by Molly Rice
Some instinct made her trust him. “The legal and the court systems here in Minneapolis are very patriarchal and…almost chauvinistic. A menacing combination for a woman trying to keep a foothold against the built-in odds. If they find out I’m being threatened, they will become so protective, it will hinder my freedom to do my job. That’s the first thing.” She waited a beat and then added, “The other thing is that I don’t entirely trust the police department.”
Nico had his cup to his lips but set it down without drinking.
“What? But why? Your husband—”
“I know, I know.” Dana waved a hand dismissively. “But maybe that’s why. I’ve never been completely satisfied with the way his murder investigation was handled.”
“And that’s because…”
“Because I think they gave up too soon, and maybe the reason they did was because they didn’t want to be discovered with egg on their faces so they decided the sooner the case was quietly pushed to the back of the closet, the quicker the public would forget that they hadn’t been able to solve it.” She wet her dry mouth with another swallow of coffee. “And maybe someone was paid to distort the facts and contaminate the evidence.”
“You’re talking about your husband’s fellow officers.” Was that tone, that look on his face, meant to chastise her?
Dana’s chin jutted defiantly. “So that means one of them couldn’t have been on the take?” She laughed bitterly. “When did you become so biased in their favor? What are you, an ex-cop?”
“Yeah,” Nico said quietly. “But you’re wrong about me being biased. I was only playing devil’s advocate.”
But Dana was still digesting his admission.
“You were? When?”
“When I reminded you that whoever covered the ev—”
Dana’s fist hit the table. “I meant, when were you a cop?” she asked through clenched teeth.
“A long time ago. Another time, another place.”
Dana’s gaze was searching. “I confided in you,” she noted pointedly.
His look matched hers and held for a long, drawn out span. Then he said, “Five years ago. St. Paul P.D. Detectives. Vice.”
“Why did you leave?”
Nico got up and refilled their cups before answering. When he sat back down, he saw that she’d unearthed a rubber band and pulled her hair into a ponytail. He smiled inwardly and then sobered as he considered his answer to her question.
“I didn’t like the way the department overlooked certain infractions.”
“So you were a by-the-book cop. That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Not that, so much as that I couldn’t stomach the inequities.”
“Such as?” She had her elbow on the table, chin on her hand, enrapt by his revelations.
Nico smoothed his mustache and then slumped back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. “It didn’t make sense to me that the same cops who arrested the hookers were also accepting their favors. It made even less sense that we’d bust dealers and then some cops would pocket the goods for their own private use. It seems to me if prostitution and drugs are vices, and illegal, they’re off limits for cops, too.” He shook his head. “Especially for cops.”
“Makes sense to me,” Dana agreed. “So why didn’t you just report them to Internal Affairs?”
His laugh was a short bark and his look disdained her naivete. “It was hard enough on my parents, having a son on the force, without putting myself at deliberate risk.” He stood up, shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and wandered over to the outside door, peering through the window into the night
With his back to her, Dana had to strain to hear him.
“There isn’t a criminal out there more dangerous than a rogue cop. We’re trained, armed, put out in the streets to mix it up with the thugs. If one of us goes bad, we have the resources of both the force and the streets to do our dirty work. And it isn’t just on the streets that a guy’s partner will back him up, most likely that same partner will cover for him if he’s caught with his hand in the cookie jar. So then it isn’t just one bad cop you’ve got to deal with, but two.” He turned to face her, leaning back against the door.
“I’d rather go up against your average Mafia lord any day than a cop gone sour.”
Dana could feel her heart pounding in her chest It wasn’t just the terrible things Nico was saying, it was the utter despair in his voice when he said them, and the look of pure desolation in his eyes.
She had the urge to go to him, to comfort him with a hug, as she would Krystal. She reminded herself they were newly met and that she had no idea how he would respond to such a liberty. He might mistake it for an invitation, or he could have one of those male egos that rejected anything that might be construed as pity. She balled her hands into fists and kept them in her lap as she remained in her seat.
She offered him trust instead.
“Would you like to look at those notes, Nico?”
He looked puzzled and then wary. “Not unless you’re willing to take us on board.”
“What do you mean?”
He joined her at the table, pulling the chair out to turn it around so he could sit on it backward, his arms folded across the top of the chair back.
“The way our agency works is that you don’t hire a single private eye when you contract with us. You probably caught that clause when you looked over the contract I had you sign.
“It’s actually the agency in its entirety that you contract with, and as many investigators as deemed necessary are assigned to a single case. In other words, when you hire me, you have access to the whole company. We have a good forensics department and do quite a bit of our own lab work. In fact, the lab also does work for other organizations. My boss’s way of bringing in more revenue so the lab doesn’t have a lot of down time.
“The best thing is, we can guarantee absolute privacy while an investigation is under way. We’re not beholden to the public in any way so we don’t have to answer to the press.”
He put his hand out on the table.
