Harlequin Intrigue July 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Carol Ericson

  Terrence chuckled as he slipped the envelope in a side pocket of his bag. “It might be. Quinn worried about you.”

  “I know, and all that time I should’ve been worrying about him.” Kyra pressed a fist against her lips to stop the sob that threatened to escape.

  Terrence placed a hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You took good care of Quinn. He told me himself.”

  “Thank you, Terrence. I’ll be in touch about the funeral. The ME is doing an autopsy.”

  “I figured as much.”

  She walked Terrence to the door, and he stopped suddenly, digging into the pocket of his jacket. “I forgot to give you the keys to the houses.”

  “I have my own key to the house in Venice.”

  “I know that, but this makes it official.” He dangled a key chain from his fingers and dropped it into her waiting palm. “Let me know what you plan to do with the house—move in or sell it. No hurry.”

  “Good, because I’ll have to think about it.”

  When the attorney left, Kyra shook out some kibble into a bowl for the missing Spot, who’d left in a huff after she’d shunned him. As she passed through the kitchen, she snatched the extra sandwich from the fridge and curled up in front of the TV with a glass of wine.

  Then she put on the next episode of the show she and Quinn had been watching together—a show he’d never finish—and drank deeply.

  * * *

  “WHAT DID HICKS WANT?” Captain Castillo strolled into the nearly empty task force war room and sat on the edge of Billy’s desk. “Plans for Quinn’s funeral?”

  Jake glanced up from the thick envelope Hicks had left him, Quinn’s bold writing scrawled across the front, and dropped it on his desk. “Yeah, we talked about that. There’s a lot to do, but Hicks has gone through this before for other clients.”

  He didn’t want to read any last words Quinn had for him in front of the captain.

  Castillo’s gaze flicked to the envelope before meeting Jake’s eyes. “West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department hasn’t come up with much at the scene of Erica Fuentes’s murder, have they?”

  “They sent the footage over, and the guy knew he was on camera, because he avoided it as much as possible and wore a thick jacket, a hat and a hoodie. Can’t tell much from that. He did have a box in his hands, as if he were a delivery guy. Maybe that’s how he got her to open the door, and then he kicked it open once she cracked it. We don’t see anything again until he leaves with the box under his arm and is able to avoid the cameras on his way out of the building. We checked for parking tickets on the street during that time, canvassed the neighbors, looked at other footage in the area—nothing.”

  Castillo picked at a cuticle. “You ever think this might be The Player cleaning up for one of his minions, like he did with that crime blogger?”

  “Billy and I thought about it. Could be, but that still doesn’t give us any more evidence than what we got.”

  “How’s the real witness?”

  “Hanging on. Kyra spoke with her over the phone today. She’s more upset about the death of her girlfriend now than she is about witnessing that body dump.” Jake shrugged into his jacket.

  Castillo hopped off the desk. “Kyra doing okay?”

  “She’s fine. She wants to go to Quinn’s house tomorrow, which I think is a little too soon, but once she makes up her mind, there’s no stopping her. I guess it’s progress. At first, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to return to that house.”

  “That’s a prime piece of property.”

  “It is.” Jake raised his brows at the unusually loquacious captain, hoping he’d take the hint to wrap it up.

  Castillo said, “I’ll let you get going. Long days for everyone. Your daughter doing okay after the kidnapping?”

  Jake swept Quinn’s envelope from the desk and tucked it in the inside pocket of his jacket. “She’s recovered. Maybe even learned a lesson or two—I know her mother and I learned a few things about social media accounts.”

  “It’s a tough age. Not looking forward to going through that stage with my two youngest. When my older kids were teens, social media wasn’t as pervasive.”

  “Gotta keep vigilant.” Castillo was on his second marriage and had two young kids with this wife, although his older daughter was married and expecting Castillo’s first grandchild. Jake had missed a lot of Fiona’s childhood years, but was eager to experience it all with his and Kyra’s children—if he could persuade her to go down that path with him.

