Safe in Your Arms

by RaeAnne Thayne

  How could she blurt out to a stranger that the wiring inside her head sometimes decided to go haywire and when it did, she couldn’t even find a simple word like hello?

  She blew out a breath. He must think she was the rudest person on the planet. The ice princess. She knew people called her that. It was a far better label than the ones she’d heard as a child.

  Freak.

  Moron.

  Stupid.

  She would take ice princess any day. The hand still pressed to her stomach clenched into a fist. She would just have to let him go on believing her cold. If he was willing to help her find who killed Tina, she didn’t care what he thought of her.

  She closed her eyes but his image still burned in her mind, as it had far more often than she cared to admit since the night of the fund-raiser, until Tina’s violent death three weeks ago had pushed away anything as frivolous as thoughts of a gorgeous man.

  Tina would have called him a major hottie. Elizabeth managed a smile even as grief pierced her again whenever she thought of her friend.

  He was very different from the polished, smooth executives her father had paraded home in the months before his death a year ago, eternally hopeful that one of them would take his dimwitted daughter off his hands.

  Beau Riley had little in common with those tame, docile men like her one-time fiancé, men who cared more about their manicures than about things like truth and justice. She knew it instinctively.

  The bleat of her cell phone shattered the quiet inside the Lexus before she could dwell more on the detective.

  She gazed at the phone as it rang a second time, tempted to ignore it. Talking on the phone was always a challenge when she couldn’t use body language and facial expressions as cues.

  One look at the incoming number told her she had no choice but to pick it up. Luisa never called unless it was important.

  “Hello?”

  Silence answered her for a moment, then Luisa’s melodious, soothing voice reached her. “Mi hija? I worry for you.”

  Elizabeth didn’t need to see the older woman’s sweet, plump face to comprehend the concern and love in her voice. Some of the tension in her shoulders began to seep out. “I’m fine. I’ll be heading for the…” Big. Water. Float. She could see the blasted thing in her mind but the slippery word evaded her.

  “I’ll be home soon,” she finally said.

  Ferry! That’s what she meant. The ferry. She almost blurted it out but she knew Luisa had enough experience with her conversational idiosyncrasies after all these years that the occasional lurch didn’t faze her at all.

  “How is Alex?” Elizabeth asked instead.

  “Taking a nap,” his grandmother answered. “Did you talk to the policia?”

  “Grace’s friend agreed to look at the file. I think he will help me.”

  The other woman didn’t answer and Elizabeth swallowed her sigh. Luisa wasn’t convinced that her daughter had been murdered. She wanted Elizabeth to let the whole thing drop, to allow the police ruling to stand. As painful as it was to think her daughter had ended her own life, Elizabeth suspected Luisa feared digging too deeply into Tina’s wild, troubled world.

  “I’ll be home soon,” she finally repeated. “Give Alex a kiss for me when he wakes up and tell him I’ll take him down later to watch the…” Swim. Quack. This time she forced herself to concentrate until the word came to her. “To watch the ducks.”

  She hung up the phone and stared out the windshield at the dim, unnatural light inside the garage. Despite Luisa’s reservations, Elizabeth knew she was doing the right thing by pursuing this investigation, no matter how difficult she might find it.

  For Alex and for Luisa.

  And for Tina, who had never called her stupid.

  * * *

  An hour after Elizabeth Quinn walked out of the precinct, Beau could swear her subtle perfume like just-ripe peaches still lingered in the air, sweet and fresh and oddly innocent.

  Like her.

  He frowned. Now why the hell would such a thought enter his head? He didn’t know about the innocent part but he knew for sure she wasn’t sweet. She was cold and snobby. The ice princess, who didn’t have the time of day for a cop unless she wanted something from him.

  Somehow the nickname didn’t jibe with the quiet, solemn woman who had faced him with trembling hands and chewed-to-the-quick fingernails.

