Harlequin Superromance May 2016 Box Set

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Bran turned in, searching the jammed-together tables for a woman meeting the description Pippa Marks had given him. Brown hair streaked with hot pink, and she’d wear her favorite feather earrings.

  The clientele was typical of a college town—a mix of young students, some older ones who might be in grad school and a guy with a scruffy gray beard, absorbed in a book, who had to be a professor. Everyone seemed to have a smartphone in hand. His weapon and badge earned him some curious looks, but no one caught his eye.

  From behind, a woman said tentatively, “Are you Detective Murphy?”

  He swung around. She must have walked in the door thirty seconds behind him. Hot pink streaks—check. Feather earrings that reached her shoulders. Eyebrow hoop she hadn’t mentioned. Black knit shirt that formed a second skin. Butt-shaping skirt over lacy stockings that disappeared into what appeared to be combat boots. Probably tattoos he couldn’t see.

  God. Someday his daughter might dress like this. He felt not only old, but old-fashioned, too.

  “Miss Marks,” he said. “Thanks for meeting me. Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

  A small, round table in the back corner opened at the right time, and they were soon seated with their drinks. Upon questioning disguised as general conversation, Pippa admitted to being from Clear Creek, and said she and Makayla had met at a party.

  When he asked, she told him she was majoring in chemistry with the intention of going on to grad school to become a chemical engineer. No airhead, here.

  He was tempted to ask what she and Makayla had had in common, but it didn’t really matter. Instead, he opened the folder he’d brought and turned it so Pippa could see the drawing.

  She scrutinized it for a long time, then looked up. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s the guy. I remember him. He did ask me out. The thing is, I said no. He seemed too old, for one thing, and...there was something about him.” She cradled both hands on her paper cup as if she was suddenly chilled. “I don’t know what it was. I mean, he’s okay-looking, and he was nice. He liked my singing.”

  “Karaoke,” Bran remembered.

  “Yeah.” She grinned at his tone. “Not your thing, huh?”

  “For many reasons,” he agreed.

  Her gaze dropped to the drawing again. “This is...really eerie.”

  “Is it accurate?”

  She shivered. “Yeah. What if I’d gone out with him?”

  “He might have seemed like a decent guy. He must be lacking in conscience, but that doesn’t usually show on the surface.”

  “No. I’ve read about the Ted Bundy kind of guys, super charming.”

  Bran nodded at the face looking up at them. “Was he?”

  “No-oo. I mean, I don’t remember that well. I don’t think we talked for that long. When I turned him down, he shrugged and moved on.”

  “Any chance you remember what you talked about?”

  Pippa wasn’t pretty in the same way as her friend had been, the two sides of her face not quite lining up, but there was an appealing quirkiness about her.

  “Mostly, he asked about me. And we had to practically shout, you know.” She shrugged. “I think he said he was staying around there.”

  “Staying,” Bran repeated thoughtfully.

  “Like, with friends?”

  He remembered the deputy telling him about the odd scene during the domestic disturbance call. He should have asked more about the husband.

  But first, he had the fifty-million-dollar question for her. “Did he tell you his name?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BRAN GROANED AND STRETCHED. “Damn. I’m glad you didn’t want to put in a cast-iron bathtub upstairs.”

  Zach laughed. “The weight might have deterred me. The worst thing about fiberglass showers is the sheer bulk.”

  “Let’s take care of the vanity next,” his brother suggested.

  “Don’t forget the toilet.”

  Bran complained some more when he saw the solid maple vanity in the bed of Zach’s pickup truck, backed as close to the porch stairs as Zach had been able to get it. The day had started out chilly—hovering around freezing—and, once the early, winter darkness descended, the temperature dropped into the low twenties. Zach didn’t even feel it and he doubted Bran did, either. Sweating the way they were, who needed a coat?

  The yard was lit garishly with porch-and floodlights. After the spring attacks on him and Tess at both of their houses, he’d gone overboard with the night lighting.

  The frozen grass crackled underfoot, and he stepped extra carefully on the porch steps in case of ice. At the top, they took a break for the sake of their backs and to catch their breath, then heaved the thing up again and through the front door. Lina and Tess came out of the kitchen to form an anxious audience.

  “Careful,” Zach exclaimed, as a minute later the two men maneuvered to make the turn at the top of the narrow staircase. He was the one to groan when they set the blasted thing down carefully on the already sanded bedroom floor. Grinding the heel of his hand into his lower back, he muttered, “I sure hope having a bathroom up here is worth the money and work I’m pouring into it.”

  “We really wanted one when we were kids,” Bran surprised him by saying. They didn’t talk much about the years before Sheila’s murder. Which was too bad, since they’d been good years. Zach had idolized his older brother.

  He cleared his throat. “That’s occurred to me. Anyway. When we sell the place, people go for a classic master bedroom.”

  Bran looked askance. “I thought you two had decided to stay in the house.”

  “For now. We might want a bigger one once we have kids.”

  “Kids.” Bran shook his head, not in disbelief so much as bemusement, if Zach was reading him right. “You’re the one who didn’t want them.”

  Zach slapped him on the back. “Times change.”

