She sat up, crossed her legs, and propped her elbows on her knees as if preparing to calmly discuss the weather. “No way, cowboy. I’ve been screwed out of way too many good family memories. No way I’m getting screwed out of the memory of you proposing.”
He sat up straighter, too, trying to figure out what had sparked such an un-Jordan-like comment. “Baby, if you want to get married, just—”
She held up a hand. “I’m not saying that, and I’m not even asking you to propose. It’s just that it occurred to me that I’ve given you trouble around every turn, and you might be afraid to bring up the subject.” She shrugged. “I wanted you to know, if you can still be here after seeing the dreams, after knowing what a screwed up life I’ve led, even writing in my journal for crap’s sake, well, it may be the first time in my life I have ever seen a future, but I can see one with you.”
He smiled. “So this proposal, you wouldn’t want it to be a spur of the moment thing while we’re eating Oreos in bed and journaling a murder, I take it?”
She smiled back. “At the risk of sounding like a bitch, I think you can do better.” She gave him a quick peck on the lips. “Now let’s get back to business.”
Fairly certain he
could
do better, he let her drop the issue. For now. Although she
had
opened a door and he had every intention of walking through it before she changed her mind. He tossed the cookies on the nightstand and shooed Beauty off the bed. Tackling Jordan, he pinned her under his body with her arms above her head.
“You’re right, we have unfinished business. Where were we?” He kissed her neck and her ear.
“Discussing a case, I think.”
“Weren’t we done with that?” He planted a slow, deep kiss against her lips.
“No, I don’t think we were.” She murmured and stretched up to check the clock. “Plus, I promised Bahan I’d go to his office first thing this morning.”
“You’re on vacation. Maybe we could spend an hour or two—”
“Ty.” She pushed him off and sat up. “What are you going to do about David Benson?”
Christ.
What
was
he going to do? He’d like to think he’d solved a murder, so why the hell didn’t it feel that way? He slung an arm over his eyes. “A shitload of paperwork, I guess.”
“Ty.” She tugged his arm away and looked down at him. “Honestly, what do your instincts tell you about David?”
“I don’t know, Jordan. I guess the kid fooled me, because even when we went to arrest him, I still couldn’t wrap my head around his guilt. It’s like it’s too easy. If he’s a clever sociopath who killed his girlfriend and can lie so convincingly through his teeth, why the hell would he toss a bloodstained coat in his trunk? Doesn’t add up.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I’d think just about everybody would know to get rid of the evidence. So could someone be setting David up?”
He looked at her. “That’s not what your dream showed.”
“I just explained that I don’t always know what my dreams are showing at first. I still think Hailey is trying to tell me something that I’m just not getting. And I know you have doubts about David’s guilt. How hard would it be to get me inside to talk to David tonight?”
“Ha,” he said. “Not happening. Once his dad and lawyer entered the mix, I hardly got to talk to him. Although I‘d love to see what kind of feel you get from David.”
Ty watched her slide her sleek, naked body out of bed and gather up underclothes from the dresser. The woman was long, lean, and lethal.
Damn.
He glanced at the clock, too.
“Where is he now?” she asked.
“Huh? Who?”
Jordan rolled her eyes. “Your suspect. The guy we’ve been talking about all morning.”
“In a holding cell in Cooper.” Ty got up, too, decided to convince Jordan to at least conserve water. “You taking a shower?”
“Yes. Alone.” She pushed him back down on the bed with one finger. “You have friends in Cooper? Someone who could get us in to see David tonight?”
“I think it’s our job as concerned citizens and officers of the law to conserve water once in a while.”
“Not happening. I told you, I’m meeting Bahan this morning.”
“You don’t have a time schedule, do you?”
“Tyler, focus please. Up here.” She pointed to her face. “Do you know anyone who can get us in tonight?”
“I know all the guys in Cooper. Getting in to see him isn’t the problem, but his dad and lawyer will fry me if we attempt to talk to him.” He stood again and stalked in her direction as she backed toward the bathroom.
