by Terry Odell
“Give me a minute.” In the bathroom, she saw the second toothbrush sitting in the glass next to hers. They looked happy standing side by side. She brushed her teeth, released her hair from its ponytail and gave it a few licks with her hairbrush. She pulled her nightshirt from the hook on the bathroom door and wriggled into it. For a split second, she wished she had something silk and sexy.
Ridiculous. Even if she did, it would be a total waste tonight. Graham needed to sleep.
She flipped off the light and went to the bedroom. He was lying on his back now, eyes closed, breathing evenly. She tiptoed across the room, climbed in beside him and switched off the lamp. He gave a quiet grunt, turned on his side and spooned her into him. She savored the rise and fall of his chest against her back for a long time before she slept.
Colleen felt a restless stirring beside her. Disoriented at first, until the memories came back, she reached for Graham. She heard his labored breathing, recognized all the familiar signs of a nightmare.
“You okay?” she whispered.
“Fine. Go back to sleep.” He pulled off the sweatshirt she’d given him and dropped it to the floor. “Too hot.”
She stretched her body along his length, feeling his heat radiate through the thin cotton of her nightshirt. Moving her hands up and down his back, she pressed his taut muscles. She rubbed small circles on his temples, touched her lips to his. It was as if every muscle in his body was clenched. Her fingers moved from his temples to his chest, her lips from his mouth to his neck. He moaned softly and his muscles went lax. He reached for her, but she pushed his hands away. How long since he had offered comfort? It was her turn.
“Lie still,” she said. “Relax.”
He’d come to her. Needed her. Not as an outlet. As a friend. But he’d taught her the peace and joy two bodies could give each other. She reached for him. Her fingers caressed, stroked, teased. When they swirled around his navel, he gasped.
She felt his arousal growing, but she stroked his thighs, back to his belly, avoiding his genitals. When she heard his breathing accelerate, she grazed his testicles, letting her fingers toy with the soft hair covering them. She explored his stiffening erection. Her fingers moved along its smooth length, around its tip, then returned to his thighs. She repeated the motion. And again, until his hips jerked.
“Relaxing isn’t an option anymore, mo chridhe.” He ran his fingertips over the turgid peaks of her breasts. Desire shot between her legs. His hands traced her body as she explored his, slowly, as if the night would never end. She opened the nightstand drawer.
When they were ready, she took him slowly, drawing out the joining until neither could wait any longer. With him fully inside her, she clutched her hands around his buttocks as if she could draw him even closer. Could being inside her feel as good to him?
She tilted her head, giving him access to the place below her ear where she loved to be kissed, and she moaned with delight when he understood what she meant. He began to move in long, slow strokes. She knew what she wanted now, and what he needed. Her hips moved to match his rhythm. She tightened herself around him, fine-tuning angles to heighten her own pleasure while denying him nothing.
Their passion grew in gentle waves until almost without knowing how they got there, they were both balanced on the razor edge of ecstasy. She heard him whisper, “Now, mo chridhe. Say my name. Now.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Graham woke to the beep of his wristwatch alarm. His stomach burned from the previous night, but Colleen’s body, entwined with his, made up for any residual misery. He pulled her arm from across his chest and managed to turn off the alarm before it woke her. But when he tried to slip of out bed, she sat up.
“What time is it?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep.
“A little before five. Go back to sleep. I have to get home and change for work.” He got up and found his pants beside the bed where he’d dropped them. His underwear was buried somewhere in the bedclothes. She tossed back the covers and fished them out, dangled them from her fingertips. Bedroom eyes tormented him.
“Thanks,” he said, wishing he had time to take her up on her invitation.
“I’ll make you some coffee,” she said and crawled off the bed.
“No time. I’ll grab some on my way.” He picked up his shirt, telling himself he imagined the stench of the corpse. He hadn’t touched it, but in the morgue, it seemed the smell permeated his every pore. Repressing a shudder at the memory, he worked his arms into the sleeves but couldn’t find the fortitude to do up the buttons. Too close to his skin.
