The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set

by Danielle Girard

  “But then that thing happened at the banquet,” Tim said. “I thought we were fine, and then she blew me off again.”

  “There must have been something in between her office and the banquet,” she pressed. “What happened?”

  “There was nothing,” he said. “I swear. It’s like there are two of her—one hot, one cold. It’s not the first time. She does this from time to time—kind of freaks out and distances herself. But, it got to me this time. I was furious.”

  Jamie noticed how he spoke of Natasha in the present tense. Like she wasn’t dead. He still loved her. “And you hadn’t talked since you were in her office?”

  “No.”

  She shook her head. It didn’t make any sense. “So after the banquet you went back?”

  “I went out for drinks with Marshall and Ramirez then Ramirez dropped me off.”

  Marshall was the captain of homicide. An ideal alibi in a murder investigation, but she had a feeling Marshall wasn’t going to be able to provide an alibi for Tim. Natasha could have been killed after Tim got back at the station.

  “And after Ramirez dropped you off?”

  “I saw her car in the lot, so I went up to her office. I called her name, but she didn’t answer. I walked in. The office was dark and I saw her on the floor. I leaned down to check her and someone hit me.”

  “Did you see the attacker?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you hear anything?”

  He glanced up. “Yeah. He said something.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Stupid bastard.’” Tim’s eyes widened. “I think he stuttered it, actually.”

  “Stuttered?”

  Tim nodded.

  “Did you tell all this to the police?”

  “Yeah,” he said, deflated. “I told them.”

  Jamie tried piecing it together. It was enough to charge him. The blow to the head was hard to explain. He couldn’t really have given it to himself, but maybe they thought it had happened in a struggle with her. “Do they have anything else?”

  “They talked to her neighbor about the fight.”

  “And that’s all?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Tim.”

  “I wrote her a note. I gave it to her when I was leaving her office that day—before the banquet.”

  The guard appeared behind Tim. He pointed to his watch.

  Jamie put a finger up. “One minute.” She looked back at Tim. “What kind of note?”

  He didn’t answer.

  The guard stepped forward, took Tim’s arm. Tim tried to pull free.

  Jamie stood up and rapped on the window to get Tim’s attention. “What did the note say?”

  The guard yanked Tim to his feet. The phone clattered against the glass.

  Jamie banged against the thick plastic window. “Answer me,” she shouted.

  Tim shook his head, kept silent.

  “Christ, what did the note say?” she yelled.

  His words were barely a whisper. They struck her ears like thunder. “That I couldn’t live without her.”

  Chapter 12

  Hailey Wyatt parked the department’s brown Taurus in a spot at the far end of Washington Square below Russian Hill. The residential neighborhood was quiet at lunchtime.

  Anywhere else, she would have flipped down the police lights on her sun visor and parked in the red. Not here. When she was here, she didn’t want to call attention to her car. Or herself.

  They always arrived separately. She always left first.

  Her rules, not his.

  There was too much at stake professionally and privately to get caught.

  She sat in the car, stared across toward Bruce’s building, wondering the same thing she always did when looking at this view. Why had she come?

  There was plenty to keep her occupied with Natasha’s murder. CSU and the lab were scrambling to solidify the evidence against Tim Worley. She and her team were interviewing everyone to identify any witnesses. Though they were trying to narrow the window, the time of death was currently estimated between ten p.m. and two a.m. Hailey had to believe someone saw something.

  It was always that way.

  There was always a case that required her attention, more to do to finish off the workload, tie up one murder as another landed on her desk.

  This one was worse.

  This was the murder of a police inspector.

  Everyone was putting in one hundred and ten percent. The pressure was as heavy as she’d ever felt it. And despite all that—or perhaps because of it—Hailey was here.

  John had kissed her goodbye that morning. They’d had a good night as a family. Board games followed by baths for the girls before bed. It was peaceful, comfortable. No talk of campaigns—neither John’s, nor Jim’s. No work talk at all. Just homemade popcorn and Frozen for the umpteenth time.

