Like No One Else

by Maureen Smith

  “Mock all you want, Tommie,” Roland said with quiet conviction, “but I know what I’m talking about. And one day you will, too.”

  “Okay. Whatever.” She blew out an impatient breath, ready to bring an end to the vexing conversation. “If you don’t mind, Roland, I have another class in half an hour, and I’d really like to finish what I was working on before my students arrive.”

  “Of course. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”

  “Too late,” Tommie snapped.

  Gazing earnestly into her eyes, Roland said, “Despite what I did to you, Tommie, I want you to know that I’ve always loved you. Although you may not remember, we were good together once.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Tommie said coldly.

  “I know. A lifetime ago.” A sad smile touched his mouth. “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. If our heavenly Father can forgive us our sins—”

  “I get the point.” Tommie crossed to the door, yanked it open. “Good-bye, Roland. Don’t ever come back here again.”

  He hesitated, regret and longing etched into his features as he stared at her. After an endless moment, he left without another word.

  Tommie slammed the door behind him, then released a deep, shaky breath and swept back the tendrils of hair that had escaped her ponytail. As she turned, she saw Hazel coming slowly down the stairs. The look on her face told Tommie she’d heard everything.

  Tommie managed a rueful smile. “That wasn’t exactly the way I wanted you to find out about my fall from grace.”

  “No, I suppose not.” The older woman’s eyes were full of gentle concern, not the condemnation Tommie had feared. “Are you all right, baby?”

  “I think so.” Tommie paused. “That probably needed to happen sooner or later. You know, so I could finally have…What’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Closure?” Hazel supplied.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Closure.”

  Hazel nodded sagely. “I think you may be right.”

  They fell silent for a moment.

  “Where’s the ice and paper towels you were bringing him?” Tommie asked, belatedly noticing that her pianist had returned empty-handed.

  “Oh, that.” Hazel frowned. “I never actually made it into the loft.”

  Tommie arched a brow. “Were you eavesdropping the whole time, Mrs. Calhoun?”

  “Maybe.” She sniffed. “Anyway, after overhearing what I did, I figured Deacon Jackson was getting off easy if all he walked away with was a busted lip and a black eye.”

  Tommie gaped at the older woman, saw the spark of defiant mischief in her eyes, and burst out laughing.

  It was only later, in the middle of leading her ballet class through a grand battement jeté, that Tommie realized she’d never asked Roland what had brought him to Houston in the first place. She knew for a fact that he’d still been living in San Antonio when he’d mailed the videotape to her artistic director seven months ago.

  So when had he moved? she wondered uneasily. And what were the odds that he and Tommie had chosen to relocate to the same city to make a fresh start?

  Was it possible that Roland had followed her to Houston?

  The answer, she decided, was too disturbing to contemplate.

  Chapter 14

  Twenty minutes after leaving Santiago & Associates, Paulo and Donovan were back at the police station and wending their way through the homicide division, a wide room filled with cubicles and abuzz with the activity of detectives and uniformed officers walking, talking on phones, reviewing files, or clicking away at computer keyboards.

  “I can’t believe you don’t think Colston is our guy,” Donovan said, picking up where he and Paulo had left off in the car. “He was lying through his damned teeth the whole time he was talking to us!”

  “I didn’t say he isn’t our guy,” Paulo corrected, winking at an attractive black woman who was sashaying toward them, a cup of coffee in one hand, a computer printout in the other. She smiled flirtatiously at Paulo, mouthing call me sometime as she passed by.

  Donovan rolled his eyes, shaking his head at Paulo. “Don’t you ever get enough? Oh, that’s right,” he amended, his face splitting into a wide grin. “Last night you didn’t get any.”

  The remark was met with a stony look that promised retribution.

  Donovan laughed.

  “As I said in the car,” Paulo muttered, shoving aside the unwelcome reminder of Tommie and the hellish night she’d put him through, “I don’t think Colston slept with Maribel that morning, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her. If anything, he might have offed her because he found out she was two-timing him.”

