Czytaj książkę: «Detective On The Hunt»

Chapter 1

The sixth sense that JJ Logan considered as much a tool in her line of work as any of the physical, tangible ones made the back of her neck tingle. She lowered the binoculars from her eyes and shifted her gaze to the rearview mirror. A police vehicle, its lights on, was pulling to the side of the road behind her. She’d half expected this—a stranger with out-of-state tags on her car surveilling a local’s house just screamed for police intervention—but it gave her an odd feeling, being on the wrong side of the flashing red-and-blue lights.

A tall, lean man dressed in khakis got out. He seated his hat before he began walking toward her, tipping it so it shadowed most of his face, then stopped far enough away from her car that she couldn’t open the door and knock him off balance.

She liked caution in a cop. That was why she kept her hands resting loosely on the steering wheel. She waited, prepared to tell him right up front that she was a cop herself, to show him her ID, driver’s license and proof of insurance and tell him that she had a pistol in the console and a Taser on her hip.

Before she had a chance to even say hello, though, he surprised her.

“Are you Jennifer Jo Logan?”

She blinked, her mouth quirking the way it always did when she was called by her full name. Growing up, it had meant trouble, with consequences she deserved. Today, though, she couldn’t possibly have done anything to earn consequences. She didn’t know a soul in Cedar Creek, Oklahoma, and no one knew she was here besides her parents, her sisters and a few people back home. While watching someone’s house might provoke curiosity, it wasn’t actually illegal.

Except…one of those people who knew she was here and why was the person she trusted least in the world. Police Chief Bryan Chadwick. Her boss.

The officer was waiting, his expression immobile, and she forced a smile. “Yes, I’m JJ Logan. Can I help you?”

His carved-stone features didn’t shift. “Chief Douglas would like to have a word with you. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to the station.” His voice was deep, reminding her of the long-ago times of midnight radio broadcasts, sultry music and a honey-sweet, soothing voice. This morning, the voice was a little short on the honey. Instead it was raspy, heavy, what she would expect from someone who didn’t talk a whole lot.

“I know where it is, Officer…” Her gaze flickered to the brass nameplate on his shirt. “Foster.” She’d studied online maps of Cedar Creek, familiarizing herself with the places that would be important while she was here: the hotel, the police station and sheriff’s departments, the house she’d been watching just ahead and, of course, restaurants. Creek Café had a zillion five-star reviews, and there were Chinese, barbecue and steak places that were similarly popular. She was a real fan of food that someone else had prepped, cooked, served and cleaned up after, so she intended to visit every one of them.

Her smile, her cooperation and her friendly use of his name didn’t soften him one bit. “Then I’ll follow you.”

Ah. The chief’s request to see her wasn’t a request at all. Like a lot of small-town police chiefs, he probably didn’t play well with others, especially when those others wandered into his jurisdiction and didn’t show the courtesy of dropping by to introduce themselves. She’d told Chief Dipstick—er, Chadwick—that she wanted to check in with the locals, but he’d instructed her not to. This was family business, private—no need to involve anyone else.

That hadn’t been a request, either. Chief Dipstick considered himself so far superior to women that asking them for something would never cross his mind.

Suppressing a sigh, she looked up at Officer Foster again. Barely visible under his hat, his hair was blond, streaked with lighter strands that would be a definite gray in a few more years. Dark glasses hid his eyes, but with the blond hair and golden skin, she would put her money on blue. She would also bet they were as steely as…well, steel. To match the hard line of his jaw. He looked like a guy who was having a bad day. A guy who made other people have bad days.

Don’t get confrontational with a cop who is armed. One of her personal rules. With a thin but notoriously compliant smile, she said, “I appreciate the escort, Officer. Okay if I make a U-turn?”

His response was a slight tilt of his head.

As she started the engine, he stepped back, then returned to his vehicle, a huge black pickup truck emblazoned with the usual police stickers. A drug forfeiture? Or was Cedar Creek more generous with its police budget than Evanston, where her official car was a beater practically as old as she was?

The thud of Foster’s door sounded through her window as she shifted into Drive. The house holding her interest was the last one on this lonely street. Its nearest neighbor was half a block behind her, and the street ahead ended a hundred feet past its driveway, the pavement abruptly chopped and blocked to traffic with steel barriers. She’d intended to drive up there when she left, to use the driveway to turn around. To see whether there was a gate, any obvious security system, possibly a security guard.

She would have to come back to find out. This job required a face-to-face visit with Maura Evans, and JJ never left a job undone.

There were no curbs on the sides of the street, the newly greening grass growing right up to the concrete. Her Challenger didn’t require a lot of room to turn around. Frustrated, though, that the locals knew she was here—and pretty sure it was Chadwick who’d told them—she vented by expanding what should have been an easy three-point turn into five or six points.

“Yeah, no passive-aggressiveness in you, Detective Logan,” she murmured as she drove past the scowling Officer Foster with a half-hearted wave and back down the block.

