Forbidden (Southern Comfort) by O'Neill, Clark (free ebook reader txt) 📗

the reception desk, and when Clay flashed his badge, the woman pointed toward an office in the rear.  Through the glass on the closed door he could see Deputies Jones and Harding, whom they’d met last night, standing near the desk of an older man that Clay took to be the sheriff.  All three men looked up as he rapped on the door.

Deputy Jones motioned for them to come inside.

The sheriff rose to his feet as his deputy made the introductions.  Sheriff Nolan Callahan was a big man, balding and ebony-skinned, with a paunch that even the world’s best posture couldn’t disguise.  And while he looked like he’d be more at home kicked back in his Barcalounger with a beer and a ballgame than behind a badge, Clay knew that looks were deceiving.  He’d run a check, and Callahan had a solid reputation in the county. It might not seem like much, considering the county was little more than a backwater, but Clay well knew that even backwaters can harbor dangerous microbes.  It was therefore with respect that Clay shook the man’s hand.

“Agent Copeland,” Callahan said with a nod, cool dark eyes radiating intelligence.  “I appreciate you coming in.”

“It was fortunate that I happened to be in town.”

Sheriff Callahan’s eyes darted toward Tate.  “Yes, well, we’re sorry to have interrupted your vacation, but I do thank you.  As Deputy Jones told you this morning, I believe we might have a situation.”  With that, he turned to the second deputy – the one named Harding – and asked him to escort Tate to the interview room, where she would begin the process of looking through the mug shots.

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then Harding – who with his mussed hair and too-pretty face had a boy band sort of thing going on – blushed to the roots of that artfully arranged coiffure when he realized that the sheriff was talking to him.  He hadn’t heard him, apparently.

Because he’d been staring at Tate’s legs.

“Oh, uh, yes sir.”  Harding snapped out of it and stepped from behind the desk.   He smiled at Tate, flushed again, and steered her toward the door.

Clay forced himself not to bristle.

What the hell was a metro-sexual male doing working as a sheriff’s deputy in East Jibip?  Something just wasn’t right.

Like your malfunctioning brainwaves, Copeland.  Stop thinking about the girl and start acting like you know what you’re doing.

“Okay, Sheriff.”  He stepped closer to the desk.  “What kind of situation are we discussing?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

TATE took a sip of the lukewarm bottle of water Deputy Harding had brought her almost an hour ago, but it did little to settle her stomach as she slid her finger across the screen of the digital mugbook.  They’d started off by showing her shots of all the registered sex offenders in the area – which had pretty much stolen her breath when she realized there were so many – and then expanded her personal little cesspool to wade through by expanding the search to almost any and all apprehended felons who fit the physical criteria.

She’d taken her time, trying to give each face due consideration as opposed to just a cursory glance, even when they all started to look alike.  It had been dark when she’d seen the man, and he’d been wearing a hat with the brim pulled low, and on top of that he’d been backlit by a barrage of blinking lights.  Not exactly the best scenario for identification purposes.   Aside from the fact that he’d been dark – dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes – she wasn’t absolutely sure that she would recognize his face.

His body, however, was a different matter.

The man had been huge, with bulging muscles evident despite the covering of clothes.  There had been a few large men in the mug shots she’d examined, a few that she would describe as burly and a few that might qualify as jacked. But so far none of them had shown quite the size or well-sculpted delineation that she remembered.

She kept searching, all the while hoping that Casey had simply run away from home or gone off somewhere with a boy, and not fallen prey to the man she’d seen talking to her.

A small, vulnerable girl didn’t stand a chance against a man like that.

Shuddering, she sat the bottle back down and studied the screen.

The door opened with a squeak of hinges, and Tate looked up to see Deputy Harding entering with a sketch pad and a laptop computer.

He scraped in just a little shy of six feet, had the sort of lean, muscular build she associated with runners, and was the most inherently… stylish man she’d ever met.  Even in his police uniform, he possessed an air of elegance that was quite at odds with his surroundings.  Taking in his trendily styled dark hair, laser beam blue eyes and charmingly lopsided smile, Tate had no doubt that Deputy Harding brought all the teenyboppers in town to their knees.

“Hi.” He sat the laptop down on the table.  “Still no luck identifying anyone?”

Tate shook her head.  “Lots of scary-looking people, but no one that I recognize.”

“Well, thank God for that.”

Surprised, Tate looked up.

“I mean, it’s too bad that you can’t ID the guy we’re looking for, but a relief that you didn’t see your next door neighbor in there and have to be like ‘Oh my God! Bob’s a sex offender!’   That kind of thing’s always a bummer.”

Tate grinned.  The guy was all kinds of adorable. And he was, she suspected, trying to make this easier for her by keeping things light.  She motioned toward the sketch pad.  “Is this the part where you bring in the artist and I have to describe a man that I only vaguely got a glimpse of, and she ends up doing a sketch that looks like Sponge Bob wearing a baseball cap?”

His smile was wry as he flipped open the pad.  “I’m not sure whether to take that as disparagement of your observational skills