by Julie Miller
“Was the jewelry expensive?”
“Not enough to give the Rockefellers a run for their money, but probably enough to feed a junkie’s fix for a few weeks.” Gabe plucked the picture from Olivia’s fingers to put it back in its drawer. “I know what you’re thinking—Dani wasn’t murdered for the diamond she was wearing—”
“I have to consider every possibility.”
Gabe closed the drawer. “You only have to consider the right one.”
“The right one?” Olivia planted her hands at her hips and tipped her face to his. “Just because it’s your theory, that makes it right?”
He mirrored her stance, watching the green fire of temper take over the color in her eyes. “Factually, I know you have to explore every possible motive and suspect—but what do you think I’ve been doing for six years? Your father and his partner never found the thief they were looking for because he didn’t exist. Dani was killed to cover up a story.”
“That’s only one possibility. I have to revisit and rule out any other—”
A soft knock and the door opening ended the argument. A platinum blonde, wearing a designer suit that cost as much as his monthly salary, entered with a friendly smile that faded when she saw the two of them together. “Gabe, I... Sorry. Didn’t know you had company.” Gabe’s boss, the slightly older woman who’d inherited the newspaper, but earned her CEO status and his respect with her business and management skills, tucked the small box she carried under one arm and walked right up to Olivia. “Hi. I’m Mara Boyd, publisher of the Journal.”
The two women shook hands. “Detective Olivia Watson.”
“Detective? Has something happened?” Mara tipped her bright blue eyes to his. “Has there been a break on Dani’s murder? You know I want that story. She was our girl. Nobody gets to scoop us. Will you be able to write it? You deserve to have that vindication, but if it’ll be too much, I’ll assign it to someone else.”
Olivia stepped in front of him, as though she meant to protect him from the verbal barrage. “Let’s solve it first.”
“Of course.” Mara’s gaze dropped back to Olivia. “But you being here is good news, right?”
“I hope so.”
“Yes.” Gabe closed his hands around Olivia’s shoulders and scooted her to the side. He could fight his own battles. Not that talking business with Mara—or even something so personal as Dani’s murder—was ever an issue. “Detective Watson is exploring the possibility of a link between Dani’s murder and a death that occurred yesterday.”
“Are you talking about Ron Kober’s murder?” Mara asked.
Olivia subtly pulled away from the grasp of his fingers. “Did you know Mr. Kober?”
“Of course.” Mara hugged the box she was carrying in front of her. “Ron delivered all kinds of press releases when he worked for Senator McCoy. I’ve met him at fund-raisers, and the paper did an article on him when he built the Kober Building and opened his private PR firm.”
“Do you know of any dealings he might have had with Danielle Reese?” Olivia pressed.
“Dani and Ron?” Mara shook her head. “Dani was a cub reporter. They ran in different social circles. She wouldn’t have been covering anything he was involved with.”
Great. Just what Gabe didn’t need—his boss contradicting his assertion that Dani and Kober had been working together. He stepped away from Olivia and escorted Mara back to the door. “Did you need something?”
Mara’s smile was back. “I just wanted to remind you that you’re covering the mayor’s cocktail reception for party members and the press at the art gallery tomorrow night. And give you this.” She placed the small, narrow box in his hands. “I didn’t know if you had one of your own. I rarely see you wear them.”
Gabe lifted the lid and arched an eyebrow at the black silk. “A tie?”
“I reserved the tux that goes with it at the rental place on the card inside. Plus, it’s an election year, so you know there’ll be a photo op. Madam Mayor may even be looking for our endorsement, but I’d like to hear her answers to some hard questions before I put the Journal’s name behind her. You know I’d go myself but, um...”
“I’ll be there.” Gabe knew firsthand about his boss’s recent reticence to attend anything resembling a public society event. “I may even wear the stupid bow tie. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Keep me in the loop on any new developments with Dani’s murder.” Mara’s smile included Olivia. “I’ll let you two get back to work.”
Gabe closed the door and tossed the tie box on top of his desk. “Where were we?”
Oh, right. Sniffing Olivia’s hair, failing to keep his hands to himself, verbally duking it out with her and enjoying it all more than he should, considering Olivia represented the enemy he had to bring over to his side of the investigation.
“Your boss likes you.”
“Because she knows I’ll give her an honest opinion about what’s really going on behind the mayor’s party line.”
“No, I mean she likes you.” Olivia picked up her coffee and drank a couple of swallows, using the cup to mask her assessment of his reaction.
She wasn’t getting one. “The woman gave me a tie, not the key to her apartment.”
“Have you two gone out?”
“We’re friends. A couple of times she’s needed an escort and I’ve obliged her so she doesn’t have to mess with the whole dating-after-forty scene.”
Olivia’s eyes widened with mock surprise. “You date?”
Gabe circled around his desk opposite her. “Not every woman finds me to be—how did you put it?—too damn arrogant to spend time with.”
When she lowered her cup, he was surprised to see that the cop could blush. “You do pay attention to details, don’t you. Still, in the interest of the investigation, Ms. Boyd wouldn’t happen to have a jealous streak, would she?”
