Detective On The Hunt
Detective On The Hunt
Marilyn Pappano
They’re tracking a missing person But will they be the next victims? Detective Jennifer “JJ” Logan is determined to unearth a missing socialite. At her side looms officer Quint Foster, who bridles at having to work alongside JJ. But as they dig deeper into the victim’s odd behaviour, he feels alive for the first time in years. The hunt means their deepening emotions have to take a back seat to getting out alive!
They’re tracking a missing person
But will they be the next victims?
New-in-town detective Jennifer “JJ” Logan is thrown into the deep end with her first case. Assigned to unearth a missing socialite, JJ must also deal with a new colleague: Officer Quint Foster.
Quint bristles at having to work alongside JJ. But as they dig for clues, he feels alive for the first time in years. The hunt puts them both in the crosshairs, and their deepening emotions have to take a back seat to getting out alive.
Oklahoma, dogs, beaches, books, family and friends: these are a few of MARILYN PAPPANO’s favorite things. She lives in imaginary worlds where she reigns supreme (at least, she does when the characters cooperate) and no matter how wrong things go, she can always set them right. It’s her husband’s job to keep her grounded in the real world, which makes him her very favorite thing.
Also By Marilyn Pappano (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
Copper Lake Secrets
In the Enemy’s Arms
Christmas Confidential
“Holiday Protector”
Copper Lake Confidential
Copper Lake Encounter
Undercover in Copper Lake
Bayou Hero
Nights with a Thief
Detective Defender
Killer Secrets
Killer Smile
Detective on the Hunt
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Detective on the Hunt
Marilyn Pappano
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-09465-8
DETECTIVE ON THE HUNT
© 2019 Marilyn Pappano
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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Note to Readers (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
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Text to speech
“I said, thanks for your time.” JJ left it at that, but her smile suggested what she left unsaid. Though it wasn’t your choice.
“Not a problem.” Another of those annoying phrases. When had people stopped saying “you’re welcome”? He couldn’t recall.
She dug out her car keys and used the remote to unlock the Challenger before she opened the door. He watched her slide into the seat, a fluid movement of heavy brown coat and snug-fitting denim. When she moved to close the door, he hastily spoke.
“If you have any trouble with the neighbors…”
Now, why had Quint gone and said that? He was done. He’d followed Sam’s orders—had gone beyond them by going shopping and having lunch with her. Why give her even the faintest idea that he might be willing to do it again?
But he couldn’t take back the words, and when that naughty-little-girl grin lit up her face, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Dear Reader (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8),
There’s an old saying to write what you know, which is one of the reasons I write so many small-town books, but not the only one, mind you. I know small towns, and I love them. Though our few big-city years created great memories—hello, San Diego—I can’t see myself living anywhere now but the little Oklahoma town where I grew up. Granted, there’s a shortage of restaurants, and shopping’s limited pretty much to Walmart and the farm-supply store, but I can cook, and shopping’s overrated, anyway. Besides, where in a big city can you buy fried frog legs to munch on while you fill your gas tank?
This particular little town, Cedar Creek, is my hometown in disguise. Well, maybe not fully disguised. Slightly camouflaged might be more accurate. There are a few fictional places mixed in with enough real ones that the locals recognize it in spite of made-up names. It makes writing the books feel like…well, coming home.
In this book, I combined a second love—heroine JJ is from South Carolina. We lived there three times while my husband was in the navy, and it’s a special place. Of course, by the end of the story, JJ is willing to leave home and settle in Cedar Creek with Quint, just like I once moved from Oklahoma and settled a lot of places with my husband.
Because, after all, home is where the heart is, isn’t it?
Happy reading,
Marilyn
To my childhood partner in crime, my cohort and conspirator, and one of the very few people I know who really would be sitting beside me if I ever wound up in a jail cell, saying, “Dang, that was fun!” You’re the best cousin ever.
Yes, Hope Cooper, I’m looking at you. Love you!
Contents
Cover (#uf6c465ef-187d-5a65-9144-9c5e378517c8)
Back Cover Text (#uf07531ad-62fa-5797-a751-8b5dff367bfa)
About the Author (#u918f7c54-f32f-5274-9b41-fc8a0682ebd3)
Booklist (#u5d6feb7c-9b24-533a-9eec-4b1c293ef732)
Title Page (#u708688d4-8243-5cab-bd4b-237b6486e524)
Copyright (#udbbc057f-a052-5133-bec3-47b0d33123c1)
Note to Readers
Introduction (#ub3cf9b35-966a-52b1-9014-33a9d967baf6)
Dear Reader (#u1857aebb-72e9-55b3-9fd1-7db397399325)
Dedication (#ufb742a93-9995-5bbe-8bdb-34db59550a65)
Prologue (#u1c237759-2114-59ac-bf4d-4b2a21d18c07)
Chapter 1 (#u171e6c8d-d4e4-559b-8a54-9d029991c777)
Chapter 2 (#ud29aee7b-9efd-5251-a245-98c58742aa8a)
Chapter 3 (#uc2cca7db-e499-571c-b76c-892d9659ae27)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t fire you.”
Quint Foster kept his gaze steady on the upturned Stetson on Sam Douglas’s desk, kept his jaw shut tight and every muscle in his body wound like a spring. If he tried to answer the chief’s question, if he relaxed his control just that little bit, he would fall apart in a way he never had before. Never could.
Because he didn’t have the courage to put himself back together again.
“Damn it, Quint, you showed up drunk at a crime scene. You assaulted a prisoner in custody. What the hell—”
Sam broke off. Quint knew the question: What the hell is wrong with you? Just as Sam knew the answer: Belinda. The day she’d died, so had Quint. His body just hadn’t been smart enough to catch on. His brain functioned enough to keep his heart beating, but not enough to make him care about a damn thing. He’d lost everything that mattered except his job, and that was coming.
The thought echoed through the hollowness inside him. Losing his job… All he’d ever been, all he’d ever wanted to be, was a cop. For nearly twenty years, he’d been a good one. He’d advanced through the ranks to assistant chief. If things had continued as they’d been, he likely would have succeeded Sam as chief, if he didn’t retire before the boss.
Now, in another ten minutes, maybe fifteen if Sam was pissed enough, he would be turning in his badge and commission. He would walk out the front door for the last time, and he would truly have no reason to get out of bed again.
Sam remained silent, his steely glare unwavering. Quint didn’t have what it took to look at him, but he could feel the disapproval and disappointment and disgust radiating around him. He’d never imagined the day he would lose his boss’s respect, but here it was. It was only by the grace of God that Sam hadn’t thrown his ass in jail.
By the grace of something. Quint didn’t believe in God anymore. Maybe he was real, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he existed for other people but not for Quint. Every prayer, every plea, every moment he’d spent begging on his knees had been for nothing. Linny had died. He hadn’t.
“Damn it, Quint.” This time the words sounded more sorrowful than angry. Sam raked his fingers through his hair. “What am I supposed to do?”
For the first time in seventy-two hours, Quint made eye contact with his boss. His gut was knotted with dread at losing that last part of himself. He wanted to go to the men’s room and puke up everything in his stomach, then he wanted to go to the nearest bar and refill it with the cheapest crap they had. He wanted to die.
What he did was stand up very carefully. He pulled his badge from his belt, took his credentials from his back pocket and unholstered the gun on his hip. He had to clear his throat twice to make his voice work. “I’ll make it easy for you, Sam. I quit.”
Sam wasn’t surprised. “I don’t want you to quit. You’re a good cop, and I need good cops. I just need you to…”
If he said, “Get over it,” Quint would punch him in the face, and if he hit him once, he wouldn’t stop until he was pulled off.
“I need you to deal with it, Quint,” Sam said quietly. “I can’t even begin to guess how hard this is for you. Belinda was your world, and it’s unfair as hell that she’s gone, but you’re not. You can’t just crawl into your grief and wait to die. It’s not what she’d want. It’s not even what you want, or you would have already done something.”
Quint didn’t know if he should argue that last statement. He felt every year of his forty years twice over. He was tired. Worn-out. Hopeless. Faithless. Alone. Every morning since her death, he’d woken up and thought, damn, he’d survived another night. For a while, it had been a good damn. Everyone had told him—his family, his friends, Linny’s pastor—that recovery was a one-day-at-a-time deal. He was supposed to be grateful for each day he made it through, and in return, God was supposed to make each successive day a little easier.
It hadn’t happened.
“I don’t want you to quit,” Sam said again, “but I can’t keep you as assistant chief. I have to put you on probation. Back in uniform. Back on the street. Are you willing to do that?”
A sound halfway between a snort and a laugh escaped Quint. He sank into the chair again, rubbing hard at his eyes. He hadn’t been in uniform since he’d met Linny twelve years ago. He didn’t even own the current uniform; suits or tactical pants and polo shirts had been his work clothes. Everyone in the department—hell, in the whole damn town—would know he’d been demoted. They would scorn him or pity him. No one would ask his opinion, respect his judgment or even acknowledge all his years of good work. He’d be a patrol officer again, writing tickets, filling out reports on inconsequential incidents, turning the important cases—the cases he’d handled himself the past twelve years—over to detectives to investigate.
But he would still be a cop. He would still have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And given what he’d done, that was a hell of a lot more than he deserved.
His jaw didn’t want to unclench. His mouth didn’t want to form words, but he forced them out. “Yes, Chief. I’m willing.”
Chapter 1 (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
The sixth sense that JJ Logan considered as much a tool in her line of work as any of the physical, tangible ones made the back of her neck tingle. She lowered the binoculars from her eyes and shifted her gaze to the rearview mirror. A police vehicle, its lights on, was pulling to the side of the road behind her. She’d half expected this—a stranger with out-of-state tags on her car surveilling a local’s house just screamed for police intervention—but it gave her an odd feeling, being on the wrong side of the flashing red-and-blue lights.
A tall, lean man dressed in khakis got out. He seated his hat before he began walking toward her, tipping it so it shadowed most of his face, then stopped far enough away from her car that she couldn’t open the door and knock him off balance.
She liked caution in a cop. That was why she kept her hands resting loosely on the steering wheel. She waited, prepared to tell him right up front that she was a cop herself, to show him her ID, driver’s license and proof of insurance and tell him that she had a pistol in the console and a Taser on her hip.
Before she had a chance to even say hello, though, he surprised her.
“Are you Jennifer Jo Logan?”
She blinked, her mouth quirking the way it always did when she was called by her full name. Growing up, it had meant trouble, with consequences she deserved. Today, though, she couldn’t possibly have done anything to earn consequences. She didn’t know a soul in Cedar Creek, Oklahoma, and no one knew she was here besides her parents, her sisters and a few people back home. While watching someone’s house might provoke curiosity, it wasn’t actually illegal.
Except…one of those people who knew she was here and why was the person she trusted least in the world. Police Chief Bryan Chadwick. Her boss.
The officer was waiting, his expression immobile, and she forced a smile. “Yes, I’m JJ Logan. Can I help you?”
His carved-stone features didn’t shift. “Chief Douglas would like to have a word with you. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to the station.” His voice was deep, reminding her of the long-ago times of midnight radio broadcasts, sultry music and a honey-sweet, soothing voice. This morning, the voice was a little short on the honey. Instead it was raspy, heavy, what she would expect from someone who didn’t talk a whole lot.
“I know where it is, Officer…” Her gaze flickered to the brass nameplate on his shirt. “Foster.” She’d studied online maps of Cedar Creek, familiarizing herself with the places that would be important while she was here: the hotel, the police station and sheriff’s departments, the house she’d been watching just ahead and, of course, restaurants. Creek Café had a zillion five-star reviews, and there were Chinese, barbecue and steak places that were similarly popular. She was a real fan of food that someone else had prepped, cooked, served and cleaned up after, so she intended to visit every one of them.
Her smile, her cooperation and her friendly use of his name didn’t soften him one bit. “Then I’ll follow you.”
Ah. The chief’s request to see her wasn’t a request at all. Like a lot of small-town police chiefs, he probably didn’t play well with others, especially when those others wandered into his jurisdiction and didn’t show the courtesy of dropping by to introduce themselves. She’d told Chief Dipstick—er, Chadwick—that she wanted to check in with the locals, but he’d instructed her not to. This was family business, private—no need to involve anyone else.
That hadn’t been a request, either. Chief Dipstick considered himself so far superior to women that asking them for something would never cross his mind.
Suppressing a sigh, she looked up at Officer Foster again. Barely visible under his hat, his hair was blond, streaked with lighter strands that would be a definite gray in a few more years. Dark glasses hid his eyes, but with the blond hair and golden skin, she would put her money on blue. She would also bet they were as steely as…well, steel. To match the hard line of his jaw. He looked like a guy who was having a bad day. A guy who made other people have bad days.
Don’t get confrontational with a cop who is armed. One of her personal rules. With a thin but notoriously compliant smile, she said, “I appreciate the escort, Officer. Okay if I make a U-turn?”
His response was a slight tilt of his head.
As she started the engine, he stepped back, then returned to his vehicle, a huge black pickup truck emblazoned with the usual police stickers. A drug forfeiture? Or was Cedar Creek more generous with its police budget than Evanston, where her official car was a beater practically as old as she was?
The thud of Foster’s door sounded through her window as she shifted into Drive. The house holding her interest was the last one on this lonely street. Its nearest neighbor was half a block behind her, and the street ahead ended a hundred feet past its driveway, the pavement abruptly chopped and blocked to traffic with steel barriers. She’d intended to drive up there when she left, to use the driveway to turn around. To see whether there was a gate, any obvious security system, possibly a security guard.
She would have to come back to find out. This job required a face-to-face visit with Maura Evans, and JJ never left a job undone.
There were no curbs on the sides of the street, the newly greening grass growing right up to the concrete. Her Challenger didn’t require a lot of room to turn around. Frustrated, though, that the locals knew she was here—and pretty sure it was Chadwick who’d told them—she vented by expanding what should have been an easy three-point turn into five or six points.
“Yeah, no passive-aggressiveness in you, Detective Logan,” she murmured as she drove past the scowling Officer Foster with a half-hearted wave and back down the block.
She’d seen nothing worth seeing in her hour at the house Maura was renting, unless she counted the cat sunning on the patio table. Funny. She remembered Maura as a fierce dog lover with no interest in felines whatsoever. Granted, that was over fifteen years ago, and Maura had been a little kid. She’d changed, like all little kids did when they grew up, and JJ knew next to nothing about the woman she’d become.
Except that, according to the Evans family lawyer, she’d gotten lost in her grief after her parents’ deaths. She’d closed up the family mansion and hit the road in the überexpensive Mercedes that had been their last gift to her, and six months ago she’d settled in Cedar Creek. Three months ago she’d cut off all contact with her past life.
And now JJ was here to make sure everything was okay with her. According to Chadwick, she’d been his first choice to look into the matter. If she didn’t detest the man so much—and if he didn’t detest her even more—she might have taken that as a compliment. But she knew better. From his first day on the job, he’d made it clear that women had no place in his department and certainly not in his detective squad. The only problem: he couldn’t fire her without cause, and she was damn well determined not to give it to him.
Which left him one option: making things bad enough that she would quit. He’d alternated between assigning her cases so simple a brain-dead squirrel could close them and ones so lacking in evidence they would stump Sherlock Holmes, Columbo and Steve McGarrett combined. He nitpicked everything she did and everything she didn’t do. He disrespected her within the department and encouraged the real officers—read: male—to do the same. Publicly he was gracious, but privately he made her work life hell.
He hadn’t realized he was butting heads with the most stubborn person in town. JJ intended to outlast him, and the odds were in her favor. He’d come to Evanston after retiring from a small North Carolina police department. He was seventy-two, believed fervently in the Southern food adage If it ain’t fried, it ain’t done, drank like a fish and had high cholesterol, heart disease and high blood pressure. Sooner or later, he would retire again or die, and she would be there to wave him off—or throw the first shovel of dirt into his grave.
With a surprised look around, she realized she’d driven the few miles to the police station without noticing. When she’d worked traffic, she’d made a small fortune for the city of Evanston writing tickets to inattentive drivers, and now she didn’t remember how she’d gotten here.
Officer Foster in his big truck followed her to a parking space, left a couple of empty spots between them, then got out and met her at the rear of the vehicles. Though the morning had started off nippy, it had turned into a glorious March day. Things were greening, coming back to life. The sun was warm, and she would swear she could smell the fresh, sweet, woodsy fragrance of the flowers thirty yards ahead of them.
Unless… She weaved a bit closer to Officer Foster and surreptitiously took a deep breath. Yep, it was him, not the flowers. The scent made her mouth water and her stomach do a little butterfly twirl. Lovely, lovely.
There might be an upside to this gig, after all.
Probably in defense of her gleaming little car, Jennifer Jo Logan—JJ, Quint reminded himself—had parked at the farthest end of the lot from the station, six or eight spaces from the next nearest vehicle. Though she was half a foot shorter than him, she matched his strides without complaint. He was long out of the habit of slowing down to accommodate anyone with shorter legs—Don’t think of Linny—but now he made a conscious effort to shorten his steps.
Which gave him an opportunity to study JJ.
From a purely professional viewpoint.
She would have to stand on tiptoe to pass five foot six, and she was slender, curvy, soft, but she had an assured don’t-mess-with-me air about her. Her hair fell to her shoulders, nothing special, brown with a few reddish streaks, and her eyes were hazel, again nothing special.
And somehow, in spite of all that nothing special, she was pretty. Not beautiful, not the sort who would stop guys in their tracks, not like—
His jaw tightened, and he forced the thought to its conclusion: not like Linny. Linny had been gorgeous, with silky black hair that fell straight and sleek to her waist, skin so pale it might have never seen the sun, delicate and fragile and breathtaking.
JJ Logan wasn’t any of that. But neither was any other woman in the world.
Quint was comfortable with silence—had made himself become comfortable—but not so much her. It wasn’t more than a minute before she spoke. “How long have you been a cop?”
“A while.”
“You a local boy?”
“Yeah.”
“You like patrol?”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, realized she wasn’t looking and grunted instead.
An annoyed tone came into her voice. “Is your chief good, bad or indifferent?”
As if any cop who cared about his job would honestly answer that question from a stranger. Sam was damned good—Quint wouldn’t have a job if he wasn’t—but if the truth was one of the other two answers, no way he’d admit it. “Good.”
He thought he heard a sigh from her in response, but when she didn’t respond, he turned his attention to the police station ahead of them. The building was three stories, constructed of huge blocks of sandstone, with broad concrete steps leading to the double doors. More than a hundred years old, its purpose wasn’t just function; it provided beauty and solidity, elegance and grace—a quote from the city’s tourism brochure. It had been built to last, and it gave him a sense of…
He wasn’t sure how to identify the feeling. He’d spent sixteen months learning to ignore feelings, and it was hard, once a habit formed, to give it up again. Satisfaction wasn’t quite the right label. Neither was comfort. Security, maybe. It had stood there strong and whole his entire life, and it would still be there, strong and whole, long after he died. Unchanging. Constant.
They stepped onto the curb, walking between flower beds planted with hardy petunias, when JJ broke her silence. “Just for the record, I’m armed.”
He stopped. So did she. He wasn’t surprised. Most cops he knew didn’t go anywhere without some form of weapon. His surprise was that he hadn’t thought to ask her. Now he faced her, his gaze focused tightly as it moved down, then back up her body. Almost immediately, he spotted the slight bulge beneath her jacket on the left side indicating something holstered there, but he didn’t assume it was the only weapon.
Her white shirt was fitted, hugging her breasts and stomach, and couldn’t have concealed a thing. Her jeans, faded soft blue and showing signs of long-term wear, were snug over her hips and clung to her muscular thighs and calves, all the way down to the brown leather boots peeking out from beneath the hems.
Nothing special, he reminded himself.
“What is it?” he asked with a nod toward her caramel-colored suede jacket.
She pulled back the left side to reveal the black-and-yellow Taser holstered grip forward on her waistband. An easy position to draw from for a right-handed person. No doubt she normally wore her pistol on the right. No chance for a mix-up unless a person was an idiot.
“Is that all?”
A smile crinkled her eyes. “Where could I hide anything else?” Then a nod toward the Challenger. “My weapon’s locked in the car.”
Confirming what he suspected: JJ Logan was in Cedar Creek on a job—the reason Sam had sent him out to retrieve her in the first place. Sam liked to know what was going on in his town. Quint…he didn’t care that much anymore.
