Manhattan Flame (A Bridge & Tunnel Romance Book 2)

by Gibson, Mira

  Physically, she looked soft, yet her expression was hardened as though her dewy complexion, large angled eyes, and round mouth were cloaked in a tough attitude—gentle features stiff with the guardedness that comes from too many years in too rough a neighborhood.

  His chest grew tighter the longer they looked at one another and it wasn’t until she set an abnormally large camera on the counter that he realized she even had such a thing with her.

  “How can I help you?” He asked, a bit thrown by how concerned his voice sounded.

  “I think I saw something,” she said in a hollow tone that seemed lost and out of sorts.

  “Theft?”

  “No,” she cut in then her lower lip began quivering and she muttered, Damn under her breath, stepping back and giving her hands a good shake before looking at them.

  “Take your time.”

  She let out a carefully measure breath, glancing discretely at her hands as if willing them to stop trembling. When she stepped up to the counter again, she pressed her palms flat onto it and Kevin noted their demure shape—long fingers adorned with several rings.

  She gave an honest attempt at starting slowly and clearly from the beginning. “I was over at Riverside Park, damn,” she swore again under her breath. Plowing her long fingers through her hair, she corrected herself, explaining, “I was down at the piers, but I started at the park so I don’t know which pier I was at.”

  “The first one? Twelve,” he supplied. “I know the area.”

  Again, she exhaled, her eyes scanning the counter as though it would help her gain clarity.

  “Hey,” he said softly, angling to catch eye contact. When he had it, he assured her, “Just tell me what you saw and we’ll go from there.”

  “Right,” she breathed. “I think I saw these two business-looking guys kill some Russian dude and throw him in the river.”

  Now that was a statement.

  Kevin realized he was staring so he whipped around, pulled a homicide report form from the shelving unit and found a pen, and set both on the counter.

  “Bear with me, I need to collect all of your information.”

  “Anonymous,” she blurted out then cooled herself. “I’d rather make an anonymous report.”

  Kevin leaned forward but not so much as to crowd her, and spoke firmly and deliberately. “This is serious. If you witnessed a murder, if that’s really what happened, then no, you don’t get to disappear into the night. There will be a full investigation and we’ll need to follow up with you.”

  She looked reluctant, far too reluctant to cooperate, but he held her gaze anyway, and it finally registered that she was nearly as tall as him. Not that he should let himself get distracted by such a detail... maybe she was wearing heels, he hadn’t noticed one way or the other when she’d come in.

  “Fine,” she told him, sounding defeated as she blew air through her teeth. “Tasha Buckley... here.”

  She stole the pen from him, leaning over the counter and making slow work of identifying each field. He pointed, indicating the Name field, then the Address field, Home and Cell numbers and so on down the list, as she filled it out. Then he slipped the form away and took over again, entirely aware that she smelled faintly of lilacs. He didn’t know flower scents, not beyond lilacs since his mother had a bush in front of his childhood house on Staten Island.

  “When did this happen?” He asked, stealing quick glances at her as she composed herself to answer.

  “Just now. I was going to call 911 when it was happening but my cell died so I walked over here. It took me maybe ten minutes to walk.”

  “Did you get a good look at these guys?”

  “Good enough.”

  “From how far away?”

  She held his gaze and Kevin could tell he wasn’t going to like her response.

  “Two, maybe three hundred yards.”

  Ordinarily he would’ve laughed a civilian right out of the precinct. Only a hawk could see from that distance. If her allegation proved to be valid, he doubted she'd be able to ID the perp in a lineup. But there was something about Tasha—the glint in her brown eyes, the way she pressed her mouth, even her apprehension about being here in the first place told him that she wasn’t making this up.

  “Give me a sec, alright?” he said before glancing over his shoulder to get a read on where the sergeant was skulking around.

  Traumatizing Taite again, he should’ve known.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  It took more effort than he cared to admit to tear his gaze from her, but he broke free and wove his way through the bullpen until he reached Reilly, who was sloshing what looked like luke-warm coffee around in a cracked mug.

