His disdainful smirk eased. “I really liked you.”
She said nothing.
Kadin understood the man’s disappointment, but even a pedophile could feel that way when a normal-appearing relationship ended.
“I’ll have my assistant call yours to arrange our next meeting,” Jax said, and then he turned and walked away.
Penny lowered her arms with a sigh. “Come on, let’s go into my office.” She led Kadin there. “What brings you by?”
He finished checking out her office. Like her house, it was modern and clean and tidy, except her desk had lots of papers on it. Her phone rang. On the second ring, it stopped. Jordan must have answered.
“Detective Cohen called,” he explained.
Penny nodded as though she knew what the detective had said. “The search was done. Barn burned to the ground. Jax told me. That’s why he and his brother were here.”
“He suspects arson.”
“So do I.” She folded her arms in front of her. “Is he any good? This detective?”
Cohen was more of a small-town sheriff with little to no big-city crime experience, which Kadin considered all child abduction cases to be. He categorized them as such, even if they did occur in small towns.
“He’s a little abstemious. I hear his parents made him go to law school and he stumbled into his career.” The morbid nature of the job might have dulled him over the years. “But he’s detail-oriented. He’ll follow the law and get a conviction. He just needs a good analyst.”
“Which is where you come in.” Penny smiled fondly.
“They’re going to ask Jax to go in for questioning,” Kadin said, instead of responding. “Cohen is waiting back at Ballard’s corporate office to talk to him.”
“Fantastic. Jax’s brother still wants him to work with me.”
“You can handle it.” He grinned, knowing she could. She was no shrinking violet. And then he wondered why his brother didn’t back up his request to sever ties. “Is Dane that sure Jax is innocent?”
Penny shrugged. “Must be. He also wants the ad campaign done on schedule.”
That was the business reason. “Do they get along?”
Her forehead creased with that question. “As far as I know. Jax never said otherwise. They run the company together.” Her brow smoothed and lifted. “But Dane is the CEO. Jax reports to him.”
Kadin nodded once. “We’ll have to wait for the crime scene evidence on Sara Wolfe’s case.”
“You think Dane might have something to do with this?” Penny asked, evidently not ready to stop talking about the brothers.
“Not at all. But if they don’t get along, that might work in our favor.” If Dane didn’t like his brother, he’d be more inclined to talk to the police. Or him.
“Detective Cohen invited us to be present for the questioning,” Kadin said.
“Us?” She unfolded her arms to point from him to herself.
“I’d like you to stay close until this is resolved.”
She lowered her arms and smiled. “You going to protect me, Detective?”
There she went again, flirting, getting more confident with it, too. He didn’t think he should like that anymore. He didn’t respond.
“Is now a good time to leave?” he asked instead, ignoring her fleeting but stunned reaction to the subtle rejection.
* * *
Penny entered the room on the other side of the interrogation room, and Kadin came to stand beside her. His aloofness after she’d tried teasing him had her out of sorts. Maybe treating this casually was the wrong approach. She’d come across as shamelessly throwing herself at him when he wasn’t all that in to her. Or was he? He’d sure been into her last night, in more than a physical sense. She didn’t think she’d imagined how his passion had matched hers. If she pushed, would he finally crack and she’d have a new and exciting man in her life? But what if that never happened and she ended up longing for more than he could ever give?
“I thought Kadin Tandy was in charge of this investigation,” Penny heard Jax say through a speaker connected to the room on the other side of the glass. He took a seat, smoothing his tie and jacket.
“He’s agreed to assist us in the investigation.” Detective Cohen sat down, putting a recorder on the table with a querying look to Jax. “Would you mind answering a few questions?”
Jax opened his hands from where they were clasped on the table. “Whatever you need.”
The detective started the recorder.
“Is he legitimate?” Jax asked. “Kadin Tandy?”
The detective looked at Jax, putting his hands on the table, unassuming and methodical. “As in...law enforcement?”
“He seems to have taken the law into his own hands. Opening that agency. Dark Alley Investigations? Did Penny do his ad? He looks like an underwear model.”
Detective Cohen’s grin curved in humor. The detective rarely smiled.
Penny looked at Kadin, unable to suppress her own appreciation. Kadin didn’t react to the comment or her look, only watched the interrogation room.
“I can assure you he’s no underwear model,” Cohen said, his humor short-lived. “He was one of New York City’s top homicide detectives. Solved every one of his cases, including his own daughter’s. Damn near killed her murderer. Took half a dozen officers to pull him off the man.”
This time when Penny looked over at Kadin, she felt no amusement. His jaw had tensed and the muscles in his arms seemed harder than before as he must have been recalling that day, the day he’d captured his daughter’s killer. She had new respect for him, for his expertise and for his aversion to discussing his great loss.
When she turned back to the interrogation room, she saw how Jax’s ridicule had vanished into disconcertion. Having the likes of Kadin Tandy on the case made him uneasy, a homicide detective with plenty of motive to be good at what he did. Catching killers.
