Solid Steel (Unseen Enemy Book 6)

by James, Marysol

  He shook her off, saw the marks left in his skin by her nails.

  “Safe from him?” he repeated. “What’s he going to do to you?”

  “I don’t know.” She bit her lip. “But he – he hurt me, Luke. For years.”

  He sat down again. “How?”

  Natalie looked away from that intense blue gaze. “He hit me.”

  Luke was silent again, watching her. He waited.

  “He… he said that if I left him, he’d kill me, and I believed it. I still believe it.”

  “Have you left him?”

  “Yes.” She was shaking, he saw now, and despite his anger and dislike, he felt himself softening a bit, starting to buy in to her story. “I did. He’s in New York this week for some training conference, and I’ve been waiting for this for months. The second he sent word that he’d landed, I grabbed my chance and ran. He doesn’t even know that I’ve moved out.”

  “When does he get back?”

  “In two days.”

  “And where are you staying?”

  “In an awful, cheap motel off the highway.” Tears were welling in her big, blue eyes and she was sure her eyeliner was running, but she didn’t care. “I was hoping that I could – that you’d take me home? With you?”

  He leaned back, amazed at her presumption, pissed off that he’d nearly been taken in so easily. “So… what? You thought that you’d tell me some sob story – which I’m not totally sure that I believe, by the way – and you’d just come on home with me?”

  “Well…” She peered up at him. “I hoped that you’d want to help me.”

  “Again, Nat,” he said coldly. “I’m not buying it. I mean, it’s all a bit convenient, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “You telling me that Brad abuses you, after weeks of sexting me and ambushing me at work half-naked and throwing yourself at me. And tonight you say you want me back and I shut you down… and suddenly I have to take you back ‘cause if I don’t, you’ll get hurt?” The sarcasm was thick enough to almost touch and see. “Talk about putting me on the goddamn spot. Talk about twisting my arm, huh?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “Luke, I’m not. I swear.”

  “Oh, right. Because you’re so trustworthy.”

  “OK, look.” She tried to stay calm. “I get why you don’t believe me, alright? I wouldn’t believe me either, if I were you. I lied to you and I cheated on you and I fucked off on you… I’m not your favorite person, and I don’t blame you for being angry and suspicious. My timing is suspect, my story seems designed to appeal to your sympathy and back you in to a corner. I get it, Luke.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “And I’m still asking for your help.”

  “You’re asking to come home with me.”

  “Yes.”

  “And my answer’s still no.” He stood up.

  “Oh, God.” She got to her feet now, started to move towards him, her arms extended. “Luke, I am begging you… begging you.”

  He took a step backwards, then another, avoiding her embrace.

  “No, Nat. If what you say is true – and I fucking doubt it, to be honest – then go to the police. Hide out in the motel for a bit longer. Go to your parents, go to a friend or a colleague. You don’t need to drag me in to any of this. I’m just a guy that you dumped three years ago.”

  “You’re the most trustworthy person that I know,” she said, her voice breaking. “I know you’d keep me safe. Keep me safe, Luke.”

  For just a few seconds – seconds that were going to haunt him for the rest of his life – Luke wavered. He wondered if she was actually telling him the truth for once, if this wasn’t some huge manipulation. But then he remembered her hitting on him at Curves, and her blackmailing him in to this meeting, and his resolve returned.

  No fucking way I’m getting sucked in to her drama and games, not again. She can’t be trusted.

  “It’s not my job to keep you safe,” he said. “Not anymore. Now that falls on your family and the cops. Count me out.”

  “Luke…” Her voice rose and a few diners looked over at them now.

  “No. This conversation is over.” He turned away from her. “One last thing, Nat.”

  She stared up at him, still pathetically hopeful. “Yes?”

  “No more calls, no fuck-me texts, no more surprise visits at Curves. No more strong-arming me in to secret meetings, no more bullshit sob stories. And? You so much as get within one hundred feet of my girlfriend, I’ll report you to the police for stalking her and me.” He was so cold and distant, it hurt the way that the winter wind blowing down the Rockies hurts: so damn cold, it cuts your chest like a knife and steals your breath. “I never want to see or hear from you, not ever again. You get me?”

  “Yes.” She knew she was beaten and she just gave in, gave up. “Yes, I get you. You’ll never see or hear from me ever again. I’m gone, I promise you.”

  Luke had no idea at the time just how true that all was; he didn’t know just how gone Natalie was going to be.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Early the next afternoon, Selena was over at his place. They were on the sofa watching a movie and eating pizza and chatting a bit. She was so soft and sweet, all curled up against him, and he held her, wondering if he should say something about Natalie.

  Maybe he should just come clean about it all: the evasion and the half-truths and the lies. He figured she’d be as pissed off as hell, but he didn’t want any of this crap between them, either. He hated keeping stuff from Selena. She deserved to know what had been going on, because God knows she’d trusted him with her own truths and fears.

  He’d just made up his mind to tell her – and was bracing himself for the rage tsunami – when there was a knock on the door. Luke dropped a kiss on the top of her head, got to his feet, ambled over to answer it. When he saw the two cops standing there, he blinked.

