by Julie Miller
He pulled his shirt on over his head and slipped the rest of it into place before standing beside her. He dropped his head to whisper against her ear, “It is for me, sunshine. As far as I’m concerned, the fairy tale is real.” He inched in a little farther and pressed a kiss to her hair. “I just need you to decide when or if you’re going to accept that I’m in love with you and that you’re in love with me. I want to be a father to your son and a husband to you. And you know damn well that I’d be good at both.”
He couldn’t lay it on the line any plainer than that. With his heart and future in her hands now, Trent left her standing there in pale silence and returned to his own room to put on his badge and go to work.
CHAPTER TWELVE
What John Smith’s office lacked in decor, it more than made up for in messiness.
Katie helped Trent sort through the rows of file cabinets, looking for anything useful. Folders had been stuffed into drawers without regard to labels or alphabetizing. Whoever had gone through the office before them hadn’t been there to rob Smith because they’d left behind a bottle of scotch and bag of marijuana that had been stashed in the back of one drawer.
She’d at least been able to make more sense out of his desktop computer. It appeared he’d used it mainly for word processing and internet research, so she’d easily tracked several of the searches he’d recently made—including a floor plan for the units in her apartment complex, news updates on Leland Asher’s release from prison and several searches of medical sites to find the prognosis and life expectancy for a sixty-year-old man diagnosed with lung cancer.
“Looks like he’s been tracking Asher for years,” Katie reported.
Trent nodded, looking over her shoulder to read the monitor. “That clued him in on when he needed to change his identity again. If Asher got too close to finding out he was still alive, Francisco would go underground for a few months and reinvent himself as someone else.”
“The medical searches probably meant he was hoping Leland would die soon. Maybe that was why he was at the press conference, to see with his own eyes whether the man who wanted him dead had long to live.”
Trent went back to the file cabinets to continue his search. “Unfortunately for him, he miscalculated. Leland’s men got to him first.”
Katie rolled the chair away from the desk to help Trent dig through the remaining mess for other useful clues. There was one more piece of information she could get off Smith’s computer—who had hired him to spy on her—but they needed a different warrant to breach the confidential agreement between investigator and client. While Lieutenant Rafferty-Taylor pleaded their case to a warrant judge, she and Trent were spending their morning in dusty cabinets, sharing terse, business-only conversation.
“Katie.” His sharp voice pulled her from her thoughts. He set a bent folder on top of the cabinet and opened it. “Is this who I think it is?”
Katie joined him, reading the name scrawled across the top of the first page. “Stephen March.” She flipped through the pages to see copies of March’s time spent in drug courts and rehab, along with a criminal complaint Stephen March had filed against his sister’s fiancé, Richard Bratcher, which had been thrown out of court. “This shows March’s motive for wanting Bratcher dead, as well as blackmailable offenses that could be used to get him to kill Dani Reese.” She dug farther into the drawer in front of her. “These are all people Smith investigated?”
“Looks like it.” He peeled a tiny slip of masking tape off the inside of the drawer. “I wonder.”
“What is it?”
He showed her the hyphenated list of numbers before crossing over to the safe behind Smith’s desk. He knelt down and twisted the numbers on the dial. “This guy was resourceful, but I don’t know that he knew much about security precautions.” Trent opened the door and pulled out three thick manila envelopes and stacked them on top of the safe. He pulled a fourth one out and dumped the contents out beside the stack. Out tumbled bundles of money. Twenties, fifties, hundreds. “I’m guessing this was a cash business. Probably a smart idea for a man who had to change identities and bank accounts every couple of years.”
“Trent.” She pulled another folder from the file drawers. “This says Hillary Wells.” There were other files in this cabinet that matched names in her own research. “That creep piggybacked off all my work. In some of these, he’s gone to websites I checked and printed off the exact same information.” She didn’t know whether to feel angry that he’d stolen her months of dedicated research to use for some nefarious purpose or violated to think John Smith, aka Francisco Dona, had followed every thought, every move, she’d made on her computer—and she hadn’t even known he’d been lurking, watching.
“I think we’re onto something here, sunshine.”
Katie snapped out of the emotional debate. Trent hadn’t used her nickname since that conversation about fairy tales earlier that morning. In fact, he’d barely looked at her. And he certainly hadn’t kissed her or held her or touched her in any way since dropping that bomb of an admission this morning.
I just need you to decide when or if you’re going to accept that I’m in love with you and that you’re in love with me. I want to be a father to your son and a husband to you.
That promise was everything she’d wanted growing up. But a life’s worth of mistakes and tragedies made it difficult to believe in that promise. How was she supposed to do the right thing when she wasn’t sure what that was anymore? How could Trent love her enough to risk a relationship with a woman with all her phobias and eccentricities and emotional baggage that came with the package? And was it worth the risk of her and Tyler losing him from their lives if the relationship didn’t work? Then again, maybe she’d lost him already by not giving him the answer he’d wanted this morning.
And the idea of not having Trent’s strong arms and stalwart presence and beautiful soul in her life anymore already felt like a very big mistake.
But Trent was talking work now, not their personal lives, where she got him shot and broke his heart. She circled around the desk to join him. “What did you find?”
