by Diana Palmer
His hand smoothed absently over the steering wheel and he frowned, deep in thought.
“I thought Gretchen would have told you,” Josette said, puzzled by his silence.
“We didn’t talk about you after that night,” Brannon replied. “Or before it.” He drew in a long breath. “It’s far too late to say I’m sorry. But I am. Deeply sorry.”
“You didn’t know,” she said. “It was a misunderstanding all around.” She picked at the cuticle around her thumb. “Brannon, were you…going to stop?” she asked.
“No.”
Her intake of breath was latent with shock.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was much too blunt. But it was the truth, just the same. I was in over my head,” he amended. “I’d wanted you for a long time. We were alone together in my apartment, and you were so responsive that I stopped thinking in terms of right or wrong. I hadn’t planned to seduce you. But I lost control. I never had before.”
“Oh.”
“And I had company,” he added solemnly. “Because you lost control, too, Josie. That’s why you can’t face what happened. You wanted me so badly that you were sobbing with sheer desire. You begged me not to stop, and I was so sick with realization of what you were and what I’d cost you that I couldn’t think past getting out the door.”
Brannon stopped at a stop sign and turned to face her fully on the deserted stretch of road. “I compounded every error I’d already made by not explaining why I left. It wasn’t only because I was ashamed of what I’d done to you. It was because I felt comfortable coming on to you in a purely sexual way, with your past. I should have been horsewhipped.”
“But it wasn’t completely your fault,” she said. “I…” Josette averted her eyes and clutched her briefcase tightly on her lap. “I…”
“Wanted me,” he said for her. “It’s not a dirty word. Desire is the way God perpetuates the species. It isn’t ugly.”
“It is.” She choked. “It’s ugly and it makes women act like prostitutes!”
“Prostitutes sell their bodies, sweetheart,” he said gently. “It’s not the same thing. Not at all.” He reached out and grasped one of her hands tightly in his. “I wanted very badly to make love to you that night. Not as a one-night stand, or a casual affair, either.” Brannon smiled faintly. “It was hard for me to leave you, even to go home at night,” he confessed. “I found the damnedest excuses to run into you, on campus, in town. I even started going to church, so that I could see you on Sundays.”
Her eyes widened with surprise.
“You didn’t notice,” he mused. “Your father did. He was still uneasy about having you go out with me, thinking about you the way I did. But he seemed to realize later that it wasn’t just physical with me. Or with you.”
She hesitated. “It wasn’t?”
His fingers tightened around hers. “Josie, you have some wonderful qualities,” he said softly. “You have a heart as big as all outdoors. You’re generous to a fault. You love people, and they react to you because they can see it in the way you look at them, the way you talk to them. You’re honest, you hate lies, you never shirk a job because it might be hard or dangerous, and you’re the best company I ever had. I even enjoyed going to the park with you, because I could watch you watching other people. And even then, it didn’t dawn on me that what I felt was more than desire.”
“Was it?” she asked huskily.
“You know that already,” he said. “But you’re hesitant to trust me, because you’ve been let down so badly. You accuse me of living in the past, but so are you. Until you can put away all that resentment and anger, there isn’t any hope for a new relationship.”
She shifted restlessly. Her arm was uncomfortable, even in its sling. “What sort of relationship could we have?”
He rubbed his thumb over her palm, sensitizing it. “Any sort you want,” he said openly. “I want to be your lover. You know that. But I’ll settle for whatever you feel comfortable giving me, even if it’s only friendship.”
Her dark eyes softened on his face, curious and puzzled.
“I’m not putting any pressure on you,” he added. “But I’d like to get to know you again.”
Josette swallowed. “You live in San Antonio. I live in Austin.”
“You could work out of the D.A.’s office here,” Brannon pointed out. “I know they have vacancies. Not a lot of people are standing in line for investigators’ jobs here. Or I could work out of Victoria and you could get a job with the district attorney in Jacobs County and work out of Jacobsville.”
“That would be like a…commitment.”
He nodded. “Yes. A commitment.”
Josette sighed. “What would you expect?”
“Now, or eventually?”
“Now.”
Brannon smiled. “A companion for the symphony and the opera and the ballet,” he said. “We used to share a passion for those things.”
Her face brightened. “Yes. I enjoyed going out with you.”
“I enjoyed just being with you.” He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it hungrily, making her tingle all over. “I won’t try to seduce you, either,” he promised.
“I’ll have to think about it,” Josette said after a minute. Her heart was racing. Her body was exploding with sensation and hope.
He saw that expression in her eyes and smiled. “Take all the time you like.”
Brannon dropped her hand and moved back onto the road toward Holliman’s. It felt like a new beginning. He hoped that this time he wouldn’t foul things up.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mr. Holliman was waiting for them on the ram-shackle front porch when they drove up. He smiled as they approached him, until he got a close look at their faces.
“Something’s happened, hasn’t it?” he asked uncertainly, and his expression tautened.
“Yes. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your sister’s been killed,” Brannon said straight out.
“Been killed?” The old man just stood and stared at them for a minute. “Killed? How?”