“Should I leave the Taser in the car?”
Quint shook his head. “Everyone inside is armed, too. You’re not a threat.”
She gave him a look halfway between hurt and insulted. “Don’t be so sure of that. You don’t even know me yet.” Smiling, she began moving again, reaching the bottom step before he gave himself a mental shake and followed.
He knew one thing: he didn’t want to know her. His life was steady. Predictable. Not happy, but the normal that had been forced on him. He didn’t need any upsets to his routine. He was going to deliver JJ Logan to Sam’s office, go back to his vehicle, forget he’d met her and get back to work. Back to the solitude he preferred.
Maybe not actually preferred, but had chosen. Or had it chosen him?
You can’t change the world, someone had told him, but you can change the way you react to it. And he had changed the only way he knew how. No reactions whatsoever. If he didn’t lose control, then he didn’t have to struggle to regain it.
JJ reached the double doors before he did, opened one and stepped back so he could enter first. It didn’t bother him. In Cedar Creek, courtesies like that weren’t assigned by gender. Whoever was there first did the honors, and sooner or later the honoree would do it for someone else.
She stopped a few feet inside the door to look. He was in and out of here five or six times a day. He rarely noticed the furnishings anymore, but JJ certainly did. The lobby was marbled, high-ceilinged, chandeliered and grandly staired. Behind the gleaming wooden counter, though, the ceiling had been dropped to a regular height with ugly acoustic tiles, and so much furniture had been crammed in that there was little breathing room.
Quint used to have his own office. Now, in the event he needed a desk, he used one of the two unclaimed ones against the back wall. One had two uneven legs, and the other was so scarred on top that it was impossible to write legibly without borrowing a solid surface from elsewhere.
The chief’s secretary, Cheryl, looked up and over the top of her glasses. “Sam’s in his office.”
Quint acknowledged her with a nod, seeing that everyone else was looking at them, too: Daniel Harper and Ben Little Bear, two of the detectives who’d once answered to him; Morwenna Armstrong, dispatcher and coqueen of local gossip along with Lois Gideon, their first female and first turquoise-haired officer; and three other patrol officers checking in for something or other. Quint knew they were interested in the visiting detective, not him, but bitterness stirred in his gut anyway. That sourness—regret or, more likely, shame—made its presence known damn near every time he came into the station.
He gestured to the hallway this side of the staircase. Too narrow to be called a corridor, it had been chopped out of other spaces and just barely allowed two people to pass without bumping shoulders, and that was only if one of them wasn’t Ben Little Bear. It was lighted by cheap ceiling fixtures circa the ’70s, and two of the four had burned out. Waiting for someone else to do something about them hadn’t worked, so maybe Quint would drag out the ladder before he went home today and change the bulbs. It was something to do.
Something to put off that moment of pulling into the driveway of his and Linny’s house. Of climbing the steps knowing the house was empty. Of opening the front door and walking into a space where her fragrance didn’t sweeten the air, where her laughter didn’t ring, where her presence was insubstantial.
The first door down the hall opened into Sam’s office. Quint rapped a little sharper than necessary, feeling the sting in his knuckles, then opened the door. He’d radioed in when he parked outside, so Sam was expecting them. This time, Quint stepped back and let JJ enter first. “Chief Douglas, Detective Jennifer—”
She cleared her throat.
“Detective JJ Logan,” he finished. “I’m headed back out—”
“Come on in, Quint. You should probably hear this.” Sam rose from his desk and shook hands with JJ, then directed her to one of two chairs in front of his desk.
Quint stiffened. No, he shouldn’t probably hear this. Whatever JJ was doing in Cedar Creek couldn’t have anything to do with him. Sam—he needed to know. Little Bear, Harper, the other detectives—they might need to know. But Quint was just a patrol officer. He wrote tickets, broke up brawls, handled domestic disputes. He didn’t need to be in the loop on the important stuff any more than the newest rookie out there did.
But he wasn’t about to argue with Sam, especially in front of a stranger. Reluctantly, he pivoted back into the room, closed the door and, ignoring the empty chair, leaned against the edge of the table butted up to one wall. It gave him a good head-on look at his boss, with only a peripheral view of JJ.
“I bet you got a call this morning from South Carolina,” she said pleasantly.
“I did,” Sam agreed.
“From Chief Chadwick?”
“It was.”
Though JJ’s tone hadn’t changed when she spoke her boss’s name, something about it, or about her, reminded Quint of the question she’d asked out front. Is your chief good, bad or indifferent? Not idle conversation, then. His intuition was willing to bet that she put Chadwick as squarely in the second category as Quint put Sam in the first. Personality conflict? Professional differences? Was Chadwick a bad chief, was JJ a bad cop or did the truth fall somewhere in the middle?
That feeling rousing in his gut felt vaguely like curiosity, maybe even plain old interest. How long had it been since he’d been interested in anything?
Maybe he’d been wrong outside. Maybe he did want to know more about JJ Logan.
JJ tried to not let her nose wrinkle with distaste at Chief Douglas’s last answer. She’d known Chadwick couldn’t be trusted. If she told Douglas—and the handsome Officer Foster—that Chadwick had specifically told her to not touch base with them, she would seem petty or defensive. Besides, no cop bad-mouthed her chief to cops she’d just met. That would be a big step toward giving Dipstick the reason he needed to fire her.
So she put on her best trust-me face—a smile that was neither over-nor underwhelming, her gaze clear and steady—and added a bit of sheepishness to it. “I really did intend to come by later today. I was just eager to get to work.”
“Work,” Chief Douglas repeated. “What’s your interest in Maura Evans?”
Had Chadwick told him the truth about that or tried to screw her there, too? Was she going to tell her story only to find his had been totally different and thereby look like an idiot—worse, an untrustworthy idiot—in front of these fellow officers?
Nothing she could do but be honest herself. If the boss had muddied things between her and the local department, she would just have to make the best of it.
“Maura’s a local girl. She left town a few years ago after her parents’ deaths. She’s twenty-five, single, still grieving…and very wealthy. She settled here in Cedar Creek about six months ago and, three months later, cut off contact with everyone back home—friends, relatives, the family attorney who also happens to be her godfather. He wants to know what’s going on with her.”
She saw a flicker of expression—negative—cross Officer Foster’s face, making it easy to guess what he was thinking. Spoiled rich girl, selfish, entitled, the center of her own universe—her influential lawyer godfather taking advantage of the system, the chief giving in to political pressure to treat Maura as if she were special.
It was harder to tell with his chief, though. Douglas’s expression gave away nothing, and neither did his tone. “Your department must be blessed with detectives—and funds—if they can send one halfway across the country to do a welfare check on one of our residents.” Then came a faint whiff of disapproval. “A check that we would have happily handled for you if you’d just called.”
Her smile thinned. Hey, she wasn’t onboard with this, either. She had much more important cases she could be working on, cases where there was actually a police interest. “Did I mention that the town Maura Evans left is named Evanston? The Evans family have been rich and powerful since they founded the town in 1804. They donated land, set up charities, ran businesses, built schools and libraries and churches and hospitals. The men were war heroes, and the women were social workers ahead of their time. They are one ridiculously wealthy family that everyone in town respects and cares about.”
She hesitated, then corrected herself. “They were. Maura has distant relatives, but she’s the last one in the direct line.” People would have treated her like their greatest, most fragile treasure if she hadn’t fled town after the funerals. But no one blamed her for that. How could she have stayed in that town with its all memories, in that house knowing…?
With a suppressed shudder, JJ shifted her gaze to Officer Foster. Quint, the chief had called him. She liked the name. It was neither overly common nor trendy nor so unusual as to be unspellable, unpronounceable or unmemorable. “I really was just having a look around out there this morning.”
His only response was the smallest of shrugs. The chief, on the other hand, raised one brow. “That’s what you call surveillance back in South Carolina? Having a look around?”
“All right, yes, I parked down the street from her house this morning for fifteen minutes…maybe thirty…maybe an hour.” She couldn’t resist a rueful grin, the one her sisters called her mischief grin. Standard when she’d been caught with the cookie jar in her hands and chocolate chips smeared across her face, saying, Yes, I’m guilty, but I’m just so darn adorable, you have to forgive me for it. Dad always had. Mom usually had. She achieved varied success with others, and it looked like none whatsoever with Quint Foster.
Aw, she’d really like for him to find her adorable. If not him… She remembered the other officers she’d seen when they’d come in. Good-looking, every last one of them. Hopefully, between work, she’d manage some play on this trip, too.
“Along with a pair of binoculars, a map of the city, a camera, a large cup of coffee and an empty bag from Ted’s Doughnuts.”
JJ was impressed that Quint had been so observant. With those dark glasses he’d had on, of course, she couldn’t see where his gaze was directed, but it had felt as if it was on her the whole time. Obviously not.
“Didn’t take her long to figure out where the best doughnuts in town are, did it?” Douglas murmured.
Though the comment wasn’t directed at her, she responded with a little shrug. “Cops and doughnuts. What can I say?”
He smiled briefly at the stereotype, then opened the laptop and began clicking away. She’d never had a chief who was anywhere near her age, but she would bet Sam Douglas was even a few years younger. He didn’t wear a uniform—Chadwick always wore a uniform with four shiny gold stars on his collar to ensure everyone recognized him as the head honcho—but instead was dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. A soft-looking gray cowboy hat was on the file cabinet to the left of his desk, leading her to expect cowboy boots on his feet if she could get a peek.
You’re definitely not in Carolina anymore, JJ.
“Okay, Detective Logan—we don’t stand on ceremony much around here. All right if I call you JJ?”
She nodded.
“I’m Sam, and he’s Quint.”
Wow. She’d never had a chief who was that casual, either. Even the last one, her mentor, had never invited her to use his first name. He’d believed in good work relations, but there was a line that should never be crossed.
“You didn’t ask what we know, but we’ll tell you anyway. You have the address of the house Maura’s renting. You know she drives a little red car that cost more than a lot of people’s houses around here. I’ve never met her myself, but my officers have handled four disturbance calls at that address for loud parties and given her three—no, four citations for speeding.”
Disturbance calls at that big house at the end of that lonely street. Those must have been some parties.
“Quint gave her three of those tickets.”
She shifted her gaze to Quint. He hadn’t changed position—he still leaned against the table—but his posture seemed fractionally more rigid, his expression harder. She was half surprised he could open that taut jaw to add, “I also answered one of the disturbance calls with Ben.”
Sam frowned. “Why was Ben answering a disturbance call?”
“He was in the office when it came in. Loud party, forty or so people, lot of booze.”
JJ called to mind the area across the hall that served as reception, dispatch and detective squad, including a very tall, very broad-shouldered muscular man. “I’m going to guess Ben is the big guy out there at one of the desks.”
Sam nodded. “Six foot four, solid muscle, can make you confess to anything just so he’ll go away and stop looking at you. No matter how drunk people are, they never want to take on Ben Little Bear.”
She envied that. When she was in uniform, all the drunks had wanted to take her on. She’d been forced to perfect her combat skills and had developed quite an affection for her nonlethal resources: baton, pepper spray and Taser.
“When was the last time you saw Maura?” Sam asked Quint.
“The day I gave her that last ticket.” Quint’s scowl was slightly more fierce than his normal expression. “About two months ago. She was doing forty-eight in a twenty.”
JJ smiled faintly. “That sounds like Maura. The day her parents gave her that car, she got stopped for speeding in town and again in the county. Notice I said stopped, not ticketed. The officer and the deputy let her go when they realized who she was. I wrote her father a ticket once. Got called back to the station and royally chewed out.”
“Must be nice to have so much influence.” Cynicism made Quint’s voice dry as parched sand.
“I can live without it.” She crossed her legs and let her foot tap air a few times. “At home, we have a dispatcher named Carla and a patrol officer named Patrick who know everything there is to know about everyone in town.”
Quint and Sam exchanged looks before the chief answered. “That would be Morwenna and Lois. Quint, why don’t you show her the conference room and I’ll get them.”
Quint straightened to his full height easily and fluidly. She, on the other hand, felt the stiffness of two days’ driving and another few hours’ sitting. While she was here, she needed to make time for regular runs, long walks or—her gaze slid from his golden hair over his chest, his narrow waist and narrower hips, down long legs to the black tactical boots he wore—ah, yes, physical activity of some sort.
Without realizing it, she’d registered at some point that, unlike Sam, he wore no wedding ring. She had only two hard-and-fast rules in her romantic life, and one was that she didn’t dally with married men. She’d pulled enough enraged wives off their husbands’ girlfriends, hands filled with hair and fingernails leaving deep gouges, to know the best sex in the world wasn’t worth that.
The other rule was that her butterflies had to twirl and her heart had to pitter-patter.
Check on the butterflies. And—she caught the slight increase of her heart rate—check on the pitter-patter.
But what were the odds she’d be here long enough to thaw him out?
Showing JJ to the conference room took about five seconds: out the door, turn right, go to the next door. Quint flipped on the overhead, then went to open the blinds on the tall windows. The light flooding the room illuminated the intricate crown molding, original to the building, along with the battered table, cast-off chairs and unwanted desks bunched against one wall.
“Interesting room,” she remarked as she made her way to a chair. “The marble floor is gorgeous, and the moldings are incredible.”
“But everything in between sucks.”
“Except for the windows, pretty much.” She sat at the far end, where sunlight filtered through the blinds. The position would give her a good look at everyone else while she would be shadowy when they looked back. He bet she had all kinds of similar tricks up her detective’s sleeve.
He should ask Sam if he could go now, but Sam hadn’t included that in his instructions. For whatever reason—probably because Maura lived in Quint’s patrol district—he wanted Quint to know all this, and because Quint was damn grateful to have his job, he was going to obey. But he’d still rather be outside, alone in his vehicle, with nothing for company but the radio broadcasts.
JJ’s chair was pushed back from the table, leaving her room to cross her legs again. Her spine was straight, barely touching the back of the chair, and except for the heavy jacket, her clothing clung, shirt hugging her breasts just short of straining the buttons, denim stretching over her thighs. Most women he knew with that kind of posture had suffered through years of ballet or gymnastics. He tried to imagine her in leotards or tights, tumbling or pirouetting on her toes, but the image wouldn’t form. Swinging a baseball bat or breaking a board with her bare foot seemed far more likely.
She brushed her hair back, and sunlight flashed on a stone on her left hand. It was on her ring finger, fiery orange set in gold. A nontraditional engagement or wedding ring, or just a piece of jewelry she liked? He wouldn’t find it hard to believe she was unconventional. Wouldn’t find it hard to believe she was married, either.
Didn’t matter to him either way.
“What is your impression of Maura?”
Embarrassment heated Quint’s neck but luckily burned inward instead of out. From the moment the dispatcher had passed on the call to check the stranger on Maura’s street, he’d known in the back of his mind that this had to do with Maura. Who else on that street was interesting enough for surveillance? The young couple with four kids in the house fifty feet behind where she’d parked? The elderly sisters? The two college girls down the street or Jamey Moran, the deputy fire marshal who was so clean he squeaked?
But the front part of his brain hadn’t wanted to give it any thought. Now he had no choice, so he gave the most superficial answer that came to mind. “She’s a bad driver with too much time and money on her hands.”
JJ tilted her head to one side. “That’s it?”
Acknowledging that he seemed to be getting further away from returning to his vehicle instead of closer, he swallowed a sigh and took a chair near her end of the table, leaving an empty space between them. “I don’t know her. My interaction with her has been less than thirty minutes, all calls combined.”
That was true. But he was leaving out the fact that the last time he’d stopped her, Maura had offered to remedy the not-knowing-each-other thing if he wouldn’t write the ticket. He’d stood there in her driveway—she’d refused to stop until she reached the house—and smelled the sweet scent of her perfume, watched the breeze mold her already-tight dress even closer to her body, and sweet hell, he’d been tempted. He’d been alone so long. So damn alone. Sometimes he’d missed human contact so much that he’d physically hurt with it, and he’d thought…
It had shamed him then, and it did now. He’d thought Maura was no one special. She would never mean anything to him. He could use her to ease his pain and never have to bother with her again. He’d never treated women as disposable, but it had held a strong appeal that day.
Then she’d touched him, and it had had the effect of a gut punch, slamming home one important truth: he didn’t want human contact. He wanted Linny. No one could ever replace her, not for a night, for an hour or a minute, and certainly not some rich girl who thought avoiding a hundred-dollar ticket was worth trading sex for.
Disgusted with himself, he’d removed her hand, a bit of a struggle when she’d already insinuated her fingers inside his belt and didn’t want to let go. She’d pouted, called him a few names, torn up the ticket and let the wind scatter the pieces. And after that, he’d turned a blind eye to her driving infractions, just like those South Carolina cops did. Don’t poke the bear, his father used to say. The next time he might not walk away with his dignity intact.
“She was self-centered. Used to getting her way. She fluttered her lashes and smiled real pretty and expected problems to go away. I have no idea why she settled here. There aren’t a lot of restaurants, no clubs that would appeal to someone like that, no shopping besides Walmart, a couple of small clothing stores and the antique stores downtown, and name-dropping wouldn’t get her anywhere this far from home. Cedar Creek doesn’t have anything to offer her.”
That was the most he’d said at one time in months. His chest was tight, his lungs empty from putting together so many words. It was an odd feeling, hearing so much of his own voice when he generally got through the day with minimal talking.
He drew a breath and turned the question around. “What is your impression of her?”
Her smile was easy. “She was self-centered and used to getting her way. But I don’t think she could really help it, given who she was and where and how she was raised. I don’t think she was strong enough to develop any independence or real sense of character when every soul in her life expected her to be a princess.
“I babysat her one summer. I had graduated from college, and her mother was busy, and I had some time on my hands before the academy started. She was spoiled, of course, but not rotten. She just expected things to go her way because they always had. It never really occurred to her that they wouldn’t until her parents…”
Quint watched as JJ’s mouth thinned, her affect darkened. “How did they die?”
She bit her lower lip, full and soft peach in color, then blew out her breath. “They were murdered five years ago. Home invasion. I had stopped by my parents’ house a few blocks away, so I was the first officer on the scene. Their bodies were found by the housekeeper, but Maura came in a few minutes after I got there and saw…everything.”
The twinge of sympathy Quint felt surprised him. He’d always been empathetic—most cops were—but the only person he’d felt sorry for in the last year and a half had been himself. Maura had been twenty at the time. How deeply had that sight scarred her? If she hadn’t been strong before, that experience certainly wouldn’t make her any stronger. So she’d coped by running away, by living fast and partying hard and trying her damnedest to forget the memories. By drinking and using drugs and having meaningless sex.
But sympathy didn’t mean he wanted any contact with her again. It didn’t mean he particularly cared what state her life was in. He just didn’t have it in him to care right now.
He shoved back the discomfort that admission caused and refocused his attention on JJ. “So, you’re going to go talk to her, make sure she’s okay and go home.” He said it as a statement because that was what he wanted to happen. Like he’d thought earlier, he didn’t want upset in his life. It was routine that got him through the days—and quiet desperation that carried him through the nights—and like a cranky old dog, he needed to stick to that routine as much as possible.
“Actually, I’m going to look around first. Talk to your dispatcher and your officer, maybe visit her neighbors, her landlord.” Her lips thinned again, but thoughtfully this time. “As I said, she’s very wealthy. Her godfather is executor of her parents’ estate. About ten million went to their favorite charities, but Maura got the rest. I don’t know how many zeroes are tacked onto her net worth, but she gets an allowance of $100,000 a month, which she never completely spent until she came here. She’s young, rich, grieving, vulnerable.”
Quint ignored the statement that she was going to stay around longer than necessary—he wouldn’t have to deal with her—and laced his fingers together. “So her godfather is concerned because this spoiled rich kid is spending more money than usual?”
“No, not just that. For all her flaws, Maura was very close to her parents. She left town after they died and traveled constantly until she came here, but no matter where she was, she remembered every holiday—their birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day—with deliveries of extravagant flowers. Even when she was trekking in Nepal and on a tourist expedition to the South Pole, she sent the flowers. But she missed both their birthdays last month.”
“Maybe she’s coping better now. Maybe she realizes flowers don’t change anything.” They made the grave site prettier, let people know that the person who occupied that grave had someone who loved them in death as much as they had in life. But they didn’t ease the pain. They didn’t make life any easier. They didn’t help you survive another day or another week. They were a gesture, but a pretty meaningless one from his experience.
