Читать книгу Kansas City Cover-Up - Julie Miller - Страница 9

Chapter Two

“Are you deaf or stupid, Mr. Knight?” Gabe halted on the seventh floor’s concrete landing at Olivia Watson’s voice. “I’ll bet it’s neither one. You’re just too damn arrogant to think that the rules apply to you, aren’t you?”

It was the husky undertones coloring that voice, not the words themselves, that turned him to face the detective.

She glared at him from the bottom of the stairs, her chest subtly expanding and contracting beneath that trim leather jacket. It hadn’t taken the police as long as he’d expected to notice him sneaking through to the back stairs and chase him up six flights of steel and concrete. This one was smart. Determined. Ticked off.

“Detective,” was all the verbal acknowledgment he gave her. Because the hammer of his traitorous pulse was already acknowledging way more than it should, given that she was a cop, she was a Watson and she wanted to shut down his investigation.

The badge she wore like a necklace, the gun resting on the curve of her hip, and the accusation filling her green? gray? gold?—curiously indefinable eyes did little to diminish her striking beauty. She might wear her sable dark hair in that mannish cut and talk the same sarcasm and suspicion the male cops he knew used, but there was no mistaking the femininity in that husky voice and her leggy, athletic build—or his damnable reaction to them.

For the six years he’d been obsessed with finding Dani’s killer, he’d been anything but a fan of KCPD. That another woman, a cop—Thomas Watson’s daughter, no less—should get him thinking randy thoughts about stripping off all that hardware and attitude didn’t sit real well with his celibate devotion to the fiancée he should have saved. His curious fascination with the mysteries surrounding the lady detective who’d tracked him down rankled his long-held contempt for the police department that had failed to bring Dani’s killer to justice.

“I need you back downstairs,” she ordered. “Now.”

Thanks. The sharp command took the sexy out of her voice and made it easier for Gabe to dismiss his far too male reaction to her.

He moved to the edge of the landing, toward the woman attempting to stop his return to the taped-off office suite on the tenth floor. “There’s no such thing as a perfect crime, Detective. Only an inability to see and understand the clues that are there. If you aren’t willing to find the connection between the two murders, I will.”

With a curt nod, he turned to the next set of steps, skipping a stair and another pointless conversation with KCPD.

“Don’t make me pull my gun, Mr. Knight.”

He stopped and leaned over the railing. “Why don’t you join me and do some real police work, instead of standing there, trying to make me think you can stop me.”

“Trying?” The curse that followed definitely wasn’t feminine. Gabe laughed and climbed the steps. He heard her charging up the stairs after him.

Good. He’d goaded at least one KCPD cop into taking some action. Even if she argued every step of the way, Detective Watson’s presence would get him back into Ron Kober’s office so he could pick up what the CSIs and detectives were saying, and he could get a closer look at the crime scene for himself.

But Gabe’s smug smile flatlined when he felt a strong tug at his shoulders. “What the—”

“You are officially trespassing in a restricted area.” Olivia yanked his jacket halfway down his arms, twisting them back and restricting his movement long enough to snap a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. She wrapped her hand around his elbow and turned him to face her. “And you’re annoying the hell out of me. Now, either go out front with the other reporters, or I’ll happily escort you to a jail cell myself.”

Locking his hands behind his back wasn’t going to stop his investigation. “I know Dani Reese is in your cold case files.”

“Fine. I’ll look it up when I get back to the precinct. You’re still leaving.”

With a tug on his arm and a dare to defy her challenge bringing out the green in her eyes, Gabe reluctantly fell into step beside her and headed back down the stairs. She might have changed his direction, but she hadn’t silenced his voice. He calmly explained his reasons for ignoring her order to clear the building. Again. In case Olivia Watson had more bravado than brain cells going for her. “I’m trying to speed the process here, Detective. Dani was getting inside information on strong-arm tactics and a possible mob connection to Senator McCoy’s campaign. Six years ago. And now he’s running for reelection?”

“I get your timeline. And I get that the events are too serious to dismiss as coincidence. You said Kober was feeding your fiancée intel on the senator’s campaign?” Her fingers tightened around his arm as they turned the corner—probably standard procedure to provide extra balance to a man in handcuffs. But his pulse leaped at Olivia’s firm grasp on him, momentarily distracting him from the questions laced with skepticism. “How do you know that? Were you working the story, too?”

“No. It was Dani’s big scoop. She was trying to make a name for herself. I didn’t even realize what she was onto until it was too late.” Taking a deep breath, he pushed aside his lusty reaction to Detective Watson’s touch and let his heart fill with its customary guilt and grief. It wasn’t hard to replace Detective Watson’s changeable eye color with the sky blue beauty of Dani’s soft gaze in his mind. “I started reading the notes she had saved on a zip drive one night. I found Kober and Senator McCoy’s name, along with the draft of a story on kickbacks from Leland Asher.”

Olivia’s pace slowed. “The alleged crime boss?”

