by Mary McBride
Maggie lodged her cup on the center console and unfastened her seat belt. “I’ll go talk to her. You stay here and sulk, Decker. You probably scared her half to death, anyway.”
He rolled his window down and yelled to her as she made her way up the slippery walk. “Don’t take no for an answer, Mag. She’s got to look at those pictures.”
Sara opened the front door, partly relieved to see it was Sergeant Maggie O’Connor standing there, but wary all the same, especially when she glimpsed Lieutenant Decker glowering at her from the passenger side of the car. His breath was coming out in a cloud that looked like hot steam. She invited the woman in, then waited for the usual, rather breathless, silly comments about the magnificence of the foyer. She should just have people come to the back door, she thought, to avoid all the fuss.
But the sergeant seemed oblivious of the marble and gilt that surrounded her and kept her gaze on Sara. “Joe explained the problem, Miss Campbell,” she said without preamble. “Is there anything I can do to reassure you? This shouldn’t take long. We could have you back here in an hour or less.”
“I can’t.” Sara felt tears welling in her eyes. She wasn’t used to talking about her problem. She was used to offering lame excuses rather than the truth. And she wasn’t all that used to saying no. “I know you think I’m being uncooperative, but I’m not. Really. Can’t you bring the photographs here?”
“Look. It’s okay. I understand.” The sergeant put her hand on Sara’s arm and squeezed gently. “I mean, as much as anybody can understand. My aunt Rose has the same problem. Have you got any tranquilizers around? Maybe if you took a couple...”
Sara shook her head. “They don’t help.”
“Okay.”
Maggie O’Connor chewed her lower lip a moment as if trying to come up with a solution while Sara stood there, steeling herself to say no for what felt like the thousandth time. But then the sergeant grinned quite unexpectedly.
“We’ll be back in about an hour with the pictures, okay?”
“I thought the lieutenant said that was against regulations.”
“It is,” she said, “but the lieutenant has a reputation of bending those when he has to. And I guess this is just one of those cases, isn’t it?”
Sara felt herself breathing again, drawing cool air and sweet relief deep into her lungs. “Thank you, Sergeant.”
“That’s okay.” Maggie O’Connor’s gaze intensified on Sara’s face. “Look. It really isn’t any of my business, but I’m probably not doing you any favors in the long run, Miss Campbell. I guess you already know that.”
“I only know you’re doing me a huge favor now, and I appreciate it more than I can say.”
Joe hadn’t seen the top of his desk in months. It was such a mess that the captain had had it moved to a far corner of the squad room, which was fine with Joe because he didn’t have as far to go to get a cup of coffee. Frank Cobble was eyeballing his desk right now, as if he wished he could move it even farther away. Like Siberia.
“How’s it going with the Campbell woman?” he asked as he flipped the pages of Joe’s desk calendar two weeks forward to the correct day. “Did you get anything in the way of a description yet?”
“We’re working on it,” Joe answered, sliding the manila envelope crammed with borrowed mug shots into his top drawer. All innocence, he looked at his boss’s narrowed eyes and pinched mouth. “What about some kind of security for her, Captain?”
“No can do, Decker. I told you last night. No more overtime until the new budget makes it through the city council.” The captain picked up a pen half buried under papers, then scrutinized the desktop. “You got a cap for this, Decker? These cheap pens run dry overnight if you don’t cap them.”
Joe sighed. He didn’t think much of Frank Cobble to begin with, but the man’s ability to focus on the insignificant and the inane practically made the fillings ache in Joe’s clenched teeth. “I’ll get right on that, Captain.”
Maggie was sauntering across the squad room, licking the cream filling from a doughnut off her fingers.
“It’s a little late for breakfast, isn’t it, O’Connor?” Cobble snapped.
“This is lunch,” Maggie answered matter-of-factly, causing the captain to roll his eyes and retreat to the safety of his pristine office. “Did you get them?” she whispered, perching on the edge of Joe’s desk.
