Unforgivable (17 page)

“Nobody out there,” he said, reaching around her for a dish towel. “But it looks like you might have had a raccoon in your trash.”

She stared at him, and he noticed the makeup smudges under her eyes. Goddamn it, she
had
been crying on her way home. Ric’s gut twisted. He’d meant to coax information out of her, not make her cry.

He tossed the towel onto the counter, then pulled his phone from his pocket and started dialing.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling a patrol unit. We should have one in the area.”

“You said it was a raccoon.”

“It probably was. But it doesn’t hurt to have someone do a loop through your neighborhood.”

“No cops.” She snatched the phone out of his hand and disconnected the call. “It’s fine. There’s nobody there.”

He frowned at her as he gently unfolded her fingers from around his phone. Her hand was shaking. Her whole body was shaking. Was this a delayed reaction to getting shot the other night? He’d never seen her so uptight, but she’d probably never been under this much stress.

He put the phone on the counter and slid his hands up the backs of her elbows. His fingers stopped just shy of her bandage. She tensed. Little tremors shook her shoulders.

“Hey.” He slid his hands up her neck and tilted her head back to look at her face. Her blue eyes were wide and watery and filled with so much anguish it made his chest hurt to see it, so instead he looked at her mouth. And when those pink lips parted, he leaned down and kissed them.

Ric’s tongue was in her mouth. The knowledge was a five-alarm, cymbal-clanging wake-up call to every dormant nerve in her body as she stood there, pressed against her kitchen sink, being kissed by him and kissing him back. He tasted hot and spicy and fierce, and he kissed her like he was starving for her. She wrapped her arms around him and leaned into him and kissed him the same way right back. And then his hand was sliding up under her bulky sweater, curling warm around her rib cage, and clutching her against
him as he pulled her up to her tiptoes and fed on her mouth some more.

She’d imagined kissing him so many times, but she’d never imagined
this.
She’d never known. She’d never dreamed he could awaken every cell in her body with only his tongue. And his lips. And his teeth and his hands and the rock-hard ridge pressing against her abdomen. His tongue tangled with hers, sweeping her mouth, tasting her, as his thumb dipped into her bra and found her nipple. His touch there was an electric shock, and she gasped, but he swallowed it. She kept kissing him, absorbing his taste and his warmth and his touch and melding herself against him and wishing he’d never stop. He murmured something, and she pulled back and looked up at him dizzily. And the reality of what was happening slapped her in the face.

No cops.

“Where’d you park your car?”

He drew back. “What?”

“Where’s your truck?” She turned around. “Is it outside?”

“It’s at the restaurant. Why?”

“You followed me home.”

“What’d you think I would do?”

She pulled out of his arms and looked around. The green light of her burglar alarm blinked at her. That alarm had been on when she got home. And yet someone had been in her kitchen and left a message for her right there on the table. It was a wordless message but unmistakable. The purple Mardi Gras beads she’d last seen dangling from the rearview mirror of her Jeep could mean only one thing. The man who’d carjacked
her had been in her house, and he wanted her to know that. He was the same man who’d threatened Sam, and he wanted her to know that, too. He was lethal. And she had no doubt he’d make good on his threat if she didn’t play by his rules.

“What is it?” Ric was watching her with that intensity again.

“Nothing.” She looked away, and her gaze fell on the black handgun sitting on her counter beside Ric’s phone.

Ric’s
handgun. His service weapon. Her heart lurched as she stared at it for an endless moment.

No cops.

She glanced up at Ric, and all of the questions she’d been asking since the night of the shooting swirled through her mind. And all of the mental acrobatics she’d been doing to answer those questions suddenly ceased, because, just like that, the answer that had eluded her for so many days tumbled into place.

She understood. She’d underestimated this.

And she had to get Ric out of there, soon. Because that plan she’d made with Vivian wasn’t going to work now.

That plan could easily get her killed.

She needed a new plan. And it was time to call Alex.

CHAPTER 12

The storage room for the Fort Worth Police Department was a cinder-block bunker underneath the courthouse, and if the room was attached to the building’s central heating system, Ric sure as hell couldn’t feel it. What he could feel was a burning knot of frustration that had been with him since he’d left Mia’s kitchen.

He still couldn’t believe he’d kissed her. And not just kissed her—he’d damn near pulled her to the floor and yanked her clothes off right there in that kitchen. He probably would have if she hadn’t slammed on the brakes. He was supposed to be investigating. What the hell was wrong with him?

Mia was wrong with him. It wasn’t just his attraction to her—that was nothing new. He’d been fighting that urge, very successfully, for months now. This was something else, something more, attraction mixed with a deep-rooted protective instinct that had come out of nowhere and blindsided him. The more he tried to block it out, the more it took hold of him. He couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. For thinking about
her.
He was
exhausted and distracted, and that was no way to run an investigation.

Ric rubbed his bleary eyes and returned his attention to the case file in front of him. It was pitifully thin, which, given the fact that the murdered grounds-keeper had been both poor and illegal, wasn’t surprising. Money was tight everywhere, and even homicide cases had to be prioritized. From the looks of it, this one hadn’t been given more than about two days of a detective’s time. Ric finished skimming the autopsy report and flipped to the last page of the detective’s notes. The ballistics report was tucked in back, right behind a couple of crime-scene photos. The half-page report told Ric what he already knew. Carlos Garza had been killed by a forty-caliber bullet, which had probably been fired by a Glock. The shell casing had been run through IBIS, but the database didn’t contain any matches.

Until now. The same weapon that had fired the bullet that killed Garza had been used to kill Frank Hannigan. Had been used to
nearly
kill Mia. Every time Ric thought about it, the burning in his gut intensified.

