by Beverly Bird
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I’ve got somewhere I’m supposed to be.”
“So go be there. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Right.”
There was a click as he hung up, but Tessa stood for a moment with the phone in her hand. She wondered why the brownstone suddenly sounded so quiet. Wondered why she felt as if she were the only person in the city who was home alone on a Friday night.
What a way to celebrate being back in the fold.
She drained the last of her wine and stared thoughtfully and sadly down into the empty glass, then she decided on another.
“Here’s to Homicide,” she murmured quietly.
Maxwell meowed.
Tessa stared into her closet the following morning for a long time before she settled on black jeans, a turtleneck sweater and a heavy wool jacket. If Gunner’s driving was as bad as everyone said it was—bombs and bad parking notwithstanding—then she reasoned it would be easier to scramble from a wreck if she wasn’t wearing heels.
She fed Maxwell and read most of the morning Philadelphia Inquirer, all before seven o’clock, and refused to think what that might mean.
She walked into the Homicide Detectives’ office at a quarter to eight. Gunner had beaten her there anyway. He was sitting on the corner of Melanie Kaminski’s desk. Tessa picked up scraps of their conversation as she crossed to them, and realized that they were talking about the new North Central case.
She was more interested in Mel’s faint but discernible blush.
How could Gunner have that effect on every woman? Tessa wondered wildly. We don’t all go for the same type of man, she reasoned. Some liked blond, aristocratic types. Others went for the rough, dark looks. But it was beginning to seem that everyone got hot and bothered over John Gunner.
Then, watching him, she realized what it was. It wasn’t just his looks, though they certainly had impact. It was the way he used them, with lazy, unstudied sex appeal. When he smiled at a woman, he made her feel as if he had never smiled in just that way for anyone else before.
Potent stuff, she thought. She wished she hadn’t worn a turtleneck. Suddenly it felt tight around her throat, and that gaze wasn’t even directed at her.
Gunner looked up at the sound of her footsteps. “Hey, Princess.”
A tremor scooted through her. He said it so... intimately.
“Hey yourself,” she answered carefully. “Ready?”
He nodded and slid off the desk, then he stopped to get a cup of coffee to take with him. While his back was to her, Tessa let her gaze coast over him again. There was something about Gunner on the morning of an official day off that was both comfortable and titillating. He hadn’t shaved. He wore very tight jeans. It was below freezing outside, but he seemed comfortable in a T-shirt that outlined every broad, hard inch of those shoulders and his biceps. He smelled like something woodsy, she thought, sniffing, as though he had just stepped out of the shower, which he probably had. The ends of his hair were still wet.
Immune? she thought again, then added an extra warning to herself. Don’t look at him.
He grabbed his jacket. Tessa moved fast to catch up with him, and he held the door wide for her.
They picked their car up in the garage and Gunner swung it south on Eighth Street. Tessa buckled her seat belt. She started to ask him why they were heading south, but Gunner was apparently a morning person and that distracted her. He switched the radio on to a rock station and began singing, pausing now and again to drum his hands energetically on the steering wheel.
“Has anyone ever mentioned to you that you’re tone deaf?” she muttered.
“Can’t hear myself. Doesn’t matter.”
“Ah.” She slid down a little in her seat so that she wouldn’t have to watch the parked cars rushing at them. “I’d feel better if you kept both hands on the wheel, Gunner.”
He stopped drumming, but only long enough to speed through an intersection while the light was still marginally yellow.
“So how do you know Dr. Byerly?” Tessa asked. She really didn’t care. She was just making conversation, she told herself. If he was talking, he couldn’t sing.
Gunner seemed to think about it. “We go way back,” he answered finally. He was discreet, she’d give him that much.
“Did you know her before you joined the department?”
“Yeah.”
“So what does she look like?” Angela Byerly had taken over the post while Tessa had been at the Fifth. She hadn’t had occasion to meet her yet.
