Crazy Cool

by Tara Janzen

  “If you can book a couple of these guys in before lunch, that would be great,” he said, holding up the printout Skeeter had made for him with the current phone numbers and addresses for the Prom King boys. Four lived in Denver or close by, one was in Maryland, and one was missing, no current address available.

  Without a word, she held out her hand, and he obeyed like a hound dog coming to heel, crossing the room on her command.

  “There’s been a change of plan,” she said when he handed over the paper.

  “No, there hasn’t,” he said, immediately wary.

  “I’m going with you.”

  “No,” he said more firmly. “You’re not. You’re staying here.”

  He couldn’t actually see her eyes behind the dark glasses, but he felt the look she was giving him—and it was pure “don’t mess with me” attitude. She hadn’t had that look at eighteen, and though he admired it, he couldn’t say he liked it, especially when it was directed at him. He needed to be in charge here.

  “You’ll get twice as much information twice as fast with me as you will without me,” she said.

  Possibly, but it wasn’t a chance he was willing to take. “I don’t want you anywhere near these guys.”

  “I did some thinking in the bathroom.”

  Dangerous territory, he thought, though he didn’t say a word.

  “And you’ve got two choices,” she continued. “Take me with you and get what you want; or go alone and find out your cover has been blown. I can make sure these guys don’t talk to you, and I will.”

  Son of a bitch. She was serious.

  “Don’t work against me, Kat.” It was as much a warning as a plea. He didn’t want her hurt, and that meant he had to catch the bad guys as quickly as possible, before they could get to her. His gut was telling him it was him they wanted, nailed to a cross, just like last time—but that didn’t mean she was safe.

  KATYA watched the subtle play of emotions on his face, mostly anger and a whole lot of worry, which was fine. He needed to be worried. She had done some thinking in the bathroom, serious thinking, putting aside her horror at Ted’s death, and Alex’s betrayal, and the simple disaster of the auction going up in balls of flames—and what she’d realized was that he was in at least as much danger as she was, maybe more.

  By his own admission, he didn’t know who had gotten him assigned to the Botanic Gardens, and neither of them knew who had planted the tiara and the awful photographs in her apartment, but it would be ridiculous to assume the two events weren’t somehow tied together—and that meant trouble, big trouble, for him.

  She couldn’t sit idly by, letting him handle everything, and just hope for the best. She couldn’t . . . and still live with herself. She had to step in and do what she’d tried and failed to do during his murder trial. She had to try to protect him.

  “I either go with you, or I go on my own. Your choice.” She wasn’t budging on this, for her sake as well as his—but it wasn’t easy holding her ground.

  His gaze had narrowed to a dangerous degree. His jaw looked tight enough to snap.

  “Fine,” he said, not sounding any too happy about it. “My choice, my rules, which means I give the orders. All the orders.”

  She agreed with a short nod. He could give all the orders he wanted—that didn’t mean she’d follow them.

  TIM McGowan needed a haircut, and a shave, and a shower, and a clean shirt after the baby had spit up on him. Hawkins also figured he needed about two fewer kids than the five he had, or a wife whose high-powered job didn’t send her to Europe or one of the coasts two weeks out of every four.

  Tim had not been able to meet them for coffee. They’d had to go to his big house in one of Denver’s more exclusive suburbs, and after about two minutes at his kitchen table, Hawkins had felt like he needed a shower, too. There’d been milk and cereal everywhere, kids everywhere, cartoons blaring, two dogs trying to eat as much of the cereal as they could wolf down before they got caught, and just an overall general stickiness to the whole situation.

  Kat still looked good, though. She didn’t have a Fruitio or a Crunch Flake on her anywhere, and he’d just peeled another one off his jeans and tossed it out Roxanne’s window.

  He downshifted for the red light and glanced in her direction.

  “I don’t think Tim is our man,” he said.

  “No kidding,” she said, tilting her head and looking at him over the top of her sunglasses.

  “You didn’t think so, either. That’s why you started with him, isn’t it?”