“Shot,” Brannon said, without going into details. “We don’t know who did it. Her apartment was ransacked, so we know the perpetrator was looking for something. Two items were removed, but we don’t know if they found what they were looking for or hoped to find it in the items. We assume that it was something of Dale Jennings’s that they thought she had. We’re investigating.”
Mr. Holliman sat down in his chair on the porch, heavily. “I’ll have to make arrangements…” He looked up. “Is she at the hospital?”
“Yes. The medical examiner will have to do an autopsy, and evidence will go to the state crime lab for analysis. When the autopsy is finished, they’ll make arrangements to release her to a funeral home. You can call Alice Jones at the medical examiner’s office. She’ll tell you what you need to know.”
“I’ll do that, and get in touch with the funeral home,” he said, lifting his head. “Two funerals in less than a week is a little more than I bargained for.” He sighed. “That makes me the last of my family,” he murmured sadly. “The very last one…”
“Is there anything we can do?” Josette asked, interrupting him gently.
“Yes.” The old man’s watery eyes glittered. “You can get her murderer for me,” he said coldly. “You can make sure he’s punished. Because ten to one whoever killed her also killed my nephew!”
Brannon dropped Josette off at the D.A.’s office. She paused in the open door with the engine running and looked back at him.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, explaining her silence on the way back. “What if Jennings had a safe-deposit box?”
He nodded slowly. “That’s possible. I’ll look into it. Call you later.”
“Okay.”
“One more little thing,” Brannon added softly.
Her eyebrows lifted and she smiled. “Yes?”
He leaned toward her. “If you feel sick, or dizzy, get someone to drive you back
to my apartment and phone me. I don’t want you out of that office alone, for any reason. We’re still short one hit man.”
York, he meant. Josette stared at him with an odd little smile. He was very protective. She shouldn’t like that. But she did. “Okay.”
He smiled back at her. “And don’t go adventuring.”
She moved her wounded arm gingerly. “Too soon for that. See you.”
She closed the door and watched him drive away before she went inside to report their progress. She was introduced to Grier, who invited her into his office.
Cash Grier was thirty-eight, tall and lean-faced, with black eyes and long, black hair that he wore in a ponytail. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt under an un-constructed denim jacket, and black boots. Josette was quietly amused at the thought of him as a sort of reversed Texas Ranger. Unlike his colleagues, he didn’t like a white hat and conventional haircuts. He was certainly nothing like the conservative detective Josette had pictured. Grier had perfect white teeth, which he displayed only briefly when they were introduced, and a manner that was to the point and professional. He was the computer expert, and within two minutes Josette would have put him on a par with Phil Douglas in Simon Hart’s office. Grier knew his job.
“Sandra Gates is responsible for getting Jennings transferred to a state prison, and onto a work detail,” he said at once. “I’ve tracked down every connection she’s made in the past three months, including forays into her account at the bank,” he added. “She gets paid a flat fee for her software, mid-four figures. But she’s got fifty grand in her savings account, and it was all deposited at once, the day Jennings was killed.”
“Bingo!” Josette said, smiling. “Can you prove it?”
“I can,” he said. “And in fact, I’ve put together enough evidence for a warrant. There’s just one small hitch.”
“Which is?”
“She flew the coop,” Grier said, leaning back in his chair, his black eyes under heavy dark brows steady and impatient. “She went to the bank and drew out her money, got a cab to the airport and went to Argentina. Your guy Phil Douglas tracked her there. But we can’t extradite her from there.”
“At least we know that she’s involved in all this,” Josette said.
“Yes, but it doesn’t help us find her connection to Jennings’s murder, or to Jake Marsh. She had no computer contact with anyone except Jennings, in prison, and with the other computers she broke into to make those changes in Jennings’s record. She had a clear field there, because the prison where he was staying had just had a systems crash and some prisoners got lost in the cracks.”
“That explains a lot.”
“It doesn’t help my conviction record,” Grier said curtly. “I’d like to fly down to Argentina, slip a bag over her head and bring her back for questioning.”
“Ask the D.A. for a plane ticket,” she suggested lightly.
“I did.” He looked absolutely disgusted. “She asked the budget chief. He said I could stand outside with a tin cup and a sign until I collected the fare.”
Josette laughed. “Okay, that avenue’s cut off,” she added. “But we still have Jennings’s tie to Jake Marsh, and the hit man, York. Well, we had York. He escaped from the hospital.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” he commented, crossing his long legs. “Sloppy police work.”
“No fair. The officer guarding the door was knocked out,” she explained. “He has a concussion. Nobody expects a man with a gunshot wound to be walking around.”
“I would,” Grier mused, noting her wounded arm in its sling. “Doesn’t seem to have slowed you down much.”
“Point taken. The thing is, he’s out and we don’t know who his target is. We don’t think he killed Mrs. Jennings, though. The neighbor described the man as wearing wing-tip dress shoes, and we know that Marsh favors them.”
“Yes, and two-thousand-dollar suits,” he added. He got up, grabbing his service revolver out of his desk drawer. Grier checked it, made sure the safety was on and stuck it in its holster at his lean waist. He wore his detective’s shield in front on his belt, she noted. “I have a contact who’s in the local mob. He usually knows what’s going down in the underworld. I’ll go see him.”
