Eventually the detectives finished eating and peeled away from the table to start their day. Hope and Raintree left together, stepping from the restaurant into a sunny, warm morning.
“What’s the plan?” Hope asked as they walked into the crowded parking lot. Her heels clicked on the asphalt. Gideon’s steps were slower, steady and rhythmic.
“I want to go back to the apartment and have a look around. Maybe you can work on organizing the paperwork before the case files I requested start coming in. The neighbors’ interviews need to be typed up. It’ll be a day or two before we get a report from the crime lab, but you could give ’em a call and try to hurry it along.”
Hope tried—very hard—not to get riled. “I’m not your secretary, Raintree.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You want me to take care of the paperwork while you investigate.”
“Leon didn’t mind.”
“I’m not Leon.”
He stopped a few feet from his car and looked pointedly down at her. “I’m very well aware of that, Detective Malory.”
“I’ll drive today,” she said.
“I’d better—”
“I’ll drive,” she said again, more slowly this time. She refused to allow him to dominate this partnership. Best to show him right now that she wasn’t going to be pushed around.
There was a flash of something in Raintree’s green eyes. Amusement, maybe. It definitely wasn’t surrender. Still, all he said was, “Okay. If you insist.”
Her Toyota was parked just a few spaces down from his Mustang. “Do you want to put the top up?” she asked, pointing to his convertible.
“It’ll be all right,” he answered casually.
She slipped her keys from the side pocket of her purse and unlocked the doors with the remote on her key chain. She opened the driver’s side door while Raintree paused to look over her vehicle.
He casually placed one hand on the hood and said, “Nice car. Does it get good gas mileage?”
She almost laughed. “Significantly better than your gas guzzler.”
He straightened away from the car and coolly took his place in the passenger seat, seeming perfectly at ease. Yesterday he had been insistent about driving, but today he seemed to accept his role as passenger quite well. Maybe this partnership would work out after all. Hope buckled her seat belt and turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened.
She tried again. There was a dead-sounding click, and nothing more.
“Sounds like your starter’s on the fritz,” Raintree said evenly as he opened the passenger door and stepped out. “I know a guy,” he said as he snagged his own car keys from his pocket and headed for his convertible. “I’ll give you his number, and you can catch up with me when—”
“Oh no.” Hope locked her car and followed Raintree, her own strides shorter than his but no less firm. “I’ll take care of the car later. You’re not leaving me here.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “You’re very dedicated, Detective Malory.”
With the harsh sunlight on Raintree’s face, she could see the faint lines around his eyes. He had probably been a pretty boy in his youth, and just enough of the pretty remained to make him interesting. He wasn’t a kid anymore, though. Neither was she.
“I’m stubborn,” she said. “Get used to it.”
He grinned as he opened the passenger side car door for her and waited for her to step inside. She did, and then she looked up at him. “Don’t do that again,” she said softly.
“Don’t do what?”
“Treat me like we’re on a date. I’m your partner, Raintree. Did you ever open the door for Leon?”
“No, but he was ugly as sin and had fat, hairy legs.”
She glared at him and didn’t respond.
“Fine,” he said as he rounded the car. “You’re one of the guys. Just another cop, just another partner.”
“That’s right.” She was still annoyed about her car, but she wasn’t about to stand there waiting for a mechanic while Raintree went to the crime scene and tried to piece together any clues he might have missed yesterday.
Hope no longer believed to the pit of her soul that Gideon Raintree was crooked, but she had no proof one way or another, and she didn’t know him well enough to entirely trust what her instincts told her. She’d been burned more than once by a man who hadn’t been what he’d claimed to be. It wouldn’t happen again.
As he pulled his car out of the parking lot, Raintree said, “Leon called me Gideon. If you’re determined to hang with me until we get this whole partner thing straightened out, you might as well do the same.”
Calling him by his first name felt so personal. So friendly. How could she be friendly with Raintree when she still suspected, however uncertainly, that he might be corrupt?
Maybe he really was just a good cop. Maybe she would discover that he was as great a detective as he appeared to be, and his motives were nothing but noble. If that were the case, she would work with him, and learn how and why he was so good.
In truth, more than that was causing her hesitation. In spite of her down-to-earth personality and her dedication to her career, she had the very worst luck with men. She always picked the wrong guy. If there were twenty nice guys in a room and one stinker, she picked the stinker every time. She’d felt an unwanted but undeniable attraction to Gideon Raintree from the moment she’d laid eyes on him, and the last thing she needed right now was to get involved with another stinker.
“Okay, Gideon it is,” she said. “I guess you might as well call me Hope.”
The half smile that crossed his face made him look as if he knew something she didn’t, as if he was in on a secret joke and she wasn’t. “You sound so enthusiastic about the prospect, how can I refuse?”
The apartment didn’t look any different than it had yesterday. It was just quieter. Deader. Sherry Bishop wasn’t hanging over his shoulder, wailing about the injustice of being dead and not getting to wear her new boots. There weren’t cops and neighbors hanging around in the hallway, watching. It was just him and Malory trying to piece together a very bizarre crime.
