by Beverly Bird
Tessa went still. “Did you type the blood?”
“Of course,” Angela said. “It was AB-Negative.”
“And Daphne was...” Gunner prompted.
“B-Positive,” Angela said triumphantly.
Tessa’s heart began beating hard. This was almost too easy.
“So we get a blood type on Benami, and then I guess you can throw out your cigarettes.”
“Not so fast, Princess.” Gunner patted his pocket. Angela’s gaze moved curiously between them. “We’ve got a little way to go on this yet. It’ll still keep us occupied for a while.”
Tessa felt her blood chill. He was so cocky, so confident. Had he set her up?
She remembered thinking yesterday that Gunner would never make a bet that involved not smoking if there was any real chance that he could lose it. He had already known the autopsy results, she decided. After all, Angela was some kind of a...a personal friend. Suddenly, Tessa would have bet money that Gunner already knew that Benami did not have AB-Negative blood.
Except that didn’t make sense, because he really didn’t stand to gain much if he won this deal. A beer?
Then she thought she understood.
The room grew immediately, cloyingly hot. “You ... you orchestrated this,” she managed to say.
Gunner shot a brow up at her.
“You don’t care about this stupid bet,” she said. “You were just ... playing with me. Keeping me preoccupied with it so I wouldn’t—” What? she wondered wildly. Then she knew that, too. Be assailed with memories of Matt.
He had done it so she wouldn’t be crippled by remembrances of the last time she sat in that Homicide Unit and of the man who had often stopped by to sit on the corner of her desk then. That was the only reason Gunner had argued with her all day yesterday, keeping her preoccupied. It was the reason he had kept throwing her curves—you’re rusty, Princess—and why he had challenged her at nearly every turn. The bet was just part and parcel of keeping her on her toes so that she wouldn’t feel, hurt, remember.
She shot to her feet.
“Let’s get one thing straight, Gunner, right now, right from the start.” She was vaguely aware of Angela’s gaze flying back and forth between them now, and that her hands were trembling, but her temper couldn’t let her care. “I don’t need a keeper.”
“Chill out, Princess,” he said mildly. He leaned lazily against the wall behind him. “I never said you did.”
“You—”
“I was just trying to spiff things up a bit. It’s damn awkward being thrust onto a new partner.”
Awkward? For him or for her? “You knew—”
“I didn’t know diddly,” he snapped, getting angry.
“But—”
“You’re thinking that I got the results from Angie last night, right? Get real, Princess. The work wasn’t even done when I talked to Angela. Ed was still cutting.”
He shot Dr. Byerly a look. The woman nodded.
“I didn’t know the results until right now, sitting here with you,” Gunner said, and his face finally softened. “If you’re going to get ticked off at me for something, then for God’s sake, do it because I thought this bet thing would challenge you a little, get your mind off ... you know. I thought it might get you to think like a Homicide cop again.”
She had been right about that part, then. Oddly his admission took the wind out of her sails.
“I...the whole department has been expecting me to grow horns or fall apart for a year now, ever since Matt went down,” she said more softly. “I really am fine.” She was.
“Is that Hadleyese for ‘I’m sorry for flying off the handle, you miserable peon’?”
Tessa glared at him.
Gunner finally nodded. “Yeah. You’ll be just fine, Princess.”
Her heart thumped too hard. It was the first vote of confidence anybody had really given her. Even Kennery had seemed a little cautious when he’d brought her back.
She stood up abruptly and made a swiping move for the car keys on the breakfast bar. She got them before he could react.
“Yes,” she agreed firmly. “I’m going to be fine. And your little game is going to cost you, partner. I’d suggest you do some heavy smoking now, because when we get back to the office, your cigarette days are numbered.”
“One more thing that might help,” Angela said hurriedly, handing Gunner their copy of the autopsy report. “AB-Negative is extremely rare. Roughly two percent of the entire population has it. If you can find a suspect with it, then I’d bet my entire life savings that the DNA will match as well. Of course, it’s going to take six weeks or more for the DNA work to come back.”
Gunner looked down at the report absently. Then he glanced up again and watched Tessa stride elegantly—and still a little angrily—down the hall.
“Wow,” Angela said, watching her go, too.
Gunner’s gaze shot to her. “Wow, what?”
“There’s a lot boiling in there, John, just looking for a place to explode.”
Gunner’s face hardened again. “She’ll be fine.” And he wondered why in the hell he sounded defensive all of a sudden.
He leaned sideways to watch her go out the front door.
“She’s also out of your league, John,” Angela warned, watching his expression. “You could get your heart broken really badly here.”
Gunner let out a bark of laughter. “All those fancy college degrees, and you’re way out in left field on this one.”
But Gunner thought about it. As far as he was concerned, Angela was the kind of woman who made him think of a cold beer—thoroughly enjoyable, and she certainly had her place at the end of a hot, hard day. He had dated her briefly, when they had been teenagers. But Tessa ... well, Tessa Hadley-Bryant was more like eighteen-year-old Scotch.