Gunner shot her an amused glance. “What difference does it make?”
“I’m just curious.”
“She looks sort of like a young Dyan Cannon.”
“So she’s blond.”
“Last time I saw her. You got a thing about blondes, Princess?”
“I think you do.”
This time when he looked at her he was grinning fully. “As a matter of record, I’ve gone out with just as many brunettes.” And one memorable, natural redhead, he mused, but that had been a very long time ago.
“Gunner!”
His gaze shot forward again. He was bearing down fast on a garbage truck. He swung around it and narrowly missed an oncoming cab.
“Oh, my God,” Tessa groaned. Then, in spite of herself, she laughed. The reflex shimmered through her, feeling good, whispering all the way down to her toes.
Gunner grinned. “Angela’s a good kid,” he went on without missing a beat. “Well, not a kid anymore, I guess. She’s my age.”
Which put her at about thirty-six, Tessa figured.
“She’s from the old neighborhood.”
“So you’ve remained friends with her all this time?”
“The best.”
Well, she had asked, Tessa thought. “What were you doing then?”
“Doing? When?”
“For a living, before you joined the department.” She wasn’t sure why she was asking. She really was convinced that she didn’t need to know that sort of thing in order to work with him. But if he hadn’t joined their ranks until six years ago, he would have been about thirty then and presumably he’d had another career. Besides, talking seemed to keep his mind off the radio.
Gunner passed a slow-moving car. “I worked for my father-in-law.”
That startled her. “Father-in-law? You’re married?”
“Not anymore. Why? Interested?”
She blushed and decided to ignore that question altogether. “What did you do for your father-in-law?”
“He had an accounting firm.”
“You were an accountant?” She couldn’t help laughing again, this time until her stomach hurt, then she sobered abruptly.
She hadn’t laughed a lot since Matt had died. She felt an odd, uncomfortable queasiness in the pit of her stomach, that she should do so twice in five minutes this morning.
She just couldn’t see John Gunner behind a desk, though, in a suit and tie, no matter how she tried. Granted, their partnership was only a day old, but so far all she’d ever seen him do was sit on desks.
“Don’t tell me,” she said finally. “He fired you.”
“Nope, she did.”
Tessa sobered. “Why?” Given Gunner’s reputation, maybe he had cheated on the woman, she thought. And if that were the case, she decided that she’d really prefer not knowing.
But Gunner looked sad and thoughtful. “Elaine wanted to grow up to be just like you.”
“Like me? How?”
“I don’t know. Rich.”
“I live off my salary,” she said indignantly. He shot her another glance. “Would you please keep your eyes on the road?”
“You didn’t buy a place in Elfreth’s Alley on a cop’s salary,” he observed finally.
Something skittered through her blood. “How do you know where I live? I’m not in the phone book.”
“Nope. Hadley-types usually aren’t,” he agreed, “at least from what I’ve been able to tell. It’s in yo
ur file.”
“You read my file?”
“I wanted to know what I was getting into.”
“Personnel isn’t supposed to give out that sort of stuff,” she said stiffly, then she sighed. He was right, of course. “Hadley-types” tended to be very private. A certain aloofness had been drummed into her from the cradle. Silly, really, she thought, and a regular nuisance when you stepped down into the real world, a world she had positively ached to rejoin for months now.
“I guess it sort of depends on how you ask them,” Gunner was saying.
Them, Tessa thought, was Nancy Hart, the woman in charge of employee records. She decided she didn’t want to know what methods Gunner had used on the woman ... and she definitely didn’t want to feel the flutter that came from realizing that he had been curious enough about her to use those methods.
“Matt and I bought the brownstone together,” she said suddenly, then she scowled, feeling the beginnings of a headache. She wondered why she felt so compelled to pull Matt into this conversation.
Gunner nodded unconcernedly. “Well, Elaine wanted a place just like that. Or one in Society Hill. And she wanted me to work eighty hours a week to take her there. I just couldn’t see the point.”