She’d seen nothing worth seeing in her hour at the house Maura was renting, unless she counted the cat sunning on the patio table. Funny. She remembered Maura as a fierce dog lover with no interest in felines whatsoever. Granted, that was over fifteen years ago, and Maura had been a little kid. She’d changed, like all little kids did when they grew up, and JJ knew next to nothing about the woman she’d become.

Except that, according to the Evans family lawyer, she’d gotten lost in her grief after her parents’ deaths. She’d closed up the family mansion and hit the road in the überexpensive Mercedes that had been their last gift to her, and six months ago she’d settled in Cedar Creek. Three months ago she’d cut off all contact with her past life.

And now JJ was here to make sure everything was okay with her. According to Chadwick, she’d been his first choice to look into the matter. If she didn’t detest the man so much—and if he didn’t detest her even more—she might have taken that as a compliment. But she knew better. From his first day on the job, he’d made it clear that women had no place in his department and certainly not in his detective squad. The only problem: he couldn’t fire her without cause, and she was damn well determined not to give it to him.

Which left him one option: making things bad enough that she would quit. He’d alternated between assigning her cases so simple a brain-dead squirrel could close them and ones so lacking in evidence they would stump Sherlock Holmes, Columbo and Steve McGarrett combined. He nitpicked everything she did and everything she didn’t do. He disrespected her within the department and encouraged the real officers—read: male—to do the same. Publicly he was gracious, but privately he made her work life hell.

He hadn’t realized he was butting heads with the most stubborn person in town. JJ intended to outlast him, and the odds were in her favor. He’d come to Evanston after retiring from a small North Carolina police department. He was seventy-two, believed fervently in the Southern food adage If it ain’t fried, it ain’t done, drank like a fish and had high cholesterol, heart disease and high blood pressure. Sooner or later, he would retire again or die, and she would be there to wave him off—or throw the first shovel of dirt into his grave.

With a surprised look around, she realized she’d driven the few miles to the police station without noticing. When she’d worked traffic, she’d made a small fortune for the city of Evanston writing tickets to inattentive drivers, and now she didn’t remember how she’d gotten here.

Officer Foster in his big truck followed her to a parking space, left a couple of empty spots between them, then got out and met her at the rear of the vehicles. Though the morning had started off nippy, it had turned into a glorious March day. Things were greening, coming back to life. The sun was warm, and she would swear she could smell the fresh, sweet, woodsy fragrance of the flowers thirty yards ahead of them.

Unless… She weaved a bit closer to Officer Foster and surreptitiously took a deep breath. Yep, it was him, not the flowers. The scent made her mouth water and her stomach do a little butterfly twirl. Lovely, lovely.

There might be an upside to this gig, after all.

Probably in defense of her gleaming little car, Jennifer Jo Logan—JJ, Quint reminded himself—had parked at the farthest end of the lot from the station, six or eight spaces from the next nearest vehicle. Though she was half a foot shorter than him, she matched his strides without complaint. He was long out of the habit of slowing down to accommodate anyone with shorter legs—Don’t think of Linny—but now he made a conscious effort to shorten his steps.

Which gave him an opportunity to study JJ.

From a purely professional viewpoint.

She would have to stand on tiptoe to pass five foot six, and she was slender, curvy, soft, but she had an assured don’t-mess-with-me air about her. Her hair fell to her shoulders, nothing special, brown with a few reddish streaks, and her eyes were hazel, again nothing special.

And somehow, in spite of all that nothing special, she was pretty. Not beautiful, not the sort who would stop guys in their tracks, not like—

His jaw tightened, and he forced the thought to its conclusion: not like Linny. Linny had been gorgeous, with silky black hair that fell straight and sleek to her waist, skin so pale it might have never seen the sun, delicate and fragile and breathtaking.

JJ Logan wasn’t any of that. But neither was any other woman in the world.

Quint was comfortable with silence—had made himself become comfortable—but not so much her. It wasn’t more than a minute before she spoke. “How long have you been a cop?”

“A while.”

“You a local boy?”

“Yeah.”

“You like patrol?”

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, realized she wasn’t looking and grunted instead.

An annoyed tone came into her voice. “Is your chief good, bad or indifferent?”

As if any cop who cared about his job would honestly answer that question from a stranger. Sam was damned good—Quint wouldn’t have a job if he wasn’t—but if the truth was one of the other two answers, no way he’d admit it. “Good.”

He thought he heard a sigh from her in response, but when she didn’t respond, he turned his attention to the police station ahead of them. The building was three stories, constructed of huge blocks of sandstone, with broad concrete steps leading to the double doors. More than a hundred years old, its purpose wasn’t just function; it provided beauty and solidity, elegance and grace—a quote from the city’s tourism brochure. It had been built to last, and it gave him a sense of…

He wasn’t sure how to identify the feeling. He’d spent sixteen months learning to ignore feelings, and it was hard, once a habit formed, to give it up again. Satisfaction wasn’t quite the right label. Neither was comfort. Security, maybe. It had stood there strong and whole his entire life, and it would still be there, strong and whole, long after he died. Unchanging. Constant.

