by Lynn Bulock
Quinn straightened up and glared at Josh. “We both got our GED. But yeah, I won’t argue that money was important. It still is if I’m going to make a real home for my son.” He put his hands flat on the table, pushed his chair away and stood up. “Are we done here? Because I need to get back to work.”
“We’re done, for now. But we’ll be staying in touch.” If Quinn was going to play the tough guy, he would, too. Kyra looked from one to the other without saying much. Josh could tell that she would have ended the interview differently. Maybe next time he’d let her call the shots.
They let Deon leave the coffee shop first and Josh watched him get into his small car. “Is this the way your part of the job usually works? Because it felt kind of abrupt to me. There were a couple of questions I would still like to ask him.”
“Me, too. But we might as well let him feel like he has some control of the situation for now. We learned a lot here, and one thing I heard makes me want to go straight back to that medical clinic.”
Kyra tilted her head, looking confused. “Were we listening to the same conversation? What did you hear that I didn’t?”
“The part about Gen’s great new career in medicine, courtesy of a guy named Ray.”
She was silent for a moment, and then perked up. “Ah. Does this mean you think Gen’s Ray might be Ramon Garcia?”
“It’s a possibility, and one I want to explore. I needed one more reason to check out Garcia on a deeper level, anyway. And then there’s Griffith.”
“Gary Griffith? Do you think we should investigate him?”
“Oh, yeah. We’ve turned up three guys that have connections with at least two of the women and he’s one of them. We may both think somebody else is the most likely possibility, but I’m not going to let Griffith go without at least talking to him.”
Kyra shrugged. “Suit yourself. It’s difficult for me to imagine that Diana would stay married to someone capable of crimes like this, or have a child with anybody she didn’t trust.”
“Does this mean you want to come with me when I talk to them? If you can keep from making up your mind beforehand and stay fairly quiet, you’re welcome.”
Kyra wrinkled her nose. “Well, thanks for thinking so highly of me.” And before he could defend his remarks, she breezed out of the coffee shop, leaving him to follow.
He still felt like he was trying to catch up to her the next day. She’d found ways to mostly avoid him all morning. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as it had been after he’d told her she’d had an easy life, but she wasn’t real cordial, either.
Finally about one she came into their shared office again and he got up from the computer right away. “We need to talk. I don’t want some kind of wall between us again. It’s too hard to share an office and work on the same case with friction between us. Besides, it’s no fun.”
Until that last sentence Kyra had looked serious. With the last bit, she gave him the ghost of a smile. “You’re right about that. And there’s precious little fun in this job a lot of the time. But we’ve got to agree on a few things. For one, you can’t keep making assumptions about me.”
Ouch. She was right there. “It’s hard not to. I spend most of my time making assumptions about people and sometimes it slips over into my personal life.”
Kyra gave a short laugh. “Are you sure that came out right? I’m not sure we should describe anything going on between the two of us as our personal life. Won’t that just make it harder to share work space, or work?”
“I think it’s already too late to worry about that.” Josh hadn’t thought about it before he answered her, but now he realized that it was true. “What we’ve got is personal, and it’s work. And it’s different from anything else I’ve ever been a part of. How about you?”
She didn’t take long to answer. “The same. I haven’t had a lot of relationships with men, but this definitely feels like something out of the ordinary. That probably means we both need to be careful.”
Josh nodded, feeling his mouth go dry. “Do you still want to go with me to talk to the Griffiths?”
Kyra’s green eyes widened. “I don’t think so. Maybe we need some time apart. Do you want me to call Diana and set things up? I can do that much.”
“Sure. You already have the contact with her. That will make things easier. Thanks, Kyra.”
“You’re welcome. Just don’t make me regret doing this.”
He felt an incredible surge of protectiveness for her and his mouth was even drier. “You can count on me.”
He thought he saw a flicker of pain in her eyes, and then it was gone. “I hope you’re right. Normally I don’t count on anybody but God. Life is just easier that way.”
Josh shook his head. “To me that sounds a lot harder than counting on another human being. And for me, that’s one of the most difficult things I can think of.”
“See, that’s something we can agree on, even though it’s for different reasons. We both find it hard to trust other people.” Kyra turned back toward her desk. “I think you’ll understand very quickly, though, why I find Diana Griffith easier to trust than most people.”
Sitting in the Griffiths’ living room, Josh saw what Kyra meant. Diana Griffith could only be described as sweet-looking and warm. Her light brown hair framed her face in short curls that made her look only slightly older than the six teens living in the group home that she and her husband, Gary, ran. “I’m so sorry to hear that it was Nikki that you found. I always hoped that she was out there somewhere, that maybe she had made it to Alaska.”
“Alaska?” Joshua had found that just echoing someone’s statement sometimes led to a lot more information.
Diana nodded. “Most of the girls that live with us come from pretty rough family situations if there’s any family at all. The ones that aren’t too beaten down have a focus or a dream. For Nikki that was Alaska. She always said that someday she was going to live there, with the moose and the elk and the polar bears.”
