H.E.A.T. Book Bundle (H.E.A.T. Books 1-3)

by Nicola Claire

  "Law of averages is one thing, but it won't stand up in court," Hart shot back.

  "Then let me find you the evidence, sir."

  Hart stared at me for a long moment. I'm not sure what his set look meant.

  Then finally he said, "Carl going rogue is not your fault."

  "Not catching him, sir, is." Truth again, just not a complete confession. Pierce and Damon were rubbing off on me.

  I was definitely unsure how to take that.

  Hart started to pace. "This would have to be done on the quiet. The resources available to you would be extremely limited."

  "She can use ours," Damon offered, making Hart stop pacing, Pierce smirk, and me to look at him open mouthed.

  "That could work," Hart agreed. "Are you prepared to get HEAT involved? It could come out in the end."

  "I go where Lara goes. HEAT goes with me," Damon quipped, giving a casual shrug to offset the telling admission.

  Hart straightened up, his shoulders-back-chest-out-decision-made position. "All right, then. This needs to be done and it needs to be done in a way no one will find suspicious. Pierce, you're in charge of tidying this lot up and chasing down evidence of Kahui's involvement in the King spill-over case."

  Pierce nodded. Not something he wasn't already aware of and currently assigned to.

  "Keen, you're off the case completely. I don't want you associated with Kahui at all. It's bad enough you're associated with Carl. But to counteract that, I'm assigning you on loan to HEAT. Who I believe," he turned and gave Damon the evil eye, "has an arsonist problem in their midst."

  "Bloody hell," Michaels muttered.

  "You think my detectives don't notice these things, Investigator? And then don't inform me?"

  "Don't look at me," I mumbled, when Damon began to glare in my direction. Pierce started whistling, staring up at the cloudy sky.

  "Great," Damon growled. "I'll remember that, Pierce." Pierce shot him an amused smile.

  "Officially," Hart said, bringing everyone's attention back to him, "Keen's on the HEAT arsonist case. Unofficially, she's on the CIB traitor in our midst case. You tread carefully on this, Keen. It could mean your career."

  And he was not referring to it making my career, that much was obvious in his angry scowl.

  "You all know what to do, now get on and do it," Hart declared, taking a step away towards the side of the house.

  He stopped suddenly, heavy and unforgiving frown in place, and spun back, eyes on Damon.

  "Get her out of here. She can make her statement from home." His offhand way of making sure I was taken care of. Knowing, I was certain, that today had been tough.

  Message delivered, he carried on toward the front of the property and out of sight.

  Pierce walked up then, and placed a hand on my shoulder, giving it a firm squeeze.

  "We communicate outside of CIB on this. Watch your back." His eyes darted to Damon's. "You watch it too." Damon nodded. "Go home and have a glass of wine, Keen. This will all come out in the wash."

  He walked off toward the back door of Kahui's house, where a uniformed officer had appeared.

  I stood there silently, feeling like the earth had shifted under my feet. This morning I had thought Carl Forrester dead. This afternoon I'd been four feet away from his familiar face. I was now on assignment to another service, while investigating my own department on the sly. There could be no more alternate universe than this.

  And Hart hadn't even mentioned catching Carl.

  I knew it wouldn't be the last time I saw my old partner. He'd said as much. Now a stalker and a wannabe guardian angel. But definitely a thorn in my side.

  I hurt. All over, not just from that barb. I ached in my chest. My stomach twisted into knots. And my head pounded with all the lies inside.

  I was one step closer to the other side, myself. One step farther away from a path I had followed my entire life. The law is there to protect us, Lara-Marie. Stay on the right side of it, and it will always be your guiding light. Cross it, and it becomes a laser beam.

  My father's words, in one of his more approachable moments. Words I'd lived by.

  Words I was pushing from my life.

  I turned back to Damon, who'd been watching me quietly from my side.

  What's next?

  "Your place or mine?" he surprised me by asking.

  A soft, sexy smile on his lips told me a glass of wine wasn't all he had on his mind to help me forget this horrendous day. Incorrigible to the very end.

  For a second I considered walking away. I hurt too damn much. Nothing was right in my world, everything was wrong. Feeling anything other than heartache felt impossible right then. Felt unjust.

  Then I let my gaze trail over his features; his strong jawline, his dark, intense eyes, the constant stubble he has on his cheeks. His eyelashes. I'd forgotten how long they were, how they swept down when he blinked. Lush lips; the memory of them lavishing my skin with hot kisses. That body, and how fucking good it felt pressed against mine.

  And like he had done in the past, just by being him, just by being there, he cracked the ice that encased me. He melted it with apparent ease. He made me feel. He made me want. He made me take a step outside of myself and long to go that much further with him.

  "Yours," I finally said, starting to walk towards the side of the house and back to my car. "It's got a bigger bath," I offered over my shoulder with a shockingly natural grin.

  He smiled back. It said it all.

  Damon had broken through my shell, rescued me from myself, and was determined to do it again and again.