  “The cheating husband gets cheated on,” Donovan ruminated. “Talk about poetic justice.”

  Still relishing the notion, he continued down the hallway while Paulo ducked into his cramped office. His desk was littered with files and crime scene photographs, along with notes and lab reports. After booting up his computer, he checked his e-mail and waded through phone messages that had come in overnight and early that morning. There were messages pertaining to some of his other active cases, and the usual calls from pushy reporters demanding an update on the status of Maribel Cruz’s murder investigation. Norah O’Connor from the crime lab had called to confirm that the blood used to inscribe the word liar on Maribel’s bedroom wall had been her own. Fibers lifted from the blood sample had come from a standard paintbrush, the kind that could be found in nearly every household and purchased at any home improvement store.

  Out of habit Paulo called O’Connor back to badger her for more information about trace evidence collected at the crime scene.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be satisfied with what I gave you,” the harried forensics investigator griped at him.

  Paulo grinned wickedly. “That’s not something I hear very often.”

  “I bet,” O’Connor said with a reluctant chuckle. “Anyway, when I have more results to share, you’ll be the first one I call.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  Paulo grinned. “But I only mean it when I say it to you.”

  O’Connor snorted out a laugh. “God, Sanchez, you’ve got my heart all aflutter.” Sobering after a moment, she said quietly, “I heard she was pregnant.”

  “Yeah,” Paulo said grimly.

  “Damn shame. I hope you catch the son of a bitch.”

  “You and me both,” Paulo muttered.

  He’d just hung up the phone when Donovan strode into the office, his eyes bright with adrenaline and excitement. He kicked out one of the chairs in front of Paulo’s desk and quickly sat down.

  “What’s up?” Paulo asked.

  “Seems we’ve got our own little juicy scandal brewing on Wisteria Lane,” Donovan said.

  “Wisteria Lane?”

  “Yeah, you know. The fictional street on Desperate Housewives.” At Paulo’s blank look, Donovan shook his head in disbelief. “Man, you really don’t watch much TV, do you?”

  Paulo snorted. “I sure as hell don’t watch Desperate Housewives. And if you do, I’m asking for a new partner. Anyway, what scandal are you talking about?”

  “I just got off the phone with one of Maribel Cruz’s neighbors, a woman named Jayne Walsh. She says she was out of town on a business trip, just got back last night. When she heard on the evening news that Maribel had been killed, she wondered if it had anything to do with the argument she’d overheard between Maribel and Kristin Ramirez.”

  “The neighbor across the street? The one with the mother-in-law?”

  Donovan nodded, leaning forward in the chair. “According to Walsh, about three weeks ago Maribel and Kristin got into a heated argument during a housewarming party at another neighbor’s house. Walsh says she was on her way to the kitchen to get some more wine when she overheard the two women arguing. Get this, man. Kristin called Maribel a disgusting whore, and accused her of sleeping with her
husband, Enrique.”

  Paulo stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Walsh says Maribel seemed really upset. She kept saying she didn’t know what Kristin was talking about. She called her paranoid, a jealous psycho. Walsh couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She thought her ears were deceiving her, like maybe she’d had one too many glasses of wine. She peeked into the kitchen just in time to see Kristin shove Maribel against the counter. When Walsh gasped, the two women saw her and stopped fighting. But before Kristin stormed out of the kitchen, she told Maribel to watch her back, told her what goes around comes around.”

  “Shit,” Paulo muttered grimly.

  “I know. It’s crazy, right? Correct me if I’m wrong, but at no time during our conversation with Kristin Ramirez did she mention threatening the deceased.”

  “She claimed she’d never seen Maribel with any particular guy,” Paulo recalled, frowning. “She said she didn’t know her very well.”

  “Well, it sounds like her husband knew Maribel very well.”

  “Unless she was telling the truth about not sleeping with him.”

