Police Business

by Julie Miller

  “Sorry.” He squatted in front of her, bracing one hand on the desk above her head. Her blue eyes looked a bit dazed. Guilt instantly replaced both curiosity and amusement. He gently touched her shoulder, needing to do something to make amends. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Are you hurt?”

  She glanced down at his hand as if the comforting gesture surprised her. When she didn’t pull away or protest, he trailed his fingers up the side of her neck and found skin as soft as the silk she wore and a racing pulse. Or maybe that was his own heart rate speeding up with awareness and concern.

  “Do you need to lie down?” Her gaze darted to his lips and searched them as if she couldn’t quite grasp what he was asking. “Miss Winthrop?” he repeated, reminding himself to focus on first aid and not the way her eyes pooled and darkened as if she was having a hard time staying focused herself. “Are you hurt?”

  He reached behind her head to probe for any cut or goose egg. As he gently nudged his fingers into her hair, his palm brushed against the small plastic hearing device hooked behind her ear.

  The instant he touched the device, she blinked her eyes clear and pushed his hand away. “I’m fine.”

  Rightly denied the contact that had slipped beyond professional, A.J. sat back on his haunches. But he never got the chance to apologize.

  Instead, Claire Winthrop moved her fingers in a frantic dance that he knew to be sign language, even if he didn’t understand the words. Fortunately, she spoke out loud as she signed. “I think the mats have been switched.”

  The discovery seemed to excite her, judging by the flush of color on her cheeks. A.J. grinned in relief and rose to his feet. This woman wasn’t hurt—he’d seen that distant focus dozens of times in his sisters’ eyes. Claire Winthrop was preoccupied. Obsessed, even.

  A.J. offered his hand to help her stand. “What makes you say that?” When she didn’t immediately answer, he waited until she looked up into his face and repeated the question.

  “This one is worn around the edges and has wheel dents.” She pointed out the damage. “I’m sure my father’s was replaced within the last couple of months when my stepmother remodeled his office. This one should still be smooth.”

  Interesting eye for detail.

  Seemed he couldn’t help noticing a few details himself.

  About his witness.

  After a moment’s hesitation, when he thought she might refuse his assistance or continue her explanation, she laid her fingers across his palm, giving him a glimpse of the evocative contrast between her creamy porcelain skin and his callused, olive-tinted hand.

  To his surprise, there was nothing weak in her grasp as he provided an anchor for her to pull herself to her feet. The pink suit and delicate features had given him a mistaken impression of fragility. This woman possessed a sinewed strength from the tips of her fingers to the length of her shapely calves.

  “Detective…Rodriguez?” She pronounced his name carefully, slurring the Rs with subtle W sounds. And while he mulled over the husky softness of her voice when she wasn’t desperate with confusion or shouting with excitement, she dropped her sky-blue gaze to the clutch of their hands. “Thank you.”

  She hadn’t signed, but A.J. understood the prompt and quickly released her. He’d held on a shade too long to be proper; his grip had been a little too snug to be polite.

  Bad move, A.J. He shouldn’t be noticing anything about Claire Winthrop except her reliability as a witness—which at this point was, unfortunately, questionable. He shouldn’t care one damn whether the pampered heiress was offended or turned on by holding a working man’s life-scarred hand.

  It wasn’t like him to get distracted from his purpose, not by any woman. Certainly not by Cain Winthrop’s daughter. The job didn’t allow it.

  He wouldn’t allow it.

  He stuffed said workingman’s hands into the pockets of his jacket and told himself he hadn’t noticed the subtle perfume that clung to her hair and emanated from the heat of her skin, either.

  Needing his space before his brain got addled with any more pointless impressions, A.J. strolled to the center of the room and placed the desk between them. “So you think the killer—”

  “—and his accomplice,” she insisted. A.J. conceded the addition to her scenario. “The killer and his accomplice rolled up the body in the plastic mat and disposed of it? Then they put a new one in its place?”

