by Maggie Price
Regret, she thought again as the familiar ache stirred in her right thigh. Dark, raw regret.
The sound of the door sweeping open had A.J. turning. Michael strode in, his concentration centered on the report in his hand. Sometime in the past two hours he’d shed his suit coat and rolled his starched sleeves up on his forearms. His shirt collar was unbuttoned and his tie loose. His thick, dark hair gleamed beneath the room’s lights.
A.J. expelled a slow breath. If just his entering a room had the effect of a roller coaster dip on her stomach, how the hell was she going to maintain the distance she’d resolved to keep?
“Lieutenant?”
He looked up from the report and glanced around the room. “Anything come in on Hollis yet?”
She shoved her hair behind her shoulders. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know if it had. I was concentrating on Dianna Westfall’s address book and had no idea I was alone in the room until the phone rang.”
He nodded as he pulled his chair out from the conference table. “I’ve got everyone checking leads on Hollis and passing out flyers to the patrol units. The sooner we find him, the better.”
“I...the phone call was for you. I took a message.”
The tightness that she heard in her own voice had his eyes narrowing. “Who called?”
“Your daughter.”
Michael’s expression transformed immediately to one of pleasure as he settled into his chair and grabbed the phone. “I’ll call her back.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?” he asked, then began stabbing in the number without waiting for her answer.
A.J. wrapped her arms around her waist. “I mean, you can try, but they... She was leaving for the airport. I asked her to try to call you from Cancún.”
Michael sat with the receiver pressed to his ear, listening. Moments later he hung up, muttering a ragged oath. “Answering machine. It seems the only time I ever hear my daughter’s voice is on that damn answering machine.”
A.J. had no idea what force it was that drew her across the room to stand beside his chair. All she knew was that to try to resist its pull would have been like standing still in a tornado—impossible to do.
“I’m sorry you missed her.”
“Yeah.” He raked his fingers through his hair, which only heightened his rugged look. “Missing my daughter is the story of my life. When her mother and I were still married, I missed a lot about Megan. Her first word. Her first step. I missed them all, because I let my job take precedence.” He shook his head. “Now, Megan lives two thousand miles away, and I just miss her.”
The stark loneliness of his statement clenched at A.J.’s heart as she slowly lowered herself into the chair beside him. Here was the father she could not picture before. The father whose very voice ached for the daughter he loved.
“She said she can’t wait until she’s old enough to enroll in the academy. She wants to follow in your footsteps.” Her lips curved. “It sounds as if she’s very proud of you.”
Michael swiveled his chair slightly, leaned and rested his elbows on his knees. His firm, capable hands dangled inches from her own knees. “And when she graduates from the academy, I’ll worry every minute she’s on the street.”
“Maybe you can talk her into becoming a crime analyst. She thinks my job is cool.” A.J. paused, then added, “She said to tell you she loves you.”
Michael reached for her hand in a gesture so swift and smooth that A.J. didn’t have time to feel shock. All she felt was the warmth of his flesh against hers, the firmness in his touch, the jolt of desire deep inside her.
“Thank you.” His palm cradled her fingers while his thumb grazed her knuckles in a swift, light caress.
“I...” A.J. couldn’t speak, not while he touched her. Not while he sat inches from her, absorbing her with his eyes.
“You what?”
“I just answered the phone, is all—”
It was as if they both sensed another presence at the same time, their heads swiveling in unison toward the door.
Helene stood half in, half out of the doorway, her dark, sleek suit and hose giving her the look of a leggy black spider. Her gaze was assessing, measuring, her red-glossed mouth set in a thin line.
“Officer St. John,” Michael said as his hand casually slid from A.J.’s and he turned in his chair. “Did you get anything on Hollis?”
Helene cocked her head, sending a cascade of platinum hair down one shoulder. The tension already present in A.J.’s stomach turned into knots under the woman’s cool, scrutinizing gaze.
“Lieutenant, if I’m interrupting—”
“You’re not,” Michael said evenly. “What have you got on Hollis?”
