by Julie Miller
Dani had mentioned that, too, how Gabe had taken her raw skills and turned her into a better writer. “Some of the things she says in here, the way she says them, reminded me that a woman thinks differently than a man.”
He gave her a thumbs-up on the breakfast and drank a sip of coffee. “That’s not news worth reporting, Detective.”
“Dani was angry that night she left.”
“Yes.”
“She downloaded her story and file notes onto her flash drive so you couldn’t spy on her and tell her what she was doing wrong or—”
“I didn’t say she was wrong. Her story was legit. I wanted her to understand that the people she was about to expose would do whatever it took to stop her. She didn’t have backup who knew to go looking for her if she didn’t call in or show up at a certain time. She was meeting in a dangerous part of town. She didn’t have the right kind of protection in place.”
As the tension radiating off him increased, Olivia reached across the island to touch his hand to soothe him. “I get it. You were both upset.”
Gabe nodded, understanding that this was about piecing together a puzzle, not placing blame. He squeezed her hand before taking his plate to the sink to rinse it and put it in the dishwasher. “Sorry. That’s old news. I know you’re leading up to something. What is it?”
“When a woman gets really emotional like that, she has a go-to plan, a habit she uses to regain her equilibrium. Especially if she has an important job or responsibilities she has to take care of.”
Gabe picked up the pan and spatula to load them into the dishwasher, as well. “Like five minutes of peace and quiet.”
“That’s right. Some women go for a run. Others take a bubble bath. I like to be alone in a place that’s calm and serene.” Like spending an hour watching the sun come up over the city skyline from the secluded nook of Gabe’s window seat. She hadn’t just been reading the diary, she needed some time to process the emotional upheaval of sleeping together and realizing just how important he’d become to her in the short span of time they’d been together. But that was a discussion for another time. “Where did Dani go when you two had a fight?”
“We didn’t fight that much.”
Olivia waved aside his defensive argument. “When anything upset her or frustrated her, what was her go-to plan to cool off and compose herself?”
Gabe finished his task and closed the dishwasher, using the time to think before rejoining her at the island. “She liked to go up onto the roof. She planted some flower boxes and a bunch of pots with herbs on the deck up there, bought some patio furniture and a grill. She kept saying one day when we stopped working we were going to have friends over and entertain up there.”
“You probably hated the idea of not working.”
“So did she.” He smiled at the fond memory. “But she’d plug in some music and go up there to trim off dead blooms, put together bouquets and dig around in the dirt.”
Dani had been murdered on a rainy autumn night. “Would she go up there even if the weather wasn’t nice?”
Gabe nodded. “She built a snowman up there once.”
“Are the pots and flower boxes still up there?”
“She went up there that night. I swear I could hear her cursing through the ceiling. She went down the fire escape and left without coming back in to say goodbye.” Gabe’s hands fisted on the cool granite. “And I was too proud or angry or whatever stupid emotion I was feeling to go up there and apologize. I thought she’d come back down and we’d have a civilized discussion about how to handle her story.”
Blame and regret didn’t matter right now. Olivia climbed down off the stool. “How do I get to the roof?”
Gabe’s blue eyes locked onto hers and widened. “Are you saying finding that flash drive is that easy?”
Olivia hurried into the guest bedroom where she’d left her tennis shoes and shouted her answer. “Not exactly easy. We haven’t actually found it yet. And it might not be there. Six years have passed. You and my dad searched in the places a man would think of. Logical places. This is just a hunch I have based on...”
When she came back out with her shoes on, Gabe had disappeared. Seconds later, he walked out of his room, buttoning a starched blue shirt over the T-shirt he’d put on. “I’d trust your hunches over most people’s eyewitness testimony any day, Detective.” He pulled on socks and shoes, grabbed his keys and reached for her hand. “Let’s go look.”
Six years with mostly Mother Nature to take care of the rooftop garden had turned the red paint on the deck railings and flower boxes brown. The only flowers that had survived since their last caretaker were a pair of overgrown rosebushes in two giant pots chained to the railing at the far end of the deck. Dani had chosen hardy plants because, even now, there were new green shoots pushing up through the dirt.
“I can see why she’d like it up here.” Olivia squinted into the damp morning breeze that indicated they’d have rain later in the day. But the view up here was panoramic, with the tallest buildings of downtown KC far enough away that she could see for miles in almost any direction. She tried for a few moments to think like Dani would have that night. “Are there any lights up here?”
Gabe nodded. “She used to string party lights up here. But you have to turn them on...” He paused to unlock a small shed. “In here.” He hit a switch, turning on a bare lightbulb hanging in the middle of the shed, as well as twin spotlights on the outside, angled over the deck area. “That’s the light she would have had that night, plus a few twinklers hanging from the railings.”
“It’s not much.” She followed him inside the shed after he moved aside a grill and deck chairs stored there, clearing a path.
“It would have been crowded like this in here, too,” Gabe added, uncovering the grill and checking inside. “We packed everything up over Labor Day weekend.”
“Then it needed to be a place she could get to quickly. She wasn’t up here that long, right?”
“Maybe five minutes, tops.”
