of the guy, imprint his fighting style into his brain, then picture all the various ways he could beat him.

  Today, his opponent was not Ricky “Quick Death” Marquita. Today, the face he saw was his brother’s.

  Dwayne was the one who’d motivated him to learn to fight—not by encouraging him, but by beating him up a few times when they were kids. Bigger, older, Dwayne had had no trouble besting his little brother.

  Mitch continued to rain punches and kicks onto the hapless bag filled with sand and gel, pausing only long enough to whip off his T-shirt after he’d gotten good and warmed up. Roundhouse kick to the head. Elbow to the chin. Inside crescent kick to the knee. He kept going long past exhaustion. Sometimes, the winner of a cage fight was simply the one who could stay upright the longest. Fighting through exhaustion was a key skill.

  If he and Dwayne fought today, things would be different. Dwayne still outweighed Mitch by a good thirty pounds. But Mitch was sure that if they ever met in a chain-link cage—or in a back alley—he could smear the mat with his brother.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BETH TRIED TO TELL HERSELF she’d done what she could. If Mitch was determined to be an idiot about this situation, how could she talk him out of it? Arguing wasn’t her best skill; she left that for the lawyers.

  Turned out Daniel didn’t agree. He shared Raleigh’s concern about a scandal being detrimental to Project Justice, and he didn’t allow anything to get in the way of the foundation’s efforts to free wrongly convicted men and women from prison. But he also cared about Mitch, who had been one of the first people Daniel had hired when he and his father had started the foundation.

  After Mitch had stormed down the hall toward the elevator, Beth had returned to her little laboratory, the place where she felt most comfortable. Fingerprints, fibers and blood didn’t argue. They spoke only the truth. They weren’t all that complicated.

  Men—Mitch, in particular—were.

  But she hadn’t been in the lab ten minutes before Daniel called her.

  “You want me to try again to convince Mitch to cooperate?” Beth asked, almost before Daniel had said two words.

  “You’re the one who knows him the best, Beth,” Daniel said. “I’m in the middle of a Logan Oil board meeting, or I would track him down myself and talk some sense into him.”

  Those were pretty strong words, coming from Daniel, who seldom left his estate unless it was for something really important. His new wife, Jamie, was in the process of pulling him out of his shell, but old habits died hard.

  “Apparently I don’t know him as well as I thought,” Beth huffed. “Coot’s Bayou? He’s never said a word to me about his hometown. Or his half brother. Or his arrest record.”

  “He had good reasons for wanting to put that part of his life behind him, Beth. He wasn’t trying to hide anything. He grew up under pretty harsh conditions and it’s not something he wants to think about.”

  “He’s sure trying to run from it now.”

  “He can be convinced to do the right thing, I know he can. He’s smart, just bullheaded sometimes. Mitch cares about you and respects you. He’ll listen to you if you try one more time.”

  Beth wasn’t so sure. But despite his reclusive ways, her billionaire boss understood human nature better than most anyone Beth knew.

  “If you really think it will help, I’ll try.” She would simply have to put her disastrous attempt at dating Mitch out of her mind. He was, first and foremost, her friend. He needed her, even if he didn’t know it.

  “Do it now. Because frankly, if you don’t convince him, I’m going to have to tell him to take a leave of absence from work.”

  Beth stifled a gasp. “Daniel, he didn’t—”

  “I know he didn’t kill anyone,” Daniel said impatiently. “But we have lots of innocent people depending on us. Having one of our key employees accused of murder, no matter how ridiculous the charge, could damage us beyond repair. I will stand behind Mitch a hundred percent. But I won’t have him dragged off in cuffs from our offices, in front of TV cameras. Which is exactly what could happen if Mitch doesn’t cooperate.”

  Beth swallowed, her mouth going dry. She’d known things could get bad for Mitch, and for everyone who worked at Project Justice as well as their clients. Why didn’t Mitch see it?

  “I’ll go right now, Daniel. I’ll find him. I’ll convince him.”

  She tried calling Mitch’s cell, then his home, but got voice mail both times. He was very good at ignoring a ringing phone when he didn’t want to talk. “You can run, but you can’t hide,” Beth murmured as she grabbed her purse and headed out the door, putting her assistant, Cassie, in charge for the rest of the afternoon.

  Mitch’s house was less than ten miles from downtown and close to the I-610 loop, but it had kind of a rural feel, with a cow pasture across the street and an oil field next door.

  Rush hour hadn’t gotten a good grip on the city at three in the afternoon, so the trip to his home only took a few minutes. She pulled into the driveway and saw that his Harley was there. Good. But she didn’t get out right away. She sat in the car, composing in her mind exactly what she would say to him.

  By following him home, she was pushing the bounds of their friendship. But she couldn’t sit back and allow him to be railroaded right into prison. Her job had presented her with too many examples of innocent men and women, accused of crimes, who had made their situations so much worse by going into denial.

  Mitch’s house was cute, Beth had to admit, even if the locale wasn’t ideal. The white brick house had red shutters and a trellis shading the front porch, on which grew trumpet vine and morning glories poised to burst into bloom. Mitch kept everything in good repair, but Beth couldn’t help thinking, as she mounted the front steps, that the place could use a woman’s touch.

  She rang the bell. When he didn’t answer after a few moments, she rang again and knocked. “Mitch? I know you’re in there. You better just come to the door, because I’m not leaving. We have to talk.”

  Still nothing. No sound.

  Determined, she walked around the house and let herself into the backyard through the gate in the honeysuckle-choked chain-link fence. The patio and yard were empty, but she found the sliding glass door unlocked.

  Nervous sweat broke out on her upper lip as she opened it. “Mitch?”

  She was about to go inside when she heard something, a strange
noise punctuating the silence.

  Smack, smack, smack. And the unmistakable sound of a human male exerting himself. The noise was not coming from inside the house, but behind her. From the yard…no, beyond the yard. Beyond the fence, into the otherwise still oil field.

  What the hell?

  Curiosity killed the cat, she reminded herself as she abandoned the sliding glass door and went in search of the source of the sound.

  The back gate had been left ajar. As a trained crime scene investigator, she should have noticed that before. Mindful of her heels on the uneven ground, she crept through the gate and followed the strange sounds to another fence, a beat-up chain-link enclosure surrounding an old grasshopper pump.

  She could see no way in, so she cleared away some of the tall weeds and peered through the gap she’d created.

  Her breath caught in her throat. Finally she’d found Mitch, and he appeared to be beating the crap out of a punching bag, pounding it with his fists, bare feet, elbows and knees.

  She was at once fascinated and horrified. Here was a male in the prime of his health and vitality, shirtless, muscles rippling and sheened with sweat. He was beautiful…and terrifying.

  Her jaw throbbed and she rubbed it, trying hard not to think about the damage Mitch’s fists could do to a human being.

  Suddenly he growled like a wild animal and rushed at the punching bag headfirst, hitting it so hard that it disconnected from the chain and crashed to the broken concrete at the base of the pump. The chain that had held it suspended whipped around and struck Mitch in the shoulder, but he seemed to not notice. He was intent on doing more damage to the bag, kicking it savagely with his heel. Then he jumped on top of it and beat it a few more times with his fists.

  She must have made some kind of noise, because he slowly stilled his fists, then turned his head and looked right at her.

  Embarrassed to have been caught staring at what should have been a private moment for Mitch, she wanted to shrink back behind the weeds and creep away. But it was too late.