by Diana Palmer
Her arms went under his and around him. The utility belt was uncomfortable. She felt the butt of his automatic at her ribs. His arms were bruising. But she didn’t care. She held on for all she was worth and shivered with what must have been desire. She’d never felt it. Not until now, with the last man on earth she should allow herself to feel it for.
He felt her shy response with wonder. He’d expected that a socialite like Winnie would have had men since her early teens. The way of the world these days was experience. Virtue counted for nothing with most of the social set. But this little violet was innocent. He could feel it when she strained away from the sudden hardness of his body, when she shivered as he tried to probe her mouth.
Curious, he lifted his head and looked down into her flushed, wide-eyed face. Innocence. She couldn’t even pretend sophistication.
Gently, he eased her out of his arms. He smiled to lessen the sting of it. “You taste of green apples,” he said enigmatically.
“Apples?” She blinked, and swallowed. She could still taste him on her mouth. It had felt wonderful, being held so close to that warm strength. “I haven’t had an apple in, well, in ages,” she stammered.
“It was a figure of speech. Here. Put on your coat.” He helped her ease her arms into it. Then he handed her the cup.
“Am I leaving and taking it with me?” she asked blankly.
“No. We’re just drinking it outside.” He picked up his own cup and shepherded her out of the door, onto the long porch, down the steps and out to a picnic table that had been placed there, with its rude wooden benches, by the owner.
“We’re going to drink coffee out here?” she asked, astonished. “It’s freezing!”
“I know. Sit down.”
She did, using the cup for a hand warmer.
“It is a bit nippy,” he commented.
A sheriff’s car drove past. It beeped. Kilraven waved. “I’m leaving next week,” he said.
“Yes. You told us.”
A Jacobsville police car whizzed by, just behind the sheriff’s car. It beeped, too. Kilraven threw up his hand. Dust rose and fell in their wake, then settled.
“I had some sick leave and some vacation time left over. I can only use a little of it, of course, for this year, because it’s almost over. But I’m going to have a few weeks to do some investigating without pay.” He smiled. “With the state of the economy what it is, I don’t think they’ll mind that.”
“Probably not.” She sipped coffee. “Exactly what do you do when you aren’t impersonating a police officer?” she asked politely.
He pursed his lips and his silver eyes twinkled. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to—”
A loud horn drowned out the rest. This time, it was a fire truck. They waved. Kilraven waved back. So did Winnie.
“Have to what?” she asked him.
“Well, it wouldn’t be pretty.”
“That’s just stonewalling, Kilraven,” she pointed out. She frowned. “Don’t you have a first name?”
“Sure. It’s—”
Another loud horn drowned that out, too.
They both turned. Cash Grier pulled up beside the picnic table and let down his window on the driver’s side. “Isn’t it a little cold to be drinking coffee outside?” he asked.
Kilraven gave him a wry look. “Everybody at the EOC saw me drive off with Winnie,” he said complacently. “So far, there have been two cop cars and a fire truck. And, oh, look, there comes the Willow Creek Police Department. A little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?” he called loudly to the driver, who was from northern Jacobs County. He just grinned and waved and drove on.
Winnie hadn’t realized how much traffic had gone by until then. She burst out laughing. No wonder Kilraven had wanted to sit out here. He wasn’t going to have her gossiped about. It touched her.
“If I were you, I’d take her to Barbara’s Café to have this discussion,” Cash told him. “It’s much more private.”
“Private?” Kilraven exclaimed.
Cash pointed to the road. There were, in a row, two sheriffs’ cars, a state police vehicle, a fire and rescue truck, an ambulance and, of all things, a fire department ladder truck. They all tooted and waved as they went by, creating a wave of dust.
Cash Grier shook his head. “Now, that’s a shame you’ll get all dusty. Maybe you should take her back inside,” he said with an angelic expression.
“You know what you can do,” Kilraven told him. He got up and held out his hand for Winnie’s cup. “I’m putting these in the sink, and then we’re leaving.”
“Spoilsport.” Cash sighed. “Now we’ll all have to go back to work!”
“I can suggest a place to do it,” Kilraven muttered.
Cash winked at Winnie, who couldn’t stop laughing. He drove off.
Winnie got up, sighed and dug in her coat pocket for her car keys. It had been, in some ways, the most eventful hour of her life. She knew things about Kilraven that nobody else did, and she felt close to him. It was the first time in their turbulent relationship that she felt any hope for the future. Not that getting closer to him was going to be easy, she told herself. Especially not with him in San Antonio and her in Jacobsville.
He came back out, locking the door behind him. He looked around as he danced gracefully down the steps and joined her. “What, no traffic jam?” he exclaimed, nodding toward the deserted road. “Maybe they ran out of rubberneckers.”
Just as he said that, a funeral procession came by, headed by none other than the long-suffering Macreedy. He was famous for getting lost while leading processions. He didn’t blow his horn. In fact, he really did look lost. The procession went on down the road with Winnie and Kilraven staring after it.
“Don’t tell me he’s losing another funeral procession,” she wailed. “Sheriff Carson Hayes will fry him up and serve him on toast if he does it again.”
