by Julie Miller
“Something different than the drug dealer you worked for? Did she ever mention insurance to you? Do you have any ideas? Can you tell the police anything?”
“Not if I want to stay alive in here.” Verna warned her, her gaze darting to Conor to include him, too. “Be smart and let it go. Chloe had a good thing, but she ruined it because she wanted more. She couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
“So, she did talk to you about it.” Laura pushed. “What good thing? What did she ruin?”
“A real relationship.”
“With Isaac Royal or Vinnie Orlando?”
Verna didn’t answer.
Conor prodded her for a response to an easier question that didn’t involve naming murder suspects. “Besides Deputy Cobb, who’s been here to see you today?”
She was drumming again. Maybe that nervous tic was less about combatting her need for a fix, and more about controlling the urge to answer their questions.
After receiving a nod of permission from the guard, Verna pushed to her feet. “Time’s up. I gotta go.”
“Verna, please. Anything you can do to help us...” Laura shot to her feet to stop her, but Conor grabbed her arm and pulled her back to the table, preventing her from touching the prisoner. That didn’t stop her plea, though. “I don’t want Chloe’s killer to get away with murder.”
The older woman stopped for one last word. “Chloe was messing with people who don’t like to be messed with. And as much as I loved her, she was trash, just like me. No amount of money can ever change that.”
“She wasn’t trash. You aren’t. Verna?”
The guard unlocked the door, then Verna reentered the cellblock without ever looking back.
* * *
NIGHT ROLLED IN with a blanket of clouds that reflected the lights of the city back onto the snow, creating an eerie brightness over the stillness of the cemetery where his mother was buried. The hazy light also created impenetrable shadows behind every tombstone, tree and mausoleum. There were plenty of places for an enemy to lie in wait, or a spy to chart their movements without anyone ever knowing they were here. Conor had a bad feeling that someone was out there, tracking Laura’s every move.
It wasn’t the first time in the past twenty-four hours that he’d sensed someone watching them. If he wasn’t with her, would that someone do more to Laura than just watch?
Conor squeezed his fingers around the steering wheel, replaying everything Laura had told him. Some anonymous rat had called her and threatened to kill her if she didn’t tell him everything she knew about Chloe’s secrets.
With one woman already dead, he didn’t think it was an idle threat.
He followed the winding road through the iron gates and around the first hill, keeping Laura and her car squarely in his rearview mirror. He wanted her here in the SUV with him. Partly so he knew she was safe from crank phone calls and pompous deputies who didn’t care a fig for her safety, but also because he liked hanging out with her. She was funny and sexy and smelled like an exotic perfume that was unique from any other woman’s. She was clever. She kept him on his toes. She was every bit as impulsive and driven by her emotions as she’d been growing up. But what had once been a source of frustration and amusement, he now saw as something intriguing. Enticing. Hell, if she wasn’t Lisa’s little sister, and this attraction he felt didn’t seem so awkward, he’d be asking her out. No, he’d be asking her in. For the evening. Maybe for the whole night. This trip home to Arlington had taken a completely unexpected turn—and it wasn’t just because he and Laura had discovered a woman’s dead body.
He pulled up beside the grove of evergreens that marked the hilltop where his parents rested for eternity, killed the engine and got out to meet Laura before she parked behind him and climbed out of her car.
“I wasn’t counting on the sun to set so early,” he apologized, holding the door open for her. “The gates won’t close for another twenty minutes or so. We’ll make this quick, I promise.”
“Take your time.” She zipped up her short jacket before nudging him back a step, as if his protective stance was crowding her. Or maybe she just needed a better angle to tilt her gaze up to his. “Checking to make sure your mother’s marker is set correctly and is exactly how you ordered it is important.” Her palm lingered at the middle of his chest. He liked that she was a toucher. He liked that a lot. “That would have been ridiculous to drive me all the way across the city and then double back to the cemetery. And I wouldn’t have felt right, leaving my car unattended in the prison parking lot overnight. Besides, I’d like to pay my respects to Marie.”
