by Kylie Brant
“Really, you’re psychic? Let’s see how good you are,” Kell said conversationally. “You broke into the house of the prime suspect in a high-profile kidnapping case. You hid rather than identifying yourself when we came in.” Macy lifted the edge of the woman’s coat and plucked the sidearm out of its holster. “No camera in sight, so that means you’re not paparazzi. So I’m thinking you’re an accomplice of Nick Hubbard’s, here to fetch something for him. How ’bout it? How close were you?”
Macy started to frisk the woman.
“You’re not CBI,” the woman countered brazenly. “And you’re sure as hell not local law enforcement. Maybe you don’t have a right to be here either.”
He smiled humorlessly. “Turns out you’re not psychic after all. Ah-ah.” He wagged the weapon at her as she started to lower her hands. “What’d you find, Macy?” She’d withdrawn a couple items from the woman’s coat pockets and was perusing them.
At his question, she held up a picture ID hanging from a lanyard. He squinted to read it then smiled grimly. “Denise Temple. Looks like a two-fer. I think we’ve found Hubbard’s girlfriend. And a Denver police officer.”
“Sergeant,” snapped the woman. “And I’m lowering my hands.”
“Go ahead,” Kell invited pleasantly. “Just don’t forget you have two weapons trained on you, a DPD officer stationed out front, and a CBI agent coming through that door any minute. So start talking. You can begin by telling us where Hubbard is.”
“How would I know?”
“You’ve been dating him for the last several weeks. You’d probably know better than anyone else where he might be right now.”
“I have no idea. Really.” The woman’s gaze encompassed both him and Macy. “Don’t you think I’d have gone to my captain if I knew? I’d much rather be a hero in this thing than sneaking around trying to save my badge.”
Macy was rifling through the dark garbage bag at the woman’s feet. “When was the last time you spoke with him?”
“Three days ago. I spent the night and we had tentative plans to meet for a late dinner the next day. I phoned him a couple times”—she lifted a shoulder—“but he never answered.”
“When did you call?”
“Around five and again at midnight. I was pissed, because he blew off our plans.” Her voice was sour. “Now I know why.”
“The bag’s empty except for a towel and boots,” Macy observed, rising again.
“How’d you get in?”
“I have a key Nick gave to me. Another few minutes and I’d have been out of here and no one would have been the wiser.” Her expression went dour. “Add poor timing to my lousy judgment of men.”
“So you think Hubbard kidnapped the Mulder girl?”
“You tell me. It’s what the CBI thinks, isn’t it?”
“I’m asking you.” Out of the corner of his eye, Kell watched Macy go through the contents of the woman’s other coat pocket. “You were sleeping with him.” He saw the almost imperceptible wince the woman gave and wondered at it. “What do you think?”
Temple blew out a breath. “Nick’s the last person I’d ever expect to do something like this. But DPD has been getting BOLO reports from CBI ever since they came in on this thing. If they want us to be on the lookout for Nick, they must believe he has something to do with this. And like I say, he blew off our plans, hasn’t been answering his phone . . . It doesn’t exactly look good for him.”
“So you’re not here to clear his name, I take it.”
“Looks like we’ve discovered the owner of the unidentified caller on his LUDs,” Macy murmured, holding up the woman’s trac phone.
“A couple weeks ago I was sleeping over. He got a call from work and didn’t have any paper upstairs.” Temple lifted a shoulder. “I pulled a business card out of my purse and he wrote on the back of it. I got to thinking . . .”
“That we found your card and you were implicated in this thing.”
She flushed. “I figured you probably hadn’t because no one had contacted me. And I knew it’d be hard to trace my phone. But I got paranoid. No one knew we were involved, but if he had hung on to that card . . . I started thinking maybe I was being watched. It affected my job. So I decided to come check for myself. Like I say, stupid.”
He shot a look at Macy. She gave a slight shrug. It appeared neither of them were convinced yet. “Why the un-traceable phone?”
