“She thinks she does.”
“She thinks she does, or she does?” Adam needed Burt to confirm she was in charge.
“She tells me what to do, but I’ve got a mind of my own.”
“Did she tell you to do the job at the hotel?”
“No. She’s not in charge of me.”
“Did Dover tell you to do the job at the hotel?”
“No. He doesn’t tell me what to do all the time either.”
At least they’d gotten a confirmation from Burt that he’d done the hotel theft. “So where is Phyllis? She thinks she’s getting away with this.” Adam hoped Burt knew where she was, and they could arrest her.
“Hell if I know. She said we needed to each go our own way, and that was that. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Why did Dover want you to kidnap the girl and try to frame Ms. Redding for the job?”
“Are you kidding? Sierra Redding lied about her dog being in her hotel room and lied about Dover threatening her in the room. He threatened a growly dog, not the woman! He’d never even seen her before. By supposedly threatening the woman, he got a lot more time than he would have otherwise.”
They had Dover jailed, but Adam worried about Sierra’s safety when the man got out of jail. Hell, he worried about her safety with Dover still in jail as long as his henchmen threatened her. But Dover was a ticking time bomb. He had been in several armed robberies that they hadn’t had enough evidence against him to actually convict him of. Adam had needed Sierra to help them convict him this time. Had he done Sierra a disservice? He was afraid he had.
It still gave him chills to think of what could have happened if Sierra had come out of the shower and found an armed man in her hotel room, if she hadn’t changed into her wolf. Would Dover have just left and not threatened her with bodily harm? After she’d seen him and testified against him? She was his first victim who had actually seen him in the act of attempting to burglarize her and had effectively testified against him with such detail that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she’d seen him do just what she said she had.
Burt was staring at the table and running his hands through his hair, looking distraught.
“Write everything down that happened—the robbery at the hotel, the kidnapping of the minor—in your own words.” Adam gave Burt a pen and paper and sat back against his chair. “Did you want anything to drink?”
“A beer.”
“Water? Soda?”
Burt shook his head and stared at the paper. “If I confess, you’ll state that for the record so I’ll get less jail time?”
“We’ll let the DA know you were cooperating with us.”
Burt glanced at the evidence of the robberies and the sketches of him. “She drew them, didn’t she? Sierra Redding? I know that’s what she does for the cops. Yeah, she did them.”
Then he began to write on the paper.
Jerome folded his arms as he stood near Adam, watching Burt struggle for the words to put on the paper.
When Burt had finally finished writing his confession, he pushed the papers at Adam.
“You need to sign and date them,” Adam said, giving him today’s date and passing them back to him.
Burt signed and dated them. Adam took the papers and read through them. “Okay, good.” He handed them to Jerome to read.
He nodded. “This looks good.”
“Are you sure you don’t have any idea where Phyllis went?” Adam asked.
Burt shrugged. “Maybe she’s with the guy she has been seeing.”
“A new guy?” Adam asked, hoping this could be an important new lead.
“No, one of the original crew. If Dover finds out, he’ll kill ’em both. The guy goes by Vlad the Impaler, Victor Freemont. He likes to bite the women he’s seeing. I’ve seen the bite marks on Phyllis’s neck. And hell, it didn’t take her long to jump into bed with him as soon as Dover went to jail.”
“Where is Victor?”
“I have no idea. I’ve just seen them together whenever she was supposed to meet up with me over stuff. That’s all I have.”
“All right, if that’s it, we’ll be seeing you.”
Once they learned they couldn’t get anything more out of Burt, he was carted off to jail and Jerome said to Adam, “Man, how do you and Josh do it? My partner and I were talking about how the two of you could convince more suspects to confess than any other detectives on the force could without even threatening them with mayhem or bargaining with them to reduce their sentences.”
“It’s all in the sweat, reading their body language, knowing when they’re going to fold.” Their scent too. And how beta they were. Burt was definitely a beta, and Adam was the alpha. So was Jerome, but he didn’t realize he was intimidating the hell out of Burt by just standing there. Burt might be afraid to go against Dover, or he might even feel some friendship and loyalty to him, but when his “alpha leader” wasn’t there to protect him, Adam and Jerome had become his alpha leaders.
“You sure have them pegged. I could learn a thing or two from you in the art of interrogation. And here I thought I knew it all.” Jerome grabbed all the evidence to put back in the evidence room.
Adam slapped him on the back and headed for the door. “Anytime you want a tip, I can give it to you.”
“Thanks. Oh, and thanks for coming in last night. My partner wanted me to tell you that since he was the one on call.”
“No problem. I know if either of you were working on a case, you would want to go in about it.”
Jerome chuckled. “Hell, on my night off? My wife would give me the boot.”
Adam knew him better than that. He and his partner would have gone in about their own cases if it meant they might get a break in them.
Adam headed outside to Sierra’s car and got a call from the auto-body repair shop. It would cost him a couple of thousand dollars to repair the Hummer. Hell. Well, that was another charge that Burt would have to face. Adam pulled off his suitcoat and laid it neatly in the back seat of the car, then drove off.
When Adam called ahead to tell Sierra he was on his way to pick her up for work, she said, “Well, it’s about time. Though I already did two eyewitness accounts. Tori took me.”
“Ah, hell, honey.”
Sierra chuckled. “She was happy to do it. We were having a blast unpacking boxes, and I just had to run out to a couple of crime scenes to do witness sketches. We’re getting lunch delivered. What kind of sandwich do you want?”