“No, no. I’ll drive you.”
“Thank you, dear,” she softly smiled. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Probably take a cab, I bitterly thought to myself.
She cuddled closer and nuzzled the tip of her nose against the expanse of my neck. “How can I ever repay you?” Her mouth was hot and wet against my skin.
I felt her fingers begin to creep under the bottom hem of my t-shirt. She scratched her nails across my abdomen before starting the journey up to my bra-less breasts.
I closed my fingers around her wrist to keep her hand from traveling. “Maybe when you get back from Duluth,” I mumbled.
Julia pulled away. Her eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Are you punishing me?”
“No,” I said darkly. “I’m just not in the mood.”
“I love you.”
“I know you do,” I couldn’t help snapping. I took a deep, calming breath. “I just—I need a little time, okay? My ego’s a little wounded, I guess.”
She nodded curtly, mouth drawn in a tight line. “Good night, dear.”
I rolled onto my side and sighed. “Night.”
+ + +
Julia wasn’t the type to hit the snooze button. The alarm on her phone chimed and she immediately rose out of bed. Her feet were silent on the carpeted floor and she only turned on the bathroom light after she’d closed the door.
I heard the shower turn on. I remained in bed and reached over to her side of the mattress. Her pillow was still warm. It was still dark outside; I had no idea what time it was. I could hear the light patter of rain against the bedroom windowpanes.
The shower turned off. I stared at the ceiling. What if I’d ruined everything? Why had I been so stupidly impatient to propose marriage to her after only a few months of dating? I’d barely gotten her to agree to date me; why would I ever think she’d want to get married?
I heard the sounds of the bathroom faucet turning on and off as Julia brushed her teeth behind the closed bathroom door. Her hairdryer turned on a few moments later. She hadn’t even left, but I missed her already.
My mind raced to the ridiculous. What if she’d made up the excuse about needing to go to Duluth? The timing was impossibly coincidental. What were the chances that she’d have to go out of town immediately after I’d proposed? And who was this Charlotte person that Julia had to go save? I didn’t have a last name, so running her name in the system wasn’t even an option.
The bathroom door opened and Julia stepped out. My eyes had adjusted to the dim bedroom lighting, but I could only make out her silhouette.
“Cassidy,” she whispered.
“Yeah?” My voice sounded too loud. Hollow and foreign.
“Do you still want to give me a ride?”
“That suggests I want you to go.”
The edge of the mattress dipped as Julia sat down. Her fingers went to my hair, twirling tendrils that had worked their way out of my bun. I closed my eyes and suppressed the urge to lean into her touch. I was literally wrapped around her fingers.
“I can call a cab,” she offered.
“No, no. I’m up. I’ll drive you.” I sat up in bed and threw the covers off of me.
Julia remained seated on the bed. I could feel her introspective stare. “Are we okay?”
Her complicated question pressed against my chest. “Yeah. Sure. Of course.” The words moved with resistance like a thick, sticky syrup.
She nodded, my halted assurances apparently enough to satisfy her.
I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt while Julia finished getting ready. She’d packed a medium-sized suitcase. It wasn’t the largest bag she owned, but it also wasn’t her smallest. I imagined it packed with meticulously folded blouses and pencil skirts. Red bottomed high heels and pearl necklaces.
Julia dropped her key ring into my hand, and I knew it was time to go.
“Feel free to use my car while I’m gone.”
I nodded, hands at 10 and 2. I knew I wouldn’t use it. As soon as I finished chauffeuring her to the airport, I’d park it in her spot at the apartment complex and leave it there until she needed me to pick her up from the airport again.
“When’s your return flight?” I asked.
“I bought a one-way ticket.”
I glanced once in her direction. Her eyes were on the dark road ahead of us; she’d tucked her lower lip beneath her top row of teeth.
“Are you sure you’re not running away?” I tried to joke.
“I don’t know how long the trial will take.”
It was a logical, reasonable answer, but it did nothing to ease my nerves.
The drive to the airport took no time at all. The sun was still sleeping along with most of the Twin Cities’ commuters. I pulled Julia’s Mercedes up to the drop-off curb in front of her airline. She turned towards me, but I unfastened my seatbelt and hopped out of the car before she could complete her hasty goodbye.
I grabbed her wheeled suitcase out of the trunk and set it on the curb. The persistent rain had dropped the air temperature. My leather jacket cut through the chill, but Julia was practically shivering in her thin trench coat.
I roughly rubbed the outside of her arms. “You should get inside.”
She ignored my advice. “Are you sure we’re okay, Cassidy?”
The look of concern on her beautiful face made me ache.
“Because I won’t get on this flight if we’re not.”
“Don’t say that,” I barked out a laugh. “You’ll have me lying to keep you here.”
Julia’s mouth twitched with the hint of a smile, but she still wasn’t convinced. “I’m sorry I couldn’t say yes.”
I wrapped my arms around her figure and pulled her to me. I felt her rigid posture slip as she leaned against me. “I get it,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I don’t like it, but I get it. Now go,” I ordered. “The sooner you’re on that plane, the sooner you’ll win your trial and can come back to me.”
