by Julie Miller
Explain those kinds of complications to an eight-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome.
He wasn’t sure he could explain them to himself.
So he plucked the scraper from Holly’s hand and said, “Looks like it.” As she closed the back door, he opened the front one for her. “You sit inside while the engine’s warming up and I’ll brush the snow off your windows.”
“You’ve walked me to my car to make your mom happy, kept me from blowing my cover with Mr. Caldwell and snuck me out of the building without my sister or Blake Rivers seeing me. I think I can scrape my own car.” She closed the front door, sending an avalanche of snow down over the tops of her high heels. Her face froze for a moment in mute shock. Almost instantly, the icy crystals started to melt and seep inside her shoes. Her toes would be frozen in a minute if they weren’t already. “Really, I can.”
Edward was too tired to wipe the amused smirk off his face at her deadpan delivery. “Allow me.” Shifting his balance, he went down on his good knee in front of her and brushed the snow off her feet. He was still smiling when he stood back up. “Now, will you get in the car and let me work?”
“Why do you carry a cane?” she asked in lieu of “I’d love to get warm, thanks.” “You don’t need to use it. You knelt down just now without any problem. When you dropped it in Blake’s office, you still managed to toss me into the closet and then run back and get it without missing a beat. From everything I’ve observed, your body has healed.”
She couldn’t just get in her car, could she. Edward gave up on smiling and went with the logical explanation. “It’s for that one time my knee or ankle gives out or I hit a patch of ice and I slip. I’m not going back to the hospital because vanity kept me from using a cane to balance myself.”
One dark brow arched beneath her snow-dotted bangs. “Sounds like an excuse to me.”
“Yeah, well, the cold air makes my joints ache like a big bear, so I’m using the cane.”
Holly shrugged. “I’m not an orthopedic doctor, but your limp is barely discernible, your reflexes are quick and you have enough musculature on your body to compensate for any minor shifts in balance. Have you tried to pass your active-duty physical since you were injured?”
He tried glaring her into the car.
A knowing smile bloomed across her face. “You passed the physical already.”
If she asked about the mental exam, this conversation would be over. It needed to be over. “It’s something my physical therapist has me go through every month so she can benchmark my progress.”
Holly plunged her gloved hands into the pockets of her coat. She was shivering. “Jillian is studying to be a physical therapist.”
This was ridiculous. “If I hand over my cane, will you get in the car before you freeze?”
As usual, she had one more thing she wanted to say. She clutched her collar together at her neck and lightly stamped her feet. “I knew the party was going on tonight because of my sister. I wanted to get in here and see one of those bullets you mentioned. But I also wanted to check on her. I mean, I didn’t want her to know I was checking on her, but I was worried because of her history with Blake.”
Her tongue darted out to nervously moisten her lips. Edward’s gaze darted to the spot and something needy growled inside him. He was having no problem staying warm.
“I just wanted to thank you for listening to me—for reminding me that I can’t be such an overprotective sister that I start enabling her addictive behavior again.” The fingers at her collar reached out and brushed against his chest, lightly petting him while she sought her next words. When she curled her fingers beneath the placket of his coat, he wished there weren’t gloves and coats and sweaters between them. “Thank you for telling me about your addiction, too. Sometimes I forget that other people can understand what my family has gone through. It’s good to be reminded I’m not alone.”
That better be snow melting on the tips of her lashes. Even before she blinked away the sheen of tears, the urge to kiss a smile or defiant pout or any other expression but sadness onto her lips surged through him. Edward dipped his head and pressed his mouth to hers, taking a gentle kiss. He angled his head the opposite way and kissed her again, kissed her until he’d warmed away the chill from her lips and she was kissing him in return.
But when the need to feel her long curves aligned against his harder angles had him backing her into the car to deepen the kiss into something that was more passionate than healing, Edward reluctantly pulled away. He stepped back far enough to let the wintry air surge between them and cool his randier impulses. His breath might be stuttering inside his chest and his jeans might be feeling a little tight behind his zipper, but he was going to be a gentleman. He was going to be a good guy.
