Colorado Crime Scene

by Cindi Myers

  “Aw, honey.” She stroked his arm. “We can find some new medication that will shut those demons up for good. Drugs without all the side effects you had problems with before.”

  He set his mouth in a stubborn line and said nothing, focusing on the dishes.

  She tried another tack. “What brought you to Denver?” she asked.

  “I came for the race.”

  “That’s good. Have you seen some friends while you’re here?”

  “Some.” His expression grew more troubled. “They’re all busy. Still racing. I think it was a bad idea for me to come. I should leave.”

  “Please don’t go before we’ve had a chance to catch up.” She tried not to sound as desperate as she felt. If she talked to him longer, reminded him of how close they had been, maybe she could convince him to ignore the voices in his head and listen to her instead.

  He switched off the water and turned to her, looking her in the eye for the first time. “What were you doing with that guy last night?” he asked. “The guy with the gun.”

  “I was looking for you.”

  “Why? Do you think I did something wrong? I didn’t.” He flinched, clearly agitated, and began shaking his head again.

  “I know that. You wouldn’t do anything wrong. I just wanted to see you. Because you’re my brother and I love you.”

  “That guy had a gun,” he said.

  She debated whether to tell Scott that Luke was a law enforcement officer. Would that frighten him even more? “He was looking for the man who was taking out the trash,” she said. “Are you a friend of his?” Her stomach knotted as she waited for his answer.

  “Danny?” He shook his head, then nodded. “I mean, I didn’t really know him. I ran into him in London. He was watching the race. A fan, you know?”

  “So he likes racing, too. That’s something you have in common.”

  “But we’re not friends or anything. He scares me.”

  He switched on the water again and reached for a dirty plate.

  “Why does he scare you?” she asked. “Did he threaten you or try to hurt you?”

  “He put something on one of the plates last night. He didn’t think anyone saw him, but I did. And when he looked around and saw me watching, he made a really mean face. It scared me.”

  “Hey, sweetie, I’m sorry to break this up, but you’re gonna have to go.” Gary joined them by the sink. “We’re getting ready for the lunch rush and I need Scott to speed it up on washing these dishes.”

  She started to protest but thought better of it. She didn’t want to get on Gary’s bad side. “Okay, I’ll go now.” She pulled a business card from her pocket and scribbled the name of her hotel, her room number and her cell number on the back. “Come see me after you get off, okay?” she said, slipping the card into the back pocket of Scott’s jeans. “We’ll have dinner and just talk. Okay?”

  He nodded, head down over the sink.

  She wished he would look at her so she could see that he really meant to stop by later. But he clearly didn’t intend to look up, and she could feel Gary growing impatient. She patted Scott’s shoulder. “See you later.”

  She stopped at the door and glanced back at him. He’d looked up from the sink and was watching her. The haunted look in his eyes made her want to cry out and rush to his side to comfort him. But she knew doing so would only make him retreat further into his shell. So she settled for a brave smile and a wave, then hurried away, blinking back the tears that stung her eyes.

  * * *

  LUKE’S FACE STILL burned from the tongue-lashing he’d endured from Blessing when he finally exited the conference room. Fury churned his stomach and knotted his fists. He didn’t know whether he was more upset with Blessing, the photographer who’d snagged the damning photo, Morgan for interfering with his case or himself, for getting involved in such a mess.

  Travis caught up with him at the elevators. “What happened in there?” he asked.

  Luke shoved both hands in his pockets. “I’m off the case.”

  Travis had the grace to look stunned. “Why?”

  “Did you see the paper?”

  “The picture of you and Morgan? Yeah. Some photographer’s idea of being cute.”

  “Blessing is hot under the collar about it. Says I jeopardized the case, endangered a civilian. He’s pulling me off.”

  “Off the team?”

  “No.” At least the commander hadn’t gone that far. “He’s shifting me to tracking down leads on the terrorist cell, trying to find a connection.”

  “Maybe you’ll have better luck than we’ve had. Our guy has vanished, and Blessing isn’t the only one losing patience.”

  “All the more reason why I should be out pursuing our suspect. I was the closest to him. I got the best look.”

  “You’ll still be in the loop, so you can help us,” Travis said. “Will you see Morgan again?”

  “I still have a lot of unanswered questions for her.” The elevator arrived and he stepped on. Alone after the doors closed, those questions played on an endless loop in his head. Was Morgan spinning a crazy lie for him? Were she and her brother somehow tied up in terrorist activity? Was she using him to keep tabs on the investigation?

  The pain when she’d talked about her missing brother had felt so real to him. It was the same pain he felt when he thought of Mark. But was he letting his emotions interfere with logic? The other team members didn’t have any trouble thinking of Morgan as a suspect—why couldn’t he reclaim that same objectivity?