Did he regret agreeing to come talk to the detective? He should.
“Why do criminals talk to police when they don’t have to?” she asked Kadin, keeping her voice low even though she didn’t have to.
“That’s always amazed me, too,” he said, also in a low tone.
“Will you please state your name for the record?” Detective Cohen asked, matter-of-fact.
“Jax Ballard. I already talked to the police.”
“This is more of a formal statement.” Detective Cohen leaned back against the chair. “Why don’t we start with the day Sara Wolfe was kidnapped? Where were you that afternoon? Were you at work?”
Logically, that would be where he ought to have been. But Jax said, “No. I had taken the afternoon off to be with my son, Quinten.”
“What time was that?”
“I left work at about one.”
The detective nodded. “One. All right. Then what?”
“I went home to change and pack and then picked up my son and we drove to my house in Park City. We went to a movie.”
“A movie? What time was that?”
Jax reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet. Opening that, he pulled out a receipt and handed it to the detective. “It was a five o’clock show.” He pointed to the receipt. “See the time and date? And the amount is for two.”
Penny found it odd that he’d come so prepared. She glanced up at Kadin, who kept his attention on the room through the glass.
“Thank you.” The detective picked up the receipt. “May I?”
“Yes. I made a copy.”
“Good.” Detective Cohen kept everything friendly, deceptively so. “Take me through the whole day. When did you notice your truck missing?”
“At about seven in the morning. I saw it in the parking garage the night before and it was gone when I left for work the next morning. I ca
lled to report it missing on my way to work.”
“When you left work, did you stop anywhere?”
“No,” Jax answered.
“Did you drive by Miller Elementary School?”
“No. I wasn’t anywhere near there.”
“What time did you get to your apartment?” Cohen maintained a friendly demeanor and tone.
“No later than one-thirty. And I left by about two.”
“What did you drive to Park City?”
“My Mercedes.”
“You drove with your son?” Cohen asked.
“No, he was already up there.”
The detective studied Jax a moment. He had plenty of time to go by the elementary school, and had no alibi for the entire afternoon.
“Did you park your truck in the barn on your property?” Cohen asked.
“No,” Jax said with conviction.
“Then how did it get in there?” The clever question came unassuming and subtle.
“I don’t know. I didn’t put it there. Like I said, it was stolen.”
The police had a record of the report.
“Mr. Ballard, is there anyone who might have something against you?” Detective Cohen asked, a well-placed shocker he must have planned. “Someone who’d burn down your barn?”
Was the detective trying to throw off Jax? Shake him up? Catch him in a lie? Penny glanced at Kadin again, who continued to focus intently on the interview.
“Not that I know of,” Jax replied, and then after thinking in a way that suggested he’d dreamed up a lie, he added, “Sometimes you have disgruntled employees. Why? Do you think someone is after me?”
“I’m trying to establish motive. It could be your motive or someone else you know, such as a disgruntled employee?” He explained this as though he were talking to a young boy.
Jax had to know why he’d been asked to come here and answer a few questions. Jax took a few moments before he responded. “I fired a man a few weeks back. He did construction on the side. I paid him to do a small remodeling job at my house in Park City.”
“What’s his name?”
Jax provided the name.
Detective Cohen looked across the table for several seconds, a picture of study. “Is there anything else you’d like to add to your statement?”
Jax shook his head.
“All right.” Detective Cohen stood. “That’s all I need for the moment. Would you be willing to provide a DNA sample and complete a lie detector test for us?” When Jax hesitated, the detective said, “It’s standard procedure. Just so we can clear you as a suspect.”
After a beat, Jax nodded. “Sure.” And then he asked, “Are there any other suspects?”
“So far we only have persons of interest.” The detective seemed genuine and reassuring, but he had to be practiced in making criminals comfortable. “Thank you for coming down today.”
Jax stood. “I hope you catch whoever killed that girl.”
Detective Cohen said nothing as Jax was allowed to leave.
“He sure tried hard to present an alibi,” Penny said to Kadin.
“If you can call it that. Sara’s school got out at three-thirty the day she was taken. He had plenty of time to abduct her and drive to Park City for the movie with his son.”
Chapter 5
The only reprieve that Penny had from Kadin was work. Although he hovered outside or at a nearby coffee shop when he wasn’t meeting with the lead detective in the Sara Wolfe case, she didn’t have to look at him. It pained her to look at him. Now two weeks later, they were still waiting on news from the forensics team and Kadin had camped out in her guestroom. He seemed to try to avoid one-on-one time as she did. He woke before her and stayed busy on his other cases in the evening.
She’d grown to like listening to his deep voice and the intelligent way he spoke with other law enforcement types. There was one man he spoke with on a regular basis, an FBI agent who helped him process clues by accessing databases Kadin didn’t have the authority to access. He seemed to have a lot of contacts like that, colleagues from his days as a detective in New York, men in the military. His reach appeared endless. And while she couldn’t hear the other side of the conversations, she could tell everyone respected him and held him in high esteem.