  There was more to Elizabeth Quinn than her reputation. He had a feeling she was far more complex than the facts of the case she had asked him to look into.

  With a sigh he turned back to the file. What did she expect him to find that the other detectives couldn’t? The file told a grim story of a troubled woman who had hit rock bottom.

  Tina Hidalgo, age twenty-eight, had been found by a nosy neighbor peeking through open blinds. She was dead of a gunshot wound. The Glock with only her fingerprints on it—the Glock she had purchased illegally the day before she died—was on the floor, underneath her dangling fingers. The medical examiner said the bullet entry and exit were consistent with a self-inflicted injury.

  She had powder burns on her hand.

  And she had left a note, short and succinct.

  I’m sorry.

  He looked at the copy of the note included in the file. Her girlish handwriting with its big loops and rounded letters looked shaky, but that was only to be expected by someone under severe emotional strain. It definitely matched other samples of her writing, also included in the file.

  Elizabeth Quinn had left out a few interesting little tidbits during their meeting. Like Tina Hidalgo’s drug problem. The night of her death, she had enough heroin in her system to launch the space shuttle.

  Elizabeth had also neglected to tell him her friend had been fired the week before from her sometime-job as a stripper for frequent absences from work—and even more damning, this wasn’t her first suicide attempt. Seven years earlier, she’d had her stomach pumped after swallowing a bottle of painkillers.

  It was a clean case. Speth and Watson hadn’t missed anything. He set his pen down and rubbed at the ache between his eyes he always got when he read too much.

  He wasn’t going to enjoy telling Elizabeth Quinn his conclusions. He could just picture that devastated grief in her pretty blue eyes again.

  “What’s all this?”

  Beau looked up from the file. He’d been so engrossed in trying to figure out how to break the news to Ms. Moneybags Quinn he hadn’t noticed the return of his temporary partner.

  “Hey, Griff,” he greeted the clean-cut, scrubbed detective. Fresh off patrol, J. J. Griffin was eager to learn the ropes in the violent crimes division. He was a little too idealistic, maybe, but Beau figured that shine would wear off after another month or two.

  “How was the dentist?”

  Griff flashed his teeth. “Great. Not a single cavity, as usual. I’m telling you, it’s all about flossing.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  The kid ignored his dry tone and picked up the case file. “This is that Hidalgo case Speth and Walker caught, isn’t it? I thought they told the lieutenant in yesterday’s briefing they were signing it off as a suicide.”

  “They did. I’m just taking another look for a friend of the victim’s.”

  “That classy piece I saw sitting at your desk before I took off?”

  Beau decided he didn’t like the slightly besotted look in Griff’s pretty-boy eyes. He grunted an assent.

  “What are you looking for?” his partner persisted.

  “The friend doesn’t agree it was self-inflicted. She thinks we’re missing something.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I knew that, the case wouldn’t still be closed, now would it?”

  In his relentlessly cheerful way, Griffin didn’t appear to take offense at Beau’s curt tone. He pulled a chair over. “Mind if I take a look?”

  Beau shrugged. If the kid wanted to waste his time, too, he wasn’t going to stop him.

  He
was examining the medical examiner’s report again when Griff plopped a photograph on top of it. “What’s this smudge here?”

  “Where?”

  The kid pointed it out. Beau frowned and reached into his desk drawer for a loupe for a closer look. What he saw through the magnifier sent red flags flashing all over the whole case.

  “I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

  “What is it?”

  “Her wrist is bruised. See? Right there?”

  “Like she was tied up?”

  He looked carefully at the autopsy photo. “No. They’re not deep enough for that. And only the right hand is bruised.” The writing hand, the trigger finger.

  As if someone had held her wrist just long enough to force her to write that brief note. And then held it tight and helped Tina Hidalgo commit suicide.

  Why hadn’t CSI picked up on it? And why wasn’t it in the ME’s report? Maybe because the rest of the facts in the case pointed so overwhelmingly to suicide.

