Tierney crossed her arms over her chest. “She has the autopsy reports in there, Kipling. The crime scene photographs. I don’t know where she got them, but…what happened to your family was bad.”
“I’m aware.”
“Whoever did this, whether it was her brother or someone else, they’re bad news. You could be walking into a trap.”
I picked the duffle off of the bed and turned toward her. “I appreciate your concern—”
“You’re part of the family here. We are all part of this family. I can’t just watch you walk out of here and into this kind of trouble.”
“You can and you will.” I gestured behind her, to where Alexander was watching us from across the sitting room. “Besides, I think Alex there would prefer if you keep your involvement in all this down to a minimum.”
“Kipling…”
I kissed her forehead lightly. “Thank you for your help. But what’s done is done.”
I walked off, joining Harley where she was waiting at the top of the stairs. We slipped out of the house through a side door, took my SUV, leaving her car parked in its spot in the large garage. She settled back in the passenger seat, her legs tucked up under her and her head resting on the window in the door. She hugged her accordion file to her chest as if it was a teddy bear or something.
I wanted to reach over and touch her hand; I wanted to reassure her. I had to remind myself that the only reason I knew her was because she was related to the man who confessed to killing my family.
A kind of important detail if you asked me.
“Why aren’t you at work?”
She glanced sleepily at me. “They gave me time off.”
“I didn’t realize they gave residents time off.”
She lay her head back down. “They don’t. But when they release you from the program for taking too many personal days, you get all the time off you want.”
“You were fired?”
“I was released.”
“Do you really think that’s what he wanted?”
She glanced over at me. “What do you care what Mickey might or might not have wanted?”
“I don’t. But you do.”
She adjusted her position, pulling her legs out from under her bottom, leaning forward a little as if her stomach had begun to hurt.
“No one else cares about him,” she said softly. “My mom gave up on him long before he confessed to this. Wouldn’t even show her face at any of his hearings, wouldn’t call the prosecutor and pull the family card. If she’d just…but she didn’t. I was the only one.”
“Sounds to me that he didn’t want your involvement.”
“Maybe not. But I couldn’t just walk away and let my brother rot in jail while I was going to school and attending parties and living my life like it didn’t matter.”
“I don’t think anyone ever accused you of not caring.”
“You did.”
I eased the SUV onto the 290, the small, two-lane highway that would take us into the heart of Houston. I glanced at her reflection in the windshield, the way it distorted her face but still reflected her beauty in a way that seemed almost impossible.
“I accused you of not caring about Jesse and Grace. Not your brother.”
“You can’t even say his name.”
“I try not to. It makes him too human.”
She was quiet for a moment, sitting back a little, still clutching at that file. “I’ve studied them,” she finally said, softly. “I’ve looked at their pictures, studied the autopsy files, the crime scene photos. I’ve studied every aspect of what happened that night, of what the evidence shows.”
“You’ve studied one night of their lives. You don’t know anything about the rest of their lives.”
“And you only know the bad side of Mickey. You don’t know all the times he came to my rescue in one way or another, the way he would lay in my bed with me and read me bedtime stories, the way he would hold my hand when I went to the dentist because I was afraid of what he might do to me if I were alone. You don’t know anything about him except what his arrest records show.”
I gripped the steering wheel a little too hard, tugging at it until the car swerved just slightly in the lane. Anger blew through me because, quite simply, I didn’t want to know shit about Mickey Connors. I knew he was a confessed killer. That was enough for me.
“Did you know Grace was just three weeks short of her third birthday? Did you know that I was working like crazy to make sure I was home in time for that? Did you know that I talked to my wife over Skype just a few hours before this happened, before that…before whoever broke into my house and did those things to her? That she was laughing and joking with me, that she was so looking forward to my return? That we had all these things we were planning on doing…”
I stopped, afraid of the frog that had suddenly jumped into my throat.
“Jesse had never wanted anything more than to be a mom,” I said when I felt like I’d regained control over my emotions. “She told me on our first date that she wanted a dozen children, and if that scared me, I should run for the hills.”
I smiled at the memory because we were already sneaking around, hiding our relationship from my boss, her father. If I’d wanted to run for the hills, I would have done it long before then.
“She got pregnant on our honeymoon. Did you know that?”
“I’m a doctor. I did the math.”
I glanced at her. “I got nine months with my baby, nine uninterrupted months while I worked at Fort Jackson. But then they called me to Afghanistan. Eight months here, eight months there. I got maybe three months with her from the time she was just beginning to crawl until the night she died. A year added together. That’s all I had with my daughter.” I eased the SUV around a slow-moving car ahead of us, my thoughts so ragged that I was focused on the windshield, but I was seeing things that never really existed. “She would be thirteen now. Going to junior high, flirting with boys. And, if she grew into the kind of girl her mother was, I’d be knocking those boys off with a pretty big stick.”