  I ducked my head and kept walking, the grin turning a little dazed.

  I shouldn't feel this. I shouldn't want it.

  Then I heard him whisper, "Deal."

  It was sealed.

  Damon and I were a team. Partners. And I had a pretty strong feeling that he'd engineered it right from the very start.

  The clever, irresistible sneak.

  I realised then, that it didn't matter what I thought I should feel.

  All that mattered was what I wanted to feel.

  On a dark day, where darker memories collided with the darkest of realities, I'd found a flare of heat to melt the chill that had invaded my bones, frozen my heart, and iced my soul.

  And Damon had given it to me.

  Tomorrow, I'd face the shadows... because they would surely come.

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  Description

  “No one owns life. But they can certainly own death.”

  A woman is murdered outside an exclusive gaming club and all the clues point across the street to Sweet Hell. Lara Keen, Detective at Auckland Criminal Investigations Bureau, is called in to consult, adding her own unique take on the crime scene.

  But the murder is only the tip of the iceberg, and Lara soon finds herself twisted up in a series of chilling crimes that don't seem to connect, but keep pulling her inexorably further in. Uncovering each clue will require delving deeper into her past and facing some shocking truths better left untouched. And when her boyfriend, HEAT Chief Investigator Damon Michaels, gets caught up in it all, the dots simply disconnect.

  Trust is something they both will have to learn to give, but can Lara open up to that degree? Or will Lara's past make it impossible for her to solve the crimes before the murderer strikes again? Everything hinges on Lara, but the more she uncovers, the harder it is for her to even breathe.

  A sexy, sizzling crime-thriller sure to add a touch of heat to your night.

  For: The aunts & my mum.
>
  Love ya.

  Chapter One

  “You know me better than most.”

  No one owns life.

  But they can certainly own death. All it takes is a knife to the gut or a gun to the head or a well placed fist to the temple. Or, in the case of the mottled body lying before me, large hands strong enough to asphyxiate their victim.

  Whoever did this owned it. They looked into the face of death and claimed it as their own.

  I crouched down and stared at the ring of bruises against her slender neck. Deep purple, a colour as a child I’d found appealing. As a police detective it meant the rupture of underlying blood vessels, usually achieved in a violent manner.

  Life was hard. But death was often brutal.

  She had dark hair, tangled around a perfectly made up face. If she cried in her last minutes of life, the murderer erased the evidence. And reapplied her mascara.

  Her lips were cherry red, but underneath the lipstick they’d be blue. Her eyes were sightless, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t seen her killer. I stared at the dull brown irises and wondered what her last look at life had been.

  Her clothes were sleek and designed to be sexy, elegant evening wear that looked incongruous against the polluted inner city backdrop of her final resting place. She’d been out on the town, partying. Alone? With a crowd?

  Location and mechanism, it always meant something.

  “Does Hart know you’ve asked me to consult on this?” I asked, my eyes still trained on the deceased.

  The sound of soft footfalls came from over my shoulder, but I didn’t turn around. The dead require attention. And the only police officer near me would be Detective Sergeant Ryan Pierce. He’d cleared the scene before I arrived. All the better to hide my involvement.

  “He knows,” came in his deep, rumbling voice.

  “Does anyone else?”

  “No.”

  I forced the sigh, that wanted out, back down.

  Three weeks I’d been on “assignment” to another emergency service. Three weeks I hadn’t stepped foot in Central Police Station. Three weeks Pierce and I had met off-sight, pretending my career wasn’t teetering on a jagged edged, bottomless abyss.

  The woman waited on silently for someone to find her justice.

  I was sure it wasn’t going to be me.

  “It’s personal,” I said, standing up and dusting down my black trousers. They weren’t dirty, but death makes you feel unclean.

  “He used his hands,” Pierce agreed.

  “But the placing,” I said, waving at the woman’s staged position. Arms outstretched, ninety degree angle to her supine body, legs crossed at the ankles, face tilted to the side, eyes sightlessly looking towards the entrance of a nightclub as though praying someone would step out that front door and miraculously save her.

  Or maybe the hope I saw was all on me.

  “Yeah, the placing,” Pierce murmured. “Looks like she’s lying on a cross.”

  I lifted my gaze to the club the body lay in front of. The Whiskey Lounge. An innocuous enough name for a Karangahape Road establishment. Especially one down the red-light end of the long street we were on.

  “You think the club is important?” Pierce queried.

  “Don’t you?”

  He grunted his agreement. “Adult entertainment venue. One of dozens in this area.”

  “Sex sells.”

  “And obviously can kill.” Pierce looked down at the body.

  Silence as we both contemplated the finality of that statement.

  “What I don’t get,” Pierce began, “is that K Road is one of the busiest in Auckland. Twenty-four seven. How did he do it, even if it was done elsewhere, how did he kill her and then stage her right here on the footpath in front of so many potential witnesses?”

