“Asking questions,” she replied tersely.
His eyes never left hers. It impressed him that she didn’t flinch or look away. “Isn’t that a little in the overachiever range?”
She shrugged carelessly. “The sooner this case gets solved, the sooner I can go back to Mission Ridge—and get out of your hair.”
“Very noble of you,” he commented. She wasn’t sure she detected a note of sarcasm in his voice. And then he pressed, “So that’s all you were doing? Showing one of the victim’s photographs around?”
She raised her chin, silently daring him to disprove her. “Yes.”
His eyes pinned her. “Which one?”
Julianne blinked, her mind scrambling for a name. She stalled for time. “Excuse me?”
“Which victim?” he asked. “Which victim’s picture were you showing around? Seems like a simple enough question.” The longer she didn’t give him an answer, the less he believed her.
Damn him. She didn’t like being cornered. It took Julianne only half a beat to make a selection. He wouldn’t know the difference. Not unless he’d gotten out of the car and questioned the hookers she’d talked to after she was gone. And even then, he wouldn’t get an answer. Some of them seemed pretty out of it.
“That one.” Julianne pointed to the photograph of a somewhat bedraggled woman whose picture was heading up the third column.
He turned to look, then approached the bulletin board. “That’s Andrea Katz. She was a computer programmer for Dulles and Edwards.” He looked back at Julianne. “Why would you be asking around about her there? Andrea Katz wasn’t found anywhere near that part of town.”
Why was he pushing this? “Okay, so it was the one next to her.”
Again, he turned just to verify what he already knew. He’d gone over and over this board time and again, searching for the one connection he needed. The women’s likenesses were all embossed in his brain.
“Ramona Hernandez. Hooker. Found in a Dumpster behind a diner in the older part of the city,” he recited. “Want to try again?” he asked cheerfully.
It was getting harder and harder to hang on to her temper. “What do you want from me, McIntyre?”
“The truth, White Bear. I’d like the truth. Is that too much to ask?”
He was crowding her space. She was a very, very private person, one who had trouble filling out anything beyond her name on a form, feeling that it was her business, not anyone else’s. But what harm would telling him do, Julianne silently argued with herself. And if it would get him off her back, maybe telling him would be worth it.
“Okay,” she bit off the word. “In my off hours, I thought I’d try to find my cousin, Mary. Mary White Bear. She’s a runaway. Just before I left Mission Ridge, someone told me that they thought they saw her in Aurora.” Again Julianne lifted her chin pugnaciously. He’d agitated her and part of her was almost spoiling for a fight. “Satisfied?”
Questions about the woman before him began materializing in Frank’s head at a prodigious rate. “No.”
Her eyes narrowed into annoyed slits. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that, is there?”
Now there they had a difference of opinion. He allowed a smile to curve his mouth. “You could tell me why you thought you had to lie about that and keep it to yourself.”
She hadn’t told Randolph about Mary and she got along with the Captain fairly well. Julianne couldn’t see herself voluntarily sharing something so personal with a stranger. She shrugged carelessly, combing her fingers through her hair and sending it back over her shoulder. She said the first thing that came to mind. “I figured you wouldn’t want me distracted.”
“I don’t,” he agreed firmly. “But what you do in your time away from the job is none of my business.” And then, because there was an aura of danger about this woman he needed to find out more about, he qualified his statement. “Unless you wind up killing someone.”
Julianne looked at him sharply, adrenaline rushing through her veins. Had he looked into her background? Did he know about her uncle?
Frank saw the heightened awareness, saw the wary look that entered her eyes. White Bear, he realized, just might be capable of anything. If she turned out to be a loose cannon, he wanted her off his task force. “Did you wind up killing someone last night?”
“No.”
Well, that was a relief. But he was still going to keep an eye on her. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been a hardship. But her looks were distracting and he couldn’t afford to be distracted, not until the killer was caught and this case was closed.
“Okay then, I’ve got no problem with you looking for your cousin during your downtime.” Turning away from her, he began to walk toward the cubicle that served as his office. “Can I see it?”
“See what?” she asked warily.
This woman trusted no one, he thought, as more questions about her came to mind—the first being why was she so distrustful? “The photograph you were showing around. Maybe I’ve seen her,” he added when she made no effort to retrieve the photograph from her purse.
Maybe he had, Julianne thought.
No stone unturned, remember?
She was going to have to do something about her defensiveness, Julianne silently upbraided herself, taking her purse out of the desk’s bottom drawer. Opening it, she pulled out the photograph of her cousin and held it up to him.
The girl in the photograph looked like a younger version of Julianne. She had incredibly sad eyes. “Pretty girl,” he commented.
“She would have been better off if she wasn’t,” Julianne answered grimly, looking at the photograph herself.
“Meaning?”
Julianne raised her eyes to his. “Meaning that she looked a lot like my dead aunt. And the first one who noticed was my uncle.”
Her tone of voice had Frank quickly reading between the lines. Incest was a crime he could never quite wrap his head around. It was just too heinous. “So she ran away from home before he—”
“No,” Julianne contradicted angrily, “she ran away from home after he…”
She deliberately let her voice trail off without finishing the sentence, but there was no mistaking her meaning.
