Yeah, that was what he told himself.
Thinking he deserved one more of Willie’s kicks, he went upstairs to change into khakis and another polo shirt. The scrape on his arm was nothing to worry about. He cleaned and bandaged it, then tossed his shirt into the hamper.
What he should have done when he got back downstairs was yell, “I’m leaving now,” and followed through. What he did instead was turn down the hall toward the library.
The windows in there were open, with a fan blowing toward them, removing some of the chemical stink from the room. The odds of exposure there were slim. Inside looking out, the only view was the neighbor’s blank wall. Outside looking in, crape myrtle branches created a dense screen for anyone shorter than six-and-a-half feet tall.
Masiela was standing in front of the fan. It blew her damp shirt against her, a detail he noted only because he was a good detective, and dried the sweat that dotted her face.
“Nice work,” he commented. She’d accomplished a lot in the few hours he’d been gone, evidenced by one empty can of stripper, a pile of dirty cloths and a dozen or more shelves scraped down to bare wood. It was mind-numbing work for someone who hated tedium—though apparently not as much as she hated daytime TV.
His phone vibrated and he pulled it from the case clipped to his belt. After a glance at the caller ID—it was the chief—he grimly flipped it open. “Decker.”
Masiela turned her back to the fan, giving the impression of privacy. He listened to his boss, made the appropriate responses and wondered how a pair of plain denim shorts, not too short or too snug, could look so damn enticing.
“Yes, sir,” he said at last. “I’ll be there in five minutes, sir.”
She turned around again when he ended the call. “Trouble?”
“Nah. It’s just that the kid I arrested this morning is a Calloway. Arresting one of them always requires some damage control.”
Her expression tightened just a fraction at the mention of the Calloway name. Like most cops, she disliked people whose name was more important than their crimes. At least, she had when she was a cop.
After she’d become a defense attorney…
His own jaw tightened as he put the phone back in the case, then turned toward the door. “I’ll be home between four and five. Don’t knock yourself out in here until I find out if the kid’s already sued me.”
A glance over his shoulder showed her faint smile as she returned to the half-finished shelf.
Taking a break for lunch, Masiela settled on the couch with the last pieces of leftover pizza and a glass of iced tea and flipped through the TV channels. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Choosing a channel at random, she took a bite of cold cheese and veggies and chewed slowly. She missed the light that would be flooding the room if she weren’t being such a scaredy girl, though not the heat the afternoon sun brought with it.
Her gaze strayed to the corner where she’d left her laptop case. Her cell phone was tucked inside, powered off, so the GPS unit couldn’t be used to locate her. The laptop was off, too. She couldn’t check her voicemails or e-mails, couldn’t risk the chance that Myers and his buds had circumvented the legal process and gained access to her Internet or cell accounts. No doubt there were messages from Yelina and Elian on one device or the other, from her father and her grandmothers, from her office and probably from the cops who’d sent her into hiding. She had told her family she would be out of touch but safe, but they would worry anyway.
I hated when you were a cop, Yelina had said. I never thought you’d be in more danger now than then.
Neither had she, Masiela thought, with a grim smile.
Lunch done, she went back to work in the library. After the stripping and the sanding were finished, every piece of wood would be uniformly smooth. AJ would stain it, and one day Dr. Cate would fill the shelves with books and whatever kind of knickknacks a Calloway woman acquired. She would give AJ the credit for her beautiful office, and he would never tell her differently, because he wouldn’t want to explain that he’d hidden a woman he’d once slept with under her nose for a week.
Funny. Masiela had never really imagined AJ marrying, and certainly not into the most influential and powerful family in town. He’d had a solidly middle-class upbringing; he wasn’t impressed by money or power; he preferred jeans and T-shirts over dressier clothes and a pizza joint over a country club.
He must love Dr. Cate a lot.