  It still might be, he reminded himself. Tina Hidalgo could have gotten those bruises hours—or even days—before her murder.

  But all his cop instincts were warning him that everything in this case wasn’t as it appeared at first glance.

  It looked like Elizabeth Quinn would get her way after all, probably just as she always did. Her friend’s case would go back into the active pile, which meant he was going to have to see the ice princess again.

  He didn’t even want to think about whether his tangle of emotion at the thought was dread or anticipation.

  CHAPTER 2

  Several hours after her visit with the terrifying police detective, Elizabeth still couldn’t quite seem to catch her breath.

  She sat on a bench near the water’s edge watching Alex toss stick after stick into the shallows in the hope that his new puppy would chase after it.

  He wasn’t having much luck. Although she was a yellow Labrador, Maddie either didn’t have the retriever instincts of her breed or she didn’t quite catch the concept of fetch just yet. Instead of bounding into the water after the stick, she planted all four of her gangly legs on the rocky beach and watched the boy with a bemused expression on her jowly face.

  Probably the same expression Elizabeth had worn at Beau Riley’s desk earlier—that slightly panicked what-am-I-supposed-to-do-now? look.

  The detective’s opinion of her shouldn’t matter at all. She knew it. But she hated imagining what he must have thought of her sitting in front of him with her thoughts and words atangle. Pathetic. He must have thought she was absolutely pitiful, and he had probably agreed to help her only so he wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore.

  She sighed, angry with herself for continuing to dwell on this. Was she so narcissistic, so desperately eager for approval, that she really cared why the man had agreed to help her? His motives didn’t matter. Finding Tina’s killer was the important thing.

  Still, she couldn’t help wondering with bitter regret why he seemed to bring out the worst in her, first the night of Grace Dugan’s fund-raiser and then today at the police station.

  Most of the time she was far more composed. She could go days without stumbling over her words or missing more than the occasional conversational beat.

  If she did start to have trouble, she had learned over the years that she could invariably hide the worst of it behind a veneer of chilly reserve.

  It was just her bad luck that Beau Riley—the first man she’d been attracted to since Stephen—made her forget all her usual defenses, made her feel just like a stupid, stuttering girl again.

  And there was the real trouble, she admitted. She was attracted to him, to that masculine combination of dark wavy hair, green eyes and lean, dangerous features.

  She knew better. Experience could be a cruelly effective teacher. A man as brash and confident as Beau Riley would want nothing to do with someone like her.

  Alex grunted suddenly, and she looked up from her grim thoughts in time to see him throw the last stick from the pile he’d collected so carefully into the water with more pique than precision. He made a garbled series of sounds, each more frustrated sounding than the last as he glared at the dog he had adored until now.

  Elizabeth mentally kicked herself. Usually she was far more attuned to Alex’s moods. Why hadn’t she noticed his mounting frustration over his inability to make Maddie do what he wanted? If she had been paying attention—instead of brooding over her encounter with Beau Riley—she would have picked up on the signs and headed this minitantrum off at the pass.

  She, of all people, should have sensed it. Heaven knows, she had enough experience herself with that same suffocating frustration over the past twenty-seven years.

  Rising swiftly from the bench, she touched Alex’s shoulder so he would face her. As soon as he turned, she had to fight the urge to kiss that adorable scowl off his little face.

  Don’t give up, she signed.

  Maddie’s a stupid dog, he responded, his hands that were still chubby with baby fat a little clumsy with the signs.

  No she’s not. We need to work a little harder to teach her what we want. I’ll help you.

  Alex’s bottom lip stuck out. I don’t want to. Maddie’s a stupid dog, he repeated.

  Not stupid. Young. She won’t learn unless we take the time to teach her. Come on, I’ll help you.

  For the next half hour they worked with the dog, trying to teach her to obey the hand signal for fetch. Elizabeth was tempted several times to use verbal commands with the dog but she resisted, remembering the advice of Alex’s speech pathologist.