“Wait,” Colleen said. “We never talked last night. What if I drove you home and then to work?”
“Too complicated.” How could she snap to coherence so quickly? “Things are starting to come together. I don’t know when I’ll be finished. I’m meeting Peterson at seven-thirty, and I’ve got the Gainesville investigators coming around ten.” He shoved his socks into his pockets and crammed his bare feet into his shoes. He went into the bathroom and when he was finished, Colleen was gone.
She waited in the living room, holding a large grocery bag, her lips in a tight line. “Here,” she said and opened the front door.
“What’s this?”
“A Crystal Shores brochure. Complete with Stuart Gravely’s fingerprints. You decide if you can use it.”
Shit. He was not a morning person. Especially not the morning after a lousy day. The night had ended on a high note, but a little more sleep would have helped. He glanced at his watch, decided he wasn’t late yet, pulled Colleen to the couch and set her on his lap. “I didn’t thank you for last night. I’m a bear without my coffee.”
“I said I’d make you coffee,” she said in a tight voice.
“I know. But I have to get going. I’ll try to call you. How about dinner? You can tell me how you got this stuff. Until then, I’m not sure I want to know.”
She glared at him. “It was legitimate, Harrigan. Nothing you couldn’t have done without a warrant. I’ll have you know I went to great pains to get it too.”
“I’m sure you did. Forgive me? If you hadn’t been here for me last night—well, best case scenario, I’d probably be nursing the king of all hangovers and would never make it to work.”
“I want to be here for you.”
He lifted her chin with his forefinger and kissed her. “I’ll call, okay? Soon as I’m clear, you can fill me in.”
“Okay.” She scooted off his lap and he went to the door.
“Go back to sleep. I think I want you well rested tonight.”
He ducked when she picked up a pillow from the couch and hurled it at him, but not before he got a flash of her dimple.
Graham sorted his thoughts as he waited for Peterson. Colleen had called right after seven and explained what Stuart Gravely had told her, including the fact she’d seen him talking to Doris. He had turned the folio over to the lab to see if they could match the prints to any of the unknowns from Doris’ house. Better for the case if they could place him inside. And how did Doris connect? Was she a Crystal Shores investor?
He thought more about the property. Crystal Shores wasn’t defunct, merely undergoing a name change. Maybe Gravely was hiding something. Like bald eagle nests.
When Peterson arrived at seven forty-five, he looked tired, but with his basset hound face, that was the norm. He always looked like he’d just been awakened from a sound sleep, but Graham had discovered Peterson was a sharp investigator.
“I heard you might have found your guy,” Peterson said, turning on the computer. “Not a pretty one. You got cause of death yet?”
“Two bullets in the chest, apparently. ME will confirm.”
“Okay,” said Peterson. “Tell me what we’re looking for.”
“Anything fishy in Stuart Gravely’s finances, or that could tie him to Jeffrey or Doris Walters.”
Two hours later, Graham’s eyes burned as Peterson continued to whiz through databases and scroll through
impossible screens full of numbers. Graham gave up trying to follow and settled for writing down Peterson’s terse explanations. Every now and again, the man would whistle, shake his head and swear softly.
“This guy’s good, Harrigan. Real good.”
“Can you summarize in words of one syllable?”
“Gravely bought a chunk of land from Jeffrey Walters. Then he started getting people to invest in this fancy community he was building. But something must have gone wrong. He’s got this piece of property bought and sold to at least four different shell companies, all of which he owns.”
“Who owns it now?”
“He still does, but it’s not Gravely Enterprises anymore. It was SGE for a while, but that was sold to Grave Construction, which is now defunct and taken over by Florida Sunshine, Inc. Looks like Crystal Shores is now called Woodland Estates, and it’s owned by Empire Builders.”
“So you found a bunch of companies, all owned by Stuart Gravely?”
