Читать книгу Buried Secrets - Evelyn Vaughn, Linda Winstead Jones - Страница 11

Zack was in Hell—Hell with Formica countertops, contoured bedspreads and a window air conditioner that made the carpet smell like wet socks. Almanuevo didn’t rate a Holiday Inn, much less a Hilton. Unless he stayed in a bed-and-breakfast or tourist resort, he was left with the Alpha Inn, a “motor hotel” of unparalleled luxury—if you lived in the freaking 1950s.

He still stayed awake most of the night, for his own reasons. But even though he was awake ungodly early, taking notes at the pink “kitchenette” table, Zack swore when his mobile phone rang out its programmed Journey riff. It didn’t matter if he was awake or not. Who the hell called at dawn?

He snatched up his phone. “Whaddaya want?”

“Mr. Lorenzo?”

A woman? “Yeah, this is Lorenzo.” So whaddaya want?

“This is Sheriff James, from Spur.”

He guessed the sheriff counted as a woman. Cocky, yeah. Butch even. But Josephine James couldn’t hide being female, even from a man who wasn’t particularly interested. Jeans and short-sleeved cotton tops just fit differently over feminine curves. Her shiny brown hair, shorter than some men’s, had bared the nape of her neck. Zack never really thought before then about how soft and vulnerable napes looked. And her pixie nose had undermined her no-nonsense, I’m the sheriff attitude.

So, now, did the caffeinated strain in her voice. He felt a twinge of guilt for maybe giving the lady a fairly sleepless night, but he fought it. Gotta break a few eggs, yada yada. This was his job. Worrying about other people wasn’t, not anymore.

He wasn’t any damned good at it, anyway. “What can I do for you this morning? It is morning, right?”

“Look, Mr. Lorenzo, I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to talk to you. If you’re still in the area, I mean.”

The area. Yeah. Right. “I’m still in the state, anyhow. You want I should drive back down there?”

“No,” she said quickly, then paused. “It’s a small town, and I don’t want questions. I’ll drive up and meet you.”

“You know,” he pointed out, “as many car accidents are caused by exhausted drivers as by drunks.”

“I’m a good judge of my own limits.” He’d heard that before. It was usually a lie.

“I’d make better time,” he insisted.

“I’m sure you would. Where are you staying?”

Stubborn, wasn’t she? “The Alpha Inn. Room 7.”

“I’ll be there by lunch.” And she hung up, which Zack found annoying, even though he generally did the same thing.

“I could be there by breakfast,” he muttered, and went back to his note-taking so he could maybe catch a nap before Little Jo moseyed on into town.

A nervous woman. Great. Even the well-rested ones were trouble.

He hoped she had something worthwhile to tell him.

Relieved to have that decision made, Jo managed a quick nap on the cot in the jail’s cell before she left Fred in charge for the day. She couldn’t help remembering that the last person to stretch out on that cot was one rangy, thirty-something Chicago P.I. Despite having changed the sheets, she imagined that she could smell the faint scent of aftershave. Or was that just the whole “breathing again” business?

Either way, she slept better.

She drove her old Bronco into Almanuevo a little after 11:30 a.m., marveling at how quickly the once-deserted little town had risen from the dead. Was it even five years since some real-estate developers started marketing the area as an Eden for psychic enlightenment? Not that it wasn’t pretty in its red-rocked, desert-y way—Big Bend National Park lay several hours south of them and the Guadalupe Mountains almost as far to the north. But when the closest metropolitan area was El Paso, how could Jo not be surprised by Almanuevo’s success?

And it was, against all probability, succeeding. Billboards advertised vortex tours, psychic readings and even a dude ranch that offered everything from chakra alignments to rattlesnake roundups. The signs were set too far back to shade the two-lane highway as she drove into town, her windows open to the unseasonably warm March sunshine. But they were entertaining.

She knew the Alpha Inn, with its pitted parking lot and faux-adobe bungalows. It was one of the oldest businesses in town. Its first incarnation had been as the Tumbleweed Motel, before interstates had put the original town out of business. Jo spotted Lorenzo’s black Ferrari, a rental with New Mexico plates, and she parked her battered blue Ford beside it.

