by Terry Odell
Curtailing her curiosity was something she was used to. The full-blown desire to clutch this man’s head to her chest and make his pain go away was new. She’d have to find another mental box. A big one, steel-plated, with a heavy-duty padlock.
She made sure she kept her tone upbeat when she entered the room. “Here you go.” She set the mug on the corner of the desk, along with the cookies. Dalton sipped the coffee. If he noticed it wasn’t his preferred style, he gave no indication. “I’ll be finished here in a couple of minutes, and we can go use your fancy computer system. Have a cookie. Samantha’s specialty.”
Even while he shook his head, his fingers picked up a cookie. First he nibbled at the edge, then devoured the rest.
“Take them both,” she said. “I’ll get my purse.”
Dalton found his voice on the drive to Blackthorne’s office. The coffee and cookies had polished the gravel in his throat, and his smooth Texas drawl was back. Okay, so now she didn’t want to offer succor—she wanted to—what? She wanted him. Period.
This was Nancy’s fault. Nancy planted a bug in her ear last night, that’s all. A really big bug. A tarantula-on-steroids-sized bug. Heat pooled between her legs. Her nipples strained at her bra, and she reflexively crossed her arms over her chest, no matter that her parka hid evidence of her response. She glanced his way, but—thank goodness—his attention was on the road.
“Did you find anything your missing people have in common?” he asked.
“Beside the fact they were all women?” she said. “Which isn’t much. More than half our residents are women.”
“First we collect facts. We’ll worry about what they mean later.”
After parking in the lot, Dalton led Miri through a side entrance, up a flight of stairs, and down a hallway lined with closed wooden doors. Stopping at one, he gave a quick tap. When there was no response, he opened the door and stepped inside.
“Your office?” Miri asked. There were four desks in the center of the room, pushed together to form one big table. A computer monitor and keyboard sat on each desk.
He shook his head. “I don’t have an office here. These are set up for research, and we can use the computers.”
Miri started to ask him where his office was but decided it didn’t matter. She handed him the jump drive. “Here. I made spreadsheets like you said, but that’s as far as I got.”
“Let’s take a peek.” He inserted the drive into a USB port and pulled the chair back for her.
She reviewed the information she’d put in the spreadsheet. “There wasn’t much. Names, dates, if they were dailies or residents, what they did. When they left, how they left. They’re all different, though.”
“Why don’t you copy the files to that computer, and I’ll put them on this one.” He powered on the one next to her. “We can work in different directions and cover twice as much ground.”
Miri dragged the files to the computer desktop and removed the jump drive. Dalton took it from her hand. His fingers drifted slowly down the length of hers, and he must have felt the spark because he yanked away.
She bit her lip and studied her computer monitor. Dalton seemed to be having trouble getting the drive into the USB port. Finally, he clicked his mouse and stared at the screen.
“I’ve got your spreadsheet up,” he said. “Why the asterisks by some of the names?”
“Those left under normal circumstances, but I haven’t seen them lately, and after what happened with Elena, I thought I should check them out.”
Dalton pulled out a couple of legal tablets from a desk drawer. He passed one across the desk. “In case you want to make notes.”
He seemed to be having as much trouble meeting her eyes as she was meeting his.
He tapped a few keys. “Let’s find commonalities. Give me the basics. Age, race, special skills. Maybe something will pop.”
Good. Something she could think about other than his disarming presence. She added columns to her spreadsheet, filled in a few things she’d been thinking about in the pre-dawn hours.
Those hours when thoughts of Dalton filled her dreams. Dreams. That’s why she was so uncomfortable. She’d been dreaming about him—okay, so they were erotic dreams of major proportion—and with him here in the flesh, those dreams came back. She sneaked a glance in his direction. Although the real Dalton looked like hell, he beat the dream Dalton hands down. The dream Dalton had no substance. This man sucked the oxygen out of the room.
He leaned forward, depriving her of even more air. His expression was all business. “I want to help. You’re going to have to be honest with me, or this is a total waste of time. Are the names on this spreadsheet fake?”
Miri decided to be up front with him. “They’re exactly what we have in our files. I’m sure some of them are made up, but what you have is everything in Galloway House’s database.”
“Good. I don’t have my notes from the other day. Which three triggered your concern?”
As she recalled, he hadn’t bothered with many notes at the time, but she opted not to go there. Now, he seemed genuinely interested. “Luisa, Cissy, and Robbie. The first three.”
“I’ll start with them, run them through databases you can’t access. Meanwhile, you Google your list and see if you get any hits. You’ll be more likely to know if they’re the same people.”
She clicked open the Internet browser and entered the first name. As expected, “Luisa Fernandez” gave her thousands of hits.
“This could take awhile,” she mumbled.
Dalton chuckled, and the sound lightened her heart. “Detective work is nothing like what you see on television. Try narrowing the search. Add San Francisco to your query. Start with the last six months. If we need to go back further, we can do it later.”
She sighed and started following links, not really sure what she was looking for.
“Yes!” she said to her screen when her umpteenth search brought up a newspaper article with a photo she recognized. Becky Crandall, a former resident, beaming as she accepted an award. Miri’s eyes brimmed.