What was she caught up in? And why was she lying to him? She was hiding something. Ric knew it, just as surely as he knew he was about one hot look away from dragging her off to bed and stripping away everything between them—the lies, the secrets, everything. No matter what she told him, he knew that trust and sex were all part of the same package with Mia. Ric knew that if he could get her naked, he could get her trust. And that, more than anything, was what he needed right now.

Ric closed the folder and looked into the file box. It contained only two other items: an envelope holding the brass recovered from the crime scene and a paper evidence bag containing the gardener’s clothes.

“Still down here, eh?”

Ric glanced up as a bulky guy with white hair stepped into the room. Ric had never met him, yet he was all too familiar. He looked like every homicide cop on the brink of retirement Ric had ever known, right down to his thinning hair and his clogged arteries.

“Brice Baker?” Ric ventured.

He leaned against the door frame and rattled his pocket change. “That’s me.”

“They told me you were in court today.”

“Judge took a recess.” Baker pulled a pack of Winstons from the pocket of his cheap navy blazer and tapped out a cigarette. “Got your phone message. What can I do you for?”

“I’m up here on a case. Carlos Garza.” Ric nodded at the file. “Saw your name on the log. Looks like you checked out this jacket about six years ago?”

Baker blew out a stream of smoke, ignoring the
NO SMOKING
sign posted beside the door. “Groundskeeper up at the country club. Bullet to the forehead, I seem to recall.”

“That’s the one.”

“That case is colder than a witch’s tit.”

“Not much in the file, either,” Ric said. “Can I ask why you checked out the case file?”

“Sure can. Don’t mean I’m gonna remember much.” He stepped up to the table and took a look, ashing on the linoleum floor as he flipped through the pages. “Yeah, I
recall it now. I’d planned to interview him. He was on my list of witnesses on another case. Checked out before I could track him down, unfortunately.”

Ric’s interest picked up. A list of witnesses implied a serious investigation. “What was the other case?”

“A homicide.” Baker sank into the metal chair at the end of the table and took another drag.

“When?”

“Oh, ’bout six years ago.” He pulled the file toward him and tapped the date on the autopsy report with a meaty finger. “Yup, just a few days before ol’ Carlos bought it. This was a teenage girl. Stabbing vic. She was found in the woods near the golf course.”

Ric sat forward. “Laura Thorne?”

Baker’s gaze sharpened. “What have you got on it?”

“Her name came up in connection with another case I’m working.” Goddamn it, Mia was right. There
was
a link. Ashley Meyer, Laura Thorne, Frank Hannigan, now this. It all tied together. Ric just didn’t know how.

“You worked that case,” Ric stated, although he hadn’t known the detective’s name until now. Jonah had given Ric a notebook full of names and numbers to follow up on while he was in Fort Worth, and he’d been planning to do it after he read the Garza file. Now the detective was sitting right in front of him.

“Messy business.” Baker shook his head. “Pretty girl, too. Least she was, up until some nut job got to her. Slashed her up good, dumped her in the woods. Grounds-keeper you got there”—he nodded at the file—“he was on shift when she went missing from a party out there at the country club. Thought he might have seen something. Woods where she was found border on the golf
course he tends, so I had it in my mind to interview him, see if he knew anything.”

“You guys ever close the case?” Ric asked, although he knew the answer. Mia had looked into it just last week, and she was thorough.

“Nope. Sent her clothes off to the lab. Nothing useful turned up. That case file’s been collecting dust for a while now.”

Unbelievable. A homicide with a clear link to another unsolved homicide, and yet both cases hadn’t been looked at in years.

Baker dropped his cigarette butt on the floor and crushed it out with his shoe. The shoe was polished. Baker’s shirt was pressed and his hair combed neatly— probably all for his court appearance. The man might be close to retirement, but he still took pride in his job, which made Ric bite back all of the snide comments he wanted to throw out right then.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Baker said. “But you know how it is. Money. Case loads. Our population’s ’bout doubled these last twenty years. You think the budget’s kept up? Heck, no. We still got just a handful of guys working a shitload of cases. We focus on the fresh ones. The ones with suspects, witnesses, physical evidence. I bet it’s the same where you are.”

Ric didn’t say anything, which was confirmation enough. It was the same everywhere. But that didn’t make it okay. Once these cases went cold, it was next to impossible to heat them up again. It took confessions, DNA hits, people like Mia who were willing to take a second pass at old, forgotten evidence using new technology.

“You still have the case file?” Ric asked.

The detective nodded down the endless row of shelves lined with cardboard file boxes. “Bottom shelf. End of that row.” He pushed back in his chair and stood up. “I comb through it every year or two, see if anything new jumps out.”

Now it was Ric’s turn to be surprised. “You do?”

“She sticks with me. Go through the crime-scene photos. You’ll see what I mean.”

Ric followed him down the long row of boxes, sobered by the knowledge that each one held evidence of a crime that had destroyed lives and devastated families. Baker stopped at the end and stooped down to pull out a box. He handed it to Ric, then pulled a second box from the shelf.

“Lot more than the Garza file,” Ric commented as they carried the boxes back and dropped them onto the table.

“Pretty blond teenager. You know how it is.” Baker pulled off the lid to his box and tossed it aside. “Turned out she was a high-class call girl. Me? I’d call that an oxymoron, but that’s what the press labeled her. They got hold of some pictures from some Web site she was on and kept running them over and over on the news, so the story wouldn’t go away. Even my partner got obsessed with it.” Baker reached into the box and pulled out a fat accordion file. “Now, most of what you want? It’s in here. The rest of this is noise mostly, stuff that never went anywhere.”