  “Isn’t that a realistic possibility to explain why Valerie’s not here?”

  “Assuming Miss Justice is as least as big as you are, how do you smuggle out a body without being seen?”

  “It’s a big building. They took the freight elevator or the stairs. Only the security lights are on inside. The sky’s overcast so there’s no moon outside. I don’t know.” Her shrug was an easy enough sign to read. So was the quick snap of her fingers. “But we should be able to check the mats.”

  When she breezed past him and headed out the door, A.J. wondered if he was being polite or just plain crazy for following her and joining the search. At Claire’s pace, it didn’t take long to inspect every office on the floor to discover that there were no chair mats missing from beneath any of the desks.

  He could almost feel her disappointment at a good idea refusing to pan out. Her frustration was such a tangible thing in the stiff set of her shoulders and crossed arms that he wanted to say he believed her story, even though the possibility of a woman being shot to death in Cain Winthrop’s office seemed more remote by the minute.

  “How many offices are in this building?” he asked, knowing he didn’t have enough of a case here to warrant pulling any manpower off the Slick Williams murder and other homicides for an extensive room-to-room search.

  “Hundreds.” She tipped the point of her chin at him, her blue eyes blazing. He recognized that look from his sisters, too. “And, yes, I’m sure I have the right room.”

  She looked about as dangerous as a kitten, all huffed up and ready to spit in self-defense. A.J. respected her right to a temper, but couldn’t help smiling to himself at the notion she looked more cute than ferocious. “That wasn’t what I was thinking, amiga.”

  Tiny fine lines appeared beside her eyes as she frowned. “What?”

  She hadn’t understood him. “Amiga?” Reading lips in English was amazing enough. He supposed translating a foreign language on top of that would confuse most people. “It’s Spanish. It means friend.”

  “Oh. Amiga.” She said the word again, touched her own lips as she repeated it, giving A.J. the feeling she wasn’t most people. She’d just expanded her vocabulary and wouldn’t miss that word again. “I’m bilingual, too.”

  “You seem to communicate just fine.”

  Her pale cheeks colored at the compliment. “It helps when someone really listens.”

  Meaning there were others who didn’t listen to what she had to say? A.J. raised his guard a notch against his growing admiration for the woman. Maybe she had more of a reputation for making up stories than her father had indicated. Or maybe, like his own father had once told him, Winthrop will ignore the truth if it doesn’t suit his purpose. Or he’ll change things to make them fit his truth.

  As a smart-ass teenager, A.J. had asked his father what he was smokin’ to come up with that deep thought. Antonio, Sr. had shoved his only son up against the wall and warned him to watch his mouth. Maybe if he listened a little better, instead of putting so much noise into the world, he could see the truth. If he heard the truth, if he championed it, then men like Cain Winthrop and his compadres at Winthrop, Inc. would lose their power to control and ruin other people’s lives.

  His father, who had never once resorted to violence with his children, had been trying to tell him something important. But A.J. shrugged him off, called him loco and worse, ignored his warning and sped away in his muscle car.

  It wasn’t the first time his father had tried to teach him how to be a man.

  But it was the last time.

  Though A.J. knew
his father’s car, even as a burnt-out skeleton in the police impound lot, the coroner had needed dental records to identify his father’s remains. His mother had needed a sedative, his sisters had needed a shoulder to cry on and he had needed to grow up and become the man his father wanted him to be.

  He was still working on that last one.

  With little more than a blink to betray the depth of guilt and hurt he buried inside him, A.J. shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and tried to hear Claire Winthrop’s truth.

  “Your father doesn’t listen to you?” he asked.

  Claire’s cheeks paled again, giving him the real answer. “So what were you thinking, Detective? About the offices?” she asked, defending her father by refusing to condemn him.

  A little spark of anger kindled deep inside A.J., disrupting the Zen-like sense of calm that kept his temper in check, his priorities straight and his desires under control. How could a father ignore his own child? Dismiss her when she needed his support? Antonio, Sr. never had.