“It was important to her,” JJ disagreed. “Also, in the last three months, she’s only gotten in touch with Mr. Winchester, her godfather, twice by text. The first time, she demanded more cash, and the second, she threatened to sue him for control of the money. Mr. Winchester and his wife are also important to her. They’re her second parents. It’s out of character for her.”
Quint wasn’t convinced anything was out of character for someone like Maura. Pretty, entitled, spent her money freely, shared herself freely… Unpredictable seemed the best word to describe her. Hell, she’d gone from South Carolina to the South Pole to Small Town, Oklahoma, where her name meant nothing. Out of character seemed to be the only constant in her character.
But it wasn’t his problem.
That was the best part of the situation. Once he left the station, he was out of it.
Chapter 2 (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
JJ rose from her chair when Sam escorted two women into the conference room. She’d noticed both women when she and Quint had arrived and had presumed Sam got busy on the way back or Lois had gone back on patrol and he’d had to wait until she returned. The women greeted her with friendly smiles and very curious gazes. Oh yeah, they were just like Carla and Patrick at home. In seconds, they’d summed her up, cataloging her from head to toe as efficiently as any machine.
After shaking hands, she sat down again and told them why she was in town, watching their faces when she named Maura. Recognition lit both pairs of eyes.
“Wild child,” Lois said immediately. She was the officer, the older of the two, compact and competent, her short hair colored a blast of fresh blue that suited her perfectly. “Lot of money, lot of parties, lot of spending. Drives a flashy little red convertible that I would look so good in—” she preened accordingly “—and thinks speed limits and red lights are more suggestions than actual laws.”
Morwenna, the dispatcher, was young enough to be Lois’s daughter, pretty, soft, her clothing bright and mismatched enough to present a danger to everyone’s vision. A faint hint of an accent came and went from her voice as she agreed. “I don’t think she’s a bad person. She’s just spoiled. But she’s very generous, too. We’ve run into her and her friend a couple times in Tulsa, and she paid for everyone’s drinks all night long, then took us to a late dinner—er, early breakfast when we were done. And her parties are always popular. I went once—too loud and too much booze and—” she glanced at Sam “—and, uh, weed for me. And the police show up at least every other time, and I didn’t want a lecture from you, Sam, for being at a party where the cops were called.”
Nothing new there, JJ thought. The cops at home had often gotten called to Maura’s parties. She’d held them at other kids’ houses because the Evans family home would have shaken on its foundations at such goings-on. She’d invited a few friends, who invited a few friends and so on, until two or three hundred people from all over that part of the state showed up. The liquor had flowed freely, the pot had perfumed the air and who knew what else the kids had been doing?
“You mentioned a friend,” JJ said to Morwenna. “Man or woman? Do you remember a name?”
The dispatcher propped her foot on the seat of her chair, wrapping her arms around one leg covered in Easter-patterned tights. The yellow chickies, white bunnies and pastel eggs were cute, but the lime-green shirt over a fiery-red tank… It would give Chadwick apoplexy if one of his dispatchers showed up dressed that way.
JJ liked the outfit for that reason alone.
“It was a girl, but her name was a guy’s name.” Morwenna pressed her lips together and quirked her mouth to one side while tugging on her ponytail. “Mick, Mike…no, Mel. The last name was common. Smith, Jones, something like that.”
Lovely. There was nothing so tedious as searching for someone with a common surname. It was one of Chief Dipstick’s favorite jobs for JJ. “Is Mel a local girl?”
“Not Cedar Creek. We thought she was a cousin or something. Blond hair, blue eyes, cute little nose—” Morwenna tapped her own less-than-little nose “—little Cupid’s bow mouth. Same attitude, same entitlement.”
“There was definitely a resemblance,” Lois said.
“They were really tight for a while. Mel was at her house all the time. She practically lived there. Maybe she did live there, at least for a while.”
That made sense. Maura had never been a quiet, rely-on-herself sort of person. She needed companionship and entertainment. All that traveling… JJ had thought she was getting acquainted with herself, plumbing depths that no one knew she had, but maybe not.
“What happened to Mel?” Sam asked.
“Maura said she went home. She was getting bored with Cedar Creek. She never mentioned where home was for either of them.”
“When was that?”
Morwenna shrugged, her vibrant image blurring in JJ’s gaze. “Three or four months ago. I’m not sure. We aren’t really friends. We just hung out a few times.”
JJ made a mental note to ask Mr. Winchester if there was an Evans relative named Mel—Melody, Melinda, Melanie. As far as she knew, the Evanses had no close relatives. Neither of Maura’s parents had had any siblings, and she’d been an only child herself. But in a lot of Southern families, the Logans included, a cousin was a cousin, no matter how many times removed.
Sam handed out notepads and pens from the battered desk and asked everyone to make a list of Maura’s associates. While the women started writing, Quint declined. “She was alone when I stopped her, and I didn’t know anyone at the party.” He shrugged. “I’m more likely to recognize those kids’ parents than them.”
JJ’s gaze settled on the stone in her ring. It was a Mexican fire opal, orange-red, her birthstone. It was a lucky stone, her mother had told her, symbolic of hope and innocence, a god’s tears turned to stone and colored with the fire of lightning. JJ wasn’t sure about any of that, but touching it did help her think better.
One of Mr. Winchester’s concerns that she hadn’t brought up earlier was the possibility that Maura was being influenced by someone. Con artists were always on the lookout for easy targets, and between her sorrow, her dependence and her immaturity, she would be one of the easiest. The payoff for the crook could be in the tens of millions of dollars. Was that Mel’s role in her life? Manipulating all that lovely money into her own greedy hands?
Or maybe she really was a relative. Or a friend. Maybe more than a friend. Mel had left Cedar Creek about the time of the change in Maura’s behavior. A broken heart could certainly explain a lot, especially with a twenty-five-year-old who’d already lost so much.
But shouldn’t that have strengthened the tie to her godfather? Would she actually threaten the only person left in her life because her girlfriend had left her?
Maybe. If she was distraught enough. If she’d thought he was too conventional to understand.
The women finished their lists at the same time and passed them to her. Morwenna’s, written with loops and swirls, was longer, while Lois’s, in graceful old-school cursive, was more detailed. JJ thanked them as they stood and, after a moment’s chitchat, left the room.
Sam slid a piece of paper down the table toward her. “She owns the house Maura’s renting. Quint will go with you.”
Annoyance flickered across Quint’s face, and for an instant, JJ was half insulted on two fronts. She had conducted hundreds of interviews all by herself and didn’t need help with this one. And Quint should have realized by now that she was fun. Smart. Could carry a conversation all by herself. She was an easy companion. And adorable.
And he was cranky. Not a people person. Not thrilled with the idea of giving up a good part of his day to babysit the out-of-town cop when he had better things to do. She totally got that. She had lots of better things to do than make sure Maura was coping. With all that money, Maura could buy everything she needed: someone to pamper her, take care of her, entertain her, have sex with her, clean up after her. She could even buy someone to love her.
She and Mr. Winchester had managed to temporarily buy JJ herself, though against her will.
“I don’t really need an escort,” she said, standing to her full height, unimpressive as it was with men who both topped six feet.
Sam’s smile was part genuine, part sly. “I promised your chief we’d do all we could to help out.”
She was considering baring her teeth at him when he went on.
“Besides, Mrs. Madison doesn’t take kindly to many cops. Quint happens to be one of the exceptions. She’ll be more likely to talk to you if he’s with you.”
So instead, she bared her teeth at Quint, disguising it as a smile. “Then I appreciate the offer. And I thank you for your time, Sam.”
Folding the notepaper into a neat rectangle, she tucked it into her hip pocket, slid the chair under the table and followed the two men out of the room. Sam turned immediately into his office. Quint moved toward the front door with long, natural strides, making for a pleasant view as she followed him.
Momentum carried her to the edge of the first step, where she stopped cold. “Holy cats, what happened with the weather?”
Quint drew up as he realized she’d gone stationary. “Cold front moved in.”
“Damn.” The sky had darkened, and the breeze had morphed into a merciless wind with a bite that made her so-cute-and-comfortable jacket totally inadequate. Too bad she hadn’t brought anything warmer. Too bad she didn’t own anything warmer.
She hugged herself tightly as she hustled down the steps and started across the lot. Her exposed skin was seriously cold, and the kind of bone-deep shivers that were actually painful were starting. She had no clue how many degrees the temperature had dropped while they were inside—thirty or more?—but it was way outside her comfort zone. She needed protection from the wind, and she needed it now.
Quint easily matched her stride. She knew a lot of men who used their longer, faster steps as a passive-aggressive outlet when they dealt with her five-foot-five-inch self. She’d long since stopped trying to keep up, especially when they were traveling in the same vehicle. Let them dawdle at the car, she’d decided, because generally they couldn’t leave without her.
At the black pickup, he beeped the doors, slid inside and moved his black duty jacket from the passenger seat while she climbed up. Adjusting the mounted laptop to give herself an extra couple of inches of space took a second longer than it should have because the chills had worked their way from the inside out, and ditto with the seat belt. “Heat, please,” she requested before her teeth started chattering.
He gave her a sidelong look as he started the engine. “Are you that cold?”
“South Carolina has a humid subtropical climate. In Evanston, fifty degrees is a frigid winter day. I break out my jackets at sixty.”
He grunted before turning the heat on high. “Windchill’s supposed to drop to around ten. You might want to put on those jackets before we go see Mrs. Madison.”
“I didn’t bring them. It’s March. It’s springtime.” She tucked her fingers underneath each arm to stop them from turning blue. He didn’t even seem affected, and he was wearing short sleeves.
“Here, winter’s not over until summer.”
She luxuriated in the rapidly warming air blowing from the vents, finally loosening her self-hug so she could hold her hands out. When her heart had recovered from the shock and started pumping warm blood again, she settled back. “Why does Mrs. Madison not like police officers?”
“Family tradition. None of them were very good at walking the straight and narrow.”
They had plenty of those families in and around Evanston. Some of them were belligerent about it, but others, at least, disliked the police from the right side of the law. “And why does she like you?”
“She doesn’t exactly like me. She tolerates me. She and my mother’s family were neighbors.”
JJ doubted the first part of his statement. Once people got past his stiff, stern exterior, she figured, they liked what they found. Sam, Lois and Morwenna certainly seemed to have a bond with him.
She gazed out the window at the sometimes pretty, sometimes shabby, sometimes overcommercialized town that Maura had chosen to live in. It really wasn’t so different from Evanston. Smaller, not quite so prosperous, but she was certain it had its charm when the sun was shining and the air was sweet and warm.
She’d studied the Cedar Creek map, but it was always good to see exactly where to find the ice cream store and the grubby little hamburger joint that surely made the best burgers in town. In this particular case, they were south of downtown on Main Street. Another mile down, they passed a Whataburger, and her mouth started watering.
When she was a kid, every time they visited their grandparents in Florida, Grandpa had taken her and her sisters to Whataburger for a burger, fries and shake. Given that her mom and Grandma both had an unnatural aversion to fast food, it was always an absolute delight.
She intended to delight all over one later today.
When the street ended a moment later, Quint turned right. Three blocks later, he pulled into the parking lot of an assisted-living facility. Who’s going to take care of you when you get old if you don’t have kids? Mom routinely asked. You’ll wind up in one of those old folks places.
This one didn’t look so bad. The outside was well maintained, and inside, the lobby smelled of flowers and wood polish and, faintly, Italian spices, tomatoes and onions. Large windows let in a lot of light, and plants brightened even the darkest corners.
Quint signed them in, and they took the elevator to the third floor. Their strides weren’t so evenly matched this time. In fact, if she were a suspicious person, she would think he was practically skulking along the far wall, head down, shoulders hunched, face turned to the left. When he actually raised his right hand and pulled his hat even lower as they passed an open door, she made a quick note of the room number—318—then watched him revert to normal. Or, at least, his variant of normal.
Interesting.
With a silent sigh of relief at passing room 318 unnoticed, Quint stopped at 327 and rapped on the door. The voice that called a response was soft, frail, sounding like a fragile old lady summoning up her dying breath to invite them in.
He knew better.
Georgia Madison’s apartment consisted of a tiny kitchen that went mostly unused, a small living room and, visible through an open door, a bedroom. It was brightly lit to offset the gloominess outside, with table lamps and hanging globes of vivid colored glass. They were every shape and size: royal blue beside an orange the shade of JJ’s ring, sunny yellow and green and a red that set the standard for all reds.
Georgia was sitting in a recliner near the floor-to-ceiling windows. Her hair was a mix of faded black, steel gray and white, her face lined with wrinkles, her eyes displaying her perpetual distrust of the unexpected. When she recognized him, some of the distrust faded, only to return in intensity at the sight of JJ.
“First time you come to see me in months, and you bring a copper with you?” She shook her head with mild disgust. Then she broke into a smile for him. “How are you, Quint?”
“I’m good, Georgie.” It was a blatant lie, and going by her second head shake, this one with mild sorrow, she recognized it.
He gestured to JJ, who’d stopped beside him. “Mrs. Georgia Madison, this is JJ Logan. You’re right, she is a cop. But she’s not out to get you.”
“All cops are out to get everyone.” The old lady gave JJ an appraising look, then nodded. “Sit. Ask your questions.”
JJ chose the couch, settling naturally into that perfect posture he’d noted earlier. Quint sat with a creak in the rocker a few feet to her left. The chair was old, the finish faded, but it was comfortable in ways a brand-new one could never be. He’d always sat in this chair when he’d visited the Madison home as a kid. It had squeaked badly even back then, and rocking in it had been one of his pleasures, until the inevitable warning from whichever adult was closest to please stop that.
He hadn’t thought about the chair, or those visits, or that time of his life in a very long while.
“How did you know I’m a cop?” JJ asked.
“Really? That’s the question you want to lead with?” Georgie gave an eye roll and a sigh, both heavily exaggerated. “It’s the look. Quint has it. That good-looking Little Bear kid he works with has it, that little guy, Harper—hell, everyone down there at thug headquarters. All good cops have the look.”
JJ considered, then accepted her answer as a compliment if her satisfied look was anything to judge by. “Do you prefer that I call you Mrs. Madison, Miss Georgia or Georgie?”
“Quint’s the only one in this room who can call me Georgie. For all other coppers, it’s Mrs. Madison.”
“All right, Mrs. Madison, can I ask you a few questions about the woman renting your house on Willow Street?”
“You can ask whatever you want, and I’ll answer whatever I want. And of course it’s my house on Willow Street. It’s the only house I own.” She humphed. “So? What do you want to know? I’m ninety-six years old, honey. Time’s a-wasting.”
JJ muttered, “And they say the good die young.” Her voice was barely a whisper, and her mouth hardly moved, but that wasn’t going to save her, Quint knew. Georgie heard everything.
Georgie’s brows drew together in a frown. He thought for half a second about intervening but decided against it. The old woman was more than happy to spread her ire around, and he was more than willing to let her. Instead, he sat back, rested his ankle on the other knee and rubbed at a scuff on his boot.
“Let me tell you something, little girl. Disrespecting a fragile elderly woman that you want information from isn’t the smartest way to go. My hair may be gray, my bones may be weak and my body may be giving up while I’m still using it, but my hearing is as good as ever, so a little politeness is in order here.”
Quint waited for JJ’s flush, for her eyes to widen with dismay and words of apology to tumble out of her mouth. That was how people always reacted to Georgie, especially coppers. But not this one. JJ arched one brow and fixed her steady, challenging gaze on her adversary. “That politeness extends both ways. Besides, I bet you never aspired to be good or die young, so that’s probably more of a compliment than an insult.”
Okay, she’d surprised him. He wouldn’t be surprised by Georgie’s response, because he had zero idea what it would be. He’d never known anyone who, when dressed down by Georgie for her attitude, displayed even more attitude.
He should have left JJ downstairs in the lobby. Better yet, he should have just called Georgie and asked about Maura. But hell, who ever would have thought he would be the more tactful of any two people in the world?
Georgie’s stare simmered for a long moment, then she pointed one long, thin finger JJ’s way. “You should be scared of me.”
“Ha. You never met my grandmother Raynelle. She was a lot like you, only she was really scary.”
Georgie considered the name a moment. “I don’t know any Raynelles. Where are you from?”
“South Carolina.”
“And they say Southern women are genteel. Apparently, they never met you.” Georgie snorted before relenting. “You’re right. I never did aspire to be good, just like you never cared about being genteel. And you can call me Miss Georgie. I like the la-di-da sound of that. So what do you want to know about Maura Evans?”
Quint blinked. He’d seen Georgie chew up grown people and spit ’em out. If she’d been a cat, she would have been the sort who tormented the mouse mercilessly before killing it. JJ should have been lucky to walk out of here with her skin intact.
Instead, they both looked smugly satisfied. Like they’d come to some kind of agreement and would now make nice of their own accord. He’d never seen Georgie make nice with anyone outside her family or his.
JJ set her clasped hands on her lap. “Have you met Maura?”
“Of course. I’m not going to let someone move into my own house without getting a good look at her. My granddaughter showed her the house.” Georgie’s faded gaze darted to Quint. “Twenty-three and hasn’t been to jail once.”
“Yet,” he tacked on, making her grin. Truth was, none of her family had been to jail in his lifetime. They’d gotten tamed before he was even born. But they’d still nursed that family animosity toward the law.
“She’s going to be a schoolteacher. Graduates from OSU next December.” Georgie rummaged in the drawer beside her chair and drew out an electronic cigarette. Her smoking had been the nastiest habit under the sun, his mother used to declare, even though Georgie had never smoked in anyone’s house, not even her own. At her age, he figured, she was entitled to a few vices. Smoking, a glass of whiskey before bed and terrorizing the other old folks in the home were all she could manage.
“When Maura decided she wanted the house, I had her come over here to sign the papers. We had lunch, just me and her and that obnoxious little friend of hers. Mel. I hope her real name was something like Mellissandriennalou. That twit walked through the door—” she gestured with her e-cig toward her own door “—took a sniff and said old people smell like death. Like she even knows what death smells like. Rude kid. I should have pinched her ear.”
JJ grinned. “You are like Grandmother Raynelle. I was convinced my right ear was going to be bigger than the left because of all the times she tweaked it.”
“Sounds like you needed it.”
Quint couldn’t quite see JJ as a disrespectful kid. Disobedient, sure. She struck him as someone who acted first and apologized later—sweetly, innocently and even faintly sincerely—if it was necessary. Even in her earlier exchange with Georgie, he suspected she’d already known how the old woman was going to react, so there’d been no real disrespect intended.
“Do you remember Mel’s last name?”
“Wasn’t even polite enough to offer it.”
“What did you think of their relationship?”
With the push of a button, Georgie reclined the chair, stretched out her legs and crossed her ankles, propping hot-pink running shoes on the footrest. “I thought they were family at first. Mel’s hair and eyes were brown, and Maura was a blue-eyed blonde, but other than that, they could have been sisters.
“But you could tell Maura had always had money and Mel never had. Maura was all elegant and confident, and Mel… There was a sort of hunger about her. Not physical, you know, but more as if life had been tough and she’d never known anything better. She didn’t look like money, you know? And telling me I smell. Twit.”
The image that formed in Quint’s mind didn’t create a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. Rude, disrespectful, didn’t know how to behave and eager to trade her tough life for something better. And that was apparently the only friend Maura had had. And then Mel had left her.
As unsympathetic as he intended to be, that thought told him he wasn’t succeeding.
Because that was just damn sad.
JJ tipped her head back and gazed at the ceiling. The mysterious Mel sounded like Maura’s friends back home, except that the Carolina friends mostly came from money, like her. JJ was familiar with some of them because of their run-ins with police that never resulted in consequences, some because of their parents’ friendships with her parents. Most of them she could recognize, maybe even identify by name, but that was all. She couldn’t recall a brown-haired, brown-eyed hard-luck kid who’d infiltrated the Evanston crowd and stuck with it.
The two women could have met in college or on the road. It didn’t seem possible Mel had toured a winter’s full of ice palace hotels in Norway or cruised the Mediterranean, but Maura had spent plenty of time in American cities, as well. They could have run into each other in any number of ways, hit it off and decided to roam together with Maura picking up the tab. She was very generous, Morwenna had said.