“Yep. Each time he sold the property, he changed the name of the development.”
“I have a witness who said he wasn’t going to call it Crystal Shores anymore.”
“Well, the thing is, according to what I can get out of this machine,” Peterson said and stroked the monitor almost reverently, “is that he’d get a batch of investors, string them along and then change the name of the property and get another batch. He’s selling the same land over and over.”
“Shit,” Graham said. “Okay. What about this?” He explained the fires and the bald eagle nests to Peterson, and the man’s eyes went from droopy to round. He clicked through more databases and gave another low whistle.
“No Environmental Impact Survey filed. Not under the land itself, or any of the other names. He couldn’t start building without one, and with active eagle nests on the property, it’s doubtful he’d get what he wanted. But then, maybe he never intended to build.”
“Well, I can see lots of people with a motive to do in Mr. Gravely,” Graham said. “But he seems to be doing fine.”
“Not financially. Unless he’s hiding his money in another dummy corporation I have yet to find, he’s barely making ends meet. There were at least half a dozen other projects he didn’t make a dime on. This guy’s good at moving money, but not very good at hanging on to it.”
“So if an investor with any smarts went out to the property and saw the eagle nests, it could be the end of this scam.”
“That would be my guess. Gravely’s the one with the motive to get rid of the nests.”
At the sound of his name, Graham turned. Schaeffer stood in the doorway with a petite brunette wearing a black pantsuit.
“Harrigan, this is Detective Louise Carpenter, Gainesville Police Department. Detective Carpenter, Deputy Graham Harrigan. I’m sure you’ll get along fine,” Schaeffer said with a smile, then left the room.
The woman extended her hand. “Call me Lou. I hear my Townsend case might hook up to something down here.”
Graham took her hand, noted the confident handshake. He thanked Peterson and motioned Carpenter toward his desk. “What happened to Vasquez?”
“I’m his partner, and he’s tied up. Afraid you’re stuck with me.”
“I’m sure that won’t be a problem. What can you tell me?” He dragged a chair from a nearby empty desk and she sat down. Her eyes were deep chocolate brown, large and intelligent looking. Simple pearl stud earrings peeked from beneath her short-cropped hair. She opened a briefcase and set a file folder on the desk.
“Frank Townsend, in addition to being a grad student, had a small consulting business on the side. He did basic land surveys, identified flora and fauna, especially endangered and threatened species, for Environmental Impact Surveys. His records show he did a job for Gravely Enterprises in Port Orange about a year and a half ago.”
“Nothing recent?” he asked. Over a year ago wouldn’t help him much.
Carpenter gave him a wry grin. “Nothing on paper, shall we say? But his bank account shows he was making extra money, and we dug a little deeper into his computer files. It appears he was playing a bit of CYA.”
“Covering your ass is usually a wise thing.”
“It sure helped us on this one.” She pulled a piece of paper from the file folder and handed it to Graham. “Turns out, his surveys for Gravely have been more on paper than on site. He’d look around enough to show he knew the habitat, but didn’t actually get down to the nitty-gritty of formally documenting what lived there.”
He scanned the page. A letter from Townsend to Gravely admitting he’d been willing to write reports without actually doing the surveys in the past, but he was pretty sure he’d noticed bald eagle nests at Crystal Shores, and that was a line he wouldn’t cross.
“And this one was sent about a week or so before the estimated time of death,” Carpenter said as she handed him a second page.
Another letter saying simply because there were no active nests listed on the property didn’t mean there weren’t any there and he was going to double check to be sure.
“The call Townsend made to Gravely was from his cell phone. From somewhere near Crystal Shores,” she said.
“This would indicate Gravely knew damn well what was going on.”
“I agree. I plan to drop in on Mr. Gravely. You’re welcome to come along.”
He handed the detective the papers and gathered his own paperwork. Before he’d put it away, he was called to the phone. Carpenter nodded in understanding when Graham took the call. After hanging up, he summarized the call for Carpenter. “That was the ME. The dead body has been identified as Jeffrey Walters, my missing person. They recovered the bullets from the body. Thirty-eights.”