“No kidding,” Kilraven agreed. “There’s already been the threat of a lawsuit by one family.” He shook his head. “Hayes really needs to put that boy behind a desk.”
“Or take away his car keys,” she agreed.
He looked down at her with an oddly affectionate expression. “Come on. You’re getting chilled.”
He walked her back to her car, towering over her. “You’ve come a long way since that day you went wailing home because you forgot to tell me a perp was armed.”
She smiled. “I was lucky. I could have gotten you killed.”
He hesitated. “These flashes of insight, do they run in your family?”
“I don’t know much about my family,” she confessed. “My father was very remote after my mother left us.”
“Did you have any contact with your uncle?” he asked.
She gaped at him. “How do you know about him?”
He didn’t want to confess what he knew about the man. He shrugged. “Someone mentioned his name.”
“We don’t have any contact at all. We didn’t,” she corrected. “He died a month ago. Or so we were told.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her dark eyes were cold. “I’m not. He and my mother ran away together and left my father with three kids to raise. Well, two kids actually. Boone was in the military by then. I look like my mother. Dad hated that. He hated me.” She bit her tongue. She hadn’t meant to say as much.
But he read that in her expression. “We all have pivotal times in our lives, when a decision leads to a different future.” He smiled. “In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII fell in love with a young girl and decided that his Catholic wife, Catherine of Aragon, was too old to give him a son anyway, so he spent years finding a way to divorce her and marry the young girl, whom he was certain could produce a male heir. In the end, he destroyed the Catholic Church in England to accomplish it. He married Ann Boleyn, a protestant who had been one of Catherine’s ladies, and from that start the Anglican Church was born. The child of that union was not a son, but Elizabeth, who became queen of England aft
er her brother and half sister. All that, for love of a woman.” He pursed his lips and his eyes twinkled. “As it turned out, he couldn’t get a son from Ann Boleyn either, so he found a way to frame her for adultery and cut off her head. Ten days later, he married a woman who could give him a son.”
“The wretch!” she exclaimed, outraged.
“That’s why we have elected officials instead of kings with absolute power,” he told her.
She shook her head. “How do you know all that?”
He leaned down. “You mustn’t mention it, but I have a degree in history.”
“Well!”
“But I specialized in Scottish history, not English. I’m one of a handful of people who think James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, got a raw deal from history for marrying Mary, Queen of Scots. But don’t mention that out loud.”
She laughed. “Okay.”
He opened her car door for her. Before she got in, he drew a long strand of her blond hair over his big hand, studying its softness and beautiful pale color.
Her eyes slid over his face. “Your brother wears his hair long, in a ponytail. You keep yours short.”
“Is that a question?”
She nodded.
“Jon is particularly heavy on the Native American side of his ancestry.”
“And you aren’t?”
His eyes narrowed. “I don’t know, Winnie,” he said quietly, making her name sound foreign and sweet and different. “Maybe I’m hiding from it.”
“Not you,” she said with conviction. “I can’t see you hiding from anything.”
That soft pride in her tone made him feel taller. He let go of her hair. “Drive carefully,” he said.
“I will. See you.”
He didn’t say anything else. But he did nod.
With her heart flying up in her throat, she got in and drove away. It wasn’t until she got home that she realized, she still didn’t know his first name.
4
Winnie was back at work the next morning almost walking on air. Kilraven had kissed her. Not only that, he seemed to really like her. Maybe San Antonio wasn’t so far away. He might visit. He might take her out on a date. Anything was possible.
She put her purse in her locker and went to her station. It was in the shape of a semicircle, and contained a bank of computers. Directly in front of her was a keyboard; behind it was a computer screen. This was the radio from which she could contact any police, fire or EMS department, although her job was police dispatch. There were separate stations for fire, police and EMS. Fire had one dispatcher, EMS had two. She, along with Shirley at a separate console, handled law enforcement traffic on her shift for all of Jacobs County. Beside her was a screen for the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Behind the computer screen, on a shelf, sat three other computer screens. One, an incident screen, noted the location of the units and their current status. The middle was CAD, or computer aided dispatch, which featured a form into which information such as activity code and location were placed; typing in the location brought up such data as prior calls at the residence, the nearest fire hydrant in case of fire, the name and address of a key holder and even a box to fax the incident to the police department. It also had screens for names and numbers of law enforcement personnel, including cell phone and pager numbers. There was a mobile data terminal from which dispatch could send messages to law enforcement on their laptops in their cars. The third computer screen was the phone itself, the heart and soul of the operation, through which desperation and fear and panic were heard daily and gently handled.
This information came through two call takers. Their job was to take the calls as they came in, put them into the computer and send them to the appropriate desk: fire, police or EMS. Once the location and situation were input, the computer decided which was the appropriate agency or agencies to be dispatched. For a domestic incident with injuries, police were sent first to secure the scene, and an ambulance would stage in the area until it was deemed safe for the EMS personnel to enter the house to assist the injured. Often the perpetrator was still inside and dangerous to anyone who attempted to help the victim. More police officers died responding to domestic disputes than almost any other job-related duty.
