“Same,” Adam said. “If I didn’t love the area so much and the pack, and hell, now we even have yet another eligible she-wolf, I might have considered moving to someplace quieter, less crime-ridden.”
“You would be bored.” Sierra was sure of it. Adam would be so intensely involved in a case that no way would he want to work somewhere that didn’t have any real crime to speak of. “Can you imagine getting calls about treed cats and such if you went to a town where nothing ever happened?”
He smiled. “True.”
“It would waste all of your detective talent.” She heard the dryer quit finally. “Sounds like your clothes are probably ready. I’ll get them and set them out for you in the guest bedroom next to my room so you can change.”
“Thanks so much for doing that,” Adam said.
“Thanks for coming to my rescue! I could have still been wandering around in the storm without a way to get home.” She headed down the hall to the laundry room.
As soon as she was pulling clothes out of the dryer into her laundry basket, she heard Ethan ask Adam, “So are you going to ask her out first, or should I?”
She smiled. Yeah, dumping Richard was a good idea all right.
Chapter 8
Adam and Ethan left Sierra’s house at the same time, both men believing she was feeling fine and not upset over the breakup with Richard. But Ethan didn’t have to ask Adam who should ask her out first. Of course, she’d heard. She was a wolf!
And she needed time to get over this, Adam thought.
Ethan drove off to his home and Adam to his, and he was almost home when his boss called him. “Hey, Adam, I heard Sierra has returned home from her vacation early.”
“Yeah, she came in tonight.” Adam wondered why his boss would be calling him about that.
“Willy turned in his papers tonight.”
“Ah, hell.”
“Yeah. First Josh, now Willy. Don’t you get any ideas.”
Adam smiled. “No, I’m good.”
“Anyway, I need Sierra to come in tomorrow and start working full-time temporarily if she doesn’t want the full-time job permanently. Otherwise it’s hers. You probably know her better than anybody at the bureau. What do you think she’ll say?”
“Uh, well, she really liked the previous arrangement.”
“I know. She did most of the eyewitness sketches and Willy handled the dead bodies. Sierra’s a known quantity as far as her witness sketches go. She does an outstanding job with handling distraught eyewitnesses. We don’t want to lose her, so if you can convince her that we need her and no one else will do, I’m going to tell her tomorrow she’s got the job. I’ve got to go. My wife is calling me to change out a light bulb for her.”
Adam smiled. Every time his boss called him after Adam had left work, he ended the call saying his wife needed him to do something for her. Adam often wondered if she really did or if that was his convenient excuse to end the call.
“Okay, I’ll talk to Sierra. See you tomorrow, sir.” Adam wasn’t about to call Sierra with the news tonight. Not after she’d just broken up with her boyfriend. Since she’d already told him she preferred the way things were, Adam didn’t want to hit her with the news that Willy had retired and the boss wanted her to take his place.
In fact, Adam had every intention of letting the boss tell her what was up tomorrow morning. Then if Adam still had to convince her she was the only one for the job, he would certainly attempt to do so. He really liked to work with his wolf kind because they could talk about their wolf halves while on an assignment when humans weren’t about. That was one thing that he enjoyed while working with Josh. He didn’t see Sierra as often, but if she worked full-time? He would see more of her, and he would enjoy that.
He hoped she would really like Tori. He knew Tori would try to convince Sierra to work full-time too. Or at least he hoped she would.
* * *
Early the next morning, Sierra felt good about calling it quits with Richard. While she was having a cup of orange tea and just chilling, Sierra got a call from her boss. “Adam needs you to do a witness sketch this morning. He said you had arrived home from your vacation last night.”
“Uh, yeah, okay. I’ll be right in.” Her boss was always all business. She hadn’t expected him to appreciate that she was home early or ask her how her vacation had gone. He never took a vacation, and he didn’t really think anyone else should either. Not when there was work to be done. And truly, there was always work to be done when it came to trying to solve crimes in the area. She wondered how his wife went along with it.
Sierra hurried to finish getting dressed. Even though she was only part-time and was more on an on-call schedule, she was always ready in case she did get called in. She hadn’t expected to get a call this early though. Willy usually handled the cases until nine. She guessed he was busy on another case.
When she arrived at the bureau, she expected to see Adam there and maybe his new partner. Adam would want Sierra to speak to a witness right away. Instead, he wasn’t there. Neither was anyone who looked new who could be Tori.
“Redding! I need to see you. Now!” Police Chief Arnold Covington hollered.
She entered his office, and he motioned to a chair. She took a seat, wondering what was up now. He usually only had someone sit down when he wanted to scold them about something.
“You’re it. You’re taking over Willy Blanchard’s full-time job.”
“You want me to do what?” she asked her boss. She really hadn’t expected that. He’d called her in because Adam needed her to do a witness sketch!
The chief had round, pudgy cheeks that were always a little flushed, a bulbous nose, and a rounded belly that made him look like he ate too many of the chocolate-crème-filled cookies he had tucked inside his upper desk drawer. She knew because she’d seen him grab a couple to eat with his morning coffee, and he would down a few more when he returned from lunch.
He wore a butch haircut, the sides of his hair sporting gray, the top black. He reminded her of a sergeant she had worked with in the army, except that the sergeant had been in a lot better shape and beer had been his vice, not chocolate cookies.
“Okay, look, yeah, we still need a police sketch artist when someone hasn’t caught the perp’s face on a cell phone or a security video hasn’t captured it. So then witnesses can help you create the person’s image on a sketch pad. And you do a damn good job at it. But when you don’t have a witness sketch to do, we really need you to do a different kind of sketch, one to identify the victim instead.”
“As a forensic sketch artist working from deceased facial photos from the crime scene or the morgue, sure. What happened to Willy Blanchard? He always worked those cases.” She would much rather do sketches of criminals based on witness accounts. She hoped Willy hadn’t been fired.