  “Tim was always a decent guy. He actually came to Paris to see me at the—uh—place where I was staying, to apologize, to make sure I was okay. The only reason he ran into that alley was to try and make the other boys back off.”

  “I don’t remember seeing anyone trying to rescue you.”

  “Tim had asthma as a kid. Always carrying his inhaler around. He was probably the only one there that night that I could have outrun. When you pulled up, he was still at the other end of the alley.”

  Hawkins thought that over for a minute. It was possible, he decided. It had all happened so fast. One of the boys could have been coming into the alley instead of going out.

  “He didn’t seem too upset about Ted.”

  “He wasn’t really part of that crowd of boys,” she said, lifting her hair up to catch the breeze coming through the window. The day was definitely heating up. “We all just kind of ended up together prom night. I think he thought the other boys were all too spoiled, and too fast, and headed for too much trouble. What happened to Jonathan only proved him right. He’s too nice to say it, but he probably feels the same way about Ted, bad apples coming to no good end and all that.” She lifted her other wrist up and checked her watch. “I really do need to at least stop by the gallery. This is Nikki McKinney’s first major show, and I’d like everything to go well for her.”

  “So Ted was a bad apple?” he said, ignoring her request.

  “You’re killing me here.”

  A fleeting grin curved his lips. She was nothing if not persistent, but it was a no-go. They’d been over this at the loft, about a hundred times. She’d called Suzi Toussi in to help Alex Zheng get the show together, and that was as much involvement as he was willing to allow. Whoever had murdered Ted was still out there, and all the clues pointed to its being someone she knew, and worse yet, someone who knew her. She wasn’t leaving his sight, and he didn’t have time for an art show.

  “He was a jerk,” she said with a sigh, letting her hair fall back down over the front of her shoulder. “A terrible, disgusting jerk, and out of all of them, I guess he’s the one I’d put my money on for taking those pictures, but he’s dead.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t take the pictures.” The light changed, and he slid Roxanne up into first.

  “No,” she admitted, automatically bracing herself, her hand sliding onto the armrest on the door. “I guess not, but he sure as shoot wasn’t the one who put them in my apartment.”

  “Why not?” He shifted up into second and then cast a quick glance in her direction. It was stupid, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d noticed she always crossed her legs for second gear—and sure enough, she did it again. He didn’t know what it meant, but he found it fascinating. Or maybe it was just the way she crossed her legs he found fascinating.

  “Because the only thing Ted Garraty has been breaking into with any regularity is doughnut boxes. He must have gained about fifty pounds over the last thirteen years, and he wasn’t just heavy. He was out of shape, dissipated. No way could he have climbed five flights of stairs, and he wouldn’t have fit in Toussi’s elevator.”

  She had a point. The elevator was small, damn small, wonderfully small.

  He cleared his throat, shifted into third, kept his gaze straight ahead, and asked a question he already knew the answer to. “So who’s next? Robert Hughes?”

  “Bobba-Ramma Hughes,” she corrected him.

&n
bsp; “Bobba-Ramma?” He shot her a skeptical glance.

  Her cell phone rang inside her purse, muted, insistent, maybe getting a little desperate, but like the last five times it had rung, she ignored it. They both knew who it was. Alex. He’d been calling every two minutes since she’d turned the phone on ten minutes ago. Suzi must have arrived with her assistants by now and informed him his boss was not coming in or coming home today.

  “That’s what he told me when I called,” she said. “He’s not plain old Bobby anymore. He’s Bobba-Ramma, the Prince of East Colfax Avenue. Apparently, he decided against going into his daddy’s stock-brokerage business and bought himself a high-end strip club, which sounds like an oxymoron if I ever heard one.”

  Skeeter had notated the club on the hot sheet, The Painted Pony, but nothing had been said about “Bobba-Ramma.”

  “You think he’s our guy?”

  “He certainly qualifies as a pervert,” she said without hesitation. “He always has. He was suspended twice our senior year for exposing himself in the boys’ bathroom, and once for exposing himself in the girls’ bathroom.”