“You know there’s nothing alleged about the way he conducts business. That man has more ways to launder money than an industrial linen service. When I confronted Dani about the scope of what she was working on—and warned her of the danger—she got mad and stormed out. By the time I found out where she was meeting her contact, it was too late.” He stopped on the landing, needing to set his feet to withstand the memory that chilled his blood like a ghost passing through his body. He should have stopped Dani that night. He should have gone with her. He should have covered the damn story himself and not let a junior reporter—no matter how good her instincts might be—take that kind of risk. When he found his breath again, when he could firmly close the door on the gruesome images from the past, Gabe continued. “The next time I saw Dani, she was lying on a slab in the morgue. She’d been shot three times. The ME had to identify her by the dragon tattoo on her ankle and what was left of her teeth.”

“I’m sorry.” Olivia’s fingers curled into a fist and she pulled away. “I know that’s rough. Losing someone you love is tough enough. Seeing them in the morgue...”

Gabe glanced down to see her unfocused gaze staring off into the corner. Was that real empathy? Some haunting remembrance of another case she’d worked? An official training technique to gain his cooperation? Didn’t matter.

“Save your pity. Do your job.” As soon as he spoke, her gaze snapped back to his. “A couple of dock workers found Dani lying beside her abandoned car near an old warehouse. The killer had taken her engagement ring and billfold, and tried to make it look like a robbery. That’s how KCPD investigated her death, as a carjacking gone bad. But I tell you, it was all about the story she was writing. That’s why you people never solved the case.”

“You people?” He watched her bristle at the dig against cops, against someone much closer to the case than she probably realized. Detective Watson wrapped her hand around his arm again and pulled him into step beside her. Ah, hell. She hadn’t really been listening. She was just humoring him. “Less talking and more moving, okay, Knight?”

Gabe lengthened his stride to get ahead of her. He stopped on the next landing and turned, forcing her to halt on the step above him. He had no problem getting in her face and making his point. “Connect the dots, Olivia. If Ron Kober knew enough about Leland Asher’s influence on the campaign to share it with the press six years ago, I don’t imagine either Senator McCoy or Asher would want Kober around now. McCoy is already under investigation. If Kober told anyone what he knew? What Dani knew? You know how the press is ready to jump on any hint of a scandal during a campaign.”

To her credit, she didn’t back down from the confrontation. “Look, I understand why you think there could be a shared motive between the two deaths. I promise, I will read through your fiancée’s case file. But I told you, I’m not even assigned to Kober’s murder. All I can do is inform Detectives Hendricks and Kincaid that—” She stopped abruptly and angled her head to the side.

“I’m telling you.”

She leaned toward the steel railing. “Shh.”

He leaned with her, demanding she pay attention. “It makes sense that the same person who wanted Kober dead might also have wanted to silence Dani. The two murders—”

“Shut. Up.” She pushed him back against the wall with a hand over his mouth.

And then he heard it, too. The double click of a door opening and closing. Footsteps in the stairwell below their position.

Running footsteps.

Even the pretense of listening to his outpouring of information had ended. She was in full cop mode now. Olivia pulled her hands from his chest and chin and plucked the radio off her belt. “This is Detective Watson. Has the building been cleared?” While other officers in the building responded, she pulled a ring of keys from her jeans and unlocked his cuffs. Her next question was to him. “Did you bring any of your reporter friends with you?”

Gabe shook his head. He shrugged his corduroy jacket back onto his shoulders and zeroed in on the sounds of huffing breaths and hurrying footfalls below.

There was the punch of another door handle and a muttered curse before Olivia got back on the radio. “I’ve got activity in the south stairwell. Maybe somebody who shouldn’t be here snuck in.” Her gaze tilted up to his. Okay, so she could do the subtle dig thing, too. “Or our perp is trying to sneak out. I’ll get eyes on it. Watson out.” She pushed open the door marked with a three and pointed into the main building, dismissing him. “Can I trust you to find your way to the front door all by yourself?”

She must have accepted his silence as an agreement because she put away her handcuffs and radio and pulled her gun in the same fluid movement. Then those long legs were booking it down the stairs.

* * *

OLIVIA PUSHED ASIDE the charged energy that hummed through her system after trading words with Gabe Knight and focused on her pursuit of the unknown subject. She saw the second-floor door swinging shut and pressed her back against the concrete block wall, keeping her attention on both the door and the stairs, uncertain which way the intruder had gone until she heard the deep, ragged panting of a man trying to catch his breath from a location below her. He’d heard her coming and had ducked into a corner to hide.

“KCPD. You on the stairs—show yourself.” She crept down to the midfloor landing, her gun leading the way. “Hands up where I can see them.”

She smelled the sweat of fear and desperation coming off the intruder as she neared the rear exit on the first floor. Maybe this was just a homeless guy who’d wandered in off the street. Nothing like discovering a hoped-for haven swarming with cops to make a guy nervous. “I’m Detective Watson with KCPD. My goal isn’t to hurt you, but you’re trespassing. I’d like you to identify yourself, and I need to ask you some questions.”

For a few seconds, the heavy breathing stopped. Olivia focused in on the body odor wafting from the recess between the rear exit and the side of the stairs and turned. There was a guttural roar and a flash of gray before the intruder’s arms swung over the railing with a metal folding chair and knocked her down the last couple of steps.

