Beauty and the Badge

by Julie Miller

  Yolanda winked as she moved the walker and set up a folding TV tray in its place. “Miriam is a handful every day. She keeps me on my toes.”

  Kevin could imagine. Miriam’s strong will had gotten the best of him for thirty-seven years now. He chuckled as he moved aside for the nurse’s aide to get his grandmother situated.

  “That’s why I like her. The days I work with your grandmother are never boring. There.” Yolanda finished opening the nutrient supplement and tucking a napkin into the neckline of Miriam’s robe. “Could I get you a cup of coffee, detective?”

  “I’m good.”

  Yolanda pointed to the coffee pot and paper cups on the table between a decorated Christmas tree and the sunporch’s arched entry way. “If you change your mind, it’s right there. There’s sugar, cream, whatever you need.”

  “Thanks.”

  Yolanda slid her hands into the pockets of her jacket and excused herself. “I’d better finish my rounds. Mr. Del Ray gets extra cranky if his meals are late.” She pointed to Miriam’s plate before heading through the archway. “Now clean your plate. At the very least, drink the supplement. You need your calcium.”

  “Bossy boots,” Miriam muttered.

  “Sunshine,” Yolanda shot back as she left.

  Both women were smiling.

  “I’m beginning to think that bossy means you care.”

  Beth Rogers’s teasing voice interrupted Kevin’s thoughts the same way their kiss had haunted his dreams last night. The hell of it was that he was beginning to care about the freckle-faced brunette. No wonder he was getting circles under his eyes. Between worrying over her safety, unraveling the mystery of the odd events surrounding her these past two nights—and lusting after her even though common sense told him that her willingness to kiss and cling never would have happened if she hadn’t been in danger—he was guaranteed plenty of sleepless nights.

  There was no way to break the curse of his size and face, or dissolve the distrust that encased his heart. And there was no way to have a real relationship with a woman unless he could.

  “Sit down, son.” A tug on his coat sleeve brought Kevin back to the Oak Park solarium and the chiding voice of his grandmother. “When you tower over me like that, it makes me feel short.”

  “You are short.”

  She pointed a knobby finger at him. “I hope you don’t talk to all the girls in your life with that smart mouth.”

  Kevin snorted. All the girls? “I’m supposed to lie to them?”

  “No, but when you love someone, you see them differently than the rest of the world does.”

  He pulled off his coat and draped it over the back of the love seat. “Is that why I think you’re such a beauty?”

  Sharp as a tack, she didn’t miss the perfect setup line. “I am a beauty.” When Kevin laughed, she tried to take advantage of his good humor. “Before you sit down, go get me a cup of coffee. Yolanda forgot to bring me one.”

  Kevin sat anyway. “She didn’t forget. You know caffeine isn’t in your diet. The doctor says it keeps your bones from absorbing the calcium they need.”

  “Oh, but it smells so good.” With a resigned shrug of her thin shoulders, she stabbed a forkful of eggs and ate a bite. “Mr. Harrison would get his morning coffee, take his pills and come sit with me out here every morning while I ate. I enjoyed the smell of his coffee as much as I enjoyed the conversation.”

  “Who’s Mr. Harrison?” Kevin asked.

  “Was,” she amended sadly. After swallowing another bite, she set down her fork and gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows. With the winter storm having moved on, the sky was clear. Although it did little to warm the temperature outside, the sun shone brightly, illuminating crystals of light over the carpet of new-fallen snow. “He was quite the gardener. Don’t know if that’s what he did before retirement, but he always sounded so knowledgeable. He was suffering from the onset of senility. His son or daughter would visit from time to time, and though he couldn’t seem to remember their names or faces, he could identify every plant in the garden. He was a talented artist, too. He’d draw sketches of how he thought the courtyard and garden would look when the flowers were all in bloom.”

  Kevin reached over to pat Miriam’s hand. “When did he pass?”

