by Beverly Bird
Damn right she was, Tessa thought. “The Carlsons don’t marry men like Christian Benami. And they definitely don’t marry men like that then immediately write them into their will as sole beneficiary. He had to have twisted her arm somehow.”
“Maybe with some prime loving?”
Her heart hitched again at the slow, intimate drawl he rolled the words out with.
“What about the Hadleys?” he asked suddenly.
Tessa blinked. “What about us?”
“Would a Hadley be expected to marry someone like Matt Bryant—a cop, even one with a law degree?” Matt had had one, too, Gunner remembered. In fact, he was pretty sure they’d met in law school.
Tessa paled. “You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“It’s a big, bad world out there, Princess. Best way to fight it is to be honest with yourself and your partner. I was just trying to make a point and get a handle on your motivations here. I’m trying to figure out why you want to go after Benami so damn badly. And you know what I’m starting to think? You’re already too emotionally involved in this thing. You’re thinking that Daphne could have been you, I’d bet. Did you write Matt into your will as sole beneficiary?”
Tessa flinched. “Yes, but—”
“So what are you thinking here? That there but for the grace of God goeth you?”
It was true, she admitted uncomfortably.
“You’re letting it skew your judgment, Princess. You’re not seeing the forest for the trees.”
That wasn’t true. “It’s a gut instinct,” she argued. “I really think Christian did it.”
Gunner blew out his breath and studied his coffee. “All right.” “All right?” Her jaw dropped. They’d been going around in circles on this all day. Why was he suddenly giving in now?
“Maybe,” he amended. “I’ll make a bet with you.”
“What kind of bet?” she asked warily.
“The Medical Examiner’s report should be in anytime now,” he went on, then he cocked his head a little bit as though he was trying to remember something. “As a matter of fact, I know her. Doc Byerly is a fine lady.”
Tessa groaned and rolled her eyes. “Most women are, Gunner, where you’re concerned.”
“Nah. You’re letting that imagination of yours get away with you again.”
“Go listen in the women’s bathroom.”
He grinned. “Really? They talk about me in there?”
“Often,” she said dryly.
He shook his head. “That’s amazing.” He wondered privately what they could be saying. All he knew for sure was that their imaginations had to be top-notch, because he honestly hadn’t been to bed with any of them.
He shook his head to clear it. “Anyway, about Angela.”
“Angela?”
“Byerly. The Medical Examiner. Get with the program, Princess.”
She continued to eye him suspiciously. “Okay. The M.B. So what’s this bet that has to do with her?”
“If Angela gives us any physical evidence whatsoever that Christian did this, then I won’t smoke in your presence and contaminate your pretty little lungs for a whole week.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
He thought about it. “You can buy me a beer. At the establishment of my choice.”
Her eyes narrowed. Already she knew him well enough to guess that he probably had a card up his sleeve.
“You’ve never said who you think did it,” she realized aloud. “All day you’ve just kept saying that it wasn’t Benami. Don’t tell me you’re buying into the suicide angle.”
He looked at her levelly. “Nope. If it was suicide, you’d still be uptown filing reports on dog poop.”
Tessa flushed. She had badgered their captain for months to let her come back to Homicide. She had been exiled—she still couldn’t think of it in any terms but that—to the Fifth District after Matt had been killed.
“I’m just warning against closing our eyes to other possible scenarios.” Gunner hesitated. “You’re rusty, Princess. That’s all. And you’re letting your heart rule your head here. It’s no big deal,” he added quietly when he watched her stiffen. “Hell, I’d be rusty, too, if I’d spent nearly a year on desk duty. But I didn’t, so I’m suggesting that we make this bet just for the hell of it, just to see where it takes us.”
Rusty? He was right and she knew it, but she hated it. She looked at her watch in a deliberate attempt to end the conversation.
It was past six o’clock. She made a move for the coat tree. “I’m going home.”
