Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set

by Addison Fox, Cindy Dees, Justine Davis

  She sighed, and praise the Lord, shifted into cop mode, as well. “No hits at all. He’s gone completely off the grid.”

  “Which is suspicious as hell,” he commented.

  “Oh, yeah. I seriously want to sit down with him and have a long conversation.”

  He’d bet. The man’s gun had been used to shoot her brother, and Jordana was nothing if not protective of her family. Dexter’s wife claimed the weapon must have been stolen by the shooter, and no doubt Markus would corroborate that story.

  Frustration rolled through his gut. The police were missing something. A link, a bit of evidence, to prove that Markus Dexter had killed the young woman found hidden in the wall, Olivia Harrison, and the older man beside her, Fenton Crane.

  The police guessed the private investigator, Crane, had come to Braxville looking for the murdered woman, and that was what had gotten him killed. But they had yet to find a solid motive for her murder. Reese’s working theory was that Dexter and the woman had been having an affair.

  Jordana interrupted his train of thought with, “I talked with another one of Mary Dexter’s friends from her church, yesterday.”

  “Did this one also know about the rumors that Dex fooled around on his wife a lot?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Did she give up any names?”

  “No,” Jordana answered in exasperation that matched his. “Dexter was careful. It’s purely rumors and hearsay that he was having affairs all over the place. Apparently, everyone but Mary suspected he was stepping out on her.”

  “How does a woman miss years’ worth of cheating? She struck me as a reasonably intelligent and aware woman.”

  Jordana shrugged. “Maybe she stayed with him for the money. Or maybe she knew about the other women and was relieved she didn’t have to sleep with him. Maybe Dexter’s epically lousy in the sack.”

  “Possible.” It was as valid a theory as anything else they had to go on, right now. “How do we prove he was sleeping with Olivia Harrison when she died?” he asked.

  “No idea. Did Yvette have anything new for us any of the forty-two times you’ve gone down to the lab to ask her this week?”

  She’d noticed that, had she? In light of last night’s date and this morning’s disastrous aftermath, he should probably lay off forensic lab visits for a while. Jordana was a formidable woman and not one whose bad side he cared to be on.

  “Your sister got the insect results back from the burial sites. It appears the Harrison woman was killed in the spring and Crane in the fall.”

  Jordana nodded. “That tracks with our theory that Crane came looking for Olivia after she’d been missing for a while and that he found her killer.”

  “We just need that one piece of conclusive evidence to identify the killer,” he declared.

  “Or a confession. If we can find Dexter and bring him in, I’m sure we can get him to spill his guts. He’s no hero.”

  “Not fond of your daddy’s partner, are you?” he asked.

  “Dex is the one who first thought it would be a good idea to use arsenic-laced wood from China. I think he’s a cheat and coward who took off as soon as the consequences of his crimes caught up with him,” she replied sharply.

  “Your father gonna testify against Dexter in the arsenic case?” he asked. He already knew the answer to the question, but it was a secret that he’d been involved in the plea negotiations, so Reese pretended ignorance.

  She nodded. “His lawyer has nearly finished up the paperwork on a plea deal.”

  “Is Fitz gonna get any jail time?”

  “Not the way I hear it. He’s going to testify against Markus, and the DA is going to agree to let him sell his company and turn over all the proceeds to the victims of the arsenic poisoning and their families by way of a fine.”

  “Ouch. That’s a big hit.”

  She shrugged. “My parents have plenty of money without the company. They own a bunch of land and real estate. And with Braxville growing the way it is, the value of all that is skyrocketing.” She added, “If we can’t nail Dexter for murder, we can at least charge him with illegally using arsenic-laced construction materials.”

  “If Dexter knows what’s good for him, he’s halfway to Tahiti by now,” he commented.

  She shrugged. “Here’s hoping Dex doesn’t know what’s good for him.”

  Reese sank into his desk chair thoughtfully. He also knew what wasn’t good for him, and that was messing around with Jordana Colton’s baby sister. His partner had flared up like a mama bear at the mere idea of him hooking up with Yvette.

  Too bad. Yvette was one of the most fascinating women he’d met in a long time. He never could resist a good puzzle, and she was definitely more puzzling than most women.

  CHAPTER 4

  Yvette literally ran for her solitary lab in the basement of the police building to hide from the indignity of what she’d just done. Cripes. She’d just slugged a cop in a room full of cops. As soon as the police chief, Roger Hilton, heard about it, she had no doubt he would summon her for a well-deserved chewing out.

  Dumb, dumb, dumb! She knew better than to let her emotions run away with her like that! She’d gotten away with stupid stunts like that as a kid, but she was an adult, now. Allegedly a professional.

  Kicking herself mentally, she opened a random box of evidence seized from the Dexter home in a recent search of it. Peering inside, she spied a pile of datebooks, each with a year embossed on the cover.

  She picked one up and opened it. The pages were starting to yellow with age and the handwriting was in Markus Dexter’s messy scrawl, which she knew well, now, after having stared at thousands of pages of his personal documents last night. She turned the book over. In faded gold, the year was stamped on the cover. She glanced through it and noticed right away that all of Dexter’s appointments and meetings were identified only with initials. Never a name. She thumbed through a few more of the annual planners, and the same thing was true of all of them. The man never used names in his datebook.