Masiela’s jaw clenched, and she was pretty sure it didn’t relax until 4:29, when the phone rang. She didn’t get up from the floor, but she did stop scraping long enough to hear Decker’s message on the kitchen answering machine. “I’m here. Don’t shoot.”
She looked awful. She was hot and sweaty and had stripper gunk under all her nails. Her clothes were dirty, her ponytail had gone limp hours ago and she ached pretty much everywhere. It was a good thing she wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
The front door opened and closed, then footsteps climbed the stairs. His bedroom was directly above the library; an occasional creak allowed her to track his movements around the room. He would strip down to his boxers—unless Dr. Cate preferred some other kind of underwear—and change into shorts and a T-shirt, probably something really old and ratty. He never threw a favorite shirt away, not until it literally fell apart.
She knew so damn much about him, and he about her, and yet he still believed Myers and the others over her. The unfairness of it all would drag her low if she let it.
Footsteps descended the stairs, then stopped in the doorway. “Knock it off for the day,” he said, his voice low, just this side of gravelly. “Come have a beer.”
Concentrating on not looking at him, she considered declining, but a spasm in her right hand changed her mind. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
He left—she felt the change in the air—and she wiped away the last of the stripper from the shelf. After cleaning the putty knife, she sealed the can, stood and stretched, long and slow, bending at the waist to ease the kinks out of her back. Her hair fell forward, her fingertips brushing the floor, and the air shifted again. Looking between her feet planted wide apart on the wood floor, she saw an upside-down version of Decker, two beers in hand and a look on his face of…
It was masculine appreciation for a female body. No big deal. He’d always admired her determination to maintain the fitness she’d attained in the academy. The stronger and more capable she was, the better she could do her job and the safer they both were.
It was the blood rushing to her head that made her cheeks hot, not his gaze. Slowly she straightened, and everything—her hair, her shirt, her shorts, her view of the world—slid back into place.
“Thanks,” she said, taking one of the beers as she passed him. She gulped a swallow on her way to the sink. After scrubbing up, she slid onto one of the stools at the counter. He took the other. “How did the damage control go?”
“Not bad. It helped that Connor’s cousin, Robbie, witnessed the whole thing.” The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Another cousin by marriage, Jamie, is the department’s lawyer.”
“Good grief, how many Calloways are there?”
“No one knows. And they reproduce like rabbits.” The partial smile turned into a full one. “Most of them are okay. There’s just the bunch that thinks being a Calloway makes them better than everyone else.”
“Must be nice. Did the chief want to drop the charges?”
“Nope. Just wanted my side of the story before he talked to the kid’s lawyer. He totaled three cars in front of the courthouse, then fled. There isn’t much else to say, except the kid’s claiming I’m harassing him because I almost arrested him for shoplifting a big-screen plasma TV yesterday.”
“Almost? The store owner wouldn’t press charges against a Calloway?” she asked drily.
Decker nodded. “Can you imagine what your parents would have done if you’d pulled a stunt like that?”
“I’d still be grounded.”
“I’
d probably be dead.”
She nodded. “Your father’s strict moral code.” Both his parents, but his father in particular, had taught Decker all the important lessons, practically from the cradle: honesty, honor, courage, trustworthiness, responsibility. They weren’t just words, they were who he was. How he lived his life. Not embracing those concepts would be impossible for him.
Too bad he’d learned wrongheaded loyalty and stubbornness just as well.
“So…” She took another drink. “How does Dr. Cate fit in with Connor, Robbie, Jamie and all the other little bunnies?” She didn’t sound too interested, did she? Just casually so, she hoped.
“Cate’s divorced from one of Robbie’s cousins.” He sounded as flat as she was afraid her question had been.
So the good doctor had married into the family, then divorced out of it but kept the name. Probably kept some of the prestige, too, along with a hefty chunk of her ex’s Calloway money.
And now she was in line to marry into a better family.
Some people had all the luck.