“So…” he began gruffly. Holly’s cheeks were flushed with more than the cold and he had to look away or his good intentions might go to hell. Plucking the scraper from her unresisting grasp, he went to work cleaning the snow off her windshield. “…you infiltrated Bill Caldwell’s party because you wanted to see if you could get some information on one of those bullets.”
She cleared her throat. “Yes. But I couldn’t get into any of the labs. I knew Blake Rivers worked in product development, so I thought if I could get into his office I might be able to find a schematic or chemical recipe for the bullet to see how they decompose so quickly. Wait.” With a little more energy to her voice, she opened the car door and pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from her purse. “I did find this on Blake’s computer. Actually, it was on the network server, so it could belong to anyone in the company, but…” She smoothed out the paper against her thigh and handed it to him. “There’s a coded file marked ‘Z’. Now it could mean projects made with zinc or an employee named Zach, but I thought the coincidence was too much to ignore since we’ve traced similar bullets back to Z Group.”
“May I keep this?”
Holly nodded. “I wish I could have gotten my hands on one of those bullets. There are so many things the lab could find out if I could compare just one that wasn’t tainted to the decomposed bullets.”
Edward pulled off a glove and lifted his coat to fold the print-out into the pocket of his jeans. Then he dug deeper and pulled out a small plastic bag. “You mean one of these?”
Holly’s face lit up like Christmas d—no, he didn’t even want to think that comparison. “Is that a disintegrator? How did you get your hands on one?”
“It helps to be friends with the boss. One of the guards recognized me as a friend of Bill’s, and I talked him into letting me tour a lab.”
She ducked and weaved like a prizefighter, trying to look at the inch-long projectile from all angles without touching the bag. “I don’t have any examination gloves with me. The fibers from these wool ones would transfer too easily.”
“Lord, woman, you’d think I’d brought you chocolates or flowers.”
Her green-gold eyes glanced up at his. “Trust me, this is better. May I see it?” Without pressing her fingers against the bullet inside, she lightly took hold of one corner of the plastic bag and examined the contents more closely. “So, you stole this, huh?”
“There were boxes of them in Rivers’s storage locker.”
“Boxes?” She frowned without looking away from the specimen she held. “I thought you said Caldwell Technologies had created a prototype.”
Seeing hundreds of them inside that storage locker had bothered him, too. “That’s all it was supposed to be. I don’t know if these are new or have been sitting there for a while, but the bullets have definitely been put into production at some time. I’ll wait for a more private moment to ask Bill about them.”
“Or Blake Rivers. You said they were in his storage locker?”
Edward nodded. “Rivers could be manufacturing them on the side and selling them under Bill’s nose. I’ll see what I can find out. Do you have a way to compare this bullet to what’s left of the ones at your lab?”
“Yes.”
&
nbsp; “Maybe someone here is supplying the ammunition Z Group is using to kill its former operatives in Kansas City.” Edward glanced around the parking lot to make sure no one was eavesdropping on their conversation. But since they’d departed the festivities early, they appeared to be alone. “According to my dad’s journals, the organization is responsible for some major arms smuggling. If these do match up to the slugs taken out of the victims, then there may be other types of weapons and technology being produced at Caldwell and shipped out of the country.”
“But this it isn’t a legal seizure of evidence.” Edward stifled a groan. Couldn’t Holly see that following the rules and obeying strict investigative protocols hadn’t solved any of the murders yet? “If we do prove a connection, we couldn’t use it in court,” she continued.
“One step at a time, Stick.” He opened her car door, tossed the scraper onto the floor behind the front seat, then stepped aside for her to climb in behind the wheel. “Let’s make a connection first, and then we’ll get nitpicky with the details. What if I’d told you that I found that in Rivers’s trash can?”