And that had its place anytime, anywhere.
Unfortunately, he had a beer budget. He couldn’t afford good, eighteen-year-old Scotch unless he saved for it, and that wasn’t his fiscal style. But Angela was right about one thing. Tessa Hadley-Bryant had a lot going on in there. She wasn’t ready. As thorny as she could be on any subject related even remotely to Matt Bryant, Gunner knew she wasn’t anywhere near ready for romance, not with him, not with anyone at all.
“Thanks, Angie.” He threw the words over his shoulder and went to catch up with his new partner.
Tessa was waiting behind the wheel of their unmarked car. He stopped beside her window and tapped at it.
Tessa lowered the glass. “What?”
“Damn it,” he growled, looking down.
“What’s wrong?” she asked again, alarmed now.
“Pop the trunk, Princess. We’ve got a flat.”
She groaned and pulled the keys out of the ignition. She pushed open the driver’s side door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Before she could take even a single step toward the trunk, Gunner had slipped the keys out of her hand.
“Hey!” She whipped around, but not fast enough to stop him from sliding behind the wheel in her place. He started the engine again.
“Damn it, Gunner! That was sneaky!”
“Sure it was. Five seconds to blast off, Princess.”
She hurried around the car and scrambled into the passenger seat. She wasn’t entirely sure that he really wouldn’t drive off without her.
Gunner pulled out into traffic again with a slight squeal of rubber. “I’m all for equal opportunity employment,” he explained easily, “but I like to do my own driving.”
She slouched in the seat, moderately angry. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Not really. Men are good at some things, women at others. And men have better reflexes than women behind the wheel of a car.”
“Tell that to the cabbie you just barely missed driving down here.”
“But I did miss him, didn’t I? Because I’m a man, and men are better drivers.”
“Of all the chauvinistic, superior—”
“Easy, Princess. By the same to
ken, I can’t type worth a damn. In fact, I can’t do anything that requires delicate work with my fingers.” He thought about it. “Well, hardly anything.”
Her eyes widened and she looked across at him to see if he meant what she thought he meant. He was grinning again. Heat seared into her face and she fidgeted in her seat.
Don’t think about it. But, of course, once the idea was planted in her mind she couldn’t help but think about it. In minute detail. She was widowed, not dead. She watched Gunner’s hands as he began drumming on the wheel again, and his fingers were long and strong and ... well, capable, she thought. She imagined them sliding and probing into secret places of a woman’s body, and she fidgeted some more and tried to find her breath.
She was blushing to the roots of her hair, Gunner thought, fascinated. He wasn’t actually sure he had ever seen a woman do that before.
“Something going on with that seat that I don’t know about, Princess?”
Tessa gasped.
Gunner laughed aloud, but then he found it hard to hold onto his grin. He knew exactly what she was fidgeting about over there, and he thought again about what Angela had said.
He took a deep breath. He’d seen Tessa around, of course, back before Matt had died. Maybe once in a while he had appreciated the way she walked with that unstudied, unconscious, built-in class. He remembered her from the funeral, as well. Damn near every cop in the tristate area had turned out for Matt Bryant’s viewing. It had been hard to miss his widow, her face chalk white, that wild-animal, pleading kind of desperation in her eyes, as though she were just waiting for someone to wave a magic wand and make it all be a terrible mistake.
Though Gunner had barely known her, for a moment there he would have given body and soul to have possessed such a wand...and he doubted very seriously if he was the only man there who had felt that way.
Angela was right. She was pure class, a purdy good woman, and she was out of his league.
He’d gotten married all those years ago because Elaine had pushed and wheedled him into it, because she’d said it was the natural progression of things, and she had largely been right. They’d been going together for several years. They’d been good together, in a way old friends were, as he and Angela were. But that, of course, was absolutely no basis for a marriage.
Afterward, when he’d acknowledged regretfully that marrying her had been a mistake, Gunner had given that some thought. He’d decided that if there really was such a thing as love, then it undoubtedly involved the kind of woman who made thunder roll and lightning strike. The kind of woman who made your life pass before your eyes at the thought of losing her. An actual relationship should be saved for a woman to kill for and die for. Since he was reasonably sure that such a woman didn’t exist, he played the field. Anything less would be shortchanging himself—again—and the woman, as well.
The bottom line was that if, through all the dating he had done, thunder had never rolled, lightning had never struck, well, then, it wasn’t likely to start happening at this late date. He didn’t have it in him, he thought again. No big deal. He’d accept it, and live accordingly.
Which brought him back to the woman who was still squirming in the seat beside him. He thought again how she had looked at the funeral. She knew how to love.
She could fidget her way clear out the car door, Gunner thought, but Tessa Hadley-Bryant sure as hell wouldn’t let anything develop between them. Nor did he think it was a good idea. And conversely, that was his only real concern about their partnership. Partners needed a certain rapport to work truly well together. And Tessa was very busily building walls between them. Already he knew that she had no intention of letting him get too dose, platonically, romantically, or otherwise.