“Because you loved her, maybe?”
Gunner scowled at her. “Hell, Princess, I was twenty-five. I didn’t know love from baloney.”
“Do you now?” Why was she asking this? “Never mind. Go back to singing.”
He switched the radio off instead. “I haven’t had cause to think about it in a good long time,” he said honestly. “But no, I’d kind of have to doubt if I’ve ever been in love. Maybe I’m just not capable of it. Maybe love’s just too confined, too stringent for my tastes. Marriage definitely was.” He paused, obviously giving it a great deal of consideration. Then he shrugged. “Anyway, there’s no sense in trying to pretend that a relationship is something it’s not. So I let Elaine go with no hard feelings, and since then, I just keep things simple.”
She wanted to pursue the subject—and knew it was far wiser not to.
A moment later she realized that he drove as if he knew South Philly with his eyes closed. It was a colorful area, settled heavily by Italian-Americans. The whole city had pockets of strong ethnic culture, but South Philly had the Italian Market with its delicious smells and startling bursts of sound, and some of the best pasta she’d ever encountered anywhere. It also had its share of organized crime hits. She had been down here a few times before she’d been relegated to the Fifth.
She wondered if this was the area of the city Gunner lived in and bit her tongue against asking. She had already crossed over her lines enough this morning.
And what the devil were they doing in South Philly anyway?
Gunner darted the car through back streets and finally screeched to a stop on Oregon Avenue, in front of a long line of middle-class row homes. “What’s this?” she asked dumbly.
“Angela’s place.”
“Angela’s ... her house? Why did we come here? What was wrong with her office?” She’d felt as though she’d suddenly opened her eyes to find they’d landed on the moon. She’d been so preoccupied with their conversation that she hadn’t even wondered what they were doing driving so far.
“She’s off today, Princess,” Gunner said patiently. “It’s Saturday.”
“She’s a medical examiner!” Tessa protested senselessly. “She doesn’t get days off!”
“Nope, not when there’s an autopsy requiring her personal attention. But this one’s done, and there’s no reason why she should have to go into the office today just to talk to us. If she were anyone else, she would have pushed us off on one of her assistants or held us off until Monday. As it is, she brought the Benami file home with her last night as a special favor to me.”
“I ... oh.” There wasn’t much she could say to that.
She got out of the car. It was still early enough that there weren’t many children around, but there was evidence of their presence—bicycles chained to stoop railings, and a basketball sat on top of an overturned trash can.
“This way,” Gunner said. Then one of the doors opened and Angela Byerly bounded out.
Tessa felt her stomach tighten hard. She had already known that the M.E. was going to be blond and beautiful. But she wasn’t prepared for someone so ... exuberant. Given her job, Tessa had expected the woman to be more grim and subdued. But Angela fairly hurled herself at Gunner. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he gave her a quick spin before he put her on her feet again.
Tessa buttoned her jacket self-consciously and forced herself to walk up the sidewalk to join them. She offered Angela a hand and a weak smile.
“Hi. I’m Tessa Hadley-Bryant. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Hadley?” Predictable things happened to the woman’s expression. “As in—”
“That’s right,” Gunner supplied, interrupting. “She’s a real blue-blooded princess.” It would have stung, Tessa thought, except he winked at her. God, he was good.
They went up the steps together, hand in hand. Tessa followed behind them, feeling awkward and uncomfortably hot in her wool jacket. She wondered for the first time if she hadn’t made a big, big mistake coming back to Homicide under these circumstances. What was another month or two in the Fifth District? If she had waited awhile longer, Kennery would have brought her back eventually, and surely another partner would have become available for her.
But then again, she had laughed—twice. And she had been a good five miles into the south part of the city before it had even occurred to her to wonder what they were doing there.
She was suddenly convinced that no matter how many rules she devised for herself, working with John Gunner was not going to be a good idea.