From the nightstand, the clock’s digital display glowed an eerie red 2:00 a.m. Outside, winter blustered, pinging pellets of sleet against the second-story windows. A burglar alarm, triggered by the storm, wailed somewhere in the distance. As he had for three consecutive nights, Michael lay staring at the ceiling’s shifting patterns of black-and-gray shadows while trying to figure out what the hell he was going to do about A.J. Duncan.
Three days, he thought. In the time since he and A.J. visited her ex-sister-in-law’s office and Emily Duncan’s hospital room, A.J. had performed her task force work with cool, controlled efficiency. Now, she spoke to him only about the Westfall case, and only when a memo or E-mail message wouldn’t suffice.
A.J. had accomplished what Michael hadn’t managed. Couldn’t begin to manage. She’d put emotion aside and relegated their relationship to one of business. Which was what he should have done the night she walked into his office in Internal Affairs. But he hadn’t. He’d broken the first law of being a cop—he’d replaced discipline with emotion and gotten involved.
Good, God, had he gotten involved!
Each day he watched her down the length of the report-laden conference table while the subtle nuance of her every movement branded itself in his brain. He had a picture frozen in his mind—A.J. with her head bent over her work, dark, thick hair draping her breasts, molding her curves with intimate detail.
He watched her. And he wanted her.
“Damn!” Michael scrubbed a hand across his face while the thought of those curves sent heat arrowing straight to his loins.
“Get your head on straight, Ryan.”
A.J. wanted distance between them, which was exactly how their relationship had to stay until they resolved the unfinished business of Ken. So why couldn’t he leave it at that? Michael wondered. Why couldn’t he relegate her to some dark part of his subconscious and get on with business? And why the hell did her obvious desire to avoid all but essential interaction with him only fuel his need to demolish the wall she’d built?
The wall intended to keep him out.
“Because you’re crazy about her,” he muttered.
Giving up on any chance of sleep, he sat up and flicked on the lamp beside the clock, illuminating the room in a dim wash of light. The rumpled sheets and pillows around him added to his discontent. There had never been such a cold emptiness to his bed, not even in the weeks after Lauren walked out, ending their marriage.
It sure as hell wasn’t his ex-wife whom he wanted naked beside him now. He wanted A.J. Wanted her hot, silken flesh sealed against his. Wanted to see desire for him glistening in her dark eyes as he lowered himself onto her and sated an urgent, primitive hunger to make her his.
Damn. It was insane, unbelievable, this need he felt for her. He’d held her in his arms once. Tasted her lips once. Yet, in his mind, she was his.
As if sensing his restlessness, the wind picked up, hammering sleet against the windows with an unearthly wail.
Tossing back blankets, he rose and walked across the room, his pajama bottoms riding low on his hips. He paused to push aside the curtains that covered the window over the antique rolltop desk, the one piece of furniture he’d salvaged from his marriage. In the overlapping puddles of security lights, his backyard res
embled a dazzling world of glass. He thought of a long-ago winter night when he’d stood at this window holding his daughter in his arms while promising to take her on a sled ride the following day. But when morning dawned the phone rang and he’d been called in to work. Another opportunity missed, just as he’d missed Megan’s phone call three days ago.
Expelling a slow breath, he popped open the locks on his briefcase and pulled out Billy Hollis’s mug shot.
The persistent drone of the storm faded from his hearing as he concentrated on Hollis’s face. They’d issued a radiogram three days ago, and Hollis still wasn’t in custody. The special projects unit had staked out the church parking lot during Dianna Westfall’s funeral, but her nephew hadn’t shown up to pay his last respects. Not that Hollis’s absence had surprised anyone. But the guy was a hand-to-hand dealer, selling nickel bags on street comers—a profession that didn’t require a vast amount of intelligence in its workers. Unless Hollis had been tipped off that he was hot property and told to lie low, some patrolman should have run across him by now.