  Speaking low, Kevin said, “I got a woman who saw a murder down by Pier Twelve. Says two men pushed another into the river.”

  “People don’t die falling in the water,” he grumbled.

  “She seems credible,” he insisted while keeping his tone even.

  Reilly glanced past the hustle and bustle of his detectives to the woman beyond the front desk and Kevin caught the exact moment his sergeant had written the whole thing off.

  And it was because Tasha was black.

  Kevin could smell it. This type of dismissive racism had been brewing throughout the entire department ever since the day he’d started and it didn’t bode well for inspiring him to move up the ranks.

  But he wasn’t going to back down. “Talk to her. Send a cruiser over. According to her this happened ten or fifteen minutes ago.”

  Reilly said, “I’m going to show you something.” He sounded companionable enough, but Kevin knew the man was anything but. “Come with me.”

  The sergeant stomped out to the front desk, as Kevin trailed tightly behind, and Tasha seemed to stiffen at their approach. She folded her arms and a distinct look of distrust shielded her otherwise frightened features.

  “What’s your name?” he barked, making a display of eyeing the monitor, the report on the counter, anywhere but Tasha in order to make her feel small.

  In this moment, Kevin genuinely despised him.

  “Tasha Buckley,” she said clearly with a faint street-lilt in her tone. “You want to hear what I have to say?”

  “I know what you think, Sweetheart.” Tasha screwed her face up at the endearment and then her eyes went slack as if this wasn't her first rodeo with an authority figure who just plain didn't like her. Reilly pounded on, asking, “Have you been drinking this evening?”

  “What?” Her fist was on her hip now and she swung her other hand up. “Hell, no. No, I don’t need this.”

  “So is that a yes?” he pressed.

  “No, Officer,” she barked back in a thick New York accent. “I haven’t been drinking. I’ve been taking pictures down at the pier.”

  “Are you on drugs?”

  The second the sergeant had asked, Tasha’s eyes snapped to Kevin, widened, and her mouth drifted open, appalled. Reeling in her emotions in a way that impressed him—if he were in her shoes, he'd probably explode—she turned to Reilly and stated, “No, Sir, I have not been drinking and I’m not on drugs. I don’t do drugs. I do photography. That’s my thing.”

  Reilly was staring at Kevin now as though the two of them might chuckle about this later, but Kevin didn't find it funny and was about to assert as much when Tasha spoke up.

  “You don’t want to believe the young black woman whose trying to do you a favor? Fine. Believe this.” She had her camera in her hands now and clicked a few buttons then turned the view screen towards them and Kevin saw clearly what looked like two men strangling a third on the pier.

  Reilly seized the camera for a closer look.

  “Rapid-fire,” said Tasha. “Click through it fast, it’ll play like a movie.”

  The sergeant took her suggestion and as he clicked through the frames, his pale eyes locking on the screen, Kevin could tell the man was having a hard time pulling his foot out of his mouth. And if he wasn’t mistaken, he tho
ught Reilly looked a strange mix of pissed and scared. Then again, insult brought with it a wealth of emotions and the sergeant was obviously insulted that Tasha Buckley had stood her ground and been right.

  Kevin liked this girl, but he managed to suppress the crooked smirk that was threatening to overtake his expression.

  “Wait here,” ordered Reilly, as he took her camera with him deep into the bullpen.

  Kevin watched him and it wasn’t until Reilly slammed his office door shut that he returned his gaze to Tasha. She looked put-off and he couldn’t blame her so he reinforced the good she was doing by mentioning, “He’s hardheaded, but this is solid. I’m glad you came in.”

  “Hardheaded?” she challenged. “I could think of a better word.”

  The smile he’d been holding in came out and felt good, and to his surprise it was contagious. She let a small smirk form across her face and as her lips parted, he took a moment to eye her straight teeth and the snaggletooth—an incisor—that he hadn’t noticed before.