Gunner stepped quickly in front of her, blocking her way. “Come on, Princess. What have you got to lose?”
Tessa shrugged, dodging around him.
“I’ll sweeten the pot. If Angela gives us the evidence you want, I’ll go two weeks without smoking.”
Tessa hesitated. Now that was a deal. She had nothing to lose but a few bucks for a beer. Still, the people who had dubbed her “Princess” had vastly underestimated her.
“Forever,” she countered.
“Huh?” He looked disbelieving.
“No cigarettes in my presence ever. Certainly not at my—our—desk.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Princess.”
Her chin came up a notch. Something in her eyes grinned. It was fascinating, he realized.
“Take it or leave it, Gunner.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll yak all day tomorrow, too.”
“I’ll take the bet.”
“Wise man.” Actually, Tessa thought he was either a bone-deep gambler, or dead sure that she was wrong.
He held her coat out for her. Tessa took it from him rather than let him help her on with it. That might have meant touching him in some fashion. And she had decided at nine o’clock this morning that that was going to be a definite do-not-do with John Gunner. The Homicide Unit walls had eyes. If he so much as touched her, the department gossips would sink their teeth into it and run with it in a hurry. Tessa had decided right off the bat that the best and only way to maintain a good working relationship with Gunner was to keep him at a personal arm’s length.
She wondered how buying him a beer would fit into that, and her heart did something that almost felt like a skip.
Gunner pulled his own jacket—comfortably worn black leather—off the tree. “I’ll call the M.E. tonight and see how close they are to finishing the autopsy. Maybe we can run over there first thing in the morning.”
Tessa thought about it, about how much running they would actually have to do. The M.E.’s office wasn’t far. She nodded.
Granted, she thought, Gunner had only actually wrecked one of the cars whose demise was listed in his file. He had parked another in the wrong place in a city lot and it had been tagged as inoperable and towed off and destroyed. And Tessa thought she’d heard that the third car had been bombed by an ex-felon convicted on Gunner’s testimony.
Gunner held the office door open for her just as Becky Trumball, their captain’s secretary, appeared there. Gunner winked at the woman and strolled off down the hall, and Becky pivoted to watch him appreciatively.
“My, oh my,” she murmured.
“He pulls his pants on one leg at a time, just like every other man. Trust me,” Tessa responded tightly.
Becky looked back at her fast. “You’ve witnessed this?”
Tessa was taken aback. “No! Nor do I want to.”
Becky studied her a moment, then she shook her head. “You won’t stay immune to him for long, honey. Mark my words.” She handed her a file. “It’s that hooker who was killed up in North Central last night. Kennery says to give it to Mel and Jeffrey.”
Tessa took the file and hugged it to her chest for a moment. “So have you...uh, witnessed it?” Tessa didn’t care, of course. She was just curious.
“What?”
“Gunner putting his pants on” She already regretted that she had asked. Becky seemed to be struggling with herself.
Th
e woman finally shrugged. “A lady’s got to have some secrets.” But Tessa thought her voice sounded pained.
No, she guessed, Becky had probably not witnessed it, and she was undoubtedly the only one in the department who hadn’t, with the exception of Tessa herself.
Becky spun out the door again. Tessa. went to put the file on Melanie Kaminski’s desk.
Immune? It didn’t feel like it. It didn’t feel like it much at all.
Chapter 2
It was snowing when she got outside, small, stinging flakes that wouldn’t amount to much, but they would definitely make her walk a miserable one. Tessa pulled her collar up and lowered her head into the icy wind instead. Her brownstone was in Elfreth’s Alley, five blocks from the Police Administration Building. She’d be halfway there before she found an empty cab at this time of night, she thought. Besides, even at its worst, she loved Philadelphia.