“You got a hit?” Dalton swiveled his head in her direction.
Miri nodded as she skimmed the article. “Becky Crandall said she was moving home. Looks like she did, and she won an award for an art contest.” Her chest swelled. “I’m so proud of her.”
Dalton, sandalwood and all, hovered behind her and read over her shoulder. “Makes it mean something, doesn’t it?”
“It’s what it’s all about.” Miri swiveled around. Dalton’s face was inches from hers. If she tilted her head up—no, definitely the wrong move. She addressed the monitor. “Guess I’d better keep going.”
“I’ll cross her off my list.”
Had he sighed? Or simply exhaled? She typed the next name into the search engine.
Two hours later, her eyes burned, her neck ached, and she had covered eight names. Only one crossed off the list. “Why don’t you have Mr. Spock’s computer?” she mumbled. “Ask it a question and it correlates everything and talks to you. No eyestrain.”
“I’ll see if I can requisition one for you,” Dalton said. “Until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with these manual versions.”
She pressed her eyelids while she waited for a page to load. Dalton was on the phone, his drawl getting deeper.
When she opened her eyes, she blinked in disbelief, but the words on the screen didn’t change. Her pulse pounded in her ears.
“Oh, my God.”
* * * * *
Dalton whipped his head around at the whispered gasp from Miri. “I’ll have to get back to you, darlin’. Thanks,” he said into the phone and clunked down the receiver. Miri stared at the computer as if a ghost had materialized on the monitor.
“Find something?”
Her fingers groped for the mouse. He covered her hand with his, squeezing to stop her trembling as he looked over her shoulder at the display. “What’s wrong?”
Miri pointed at the screen. “Tania.”<
br />
Dalton scanned the page, a newspaper article four months old. The body of a vagrant woman, initially discovered under a pile of trash between two Dumpsters, identified after two weeks as Tania Ivanova. With the identification, officials reopened the case. Cause of death not positive, homicide a possibility.
Dalton rolled his chair closer to Miri’s. She shoved back and wandered to the window. After bookmarking the page, he stepped behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. When she relaxed into him, his physical response, appropriate or not, was immediate. He inched his hips away from her. Lowering his head, he spoke softly into her ear.
“I can take it from here. I’ll drive you home, or to Galloway House, then come back and keep working.”
He waited, feeling her breathing, in and out, in and out. Finally, she shook her head.
“No. I’m all right. It’s just that Tania . . . she was so full of life. She didn’t always make the right decisions, but she never second-guessed herself. She set a goal and busted her ass to meet it.” She exhaled a long breath. “Can I . . . um . . . freshen up?”
When she faced him, her eyes glistened with unshed tears.
“Across the hall on the left,” he said.
By the time she came back, he’d followed the threads and pieced together enough information for a case outline.
“Okay,” she said, sliding into the chair beside him. “What did you find out? What can I do to help?”
He faced her, saw the determination in the set of her jaw, the steady way her gaze met his.
“Did Tania leave without notice? I didn’t see any address information on your spreadsheet.”
Miri shook her head. God, he wished she wouldn’t do that—it dispersed her scent as if she sprayed the room with a Miri aerosol.
“She said she had a place to live, a friend from school she’d re-connected with. Somewhere south of here, but I don’t remember. The article said they found Tania outside of Santa Barbara, but that doesn’t ring a bell. She seemed so excited. Sammi—Samantha—one of our residents, made a special chocolate cake for her.”
Miri’s face fell. “Good Lord, that’s pathetic. I can’t remember where she was going, but I remember a damn chocolate cake.”
Resisting the temptation to caress her, he laid his hand over hers, pleased when she didn’t pull away. “Hey, don’t get upset. You had no way of knowing anything like this would happen.”
From the pain in her eyes, she’d remember more than chocolate cake from now on.
He gave her hand a gentle squeeze, then rolled his chair back to his own computer, searching for the right way to pose the questions he had to ask. “We need to approach this from all angles. It’s important to keep things impersonal.”
“Impersonal? Two people I knew are dead. That’s personal.”
“It’s a matter of being able to do the job. Emotional responses keep you from seeing things clearly.”
“So, people you know die and you plod right on as if nothing happened?”
He felt the blood leave his face and he clenched his jaw until he was afraid he’d crack a tooth. His ears buzzed. No. Life stops. But you find a way to keep going. You build your wall and don’t let anyone get through.
He croaked out a response. “If you want to do the job, sometimes that’s the only way.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That may work for you, but I can’t pretend I didn’t care about these people.”
“We’re not in the same line of work. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t care. But I’m going to ask you to be objective. If that’s too hard, I understand and can take you back.”
“No. I’ll stay.”
Normal background sounds replaced the buzzing in his ears. He wiped his hands on his jeans and picked up the pen. He tapped it on the legal pad until he was sure his hands were no longer shaking.
“From what I’ve found, the cops didn’t work too hard on Tania’s case. Once they identified her, they followed a few leads, but there wasn’t enough evidence of homicide.”
Miri toyed with the computer mouse. “I can’t help but feel responsible. I should have prepared her to avoid whatever killed her.”