God, she was tired.

For a moment, right after she killed the engine, she let her head fall back and wondered what the hell she was doing here. The sensation felt very much like panic, but at what? The story she finally was going to tell?

Or the man she meant to tell it to?

Since she never allowed herself to panic, Jo grimly shook it off and got out of the truck, sand crunching between her boots and the warm, worn asphalt. At least her cowboy hat—stained white straw, for summer wear—kept the worst of the sun off.

She knocked on door #7. Then she waited, squinting even through the shade of her hat brim and sunglasses. She noticed the drapes were closed.

She knocked again, harder. Nearby a snake of some kind flowed off a flat rock and into the desert. Jo thought she might just fall asleep on her feet out here.

Then the door swung open, and she found herself surrounded by a burst of air-conditioned coolness and nose-to-hairy-chest with the P.I.

Lorenzo had obviously just woken. His thick, dark hair was messy, his shirt was halfway open, his jeans partly unbuttoned, and he was barefoot. For a long moment, Jo just stared—breathing again. She forced her gaze slowly upward. From the small, gold medal nestled in his chest hair to his throat, his shadowed jaw, finally his intense eyes squinting down at her against the glare of Texas sunlight. The awareness that whispered through her from his proximity surprised her. It was another sensation she didn’t generally allow herself to feel.

When Lorenzo covered a wide yawn and waved her in—“Nice hat”—Jo entered his cool, dark cave. She didn’t like caves.

Yet it was so unlike anyplace she expected a man who drove a Ferrari to stay that she found herself grinning. “Pink Formica?”

He snorted. “You got something against Formica?”

But her attention had moved on to the rumpled, king-size bed. It looked particularly inviting, more than this morning’s cot had, and Jo hid her own yawn as she took off the hat and sunglasses. “It’s kind of dark in here,” she hinted.

“Oh yeah. Sorry.” Lorenzo flipped on the lights.

Accepting that as the best she’d get, Jo sank into one of the hard plastic chairs by the paper-strewn table. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“No problem.” Belatedly, Lorenzo buttoned his jeans, then sprawled with his odd, lumbering grace into the other chair. He dwarfed it. “I’m gonna send out for lunch—you want anything?”

She tried not to look at the bed, wishing she didn’t feel so…so alert, around this man. “Almanuevo has delivery now?”

“Not exactly.” He smirked at the rotary phone as he dialed, as if something about it amused him, then said, “Yeah, this is Lorenzo at the Alpha. Send me the usual, and….”

He widened his eyes, waiting on her.

“Just coffee,” she insisted.

“Toss in a slice of apple pie and an extra coffee. Yeah.” And he hung up. “Delivery in Almanuevo is me saying I’ll give five bucks extra to whoever carries my order across the street from the Ambrosia Café. Sometimes it’s a waitress, sometimes it’s another customer.” He shrugged at the quirks of small-town life. “So you thought about what I said yesterday?”

“I thought about the cave-in,” she admitted.

“Want to tell me about it?” It wasn’t exactly concern, but she appreciated his pragmatism. Concern might make her want to cry, or say something embarrassing, and she didn’t need that. Lorenzo found a legal pad buried amongst the pile of loose pages on the desk and fished a pen out of the mess as well.

Jo hesitated. She hadn’t told anyone what she’d seen—thought she saw—since the reporter, and she’d been doped up on painkillers at the time. Since she’d been quoted as an anonymous source, she doubted even her brothers knew she was the one who’d started the rumor about zombies.

A laptop computer sat on the kitchenette bar, plugged into a phone jack, and paperwork covered the table. But did she really mean to recite the whole, unbelievable story to a stranger from Chicago?

She was here to make the dreams stop, that was all.

“You changed your mind again,” guessed Lorenzo, sagging back in the chair and looking ceilingward.

“I’d just like to know more about why I’m telling it,” Jo challenged. She’d been more comfortable in her jail. Now in his motel room, his messy bed sprawled beside her and his chest hair staring her in the face, she felt distinctly out of her league.

