Jason knew that inside the dark warehouse at his back at least ten men gathered. So far Jaime Campanero had not joined them. But Jason’s system of snitches had revealed that the illegal alien was a regular visitor to this weekly distribution by one of the city’s smaller drug suppliers.
Leaning back against the cool concrete wall, Jason waited. He and his team were here partly because Emma St. Clair had suggested that Amalia Campanero had a brother. He imagined she’d be pleased when he told her they’d found the man.
Scowling at the distracting image of Emma smiling, he tried to focus on the moment. Narrowing his eyes, he visually canvassed the street. The dozen men he and Charlie had brought along were invisible. Tonight’s raid would be a piece of cake.
If only Jaime Campanero would show up.
Something scuttled through the garbage strewn along the base of the building. Dank, the atmosphere weighed on him. He considered how Ty had been standing in an alley like this one when he’d been gunned down. He’d lain there alone, bleeding in the muck and garbage for a long time before a waitress from the club had found him during her cigarette break. Of the thirty-two customers and staff in the club that night, Chief Hosken had interviewed only a fraction of those that Jason had talked to since he and Charlie had been pulled off the case. That was more proof that they should still be investigating Ty’s murder.
Jason’s earpiece crackled again and he heard Charlie whisper, “Here comes another one.” Two blocks away, Charlie waited in the back of a catering van that had been outfitted with surveillance equipment. “That’s him. Get ready.”
Jason huddled further back and tried to focus on the present. From where he sat between the dumpsters, he couldn’t see up or down the street and so had to rely on his hearing. After a few seconds, he heard a splash of water.
He tensed. The newcomer passed the dumpsters. Jason caught only a quick impression of a tall, lanky figure in dark pants and a pale T-shirt. Jaime Campanero stood over six feet tall according to INS reports and weighed less than one-hundred-fifty pounds. Charlie was right. This was their man.
Although he wanted to move, Jason held his position. Getting Campanero was the ultimate goal of the raid. But if they could nab almost a dozen drug dealers and their supplier at the same time, victory would be all the sweeter.
The warehouse door creaked. Slowly, Jason stood up and lifted his radio to his lips. “MacKenzie here,” he whispered. “Get ready.”
Lowering the radio, he raised his other hand. Silently, he slid off the safety on his gun. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two other figures detach themselves from the shadow of the building across the street. He saw the sheen of light on their guns and felt the comfort any cop feels in the presence of fellow officers. He wondered what feelings Tyrone had experienced, all alone that last night of his life.
Even as that thought occurred to him, Jason heard a shout from inside the warehouse, followed quickly by a gunshot.
“Officer down!” Static surged with the voice over Jason’s earpiece and then the night exploded with gunfire.
Chapter Six
“Happy Friday, Doc.” Skitch placed a full mug of coffee on Emma’s desk and then sat across from her with his own foamy cappuccino. He kept a small machine in his cubicle down the hall, along with a drawer full of assorted pastries. “You’ve made it almost a week,” he said.
Emma shook her head when he offered her a powdered donut. But she did pick up the mug and take an appreciative sniff of the steamy richness. “It feels like I’ve been back a year.”
She was more relaxed now and credited her brief tear-fest. She had stood up to her ex-husband and Wednesday morning’s strangeness in the lab seemed a vague memory. She wanted to wait a few more days before trying another autopsy but was confident she could handle it. She’d taken her anti-anxiety meds, gotten some good rest and now she was back in the swing of things. She hadn’t even dreamed about Jason MacKenzie.
That, oddly, was a bit disappointing.
“Did you hear about last night’s big drug bust?” Skitch licked foam off his upper lip. “Sounds like we’ll be busy today. Your Detective MacKenzie was involved.”
“He isn’t my Detective MacKenzie.” And yet worry flared. There was something about the man that shot straight to the emotional core of her, dreams or not. “There were casualties?”