“I’m sorry, Kipling.”
I glanced over at her. “She was more than just one of the victims in your brother’s case. She was my daughter. My reason for getting out of bed every morning and my last thought when I went to bed every night. She and her mother were everything to me.”
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
“Don’t you see that we both lost something in all this?” Her voice was raw. She looked over at me, anger flashing in her eyes that I could see even in the darkness of the car. “Mickey had nothing to do with this. But by confessing, he walked away from me, from my life. He wasn’t at my high school graduation; he wasn’t at my college graduation. He wasn’t just a phone call away when I needed someone to talk to. He wasn’t a part of my life anymore despite the few visits I got to share with him, the little bit of time I got with him.”
“But your time with your brother is more than I’ll ever have with my wife and daughter.”
She nodded. “You definitely got the shorter end of the stick here. But what if Mickey was innocent? What if the real killer just got a free pass because of what my brother did? Doesn’t that piss you off? I know it does me.”
“Do you think your brother is complacent in this at all?”
She snorted, her eyes moving to the side window, as the hills and orchards and rich fields of south central Texas flew by.
“He confessed. If he hadn’t…but I really think he had a good reason for doing it. At least, I think he thought it was a good reason at the time.”
“A man would have to be a goddamned idiot to confess to such a crime.”
She chuckled a little. “No one ever accused Michael Warren Connors of being smart.”
She settled back down against the window, her eyes sliding shut after a little while. We arrived in Houston a little after one, the big city very close to rolling up the streets as we pulled up to the first hotel I saw. I
went inside to get a room only to discover they had only one room left. A room with a king-sized bed.
“There’s a convention in town,” the apologetic clerk said. “You’d probably have to go to Katy to get something else.”
“Okay. We’ll take it.”
I drove around to the back of the hotel and parked up close to the building, to a place where the security cameras would be sure to catch anything that might happen near the car. You never knew when trouble might come looking for you.
I grabbed my duffle and tapped on Harley’s window. She was in something of a daze as I led the way to the interior corridor and the elevators that would led us to our room. I was even nice enough to get her bag out of the back since she seemed too tired to realize she’d likely need it. She never said a word about the single bed, just fell into it, pausing long enough to kick her shoes off her dainty feet before sliding them under the heavy comforter and falling back into deep sleep.
I watched her for a minute, annoyed with her assumption that the bed was hers. I dumped my stuff and shrugged off my jacket, loosening the collar of my button-down shirt donned for the ceremony of the evening. I wanted a shower, but I was just as exhausted as she was—probably more emotionally than physically, but it all felt the same.
“To hell with it,” I muttered to myself, as I climbed into the bed beside her, a couple of pillows shoved into the wide space between us. I was asleep in an instant, the realization that this was the first time I’d lain with a woman since my wife just a tickle at the back of my mind.
Chapter 2
At the Compound
“I need to tell David,” Tierney said.
They’d only been gone a minute when she charged the stairs. He stepped into her path, pulling her aside with his hands on her upper arms.
“He asked you not to.”
“But he’s going to need all the help he can get.” She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “You didn’t see the stuff in that accordion file. It’s bad, Alexander.”
“But it’s Kipling’s business.”
“He came to me because he needed help. What kind of a friend would I be if I didn’t offer it to him?”
“I don’t want you getting involved in this.”
Tierney reached up and touched the side of Alexander’s face, stroking it gently. “I love you, babe, but this is my thing. And that girl—she had strong evidence in that file. Kipling’s going to need all the help he can get.”
He relented, reluctantly stepping away. Tierney rushed down the stairs, nearly running headlong into David as he carried Ricki up the stairs.
“Hey!” Ricki said, laughter in her eyes. “I was wondering where everyone had gone. Is Kipling hiding up here, too?”
“He’s gone,” Tierney said, catching David’s eyes. “Something’s happened that I need to talk to you about.”
David seemed to understand. He just inclined his head, moving around Tierney to get Ricki up to their bedroom. She waited, pacing in the sitting room, aware of Alexander watching her and feeling a little uncertain because he didn’t know what to do to help her.
She loved him even more for that.
They’d been together for less than a year, but she couldn’t remember what her life had been like before him. And she couldn’t imagine what it would be like without him in it. For the moment, she was perfectly content for things to go on as they were, them living together in his little cottage here on the property, working together, though most often on separate cases. She loved what Gray Wolf Security did; she loved that she could help people in a much more productive way here than she ever had as a defense attorney. And she loved the people who worked here, felt as though they were more family to her than the father who’d reluctantly—if only partially—claimed her and the mother who gave up everything for her.
David stepped out of the door that led the way to his private space, his hands shoved into his front pockets as he came over to join Tierney by the windows.
“Is this about Kipling?”
She inclined her head. “This girl showed up tonight, the sister of the man who confessed to the murders of Kipling’s family?”