Instead of pulling away, Julia buried her face into my shoulder. “Just a little longer.”
I would have been content to stand in the cold and hold her all day, but the sound of a shrill whistle tried to interrupt our embrace.
“Black Mercedes!” A traffic cop in a yellow safety vest yelled at us. “Get moving!”
I locked eyes with the cop and waved to let him know I’d heard him. Julia, however, refused to let me go.
I pressed my face against the side of her head. The scent of her spicy shampoo hit my nostrils. “You’re gonna get me arrested,” I chuckled.
Her arms tightened around my waist. “I’ll visit you in prison.”
The airport cop blew his whistle again. I heard Julia’s low growl. “I will have that man’s head on a plate.”
“Easy, Counselor. Save some of that for the court room.”
Fingers curled around the collar of my leather jacket. She tugged me to her height. Our lips met, and I heard the police officer’s whistle go silent.
“I hope he choked on that damn thing,” Julia murmured against my open mouth.
I slipped my fingers through her silken hair and deepened the kiss. When she hummed against my lips, I wanted to toss her into the back of her Mercedes, but I knew I was only delaying the inevitable.
I broke away from her mouth with an unreasonable amount of willpower. “You’ve got a flight to catch,” I rasped.
“Why don’t you come with me?” she proposed. “You’re due a vacation.”
I let my head fall back and I breathed out. “A vacation in glamorous Duluth, Minnesota. Sure.”
“Who cares about the destination?” Her voice lowered to a rough burr. “We wouldn’t leave the hotel room anyway.”
If I’d still been sleepy from the early hour, her promise had my body at full attention. “Oh God, that’s not fair,” I groaned.
Julia batted her dark lashes in faux innocence. “Thank you for the ride, Detective. I’ll have to think of some way to repay your kindness.”
You could let me marry you.
I forced a grin to my face. Julia’s mood had turned playful, and I wasn’t about to sour it again with my selfishness.
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.” I jammed my hands into the pockets of my jacket and started to walk backwards toward her car. “Text me when you land?”
Julia nodded. She looked as though she had more to say, but there was an airport police officer marching in our direction, and I really didn’t want to go to jail.
I drove back to Julia’s apartment in silence. I didn’t turn on the car radio; only the rhythmic sound of the windshield wipers broke the quiet inside the car. It was quiet in the interior of the car, but not inside of my head.
Everything about Julia’s demeanor as I’d dropped her off suggested that she was sensitive and sorry for having damaged my feelings. But her leaving was more powerful than any reassuring words or sweet gestures. Selfishly I’d wanted her to cancel her trip altogether to baby my bruised ego. But Julia had been a lawyer long before we’d met. She had a reputation to consider and apparently a mysterious friend to help in Duluth. I wanted to shove down feelings of inadequacy, but in my current position it was hard to feel anything but abandoned.
I came home to an equally quiet apartment. I didn’t have to be to the office for a few more hours, so I shed the clothes I’d been wearing and purposefully left them in a sloppy pile on the bedroom floor. I considered calling in sick, but I knew what would have followed—me wallowing in self-pity, drinking too much beer, and ordering takeout. Going to the office would at least distract me during daylight hours. I could self-destruct later.
I rolled over to Julia’s side of the bed; her pillow smelled like her. I was probably imagining it, but the sheets were still warm.
CHAPTER NINE
“Hey, Miller. Truth or Dare?”
I stopped typing the weekly report that my immediate supervisor, Captain Forrester, required of me. He didn’t physically keep tabs on our goings-ons in Cold Case—he was too busy dusting the taxidermy in his office down the hallway—so the review served as his way of staying in the loop without having to do any actual work.
I shook my head at Sarah, who sat at her computer work space on the other side of the room. “You really have nothing better to do?” I charged.
“I can multitask, can’t you?” she seemed to challenge.
The click-clack of high heels against the linoleum basement floor pulled my attention to the open doorway of the Cold Case office. A Pavlovian response kicked in at the distinctive sound. Since I’d just dropped her off at the airport, I didn’t really expect it to be Julia, but I also didn’t expect to see Celeste Rivers away from her crime unit laboratory.
Her white-blonde hair was down from her usual bun and fell in loose curls against her shoulders. She’d left the white lab coat at work in favor of a white angora sweater that accentuated the soft swell of her breasts underneath. The overhead lighting in the basement tended to be unflattering, but she appeared to be wearing more makeup than before.
She approached my desk and handed me a stack of computer paper.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Kennedy Petersik’s cell phone records. I went as far back as two days before her death.”
“Wow,” I blinked. “You didn’t need to bring them all the way down here.”
“It’s no problem,” she dismissed. “I thought you might be in a hurry to see them. Is, uh, is Stanley in?” she asked, suddenly looking unsure of herself and her surroundings.
I scanned over the material on the thick printout. “No, he’s babysitting the Freezer today.”
“He’s what?” she questioned.
“Oh. Sorry,” I apologized. “That’s insider speak. He’s out at the evidence warehouse today.”
She made a humming noise. I wanted to ask her more questions about her relationship with my hairy, awkward colleague, but I also didn’t want to embarrass her, knowing how likely it was that Sarah would pounce on her discomfort.