But the cop was obviously done cooperating. “I don’t even know who you two are. Are you CBI? If so, let’s see some ID.”
“Not really in the position to be making demands,” Kell reminded her. “We’re special consultants working with CBI.”
Suspicion settled over her face. “I haven’t heard about any special consultants being called in.”
“DPD isn’t exactly in the loop on this thing,” Kell reminded her. “My guess is your department is being used strictly for manpower and any info is on a need-to-know basis.”
She shot him a look filled with dislike. “Come to think of it, maybe you are CBI. The agents I’ve met from there are all arrogant.”
He grinned in genuine amusement. “Finally we agree on something. And you still haven’t answered. Why all the secrecy about dating Hubbard? Why the phone?”
After seeming to weigh her options for a moment, the woman capitulated. “I’ve got a douche bag ex who has a habit of appearing when I can least afford trouble. This job is going well, and I don’t want him showing up and screwing things up with my boss. He’s a cop, too, so it gets messy.”
There was the sound of footsteps coming up the front exterior steps. Quickly he grabbed Temple and hauled her into the dining room, out of sight. To Macy, he said, “Get rid of him.”
“What?”
He jerked his head toward the door, where a key was sounding in the lock. “Travis. Get him back to the car. Buy me fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen . . . I can’t . . .”
“Now!”
The look she gave him would have dropped a lesser man in his tracks. He was half-surprised to see her stride toward the door as it squeaked open. “Did you get tired of waiting?”
He slipped his gun in his pocket and pulled out his phone and hit the contact number for Paulie Samuels, Raiker’s second-in-command. He sent a short silent text to get him background on Denise Temple of the DPD and have it back to him in ten minutes.
“What’s taking so long?” he heard Travis say. “I could have been in and out three times by now.”
“You know Kell. He wanted to do another walk-through and then he . . .” The door closed behind them and he could no longer hear their conversation. Given that last look Macy had sent him, he figured that might be a good thing.
It didn’t matter what she told the other man, though. As long as she bought him enough time to get a response from Samuels and to decide what to do about Denise Temple.
She couldn’t stand the way he looked at her.
Sometimes he’d play with the long wicked blade while he stared, absently running his thumb along the sharp edge. When it broke the skin and left a long thin line of blood, he’d bring his thumb to his mouth and suck the blood away like a vampire. She had a feeling he wanted to use that blade on her.
Ellie wondered what was stopping him. What was he waiting for?
Art Cooper hadn’t waited. At least not for long.
She’d been coming back from the bathroom at the party when he’d yanked her into the men’s room and shoved that stinky cloth in her face. And then she didn’t remember anything until he’d opened the trunk of his car and pulled her out and into the backseat on that gravel road. She’d screamed and screamed and screamed, but there hadn’t been anyone around to hear.
Cooper hadn’t liked it when she screamed. But she had a feeling this man would.
She looked away from him as her stomach cramped up again. There wasn’t a real bathroom in the small area. Just a bucket in the corner. He’d let her use it but he always watched her, so she waited as long as
she could before asking.
“Are you scared?”
Reluctantly she looked at him again. The only time there was ever expression in his eyes, on his face, is when he asked her a question like that. “I’m not afraid of you,” she lied, and he laughed, a low ugly sound.
“You’re a liar, little girl. Not a very good one either. If you aren’t scared now, you will be. But terror will be just one of the things you’ll be feeling.”
“How do you know?” His eyes went flat and cold, and she swallowed hard. But something inside her made her continue. “I’ll bet it’s been a long time since you’ve felt anything. You probably don’t even remember what it’s like.”
He moved so fast it was like a blur. One moment he was on the lawn chair and the next he had her head yanked back by her hair. “Are you stupid?” The tip of the blade pricked the skin beneath the chin where he held it. She could feel blood running down the side of her throat. Memories flipped through her mind, like a movie on fast-forward. Presents that Cooper would bring her. Special cakes and treats. And she’d known what he wanted. A little girl that smiled and laughed so he could pretend she loved him, loved being with him.
