“I’ll go grab my car and pull it around.” Phil must have sensed the boss wanted to have a private moment with her.
“Okay. Thanks.” Roxxy tucked her dark hair behind her ear.
He disappeared from the room. Earl closed the door behind him.
Roxxy swallowed hard and held her binder close to her chest. She suddenly felt sixteen again, staring up at him.
“Is there something you need to tell me, Roxxy?” Earl’s eyebrow rose high.
“Should there be?”
“I’m just curious as to when you would have time to question Officer Burton.” He slid his hands into his pants pocket.
This was a tactic he’d used on her when she was younger. He tried to look curious, and when she was a child, she fell for it every time. Now that she was grown, it wasn’t going to work.
“I told you I had time at the tryouts. In between their drills and for a few minutes afterwards when he escorted me to my car.”
Earl stared at her. His blue eyes bored into her, and she had to fight the urge to squirm. He had always been the ultra-protective militant father. Tough. Caring. Strict.
But he had one weakness.
His daughter’s wide eyes and smile.
“Did I do something wrong?” She turned on the charm and tilted her head to the side.
He’d never been able to resist her innocent act. Even when she was a child and he had all the evidence that she’d done wrong, one pitiful look from Roxxy would break him.
“No, you didn’t.” He chuckled.
She relaxed a little and smiled. It had worked like a charm. She knew her father well.
“Yesterday when I went down to the hotel lobby to snag a cup of coffee, I just happened to see Officer Burton coming from the elevators and leaving. You wouldn’t know anything about that now, would you?”
Roxxy froze, her smile still in place.
Shit.
She maintained eye contact with him for she knew if she cut away, it would be a dead giveaway she was not telling the truth.
Instead, she shrugged and tried to act nonchalant. “I wouldn’t know. This is a small city after all.”
“Is that so?” he murmured.
She stood on her tiptoes and laid a kiss on his cheek. “Love you, Daddy. See you in a little bit.”
Roxxy escaped from the room and breathed a sigh of relief. Her feet carried her as fast as they could in heels without running to put some distance between her and her father.
She didn’t want to give him the chance to call her back into the room.
Nope.
Not going to even have that conversation with him.
Exciting the precinct, she caught sight of Phil pulling up to the door. She hopped in the car. “Let’s roll.”
“We should have gone in immediately from the moment we knew he had barricaded himself in the fucking building,” Myles growled. He leaned a hand against the BEAR. Pissed off didn’t even describe what he was feeling.
Those two women hadn’t deserved to die in the manner they had. According to the sisters of the suspect, Adrienne, the ex-girlfriend, had broken up with Darius six months ago—he had not taken the breakup well.
“They were dead before we even got here,” Ash replied, keeping his voice low.
Myles wanted to tear into something.
SWAT was to protect the people of the city against bad men like Darius Sherman.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Myles released a snort.
How much proving did they need to do?
The man had been outside popping off a few shots and then went inside. The poor women had been shot up by the power of a semiautomatic weapon that had been confiscated from the scene.
“No one heard anything? No one called the cops?” Myles blew out a frustrated breath.
This was the downside to the job.