“Can I go along?”
He scowled. “Why?”
“I’m closer to the Jennings case than you are,” Josette said simply. “I can think of questions to ask that you might not.”
He looked absolutely perplexed, and there was an odd glint in his dark eyes.
“I’m not going to storm in and start flashing my credentials,” she persisted. “I’ll just be an appendage. You can tell him I’m a colleague.”
He gave her a curious appraisal. “Brannon know you’re going with me?”
Josette glared at him. “I do not report every movement I make to Brannon,” she said firmly. “Anyway, he won’t mind.”
Grier pondered that with narrowed eyes. “Brannon has a peculiar way with him about women,” he persisted. “I’ve heard him speak of you. He’s territorial and he has a temper almost as bad as mine. I don’t trespass.”
“Yes, but then, you probably don’t have to pick up wounded women at the hospital to get them to go to your apartment with you,” she replied pertly.
“I don’t take women to my apartment,” he returned, and he didn’t smile.
She cleared her throat. What Brannon had said about this guy having a badge sewn to his underwear was beginning to make sense. “It’s a business matter. I’m working with the D.A.’s office, just like you. There’s nothing personal about it. Now, shall we go?”
Grier shrugged and stood aside to let her go first.
He drove an unmarked patrol car. Josette glanced at the hubcaps, shook her head and got inside.
He slid in beside her, noted that she had her seat belt on and fixed his in place before he started the car. “Something funny?” he asked.
“Unmarked police cars,” she said. “They all have those same round plain hubcaps that regular police cars have. It’s a dead giveaway.”
Grier made a rough sound and ignored her until he pulled up at a local billiards parlor. She grinned, but he didn’t notice.
There were two men around a big pool table, while three others sat at a nearby table playing cards.
“Hello, Bartlett,” Grier greeted the elder of the two men, and the shortest. He shook hands with him. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad, Grier.” He glanced at the woman beside the detective. “Crippling women these days?”
“I didn’t shoot her,” Grier returned drolly.
Bartlett chuckled. He had a raspy voice, the kind that comes after countless years of smoking. He coughed and went back to his game. He called the shot, and made it.
“Nice shot,” Josette mused.
He looked at her curiously. “You play?”
“A little,” she said with a smile. “I learned from a girl in college.”
“I don’t guess you play much now,” he said, indicating her arm.
“Only if I could hold the cue stick with my toes,” she agreed.
He chuckled. “She’s okay,” he told Grier. He set up his next shot. “What you want, Grier?”
“A word in private.”
“Sure.”
He put the cue stick down and moved out into the deserted cafeteria next door with Josette and Grier.
“Is there any word on the street about Marsh being involved in a hit?”
The smaller man’s eyebrows lifted. “How’d you know about that?”
“Never mind. What do you know?”
“Well, what I hear is that Marsh had hired this guy he knows to put away a blackmailer for him. Then he finds out the dead guy didn’t have the stuff on him, the blackmail stuff. So now he’s going nuts trying to find it and zapping anybody who gets in the way.”
“You know if he’s found it yet?”
“Naw, but I doubt it,” the little man drawled. “They say he’s got hives
worrying that he’s going up for Jennings’s murder. Not that he did it,” he added.
“Who did? York?” Grier asked.
“That would be my bet,” the older man replied. “York’s been in the game for several years. He may look like a kid, but he’d do anything for a dime. Marsh hires him for the really dirty jobs.”
Grier gave Bartlett the description he had of the man who’d gone into Mrs. Jennings’s apartment and killed her.
“Not York,” he agreed. “But that wouldn’t be Marsh’s style, either. He don’t torture old ladies.”
“There was a woman with him, in a fancy hat and veil.”
“Marsh has a mistress. I’ve never seen her. They say she’s married to some rich guy that Marsh knows. Word is that she’s ready to leave the husband because of something that’s going to happen to him.”
“Something connected with blackmail?” Grier wondered.
Bartlett smiled. “Now what do you think? You’re the detective, aren’t you?”
On the way back to the office, Josette was quiet. The presence of the woman in Mrs. Jennings’s apartment was disturbing, since no one seemed to credit Jake Marsh with stooping so low as to torture old women. So—what if the woman had done the torturing?
That made the situation even more disturbing—and more complicated. A rich woman, married to a rich man, who had a connection to Dale Jennings, who had evidence of some sort of wrongdoing. In the middle, Jake Marsh—the local mob kingpin—and a hit man, and two recent murder victims connected to it all.
“Someone,” Josette said aloud, “is taking extreme risks to get their hands on a piece of blackmail.”
“Someone connected to Marsh and Jennings,” Grier added.
“That woman your contact mentioned, Marsh’s mistress,” she began. “What if she tortured old Mrs. Jennings, trying to make her tell what she knew?”
“I’ve seen it done.”
“Some women are worse than some men,” she said.
His hard face got even harder. “I’ll drink to that.”
Josette had a feeling that he was speaking from personal experience, but he was a colleague, not a confidant, so she didn’t press.