Josh knew his expression gave him away when Diana laughed softly. “Okay, you and I know as adults that there are no polar bears in most of Alaska, but I wasn’t about to tell an eleven-year-old that. I had to give her enough bad news without that kind.”
“How long did she stay with you?”
Diana looked up toward the ceiling, with an expression that said she was counting in her head. “Almost three years. It was the longest she ever stayed anywhere. If she hadn’t started acting out, she would have been here even longer. Who knows, maybe if that had happened…”
“It’s no good second-guessing yourself, Mrs. Griffith. It sounds as if you provided as good an environment as possible for Nikki. You said she acted out. What happened?”
“She was fighting with the other girls here, the younger ones, and things got way too physical. We couldn’t take the added stress in the house just then. I was pregnant with Sarah and we couldn’t get Nikki turned around. Then she ran away and that tipped the scale. Four months later I heard that she had been found and put into a…structured facility.”
“Does that mean juvenile detention?” Josh didn’t like euphemisms if there was a way around them.
Diana looked away from him for a moment, pushing her lips into a tense line. “Not exactly. This would have been somewhere between the kind of home we have here and detention.” Before she could say more a sound outside made Diana rise from the armchair where she sat. “I heard car doors. You’ll have to give me a minute.”
Josh watched as she went to the front door and opened it. Two girls came in, letting a blast of damp spring air in with them. “It’s raining!” the younger one exclaimed. “We got all wet.”
She had a delighted giggle and springy curls accentuated by the humidity. Josh had to guess that she was about seven. “Mr. Richards, this is my daughter, Sarah, and Jackie. Besides Sarah she’s the youngest of our kids right now and she goes to the same school as Sarah.” While she spoke Diana gave each girl a hug. “Now, both of you go upstai
rs and change out of your school clothes and take off those wet shoes, okay?”
In a flurry of backpacks and jackets the children did as they were told. Diana nodded toward the back of the house. “We’re going to have to move this conversation to the kitchen while I get snacks ready. If those two are home, it means that Gary should be home with the middle-schoolers in about ten minutes. He picks them up on his way home from work at the hospital and they get here right after the grade-school carpool.”
With an ease that told Josh that it was her normal routine, the woman pulled a box of graham crackers out of the pantry and lined up five mugs on the kitchen countertop, spooning cocoa mix into them. Josh watched her with a twinge he recognized as guilt at his momentary envy for the kids in her care. Nobody had ever met him after school with cookies and hot chocolate.
He was still castigating himself for the thought when the back door opened a few minutes later and two more slightly older girls came in, followed by a man closing an umbrella. “It’s pouring out there. Weatherman was wrong again,” he grumbled. Josh looked at him as he took off a light jacket and hung it on a coatrack, laying the wet umbrella under the rack. “Gary Griffith,” he said, sticking out his hand to Josh, who introduced himself.
“Diana told me you were coming. Do you want to go back to the living room and talk, away from the commotion in here?”
Josh followed his lead back to the living room as Griffith eased through a swinging door between the two rooms. “She also told me about Nikki,” he said softly to Josh. “I don’t want any of those kids unduly upset. They have enough to worry them without something like this.” The concern in his dark eyes looked real, and after only a few more minutes talking to Griffith Josh was ready to go. He needed to go back to the office for a discussion with Kyra. It was time to try to convince her that they needed to issue a warrant before Ramon Garcia got away from them.
NINE
Kyra looked up from her paperwork when Josh came into the office. He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t seem terribly upset, either. “Okay, prepare to be surprised,” he told her, pulling a chair up to her desk. “I totally agree with you on something.”
“Oh? That is a surprise.” Kyra couldn’t remember too many times in their work on this case when the two of them had been in agreement on anything. “Does this have to do with Diana and Gary Griffith?”
“It does. And after talking to her for a while, and seeing her with the kids there, it’s hard for me to imagine that she could have anything to do with one murder, let alone three.”
While Josh talked, Kyra watched him. His hair had gotten noticeably longer in the time they’d been working together. She realized that it was a good indication of how much time they’d been spending on work. Every night when she went home, Ranger wound around her ankles with an ongoing feline commentary on how he felt about her long hours in the lab. Obviously Josh had spent so much time on the case and driving back and forth to his apartment in Virginia that he didn’t have time for a haircut.
She must have been thinking about all of this longer than she realized because Josh was looking at her, blue eyes sparkling. “You still with me?”
“Yes. I’m sorry about that. I was truly paying attention, but then I started looking at your hair.”
His brows drew down and together. “What’s wrong with my hair? I know I’ve combed it at least once today. It was raining when I left the group home, but I didn’t think it did that much damage.”
“No, it’s not that,” she tried to reassure him. “It’s just that it’s gotten so much longer while we’ve been working together. You haven’t even had time for a haircut.”
Josh ran a hand through the gingery mass, starting to get slightly wavy. “You’re right. I kind of like it this length, though. I’d been keeping it shorter than normal while I’d done some undercover work. Unless you think I should cut it, this is good.”