  Growing a little agitated, she picked up her fork and poked her eggs around her plate. “I’m not sure. Last week sometime? When you get to be my age, you aren’t surprised when you lose a friend. I’d like to send a card to his children or buy some flowers for his grave, but the staff here won’t tell me anything.”

  “They’re protecting your feelings,” Kevin suggested.

  “I don’t want protection, I want to honor a man who became my friend this past year.”

  “I’ll ask Yolanda if she knows anything before I leave.”

  Although a little on the wistful side, Miriam’s smile returned. “Thank you, dear. The last morning I saw Mr. Harrison, he talked about how the groundskeeper should already be preparing the dirt for planting in the spring—to take advantage of the moisture all this snow provides. Through his eyes I could picture the roses and irises blooming already.”

  Knowing how his grandmother had loved the flowers in her own garden, Kevin could well imagine how she’d enjoyed Mr. Harrison’s company. “I’m sure he looked forward to your mornings together, too.”

  “He complained of stomach gripes that last morning.” Miriam shook her head. “It’s like he just disappeared. I went down to his room, but everything that was his had already been packed up. Sent to his children, I suppose. But I wouldn’t have minded keeping one of those sketches.”

  He’d be sure to ask about that, too.

  “Enough about me.” She patted Kevin’s knee on the seat beside her. “You didn’t come to hear me go on. Tell me what’s troubling you, dear.”

  “Nothing’s troubling me.”

  “Something’s up.” She squeezed his knee. “Where do you think you learned your deductive reasoning skills?”

  “The police academy?”

  But he wasn’t joking his way out of this one. “Is it a case?”

  “I’m working a couple of tough ones right now,” he admitted. “But I’m handling them.”

  “Then what’s causing those shadows under your eyes? Are you ill? Is it a woman?”

  “No and no.”

  Kevin didn’t think he’d even blinked. But Miriam’s expression lit up with a smile. “It is a woman. What’s her name? Is she nice? She treats you better than that last witch did, doesn’t she?”

  “How do you…?” He shook his head, realizing he’d just been outted by the master. “Beth’s no witch.”

  “Beth, is it?”

  “I’m not telling you anything because there’s nothing to tell.”

  “Have you kissed her yet?”

  “Grandma!”

  “You have.” She clapped her hands together.

  “I’m not discussing this with you.”

  If her age would let her, Miriam would be sliding across the love seat and shaking the answers out of him. “I can’t be your best girl, forever, Kevin. I want you to find someone.”

  “You’re not planning on going anywhere anytime soon, are you?”

  With a frustrated sigh, Miriam’s excitement dissipated. “That dog you rescued won’t be company enough for you when I’m gone. You need a woman. You need babies.”

  “Grandma—”

  “Just remember that you are the finest man I know. If she can’t see that…”

  Then Beth would be no different than the other women he’d been attracted to in his life. “She’s in a little trouble. I’m trying to help.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway. I always expect you to do the right thing. Even if it’s hard.”

  Being a good neighbor was turning out to be harder than he’d ever imagined. “Even if it means walking away from a relationship that shouldn’t happen and can’t last?”

  Miriam frowned. “That’s tha
t witch talking. She was blind not to see the prince inside you. Don’t let what she did to you spoil your ability to fall in love again. Is Beth important to you, Kevin?”

  “I’ve known her for only two days.”

  “I knew you were important the moment your mother left you on my kitchen table. I didn’t need two days to fall in love with you.” Miriam articulated the words as if he hadn’t understood them. “Is Beth important?”

  Apparently, the answer he wasn’t sure of was written plainly on his face. With a soothing maternal smile, Miriam reached up and cupped his cheek. “I know you have a good heart, son. The right woman will accept you as you are and love you just as much as I do. But you have to be brave enough to give her a chance.”

  He covered her precious hand with his own. “Man up and risk putting it all out there, hmm?”