“Can you check it out with ATF and see if Gravely owns one?” Carpenter asked. “I’d like to make a quick pit stop.”
“Sure. Down the hall on the left.” He watched her leave. Her stride was professional, purposeful, but there was no denying she was female. And he didn’t give a damn. He logged into the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms database. Stuart Gravely owned a thirty-eight caliber Smith & Wesson.
Carpenter came back. “Get anything from ATF?”
“He owns one. Think we can get a warrant?”
She chuckled. “I wish. We need to make him a suspect first. Let’s talk to him, see what we can get.” Her expression turned serious. “But your body? Don’t you have to notify next of kin? God, I hate doing that.”
“I thought I’d wait until after we talk to Gravely. Walters has been gone for weeks and the aunt isn’t worried about him. She swears he’s on a business trip, so a couple of hours shouldn’t make too much of a difference. His stepdaughter’s in Ocala. I’ll let Marion County know and they’ll take care of it.”
“Let’s move.” She flashed him a smile. No dimple.
Chapter Thirty
“It really was Jeffrey?” Colleen asked and took the phone to her couch. “Shot and dumped?”
“Yep. Dental records confirmed it. Thanks, by the way. Knowing his dentist saved a lot of time.”
“And since he’s dead, you shouldn’t have to worry about how I got his dentist’s name. As a matter of fact, now that he’s dead, nothing I did can come back and bite you.”
He ignored the layer of sarcasm in her tone. But he accepted his relief that she was right.
“Who do you think did it?” she asked.
“I’m leaning toward Gravely, although he seems to have the least motive for wanting Jeffrey dead. He admitted dealing with Jeffrey, showed us the contract where he bought the land. Their business was over. But the Gainesville cops say he’s lying through his teeth about Townsend. The two of them definitely did business.”
“Who else has a motive?” Colleen asked. “Kimberly? She needs money.”
“Once we get our hands on Jeffrey’s will, we might have a better idea. Speaking of wills, I’m going to have to notify next of kin. Doris seems to be his nearest blood relative. As long as I’m in the neighborhood,
I can stop by afterward. We said something about dinner.”
“I have some errands to run. I should be back by four.”
“I’ve got a few more things to do here and then I’ll head to Doris’. I should be done right about then.”
Colleen hung up the phone and surveyed her food supply. If Graham was dropping by, she definitely wanted to have more than cereal, eggs, and yogurt on hand. She kicked up her grocery list and started on her route.
When she’d finished, it was three-thirty, and she couldn’t help but smile when she turned the corner and saw Graham’s Jeep by the curb. She started down the driveway, catching a glimpse of Graham, his long stride carrying him down the path toward the main entry. She pictured him being kind and supportive as he told Doris of her nephew’s death. Damn, but she’d hated death notifications. That was one part of police work she’d never miss. For a fleeting moment, she contemplated offering to go with him, to offer support for Doris, but the thought was short-lived.
Graham must have heard her car, because he stopped, turned and trotted toward her. Delaying the condolence call, no doubt. She stopped at the end of the drive and started unloading her bags.
He stepped behind her, his aftershave creating a flutter of desire. He nuzzled her neck. “Need some help?”
“I thought you were supposed to be telling Doris about Jeffrey.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like to tag along? Normally a chaplain accompanies us, but he called to say he was delayed, and I didn’t want to put it off any longer.”
She groaned inwardly. Until she met his gaze and saw the plea for help and all resolve evaporated. “Why me? I’m not official.”
“But you’re a woman, and compassionate, and I’m sure Doris will appreciate your being there.”
“I suppose. If nothing else, I can call some of her friends if she falls apart. But you’ll owe me. Big time. Help me get these groceries inside.” She started for her door.
Graham followed, carrying the rest of the bags. “Small price to pay.”
