Kane tapped the envelope against his thigh. “She knows about my vacation. Saw Dietz in action. She won’t say anything about you helping me out, will you, Annie?”
“No.” Never mind the fact she had no idea whom she knew to tell.
“And she won’t touch anything either.” Kane cleared his throat. “She’ll stand there and behave.”
Annie felt a headache coming on. “Should she roll over and play dead? Maybe fetch your slippers?”
Maybe that belly thing was the stomach flu after all.
“She could start practicing staying quiet,” Kane suggested.
“If you refer to me as ‘she’ one more time, I’ll kick you.”
Ted coughed into his fist in a lame attempt to cover a laugh.
“Yeah, she’s hysterical,” Kane muttered. “Let’s go.”
They walked through the double doors and into an open area. The building was small enough for her to see past the counter and through to the double doors at the other end of the room. Except for two glassed-in offices to her left and a kitchen area to her right, only desks, chairs and paperwork littered the room.
Kane exchanged a few words with two men. One wore a uniform, and the other the same casual attire that most men in Kauai wore to work, khaki pants and a short-sleeve shirt.
The tour was a bit of a letdown. Nothing like the squad rooms on television. Messy, yes, but no action. No guys in handcuffs. No screaming. No gunfire. Kind of boring and normal.
“Where do you interrogate people?” She was dying to take a photo of that. She could see a feature about jails in a place where visitors rarely thought about crime.
Both men turned to look at her. They wore matching frowns. If this were a contest, Kane would hold a slim lead.
Words finally popped out of Ted’s open mouth. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
“You know, the two-way mirror. You sit in there and ask a suspect a bunch of questions until he cracks. The good-cop-bad-cop thing.” Her gaze went back and forth between their blank stares. “Don’t you guys do that?”
“We prefer to beat up suspects and throw them in the torture chamber downstairs. We can’t starve them up here where anyone could walk in and see,” Kane said.
“That’s not funny.”
“Who said I was kidding?” Kane kept a straight face when he said that.
Would it kill the guy to answer a question? “Forget it.”
“This way.” Ted pushed open a door to a stairwell and walked through.
Annie had the sneaky suspicion Ted was laughing at her, not with her. “Where are we going?”
Kane answered with a soft whisper next to her ear. “Downstairs. To the special room.”
She elbowed him and felt a measure of satisfaction when she heard an “ompf” in response. He might be armed with a licensed weapon, but she had enough attitude for both of them. Her mouth versus his gun…yeah, she’d win that battle. No problem.
They walked in a line down the stairs, with Ted in the lead. He opened the gray metal door at the bottom and shut it behind them, locking them inside.
The underbelly of the building made the top half look like a palace. Without the windows, the walls seemed to close in on the long, narrow hallway. A musty smell killed off the soft scent of flowers that hovered over every other part of the island.
There wasn’t anything open about this area, just a series of closed doors on either side. Buzzing fluorescent lights lined the ceiling. A desk sat in front of a heavy locked door about halfway down the hall.
“What’s that?”
Ted looked where she pointed. “Lockup.”
“A jail?”
Kane’s husky voice buzzed by her ear again. “Want to stop in for a visit? Pick a bed?”
She threw another elbow in the direction of his midsection. “You’re in my personal space.”
“Yeah,” he snorted. “I wonder why.”
Ted slipped a key in the door marked “Evidence Room” but glanced up at them before turning the knob. “Something wrong?”
“Inside joke.” Kane slid past her and pushed the door open for them to follow.
They walked into a room lined with shelves, lockers and filing cabinets. Except for the boxes stacked on the long table, nothing else was visible in the room.
“This is everything you collected off the Samantha Ray?”
Ted braced his palms against the table and watched Kane sort through the envelopes. “Except for fluids and some other items that were sent to the lab. We roped off the yacht and surrounding area in case we need to take another look.”
“Then, what’s in the envelope you have?” she asked Kane.
Kane flashed an unreadable look at Ted. “The preliminary police report and copies of the notes.”
“Should you have that?” she asked Kane, wondering if he was borrowing more trouble.
Ted stayed quiet. He looked down at his feet, probably trying to blend into the floor.
Kane smiled. “Since the police gave it to me, I don’t think it’s a problem.”
“Probably not,” she mumbled as she looked around at the other envelopes. Her hands itched to flip through everything to look for the journals and papers she hadn’t left at the hotel. She inhaled to calm her nerves and keep her heart from racing.
“Describe the scene for me.” Kane read through a file.
She admired his multitasking abilities. All she wanted to do was dive in with both hands. With everything in different-sized marked envelopes, she couldn’t see a thing. Peeking over Kane’s shoulder was out of the question. Not because she wouldn’t do it, but because he was too damn tall for her to see anything.
That didn’t stop her from moving closer. She shifted until she stood right at Kane’s left elbow. If he would lower the file she could…
“There are four staterooms and staff quarters on the yacht. All but two bedrooms—”
When Ted started talking, she jumped a foot. So much for her covert skills.
“Something wrong?” Kane asked.