“I would have been happy to take you home and do this tomorrow,” he repeated, just like he’d offered outside the women’s prison. “It’s not like Mom’s going anywhere.”
She patted his chest before circling the car and leading the way to his mother’s stone. She had been here to pay her respects before. He liked that about Laura a lot, too. Damn it. Conor’s frustrated huff clouded the cold air around him. He needed to stop making a list of Laura Karr pros and cons—not that he could come up with a single con at the moment. Except maybe this propensity to get involved with some dangerous people.
She was his friend. She needed his law enforcement expertise to help her navigate this unofficial investigation into her friend’s murder. She wanted him to watch her back. Period.
His gaze dropped to the sweet flare of her hips walking away from him. Nope, he had absolutely no problem watching her backside.
He squeezed his eyes shut, silently reprimanding himself on the errant thought. Hopeless, Wildman. You’re hopeless.
He hurried the last few yards to catch up to Laura, reaching her as she stooped down to brush the fresh snow off the red marble marker. He stood above her, still feeling that clutch of grief in his gut as he read his mother’s name and the dates of her birth and death, and saw the spray of daffodils etched into the stone’s polished finish. “It looks perfect. Simple and beautiful. Marie would have approved.”
Although the grass wouldn’t fill in around the newly placed headstone until spring, he was happy to see that the monument matched his expectations. “The daffodils were her request before she died. She always had them growing in the backyard.”
“I remember. All around the fence. They’d bloom every spring.” Laura reached up to squeeze his hand before pulling herself up beside him. Then she hooked her free hand around the sleeve of his coat and rested her head against his shoulder in another one of those arm hugs that made him lean a little closer to her, too. It took him a few moments longer to exit his thoughts and realize that Laura was switching topics. “Who calls her own daughter trash?”
Obviously, she’d been stewing over her friend’s murder and not fixating on him the way he’d spent every mile thinking about her. It was almost a relief to switch gears from trying to make sense of the relationship he couldn’t have and start making sense about Chloe Wilson’s murder. His mother’s new stone, and the older, weathered slab of marble beside it gave him the explanation he needed. “Not every family looks like the cover of a magazine. A lot of us don’t grow up with a Ron and Leslie Karr like you did.”
Her fingers tightened around his hand and arm. “You’re talking about your father now, aren’t you.” She looked down at Arthur Wildman’s gravestone before glancing up at him. “Did he denigrate you like that?”
“Nah. He wasn’t around enough to screw me up that way.” Although stepping up to be the man of the house at the ripe old age of eight—when Arthur was accidentally electrocuted at work two years after abandoning his family—had instilled in Conor a rigid sense of responsibility and equipped him with a sarcastic armor. His father’s death had ended any shred of hope Conor had nursed about his family reuniting, and the defensive shield kept most people at a far enough distance so he couldn’t be hurt again. “I have some good memories of him from when I was little,” h
e admitted. “I remember him holding me up on his shoulders to watch a parade. He was as tall as I am now. It felt like flying to be lifted so high. I think I was about four. Soon after that, he just wasn’t there.”
“We’re your family.” Conor remembered running after his father as he tossed a duffel bag packed with his personal belongings into the back of his truck. Conor’s skin had chapped with all the tears he’d cried that day. “I’m your son.”
“It’s not enough,” Arthur answered. “You go on back in the house with your mom. And stop that cryin’. You’ll be okay.”
But he hadn’t been. Maybe a part of him still wasn’t. “He didn’t want to be tied down to us, to the responsibilities of raising a son and supporting a family and living in suburbia. A couple years later he was dead.”
Laura’s hold on him shifted and she sidled even closer, circling her arms around his waist and resting her cheek against his heart. “I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be abandoned like that. But you had your mom. Marie was as solid and hardworking as they come.”
