Harlequin Intrigue, Box Set 2 of 2

by Julie Miller

  “Minor stuff. Nothing violent. Possession of narcotics. A DUI. He never went to prison. It was all time served and community service. And court-ordered NA meetings.”

  “Like Stephen March.” And Isabel Asher. And any of a number of pushers and addicts who’d worked for and bought from and crossed paths with Asher’s criminal empire.

  “A decade earlier, but yes.” She sank onto the edge of her bed as if her legs had grown too weak to hold her. She’d made the same realization he had. The team’s idea of a Strangers on a Train setup behind several of their unsolved crimes could no longer be discounted as a mere theory. “It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

  Trent knelt on the carpet in front of her, relieved to see that she didn’t swat away a comforting touch when he rested his hand on her knee. “Cold cases are built on circumstantial evidence more than anything else. There are an awful lot of circumstances that your research has linked together. Now we just have to prove that Leland Asher is behind it all.”

  Her gaze met his and she tried to smile. “Good luck with that.”

  “Look, I’m going to take this information and run with it. I’ll get Sergel and Price and Dr. Eisenbach and maybe even Leland himself all in for interviews. We’ll get the doctor’s patient list and see if she counseled Leland. We’ll make a case against Asher and put him back in prison where he belongs.” He stroked his fingers over the gray wool of her slacks. “But my immediate concern is those threats you’ve been getting. I’ve got a call in to Max to see if he can run down the name of that guy who got away. You didn’t recognize him, did you?”

  “From the back? Running away?”

  “He was wearing dress shoes instead of snow boots. Like the photographer you saw at the theater.”

  The telephone on her bedside table rang and she jumped. Trent squeezed her knee before standing up and giving her the space to move around the bed and answer it. “So that’s why he looked at my driver’s license.”

  “If it’s the same guy who defaced your laptop, yeah. It’d be easy to find you.” Trent caught her by the hand before she left him entirely. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into packing a bag for you and Tyler and moving in with me until this all blows over? It’s hell sleeping in my truck, and your couch isn’t big enough.”

  He needed her to read between the lines of his teasing tone and understand he was drop-dead serious. I’m not going anywhere and I’m not leaving you alone.

  Her fingers trembled for a moment inside his grasp before she pulled away and picked up the cordless receiver from its cradle. “Hello? Yes?” Trent watched the color drain from her face. “Who is this? Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Katie?”

  She punched the button to put the call on speakerphone and held the receiver between them as an electronically altered voice filled the room. “—want to hurt you, Katie Lee. But you’ve left me no choice. I know what scares you. The dark. A syringe. Your murdering father. Losing your child.”

  Trent dropped the photos Katie had printed out and grabbed the phone from her hand. “This is the police. Who is this?”

  He gritted his teeth at the answering laugh. “You were warned. Even your boyfriend’s not going to be able to save you now.”

  The click of the disconnecting call echoed across the room. Trent hung up her phone and pulled his from his coat. He’d call Max again to find out who’d just dialed her number. Although he’d bet good money this wraith stalking Katie had used an untraceable cell.

  Katie sank to her knees, crawling across the carpet to pick up the photos. “He’s not going to hurt you, sunshine. I won’t let him.” His partner picked up. “Max?”

  But Katie was more focused on some distant point inside her head than in any kind of shock. She sat back on her heels and crumpled the papers in her fist. “It’s these.”

  “Pictures? Printouts? The mess I made?” After relaying the message to Max, Trent picked up the rest of the papers and tried to understand the wheels turning in her head. “You’re not talking to me, woman. What do you mean?”

  She blinked and brought those cornflower-blue eyes into focus on him. “It’s the research I’m doing on these cold case files.” She braced her hand on his shoulder to stand and hurried to her computer. Trent followed, anxious to catch up on her train of thought. “I’ve opened up the wrong can of worms somewhere—I’ve breached some piece of information I shouldn’t have. That’s what he wants me to stop.”

  Trent looked over her shoulder as she booted up her computer, plugged in her portable hard drive and turned on the hot-spot security device. “The brass isn’t about to stop a criminal investigation. Even if the lieutenant takes you off the case and reassigns you, we’ll still be going after Asher. Are you sure?”

  “Every time I ping another database, every time I send an email request—that’s when he contacts me.” With the equipment in place, she tucked her hair behind her ears and went to work. “I need to run a full system diagnostic. It may be on my computer at work, too. He’s mirroring me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Somebody’s tapped into my computer. Or maybe the portable hard drive. Even if he’s not copying my data, he can see what sites I go to. He’s been tracking every movement I make online.”

  “How can you tell?”

  She’d gotten into the belly of the programming now and was scrolling through code. “Every time I get a little more information about Leland Asher, every time I discover another piece of the puzzle that can build our case against him, something happens. That man at the theater. Vandalizing my laptop. He’s tracking me somehow. Either visually or online.”

  Stop what you’re doing, the message had said. “They want you to stop investigating Leland Asher?”

  She pointed to the gibberish on the screen. “It’s all right here. But I’ve been too distracted to see it. It’s a virus, a replicating virus that copies everything I do to another computer. Someone got close enough to my laptop or portable hard drive to plant it.”