She stepped into Avenue One an hour earlier than usual. The more time she spent with Kadin, the more she liked him. She struggled to contain her urge to let loose her desire. But doing so might make do something she’d regret later.
The catch of his gaze. The sinewy movement of his biceps. The way he walked toward her. Whatever he was doing at the moment, she saw him. He captured all her attention. Stirred her. Heated her. It didn’t help that she knew what it felt like to kiss him. And more. She tried not to go there.
Recalling their night together presented a major distraction.
Lost in thought, she didn’t notice Mark until she reached her office door, which was open. She stopped in the doorway, seeing him sitting at her desk, her laptop docked and her desk monitor lit. What was he doing?
He looked up and saw her. “Penny.”
She watched him click the mouse and close the screens he’d had open.
“You’re in early.” He stood up, doing a bad job of trying to appear innocent.
“What are you doing on my computer?”
“Company computer. I was looking for a file.”
“What file?” she asked, stepping into her office.
“The presentation we gave to propose the Super Bowl ad.” He moved out from behind her desk as she reached him, allowing her to sit in her chair.
“You could have asked me to send it to you.”
“Didn’t want to bother you, since it’s so early...” He headed for the door.
“Does this have anything to do with why you’re so worried about Avenue One?” she asked.
“What?” Turning to look back at her over his shoulder, he laughed in a nerdy, awkward way that gave away his guilt. “No. Of course not. It’s just a file.”
“I sent that to you before we proposed the account,” she said.
“Yeah, but I couldn’t find it. Must have deleted it.” He shrugged. “Sorry. I’ll wait for you to get in next time.” He patted the door frame once and started to leave again.
“Did you find it?” she asked.
He stopped and turned. “Find what?”
He’d forgotten so quickly? “The file.”
“Oh.” He smiled. “No.”
“I’ll send it to you.”
“Thanks.”
After he left, Penny stared at the office door, certain she hadn’t imagined his purpose in coming into her office had been secret and suspect. And he hadn’t been looking for the proposal on the Super Bowl ad.
She looked at her computer. He’d closed all the screens he’d had open. She checked the recent files and there were none that had been opened since she logged on yesterday.
Navigating to the folder where she kept the proposal, she opened that file and scanned all the slides. There was nothing unusual. Nothing that would reveal anything sinister. Nothing they wouldn’t have wanted the client to see.
She searched through a few other files but couldn’t find anything suspicious. She had a lot of files. Status reports. Deliverables to the customer. Video files. Much more. What had he been looking for?
A knock on her door brought her head up. Kadin stood there, sexy as hell in jeans and an Under Armour shirt. He entered.
“Detective Cohen is on his way up,” he said.
Still busy drooling over his hard, muscular physique, she barely heard him. He must not be wearing his guns. Running her gaze down his body, she saw a slight bulge at his ankle and surmised he at least had one gun on him.
&
nbsp; “He called when I pulled into the parking garage.”
“Oh.” Penny snapped out of her trance. “He must have news.”
“Yes.” Kadin stepped toward her desk, stopped and then walked to the door. After glancing toward the elevators, he turned and came back.
He was anxious.
And she understood why. Getting up from her desk, Penny went to him as he was about to take another walk to the door. She put her hand on his arm.
He stopped and looked down at her, the tension around his eyes and mouth conveying all of his torment. This must be like reliving his daughter all over again.
“I wish there was something I could do,” she said softly.
Instead of comforting him, this increased his tension.
“Don’t,” he said.
Don’t talk about it. “Kadin...” She wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to try to break his hard shell.
“Penny?” Jordan said. She must have just arrived to work. “There’s a Detective Cohen here to see you.”
Penny stepped back from Kadin. “Send him in, please.”
Kadin faced the doorway with her as the detective entered, looking very Sherlock Holmesy in his suit jacket and hat, giving personality to his otherwise deadpan demeanor.
“Ms. Darden.” He nodded. “Kadin.”
“Please, call me Penny.” She was honored that the two of them included her on this meeting. Although Kadin had been on his way here when the detective had called, so she couldn’t be sure he’d include her otherwise.
“Jax Ballard’s alibi for the evening Sara Wolfe was kidnapped checks out. He did go to the movie with his son,” the detective said to Kadin. “We also traced cell phone calls the night of the fire. He was here in Salt Lake City when he made the calls. The last one was around eight and was to his house in the mountains. Video surveillance at his apartment showed him leaving shortly thereafter.”
Just as they’d thought, Jax had plenty of time to get to his log house and burn down the barn.
“Why was he calling his house?” Kadin asked.
“Maybe to get a hold of his son,” the detective replied.
“Or to make sure he wasn’t there?” Penny countered, voicing her own opinion.
A Wanted Man (Cold Case Detectives Book 1) Page 8