He opened the drawer a few inches, disclosing the manila envelope. “Let’s just hope our guy’s in there.”
“And that Sara Campbell can ID him.”
“Yeah. And that he can’t ID her. Which reminds me.” Joe mounted his most effective grin. “What are you doing tonight, Mag?”
“Oh, no.” Maggie jumped up as if the desktop had suddenly turned red hot. “Uh-uh. I’ve finally got a date with that security guard at Saint Cat’s. No way am I going to cancel.”
He threw up his hands. “Well, what the hell are we going to do, then? I can’t quite see the Princess of Panic agreeing to go to a hotel, can you?”
“Can’t Cobble assign somebody?”
Joe swore. “He’s too busy worrying about putting caps on pens and the red ink in the budget to worry about the only witness in this case.” He picked up a pen, wrenched off its cap and hurled them both across the room.
“Well, then, I guess you’re in the bodyguard business again, Decker.” She waggled her eyebrows. “At least for another night.”
When the doorbell rang, Sara was just pulling her perfectly browned grilled cheese sandwich from under the broiler. Startled by the bell, she dropped the gooey concoction on the floor, and then, when she tried to pick it up, the melted cheese stuck like molten lava to her thumb. She headed down the long hall to the front door, alternately flipping on lights and sucking her thumb as she went. The bell rang once more before she got there.
“All right. I’m coming. I’m coming,” she muttered, then called out, “who’s there?”
“Joe Decker,” came the deep baritone reply from the opposite side of the door.
Sara paused, one hand on the lock, the other on the knob, her thumb beginning to throb and her inner panic alarm starting to sound its warning. “You’re not going to try to cart me off someplace, are you, Lieutenant? Because, if you are, you’re really wasting your time.”
“Open the door, Miss Campbell.”
He sounded just as annoyed as when he’d left a few hours ago. Sara opened the door, expecting to see a grim set to his ruggedly handsome face, but he was grinning instead and holding up a big envelope.
“Pictures,” he said, stepping across the threshold. “Time to play pin the tail on the perp.”
Her heart skipped a little beat, and it took her a second to realize that the sensation wasn’t from anxiety, but rather from the surprising sight of the crinkles in the corners of his steel gray eyes and the sudden slash of his smile. They took her breath away for a moment Not knowing what to say or how to say it, Sara popped her thumb in her mouth again.
“What did you do,” he asked, “burn yourself on a grilled cheese sandwich?”
Sara felt her eyes almost bug out. She pulled her thumb away. “How did you know that?”
“I’m a detective, remember?” He laughed, and his eyes crinkled even more.
“I’m serious. How in the world did you know that?”
He tapped the side of his nose. “Eau de grilled cheese.” Then he jammed the envelope under his arm and took her hand in both of his. “It’s blistering. We should probably get some antibiotic cream on that.”
His hands were warm, which seemed amazing since he’d just come in from the cold. His voice was gentle, which was even more amazing since the last time she’d seen him he’d yelled that she was crazy.
“I’m sorry I called you a jerk, Lieutenant,” she said. “You know. Before. When you called me...”
“A nutcase?” He smiled while his thumb traced along hers.
“Crazy, I believe, was the exact word.”
“Oh
, yeah. Well, I guess I was a jerk, then.”
She tipped her face to his. That grin of his was irresistible, and she felt her mouth being tugged at the corners. “Is that an apology, then?”
“That’s about as close as I ever get.”
She laughed out loud. “Then I guess I better accept it.” It wasn’t easy to take her eyes off him or withdraw her hand from his grasp, but she did. “What about these pictures?”
He looked at the envelope tucked under his arm as if he’d completely forgotten it was there. “Oh, these. They can wait a few minutes. Let’s take care of that burn first, okay?”
They were in the little powder room off the kitchen, Decker with one hip angled on the vanity, Sara perched on the closed commode with her arm draped across the lieutenant’s leg. In such close quarters she was more than a little aware of the heat from his muscular body, not to mention the wonderfully tropical, almost edible scent of his cologne.