  As if his thoughts had summoned her, when he stepped off the elevator, Morgan was standing there, waiting to get on. She grabbed his arm, practically vibrating with excitement. “I saw Scott,” she said. “I talked to him. He agreed to have dinner with me after he gets off tonight.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Cameron, in line at the lobby coffee shop. He hadn’t seen Luke yet, but all he had to do was turn his head to spot him talking with a woman the rest of them hadn’t ruled out as a suspect. Luke hurried her out of sight, around the corner. “We need to go somewhere we can talk,” he said. “Somewhere private.”

  “Have you found out something? Something about Scott? Or about Danny?”

  “I’ll tell you what I can when we’re alone.” He scanned the area. Any minute now, Blessing himself might walk around the corner and see them.

  “All right,” she said. “Do you want to come to my hotel? We’ll have plenty of privacy in my room.”

  He knew she didn’t mean anything illicit in the invitation, so why did his mind go immediately to images of them sharing a bed? As if that was the only reason two adults might be alone in a hotel room in the middle of the day. “All right,” he said. “Lead the way.”

  * * *

  LUKE SAID NOTHING on the walk over to Morgan’s hotel, and as they rode the elevator up to her floor, he kept his eyes focused on the door in front of them. His silence and his refusal to look at her made the distance between them seem much greater than the few inches that physically separated them.

  She led the way down the hall to her room, aware of his muffled tread on the carpeting behind her. “This is it,” she said, stopping in front of the door, nerves making her hand shake as she slid her key card into the lock. She’d felt so at ease with Luke last night, but something had happened to change that. Not knowing what that something was made her uneasy.

  Inside, she was relieved to see that the maid service had made the bed and provided fresh towels. Being here alone with Luke was awkward enough without an unmade bed to taunt them. And why did hotel rooms never have adequate seating? With only one chair, one of them was going to have to sit on the bed.

  It didn’t help when Luke took the Do Not Disturb sign and hung it on the doorknob. “I don’t want any interruptions,” he said.r />
  A hot tremor raced up her spine at the words, as if her body insisted on seeing this meeting as a passionate tryst even though her mind knew differently. She backed toward the bed but didn’t sit. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “Why would you think something was wrong?” His words were clipped, his tone bitter.

  “You’re acting strange,” she said. “As if you’re angry at me.”

  “I’m angry at you. And at myself. And at pretty much everyone else involved in this whole fiasco of a case.” He raked one hand through his hair and looked around the room, as if searching for something to punch.

  “What’s wrong?” She did sit then, her legs too shaky to support her. “What’s happened?”

  “I’ve been pulled off the case. I’m lucky I wasn’t sent back to Washington, or to Timbuktu.”

  She had trouble breathing, and it was a moment before she could speak. “Pulled off the case? Why?”

  The grieved look in his eyes wounded her. “You don’t know? You can’t guess?”

  “Was it because I interfered with your capturing the terrorist?” The memory of that made her stomach hurt. “I feel terrible about that, but I didn’t know—”

  “Have you seen today’s paper?”

  She shook her head, confused.

  He strode to the laptop set up on her desk and stabbed at the keys. After a moment, he angled the screen toward her.

  She stared at the image that filled the screen, of them clinging together, bodies melded, lips joined. Her body responded with the same heat and intense desire she had felt in his arms, sensuous and visceral. Then the realization of what he was showing snapped her back to the present. “Someone took our picture? Why?”

  “I thought maybe you knew.”

  “No, I... That was in the paper?”

  “Front page. Love Amidst the Chaos.” His scowl chilled her.

  “I had no idea...”

  “You swear you didn’t know anything about this?” He jabbed his finger at the screen.

  “Of course not. What? Do you think I arranged for someone to take our picture? Why would I do that?”

  “You must have photographer friends. If you thought I was getting too close to information you didn’t want me to have, you might use this kind of publicity to get me pulled from the case.”

  “Excuse me, but I don’t recall holding a gun to your head and forcing you to kiss me. And what do you mean, ‘information I didn’t want you to have’? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the way your involvement in this case looks when I lay out the facts.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. It was either that or give in to the urge to slap him. But she wasn’t the slapping kind. “What facts are those?”

  “When I went into the hotel kitchen last night to ask questions, you insisted on coming with me. Your brother, who you claim not to have seen for months, just happens to be there.” He paced the narrow space between the bed and desk, ticking off his reasons on his fingers. “You say you didn’t even notice the other man who was there, the one who tried to shoot me, but your pushing me out of the way allowed him to get away—and your brother with him. When I returned from searching for them last night, you just happened to be waiting to find out what I knew. And that kiss we shared got me pulled from the case, so I’m no longer part of the search for your brother or our other suspect.”

  “You’re forgetting one very important fact. You’re the one who approached me first. I came here to write a story for a magazine and the next thing I know, an FBI agent is following me. How, exactly, do you think I arranged for that to happen?”

  Some of the stiffness went out of his posture. “Maybe you only saw your chance after I approached you.”

