Daring Time (2 page)

Ryan couldn't help but grin. "I thought you were a big, bad vice detective. Since when are you scared of a little tiny female?"

Ramiro gave him an insulted look. "Ever since the 'little tiny female' is dead."

"She's
not
dead."

Ramiro looked a little taken aback by Ryan's hard tone. "Whatever, man." Ramiro shivered and started toward the door. The image of his brawny partner shuddering reflexively struck Ryan as markedly odd, not to mention alarming for some reason.

"The only time I saw you get so pale was when you got shot," Ramiro said. "Take my advice and sell this place quick as you can. I'll take the likes of a slimy rat like Anton Chirnovsky any day versus a haunted house. Come on. Crenshaw will be waiting for us at Bureau Headquarters. We're making sure Chirnovsky has his story straight and is in good voice before we strap the wires on him for Donahue's downfall this weekend."

Ryan closed the heavy wardrobe door with a brisk bang, perhaps hoping to shatter the fey spell wrought by the vision of the stunning woman. He didn't believe in ghosts and he was every bit as eager to nail Jim Donahue for human trafficking as Ramiro was.

Still, he lingered in the doorway, casting his gaze around the empty bedroom warily before he shut out the light.

***

Anton Chirnovsky seemed to sense Ryan's stare when he exited the conference room. His pale blue eyes met Ryan's and then shifted away nervously. The FBI agent in charge of guarding him while he colluded with the police and FBI to have his boss Jim Donahue arrested tapped his elbow. Chirnovsky willingly headed down the hallway away from Ryan.

"Rat bastard. Guy's as much of a scum as Donahue," Ramiro muttered bitterly under his breath.

"Uh-uh. Donahue's worse," Ryan stated flatly, his tone not inviting one of Ramiro's typical glib responses.

They'd been working on the case against Jim Donahue for a year now, ever since Ramiro and he had followed a tip in regard to a supposed brothel operating in an upscale high-rise on the Gold Coast. They'd instead uncovered a white slavery operation; eight young women being held against their will and forced into performing acts of sex with strangers in exchange for food and freedom from heinous brutalization, never seeing a cent of the money that changed hands. They'd been primarily from Mexico, but several had come from eastern European countries after being promised jobs as waitresses and bartenders, but instead being taken captive and filtered to the United States across the porous Mexican-American border.

Jim Donahue was perfectly poised to mastermind a human trafficking operation that extended way beyond those eight girls. As the owner of Donahue Landscaping, Donahue received approximately forty million dollars a year in contracts from the city of Chicago for street and park landscaping. Donahue cut costs by regularly importing illegal immigrants for cheap labor. He was a slick operator, though, and decided to put his network of illegal immigration contacts to more profitable use. It wasn't too far of a leap for him to expand from illegal transportation of aliens to the sex-slave trade.

The bureau had become involved after their discovery on the Gold Coast, but Ryan and Ramiro had been assigned to an FBI-CPD combined task force created specifically to stamp out human trafficking in Chicago and the northern Illinois area.

"Daire, wait up!"

He and Ramiro paused on Roosevelt Road on the way to Ryan's car while Dale Crenshaw, the special agent in charge of the human trafficking task force, caught up to them.

"What do you think?" Crenshaw asked.

"Chirnovsky will play. He's scared shitless Daire'll turn his pretty-boy face to hamburger meat if he doesn't. It's amazing the cred you get for being the Amateur International boxing champion for three years running," Ramiro bragged as if he'd been talking about his own titles instead of Ryan's. He had a habit of compensating for Ryan's extended silences and terse explanations in a manner that didn't even remotely resemble anything Ryan would say.

"I didn't hear that," Crenshaw said resolutely, his thin lips twitching with amusement. In the past year of working with him, Ryan had found the older man to be fair-minded and relatively easy to work for, especially considering the problems Ryan'd encountered on multidisciplinary task forces in the past.

"Got your tuxes all brushed off and ready to go?" Crenshaw asked, referring to the undercover sting operation to nail Donahue over the weekend. Donahue was expecting to meet with Chirnovsky at a black-tie charity event sponsored by the City League at the Field Museum to discuss future importation plans for women to Milwaukee, St. Louis and Kansas City.

