A Lick Of Heat: H.E.A.T. Book Four

by Claire, Nicola

  The kiss lasted aeons or maybe mere minutes. But eventually, I felt the wall at my back and Damon’s body pressing against mine, sandwiching me.

  I knew the moment he felt it all; the moment the ice melted and he let me in; let himself out; let himself feel.

  And then a throat cleared beside us, and we pulled back to see the highly amused eyes of my superior officer.

  “Great timing, as usual, Pierce,” I muttered.

  Damon chuckled; that purely male sound they make when satisfied with themselves. When the caveman rears his head, and he all but thumps his chest in pride.

  Me man. You woman. She mine.

  Men.

  But a sweeter sound I had never heard because it meant Damon was present. Damon was with me. Even if he was a Neanderthal, in the end, he was here, now.

  “If you two are done necking in the hallway of a highly secure facility with not one but two cameras focused on you then we need to talk,” Pierce deadpanned.

  “What’s up?” I asked, ignoring the fact that he’d undoubtedly known what we were up to before he even stepped into the hallway to confront us. I forced myself not to glare up at Shaw in the ceiling camera lens and offer him a one-finger salute.

  “We’ve had a development,” Pierce said without preamble. “We should bring the others in on it.”

  He didn’t look like he wanted to do that.

  “I don’t trust them either,” I murmured, keeping my voice low. “But we don’t stand a chance without them.”

  “It’s not that, Keen,” he said.

  I stared at him, aware that this had to be really bad for Ryan Pierce to hesitate to voice it.

  “What is it, Sarge?” I pressed.

  “Come on,” he said, leading the way back to Control and not answering my question. This was definitely going to be bad. “Shaw should be calling the others in.”

  “I thought the whole idea of having the planning session in the meeting room was to keep the new spook out of Control,” I groused.

  “Nick’s tired of the bickering,” Pierce said. “At least in Control, he can subdue us.”

  “What? With panic buttons and a tech geek?”

  Pierce looked at me and shook his head.

  “Don’t underestimate the geek, Lara, and sure as hell don’t underestimate Control. Nick’d probably gas us all just to contain us and have Jason Cain extricate him and Eric, administering the antidote, and leaving our bodies to rot in that hell hole.”

  “And you call the man a friend?” I said dryly.

  “I never said it was an easy relationship.”

  I snorted just as we reached Control. The door clicked open after Pierce waved at the camera. To my utter surprise, Charlie, Ava and Nick were already there.

  There were ways to circumvent that hallway, and I did not like that I wasn’t aware of them.

  Plus the fact that they all felt the need to circumvent it in the first place.

  Which meant they all knew exactly what Damon and I had been doing.

  I refused to feel embarrassed about that and Damon sure as hell wasn’t feeling the least bit concerned.

  Men.

  I glared at Pierce as he was the safest person to be mad at. He could have warned us, but he hadn’t. He offered a shrug of his shoulders and walked across the room to Shaw.

  “Show them,” he said.

  Shaw then pressed a few buttons on his keyboard, and the main screen changed to a view of the halfway house where Stretch was being held prisoner.

  Clearly visible, in the shadows cast by a convenient tree, was none other than Joe Cawfield.

  I took a step and then another until before I knew it, I was standing right in front of the screen.

  “Hello, Joe,” I said.

  “She’s good,” I heard Ava say over my shoulder. “Cool as a cucumber. I expected a rant at the very least.”

  I turned to look at her.

  “You know who he is,” I accused. And I didn’t mean his name and police ID number.

  She knew he was our traitor. Or who we pegged for it, anyway.

  “Do you honestly think I wouldn’t do my homework before I came here?” she asked.

  I turned away, ignoring her rebuke and the fact that she wouldn’t have had time after Charlie contacted her to do any due diligence on any of this.

  She’d been keeping tabs on Charlie.

  Charlie for her part didn’t look surprised. She probably could have told us a few secrets about Ava. What a twisted world they both lived in.