  “At the theater? There’s too much security at HQ.”

  “I don’t know. I may be able to track down the source.” Her fingers were flying over the keyboard, clicking on icons and typing in commands he didn’t understand. “I need to notify tech support at work to sweep the systems, just in case they’ve found a back door into the KCPD network. But there are enough safeguards that that might be difficult, even for an experienced hacker. More likely, it’s my personal account that’s been...”

  She picked up the hot-spot device and turned it over. “Do you have your pocketknife?”

  Trent reached into the pocket of his jeans to retrieve the knife. He marveled at the woman’s intelligence as she pried open the device. “Katie?”

  She dropped the pieces onto the desk and sank back in her chair. Trent didn’t have to be a genius like her to see that the innards weren’t connected, so it hadn’t blocked any intrusive signals. She could have been hacked almost anywhere if that wasn’t working—at the coffee shop, at the theater, at home.

  He pried the open knife from her grip. “Where did you buy that thing? Who would have access to disable it besides you?”

  “Anybody. I bought it months ago. I keep it in my bag. If they could get to my laptop, they could get to the hot-spot device. Then I’d be as vulnerable as if I had no security on my computer components at all. I am so going to lose my job over this, aren’t I?” She closed her hands into fists. “Such a screwup.”

  “You’re not,” he insisted. He dropped down on one knee beside her and captured her jaw between his thumb and fingers to turn her gaze toward his. “This just means there’s somebody who thinks he’s as smart as you out there. He’s a lot more calculating and doesn’t give a damn about who he hurts.” He tightened his grasp and pulled her forward to meet his kiss. Katie’s lips were full and sweet a
nd shyly responsive in a way that shattered the caution around his heart and kindled a fire in his blood. “I believe in you, sunshine. Maybe this is a break in the investigation, an opportunity to trace it back to some hacker with ties to Asher. Now take a deep breath and figure this out.”

  Her hands came up to cup his face and she smiled. “I don’t know why you’re so good to me.”

  “That’s easy.” He leaned in to kiss that worry dimple on her forehead. “Because I lo—”

  “Wait a minute.” Trent reeled in the ill-timed confession as a new idea reenergized her. He folded the knife blade and returned it to the safety of his jeans pocket while Katie went back to her keyboard. “I should be able to track back to the date the device was disabled. The time should help us zero in on a location and who could have—”

  She drew back with a gasp, her hands raised as row after row of words scrolled across her computer. After the first line, they were the same words, repeating over and over and over until they filled the screen.

  Stop, Katie.

  Die, Katie.

  Die, Katie.

  Die, Katie.

  Die, Katie.

  Die, Katie.

  “Trent?”

  “Son of a bitch.” Trent pulled her to her feet. He wanted to smash the monitor to erase the threats she’d somehow triggered. He would have ripped the whole thing out of the wall and tossed it across the room if some little sane part of his brain hadn’t remembered he was a cop, looking at a desk full of key evidence. “Log out of there. Do something. Fast.”

  Katie quickly shut down her Wi-Fi connection and pulled the cable connecting her router to the internet. He turned off the screen himself before she backed into him. His arms instantly went around her. “Easy, sunshine. You’re okay.”

  She shook her head, the nylon of his coat rustling against her hair. “Why is this happening to me? I’m just one little cog on the team. I’m background. I’m nobody. We’re all trying to solve cold cases and connect them to Leland Asher. All I do is the research. Why was that man here? Why is he trying to scare me?”

  Probably because they were getting closer to the truth, closer to making a major case against Asher stick. And someone in Asher’s camp was targeting Katie because she was the weakest link on the team—she hadn’t had police training and she didn’t carry a gun, but she was vital to proving that there was nothing alleged about the mob boss and his illegal activities. “Their time to shut us down is running out. Asher gets released from prison today.”

  She shook within his grasp. He knew the moment she decided she needed him more than she needed the distance between them. Turning in his arms, Katie shoved open the front of his coat and burrowed against his chest. Her fingers clenched in the layers of his shirts and the skin and muscle underneath. Trent threaded his fingers through her damp waves and cradled the back of her head, dropping his lips to the fragrant sunshine of her hair, holding her tightly against his strength.

  “Mom? Are you okay?” a soft voice whispered from the open doorway. Despite the grip he had on Padre’s collar, Tyler’s eyes were wide with concern. Smart kid. He could see his mother was scared.

  He just prayed the boy couldn’t see that Trent was more than a little frightened for Katie, too.

  “I’m okay, sweetie,” Katie answered, her voice strong to reassure her son. “I just got some bad news.” She tried to push away, but Trent wasn’t budging.

  Instead, he held his hand out to the little boy. “You’re going to come stay at my house for a couple days, buddy. Okay?”

  With a nod that didn’t quite erase his frown, Tyler left the dog and ran across the room to hug Katie. She lifted her son into her arms and Trent wrapped them both in his shielding embrace.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Trent sat at his desk, staring at the twelve pictures on his computer. Six victims, six suspects. Plenty of circumstantial evidence to link one to another, but no real proof as to who was ultimately behind either the unsolved murders or the threats against Katie. But the key to solving the crimes attributed to Leland Asher and his criminal network had to be staring him in the face. If only he could get those pictures to talk.