  Well, that was a new and unpleasant twist.

  “What about the pyro part?”

  “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I can see him liking the drama of starting fires, big fires, especially with explosions, but he’s no murderer, not by a long shot. He’s too self-absorbed. I can’t imagine him being interested enough in anyone else to go to the bother of killing them. You know he’s doing me a big favor seeing me this morning. God knows what he’s going to think when I drag you in with me.”

  “He told you he was doing you a favor?” She’d done a good job on the phone this morning, played it perfectly, despite the fact that she’d been holding her head with one hand and the telephone receiver away from her ear with the other. She hadn’t said much when it was all over, just handed him back the sheet with times, addresses, and meeting places written in the margins by the prom boys’ names.

  He’d been impressed.

  “Sure did. He’s just so, so busy, but it was just so sweet of me to call, and we were such old friends, so he was just going to push his schedule and make room for little old me, because it was just so awful about Ted.”

  The news had broken all over the morning papers. There had even been pictures of the fireworks exploding over the Botanic Gardens. Nothing had been mentioned about the quality of the kill shots: perfect, two hits, dead center between the eyes. To his relief, Katya’s name hadn’t been mentioned, either, but he’d still called Lieutenant Bradley and gotten a couple of undercover cops to be at the show, to keep their eyes open and make sure nothing bad happened.

  “As far as I know, he’s the only one with a motive for wanting to hurt me,” she continued, “or ruin me, if that’s what this is all about.”

  He quirked a brow in her direction. “What motive?”

  “He wanted to be prom queen that year. It just ate at him all night long when I won.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope.” She leaned forward to pop open Roxanne’s glove box.

  Hell. Hawkins felt like he was sliding toward the bottom of the social misfit barrel, a place he’d had more than enough of in prison, but he couldn’t fault his guide. She was nailing these guys for him, giving him information it would take Lieutenant Bradley weeks to uncover.

  She started rustling through the stash of pharmaceuticals she’d put in the glove compartment. She had all the legal painkillers out of his bathroom, and all the antacids, the combination painkiller/antacids, three herbal supplements guaranteed to cure what ailed her, and a bottle of B vitamins she was sure would set her right—if she could just get enough of all of it down, and keep it down. She’d also brought a box of crackers she’d set on the dash, an orange she was sure would rehydrate her as well as give her immune system a much-needed boost, and two bottles of mineral water she’d found in his refrigerator.

  It had been like watching a general prepare for war this morning. She’d commandeered his loft, his phone, and every ounce of his attention. It was hard to keep his eyes off her. Hell. It was impossible. He’d had about twelve hours to get used to the idea of having her around, and he was starting to like it way too much, starting to forget that she was at the top of his “Ten Most Wanted” list for having fucked up his life.

  So he just had to be careful, he told himself, just a little more careful.

  FIRST Tim McGowan and now Bobby Hughes, Katya thought, rummaging through a few things she’d stashed in Roxanne’s glove compartment. From Dudley Do-right to Psycho-boy.

  “So do you think Bobby Hughes wanted the prom queen thing badly enough to nurse a grudge for all this time?” Hawkins asked from the driver’s side of the car.

  “Absolutely,” she said without hesitation. She found the orange among all the stuff she’d brought with her from Hawkins’s kitchen and his medicine cabinet in hopes something would help ease her amazing hangover. It had been a solid seven on the Richter scale when they’d left Steele Street, but Tim’s beautiful, wildly rambunctious, and unbelievably loud kids had pushed it toward a ten. “Nursing grudges is what Bobby always did. He made sure he was the strangest ranger at Wellon Academy, then spent all his time complaining that people treated him like he was strange. There was no winning with Bobby. Never was. He hated his mother for being a flamboyant alcoholic and his dad for being a straitlaced stockbroker. Even though a lot of us Wellon kids lived around the Denver Country Club, we avoided going to the Hughes’s, at least us girls did. The guys went there to get drunk. There was always plenty of booze, and Bobby’s mom didn’t like to drink alone. Rumor had it that some of the Wellon boys even slept with her.”