Like the world had started vibrating at a faster speed. But to hear some folks talk, maybe that was just Almanuevo.

He seemed to consider the request, then shrugged. “Right. I can handle that. What I do, Miss James—”

“Ms. James,” she corrected easily. “Or Sheriff.”

He stared at her, then tried again. “What I do, Mzzz. James, isn’t the usual private investigation stuff. I do that too—cheating spouses, skip-traces on bounced checks, crap like that. A guy’s got to make a living, no matter how well-off his partner is. But our specialty is the weird stuff. Cults. Curses. Ghosts.”

Zombies. Jo’s discomfort settled into her gut as she pursued the less remarkable claim. “You believe in ghosts?”

“My partner does. Me, I’m careful not to disbelieve in anything nowadays. What with the Internet, it’s pretty easy for people with, let’s call ’em special requirements, to find me. Most of them are major flakes, by the way, same as the assholes who generally suck them in. But a few of ’em aren’t.”

And that, apparently, was important.

He shifted in his seat, though it looked a bit small for him to get truly comfortable, then continued, one hand sculpting the story out of air. “So a few weeks back, we get a call from a mother whose son vanished, maybe four months ago, in Almanuevo. Not a child—a college kid. Thing is, he vanished dead. Seems he and his buds tried rock-climbing under the influence of God-knows what, with the expected, pancakelike results. No biggie.”

Jo didn’t bother to hide her scorn. “No biggie?”

He was unfazed. “So one minute his remains are safe in the town clinic, toe-tagged and body-bagged. Next thing you know—” He snapped his fingers. “Gone. Like he got up and walked away.”

“But clearly,” said Jo, “he didn’t get up and walk away. Corpses have been stolen before….” Though not around there. That she knew of. “Haven’t they?”

Lorenzo’s rugged expression stilled. Then he frowned.

When a knock sounded at the door they both jumped—then avoided each other’s eyes. “Lunch,” the detective said, rolling to his still-bare feet. He checked the peephole before cracking the door, more cautious than Jo would have expected. He was a big guy, after all. And his automatic pistol lay on the bedside table.

It was lunch. He handed the kid some bills, then shut and chained the door and carried the bag back to their table.

“Yeah, corpses get stolen,” he agreed finally, exhuming cardboard cups and Styrofoam containers of food and laying them on top of his papers. “But usually their buddies don’t claim to see them wandering around a few days later. Have some pie.”

He got the pie for her? “I only asked for—” Did he say wandering around? “—coffee,” Jo finished lamely.

“Have pie anyway. I can’t eat if you aren’t eating.” Considering how he tore into his hoagie, she questioned that.

“His friends saw him wandering where?” she demanded.

“That,” said Lorenzo, covering his mouth behind his thick wrist until he could swallow, “is the tricky part. They don’t know for sure. Not our best or brightest, they were having a memorial out in the desert, honoring their fallen comrade—no pun intended—when whaddaya know? They see him ambling along in the distance. They take off after him, lose him in the rocks, then decide not to report it to the cops because they weren’t exactly smoking Marlboro 100s out there. But later they feel guilty and admit it to the kid’s mom, who then calls—” And he pointed a thumb at himself.

Jo hesitated. She didn’t want to insult the man, but…. “And these guys don’t fall under the category of flakes?”

Lorenzo grinned full agreement with her conclusion. He had a great grin, wide and honest. It almost turned him handsome.

Almost.

“Like Christmas snow,” agreed Lorenzo. “And along with their sterling testimony, the kid’s mother has contacted a psychic who says the kid’s neither alive nor dead. As probably won’t surprise you, this upsets her. Thing is—” And he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, turned more serious. “The psychic she contacted is one of the most reputable in the country.”

Jo hadn’t fully realized that some psychics had better reputations than others. Better publicists, sure. But… “So you looked into it?”

