“W
HAT’S SO URGENT
you couldn’t wait for me to come into the station?” Seth said into the cell phone after closing the door on his neighbor. He crossed his tiny carpeted living room and headed toward his bedroom.
“They knocked over another jewelry store last night,” Devon Jones replied in a dry tone.
Seth propped his cell between his ear and his shoulder and grabbed his note pad and a pen. “Okay, you got my attention. Go.”
His partner gave him a quick rundown. “Owners just arrived and discovered the store had been broken into. Beat cops are questioning them now. I’m en route to the scene.”
“Give me the address, kid. I’ll meet you there.”
Jones remained silent.
That might have been Seth’s fault. He still hadn’t adjusted to the idea of another partner, his third in the past five years. He was sick of teaching guys the ropes only to have them promoted before him. At least this one didn’t lap at his heels the way the previous two had. Well, until they were promoted, moved to the homicide division, and believed they were too good to associate with him.
Breaking in a new detective was not something he wanted to do. Lately, it seemed the rookies were getting younger, or maybe just cockier. Usually, he didn’t care if he annoyed Jones by calling him a kid. Today was different; he needed his
partner’s
cooperation.
“Detective Jones.” Seth made an effort to sound civil. “May I please have the address?”
“McGivern’s on the corner of Sixty-eighth and Pacific, in a strip mall with some florist shop.”
“The jewelry store across from April’s Flowers?”
“That’s the one.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Seth didn’t wait for Jones to respond, he simply ended the call. He needed a quick shower. No, what he needed was to get his head on straight. Jules had been right. Mistaking oregano for pot had been a rookie mistake.
Heading into the bathroom, he turned on the shower and stripped. Steam quickly filled his tiny bathroom, fogging up his mirror.
He climbed beneath the water and tried to convince himself his error in judgment had been an anomaly. On the force he’d only ever made one other mistake.
That one error nearly cost him everything. Since then, he’d spent the past five years determined to never miss a single detail on a case, often working twenty-hour shifts. He’d missed blind dates, his own surprise party, and last spring, he almost missed his daughter Theresa’s high school graduation.
But he owed it to her and to himself to earn back the reputation her mother and her mother’s lover had nearly ruined. So he worked.
Under the spray, Seth tried to focus on the Diamond Gang case.
Why did the damn press have to come up with such an idiotic name in the first place?
Diamond Gang . . . sounds like they should be covered in sparkling jewels.
Jules.
Her sexy body flashed in his mind, her wide green eyes and her slender body supple in all the right places. The vibrant red hair she wore down around her shoulders suited her far better than the black wig. And this morning she still smelled like strawberries. It had taken everything in his power not to press his nose against her hair when she’d stood beside his bed. Okay, so he wanted to do a lot more than smell her hair. When she’d been on her knees a myriad of other things he’d like to do with her sparked in his mind.
Why did she have to be his neighbor?
There’s no way he could start a casual fling with someone in his own building. Only one way that would end: badly. His daughter had been right when she’d pointed out, after his last relationship crashed and burned, he sucked at commitment. Every single woman he’d liked and had dated, hated him now.
That decided it. He couldn’t like Jules. He refused to be attracted to her. If he was, he’d do something stupid, like break his own rules and pursue her until she was naked and writhing in his bed. Then it would happen.
After a week or two of steamy, sweaty, heart-pounding, soul-numbing sex, he’d grow bored and she’d grow attached. Just like every other woman he’d met in the past four years. And then he’d need to avoid not just her, but Ernie and April as well. And he liked them.
Then again, they were going on vacation, and when they returned, they wouldn’t live in his building anymore.
No. He couldn’t do it.
Jules was no one to him, absolutely no one. Too bad his body seemed to disagree.
He flipped the knob to cold and shivered, washing beneath the frigid water. By the time he’d shaved, all thoughts of his troublesome neighbor had been replaced by his case.
Dressing quickly, he focused on what he knew about the Diamond Gang. No one else on the force wanted to touch the cases that had been passed from one detective to another over the past two years. The burglaries were considered trivial and unsolvable to everyone but Seth and the four jewelers who had been put out of business.
