Which meant that subconsciously, there was a reason. And the most logical reason she could come up with made her very, very uncomfortable. In fact, it scared her, scared her in a basic way. And not simply because of the impossibility of it all. He was, after all, the chief and her boss in a male-oriented world that, given half a chance or less, would chew her up and spit her out. No, her fear stemmed from a much more basic fear.
She had sworn, after Bobby was killed in the line of duty a month before they were to be married, that she would never fall for a cop again. She'd renewed the pledge fervently when Miguel de los Reyes had lain near death, almost grateful that Anna wasn't here to go through this hell.
Now she could only sit in the darkness and hope she hadn't remembered that vow too late.
* * *
Chapter 8
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The room hushed for a moment when the door opened, and Kit looked up. The new arrival, looking both curious and a bit uneasy, glanced around. It was a moment before the normal noise and chatter of the Neutral Zone picked up, but no longer than for any other unknown visitor.
Which, Kit told herself, was a good sign. It meant the kids probably didn't realize the chief of the Marina Heights police had just walked into their sanctuary. Lord knows what would happen if they did.
She finished with the glass of soda she'd been filling and handed it with a smile to the young girl across the bar. Gloria, a pretty fifteen-year-old who dressed like she was thirty and tried to talk like she was forty, turned and saw the tall, lean man approaching. She let out a low, earthy comment of appreciation.
Kit only knew a couple of the Spanish words, but it was enough to get the gist. Despite his advanced age, from Gloria's point of view, Miguel de los Reyes was one fine piece of male. And as she looked at him, dressed in jeans—black ones this time—a gray knit shirt and a black belt with a silver buckle and tip that emphasized his lean waist, she couldn't help agreeing.
"You said it, sister," she muttered, winning a grin and a wink from Gloria before the girl went to join her friends, taking time to eye the approaching man once more as they passed each other.
"Sorry I'm late," the chief—Miguel, she corrected herself, still not used to the familiarity—said as he reached the bar. "That budget meeting with the city finance director ran long. And I wanted to change clothes. This doesn't seem the place for a suit."
"Hardly," she agreed with a grin. "No problem. I'm here for the duration, anyway."
It was her night to run the club while Caitlin stayed at home with little Celeste, so they had agreed to meet here. All of Caitlin's friends, from Trinity West and elsewhere, were pitching in, knowing that while her dedication to the Neutral Zone hadn't changed, her available time had. The little girl who had been named for Quisto's mother was keeping her more than busy. So they were all taking turns donating an evening, keeping the place going as it always had.
"How's your arm?" he asked.
"Fine," she assured him.
He'd called yesterday afternoon to be sure she was all right, and she hadn't known whether to be gratified or nervous. She hadn't seen him at the station today, although a brief chat with Rosa had yielded the information that he was tied up at city hall and probably would be all day. But he'd called that evening just before she'd left Trinity West, and when she'd told him records had tracked down the case number on the drive-by shooting involving the supposed witness to the murder and she was going to stop by the storage room on her way out and dig out the file, he'd wanted to meet to go over it.
"Coffee, soda?" she offered. "Or maybe one of Quisto's favorite root beer floats?"
He laughed. "Just coffee, thanks."
"Grab a bar stool."
"It looks different," Miguel said as he looked around. "I was in here right after she opened, when we were still trying to convince her she'd be safer closer to Trinity West, but I haven't been back." He grimaced. "I thought it might make the kids nervous if they recognized me."
Kit paused, coffeepot in hand. "I never realized how much your job affected your whole life."
He shrugged. "It has its moments."
He took the mug she offered him and looked over the rim to the wall behind her. Kit knew what he was seeing, the cheerful, bright yellow expanse Caitlin had added as counterpoint to the dark, grim wall on the other side of the big room. Over there, photos of young people, some still children, some mere babies, hung in stark profusion, with only one thing in common—they were all, every one of them, dead. Murdered with intent, or by the accident of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were mute testimony to the ugliness of the streets, and to Caitlin Romero's determination that they not be forgotten. It was that wall as much as anything that brought the kids here. It had become a shrine to lost brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, parents and even the children of these children.
But the yellow wall was the antithesis of the brutality of the dark wall. It was the home of hope, of photos of new babies born, of graduations and weddings and gamboling puppies. And it gave these kids something to think about when too much of their time was spent wondering if they would live to adulthood.
Kit got a towel to wipe off the top of the highly polished bar. It wasn't fancy, but Caitlin saw to it that it, like everything here, was taken care of. It was all part of her campaign to make the kids see things didn't have to be expensive to work and look nice.
Kit saw Miguel smile as his gaze reached the spot over the root beer tap. She knew why, knew that he was looking at Caitlin and Quisto's wedding picture, hung in that place of significance for them both.
"I've noticed," Kit said thoughtfully, "that whenever Quisto or Cruz or Ryan do a shift here, the female population seems to get a bit silly. Why is that, do you suppose?"
Miguel laughed, and Kit thought the genuine, lighthearted sound the sweetest thing she'd heard in a long time.
"I can't imagine."