“No, I’m just feeling a bit—” Anxious, scared, worried. All those things. “Just tired. Something kept bugging me when I tried to fall asleep last night.”
“I hear sleeping outside helps that problem.”
Ted reached for something. For a split second Annie worried that thing was a gun. When he pulled out his car keys, she chalked the irrational thinking up to the exhaustion of the last two nights.
“I could take Annie home and circle back around and help you here.”
Kane didn’t even lift his head. “She stays.”
Ted glanced at her but didn’t say anything.
“Go on with the story.” Kane dropped the file and opened an envelope.
“Two bedrooms were in good condition. By the clothing and personal effects, we think Chester Manning was in one of those. Someone wrecked the two suites along with the family room.”
“And the other bedroom?”
“A woman.” Ted dragged a box toward him. “These are the items from that room. Not much, but interesting.”
Annie felt her lunch churn in her stomach and regretted getting mayo on her turkey club. She’d taken one small bag and her camera bag on the yacht with her. Everything else she’d left in the room at the hotel.
That didn’t explain why everything she brought with her to Kauai, the stuff from the boat and from the hotel, seemed to be gone. The box held, maybe, five envelopes. No camera. No papers. No clothes, or if they were there, someone folded them into tiny squares.
Something was very, very wrong.
“What’s in the envelopes?” she asked.
Ted waited until Kane nodded his okay to answer. “A negligee, underwear. Nothing much really. The woman, whoever she was, was there for a booty—”
“A what?” Shock made her voice lift an octave.
Ted cleared his throat. “As a guest of Sterling Howard.”
Her cheeks burned. “Only underwear? That’s it?”
; “Yeah. Some of it went to the lab to check for fluids.”
“Fluids?” This time she choked on the word.
Kane smiled again. “He means from sex.”
“Yeah. Thanks. I got that part,” she grumbled out.
“We got this pair out of the drawer.” Ted pawed through the envelopes and pulled one out. He broke the seal and dumped the contents on the table.
There they were. Panties. White, lace thigh-high panties. Make that white and very transparent and very skimpy lace panties. Hers.
“Looks like someone has some explaining to do,” Kane said.
The smile in his voice made her look up again. She waited for a physical reaction. Why she bothered, she’d never know. His gaze never left the underwear. He’d worn that same stupid grin when he saw her half naked and chained to his bed.
“First we have to find the lady,” Ted pointed out without taking his gaze off her panties.
If either of them made one move, inched even a little pinky toward the underwear, gun or not she’d kick them. Even without moving she seriously considered banging their empty heads together. Had they never seen women’s underwear before?
“As far as we know, Howard didn’t have a mistress, but she could have been new. The guy views women as disposable.” Ted leaned in for a closer examination of the underwear. “But I’d say those belong to someone young and hot with good taste in lingerie.”
A scream raced up her throat and fought to get out. The idea of sleeping with Sterling Howard made her physically ill. The guy was garbage. Sure, she’d come to Kauai to find him, but not for that. No, when she had discovered his identity, she tracked him down and followed him to Kauai for one reason only. The same reason that put her on the opposite side of the law from Kane.
She’d come to kill Sterling Howard. Make him squirm, let him know he was going to die, maybe even give him a chance to beg. Then kill him anyway.
“Find any paperwork on the mystery woman?” Kane’s gaze still hadn’t moved. Unlike Ted, he kept a respectful distance from the panties.
Ted shook his head. “We’re hoping the lab finds something. If not, tracking her down will be tough.”
“Yeah.” This time Kane raised his head and stared right into her eyes. “I wonder where we’ll find her and what story she’ll come up with to explain this.”
Well, as soon as she invented a feasible story, she’d let him know.
Chapter 11
Sterling Howard’s mistress.
A few hours after their visit to the police station, Kane still couldn’t get the thought out of his head. He sat on the edge of his bed, turning the possibility over in his brain. No matter how hard he tried, the information refused to fit into the picture he’d put together of Annie.
Still, the idea made his back teeth slam together. Howard touching Annie, kissing her…The thought of Annie having sex with Howard, with any man, made everything inside him tense.
The damn woman sure knew how to ruin a perfectly boring vacation.
And she was taking her sweet time in the shower. He would have worried if the room had a window or other obvious escape. It didn’t. The only way out was through him.
The woman wasn’t going anywhere until he confirmed she was the owner of the underwear. Then he needed a believable answer about her underwear showing up at a crime scene. That was if he could tolerate talking about her panties without actually pulling them off of her, which he doubted.
The memory of the little white scrap flashed in his mind all evening. She wouldn’t talk, and he couldn’t concentrate on anything else.
One cold shower later he sat a few feet from the bathroom door, dressed only in a pair of shorts and a tee, and waited for the knob to turn. Annie had stepped in there almost forty minutes ago. The water stopped running ten minutes after that. Unless she’d squeezed down the drain, she was in there.
She didn’t strike him as someone who hid. No, from his experience, she came out guns blazing and mouth running. The quiet, introspective Annie was new and likely only a ploy.
As the minutes ticked by, he wondered about the size of that drain.