He pulled another manila envelope from the safe and handed it to her. “Check inside. I’m guessing that envelope you saw with Doug Price held something similar.”
Katie pulled out a stack of photographs. “Oh, my.” These were images of scantily clad women, obviously taken by a hidden camera. She even recognized an image of the college student who’d sued Doug for harassment. “Oh. My.”
“You blackmail a man into doing a job for you, then you keep an extra copy of the evidence for insurance purposes.”
Katie stuffed the pictures back inside the envelope. “This man was horrible.”
“Which one?” The phone in Trent’s pocket rang before she could answer. Katie waited in anticipation until he nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” She sat at the desk again and booted up the private detective’s computer, waiting for the order. “We’ve got the warrant. Do it.”
One keystroke and she’d know who’d hired Smith to spy on her. She leaned back in the chair, surprised by the answer on the screen. “There’s only one name here. One person who hired Smith to watch over all these people.”
“Please tell me it’s Leland Asher.”
“No. Dr. Beverly Eisenbach.”
* * *
TRENT GLANCED AROUND Ginny Rafferty-Taylor’s office, as anxious to get this show underway as the drumming of Katie’s fingers or Max’s pacing would indicate.
Four suspects. Four different strategies. Four different plans of attack.
And if the team was as good as the lieutenant seemed to think, then Leland Asher would be on his way back to prison by the end of the night.
The petite lieutenant picked up the stack of folders Katie had prepared and handed them to Trent. “Are you ready to do this?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How do you want to handle it?”
Trent glanced over to Katie’s big blue eyes staring up at him. He couldn’t, wouldn’t put his heart out there again for her to torment until she decided whether she was going to live her life taking risks or holed up in the security of lonely nobility. But whether he got his fairy-tale ending or not, he’d be damned if anyone was going to hurt her or Tyler again.
He nodded to her, making that silent vow, and headed out to Interview Room 1. “I’m going to pick off the little fish first.”
In the grand scheme of things, Doug Price was an easy interrogation. Trent was twice the older man’s size, and all he had to do was stand and dominate the room to get the play director to talk.
He tossed the stack of lewd photos he’d gotten from John Smith’s safe and fanned them across the table in front of Doug and his attorney. “Anything look familiar to you, Mr. Price?”
His lawyer tried to keep Doug from saying anything, but the man already had some of that oversprayed hair falling out of place. He sat forward in his chair. “Where did you get these?”
Trent tossed a crime-scene photo of John Smith’s bloody face on top of the other pictures. “From this guy.”
Doug cringed and pushed the photos away. But he cracked like an egg. “John Smith. He’s a private investigator. He told me he’d given me the last copies of those pictures when I saw him last night. I had no reason to kill him. I was doing him a favor.” A favor in the sense that Smith hadn’t given Doug any choice. “Smith said if I kept an eye on Katie and helped him get access to your team’s investigations that he wouldn’t turn any of those photos over to the police.”
“So you sabotaged Katie’s laptop and left those threats for her? You assaulted her in the women’s dressing room?”
“It wasn’t assault. I was removing a camera. I wasn’t expecting her to be there. I just wanted to get away.”
“I think we can safely say that your career in community theater is over.” Trent pulled out a chair on the opposite side of the gray metal table. Doug started to relax, but Trent decided to stay on his feet and catch him off guard. He pulled three more photographs from the file Katie had prepared. Three more links in the chain of related crimes she’d dug up in her extensive research. He set the pictures down in front of Doug, one by one. “Do you know any of these people?”
“No. No.” He pointed to the last one. “Her. I don’t understand what she has to do with any of this.”
Interesting. “Who is she to you, Doug?”
“My therapist. I saw Dr. Eisenbach for a few months years back. Court-ordered sessions. The judge said I had an addiction to pornography.”
* * *
BEV EISENBACH AND Matt Asher clammed up behind their attorneys when they were separated into two interview rooms. But as Olivia slyly observed when she and Max accidentally allowed the two suspects’ paths to cross in the hallway across from the restrooms, the twenty-two-year-old and the woman old enough to be his mother clearly knew each other. They’d called each other by their first names in a quick, hushed conversation, and their fingers had met in a quick squeeze.
Now, there was an odd couple.
They each truthfully claimed to have shared nothing with Trent, then whispered something about promising to remain silent.
So the two had a plan that they’d clearly been working on together for some time...while their uncle/boyfriend had been locked away in prison. Instead of kowtowing to the boss, they’d been plotting behind his back. Setting Leland up for murder? Or taking over the criminal empire from a dying man?
The information Olivia had fed Trent between interviews made him grin. Bev and Matt’s conversation had given Trent some key intel to use as he moved on to his final interview with Leland. He grinned because while they acted as though Leland was on his way out of the business, and they were setting themselves up to take his place, someone had forgotten to tell Leland.
Trent’s approach to a man of Leland Asher’s self-appointed stature was different than the intimidation he’d used with Doug Price or the friendly charm he’d turned on his nephew and Bev Eisenbach. “How long do you have to live, Mr. Asher? Years? Months? Weeks?”
Leland smiled. “I like a man who’s direct, Detective. I can talk to a man like that.”