  I looked back at Cawfield on the screen.

  “How long ago was this?” I asked.

  “Twenty minutes; give or take,” Shaw said.

  I reached over and manipulated the mouse he used to zoom in. I took in Cawfield’s stubbled jaw and red eyes. His crinkled shirt and fisted hands. The way he was checking over his shoulder as if he was being tailed.

  I zoomed out and moved the image about, focusing on where Cawfield was looking in the photo.

  “I gather this was taken from surveillance footage,” I said.

  “You gather correctly,” Shaw replied.

  “Can you play it back; slowly?”

  Shaw nudged my hand away from the mouse and entered a command. The video started playing. He rewound it without asking. We watched Cawfield approach the halfway house along Ponsonby Road from the College Road end. He walked with purpose, but I knew Joe Cawfield. He was spooked.

  I glanced at the spooks in the room with me, but returned my attention to Cawfield on the screen immediately; I didn’t want to miss a thing. The closer he got to the halfway house, the more ragged he looked. Shifty. Flitting from shadowed alcove to shadowed alcove. Pausing to check over his shoulder more than once.

  “Slow it down,” I said, “Frame by frame if you have to.”

  “Are we looking for anything in particular?” Anscombe asked

  “Frame by frame will take us to midnight to view the entire sequence,” Shaw offered.

  I said nothing to either man and just watched.

  And then I saw it.

  A fedora hat and long trench coat.

  “Son of a bitch,” I growled and slammed my index finger down on the pause button. Shaw lifted his hands in surrender as I manipulated the frame.

  Until a slightly grainy, shadowed image of Carl was enlarged in the centre of the screen.

  “Damn it,” Pierce muttered.

  The spooks said nothing.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Sometimes All It Takes Is A Gentle Shove In The Right Direction. Sometimes It Takes A Two-By-Four To The Head."

  Both Carl and Cawfield being at the crime scene we were about to bust in on was disturbing. Until now, I’d thought Carl was looking out for me. Protecting Eagle on K Road. Keeping tabs on me at Mount Eden Prison. And watching over me outside Pitt Street Fire Station. But I was beginning to question how he knew to be where he was when he needed to be.

  It was a question I should have asked myself at the beginning.

  Carl had been a damn good cop. He was the detective I’d modelled my own behaviour on. His close-rate was excellent. He’d been doing it for so long that I was sure he’d written the manual.

  I’d looked up to him.

  I’d idolised him.

  And then he’d gone and faked his death (after the fact, but still) and killed people to protect me.

  My world had turned inside out overnight, and afterwards, I’d shied away from any conclusive or in-depth investigative thoughts regarding my ex-partner.

  But here he was on the footpath across the road from the halfway house where Stretch was being held by a madman in a bid to lure Damon into a trap.

  How had he known to be here?

  I needed to ask some questions that I’d, until now, thought unimportant.

  Voices began to coalesce around me — Pierce growling. Nick poking the bear. Damon snapping. Shaw offering the odd bit of intel that didn’t really take us anywhere. The spooks watched on silentl
y as Savill, ASI’s only other operative in the building, flicked through images on a spare computer terminal bringing himself up to speed on the op.

  I saw Carl more than once as he swiped the screen. I saw Cawfield, too.

  Were they working together? How had I missed that?

  I shook my head and then reached out and picked up my handbag from where I’d stashed it and walked to the door of Control.

  It was locked, of course. Eric handled ingress and egress completely. You didn’t get in or out of the room without him being aware of it and allowing or disallowing it. He was the master of his domain and right then it did not suit my purpose.

  “Open the door,” I said, not raising my voice in the slightest.

  Everyone stopped bickering.

  “Keen?” Pierce called softly. “Where are you going?”

  “To the ladies,” I said. “I need to pee, Sarge.”

  I heard a soft snort from Ava and knew Charlie was watching me closely.