Chapter 6
Why had she asked about Cate? AJ wondered. Not just once but a couple times. She’d never shown much interest in the women he dated, even though they’d doubled a lot. She said that she’d learned all she needed to know from the first one. After that, only the names changed; everything else—body type, character, personality—stayed the same.
And the hell of it was, she’d been right. He picked a type and stuck with it: pretty, empty-headed, superficial. Not likely to challenge him anywhere except in bed. Not likely to inspire anything deeper in him besides short-term fondness and lust.
Not likely to remind him even remotely of Masiela. After all, who wanted to go to bed at night with a woman who reminded him of his buddy?
He snorted silently. Yeah, right, that was all Masiela had been—just a buddy. He could let himself pretend that. After all, only he knew, and he already knew he was a fool. The proof sat across the counter from him.
“Hey.” Masiela snapped her fingers in front of his face, startling him from his thoughts. “For the second time, have you heard from Donovan?”
He blinked, then shook his head. “You know Donovan. He works on a need-to-know basis.”
“Considering that I’m the one who’s been threatened, I think I have a pretty good need to know what’s going on.”
“He’ll call when he’s got something.”
Donovan worked cases the way he played poker: with his cards close to his chest. He wasn’t the type to check in just to say there was nothing to say.
“So at least I can be fairly sure my condo hasn’t been torched or my office blown up.”
“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”
She stared at him, her face expressionless. “When they shot out the window, I was standing right there. I got cut by the flying glass.” She stuck out her left arm, her right index finger pointing from one small line to the next. Scars, thin and pale against her bronzed skin, stretching in broken lines from the back of her hand to her shoulder. “They broke into my house. They threatened me.”
She paused, and his muscles stiffened. He knew what was coming next, and damn it, he didn’t want to hear it. He slid from the bar stool, but had barely gained his feet when she said it, flatly, as if it couldn’t be anything but true.
“They threw Teri Riggs off that building.”
He stared back, heat and anger building inside him. He hadn’t been working that night, but the news got to him pretty quickly. He’d gone to the scene; he’d seen Teri’s body, broken and bloodied, on the sidewalk. She’d been a little thing—five-three, not even a hundred pounds—but she’d had a big smile and big dreams. She’d had plans for herself and her little girl, plans that AJ had been encouraging for two years. Plans that had died along with her, at the end of a five-story fall.
“Why?” He barely managed to force the word out. “What in hell did Myers, Kinney and Taylor have to gain by killing Teri?”
“They got her pimp locked up on a life sentence.”
“You’re saying they killed her just to see Rodriguez in prison?” AJ shook his head. “You think Teri died because she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? That three dedicated and decorated officers murdered her just so they could frame her pimp? Jeez, Mas! You know these guys. They were our buddies, our friends!”
She stood, too, arms folded over her middle. “Buddies? Who are you kidding, Decker? They harassed me from the day I joined the squad. Touching, leering, making suggestive comments. They cornered me when I was alone, rubbing against me, telling me they had just what I needed, so I made damn sure I wasn’t alone around them. When they backed us on calls, if you were out of sight, so was my backer. Remember the time I got the black eye?”
He did. They had met for dinner and walked in on a robbery in progress. He’d gone after one suspect, Myers and Taylor after another, and Masiela and Kinney had run out the back door after the third. They’d met up again, prisoners in tow, and she had bruises on the whole right side of her face. Kinney said she’d outrun him, that by the time he’d caught up, the suspect had already punched her, and she hadn’t disputed him.
“He stood there and watched that guy come after me. He didn’t step in. He didn’t help. He just watched.”
“I don’t believe you.” But the memory nagged at him. When she and Kinney had returned with their prisoner, her usual euphoria of a chase and an arrest had been absent, buried beneath something else. Decker had thought maybe it was a sobering experience: the first time a suspect had almost come out ahead in a struggle. A lesson that all the training in the world couldn’t ensure she would always prevail.