"Yeah, but I'll still be staying background. Donahue and I have met. Took an instant disliking to each other," Ryan said as they walked down the sidewalk.

Crenshaw paused, an anxious look on his thin face.
"What?
You never mentioned that."

Ryan just shrugged and kept walking, but Ramiro spoke for him yet again.

"He met him years ago through his father. Daire's dad was a hotshot lawyer, did legal work for the city and county. You can imagine how disappointed he was when his precious only son joined the ranks of the common soldier."

Ryan shot Ramiro an annoyed look. Ramiro's eyebrows went up and Ryan knew that he'd gotten the message to shut up. For the most part, Ryan was as used to his partner's garrulousness as Ramiro was accustomed to Ryan's extended silences, but occasionally Ramiro went too far. Ramiro knew perfectly well that Ryan's father had eventually become proud of his son's work on the CPD despite his early misgivings about Ryan's choice to drop out of law school and become a cop.

For the past year or so Ryan had been having some doubts about the career decision he'd made ten years ago, though, and maybe that's what made him extra testy about Ramiro's off-the-cuff comment. Ryan wanted to make a tangible difference. That's why he volunteered his time to coach boxing to inner-city youth and chose to fight crime and human greed as a cop instead of a lawyer.

Sometimes he wondered if it was enough, though.

"Don't worry. I only met Donahue once years ago. I doubt he even remembers it, but I'll stay background, anyway. I wouldn't let anything get in the way of nailing Donahue's hide," Ryan told Crenshaw.

"Good. Make sure of it," Crenshaw said with a pointed glance before he said good night and headed toward his own car.

"You got a date with the society princess tonight?" Ramiro asked later when Ryan pulled up in front of Ramiro's Wicker Park condominium building.

Ryan shook his head, not bothering to elaborate. He'd only been out with Carrie Prince twice. They hadn't slept together yet and Ryan was suddenly convinced they never would. His heart just wasn't in it, which was damned strange for him.

The realization that he'd never get to know Carrie any better than he already had didn't warrant much interest on his part, let alone a pang of regret. He doubted the delicate, blonde-haired Carrie was the type to be overly thrilled to discover that Ryan's sexual preferences included not just fucking a woman in his bed but tying her down to said bed in the process—among other things.

"You driving tomorrow?" Ramiro nodded. "Do me a favor, will you?"

"Shit. Don't make me pick you up one of those nasty milkshakes from that health-food store on Damen before I get you. Drinking those things is like chewing a mouthful of vitamins and that nut-ball lady who owns it gives me these suspicious looks, like she can smell the bacon on my breath."

"She probably can. Pick me up on Prairie Avenue."

Ramiro gaped at him. "You're fucking with me."

"I'm serious."

"Then you're just
fucked.
You're not actually thinking about
living
in that place, are you?"

Ryan shrugged. "Maybe. Just until I sell it." He saw Ramiro open his mouth. "Can it, Ramiro. Just pick me up there in the morning, willya?"

Ramiro shook his head as he unfastened his seat belt. "That ghost bitch must have been smoking."

"I told you—I didn't see a ghost."

"You saw something that fried your brain,
hermano"
Ramiro told him pointedly before he slammed the passenger door shut.

Ryan was inclined to agree with Ramiro's parting shot when he turned on the light in the Prairie Avenue bedroom using his elbow. He set down the stuff he'd grabbed from his west-side loft before driving over to the mansion—a portable heater, two insulated sleeping bags that he'd zip together to accommodate his large frame, a pillow and a hastily packed duffle bag filled with camping equipment, clothing and toiletries.

He'd bring a carload of stuff over tomorrow, maybe ask Ramiro's cousin if he could borrow his truck to transport his mattress so he could set up the brass bed.

You've gone off the deep end at about 120 miles an hour,
he told himself as he walked across the room, the wood floors creaking loudly beneath his boots. He felt like he'd penetrated the depths of a massive, sentient creature, as if the house itself was alive around him and regarding his intrusion with cold skepticism and a hint of amusement.

For the life of him he wouldn't have been able to say when he'd made the decision to move, at least temporarily, into the mansion.