  So why did she do this? Why wasn’t that life enough?

  She imagined how she’d grown up—the comings and goings of her mother’s men. Men Hailey never knew, a long line of shadows whose faces never had the chance to imprint. That had been her mother’s choice. Not to keep those men around. She didn’t want a partner; aside from the occasional companionship, relegated to the hours when her daughter was sleeping, she didn’t want companionship.

  Hailey wasn’t her mother. Nor did she blame her mother for her own failings. That would be pointless.

  She knew the answer was in that past.

  Giving in to her desire, Hailey stepped from the car and crossed through the park. The sun cut between two fat clouds that looked like unshorn sheep grazing in a blue pasture. A woman in sweatpants ate a McDonald’s hamburger and fed bread to pigeons. She spoke to them in a low jabber that Hailey associated with mental illness. The pigeons didn’t seem to mind.

  The woman reeled her arm back over her head and threw bread to the far reaches of the flock like a fly fisherman casting. She paid no attention to Hailey.

  Head down, Hailey hiked the steep block up Union Street, then turned into the familiar marble façade on August Aly. She stared at the bell, felt more guilt. Rang apartment number 10. The door buzzed and clicked open. Without a word, she climbed the two flights. The halls were empty. His door was cracked.

  The first time she’d made this trek, a nest of rattlesnakes had been hatching in her belly. Now, there was the eager flutter of a dozen butterflies.

  She let herself in, closed the door behind her, turned the lock, and made her way into the kitchen. As she had been doing for eight months.

  Bruce drank ice water from a tall plastic cup, handed it to her. She took a thirsty gulp before he pulled it from her hands. He set it down with a splash and yanked her to him. She heard her breath seize as he took her mouth, pressed against her. Intense.

  His mouth on hers, he backed her down the hallway toward the bedroom. No words. Her jacket dropped to the floor. He unfastened her buttons, kissed her neck, the small of her throat. He hung her shirt off the bathroom doorknob. They fell onto the bed, the rest of their clothes soon a tangled mess on the floor.

  “God, I missed you,” he said when they were done. The first words they’d spoken.

  She rolled over and leaned her chin on his chest. “Me too.”

  He tucked an arm under his head, wound a finger through her hair.

  She pushed his hand away, the motion too much like John. They couldn’t be the same. She forced the guilt out, closed her eyes. Tired.

  Bruce ran a finger down her spine. She felt the stretch of her muscles in the small of her back and legs. Sighed.

  “What’s going on in IA?” she asked. Talking work was one of the things she loved about Bruce. He wanted to hear about her cases. He understood why she loved it.

  “You heard Scanlan’s latest?” he asked.

  “No. What’d he do?” Scott Scanlan was the deputy chief’s son. Though Hailey had never met him, rumor had it that he was a punk with a tendency to drink too much and
act like a total asshole.

  After getting kicked out of the Los Angeles Police Department after a drunken incident at the annual police ball, he made his way home and hooked up with Daddy’s department.

  “Couple of investigators from General Works made some jokes. Scanlan got so upset, he took them on in the parking lot.”

  She winced. “He’s only five-seven or something.”

  “Yeah. And he was already on probation.”

  She remembered the story. A few months back, Scanlan was out drinking at Balboa Cafe, one of three bars that made up a hot spot called the Triangle in San Francisco’s Marina District. Drunk, Scanlan demanded a college kid give up his burrito. The kid had refused and Scanlan hit him. The kid hit back and although Scanlan had suffered most of the injuries, the kid had called the police.

  The department had tried to sweep the incident under the rug. The attempt to conceal Scanlan’s misadventure had led all the way to the chief of police, but the media had gotten wind of the story and the attempted cover-up and hung the whole department out to dry over it.