  Donovan looked skeptical. “Considering this is the same woman who had an affair with her boss—another married man—I’m not in any hurry to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

  Paulo grimaced. “You’ve got a point.” Leaning back in his chair, he scratched at his chin thoughtfully, scraping bristly whiskers as he turned possibilities over in his mind. “So you’re thinking that Kristin killed Maribel?”

  “She sure as hell had motive. And living right across the street, she definitely had opportunity. She knew Maribel’s routine, knew what time she left for the office every morning. Kristin herself worked nights. From seven to seven, she told us. Maribel called in sick at seven-thirty that morning. Kristin could have gotten off from work, parked her car around the corner from their street, then walked to Maribel’s house.”

  “In broad daylight?”

  Donovan shrugged. “Suppose she’d changed into a sweatsuit. No one who saw her would think twice about her going for a jog in her own neighborhood. She stops in front of Maribel’s house, glances around casually to make sure no one is watching, pulls a letter out of her pocket, then calmly walks up to the front door. If anyone asks later, she can just say she was dropping off misdirected mail.”

  “How did she get inside the house?”

  “There was no sign of forced entry. Maybe she just rang the doorbell and told Maribel she wanted to talk, hash out their differences. Maribel let her inside, asked her to give her a minute to finish getting dressed. She goes back to the bedroom, Kristin makes her move.”

  Paulo said nothing, running the scenario through his mind. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Kristin Ramirez had killed Maribel Cruz in a jealous fit of rage. After fifteen years in homicide, Paulo had seen enough deadly love triangles to know that anything was possible. But something about the scenario his partner had just described didn’t feel right. Something was off.

  “Kristin works at Ben Taub,” Donovan continued, referring to a large hospital located downtown, “so she could have been home in twenty minutes.”

  “But she would have had to leave the hospital early in order to get home before Maribel left for work,” Paulo reasoned, thinking aloud. “She wouldn’t have known that Maribel woke up that morning and decided to call in sick.”

  “Okay, so we need to find out whether Kristin left work early that day. One phone call takes care of that.” Donovan paused. “What about the mother-in-law? Think she knows anything?”

  Paulo grimaced. “I don’t know. She barely spoke any English. Would she have gone to the trouble of having Kristin call the police if she knew her daughter-in-law had done the deed?”

  “She would if she was trying to help Kristin cover her tracks. She could have made up that whole story about the mysterious black car just to throw us off.”

  “Yeah, but the fact remains that Maribel had consensual sex that morning. Someone was there with her.”

  “Yeah. Ted Colston.”

  “Not according to him.”

  “He’s lying,” Donovan said flatly.

  “The jury’s still out on that.”

  “So you say,” Donovan retorted, his lips twisting cynically.

  Paulo chuckled. “Make up your mind about him. This morning you were convinced he was a cold-blooded killer. Now after one phone call from a neighbor, you’ve got someone else in your crosshairs.”

  Donovan gave a negligent shrug. “Hey, that’s the nature of homicide investigations. They’re unpredictable, constantly evolving.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Paulo said dryly. “I’ve been at this a little longer than you have, junior.”

  A spark of anger flared in the younger detective’s eyes. “Maybe you’ve been at it a little too long,” he fired back. “Maybe it’s going to take someone with a fresh perspective, someone willing to go out on a limb every once in a while, to solve this case.”

  Paulo regarded his partner for a long, unblinking moment.

  The shift in the tension between them was subtle, but there. A tightening of muscles. A heightened awareness.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Paulo said in a deceptively mild voice, “I would think you were calling me washed up. I would think you were questioning my commitment to the job.”

  Donovan scowled. “Don’t put words in my mouth, Sanchez. I’m not questioning your commitment. If I didn’t think you were a good cop, I wouldn’t have asked to be your damned partner. All I’m saying is that maybe you’ve seen too much shit over the years. Maybe it’s getting harder and harder for you to work up the same level of enthusiasm for each case. I mean, you’re always the last one to arrive at crime scenes.”