“Not if David agrees to it. He’s a legal adult, right?”
Ty stopped. “Why on earth would he do that?”
“Because I can be very persuasive. And you’re not the only one with wicked instincts. He may get past one of us, but he’s going to need to be a damn good liar to fool us both. And if he’s innocent, he’ll want the truth as badly as we do. Now go find something to do while I shower. Alone.” She took one step back and slammed the door.
Ty grinned. The last time he checked, their bathroom door didn’t have a lock on it.
Chapter 13
Jordan and Ty sat in the lobby of the Cooper Municipal Building, waiting to be escorted back to the holding cells to talk with David Benson.
“This place is pretty nice. And about twenty times bigger than Longdale. You should try to get hired on here. Maybe the pay and benefits are better.”
Ty let out a sarcastic laugh. “I wasn’t kidding about the politics in small towns and in small-town police departments. I like it just fine where I am. Besides, Chief Donner will probably retire in the next couple of years. Good chance I’ll be police chief before I’m thirty-five.”
“Really?” Jordan smoothed her hand up his thigh. “Chief McGee,” she whispered in his ear. “That sounds powerful and sexy. Kind of turns me on.” She fell into her best Scarlett O’Hara imitation. “Oh no, Chief McGee. Don’t lock me in that cell and do all those wicked, wicked things to my body again.”
It didn’t happen often, but she loved to see big, strong Tyler McGee turn three successive shades of red.
He grinned and shook his head. “Sounds like all the incentive I need to stay right where I am and become chief.”
A few minutes later a uniformed cop approached them, made some small talk with Ty, and then led them back to David’s cell.
“Since you’re a narcotics specialist and have experience with suspects who claim to have blacked out, Chief Donner said you can consult on this case,” Ty whispered as he dropped a small electronic device into her hand. “But remember to use the recorder. If you get him to waive his rights to an attorney, we want proof.”
“This isn’t my first rodeo, cowboy. Relax.”
“You want me to go in with you?” he asked.
“Hell, no. You arrested him; right now you’re the last person he wants to see. You need to stay far away if you want him to talk.” She walked down the row of cells and stopped at the one David Benson was sitting in. “Hi, David.”
He lifted his head, but didn’t say anything.
“I’m Detective Jordan Delany from St. Louis. Officer McGee is a friend of mine. I’m also a narcotics specialist. Which means I’ve worked with people who’ve had lapses in memory from drugs or alcohol. I was wondering if maybe I could come in and talk to you.”
“My dad said I can’t talk to anyone without my lawyer,” he muttered. His voice shook. With his big mop of blond curls and his wild eyes, the kid looked like a big, terrified, overgrown puppy. No wonder Ty had had such a hard time arresting him.
“You’re right, you have every right to have a lawyer present. But I’m not here to try to get you to confess. I’m here to help find the truth, whatever that truth may be.”
The kid still didn’t answer, just looked down at the tile.
“You can go to the arraignment tomorrow morning and Officer McGee can present all the evidence against you. And most likely you’ll be charged with murder. Or you can give me one chance to try to make sense of all this. And to figure out if someone other than you could have hurt Hailey.”
David continued to stare at the floor.
“All any of us want is the truth. Especially Officer McGee. I know him. He won’t sleep at night until he finds out what really happened. He thought that might be important to you, too.” She let that thought hang in the air for a moment.
“I’m not going to lie. If you killed Hailey we’re going to find out and you’re going to have to pay for it. But, David, no one wants to ruin your life if you’re innocent.”
The kid looked up now. “Ruin my life? Hailey’s gone. I loved her. I was going to ask her to marry me this summer. Do you think I give a fuck what happens now?” He shook his head. “It just doesn’t matter. My life
is
ruined.”