“I think you should hire the agency to help you uncover the truth, find out who’s making the threats, and more important, find out if the person sending them is the same person who shot at the house last night”
Dana sat forward. “You think the threats and the shooting could be coming from two different sources?” The air went out of her lungs in a painful whoosh. She shook her head, loosening wisps of hair from the ponytail. She tried to tuck them back in but found the effort wasn’t worth it.
Nico tried not to let the sight of her casual attire deter him from straight thinking. She looked better in jeans than any woman over the age of twenty that he’d ever seen. The soft, faded denim clung to her lower body as if tailored to show the sleek lines of her legs, the enticing curve of her derriere. God, she was one sexy woman and if circumstances were different…
“The shooting smacks of spontaneity, not the work of someone who’d harass you with notes and phone calls. A person like that is more of a long-range thinker, using the threats to scare you into a deal.”
“That was more or less what Yearling and Joe said,” Dana admitted. A glimmer of an idea formed. “Maybe the shooting was only meant to be a threat,” she suggested. “Maybe the shot went wrong and met a target quite by accident.”
Nico felt his admiration for her go up another notch. She wasn’t letting the personal trauma keep her from thinking like the fine lawyer she was. He nodded. “That’s possible, too. We need to be open to all the angles. So. Do we have a deal, Dana?”
“You understand that your first priority is still to keep Krystal safe?”
He nodded assent. “I can do both and there are people in the agency who can be called on to fill in as needed.” He hesitated a moment and then added, “It’s not going to be cheap so if—”
“I can afford it.” She leveled a firm look at him.
Nico cleared his throat and lowered his eyes. “I guess
that leads to my next question, Dana. I know what an assistant D.A. makes, and Zachary Harper was a cop…”
Dana’s quiet laugh brought his eyes upward to her face. “You want to know how I can afford this house, to live this well.” It suddenly dawned on her what he was really asking was if Zack had been on the take. The unasked question would normally have raised her hackles, but after what he’d told her, she understood where he was coming from.
She met his dark brown gaze with her own blue-eyed honesty.
“My father is Daniel Taylor,” she said simply, and waited for recognition to sink in.
It took less than a minute. “Of Taylor Industries?”
“Yes. I have a considerable trust fund that came to me from Dad’s father when Dad took over the family business.” She didn’t know why she was being so revealing with him; he was practically a stranger and she knew many men would respond with avarice to her admission of wealth.
But Nico Scalia didn’t react at all. It answered what he had asked and he seemed to have no further interest in the subject.
He nodded and said, “We’ve done some work for T.I. Not me, personally, but the agency, I mean.”
She smiled. “I know. The time that T.I. hired your company it was at Zack’s suggestion. Evidently the private sector has better technology and technicians for uncovering espionage, and breach of security, than the police do.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So are you going to take us on and let me work more directly with you?”
“The notes are in my study,” she said, standing to lead the way.
Chapter Five
“As you can see, they’re fairly straightforward,” Dana said, looking over Nico’s shoulder. He sat at her desk studying the notes laid out in the order she’d received them.
They seemed identical. “‘C. Gets Off Or You Go Down.’”
Nico looked up at her. “‘C.’ for Caprezio?”
Dana shrugged. “It’s not that easy. As it happens, ‘C’ is the first initial of either the first or last name of each of my three major cases.”
“Hmm. Funny the sender doesn’t realize that.”
Dana felt the first ray of hope since she’d begun receiving the notes. Maybe it was better to have someone to share this with, input from another mind. She went around the desk and sat on the edge of the front of it. “You’re right. The sender either doesn’t follow the news, or has such a big ego he thinks of himself as the one and only ‘C.’”
“You know the defendants pretty well by now, which of the three fits that picture?”
Dana thought about her three cases. “Well, first of all, it’s four defendants, not three. In the Carter case, I’m prosecuting two brothers, accused together of rape and murder. But it isn’t only the brothers we’re dealing with, the entire Carter family has been very public about their hatred of the police and the legal system in general, loudly proclaiming that the two boys were framed, offering up such an assortment of phony alibis that we almost got buried by the sheer numbers.” She laughed without mirth. “We had to check out the alibis of the alibi providers on that one.”’
“And Marcus Caprezio? What’s his story?”
Dana plucked a pencil from an intricately carved teak cup and twirled it between her fingers as she ran the case down for him.
“That one should be open and shut. Marcus got into a fight, in a bar, with one Anthony ‘Squirrel’ Nunzio. Plenty of witnesses. Marcus stormed out after the bartender intervened. An hour later Nunzio comes out and a car rolls up, the driver leans out and shoots him, and the car drives off. Again, plenty of witnesses. Nobody got the license plate number, unfortunately, but the description of the car makes it Marcus’s bright red Porsche. Only three of those in the twin cities. One owned by a rock musician who was on tour in Europe on the date, his car in storage. The second owned by a Porsche dealer. Airtight alibi. He had driven to a dealer’s seminar in Chicago. Any number of people could account for his presence there.”
“The third, of course, is Caprezio’s.”
“Anyway, it was enough for us to bring him in. And to and behold little Marcus Caprezio hadn’t covered his butt. He has no alibi for the time slot.”