“One of the uniformed cops was wounded. Word is he jumped the gun. But he’s okay. Two drug pushers were killed, though and—” Skitch paused. “Well, well, speak of the devil.”
At Skitch’s lighter tone, Emma looked up to find Jason standing in her office doorway. When he locked those golden-brown eyes on her and smiled, her face heated and she couldn’t blame it on the steam from the coffee. She wasn’t even sure she could blame it on Skitch and Marta’s stories anymore. Or her dreams. No, this attraction definitely came from inside herself and it was real.
“I’ll just take my coffee and donuts back to my cubicle.” Skitch bounded to his feet, shedding powdered sugar all over his lab coat as he did so. “We’ll review those reports later, Doc.”
Panic swept in. “Skitch, you don’t have to lea—”
“Mornin’, Detective MacKenzie,” he said as he ignored Emma’s pleading glare and headed out the door.
“Good morning, Skitch.” Jason entered her office and dropped into the chair Skitch had vacated. He smiled at Emma. “I came by to thank you.”
She took a deep breath to calm a pulse that had begun to flutter in a most annoying way. It was too soon after her divorce for her to be interested in another man. It was too soon after her trauma.
“I’d have figured it out eventually,” he went on. “But you got me there faster than I would have on my own.”
Wondering if she’d missed something while staring into his sexy eyes, she sat up straighter. “What are you talking about?”
“Amalia Campanero. Your sympathy for her got me thinking. I did some checking and discovered she had a brother. We found the guy last night and he confessed to killing her.”
Jason’s words streamed into Emma’s ears and down through her body, landing in the pit of her stomach like a ten-ton weight. “A…brother?”
“Yeah. Jaime Campanero.”
That weight intensified, pressing on her diaphragm, making it difficult for her to draw breath to say, “Jaime?”
“That’s right. He’s an illegal alien who’s been deported on several occasions over the past twenty years. This time, he was determined to stay in Texas and so he forced Amalia to let him hide out at her place. She’d always managed to run him off before. This time, though, he refused to budge.”
The incident in the autopsy suite rushed back to Emma with startling clarity.
“My brother,” the vision had said. “He shot me and ran out the back.”
And I knew his name was Jaime, Emma thought.
“They argued.” She felt the cold vinyl of her chair arms under her elbows and the weight of the ceiling above, pressing down on her head.
“Emma?”
Blinking, she looked up to see Jason watching her. The suspicion in his eyes had her breath catching in her chest.
“What makes you think they were arguing?” he asked.
“Oh… I was…just…hypothesizing.” Her stomach churned. Air. She needed air. Rising, she stepped around her desk. “I have to go.”
Jason stood up too and blocked her escape route. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Did someone tell you they argued? Is there a witness I should know about? Someone you’ve talked to?”
“No, I just…had a feeling.” She pressed a hand against her roiling stomach. “That’s all. Now I really have to go.”
Brushing past him, she stepped out of her office and ran for the ladies’ room.
* * * * *
Jason stared at the empty doorway, his stomach sore and throbbing as if she’d just driven her fist into it.
“Guess I’m not as charming as I thought,” he muttered and then strode
out of her office. The sterile tile hallway stretched away in both directions, populated with individuals in various colored lab coats. But Emma had vanished.
Settling his hands on his hips, he stood in the corridor for a long moment, debating whether or not he should hunt her down. Why had she run? She’d said she had a feeling. Did she mean an innocent hunch or some kind of psychic episode?
His stomach clenched again. Psychics…he’d had enough of that crap after Rose had died. So-called mediums and psychics had plagued him like cockroaches crawling out of the woodwork of an old house—charlatans claiming to have messages from his sister that they would pass along for a price.
Yeah, right. As if he’d believe in that stuff.
And Emma was a doctor, a professional. She couldn’t believe in such nonsense either. He needed to know that she didn’t because if she did believe, it might tempt him to reconsider. And reconsidering could only lead to painful hope.