Michael stared into the hopeless eyes that glared from the depths of the mug shot. Hollis might be worth questioning, but at this point Michael wasn’t sure he’d had anything to do with his aunt’s death.
And after what Dianna Westfall’s neighbor Pamela Rawlings said when interviewed, Michael wondered if they’d ever clear the case. According to Mrs. Rawlings, it was a wonder Dianna had time for volunteer endeavors, what with all the men she’d brought home over the past year. The neighbor’s assumption that Dianna had invited the men to her mansion for something other than philanthropic endeavors was supported by the dozens of male names listed in Dianna’s address book.
Rolling his shoulders to ease his tight muscles, Michael flicked the mug shot idly back into his briefcase. If the investigation dragged on, if they never made an arrest, he might spend an eternity sitting at one end of a table, wanting the woman at the other. “Hell of a life,” he muttered.
The phone’s sudden ring jarred his senses. He had the receiver against his ear before the second ring could sound. “Ryan.”
“Lieutenant, this is Morales at dispatch. Unit 433 asked me to call. He just picked up the subject of your radiogram.”
“Hollis?”
“Yes.”
Michael grabbed his holstered 9mm Sig Sauer out of the briefcase, then slammed the lid shut. “I’ll be downtown in twenty minutes.”
“You need me to contact anyone else?”
“Sam Rogers and Grant Pierce. Have them meet me there.”
“That it?”
“Call Sky Milano. Tell her we’ll need her to take a blood sample.”
“Got it. Anyone else?”
For a fleeting instant, Michael thought of A.J. But no, there was no reason to call her in. No reason, save for his personal one.
“That’s it. Morales, before you make those calls, get Unit 433 back on the air. Tell him to make sure he reads Hollis his rights.”
Chapter 9
A.J. stood over the bathroom sink, finishing off her makeup with a stroke of blush to her cheeks. It was Saturday. In deference to the department’s relaxed weekend dress code, she’d pulled on a snow white cable-knit sweater and a pair of jeans that clung snugly to her legs. Her dark hair fell in soft waves across her shoulders.
In the mirror’s reflection she could see one side of the door behind her, then a wedge of her bedroom beyond that. The place looked like a burglar had tossed it. Drawers gaped from the bureau, their contents littering the area rug and wood floor. The closet door stood open, every purse, piece of clothing and pair of shoes stripped from its interior. The mattress, void of bedding, lay at an odd angle atop the box springs.
She had searched every pocket, nook and crevice large enough to hold a microcassette tape.
The bedroom had been the last of the rooms she’d explored on her nightly forays through the rambling Victorian brownstone. Other than a dust-laden box of Egyptian bric-a-brac shoved behind the attic staircase that her aunt had thought long lost, A.J. had found nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest Ken had hidden a tape...or anything else for that matter.
Propping her wrist against her ribs, A.J. squinted at the clasp of her watch, which stubbornly refused to snap closed. She blinked, struggling to get the gold band into focus. Her eyes burned, her head felt light. She’d gotten little sleep over the past few nights and she was punchy with fatigue. Her reflection in the bathroom mirror confirmed as much. All the makeup in the world couldn’t conceal the dark smudges beneath her eyes, couldn’t hide the small lines that had settled at the corners of her mouth.
“Duncan, you look like warmed over poop,” she muttered.
It was barely 6:00 a.m. She needed about eight hours of oblivion in her future. Instead, she faced a full day of intense work on the profile of Dianna Westfall’s killer.
And truth was, a full day of forcing her mind to ignore Michael Ryan’s unsettling presence while her body went as tense as strung wire each time she looked at him.
Which was getting harder and harder to avoid.
She’d never realized how appealing a man could look shuffling through a stack of police reports with smooth, economic movements. Or leaning back in a chair, phone caught between his shoulder and cheek, while he thoughtfully shifted a roll of red evidence tape from hand to hand. Or standing before a ceiling-high window, his tall, athletic build silhouetted by the fading light of a December day.
And those eyes. Deep, fathomless blue eyes that, if she didn’t know better, followed her every move.
