Baby Jane Doe

by Julie Miller

  Masterson nodded agreement. “Early-morning strike. Minimal hostage risk.”

  Shauna wriggled a few inches of freedom from beneath him. “Those hostages should be our first concern. I need to get out and help the guard.”

  She had both arms free and was pushing up before the detective cinched his arm around her waist and pulled her back into the heated curve of his body. “Look who they took out first. I don’t think these men would be too impressed to find out we’re cops.”

  Turning her cheek into the carpet, Shauna looked into Eli Masterson’s cool brown eyes. “You know who I am?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She supposed that was the curse of having such a public face. Detective Masterson thought he was earning brownie points. Fat chance. On a more charitable note, maybe he was just being a team player. If that was the case, she wasn’t cutting him any slack. He should be obeying the chain of command.

  Shauna pried his arm from her waist. “Then chances are, they do, too. Keep your sidearm holstered and don’t try to be a hero.” She got her knees beneath her and wrenched free before Masterson could nab her again. “I’m a trained negotiator. I’ve dealt with situations exactly like this one. I’ve already paged—”

  “Backup’s already on the way,” he informed her. His hard exhale matched her own. “Stay put. Let these guys take what they want and walk out of here. They won’t get far.”

  “You two. Shut up.” The antsy thirtysomething, whose street-tough look lacked the bulk of his partner’s Kevlar vest, leveled his Smith & Wesson at Shauna’s forehead, silencing the debate. “Get behind the counter with the others.”

  But Shauna was insistent. She looked up along the gun barrel to his nervous, darting eyes. “That guard needs medical assistance before he bleeds out. I have first-aid training. You don’t want this to turn into a murder scene. Let me help.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Shauna slowly rose to her feet, keeping her eyes on his the entire time.

  “Okay. Hey! Not you, big guy.” Shauna froze as he swung his gun toward Masterson, who deliberately ignored the order and stood up beside her. “Don’t move!”

  Though he held his hands up in surrender, Masterson towered a good four or five inches over the armed man, and the cold mask of his expression didn’t so much as blink at the gun pointed his way. “I can help the other guard,” he offered.

  The man with the gun contradicted his own order and jabbed the gun into Masterson’s chest, knocking him back a step. “Get behind the counter.”

  “Get him back here. Now!” The man in the trench coat appeared to be in charge of the robbery. He left the banker to cram what stacks of bills would fit into a briefcase already stuffed with files. He pointed his snub-nosed rifle at them as he whirled around the corner. “Do what we say and live. Okay, lady—help the cop.” He shoved aside the other thief to personally back Masterson behind the counter. “You? Move!”

  Though he’d mistakenly referred to the fallen guard as a member of KCPD, Shauna wasn’t about to correct him. She hurried over to the wounded man, peeled off her jacket and pressed it against the hole in his chest, murmuring soothing words when he groaned in pain.

  The guard’s gun was still in his holster, within arm’s reach—unlike her own weapon, which was ten feet away inside her purse. Of course, she shouldn’t try to play hero, either. Not with hostages involved. Not when they were up against a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun with a fresh clip of fifteen bullets. And if they robbed the patrons, went through pockets and purses and discovered badges and guns…

  She prayed KCPD’s response time was as good as she’d claimed it to be in her last television interview.

  “Is he gonna be okay?”

  Shauna started at the perp’s voice beside her. But the sniff of gunpowder residue clinging to him and his gun kept her from feeling any compassion at his remorseful tone. She didn’t mince words. “He needs an ambulance.” She tipped her head to the side, indicating the guard lying by the shattered front door. “I need to check him, too.”

  “He’s moanin’. Breathin’ normal. So he can’t be hurt that bad.”

  “Internal injuries are hard to evaluate just by looking at a man.” She let the shooter see her bloody hand before she wiped it on her skirt and smoothed the guard’s white hair off his forehead. “Please let me call the paramedics.”

  “No can do.” She could smell the sweat, fueled by fear, on him. “We’re almost done. We’ll be out in a minute and then you can call whoever the hell you want.” He turned and shouted over his shoulder. “You got all the papers the boss wanted?”