“Did you?”
He kept a straight face through the lie that would temporarily absolve them of guilt. “Yes. Now quit smiling at me like that. Call me tomorrow, and let me know what you find out on that bullet.”
“I will.” She reached across the space between them and squeezed his hand. “Good luck finding your meeting. Take care of yourself.”
He squeezed back. “You, too.”
Edward closed the door behind her, brushing some snow off the side window as she shifted the car into Reverse. Then he patted the roof of the car, letting Holly know she was clear to back out of the parking space.
He watched the silver Honda until it turned onto the access road. Then he hunched his shoulders against the cold and headed toward his Jeep, carrying his cane in his hand.
“Good job, Daddy. Good job.”
Was that his conscience congratulating him for letting Holly drive away without forcing more of his conflicted feelings and desires on her?
Or was his little girl’s voice—and some rusty investigating instincts—telling him he was finally on the right track toward solving his father’s murder?
HOLLY WASN’T SURE IF IT WAS fear that she’d be caught or just flat-out excitement that she’d finally gotten her hands on an intact disintegrator bullet that made her drive away from the Plaza lights and her apartment and toward the crime lab facility.
She’d always done her best thinking alone in her lab at night when there were fewer interruptions from coworkers and fewer calls to crime scenes. The quietness of the building and the sleeping world beyond its walls seemed to soothe her nerves and free up her powers of observation and concentration.
Tonight was no different. She’d dumped her coat in her office and kicked off her high heels. She wore the black silk dress with a hand-beaded sweater underneath her lab coat. But the rest of the trappings that put her in a productive mental groove were the same.
With Julie Andrews singing Christmas carols through her headphones, her plastic goggles and gloves on, and her metal clipboard on the countertop beside her so she could jot notes, Holly quickly lost herself in her work. Though she wasn’t the ballistics expert Rick Temple was, she knew the basics about testing for chemical components and running reaction tests. Using sample scrapings from the unfired bullet, she’d already determined a few fundamental facts—the metal jacket was partly fabricated with a dense ceramic compound. And while that compound was resistant to physical stress, it had a tendency to break down quickly when combined with certain chemicals.
A saline solution similar to human tears had no effect. The chemicals in sweat, nothing.
But something inside the human body turned that rock-hard object into mush in a matter of hours. And there were plenty of chemical combinations left to try.
Holly had lost track of the hour by the time she walked out of the lab’s sample bank for blood and tissue. “Glo-o-o-o-o-or-ia…”
She stopped by Rick Temple’s office and wrote out a note requesting a favor. Could he provide a list of chemical compounds that would be resistant to the minute gunpowder explosion that fired a bullet from a gun? Since he was so keen on proving who between the two of them was smarter, she’d give him the chance to strut his stuff.
Maybe he could narrow down whether it was a man-made agent or a naturally occurring element that kept the bullet from blowing up inside the gun when fired, yet made it soften like putty when exposed to something inside the human body. Then she dropped the note and a copy of the sample bullet’s chemical component graph into an envelope and tucked it inside his desk. No sense leaving it in his work-order job box since this would have to be an off-duty request.
Mindlessly singing along with the CD, Holly waved at Floyd at the front desk and hurried back down the stairs so she could prep her next reaction experiment. Holding a vial of a minute fragment of the bullet suspended in solution, she injected a sample of O positive blood, mixed them together in a centrifuge and waited for something to happen.
She counted off the reaction in seconds. Before a minute had passed on the clock above the door, the solution had clouded over. Within another minute, it was clearing again.
“And we have lift-off!”
A tremor of excitement fed her energy and she picked up her clipboard to record the time and her observations. She’d need to get one of the actual chemists to run a comparison analysis on this solution and the remains of the decomposed bullets she’d extracted from one of the Z Group victims to see if they were an exact match or just a similar product. And then they’d need to break down the components in the blood to see if it was the iron or—
Holly slammed the clipboard down on the counter. What was she getting so excited about? Nobody was going to run any such test.
