by Kylie Brant
Liam. She remembered the call immediately. The awkward search for conversation, the effort to gloss over all the things neither of them dared say to the other. She'd thought Cade had been asleep for most of that call, but it was obvious that he'd heard at least part. And wondered about it.
"It was my brother." She was amazed at herself for offering him the explanation. And intrigued by the arrested look in his eyes when he heard it. "I'm planning to visit him this weekend."
She could almost see the tension seep from his limbs, but before she could wonder about it, he said, "I'll see if I can arrange it. How far away does he live?"
Her heart stopped for a moment. "Why?"
"If it's not far, I can arrange for someone to accompany you." Because he'd gone to dig in her refrigerator, he missed her reaction at first. But when he closed the door again, turned toward her with a bottled water in his hand, something in her expression must have alerted him. "You can't seriously believe that I'd let you go on your own when LeFrenz is out there, just waiting to get to you."
Why hadn't she considered that? The boundaries being drawn around her life, boundaries not of her making, began closing in and threatened to choke her. She hadn't for a minute thought about how this situation affected people around her. Not only was there Liam to think about, but TeKayla, as well. What if LeFrenz followed her on her outing with the little girl? Shae shivered at the thought. If this situation put anyone else's life at risk, she'd never forgive herself.
Cade twisted the top off his water, watching her carefully. "I'm not suggesting keeping you prisoner. There's no reason you can't go about your life within reason. We'll keep you under surveillance." His voice was expressionless when he offered, "Or if you prefer, I'll go with you."
"No." The next moment she realized he might misconstrue her vehemence. She sought to temper it. "I'll just postpone my plans until … this is over." The thought of Cade going with her to the Louisiana Federal Penitentiary had her chest going tight. And the thought of introducing one of New Orleans's finest to her younger brother made it worse.
Frowning, she paced the room. Her relatively simple life had become suddenly fraught with complexity. It was her nature to tackle obstacles head-on. With Ryan as a father, with his penchant for using their front door as a turnstile, someone had needed to bring order to their chaotic lives. Since her eighth birthday, that someone had been Shae.
"All right. What can I do to help?"
If Cade was surprised by her sudden offer, he didn't show it. He tipped the bottle to his lips and took a long pull of water. When he lowered it, he asked, "Do you have a cell phone?" She nodded. "Let me see it."
Shae went to the table near the front door where she'd set her cell, and brought it back to him. Setting his bottle down, he studied the phone for a moment before tapping in some numbers. Then he clicked the power off and handed it back to her. "Keep it turned off. If LeFrenz should somehow get that number, I don't want him to be able to use it."
"And that number you just put in my cell memory?" she asked dryly. "The local pizzeria?"
His lips twitched. "Not quite. It's my cell. Twenty-four-hour service, though, and I do make deliveries. Satisfaction guaranteed."
Flames licked through her veins. Cade Tremaine on her speed dial. The ability to summon the sexy detective at the press of a button. Deliberately she put the glass to her lips. The thought was more provocative than it should have been.
"I want you to keep the cell phone with you at all times. If he calls again, just hit my number to alert me. I'll tip off headquarters and we can get the trace running."
"Maybe it won't come to that." She was tired of waiting around for something to happen. The need for action propelled her to suggest, "I've got a VCR. Let's watch those tapes now and see if we can see anything useful on them."
She couldn't imagine what she'd said to put that look of wariness in his eyes. "I was going to do that later. At my place."
Striding past him, she went to the box on the counter. Reaching in, she took out a handful of tapes and headed toward the VCR. "So you'll watch them here, instead. What's the difference?" She'd quickly grown tired of waiting on the sidelines while decisions were made that affected her. She was ready to do something—anything—that might speed the process along.
Shae knelt in front of the TV and put a tape into the recorder. After pressing rewind, she said over her shoulder, "It should go pretty fast. You said these were from the camera filming outside the store, and we can fast-forward through the film with daylight on it. We'll be able to quickly see if—" Her words abruptly halted and she narrowed her gaze at him. "What?"
His head was tilted to the side, and he was watching her with an all-too-male expression of appreciation on his face. She was instantly aware of the clothes she'd thrown on before she'd realized she'd be entertaining the detective that evening. The gray yoga pants and matching ribbed tank top had been chosen with comfort in mind and left only her arms bare. But the outfit was snug enough to call attention to her shape, a fact that didn't seem to escape him.
Her pulse whipped a faster beat. When it came to Cade Tremaine, the cop, she was certain of one thing: she wanted this case closed so she could go about her life again. She was so eager for that to happen that she'd supply him with whatever help she could. But Tremaine, the man… A cluster of butterflies fluttered in her stomach. She wasn't so anxious to see the end of him. Not until she'd explored that dangerous control of his. Not until she'd discovered what it took for him to set the cop aside and unleash the primal male animal that lurked beneath.
Shae was neither coy nor indiscriminate when it came to sex. When it came to choosing the time and the man, her major consideration was how easily he could be extricated from her life when the time came to part. That was why she never dated colleagues. Cade didn't qualify, but there was still an unknown quality to him. As a detective he was used to being in control. He might not be as easily dispatched as other men.