He pressed a hand to his stomach and recognized an ache deep inside, evidence of a different kind of need that he hadn’t felt in a long time. A need that grew more intense every time he saw Emma, spoke to her, thought about her. Her expressive blue eyes, the husky purr in her voice… He couldn’t ignore the effect she had on him. Her apparent disinterest in what he’d considered his easy charm, her ability to walk out on him without even glancing back, made him want to find a reason to stay away from her. But he couldn’t. Emma St. Clair intrigued him far too much for him to just forget about her.
And that annoyed the hell out of him.
“Leave her alone,” he muttered, turning toward the elevators. “Damned if I will.”
* * * * *
Emma stared at her reflection in the restroom mirror and tried to see some sign of sanity in it. But her pale cheeks and wide pupils looked anything but sane. She looked like she felt—terrified and slightly out of her mind.
And who was to say she wasn’t? The specter in the autopsy suite had told her things she couldn’t possibly have known on her own.
“I knew she had a brother,” she told her reflection. “I knew his name. I knew they argued. How?”
Her reflection had no answer. Turning her back on the mirror, Emma leaned back against the porcelain sink. Closing her eyes, she took several deep breaths. It didn’t help. There was just no way she should have known what she’d known.
Unless ghosts really did exist.
* * * * *
Jason was still annoyed three hours later as he stood in the dark observation room at police headquarters and stared through the two-way mirror. On the other side of the mirror, Marta Zamora smoothed a hand over her dark hair as if studying her reflection.
“Look at her left eyebrow.” Charlie stood beside Jason in the darkness. “See how it tilts? The lady isn’t pleased.”
“Neither is Eddie Gibbs.” Jason inclined his head toward the court-appointed attorney who sat with Jaime Campanero at the table inside the cramped, gray interrogation room. The slouchy lawyer wore bags under his eyes the way other men wore power ties. An accessory of his job, those bags had grown even heavier in the half-hour since Campanero had recanted his confession.
Charlie folded his arms across his chest. “I’d say the only person around here who is pleased is Campanero.”
The accused killer slumped in his chair, long legs splayed under the table. His lips curled in a smug smile and his dark eyes glittered beneath hooded lids as he stared at Marta.
“Excuse me a moment,” she said, her voice deepened by the hidden microphone and walked out of the interrogation room. Seconds later, she joined Jason and Charlie. Leaning back against the closed door, she regarded them with hopeless eyes. “Give me something to work with, guys.”
“We have his confession on record,” Charlie offered, although his tone reflected her hopelessness.
Marta’s full lips turned down in a frown. “Which he’s saying was coerced.”
Jason felt her disappointment. He liked Marta and knew that she respected him as a cop. She’d made it clear early on, however, that she disapproved of his personal life. Jason had always accepted that. But now her disapproval stung because even though his personal life had changed, Marta and others still believed he was a hound who would chase anything in a skirt. He could handle that. But had her lowly opinion of his personal life spilled over to his professional one?
“You know we wouldn’t coerce a suspect,” he said.
“I do know. But since he confessed before his lawyer showed up, we’ll need some hard evidence if we’re going to convict him.” Marta toyed with a lock of her black hair. “Something more than a kid with a sketchpad. I’m thinking the murder weapon would be nice.”
Jason lifted one shoulder. “That gun could be anywhere in Clear Harbor.”
“A smart man would’ve tossed it in the bay,” Charlie added.
“I need something,” Marta insisted. “We’ve got no gunpowder residue and our only witness is a kid who didn’t see the actual crime. Three other guys will swear our man was fishing with them the night Amalia was murdered.” She fixed a pointed gaze on Jason. “What made you look for him in the first place?”
Jason thought about Emma. Using her words, he answered, “I just had a feeling.”
“I hope you get another feeling pretty quickly.” Marta drummed red-tipped fingernails against the outside of her navy-clad thigh. “You know, boys, you’ve missed on a couple of cases recently. Tyrone Sharpe. Brian Reiser. I’d hate to see this Campanero guy get away with murder too.”