  “You mean, passing time ages you.”

  “You’re in a mood.” He looked more carefully, and saw how set his brother’s expression was. “Not being able to find this guy getting to you?”

  “Yeah. Shit.” Bran took a few steps away, then turned back. “Among other things.”

  “The toilet can wait. Let’s get a beer and go out on the front porch.” Where the women in the kitchen wouldn’t be able to hear them talk, assuming it was Lina Bran needed to talk about.

  He grunted, which Zach took for acquiescence. When they appeared in the kitchen, Tess teased them about needing to recover after a whole half hour of hard labor, but also gave him a quick kiss. Lina smiled politely, but without looking at Bran.

  Outside, Zach half sat on the railing and let his brother have the new porch swing. The cold penetrated his jeans in seconds, but what did a numb butt matter? Anyway, the way his breath was hanging on the air, he figured they had fifteen minutes tops before their sweat froze. Both opened their cans of beer. Bran took a long drink.

  “Problems with Lina?” Zach asked casually.

  “There’s been some tension.” He gazed out at what he could see of the neighborhood in the dark, finally sighing. “Mom has been calling.”

  “So she said.”

  Bran’s eyes met Zach’s. “What does she want?”

  “To get to know you. I made the mistake of telling her about Lina.”

  Bran growled an obscenity.

  “She’d find out sooner or later anyway.” Zach paused. “She just wants to talk.”

  Bran set the beer on the porch floor, braced his elbows on his knees and let his head hang. “That’s what Lina wanted, too.”

  “To talk?” Poor woman. Getting Bran to strip bare his emotions when he didn’t want to was akin to trying to crack open a geode using a toothbrush. Not much chance of ever finding the glitter inside. Zach knew he wasn’t much bette
r. Tess would say it was the blind leading the lame, he thought in amusement. “About what?” he prodded, giving it a try anyway.

  His brother looked up with a grimace. “Mom.”

  “Ah. So Lina’s sulking because you clammed up?”

  The lines furrowing Bran’s forehead suggested the problem was more complicated than that, but apparently he was done sharing. No surprise there. Instead, he changed the subject. “I didn’t get anywhere with the name.”

  He didn’t have to explain what name he meant, given that the threat to Lina was foremost in Bran’s mind.

  “It’s tough with a partial like that,” Zach said.

  “He probably made it up,” said Mr. Doom and Gloom.

  Not that Zach could fault his brother for the attitude. Three and a half weeks had passed since the bank robbery without them so much as having developed a suspect. The only significant lead had been the drawing, but despite initial excitement, Bran and Charlie Warring weren’t any further ahead. Of course, there might be something the typically closemouthed feds weren’t saying, but Bran had bitched that their strategy was to wait for the pair of robbers to strike again.

  Bran had to be especially discouraged about the most recent hope, a girl who’d actually met the creep, but wouldn’t you know she’d only remembered a first name. Or it could be a nickname. Or...? Tag. Short for Taggart? Or, who knew? Turned out, there were exactly two county residents with the last name of Taggart, and both had been eliminated immediately.

  Bran only shook his head when Zach asked about his next step.

  Both men turned their heads to watch some neighborhood boys shoot down the street, appearing in the pool of light from a streetlamp, becoming indistinct once they left it. Two were on bikes, one on a skateboard. The kid could really move on it. None of them wore coats, either.

  Zach’s mouth quirked. Mom used to get so mad when she discovered they’d left for school without their jackets even after she’d reminded them.

  “Funny thing, us both hooking up with women who needed our protection,” he commented.

  “The parallel has occurred to me. Usually when I’m remembering how close that shit Hayes came to killing Tess.”

  Trust Bran to focus on the near-tragedy.

  Finding Tess collapsed with her bedroom burning around her was a memory Zach still relived too often. Having Bran sitting beside him in the hospital while he had to wait for the doctor to tell him whether she’d make it or not had transformed their sometimes-testy relationship. They might still quarrel, but they had each other’s backs.

  “You know, while I’m here, why don’t you call Mary Greaver?” Bran suggested. “She and her husband might be out on a Saturday night, but it’s worth a try.”

  Zach had to go find his cell phone. On the way back, he grabbed a down vest and Bran’s parka. As he let the screen door bang behind him coming back out, he saw his brother straighten his shoulders and wipe a morose expression from his face. Without comment, Bran snagged the parka and shrugged it on, then added leather gloves from the pocket.

  Zach scrolled to the number he’d tried a couple of times already this week, and waited while it rang. This time, a girl answered.

  “Just a minute, please,” she said politely, then bellowed, “Mom!”

  When he identified himself to Mary, she said disagreeably, “Mom told me about you being around.”

  “Good to hear your voice, too,” he said mildly.

  A huff of air might have been a snort. “What do you want?” Her rudeness was balanced by curiosity, at a guess.

  “You know I’m a cop.”

  “Mom said you and your brother both are.”

  Zach’s eyes met his brother’s. “That’s right. Your mother didn’t much want to talk to me, but I was hoping you would. You were more our age. Between your friends and your babysitting, you probably knew more people in the neighborhood than anyone.”