Frank took a breath. Maybe that was why this woman was so angry. It would have certainly made him angry to have a cousin of his violated by the very person who was supposed to protect her.
“Sorry to hear that,” he said, his voice as full of feeling as hers was monotone.
She thought he honestly meant that and it made her regret the tone she’d taken with him. When she reached for the photograph he was still holding, he didn’t surrender it immediately.
“Why don’t I have copies made of this?” Frank suggested. “Pass it around to the beat cops. Maybe one of them will see her and get back to us.”
Us. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she hadn’t asked for his help, but she swallowed the words. She had to start trusting someone somewhere along the line or she was just going to wind up self-destructing. That wasn’t going to help Mary at all.
Julianne pressed her lips together. Time to take the hand that was reaching out to her, she silently ordered. Taking it didn’t automatically make her weak.
“That would be good, yes,” she agreed.
But just as he began to head for the copy machine, the phone on Riley’s desk rang. Since he was closer to it than Julianne was, Frank picked it up.
“McIntyre.”
Julianne saw his face darken as he listened. His eyes went flat.
“We’ll be right there,” he said grimly before hanging up. “C’mon,” he told her, putting the photograph down on her desk. For now, it was going to have to wait. “They just found another body.”
Chapter 4
The Dumpster was clear across town behind a popular restaurant that served Chinese cuisine, buffet style.
Gin-Ling’s was a popular food source for the homeless. Confronted with the all-you-can-eat philosophy, more than ha
lf the patrons who came to Gin-Ling’s had a tendency to overload their plates. Discovering that their stomachs weren’t really as large as they’d surmised usually followed shortly thereafter. Since the restaurant didn’t provide doggie bags, most people left the uneaten portions on their plates.
Most evenings, the twin Dumpsters behind Gin Ling’s were filled to overflowing.
This time, one of them was more “overflowing” than the other.
Parking his Crown Victoria sedan at the end of the alley bordering the crime scene, Frank got out. As he began to make his way to the Dumpster where the newest gruesome discovery had been made by a homeless man with, it turned out, a very weak stomach, he pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his pocket and started to put them on.
Mentally, Frank wished he had coveralls on instead of the suit he was wearing. But when he’d dressed this morning, he hadn’t been planning on undertaking a safari through a Dumpster.
Just before he reached the Dumpster under scrutiny, Frank glanced toward Julianne and saw that she was putting on her own pair of plastic gloves. He noted that her mouth was set grimly and recalled what Riley had told him last night. The detective from Mission Ridge wasn’t used to homicides.
“You up to this?” he asked her suddenly.
Busy taking in everything around her, significant or otherwise, it took Julianne a second to realize that McIntyre was talking to her.
“Excuse me?”
He stopped walking. “Riley said that you mentioned that the woman who was killed in Mission Ridge was your first dead body.” These things could be pretty unsettling and he didn’t want to be sidetracked by a detective throwing up her breakfast.
Julianne wasn’t sure where the detective was going with this, only that she probably wasn’t going to like it. “So?”
“So,” he continued patiently, “if you’d rather sit this out—until at least the rest of the team gets here—I understand.”
Right. He understood. And then he’d use that against her to send her back. She didn’t need those kinds of favors. She was here and she planned to remain here until she found Mary and, oh yes, helped to find the serial killer as well.
“Thank you but there’s no need to worry about me,” she told him coolly. “And Millie Klein wasn’t my first dead body,” she informed him. “Just my first homicide.”
Her uncle had been the first dead person she’d seen. And that scene had been made that much more brutal because he was dead by her hand. Blood had been everywhere. She could still see him staring down at the knife, anger and shock on his face as the life force fled from his veins.
But there was no way she was about to go into that now.
Frank could sense she was holding something back. He had a feeling that if she were drowning, White Bear’d throw the life preserver back at his head, determined to save herself on her own. Pride was a good thing, but there was such a thing as too much of it. For the time being, he let it go.
“Okay.”
As he approached the Dumpster, he saw that the crime scene investigators had already been called in. A slight, younger man was busy snapping photographs of the area directly surrounding the one Dumpster, while another man, older and heavyset, was inside the Dumpster. Wrinkling his nose involuntarily against the pungent smell, he was taking close-ups of a woman who could no longer protest.
Overturning a wooden crate that, if the image painted on the side was correct, had once contained bean sprouts, Frank pushed the box next to the Dumpster and used it as a step to facilitate his getting into the Dumpster. The thought of just diving in seemed somehow repugnant.
The smell of death and rotting food assaulted him. Still, a job was a job. The first thing he noticed, before he climbed in, was the wig. A blond wig, obviously belonging to the victim, had slipped halfway off her head.
The second thing he noticed was the woman’s face.
He’d seen that face before. Less than an hour ago.
Stunned at the way fate sometimes toyed with them, he turned to see that Julianne was gamely about to follow suit, waiting her turn to use the wooden crate as a stepstool.