“And found out that this kid’s not the only stiff to go missing in the area. Not all of ’em are from Almanuevo, but close enough that the Chamber of Commerce is no-commenting on the issue. Also, he’s not the only John Doe to be sighted wandering the desert in a daze, though others weren’t recognizably dead at the time. This, I had to look into. So I flew into Albuquerque, and here I am.”

Bingo. “El Paso’s closer.”

“Yeah.” He took another big bite of his sandwich, then muttered through it, “But it has a smaller airport. Lousy selection in car rentals.”

She shook her head as she took a sip of coffee, still ignoring the pie. The way her stomach cramped up at the very thought of telling her own experience, she meant to continue ignoring the pie. “Still, you can’t think that this kid—these missing persons—are the walking dead, can you?”

She wasn’t sure which she wanted more—for him to say no, and keep her safe, or yes, and prove her sane. Besides, it wouldn’t prove her sane. It would just make him another flake.

Lorenzo shrugged. “Guess I won’t know until I meet up with one of them. But it’s my job to think outside the box, so on that outside chance…”

That was her cue. He’d told her his story; now he wanted to hear about the zombies…or what could maybe have been, but surely weren’t, zombies. Part of Jo wanted to trust him, maybe to be believed or, better yet, to have everything explained at last. But if it turned out he couldn’t believe her either…

“Can I see your P.I. license again?” she asked.

With exaggerated patience, he leaned to the side in his chair, fished his wallet out of his jeans’ tight back pocket, and handed it to her. It was still warm with his body heat.

She wished she knew what a real State of Illinois private investigation license should look like. She also wondered who the pretty Italian girl displayed next to it was. It looked like a high-school graduation picture.

“Anything else?” Lorenzo asked as Jo handed back the wallet, and she shook her head.

“The cave-in,” she began hesitantly, and he slid his pad loose from beneath his lunch. “There’s so much I can’t be sure even really happened. How much do you want to know?”

He groped through stray papers until he reclaimed his pen. “As much as you’re willing to tell me—whether you’re sure of it or not.”

So she did.

She hadn’t looked scared once, not even during his undead-frat-boy story, and that one still made Zack’s partner, Cecil Taylor, shudder like a wet cat. Zack liked that about Josephine James. He liked feeling he didn’t have to sugarcoat what he did. He could almost stop thinking of her as a woman and just think of her as a law-enforcement colleague. For whole minutes at a time.

The hat had helped.

Then, as she readied to talk about the mine cave-in, damned if Jo James didn’t start looking all female and vulnerable after all…despite how her story began.

“During summer break after college, I worked as an underground blaster in a New Mexico coal mine,” she admitted. “I calculated quantity of explosives to tons of rock, loaded and tied-in blast patterns. Stuff like that.”

“Damn.” Zack sat back in his chair. “I’m impressed.”

She narrowed her eyes, suddenly less vulnerable. “I grew up with brothers, Mr. Lorenzo. I’m not exactly a frail flower. Anyway, it’s good money. Surface blasting pays well, underground blasting even better.”

“And I said I’m impressed. So what happened?”

“The insurance companies blamed it on an earthquake. I’m not sure what to believe. One minute I was walking along with Frank and Gil—and the second foreman, Diego—in the third-level tunnel. The next, we all just…stopped. Dead-still. It was eerie.” She swallowed, hard. “We looked at each other, without even knowing why. And then…”

She shrugged, fidgeting with an unpainted fingernail, looking vulnerable again. And small. She was small—Zack had finally noticed that today. The sheriff didn’t walk small or talk small. But when she’d stood directly in front of him, at the door, the top of her white cowboy hat had barely reached his collarbone.

He felt more comfortable when he thought of her as tough. As it was, when he prompted her—“And…?”—he felt like a bully.

“And…” She narrowed her eyes, as though to recall the events as accurately as possible. Maybe she was tough after all. “I heard bits of dirt trickling onto our hardhats, and then the world exploded into this blast of dust, too dark to imagine….”

He thought maybe he would shudder like a wet cat. Instead he suggested a less immediate description. “It caved in.”

“Yeah,” she agreed gruffly. Her blunt lashes lifted long enough for her to meet his gaze with something like gratitude.