Not giving him that had been her only weapon. He beat her every time she tried to escape until she was kept tied all the time. But she hadn’t given him the one thing he wanted more than almost anything else.
And she wouldn’t give this man what he wanted either.
Her fear.
That familiar numbness was sliding over her again. She welcomed it like an old friend. Looking straight in his eyes, she whispered, “What are you feeling right now?”
“I told you to meet me in my room in ten minutes.” The door had barely opened before Macy grabbed a handful of Kell’s shirt and pulled him inside.
He grinned. “I like a lady who’s eager. Watch the plates.”
Glaring at him, she reached to take one of the covered dishes out of his hands. “Seriously? You went to the kitchen before coming up here? You’re pathetic.”
“Pathetically hungry.” He carefully set Travis’s copy of the updated files on her bed, then settled himself on it with his plate in his lap. “Hope you like burgers. Travis was waiting for some fancy chicken dish to get out of the oven, but I nabbed the sandwiches and fries and headed up as soon as I could.”
She sent a belated look toward the file he had set down. “With Travis’s file?”
“Like taking candy from a baby. It’s so easy I’m thinking of working left-handed, just to even the odds a bit.”
“It’s not wise to get cocky. Of course, you seem to be full of unwise decisions today.”
“You mean because of Temple?” Knowing an invitation wouldn’t come, he made himself comfortable on her bed and uncovered a heaping plate. The two burgers with full fixings looked better than anything he could have hoped to score if he’d had a chance at a drive-through, but his standards tended to lower when he was starving.
“Yes, I mean Temple, and don’t you dare eat that on my bed.”
He picked up a sandwich and bit into it, his eyes sliding shut in appreciation. Even better than he’d expected. After swallowing, he advised, “You better eat. You’re grumpy.”
The burger was half gone before his hunger had subsided enough to notice that not only had she not taken his advice, she was looking at him as though she were giving serious consideration to heaving the plate she held at his head. “If you’re not going to eat that, bring it over here.”
She stalked—there was no other word for it—toward the chair she’d pulled up to the bed yesterday. “You let her go?”
He had a healthy enough sense of self-preservation to know better than to feign ignorance. “I let her go.”
“That was a mistake.”
“It was a calculated risk,” he corrected, and polished off the rest of the burger before continuing. “Samuels did a quick dive into her background, and she checked out, at least on the surface. The story about the ex, the change of jobs . . . that’s true. She’s filed two restraining orders against a Henry Cole—she took her maiden name back—in the last three years. He’s a lieutenant for the Phoenix police department. She’s not going anywhere. She’s got a mortgage.”
“So does Hubbard.”
He thought it wiser to ignore her. “She’s also up for a promotion. Paulie’s been sending me regular updates since he started digging. I don’t think she’s going to run. And I figure she’s telling the truth about not having any idea where Hubbard is.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
From her tone, he hadn’t yet convinced her. “I can be reasonably certain, so I took a calculated risk. I asked Paulie to fill Adam in and get a private investigator over to her house, make sure Hubbard isn’t holed up there.”
“You took a risk for very little reason,” she corrected. But at least she’d lost enough of her ire that she was uncovering her food. “There’s nothing to be gained by keeping Temple’s secret from the CBI. Whitman was very clear about what his reaction would be if we pulled something like that, not that he’s been exactly pure in that area.”
“I’ll let Adam have the final say tonight when I talk to him.” He lifted a shoulder and bit into the second hamburger. And silently acknowledged that his boss’s reaction could well reflect Macy’s, minus the snootiness. “With what Paulie has given me so far on Temple, I’m comfortable with giving her a little rope. As long as she comes through with what she promised in return.”
The look Macy shot him then would have seared stone. “It’s so not what you’re thinking, and God, you really don’t hold me in high esteem, do you?”