She passed a vendor on the corner of Seventh and Race Streets, smiling at the smell of the soft pretzels the city was renowned for. Fragrant steam rose off them in the frigid air. A teenage boy waved a copy of the Daily News at her, but she wasn’t much of a sports fan, and that was the paper’s forte. Further on she had to step around a homeless person who was already bunked down for the night on one of the sidewalk grates. The P.D. had a separate, special detail for vagrants. She knew someone would be around to collect the man shortly and take him to a shelter.
Philadelphia was... Philadelphia, she mused. A little less hostile than New York, much less transplanted than L.A. The weather was fractionally better than in Chicago, and the people were less affected than in San Francisco. Some obscure, nonsensical survey had recently revealed that the merchants and the cabbies here were the most honest of any major American city. Tessa grinned crookedly. If that was the case, then she definitely didn’t want to live anywhere else.
Drivers blared their horns just as loudly as those in Manhattan, and people rushed through center city with the same determination, but Tessa was convinced that there was a gentler mingling of smells, sounds and impressions here. There was a stronger sense of history. Her brownstone was half a block from Betsy Ross’s house, two blocks north of Penn’s Landing. It was another handful from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. When the weather was good, she sometimes detoured by that way, if only to watch the tourists.
But the weather wasn’t good. She kept an eye out for a cab, but she had been right—she was a block away from home before she saw one that was available. She jogged the rest of the way, rushed up the stoop and fumbled for her keys in her briefcase.
Maxwell, her cat, was just inside the door. He greeted her with a highly insulted squawk and she grinned down at him. “It was for a good cause.” She hung her coat up and dropped her briefcase into the antique Louis XIV chair in the entryway. “I’m back, Max. I really worked today. And you ought to get a gander at the guy I’m working with.”
She started for the kitchen at the back of the house. Maxwell forgot his temper to trudge after her curiously.
“No,” she went on, “you haven’t met him, and you never will.” She reached into a cabinet for a can of cat food. “But he was why I was late, so I thought you might care.”
She spooned food into his bowl, then she went still, the can suspended over the dish. Oh, God, now she was talking to the cat. Not that there weren’t thousands of people—probably hundreds of thousands—all over Philadelphia talking to their cats right about now, but when you had been widowed less than a year, and you were only twenty-nine years old, every response, every impulse, became suspect.
That was perhaps the only thing she had learned in grief counseling after Matt had been killed. The therapists had jumped on every moderately unusual reflex she possessed. Which was why she had stayed with the counseling less than three months. Their badgering still left her a little bit paranoid about almost every move she made, and she hated living that way.
She straightened away from the cat’s bowl and tossed the can into the trash compactor. She decided she wasn’t hungry herself, but then she had to pause to examine that reflex, too. Was she depressed, or was it merely that obscenely loaded hot dog Gunner had talked her into at three o’clock?
Probably the hot dog.
She shook her head and looked briefly at the canister full of odd and exotic tea bags she had collected over the years. For one of the rare times in her life, she went into the dining room for a bottle of wine instead. She was celebrating, after all.
She poured herself a careful half glass of cabernet and took it upstairs. She turned on the tub in the master bath, generously adding some bubble bath. As she passed back through the bedroom, she scowled. The grief counselors had urged her to sell the brownstone, but she was stubborn and she loved the place. She had changed the bedroom since Matt had been gone. The bed they’d shared was in the guest room now, and she’d bought cherry antiques and brass for this room. But Matt still lingered somehow. Tessa closed her eyes for a moment, letting herself remember him.
Suddenly she panicked.
Her heart started pounding hard. For a second, maybe only a fraction of a second, she had a hard time calling back his face. She didn’t want to lose him ... but on New Year’s it would be a whole year since he had been gone.
She slipped quickly out of her clothing, grimacing again at the coffee stain on the sleeve of her silk blouse. She went back to the bathroom and slid into the hot, foamy water, and this time when she closed her eyes, Matt’s face came to her more easily, if only because she worked at it.
Unfortunately it was as she had last seen him. Dying.