Jordan swallowed, trying to figure out the best way to get through to him. He was in a state where he didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything. She’d been there, so she got it. “I know it feels like your life is over right now, but it might not always feel that way. It might take a few months, or it might take a few years to move on. If you didn’t do this, if you didn’t hurt her—”
“Look around.” He stood and walked toward the cell bars. “They arrested me for killing Hailey. My
God
.” Big tears streaked down his face. “Her parents hate me now. They’re not even going to let me go to her funeral and say goodbye.” He sobbed the words. “And all I can say is I don’t remember what happened. That is
so
fucking lame. I want to say that I could never hurt her, even drunk, that I’d die before I laid a hand on her. But even if that’s true, I’m just as guilty as the asshole who did this. I should have been there. I should have walked her home. I should have protected her.”
He dropped his head against the bars and cried.
Jordan had never felt as she now did in any other interview. Most of the people she dealt with were deep inside the drug world, and most had rap sheets longer than her arm. Pity and sympathy weren’t familiar sentiments in her line of work. Ty was right. Something about David Benson felt different.
She walked to the uniformed cop and asked him to open the cell door. David was still crying, so she touched his shoulder. “Hey, come on over here and sit down with me.”
David scrubbed his hands up and down his face and followed her to the cot. He dropped down next to her. His long, lean body nearly doubled over as he sat with his elbows propped on his knees and his head hanging down. “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk to you.”
Jordan mirrored his pose and bumped her shoulder against his. “Probably not. Your dad will probably kick your ass. But only if he knows. I won’t tell him if you don’t.”
David looked at her.
“And to make us even, Officer McGee is going to kick my ass, too. You see”—she pulled the recorder out of her pocket—“I’m supposed to ask for your permission to record our conversation and ask you to waive your rights to have your attorney present. I figure if you take a chance and talk to me, I’ll take a chance, too.”
Ty was going to snap her in half when she walked out with no recording, but she wasn’t fishing for a confession. They needed one small thread to pull in a case that otherwise didn’t add up. She smiled at him and slid Ty’s recorder across the floor and out the front of the cell.
He looked puzzled, like he didn’t quite know what to make of her. “You’re not going to record our conversation? Are we going to get in trouble?”
“David, I hate to point out the obvious, but you’re already in a shitload of trouble. And I spend most of my days with my ass in a sling for one reason or another, so I figure neither one of us has much to lose.”
She smiled at him, trying to lighten his mood. “I’ve been told I’m resistant to authority. That’s what they write in your review when you care more about getting the truth than you do about following the rules.” She liked to believe her instincts were sharper than most and that guilt was not what she was feeling as she sat next to David Benson. “I believe there may be a truth here we haven’t uncovered yet, and I’d like to talk to you about it. But the talking is up to you.”
David took a deep breath and shrugged. “I don’t care who I talk to anymore. I’m so tired, and I’m so confused. I don’t even know what the truth is, so I don’t see how this is going to help.” His eyes filled with tears again. “I mean, I keep going over and over Friday night, thinking something else will pop into my head. Something that will make sense. Yet nothing ever does.”
He sat back, his tall lanky body leaning against the cell wall. He looked exhausted. And he sounded heartbroken. Try as she might, Jordan was having a hell of a time believing he murdered his girlfriend and walked back to a frat house and slept it off.
“Here’s my plan, David. Just for the next few minutes, let’s operate under the assumption that you didn’t kill Hailey.”
He didn’t look like the idea excited him much. “I may not have killed her, but I didn’t protect her, either.”
“David.” She said his name sternly. She needed answers, and he needed to focus. “If you didn’t kill her and you love her as much as you say you do, don’t you think you owe it to her to find out what really happened?”
“I guess.” He shrugged. “But it won’t bring her back, and that’s all I really want.”
“Nothing is going to bring her back. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve the truth. Her family deserves the truth. Hell, David, you deserve the truth.”
Jordan shifted until her gaze made contact with his. “I’m going to tell you something that I never tell anyone. My parents were murdered when I was a kid. The circumstances were complicated, and what really happened has been kept from me for a very long time. I’m just now figuring out some of the details, but I can tell you the hardest thing to live without is the truth.”