  There was a flurry of press releases issued about Scanlan’s mental state—references to post-traumatic stress though no one could identify the incident to which the reaction was related.

  “These are guys my age,” Bruce continued.

  “Wow. Old, huh?”

  He tickled her side.

  She wiggled. “What did they say to him?”

  “Burrito jokes.”

  “Oh, God, Buck.”

  “I guess Scott took a swing at one of them.”

  “What’d they do?”

  “They left him cuffed to the axle of his car.”

  She stifled a laugh. “That’s terrible.”

  “Ah, he deserved it, the punk.” He turned her over, kissed her again. They stopped talking for a few minutes. Then he sat up again, stared at her. “What’s going on with Natasha?”

  She put a leg over his, tucked herself against him. Put her head down. “You heard Tim Worley came forward? He was with her. Says she was already dead when he found her in the office.”

  Bruce raised a brow.

  “Claims he planned to take her to the hospital. He knelt down to check her pulse when he was hit in the head.” It wasn’t a strong story. Maybe that meant it was true.

  “Any evidence he was hit?”

  “He’s got an odd-shaped cut and a goose egg,” Hailey said. “He claims he woke up a bit later and carried her out.”

  “Why carry her out if she was already dead?”

  “Says he didn’t realize she was dead until he was already moving her. Then, he didn’t want to leave her there.”

  “Is the story consistent?”

  Hailey shrugged. “Hard to be sure. She was definitely killed in her office and definitely moved. That’s about all I can say on it yet.”

  “You find a weapon?”

  “No. And since he’d showered by the time he came in, any trace evidence on him is down the drain. He was hit by something. CSU is working with photos and some molds of his injury to try to find out what it was.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “In jail. We found clothes covered in Natasha’s blood in his car.”

  He whistled.

  “Did you see the blowup they had at the awards ceremony? Must’ve been three dozen witnesses.”

  “Christ. Not good PR for the department.”

  “Cause he’s with the department?”

  “We’ve got enough bad PR circulating,” Bruce said.

  The department was always under fire. They didn’t solve their cases fast enough; they jumped the gun and arrested the wrong person. They could never do it right—not in the eyes of the press.

  Scott Scanlan wasn’t helping things.

  “How do you figure it happened?” he asked.

  “Lovers’ quarrel in her office,” she offered. “He came at her. She struck him on the head, and he slammed her against the desk or something to finish her off. Could’ve been an accident. We’re running some basic tests, but we’ve got two different semen samples. Our lab can’t do anything with it, so the samples go to the outside lab. It could take months to get usable DNA results. And that’s if we’re lucky.”

  “Shit.”

  “She got around, too, which doesn’t help,” Hailey told him. “Once we match the other one, we’ll need to talk to that guy too.”

  “Well, it’s good work. Lots of people watching that case. Better to have it wrapped up.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she said. “One thing we can definitely tell from the evidence is that Natasha had sex with someone else after Tim Worley.”

  “So you think Worley interrupted something and killed her?”

  “If so, who’s our other guy? Why didn’t he come forward?”

  “You printed her office?” Bruce asked.

  “This is where it gets bad,” she said.

  He waited for her to continue.

  “The desk was cleaned off with some sort of bleach wipe. The door too. No sign of any prints—not Natasha’s or Worley’s. None.”

  “Can you link the chemical to a solution she had in the office?” Bruce asked.

  “Not yet,” she said. “And we didn’t find anything like it in Worley’s stuff. The lab’s working on identifying it.”

  “That means somebody was prepared.”

  She loved the direction his logic took, that he thought like she did. “That’s the only hitch I see. A guy who has a big blowup with his girlfriend and follows her to her office isn’t prepared to clean up after the kill, unless it was premeditated. And from what I saw at the ceremony, Natasha was railing on Tim pretty hard. He sounded genuinely shocked at first. Then, he got angry.”

  Bruce was silent a minute. “Maybe he carried wipes in his car. Like a neat freak?”