“Why would you assume her death was related to something you did or didn’t do for her? You’re not responsible for everyone who comes through Galloway House.”
“You’re right. Intellectually, I know it. But emotionally, it’s another story.” She wheeled her chair back from her desk and faced him. “Tell me something. The article said they’d found a vagrant. What makes the cops assume that?”
Dalton shrugged. “Logical assumption, most likely. The neighborhood was one frequented by the homeless. No ID, shabby clothes. No one reported her missing.”
“So, tell me. If the body they found under the garbage had been wearing expensive clothes, fancy hairdo, manicured nails, whatever—would the cops have dismissed the case as easily?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “They’ve got only so much manpower, only so much money for investigations.” His stomach churned with the memories. “It’s a sad fact of life, but they prioritize. If they didn’t think she’d been murdered, what would they investigate? Another unfortunate death, one of who knows how many every year.”
“And if she had been murdered?”
He focused on Miri’s eyes, golden where Rachel’s had been vivid blue. Stay in the present. “I can’t tell you. I hope they’d do whatever they could to find whoever did it.”
“You think it was easier to assume it wasn’t a homicide, so they could close the case?”
He exhaled, only then aware he’d stopped breathing. “Miri, I’m not fighting you here. I don’t even disagree. But it’s reality, and sometimes it sucks. It’s like triage in a hospital. If you spend too much time on a hopeless case, then other people you might save will die. And I’m sure the cops don’t sleep much better than the doctors when they’re stuck having to choose.”
“You’re trying to tell me I should accept Tania’s death—and Elena’s—because of who they were. That nobody cared about them.”
Unable to sit, he strode to the window and stared at the parking lot. “I didn’t say that. But the reality is, the odds of people like Tania and Elena dying the way they did are higher than for your typical middle-class citizen. And their cases aren’t going to get a lot of attention.”
He tried to bury the images of Rachel, swallowing past a burning tightness in his throat. Miri’s scent grew stronger, her light tread approached. He blinked, pinched the bridge of his nose, scrubbed his face with his palm. He ached to reach out to her, to take comfort from her, the way she’d comforted baby Zoey. He jammed his hands into his pockets and leaned against the window.
She meandered through the room, then sat down on the edge of the nearest desk.
“What you said before,” she said, running her fingers across the pens in a mug on the desk. “About priorities. Maybe there’s a good side.” She picked up one of the pens and wiggled it between two fingers. “Nobody can help Tania anymore. Or Elena. If the police start a big investigation, they’ll talk to everyone who comes to Galloway House.” The pen wiggled faster. “We’re nothing if we can’t offer a safe haven. So, maybe if the police aren’t investigating, we’ll be helping more people. If they’re too scared to come because they’re afraid of cops, we can’t do anything for them.”
“I can make a few calls. See if I can get the cops to compare notes on Elena and Tania.”
She shook her head. “That’ll bring them in. Isn’t there a way you can do it without them?” One corner of her mouth lifted. “You being a super-sleuth and all.”
Her upturned mouth was enough to release some of his tension. His phone jangled, and he gave her a quick grin as he reached for it.
Chapter 10
Miri tried to finish another search while Dalton grunted unintelligible sounds into the phone, nodding, shaking his head, writing notes. This time, the writing wasn’t neat and tidy, and she gave up trying to dec
ipher his scrawl.
“Thanks, sugar. I owe you,” he said in an over-the-top drawl. He averted his face and murmured something into the phone.
The twist in her belly was not jealousy. How could you be jealous when you’d just met someone, and he irritated the hell out of you half the time? She rested her chin in her hands to hide the flush she felt rising to her cheeks.
Dalton apparently didn’t notice, thank goodness, because he attacked the keyboard, his gaze flitting between it and the monitor.
The door flew open. A young woman—mid-twenties, maybe—breezed into the room behind a toothpaste ad smile.
“Hey, Cowboy, what about that steak dinner you owe me?”
Dalton leaped to his feet and hurried toward her on an intercept course. “Debbie. What are you doing here?”
Miri ducked behind her monitor. Debbie seemed oblivious to anything other than Dalton. She wore a white lab jacket that hit her mid-thigh. Whether she wore anything underneath was up for grabs.
“I’ve got three analyses running that don’t need my babysitting, and someone said they saw you up here. When did you get back? And if it was more than a day ago, I’m going to be very hurt that you didn’t call.”
Peering around her computer screen, Miri took in the short, spiky blonde hair, the deep blue eyes that had to be contact lens-enhanced, and the clunky boots that somehow exuded the elegance of strappy stilettos. She thought about her own standard jeans and ratty sneakers.
Debbie launched herself at Dalton’s neck.
Okay, so this time the belly-twist was jealousy. She cursed herself for feeling it.
Dalton pecked Debbie’s cheek and peeled her away. “I’ve been busy.”
“I heard you got grounded, but I didn’t believe it. Are you really stuck on some dumb domestic?”
Miri adjusted her polo shirt and rose from behind the monitor. “Hello. I’m Miri Chambers, Dalton’s dumb domestic.” She extended her hand. At least Debbie had the decency to blush as she gave Miri a firm handshake.