Because her companions had let her thoughts wander undisturbed—Quint probably preferred her silence, but as Miss Georgie had said, time was a-wasting—she filled the silence with an absentminded comment. “Your glass is beautiful.”
“It is. That swirly red-and-green one there—that was a Christmas gift from Maura. She brought it when she delivered the December rent. We had lunch together every month when she paid the rent, but after that, I never saw her again. The rent started coming in the mail.”
JJ studied the lamp with new interest. Maura had noticed the collection and taken the time to find a beautiful icicle-shaped addition. For a woman she didn’t really know and expected nothing from in return. That was the kind of thoughtfulness one expected of an Evans a few generations ago, not from the current one. If she made the right friends, fell in love with the right person, would Maura discover something of substance inside herself?
Possibly. But it didn’t seem likely that maybe-Melanie, maybe-Mellissandriennalou was the kind of friend who could anchor Maura in the real world. Instead, she appeared to have been along for the ride, enjoying the luxury until she’d gotten bored and moved on.
Leaving Maura one more loss to cope with.
Her muscles protesting too much sitting, JJ got to her feet. The rocker squeaked as Quint followed suit. “One last question, Miss Georgie. Did Maura say why she’d decided to stay in Cedar Creek?”
A rather sad look claimed Miss Georgie’s features. “She said it reminded her of home. You know, I never saw a person more lost than her.”
JJ felt a little sad, too, as she approached Miss Georgie and offered her hand. The old woman’s skin was dry and cool, marked with what Grandmother Raynelle had called wisdom spots, and her fingernails were painted a sparkly midnight blue.
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Georgie.”
“For a copper, you’re not too bad.” The effect of Miss Georgie’s scowl was dampened by her sly wink.
“You’re not half as bad as you think you are.”
Miss Georgie chuckled. “You can come back sometime. We’ll see if I can change your mind about that.”
“I’d love to see you try.” JJ gave the thin hand a gentle squeeze, then turned toward the door.
She was halfway there when Miss Georgie spoke again. “Come over here, Quint.”
There was no doubt it was a command, and no doubt that he would obey it, JJ thought, hiding a grin, because that was the kind of person he was. She waited at the door while he did, indeed, obey and Miss Georgie took both of his hands in hers.
“How are you? Really?” Her voice was a murmur, but JJ shared one thing with the old woman: excellent hearing.
He looked as if he wanted to pull away, rush out the door and let the cold air drive away the flush to his cheeks. He didn’t, though. Instead, he muttered, “I’m okay. Really.”
Okay about what? It clearly wasn’t the throwaway question everybody used a dozen times a day. Something had happened in his recent past that worried the crusty old woman—something he didn’t want to discuss.
JJ turned her back, deliberately tuning out their conversation. She didn’t feel guilty for being curious. She wouldn’t be a police officer if she wasn’t curious about things, and she wouldn’t be a woman if she wasn’t curious about him. But she didn’t stoop to eavesdropping, not unless it involved a case.
After a moment, his footsteps sounded behind her. She opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. He closed the door and stopped beside her, looking to the right, the way they’d come, then to the left, where a red exit sign marked the stairwell. He looked like a man who very much wanted to take the stairs.
“Who’s in 318?”
His scowl wasn’t as fierce as Miss Georgie’s, but it was more sincere. “You noticed that.”
“I’m a copper.” The word made her grin. She might never call herself a cop again. “I get paid to notice things.” Turning 180 degrees, she started toward the stairway exit.
She was pretty sure that was relief radiating off him as he fell into step beside her. No answer was forthcoming, though, so she prompted him. “Family?”
The closing of the stairwell door was muffled by the sound of their boots, hers sharper, his more solid, descending the steps. He didn’t answer until they reached the second-floor landing. “Practically.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but that was okay. She didn’t have the standing to insist on more. Though they’d spent half the morning together, they were still strangers. His life was his, and he got to choose what he wanted to share.
Besides, it wasn’t his life she wanted him to share.
She had a healthy regard for sex. She was thirty-seven and unencumbered by relationships. She’d come close to marrying once, a decade ago. Ryan had been a fellow officer who moved to Evanston after two years with the Columbia Police Department. He’d been sweet and smart and funny and everything she wanted in a guy…until she made detective before him.
When he’d broken the engagement and moved back to Columbia, it had stung her pride and made her doubt her judgment, but it hadn’t broken her heart. Which meant he really hadn’t been even close to everything she wanted in a guy.
Since then, she hadn’t gotten within squinting distance of marriage. She’d dated her share of men, had sex with some of them and not with others. She didn’t indulge in one-night stands or stranger sex because of the inherent risks. She still had a yearning, not necessarily for marriage but for commitment. For that one special man who would brighten her day just by being in it, who would love everything about her the same way she would love everything about him and would make her heart flutter when she was eighty.
But if she waited to meet Mr. Forever before she had sex again, she would be a very grumpy and cranky JJ, and that wasn’t a pretty sight.
The air broke over her, offensively cold, when she walked out the front door. This time, though, she didn’t stop in shock. Her steps lengthened as she practically jogged across the lot to Quint’s vehicle. The exercise, brief as it was, felt really good to muscles cramping from the same position for so very long. On another day, she might even have told Quint she would walk back to her car, enjoying the exercise, the fresh air and the budding of the trees. Today, spending one instant more than necessary outside was out of the question.
“What now?” Quint asked as they fastened their seat belts.
“Where can I buy a coat?”
“Walmart. Atwoods. It’s a farm and ranch supply store. Or there’s a little store about a mile north. We can stop there on the way back to the station.”
Ooh, she liked a man who didn’t whine about shopping. Her father and both her brothers-in-law acted as if their fingernails were being torn out with pliers every time they had to hang out in a women’s clothing department. Though, truthfully, JJ felt the same way when she accompanied her middle sister. Kylie could spend an hour choosing between two pairs of nearly identical jeans.
“Little store sounds fine. When it comes to warmth, I have no vanity.”
He reached into the back, snagging his duty jacket, and offered it to her. “Until the truck warms up.”
She hesitated half a second before accepting it, huddling beneath it like a blanket. It was big and heavy and smelled enticingly of scents undiluted by cologne. Shaving cream, detergent, fabric softener, soap. No floral or woodsy intruders, but plain, simple Quint. She drew a deep breath, then sighed happily, her chin tucked into the faux-fur collar.
It was a quick drive to the shopping center where the clothing shop nestled between a coffee shop and a grocery store. The air blowing from the truck’s heating vents wasn’t much warmer than outside when they parked, but she handed the jacket back, anyway. He didn’t insist she keep it, didn’t pretend he wasn’t finally feeling the cold himself, but shrugged into it as he got out.
She appreciated that fact. She’d never understood why men always offered their jackets to women who’d failed to dress warmly enough. Like the chill didn’t cut through their clothes just as easily? She had never been a Boy Scout, but she knew all about the consequences of not being prepared. You don’t take an umbrella on a soggy day, you get wet. You wear a sweater on a hot day, you get sweaty. You don’t take a heavy coat to a place known for its iffy weather, you get frozen lungs and blue skin.
Sadly, blue wasn’t really her color.
They hustled from the parking lot to the store. On the other side of the glass doors, warm air, an explosion of colors and rock music greeted them, along with a pretty girl sitting at the checkout counter and texting. Her hello was perfunctory until she glanced up. Then a smile split her face, she clutched her cell phone, jumped to her feet and rounded the corner to approach them. “What are you doing here? Did that six-pack of T-shirts you bought five years ago finally wear out? Can I take your picture and send it to everyone as proof of life?”
Curious, JJ looked from Quint to the girl. She was way too young for anything romantic between them. Sure, some older guys had to go young for an emotional-needs match, but he seemed far too stolid to date someone he could have fathered. Besides, with the blond hair, blue eyes and the square angle of both their jaws, she’d put money on a relative. Much younger sister, niece, cousin.
“If you take my picture and send it to everyone, there won’t be any life left in your phone by the time I finish grinding it into the ground,” he said, gaze narrowed, voice gravelly enough to give some weight to the threat.
But the girl wasn’t the least bit threatened. “Uncle Quint, you haven’t scared me since the time you caught me and my friends drinking beer at the park. That was ages ago.”
“Four years.”
“Like I said. Ages.” Her gaze shifted to JJ, raking up and down. “I love that jacket, but it’s way too cold for it today.”
“That’s why I’m here.” JJ saw racks of coats near the back of the store and headed that way. A murmured conversation drifted behind her—Quint’s voice low and raspy, the girl’s higher and lighter—then came the click of high heels on the tile floor. JJ lifted a black wool coat from the rack to examine it, and when she lowered it, the blonde was on the other side.
“Hi, I’m Lia, and though my job is to sell the merchandise, that coat is something my grandma would buy. We have a great plum one, and a persimmon one, and a gorgeous fuchsia. Even something like this brown does so much more for you than black. Plus, it’s more fitted, like your jacket, so you still have a shape when you’re wearing it, instead of being padded and curveless like the black one.” Lia held up the brown coat, flashed a smile at Quint, waiting by the register, and lowered her voice. “So you’re a friend of Uncle Quint’s.”
JJ couldn’t help but smile at both her fashion advice and her conspiratorial tone. “We just met this morning. I’m in town on business.” She patted her Taser after removing her own jacket and before pulling on the brown coat. The shade was rich and dark and reminded her of hot cocoa with just a sprinkle of cinnamon. Its luxe lining embraced her with warmth.
Lia smoothed the collar, then turned JJ to face a mirror. “See, the color plays up the reddish tints in your hair and those freckles you do a decent job of hiding. You really shouldn’t be hiding them. They’re there, they’re cute, and Uncle Quint likes freckles. And you can be warm without adding so much bulk.” Without a breath, she shifted gears again. “How long will you be here?”
“No idea. A few days, maybe a week.” She shrugged.
“Oh. Too bad…or maybe not. I mean, not everything’s got to be forever, right? You’re pretty, and you have good taste, and a week of innocent—”
Quint cleared his throat, and Lia literally jumped. Her face went pale, then a few shades darker than his own flush. “I’m telling Grandma you eavesdropped.”
“Grandma was the one who taught me that when your voice got quiet, you were up to something.”
Lia sniffed. “She should have been the cop in the family.” Her pout turned immediately to a smile when she turned back to JJ. “Do you like this coat, or would you like to see the persimmon one? And do you need a scarf or gloves to go with that? They’re right this way—”
The glimpse JJ got of Quint’s aggravated face as Lia pulled her away was sweet. He wasn’t terminally cranky, after all; he was kind to old ladies and fond of his niece. Chief Dipstick had clearly sent her here as punishment, but the universe had smiled on her by putting Quint in her path.
Wouldn’t that make the old man spit nails?
Quint stayed nearby while Lia rang up JJ’s coat, scarf and gloves, then cut the tags from them. The only way to stop a Foster woman from talking about anything and everything was to stand watch, ready to put the fear into them. He’d forgotten that when he’d let his niece wander off to wait on JJ. He hadn’t heard everything when he joined them, but he’d heard enough to get the impression that Lia was trying to set up JJ with someone, and since he was pretty much the only single guy in Lia’s life right now—definitely the only single one in JJ’s age range—he figured he’d been Lia’s target. All the Foster women—and, sadly, most of the men—thought another relationship was the best way to get him over the one he’d lost.
He rubbed idly at the center of his chest where it ached. There had been a few times in the beginning when he’d thought he was having a heart attack. Had hoped he was. He hadn’t wanted to live without Linny. Had never even imagined it. She’d been the best part of his life for so long, and the idea that he would have to live without her had been incomprehensible.
Forty was too young to die. Sure, it happened all the time—accidents, suicides, homicides—but natural causes fell pretty low on the list. Linny had never had surgery before. How could anyone have known she would have an adverse reaction?
Adverse reaction. A nicer, neater way of saying stroke. How in the hell had a healthy forty-year-old woman having a minor surgical procedure had a stroke and died on the table? How could anyone have prepared for that?
Slim fingers caught his hand and pulled it away from his chest. His vision was fuzzy when he focused, slowly clearing to show concern on Lia’s face as she gazed up at him.
“Uncle Quint?”
How many times had she spoken to him? Her expression suggested several. He squeezed her hand reassuringly. “What were you saying, Bean?”
As he’d expected, she rolled her eyes at her childhood nickname. “Mom is gonna call and see if we can have Easter at your house.”
Easter. Was it already time for that? Then came Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July and enough birthdays to tire out a partier like Maura Evans. “She knows I prefer family get-togethers where I can go home when I’m done.”
She laughed. “That’s why she wants to do it at your place. So you can’t make an early escape.”
Quint tugged at his ear. He didn’t want a celebratory dinner at his house. Cleaning it to meet his mother’s standards wasn’t a problem; he kept it neat. An overgrown yard wasn’t an issue, either. He would surely mow it between now and then. But instead of saying no flat out and wiping that sweet grin from Lia’s face, he said, “I’ll think about it.”
“All right! We’re partying at Uncle Quint’s! I’ll tell Mom.” She folded JJ’s suede jacket and handed it to her. “Thank you for the business, it’s nice to meet you and have fun while you’re here.” She’d whipped her phone out before finishing the words and was already texting when they turned away. No doubt telling her mom that Easter was a go.
He walked behind JJ through narrow aisles to reach the door. Before she opened it, she pulled the new orange wool cap over her head and slid orange gloves onto her hands. This time, when they stepped outside, she didn’t act as if she were the loser in a game of freeze tag. “Your niece is cute.”
“Huh. How did ‘I’ll think about it’ turn into ‘Sure, bring the whole gang’?” He zipped his jacket, then shoved his hands into the pockets.
“When my mom said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ that was exactly what she meant. With our dad, my sisters and I heard what we wanted. And because we were so adorable, it usually worked for us.”
Adorable. That was his niece. She’d had him wrapped around her little finger when said finger was only an inch or two long. He could see some adorability in JJ, too. Some prettiness, too. He’d always thought of brown as kind of a noncolor, like white or black, but the brown coat looked good on her. It made him aware, even in the dreary lack of sunshine, that her hair wasn’t entirely brown but threaded through with strands that would gleam like copper in bright light. The color warmed her face and the fabric hugged her body, showing only a faint bump where her Taser was holstered.
She wasn’t so nothing special as he’d thought just a few hours ago.
Scowling, he climbed into the truck. Sam, JJ, Georgie and Lia—he’d talked to more people today than he usually did in three or four days combined. He was ready to take JJ back to her car and regain his usual solitude, but when he opened his mouth, that wasn’t even close to what he suggested.
“Want to get some lunch?”
Chapter 3 (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
JJ beamed, well aware that growls would start echoing from her empty stomach if she didn’t eat soon. “I’m glad you asked. Can we go to Whataburger? The nearest one to Evanston is a couple of hours away, so I haven’t had one in years, and that’s way too long.”
He took the back way out of the strip mall, passing a Chinese restaurant and a hot dog place, then turned back onto Main Street southbound. In a couple of minutes, he was parking in the restaurant’s lot. The dining room was warm and smelled of beef and onions and French fries and the best ketchup in the world, and she breathed in deeply, appreciating every happy, sweet, treat-with-Granddad bit of it.
When they placed their orders at the counter, she swiped with her card before Quint got his out of his wallet. “Expense account,” she explained.
His gaze narrowed. “Your department must have a bigger budget than ours.”
“The lawyer’s expense account.” She wouldn’t abuse it—she was meticulously documenting every penny she spent—but buying lunch for an officer who’d been pulled away from his regular duties to help her was definitely a legitimate expense.
They got their pop, then chose a table by the plate glass window on the side where they’d parked. Sitting across from each other, they were able to keep an eye on each other, the other customers, the employees and the pickup outside. Cops like expanded horizons.
When she sat on the hard bench, the papers in her hip pocket crackled. Shifting her weight, she pulled them out. “These are the notes Morwenna and Lois did for me.” She smoothed them on the tabletop and scanned over them.
Morwenna had listed a few dozen names, half of them only first or last, with additional data when she had it. Tanya West—works at Starbucks on Taft. Landon Jonas—mechanic at the garage on First. Lily Ransom—day shift at the local ER.
“Anything interesting there?” she asked, sliding the page to Quint.
He scanned it as quickly as she had. “I know some of these kids’ parents or grandparents. Tanya is a friend of Lia’s. Giggly, goofy, doesn’t have any ambition. Jonas does the routine service on department vehicles. My own truck, too. He’s okay, except that he’s got a motorcycle that goes really fast and a need to prove it occasionally. He’s got a string of tickets for that, but nothing else.”
Another long conversational piece from him. She was reminded of a conversation with her aunt, the mystery author. Jada had hefted a dictionary and said, “My entire book is in here. I just have to pull it out one word at a time.” Was more than twenty words at once a sign that Quint was warming up to her?
“I was first in my academy class in pursuit driving,” she said, “but motorcycles make me scream like a girl. Way too exposed. All the protective gear in the world can’t really protect you. Give me a four-thousand-pound cage wrapped around me any day.”
She took his grunt as agreement before turning her attention to Lois’s list. It was shorter but had more commentary. Like Quint, she knew most of the kids’ parents and had filled in ages, vehicles and job information. She dedicated an entire paragraph to one Alexander Benson: oldest of three kids, twenty-six, arrests for bar fights, possession, reckless driving, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, harboring a fugitive—his sister—and three counts of assaulting a police officer. All three times, he’d gotten between a relative and the cops trying to arrest said relative. Where Maura and Mel went, he followed.
He went by the nickname of Zander, and he was definitely, according to Lois, the boy our mothers warned us about. Bad boys. Every town had them, and every good girl managed to meet them.
“Do you know Zander Benson?” Then, remembering his comment, she teased, “Or should I ask if you know his parents?”
His gaze narrowed again, almost as if from habit. “Yeah, I went to school with his dad. Hank had better things to do than spend every day in school, so he went to class when it suited him. He was a senior when I started my sophomore year, and he was still a senior when I started my senior year. He did manage to graduate that time. Marisa was sitting in the audience, holding Zander and pregnant with number two.”
That image could have been inspiring. She loved underdog stories, people who never gave up until they achieved their goal. After three senior years, Hank had graduated, but had it really been an accomplishment, or had the school given him the diploma so they could be done with him? If his son was anything to judge by, probably the latter.
“I’m guessing marriage and fatherhood didn’t turn Hank into father of the year material.” Though her cynical cop side snorted at the idea, she believed it was possible. Hank could have learned his lesson about the value of education and staying out of trouble. He almost surely would have wanted better for his kids. It happened. Sometimes. On occasion. And Zander and his sister might have simply rebelled.
“Nah, Hank’s still the overgrown idiot he was back then, and Zander’s just like him. Too lazy to work, likes his drugs and his booze, rude and surly and looking for someone to take it out on.”
JJ rolled one corner of the paper tightly, smoothed it, then rolled it again. “So Maura’s best friend is rude, obnoxious and disrespectful, and her other friend is rude, surly and finds trouble everywhere he goes. Not that Maura didn’t have obnoxious and surly friends at home, but they came from money. They were just like her.”
“You mean they were her own kind.”
That sounded ugly and made her nose scrunch and her mouth wrinkle. “I don’t mean they were better because they were rich. God knows, that’s not a plus for most of them. Just…they all had money, so none of them took advantage. One day it was Maura blowing five grand on a party, but the next time someone else stepped up. They took their turns.”
“But none of these people—” he gestured toward the lists “—have money, which would explain why $100,000 a month is no longer adequate for her expenses. Friendship doesn’t come cheap.”
A pang twinged around her heart. Was that what Maura had sunk to? Buying friends? She was a pretty girl. She’d been taught perfect manners, all the social graces. She would be as comfortable at a White House state dinner as a regular person was at McDonald’s. She was smarter than average, had an enviable prep school education and all the potential in the world. And yet grief and sorrow had led her to a spot where she had to pay big bucks for the barest of friendships.
“My dad used to joke that he and Mom had me so my sisters would have someone else to torment, but now they’re my best friends. They drove me crazy—still do on occasion—but they also stood by me, no matter what. If Maura had had a brother or sister to lean on, to grieve with and recover with, maybe…” Maybe that brother or sister would have been her rock. Or maybe he or she would be floundering with her, dragging her even farther down.
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Marilyn Pappano
They’re tracking a missing person But will they be the next victims? Detective Jennifer “JJ” Logan is determined to unearth a missing socialite. At her side looms officer Quint Foster, who bridles at having to work alongside JJ. But as they dig deeper into the victim’s odd behaviour, he feels alive for the first time in years. The hunt means their deepening emotions have to take a back seat to getting out alive!