While his head was bent over her hand, she perused the strands of silver in his hair and studied the way it curled softly over the collar of his flannel shirt. Nice, she thought Too nice.
“This is silly,” she said, trying to suppress a nervous laugh. “I can do this myself, you know.”
“Hold still.” His baritone dropped to a soft growl. “Where did you get your medical degree, Campbell?”
“Well, where did you get yours, Decker?”
“Premed,” he said, tearing the wrapper off a Band-Aid. “And prelaw. Right here at the university. I quit after one year of law school. Turn your hand the other way.”
Sara did as she was told. “Why’d you quit?”
“Well...” He positioned the vinyl strip carefully over her thumb. “It seemed pretty clear that my wife was going to make a better lawyer than I was, so I got a job to put her the rest of the way through school.” He pressed the ends of the bandage to her finger. “There. All done. I don’t think we’ll have to amputate.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling stupid and disappointed and inexplicably sad all at once. “So your wife’s a lawyer. You must make quite a team.”
“We did. She died three years ago.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sara breathed.
“So am I.”
He stood up, letting go of her hand. There was a kind of half smile on his face, a woeful, little-boy-lost expression that touched Sara’s heart. It was all she could do not to press the palm of her hand to his cheek. The intensity of her desire to comfort him fairly shocked her.
Well, there was comfort and then there was comfort food, she thought.
“Would you like a grilled cheese sandwich, Lieutenant?”
The kitchen was practically as cozy as the den with its light oak glass-fronted cabinets and bright Mediterranean tiles. Joe settled on a rush-seated stool, leaned his elbows on the center island and watched Sara Campbell, or more exactly Sara Campbell’s shapely derriere, while she muttered to herself and pawed through the refrigerator, every once in a while tossing something—a loaf of bread, a stick of butter, a package of cheese—onto the adjacent countertop. It had been a long time since he’d enjoyed the sight of a woman fussing in a kitchen.
“Two sandwiches, Lieutenant?” she asked.
“Sounds good.”
Her hands were graceful, he noticed, and her movements deft and sure, which surprised him a little considering her condition or her affliction or whatever the hell it was. She didn’t strike him as a nervous Nellie at all, but a woman who was cool and calm and completely secure. He liked watching her. Probably more than he should have, he was quick to remind himself, when his gaze kept straying from her face and busy hands to that shapely backside and those equally shapely breasts. His body, running ahead of his brain, had already responded to those curves. Now, that hadn’t happened in a long, long time.
She hummed the refrain from a golden oldie, sweetly off-key, while she lined up the buttered sandwiches on a metal pan. “Let’s see if I can do this without grilling myself this time,” she said with a little laugh, opening the wall oven and sliding the pan under the red heating element.
The phone on the far wall rang, and Sara glanced at it, frowning, then at the oven.
Joe stood up. “Go ahead. I’ll watch them.” He reached out for the spatula she was clasping.
“Thanks.”
She hurried around the island and caught the phone on the fourth ring, said a bright hello, followed it a moment later with a more insistent one, then put the receiver back. “Odd,” she said. “There was somebody there, but they didn’t say anything. Oh, well.” She walked to where Joe was standing guard at the oven. “I’ll take over now, Lieutenant.”
“Do you have caller ID, Miss Campbell?” he asked, handing over the spatula.
“Uh-huh. The box is in the den. Why?”
He shrugged. “Nothing important, really. I just thought I’d take a look at it. Do you mind?”
“No. Not at all. The den’s...”
“I’ll find it.”
He deliberately ambled out of the kitchen, then walked a little faster to the cozy, firelit room where he’d been earlier that day. The phone and the ID box were on the rolltop desk, and Joe wasn’t all that surprised to see that the call Sara Campbell had just received had come from a pay phone. He wrote the number down and shoved it in his pocket, cursing softly. It was time to check the windows and doors on the first floor.
