A Good Day for Chardonnay (Sunshine Vicram #2) by Darynda Jones

Zee had cued up the Quick-Mart video showing the argument between their victim, Keith Seabright, and one of his assailants, but that could wait. She needed to know more about these men casing the town. And Zee wasn’t at her desk anyway.

Rojas jumped and turned to her, his burnished skin glowing healthily in the soft morning light. He looked good. Better than he had when she’d met him four months ago, before she sent him off to the police academy.

“Let’s grab a cup.”

He grinned, hopped up, and followed her to Del Sol’s latest and greatest coffee shop, Caffeine-Wah.

The owners, Richard and Ricky, two of her best friends from Santa Fe, opened the establishment when Sun found out she’d been elected sheriff. They’d wanted to put a shop in Del Sol for a long time. Her win gave them the perfect excuse, as they wanted to remain close to Auri. Sun understood. They’d helped raise her, after all. Which would explain Auri’s incredible taste in clothes. She sure didn’t get that from her mother.

However, neither of her friends were in. The girl behind the counter said they had to run to one of their Santa Fe stores that morning, but they’d be back soon. She and Rojas ordered, then sat at a bistro table near the front window.

He pushed a few buttons on his phone and handed it to her.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“The guys casing us.”

She looked up in surprise. “You got pictures of them already?”

“I did. Do you recognize any of them?”

She scrolled through the shots, about ten each of three different men. Rojas was right. They were literally just standing around. Window-shopping or reading a paper or sipping tea on the veranda of the Del Sol Diner. “How did you already get pictures of them?”

“You were busy with the DA. He really seems to like you.”

“Yeah,” she said with a soft chuckle. “He’s a peach. I don’t recognize any of them. Do you?”

“Nah. Sorry, boss.”

She noticed a couple had visible tattoos. “What about their ink?”

“That one,” he said, scrolling back until he came to the stocky one with the tattoo of a scorpion on his hand, “is La Cosa Nostra.”

She gaped at him. “Really?”

He laughed. “No.”

“Rojas,” she said, admonishing him while fighting to keep a straight face.

“But that’s what’s weird. None of their ink is local. A couple of their tattoos are exactly the same, so they’re affiliated. I guarantee it. Just not with anyone around here.”

“Around here as in Del Sol?”

“Around here as in the whole of New Mexico. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re East Coast.”

“Wonderful.” Because that was what she needed. A crime war on her turf. His teasing about La Cosa Nostra may have not been that far off the mark. “Which ones have been to prison?”

He pointed out two of the three. The stocky one with the scorpion tattoo and a taller one wearing a black leather jacket from the seventies.

“The third one,” he said, scrolling to an older gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair and a spray tan if Sun ever saw one. “I’m just not sure about him. If he did do time, he did it well. Probably a higher-up of some kind. I can run facial recognition when we get back, but I doubt we’ll get a hit. We need someone with access to a federal database.”

“I can ask my contact in the FBI.” She looked out and studied the two men she could see from her vantage. “How do you know all of this? What’s the giveaway?”

“It’s in the eyes. The way they move. Their posture.” He looked at her. “You ever notice how men in prison either hunch or stand ramrod straight with their chests puffed out?”

She thought back and nodded. “I do actually. It always seems to be one or the other.”

“And therein lies the tell. The differences in the pecking order.”

“What about the ones that do neither?” she asked, thinking of Wynn Ravinder. He didn’t seem to feel the need to put on a show. As though he were just as relaxed in prison as Sun was at the spa.

A slow, calculating smile spread across Rojas’s face. “Those are the ones with true power. Those are the ones to watch out for.”

A wave of goose bumps raced over her skin. Maybe she was playing with fire by inviting Wynn back into the state, but she wanted to know everything. Especially the son of a bitch who violated her. What she would do with that information, she didn’t know, but at least she would have it.

She looked out the window. “What about anyone else in town? Have you noticed—”

“Him.”

She blinked. “That was fast. Who?”

Rojas pointed to a gray-haired gentleman walking toward the coffee shop. A man who just happened to be her father, Cyrus Freyr.

Sun propped her elbows on the table and faced him. “Have you been messing with me this whole time?”

“No way, boss. Why?”

“That man has never even spent a day in jail, much less prison.”

He eyed the guy again. “Sorry, boss. That man has spent time inside, but from the looks of him, it was maybe a military prison? Or something similar?”

She snorted, then rethought her doubt and turned back to study the man in question. Had he been in jail and never told her?