  Finally, Castillo made a move, and Jake walked out of the room with him, waving to a few of the officers staying behind. Everyone on a task force had a job to do, and some of that work was better suited to a quiet office and quiet phones.

  Castillo peeled off at his own office, and Jake jogged down the stairs and exited the building. Before getting into his car, he sloughed off his jacket and snatched the envelope from the pocket. He slid behind the steering wheel of his unmarked sedan and slipped his thumb beneath the sealed flap of the envelope.

  He pulled out several sheets of paper. One listed a description of some weapons Quinn was leaving to Jake. The second page contained a note from Quinn. In the note, Quinn explained to Jake that he had some files related to The Player locked away in a safe. He’d ended the note with a cryptic statement about how Jake would understand why he kept the file a secret once Jake looked through it.

  The crease between Jake’s eyebrows deepened when he got to the third sheet. He smoothed the paper over the steering wheel and studied the map Quinn had sketched—a real, live treasure map. Only X didn’t mark the spot out in the desert or even in a storage unit like Kyra’s foster brother had kept.

  Quinn had buried his treasure under the floorboards of his house in Venice. Even more mysterious was Quinn’s final directive that Jake not tell Kyra about this file. Jake’s mouth got dry. It must be something horrendous about her mother’s murder Quinn had never told her.

  He’d follow Quinn’s instructions to a T, but he’d have to figure out how he was going to lift up some floorboards in a room in a house that Kyra now owned.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING, after a full day of work and a quick bite to eat from a fish market on the Santa Monica Pier, Jake drove Kyra to Quinn’s house to start looking around. Kyra wasn’t planning to start packing up anything, but she did want to find a nice suit for Quinn’s burial and get a feel for whether she could live in the house.

  Jake didn’t press the issue, but he was hoping she’d start thinking about the idea of moving in with him. She could still hang on to the Venice house and rent it out—but this wasn’t the time or the place.

  He parked his car as close to the canal walk streets as he could, conscious of Quinn’s map tucked in the back pocket of his jeans as they crossed the bridge to the red door of Quinn’s house—Kyra’s house.

  With shaky fingers, she inserted the key and turned the handle. Jake reached around her to push open the door.

  Kyra hesitated on the threshold, clutching the key chain at her side, her gaze glued to the spot where they’d discovered Quinn’s body.

  Jake nudged her back gently. “I’m right behind you.”

  He followed her into the living room, and his nose twitched at the air, already musty even though the house had been empty just a few days. He didn’t detect any odor of death and released a pent-up breath. “I’m going to open some windows and the back door just to get some air in here.”

  On his way to a window to yank up the sash, he glanced down at the hardwood floor beneath a throw rug in front of the fireplace—Quinn’s secret hiding place.

  As he grabbed the window, Kyra gasped behind him and he spun around.

  Standing in front of a built-in bookcase, Kyra turned to him, her eyes wide and her face pale. “Someone’s been here, Jake. Someone broke into Quinn�
�s house.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jake’s eyebrows jumped to his hairline, but his face didn’t reflect the panic she felt clawing at her chest. Didn’t he see? If someone broke into Quinn’s place, maybe that person was also responsible for Quinn’s death.

  Surveying the room, Jake said, “What makes you say that? Everything’s shut up tight, or it was until I opened this window. The dead bolt on the front door was locked, wasn’t it?”

  She chewed her bottom lip and grabbed the two pictures from the bookcase. She thrust them in front of her. “These were out of place.”

  “Two pictures were out of place on a shelf and you jump to break-in?” Jake cocked his head. “That’s a big leap. How do you know Quinn didn’t rearrange them or move them to get a book?”

  “I feel it.” Her gaze darted around the room, alighting on cushions tucked into the corners of the couch, a blank pad of paper next to Quinn’s landline phone, the corner of the throw rug in front of the mantel turned back—slight differences around the room that made the hair on the back of her neck quiver.