  The men predictably looked embarrassed. There was something about women and peeing that had them looking the other way. Most men, anyway.

  The door clicked, and I slipped out. I waited for it to shut behind me. And then I waited for a little longer to see who would follow me. When no one did, I headed toward the back door of the building that led out into customer parking and an additional exit to the property that spilt out eventually onto Remuera Road.

  Pierce’s police-issued sedan was there as was Damon’s HEAT vehicle. I had a key to Damon’s truck for emergencies, but I’d also lifted Pierce’s keys from his jacket pocket as it hung neglected over the back of a chair by the door to Control.

  The HEAT ute stood out. NZ Fire Service liked to paint their support vehicles with various forms of educational advice.

  Keep an eye on what you fry.

  Never underestimate the speed of fire.

  Smoke alarms save lives.

  All very helpful but not exactly low key. In comparison, the late model Holden Commodore was a popular street vehicle and blended in nicely in almost every neighbourhood.

  It certainly would fit in sufficiently for my purposes.

  I beeped the locks and slipped into the driver's side.

  The back door to ASI burst open behind me. I looked up into the rear vision mirror and saw an extremely irate HEAT Chief Investigator storm across the parking lot towards me.

  I rolled down my window, but he didn’t go there. He went directly to the passenger side and opened the door before I had time to press the internal locks again.

  “There are cameras all over that building,” he said in a low and angry voice as he slid into the seat beside me. “Did you really think we wouldn’t see you going in the wrong direction to the toilets?”

  I sighed.

  “What’s Pierce doing?” I asked and started the vehicle.

  “Working on the halfway house with Anscombe as I thought we would be.”

  He sounded hurt. Damon was showing way more emotion than he usually did. And wasn’t that ironic? Because when you crossed that line in the desert, you usually felt nothing; you became numb. And yet Damon, unlike me, displayed emotions as if they were grains of sand.

  Hennessey had called it a type of post-traumatic stress. But I’d refuted that saying I hadn’t been through anything that would constitute stress of a magnitude that could incapacitate someone. I was a cop. I saw horrible things on an almost daily basis. I watched my ex-partner get shot and fall off the side of a cliff right after I’d shot and killed someone myself.

  In retrospect, it made complete sense. Hennessey was right. I was suffering from post-traumatic stress.

  But Damon was suffering from something else altogether. Damon was suffering from a build-up of stress that threatened to make him explode.

  The fact he showed more emotions than normal was understandable.

  The fact I showed very little also made sense.

  We weren’t two peas in a pod; we were an apple and an orange in a fruit basket — both fruit, but both tasting entirely different from each other.

  I shook my head, trying to clear the unhelpful analogies from my mind, and negotiated traffic onto Broadway, heading toward the motorway and ultimately West Auckland.

  Heading away from Newmarket and central Auckland… and Ponsonby. The halfway house.

  “Where are we going, Lara?” Damon asked quietly.

  “Approaching the halfway house now without being prepared is out,” I said. “Pierce will slow things down if Anscombe hasn’t already.”

  “They already said something to that effect before I came after you.”

  “Why didn’t Pierce?” Come after me, I meant.

  “I told him to stay the fuck out.”

  That was Damon. Standing between me and imminent peril.

  I smiled thinly and merged with traffic. The North-Western motorway was packed. I could have flicked the lights and siren on, but the whole idea of taking Pierce’s car was to blend in. You never knew who would be watching. ASI certainly. Shaw would be following our progress via CCTV cams.

  But if ASI could, so could Weston.

  Maybe even Carl.

  And if Carl knew where I was going before I got there, who knew what the bastard would do.

  “I don’t know why Carl is turning up everywhere he shouldn’t,” I finally said.

  Damon turned slightly in his seat and stared at me.

  I gripped the steering wheel tighter.