“That length is fine,” she said, pushing away the wish to run her fingers through his hair as well. She could imagine the texture, thick and smooth under her fingertips. “So we agree on Diana. Tell me what you thought of Gary.”
Josh shrugged. “He doesn’t immediately make me cautious like Garcia does. He brings the kids home from school, worries about talking about death in front of them and seems to have a clean record at work.”
“So you haven’t been just checking out Ramon Garcia?”
Josh smiled briefly. “Even though I still suspect him, it would be foolish not to check out anybody that could have as much possibility as Griffith or Deon Quinn.”
“My kind of investigation usually takes place mostly within the lab,” she told him. “I’m not used to being a part of this kind of search involving live people.”
“That’s why they wanted me here. And I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. When I started I wasn’t looking forward to my time here. It felt like a punishment or a demotion.”
Kyra wrinkled her nose. “Even working with me? Thanks for the compliment.”
“Hey, that’s not the way I meant it. I was just unhappy about being out of the bureau and way out here in the boonies. Working with you was probably the one positive this assignment had going for it.”
She found herself smiling as she listened to Josh backpedal, and watching him earnestly try to get out of the hole he’d dug for himself with his words. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him how fluttery she’d felt when he started working at the crime lab. But she kept that to herself and let him stew just a little while longer. “Okay, let’s drop this train of thought and go back to talking about the investigation. Why did you look at Quinn and Griffith if you’re so sure that Garcia is your prime suspect?”
“Exactly because Garcia is the prime suspect. If I have to testify in court I want to be able to say that we checked out everybody who had the same kinds of means, motive or opportunity that he had. And all that is why I think it’s time to get a warrant to look at Garcia even closer.”
He looked so eager that Kyra hated disappointing him. “Josh, this is where it’s going to get hard for you. Our job is wrapping up here. Now that we know who the victims are and have a rough idea of how long they’ve been dead, we become the support team for Homicide.”
His face fell. “You mean that you don’t follow up any of the rest of the investigation? Before when you’ve worked with me on FBI cases I always kept you in the loop on how things turned out.”
Kyra nodded. “Was that policy for the bureau, or professional courtesy?”
Josh looked down at the floor. “I guess it wasn’t policy.”
Kyra pushed on, hoping she could do things without being too blunt. “And you were in charge there, Josh. Here, the state of Maryland is running the show and you’re just an investigator on loan because you have experience. Technically there’s not a solid reason for the FBI to get involved.”
“Which means I have no official standing here. That’s a new experience for me and I don’t like it,” Josh admitted. “How do you handle just letting things go like this?”
“It’s what I do. I am responsible for identifying the victims, creating a timeline, and when I can, telling the state police how someone died. Past that, I’m out of my area of expertise.”
“Yeah, well, I consider this my area of expertise all right, and I want you to figure out how I get transferred on to the homicide team that’s going to take over. At the least I need to brief them on everything we’ve got so far and talk to somebody who wants to chase down Garcia pretty quickly.”
“I’m pretty sure that a transfer isn’t going to work. Didn’t you tell me that you were specifically assigned to my office for the duration of this case?” Kyra saw him wince a little at the accuracy of her assessment of the situation.
“So what about being a consultant? Or a liaison from this office? You just said this isn’t your area of expertise. Maybe you need somebody to follow up on investigations like this one that are bound to be hig
h profile.”
Kyra sighed. “I’m glad I’m on the same side of the law that you are, Joshua. You’re extremely determined.”
“I pride myself on it.” His eyes were blue steel. “That isn’t much of an answer.” He stepped close to her, and Kyra stopped breathing for a moment while she drank in his power and intensity. If it had been hard earlier to resist touching him, running a hand through his hair, it was twice as difficult now. The spicy scent of his cologne and the warmth of his breath, which she could feel at this distance, didn’t make things any easier.
“I could probably answer you better if you weren’t so close to me,” Kyra admitted. It was difficult to form coherent thoughts standing this near to Josh.
“Me, too, but now that I’m this close, for some reason I don’t want to move.” His voice was softer, husky. They touched each other at the same instant; Kyra could feel his hands in the middle of her back while she felt his ribs expand with his breath.
The room was silent for what seemed like a very long time, but was really only seconds before he bent his head slightly and kissed her. His lips were warm for a moment. Before they could feel warmer he pulled away, letting go of her and stepping back a pace. “I’d apologize, except I think that was mutual.”
Kyra nodded, not trusting herself to speak quite yet. “If that was an effort to convince me we shouldn’t be in the same office all day, it won’t work. I agreed to have you as an investigator for this department and it has to stay that way. But I’ll make sure that you get as much connection with the serious crimes unit as possible, okay?”
He shrugged slightly. “It’s going to have to do. When I came over here, Pam Gorman gave me the choice of taking this assignment or going on full paid leave for at least six weeks, so I expect she wants me out of the office at least that long. Since I imagine she’s not ready to have me back this soon, I’m pretty much at your mercy.”
Josh looked at her with intensity, then sighed softly. “With some people that would be a bad thing, but I think I can handle it as long as it’s you.”