Her eyes were blue. Pretty. Definitely a woman’s eyes.

They both looked back at the table. “It was dark when I regained consciousness. Mr. Lorenzo, have you ever been underground with the lights out? The dark’s so thick, it’s as if you’ve been swallowed. You feel the weight of all that…that rock above you. I was trapped under something heavy, it turned out to be Gil—I think he must have thrown himself on top of me. I turned on my helmet-lamp and got loose and tried to help him, but…” She stopped again.

“He died,” Zack finished.

“And then Frank, and farther down the shaft…”

Great. Resenting his chivalrous impulse, he still tried to nudge her past that particular catalog of corpses. “Did you find anyone alive?”

“Diego.” But she didn’t look happy about that, either. “Just Diego. And he was badly hurt, though he pretended not to be. He kept insisting that the Safety Response Team would be pulling us out any minute. Then we both heard something. I turned to look—with the helmet light, I could only see one direction at a time—and it was Frank. His fingers were…they…”

And she curled and uncurled her own small, solid fingers, to illustrate. Even without long nails or polish or rings, her hands were clearly female, too. Strong, but small.

“Rigor mortis?” Zack suggested hopefully.

“Except he got up. His neck was broken, and his skull was crushed. He shouldn’t have been able to get up, but he did. I told you that I probably imagined it….”

It occurred to Zack that, if he wasn’t watching Josephine James tell this, he might agree. Even after four years of learning to see this stuff, looking for answers. Maybe she was making it up, or had imagined it all. The line between reality and perception was thinner than most folks admitted. And yet…

He didn’t think so. Her face was pale, her jaw set, her eyes really still like she was focusing on the memory. “So at first I thought, Hey, Frank’s okay! Stupid, I know, but…I really wanted him to be okay. I went to him and took his arm, told him he needed to lie down and wait for emergency response. But his hand felt funny…fake. And his eyes were blank, blank like I’ve only seen on road-kill. It wasn’t Frank, anymore. And he…it tried to bite me….”

She took a deep breath, still pale but otherwise determined. “I pulled loose and grabbed a pickax, and I told it to stay back, but it came at us—at Diego—so I swung. And…” Again, she shrugged. Clearly, she’d made sure Frank wouldn’t be getting up again, friend or not.

Tough broad.

“I think I would’ve thrown up,” she said, “but then Diego shouted a warning, and Gil grabbed me, so I…stopped him, too. Then I just sat there with Diego, waiting, talking about stupid, everyday stuff. He seemed worse, but I heard digging, so I knew we were being rescued.”

Zack took a deep breath as he made more notes, then frowned at a thought and looked up at her. “Newspaper said you were pulled out unconscious.”

Josephine James met his gaze evenly, “I was wrong. The digging wasn’t them coming to pull us out.”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Zack stood, started to pace. “You had to fight more?” This was why women weren’t supposed to do dangerous stuff. This was why they should stay safe at home, like his mother and Nona did.

Like Gabriella should have done. She’d died at home, but maybe if she hadn’t been going out, without him knowing…

“One, mainly,” the sheriff insisted. “We had a strange driller working with us that summer—everyone called him Tio. Rumor was, he was some kind of mayombero, into the bad magic. Some of our crew quit rather than work for him. He wasn’t the one doing the digging, but I realized he was in control of them.”

Them. “More zombies?” Zack asked, standing still now.

“If that’s what they were. If it even really happened. They were things, not people. Not alive. I somehow knew Tio was the one who wouldn’t let them die. Don’t ask me how, but I did. I started to fight them off, and Diego managed to get up and stand in front of me, trying to protect me. I thought he’d recovered enough to help. But I was wrong about that, too.”

Merciful God. “He died.” And turned on her.

“I wasn’t thinking real clearly by then, but I knew I had to stop Tio. Even then I didn’t completely believe what he was doing, but there were so many….”

“But you were just a girl.” Zack sank onto the bed at the idea of it. He felt sick. He hated hearing stories like this, watching innocents—women—suffer, unable to reach back in time and help or protect them.