  “Let me check the sliding back door.” He strode toward Quinn’s little dining area and checked the handle and the track of the door where Quinn had an extra lock inserted. “Both in place, just like I left them.”

  He yanked open the slider, and a cloud of salty sea air wafted into the room. “Remember, I checked all the doors and windows the night Quinn died. There was no sign of any break-in, Kyra.”

  “I know that. I remember.” Clasping her hands in front of her, she did a turn in place. “I can’t put my finger on it. The room feels different...ruffled.”

  Planting his hands on the kitchen table, Jake hunched forward. “Different from usual or different from the last time you were here...when we found Quinn?”

  “That’s it.” She folded her arms and hunched her shoulders. “At first, I thought someone had broken in and killed Quinn.”

  Jake’s mouth dropped open, and she continued to talk over him. “But now that I’m looking around, the differences I’m noticing are since our previous visit when we discovered Quinn’s body.”

  “You think someone broke into Quinn’s house and ruffled a few items after he died? Have you checked to see if anything has been stolen? Could be a tweaker or something, knowing the house is empty.” Jake walked back into the living room and stood before the fireplace, his arms crossed, his feet planted on the rug.

  “He has a safe in his bedroom closet. You wanted to look at that anyway, right? You told me Quinn had left you some weapons. Those would be in that safe.”

  “Do you have the combination with you?”

  Kyra patted her purse. “I brought some of that info with me—including what should be in the safe. I think two of the guns he left to you are in there.”

  “I know he has a Makarov 9mm in there, a classic, and a German Luger.” Jake peered around the room. “You don’t see anything missing? Where’s Quinn’s computer?”

  “He always used a desktop computer because he liked the monitor size, and he kept that in his office. This house has three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Besides his bedroom, one he kept as a guest room, and he turned the other into an office.” She crooked her finger at Jake. “This way.”

  Her breathing had returned to normal once she realized she hadn’t felt this disruption in Quinn’s house the night he died, but only now. Of course, that night had been a whirlwind of emotions, and maybe she hadn’t been attuned to the changes.

  Jake followed her down the hallway, and she ducked into the first bedroom on the left. Quinn’s computer sat on a desk with some sticky notes fluttering off the edges of the monitor and some bits of paper dotting the surface area of the desk.

  Shuffling the mouse to wake up the computer, she said, “I know he didn’t have this password-protected.”

  When the monitor came to life, Jake jabbed a finger at the tabs at the top of the browser. “Looks like Quinn was on Websleuths, the true crime site where The Player met his minions, and Sean Hughes’s true crime blog, LA Confidential. He was following along with the investigation more than we thought.”

  “More than you thought.” She clicked on the LA Confidential blog, which displayed the article where Hughes had outed her as the daughter of one of The Player’s victims and detailed her troubled past as the killer of one of her foster fathers—in self-defense. Hughes had also functioned as the conduit between Jake and the third copycat, and had been murdered for his trouble.

  She closed the browser and all the tabs with a click of the mouse. “We know his computer wasn’t stolen. Doesn’t mean someone didn’t look at his files. Like I said, no password.”

  “Safe?” Jake jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  Kyra brushed past him and led him to the master bedroom, where Quinn had still slept in the king-size bed he’d shared with Charlotte. He’d admitted to Kyra once that he still left room for his wife on the left side, as if he expected her to be there one morning.

  Blinking back tears, Kyra flicked the light switch on the outside of the walk-in closet and yanked open the door. Quinn had left one whole side of this closet empty, too, after Kyra had helped him pack up Charlotte’s clothes. Now she’d have to do the same for his.

  “The safe’s in the corner, bolted to the floor.” She fished a piece of paper from the purse strapped across her body. “I have the combination.”

  Jake held out his hand. “Let me.”