Nico frowned. “Weird. If he did finger the guy, why wouldn’t he have covered himself with an alibi? Any of the people in the Organization would have put up for him.”
Dana’s eyes turned steely as she talked about it. “Right Unless Marcus’s rage was such that he just lost it and didn’t regain it in time to set up an alibi. Or, and I like this one better, he’s so damned cocksure that he figured he was above the law and never even thought he’d be arrested and need an alibi.”
Nico wasn’t comfortable with that, but let it slide for now.
“The third?”
“Surely you’ve heard of ‘Prince Charlie,’ the darling of the media? He’s been seen on TV more often than Charlie the Tuna.”
Dana tossed the pencil back in the cup in a gesture of disgust. “Charles Donegan is either the most stupid white-collar criminal I’ve ever run across or he’s brazen as hell. It appears that he’s spent most of the stolen funds on his wardrobe. He’s always impeccably, and expensively, custom-tailored—to the nth degree.
“He preens like a peacock for the news cameras and since he’s been out on bail, delights in giving pressconference-type interviews that sneer at me in particular and the court system in general.”
She sighed, stood and stretched. “So much for finding a clue in the message of the notes.”
Nico followed her movements. Her sensuality shook him. “Don’t do that,” he said abruptly, his voice harsh.
“I beg your pard…” Dana’s words tapered off as she realized what had just occurred. A mischievous grin lit up her face.
“Maybe this job is too much for you to handle, Scalia. Maybe you better have your agency put someone else on it.”
Nico was on his feet and around the desk so quickly that Dana was caught off guard. His arm around her was steel, his hand at the back of her head firm. He pulled her face close to his and his hand rippled fingers from her brow to the corner of her lips, gentle as the soughing of a spring breeze. His mouth was inches from hers, breath warm and sweet, the danger of his warning more formidable by the contrast.
“I can handle anything you dish out, Ms. Harper, and then you better be prepared to play the game to its conclusion.”
She was mesmerized by his eyes, chocolate brown turned almost midnight black and by the husky threat in his voice. Her knees weakened while her heartbeat strengthened. Was he going to kiss her? And if he did, was she going to allow it? Without making a conscious decision, her lips parted, her head tilted ever so slightly, her eyelids drifted down.
He let go of her abruptly and she fell back against the desk, catching her hip on the edge.
“Very funny, Scalia,” she snapped, rubbing at her leg. Was it relief, embarrassment, or disappointment that raged through her? She snatched up the notes and shoved them into a drawer, avoiding his eyes as he moved back to the chair behind the desk.
“You know, this seems like a pretty heavy caseload,” Nico said, acting as if the moment had never happened.
“We’re all overloaded in the county attorney’s office. Or are you just suggesting my load is heavy for a woman?”
Nico laughed. “Women are still touchy on the subject, eh?”
Dana’s color heightened. “We wouldn’t need to be if men didn’t still act like they were doing us a favor letting us move beyond the reception area.”
Nico wasn’t going to touch that. His own boss was a woman and he admired her to the max, but he knew there were still plenty of men out there who hadn’t moved from the caves out into the light of the late twentieth century.
“Actually, I was wondering if it was possible that someone figured if you were bogged down with work, you wouldn’t be able to do justice to any one case.”
“You mean…but that would imply t
hat John…No way! I’d swear on my life that Yearling is clean.”
Nico shrugged. “You’d know best. It’s my job to be suspicious of anyone and everyone. You say he’s clean, he’s clean. If you don’t mind, I’d like to go through your files, familiarize myself with the cases.”
“Of course.”
He shuffled through the folders, arranging them so that he would have room on the desk to jot down notes under each as he went through them.
But Dana was still seething and unwilling to look openly at the source of her frustration. She focused instead on what she’d interpreted as Nico’s chauvinism. “You wouldn’t be questioning the weight of my load if I were a man, though, would you?”
He gave her a level look. “Yeah,” he said calmly. “I would.”
It popped the balloon of anger and left her nothing to cling to as she tried to avoid facing her still-simmering desire.
“It’s late. I’m going to bed.”
“Good idea,” Nico said.
She was almost at the door when he stopped her with a question.
“The cops haven’t seen the notes at all?”
“No. I had them checked out on my own with the lab people. There are no clues as to the identity of the author.” She hesitated, her hand on the knob. “You know, those kinds of threats aren’t so unusual in felony cases. Most of the time they’re just blowing hot air, hoping to scare us off.”
“You haven’t even shown them to Joe Lake?”
She turned back. “No, not even Joe.”
“But you’re pretty good friends, right?”
“He was Zack’s partner, his best friend. He’s my friend, too.”
“Nothing more?”
Was the question professional or personal? Dana shrugged, either way the answer was the same. “Nothing more,” she said. She didn’t add that that was due to her feelings and not Joe’s.
She peered across the room at the handsome detective. Was he sniffing out the territory, checking to see if any other takers were stalking her? He appeared to be already involved in the work. Apparently his interest in her was minimal and his questions had been strictly professional.