  When the silence between them, the lingering eye contact, lasted for too long, he asked, “Photographer, huh?”

  “Almost,” she sighed. “Right now I’m working as an assistant, but I’ve got some stuff coming up.”

  “Stuff?”

  “An exhibition down in Chelsea. Nothing too major,” she went on, modestly—it sounded like a hell of a big deal to Kevin. “That’s why I was taking shots near the pier.”

  “At night,” he questioned.

  “At dusk, moody lighting. It’s good for about an hour and I kept fighting myself to just go home.” She shook her head as if wrestling with herself.

  “It’s good that you didn’t go home,” he asserted. “You witnessed something that shouldn’t have happened and now we have a decent chance of catching whoever did this.”

  With that in mind, Kevin glanced over his shoulder and wondered why in the hell the sergeant hadn’t sent officers over to the pier yet.

  Tasha stole his attention, asking, “You ever go to the galleries around Chelsea?”

  “Huh?” Her question registered three seconds after she’d asked it and he blurted out, “Not really. Demanding life up here in Harlem if you can imagine.”

  “I can,” she said, her brows floating up and in delayed reaction he realized she was taking an interest in him—asking about galleries, commenting on his busy cop's life. He held her gaze and sensed there was more between them than the straightforward cop-civilian dynamic, one he might like to explore.

  Finally, Reilly lumbered back, joining him behind the counter, but Tasha’s jaw had dropped and what she said next came off sassy as hell, “Where the hell's my camera?”

  “Hey!” barked Reilly at her swearing. “It’s called evidence and we need it.”

  “Like hell you do,” she objected. “You need the shots, I’ll put them on a flash drive for you. You’re not taking my camera!”

  “Calm down,” demanded Reilly in a voice so loud you’d think Tasha had just assaulted him. “It’s already logged into evidence. You’ll get it back when we don’t need it anymore.”

  Her jaw had dropped to the floor, but she snapped it shut, cooled off in a manner that to Kevin didn’t seem fair—why should Tasha have to keep a level head when Reilly was treating her like a criminal for Christ’s sake?—and then she asked, “When will I get it back?”

  Smugly, the sergeant said, “After the trial,” then turned to Kevin. “Help her fill out the 501-67-B458 so she can get her property when the time comes.” And with that he stalked off again without so much as thanking Tasha for coming forward in the first place.

  Kevin couldn’t look at her he was so ashamed. Sensing her frustration was enough to send his guts twisting and his chest tightening. He was furious for her and hated that in a sense she was being punished for having helped.

  Hunting around the shelving unit, he finally located the form Reilly had advised and set it on the counter. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry, but words were too small. If she had a photography exhibition coming up, he hoped for her sake she had a spare camera lying around somewhere, because the unfortunate fact of the matter was that she wasn’t going to get hers back for a very long time.

  And yet, as he collected her information and filled out the form, he wondered why Reilly had shot down Tasha’s very reasonable offer. She could’ve easily transferred the images onto a flash drive. It would certainly serve as evidence whether they had the camera or not. Was Reilly being a jackass? Was he getting off on giving her a hard time and making her life miserable? What was the damned point of keeping her property?

  Once he had filled out the form in its entirety, he told her, “It’ll take a day for us to process this and get an internal file number assigned, but at that point we’ll give you a copy to hold on to.”

  “Great,” she said as if the information was anything but.

  As she scraped her teeth over her lower lip and slapped her hands on her thighs as if concluding the nightmare that had befallen her, Kevin offered her a comforting smile and said, “Good luck with your art show.”

  “Yeah,” she grumbled. “I’ll sure as hell need it.”

  He watched her walk through the lobby, her swaying hips, her bouncy black curls, to his great relief noting the heels she wore—she wasn’t that tall—and when she'd disappeared beyond the glass door, he walked briskly through the bullpen, making a beeline for the sergeant’s office.

  “Send me out, Sarge,” he demanded. “I want in on this one.”

  “To the pier? I already sent a cruiser.”

  He glared at him, but Reilly’s eyes were just as steely.