  I turned in a full circle and took in the businesses opposite, the flats above the premises, their blinds all closed, the cars parked down the street with raindrops over their paintwork. It wasn’t raining now, but it had rained last night. The woman’s body was lying directly on wet concrete.

  Her clothes were otherwise dry.

  There were three strip clubs, two fast food outlets, four standard nightclubs, and a semi-private gambling-come-gentleman’s-club establishment that stood out like a sore thumb. It begged you to notice it. It pulsated with the need to be recognised. The big brother lauding over its smaller, less impressive siblings.

  My eyes took in its shiny black marble walls, mysterious black painted windows, and the gold writing above its door. The lack of neon flashing lights made a statement of its own.

  Sweet Hell.

  I looked back down at the woman.

  “You don’t need me for this,” I commented quietly.

  Pierce was an exemplary cop, and if he was just pulling me out of my fugue in order to give me something other than my own emotionally fucked up self to think about, then I wasn’t sure I could handle the embarrassment.

  Or anger. There was a lot of that in amongst the turmoil right now as well.

  “You have solid contacts in this area,” he said, voice hard and unforgiving. As though he could see my self doubt and he refused to acknowledge it. “I need you to canvas your informants and tell me what they know.”

  I finally turned to look at him. Ryan Pierce was tall, buff, and put together like a biker who was trying to go clean. He wore pressed twill trousers with a crisply laundered blazer, that contradicted the scuffed thick soled boots on his feet. His intense brown eyes stared out of a gruff goatee wearing face, but his voice was smooth as silk and richly layered. As though he’d attended private school and hadn’t quite lost the cultured accent.

  “This is more than a crime of passion. More than a drug purchase gone wrong,” he said. “My hackles are up on this one, Keen.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. My gut was telling me this was only the start. The staging too precise. The location too conscious. The mechanism of injury too obvious.

  This was act one. But how long the play would be, I didn’t yet know.

  The familiar sensations of guilt and rage and desolate loss swept through me. Familiar, only in so much as they had been so for the past three weeks. This was not me. This was not the Lara Keen I had always prided myself on. This person I had become was irrational and emotional and one step away from the loony bin.

  I still dreamt of Carl. I still dreamt of him dying.

  And he wasn’t even dead.

  I ran a hand over my my face feeling fatigued beyond measure. Disturbed sleep did that to you, and mine had been fragmented to such a degree that I had taken to “sleeping” in my recliner chair, staring out the bay windows of my lounge. Wondering if he watched me from across the street. Wondering if he couldn’t sleep either.

  Three weeks. Three weeks of knowing my partner and mentor had killed five people in a warped sense of duty to protect me.

  I didn’t need him to protect me. I needed him out of my head.

  You knew me better than most.

  I didn’t know him at all. Because if I had, I would never have thought a twenty metre fall from the top of the Melons Bay cliffs would have killed the man. I would never have given up looking for his body in the surf.

  And I would have then been able to prevent the death of five men.

  “Keen,” Pierce started, taking a small step towards me. I held up my hand to halt him.

  It was bad enough that I’d been sidelined out of CIB. It was bad enough that he was throwing me a bone with this case. Mine certainly weren’t going anywhere. The HEAT arsonist had been quiet. And finding the traitor in our midst had stalled at Cawfield.

  No. I didn’t need Ryan Pierce’s sympathy.

  “I’ll check in with my guys and let you know,” I said, determinedly moving off down the street.

  “Where’s your partner?” he called out. The tone of his voice informing me that he was going for a lighter parting than the one we were currently having.

  I stopped and tur
ned to look at him, a small, amused smile spreading my lips. Then looked at my watch.

  “Right now, he’ll be running up the Sky Tower’s 1267 steps.”

  Pierce let out a huff of laughter.

  “Complete with breathing apparatus and fire fighting gear on?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I thought you’d be there to catch him when he collapses at the end. Wipe his brow.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the man. “When have I ever given you the impression that I’m at all motherly?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not your maternal instincts I was talking about.”

  My smile grew. “Whatever,” was the only comeback I could think of.

  I nodded to the forensics team as they moved in with screens and lights and mechanic sized tool kits full of crime scene investigation paraphernalia. The crinkle of their crepe white overalls and shoe covers lending a strange accompaniment to Auckland City waking up for another promising day. But what exactly today would promise was yet to be seen.

  The past twenty one days had been a thick haze of pain and regret and utter confusion. I didn’t do confusion well. I didn’t do idleness well, either. I didn’t do a lot of things but lately I was doing them all.

  My hands fisted, my breaths came out in ragged puffs, the cold air condensing before my lips. I forced my fingers to unclench, sucked in a deep breath and held it, counting to three in my head, and then releasing it over a further count of three. Rinse and repeat.

  It worked. I was no longer hyperventilating, but it did jack shit for the inside my head. The vice around my heart.

  I was a fucking wreck.

  As I didn’t actually have far to go, I left my car where it was parked and walked, thinking the fresh air might help me.