A lesson he’d thought she needed, to rein in her enthusiasm. She’d been so damn convinced that she was invincible. She’d never been afraid, but he’d been afraid sometimes for her. He thought she’d learned there was no such thing as invincibility that night and had luckily survived to tell the tale.
But it appeared she’d learned a different, more bitter lesson.
“Detective Kinney stood by and let a suspect beat the crap out of me,” she said quietly. “You can deny it, but it doesn’t change the facts.”
“If they harassed you, if they failed to back you up, why didn’t you tell someone? Why didn’t you file a complaint against them?” He hesitated, preferring to keep the words inside, but letting them slip out anyway. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her mouth shifted into a sneer. “File a complaint? You’re kidding, right? Cops don’t ‘file complaints’ against other cops, not unless they’re looking to end their own careers. You know how narrow-minded cops are when it comes to their own. Everyone in the whole damn department would have made my life miserable. I would have been ostracized and eventually forced out.”
“So what? You were planning to quit anyway. If what you’re saying is true, why not try to take them down on your way out? Why wait until now?”
For a long time, she looked at him as if she hardly knew him. Finally, in a flat, accusing voice, she said, “I’m going to take a shower, then I’ll start dinner.”
He let her get as far as the doorway before he responded. “Don’t bother. I’m going out.”
She paused at his words, only for a beat or two, then continued down the hall without looking back.
He picked up his empty beer bottle, his fingers clenching around the long neck. He’d like to throw it, listen to it explode, watch the shards burst into the air before falling. But he wasn’t the type to break things. Besides, he’d just have to sweep it all up when he was done. Been there, done that the night before.
He’d told Masiela he was going out, and though there was nowhere he wanted to go, he felt obligated to follow through. When the shower came on upstairs, he knew the last thing he needed was to stay down here and imagine her up there, taking off her clothes, stepping into the tub, being naked and wet….
He set the bottle in the recycling bin under the sink
, grabbed his keys off the counter and left the house. The temperature was somewhere around ninety-two, and the air was thick with humidity that made breathing a chore. Next door, Calie sat in a rocker, surrounded by dolls, and her brother was sprawled in the next chair. Their lives had started out tougher than his and probably wouldn’t be improving any time soon. He’d been damned lucky to have the upbringing he had, though he felt right now as if all the bad luck he’d avoided in his life was piling up around him. A whole lot of trouble in one fairly slender package.
He just drove, no destination in mind. He turned off the music he usually listened to and tried to let his mind wander, but it kept wandering back to his house.
He didn’t believe Masiela’s story about their fellow detectives. Not that he thought she was deliberately lying. Maybe she’d let her animosity toward Kinney and the others color the way she read the situations. Maybe she was seeing hostility where, in reality, there’d been none. Maybe…
Maybe she was telling the truth.
They’d picked on her from the beginning—the same sort of hazing they’d subjected every newbie to. They’d made assumptions about her abilities, and they’d given her a hard time. But after Decker had taken her on as a partner, all that had stopped. At least, he’d thought so.
Now she was saying it hadn’t stopped, but had escalated to the point that they’d refused to back her up. A cop without backup could easily get killed. Would the men he knew put another cop in that kind of danger?
He couldn’t imagine it. Didn’t want to believe it.
But some small part of him knew it was possible.
Some smaller part believed she was telling the truth—about that, at least. But killing Teri Riggs? No way. Hazing and harassment, okay, maybe. But cold-blooded murder? It hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have.
After a while, he pulled into a drive-in in the next town for a greasy burger. The aroma of fried onions stayed with him all the way back to Copper Lake.
He stopped at the edge of town, at a small bar set at the back of a gravel parking lot. It wasn’t the sort of place he normally went to drink; he was more likely to see people that he’d arrested in the squat, cinder block building than anyone he socialized with. A good reason for going there tonight. He didn’t want to be social.
Protector’s Temptation Page 9