  “Shut up, bozo!” the man in the trench coat yelled. “Why don’t you give them our names, too, while you’re at it?”

  Shauna could make out Detective Masterson’s feet sticking out from the end of the counter. He’d cooperated by obeying the command to lie facedown on the floor. Thank God he wasn’t stirring up any more trouble. She also caught a glimpse of movement outside. A uniformed officer moving some curious onlookers who’d gathered across the street. She hoped his silent arrival had escaped the thieves’ notice. And that he wasn’t alone.

  The man in the trench coat stepped over Masterson’s prone body and leveled the gun at the banker who closed and locked the briefcase. “Is that everything?”

  “Just like we…discussed.” He stuttered when he got an eyeful of the gun barrel. “What are you doing?”

  “Following orders.” He pulled the trigger.

  The banker slumped. Hostages shrieked in panic and cursed.

  “Hell, man, are you crazy?” The man with the gun next to Shauna didn’t seem to know where to point his gun now. “You said we were just gonna scare the crap out of ’em and nobody would get hurt.”

  “I lied.” The other man turned his rifle and fired.

  Shauna ducked as the shot hit the man square in the chest and knocked him off his feet. She didn’t bother checking to see if she could help him. She knew a dead man when she saw one.

  And she knew she was next.

  Though she was already moving, the sinking certainty slowed her reaction time. When Shauna lifted her head to locate the dead man’s weapon, she looked up into the glint of fluorescent light reflecting off the shooter’s sunglasses. She didn’t need to see the eyes behind the lenses. They were focused on her.

  Just like his gun.

  Nanoseconds ticked off like eons.

  He smiled.

  Shauna dove for the floor.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  A gust of steel-tipped wind rushed past her ear.

  But the bullet never hit her.

  “KCPD!” With the clean precision of a surgical blade, Eli Masterson put a bullet center-mass in the shooter’s chest, knocking him off balance. The shooter stumbled backward but didn’t fall. “Drop your weapon!”

  But the man ignored the order and swung his gun toward the unexpected attack.

  “Cease fire!” Staying low to the floor, Shauna picked up her cell phone and threw herself against the counter, keeping her back to the only protection the lobby offered her. “Dammit, Masterson, we’ve got hostages. Cease fire!”

  “Negative!”

  She redialed her 911 call and snagged her purse to retrieve her service weapon. From the low angle of the fire, Detective Masterson was down. Was he hit or had he taken cover?

  “Masterson? Report!”

  Shauna crawled to the end of the counter for a visual. The gunman lunged toward the elevator doors, chased by a hail of bullets, unable to return fire. Two more rounds hit the back of his trench coat. The man jerked, but stayed on his feet. The elevator doors opened. He jumped inside. Swung around. Raised his gun and grinned in triumph. “You’re out of ammo.”

  Idiot!

  She could kick herself for forgetting. “He’s wearing a Kevlar!”

  Before she could get her own gun aimed, Masterson rolled. As the doors drifted shut, he snatched up the dead thief’s discarded Smith & Wesson and
put a bullet in the killer’s knee, taking him down.

  The man in the elevator screamed in agony as Shauna and Masterson scrambled to their feet and approached, guns drawn.

  “KCPD,” Shauna announced in a clear, firm voice. “Drop your weapon and come out.”

  “Like I could, you bitch.” Several more obscenities tainted the air, condemning KCPD and her own parentage, as well as promised retribution against the man who’d crippled him.

  “Shut up.” Detective Masterson’s big brown shoe blocked the doors before they could close. With his gun trained on the wounded man, he pushed the doors open and picked up the rifle. He handed it to Shauna before stepping inside to lock the doors open and drag the man out into the lobby. “The lady said to move.”

  With the man’s curses abruptly silenced by something whispered in his ear, Detective Masterson pinned him to the floor, patted him down for other weapons and cuffed him. “He’s got no ID on him.” He tossed aside the sunglasses and jerked the perp’s chin up toward Shauna. “You recognize him?”