  She shook her head. “None.”

  “His desk?”

  “Nope. And so far no trace of the chemical on his clothes or in his car, either.”

  “What about the murder?”

  “Blunt force trauma to the head. Coroner is trying to help us with the shape of the weapon.”

  “You know if Worley was hit with the same thing?”

  “Not yet.”

  He kissed her neck.

  Her stomach growled. “We going to eat?”

  He pulled Hailey back on top of him, shifted under her. “You’re not full yet?”

  She sat up, kissed him. “Worley’s the obvious because of timing, but the way I hear it, there was a long line of guys she’d dumped hard.”

  Something in his expression changed.

  “What?” she asked.

  “No, I just—”

  Just then, a cell phone rang. She sat up, looked at his sitting silently on the nightstand. “Mine.”

  She found it on the floor, glanced at the number.

  “Station?”

  She nodded.

  “Wyatt,” she answered.

  “Dispatch here. I’ve got a call from Jim Wyatt. Says it’s urgent.”

  She pressed a fist to her gut. Her father-in-law. “Put it through.”

  She heard two clicks. “Jim?” Why was her father-in-law calling her at work?

  “Hailey.”

  “Jim, what’s wrong? Is everyone okay?”

  “Fine. I’m sorry to bother you. You’re probably out at a scene…” He let the comment hang.

  “It’s fine, Jim. What’s wrong?”

  She met Bruce’s gaze. She had no idea what was going on.

  Her father-in-law rarely called her. Jim was a wealthy politician. Hailey was a civil servant. They stood on opposite sides of everything—or that was how she felt.

  John had been on her side once.

  Now it felt like he was drifting toward Jim’s.

  “I need a favor.”

  She scowled, sat back in the bed. “A favor?”

  Bruce shook his head, disgusted. He knew all about her senator father-in-law. How many times
had she complained about having to be at the dinners—being forced to dress and act a certain way?

  It was like prison.

  He ran a finger across her thigh.

  She pushed it away. “What is it, Jim?”

  “There’s been a murder. It happened this morning—here in San Francisco.”

  “Who’s been killed?”

  “Abby and Hank Dennig.”

  “Dennig?” She shook her head. “I don’t know the names. It’s not my case.”

  “Abby Dennig is Tom Rittenburg’s daughter. Tom Rittenburg is—”

  “The head of San Francisco’s NRA. I met him at your fundraiser at the old Federal Reserve.”

  “Right,” Jim said. “Good memory.”

  “How were they killed?” she asked.

  “You haven’t heard, then?”

  “No. I’ve been out of the station for about an hour.” She glanced at the clock. It had been more like two. She steadied her breath. “Do you want me to find out who’s working it?”

  “No. I already know that.”

  Of course he did. He had access in the department. Then why was he calling her? “What sort of favor do you need?”

  Bruce rubbed her shoulder. She shifted away from him, concentrating.

  “I’d like you to take the case,” he said.

  “I can’t do that. We work in rotation.”

  “I’ve spoken to the mayor.”

  He called the damn mayor. Christ. What was he playing at? The call-waiting beeped. “Jim, hold on.”

  She pressed the send button. “Wyatt.”

  “You’re a popular girl.”

  David Marshall’s voice. Her captain. “What are you talking about?”

  “I got a call from Deputy Chief Scanlan. He’s been on the phone with the mayor.”

  “Shit.”

  “You’ve got a new case—It’s Tom Rittenburg’s daughter. He’s—”

  “I know who he is.”

  “The scene’s already been processed, but the van they were killed in has been sent to the lab. You’ll have full access to it whenever you’re ready. The autopsy was done earlier. I’ll get you the full report in the morning.”

  “Whose case was it?”

  “Wade.”

  Rylan Wade. He’d been in Homicide longer than her, and had a better solve record. “He’s good. Why not let him have it?”

  “Because the mayor asked for you.”