  Maddie was Alex’s dog, a birthday gift from her and Luisa a month ago, just a week before Tina’s death. As her master, he should be able to command her. Since the boy’s oral speech was unreliable to nonexistent, his speech therapist thought it best to use only hand signals with the dog.

  With a little instruction, Maddie was a smart thing, Elizabeth thought as the dog finally managed to figure out what they wanted from her. At last, she eagerly bounded after the stick and brought it back to Alex, who giggled and let her lavish doggie kisses on his face.

  His frustration forgotten, the boy and dog wrestled happily in the thick carpet of grass above the shoreline. Elizabeth returned to her bench, content to watch them, her love for this sweet child a thick ache in her throat.

  She remembered that first moment she had seen him, shriveled and red and already squalling his little heart out. Tina had asked her to be her labor coach, so she had been there throughout that miraculous day he entered the world.

  Every time she thought about seeing him born, she wanted to weep with joy that she had been allowed to play such an important role in his life.

  She’d been there, too, at the routine six-month well-baby check with Tina when his pediatrician first suggested the child couldn’t hear. And at the subsequent specialist appointments when the doctor’s suspicions had been confirmed.

  She loved him as fiercely as if he had been her own child, and she wanted to do all she could to make sure he lived a happy life and grew up to be a confident, self-assured young man who would never look at his hearing impairment with any kind of shame.

  While they worked with the dog, storm clouds had begun to gather over the water. It was getting late, and Luisa would probably have dinner ready soon, she realized.

  She had waited just a moment too long to herd the boy and dog inside. By the time she managed to get Alex’s attention to sign that it was time to go in, the first drops of rain began to pelt them.

  She and Alex raced for the house, laughing as Maddie jumped around them with excitement. By the time they made it to the back door off the kitchen, the skies had opened in earnest and they narrowly escaped getting drenched.

  Inside the vast, gleaming kitchen, they were met by the luscious aroma of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies baking and by Luisa holding out the cordless phone to Elizabeth.

  “For you.” Luisa didn’t bother to hide her disapproval. “I was tak
ing a message when I heard you come. It’s the policia. That detective.”

  Elizabeth froze, gazing at the phone as if it had suddenly barked at her like Maddie. She hated the funny twirling in her stomach but she couldn’t seem to control it.

  She wasn’t at all sure suddenly if she could handle another encounter with Beau Riley just yet. Maybe in a few days.

  She almost instructed Luisa to take his number so she could call him back after she had a chance to muscle up the courage. Then Alex brushed past her, caught in the gravitational pull of the cookies, and the words tangled in her throat.

  Alex. She had to remember Alex. Maybe Detective Riley already had new information about Tina’s death. He didn’t strike her as a man who wasted any time. She had no choice but to talk to him and find out if he’d learned anything.

  She wiped suddenly clammy hands on the jeans she’d changed into after she returned from the city, then took the phone from Luisa.

  With a grim feeling that she would need all the concentration she could muster to hold her own with him, she slipped out of the kitchen and into the music room down the hall.

  “Hello?” she finally said, despising the thready edginess in her tone.

  “I thought maybe we were cut off.”

  In contrast to her own nervous squeak, the detective’s voice was deep and commanding, a smooth, rich bass. He had shades of the South in his voice, she discovered. Not much, just a hint of a drawl, like a slow-moving Georgia creek hidden in thick timber.

  Her mind went blank for a moment but she fought hard to regain composure. “No. I’m sorry. I needed to find a…quiet spot to talk.”

  “Big party going on?” Not exactly cordial in the first place, that voice dropped several degrees. He must not have a very high opinion of her if he thought she could come to the police station one minute speaking of her best friend’s murder, then return home to throw a soiree.

  Of course he didn’t have a high opinion of her. The first time they’d met, she had given him the coldest of shoulders and the second time she had sat at his desk all but wringing her hands like the helpless heroine of some silent film. He must think she was a complete idiot.