  Icy gray eyes like that she would remember. “No. But we’ll run his prints if he doesn’t cooperate.”

  “Like I’m gonna—”

  Masterson ground the man’s face into the carpet, silencing him.

  By the time the detective was on his feet again and holstering his gun, Shauna had retrieved the briefcase and given the dispatcher instructions for police and paramedics to move in.

  Maintaining his protective stance over the perp, Detective Masterson glanced down over the jut of his shoulder at her. “You all right?”

  Other than some bruises and rug burns she wouldn’t complain about, Shauna was in one piece. She nodded. “You?”

  “He had you in his sights.”

  Shauna pretended his deep-pitched admonition didn’t send an ominous chill through her veins. “I’m fine.”

  She took note of the two-inch cut oozing blood along the edge of his short, coffee-colored hair. But, for the moment, she ignored his forehead and watched the piercing intensity of his dark eyes cool to golden brown detachment. More than his 20/20 aim with the gun, they hadn’t missed a detail of all that had transpired here. Not even the personal threat to her life.

  Which Shauna refused to comment on. It was all part of the job, right?

  She tucked her phone and the gun in the waistband of her tweed skirt and stuck out her hand for an official introduction. “I’m Shauna Cartwright.”

  “I know.”

  She waited until he took her hand. His grip was as strong and firm as the rest of him had proved to be. And though an often-ignored part of her wished she was meeting such a seasoned, attractive man under different circumstances, she knew succumbing to her feminine longings was out of the question.

  “Eli, was it?” He nodded. “May I see your badge, Detective?”

  A scoffing sound marred his smile as he let her hand go to reach inside his jacket. “I heard you were a tough one for rules and regs. Are this morning’s events going into my file?”

  Shauna ignored the taunt and quickly read the ID beside his badge. Eli Masterson. Thirty-six years old. Fourteen years on the force, the majority of them having filled a necessary but difficult role.

  “Internal Affairs?” She glanced down at the man moaning at their feet. “And you made that shot?” She indicated the small gold star on his ID before handing it back. “Why would an I.A. detective maintain his sharpshooter’s badge? You planning to transfer to S.W.A.T.?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Does Captain Chang,” she referred to the chief of the I.A. division, “have this much trouble getting you to cooperate with your fellow officers?”

  “Yes, ma’am, he does.”

  She almost laughed at his dry delivery of the truth, and though she appreciated a man with a smart wit, she never allowed the humor to soften the taut curve of her own lips. “Well…, thank you for saving my life, Eli. You saved all our lives today.”

  He seemed hesitant to accept her praise. “No problem.”

  Leaning in, she caught him off guard as she nabbed his handkerchief from the pocket where he’d stuffed his wallet. She surprised him further by pressing the cotton to the wound on his forehead. “Make sure one of the medics clears you before you leave. I can’t tell if that’s a shrapnel cut or a bullet graze, but it looks like you could use a stitch or two.”

  It felt almost intimate, like a woman caring for her man, to stand there in the midst of the bustling recovery team, gently tending Eli’s wound. She felt herself warming beneath the scrutiny of his gaze as he tried to figure out whether her kindness was genuine or a ploy he should guard against. His fingers brushed against hers as he took over staunching the wound and retreated a step. “I’ll do that, ma’am.”

  “Good.” Wouldn’t it be nice to skip the ma’am’s for once and just be a woman with a man? But she was more than that. And the suspicion in Eli Masterson’s eyes said he knew it, too. So she pulled rank. The way he expected. The way she was supposed to. “You got away with playing cowboy today, Masterson. But when I tell you to do something, I expect it to happen. The chain of command needs to be followed, no matter what the situation is.”

  “I’ll remember that next time.”

  “Please do.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’ll expect a report from you tomorrow.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Shauna watched him turn and disappear into the crowd of officers, medics, CSI techs and curious thrill-seekers bustling about outside.

  “Damn,” she muttered, spotting the deputy commissioner, Michael Garner, breaking through the same crowd and flashing his ID to the scene commander. If the main office already knew she’d been involved in a shoot-out, that meant the reporters would be following shortly. Once the press got wind of this, her children would find out. They’d worry. But Seth and Sarah were adults now. She could handle them.