  “If that means what I think it does, then yes.” She pulled away and went back to picking at her breakfast. “Bring her by to meet me sometime. I’ll check her out and tell you if she’s good enough for you. Now couldn’t I have just a teensy-bitty sip of coffee?”

  Miriam’s advice about pursuing a relationship with Beth wasn’t the only disturbing information Kevin got at the Oak Park Center that morning. He stopped at the front desk on his way out to ask Yolanda about contacting Mr. Harrison’s children to try to track down a memento for his grandmother.

  Yolanda frowned at the request. “Mr. Harrison didn’t have any children. He was never even married that I know of.”

  “But my grandmother said a son and daughter came to visit him.”

  “The only visitors Mr. Harrison ever had were his doctors. That was because he was part of a clinical drug trial to slow down and reverse his Alzheimer’s. From what I could tell from the year he was here was that the drug was succeeding. He had more good days than bad toward the end.”

  “What did Mr. Harrison die of?”

  “Old age, I suppose. He died in his sleep. His doctors claimed the body for a medical autopsy to complete their research—it was all set up in Mr. Harrison’s will. I haven’t heard any results.”

  “Do you know who was conducting the research?”

  “GlennCo Pharmaceuticals. We’re one of dozens of nursing homes they use in their geriatric studies. Detective?”

  Kevin was already dialing Beth’s number as he strode out the door into the frozen sunshine.

  THE CONCUSSIVE STRAINS OF HOLST filtered beneath the door to Charles Landon’s office, pulsing with crescendos and decrescendos while Beth sat at her desk. Interesting music to make out to, but she wasn’t complaining. If she couldn’t hear her boss, then he couldn’t hear her, either.

  With the bright sunshine of the clear winter morning streaming through her window, she didn’t need to turn on the lights to see the information popping up on her computer screen. She’d barely taken the time to shrug her parka over the back of her chair before booting up the GlennCo server and logging in.

  She knew better than to interrupt her boss while the music was playing in his office. No doubt he and Deborah were “stealing” a little time together. There was still almost half an hour before the building would fill with coworkers and executives running around in a mad, demanding dash before the board meeting this afternoon. Charles and Deborah had probably used the personal elevator that led straight from the parking garage up to the penthouse office. Other than checking in with the guard in the lobby, Beth’s presence hadn’t even been detected yet.

  Which was just the way she’d planned it. She could tune out the music and the activity on the other side of that door. Thirty minutes of Charles Landon gettin’ busy with his lovely wife was thirty minutes of uninterrupted time when Beth could plug in the flash drive she’d found in her purse to see if she could access the encrypted files and find out if it was the missing data her boss had been looking for.

  If it was, figuring out how and why that data had gotten into her purse was something she’d worry about later.

  “Let’s see.” Even though she’d tried to retrieve the information on her home computer last night—giving up on sleep once she accepted that the taste and heat and power of Kevin Grove’s kiss wasn’t going to be leaving her memory long enough to let her relax—she hadn’t been able to read the files on the memory stick. But running the files on the mother system where they’d been created should improve her chances of success—and appease her curiosity to know what the weirdness of the past forty-eight hours was all about. She scrolled the cursor over the icons on the screen and tried to make sense of the numbers and coded file names. If this was research data, it was in its roughest form—nothing like the summarized documentation she helped Dr. Landon put together. These were most likely the names of different medicinal compounds GlennCo was testing. Beth double clicked on HE4210. “Will you open?”

  Password Required.

  Well, that was more than she’d been able to pull up at home. If she could crack the encryption, she might finally find some answers.

  Beth drummed her fingers on top of her desk, thinking of options from the most basic—Landon, Charles, Open Sesame—to something decidedly more complicated—0–1-0 variations, the names of each of Landon’s wives, chemical elements—and typing them in. But nothing seemed to unlock the hidden files.

  She supposed the easiest thing would be to show Dr. Landon the memory stick, and simply ask him if this was the missing data he’d been looking for. But how would she explain it showing up in her purse when she knew darn well she hadn’t put it there? A midnight attack, a man following her and the music of the planets kept her at her desk, busily trying every trick she knew to get the computer files to open.