“Are there any cabinets or storage boxes where she might have stashed the flash drive?” Olivia asked, drifting toward the wall display of a couple dozen colorful glazed pots that Gabe or someone had brought inside out of the elements.
“Just those open shelves and the stuff sitting around on the floor.” He pulled out a galvanized bucket and set it on the floor beside her. “We can use this or the empty pots to dump the dirt into and sift through it if you think it’s in one of those.”
The dirt inside the pots was dry and cracked or had filtered through the disintegrating bases of some to form neat, pyramid-shaped piles on the floor and shelves. She picked up a turquoise pot to start the search. Wait. Not so neat. She recognized the tracks through the dirt where tiny feet and balancing tails had scurried through.
Her heart thumped rapidly in her chest as she stepped back. “Do you have mice in here?”
“I’m sure they come in during the wintertime. Do you want me to search in here and you take the flower boxes?”
“No.” Inhaling a quieting breath, she turned the pot upside down and shook the globs of solidified potting soil into the bucket. “I’m a professional cop and a grown... Yes!” A tiny black mouse landed in the bucket and Olivia screamed. The turquoise pot shattered on the concrete floor as the vile little vermin froze for a moment, looking up to see who’d disturbed his hiding place. Then he darted away as fast as Olivia dashed back onto the deck.
“Easy, tough lady.” Gabe caught her in the middle of the deck and pulled her into his arms. “Hey. You’re shaking.”
A dozen different curses went through Olivia’s head. She hated this weakness. And though she wanted to be able to shake it off and deal with this on her own, she found herself clutching a handful of Gabe’s shirt and leaning against his shoulder instead. “Dad said my mother was ter
rified of mice, too. I think it’s a hereditary thing. Don’t think my brothers didn’t take advantage of that one.” But the firm stroke of Gabe’s fingers at the nape of her neck took the edge off her irrational fear, and allowed her to think and breathe normally again. If a kid with a knife and gun and a man in a speeding black car couldn’t scare her away from this investigation, then no furry little rodent would, either. “I’m okay.” She pressed a kiss to the edge of Gabe’s jaw and pushed away. “I’m okay.”
“I’m just glad you’re not so independent you don’t need me for something,” he teased, although the humor didn’t quite reach his eyes. He turned away and went back into the shed.
It was on the tip of her tongue to call him back and tell him that she needed him to make her whole again. She needed him to love her and teach her to believe in trust and her own judgment and happy futures again. She just needed him. Of all the crazy possibilities in the world, she needed Gabe Knight, the one man in all of KC who hadn’t broken the law, who didn’t like cops. She needed him.
She loved him.
“I’ll face the beast in here. If I find something, I’ll bring it out.” When he stepped back outside a few seconds later, Olivia shook the distracting revelation from her head. He set a pair of women’s gardening gloves and a small hand shovel in her hands. “Here. Take these if you’re going to be digging through the dirt.”
“Thanks.”
Ignoring her troublesome thoughts and wary heart for now, Olivia pulled on the gloves and started poking through the dirt and peeking through the slats at her feet. Common sense sent her to the flower boxes on either side of the railing where they’d entered off the fire escape. If Dani hadn’t had much time to hide the flash drive, she would have looked for the most convenient place—if she’d hidden it up here at all. Olivia scooted the dirt around and dug all the way down to the wood at the bottom. Nothing.
Olivia sighed in frustration, scanning the nearly empty deck. She’d thought she was onto something here. This place was secluded, had limited access to outsiders, and it was probably the place where Dani had felt the safest. It’s where Olivia would have stashed the flash drive for safekeeping until she could retrieve it later. But would Dani have done the same?
Even with the overcast sky, the morning sun had masked the most obvious hiding place of all. Olivia looked at the spotlight on the shed, and looked again. Her pulse rate kicked up a notch, with a far more even, healthier excitement than the startle she’d gotten from her run-in with Mighty Mouse.
“Are you sentimental about any of these flowers?” she shouted to Gabe, following the beam of the right spotlight over to one of the potted rosebushes.
“No.” He came to the door as she plunged her shovel into the pot, attacking the base of the bush to loosen up the soil. “Did you find something?”
“She was up here at night, for just a few minutes. She needed to catch her breath, clear her mind and hide her story so that she could get to the appointment with her informant on time.”
“That light shines right on this pot.” He joined her, pulling away the dirt with his gloved hands, then grasping the stalks of the plant itself, tugging and twisting until the roots started to give way. “She wouldn’t have had to take time to unlock the shed, and she would have been able to see what she was doing here.”
A big chunk of the gnarled old bush pulled free, dumping a shower of dirt at their feet. Gabe dumped the plant onto the deck and reached in to pull the rest of it out. But there was no need. Olivia dug out clumps of the broken roots and sifted through the dirt and debris with her gloved fingers. Was that... She felt the crinkle of something nonorganic between the root ball and the side of the pot.
“Gabe?” She yanked the zipped-up plastic bag from its hiding place. “Gabe!”
“Is that what I think it is?”
She brushed six years of dirt and the elements off the bag and held it up to the spotlight. Olivia was almost giddy with relief when they saw what was inside.
A thumb-size flash drive attached to a silver key ring.