“I also tracked down the names associated with each phone number,” she remarked.
“Damn. You’re thorough,” I approved.
“Are you cheating on me, Miller?” Sarah accused from her computer screen.
“Go back to your Minesweeper game, Conrad,” I shot back.
I flipped through the stack of paper. My eyes scanned greedily over the list of names and numbers, looking for patterns or familiar names. I paused when I saw an unexpected name on the list of outgoing calls.
“Richard Trask,” I read aloud. “Isn’t that the State Senator?”
“Yeah, I noticed that as well,” Celeste noted. “I wonder what she had to talk to him about.”
“She used to date his son,” I said absently. “The call was made the day before her body was found. Can we tell where she was when she made these calls?”
Celeste pointed to a column of numbers on the printout. “Each of these represents a different quadrant related to a specific cell tower. I included a map on the last page that identifies which quadrants are associated with different city landmarks as well as her parents’ house.”
“Hey, Sarah. I’m replacing you with Celeste,” I called over to my colleague.
Sarah made a noise and stuck out her tongue.
“Where was Kennedy when she called the Senator’s house?” I questioned.
Celeste reclaimed the cell phone printouts and flipped to the map at the back. “The quadrant associated with her parents’ house.”
I chewed on my lower lip. “You’re back from college for fall break. You call up your ex-boyfriend to see if he’s back, too?” I thought aloud. “But you don’t have his cell because he’s your ex, so you call his parents’ number?”
“That’s one idea,” Celeste remarked.
“You have any better ones?” I challenged.
To her credit, Celeste didn’t back down. “You’re kind of prickly when you’re working a case,” she shrewdly observed.
“I’ve been called worse,” I deflected. “How long was the phone call?”
The printout rustled again while Celeste consulted the numbers. “Just under four minutes.”
“So the ex-boyfriend was at home—unless you chat up your ex’s parents for that long?”
“Doubtful,” Celeste opined.
“They talk for little bit, and then what—they meet up? When does her quadrant location move?”
Celeste consulted the copy of the cell phone records. “Not long after the phone call ended,” she confirmed. “She doesn’t ping again for a while though.”
“About halfway between the Senator’s house and her parents’?” I questioned.
“I don’t know; I’d have to look up where he lives.”
“Do it. And then can you text me the address? I’ve got a house call to make. Sarah,” I said, bringing my colleague back into the conversation, “have you been able to track down Michael Bloom’s family?”
I was hesitant to bring up the topic since Sarah had lashed out at Detective Ryan earlier about it.
My co-worker frowned. “I was able to track down their DMV information. They moved out of state. They’re in Arizona now. It looks like they left Minnesota not long after their Michael’s death. Both are a little older—retirement age. With Michael gone, maybe they didn’t see a reason to stay in the state.”
Normally I would have found it suspicious for someone to flee the state so soon after an unsolved murder, but I didn’t have children. I couldn’t judge how anyone grieved.
“I suppose the weather is better in Arizona,” I noted.
“And they wouldn’t be constantly reminded of their lost son every time they walked by his bedroom door,” Sarah reasoned.
Her sage words reminded me of how much longer Sarah had been doing this job than me.
“Do we call them?” she wondered. “Let them know the case has been re-opened?”
“Right now our focus has been on Kennedy,” I said. “I thi
nk the likelihood of discovering what happened to her is greater than us being able to re-establish an old case. And hopefully, if we can find out how she died, it will shed some light on how Michael Bloom died. You said it yourself—let’s not re-open old wounds unless we have something substantive to tell them.”
Sarah nodded. “You’re pretty empathetic for a cop, Miller.”
I was going to say something about her being pretty smart for a civilian, but knowing how she’d responded to that word before with Detective Ryan, I kept the quip to myself.
“Thanks. I’ll take what I can get.”
+ + +
I knew I should have alerted Jason Ryan that we’d gotten Kennedy Petersik’s phone records and that I was going to question the State Senator—or at least the Senator’s son—but I felt like I was racing against the clock. It was another long shot. Chase Trask had been present at Kennedy’s memorial service, but he may have already returned to college on the East Coast. The more I delayed, the greater my chances were of missing out on questioning the young man before he left town.
A text from Celeste with the Senator’s home address came through by the time I returned to the parking lot and my Crown Vic. She’d also included the name of the Senator’s wife—Rhiannon—in case the Senator was at work in the capitol building. Celeste Rivers really was thorough.
After a half hour’s drive out to the affluent suburbs, I stood in front of a cookie-cutter McMansion whose address matched the address from Celeste’s text. I pressed the doorbell and smoothed back any flyaways that had worked their way free from my bun. I didn’t have to wait long before the door opened.
The woman standing on the other side of the doorway was petite. Her short, dark hair was permed tightly against her scalp. Her mouth was pursed and thin, her dark eyes narrowed in question. I spied a pearl necklace above the collar of her cream-colored cable-knit sweater that she’d paired with dark dress pants. She didn’t look much older than my own mother.
“Rhiannon Trask?” I guessed.
“Yes, that’s me,” she confirmed. “I’m sorry. Did you not see the ‘No Soliciting’ sign?”
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