Kit glanced at the pinball machine, where Gloria was clustered with three other girls, giggling and looking this way. "Hmm," she said. "I was just wondering if you knew, since you seem to be having the same effect."
He looked startled and glanced over his shoulder. Caught, the girls shrieked and turned away, then started giggling again.
When he turned to her, still looking puzzled, Kit laughed. "It's really nice to see them acting so … normal. Most of them are pretty tough cookies when they start coming here, but given the chance Caitlin gives them, they revert to young girls pretty quickly. Especially with a good-looking guy around."
His expression shifted to a smile she would have called, had it been anyone other than him, shy. "Was there a compliment in there?"
Kit stopped dead in her rhythmic wiping motion, surprised at his almost hopeful tone. He had to know. The man had mirrors in his house, after all. And she'd teased him often enough about his aristocratic good looks in those old, comfortable days when he'd been safely off-limits, marked by the biggest stop sign in the world to her, the wedding band on his left hand.
But she hadn't said anything like that since Anna had died nearly six years ago. It had seemed wrong, somehow, even after he'd taken off the ring, two years after her funeral. And she hadn't been comfortable about saying such things without that buffer.
And it had never occurred to her that he might need to hear it.
"I guess I didn't think you needed to hear the obvious," she said. "But what I used to tell you still goes. More so. You…" She trailed off, unable to summon up one of the teasing compliments she used to throw at him about looking like an Aztec god.
He looked at her steadily, an oddly intent expression on his face. "Sometimes," he said, "it's not so much the compliment as it is the source."
She was very much afraid that she was gaping at him. She had no idea how to take that remark. The most obvious insinuation seemed impossible.
"Shall we get started?" he said briskly, as if he hadn't just rattled her to the core. Or as if it had meant nothing to him at all.
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"Sure," she said, glad for the excuse to turn from him and hang the towel on its hook behind the bar. They retreated to Caitlin's office through a doorway at one end of the long, yellow wall.
He seemed to make the oblong room, which wasn't that small at seven by twelve feet, shrink somehow. She walked to the desk beneath an old, schoolroom style clock, where she had put the file she had taken to carting around with her. The small desk was rather cluttered, with a single-line telephone sitting atop an old but still functional answering machine, a well-used-looking rotary card file, a new photo of a happy-looking, dark-haired baby and a small stack of notes and papers in a plastic tray.
Dodging the file cabinet that sat beside the desk at a right angle, she walked past the long, narrow table against the side wall. It held a coffeemaker, a small radio and odds and ends of whatever projects Caitlin was involved in at the moment, from helping kids with homework to helping them find jobs. Her goal was to keep these kids out of someplace like Kelsey's place next door, the halfway house for runaways. Kelsey had often said that if there were more people like Caitlin, and more places like the Neutral Zone, she'd be happily out of business.
At the other end of the office, opposite the desk, was a sofa and a small lamp table that barely fit along the narrower wall. Kit gestured Miguel to sit down. When he did, she took a seat at the other end of the sofa and set the folders she'd picked up safely between them. If he noticed her purposeful action or saw any significance in where she chose to sit, he didn't comment.
"I haven't had a chance to even look at this yet," she said as she pulled the file out of the large manila envelope she had stuffed everything in when she'd decided she didn't want to risk leaving it in her office. "I was running late, so I just signed it out and ran. I'll make copies later and put it back."
His dark, arched brows lowered. "I meant to tell you to sign anything you pull on this out to me. Just in case. I don't want Robards on your back any more than he already is."
"Thanks," she said, genuinely appreciating the thought "But I don't think he has any idea I haven't dropped it yet" She tapped the folder with a finger. "It took a while to find the thing. It was misfiled by a year."
He frowned. "Conveniently inconvenient."
"That's what I thought," she said. "It was right where it should have been, only a year off."
"And easily explainable as a simple filing mistake."
She nodded. "I'm not even sure why I looked there."
"Those good instincts of yours." His mouth twisted. "And yet another irregularity that could go either way."
"They just keep piling up, don't they?"
"Smoke," he said.
She lifted the file folder. "Maybe this will tell us if there's a fire."
She offered it to him, but he shook his head, indicating she should go ahead. A small thing, she thought, but typical of the man. She opened the file, which was considerably thicker than the Rivas file. She scanned quickly, and it was clear this was a much more thorough investigation. Of course, there had been several witnesses and the evidence of spent shell casings from an automatic weapon.
"Looks like a typical gang drive-by. Downtown Boys versus the Charros. No plates on the suspect vehicle, and the driver, at least, wore a ski mask. Victim was a long time Charro and had several homies with him. With the mask, nobody could ID the driver, and they couldn't tell if anybody else was in the car, so the driver may or may not be the shooter. But they all recognized the car as belonging to one of the Downtowners."
"Robards didn't do the reports on this one, did he?"
Kit had looked at that first, not that she'd needed to. The printing on the pages was neat and firm, not Robards's crabbed scrawl. She glanced down to see who had done the report, and something else caught her eye. She looked at him.
"No," she said, "Carpenter wrote the initial report. But you approved it."