Chapter 3
Angela led them to her kitchen. Her hips swayed in a perfect, sultry rhythm that Tessa had never quite been able to master, certainly not in a private, Catholic school where the nuns were always poking at her spine and reminding her to stand up straight. The woman wore a long yellow skirt that probably wouldn’t have made it past the sisters, either. It was filmy and vaguely sheer, swirling about her calves.
Tessa realized that something about the woman was positively jingling. She scowled, then she saw that underneath Angela’s cascading blond curls, tiny strings of bells dangled from each ear.
Tessa decided that she had never felt so plain, so colorless, in her life.
She wished desperately that she had worn something else, something besides jeans and wool. Then again, there wasn’t a thing in her closet that would even come close to the outfit that Angela Byerly wore, and she couldn’t imagine why she should care. Matt had liked the way she dressed.
She hugged herself as Gunner made himself comfortable at the breakfast bar. He looked over at her and she realized that he was wearing that dangerous half smile again.
“Problem, Princess?”
Tessa’s spine snapped straight, as though one of those nuns had just run her ruler down it. “No, of course not.” She slid carefully onto the stool next to his.
Angela went to the coffeepot and Tessa looked at Daphne Benami’s file on the bar. She itched to open it, to know.
“So,” she prompted as Angela deposited a pair of mugs on either side of the folder. “What did you find out?”
“First of all, I had Ed Thackery do the actual cutting,” Angela began, leaning prettily against the opposite side of the counter.
Tessa nodded, noticing the woman’s vibrant pink fingernails.
“Ed found that the cause of death was asphyxiation due to strangulation,” Angela informed.
“No surprise there,” Tessa responded. She was relieved to find that her tone was short and professional. “She hanged. But was it her idea, or did somebody decide it for her? And if so, what somebody?”
“Oh, I’d say someone definitely decided for her. Ed also found rope fibers on both of her wrists,” the M.E. explained. “Si
nce she didn’t hang by her wrists, and the fibers didn’t match those we found on her neck, we sent them on to Forensics.”
“So somebody tied her up first before they tied her up?” Gunner asked, thinking aloud.
“That would be my guess,” Angela agreed. “We found pretty high levels of two different sedatives in her blood as well.”
Tessa’s mind began working. She forgot what Angela looked like. She forgot about Gunner and how he had made her laugh. Her thoughts veered, picked, considered ... and it felt so good.
“So Daphne fought,” she said aloud.
“Or her killer just expected she would,” mused Gunner.
“I wonder if he might have thought that he could just lift her up to that chandelier, or maybe he even did it by gunpoint to coerce her, but she went wild,” Tessa said. “Or at least much more wild than he had anticipated. Daphne was always ... quiet,” she remembered. “Docile. Complacent. So maybe she surprised him and he had to tie her hands to keep her from striking him, and sedate her to make her drowsy enough that she couldn’t use the rest of her body to fight him, either.”
“Could be,” Gunner agreed.
Tessa finally looked at Angela again. “How long before her death was she given the sedatives? Were they the kind she could have administered herself because of her headache?”
“Librium and Seconal.”
“Not necessarily headache stuff, but maybe she was in enough pain that she just wanted to sleep,” Gunner observed.
“My best guess says that she took the stuff—or it was given to her—about an hour, maybe an hour and a half prior to her death,” Angela told them.
Poor Daphne. Had she genuinely loved that man, or had she just been swept off her feet by him? Either way, oh, God, she must have felt so betrayed!
“What else?” she asked Angela a little too sharply. “Did you find anything else?”
“Lots of little things, maybe important, maybe not. I made a copy of the report for you guys,” Angela answered. “But I tend to agree with your assessment that she fought pretty hard, at least on an evidentiary basis. I don’t think binding her was merely a precautionary thing. For starters, the fibers were embedded, like on her neck—indicating that her assailant was angry, or at least that a good bit of force was used. There were also traces of skin and blood beneath the nail of the middle finger of her left hand.”