“Annie?” When she didn’t respond, he walked over and banged on the door with the side of his fist. “Open up, sunshine. It’s time for bed.”
“Go away,” she said in a muffled voice.
He leaned in close and listened for movement. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
Then silence.
He rattled the knob. “Annie?”
“Leave me alone.”
“This happens to be my house.”
“How could I forget?”
He heard a crash and a yelp.
“That’s it. I’m coming in.” With one shoulder aimed at the door, he backed up a bit and hit his target at a jog. His weight combined with the age of the house resulted in the wood shredding right by the doorknob. The shot also kicked in the door until it bounced off the inner wall and flew back toward his head.
He caught the edge, preventing the inevitable concussion, and focused on Annie. She sat on the toilet with one ankle crossed over her other knee. She wore one of his long T-shirts, but thanks to her pretzellike sitting position, the material hiked up high on her thighs.
Just the tee and bright pink painted toenails.
All the blood in his head rushed to his shorts. The effects of the cold shower vanished at the sight of all that naked flesh. His lower body went from interested to rock hard as soon as he crossed the threshold to the bathroom.
She frowned up at him. “I guess you didn’t know I unlocked it.”
He was so busy staring at her toned legs that her words took an extra second or two to sink in. Even then he had to swallow twice to get his simple question out.
“When?”
“Right before you did your little macho act and broke it down. That was impressive, by the way. Very coplike.” She wrapped and unwrapped gauze around her hand in what he assumed was a nervous gesture.
“You didn’t answer me.”
“I wanted privacy.”
The gauze wasn’t just around her hands. Rolls were scattered all over the floor. So were pieces of tape, two pair of scissors and a stack of crumpled tissues. Apparently she’d used the forty minutes alone to practice her surgery skills.
“What are you doing?”
“For a guy who claims to have been married, you don’t know much about women.”
“Right at this minute, I can’t disagree with you.” He saw wet towels balled up in the sink. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Nothing.”
“Do you plan to clean up all this nothing before bed?” He reached over and turned off the sink faucet. How the dripping sound didn’t drive her mad, he’d never know.
“I’m not your maid.”
“Thanks for clearing that up.”
“If you must know, my knee is killing me. Since Derek isn’t here to help me, I was trying to wrap it myself. Happy?”
“Ecstatic.” Kane kneeled down and gathered up the remnants of what once was the contents of his first aid kit and now was garbage. “Any reason you didn’t ask me for help?”
“Damn it!” She muttered and swore a few more times as she wound the stretchy bandage around her leg. Maybe because she pulled the band tight enough to cut off all circulation to the bottom half of her leg.
“Give me that.” He grabbed the wrap and undid the mess she’d made.
“Hey! That took me forever.” She slapped at his hands.
“Your calf is turning purple.”
She bent down to get a closer look. When her head dipped, her hair fell forward and brushed against his face. “Oh.”
As gently as he could, he straightened her shoulders until she sat up again. “I can’t see with your hair in my face.”
And he needed some space or he’d be all over her.
He unraveled about ten feet of bandages. Ten feet, and almost none of it secured over her actual injury. “I�
�m guessing you never took a first aid class.”
“I did about fifteen years ago.”
He sat on the floor at her feet. The view from below was pretty damn impressive. The light above her head highlighted the blondish streaks in her red hair. Her green eyes contrasted with the peach of her skin, giving her a young, almost vulnerable, look.
No wonder Derek had taken so long to wrap her leg the last time. The kid was probably mesmerized by her.
Annie wasn’t the type to visit the island in a tiny bikini and throw litter on the beach. Nor the type he grew up with who reflected his dark hair and dark eyes. No, Annie’s beauty started with an earthy glow and exotic coloring so distinct and new that a guy could forget everything else. Like the trouble that seemed to follow her.
When Derek had helped, she wore clothing. Kane had a bigger challenge. A nearly naked Annie. His fingers touched smooth bare skin, and that was all he could see. A man could exert only so much restraint before his control broke.
Fresh from her shower, the scent of vanilla still lingered in the air and on her skin. He regretted putting shower gel on the list of items she needed from the store. He had a hard enough time resisting her when she smelled like guy soap. Having her smell all sweet and feminine promised to make this a very long night.
Then there was the glimpse of yellow underwear between her thighs. Right in his line of sight. This pair wouldn’t be of the silky, lacy type sitting in the evidence lockup. This would be whatever type Derek had thrown in the shopping cart without looking. His money was on cotton grandma panties. That distinction should make a difference but didn’t. She’d look sexy in men’s boxer shorts. Better without anything.
But right now she needed his help.
With her ankle balanced on his knee and her leg slightly elevated, Kane wrapped the injury. The swelling continued to worsen, and bruising had started to show.
She’d hidden her pain well during the day. He made a mental note to keep an eye on her tomorrow. As if that would be a hardship. Watching her was his only job at the moment.
“Better?”
“No.”
He assumed from the way the color flooded back into her cheeks and the muscles around her eyes relaxed that she was lying. No surprise there. The woman seemed to excel at evading the truth.
Your Mouth Drives Me Crazy Page 9