  “Ted Garraty, maybe? Or Jonathan Traynor?” he asked after a short pause.

  She looked up from her orange, startled.

  “I guess . . . I guess that might be a motive for murder, but it was just a rumor, one of those kids’ things that go around a school. I can guarantee you Jonathan never slept with her. As far as Ted, his name was never mentioned, that I remember.”

  “What about the other boys from prom night?”

  She hated to think about it, let alone admit it, but a couple of those boys’ names had been linked to Theresa Hughes.

  “Stuart Davis practically lived at the Hughes house that summer. His mother taught at Wellon, so he was at the academy on a community scholarship.”

  “He’s the ex-Ranger we don’t have a current address for, right?”

  “Right,” she said, peeling the orange. “All you’ve got listed on the printout is the date of his discharge a few months ago.”

  “Any of the others?”

  There were only three left, and one of them she was absolutely sure had not been involved with Bobby’s mother.

  “Greg Ashe did not hang out at Bobby’s house, ever. He was homophobic, probably still is.” She looked around for a place to put her orange peels and decided on the shifter console. There was a small, scooped-out part, and if she was careful, she could just fit the peels into it. His car was very clean on the inside, and the last thing she wanted to do was make a mess. “Albert Thorpe might have spent some time there. He liked to party, and Bobby’s was a party house. Philip Cunningham, definitely. He was probably the only one at Wellon who actually liked Bobby, who thought he was funny instead of just weird.”

  “Don’t we have an appointment with Cunningham after Hughes?” he asked.

  “Cunningham and Ashe together,” she confirmed. “They’re partners in a construction company, and we see Albert tomorrow.”

  “So who do you think stole your tiara?”

  He was in investigator mode. She could tell by the tone of his voice—flat and cool, with just a slight edge.

  “I don’t know. Anybody could have picked it up. I remember it falling off in the parking lot, before I ran into the alley.”

  “What about the piece of your dress? Who all was in on that?”

  Her
glance strayed to the orange in her hand. She was trying, really she was. It wasn’t easy dealing with everything that had happened last night at the Gardens and having to relive everything that had happened that summer. The dress had been so beautiful, so perfect, and by the end of prom night it had been ruined, parts of it cut off, parts of it stained with her blood. What had started as a not very funny joke had so quickly gotten out of hand.

  Souvenirs from the prom queen, they’d been shouting. Then Jonathan had pulled out a pocketknife and everything had gone wrong.

  She’d been angry and telling all of them to leave her alone, but they’d all kept pulling and tugging at her, trying to cut off a piece of tulle—everyone except Tim. He’d pushed his way to the front and tried to shove people away, and then all hell had broken loose. Everyone had suddenly been fighting and she’d gotten cut, badly.

  “They were all in on it,” she said. “Except Tim McGowan, but I don’t know how many of them actually got a piece of the dress. It was a little crazy.”

  After Jonathan’s murder, the police had impounded the dress, and it had come out at Hawkins’s trial how cut up it had been. She didn’t remember the knife moving that fast, especially not after it had sliced into her arm, just above her elbow.

  Like the tiara, none of the boys had admitted to having a piece of her dress. But neither had they admitted to assaulting her. Just a little fun getting out of hand, they’d all said. And chasing her into the alley? Well, they’d known they couldn’t let her run around lower downtown alone at night. It wasn’t safe, and hadn’t they all been proved right? Some low-life guy in a fast car had literally roared up and snatched her away, practically kidnapped her.

  They’d been worried sick about her, especially Jonathan, they’d said—and Jonathan had ended up dead, killed by the same greasy street boy who had stolen his girl.

  A very impolite word crossed her mind at the memory. What a bunch of liars. She knew what she’d felt. She’d known she was in danger, real danger, and if it hadn’t been for Hawkins saving her . . .