He gave her an easy smile, one designed to disarm. "I wasn't staring. I was just admiring your … ah … technique with the VCR."
The machine had finished rewinding, drawing her attention away from him. A man didn't get to be that charming, she reflected as she pushed the play button, without a great deal of experience. And given his lack of ties, she could safely assume he liked it that way.
As she rose, he said, "I was going to do this at home. It'll be tedious work."
"I need to be doing something," she retorted grimly. "You can watch them here just as easily, can't you?" As she went in search of the remote, he sat down on the couch and shrugged out of his jacket. When she rounded the couch again, remote in hand, he'd toed off his battered running shoes and stretched out on the couch. It hadn't taken long to convince him.
Shoving his feet off the couch, she made space for herself in one corner and sat, gaze trained on the TV. When she saw that the date on the tape matched the day before she'd gotten the call, she fast-forwarded through the grainy street shots until she got to the night segment on the tape. Slowing the speed, she leaned forward to better study the scene on the screen.
She glanced at Cade and found him unfastening the top button of his shirt and pushing up his sleeves. Her breathing hitched and her brows arched. "Making yourself comfortable?"
"Definitely. Like I said, this isn't going to be a short process. As a matter of a fact, you might want to call out and order a pizza or something."
She looked from him to the TV, then to the box he'd carried in. "How many tapes did you say there were?"
"Three dozen or so."
Comprehension began to filter in. "All unmarked."
He propped his feet on her coffee table and crossed them at the ankle. "That's right. And three different cameras."
His bland tone invited a response, one she wasn't going to give him. She did settle back more deeply into the couch, however. From the looks of him, he fully expected this to take a while. If he thought that was going to deter her,
he was mistaken. As boring as the task ahead of them was, it marked the first time she'd taken an active role in the case that had so inexplicably ensnared her. That alone was enough to guarantee her interest.
Three hours and a dozen tapes later, Shae's vision was beginning to blur. To give her burning eyes a rest, she got up to remove the nearly empty pizza box from the coffee table before Cade's feet knocked it to the floor. She went to the kitchen, threw away the box, then got a soft drink from the refrigerator. The wine hadn't done much for her ability to focus on the TV screen, so she'd put the bottle away a couple of hours ago.
They'd rapidly arrived at a sort of routine. With three cameras and six-hour tapes, they could quickly discard the ones with times and dates that didn't match that of LeFrenz's phone call. But when they came on one of the tapes from the night in question, Cade insisted they watch at least an hour of it—before the time of the call until after—hoping for a glimpse of LeFrenz. So far they'd been disappointed. Although they'd watched a few illicit drug transactions and one instance of a minor paying someone to go in and buy beer for him, there had been no sign of LeFrenz.
"So after handling this kind of excitement all day, what do you do for an encore at night?" she asked.
Cade scrubbed his hands over his face, then refocused on the TV. "Paperwork, usually, to document my glamorous days of routine jobs just like this one."
"Those bullet holes in your chest would suggest otherwise." She felt a tug of something suspiciously close to concern. Although he'd somehow managed to convince his attending physician, he'd never make her believe his job wasn't fraught with danger. "Have you worked narcotics long?"
"Five years, on and off. I worked undercover before I made detective. And then a couple of years ago Brian and I volunteered…" His words stopped abruptly. Brian, she thought, his dead partner. Sympathy stirring, she crossed back to the couch, watched him lean over to pick up the remote.
"There was an opening and we both had experience. We took it." The remainder of the explanation was delivered expressionlessly, with none of the emotion she suspected churned within him at the memory.
"Do you believe LeFrenz really knows something about what happened that night?" The question had been lurking in her mind ever since that scene in the man's hospital room.
"Hard to tell at this point. But I sure intend to ask him about it when I catch up with him."
Frowning, she attempted to remember the exact wording of the conversation. "He said that people were saying your partner…" She paused, trying to think of a diplomatic way to put it.
"That he was dirty?" Bitterness laced his words. "Jonny might have just picked that up on the street. There's an Internal Affairs investigation that's tearing into Brian's life now. Making life hell for his widow."
Shae dropped any pretense that she was watching the tape he was rapidly moving through. "He left a family?"
Cade nodded. "A wife and two little boys." He fast-forwarded through the daylight portion. "These investigations are long and they get ugly. Lots of times when the smoke clears, there's no hard evidence, but the stench of the inquiry clings to a name forever. I'm not going to let that happen to Brian."
It was oddly disconcerting to hear him talk about a detective being the focus of such intense scrutiny. And it caused memories of Liam, and the evidence against him, to come hurtling back. It was still deeply disturbing to realize that her faith in him had been unjustified. And that his pleas of innocence, made so fervently and tearfully, had been just as false. "Sometimes the best-kept secrets are held by those closest to us."
"Brian was my friend." There was a warning in his eyes. "I knew him as well as I know my brothers. I.A.'s wrong about him."
"I hope so." And she did for his sake. Because it was easy to guard against being hurt by the ones most likely to let you down. There was little her father could do now that would touch her emotionally. But the little brother that she'd watched over, fed, helped with homework … there was a special kind of pain that struck when one was blind. Unsuspecting. She hoped with every fiber of her being that Cade wasn't in for that kind of heartache.