They’re tracking a missing person
But will they be the next victims?
New-in-town detective Jennifer “JJ” Logan is thrown into the deep end with her first case. Assigned to unearth a missing socialite, JJ must also deal with a new colleague: Officer Quint Foster.
Quint bristles at having to work alongside JJ. But as they dig for clues, he feels alive for the first time in years. The hunt puts them both in the crosshairs, and their deepening emotions have to take a back seat to getting out alive.
Oklahoma, dogs, beaches, books, family and friends: these are a few of MARILYN PAPPANO’s favorite things. She lives in imaginary worlds where she reigns supreme (at least, she does when the characters cooperate) and no matter how wrong things go, she can always set them right. It’s her husband’s job to keep her grounded in the real world, which makes him her very favorite thing.
Also By Marilyn Pappano (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
Copper Lake Secrets
In the Enemy’s Arms
Christmas Confidential
“Holiday Protector”
Copper Lake Confidential
Copper Lake Encounter
Undercover in Copper Lake
Bayou Hero
Nights with a Thief
Detective Defender
Killer Secrets
Killer Smile
Detective on the Hunt
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Detective on the Hunt
Marilyn Pappano
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-09465-8
DETECTIVE ON THE HUNT
© 2019 Marilyn Pappano
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Note to Readers (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
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Text to speech
“I said, thanks for your time.” JJ left it at that, but her smile suggested what she left unsaid. Though it wasn’t your choice.
“Not a problem.” Another of those annoying phrases. When had people stopped saying “you’re welcome”? He couldn’t recall.
She dug out her car keys and used the remote to unlock the Challenger before she opened the door. He watched her slide into the seat, a fluid movement of heavy brown coat and snug-fitting denim. When she moved to close the door, he hastily spoke.
“If you have any trouble with the neighbors…”
Now, why had Quint gone and said that? He was done. He’d followed Sam’s orders—had gone beyond them by going shopping and having lunch with her. Why give her even the faintest idea that he might be willing to do it again?
But he couldn’t take back the words, and when that naughty-little-girl grin lit up her face, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Dear Reader (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8),
There’s an old saying to write what you know, which is one of the reasons I write so many small-town books, but not the only one, mind you. I know small towns, and I love them. Though our few big-city years created great memories—hello, San Diego—I can’t see myself living anywhere now but the little Oklahoma town where I grew up. Granted, there’s a shortage of restaurants, and shopping’s limited pretty much to Walmart and the farm-supply store, but I can cook, and shopping’s overrated, anyway. Besides, where in a big city can you buy fried frog legs to munch on while you fill your gas tank?
This particular little town, Cedar Creek, is my hometown in disguise. Well, maybe not fully disguised. Slightly camouflaged might be more accurate. There are a few fictional places mixed in with enough real ones that the locals recognize it in spite of made-up names. It makes writing the books feel like…well, coming home.
In this book, I combined a second love—heroine JJ is from South Carolina. We lived there three times while my husband was in the navy, and it’s a special place. Of course, by the end of the story, JJ is willing to leave home and settle in Cedar Creek with Quint, just like I once moved from Oklahoma and settled a lot of places with my husband.
Because, after all, home is where the heart is, isn’t it?
Happy reading,
Marilyn
To my childhood partner in crime, my cohort and conspirator, and one of the very few people I know who really would be sitting beside me if I ever wound up in a jail cell, saying, “Dang, that was fun!” You’re the best cousin ever.
Yes, Hope Cooper, I’m looking at you. Love you!
Contents
Cover (#uf6c465ef-187d-5a65-9144-9c5e378517c8)
Back Cover Text (#uf07531ad-62fa-5797-a751-8b5dff367bfa)
About the Author (#u918f7c54-f32f-5274-9b41-fc8a0682ebd3)
Booklist (#u5d6feb7c-9b24-533a-9eec-4b1c293ef732)
Title Page (#u708688d4-8243-5cab-bd4b-237b6486e524)
Copyright (#udbbc057f-a052-5133-bec3-47b0d33123c1)
Note to Readers
Introduction (#ub3cf9b35-966a-52b1-9014-33a9d967baf6)
Dear Reader (#u1857aebb-72e9-55b3-9fd1-7db397399325)
Dedication (#ufb742a93-9995-5bbe-8bdb-34db59550a65)
Prologue (#u1c237759-2114-59ac-bf4d-4b2a21d18c07)
Chapter 1 (#u171e6c8d-d4e4-559b-8a54-9d029991c777)
Chapter 2 (#ud29aee7b-9efd-5251-a245-98c58742aa8a)
Chapter 3 (#uc2cca7db-e499-571c-b76c-892d9659ae27)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t fire you.”
Quint Foster kept his gaze steady on the upturned Stetson on Sam Douglas’s desk, kept his jaw shut tight and every muscle in his body wound like a spring. If he tried to answer the chief’s question, if he relaxed his control just that little bit, he would fall apart in a way he never had before. Never could.
Because he didn’t have the courage to put himself back together again.
“Damn it, Quint, you showed up drunk at a crime scene. You assaulted a prisoner in custody. What the hell—”
Sam broke off. Quint knew the question: What the hell is wrong with you? Just as Sam knew the answer: Belinda. The day she’d died, so had Quint. His body just hadn’t been smart enough to catch on. His brain functioned enough to keep his heart beating, but not enough to make him care about a damn thing. He’d lost everything that mattered except his job, and that was coming.
The thought echoed through the hollowness inside him. Losing his job… All he’d ever been, all he’d ever wanted to be, was a cop. For nearly twenty years, he’d been a good one. He’d advanced through the ranks to assistant chief. If things had continued as they’d been, he likely would have succeeded Sam as chief, if he didn’t retire before the boss.
Now, in another ten minutes, maybe fifteen if Sam was pissed enough, he would be turning in his badge and commission. He would walk out the front door for the last time, and he would truly have no reason to get out of bed again.
Sam remained silent, his steely glare unwavering. Quint didn’t have what it took to look at him, but he could feel the disapproval and disappointment and disgust radiating around him. He’d never imagined the day he would lose his boss’s respect, but here it was. It was only by the grace of God that Sam hadn’t thrown his ass in jail.
By the grace of something. Quint didn’t believe in God anymore. Maybe he was real, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he existed for other people but not for Quint. Every prayer, every plea, every moment he’d spent begging on his knees had been for nothing. Linny had died. He hadn’t.
“Damn it, Quint.” This time the words sounded more sorrowful than angry. Sam raked his fingers through his hair. “What am I supposed to do?”
For the first time in seventy-two hours, Quint made eye contact with his boss. His gut was knotted with dread at losing that last part of himself. He wanted to go to the men’s room and puke up everything in his stomach, then he wanted to go to the nearest bar and refill it with the cheapest crap they had. He wanted to die.
What he did was stand up very carefully. He pulled his badge from his belt, took his credentials from his back pocket and unholstered the gun on his hip. He had to clear his throat twice to make his voice work. “I’ll make it easy for you, Sam. I quit.”
Sam wasn’t surprised. “I don’t want you to quit. You’re a good cop, and I need good cops. I just need you to…”
If he said, “Get over it,” Quint would punch him in the face, and if he hit him once, he wouldn’t stop until he was pulled off.
“I need you to deal with it, Quint,” Sam said quietly. “I can’t even begin to guess how hard this is for you. Belinda was your world, and it’s unfair as hell that she’s gone, but you’re not. You can’t just crawl into your grief and wait to die. It’s not what she’d want. It’s not even what you want, or you would have already done something.”
Quint didn’t know if he should argue that last statement. He felt every year of his forty years twice over. He was tired. Worn-out. Hopeless. Faithless. Alone. Every morning since her death, he’d woken up and thought, damn, he’d survived another night. For a while, it had been a good damn. Everyone had told him—his family, his friends, Linny’s pastor—that recovery was a one-day-at-a-time deal. He was supposed to be grateful for each day he made it through, and in return, God was supposed to make each successive day a little easier.
It hadn’t happened.
“I don’t want you to quit,” Sam said again, “but I can’t keep you as assistant chief. I have to put you on probation. Back in uniform. Back on the street. Are you willing to do that?”
A sound halfway between a snort and a laugh escaped Quint. He sank into the chair again, rubbing hard at his eyes. He hadn’t been in uniform since he’d met Linny twelve years ago. He didn’t even own the current uniform; suits or tactical pants and polo shirts had been his work clothes. Everyone in the department—hell, in the whole damn town—would know he’d been demoted. They would scorn him or pity him. No one would ask his opinion, respect his judgment or even acknowledge all his years of good work. He’d be a patrol officer again, writing tickets, filling out reports on inconsequential incidents, turning the important cases—the cases he’d handled himself the past twelve years—over to detectives to investigate.
But he would still be a cop. He would still have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And given what he’d done, that was a hell of a lot more than he deserved.
His jaw didn’t want to unclench. His mouth didn’t want to form words, but he forced them out. “Yes, Chief. I’m willing.”
Chapter 1 (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
The sixth sense that JJ Logan considered as much a tool in her line of work as any of the physical, tangible ones made the back of her neck tingle. She lowered the binoculars from her eyes and shifted her gaze to the rearview mirror. A police vehicle, its lights on, was pulling to the side of the road behind her. She’d half expected this—a stranger with out-of-state tags on her car surveilling a local’s house just screamed for police intervention—but it gave her an odd feeling, being on the wrong side of the flashing red-and-blue lights.
A tall, lean man dressed in khakis got out. He seated his hat before he began walking toward her, tipping it so it shadowed most of his face, then stopped far enough away from her car that she couldn’t open the door and knock him off balance.
She liked caution in a cop. That was why she kept her hands resting loosely on the steering wheel. She waited, prepared to tell him right up front that she was a cop herself, to show him her ID, driver’s license and proof of insurance and tell him that she had a pistol in the console and a Taser on her hip.
Before she had a chance to even say hello, though, he surprised her.
“Are you Jennifer Jo Logan?”
She blinked, her mouth quirking the way it always did when she was called by her full name. Growing up, it had meant trouble, with consequences she deserved. Today, though, she couldn’t possibly have done anything to earn consequences. She didn’t know a soul in Cedar Creek, Oklahoma, and no one knew she was here besides her parents, her sisters and a few people back home. While watching someone’s house might provoke curiosity, it wasn’t actually illegal.
Except…one of those people who knew she was here and why was the person she trusted least in the world. Police Chief Bryan Chadwick. Her boss.
The officer was waiting, his expression immobile, and she forced a smile. “Yes, I’m JJ Logan. Can I help you?”
His carved-stone features didn’t shift. “Chief Douglas would like to have a word with you. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to the station.” His voice was deep, reminding her of the long-ago times of midnight radio broadcasts, sultry music and a honey-sweet, soothing voice. This morning, the voice was a little short on the honey. Instead it was raspy, heavy, what she would expect from someone who didn’t talk a whole lot.
“I know where it is, Officer…” Her gaze flickered to the brass nameplate on his shirt. “Foster.” She’d studied online maps of Cedar Creek, familiarizing herself with the places that would be important while she was here: the hotel, the police station and sheriff’s departments, the house she’d been watching just ahead and, of course, restaurants. Creek Café had a zillion five-star reviews, and there were Chinese, barbecue and steak places that were similarly popular. She was a real fan of food that someone else had prepped, cooked, served and cleaned up after, so she intended to visit every one of them.
Her smile, her cooperation and her friendly use of his name didn’t soften him one bit. “Then I’ll follow you.”
Ah. The chief’s request to see her wasn’t a request at all. Like a lot of small-town police chiefs, he probably didn’t play well with others, especially when those others wandered into his jurisdiction and didn’t show the courtesy of dropping by to introduce themselves. She’d told Chief Dipstick—er, Chadwick—that she wanted to check in with the locals, but he’d instructed her not to. This was family business, private—no need to involve anyone else.
That hadn’t been a request, either. Chief Dipstick considered himself so far superior to women that asking them for something would never cross his mind.
Suppressing a sigh, she looked up at Officer Foster again. Barely visible under his hat, his hair was blond, streaked with lighter strands that would be a definite gray in a few more years. Dark glasses hid his eyes, but with the blond hair and golden skin, she would put her money on blue. She would also bet they were as steely as…well, steel. To match the hard line of his jaw. He looked like a guy who was having a bad day. A guy who made other people have bad days.
Don’t get confrontational with a cop who is armed. One of her personal rules. With a thin but notoriously compliant smile, she said, “I appreciate the escort, Officer. Okay if I make a U-turn?”
His response was a slight tilt of his head.
As she started the engine, he stepped back, then returned to his vehicle, a huge black pickup truck emblazoned with the usual police stickers. A drug forfeiture? Or was Cedar Creek more generous with its police budget than Evanston, where her official car was a beater practically as old as she was?
The thud of Foster’s door sounded through her window as she shifted into Drive. The house holding her interest was the last one on this lonely street. Its nearest neighbor was half a block behind her, and the street ahead ended a hundred feet past its driveway, the pavement abruptly chopped and blocked to traffic with steel barriers. She’d intended to drive up there when she left, to use the driveway to turn around. To see whether there was a gate, any obvious security system, possibly a security guard.
She would have to come back to find out. This job required a face-to-face visit with Maura Evans, and JJ never left a job undone.
There were no curbs on the sides of the street, the newly greening grass growing right up to the concrete. Her Challenger didn’t require a lot of room to turn around. Frustrated, though, that the locals knew she was here—and pretty sure it was Chadwick who’d told them—she vented by expanding what should have been an easy three-point turn into five or six points.
“Yeah, no passive-aggressiveness in you, Detective Logan,” she murmured as she drove past the scowling Officer Foster with a half-hearted wave and back down the block.
She’d seen nothing worth seeing in her hour at the house Maura was renting, unless she counted the cat sunning on the patio table. Funny. She remembered Maura as a fierce dog lover with no interest in felines whatsoever. Granted, that was over fifteen years ago, and Maura had been a little kid. She’d changed, like all little kids did when they grew up, and JJ knew next to nothing about the woman she’d become.
Except that, according to the Evans family lawyer, she’d gotten lost in her grief after her parents’ deaths. She’d closed up the family mansion and hit the road in the überexpensive Mercedes that had been their last gift to her, and six months ago she’d settled in Cedar Creek. Three months ago she’d cut off all contact with her past life.
And now JJ was here to make sure everything was okay with her. According to Chadwick, she’d been his first choice to look into the matter. If she didn’t detest the man so much—and if he didn’t detest her even more—she might have taken that as a compliment. But she knew better. From his first day on the job, he’d made it clear that women had no place in his department and certainly not in his detective squad. The only problem: he couldn’t fire her without cause, and she was damn well determined not to give it to him.
Which left him one option: making things bad enough that she would quit. He’d alternated between assigning her cases so simple a brain-dead squirrel could close them and ones so lacking in evidence they would stump Sherlock Holmes, Columbo and Steve McGarrett combined. He nitpicked everything she did and everything she didn’t do. He disrespected her within the department and encouraged the real officers—read: male—to do the same. Publicly he was gracious, but privately he made her work life hell.
He hadn’t realized he was butting heads with the most stubborn person in town. JJ intended to outlast him, and the odds were in her favor. He’d come to Evanston after retiring from a small North Carolina police department. He was seventy-two, believed fervently in the Southern food adage If it ain’t fried, it ain’t done, drank like a fish and had high cholesterol, heart disease and high blood pressure. Sooner or later, he would retire again or die, and she would be there to wave him off—or throw the first shovel of dirt into his grave.
With a surprised look around, she realized she’d driven the few miles to the police station without noticing. When she’d worked traffic, she’d made a small fortune for the city of Evanston writing tickets to inattentive drivers, and now she didn’t remember how she’d gotten here.
Officer Foster in his big truck followed her to a parking space, left a couple of empty spots between them, then got out and met her at the rear of the vehicles. Though the morning had started off nippy, it had turned into a glorious March day. Things were greening, coming back to life. The sun was warm, and she would swear she could smell the fresh, sweet, woodsy fragrance of the flowers thirty yards ahead of them.
Unless… She weaved a bit closer to Officer Foster and surreptitiously took a deep breath. Yep, it was him, not the flowers. The scent made her mouth water and her stomach do a little butterfly twirl. Lovely, lovely.
There might be an upside to this gig, after all.
Probably in defense of her gleaming little car, Jennifer Jo Logan—JJ, Quint reminded himself—had parked at the farthest end of the lot from the station, six or eight spaces from the next nearest vehicle. Though she was half a foot shorter than him, she matched his strides without complaint. He was long out of the habit of slowing down to accommodate anyone with shorter legs—Don’t think of Linny—but now he made a conscious effort to shorten his steps.
Which gave him an opportunity to study JJ.
From a purely professional viewpoint.
She would have to stand on tiptoe to pass five foot six, and she was slender, curvy, soft, but she had an assured don’t-mess-with-me air about her. Her hair fell to her shoulders, nothing special, brown with a few reddish streaks, and her eyes were hazel, again nothing special.
And somehow, in spite of all that nothing special, she was pretty. Not beautiful, not the sort who would stop guys in their tracks, not like—
His jaw tightened, and he forced the thought to its conclusion: not like Linny. Linny had been gorgeous, with silky black hair that fell straight and sleek to her waist, skin so pale it might have never seen the sun, delicate and fragile and breathtaking.
JJ Logan wasn’t any of that. But neither was any other woman in the world.
Quint was comfortable with silence—had made himself become comfortable—but not so much her. It wasn’t more than a minute before she spoke. “How long have you been a cop?”
“A while.”
“You a local boy?”
“Yeah.”
“You like patrol?”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, realized she wasn’t looking and grunted instead.
An annoyed tone came into her voice. “Is your chief good, bad or indifferent?”
As if any cop who cared about his job would honestly answer that question from a stranger. Sam was damned good—Quint wouldn’t have a job if he wasn’t—but if the truth was one of the other two answers, no way he’d admit it. “Good.”
He thought he heard a sigh from her in response, but when she didn’t respond, he turned his attention to the police station ahead of them. The building was three stories, constructed of huge blocks of sandstone, with broad concrete steps leading to the double doors. More than a hundred years old, its purpose wasn’t just function; it provided beauty and solidity, elegance and grace—a quote from the city’s tourism brochure. It had been built to last, and it gave him a sense of…
He wasn’t sure how to identify the feeling. He’d spent sixteen months learning to ignore feelings, and it was hard, once a habit formed, to give it up again. Satisfaction wasn’t quite the right label. Neither was comfort. Security, maybe. It had stood there strong and whole his entire life, and it would still be there, strong and whole, long after he died. Unchanging. Constant.
They stepped onto the curb, walking between flower beds planted with hardy petunias, when JJ broke her silence. “Just for the record, I’m armed.”
He stopped. So did she. He wasn’t surprised. Most cops he knew didn’t go anywhere without some form of weapon. His surprise was that he hadn’t thought to ask her. Now he faced her, his gaze focused tightly as it moved down, then back up her body. Almost immediately, he spotted the slight bulge beneath her jacket on the left side indicating something holstered there, but he didn’t assume it was the only weapon.
Her white shirt was fitted, hugging her breasts and stomach, and couldn’t have concealed a thing. Her jeans, faded soft blue and showing signs of long-term wear, were snug over her hips and clung to her muscular thighs and calves, all the way down to the brown leather boots peeking out from beneath the hems.
Nothing special, he reminded himself.
“What is it?” he asked with a nod toward her caramel-colored suede jacket.
She pulled back the left side to reveal the black-and-yellow Taser holstered grip forward on her waistband. An easy position to draw from for a right-handed person. No doubt she normally wore her pistol on the right. No chance for a mix-up unless a person was an idiot.
“Is that all?”
A smile crinkled her eyes. “Where could I hide anything else?” Then a nod toward the Challenger. “My weapon’s locked in the car.”
Confirming what he suspected: JJ Logan was in Cedar Creek on a job—the reason Sam had sent him out to retrieve her in the first place. Sam liked to know what was going on in his town. Quint…he didn’t care that much anymore.
“Should I leave the Taser in the car?”
Quint shook his head. “Everyone inside is armed, too. You’re not a threat.”
She gave him a look halfway between hurt and insulted. “Don’t be so sure of that. You don’t even know me yet.” Smiling, she began moving again, reaching the bottom step before he gave himself a mental shake and followed.