He turned his chair toward her and sat. “Jealous of Dani? Mara hired her.”
“To write for her newspaper—not to marry her star reporter.”
Gabe considered the possibility for about two seconds, then shook his head. “Mara was married when I was with Dani.”
“Some women want their cake...and everybody else’s.”
That wasn’t the boss he knew. “I don’t think so. Mara didn’t have a good marriage. Her husband was Brian Elliot.”
“The Rose Red Rapist?” Olivia’s eyes widened at the mention of the serial rapist the department had put away a couple years earlier. Although, in Gabe’s way of thinking, it had taken them far too long and far too many victims to identify Elliot and make the arrest.
“One and the same. Mara knew he wasn’t right in the head, and shut down her feelings long before she got divorced. There was never any jealousy there. No strong emotion of any kind. The only thing she feels a passion for is this paper.” Olivia set her coffee on the edge of the desk and started typing on her phone again. “You’re not putting her down as a suspect, are you? Mara doesn’t have it in her to kill anybody.”
“But she’d have the money to hire someone to do it for her.”
He pushed to his feet. “Olivia—”
“Fine. I’ll move her to the bottom of my list.”
“This isn’t about jealousy.” Gabe poked the desktop with each and every point. “We should be talking to Leland Asher. Or even Adrian McCoy and his people. We should find out if there was any recent contact between the three of them.”
“We aren’t going to do anything.” Olivia lowered her phone, moving a step closer with every reply. “I’m the cop. I contact persons of interest and ask the questions.”
“I’m a part of this investigation.”
“You’re going caveman on me again.”
“Cave...” Gabe scrubbed his palm over his face and looked away, swea
ring at the apt description he’d given himself last night. But he wasn’t about to back down from what he knew was right. He tapped his finger against his temple and settled back into his chair. “You need what I have in here to solve the case.”
“Then how about a little information from that head of yours? Do you still have the story Dani was writing? Copies of her notes? Those would be more helpful than arguing with you.”
Gabe clicked the mouse to bring icons back on his computer screen. “Dani kept her stories on a flash drive that she carried on her key chain. Had it with her all the time. I never saw what was on it.” Olivia searched her phone again, while he brought up the different files of research he’d put together. “She made a few notes on her desk calendar—dates, times, code names—that I scanned. She called the source she was meeting with—”
“The source you believe to be Ron Kober?”
“Yes. She called him BB. Big Break. As in big break on the story she was writing—”
“Or the big break in her career.” She held up her phone, although he couldn’t read the text. “There was no flash drive collected as evidence. And her keys were still in the car at the scene. Do you still have it?”
“No. That proves somebody took it.” Adrenaline rushed through Gabe’s blood the same way it did when he broke a story. “You find out who has that flash drive and you’ll have your killer.”
“All it means is that we haven’t found it yet. I texted a couple of detectives I work with who are at the impound lot to tear her car apart and see if she hid a flash drive somewhere that the crime scene techs never discovered.” Olivia moved in beside him, reading the screen over his shoulder. “It also means I have to rely on you to tell me what was on that flash drive.”
One step forward and two steps back. Gabe tempered his hope at finally getting through to KCPD with a good dose of cynicism. “Over the years, I’ve recreated as much of what I could remember from the notes Dani kept.”
“But you don’t have any of the actual notes or the article she was writing?”
“When we argued that night, she downloaded all the files I’d read onto her flash drive and deleted them from her laptop.”
Gabe felt Olivia’s hand on the back of his chair. “Do you still have the laptop? Our tech guys can recover all kinds of data, sometimes even from corrupted files.”
“She took it with her. Accused me of spying on her, not believing in her. Said she wasn’t going to be treated like a rookie reporter anymore.”
When the detective didn’t immediately berate him for not having actual admissible evidence to share, he sought out her reflection on the monitor beside him. “That’s a lot of guilt to carry with you, isn’t it?” He watched her force the wistfulness from her expression before she patted his shoulder. “I’m sure the two of you would have made up, maybe even traded a laugh or a kiss, if she’d come back home that night.”
Gabe reached up to capture her hand. The eyes weren’t the only mystery he had yet to solve about this woman. “Sounds as though you know about that kind of guilt. What happened?”
But the quiet moment of a shared understanding didn’t last. “What I know is that cold cases rely on plenty of circumstantial evidence to make a conviction. But so far all I have are bad guys with alibis, a missing flash drive and a lot of hearsay from you. A few tangible facts wouldn’t hurt.”
“So you get to ask questions, but I don’t?”
Apparently not. Olivia pulled away with a determined huff and moved around the room, inspecting his office. Allowing his curiosity to simmer, he went back to pulling up files on the computer. “Did you know I was Thomas Watson’s daughter when we met yesterday?” she asked. “Is that why you requested Jim and me from the Cold Case Squad?”
Gabe glanced up to find her oddly fascinated with a Missouri Press Corps certificate framed on the wall. “Not at first. I called Chief Taylor and made the request when I heard about Kober’s murder. I didn’t know he’d be sending you.”
“Do you want someone else running this investigation?”
“Will you solve it?” he challenged. “Will you find Dani’s killer?”