The little mom-and-pop shops had struggled to survive against the influx of national chains before the robberies. After them, they couldn’t stay afloat. The shop owners needed to know who had destroyed their livelihoods. They needed closure and Seth needed to give it to them.
“Solve these,” Captain Peterson had said last week, as he handed Seth the stack. “And I’ll see to it you’re given the opportunity to take the sergeant’s exam.”
Yeah, he’d solve them all right. Seth’s career had taken enough hits over the years. Nothing was going to stand in the way of his promotion now. He had no intention of remaining a beat cop forever.
Except, he wasn’t a beat cop. Technically, he was Detective English. Ha, detective in name only, thanks to his second partner and Seth’s dead ex-wife. He pushed away the familiar fury and focused his attention on current events.
It had taken two years, but the Diamond Gang had finally slipped up.
With the remaining businesses doing their best to tighten security, the owners at Holcomb’s Jewelers had grown creative. It worked. Two weeks ago, while robbing Holcomb’s, the thieves missed one of the recently installed cameras hidden inside the body of a cheap lamp shaped like a stained glass lighthouse.
While the camera hadn’t been capable of recording sound, the video came out crystal. Thanks to it, Seth had his first solid set of clues. The thieves were coordinated, ski-mask-clad, and fast. They seemed to know exactly which cases to hit. But the biggest discovery from Holcomb’s video came as a surprise. One of the gang members was a woman.
Just before leaving the store, she’d bent over a display case in the center of the room. She’d seemed enamored with a piece of custom jewelry. A rare red diamond. While lusting after the ring, her shirt rode up. The camera captured an image of the tattoo on her lower back: a light green snake coiled around three red roses.
When Mr. Holcomb itemized the list of stolen items, the red diamond ring was included. The ring was on loan from a local philanthropist who’d planned to use it as the centerpiece in a fund-raiser for the Tidewater Children’s Network next month.
And yesterday, Seth had received a voice mail from a woman named Aimee-Lynn who claimed to have knowledge of the case. While she didn’t admit to being a member of the gang, she did request to meet with him today to discuss what she knew. She’d even claimed to have proof she wanted to share in exchange for “help for a friend.”
His gut quivered at the memory of returning her call. She’d whispered on the phone as if she feared being discovered. After setting an appointment to meet with him at four this afternoon, she’d hung up. Unless his instincts failed him, Aimee-Lynn was the female recorded on the Holcomb’s tape.
That burglary, like all the others, focused primarily on loose gems. This time, they weren’t just any gems in the store. While before the stolen gems had been a mix of semiprecious stones and diamonds, at Holcomb’s robbery they were all diamonds. At a carat each, they were high quality and easy to fence, with the exception of the red diamond. The value of that gem alone boosted the Holcomb heist to nearly a half-million dollars.
And now McGivern’s had been robbed. Seth only hoped this time the gang left fingerprints or something more substantial to go on than broken glass. He’d love to walk in there with a little leverage when he met with Aimee-Lynn this afternoon.
• • •
A
FTER CALLING HERSELF
and receiving only voice mail, Jules winced. She had no choice. She’d have to come clean.
“Um, April. I, uh, have some bad news.”
“What’s wrong?” April asked as she pulled into the parking spot at the back of April’s Flowers and cut the engine.
“Well, it seems I’ve lost my keys to the apartment and, the uh . . .” Jules bit her lip. “Shop.”
“Juliana, are you sure?” April’s eyes widened. “Wait, the shop key’s missing too?”
“I’m so sorry.” Jules hurriedly exited from the car and raced to the driver’s side to help April climb out. “I’ll pay to have the locks replaced if I can’t find the key.”
April gave her a wan smile. “That’s not necessary. I’ll figure something out. I’ll call Ernie. He’ll know what to do about changing the locks.”
A horn beeped. Jules glanced toward the loading dock to see the delivery van waiting for them. She turned back to April. “Why don’t you head inside and I’ll get the delivery sorted out.”