“That’s Dani’s,” Gabe confirmed, pressing a kiss to Olivia’s cheek. “You found it.”
“If the weather hasn’t destroyed it completely, our lab can do amazing things.”
He pulled off their gloves and tossed them and the tool into the shed and locked the door. “What are we waiting for?”
Olivia nodded and hurried down the stairs ahead of him. “Who’s waiting?”
Chapter Twelve
“I know who murdered Danielle Reese.”
Olivia stood at the side of the table and looked around at her team. Other than Gabe, who’d been at the crime lab with her yesterday and had read the same files recovered from the flash drive they’d found, she was met with looks that ranged from mild surprise to disbelief.
Max leaned back in his chair, blurting out what the others must have been thinking. “Then why don’t we have this guy in custody? What’s the catch?”
It was a big one. “I’m not sure I can prove it.”
Ginny Rafferty-Taylor quieted her office by simply raising her hand. “Maybe you’d better give us a little more explanation. We all know how rare it is to get a confession on a cold case. Do you have circumstantial evidence?”
“Yes, ma’am. A ton of it.” Olivia turned her laptop around to pull up the list of files she’d copied from the flash drive. She put it up on the screen behind her for everyone to read. “Dani Reese was meticulous about documenting her research.”
“If I may?” Gabe sat at the table now, too. He’d been accepted as an integral part of this investigation if not exactly welcomed as friend. “Dani kept photos of corroborating evidence and transcripts of interviews with her informant, as well as several drafts of the articles she was writing about Leland Asher making payoffs to Adrian McCoy’s campaign in exchange for political favors such as rezoning property Asher wanted or adjusting funding programs that would benefit his legitimate businesses or cutting budgets so there would be fewer cops in the neighborhoods where he conducts his less legitimate enterprises.”
“Money laundering. Drug trafficking. Racketeering,” Trent added. “We know the list. That flash drive can prove Leland Asher is a crook?”
Olivia answered. “We found evidence of collusion, at least. Although we can’t tie him directly to Dani Reese’s murder.”
Max frowned. “I thought you said he killed that poor lady.”
Olivia was quick to clarify. “I didn’t say it was Asher. But whether she intended to or not, Dani did tell us who shot her that night.”
“So what did she say?” Max asked. “What secrets are on that flash drive?”
“Dani used an old-school reporting technique,” Gabe jumped in, explaining the gold mine of information the crime lab had retrieved from his late fiancée’s notes. “She documented activities before and after each meeting. Basically, she kept a logbook to record her research, make note of potential sidebars, keep track of all the details of who, what, when and where, in case it might be related to her main story.” He gestured to Olivia, throwing their attention back to her. “That’s where we picked up on the man Olivia is talking about.”
Olivia opened one of the files. “He must have been stalking her for several days, if not weeks before the murder. She mentions him several times.”
Lieutenant Rafferty-Taylor jotted a note on the pad in front of her. “Stalking? Did Ms. Reese have contact with him? Had he threatened her before that night?”
“Not directly.” Olivia punched a button on her laptop to post an image up on the screen. “Here’s an example of one entry.” She read Dani’s words out loud.
“He never talks to me. But today he followed me through the park when I was power walking with Lucy after lunch. I think he has a crush and is just too shy to approach me. I’ve seen him in line at t
he coffee shop, parked in his car at the grocery store, pumping gas when I filled up my tank yesterday. But I don’t know his name. He just watches me. He sneaks closer when he thinks I’m not looking. This guy gives me the creeps.”
Katie Rinaldi shivered. “It’d give me the creeps, too, to have some guy lurking around me like that.” When Trent reached over to squeeze her shoulder, she smiled and went back to work. “Did she happen to give a name to this scumbag so I can put him in the case file and we can track him down?”
“No name, but she gave a good description of him in several different places in her reports. Reddish-brown hair. Slight build.” Olivia posted a collage of candid photos. “She even gave us his picture.”
Several of them, in fact. A skinny guy waiting for a table on the far side of a coffee shop, his face partly obscured by the crowd of patrons between them. The same man in a hooded sweatshirt, caught at an awkward angle as though Dani Reese had been trying to hide the fact she was taking a picture. A young man sitting in a beat-up car across the street from the Journal’s parking garage.
“According to the time stamp on the photos, these were all taken in the two weeks before she died.”
Max sat up in his chair and snapped his fingers. “Hey. I know that guy.”
Gabe pulled back his sleeve and raised his arm to point to the gauze bandage covering the stitches there. “We all do.”
“You’re talking about Stephen March.” Max smacked Trent on the arm beside him. “Son of a gun. We had that kid in here yesterday. He was high as a kite. He’s the one who left his DNA on Mr. Reporter there.”
Jim Parker took his cue from Olivia’s nod and passed out copies of Stephen March’s DMV photo and vehicle registration. “Five bucks if anyone can guess what kind of car Stephen March drives now.”
“Black Dodge Challenger?” Gabe drawled.
Jim nodded. “He’s been following Liv the same way he followed Dani Reese—maybe learning her routine and looking for the opportunity to find her alone, maybe working up the nerve to strike again.”