  “Uh, hi?” Luke said. “Can I help you?”

  “You sure can, Mr. Rhodes,” said the woman, and he stared in surprise at her knowing his name. “Could you come with us, please?”

  “Why?” Luke asked.

  “We want to ask you a few questions down at the station,” the woman said. “Right now, if it’s a convenient time.”

  From the looks on their faces, Luke got the feeling that even if it wasn’t a convenient time, they wouldn’t give a crap. But the thing was, it wasn’t even a remotely convenient time – Selena was there, looking taken aback at having the police at his door.

  She came over now. “Hi. What’s going on? Is everything OK?”

  “Could you stand back please, ma’am,” the man said.

  Right away, totally respectful of police authority, Selena moved away. “Sure, officer. But can you just tell us what’s happening?”

  “We need to take Mr. Rhodes in for questioning,” the man said. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Selena Perez.”

  “Ah.” The male cop looked down at his notebook. “Yeah, we need to take you in, too.”

  “Me?” Selena said. “Why?”

  “Because,” the woman spoke again. “We need to ask you both about Natalie Conrad.”

  “Who?” Selena said, even as Luke said, “Why?”

  “Ms. Conrad is Mr. Rhodes’ ex-fiancée,” the woman said to Selena and then she turned to Luke and added, “and we need to question the two of you because she’s missing… and according to witnesses, Mr. Rhodes, you were the last person to see her. You did see her last night, right?”

  For the rest of his life, Luke would remember the hurt and confusion and betrayal on Selena’s face as she looked at him. It broke his heart, but he knew that unlike Selena, he deserved that pain… after all, he’d just broken her heart clean through, and he wasn’t sure forgiveness was going to be possible any time soon. Maybe not ever.r />
  **

  Hours later, Luke sat in the police station, facing the two-way mirror in an interrogation room. He had no fucking idea where Selena was or what she was being told, but he was certain she wasn’t having a very nice chat.

  The door opened now and the female police officer entered, carrying a file.

  “Mr. Rhodes,” she said. “I’m Detective Gia Yates. Would you like anything to drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She nodded, sat, opened her file. She glanced down, all casual and relaxed. “Why did you meet Ms. Conrad at Louis’ Diner at nine p.m. last night?”

  His heart sank. If this was their opening salvo with him, he shuddered to think what they were sharing with Selena. He focused, knowing that there was nothing to be done about Selena right now; all he could do was help the cops figure out what had happened to Natalie, help them find her.

  “Because she asked me to,” Luke said calmly.

  “And was it a pleasant conversation?”

  Luke paused. “Not particularly, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Natalie asked me to take her back and I refused.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I’m with Selena now,” Luke said. “I’m not interested in anybody else.”

  “How admirable,” Gia said. “Now, tell me about these.”

  She pushed some papers over the table to him and Luke found himself staring down at rows and rows of numbers. His cell number was highlighted in yellow.

  “What’s – what’s this?”

  “Ms. Conrad’s phone records.” Her blue eyes were gazing at him steadily. “For someone who has no interest in the woman, you certainly communicate with her often.”

  “I do not,” Luke said tightly. “She communicates with me. She calls and texts me. I don’t reciprocate.”

  “Yes. Funny you should mention the texts.” Gia slid more papers over to him. “These texts? These sexually-explicit and graphic texts?”

  Luke felt his face burning when he saw it all laid out in black and white, saw the naked pictures that Natalie had sent him. Fuck, were they showing all this to Selena, too?

  “Again,” he said, fighting to not panic. “You’ll see that all the communication has been one-way… I’ve never responded in kind. Never.”

  “But you met Ms. Conrad at your place of work? At Dangerous Curves?”

  “I didn’t meet her at Curves. She showed up there once, uninvited.”

  “But you spoke to her when she showed up?”

  “Yeah, of course. To tell her to leave.”

  “And to tell her to meet you elsewhere later?”

  Luke met her stare head-on. “And to tell her to never meet me anywhere, ever again. It’s over between us, Detective Yates, and it has been for a long time.”

  “But you agreed to meet her last night.”

  “…Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she blackmailed me in to it and I decided to take the opportunity to tell her to just leave me alone once and for all.”

  “So you met her to tell her to go away?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did she? Go away?”

  “I guess so. I mean, I walked her to her car and then I left.”

  “You left first?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see her again after you left?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “So you have no idea who killed her?”

  Luke gaped at Gia. “Who – wait, what? She’s dead? You said she was missing.”

  “That was what we told you three hours ago,” Gia said coldly. “In actual fact, a homeless man discovered Ms. Conrad’s body and it’s blatantly obvious that her death was not even remotely from natural causes.”

  Like a magician performing a magic trick, Gia flipped a photo to show him. He looked at it in horror: the resolution was sharp and good and every detail stood out. Natalie had clearly been badly beaten and from the markings on her body, she’d been stabbed repeatedly.