His new partner stood near the door, studying the crime scene through her own calculating eyes. She was quiet, as if she understood that he needed silence and space to do his thing. At first she had been a distraction, but he was already accustomed to her presence. It had taken him almost a year to get this comfortable with Leon.
The blinds were open to let the morning’s natural light shine into the apartment. The ripped couch, the bloodstains and the wanton destruction looked obscene in the light of day, out of place and evil and wrong.
Standing in the quiet apartment, Gideon could almost see the progression of events. The doorbell had rung late in the evening. A woman’s voice had informed Sherry Bishop that there was a pizza delivery. She opened the door, the woman rushed in and…
“There was something odd about the knife.”
Gideon turned around and saw a very faint image of Sherry sitting on the couch as she had when she’d been living. Only now the couch was in shreds, and she was dead.
“The knife,” he whispered as he dropped to his haunches so he was face-to-face with her. From this vantage point, she looked a little more solid.
“What?” Hope took a single step toward him.
He silenced his new partner with a raised hand. She hated that, he knew, but he didn’t want to scare Sherry off. He couldn’t even afford to look away, because if he did, he might lose her. The ghost before him wouldn’t last long, not in her present state. “I’m thinking out loud,” Gideon said without looking at Hope.
“Oh.”
“What about the knife?” he asked softly.
“It was antique looking, you know?” Bishop said. “I think maybe it was silver, and there was something fancy on the handle.”
“Fancy how?”
“I couldn’t see the whole grip, because that psycho bitch was holding it, but there was an
engraving. Words, I think.”
“What did it say?”
The ghost shrugged. “I don’t know. It wasn’t English, I don’t think. I wasn’t exactly trying to read at that moment.” Already she was starting to fade. “She was really angry. Why was she so angry? I never did anything to—”
Sherry didn’t fade away; she disappeared in an instant. Gideon remained there before the sofa, hunkered down and thinking. She’d seemed certain the killer had done this before. This afternoon, when he sat down with the files he’d requested, maybe he would be able to figure out if that was true or not. They not only had the type of weapon and wound to match, but there was the matter of the missing finger and piece of scalp. This killer took souvenirs, and that was the key that would lead him to previous victims, if there were any.
It was unusual for a serial killer to be a woman, but it wasn’t impossible. What had drawn the killer to Sherry Bishop? What had caught her eye and brought her here?
He heard and felt Hope crossing the room. She moved smoothly, silently, but he was in tune with her energy, and that was what he felt as she moved closer.
“Okay, you’re spooking me a little,” she said as she stopped behind him.
“Sorry.” Gideon stood and turned to face her. “I want the uniforms to scour the surrounding area searching for the knife.”
“They did that yesterday.”
“I want them to do it again. Odds are the killer’s still got it on her, but we can’t take any chances. We need the murder weapon.”
“It could be in the river, for all we know,” she argued.
“I hope you’re wrong.” Sherry hadn’t recognized her killer, so there was no name to go by, just a vague description, the mutilation…and that knife.
Hope’s eyes softened a little. “You’re taking this case kinda personally. Did you know Sherry Bishop better than you’re letting on?”
“I take all my cases personally,” he said.
Hope studied him carefully, as if she were trying to figure out what made him tick. Good luck.
Suddenly Emma, the wannabe daughter of his dreams, appeared, floating hazily behind Hope. Her eyes widened and she glanced toward the window and seemed to swipe at Hope with flailing hands, as if she were trying to push her. “Get down!”
Without hesitation, without even stopping to wonder at the fact that Emma had appeared while he was awake, Gideon tackled Hope and threw them both to the floor. They fell into and through Emma’s image, before the girl disappeared. For a split second he was chilled by direct contact with the child who claimed to be his daughter. He and Hope landed hard, just as the window shattered and a bullet slammed into the wall. They lay there for a moment, his body covering and crushing hers.
A current of electricity shimmered through his arms and legs and torso. Not everywhere, but wherever he touched Hope there was definitely a flicker of unusual voltage that he couldn’t control. She felt it, too; he knew by the way she reacted with a jolt.
After the gunshot all was silent, until they heard the shouts of an alarmed neighbor from two floors down.
Gideon rolled off Hope, drew his gun and edged toward the shattered window. She was right behind him, pistol in hand. He peered cautiously through the window, trying to see where the shot had originated. A window on the building next door was open, faded curtains ruffling slightly with the breeze. “Stay here and stay down,” he ordered as he popped up and ran for the door.
“Like hell.”
Hope was right behind him, and he didn’t have time to stop and argue with her. Not now. She wanted to be treated like a real partner? Fine. “Third floor, fourth window from the south. I’m going up. You make the call and watch the front entrance. Nobody gets out.”
For once she didn’t argue with him.
Hope stood by the front door of the apartment building while Gideon ran for the stairwell. Anyone leaving would either come through this door or around the side of the building, a few feet away. Unless the shooter had already left the building, he was trapped. She made a phone call reporting shots fired at this location, and then she waited. Waiting had never been her strong suit, but sometimes it was required. Unfortunately, it gave her time to think about what had just happened, and at the moment she didn’t want to think.