  Odd. Secretive.

  Out of curiosity, she pulled out a random file from the year group that Reese had so carefully organized last night. What a jerk…

  Focus, Yvette. Don’t let some jackass man distract you from catching a murderer.

  This particular file was paperwork associated with an apartment complex Colton Construction had built. She riffled through it until she found Dex’s notes from a meeting in April. The date and time were noted at the top of the paper. Perfect.

  Noting the client’s name, Randall Pardo, she opened Dexter’s planner to April. Huh. On that particular date and time, the notation was for O.Q. Did Dexter actually use a code in his own planner?

  Paranoid much?

  She sat down at her desk and fooled around with how to get from R.P. to O.Q. It didn’t take her long to figure out that if she reversed the initials to last name first and then first name, she got P.R. Then, she backed up one letter in the alphabet—P went to O, and R went to Q.

  She checked a few more appointments in that year and the code held true. She poked around and found the datebook for the year they thought the murders had happened and tried the same code on a few construction appointments. But it didn’t work. She tried all the other datebooks, and that particular replacement code only worked in a single year.

  He changed his code every year? Holy cow. What was the man hiding, indeed? This was the sort of behavior indicative of someone living a double life. What’s your other life, Markus Dexter?

  She did note that, particularly in the oldest calendars, many of the “appointments” took place at night, some late at night. The year after the Harrison-Crane murders, however, even the times for appointments began to be coded also, and she couldn’t tell anymore if he was setting up late-night assignations.

  She picked up her phone and dialed her sist
er. “Hey, Jordana.”

  “Hey, Yvette. Are you okay? What on earth happened between you and—”

  She cut her sister off sharply. “This is a work phone call. I found Markus Dexter’s appointment calendars, and I thought you’d like to know he never used names, just initials. Furthermore, he used codes to record even the initials. And, he appeared to use a new code each year to refer to whomever he was supposed to meet and when. I’ll try to work out the codes if I can.”

  “Wild. Give me a shout-out if you need help deciphering them.”

  “Will do. Also, were you on the team that searched the Dexter house?”

  “No, but Reese was in charge of the search. Why?”

  “I’m curious if any secret hiding places were discovered. Secret compartments, false bottoms in drawers, hollows under floorboards, that sort of thing.”

  “I have no idea. I’ll ask Reese and have him get back to you.”

  “Or you can just relay his answer to me.”

  “What on God’s green earth happened between you two last night?” Jordana demanded.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He showed up with pizza and beer, and he alphabetized files while I separated them into useless files versus files of interest.”

  “He didn’t come on to you? Make any advances?”

  As mad as she was at Reese and at herself, she certainly wasn’t going to throw him under the bus by claiming he’d been anything other than a perfect gentleman. “No, Jordana. Nothing like that. At all.”

  “Then why did you punch—”

  “I’m up to my elbows in alligators down here. I really don’t have time to gossip.”

  “Fine. Look. While I’ve got you on the phone, would you like to go to Dusty Rusty’s tomorrow night with me and a bunch of the gang from the department? Lou Hovitz is having his retirement party.”

  “No way—”

  “Before you say no,” Jordana interrupted, “You kind of owe it to Reese to go. After that stunt you pulled this morning, you need to be seen in public making nice with him. And not punching him.”

  Making nice with Reese Carpenter was the last thing she wanted to do. But darned if Jordana wasn’t right.

  She huffed. “Fine. I’ll go to your stupid party at Rusty’s.”

  “Great! I’ll tell Reese.”

  “Jor—”

  Her sister disconnected the call before she could stop her from telling her partner. She honestly couldn’t tell if Jordana was merely trying to patch things up in the police department or trying to throw her and Reese together to see for herself what kind of chemistry they had.

  Good luck with that, sis. She and Reese weren’t even oil and water. They were fire and dynamite.

  At least Reese’s harassment campaign of hourly visits ceased today. She was vastly relieved for the first few hours of undisturbed, tomb-like silence in her lab. But as the worst of her embarrassment wore off, she actually found herself glancing up every hour and waiting for the hallway door to open.

  The day passed, hour by endless, agonizing hour, with no sign of Reese. Her shame morphed into disgust at herself for actually missing the supremely irritating detective. She missed insulting him and throwing him out of her lab, and she missed his teasing and constant suggestions on how to do her job. And darn it, she missed his bedroom eyes.

  She spent the afternoon digging through Dexter’s home evidence, looking for any notations by the search team of secret hiding places they’d found. Nothing of the like was indicated anywhere. Which led her to believe the search party had missed something. Any man who created a whole new code every year for writing down his appointments, many of which happened at night, well after work hours, had secrets and lots of them.

  The interview with his wife, Mary, had indicated she knew nothing of his extracurricular activities with the ladies. Which meant Mary was lying or else he was hiding a major part of his life from her. At a minimum, he must have a hiding spot in his home where he left his wedding ring when he went out. Maybe cash or dedicated credit cards he used to finance his dating habits. A man as careful as Dexter surely wouldn’t charge anything to a credit card whose bill his wife might see.