  “Are you afraid something’s going to jump out at me?” She held on to the paper for a second before slapping it into his palm. “Go for it.”

  Jake crouched before the safe with the combination in one hand. He read out the numbers as he punched them into the keypad. A little scale of notes trilled, and a small display flashed green.

  “Just like a hotel safe.” As Jake paused, she nudged him in the back with her knee. “You are nervous about opening the safe.”

  “Just hoping those pieces are still in here.” He pulled open the door of the safe and plunged his hand inside. “Guns, cash and a few envelopes. Do you want me to take it all out?”

  “Yes, please. I’m guessing one of those envelopes has info about his living trust and Terrence’s phone number.” She backed out of the closet. “Bring it out to the bed.”

  Jake emerged from the closet clutching several items to his chest with one arm, his other arm at his side with an old-fashioned-looking gun dangling from his fingertips. “The man was true to his word.”

  “Those are the weapons you expected to see in there?”

  “They are.” He dropped the contents of Quinn’s safe on the neatly made-up bed and ran his hand along the barrel of one of the guns. “This piece is worth a lot of money. If you’d rather sell it and take the money, that’s okay.”

  “That is most definitely not okay. Quinn cherished those guns, and that’s why he wanted you to have them.” She pushed three bundles of bills to the side and picked up one of the envelopes. She peeked inside, thumbing through some papers. “As I expected—instructions for his trust and Terrence’s business card, which Quinn had given me some time ago.”

  “And the other envelope?” Jake made a grab for the envelope as she reached for it. He eyed the contents and let out a long breath. “Banking information, which I’m sure Hicks already has.”

  Kyra consulted a sheet of paper she’d pulled out of her purse. “Guns and cash. That’s what he indicated, so it’s all here.”

  “Nothing’s been stolen from the house.” Jake lifted his shoulders. “I think you’re being fanciful about the idea that someone’s been here. It’s your mind playing tricks on you because Quinn’s gone.”

  She sucked in her lower lip, and Jake dropped the gun he’d been caressing to the bed and took her in his arms. “Are you sure this isn’t too soon for you? Let’s grab Quinn’s suit and get out of here for now. I can pour you a gla
ss of wine and give you a nice massage.”

  Curling her arms around his neck, she planted a kiss on his mouth. “I’m so glad you’re with me. Heart disease or no heart disease, I don’t think Quinn could’ve ever left me unless he felt sure someone could protect me and make me happy—someone like you.”

  Jake ran a hand through the loose strands of her hair. “Quinn has nothing to worry about. I’m right by your side.”

  His warmth enveloped her, and she murmured against his solid chest. “So, Quinn didn’t leave you instructions for my care and feeding? You’re doing it of your own free will?”

  Jake’s frame stiffened in her arms, and she poked his side. “He did leave you instructions.”

  He backed out of her embrace and pinched her chin. “Don’t be ridiculous. I told you. He left me descriptions of the two guns he wanted me to have. He already knew I’d be here to love and protect you.”

  “How’d I get so lucky?” She plucked at his shirt. “I’m going to dive back into the closet and collect Quinn’s good suit. We can come back later to clean house. I—I may need some time before I can get to that.”

  “Take all the time you need, babe.” He hoisted his two new pieces. “I’ll put these back in the safe. What do you want to do with the cash? Looks like there’s a bundle, couple grand at least.”

  “You can put that back, too. I’m thinking of giving it to that boxing gym here in Venice. Quinn had mentored a few of those young men who worked out there a couple of years ago.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I think he’d like that.”

  “I think so, too.” Jake flicked on the light to the walk-in closet and carried the guns and the cash to the back.

  As he crouched in front of the safe, Kyra bumped him with her knees. “Sorry. I’m trying to get around you to the blue suit in the plastic. Thank goodness he had that dry-cleaned recently. I believe the last time he wore it was for the funeral of that officer who was ambushed in Crenshaw. He probably never imagined his next time would be for his own funeral.”