of tracing that firm jawline and the dimple at the side of his mouth.
Color heated her cheeks. What on earth was wrong with her? The stress of the day. That’s what she would blame for her completely irrational response.
Riley surveyed the group of giggling women and Claire noticed she wasn’t the only one unable to meet his gaze, although she was quite certain she was the only one whose insides had taken a long, slow roll.
“Okay, now why do I suddenly have the funny feeling my ears should be burning?” he murmured.
“No reason, darling,” Mary Ella assured him, although she winked at the rest of them.
“A little narcissistic, are we?” Alex smirked.
He tugged at his sister’s dark curls in response before leaning in to kiss his mother’s cheek. Claire was close enough to catch his scent, earthy and masculine.
“How nice of you all to help Claire with her mess. This looks like it’s going to take months.”
“Told you,” Ruth muttered.
“I guess you know everyone here,” Mary Ella said. “Oh, except for Evie. Evie Blanchard, this is the new police chief of Hope’s Crossing and my baby, J. Riley McKnight. Evie works here for Claire.”
Riley gave his mother an exasperated frown. “I generally prefer youngest to baby, thanks all the same, Ma. It’s nice to meet you, Evie.”
He shook her hand and from his reputation, Claire might have expected him to put out the vibe, maybe offer up the same flirtatious grin he’d employed on her earlier. Evie was beautiful, after all, ethereal and blonde and deceptively fragile-looking, especially with those shadows in her big blue eyes. But Riley only smiled at her in a polite but rather impersonal sort of way.
“How’s the investigation coming?” Maura asked. “We were just talking about it. Did you come to tell us you’ve caught the little bastards?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Geez, Maur. Your language! And in front of Mrs. Tatum and Councilwoman Thorne, too. Watch it or Ma will wash out your mouth.”
“That’s right,” Mary Ella said, apparently conveniently forgetting she’d used her own pithy words earlier.
Maura never cared much about what anybody thought of her, one of the reasons Claire admired her so much. “You saw what they did here.” She gestured to the mess the women were helping Claire set to rights. “What else would you call them?”
“Point taken.”
“I guess I’m just lucky they didn’t hit the bookstore.”
“So have you caught them?” Alex asked.
“Still working on it. I need to ask Claire a couple of follow-up questions.”
“Please. We’d like to know what’s going on.” In her quest for information, Ruth had apparently decided to momentarily overlook her dislike of Riley.
“If you all don’t mind, I’d like to speak to Claire in private. Certain details of the investigation are somewhat sensitive.”
Ruth didn’t bother to hide her disappointment as Claire rose and led the way to her office. Riley shut the door, then stretched out in her visitor’s chair, rubbing at his forehead. He looked tired, she thought. His day likely had been even harder than hers. She’d only had to deal with one robbery while he’d been faced with a whole crop of them.
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked. “Or I’ve got tea.”
“I’m good, thanks. If I have any more caffeine today, I’m going to be jumpier than a grasshopper on lawn-mowing day.”
“You have information for me?” she asked.
“I guess you could call it information. For what it’s worth anyway. It’s not much, I’m afraid, but I did tell you I would pass along what I could. We found a possible eyewitness who saw a suspicious vehicle pulling away from the pizza place at an odd time in the early hours of the morning. A late-model dark blue or green or black extended-cab pickup truck. The eyewitness didn’t get a good look and is uncertain whether it was a Dodge or a Ford.”
“Great. That should narrow it down to, oh, maybe half the town.”
“I know it’s broad, but at least it’s something. Not all the security cameras in the other businesses were disabled. We’ve got security footage at the bike shop that shows three different individuals at the scene, but they’re all wearing ski masks and cheap disposable raincoats over their parkas to hide any identifying clothing.”
With some degree of shame, she realized she hadn’t given much thought to the rest of the affected stores. “Was the damage serious at the other businesses?”
“It varies. Computers, a little cash. They took a high-end mountain bike from Mike’s Bikes.” Despite the fatigue still etched into his features, his gaze seemed to sharpen. “Yours was the only store to see actual vandalism.”
Lucky her. “I still don’t understand why. Maybe they were angry that I didn’t have much for them to steal for their trouble.”
“Could be. Or maybe it was more personal. I’m sorry, but I have to ask, Claire. Can you think of anyone with a grudge against you, besides Dr. Asshole?”
She stared at him and then started to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. “Jeff? You think Jeff had something to do with this? That’s completely insane! He would never be involved in anything like this. Anyway, he has no reason to have a grudge against me. If anything it’s…”
“The other way around?”
Any trace of laughter shriveled. “Jeff and I have tried very hard to get along, for the sake of our children.”
“Ah, that rare beast, the amicable divorce.” Although he spoke in a light, mocking tone, she saw something in his eyes, some hint of bitterness, and she remembered the raw shock of his parents’ breakup. She and Alex had just been starting their senior year, so they would have been about seventeen. Riley would have been about fourteen, she estimated. Although she had seen it all through the prism of her best friend’s experience, she knew all six of the McKnight children had been confused and angry, devastated by the destruction of what had always seemed a happy family to everyone in town.
She knew Riley had struggled the most, the lone male left in a household of women after their father abruptly moved away from Hope’s Crossing to follow his own scientific ambitions.
“We’ve worked to make it as amicable as possible,” she finally answered stiffly. She really hated talking about her divorce.
“What about the new wife? We believe at least one of the individuals on the security footage might be a female.”
She tried to picture Holly skulking around town with a band of cat burglars, breaking into businesses, stealing bikes and computers and trashing String Fever—and Genevieve Beaumont’s wedding dress. The image was even more amusing than the idea of Jeff on a wild crime spree.
“You’re telling me you suspect that a woman who is five months pregnant might be some ruthless criminal mastermind?”
His dimple quirked. “Hard to say under the plastic raincoat whether she was pregnant. But, okay, probably not.”
“A word of advice. You might want to rethink dragging Holly into your little room with the lightbulb for an interrogation.”
He gave a full-fledged grin at that, all those shadows of earlier gone. He’s a pest, she reminded herself, but it was very tough to remember that when he gunned her engine like it hadn’t been revved in a long time.
“It would help the investigation if you could spend some time trying to think if anyone might have reason to be angry with you. Maybe ask your employees if they can come up with anyone who might have a grudge, against either you or them.”
She