That worried him far more than any aftershocks she might still be feeling over Matt Bryant’s murder. Partners needed to think with one brain. They needed to feel, to sense, to know what the other guy was going to do before he did it. Gunner felt reasonably certain that he was never going to develop that kind of link with Tessa Hadley-Bryant. She wouldn’t allow it.
Oh, well, he’d ride it out. He still had the strong feeling that she was far better off with him right now than with a partner who either overlooked her past or placed too much weight upon it.
He glanced over at her again. She had little diamonds in her ears this morning, and they caught the sun, winking and sparkling when she moved. She smelled good, too, he realized, like something subtly floral. He moved his own head just right to catch a whiff.
“What are you doing?” she asked curiously.
For the first time in his memory, Gunner felt his own skin heat a little in something that might have been a blush if he had been any other man.
“Huh?” he asked, deliberately obtuse.
“Nothing,” she muttered. “I just thought you were...nothing.”
She had been thinking about something, he realized. A little frown still touched her forehead.
“Okay, let’s hear it,” he prompted. “What has your mind going at ninety miles an hour?”
“You’re going ninety miles an hour.”
“Fifty-two.”
“The speed limit is twenty-five!”
Gunner tapped his foot on the brake and reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. She rolled down the window and stuck her head out. Soon, she thought, soon.
“I was just thinking that the guys who first caught this Benami thing—the precinct cops who took Christian’s initial call—didn’t notice any additional rope around the house,” she said finally.
“Having second thoughts about whodunit?”
“I’m just wondering how well Benami covered his tracks.”
He nodded and veered into the city garage, whipping the car around the turns up to the eighth level. They made their way back to the Administration Building in thoughtful silence.
Melanie was gone. Gunner went to her desk—sitting on the edge of it again—and immediately picked up the phone, tapping out a number with those fingers. It seemed to Tessa that they did reasonably well with delicate work after all.
She took a deep breath and shrugged out of her jacket. She hung it neatly over the back of her chair, pushed her sleeves up and went to work. She sat down at their desk to begin making her own set of phone calls.
Ten minutes later, Tessa heard Gunner swear. She was on hold with Hahnemann Hospital.
“What?” she asked quietly, looking over at him again.
“I can’t find any record of Benami with any branch of the armed forces.” He hitched his weight around to face her. “So what have you got?”
“Nothing, yet.” Then her eyes sharpened as someone came back on the line. She spoke briefly, then hung up the phone.
“Well?” Gunner prompted.
“Benami’s definitely our man.”
“He’s AB-Negative,” he said resignedly. He dropped his cigarettes in Mel’s trash can, wincing painfully.
“Not exactly.”
“Blood types either are or they aren’t, Princess.”
“I mean...I don’t know. I can’t find out, either. According to all the area hospitals, Daphne’s family physician, the IRS and the Social Security Administration, a man named Christian Benami doesn’t exist at all.”
It took Gunner only a split second to dive for the trash can again. Tessa moved fast and instinctively, shooting out with one foot to kick it clear of his reach.
His smoky eyes came back up to her face slowly.
“A deal’s a deal, Gunner.”
“Not if we can’t get a blood type on Benami.”
She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. “This lack of a paper trail is very suspicious, so don’t split hairs.”
“I said no cigarettes if Angela gave us anything that pointed to Benami,” he argued.
“Sure, and Benami erased all traces of his past because it seemed like a fun thing to do at the time.”
Gunner’s expression twisted.
&nbs
p; “Angela told us about the blood type, which led us to find out that Benami apparently doesn’t exist. There’s got to be a glitch in there somewhere. It’ll just take further digging.” She paused, smiling sweetly. “I hear they make nicotine patches for what ails you, Gunner.”
“Damn sissy things,” he muttered. “I’m tough.”
“Good. So stop your complaining.”
She grinned at him. Gunner surprised himself by chuckling when all his instincts were already craving nicotine.
She might be busily building walls between them, he thought, but every once in a while she forgot to. Every once in a while, she smiled that way, jumped back at him, surprised him, and he thought their partnership might work out all right after all.
He liked this lady, he thought. He really did.
Chapter 4
Gunner found himself continually revising his initial opinion of their rapport as the day wore on. It was Saturday, they were on their own time and neither of them gave a single thought to going home. They organized their priorities without conscious debate. He stayed on the phones, searching for some record of Benami, while she went to consult Igor.
The computer system was nearly phenomenal, Tessa thought, sitting down to tap her way into it—nearly being the operative word. It collated Pennsylvania’s criminal proceedings, convictions and DMV records with the other states in the union—or it tried to. Not all states had the financial wherewithal to purchase the system. Unfortunately, with such vast stores of data to sort through, Igor was slow. Sometimes he simply went down, for hours, for days, overwhelmed by the sheer number of queries made of him.
Tessa set him to work and went back to the Unit office. Gunner covered the phone by tucking it against his shoulder as he looked up at her. “What’ve you got, Princess?”
“Nothing, yet. We have prints on Benami, right?”