She reached into her pocket and turned off her music, her Zen-like focus busted over one simple, but very important fact. “You’re an illegal bullet.”
Unless she or the detectives working the case could come up with some other plausible reason to obtain a warrant, there was no going back to Blake Rivers’s lab and proving the stash of bullets Edward had found was part of Z Group’s smuggling business or enforcement operations.
She pulled off her headphones and let them hang around her neck. What she had here was, at most, proof that would satisfy her own curiosity about untraceable bullets, and at least, a vial of red dish water.
Maybe Edward could take this information and do something with it. She was a doctor, not a detective. She could provide the science, but someone with a badge had to put it into context and drum up a suspect to turn her research results into a case.
Now that the adrenaline rush of her search was ebbing, she was seized by a yawn that made her extremely cognizant of the long hours she’d been keeping these past few days. She actually made note of the time, and not the passage of it, when she looked at the clock again. It was going on 2 a.m.
Sensible people would be in bed asleep. What had happened between her and Edward tonight—from passion-laced kisses to covering each other’s story for crashing the Caldwell party to the revelation of intensely personal secrets—might not qualify as sensible, but they’d certainly felt…inevitable.
The urge to call him—to connect with him again, even over a phone line—pulsed within her. True, she wanted to tell him about her findings with the bullet that he’d found in the “trash” and share her frustrations over producing a solid lead and a dead end at the same time. But more than that, she craved the sound of his throaty, sexy voice. Whether they were butting heads, sharing secrets or exchanging comforts, there was something as uniquely soothing and stimulating about his voice as there was to the intimate quiet of the night she loved so well. She wanted that voice to tell her if that second kiss in the parking lot had been as “accidental” as the one in the closet had been.
But Edward had been serious about finding an AA meeting, and she cer
tainly couldn’t intrude on that. Maybe that’s what she needed—an organized support system that could help her sort through emotionally confusing nights like this one. She hadn’t found anything so earth-shattering that it couldn’t wait until morning. And just because these feelings for Edward Kincaid had hit her hard and fast didn’t mean he felt the same way—or even wanted to feel the same way.
“Go home, Holly,” she advised herself since she was the sum total of her own support group. Despite Edward’s advice that she needed to let Jillian fight her own battles, Holly wanted to make sure her sister had made it home safely from the party. Plus, a few hours of sleep wouldn’t hurt her, either.
Already gathering her samples and straightening her work station, Holly vowed to wait until a more humane hour to call Edward. She glanced up at the clock and smiled, amused by her own coy thoughts. Maybe she could put her curiosity and hormones on hold until, oh, say, eight in the morning?
The flicker of a shadow floating past the translucent glass drew her attention to the door. She caught her breath on a strangled whisper. “Not again.”
As the initial, short-lived terror of being startled fired through all her senses and then burned itself out, Holly stared at the clouded glass, waiting for the shadow to reappear. Her eyes burned before she finally blinked.
She heard no sound, saw no more movement. Maybe there was a problem with the stupid lights out there. Or maybe…Holly planted a fist on one hip and her clipboard on the other. “Rick? Is that you? These games of yours are way past old. I’m going to write you up if you don’t show yourself right now.”
But there was no laughter, no teasing voice that answered. Her defiance quickly waned as a dozen other explanations—none of them good—flashed through her mind. As she eased her white-knuckled grip on the stainless clipboard, the aloneness that had seemed so relaxing a short while ago rushed in on her, making her frighteningly aware of her isolation.
Rationalize this, Holly. Solve the mystery. Make it go away.
She tried to reason with her paranoia. Other people worked at the lab through the night. There were at least a six technicians on the late shift, plus cleaning staff. There were guards on duty at each entrance and one who did routine patrols. She should call Floyd at the main desk just to verify that one of his officers was patrolling the basement level right now.