Scowling into the mirror, she shoved her hands through her hair. “Get a grip!”
She walked out of the bathroom, making a concerted effort to ignore the quickening in her stomach and concentrate instead on the chaos around her. When she got home—however late that was—she’d clean up the mess. And while she straightened out the jumble, she’d figure out where to look next.
“Ken, I know you made a tape,” she said, gesturing her arms in frustration. “Where did you hide it?”
As if an eerie sign from above, her watchband loosened and slithered down her hand.
“Dammit!” Kicking a discarded blouse aside, A.J. moved past the bed while fumbling with the clasp. Her attempt at using her thumbnail to bend the tiny metal hinge left a chip in her crimson fingernail polish.
Reentry Red.
A series of images clicked in her brain, halting her steps.
“My, God!” She blinked, inhaling a shuddering breath. The hazy, unformed image that had plagued her from the moment she first saw the photos of Dianna Westfall’s severed finger settled into sharp focus.
In that time-stopping instant, A.J. knew that Dianna Westfall wasn’t her killer’s first victim. There was another.
The previous night’s sleet storm had left the roads as slick as a toboggan run. It took A.J. nearly an hour to make the drive downtown. She didn’t waste time checking in with the task force, but went directly to Homicide’s small, dimly lit file room.
Glasses perched on her nose, she carried the file on the murdered jogger to the small wooden table centered in the room and flipped open the cover. Ignoring the reports, she went straight for the crime scene photos.
The top one showed the victim, Laura Sawyer, lying facedown, her long auburn braid tangled in the thick underbrush of the vacant lot where she died. She was naked, except for blood-spattered socks and running shoes. In the distance, a For Sale sign leaned in front of a house under construction.
The crime scene techs had taken numerous photos, but wildflowers and weeds partially obscured the body. A.J. sifted through half the stack before she found close-ups of Sawyer’s hands. Nerves humming, she shuffled to the morgue shots of Sawyer, sans bloody socks and shoes, and found the photo she wanted. “You did her, too,” she said, her voice quavering on the stale air. Her fingers tightened on the photos. “You did her, and I’ve got you. I’ve got you—”
“A.J.?”
&
nbsp; She jolted and whirled, slamming her knee against the table leg. “Lord!”
Michael raised a hand. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“It’s okay.” She leaned to rub her knee through her jeans, sending a slither of dark hair down her arm. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
He walked toward her, pausing at the edge of the table. “I stopped by my office and saw the light on under the door in here.” His mouth hitched up on one side. “Thought I’d better check to see what crazed detective was working at this hour of the morning.”
He was wearing khaki slacks and a smoky blue sweater that matched his eyes. The shadow of stubble that darkened his chin told her he hadn’t taken time to shave. He looked rugged, with a hint of wildness mixed in. The effect of his presence went straight to A.J.’s stomach like a hot lance.
He glanced at the open file. “What’s going on?”
“Do you remember the jogger homicide?” she asked as his eyes came back to hers. The fiery coil in her belly had left her voice a rasp. She cleared her throat and forced her muscles to relax. She was a professional, she had a job to do. She refused to let her emotions rule her, refused to allow Michael Ryan’s proximity to tie her in knots. “We talked about the case once.”
He slid one hip onto the table. “As I recall, we talked around the case,” he countered easily. “When I asked you about the particulars, you referred me to Detective Cook.” Michael folded his arms across his chest. “He’s still on leave, and because of the task force I haven’t had a chance to read the report you compiled. If you’ve got something, you’ll need to bring me up to date.”
She glanced at the file, wishing she’d had time to go through the reports before she presented her theory to Michael. But if she was right, spare time wasn’t in the formula.
Anticipation had her turning to pace the length of the small room. The heels of her leather flats clicked on the tile floor as she pulled details of the case from her memory. “The jogger, Laura Sawyer, died sometime after dawn the last day of August,” A.J. began, her hands gesturing as she spoke. “A boy playing with his dog found her body in a field that same morning.”