  But he was years beyond giving vent to angry words. His personal opinions were irrelevant to the investigation, anyway. So he did what he did best. He played it cool and let the witness and the facts take the investigation where it needed to go.

  He shrugged off any awareness that he’d gotten too personal with his questions. “I was thinking more along the lines that your killers stashed the body somewhere else until they could come back and move it later.”

  Her eyes followed the movement of his lips, then lit with hope. “The supply closet.”

  He’d checked the supply closet earlier. No dead assistant.

  But she was already hurrying across the reception area to a black steel door. A.J. followed at a more deliberate pace. Claire Winthrop wasn’t looking for bodies. She was back to finding what she thought was the missing chair mat.

  A.J. turned on the light for her and helped her move some chairs to uncover two plastic mats stacked on their sides against the wall. Her toes tapped an impatient rhythm as she tried to transform the items into a clue.

  He tried to help. “Any idea how many are supposed to be in here?”

  When she didn’t answer, he realized she had her back to him and hadn’t heard the question. As soon as he touched her shoulder, she spun around. Oh man, this was killing her. He could see the frustration carving squint lines beside her eyes. He could read what it was costing her to keep from screaming out loud in the tight set of her mouth.

  “Who would know how many mats are supposed to be in here?” he asked.

  He was fascinated with the way her eyes followed his lips whenever he spoke. It was an intimate connection that made him want to keep talking, that made him want to study her lips with equal thoroughness.

  But Claire Winthrop was all about finding answers, not making a play for a world-weary homicide detective.

  “Valerie would know. Or the chief maintenance engineer.”

  Bam. Finally, the wake-up call he needed. Maintenance engineer. No matter how she sugarcoated the term, Claire Winthrop was the daughter of a multimillionaire while he was the custodian’s son. He had real crimes to solve, real victims to protect. A real world to live in.

  He was done playing. It was late, he was tired and he was a damn lonely son of a gun for wasting even one moment feeling whatever the hell he was feeling for Claire Winthrop.

  A.J. drew back the front of his jacket and hooked his thumbs into his belt, giving Claire a clear look at his guns, his badge and the seriousness of making a false report to the police. He needed the truth from her and he needed it now.

  “How long were you gone tonight, Miss Winthrop? From the time you allegedly saw the murder to the time you returned to the 26th floor with your father?”

  “I didn’t allegedly see anything.” Her temper spiked, then dissipated just as quickly. “I don’t know. I didn’t check my watch until I got home. Maybe two hours. Maybe less.”

  Was that enough time to completely erase a crime scene? Or just enough time for a needy young woman to perfect an elaborate lie?

  He waited for her to turn off the light and close the closet door behind her. “Since there’s no body for us to look at, maybe you could tell me more about this man with the gun you saw?”

  “I’ve already given a physical description to you and Detective Taylor.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “So you can catch me in a lie?” she challenged. Her probing eyes locked onto his.

  Definitely not as fragile as she looked. A.J. pulled out his notepad and pen to add credence to his request. “So I can find some truth to back up your claim.”

  Her defensive posture sagged on a weary breath.

  “All right. One more time.” He fell into step beside her and went back to Winthrop’s office. “How tall are you, Detective?” she asked, turning to face him inside the doorway.

  “Five-ten.”

  “Then I’d say this man was about six-one or six-two. He had hair as black as yours, longer, combed back. But his skin was pale. Almost sallow-looking. And there was acne scarring all over it.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if replaying the scene in her mind…or reviewing the details of her story. When her eyes sprang open, he was reminded again of just how blue they were—like a clear spring sky. “His suit and shirt were black, and his clothes fit as if they had been personally tailored for him. The man had money. But then I suppose professional hit men make—”

  “Hit men?” A.J. slapped his notepad shut. His attention flashed back to the murder of Ray “Slick” Williams at the Jazz Note. That had been a professional job, not the work of some penny-ante thug guarding his territory. KCPD had even issued a profile on the type of man they were looking for.