  “That’s true.” As he’d hoped, she sounded pleased.

  He leaned against the porch railing again, keeping his eyes on Bran, who was listening alertly. “I guess I was hoping you’d tell me what you remember about that night. Were you home?”

  “By the middle of the night? Of course I was. Earlier...” She hesitated. “I was babysitting. The Swanson brats.”

  Normally, he wouldn’t have expected her to have the slightest idea what she’d been doing on a particular evening twenty-five years ago, but everyone in this neighborhood would remember that night. On a smaller scale, it was like 9/11. As Bran had once put it to him, a Before and After. Innocence lost.

  “I suppose you didn’t hear anything during the night.”

  “No-o.” But she said that slowly.

  “I heard our back door open or close,” Zach told her. “But I was a kid. I thought Dad might be going out for a smoke. I went back to sleep.”

  “That must eat at you,” she said with more sympathy than he’d expected.

  He had to look away from his brother and clear his throat before he could admit, “It does.”

  “In the morning, I thought—” She put on the brakes. “Nothing important. There were police cars outside your house, and word flew up and down the street. People went out in their bathrobes to stare.”

  He hadn’t seen any of that. Bran had kept him inside, protecting him from anyone but the police officers who insisted on asking him questions. God, how I missed him. Having his brother here now, working together, that meant more than he had let himself admit.

  “Your sister—everybody loved her.” Mary sounded softer than the girl he’d remembered. She’d had a family of her own since, he reminded himself, which had probably changed her perspective. “Mostly I hated babysitting, but not when it came to Sheila.”

  “Just me.”

  “You and your brother were butts.”

  Smiling despite himself, he said, “We probably were.”

  “After that, things were never the same in the neighborhood, you know. It was like...” She was obviously groping for the right words. “It set things off,” was what she settled on. “Nobody felt safe. Parents all came down harder on their kids. Mom didn’t want me babysitting anymore, especially late. Dad and Rob fought even more than they had before, which made Mom quiet and tense. I could hardly wait to get away. But it wasn’t just our family. Do you remember Joann Erwin? Her parents got so strict, she ran away from home. They dragged her back, but it was all so weird.”

  Listening to this took Zach aback. Sheila’s murder had destroyed his family. Nothing existed for him beyond the four walls of his own home. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that the murder had reverberations throughout the neighborhood, although as an adult he understood. As a cop, he’d seen it happen.

  Bran’s intense stare pushed him to focus on one thing she’d said. “I didn’t know Rob and your dad butted heads.”

  This quiet, he guessed, stemmed from reluctance. “Well, they always did, kind of, but it got way worse after that night. Mom tried to get between them, and then they were both mad at her.”

  “Did you ever ask Rob what was going on?”

  “He said what did I care, because I’d be out of there.” He heard an echo of her brother’s sneer in her voice. “We never got along. He was crude, and he said I was snooty.”

  He and Bran had thought she was, too.

  “Did they ever make up?” he asked. “Rob and your dad, I mean, before your dad died?”

  “Rob wouldn’t even come to the funeral. Mom’s never forgiven him.” After a brief pause, she said, “Why am I telling you all this?” Her voice had changed, as if she’d been snapped out of a trance.

  “Because there were mysteries in your own home you never solved,” he suggested.

  “I guess there were,” she said grudgingly. “But no one in my family got murder
ed.”

  “That’s true. But someone came into our home and murdered my little sister.” He no longer cared if he alienated this woman. “That someone had seen her, had been in the house before and knew which bedroom was hers. He wasn’t a stranger, Mary. He was a friend or a neighbor.”

  “Or your own father.” Now she sounded like the bitch her brother had described. “That’s what everyone thought, you know.”

  “Did you?”

  Silence.

  “Or did you always wonder, because you heard a door opening or closing that night, too?”

  “This is what I get for trying to be helpful? Goodbye, Mr. Murphy.” She was gone, not having to slam a phone down to make her point.

  “That’s the first time I’ve been called Mr. Murphy.” Zach set the phone on the railing and shoved his frozen hand into the vest pocket.

  Bran set the swing to moving. “We’re tarred with the same brush.”

  Zach grimaced. “How much of that did you hear?”

  “Not much of her side.”

  So he recapped, then waited to hear Bran’s thoughts.

  “Wish I’d known Rob better then,” he said finally.

  “You didn’t later, after I was gone?”

  “He went wild. I knew there was a lot of conflict at the Greaver house. You could hear shouting sometimes.” Faint humor curved Bran’s mouth. “Rob went goth, got some piercings, had a jacked-up car with a hole in the muffler he probably put there himself. Rumor had it he was into drugs.”

  “Did whatever he could to enrage his dad.”

  “That’s...not unusual. Fathers and sons.” Bran shrugged, but his eyes were unfocused, as if he was looking back.

  “You didn’t rebel.” Zach had never even had to ask.

  “No. I was a badass, too, but that’s because I had to defend Dad from all comers.”

  “That is truly touching.” Smiling, Zach pulled his left hand from his pocket and lifted his beer in a salute.

  Bran hoisted his own can. The ensuing silence was almost peaceful.