  That one of the police department’s information technologists was being stalked and receiving threats promising to kill her or harm her son if she didn’t stop poking around with her research meant the team had gotten too close to uncovering some long-buried truths. Their cold case investigation was heating up.

  Maybe more than Trent wanted.

  Not for the first time that day, his gaze wandered across the maze of detectives’ desks to the cubicle where Katie sat, surrounded by a desktop computer, a stack of print files and a tall cup of some mocha-latte thing. She wore a pencil in her hair and a hands-free headset to talk on the phone with other tech gurus assigned to the department. The threats that had frightened her at home only seemed to motivate her now. Maybe diving into work was a way to distract herself from the fears for her and Tyler’s safety. Or possibly, skipping lunch and never leaving her computer was some kind of atonement for allowing an outsider to breach her computers and gain inside information on the cold case squad’s progress on different investigations. Or maybe there was still a little bit of that teenage girl who charged into battle left inside her, and instead of cowing her into submission, the danger that had come to her very doorstep had inspired her to take action—to save the investigation, to find justice for those victims whose murders had yet to be solved, to save her son.

  Although Trent didn’t understand all the jargon, Katie and the tech team at the lab had scoured all her computers, and, as she suspected, the mirroring had been done through the hot-spot device on her laptop and portable hard drive. The KCPD network was secure and only the public-record files she’d been using in her database had been accessed. Her laptop was back from the lab—unfortunately, with no usable prints but her own and his. And, with a legal warrant and approval from Ginny Rafferty-Taylor, Katie was back at work again, doing a little hacking herself to find out when the virus had been planted so she could determine her location at that time and identify anyone who might have had access to plant the bug in her system.

  A paper wad smacked Trent in the forehead, drawing his attention back to the desk across from his. “Really?”

  “Hey, I didn’t want to be the only one working.” Max Krolikowski had plenty of ammunition on his messy desk, but he pointed to the stray missile that had landed on the tidy expanse of Trent’s blotter before hanging up his phone. “That’s the number that called Katie this morning.” Trent unfolded the note and smoothed it open to read the information Max had jotted there. “Just like you suspected. Disposable cell. It’s been turned off so there’s no way to trace it.”

  Trent slipped the paper into a folder and glanced down at the license plate number and name of the rental company that had leased the black sports car to a John Smith, aka Mr. Fancy Dress Shoes, aka he still didn’t have any freaking ID on the guy who’d gotten far too close to Katie and Tyler that morning. Just a bunch more puzzle pieces and no big picture yet.

  “However, it does belong to a type of phone sold exclusively at your favorite big-box discount department store over the past year.”

  Trent sat back in his chair. Like the anonymous John Smith with the fake license and credit card, that was almost worse than no help. “There are a dozen of those stores in the city. Assuming the perp bought it in KC.”

  “Yeah, but they all have surveillance cameras in their electronics departments.”

  “Are you willing to sit through twelve months of surveillance footage from all those stores to see who bought a phone and then try to identify John Smith or anybody else who’s come up in one of our cases?”

  “It’s a long shot.”

  “It’s worse than a long shot.”

  “But I’d do it for Katie.�
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  Trent agreed. “So would I.”

  With an answering nod, Max picked up his phone again. “I’ll start calling, see if the stores even keep security footage from that far back.”

  “I’ll find out if this guy used his John Smith ID to buy the phone or anything else.”

  Trent closed out the pictures on his computer screen but paused before picking up his own phone to help Max with one of the tedious, but necessary, demands of police work. “What’s the point of threatening Katie? She’s not going to be arresting anybody. This bastard should be coming after me or you or Liv and Jim, or anybody else on the team, if he wanted to misdirect us or slow down our investigation.”

  His partner hung up the phone without dialing. “You think this Smith dude tried to break in to her apartment to harm her? Not just to steal her computer or something like that?”

  “I didn’t give him a chance to finish the job. And he wasn’t inclined to stop for a chat.”

  Max scrubbed his fingers over his jaw in a thoughtful sigh. “Are the threats affecting her work?”

  Trent glanced over to see Katie riffling through the files on her desk before tapping her headset and answering whatever the party on the other end of the call had asked. “She seems as scatterbrained and brilliant as ever.”

  “Interesting.” If Max meant something by that cryptic response, he didn’t elaborate. “But the scaring part’s working?”

  Trent could still feel the marks on his skin where she’d finally turned to him for solace and held on to him until her trembling had stopped. And he’d never forget the worry stamped on Tyler’s sweet, innocent face. “It’s even getting to her son. I mean, Jim’s at the school shadowing Tyler during the day, so we know he’s safe for now. But how do I reassure a nine-year-old that everything’s going to be okay if I don’t even know what I’m up against?”

  “I don’t have kids—Hell, that’s a scary thought, ain’t it—me and kids?” Max propped his elbows on his desk and steepled his fingers together. “But I think you just need to be there for them.”