But damned if Sheriff Jo’s chin didn’t come up, if the agony didn’t ease from her gaze in place of grim pride. “A girl with explosives in her pack.”

“You blew them up?”

Jo kind of liked the way Zack Lorenzo stared at her—awed. Maybe finally telling the story, after so many years, robbed it of some of its power. Maybe having someone believe her was what did it. But suddenly, instead of the nightmare owning her, Jo owned the nightmare. She had survived, after all. No matter how awful, even if it had been real—and had it?—she’d survived.

“I didn’t blow them up, exactly,” she clarified. “I dodged through the tunnel they’d come in, and I blew the wall.”

Then she’d lost consciousness, buried in rubble. She hadn’t expected to survive—not the blast, not the toxic gas that explosives emit after detonation, not the…zombies. But miraculously, she’d come-to in the hospital, her older brother asleep in a chair beside her. Since he’d been in D.C. before the accident, she could only imagine how long she’d been out. At first she wondered if she was in an asylum, but no.

Nobody but her seemed to realize that the corpses had died twice.

Sitting here with Zack Lorenzo, the rest of the details—an uncle somehow killed while helping with the rescue, a reporter who appeared while she was still dopey from painkillers—finally eased, far more than when she’d just told herself she’d imagined it all. Jo didn’t believe she was done with the nightmares, of course. But maybe, just maybe, she might sleep for real, now.

For the first time since she could remember.

Except, of course, that there was a big Chicago detective sitting on the only bed in the room, his weight making it dip. His bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought about a man and a bed in the same moment…Diego, she guessed. She wasn’t sure she appreciated the awareness that fluttered deep in her stomach. She didn’t trust the sharpness of her breath. It felt dangerous in its own right.

Was it possible that she could ever handle dangerous again?

Lorenzo rose from the bed and came back to the table. She took another deep breath as he passed her, big and warm and solid. Some risks were probably better than others. And he didn’t feel dangerous, just the awareness of him did.

Zack Lorenzo still felt remarkably safe, for a stranger.

When he sat on his plastic chair and began scribbling, she waited for him to glance up at her, wanting to see his eyes again. She couldn’t remember what color the detective’s eyes were. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze deliberately.

“I don’t think I even used the word zombies, the reporter did,” Jo admitted, reaching for the partially eaten piece of pie he’d pushed away from him earlier. He’d offered it once, after all. And he didn’t seem to want it. “I could’ve been delirious.”

“Yeah,” he muttered through his note-taking. “Right. You sound like the real flighty type.”

Since he said that sarcastically, she took it as a compliment. She also took a bite of pie, and it tasted wonderful, sweet and syrupy. She actually ventured a question. On the off chance they were both sane, after all. “But zombies are from Haiti, right? Or maybe Louisiana. Not the southwest.”

“Uh-huh,” Lorenzo agreed, still scribbling. When he finally looked up, it was all business. Business with deep, brown-green eyes. “There’s theories about whether real zombies were ever dead or maybe just drugged. Some scholarly types even talk about philosophical zombies…living people who just go through the motions, without thinking anymore, you know? But you’re right. None of that seems to fit with this Tio guy you described. Wasn’t Tio one of the Jackson 5?”

“That was Tito,” she told him, pleased. Who else listened to old ’70s music, anymore?

Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s a relief. So think back. Could he have been into voodoo?”

She swallowed another bite of pie and decided to at least pretend this was possible. Why not err on that side, for once? “Nope. If anything, it was something like Santeria.”

Lorenzo blinked at her. “You couldn’t have mentioned this earlier in the story?”

It impressed her that he knew what Santeria, a form of Cuban witchcraft, even was. Her grandfather was a scholar of this kind of stuff, but most people… “I’m just guessing. Tio wasn’t Mexican, and I’ve heard that a lot of the Brujas have a bias against mixed bloods.”

Zack rubbed a hand down his face, then squinted at her. Something about uncertainty on a face as rugged as his looked downright endearing. “Any chance you know someone around here who could tell me more about local Santeria or Brujeria?” He considered that. “Someone relatively sane?”