“Good idea.” April nodded. “Once you’ve finished with him, there are nine dozen white carnations in the back room that need to be dyed before the store opens. Can you take care of them?”
“Sure.” Jules nodded, then headed toward the large white van.
She dealt with the deliveryman quickly, leaving him to put the fresh flowers in the case and the boxes of floral supplies in the back room. She’d need to shelve them but April had wanted the flowers dyed first. Jules closed the loading dock door behind the driver as he left the building, then strode toward the back room.
Gathering her supplies—a bucket of flowers, floral paint, and her apron—she carried them to the table. She dropped the bucket to the floor and set the cans of paint next to the nine large green plastic vases on the worktable before tying the apron around her body.
Jules grabbed up a flower, an uncapped can and started spraying. Finishing the first flower, she set it in a vase then plucked another carnation from the bucket and dyed it. The problem with the mundane task was that her mind tended to wander. The last thing she wanted to do as she stood alone working was think about her vision.
Each time her thoughts drifted to the hum and bump of the wheels of the car from last night’s vision, she moved around the table, as if shifting her position could push away the unwanted memory. Before the last flower was colored, she’d circled the worktable four times and whipped her mind through topics such as how she’d find her sisters, ideas for boosting sales during the holiday season, and even April’s fears of losing the twins as she had the previous two pregnancies.
Between dropping one dyed flower in the bucket and beginning the next, the hum of the tires sounded in her ears again. At some point she drifted, carried away by the monotonous tonal memory until her nose burned with the stench of sweat, copper, and fear. She found herself sifting through the entire vision.
With her visions limited to the victim’s perspective, there wasn’t much to go on. Last night’s vision consisted mostly of shadows, blood, and pain, nothing about the victim, the car itself, or the killer. Information wise, the vision bordered on useless but it did bring on a fresh wave of nausea.
Visions always did that to her. She lived or died each moment exactly as the victim had. Her body acted as a vessel into which a ghost poured her pain, physical and mental. And when the vision ended, the rush of reality crashed into Jules with enough force to leave her feeling ill. Sometimes for days.
It was all the legacy of the Scott family crift of psychic abilities. A curse and a gift. While no two members had the same gift, each was rumored to be cursed with some form of it. Lucky Jules got to see ghosts.
Ha, lucky!
Her crift had cost her everything: her father, her sisters, even her marriage. Only Big Jim and April had ever stayed beside her, unafraid of her
talents
.
Her thoughts drifted to the hum of tires again. She realized that unless the murderer put his hands around her throat—something she seriously didn’t want—Jules doubted she would ever be able to identify him.
What am I doing?
Three years ago, when she had tried to help another ghost, she’d ended up arrested as an accessory to kidnapping. She needed to remember that.
Jules shook her head to clear it and stepped to her right, sidling around the table once more. No more ghosts. She’d never help another specter.
Resolute, she reached for another flower and blinked in surprise. With the can in her right hand, she searched the table for a fresh carnation but none were left. She’d dyed them all.
How long had she been lost in her thoughts?
“Juliana, I spoke to Ernie,” April called out from around the corner.
“April, I’m sorry about the keys,” Jules called back, sweeping stray leaves and broken stems off the worktable and into a trash receptacle.
“It’s fine. I told you Ernie would take care of it.” Her voice grew louder and the floor squeaked as she waddled down the hall. “He’s called a locksmith to come to the shop but he needs to wait for the super to . . . Oh my!” Her blue eyes nearly as round as her belly, she seemed frozen in the doorway between the storefront and the back room. “Hmmm . . . well, at least the flowers are dyed too.”
Too?
Jules glanced down. Bright orange paint was splattered all over her apron, jeans, and shirtsleeve. Not to mention the swipe on the workbench where her hand had smeared the paint when she cleaned off the table. Heat warmed her cheeks but she tried to joke away her embarrassment. “Well, pat my head and call me coordinated.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it.” April pressed her hand to her mouth but laughed anyway. Leaning out the doorway she said, “Diana, you’ve got to see this.”