  She was startled to realize it was nearly ten o’clock when she finally pushed back from her desk to call it a night. She’d broken the code on a few of the most recent appointment books—they’d been relatively simple substitution codes. But a quarter century ago, in the time frame of the murders, he’d been more cautious with his codes. More to hide, perhaps?

  Was it ageist of her to expect that a man in his late thirties might fool around more than a man in his sixties? Either that, or Mary Dexter might have been more suspicious back then. If only she knew more about the couple’s relationship.

  In the meantime, her suspicion that the search of the Dexter home could have missed something important intensified. Of course, it wasn’t as if Reese would listen to her if she told him he’d messed up. After all, he not only thought he knew how to do his own job, but also hers.

  She would really love to put that man in his place for once. How awesome would it be to tell him how to do his job for a change? Even better, to show him up at being a detective.

  In fact…

  She grabbed her purse and coat eagerly. How cool would it be to shove his superiority in his face by finding a secret hidey-hole in the Dexter house that he’d missed? Excited at the prospect, she went up to the evidence locker to find out if Mary Dexter had given the police a key to her home so the police could check it while she was out of town. The police had apparently asked her not to return to the home until her husband was apprehended. Whether that was because they thought Marcus was a threat to his wife or they thought Mary might aid and abet him in fleeing the country, Yvette had no idea.

  Indeed, the department did have a key to the Dexter house. She signed it out and hurried out to her car.

  It was a frigid night and the wind was bitter as she crossed the parking lot. Snow scudded across the beams of light her car cast into the darkness, and the roads were treacherous with patches of black ice. The forecast storm had definitely arrived. The police were no doubt going to spend all night pulling cars out of ditches. She certainly didn’t need to be one of them. Driving carefully, she guided her little car across town to the predictably ostentatious Dexter home and parked in the circular drive.

  A surveillance detail had been set up to keep an eye on the house in case Markus Dexter came back, but no police SUV was parked out front. The unit assigned to the job must have been called out on some kind of emergency. No surprise with the roads as bad as they were. The Braxville PD was not a big outfit, and didn’t always have the spare manpower to dedicate to this surveillance detail.

  She hustled to the front porch, unlocked the door and slipped inside. Where to look for Markus’s hidey-hole? The obvious place to start was a space he would consider his. An office or man cave.

  His office was just to the right of the foyer behind a pair of French doors. The space was undeniably masculine, with dark paneling and heavy leather furniture. She took her time searching the furniture—desk, tables, cabinets—and then the room itself—bookshelves, walls, even the floor and ceiling. Nothing resembled a secret hiding place.

  She walked through the rest of the ground floor and found no other room that stood out as a place Markus would consider his. She headed upstairs and found a billiard room, which she searched thoroughly. Nothing. She headed for the master bedroom. It was a shared space, but there would be dressers, maybe a closet, dedicated to his stuff. Still nothing.

  Darn it. What if she was wrong? Relief took root in her belly that she’d gone on this wild goose chase alone, late at night, without telling anyone about it. She would hate to give Reese Carpenter even more fodder to tease her with.

  She stopped in the middle of the master bathroom to think. What was she missing?

/>   What about spaces in the house that weren’t used often, like an attic or basement? The latter weren’t common in this part of the world. The clay soil tended to heave and have terrible drainage, both of which made a slab foundation more practical than a full basement. Which she knew, compliments of growing up with a contractor father.

  An attic, then. The house had a steep roof that surely had space under it for one. It took her a few minutes of searching to find a door tucked at the end of a hallway. She opened it and there was a narrow stairway leading up into blackness. Cold poured out of the unheated space.

  Yes.

  She felt around for a light switch on the wall but didn’t find one. Fishing in her purse, she pulled out the fist-sized titanium flashlight she always carried. That was her. Little Miss Preparedness. More like Miss Afraid-of-Catastrophes. Ever since Debbie’s murder, she’d always carried something hard and heavy that she could improvise with as a weapon. In some ways, she was still that kid, terrified that the boogeyman would come for her, too.

  She pointed her light at the wooden treads beneath her boots, and spied a layer of dust on them. Several sets of footsteps had recently disturbed it. No doubt those came from the police who’d searched the place.

  She pulled the door shut behind her and started up the stairs.

  With each step it grew colder, and a couple of the stair treads squeaked noisily, just like in a bad horror movie. She emerged into the cavernous space under the eaves. It had a finished floor, but the eaves were exposed. Shelving was installed in the area in front of her, stacked with plastic bins neatly labeled: Christmas decorations, door wreaths, seasonal decor, summer clothing. One whole side of this area was filled with hanging-clothing racks full of garment bags.

  The half of the attic behind the stairs was a jumbled mess of cardboard boxes, broken lamps, old furniture and general junk that looked straight off the set of a stalker movie. All the area lacked was a creepy doll staring back at her, or maybe a dude in a mask holding a chain saw.