  “Right. Because, obviously, I’m a criminal genius. Then how about this? My brother really has been missing for ten months. You can check the missing person’s report in Austin. Or talk to my parents, who are beside themselves because they haven’t known where their son is. Or you could talk to Scott’s doctors.”

  “You and your brother could have planned this all ahead of time.” But even he didn’t sound that convinced of the words.

  “Fine. You believe all the lies you want to. But I’m not the one with the problem here—you are.” She jabbed her finger at his chest. “Your trouble is you don’t trust anyone.”

  “I’ve learned not to trust people. My line of work teaches us that trust is dangerous.”

  “Everything I did—all those facts you think are so incriminating—I did to protect my brother. If you had a brother, you’d understand.”

  “I do have a brother. And I understand more than you know.” The weight of emotion behind his words froze her. She studied his face: aged by grief, the sadness in his eyes the same she saw in the faces of her parents and in her own reflection when she looked in the mirror during unguarded moments.

  She carefully lowered herself to the bed once more, her outrage receding in the face of his sorrow, and patted the place beside her. “Tell me about your brother,” she said.

  He sat and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head bowed. “His name is Mark. We’re twins—fraternal, not identical. He’s a physicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Or he was before he disappeared.”

  “Oh.” The cry escaped her before she could repress it. “How long has he been missing?”

  “Almost a year now. He went on a solo hike in the mountains and never came back. When search parties didn’t find him, local authorities assumed he’d fallen or gotten lost and perished. Others suggested he committed suicide. His wife had been killed in a car accident six months before and he was still grieving for her.”

  “But you don’t believe that.” She touched his arm, wanting to comfort him. More than one cop had suggested her brother had gone away somewhere to kill himself.

  Luke straightened. “No, I don’t. For one thing, he has a little girl he adored. Mindy is five. After his wife Christy’s death, she became even more important to Mark. He would never have deliberately left her an orphan.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She lives with her godmother, Christy’s sister. She doesn’t believe her father is dead, either. She told Susan, her aunt, that she has dreams about him, and that she knows he’s going to come back to her.”

  Her hand tightened around his arm and she tried to force down the lump in her throat.

  “There’s another reason I believe he’s still alive,” Luke said. “After he disappeared, I found out he’d been receiving threats.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “Vague ones. Some of them threatened him, some targeted Christy. They said harm would come to her if he didn’t cooperate.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell me about them. Maybe he thought knowing would put me in danger, but I could have investigated. I had all the resources of the Bureau at my disposal.”

  “Were you able to find out anything more after he was gone?” she asked.

  “No. Although some of the messages seemed to suggest that Christy’s death might not have been the accident it seemed. I tried to look into that, but I didn’t get very far.”

  “Do you think he was kidnapped?” Or murdered? She didn’t say those last words out loud. She wouldn’t add to his burden.

  “I think so. The worst thing is, I might have been in a position to stop it—or at least to find the people who did it.” He turned to her, anguish written on his face. “I dropped him off at the trailhead the morning he set out on his hike. There was another car already there, with two men also getting ready to hit the trail. If I’d paid more attention—if I’d taken even a few more seconds to memorize their faces—I might be able to find them now.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said, her voice sharper than
she’d intended.

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up that way. I’ve done it and it doesn’t do anything but make you feel worse. It doesn’t help your brother. How many times do you think I’ve replayed my last visit with Scott over and over in my head? Why didn’t I see how unhappy he was? Why didn’t I offer to help him? Why didn’t I find him the answers he needed? But none of us are mind readers. We can’t see the future. Neither one of us had any way of knowing what would happen.”

  “You’re right.” He covered her hand with his. “Thanks for understanding. And I’m sorry I went off on you earlier. I shouldn’t have taken my frustrations with the case out on you.”

  She gently slipped her hand from beneath his. For a moment she’d forgotten the rift between them and felt the closeness that had drawn her to him in the first place. “I guess I’d rather know you have doubts about me than be unsure of your feelings.”

  “No.” He captured her hand in his once more. “Laying everything out like that helped me see the holes in any theory I might have had about you being part of this. I would have come to the same conclusion, eventually, if I’d been thinking clearly.”

  “But your colleagues still think I’m suspect.”

  “Right now, we’re all in the mode of checking out any lead, no matter how tenuous, in hopes of finding a way to our suspect. We don’t want more lives lost in another act of terrorism.” He released her again. “I really need to talk to your brother, to find out anything at all he might know about this Danny character. Do you think you could persuade him to talk to me?”

  “Maybe.” She shifted, torn between protecting Scott and helping Luke. But somehow, in the past forty-eight hours, her feelings had grown to the point where she didn’t think she could keep anything important from him. “He told me he knew Danny from before. Not well, but he said he’d run into him in London.”

  “Was he calling himself Danny there, too? Did Scott say what he was doing there?”

  “He said Danny was a race fan, but I don’t know how much interaction they had. Scott was at work, so we couldn’t talk long. But he promised to come to my room after he got off work tonight so we could talk.”