Her shoulders stiffened and her chin came up before she turned. Her eyes, all green and gold now, locked onto his as she came back to sit on the edge of the desk beside him, facing him. “Yes.”
As much as her confidence intrigued him, six years was a long time to wait for the action and satisfaction he’d yet to see. “Do we bet money on this now, or what?”
“No bets. Just a promise that I’m going to do my job.” His sarcasm hadn’t fazed her a bit. She was dead serious, expecting him to take her at her word. “My father would have eventually solved the case, too, if he hadn’t been injured and forced to retire. It always troubled him—haunted him, even—that he never found Dani’s killer.”
“Not as much as it has haunted me.” But there was more regret than sneer in his tone. If he hadn’t been such a self-righteous jerk back then, warning Dani she was going to crash and burn with her story—that she was playing way out of her league—she might still be alive. If only he’d done more than preach at her that night. If only he’d stopped her. Gone with her. Done anything besides let her go off and confront a killer alone. He needed to change the subject. “How did your father get injured?”
“High-speed car chase. His partner lost control of the car and they ran off the road.” Finally, a question she would answer for him—although, interestingly, the question hadn’t been about her. “They were both lucky they survived the wreck, but at the time, Dad was more worried about whether or not the perp got away.”
“Did he?”
“No. He got caught in the accident, too. He’s serving his sentence in Jefferson City.” She moved some papers and brushed the dust off a trophy on top of the filing cabinets. “Dad and Al solved a lot of cases together, but neither one could return to regular duty after that. Dad works as a consultant for a security company now, but he hated having to retire from KCPD with an unsolved case.”
“Dani’s.”
Olivia nodded.
“Is that why you’re doing this? To avenge your father? To complete his service record?”
“Maybe a little.” She traced the plastic lid on her coffee before picking up the cup and finishing it off. “I’m doing this because solving crimes is the job I’m trained to do. The job I swore an oath to do to the best of my ability. I know you don’t have any appreciation for cops, Gabe. But I do. I take a lot of pride in protecting Kansas City, a lot of pride in being a detective. I do it because Dani and her family—and you—deserve justice.”
He tilted his gaze to hers in a hard stare, assessing her sincerity and ability to make good on her words. “This isn’t merely a personal quest for me, either. I’m just as committed to finding the truth as you are. It’s what a good reporter does.”
Refusing to look away from the challenge in his eyes, she returned to his desk. “So, if we’re done trading philosophies, I’d like to get back to work. I have a feeling the only way I’m going to earn your respect, and redeem your opinion of my father and the rest of the department, is to show you how we get the job done.”
Gabe stood to face her. “My beef with KCPD doesn’t include you, Olivia.”
She tipped her chin to keep their gazes locked. “You disrespect the department, you disrespect me.”
“Fair enough. Prove me wrong about KCPD.”
She inched a step closer. “Prove me wrong about reporters.”
The beginnings of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and Gabe nodded. Despite the glimpses of some secret vulnerability, he hadn’t run up against anyone in the department who was tougher than this lady right here. Maybe she was already halfway toward earning that respect.
He pulled out his chair for her to sit. “You can read what I’ve pieced together
from Dani’s report, along with the snippets I retrieved from her calendar and notebook. Then you’ll know what I know.”
Shaking her head, she pulled up the first file. “I’ll know what you suspect,” she corrected. “I’m still going to need witness corroboration or some other kind of proof before I can make an arrest.”
“Are you and I ever going to agree on anything, Detective?”
She picked up her empty cup and held it out to him. “I like coffee. Do you?”
Gabe gave in to the urge to laugh before snatching her cup and heading for the door. “Keep reading. I’ll go get us another cup.”
Chapter Six
Olivia shifted her Explorer into Park and killed the engine before looking past Gabe to assess the rusting, swaybacked shell of Morton & Sons Tile Works.
Despite the puffy white clouds in the late-afternoon sky overhead, there wasn’t anything cheery about this derelict block of condemned buildings. The pediment above the front doors with 1903 carved into it was one of the few bits of the brick-and-mortar facade not crumbling away from the rusting iron and chewed-up timber structure underneath. Olivia could smell the river on the other side of the warehouse, smell the faint stink of garbage or something else rotten that she wasn’t in real favor of identifying. Boarded-up windows that had been used for target practice, and a building code warning sticker beside the front doors completed the feeling of death and decay about the old storage facility. “I don’t much like the look of this place in the daylight. I can’t imagine your fiancée coming to this part of town in the middle of the night.”
Gabe drummed his fingers against the top of the rolled-down window—the only outward indication that being on the same street, in front of the same abandoned warehouse where Danielle Reese’s body had been found, bothered him. “This is a hell of a lonely place to die. I wonder how many times Dani came here to meet her informant before I realized what she was doing and warned her it was too dangerous. The only people who come to this neighborhood are gangbangers, druggies and the homeless. Any reputable businesses have closed or moved to a better location. If Leland Asher or one of his men found her here...” He shook his head and turned back to Olivia. “Even if there was someone around to see what happened, this isn’t a neighborhood where people like to talk to the police.”