Conor stared down at the gravestone, finding solace in the squeeze of Laura’s arms, in the scent of her warming the cold air he breathed, in the unabashed way she aligned her strong, short body against his. Her words reminded him of better times. Her compassion spread a balm over the raw wounds inside him. It felt completely natural, if not necessary, to wind his arms around her and settle his chin on the crown of her knit cap. “I was lucky to have her.”
“We all were.”
He could even look over at his father’s marker and remember everything he admired about the woman who’d raised him. “They never got divorced. Mom took care of the funeral arrangements when he died—I guess she still loved him.”
“Or it was her sense of duty. I mean, you’ve got that in spades—it had to come from somewhere.”
“Maybe.” He wasn’t sure how long they stood there together, but it wasn’t long enough before Laura was pulling away. “Cold?”
She shook her head, even as she hugged her arms around her own waist against the chilly air. Maybe she was as uncomfortable with the changing dynamics of their relationship as he was. Maybe a cemetery after dusk wasn’t the place to be thinking about relationship dynamics at all.
Relationship dynamics. Conor shook off the longing that holding Laura stirred inside him. She needed a cop, not a rehash of his sorry life history. And the cop in him suddenly had a pretty clear insight into Chloe Wilson. “Verna might have been onto something about Chloe.”
“What do you mean?”
“She said Chloe had a good thing, but that she got greedy. She wanted more.”
Laura shrugged, not yet catching his train of thought. “More what? Money? She was making some money with her ceramics at art shows, paid the regular bills with waitressing. She always seemed to have a boyfriend who’d take care of anything else.”
“You know what a kid from a broken family wants more than anything? More than money?” He held out his hand, waiting for Laura to take it. “A family that isn’t broken. Security. It’s probably why she liked having you as a friend—you were loyal and reliable, an anchor she could count on in her life. If she was involved with someone, she’d want that guy to commit.”
Laura’s fingers closed around his as understanding dawned. “You think she was blackmailing Vinnie into marrying her?”
He shortened his stride and she fell into step beside him. “Maybe he gave her a ring. Then decided killing her was the only way to make sure she kept his secret.”
They retraced their path through the snow back to their cars. “What secret? She never told me anything.”
“There are plenty of skeletons people hide in their closets. Things that could hurt them emotionally. Things that are bad for business or someone’s reputation. Things that could land them in jail. Or get them killed.”
“But how would Chloe find out anything so incriminating? She was hardly a detective.”
“Pillow talk?”
“Maybe it wasn’t Vinnie she was blackmailing. It could have been Isaac. He said she showed him that envelope.” Laura pulled out her keys and tapped the remote to unlock her car. When nothing happened, she muttered a curse and used the key. Conor silently vowed to find some time in his day tomorrow to get her car to the dealership to either replace the battery or reprogram the remote. “Maybe she threatened to expose him somehow if he didn’t stay away—didn’t let her marry Vinnie. You saw his hand. Maybe yesterday wasn’t the first time he lost his temper with her. Instead of reporting the incident to the cops, she used the information to get him to leave her alone.”
“Sounds like we’ve got several possibilities. We need to find that envelope.” Conor opened the door for her.
Instead of climbing in, Laura stopped with the door between them and faced him. “We? Are you sticking around for a while, after all?”
If she smiled at him like that every day and kissed him like she had at her apartment every night, it’d be hard to walk away. But he knew better than to promise any kind of forever. “Long enough. For as long as I can before I have to report back to work in Kansas City.”
Her smile dimmed. “I wish you would stay.”
“I don’t think I could be happy here anymore. I’ve got a new life I’m anxious to get back to.”
“Are you running to a new life? Or running away from your old one?”
That observation made him feel a little like his father. And that wasn’t a very comfortable comparison to make. “You don’t mince words, do you, Squirt.” His deep breath clouded the air between them for a moment. “You’re a lot like Lisa in that regard.”