Winnie had just dispatched a police officer to the scene of a motor vehicle accident, along with fire and rescue, and was waiting for further information.
In between the calls, Shirley leaned over while the supervisor was talking to a visitor. “Did you hear about the break in the murder case?”
“What break?”
“They found Kilraven’s cell phone number clenched in the victim’s hand.”
“Oh, that. Yes, Kilraven told me.”
Shirley’s eyes twinkled. “Did he now? Might one ask what else he told you, all alone at his house?”
“How do you know we went to his house?” Winnie asked, blushing.
“A few people told us. There was a sheriff’s deputy, Chief Grier, a fireman, a funeral director…”
Winnie laughed. “I should have known.”
“They did all just mention that you and Kilraven were drinking coffee at a picnic table, outside in the freezing cold,” Shirley added.
“Well, Kilraven felt that we shouldn’t start gossip.”
“As if.” Shirley chuckled. “What were you talking about?” she added slyly.
“The murder case,” Winnie said with a grin. “No, really, we were,” she added when she saw her coworker’s expression. “You remember Senator Fowler’s kitchen help died mysteriously after she gave some information to Alice Jones, the coroner’s investigator from San Antonio, about the victim? Now there’s gossip the murder might be linked to other murders in San Antonio.” It was safe to tell her that. No way was she going to add that Kilraven’s family might be involved.
“Wow,” Shirley exclaimed softly.
“Heads up,” Winnie whispered, grinning and turned away before Maddie Sims came toward them. The older woman never jumped on them about talking because they only passed remarks back and forth during lulls in the operations, but she did like them to pay attention on the job. She would know what they did anyway because everything was recorded when they were working. Maddie would be diplomatic about it, though.
Winnie smiled as Maddie passed. A message from the police officer responding to the wreck was just coming in, requesting a want and warrants on a car tag. She turned back to her console and began typing in the numbers.
IT WAS A BUSY NIGHT. There was an attempted suicide, which, fortunately, they were able to get help dispatched in time. There were assorted sick calls, one kitchen fire, several car versus deer reports, two domestic calls, a large animal in the road and three drunk driver reports, only one of which resulted in an arrest. Often a drunk driver was reported on the highway, but no good description of the vehicle or direction of travel was given and it was a big county. Occasionally, an observant citizen could provide a description and tag number, but not always. Unless a squad car was actually in the area of the report, it was difficult sometimes to pursue. You couldn’t pull an officer off the investigation of an accident or a burglary or a robbery, she mused, to go roaming the county looking for an inebriated driver, no matter how much the officers would like to catch one.
At break, she and Shirley worried about the assault on Rick Marquez.
“I hope he’s not going to be attacked again, when he goes back to work. Somebody wants this case covered up pretty badly,” Shirley said.
“Yes,” Winnie agreed, “and it looks like this is only the tip of the iceberg. We still have that mangled murder victim in our county. Senator Fowler’s hired help told Alice Jones something about him and the poor woman was murdered in a way that made it look like suicide. Now there’s an attempt on Rick, who’s been helping investigate it.”
“He’s lucky he has such a hard head,” Shirley said.
“And that his partner went searching for him when he didn’t turn up to look at some paperwork she’d
just found. Yes, I heard about that from Keely,” Winnie said. “Sheriff Hayes,” she added with a grin, “is Boone’s best friend, so they know more than most people about what’s going on. Well, except for us,” she added wryly. “We know everything.”
“Almost everything, anyway. You know, we used to live in such a peaceful county.” Shirley sighed. “Then Keely lost her mother to a killer who was friends with her father. Now we get a murder victim dead in our river and his own mother wouldn’t recognize him. This is a dangerous place to live.”
“Every place is dangerous, even small towns,” she replied with a smile. “It’s the times we live in.”
“I guess so.”
They had homemade soup with cornbread, courtesy of one of the other dispatchers. It was nice to have something besides takeout, which got old very quickly on ten-hour shifts. The operators only worked four days a week, not necessarily in sequence, but they were stress-filled. All of them loved the job, or they wouldn’t be doing it. Saving lives, which they did on a daily basis, was a blessing in itself. But days off were good so that they had a chance to recover just a little bit from the nerve-racking series of desperate situations in which they assisted the appropriate authorities. Winnie had never loved a job so much. She smiled at Shirley, and thought what a nice bunch of people she worked with.
KILRAVEN WAS PUMPING his brother for information. It was, as usual, hard going. Jon was even more tight-lipped than Kilraven.
“It’s an ongoing murder investigation,” he insisted, throwing up his hands. “I can’t discuss it with you.”
Kilraven, comfortably seated in the one good chair in Jon’s office, just glared at him with angry silver eyes. “This is your niece and your sister-in-law we’re talking about,” he said icily. “I can help. Let me help.”
Jon perched on the edge of his desk. He was immaculate, from his polished black shoes to the long, elegant fingers that were always manicured. His black hair was caught in a ponytail that hung to his waist. His face grew solemn. “All right. But if Garon Grier asks me, I’m telling him that you stood on me in order to get this information.”