“Stay back,” he ordered.
The barked commanded caught her off guard. “Why? I said I can handle it.”
Not this. “I don’t think so,” he told her tersely. There was no arguing with his tone.
Except that she refused to be browbeaten. Nor would she accept any special treatment that he could later hold over her head.
“Why don’t you let me decide that?” It was a rhetorical question and she didn’t wait for an answer. Bracing her hands on the front of the Dumpster, she was about to vault in.
“Might get crowded in here,” the investigator speculated.
“White Bear, I said get back,” Frank ordered angrily.
He shifted, trying to block her view, but it was too late. Because that was when Julianne saw her. Saw the face of the serial killer’s latest victim.
She could almost feel the blood draining out of her face.
“Mary.”
Frank jumped down from his perch in time to catch her as her knees gave out.
Julianne vaguely felt arms closing around her even as fire and ice passed over her body. For a split second, the world threatened to disappear into the black abyss that mushroomed out all around her.
Only the steeliest of resolves enabled her to fight back against the darkness, against the overwhelming nausea that almost succeeded in bringing up her hastily consumed dinner from last night.
Sucking in air, Julianne struggled against the strong arms that held her prisoner.
“I’m all right,” she insisted, hot anger mingling with hot tears she damned herself for shedding. “I’m all right,” she repeated, almost shouting the words at Frank.
The sound of an approaching car had Frank looking down the alley. He recognized Riley’s vehicle. “Look, why don’t I have Riley take you back?” he suggested kindly.
She bristled at what she thought was pity. “No.” The word tore from her throat like a war cry. Shrugging out of Frank’s hold, willing her legs to stiffen, Julianne moved back to the Dumpster. “I’m not going anywhere,” she cried defiantly.
“You’re off the case, White Bear,” he told her tersely.
Her head snapped around and she glared at him. “No, I’m not,” she insisted. “You can’t do that.”
Oh, but he could. And he had to. “You’re related to the victim.”
Her eyes blazed and she took out all the pain she was feeling on him. “You wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t invaded my privacy.”
He wasn’t going to get sucked into nitpicking. “Doesn’t change anything. You can’t—”
Suddenly grabbing his arm, Julianne dragged him over to the side, away from the investigator who had made no secret of listening to the exchange. It killed her to beg, but if she had to, she would.
“Please, I’m asking you not to take me off the case. That girl in the Dumpster is the only family I have. I had,” she corrected. Even as she said it, she could feel her heart twisting in her chest. I’m sorry, Mary. I’m so sorry. “She’s in there because of me.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You’re not going to be satisfied until I rip myself open in front of you, are you?”
This woman could raise his temper faster than anyone he’d ever encountered, but his aim wasn’t to irritate her. He had only one focus. “My only interest is in solving the case. Now if you have anything to contribute that might be helpful—”
The words, propelled by her guilt, rushed out. “If I’d taken her with me instead of leaving her with her father, she wouldn’t have run away, wouldn’t have tried to support herself by resorting to the world’s oldest profession.”
He didn’t buy that. There was always another choice.
“Lots of other ways for a woman to earn a living besides that,” he told her.
Julianne knew she would have never resorted to that, but she wasn�
��t Mary. Mary’s demons had branded her. “Not if she thinks she’s worthless. Her father didn’t just steal her innocence, he stole her soul. And I let him.” She pointed toward the Dumpster. “That’s on me.”
His eyes held hers. Frank could all but feel her misery. “You knew what was going on?”
“No, but I should have.” If she hadn’t been so involved in making a life for herself, she would have realized what was going on, would have understood the desperate look in Mary’s eyes.
If there was the slightest case for her staying, he thought, White Bear wasn’t going to do either of them any good by blaming herself for something she had no control over.
“Listen, I’m not up on my Navajo culture, but I don’t recall hearing that the tribe had a lock on clairvoyance. If you didn’t know, you didn’t know. What happened to your cousin isn’t your fault.” But he could see that his words made no impression on her. It was as if they bounced off her head.
He had to let her work the case. He had to. “Please don’t take me off the case. I’ve got to find her killer. I owe it to Mary.”
“Hey, anything wrong?” Riley called out as she came up to join them. Sanchez and Hill stood directly behind her. Both veered over to the Dumpster that had become Mary’s final resting place. Their expressions grim, each detective pulled on a pair of plastic gloves.
Frank saw the unspoken plea in Julianne’s eyes as she looked up at him. This was, for the time being, still between the two of them. Being leader sucked, he thought. But there was no way he was about to relinquish the position.
“Turns out White Bear’s got a delicate stomach,” he told his sister after a pause. “I’m trying to tell her she doesn’t have to look at the victim. Plenty to do around here besides staring at a dead woman.”
“No shame in that,” Riley assured her. “First murder victim I saw, I emptied out my stomach and didn’t eat for a week. Frank’s right,” she continued, placing herself between Julianne and the Dumpster. “There’re enough people to document the vic’s position and whatnot.” She looked at her brother. “Want us to canvas the area?”
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