Her first urge was to call him crazy. But when she pushed past that urge and thought about it… “Ashley Vanderveer, the nurse practitioner at the Almanuevo clinic.”

The one where the boy’s body had gone missing.

“Peachy.” When he saw the question in her face, Lorenzo added, “I already tried her, asking where the corpse wandered off to, but she wouldn’t talk to me. Said I’d have to hurt myself—and that it wasn’t an invitation.”

Jo laughed. She’d always liked the new nurse…though to be honest, she guessed Ashley wasn’t really new. She’d been running the closest medical facility to Spur for two years now. It was a sign of how strictly Jo had kept to herself, that she’d never pursued that possibility of friendship. “Well, she might talk to me. Or us,” she conceded quickly, at Lorenzo’s widened eyes. Definitely brown-green.

“Us,” he repeated. Like he didn’t want her to help.

“You don’t think I can just go home and forget that all this…this whatever’s-going-on is going on, do you?”

That she could go back to that half life? Sure, it was safe. But that’s all it was. And she’d thought she’d stopped them. On some level she’d really thought…

He stood. Wow, he was a big guy. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think. It’s my job, not yours.”

“Arguable.”

“This isn’t your jurisdiction. Mayberry is your jurisdiction.” Which was true, sarcasm aside. But Almanuevo wasn’t exactly his jurisdiction either.

Jo stood, too—not that it made a big difference—and folded her arms. “You’re the one who said I could help.”

“By telling me your story, in case there’s any connection. You did, and I’m thinking there isn’t.”

“You also said Ashley won’t talk to you.”

“Yeah, well maybe I just need to turn on the Lorenzo charm.” When she lifted an eyebrow at him, he looked mildly hurt. “Hey, I can be charming!”

“Look,” insisted Jo. “I’m still not sure what to believe. But if there’s any connection between those missing persons and what happened at the mine, I am not letting it go until I find out more. I can either work with you, or on my own. Your call.”

Now he folded his arms. The pose looked impressive on him; probably more than on her. “I don’t want to distract myself baby-sitting you while I’m going after whatever this is, okay?”

Baby-sitting? Luckily, she felt too good to hit him. He looked so serious—and annoyed—that she grinned instead. “And how many monsters have you blown up, tough guy?”

It degenerated into a staring contest, which Jo won. Lorenzo’s eyes were a lot easier to resist when he was being this obnoxious. And watching them kept her gaze off his body.

“Fine,” the detective spat. “Fan-freakin’-tastic. Lemme shower and we’ll go talk to the nurse. Finish the damned pie.”

That last sounded like an order, so Jo resorted to equal familiarity.

“You need a shave, too.” She didn’t just feel good, she felt cocky. Alert. Awake, after having been asleep for far, far too long. Willing to try a risk or two—maybe with him.

Breathing.

Lorenzo began to move a hand—and not to check his jaw—but lowered it self-consciously before disappearing into the bathroom. He’d probably been raised not to flip off ladies.

Jo felt more stunned than if he had. She slowly sank back into her chair. The man was wearing a ring. How long had she been out of the dating world, that she hadn’t even looked until now?

A wedding ring.

She heard the shower come on in the bathroom and forced herself not to think about a big, swarthy, naked Zack Lorenzo. Wet. She tried not to look at the shadowy, rumpled bed.

The man was married. Maybe to the Italian girl pictured in his wallet. Some risks, you couldn’t pay her to take.

Jo told herself that it didn’t matter; they were investigating missing persons, not flirting. In fact, it was probably better that he was married. Safer. It meant she could stay casual with him. It meant she didn’t have to worry about messy romantic complications. The last man she’d been interested in had died and then tried to kill her. In that order.

For the first time in years, she let herself admit that.

But when she phoned Deputy Fred, to let him know she’d be out the rest of the day, Jo felt disappointment dull the bright edge that her life had taken on a few minutes earlier. Because of a man. One she’d barely even been attracted to.

It pissed her off.

Good thing she had something worthwhile to do…even if it might yet prove a little insane.