David nodded and said, “Okay.”
“All right, let’s back up a bit. Tell me what was going on in your lives a couple of weeks ago.”
“A couple weeks ago?” he repeated. “I don’t know. What do you mean? Everything was fine a couple weeks ago. Everything was fine until Friday night.”
“Did Hailey recently mention that anyone was bothering her?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Think carefully, David. Did she mention another guy asking her out? Did she mention anyone that may have been jealous of you and her? Problems in her sorority house? Problems at home? Any of her belongings get mysteriously destroyed or go missing?”
“No, nothing. Everyone loved her.” He was quiet for a minute. “I had some money and clothes stolen, but she never did, that I know of.”
“How much money? And what kind of clothing?”
“Just the coat and hat. A few shirts. And about four hundred bucks.”
Four hundred bucks was a good chunk of change for a college kid. “Did you report it?”
“No. It happened over the course of a few months. I live in a frat house, you know. If somebody spills beer, they just go to one of the rooms and pull out a shirt. We try to lock the bedroom doors, but most of the locks don’t even work. There are always a million people in the house on weekends.”
“What about the money? Did it go missing for everybody, or just you?”
“My roommate’s money was gone once, too.” He shrugged. “And I don’t think he had anything to do with it. He’s a good guy, even lent me some cash when mine was taken. Everybody knows who my dad is and that we’re . . . well, you know. That money or clothes are not that hard for me to replace.”
“What did your dad say?”
“To just use my debit card and stop keeping cash in my room. That’s when my hat and coat went missing. It bugged me because my grandma gave me the coat for Christmas; I’d only had it a few weeks. Then some of my other clothes disappeared.”
“Okay, let’s focus on you then. Did you get into it with any of the other guys?”
David shook his head. “No. No fights at all.”
“Maybe someone from another frat house? Any drunk jerk ever threaten you or Hailey? Anyone so jealous that they might hurt Hailey to get to you?”
A little more of the life seemed to drain out of him with her last question.
“Do you think someone could have killed her to hurt me or my dad? I mean, my dad’s got business ties all over the state, probably all over the country.”
“I think that’s pretty unlikely, actually. I’m just trying to figure out if any recent situation felt off to you. Any person? Any event?”
“I can’t think of anything.” David was quiet for a moment. “Well, there was one weird thing that happened last week. Hailey said she saw me on campus Wednesday and that when she called my name and came toward me, I turned and walked away. She said she had to get to a class and didn’t have time to chase me. She texted me and asked me what was wrong and why I was in the nursing building.”
“Did you respond to her text?”
“I asked her what she’d been smoking because she knew I wouldn’t be on campus that day. My dad broke ground on a new golf course community.” He shrugged. “It’s supposed to provide a lot of jobs, so the press was doing a story. Dad wanted me to be there.”
“But Hailey thought she saw you?”
“Yeah. She was kind of wigged about it, because there aren’t too many six four blond dudes walking around. I told her to get her eyes checked. We sort of joked about it until Friday night when . . .” David covered his eyes with his hands again. “God, I can’t believe this is happening.”
***
Ty watched Jordan step out of David Benson’s cell and walk back down the hallway. “Well?”
She handed him his recorder. “Well, there’s good news and bad news.”
He raised a brow. “There’s nothing on this recorder, is there?”
“That’s the bad news. The good news is that I agree with you about David possibly being innocent. And I have a few things I think we should check out. But first you’re going to buy me dinner.”
Ten minutes later they were inside Antonio’s Italian Restaurant ordering pizza.
“So he wouldn’t let you record the conversation?” Ty asked.
“First thing he said was that I needed to contact his lawyer.”
“You were with him for almost an hour.”
Jordan nodded. “Let’s face it, Ty. I wasn’t there to interrogate a confession out of him. You didn’t need me for that. I was there because your instincts are telling you more is going on here than a guy killing his girlfriend. After seeing him, I tended to agree. So I asked him if he just wanted to talk, off the record. He said okay. He seems like a good kid.”