David nodded. “Mickey Connors. He was a drug addict who broke into the house to get money for drugs.”
Tierney chewed on the inside of her lip. “The sister thinks he was innocent, and she brought along a lot of evidence. It seems to prove her assertions.”
“She showed it to Kipling?”
“Some of it. What he was willing to look at.”
“And?”
Tierney looked out the window, watched Ingram and his little family going out to their newly renovated cottage. For a brief second—not the first one—she wondered if David would do the same to Alexander’s cottage if they got married and decided to have kids.
“Kipling was obviously upset. But then he decided to go to Houston with this woman to see what they could find out. I think he was hoping to prove she was wrong while, at the same time, protect her from whatever she might learn.”
David was quiet for a long moment. “He must have thought her evidence was credible.”
“It was. I looked it over. She could have gotten the man out of jail if he hadn’t been killed before the DNA testing came back.”
David’s eyebrows rose. “He’s dead?”
“Killed in prison a few weeks ago.”
“Do you remember what all was in there? Do you know what they’re going to be looking for when they get there?”
“A drug dealer the sister thinks is the one who paid her brother to confess.”
“Do you have a name?”
Tierney hesitated a moment, trying to remember what she’d read in some of the papers in the file. “Jaime Hernandez.”
“Okay.”
David started to walk away, but Tierney grabbed his arm.
“The sister also mentioned that this drug dealer worked for the Russian mafia. Just…thought you should know.”
David’s eyebrows knitted together, but he just nodded.
“Go to bed. Tomorrow will probably be a long day.”
***
David walked into his bedroom, a laptop in his hands. His wife watched him, curiosity clearly written all over her face.
“What’s up?”
“I need you to do research on a drug dealer called Jaime Hernandez.”
“Because…”
“It looks like he might be involved in the murder of Kipling’s family.”
Ricki immediately sat up, adjusting her pillows so that she was still on her left side, but she was sitting up enough to see the computer. She instantly began to type, loving the feel of being productive again after all her time in bed. David paced, his mind racing with the information Tierney had given him.
“What is it?” Ricki finally asked, reluctantly looking away from the computer.
“Tierney said that this Mickey Connors’ sister mentioned that this drug dealer worked for the Russian mafia. You don’t suppose it could be the same drug cartel that caused so much trouble for Ash and Mina back a few years ago, do you?”
Ricki felt the tension rush through her shoulders at the thought. It had been a bad situation. Dimitri, the son of the Russian leader who’d been gunned down by one of Ash’s operatives, kidnapped Ash’s girlfriend—who was now his wife—and forced him to go after them, ending up with most of the Russian’s dead.
It had been a tense time, one that colored much of the first months of David and Ricki’s marriage.
“You should probably call Ash. He’ll want to know what’s going on.”
David nodded. Ricki watched, as he tugged his cell phone out of his back pocket and dialed the number. David and Ash had a complicated relationship as siblings, but when it came to things like this, he knew Ash would be there for him. But Ricki could see that David was reluctant to pull his big brother back into the fire he’d only pulled himself out of a few years ago. Especially now that there were children involved.
But that
was what family did. They were there for each other in the good times and the bad. And Ash would be the first to point that out.
Chapter 3
Kipling
I woke to the sound of the shower running and, for an instant, I thought it was Jesse. I nearly called out to her, the idea of climbing out of bed and joining her too tempting to resist—even though I knew she wouldn’t like that. Jesse was a confident woman except when it came to her own nudity. She didn’t even like for me to look at her in the privacy of our own bed. I think she got completely naked once while we were making love. She preferred to keep things mysterious, she had told me. I always thought it had more to do with her father’s strict rules regarding modesty. It was something that bothered me—I wanted to see my beautiful wife in the entirety of her beauty—but I lived with it because it was a part of the whole that made her the love of my life.
The bathroom door opened as I lay there, thinking about Jesse, but it wasn’t my wife who stepped out. It was Harley—with nothing but the thin towel the hotel had provided wrapped around her curves.
“Forgot my bra,” she said, crossing to the low table by the window where her bag rested.
I couldn’t help but watch her. The light coming in through the window made that towel all but translucent. She was a little too far on the thin side, but her curves were nothing to shake a finger at. She had a nice, round ass and full hips that somehow managed to look narrow in her tight jeans. But here…I could almost see myself moving up behind her, using those lovely hips as a handle to pull her back against me, could almost feel the warmth of her flesh against my own hips, the moist heat of her cunt as I—
And then she turned around.
Her belly was flat, firm, where the towel stuck against it, her breasts so heavy that the towel couldn’t contain them completely. She had one thin arm holding the thin material of the towel against them, but it only forced them to push up under her throat, making them seem even fuller than they really were. And the towel was slipping, the top edge of her right areola peeking out. It was dark and puckered, suggesting her nipple was just erect just under the curve of her wrist.
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