He blinked. "I did?" She nodded. "Odd. I was a captain by then. Why would I be approving a report instead of the watch commander?"
"I don't know." She pulled the crime report free of the metal fastener and handed it to him. "See if you remember."
She noticed the detective follow-up on the murder of the young man known as El Tigre had been done by then detective Cruz Gregerson. It had happened just before he'd been promoted to sergeant and had taken over the felony unit. She read his report, expecting and finding Cruz's usual thorough job.
"I do remember this," Miguel said suddenly. Kit looked up. "I remember it pretty clearly. We almost had a riot on our hands that night."
"A gang riot?"
He nodded. "The Charros insisted El Tigre hadn't done anything, hadn't trespassed on Downtowner turf, hadn't dissed anybody connected to them. They were ready to go to war."
She'd dealt with enough gang members and their families to be able to guess exactly how volatile the situation must have been that night.
"How did you end up involved in it?"
"I was acting watch commander that night. I was covering for Lieutenant Lerner. He had some family thing going on."
Kit nodded. It was unusual—no, practically unheard of—in the past for the Trinity West captain to do such a thing, but Miguel de los Reyes had been different from the beginning. He didn't feel he was above any job his people had to do. And if he was the only one available to help out, then he helped out.
"In fact," he said, gesturing with the report, "this was the case that got Cruz promoted. He'd been up for it before, but Robards slammed him down because … well, he had a dozen excuses, but you know what the main one was."
"Yes," Kit said, anger welling up on behalf of her friend. "Half-breed was the nicest of what he called him."
"But this made it impossible for Robards to stop the promotion. Cruz did an amazing dance that night, keeping those two gangs from going to war right there in the street. It was as much a time bomb as the one they gave him the Medal of Valor for disarming."
"He says here you had a lot to do with it." Miguel looked surprised. "What?" She indicated the follow-up report. "He says you offered yourself as a hostage if the two sides would talk instead of shoot. That it was the weight of having the chief of police do such a thing that got them thinking more about how powerful that made them feel than about retaliation."
"I didn't approve that report," he said dryly, seeming embarrassed by Gregerson's praise.
"No," Kit said, "Mallery did. But now that I read it, I remember hearing about it from Cruz. I think that was the day he told me we were all going to be working for you someday. And that he'd be happy to see that day come."
He didn't say anything, but he looked pleased. And that pleased Kit.
"Didn't they track down the car?" he asked. "I seem to remember something like that."
Kit went back to the report, then nodded. "Cruz found the car's owner, one Lorenzo Morales, known to his intimates as Choker."
"Choker? Cute. Go on."
As she read on, she nearly laughed at the familiar ruse, seen so often when a vehicle was used in a crime. "My, what a surprise. Choker told Cruz his car had been stolen that very day, in fact merely hours before the shooting."
"How convenient," Miguel said dryly. "Again."
"Yeah." She grimaced. "You'd think they'd come up with a new story. But Cruz says here there were several witnesses to back up his story. All his homies, of course, since they were at the residence of one of them."
"Of course."
"But you're right, they did find the car abandoned the next day, down in Marina del Mar, near the beach. And there was nothing in it to connect Morales to the shooting. We had to buy his story for lack of evidence to the contrary."
"Wonderful," Miguel muttered.
He scanned the crime report again. Kit stole a moment to look at him, to wonder how his age of forty-four showed only in and around his eyes. And that, she knew, could be as much the job as anything else. It aged them all eventually. Otherwise he looked a decade younger, not much older than she did.
Of course, there were days when she felt a decade older than she was. She knew that was the job.
She found herself staring at the twin sweeps of his dark lashes, which looked impossibly long and thick from this angle. They, along with the fine arch of his brows, were a distinct contrast to the sharp, masculine elegance of his face. Even his mouth seemed masculine, or perhaps it was simply that when she looked at the shape of it, she kept wondering what it would be like to kiss. And wondering even more what it would be like to be kissed by it.
He reacted to something he read, and Kit jerked her mind out of the rut it seemed to fall into every time she was with this man. And just in time, because he looked up.
"Funny description of the driver from that one witness," he said.
"What?" She'd only skimmed the witness statements before handing the report to him.
"He said the only thing he could tell, with the ski mask, was that the guy had a fat head."
She let out a short laugh. "In more ways than one," she said. "So, we have a fatheaded Downtowner shooting a Charro called El Tigre, in typical fashion. Witnesses abound, but still nobody in jail for it."
"I'm surprised the wits were even that helpful," he said. "Usually they won't talk at all."
"I know," she said. "Usually they're in too big a hurry to retaliate. But Cruz can talk their talk. I'll bet he took that part over from Carpenter when he got there."
"Probably. It's just like him to do it and not take credit."
"Like somebody else I know," she said pointedly. And had the pleasure of seeing that little smile again.
"What I don't see," he said after a moment, "is any clear connection between the two murders. Other than one we can't prove."
"I don't, either. Even the lack of a motive for the Downtown Boys to go after El Tigre doesn't mean much."
He expelled a frustrated breath. "No. They'll do it for no reason at all often enough, shoot somebody for just not being one of them."
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