He knew one thing: he didn’t want to know her. His life was steady. Predictable. Not happy, but the normal that had been forced on him. He didn’t need any upsets to his routine. He was going to deliver JJ Logan to Sam’s office, go back to his vehicle, forget he’d met her and get back to work. Back to the solitude he preferred.
Maybe not actually preferred, but had chosen. Or had it chosen him?
You can’t change the world, someone had told him, but you can change the way you react to it. And he had changed the only way he knew how. No reactions whatsoever. If he didn’t lose control, then he didn’t have to struggle to regain it.
JJ reached the double doors before he did, opened one and stepped back so he could enter first. It didn’t bother him. In Cedar Creek, courtesies like that weren’t assigned by gender. Whoever was there first did the honors, and sooner or later the honoree would do it for someone else.
She stopped a few feet inside the door to look. He was in and out of here five or six times a day. He rarely noticed the furnishings anymore, but JJ certainly did. The lobby was marbled, high-ceilinged, chandeliered and grandly staired. Behind the gleaming wooden counter, though, the ceiling had been dropped to a regular height with ugly acoustic tiles, and so much furniture had been crammed in that there was little breathing room.
Quint used to have his own office. Now, in the event he needed a desk, he used one of the two unclaimed ones against the back wall. One had two uneven legs, and the other was so scarred on top that it was impossible to write legibly without borrowing a solid surface from elsewhere.
The chief’s secretary, Cheryl, looked up and over the top of her glasses. “Sam’s in his office.”
Quint acknowledged her with a nod, seeing that everyone else was looking at them, too: Daniel Harper and Ben Little Bear, two of the detectives who’d once answered to him; Morwenna Armstrong, dispatcher and coqueen of local gossip along with Lois Gideon, their first female and first turquoise-haired officer; and three other patrol officers checking in for something or other. Quint knew they were interested in the visiting detective, not him, but bitterness stirred in his gut anyway. That sourness—regret or, more likely, shame—made its presence known damn near every time he came into the station.
He gestured to the hallway this side of the staircase. Too narrow to be called a corridor, it had been chopped out of other spaces and just barely allowed two people to pass without bumping shoulders, and that was only if one of them wasn’t Ben Little Bear. It was lighted by cheap ceiling fixtures circa the ’70s, and two of the four had burned out. Waiting for someone else to do something about them hadn’t worked, so maybe Quint would drag out the ladder before he went home today and change the bulbs. It was something to do.
Something to put off that moment of pulling into the driveway of his and Linny’s house. Of climbing the steps knowing the house was empty. Of opening the front door and walking into a space where her fragrance didn’t sweeten the air, where her laughter didn’t ring, where her presence was insubstantial.
The first door down the hall opened into Sam’s office. Quint rapped a little sharper than necessary, feeling the sting in his knuckles, then opened the door. He’d radioed in when he parked outside, so Sam was expecting them. This time, Quint stepped back and let JJ enter first. “Chief Douglas, Detective Jennifer—”
She cleared her throat.
“Detective JJ Logan,” he finished. “I’m headed back out—”
“Come on in, Quint. You should probably hear this.” Sam rose from his desk and shook hands with JJ, then directed her to one of two chairs in front of his desk.
Quint stiffened. No, he shouldn’t probably hear this. Whatever JJ was doing in Cedar Creek couldn’t have anything to do with him. Sam—he needed to know. Little Bear, Harper, the other detectives—they might need to know. But Quint was just a patrol officer. He wrote tickets, broke up brawls, handled domestic disputes. He didn’t need to be in the loop on the important stuff any more than the newest rookie out there did.
But he wasn’t about to argue with Sam, especially in front of a stranger. Reluctantly, he pivoted back into the room, closed the door and, ignoring the empty chair, leaned against the edge of the table butted up to one wall. It gave him a good head-on look at his boss, with only a peripheral view of JJ.
“I bet you got a call this morning from South Carolina,” she said pleasantly.
“I did,” Sam agreed.
“From Chief Chadwick?”
“It was.”
Though JJ’s tone hadn’t changed when she spoke her boss’s name, something about it, or about her, reminded Quint of the question she’d asked out front. Is your chief good, bad or indifferent? Not idle conversation, then. His intuition was willing to bet that she put Chadwick as squarely in the second category as Quint put Sam in the first. Personality conflict? Professional differences? Was Chadwick a bad chief, was JJ a bad cop or did the truth fall somewhere in the middle?
That feeling rousing in his gut felt vaguely like curiosity, maybe even plain old interest. How long had it been since he’d been interested in anything?
Maybe he’d been wrong outside. Maybe he did want to know more about JJ Logan.
JJ tried to not let her nose wrinkle with distaste at Chief Douglas’s last answer. She’d known Chadwick couldn’t be trusted. If she told Douglas—and the handsome Officer Foster—that Chadwick had specifically told her to not touch base with them, she would seem petty or defensive. Besides, no cop bad-mouthed her chief to cops she’d just met. That would be a big step toward giving Dipstick the reason he needed to fire her.
So she put on her best trust-me face—a smile that was neither over-nor underwhelming, her gaze clear and steady—and added a bit of sheepishness to it. “I really did intend to come by later today. I was just eager to get to work.”
“Work,” Chief Douglas repeated. “What’s your interest in Maura Evans?”
Had Chadwick told him the truth about that or tried to screw her there, too? Was she going to tell her story only to find his had been totally different and thereby look like an idiot—worse, an untrustworthy idiot—in front of these fellow officers?
Nothing she could do but be honest herself. If the boss had muddied things between her and the local department, she would just have to make the best of it.
“Maura’s a local girl. She left town a few years ago after her parents’ deaths. She’s twenty-five, single, still grieving…and very wealthy. She settled here in Cedar Creek about six months ago and, three months later, cut off contact with everyone back home—friends, relatives, the family attorney who also happens to be her godfather. He wants to know what’s going on with her.”
She saw a flicker of expression—negative—cross Officer Foster’s face, making it easy to guess what he was thinking. Spoiled rich girl, selfish, entitled, the center of her own universe—her influential lawyer godfather taking advantage of the system, the chief giving in to political pressure to treat Maura as if she were special.
It was harder to tell with his chief, though. Douglas’s expression gave away nothing, and neither did his tone. “Your department must be blessed with detectives—and funds—if they can send one halfway across the country to do a welfare check on one of our residents.” Then came a faint whiff of disapproval. “A check that we would have happily handled for you if you’d just called.”
Her smile thinned. Hey, she wasn’t onboard with this, either. She had much more important cases she could be working on, cases where there was actually a police interest. “Did I mention that the town Maura Evans left is named Evanston? The Evans family have been rich and powerful since they founded the town in 1804. They donated land, set up charities, ran businesses, built schools and libraries and churches and hospitals. The men were war heroes, and the women were social workers ahead of their time. They are one ridiculously wealthy family that everyone in town respects and cares about.”
She hesitated, then corrected herself. “They were. Maura has distant relatives, but she’s the last one in the direct line.” People would have treated her like their greatest, most fragile treasure if she hadn’t fled town after the funerals. But no one blamed her for that. How could she have stayed in that town with its all memories, in that house knowing…?
With a suppressed shudder, JJ shifted her gaze to Officer Foster. Quint, the chief had called him. She liked the name. It was neither overly common nor trendy nor so unusual as to be unspellable, unpronounceable or unmemorable. “I really was just having a look around out there this morning.”
His only response was the smallest of shrugs. The chief, on the other hand, raised one brow. “That’s what you call surveillance back in South Carolina? Having a look around?”
“All right, yes, I parked down the street from her house this morning for fifteen minutes…maybe thirty…maybe an hour.” She couldn’t resist a rueful grin, the one her sisters called her mischief grin. Standard when she’d been caught with the cookie jar in her hands and chocolate chips smeared across her face, saying, Yes, I’m guilty, but I’m just so darn adorable, you have to forgive me for it. Dad always had. Mom usually had. She achieved varied success with others, and it looked like none whatsoever with Quint Foster.
Aw, she’d really like for him to find her adorable. If not him… She remembered the other officers she’d seen when they’d come in. Good-looking, every last one of them. Hopefully, between work, she’d manage some play on this trip, too.
“Along with a pair of binoculars, a map of the city, a camera, a large cup of coffee and an empty bag from Ted’s Doughnuts.”
JJ was impressed that Quint had been so observant. With those dark glasses he’d had on, of course, she couldn’t see where his gaze was directed, but it had felt as if it was on her the whole time. Obviously not.
“Didn’t take her long to figure out where the best doughnuts in town are, did it?” Douglas murmured.
Though the comment wasn’t directed at her, she responded with a little shrug. “Cops and doughnuts. What can I say?”
He smiled briefly at the stereotype, then opened the laptop and began clicking away. She’d never had a chief who was anywhere near her age, but she would bet Sam Douglas was even a few years younger. He didn’t wear a uniform—Chadwick always wore a uniform with four shiny gold stars on his collar to ensure everyone recognized him as the head honcho—but instead was dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. A soft-looking gray cowboy hat was on the file cabinet to the left of his desk, leading her to expect cowboy boots on his feet if she could get a peek.
You’re definitely not in Carolina anymore, JJ.
“Okay, Detective Logan—we don’t stand on ceremony much around here. All right if I call you JJ?”
She nodded.
“I’m Sam, and he’s Quint.”
Wow. She’d never had a chief who was that casual, either. Even the last one, her mentor, had never invited her to use his first name. He’d believed in good work relations, but there was a line that should never be crossed.
“You didn’t ask what we know, but we’ll tell you anyway. You have the address of the house Maura’s renting. You know she drives a little red car that cost more than a lot of people’s houses around here. I’ve never met her myself, but my officers have handled four disturbance calls at that address for loud parties and given her three—no, four citations for speeding.”
Disturbance calls at that big house at the end of that lonely street. Those must have been some parties.
“Quint gave her three of those tickets.”
She shifted her gaze to Quint. He hadn’t changed position—he still leaned against the table—but his posture seemed fractionally more rigid, his expression harder. She was half surprised he could open that taut jaw to add, “I also answered one of the disturbance calls with Ben.”
Sam frowned. “Why was Ben answering a disturbance call?”
“He was in the office when it came in. Loud party, forty or so people, lot of booze.”
JJ called to mind the area across the hall that served as reception, dispatch and detective squad, including a very tall, very broad-shouldered muscular man. “I’m going to guess Ben is the big guy out there at one of the desks.”
Sam nodded. “Six foot four, solid muscle, can make you confess to anything just so he’ll go away and stop looking at you. No matter how drunk people are, they never want to take on Ben Little Bear.”
She envied that. When she was in uniform, all the drunks had wanted to take her on. She’d been forced to perfect her combat skills and had developed quite an affection for her nonlethal resources: baton, pepper spray and Taser.
“When was the last time you saw Maura?” Sam asked Quint.
“The day I gave her that last ticket.” Quint’s scowl was slightly more fierce than his normal expression. “About two months ago. She was doing forty-eight in a twenty.”
JJ smiled faintly. “That sounds like Maura. The day her parents gave her that car, she got stopped for speeding in town and again in the county. Notice I said stopped, not ticketed. The officer and the deputy let her go when they realized who she was. I wrote her father a ticket once. Got called back to the station and royally chewed out.”
“Must be nice to have so much influence.” Cynicism made Quint’s voice dry as parched sand.
“I can live without it.” She crossed her legs and let her foot tap air a few times. “At home, we have a dispatcher named Carla and a patrol officer named Patrick who know everything there is to know about everyone in town.”
Quint and Sam exchanged looks before the chief answered. “That would be Morwenna and Lois. Quint, why don’t you show her the conference room and I’ll get them.”
Quint straightened to his full height easily and fluidly. She, on the other hand, felt the stiffness of two days’ driving and another few hours’ sitting. While she was here, she needed to make time for regular runs, long walks or—her gaze slid from his golden hair over his chest, his narrow waist and narrower hips, down long legs to the black tactical boots he wore—ah, yes, physical activity of some sort.
Without realizing it, she’d registered at some point that, unlike Sam, he wore no wedding ring. She had only two hard-and-fast rules in her romantic life, and one was that she didn’t dally with married men. She’d pulled enough enraged wives off their husbands’ girlfriends, hands filled with hair and fingernails leaving deep gouges, to know the best sex in the world wasn’t worth that.
The other rule was that her butterflies had to twirl and her heart had to pitter-patter.
Check on the butterflies. And—she caught the slight increase of her heart rate—check on the pitter-patter.
But what were the odds she’d be here long enough to thaw him out?
Showing JJ to the conference room took about five seconds: out the door, turn right, go to the next door. Quint flipped on the overhead, then went to open the blinds on the tall windows. The light flooding the room illuminated the intricate crown molding, original to the building, along with the battered table, cast-off chairs and unwanted desks bunched against one wall.
“Interesting room,” she remarked as she made her way to a chair. “The marble floor is gorgeous, and the moldings are incredible.”
“But everything in between sucks.”
“Except for the windows, pretty much.” She sat at the far end, where sunlight filtered through the blinds. The position would give her a good look at everyone else while she would be shadowy when they looked back. He bet she had all kinds of similar tricks up her detective’s sleeve.
He should ask Sam if he could go now, but Sam hadn’t included that in his instructions. For whatever reason—probably because Maura lived in Quint’s patrol district—he wanted Quint to know all this, and because Quint was damn grateful to have his job, he was going to obey. But he’d still rather be outside, alone in his vehicle, with nothing for company but the radio broadcasts.
JJ’s chair was pushed back from the table, leaving her room to cross her legs again. Her spine was straight, barely touching the back of the chair, and except for the heavy jacket, her clothing clung, shirt hugging her breasts just short of straining the buttons, denim stretching over her thighs. Most women he knew with that kind of posture had suffered through years of ballet or gymnastics. He tried to imagine her in leotards or tights, tumbling or pirouetting on her toes, but the image wouldn’t form. Swinging a baseball bat or breaking a board with her bare foot seemed far more likely.
She brushed her hair back, and sunlight flashed on a stone on her left hand. It was on her ring finger, fiery orange set in gold. A nontraditional engagement or wedding ring, or just a piece of jewelry she liked? He wouldn’t find it hard to believe she was unconventional. Wouldn’t find it hard to believe she was married, either.
Didn’t matter to him either way.
“What is your impression of Maura?”
Embarrassment heated Quint’s neck but luckily burned inward instead of out. From the moment the dispatcher had passed on the call to check the stranger on Maura’s street, he’d known in the back of his mind that this had to do with Maura. Who else on that street was interesting enough for surveillance? The young couple with four kids in the house fifty feet behind where she’d parked? The elderly sisters? The two college girls down the street or Jamey Moran, the deputy fire marshal who was so clean he squeaked?
But the front part of his brain hadn’t wanted to give it any thought. Now he had no choice, so he gave the most superficial answer that came to mind. “She’s a bad driver with too much time and money on her hands.”
JJ tilted her head to one side. “That’s it?”
Acknowledging that he seemed to be getting further away from returning to his vehicle instead of closer, he swallowed a sigh and took a chair near her end of the table, leaving an empty space between them. “I don’t know her. My interaction with her has been less than thirty minutes, all calls combined.”
That was true. But he was leaving out the fact that the last time he’d stopped her, Maura had offered to remedy the not-knowing-each-other thing if he wouldn’t write the ticket. He’d stood there in her driveway—she’d refused to stop until she reached the house—and smelled the sweet scent of her perfume, watched the breeze mold her already-tight dress even closer to her body, and sweet hell, he’d been tempted. He’d been alone so long. So damn alone. Sometimes he’d missed human contact so much that he’d physically hurt with it, and he’d thought…
It had shamed him then, and it did now. He’d thought Maura was no one special. She would never mean anything to him. He could use her to ease his pain and never have to bother with her again. He’d never treated women as disposable, but it had held a strong appeal that day.
Then she’d touched him, and it had had the effect of a gut punch, slamming home one important truth: he didn’t want human contact. He wanted Linny. No one could ever replace her, not for a night, for an hour or a minute, and certainly not some rich girl who thought avoiding a hundred-dollar ticket was worth trading sex for.
Disgusted with himself, he’d removed her hand, a bit of a struggle when she’d already insinuated her fingers inside his belt and didn’t want to let go. She’d pouted, called him a few names, torn up the ticket and let the wind scatter the pieces. And after that, he’d turned a blind eye to her driving infractions, just like those South Carolina cops did. Don’t poke the bear, his father used to say. The next time he might not walk away with his dignity intact.
“She was self-centered. Used to getting her way. She fluttered her lashes and smiled real pretty and expected problems to go away. I have no idea why she settled here. There aren’t a lot of restaurants, no clubs that would appeal to someone like that, no shopping besides Walmart, a couple of small clothing stores and the antique stores downtown, and name-dropping wouldn’t get her anywhere this far from home. Cedar Creek doesn’t have anything to offer her.”
That was the most he’d said at one time in months. His chest was tight, his lungs empty from putting together so many words. It was an odd feeling, hearing so much of his own voice when he generally got through the day with minimal talking.
He drew a breath and turned the question around. “What is your impression of her?”
Her smile was easy. “She was self-centered and used to getting her way. But I don’t think she could really help it, given who she was and where and how she was raised. I don’t think she was strong enough to develop any independence or real sense of character when every soul in her life expected her to be a princess.
“I babysat her one summer. I had graduated from college, and her mother was busy, and I had some time on my hands before the academy started. She was spoiled, of course, but not rotten. She just expected things to go her way because they always had. It never really occurred to her that they wouldn’t until her parents…”
Quint watched as JJ’s mouth thinned, her affect darkened. “How did they die?”
She bit her lower lip, full and soft peach in color, then blew out her breath. “They were murdered five years ago. Home invasion. I had stopped by my parents’ house a few blocks away, so I was the first officer on the scene. Their bodies were found by the housekeeper, but Maura came in a few minutes after I got there and saw…everything.”
The twinge of sympathy Quint felt surprised him. He’d always been empathetic—most cops were—but the only person he’d felt sorry for in the last year and a half had been himself. Maura had been twenty at the time. How deeply had that sight scarred her? If she hadn’t been strong before, that experience certainly wouldn’t make her any stronger. So she’d coped by running away, by living fast and partying hard and trying her damnedest to forget the memories. By drinking and using drugs and having meaningless sex.
But sympathy didn’t mean he wanted any contact with her again. It didn’t mean he particularly cared what state her life was in. He just didn’t have it in him to care right now.
He shoved back the discomfort that admission caused and refocused his attention on JJ. “So, you’re going to go talk to her, make sure she’s okay and go home.” He said it as a statement because that was what he wanted to happen. Like he’d thought earlier, he didn’t want upset in his life. It was routine that got him through the days—and quiet desperation that carried him through the nights—and like a cranky old dog, he needed to stick to that routine as much as possible.
“Actually, I’m going to look around first. Talk to your dispatcher and your officer, maybe visit her neighbors, her landlord.” Her lips thinned again, but thoughtfully this time. “As I said, she’s very wealthy. Her godfather is executor of her parents’ estate. About ten million went to their favorite charities, but Maura got the rest. I don’t know how many zeroes are tacked onto her net worth, but she gets an allowance of $100,000 a month, which she never completely spent until she came here. She’s young, rich, grieving, vulnerable.”
Quint ignored the statement that she was going to stay around longer than necessary—he wouldn’t have to deal with her—and laced his fingers together. “So her godfather is concerned because this spoiled rich kid is spending more money than usual?”
“No, not just that. For all her flaws, Maura was very close to her parents. She left town after they died and traveled constantly until she came here, but no matter where she was, she remembered every holiday—their birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day—with deliveries of extravagant flowers. Even when she was trekking in Nepal and on a tourist expedition to the South Pole, she sent the flowers. But she missed both their birthdays last month.”
“Maybe she’s coping better now. Maybe she realizes flowers don’t change anything.” They made the grave site prettier, let people know that the person who occupied that grave had someone who loved them in death as much as they had in life. But they didn’t ease the pain. They didn’t make life any easier. They didn’t help you survive another day or another week. They were a gesture, but a pretty meaningless one from his experience.
“It was important to her,” JJ disagreed. “Also, in the last three months, she’s only gotten in touch with Mr. Winchester, her godfather, twice by text. The first time, she demanded more cash, and the second, she threatened to sue him for control of the money. Mr. Winchester and his wife are also important to her. They’re her second parents. It’s out of character for her.”