“So would we.” Jason’s gut churned. “So would we.”
* * * * *
Emma closed the paperback book with a disappointed sigh and returned it to the bookstore shelf. Beachview Books was the third bookstore she’d visited tonight. Even in a mid-sized city like Clear Harbor, she was amazed by the number of titles she’d found on the subject of ghosts. And yet not one of the books put forth any solid evidence. Book after book, magazine and newspaper interviews, internet articles…she’d read a lot of case studies but no real evidence of ghosts existed.
That left only one option.
If she couldn’t blame what she’d seen on something outside herself then she would have to look inward. That wasn’t something she was quite ready to do.
Shifting her purse strap higher on her shoulders, she reached for the next book. As she moved, her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten all day.
You’re not eating enough lately.
Brian’s words echoed through her mind—his last words to her that night—and she felt suddenly lightheaded and warm along her back. It was difficult not to cast a wary glance over her shoulder, to see if he was standing behind her.
“Hello.”
The real masculine voice brought her head around with a start. Jason MacKenzie stood behind her. A different kind of heat swept her as his eyes locked with hers. Like the flames in her dream…
Her stomach muscles clenched and her mouth went suddenly dry, arousal forgotten as a more disturbing thought occurred to her. Fearing he would notice what type of book she was looking at, she shoved the paperback onto the nearest shelf. Then, gripping the strap of her purse, she took a step backward, into the cross-aisle. “Hello. I was just…just leaving.” She took another step backward.
He held up his empty hands as he moved after her. “I guess you didn’t find what you were looking for, either.”
To her surprise, he didn’t look any happier to see her than she was to see him. Shadows darkened his eyes and a nerve twitched just above the left corner of his mouth. Even his upraised fingers seemed tense.
Emma’s gaze drifted over his hands and something tickled the pit of her stomach as she noticed the roughness of his palms. A man’s roughness that would feel so right on the silky undersides of her…
“What happened at midnight,” he said.
Emma blushed as she yanked her thoughts back in line. “I’m sorry?”
“It’s a Hardy Boys’ book
. What Happened at Midnight. The bookstore doesn’t have a copy.”
“Oh.” God, she’d thought he knew about her dream the other night. “That’s too bad.”
Confused, not knowing what else to say, she pulled her gaze away from his and hurried toward the shop door. She had no intention of telling him what she had been looking for. He already thought she was some kind of nutcase.
What would he think if he knew what I was thinking a few seconds ago? What I’ve been dreaming about?
Before she could touch the door handle, his masculine hand shot past her to grip it.
“Allow me,” he said and Emma swore she could feel his breath against her cheek. The heat of it seeped through her skin.
He pushed the door open and she darted outside. An ocean breeze provided a little relief to her hot face but did nothing to cool the heat inside her.
“You’re really into being a detective,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t give away her ridiculous case of nerves and even more ridiculous desire. “You devote even your reading time to it.”
“The book isn’t for me. It’s for my partner’s son.”
“I see.” She gripped her purse strap tighter as he fell into step with her on the sidewalk that ran down Bay Street. Tall beside her, long-legged…
The emptiness in her stomach spread lower. Alan had once pointed out that she was far more amorous when she was hungry and right now she was nearly starving. It wouldn’t take more than a smoldering glance from Jason MacKenzie to have her melting into a puddle of need. Or jumping his bones right here in the middle of town.
“The bookstore didn’t have that title in stock,” he explained, tucking his hands into the pockets of his jeans. The turned up sleeves of his white cotton shirt rode higher on his lean, sun-burnished forearms. “They had to order it.”
“Oh.” She quickened her step. She didn’t want to make small talk with this man. She didn’t want to notice his sexy forearms or anything else about him. She didn’t want to be around him any more than she had to be. She was vulnerable—particularly so right now—and didn’t need him around to worsen her condition.
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