“Are we talking about your skills or your morals?” she inquired sweetly.
The verbal jab stung a bit more than it would have coming from someone else. And he didn’t want to spend time thinking about the implications of that. “Look, Paulie will keep looking, and at the first whiff of something funny, we can always backtrack. But Temple has access to info within the DPD and that might help us. She can give us a heads-up if something comes to light that might relate to our case, information that we have to steal to get from Whitman.”
The ire faded from her expression as she chewed reflectively, and he knew intuitively the words had been well chosen. The agent’s actions galled her as much as they did him.
“It’s not like DPD is being kept in the loop though,” she said, after polishing off her hamburger with delicate greed. “I don’t see what she can offer.”
“Let’s see how creative she gets. Temple is pretty desperate to keep her relationship with Hubbard quiet. I get the feeling the messy divorce with her ex jammed up her job with the Phoenix PD, what with him being a cop. She isn’t going to want to screw up in Denver, too. She’d wash out of law enforcement completely.”
Macy was quiet for a moment. He studied her as he polished off his French fries, which were far better than anything he could have gotten at a fast-food place. There was a quick and agile mind beneath her prim exterior, and it never failed to fascinate him. Of course, there were several aspects of her exterior that fascinated, as well, but it was best not to dwell on them when they were alone in her bedroom. He shifted uncomfortably. Especially with him stretched out on her bed.
He dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out an object, held it up for her to see. She stared, then her lips curved slowly. “You have her trac phone.”
Kell didn’t answer for a moment. He couldn’t. He was still reeling from the punch-in-the-gut smile of hers. It was just a facial expression, for God’s sake. The work of a cooperative handful of muscles. No reason for it to have the breath clogging in his lungs. It suited him to blame it on shock. He didn’t think he’d ever had Macy smile at him quite like that before.
When the smile faded, and her expression became questioning, he hurriedly answered, “I said I was taking a calculated risk, not a stupid one. Checked it over back at Hubbard’s while I was waiting for Paulie to get back to me. There hasn’t be
en a call placed on it to Hubbard since the ones she told us about the night the girl disappeared. Nothing has come in from Hubbard’s cell either.” No surprise there. They already knew there had been no activity on his phone since he’d disappeared.
Kell looked at his plate, noted with a measure of surprise that he’d finished it off. He turned a considering eye toward hers. Reading his intent, she covered her fries with a protective hand while raising her fork threateningly.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Be stingy. Don’t blame me if you get fat.”
Storm clouds were brewing in her startling blue eyes. He seemed to have a knack for putting them there. “No wonder women fall at your feet. It must be that silver tongue of yours.”
He smiled wickedly. “I think I like the mental image of you falling at my feet. You’d be naked, of course. And there might also be Cool Whip and soft handcuffs involved.”
Three seconds. That’s all it took for the color to flood her face. He knew because he’d been counting.
She opened her mouth. Snapped it shut. Opened it again. “You ass.”
He grinned. “I think the British pronunciation is arse. And that seems to be your standby retort when you can’t think of anything else to say. Hope you didn’t pay too much for that tutoring. You got robbed.”
When she rose, he ducked reflectively. It never paid to underestimate a woman in a snit. But Macy was much too regal to bash him in the head with her plate. Even when he deserved it.
“Get out. I’ve got work to do.”
“Well, yeah. Me, too.” He gestured toward Travis’s file. “Go ahead and get busy. I’ll keep you updated on the discrepancies in the files.”
“Send me an e-mail. You don’t need to work in here.”
“Why would I send you an e-mail when I could just sit here and talk to you?” he asked reasonably.
Her glare was familiar. And infinitely more comfortable to witness than the smile she’d graced him with earlier. “Why does everything have to be an argument with you?”
He was spared the trouble of a response when a knock sounded at the door, followed by Dan Travis’s voice. “Macy, I’ve brought you some dinner.”