Delores Fossen - Wanted

Like him.

“I did nothing wrong,” he heard Lyla repeat, and she stepped onto the back porch to join them. But not for long.

Wyatt took her arm and put her right back inside. “She shouldn’t be out in the open, because of the gunmen.” And he turned to the deputy. “You need to bring her to the sheriff’s office with us.”

“She insisted on coming,” the deputy said, sounding a little uncertain about that. Or maybe his uncertainty was just for Wyatt and the shots that’d been fired. “Though I did suggest she see a doctor while I deal with getting your statement.”

“The men really got away?” she asked, her eyes wide. Lyla grabbed her coat and purse from the peg next to the door that led to the garage.

Wyatt nodded and held up the camera. “Any idea who’s been watching you?”

That didn’t help ease the look of concern on her face. “No.”

He hadn’t expected any other answer from her, but then she stopped. “Three days ago someone from the electric company showed up and said he needed to do some repairs on the lines. He seemed, well, a little suspicious. Like he was nervous or something.”

That was a start. “I’ll make some calls and see if he was legit or not. Also, if there’s a surveillance disk in here, we might get a better look of the gunmen’s faces.” Of course, there probably wouldn’t be a disk. It likely had some kind of wireless feed to another device.

One that the gunmen had almost certainly taken.

Wyatt doubted they were so incompetent that they would have left something like that behind. Still, he might get lucky. He would have a closer look later.

“I take it all of this is part of some official investigation?” O’Neal asked.

“An investigation, yes,” Wyatt answered. “Official, no. Not yet anyway. I’m here for personal reasons.”

He waited to see if Lyla had told the deputy about the in vitro switch, but she didn’t say a word. Wyatt figured that would change, though, when they got to the sheriff’s office. Lyla was a crime scene analyst, bound by the law, and she no doubt trusted this deputy more than she trusted him.

Yeah, she’d tell, all right.

“I’ll let you keep your gun,” O’Neal said, leading them out the front and to his patrol car. “For now.”

Wyatt didn’t like the guy’s attitude, but he had to admit it was a generous concession. If their situations had been reversed, Wyatt wouldn’t have let him stay armed.

Since there was a bulky equipment bag in the front passenger seat, Lyla and Wyatt got into the back. She didn’t say a word to him, but she did shoot him another glare. Wyatt gave her one right back. So far, the evidence was pointing to the fact that she might be a pawn, but until Wyatt knew for sure, he intended to be as wary of her as she was of him.

“What will happen now?” she asked, directed not at Wyatt but rather the deputy.

“We’ll start with your statements,” he answered, his attention shifting all around. Wyatt was doing the same thing, looking for those gunmen. “I guess neither of you recognized those two men?”

“No,” Wyatt and she answered in unison. That seemed to annoy her, too. “But the marshal probably thinks I’m lying about that.”

“The marshal figures she’s telling the truth,” Wyatt countered. “About that anyway.” He looked at her for the rest of the explanation. “Those bullets were real, and I don’t believe you’d put the baby at risk by hiring idiot gunmen to shoot at or near you.”

“I wouldn’t.” Her chin came up. Her voice was strong. “This baby is my life, and...” She snapped away from him.

Wyatt could finish that for her. This baby is my life, and you have nothing to do with it.

Or something along those lines.

She’d already said she didn’t want a baby daddy. Wyatt had to make sure that was the truth. Then he’d figure out what to do with that truth and everything else that seemed to be hitting him at once.

“Call ahead,” Wyatt instructed the deputy, “and arrange for Lyla to be checked out by a doctor. Just in case.”

He expected her to argue with that, too, and maybe it was on her mind when she opened her mouth. But then she just slid her hand over her stomach.

“Thanks,” she said under her breath, and the deputy made the call.

While he did that, Wyatt checked his own phone. He finally had service, so he made a call and asked one of his foster brothers, Marshal Declan O’Malley, to find out if the utility company had sent someone to Lyla’s house. With one thing down, he mentally went through the long list of other calls he had to make.

But the ringing of Lyla’s phone stopped him.

“Mr. Mobley,” she greeted the caller. Her boss. “I might not be in this morning. I’m on my way to the Bulverde sheriff’s office....Oh, you heard about the shooting.” She paused. “No, I’m fine.”

Lyla opened her mouth to say more, but Wyatt heard the chatter on the other end of the line. He couldn’t tell what her boss was saying, but it had captured her complete attention.

“What?” she finally said, quickly followed by “Why?”

More chatter, and Wyatt still couldn’t make out enough of it to tell what was going on, but he hoped like the devil it wasn’t more bad news. He’d had enough of that already.

“We’ll talk when I get to the office,” Lyla snapped, and she ended the call. It took several moments, though, for her to look at Wyatt. “Mobley excused himself from the Jonah Webb investigation, and the Rangers want me to take over.”

Not exactly a surprise. “I hate to say I told you so, but I did.”

“It could mean nothing,” she concluded, but the worry in her voice said it was a whole lot of something. “Mobley got another job. A civilian company with much higher pay. They want him to work with a legal watchdog group that’s retesting evidence from old criminal cases.”

“The timing’s suspicious, but it gives me another lead. The person who offered Mobley the new job could be behind the rest of this.”

She swiveled around to face him. “What exactly is the rest of this?” She glanced uneasily at the deputy and moved closer to Wyatt. “If this is some kind of plan to get me to falsify evidence, it won’t work,” she whispered.

“It might be that.” But he just didn’t know.

“The in vitro could have been just an honest mistake,” she whispered a moment later. “Mobley’s new job could be a coincidence.”

“And the gunmen? The camera?” Wyatt pressed. “More coincidences? Because when there are that many of them, we call that a pattern.”

He almost told her about the information trail that had led him to her, but his phone buzzed. Declan.

“First of all, the utility company didn’t send someone to Lyla Pearson’s house,” Declan said the second Wyatt answered. “And second, what the hell’s going on?”

Considering that Wyatt had been about to ask his brother the same thing, this wasn’t a good start to what he needed to be a good conversation. “Are you referring to something specific? Because there’s a lot going on.”

“The Rangers got an anonymous tip that you’re trying to influence the Webb murder investigation.”

Ah, man. He didn’t need this. “No, someone else is trying to influence it.” And maybe already had. “Look, this is too complicated to get into over the phone—”

“Does it have anything to do with Lyla Pearson, the assistant director of the San Antonio CSU?”

That sent an uneasy feeling knifing through him. “It does. Why? Other than the fact that she didn’t get a real service call from the electric company, what do you know about her?”

“According to the criminal informant I just talked to, she’s in big trouble, Wyatt, and you should avoid her at all costs.”