  “At first, I just thought he knew me so well that he could predict where I was going to be.” It made sense. But not enough sense. Not now. “Eagle is like a kid brother to me,” I said. “He knows that, and he knows Weston knows it, too. Hell, for all I know, Weston could be waiting to use Eagle against me. Just because Hennessey cleared the street rat doesn’t mean Eagle is actually clear of Weston’s influence.”

  Because Hennessey wasn’t.

  “Pitt Street still made a kind of sense,” I continued.

  “Pitt Street?” Damon asked.

  I flicked a glance at him and realised I hadn’t told anyone that Carl had been there. That that’s why I had been outside the station in the middle of the night while Damon snored softly on the pullout couch in his office.

  I pushed the unwanted and uncomfortable sensation of having inadvertently hidden something from him away and said, “Carl was across the street last night.”

  “Outside my station?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to sound relaxed and not at all guilty. I failed. It was disgusting for a cop.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he demanded, calling me on my bullshit.

  “Stretch being taken made everything else pale into insignificance,” I said.

  It was a low blow, but I needed him to back off. I was on the edge where Carl was concerned, and if I did this, something I had been putting off for months now, then I had to be on the right side of that edge.

  Damon calling me out on my evasiveness over the past however many days only reinforced what I had been neglecting.

  Namely Carl. And where Carl had been staying.

  Someone had been helping him. I needed to know who now so I could understand just what Carl had become.

  I knew he’d become a murderer. I knew he’d lost his mind and was a shadow of the intelligent, law-abiding man I’d once known and respected.

  I knew he was ripe for the picking if Weston had got to him.

  And even if Carl was damn good at hiding himself from me, could he have done the same with Weston? It was another question I needed to have answered.

  So many damn questions, I was drowning in them.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered, almost under my breath.

  “Why?” Damon hadn’t snapped it, but I felt the hit as if he had.

  “I’ve missed something,” I said, instead of explaining why I was apologising. Damon had thick skin; the apology had been more for me than him.

  “What have you missed, Lara?” he asked.
<
br />   “Carl and Eagle,” I said.

  Damon shifted uncomfortably.

  “It wasn’t right.”

  “Carl’s not right in the head, love.”

  I nodded. But did his mental instability account for a scene that at one time would have set the heterosexual male off? Carl was not a bigot. But he was definitely not gay either.

  He’d had women. Plural. Hanging out in the wings for when he wanted to call on them. Sally for a bit of light fun. Rachel for alcohol-fuelled debauchery. Margaret for comfort and companionship. Liz for eye-candy.

  I hadn’t met them all, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know about them. Part of being in the men’s club meant dissecting your exploits afterwards. I hadn’t had any sexual exploits to speak of, so I hadn’t been forced to dissect them afterwards. Heaven forbid if Cawfield caught wind of me bragging about a liaison. But Carl was old school. He might have made up most of the details, but he shared the fantasy he created in the locker room with the boys each start of shift.

  I’d accepted that aspect of Carl’s character. He drank too much whisky. He slept around. He kissed and told afterwards. It was just part of who he was.

  But the Carl he had been was not the Carl he was now.

  I still didn’t feel right about the scene with Eagle in that dark alley.

  “It was staged,” I finally said.

  “What was? Eagle and Carl?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling more and more certain.

  “Carl was sending you a message,” Damon said carefully. “So, that might explain the staging.”

  “No,” I whispered. Carl’s messages were clever but never cryptic. He didn’t have it in him to couch his words in subtlety.

  That's it, Sport; softly, softly catchee criminal.

  Focus, focus, focus. Or the bad guys win.

  Life keeps chucking rocks at your head. Sooner or later you're gonna get hit.

  Being honest with yourself is harder than hearing the truth.

  Pay attention, Sport. Don't fucking fall asleep on the job.

  I was paying attention now and nothing made sense.

  “No,” I repeated. “Giving Eagle a spanking for payment to pass on a message while I was standing right fucking there? No. That wasn’t Carl.”