Had Raintree seen sunlight flashing on a muzzle? Had he heard something out of the ordinary that alarmed him? He’d tackled her a fraction of a second before the shot was fired, so he must have seen or heard something. Problem was, he’d been facing the wall at the time, not the window, so he couldn’t have seen anything. The window had been shut, so hearing anything from across the alley would have been almost impossible. Instinct? No, instinct was too much like psychic ability, and she refused to go down that path. Two flakes in the family were quite enough.
Extraordinary intuition wasn’t all she had to think about. When Gideon Raintree had landed on top of her, something odd had happened. She’d heard of chemistry, of course; she’d even experienced it a time or two. She’d certainly heard sexual attraction referred to as a spark before.
But she had never before felt an actual spark. A popping, charged spark. When Gideon had landed on top of her, it was as if she’d put her finger in a light socket. An electric charge had literally run through her body, from her toes to the top of her head. She’d felt it, as if lightning had danced through her blood. For a moment she’d had to fight the urge to reach out and hold on to the man above her with everything she had, not to fight the electricity off but to take it in and beg for more.
She tried to brush the memory off as imagination, but her imagination wasn’t that potent. She’d felt something; she just didn’t know what to call it.
Hope very much wanted to follow Gideon to the third floor, but until there was another officer available to guard this entrance, she wasn’t going anywhere. She couldn’t help but wonder what Raintree would find. Was the shooter still up there, just waiting?
A man with a solution rate like his had surely made enemies over the years. There was one open case he was continuing to investigate, many months after the fact. Had Frank Stiles, Gideon’s suspect, fired that shot? Was Gideon getting too close? Or was the shooter connected to the Bishop murder? There were too many possibilities, and now was not the time for baseless theories.
A patrol car arrived, and Hope assigned the two uniformed officers to take her place on guard duty. She ran into the apartment building and to the stairwell, just as Gideon had minutes ago. She’d had partners before, and some of them had become friends. She’d lost a couple to retirement or promotion, but she’d never lost one to a bullet. Now was not the time to start.
She met Gideon on the second floor landing. “Apartment’s empty,” he said. “No one answering my knock at the others. Who’s on the door?”
“Two uniforms, with orders not to let anyone in or out.”
They took the second floor apartments, Gideon starting at one end, Hope at the other. No one had seen anything, though they had all heard the shots. Too many apartments were empty, the doors locked. Other officers arrived, the building manager was located, and in less than forty-five minutes they’d been through the entire building, floor by floor, apartment by apartment. They searched the narrow back alley. Twice. Either the shooter had escaped before they reached the building, or he was a regular tenant and they’d looked him in the eye without knowing who he was.
When the search was done, Gideon sat on the front stoop and stared out at the street, thinking. She hated to interrupt him when he was so deep in thought, but there were too many questions to leave unasked. Besides, she’d waited long enough.
She sat beside him, close but not too close. “So, who wants you dead?”
He turned his head to look at her. “What makes you think you weren’t the target?”
She managed a tense smile. “I’ve been on the job here less than two days. I haven’t had time to make any serious enemies yet. You, on the other hand…”
Gideon turn
ed his gaze to the street again. “Yeah.”
Hope leaned back slightly. “So how did you know?”
“How did I know what?”
“You tackled me before the shot was fired, Raintree,” she said. “Not by much, but somehow you knew.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Complaining?”
“No, but I’m definitely curious.”
“Dangerous stuff, curiosity.”
She wanted to ask about the sparks she’d felt, but what if that response had been one-sided? Maybe she really had imagined the lightning bolt, and it had just been surprise and maybe even her reluctant physical attraction that had made her tingle from head to toe. Then again, maybe she’d felt sparks when Gideon landed on her because it had been two years since any man had touched her.
“I live for danger,” she said, half-serious.
“Let’s save this conversation for later.”
Even though she hated saving anything for later, she nodded and left him alone. She owed him that much, she supposed. “Okay. Now what?”
Gideon looked up and down the sidewalk. “Someone saw something. It’s broad daylight, middle of the day, and if the shooter got out, he must’ve left here at a run. Somebody saw.” He looked at her, and damned if she couldn’t feel that lightning again, even though they were nowhere close to touching. “Let’s find out who.”
FIVE
Gideon walked down the block from the apartment building where the shots had been fired, his new partner right beside him on the sidewalk. Today was the first time he’d seen Emma outside a dream. Her appearance had told him that she was indeed more than a fantasy. The little phantom had saved his life, or Hope’s, or both. He wasn’t sure who would have been hit if Emma hadn’t warned him to get down and flailed vainly at Hope, as if she were trying to push the woman out of the way.
She wasn’t a ghost. He was convinced that she was exactly what she’d claimed to be all along: an entity that had not yet come into this world, a spirit between lives. The amount of energy it had taken to appear to him as she had was considerable, and he could no longer write Emma off to bad dreams of a life he didn’t dare to ask for. She was Raintree, all right, or one day would be.
Raintree: Haunted Page 5