He only knew for a fact that he wouldn't have been able to sleep in his familiar bed in his loft tonight. Thoughts of this house—of that woman in the peekaboo nightgown—would have hounded him . . .
haunted
him, until he'd finally risen from his mussed bed, dressed and driven over here at some ungodly hour of the morning.

Might as well do the inevitable right off the bat, Ryan thought grimly.

Once he'd turned the heater to a high setting, unrolled the sleeping bags, zipped them together and cleaned up in the antiquated but functional bathroom down the hall, Ryan stripped down to his boxer briefs. He retrieved the leather-bound book of sonnets from the drawer in the table where he'd left it earlier and started to head over to his sleeping bag.

Something caught his eye.

A portion of the mahogany mantel protruded forward an inch at chest level. It wasn't hugely obvious, but Ryan thought he would have noticed it when he and Ramiro were there earlier, considering how he'd touched and admired the workmanship of the carved wood. He pulled on the section of wood gently and then with more force, but it didn't budge. He stopped when he realized the only thing he was going to succeed in doing was ripping the beautiful mantel apart.

The piece of wood snapped forward another inch. The skin on the back of Ryan's neck prickled and roughened. It was as if someone had just pushed an invisible button and sprung the release.

He pulled, revealing a nine-by-nine-by-nine-inch compartment— like a drawer that had been installed into the woodwork. He reached inside and withdrew several aged black-and-white photographs. After a tense few seconds of staring at the first one, he went over to his sleeping bag and flipped on the battery-operated lamp he'd brought along for reading. He shuffled through the photos—seven in all—slowly. When he'd seen them all, he studied each one again.

And then again.

What he was looking at was a prime example of Victorian-era erotic photography—images of a bound, dark-haired beauty and a big, muscular man in various arousing stages of a session of mild BDSM sex.

Ryan lowered his head to better examine the woman's face in one photo. The man's hand was on the nape of her neck, appearing to hold her head down on the mattress of the bed while he knelt behind her. Her eyes were closed, but every nuance and angle of her face reflected a sense of profound, intense arousal.

He moaned harshly, his hand jerking up to his crotch to alleviate the painful stab of lust that shot through his cock like a sizzling bolt of lightning.

It wasn't just the nearly tangible ecstasy on the woman's face while the man thrust into her. No, it wasn't
only
that that made Ryan hard enough to pound nails with his erection.

Nor was it
just
the arousing photo of her mouth open in a silent scream of pleasure while the man's face was buried between her slender thighs or the image of her restrained to the bed while her lover used a crop on her full, shapely breasts.

The thing that had him jerking his cock out of his boxer briefs and pumping himself like a madman was the fact that the woman being sexually dominated and pleasured in those pictures was the same woman he'd seen in the mirror.

The same woman who—if he allowed himself to examine the issue for even a split second—was the sole reason he'd come here tonight to sleep in this cold, hulking, rattling skeleton of a house. Seeing her in that mirror had made the blood simmer in his veins.

But seeing unmasked desire on her beautiful face made him burn at the center of a raging, white-hot fire.

TWO

His portable alarm clock went off at seven a.m. Ryan stuck his head up and looked blurrily around the sunlight-filled Prairie Avenue mansion bedroom before he hit the snooze button on the alarm clock and buried his face back in the pillow.

He groggily recalled how he'd jacked off not once last night, but three times in a shockingly short period of time thanks to the volatile fuel of those erotic photos. Now that morning was here, it struck him as amusing that he'd gotten as horny as a teenage boy over photographs of a woman who'd likely been dead for the greater part of a century.

He scowled at the thought, turning his head on the pillow, willing the warm, enticing embrace of sleep to enfold him once again. He heard the heater blowing out its hot air and the sound of a car backfiring on a far-distant city street. Ramiro was going to be as pissed and mouthy as a shortchanged whore if Ryan wasn't ready when he arrived.

He was weighing the consequences of sleeping in and leaning toward getting up rather than endure Ramiro's complaints when a floorboard not five feet behind his back creaked, as though someone had just placed a cautious foot on it and then paused at the subsequent sound. The hairs on his arms rose and prickled.