  What worried her was the possibility that he would find out. He seemed to know every secret about her life. Shauna shivered with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air or the scene around her.

  When Michael waved to her and hurried over with concern shining in his eyes, she wished she could disappear as easily as Eli Masterson had. Michael certainly was an efficient one. He’d wasted no time in getting here. She glanced down at her bloody hands and the stains on her cuffs and skirt. Her appearance should earn a few personal questions she was in no mood to answer. If she asked, Michael would organize the reports from this deadly fiasco and handle the press. She could go home and clean up, lock her doors and isolate herself from the death and destruction surrounding her.

  But she couldn’t ask.

  KCPD’s Commissioner of Police didn’t have that luxury.

  Chapter Two

  “Masterson.”

  Eli topped off the coffee in his plastic cup before acknowledging the unmistakable sound of authority behind him. “Captain Taylor.”

  “What brings you to my precinct?”

  Though he doubted running into each other in the break room was a coincidence, Eli took his time before stepping aside for the patriarch of the Fourth Precinct to fill a Kansas City Chiefs mug with the thick, steaming brew. “Routine follow-up on the shooting by your man, Banning.”

  No sense wasting pleasantries. There was no love lost between Internal Affairs and the Taylors since Eli and his former partner, Joe Niederhaus, had investigated the captain’s cousin, CSI Mac Taylor, four years ago. Especially since his old buddy Joe had done such a bang-up job of framing Mac and nearly getting Mac and his future wife killed. Turned out Joe was the one taking bribes, stealing evidence and blackmailing fellow cops.

  Eli had been a much younger detective then, naively blinded by loyalty to his veteran partner and unable to see the truth until it was too late. There was nothing naive left inside Eli anymore. And though he’d been the one to put the cuffs on Joe and had even, reluctantly, testified against him in court, several m
embers of KCPD judged Eli guilty by association. He already triggered guarded suspicion whenever he entered a roomful of cops. He was Internal Affairs—the cop who policed other cops and held them accountable to the highest standards of their sworn duty. But there were some, like Captain Mitch Taylor, who seemed to take their distrust a little more personally.

  Polite and professional as the captain might be, he wasn’t here to make Eli feel welcome. “Will anything go into Banning’s permanent file?”

  “Everything points to a clean shoot.” Eli chucked an empty creamer into the trash, stalling for privacy while two younger plainclothes officers waltzed in and grabbed a snack and a seat at the table on the far side of the break room. After a friendly scuffle over ownership of the remote control, they turned on the television and debated the merits of each show as they scrolled through the channels. “But any detective who’s been involved in more than one previous incident deserves a thorough double check.”

  Captain Taylor watched and waited as well before adding, “I hear you’re nothing but thorough.”

  “I do my job. I do it well.” Except for the glaring error of not seeing his partner’s corruption, Eli’s reputation made it a fact, not a boast.

  Taylor sipped his coffee, but there was no nonchalance in the steely set of his shoulders. “Just make sure you do it right. Banning’s one of my best investigators. I don’t want him stuck behind a desk indefinitely.”

  “Barring any glitch in the paperwork, you can have him on the streets by lunchtime.”

  The teasing scuffle on the far side of the room grew louder.

  “Your mama’s on TV again, Cartwright.” The taller of the two young officers, a lanky smart-mouth with a shaved head, razzed his partner. “You know, if she wasn’t old enough to be our mother, and I wasn’t so damn handsome—”

  “She is my mother,” the shorter one articulated. “And you’re not that good-lookin’. So put your eyeballs back…”

  It wasn’t their friendly, ribald banter that caught Eli’s ear so much as recognition of the name. Cartwright.

  As in Shauna Cartwright, owner of the tempting backside pressed to his groin in the heat of gunfire, and the clean, subtle scent that had fueled some forbidden dreams last night. As in Commissioner Cartwright, the memory of whose laser-sharp tongue and official rank had rudely awakened him from his fitful sleep and sent him into the bathroom for a mind-clearing shower before dawn.