  Tall. Well-dressed. Probably wearing dark clothes to blend in with the shadows. Armed and extremely dangerous.

  Hell. Had she read about Slick’s death in the papers? Had he been about ready to buy into a crime because her story reminded him of his father’s claim? Because her pretty blue eyes and articulate mouth stirred up a few hormones?

  Being played for a fool didn’t ruffle his feathers. Feeling any kind of attraction to the woman playing him did. “What do you know about hit men, Miss Winthrop?”

  He wondered if she could pick up subtle nuances in vocal tones, or if he’d revealed something in his expression. Her shoulders went back and she crossed her arms in a classic defensive posture. “You don’t believe me.”

  “There’s nothing here to corroborate your story.” This woman needed some help. But not the kind a cop could give her. “There’s no sign of forced entry. No sign of struggle. No blood. No body.”

  But she wouldn’t let the damn farce die. She paced the room, still searching for a way to make her story stick as she began to speak and sign again. “I could go down to your office to look through some mug-shot books. Or talk to a sketch artist. I have classes in the morning, but I could come in right after that.”

  Sure. Waste some more of his time.

  But the taunt never left his lips. Instead, the phone on Winthrop’s desk rang. On the second ring, Claire touched the receiver, as though using the vibrations to verify whatever sound she must have heard. “Daddy?”

  It rang again before Cain Winthrop dashed in and picked up the receiver. “Winthrop here.” His blue eyes nailed Claire’s, warning her to pay attention. “Yes. I’ll accept the charges.”

  The older man reached out for his daughter. He smoothed the hair across her crown, practically patting her on the head as if she was still a child. Then he smiled. “Thank God,” he said into the phone. He wrapped his arm around Claire’s shoulders and hugged her to his side. “Sweetie, everything’s going to be okay. We can go home and forget all about tonight.”

  Her complexion blanched to a shade beyond pale as Cain delivered the truth A.J. had been pushing for.

  “It’s Valerie. She’s alive and well and calling from Nassau.”

  Chapter Three

  “Hey, I hear y
ou caused quite a ruckus at the office tonight, Pipsqueak.”

  Claire dutifully stopped halfway up the cream-carpeted staircase to endure her stepbrother Gabriel’s teasing. Pipsqueak had never been her first choice in the nickname department, but compared to six feet four inches of tall, dark and daunting, that’s about where she measured up.

  She’d always had to make up the difference in attitude. “Bite me, Gabe.”

  Clutching her purse and shoes in one hand, she trudged on past him in her stockinged feet. He quickly reversed his descent and backed up the steps ahead of her so she had to crane her neck to read his lips and continue the conversation. “It was that bad?”

  Claire puffed out a frustrated breath. “I’ve been completely discredited by KCPD. Dad wants to send me to a spa to rest because he thinks I’m having some kind of breakdown. I broke Mom’s pearl necklace. And Detective Taylor was friendly enough, but Detective Rodriguez…”

  Detective Rodriguez what? How had her subconscious mind intended to finish that sentence?

  He made her pulse beat a little faster because he always seemed to be watching her with those unique golden-brown eyes? He entranced her with his beautifully sculpted lips, whether arched in friendly amusement, parted with concern or tight with disbelief?

  Did the Latin detective linger in her mind because he was an older man? Mature? Experienced in life the way she’d never been allowed to be? Or was it because the jolt she felt at the simple touch of his hand was more intense than even the most passionate kisses she’d tried to share with Rob?

  Heck. Rob and intense didn’t even belong in the same sentence together. A. J. Rodriguez was everything Rob Hastings was not. Danger personified, judging by his compact strength and the stitched-up wound beneath his eye. Black leather and cold steel. No wasted movement. Deliberate in his speech.

  Was she upset with A. J. Rodriguez for dismissing her claim? Or for revving up her dormant libido before he dismissed her?