“You said I wasn’t anything like her.” Her forehead puckered with a frown, and her pinkie brushed against his where they rested their hands on top of the door. With them both wearing gloves, he shouldn’t be able to feel her touch. And yet he seemed hyperaware of every move she made, every nuance of her expression. Comparing her to Lisa worried her somehow. “I don’t want you to think of me as a carbon copy of the woman who hurt you. I don’t want you to see the girl I used to be. I want you to just see me.”
“That honesty must be a Karr quality.” Conor hooked his pinkie around hers, completing the link she’d been hesitant to make, assuring her that nothing Lisa had said or done would ever impact the friendship between him and Laura. “Trust me, you are one of a kind. You’re shorter and curvier than your sister. But it’s not just your looks. You’re more impulsive than Lisa. You have a big heart. You’re loaded with compassion.”
“Lisa has a big heart, too.”
He shook his head. “She’s afraid to use it. I’ve got no doubt that she loves Joe. And I think she had genuine feelings for me. But...she’s not willing to risk putting herself out there unless she can control all the possible outcomes. I wasn’t something she could control. Not with the hours I had to keep. Not with the lies I had to tell to protect my witnesses.”
“Now you’re back to thinking I’m foolish again. Because I put myself out there. I get involved with things I shouldn’t.”
“I think you’re incredibly brave to follow your heart. To take chances on caring about people, and to risk getting hurt.” He steepled her fingers with his before lacing their fingers together and squeezing her hand. “I haven’t been that kind of brave for a while.”
“Conor...”
No. He was going to say this. “The guy who gets you—the one who captures that heart—he’ll be a lucky man.”
“What if I told you...?” Whatever she’d been about to confess was interrupted by the phone ringing in her car. “There is a guy who...”
The phone demanded her attention. “You’d better get that.”
With a heavy sigh, she pulled away and reached inside to the passenger seat to retrieve her phone from her purse. “Hello? Yes? I understand. No, I won’t forget.” Although
he couldn’t make out the words, Conor could tell it was a man’s voice. When she sank onto the seat behind the steering wheel, as if the wind had been knocked out of her, he came around the door to kneel in front of her. “I said I would. Do you have any idea...? Hello?”
Something was wrong. Was that rat coward calling to threaten her again? “Laura? Who is it?”
The caller had hung up. She hugged the phone to her chest. “Deputy Cobb. He said they found a receipt from the post office in Chloe’s apartment that matches the package she sent out. Like you said, he thinks it could be the key to breaking open his investigation. It should be delivered tomorrow.”
“Did they track who she sent the package to?”
Laura nodded. “Me.”
Chapter Seven
“Yes, ma’am.” Laura leaned forward to update the information on her computer. “I’ve added the extra room for the new chaperones and confirmed their flights. Looks like the Chapman Middle School is all set for their DC tour over spring break.” Once she submitted the revised travel package to her office and printed off a copy for her own files, she turned her cell off speakerphone and put it up to her ear to complete the call. “Have a safe trip from Nebraska.”
While she pulled the papers off the printer tray with her left hand, she opened the top drawer with her right and reached inside for the stapler. It was an action she’d done a hundred times. But her fingertips hit a box of paper clips and a tray of highlighters, instead, forcing her to actually look into the drawer. She opened it a few more inches and saw that the stapler had gotten pushed behind her other office supplies. “There you are. How did you get back there?”
One more mystery she couldn’t solve. Just like the question about what Chloe could have sent her in the mail. And where was the postman, already?
After stapling the papers together and moving the stapler back to its rightful spot, Laura crossed her booted feet on the leather ottoman beside her desk and let her eyes drift shut. Typically, she caught up on phone calls and paperwork on the days she worked from home. And though the jeans and old college sweatshirt she wore were a lot more comfortable than the starched petticoat and layers of lace and tulle she’d worn most of the weekend, she felt off this morning. Kind of like that stapler. Exhaustion had claimed her for about five hours of dreamless sleep last night. But by 4:00 a.m., she’d been tossing and turning.