Quint wasn’t convinced anything was out of character for someone like Maura. Pretty, entitled, spent her money freely, shared herself freely… Unpredictable seemed the best word to describe her. Hell, she’d gone from South Carolina to the South Pole to Small Town, Oklahoma, where her name meant nothing. Out of character seemed to be the only constant in her character.
But it wasn’t his problem.
That was the best part of the situation. Once he left the station, he was out of it.
Chapter 2 (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
JJ rose from her chair when Sam escorted two women into the conference room. She’d noticed both women when she and Quint had arrived and had presumed Sam got busy on the way back or Lois had gone back on patrol and he’d had to wait until she returned. The women greeted her with friendly smiles and very curious gazes. Oh yeah, they were just like Carla and Patrick at home. In seconds, they’d summed her up, cataloging her from head to toe as efficiently as any machine.
After shaking hands, she sat down again and told them why she was in town, watching their faces when she named Maura. Recognition lit both pairs of eyes.
“Wild child,” Lois said immediately. She was the officer, the older of the two, compact and competent, her short hair colored a blast of fresh blue that suited her perfectly. “Lot of money, lot of parties, lot of spending. Drives a flashy little red convertible that I would look so good in—” she preened accordingly “—and thinks speed limits and red lights are more suggestions than actual laws.”
Morwenna, the dispatcher, was young enough to be Lois’s daughter, pretty, soft, her clothing bright and mismatched enough to present a danger to everyone’s vision. A faint hint of an accent came and went from her voice as she agreed. “I don’t think she’s a bad person. She’s just spoiled. But she’s very generous, too. We’ve run into her and her friend a couple times in Tulsa, and she paid for everyone’s drinks all night long, then took us to a late dinner—er, early breakfast when we were done. And her parties are always popular. I went once—too loud and too much booze and—” she glanced at Sam “—and, uh, weed for me. And the police show up at least every other time, and I didn’t want a lecture from you, Sam, for being at a party where the cops were called.”
Nothing new there, JJ thought. The cops at home had often gotten called to Maura’s parties. She’d held them at other kids’ houses because the Evans family home would have shaken on its foundations at such goings-on. She’d invited a few friends, who invited a few friends and so on, until two or three hundred people from all over that part of the state showed up. The liquor had flowed freely, the pot had perfumed the air and who knew what else the kids had been doing?
“You mentioned a friend,” JJ said to Morwenna. “Man or woman? Do you remember a name?”
The dispatcher propped her foot on the seat of her chair, wrapping her arms around one leg covered in Easter-patterned tights. The yellow chickies, white bunnies and pastel eggs were cute, but the lime-green shirt over a fiery-red tank… It would give Chadwick apoplexy if one of his dispatchers showed up dressed that way.
JJ liked the outfit for that reason alone.
“It was a girl, but her name was a guy’s name.” Morwenna pressed her lips together and quirked her mouth to one side while tugging on her ponytail. “Mick, Mike…no, Mel. The last name was common. Smith, Jones, something like that.”
Lovely. There was nothing so tedious as searching for someone with a common surname. It was one of Chief Dipstick’s favorite jobs for JJ. “Is Mel a local girl?”
“Not Cedar Creek. We thought she was a cousin or something. Blond hair, blue eyes, cute little nose—” Morwenna tapped her own less-than-little nose “—little Cupid’s bow mouth. Same attitude, same entitlement.”
“There was definitely a resemblance,” Lois said.
“They were really tight for a while. Mel was at her house all the time. She practically lived there. Maybe she did live there, at least for a while.”
That made sense. Maura had never been a quiet, rely-on-herself sort of person. She needed companionship and entertainment. All that traveling… JJ had thought she was getting acquainted with herself, plumbing depths that no one knew she had, but maybe not.
“What happened to Mel?” Sam asked.
“Maura said she went home. She was getting bored with Cedar Creek. She never mentioned where home was for either of them.”
“When was that?”
Morwenna shrugged, her vibrant image blurring in JJ’s gaze. “Three or four months ago. I’m not sure. We aren’t really friends. We just hung out a few times.”
JJ made a mental note to ask Mr. Winchester if there was an Evans relative named Mel—Melody, Melinda, Melanie. As far as she knew, the Evanses had no close relatives. Neither of Maura’s parents had had any siblings, and she’d been an only child herself. But in a lot of Southern families, the Logans included, a cousin was a cousin, no matter how many times removed.
Sam handed out notepads and pens from the battered desk and asked everyone to make a list of Maura’s associates. While the women started writing, Quint declined. “She was alone when I stopped her, and I didn’t know anyone at the party.” He shrugged. “I’m more likely to recognize those kids’ parents than them.”
JJ’s gaze settled on the stone in her ring. It was a Mexican fire opal, orange-red, her birthstone. It was a lucky stone, her mother had told her, symbolic of hope and innocence, a god’s tears turned to stone and colored with the fire of lightning. JJ wasn’t sure about any of that, but touching it did help her think better.
One of Mr. Winchester’s concerns that she hadn’t brought up earlier was the possibility that Maura was being influenced by someone. Con artists were always on the lookout for easy targets, and between her sorrow, her dependence and her immaturity, she would be one of the easiest. The payoff for the crook could be in the tens of millions of dollars. Was that Mel’s role in her life? Manipulating all that lovely money into her own greedy hands?
Or maybe she really was a relative. Or a friend. Maybe more than a friend. Mel had left Cedar Creek about the time of the change in Maura’s behavior. A broken heart could certainly explain a lot, especially with a twenty-five-year-old who’d already lost so much.
But shouldn’t that have strengthened the tie to her godfather? Would she actually threaten the only person left in her life because her girlfriend had left her?
Maybe. If she was distraught enough. If she’d thought he was too conventional to understand.
The women finished their lists at the same time and passed them to her. Morwenna’s, written with loops and swirls, was longer, while Lois’s, in graceful old-school cursive, was more detailed. JJ thanked them as they stood and, after a moment’s chitchat, left the room.
Sam slid a piece of paper down the table toward her. “She owns the house Maura’s renting. Quint will go with you.”
Annoyance flickered across Quint’s face, and for an instant, JJ was half insulted on two fronts. She had conducted hundreds of interviews all by herself and didn’t need help with this one. And Quint should have realized by now that she was fun. Smart. Could carry a conversation all by herself. She was an easy companion. And adorable.
And he was cranky. Not a people person. Not thrilled with the idea of giving up a good part of his day to babysit the out-of-town cop when he had better things to do. She totally got that. She had lots of better things to do than make sure Maura was coping. With all that money, Maura could buy everything she needed: someone to pamper her, take care of her, entertain her, have sex with her, clean up after her. She could even buy someone to love her.
She and Mr. Winchester had managed to temporarily buy JJ herself, though against her will.
“I don’t really need an escort,” she said, standing to her full height, unimpressive as it was with men who both topped six feet.
Sam’s smile was part genuine, part sly. “I promised your chief we’d do all we could to help out.”
She was considering baring her teeth at him when he went on.
“Besides, Mrs. Madison doesn’t take kindly to many cops. Quint happens to be one of the exceptions. She’ll be more likely to talk to you if he’s with you.”
So instead, she bared her teeth at Quint, disguising it as a smile. “Then I appreciate the offer. And I thank you for your time, Sam.”
Folding the notepaper into a neat rectangle, she tucked it into her hip pocket, slid the chair under the table and followed the two men out of the room. Sam turned immediately into his office. Quint moved toward the front door with long, natural strides, making for a pleasant view as she followed him.
Momentum carried her to the edge of the first step, where she stopped cold. “Holy cats, what happened with the weather?”
Quint drew up as he realized she’d gone stationary. “Cold front moved in.”
“Damn.” The sky had darkened, and the breeze had morphed into a merciless wind with a bite that made her so-cute-and-comfortable jacket totally inadequate. Too bad she hadn’t brought anything warmer. Too bad she didn’t own anything warmer.
She hugged herself tightly as she hustled down the steps and started across the lot. Her exposed skin was seriously cold, and the kind of bone-deep shivers that were actually painful were starting. She had no clue how many degrees the temperature had dropped while they were inside—thirty or more?—but it was way outside her comfort zone. She needed protection from the wind, and she needed it now.
Quint easily matched her stride. She knew a lot of men who used their longer, faster steps as a passive-aggressive outlet when they dealt with her five-foot-five-inch self. She’d long since stopped trying to keep up, especially when they were traveling in the same vehicle. Let them dawdle at the car, she’d decided, because generally they couldn’t leave without her.
At the black pickup, he beeped the doors, slid inside and moved his black duty jacket from the passenger seat while she climbed up. Adjusting the mounted laptop to give herself an extra couple of inches of space took a second longer than it should have because the chills had worked their way from the inside out, and ditto with the seat belt. “Heat, please,” she requested before her teeth started chattering.
He gave her a sidelong look as he started the engine. “Are you that cold?”
“South Carolina has a humid subtropical climate. In Evanston, fifty degrees is a frigid winter day. I break out my jackets at sixty.”
He grunted before turning the heat on high. “Windchill’s supposed to drop to around ten. You might want to put on those jackets before we go see Mrs. Madison.”
“I didn’t bring them. It’s March. It’s springtime.” She tucked her fingers underneath each arm to stop them from turning blue. He didn’t even seem affected, and he was wearing short sleeves.
“Here, winter’s not over until summer.”
She luxuriated in the rapidly warming air blowing from the vents, finally loosening her self-hug so she could hold her hands out. When her heart had recovered from the shock and started pumping warm blood again, she settled back. “Why does Mrs. Madison not like police officers?”
“Family tradition. None of them were very good at walking the straight and narrow.”
They had plenty of those families in and around Evanston. Some of them were belligerent about it, but others, at least, disliked the police from the right side of the law. “And why does she like you?”
“She doesn’t exactly like me. She tolerates me. She and my mother’s family were neighbors.”
JJ doubted the first part of his statement. Once people got past his stiff, stern exterior, she figured, they liked what they found. Sam, Lois and Morwenna certainly seemed to have a bond with him.
She gazed out the window at the sometimes pretty, sometimes shabby, sometimes overcommercialized town that Maura had chosen to live in. It really wasn’t so different from Evanston. Smaller, not quite so prosperous, but she was certain it had its charm when the sun was shining and the air was sweet and warm.
She’d studied the Cedar Creek map, but it was always good to see exactly where to find the ice cream store and the grubby little hamburger joint that surely made the best burgers in town. In this particular case, they were south of downtown on Main Street. Another mile down, they passed a Whataburger, and her mouth started watering.
When she was a kid, every time they visited their grandparents in Florida, Grandpa had taken her and her sisters to Whataburger for a burger, fries and shake. Given that her mom and Grandma both had an unnatural aversion to fast food, it was always an absolute delight.
She intended to delight all over one later today.
When the street ended a moment later, Quint turned right. Three blocks later, he pulled into the parking lot of an assisted-living facility. Who’s going to take care of you when you get old if you don’t have kids? Mom routinely asked. You’ll wind up in one of those old folks places.
This one didn’t look so bad. The outside was well maintained, and inside, the lobby smelled of flowers and wood polish and, faintly, Italian spices, tomatoes and onions. Large windows let in a lot of light, and plants brightened even the darkest corners.
Quint signed them in, and they took the elevator to the third floor. Their strides weren’t so evenly matched this time. In fact, if she were a suspicious person, she would think he was practically skulking along the far wall, head down, shoulders hunched, face turned to the left. When he actually raised his right hand and pulled his hat even lower as they passed an open door, she made a quick note of the room number—318—then watched him revert to normal. Or, at least, his variant of normal.
Interesting.
With a silent sigh of relief at passing room 318 unnoticed, Quint stopped at 327 and rapped on the door. The voice that called a response was soft, frail, sounding like a fragile old lady summoning up her dying breath to invite them in.
He knew better.
Georgia Madison’s apartment consisted of a tiny kitchen that went mostly unused, a small living room and, visible through an open door, a bedroom. It was brightly lit to offset the gloominess outside, with table lamps and hanging globes of vivid colored glass. They were every shape and size: royal blue beside an orange the shade of JJ’s ring, sunny yellow and green and a red that set the standard for all reds.
Georgia was sitting in a recliner near the floor-to-ceiling windows. Her hair was a mix of faded black, steel gray and white, her face lined with wrinkles, her eyes displaying her perpetual distrust of the unexpected. When she recognized him, some of the distrust faded, only to return in intensity at the sight of JJ.
“First time you come to see me in months, and you bring a copper with you?” She shook her head with mild disgust. Then she broke into a smile for him. “How are you, Quint?”
“I’m good, Georgie.” It was a blatant lie, and going by her second head shake, this one with mild sorrow, she recognized it.
He gestured to JJ, who’d stopped beside him. “Mrs. Georgia Madison, this is JJ Logan. You’re right, she is a cop. But she’s not out to get you.”
“All cops are out to get everyone.” The old lady gave JJ an appraising look, then nodded. “Sit. Ask your questions.”
JJ chose the couch, settling naturally into that perfect posture he’d noted earlier. Quint sat with a creak in the rocker a few feet to her left. The chair was old, the finish faded, but it was comfortable in ways a brand-new one could never be. He’d always sat in this chair when he’d visited the Madison home as a kid. It had squeaked badly even back then, and rocking in it had been one of his pleasures, until the inevitable warning from whichever adult was closest to please stop that.
He hadn’t thought about the chair, or those visits, or that time of his life in a very long while.
“How did you know I’m a cop?” JJ asked.
“Really? That’s the question you want to lead with?” Georgie gave an eye roll and a sigh, both heavily exaggerated. “It’s the look. Quint has it. That good-looking Little Bear kid he works with has it, that little guy, Harper—hell, everyone down there at thug headquarters. All good cops have the look.”
JJ considered, then accepted her answer as a compliment if her satisfied look was anything to judge by. “Do you prefer that I call you Mrs. Madison, Miss Georgia or Georgie?”
“Quint’s the only one in this room who can call me Georgie. For all other coppers, it’s Mrs. Madison.”
“All right, Mrs. Madison, can I ask you a few questions about the woman renting your house on Willow Street?”
“You can ask whatever you want, and I’ll answer whatever I want. And of course it’s my house on Willow Street. It’s the only house I own.” She humphed. “So? What do you want to know? I’m ninety-six years old, honey. Time’s a-wasting.”
JJ muttered, “And they say the good die young.” Her voice was barely a whisper, and her mouth hardly moved, but that wasn’t going to save her, Quint knew. Georgie heard everything.
Georgie’s brows drew together in a frown. He thought for half a second about intervening but decided against it. The old woman was more than happy to spread her ire around, and he was more than willing to let her. Instead, he sat back, rested his ankle on the other knee and rubbed at a scuff on his boot.
“Let me tell you something, little girl. Disrespecting a fragile elderly woman that you want information from isn’t the smartest way to go. My hair may be gray, my bones may be weak and my body may be giving up while I’m still using it, but my hearing is as good as ever, so a little politeness is in order here.”
Quint waited for JJ’s flush, for her eyes to widen with dismay and words of apology to tumble out of her mouth. That was how people always reacted to Georgie, especially coppers. But not this one. JJ arched one brow and fixed her steady, challenging gaze on her adversary. “That politeness extends both ways. Besides, I bet you never aspired to be good or die young, so that’s probably more of a compliment than an insult.”
Okay, she’d surprised him. He wouldn’t be surprised by Georgie’s response, because he had zero idea what it would be. He’d never known anyone who, when dressed down by Georgie for her attitude, displayed even more attitude.
He should have left JJ downstairs in the lobby. Better yet, he should have just called Georgie and asked about Maura. But hell, who ever would have thought he would be the more tactful of any two people in the world?
Georgie’s stare simmered for a long moment, then she pointed one long, thin finger JJ’s way. “You should be scared of me.”
“Ha. You never met my grandmother Raynelle. She was a lot like you, only she was really scary.”
Georgie considered the name a moment. “I don’t know any Raynelles. Where are you from?”
“South Carolina.”
“And they say Southern women are genteel. Apparently, they never met you.” Georgie snorted before relenting. “You’re right. I never did aspire to be good, just like you never cared about being genteel. And you can call me Miss Georgie. I like the la-di-da sound of that. So what do you want to know about Maura Evans?”
Quint blinked. He’d seen Georgie chew up grown people and spit ’em out. If she’d been a cat, she would have been the sort who tormented the mouse mercilessly before killing it. JJ should have been lucky to walk out of here with her skin intact.
Instead, they both looked smugly satisfied. Like they’d come to some kind of agreement and would now make nice of their own accord. He’d never seen Georgie make nice with anyone outside her family or his.
JJ set her clasped hands on her lap. “Have you met Maura?”
“Of course. I’m not going to let someone move into my own house without getting a good look at her. My granddaughter showed her the house.” Georgie’s faded gaze darted to Quint. “Twenty-three and hasn’t been to jail once.”
“Yet,” he tacked on, making her grin. Truth was, none of her family had been to jail in his lifetime. They’d gotten tamed before he was even born. But they’d still nursed that family animosity toward the law.
“She’s going to be a schoolteacher. Graduates from OSU next December.” Georgie rummaged in the drawer beside her chair and drew out an electronic cigarette. Her smoking had been the nastiest habit under the sun, his mother used to declare, even though Georgie had never smoked in anyone’s house, not even her own. At her age, he figured, she was entitled to a few vices. Smoking, a glass of whiskey before bed and terrorizing the other old folks in the home were all she could manage.
“When Maura decided she wanted the house, I had her come over here to sign the papers. We had lunch, just me and her and that obnoxious little friend of hers. Mel. I hope her real name was something like Mellissandriennalou. That twit walked through the door—” she gestured with her e-cig toward her own door “—took a sniff and said old people smell like death. Like she even knows what death smells like. Rude kid. I should have pinched her ear.”
JJ grinned. “You are like Grandmother Raynelle. I was convinced my right ear was going to be bigger than the left because of all the times she tweaked it.”
“Sounds like you needed it.”
Quint couldn’t quite see JJ as a disrespectful kid. Disobedient, sure. She struck him as someone who acted first and apologized later—sweetly, innocently and even faintly sincerely—if it was necessary. Even in her earlier exchange with Georgie, he suspected she’d already known how the old woman was going to react, so there’d been no real disrespect intended.
“Do you remember Mel’s last name?”
“Wasn’t even polite enough to offer it.”
“What did you think of their relationship?”
With the push of a button, Georgie reclined the chair, stretched out her legs and crossed her ankles, propping hot-pink running shoes on the footrest. “I thought they were family at first. Mel’s hair and eyes were brown, and Maura was a blue-eyed blonde, but other than that, they could have been sisters.
“But you could tell Maura had always had money and Mel never had. Maura was all elegant and confident, and Mel… There was a sort of hunger about her. Not physical, you know, but more as if life had been tough and she’d never known anything better. She didn’t look like money, you know? And telling me I smell. Twit.”
The image that formed in Quint’s mind didn’t create a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. Rude, disrespectful, didn’t know how to behave and eager to trade her tough life for something better. And that was apparently the only friend Maura had had. And then Mel had left her.
As unsympathetic as he intended to be, that thought told him he wasn’t succeeding.
Because that was just damn sad.
JJ tipped her head back and gazed at the ceiling. The mysterious Mel sounded like Maura’s friends back home, except that the Carolina friends mostly came from money, like her. JJ was familiar with some of them because of their run-ins with police that never resulted in consequences, some because of their parents’ friendships with her parents. Most of them she could recognize, maybe even identify by name, but that was all. She couldn’t recall a brown-haired, brown-eyed hard-luck kid who’d infiltrated the Evanston crowd and stuck with it.
The two women could have met in college or on the road. It didn’t seem possible Mel had toured a winter’s full of ice palace hotels in Norway or cruised the Mediterranean, but Maura had spent plenty of time in American cities, as well. They could have run into each other in any number of ways, hit it off and decided to roam together with Maura picking up the tab. She was very generous, Morwenna had said.
Because her companions had let her thoughts wander undisturbed—Quint probably preferred her silence, but as Miss Georgie had said, time was a-wasting—she filled the silence with an absentminded comment. “Your glass is beautiful.”
“It is. That swirly red-and-green one there—that was a Christmas gift from Maura. She brought it when she delivered the December rent. We had lunch together every month when she paid the rent, but after that, I never saw her again. The rent started coming in the mail.”