They stepped onto the curb, walking between flower beds planted with hardy petunias, when JJ broke her silence. “Just for the record, I’m armed.”

He stopped. So did she. He wasn’t surprised. Most cops he knew didn’t go anywhere without some form of weapon. His surprise was that he hadn’t thought to ask her. Now he faced her, his gaze focused tightly as it moved down, then back up her body. Almost immediately, he spotted the slight bulge beneath her jacket on the left side indicating something holstered there, but he didn’t assume it was the only weapon.

Her white shirt was fitted, hugging her breasts and stomach, and couldn’t have concealed a thing. Her jeans, faded soft blue and showing signs of long-term wear, were snug over her hips and clung to her muscular thighs and calves, all the way down to the brown leather boots peeking out from beneath the hems.

Nothing special, he reminded himself.

“What is it?” he asked with a nod toward her caramel-colored suede jacket.

She pulled back the left side to reveal the black-and-yellow Taser holstered grip forward on her waistband. An easy position to draw from for a right-handed person. No doubt she normally wore her pistol on the right. No chance for a mix-up unless a person was an idiot.

“Is that all?”

A smile crinkled her eyes. “Where could I hide anything else?” Then a nod toward the Challenger. “My weapon’s locked in the car.”

Confirming what he suspected: JJ Logan was in Cedar Creek on a job—the reason Sam had sent him out to retrieve her in the first place. Sam liked to know what was going on in his town. Quint…he didn’t care that much anymore.

“Should I leave the Taser in the car?”

Quint shook his head. “Everyone inside is armed, too. You’re not a threat.”

She gave him a look halfway between hurt and insulted. “Don’t be so sure of that. You don’t even know me yet.” Smiling, she began moving again, reaching the bottom step before he gave himself a mental shake and followed.

He knew one thing: he didn’t want to know her. His life was steady. Predictable. Not happy, but the normal that had been forced on him. He didn’t need any upsets to his routine. He was going to deliver JJ Logan to Sam’s office, go back to his vehicle, forget he’d met her and get back to work. Back to the solitude he preferred.

Maybe not actually preferred, but had chosen. Or had it chosen him?

You can’t change the world, someone had told him, but you can change the way you react to it. And he had changed the only way he knew how. No reactions whatsoever. If he didn’t lose control, then he didn’t have to struggle to regain it.

JJ reached the double doors before he did, opened one and stepped back so he could enter first. It didn’t bother him. In Cedar Creek, courtesies like that weren’t assigned by gender. Whoever was there first did the honors, and sooner or later the honoree would do it for someone else.

She stopped a few feet inside the door to look. He was in and out of here five or six times a day. He rarely noticed the furnishings anymore, but JJ certainly did. The lobby was marbled, high-ceilinged, chandeliered and grandly staired. Behind the gleaming wooden counter, though, the ceiling had been dropped to a regular height with ugly acoustic tiles, and so much furniture had been crammed in that there was little breathing room.

Quint used to have his own office. Now, in the event he needed a desk, he used one of the two unclaimed ones against the back wall. One had two uneven legs, and the other was so scarred on top that it was impossible to write legibly without borrowing a solid surface from elsewhere.

The chief’s secretary, Cheryl, looked up and over the top of her glasses. “Sam’s in his office.”

Quint acknowledged her with a nod, seeing that everyone else was looking at them, too: Daniel Harper and Ben Little Bear, two of the detectives who’d once answered to him; Morwenna Armstrong, dispatcher and coqueen of local gossip along with Lois Gideon, their first female and first turquoise-haired officer; and three other patrol officers checking in for something or other. Quint knew they were interested in the visiting detective, not him, but bitterness stirred in his gut anyway. That sourness—regret or, more likely, shame—made its presence known damn near every time he came into the station.

He gestured to the hallway this side of the staircase. Too narrow to be called a corridor, it had been chopped out of other spaces and just barely allowed two people to pass without bumping shoulders, and that was only if one of them wasn’t Ben Little Bear. It was lighted by cheap ceiling fixtures circa the ’70s, and two of the four had burned out. Waiting for someone else to do something about them hadn’t worked, so maybe Quint would drag out the ladder before he went home today and change the bulbs. It was something to do.

Something to put off that moment of pulling into the driveway of his and Linny’s house. Of climbing the steps knowing the house was empty. Of opening the front door and walking into a space where her fragrance didn’t sweeten the air, where her laughter didn’t ring, where her presence was insubstantial.

The first door down the hall opened into Sam’s office. Quint rapped a little sharper than necessary, feeling the sting in his knuckles, then opened the door. He’d radioed in when he parked outside, so Sam was expecting them. This time, Quint stepped back and let JJ enter first. “Chief Douglas, Detective Jennifer—”