  “Oh, my God,” Luke whispered. “Nat…”

  Suddenly, Luke would have done a hell of a lot to take back every single harsh thing that he’d said to Natalie the last two times he’d seen her. She hadn’t been his favorite person, she hadn’t even been a particularly good or nice person, in his opinion, but she hadn’t deserved this. Nobody deserved this.

  “Ms. Conrad was stabbed nineteen times,” Gia said to him. “That’s not an accident and that’s not a robbery. That’s sheer rage, Mr. Rhodes, that’s the kind of rage that’s motivated by passionate anger. That’s personal.”

  Gia Yates leaned back a bit and gestured at Luke’s forearm. “How did you get those fingernail gouges on you, Mr. Rhodes?”

  Luke stared down at his arm, aghast. “I – um…”

  “If we find skin and blood under Ms. Conrad’s nails and we do a DNA test, will it come back as a match to you?”

  He shut his eyes briefly, knowing that he was totally screwed on this one. “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “Was Ms. Conrad defending herself from you, Mr. Rhodes?”

  Luke’s head was spinning as it occurred to him just how fucking bad this all looked. The calls, the texts, the scratches on his arm, the witnesses who could place him and Natalie together at Curves and at the diner the night before… and fuck, they’d argued publicly both times, and they’d left together the night before. Did anyone see him leave first, in a separate vehicle? But even if they had, how could he prove that he’d gone home and gone alone? That he hadn’t followed her back to her motel and hurt her? Killed her?

  “Detective Yates… I know how this looks. But I haven’t done anything. I didn’t do anything. I left Natalie in the diner parking lot and I went home.”

  She regarded him. “Can Ms. Perez corroborate that?”

  “No,” Luke faltered. “I – I was alone last night.”

  “Speaking of Ms. Perez,” Gia continued relentlessly. “I spoke to her at great length and according to her, last night you were supposed to be meeting someone from the support group that you lead for men who have lost limbs. Apparently he was in some sort of crisis? You cancelled plans with Ms. Perez to rush to his rescue?” She gave him a chilly smile. “Could I please get his name and number to verify your story?”

  “No. No, I – I didn’t meet anyone from the group last night.”

  Gia cocked her blonde head at him. “So why did Ms. Perez say that you did? Is she covering for you, maybe?”

  “No!” Luke was horrified at the implication. “No… Selena isn’t covering for me or for anyone. She told you that I met a man from the group because – because that’s what I told her.”

  “But you were really meeting Ms. Conrad?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s an odd way to treat the woman that you claim to be so interested in, don’t you think? Lying to her about your whereabouts?”

  Luke stayed silent.

  “Ms. Perez said that she was unaware of the fact that you’ve been in contact with Ms. Conrad for the past month that you’ve been with her as her ‘exclusive boyfriend’.” Gia put air quotes around the last word and he tensed at the implication. “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes.” Luke ran a tired hand through his hair. “That’s true… I never said a word to Selena about Natalie getting back in touch with me.”

  “I see.”

  “No, Detective Yates. I’m sorry, but you don’t.”

  “Sure I do. You told your girlfriend that you were in one place but then you went off somewhere else to meet you ex-fiancée. That makes you a liar.”

  “Maybe so. But not a murderer.”

  Her smile was slow and dangerous. “Didn’t Ms. Conrad callousl
y dump you three years ago, after you lost your hand? Took up with a friend of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. That’s personal, huh? I bet that made you angry.” She paused, gave him a friendly look. “Did it? Maybe even passionately angry?”

  Finally, Luke just decided to start talking; short answers and ‘yes’ and ‘no’ were getting him exactly nowhere.

  “Yes, it did. But I think you need to know that last night, Natalie told me that she was afraid of the man that she left me for.”

  “Brad Ellison?”

  “Yes.” Luke wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that Gia knew his name by heart. “Brad was my friend and Natalie left me for him. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in three years… and I hadn’t had any contact with Natalie until almost two months ago, when she started texting and calling me out of the blue. Last night, I asked her why she’d just resurfaced all of a sudden, after all this time.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That she was afraid of Brad… that he hit her, and had told her that if she left him, he’d kill her. But she had left him, she said. He’s out of town right now and she took the opportunity to leave and hide out in a motel.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know. She said it was cheap and awful and out by the highway somewhere.”

  “So you didn’t meet her at her motel?”

  “No.”

  Gia produced yet another photo.”So this isn’t you, leaving Ms. Conrad’s motel at two o’clock this morning?”

  Luke stared down at the picture. “No… no, that’s not me.”

  “It looks like you, Mr. Rhodes.”

  “It’s a poor-quality security camera photo of a guy with dark hair, taken from the back, in a dark parking lot. It looks like your partner, the other cop who came to my door. It looks like ten guys I can think of.”

  “But none of them were seen arguing with Ms. Conrad last night. None of them have an acrimonious history with a murdered woman. And I’d bet that all of them can account for their whereabouts last night. They can probably produce witnesses and alibis, too. Can you?”

  Luke was silent again, suddenly feeling like he needed a lawyer. But did he? He hadn’t been formally charged with anything, and until he was, he was legally a free man.