“I kept your sandwiches warm,” Sara said when he finally got back to the kitchen. “I went ahead with mine. I was starving.”
“Sorry. I had to make a couple of phone calls.”
“Did you see who that was on the phone earlier?”
“Just somebody trying to sell you a subscription to the paper,” Joe lied. He didn’t want to frighten her, even though she was going to have to know sooner or later that she wasn’t safe in this monster of a house with its scores of mullioned windows and half a dozen French doors with inferior locks.
She slid a plate in front of him with two gorgeous sandwiches flanked by a pickle, a pepper and a few of those midget ears of corn. God, he was famished. But he’d already wasted too much time enjoying Sara Campbell rather than interrogating her, so instead of digging into the food, he got up and retrieved the manila envelope he’d left with his coat. He tossed it onto her side of the island as he sat down.
“Pictures,” he said. “Remember? Let’s hope you see a familiar face.”
She stared at the envelope for a second, then opened it cautiously as if she expected it to explode. She pulled out the stack of vinyl photo sleeves, sighed and said, “Okay. Here goes.”
Joe bit into the sandwich and wanted to moan from the pure pleasure of it. Nothing had ever tasted so good. At least not in the past three years. He ate slowly, savoring each bite, and watched Sara’s eyes move from picture to picture, from page to page, before they lifted to meet his.
She shook her head. “Nothing. None of them looks the least bit familiar.” She added a breathy little, “Thank God.”
“I wasn’t holding out too much hope that our guy was in there, anyway.” He wiped his mouth and hands with a blue-checkered napkin, folded it neatly, then tucked it beneath the empty plate. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I could get you to check into a hotel under an assumed name, is there?”
“No,” she answered, beginning to look wary again. “Why on earth would you want me to go to a hotel?”
“Because you’re not safe here,” he told her bluntly. “I don’t know if you’ve thought about this, but the Ripper not only knows you can identify him, he can identify you, too.”
Her lips twitched a little and she sat up straighter. “No, I hadn’t thought about that. You mean you think he’ll come after me?”
“It’s possible.”
“But he doesn’t know who I am,” she protested.
“I’m betting that finding out who you are is right at the top of his to-do list.” He didn’t add his suspicion that the creep probably already had found out and ha
d called her from the pay phone whose number was in his shirt pocket. He’d have somebody follow up on that tomorrow, but he already knew they wouldn’t find any good prints. “If you went to a hotel...”
“I wasn’t kidding when I said I didn’t intend to leave my house again, Lieutenant.” She crossed her arms. “Really. I meant it. And I still do.” Her green eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You can’t make me go to a hotel, can you?”
“I wish I could,” he said with a mournful laugh. “But since you won’t, somebody’s going to have to stay with you.”
“Who?”
“Me. Tonight, anyway.”
“Oh.”
“Is that all right with you?” he asked, knowing he couldn’t stay without her permission, hoping she didn’t know that, that if she said get out, he’d have to, and then he’d find himself spending a long, cold and cramped night in his car out front.
It worried him when she seemed to be deliberating too long, but then she picked up his empty plate, carried it to the sink and over her shoulder said, “I guess so, Lieutenant. As long as I get to stay home, that’s just fine with me.”
Chapter 4
Sara put two more logs on the fire while she waited for Joe Decker to come in from his car. She’d offered to let him pull the ancient Mustang out of the nasty weather and into the garage, but he’d declined. “It’s better if it looks like you’ve got company,” he’d told her.
Better for what? she wondered. It was all a little difficult to believe, Sara thought as she curled into her habitual corner of the couch and sipped the Merlot she’d meant to have last night. She didn’t feel threatened by the Ripper or anybody else. She was home, after all. This was her sanctuary. She thought that Lieutenant Decker was probably overreacting, but then she decided she was glad that he was. The thought made her smile. It was nice having somebody worried about her. Somebody other than herself for a change. Even if it was, she reminded herself, just professional.