She shivered, though the water hadn’t had a chance to cool yet. It had happened at Tommy’s Grill after a quiet New Year’s Eve dinner last year. Matt had been working, but she was off. He had used his meal break to meet her at Tommy’s because it was a special occasion.
They had left the restaurant, replete and happy, talking about what they planned to do when Matt got home. Then they’d stepped outside onto the sidewalk into the middle of a mugging. Matt had interceded. It hadn’t been immediately apparent whether or not the perpetrator had had a gun. Matt had hesitated going for his own under the circumstances. And then the bullets had started spitting. Cracking. Whining.
By then, it had been too late. Tessa hadn’t had her own gun with her. She’d only been able to watch and scream. And scream.
She missed him, she thought, her throat closing hard now. Sometimes she still missed him abominably. But she had thought she was over the worst of it when she had ditched the therapists after three months. She had finally stopped dreaming about Matt by then. She had even stopped waking up in the night, her heart slamming, her palms sweating, the sheets wadded up in her hands. She had come to terms with it. Her husband had been a cop. And sometimes cops got shot. Life went on. Matt would have wanted hers to go on without too many missteps.
Tessa had always prided herself on her common sense. She’d told the Department psychologist—Gale Storm—that she could deal with it. What she hadn’t told her, what she had never admitted to anyone, was that she secretly wondered if she could have shot that night when Matt was killed, if she’d had a gun. She didn’t tell her that she often tore herself up inside wondering if there had been something—anything—she could have done to save him, and that when she thought about that part of it, her heart still slammed and her palms still sweated. When Gale had suggested that she might harbor such feelings, Tess had denied it vehemently, with all the haughty disdain and dignity of a Hadley.
But perhaps Gale had guessed. To Tessa’s utter horror, the woman had recommended against letting her go back on active duty in Homicide. And that was the other reason she had stopped seeing her—pure resentment and anger.
“Matt was down almost before you stepped through the door. The whole department knows it.” That was what Gale had said. “Still, I’m concerned that you’ll freeze up the first time somebody fires again if you come back too soon, or worse, you’ll start shootin
g blindly out of rage. Either one would be an understandable reaction.”
Kennery and her chief inspector had listened to Gale. They’d put her on desk duty in the Fifth, the district with the lowest crime rate in the entire city. She’d spent nine months writing up reports of neighborhood spats and she-said-he-saids. Then Daphne Benami had died.
Tessa’s mouth curved into a smile as she sank a little deeper into the bath. Her exile was finally over. But now she had to deal with John Gunner.
The department maverick, she thought, the Don Juan of detectives, destroyer of automobiles, loser of service revolvers, forever on probation. To be fair, though, he hadn’t seemed all that bad today. And his personal reputation was his own business. She would simply keep him at a personal arm’s length so that his horrible reputation didn’t become hers.
The phone began ringing in the bedroom, jolting her. She thought about letting the machine pick it up, but the water was getting cold and the wine was making her drowsy. She got out of the tub, grabbing a towel on her way into the bedroom, carrying the last of her wine. Gunner’s slow chuckle answered her breathless hello.
“Am I interrupting something? Do you have some erotic secret life going on over there, Princess?”
“Of course not. I was in the tub.” She felt her face go hot and was glad he wasn’t there to see it. She took a quick gulp of the wine.
His silence was just a little too long, as though he was trying to picture it.
“Well, listen,” he said finally, his grin in his voice. “I just talked to Angela. We can see her at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. She’ll have the results of the autopsy tonight sometime. How about if I pick you up at eight-thirty?”
Nice, straight, strong lines, keeping him at a personal distance. She had absolutely no idea where he lived and she wouldn’t invite him to her brownstone.
“I—No. I’ll, uh ... I’ll meet you at the office.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday, Tess,” Gunner reminded her. “We don’t have to report in.”
“This isn’t a nine-to-five job,” she snapped, then she sighed. “Speaking of which, that makes this Friday night. Don’t you have something better to do than nitpick with me, Gunner?”