Trent leaned forward in his chair, matching Leland’s confident posture. “Did you have any dealings with Craig Fairfax at the penitentiary infirmary?”
“Fairfax?” Leland scratched at his gaunt cheeks. “Poor bloke. Terrible cough. I always thought he was going to hack up a lung. Very difficult to have a conversation with him.”
“So you did interact with him. Did you ever talk about Katie Lee Rinaldi?”
“Who?”
Trent steeled his gazed on Asher, knowing Katie was watching in Lieutenant Rafferty-Taylor’s office through the closed-circuit camera overhead. This would be a tough line of questioning for her to hear, but since she was part of the team, she’d insisted on listening in. “A girl Fairfax kidnapped ten years ago.”
“Oh, that Katie. Tragic upbringing from what I hear. Yes, I believe she’s the district attorney’s daughter now.” Close enough. Apparently, Fairfax had been filling Asher in on Katie’s family history. “Goodness knows, Mr. Fairfax has a vendetta against that man. If he could get out of prison, I’m sure his first stop would be the DA’s house, or perhaps his wife’s school—or at the home of this Katie you mentioned. Yes, I remember he definitely has a score he wants to settle...if he were ever to be released from prison.”
Trent’s hand fisted beneath the table at the indirect but abhorrent threats, although he betrayed nothing to Asher. “Do you have a score to settle, Mr. Asher? With Francisco Dona, perhaps?”
“I have no comment.”
“What about John Smith? Do you know anyone by that name?”
“Not very original, is it?” Trent waited until Leland answered the question. “No, I don’t believe I do.”
“But you know Dona.”
“Knew, Detective. Past tense. Dona died in a motorcycle accident several years ago.”
“Did he?” Trent wasn’t intimidated by the man’s condescending tone. “If you discovered Mr. Dona was alive after all these years, you’d want to do something about it, wouldn’t you?”
Leland checked his brittle nails before leaning forward and resting the elbows of his tailored suit on the table. “I liked you better when you were straightforward, Detective. You know as well as I do that Francisco is a sensitive subject for me. He turned my sister on to drugs and then killed her with them. At the very least, he was a coward and let her die without raising a finger to help. Isabel was the light of my life. Francisco snuffed that light out.”
He wanted straightforward? “Did you murder Francisco Dona last night in retaliation for your sister’s death? Or hire someone to murder him?”
“So he is dead.” Asher leaned back in his chair and smiled. “I’m a dying man. Whether it was ten years ago or yesterday, knowing he died before me makes me very happy.”
Leland checked his watch and glanced at his attorney. “Will there be anything else, Detective Dixon? I have a dinner engagement I don’t want to miss.”
“Just one last question and then I can let you go.”
“What’s that?”
“Did you know that your girlfriend, Beverly Eisenbach, and your nephew, Matt, have been having an affair while you’ve been incarcerated in Jefferson City?”
Leland leaned over to whisper something with his attorney before answering.
“Yes.”
* * *
KATIE KNEW SOMETHING was terribly wrong when the cast came out for curtain call at the final dress rehearsal. There were only five Cratchit children crossing to center stage. Where was Tiny Tim? “Where’s Ty
ler?”
She ran down to the stage and straight up the stairs, pushing aside actors while the music was playing and they were still taking their bows. She wasn’t going to lose him again.
“Wyatt? Kayla? Have you seen Tyler?”
The other children seemed startled to realize one of them was missing.
“No, ma’am.”
“We were playing cards backstage at intermission. He said his last line, didn’t he?”
Yes, her son had the last line of the entire show. Then the actors had all exited backstage to line up for bows, and now... “Francis.” She caught the tall actor by the sleeve of his robe before he went back onstage. “Have you seen my son?”
She heard him snorting beneath his mask. “No director. Missing actors. Crazy costume ladies dashing across the stage. You know what they say—a bad dress rehearsal means we’ll have a stellar opening night.”
“Stuff it, Francis. Have you seen Tyler?” He tugged his robe from her grasp and ignored her question. “Then is Trent here yet?”
Francis snickered from behind his mask. “It’s not my job to keep track of your child or that bruiser boyfriend of yours.”
“Francis, please.”
“That’s my cue.”
Trent had promised to be here by the end of the rehearsal. Maybe Trent had arrived early and he and Tyler had gotten to talking backstage and her son had simply missed his cue. Katie hurried back to the greenroom.
He’d had to stay late at the precinct office, walking Doug Price through booking, writing up reports on his interviews with Leland and Matt Asher and Beverly Eisenbach, and sitting down with the rest of the team to determine whether they had enough circumstantial evidence for arrest warrants yet. Normally, Katie would have been part of such a meeting, but Lieutenant Rafferty-Taylor had excused her for Tyler’s benefit. With the threat of John Smith no longer in the picture, Katie had figured she could go to the final dress rehearsal without the benefit of a 24/7 bodyguard. Even so, Trent had insisted a uniformed officer accompany them, and he’d promised to join them at the theater as soon as he could get away from work. After all, Tyler still wanted him to be a part of his life, even if Katie needed time to decide how to respond to Trent’s ultimatum.