  Paulo’s mouth curved in a coolly amused smile. “You think maybe I’m tired of being in the trenches? You think I’m just cooling my heels, counting down the days until I get promoted to some cushy desk job?”

  Donovan just stared at him, stone-faced and defiant.

  Paulo said softly, “You’re a good detective, Jules. Smart as hell, too. Sometimes I look at you and wonder what you’re doing here when you could be making a killing at some hotshot brokerage firm. Truth be told, you’re probably one of the smartest cops I’ve ever worked with. But you’ve got a helluva lot to learn about what it takes to survive in homicide. You haven’t been around long enough to understand that it’s not about who can make it to a crime scene first, it’s about who has the patience and intestinal fortitude to see a tough case through to the end. It’s about who can maintain their sanity after years of cramming their mind with images of strangled infants, mutilated little girls, disemboweled corpses, bodies burned beyond recognition. It’s about who can ignore the demons, the tiny voices in your head that taunt and torment you until you decide the only way to silence them is to stuff your gun in your mouth and blow your fucking brains out.” He smiled narrowly, tapping his temple with his fingertip. “When you’ve gone to that dark place, Detective Donovan, when you’ve eaten, slept, and breathed it for a good while, then you can come talk to me about working up more ‘enthusiasm’ for my cases.”

  Donovan stared at him as if he’d never seen him before.

  The silence stretched between them.

  Paulo let it hang, waiting.

  Finally Donovan shook his head, blinking as if he were emerging from a deep trance. A wobbly grin tugged at his mouth. “Man, I never realized what a crazy motherfucker you are, Sanchez. I mean, I’d heard whispers here and there—”

  Paulo grinned. “And you still asked to be my partner? What does that say about you?”

  Donovan huffed a laugh. “That’s a damned good question.”

  And just like that, like the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers, the tension between them dissolved.

  “So here’s how I see it going down with Kristin Ramirez,” Donovan said, returning to the original subject as if they’d never been interrupted. “After she does the
deed, she sneaks back into her house, cleans herself up, and gets rid of the bloody clothes while the mother-in-law is walking the kid to school. The elementary school is a good fifteen minutes away from the house. Mrs. Ramirez is an old lady, walks slow. I figure Kristin had plenty of time to get her shit together before her mother-in-law returned.”

  Paulo was faintly amused. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

  Donovan flashed a grin. “If the husband didn’t have the perfect alibi—being stationed in Iraq—I’d be looking at him for the murder. You know how crazy those soldiers are. Maybe even crazier than you.”

  Paulo’s answering smile was distracted. He was thinking about the little boy he’d seen in the photograph above the Ramirez family’s fireplace. Dark eyes shining with laughter, a happy, infectious grin stretched across his face. Paulo thought of how Jayden Ramirez’s life would never be the same again if his mother was convicted of murder and sent to prison for the rest of her life.

  And then he thought of the weeping couple he’d watched on the news last night, their faces ravaged with grief, their lives forever shattered by the senseless act of violence that had claimed their daughter’s life.

  And he remembered why he’d started drinking all those years ago.

  “Hell,” he muttered, scrubbing a hand over his face and pushing out a deep breath.

  Donovan said, “I think we need to pay another visit to Kristin Ramirez, find out why she didn’t think it was important to tell us she’d once threatened her now-departed neighbor.”

  Paulo nodded. “Give me a minute. I need to return some calls.”

  After Donovan left the office, Paulo reached for the phone on his desk. As he lifted the receiver, his gaze landed on the gruesome crime scene photos scattered across his desk. He paused, realizing that the reason he’d instinctively dismissed the possibility of a female perpetrator was that in his experience women didn’t kill in such a manner—with brutality, with cruelty, with a virulent hatred for their own gender.

  In his gut he knew that Kristin Ramirez wasn’t the monster they were looking for.