JJ studied the lamp with new interest. Maura had noticed the collection and taken the time to find a beautiful icicle-shaped addition. For a woman she didn’t really know and expected nothing from in return. That was the kind of thoughtfulness one expected of an Evans a few generations ago, not from the current one. If she made the right friends, fell in love with the right person, would Maura discover something of substance inside herself?
Possibly. But it didn’t seem likely that maybe-Melanie, maybe-Mellissandriennalou was the kind of friend who could anchor Maura in the real world. Instead, she appeared to have been along for the ride, enjoying the luxury until she’d gotten bored and moved on.
Leaving Maura one more loss to cope with.
Her muscles protesting too much sitting, JJ got to her feet. The rocker squeaked as Quint followed suit. “One last question, Miss Georgie. Did Maura say why she’d decided to stay in Cedar Creek?”
A rather sad look claimed Miss Georgie’s features. “She said it reminded her of home. You know, I never saw a person more lost than her.”
JJ felt a little sad, too, as she approached Miss Georgie and offered her hand. The old woman’s skin was dry and cool, marked with what Grandmother Raynelle had called wisdom spots, and her fingernails were painted a sparkly midnight blue.
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Georgie.”
“For a copper, you’re not too bad.” The effect of Miss Georgie’s scowl was dampened by her sly wink.
“You’re not half as bad as you think you are.”
Miss Georgie chuckled. “You can come back sometime. We’ll see if I can change your mind about that.”
“I’d love to see you try.” JJ gave the thin hand a gentle squeeze, then turned toward the door.
She was halfway there when Miss Georgie spoke again. “Come over here, Quint.”
There was no doubt it was a command, and no doubt that he would obey it, JJ thought, hiding a grin, because that was the kind of person he was. She waited at the door while he did, indeed, obey and Miss Georgie took both of his hands in hers.
“How are you? Really?” Her voice was a murmur, but JJ shared one thing with the old woman: excellent hearing.
He looked as if he wanted to pull away, rush out the door and let the cold air drive away the flush to his cheeks. He didn’t, though. Instead, he muttered, “I’m okay. Really.”
Okay about what? It clearly wasn’t the throwaway question everybody used a dozen times a day. Something had happened in his recent past that worried the crusty old woman—something he didn’t want to discuss.
JJ turned her back, deliberately tuning out their conversation. She didn’t feel guilty for being curious. She wouldn’t be a police officer if she wasn’t curious about things, and she wouldn’t be a woman if she wasn’t curious about him. But she didn’t stoop to eavesdropping, not unless it involved a case.
After a moment, his footsteps sounded behind her. She opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. He closed the door and stopped beside her, looking to the right, the way they’d come, then to the left, where a red exit sign marked the stairwell. He looked like a man who very much wanted to take the stairs.
“Who’s in 318?”
His scowl wasn’t as fierce as Miss Georgie’s, but it was more sincere. “You noticed that.”
“I’m a copper.” The word made her grin. She might never call herself a cop again. “I get paid to notice things.” Turning 180 degrees, she started toward the stairway exit.
She was pretty sure that was relief radiating off him as he fell into step beside her. No answer was forthcoming, though, so she prompted him. “Family?”
The closing of the stairwell door was muffled by the sound of their boots, hers sharper, his more solid, descending the steps. He didn’t answer until they reached the second-floor landing. “Practically.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but that was okay. She didn’t have the standing to insist on more. Though they’d spent half the morning together, they were still strangers. His life was his, and he got to choose what he wanted to share.
Besides, it wasn’t his life she wanted him to share.
She had a healthy regard for sex. She was thirty-seven and unencumbered by relationships. She’d come close to marrying once, a decade ago. Ryan had been a fellow officer who moved to Evanston after two years with the Columbia Police Department. He’d been sweet and smart and funny and everything she wanted in a guy…until she made detective before him.
When he’d broken the engagement and moved back to Columbia, it had stung her pride and made her doubt her judgment, but it hadn’t broken her heart. Which meant he really hadn’t been even close to everything she wanted in a guy.
Since then, she hadn’t gotten within squinting distance of marriage. She’d dated her share of men, had sex with some of them and not with others. She didn’t indulge in one-night stands or stranger sex because of the inherent risks. She still had a yearning, not necessarily for marriage but for commitment. For that one special man who would brighten her day just by being in it, who would love everything about her the same way she would love everything about him and would make her heart flutter when she was eighty.
But if she waited to meet Mr. Forever before she had sex again, she would be a very grumpy and cranky JJ, and that wasn’t a pretty sight.
The air broke over her, offensively cold, when she walked out the front door. This time, though, she didn’t stop in shock. Her steps lengthened as she practically jogged across the lot to Quint’s vehicle. The exercise, brief as it was, felt really good to muscles cramping from the same position for so very long. On another day, she might even have told Quint she would walk back to her car, enjoying the exercise, the fresh air and the budding of the trees. Today, spending one instant more than necessary outside was out of the question.
“What now?” Quint asked as they fastened their seat belts.
“Where can I buy a coat?”
“Walmart. Atwoods. It’s a farm and ranch supply store. Or there’s a little store about a mile north. We can stop there on the way back to the station.”
Ooh, she liked a man who didn’t whine about shopping. Her father and both her brothers-in-law acted as if their fingernails were being torn out with pliers every time they had to hang out in a women’s clothing department. Though, truthfully, JJ felt the same way when she accompanied her middle sister. Kylie could spend an hour choosing between two pairs of nearly identical jeans.
“Little store sounds fine. When it comes to warmth, I have no vanity.”
He reached into the back, snagging his duty jacket, and offered it to her. “Until the truck warms up.”
She hesitated half a second before accepting it, huddling beneath it like a blanket. It was big and heavy and smelled enticingly of scents undiluted by cologne. Shaving cream, detergent, fabric softener, soap. No floral or woodsy intruders, but plain, simple Quint. She drew a deep breath, then sighed happily, her chin tucked into the faux-fur collar.
It was a quick drive to the shopping center where the clothing shop nestled between a coffee shop and a grocery store. The air blowing from the truck’s heating vents wasn’t much warmer than outside when they parked, but she handed the jacket back, anyway. He didn’t insist she keep it, didn’t pretend he wasn’t finally feeling the cold himself, but shrugged into it as he got out.
She appreciated that fact. She’d never understood why men always offered their jackets to women who’d failed to dress warmly enough. Like the chill didn’t cut through their clothes just as easily? She had never been a Boy Scout, but she knew all about the consequences of not being prepared. You don’t take an umbrella on a soggy day, you get wet. You wear a sweater on a hot day, you get sweaty. You don’t take a heavy coat to a place known for its iffy weather, you get frozen lungs and blue skin.
Sadly, blue wasn’t really her color.
They hustled from the parking lot to the store. On the other side of the glass doors, warm air, an explosion of colors and rock music greeted them, along with a pretty girl sitting at the checkout counter and texting. Her hello was perfunctory until she glanced up. Then a smile split her face, she clutched her cell phone, jumped to her feet and rounded the corner to approach them. “What are you doing here? Did that six-pack of T-shirts you bought five years ago finally wear out? Can I take your picture and send it to everyone as proof of life?”
Curious, JJ looked from Quint to the girl. She was way too young for anything romantic between them. Sure, some older guys had to go young for an emotional-needs match, but he seemed far too stolid to date someone he could have fathered. Besides, with the blond hair, blue eyes and the square angle of both their jaws, she’d put money on a relative. Much younger sister, niece, cousin.
“If you take my picture and send it to everyone, there won’t be any life left in your phone by the time I finish grinding it into the ground,” he said, gaze narrowed, voice gravelly enough to give some weight to the threat.
But the girl wasn’t the least bit threatened. “Uncle Quint, you haven’t scared me since the time you caught me and my friends drinking beer at the park. That was ages ago.”
“Four years.”
“Like I said. Ages.” Her gaze shifted to JJ, raking up and down. “I love that jacket, but it’s way too cold for it today.”
“That’s why I’m here.” JJ saw racks of coats near the back of the store and headed that way. A murmured conversation drifted behind her—Quint’s voice low and raspy, the girl’s higher and lighter—then came the click of high heels on the tile floor. JJ lifted a black wool coat from the rack to examine it, and when she lowered it, the blonde was on the other side.
“Hi, I’m Lia, and though my job is to sell the merchandise, that coat is something my grandma would buy. We have a great plum one, and a persimmon one, and a gorgeous fuchsia. Even something like this brown does so much more for you than black. Plus, it’s more fitted, like your jacket, so you still have a shape when you’re wearing it, instead of being padded and curveless like the black one.” Lia held up the brown coat, flashed a smile at Quint, waiting by the register, and lowered her voice. “So you’re a friend of Uncle Quint’s.”
JJ couldn’t help but smile at both her fashion advice and her conspiratorial tone. “We just met this morning. I’m in town on business.” She patted her Taser after removing her own jacket and before pulling on the brown coat. The shade was rich and dark and reminded her of hot cocoa with just a sprinkle of cinnamon. Its luxe lining embraced her with warmth.
Lia smoothed the collar, then turned JJ to face a mirror. “See, the color plays up the reddish tints in your hair and those freckles you do a decent job of hiding. You really shouldn’t be hiding them. They’re there, they’re cute, and Uncle Quint likes freckles. And you can be warm without adding so much bulk.” Without a breath, she shifted gears again. “How long will you be here?”
“No idea. A few days, maybe a week.” She shrugged.
“Oh. Too bad…or maybe not. I mean, not everything’s got to be forever, right? You’re pretty, and you have good taste, and a week of innocent—”
Quint cleared his throat, and Lia literally jumped. Her face went pale, then a few shades darker than his own flush. “I’m telling Grandma you eavesdropped.”
“Grandma was the one who taught me that when your voice got quiet, you were up to something.”
Lia sniffed. “She should have been the cop in the family.” Her pout turned immediately to a smile when she turned back to JJ. “Do you like this coat, or would you like to see the persimmon one? And do you need a scarf or gloves to go with that? They’re right this way—”
The glimpse JJ got of Quint’s aggravated face as Lia pulled her away was sweet. He wasn’t terminally cranky, after all; he was kind to old ladies and fond of his niece. Chief Dipstick had clearly sent her here as punishment, but the universe had smiled on her by putting Quint in her path.
Wouldn’t that make the old man spit nails?
Quint stayed nearby while Lia rang up JJ’s coat, scarf and gloves, then cut the tags from them. The only way to stop a Foster woman from talking about anything and everything was to stand watch, ready to put the fear into them. He’d forgotten that when he’d let his niece wander off to wait on JJ. He hadn’t heard everything when he joined them, but he’d heard enough to get the impression that Lia was trying to set up JJ with someone, and since he was pretty much the only single guy in Lia’s life right now—definitely the only single one in JJ’s age range—he figured he’d been Lia’s target. All the Foster women—and, sadly, most of the men—thought another relationship was the best way to get him over the one he’d lost.
He rubbed idly at the center of his chest where it ached. There had been a few times in the beginning when he’d thought he was having a heart attack. Had hoped he was. He hadn’t wanted to live without Linny. Had never even imagined it. She’d been the best part of his life for so long, and the idea that he would have to live without her had been incomprehensible.
Forty was too young to die. Sure, it happened all the time—accidents, suicides, homicides—but natural causes fell pretty low on the list. Linny had never had surgery before. How could anyone have known she would have an adverse reaction?
Adverse reaction. A nicer, neater way of saying stroke. How in the hell had a healthy forty-year-old woman having a minor surgical procedure had a stroke and died on the table? How could anyone have prepared for that?
Slim fingers caught his hand and pulled it away from his chest. His vision was fuzzy when he focused, slowly clearing to show concern on Lia’s face as she gazed up at him.
“Uncle Quint?”
How many times had she spoken to him? Her expression suggested several. He squeezed her hand reassuringly. “What were you saying, Bean?”
As he’d expected, she rolled her eyes at her childhood nickname. “Mom is gonna call and see if we can have Easter at your house.”
Easter. Was it already time for that? Then came Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July and enough birthdays to tire out a partier like Maura Evans. “She knows I prefer family get-togethers where I can go home when I’m done.”
She laughed. “That’s why she wants to do it at your place. So you can’t make an early escape.”
Quint tugged at his ear. He didn’t want a celebratory dinner at his house. Cleaning it to meet his mother’s standards wasn’t a problem; he kept it neat. An overgrown yard wasn’t an issue, either. He would surely mow it between now and then. But instead of saying no flat out and wiping that sweet grin from Lia’s face, he said, “I’ll think about it.”
“All right! We’re partying at Uncle Quint’s! I’ll tell Mom.” She folded JJ’s suede jacket and handed it to her. “Thank you for the business, it’s nice to meet you and have fun while you’re here.” She’d whipped her phone out before finishing the words and was already texting when they turned away. No doubt telling her mom that Easter was a go.
He walked behind JJ through narrow aisles to reach the door. Before she opened it, she pulled the new orange wool cap over her head and slid orange gloves onto her hands. This time, when they stepped outside, she didn’t act as if she were the loser in a game of freeze tag. “Your niece is cute.”
“Huh. How did ‘I’ll think about it’ turn into ‘Sure, bring the whole gang’?” He zipped his jacket, then shoved his hands into the pockets.
“When my mom said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ that was exactly what she meant. With our dad, my sisters and I heard what we wanted. And because we were so adorable, it usually worked for us.”
Adorable. That was his niece. She’d had him wrapped around her little finger when said finger was only an inch or two long. He could see some adorability in JJ, too. Some prettiness, too. He’d always thought of brown as kind of a noncolor, like white or black, but the brown coat looked good on her. It made him aware, even in the dreary lack of sunshine, that her hair wasn’t entirely brown but threaded through with strands that would gleam like copper in bright light. The color warmed her face and the fabric hugged her body, showing only a faint bump where her Taser was holstered.
She wasn’t so nothing special as he’d thought just a few hours ago.
Scowling, he climbed into the truck. Sam, JJ, Georgie and Lia—he’d talked to more people today than he usually did in three or four days combined. He was ready to take JJ back to her car and regain his usual solitude, but when he opened his mouth, that wasn’t even close to what he suggested.
“Want to get some lunch?”
Chapter 3 (#u3993855a-04ae-533e-b526-12a192447bc8)
JJ beamed, well aware that growls would start echoing from her empty stomach if she didn’t eat soon. “I’m glad you asked. Can we go to Whataburger? The nearest one to Evanston is a couple of hours away, so I haven’t had one in years, and that’s way too long.”
He took the back way out of the strip mall, passing a Chinese restaurant and a hot dog place, then turned back onto Main Street southbound. In a couple of minutes, he was parking in the restaurant’s lot. The dining room was warm and smelled of beef and onions and French fries and the best ketchup in the world, and she breathed in deeply, appreciating every happy, sweet, treat-with-Granddad bit of it.
When they placed their orders at the counter, she swiped with her card before Quint got his out of his wallet. “Expense account,” she explained.
His gaze narrowed. “Your department must have a bigger budget than ours.”
“The lawyer’s expense account.” She wouldn’t abuse it—she was meticulously documenting every penny she spent—but buying lunch for an officer who’d been pulled away from his regular duties to help her was definitely a legitimate expense.
They got their pop, then chose a table by the plate glass window on the side where they’d parked. Sitting across from each other, they were able to keep an eye on each other, the other customers, the employees and the pickup outside. Cops like expanded horizons.
When she sat on the hard bench, the papers in her hip pocket crackled. Shifting her weight, she pulled them out. “These are the notes Morwenna and Lois did for me.” She smoothed them on the tabletop and scanned over them.
Morwenna had listed a few dozen names, half of them only first or last, with additional data when she had it. Tanya West—works at Starbucks on Taft. Landon Jonas—mechanic at the garage on First. Lily Ransom—day shift at the local ER.
“Anything interesting there?” she asked, sliding the page to Quint.
He scanned it as quickly as she had. “I know some of these kids’ parents or grandparents. Tanya is a friend of Lia’s. Giggly, goofy, doesn’t have any ambition. Jonas does the routine service on department vehicles. My own truck, too. He’s okay, except that he’s got a motorcycle that goes really fast and a need to prove it occasionally. He’s got a string of tickets for that, but nothing else.”
Another long conversational piece from him. She was reminded of a conversation with her aunt, the mystery author. Jada had hefted a dictionary and said, “My entire book is in here. I just have to pull it out one word at a time.” Was more than twenty words at once a sign that Quint was warming up to her?
“I was first in my academy class in pursuit driving,” she said, “but motorcycles make me scream like a girl. Way too exposed. All the protective gear in the world can’t really protect you. Give me a four-thousand-pound cage wrapped around me any day.”
She took his grunt as agreement before turning her attention to Lois’s list. It was shorter but had more commentary. Like Quint, she knew most of the kids’ parents and had filled in ages, vehicles and job information. She dedicated an entire paragraph to one Alexander Benson: oldest of three kids, twenty-six, arrests for bar fights, possession, reckless driving, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, harboring a fugitive—his sister—and three counts of assaulting a police officer. All three times, he’d gotten between a relative and the cops trying to arrest said relative. Where Maura and Mel went, he followed.
He went by the nickname of Zander, and he was definitely, according to Lois, the boy our mothers warned us about. Bad boys. Every town had them, and every good girl managed to meet them.
“Do you know Zander Benson?” Then, remembering his comment, she teased, “Or should I ask if you know his parents?”
His gaze narrowed again, almost as if from habit. “Yeah, I went to school with his dad. Hank had better things to do than spend every day in school, so he went to class when it suited him. He was a senior when I started my sophomore year, and he was still a senior when I started my senior year. He did manage to graduate that time. Marisa was sitting in the audience, holding Zander and pregnant with number two.”
That image could have been inspiring. She loved underdog stories, people who never gave up until they achieved their goal. After three senior years, Hank had graduated, but had it really been an accomplishment, or had the school given him the diploma so they could be done with him? If his son was anything to judge by, probably the latter.
“I’m guessing marriage and fatherhood didn’t turn Hank into father of the year material.” Though her cynical cop side snorted at the idea, she believed it was possible. Hank could have learned his lesson about the value of education and staying out of trouble. He almost surely would have wanted better for his kids. It happened. Sometimes. On occasion. And Zander and his sister might have simply rebelled.
“Nah, Hank’s still the overgrown idiot he was back then, and Zander’s just like him. Too lazy to work, likes his drugs and his booze, rude and surly and looking for someone to take it out on.”
JJ rolled one corner of the paper tightly, smoothed it, then rolled it again. “So Maura’s best friend is rude, obnoxious and disrespectful, and her other friend is rude, surly and finds trouble everywhere he goes. Not that Maura didn’t have obnoxious and surly friends at home, but they came from money. They were just like her.”
“You mean they were her own kind.”
That sounded ugly and made her nose scrunch and her mouth wrinkle. “I don’t mean they were better because they were rich. God knows, that’s not a plus for most of them. Just…they all had money, so none of them took advantage. One day it was Maura blowing five grand on a party, but the next time someone else stepped up. They took their turns.”
“But none of these people—” he gestured toward the lists “—have money, which would explain why $100,000 a month is no longer adequate for her expenses. Friendship doesn’t come cheap.”
A pang twinged around her heart. Was that what Maura had sunk to? Buying friends? She was a pretty girl. She’d been taught perfect manners, all the social graces. She would be as comfortable at a White House state dinner as a regular person was at McDonald’s. She was smarter than average, had an enviable prep school education and all the potential in the world. And yet grief and sorrow had led her to a spot where she had to pay big bucks for the barest of friendships.
“My dad used to joke that he and Mom had me so my sisters would have someone else to torment, but now they’re my best friends. They drove me crazy—still do on occasion—but they also stood by me, no matter what. If Maura had had a brother or sister to lean on, to grieve with and recover with, maybe…” Maybe that brother or sister would have been her rock. Or maybe he or she would be floundering with her, dragging her even farther down.
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Marilyn Pappano
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 23.04.2024
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О книге: They’re tracking a missing person But will they be the next victims? Detective Jennifer “JJ” Logan is determined to unearth a missing socialite. At her side looms officer Quint Foster, who bridles at having to work alongside JJ. But as they dig deeper into the victim’s odd behaviour, he feels alive for the first time in years. The hunt means their deepening emotions have to take a back seat to getting out alive!