  Reilly ordered, “Shut the door on your way out.”

  Kevin didn’t just shut the office door. He slammed it.

  Chapter Three

  The photography studio was in crisp divide. White, floor-to-ceiling seamless paper cloaked the front half of the room. At the back was a smattering of industrial lights, illuminating an Amazonian bombshell whose teased black hair spilled over the daring, sable-fur bikini she was modeling.

  Tasha hung off to the wayside with a clipboard in her hand and noted the various lenses, angles, and apertures being used, and tracked their correlation to the model’s outfits, while her boss, Hans Janz hunched into his Nikon Coolpix L820, pacing around his subject and firing off shots.

  She would kill for that camera. Hell, at this point there wasn’t much she wouldn’t do to have a basic Kodak in her hands for a few days. The thought of her precious Canon locked in an evidence room at the police station was enough to set her teeth on edge.

  “Leg up on the block,” Hans demanded, alerting the model to the white cube his scenic designer had provided.

  While he waited for the leggy twenty-year old to play around with the prop, he tilted his head, stretching the side of his neck, and plowed his fingers through his coiffed blond hair that to Tasha looked waxy with product.

  Hans seemed annoyed that the model was struggling. He paced off towards one of the Flashpoint monolights and made a few adjustments.

  Tasha bit her tongue not to make a suggestion concerning both the angle of the light and the possibilities the model could explore kicking and mounting the cube. But if she had learned anything working under Hans Janz’s laughable tutelage, it was that assistants were meant to be neither seen nor heard.

  The model, whose name was Shivana, had moved to New York City from Trinidad when a modeling scout from IMG had so-called discovered her—as if any young adult were an island that some Manhattan hotshot could stake his flag in. She pitched her stiletto heel on the cube in a way that concerned Tasha she might twist her ankle. Worse was the fact she had also braced the cube with her left hand, which had caused such a forward bend that her breasts were threatening to spill out of the strips of fur that some designer—a man no doubt—called a bikini.

  Tasha snuck a glance at Hans, as he rounded a folding table where his DIT specialist was logging the digital shots he'd taken
into a laptop. He seemed consumed, eyeing the monitor, so Tasha risked the scolding she would surely get stepping across the white paper and approached the model.

  Demonstratively, she guided the girl aside, taking her place, then set her sneaker on the cube. Communicating only in body language since Shivana spoke very little English, she arched her back, tossed her head, and worked the white block in a way she was sure Hans wanted.

  The model smirked nervously, yet memorized all she was shown, and before Tasha slinked away, she gestured to her own chest, indicating the model needed a quick tuck to be on the safe side.

  “Off the set!” yelled Hans, as he barreled towards her, fuming and pointing angrily at the white paper she had trailed across. “Look at these scuffs!”

  She didn’t see a single scuffmark, but apologized profusely anyway, adding, “Coffee? Espresso? Red Bull?”

  “Why don’t you keep behind the lights and help me forget I hired you, hmm?”

  In addition to pressing her mouth into a hard line to stifle what might tumble out, she felt eyes on her and instinctively glanced at the model, who was gaping as if appalled on Tasha’s behalf. She might not be fluent in the language, but Hans’s tone had read loud and clear.

  The shoot picked up again—Hans clicking frames as he worked his way around the model, Shivana hiking her long leg over the cube and confidently selling the idea of the bikini she wore.

  Making her way to the very back of the studio, Tasha neared the refreshment table and poured herself a cup of coffee, which she doctored with cream and sugar. She didn’t need caffeine so much as air and there wasn’t any within an eight-yard radius of her agitated boss.

  Impacting her sour mood was all that had transpired two nights ago. It killed her not to have her camera, but as bad as that felt, she couldn’t shake how offended she was, having been dismissed by that cop. What was he, a lieutenant, a sergeant, the captain? He was a bastard as far as she was concerned. Few things were worse than not being believed. And being made to feel like a criminal herself when she had only meant to report a very serious crime was outlandish.