  “Well, hell.” Beth heard herself repeating the words she’d heard Kevin growl on more than one occasion, and instantly her mind and body went back to the unexpected passion of the kiss they’d shared last night. The prickly discomfort of all that masculine need flooding her senses, but stopping short of satisfying a purely feminine craving inside her, returned in full force, making the tips of her breasts tingle with longing and her heart squeeze with an unfamiliar ache.

  The fact that Kevin Grove could so adamantly deny the attraction between them made her wonder if he might really be the beast her first impression of him had given her. How cruel did a man have to be to set her on fire like that—make her feel like the sexiest, most irresistible woman on the planet—and then tell her she meant nothing to him? Or maybe the beast himself was the one who’d been abused. How badly had Sheila and the harassment accusations wounded him so that he no longer recognized or believed that she might like him? The scars that marked Kevin’s shoulder and chest must be nothing compared to the damage inside him.

  Beth didn’t have a lot of experience with men, but she suspected that Kevin had some sort of feelings for her. Whether it was animal lust, a need to be accepted or something more, she couldn’t say. For a man who didn’t mince words, he certainly was sending her a mixed batch of signals.

  “Get over it,” she chided herself, moving her fingers over the keyboard and typing in another dozen passwords to no avail.

  If Kevin Grove just wanted to be a cop and not get involved with her, then that was his choice. She’d be doing more harm if she forced the issue, right? They could be friends. They had to be neighbors. But she wouldn’t let him insult her taste in men or excuse another kiss as pity or gratitude, and intimate that she didn’t know her own mind. Let him have his solitude if that’s what the big brute wanted. It was her own problem if thoughts of a safe haven or shared passion, courtesy of the cop next door, kept her awake at night.

  HE4210 blinked on the screen, awaiting a password. Maybe the file labels weren’t drug names after all. “Are these patient codes?”

  Beth had typed up plenty of reports for Dr. Landon. The anonymity of their patients testing drugs and placebos had always been well-guarded. But what if there was a name to go with that code? Could that be the password? The idea couldn’t flop worse than anything else she
’d tried thus far.

  After checking the time on her watch, Beth got up and crossed to the file cabinets lining the north wall, opening the drawer labeled H–I. GlennCo had computerized almost every facet of the company over the past decade. Still, Charles Landon was old-school. It was his habit to print out hard copies of everything he analyzed or wrote. While he kept the most sensitive information locked in his safe, Beth’s office and a warehouse room on the third floor of the building housed older records, reports and correspondence. Finding a key word in all that paperwork seemed like a daunting task, but searching for a name beginning with “He” on a file with a “4210” code at least gave her some sense of retaking control over her own life again.

  She was thumbing through a stack of Helgoths and Hendersons when it dawned on her that the music in Dr. Landon’s office had looped around to replay the softer orchestral arrangements from the beginning of the CD again. Odd. There was something predictable about pills and age—normally, Dr. Landon’s early-morning trysts ended like clockwork before the last song played. But not today. She glanced at her watch. Three minutes to nine. Were Dr. and Mrs. Landon even in there? Had they fallen asleep? What if they’d stayed last night and left the CD running over and over? He could walk into her office right now and find her elbow-deep in old files.

  “Good morning, Elisabeth. Why are you in here with the lights out? Is that the flash drive I asked you about?”

  Damn. Beth shoved the files back inside the drawer and pushed it shut. She snatched her parka from the back of her chair and hurried over to the door to hang it on the coat rack. She flipped on the overhead switch, filling the room with a fluorescent light that cooled the sunshine’s warmth.

  Board meeting this afternoon, remember? Her first major appearance at a gathering of all of GlennCo’s top-ranking officials. Weeks’ worth of preparation and planning for the coming year had come down to today. The votes made this afternoon would determine what direction the company would be taking. It could determine the future of her own job.