"Date's not right on this one," he said in an obvious attempt to shift topics. Wordlessly she got up to exchange the tape for another from the pile of those they hadn't watched yet. She recognized the No Trespassing note in his voice. She'd perfected the technique herself. And so she'd respect it, although their conversation had yielded more questions than it had answered.
The next three weren't a match, either. When she saw the date on the next one, blazoned across a night scene, hope flickered once again. Cade forwarded to the time they, were looking for, and again disappointment welled up. "You can't see a pay phone from this angle, either."
"It's possible none of the cameras reach that far."
"What?" Her head swiveled toward him.
"I'm just saying, I don't know what the range of the cameras are. Maybe we won't be able to see the booth. But we still might see him approaching or leaving the scene."
He backed up the tape and stopped it at 2:30 a.m. The amount of activity on the street at that time of night surprised her. Cade had said the Quik-Mart was in a rough part of town, and she could see that from the customers that frequented the place and those who loitered in front of it.
"Given the locale and the clientele, I can't understand how a place like that can stay in business," she remarked. He reached over and stole one of the pillows near her to cushion his head as he slouched lower on the couch. "You see a steady stream of customers, though, don't you? If they weren't making money, they wouldn't take the risk. Probably sell mostly beer and smokes this time of night."
"And the last guy who came out with some looked like he had a gun in his coat pocket," she retorted.
"Yeah, well, places like that really hose you on the cigarettes."
That surprised a laugh from her. The innocent tone, at odds with the wicked look in his eyes, had her stomach abruptly hollowing out. Here lay the real danger of Cade Tremaine. It was simple to resist the steely-eyed cop. But that issued its own seductive invitation. It made him all too approachable. All too irresistible.
That thought was sobering. She was immune to charm. Ryan exuded buckets of it, and while it had worked on her mother until her death, it had always been wasted on her. She'd never failed to be surprised when people couldn't see beneath her father's slick surface to the empty, self-involved con man beneath.
She firmed her lips and directed her attention back to the screen, where two scruffy-looking characters were circling each other, exchanging obscenities. In the next moment one of the men lunged at the other. What followed was a quick and vicious knife fight that ended only when a car slowed in front of the store, preparing to turn into the lot. One of the men looked up and the other took advantage of his distraction to dart forward, his blade glinting in the darkness.
Sickened, Shae asked, "Do you suppose this got reported? Is there any way you can check? Because that guy on the sidewalk had to have required medical attention." At Cade's silence, she looked over at him, struck by the expression on his face. "Cade? Do you recognize one of them?"
"No." He rewound the tape to the beginning of the fight. "But I recognize the driver of that car going by. See him?" He leaped off the couch to tap the screen.
She frowned, straining to see around his finger to identify the person in the grainy film. And when she did, her mouth suddenly went dry. There were only a few seconds on which the man's face appeared on screen, and that only in profile.
But it was long enough to identify Jonny LeFrenz.
* * *
Chapter 10
« ^ »
The tape was wound and rewound, and each time he watched it, Cade was more certain of the driver. The camera's angle didn't take in the phone booth. Seconds after the car appeared on the screen, it disappeared into the parking lot. Ten minutes passed before it appeared pulling out of the lot again and back onto the street.
"Outsmarted
yourself, didn't you, you little bastard," Cade muttered. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his face inches from the screen. "You were careful enough to go out looking for a phone that couldn't be traced to you, but you didn't even think about winding up on film."
"You can see part of the license number there… Wait—right there." Shae tapped the screen. "SR … something. Is that an O?"
He played the tape back and paused it several times before finally saying, "It looks like a U, but I can't make out the numbers that follow. We may be able to enhance the image back at headquarters, but chances are this will be enough to go on."
Dubiously she looked back at the TV. "Really?"
Cade got up and walked to the chair he'd laid his jacket on. Taking his cell phone from the pocket, he pressed the number that would connect him to headquarters and waited. When the night sergeant answered, he said, "It's Tremaine. I need a check on a partial Louisiana license-plate number." He recited the first three letters. "Midsize, early-nineties model. Black or navy, maybe a Lumina or Monte Carlo. Driver's door dented."
Shae's head whipped back to the screen as if to check for herself. Her finger found the area on the screen. "As many times as we played it back, I never even noticed that," she murmured.
"It's probably going to be quite a list," the sergeant warned.
"Yeah, I know. Call me back." Cade set his cell phone on the coffee table. "We'll get a list of cars fitting that description from the Department of Motor Vehicles and go from there." Shae didn't look particularly encouraged. "Hey, this is a good thing. We're one step closer to LeFrenz."
"What if it's not his car?"
So that was what had been bothering her. He hesitated before saying gently, "It's not." When her face fell, he cursed himself for sharing that with her. But she wasn't the type of woman who would allow coddling. "But that doesn't matter. It may lead us to someone who has talked to him or seen him. Nine times out of ten, this is how police work is. One thing links to another, then another…" He shrugged. "You can't tell me things are always black and white at the hospital."