Olivia pitched forward, landing on her hip and shoulder, hitting the floor hard. Her knuckles banged against the concrete. She lost her grip on the gun and the weapon slid beyond her reach.

Instead of capitalizing on his advantage and hitting her again, the perp in the gray hoodie ran past her. But Olivia wasn’t about to ignore an opportunity to take control of the situation. She kicked out her feet, twisted her legs through his and tripped him.

In a tumble of clanking metal and furious curses, her attacker went down. For the split second he was stunned by the impact with the unforgiving concrete, Olivia went after her Glock. The attacker extricated himself from the chair and pushed to his feet while she rolled toward her weapon and scooped it up.

“Hey! Stop!” A blur of denim and corduroy shot past her.

Olivia flipped over, bracing her gun between her hands. But the only shot she had was Gabriel Knight’s back as he shoved her attacker against the door. “Son of a...”

She scrambled to her feet, hating that any man thought he had to save her.

“He’s got a gun!” Gabe shouted.

Ah, hell. She saw it, too. “Move!”

Adrenaline or stubbornness kept him from obeying her command. With his forearm wedged against the other man’s throat, Gabriel grabbed her attacker’s wrist and slammed it against the wall. Once. Twice. The small Saturday night special popped free and skittered across the floor. The pesky reporter was taller and broader than the other man, blocking out any chance to get a good read on the perp beyond faded jeans and the sweatshirt. Olivia picked the snub-nosed semiautomatic up by the barrel and tucked it into the back of her belt.

She was about to put her shoulder into the reporter’s ribs and knock him away from the perp when she saw the flash of steel arcing between the two men. “Knife!” She raised her gun again. “Drop it!”

Gabe Knight cursed as the smaller man shoved him into Olivia, knocking them both against the rack of folding chairs. The storage rack shifted and they wound up tangled on the floor beneath an avalanche of more chairs. The attacker flung the door open and charged into the alley behind the building before she could push Gabe off her and roll to her feet. “Get out of my way!”

“Damn it. Olivia!”

She left Gabe’s outstretched fingers behind and flew out the door after the man with the knife. “Police. Stop!”

Why was it that skinny guys could always fly?

She shifted into high gear, her boots crunching gravel and debris against the asphalt. But it was no good. Even running at full tilt, he easily widened the gap between them. And she couldn’t fire off even a warning shot without a clear line of sight to the cars driving past on the street beyond and whoever might be walking along the sidewalk and accidentally step into her line of fire. In a matter of seconds, like a shadow swallowed up by the bright afternoon sunlight, the perp shot around the corner and was gone.

Olivia lowered her gun, skidding to a halt as she reached the sidewalk. She glanced up and down and across the street through the beginnings of rush-hour traffic. “You lousy, lucky chameleon.”

He’d either ducked inside a nearby shop or had a ride waiting for him. At the very least, he’d dropped the hood and merged with the crowd of pedestrians crossing the street as the light turned green. Since she hadn’t seen his face, she had no way to identify him—not even by hair color.

“Damn you, Gabriel Knight.” Breathing deeply from the wind sprint, her voice was barely a whisper. But the gun and the badge made shocked and curious passersby walk a wide berth around her. She put up her hand to reassure them she meant them no harm and holstered her gun.

But the would-be rescuer who’d gotten in the way of her doing her job was another story. Olivia raked her bangs off her forehead, blew out a heated breath and decided to tell Gabe Knight exactly where he could stick his machismo. Maybe she’d even take him in for interfering with a police officer and allowing the person she wanted to question escape.

With a decisive nod, she spun around...and plowed into the middle of Gabriel Knight’s chest. There was a brief bombardment of sensations—soft corduroy and unyielding muscle; long, sinewed fingers; the faint scents of coffee and soap; heated skin beneath starched cotton—before she jerked back into her own space and shored up her defenses with the frustration and annoyance still sparking through her. Olivia planted her hands at her hips and tipped her face to his. “You followed me?”

“Are you hurt?” Gabe asked, dropping his hands from her shoulders, ignoring the accusation.

“Am I—” His nostrils flared with what must have been a fast run for him, too. The lines beside his eyes etched with concern as that piercing blue gaze swept over her. But her irritation with the man dissipated when she saw the blood dripping from his sleeve onto the asphalt at his feet. Shaking her head at the injury that could have been avoided if he’d just done what she’d said, she moved to his side to inspect the clean slice through the sleeves of his coat and shirt. “He cut you.”

“I’m fine.”

She’d tended enough scrapes with her three older brothers growing up that she knew that was a lie. “Let me see.” She put his hand up so gravity would help control the blood flow, and peeled back the shirt cuff that was no longer white. Although the perp hadn’t nicked the main vein or artery, the three-inch gash across Gabe’s forearm was deep enough to need stitches. “I don’t suppose your chivalry extends to carrying a handkerchief, does it?”

He smirked, reaching behind him to pull a palmful of folded white cotton from the rear pocket of his jeans. Gabe shook it open and pressed it against the wound with a wince. “You’re welcome.”

“For what?” Olivia took over rolling up the handkerchief and wrapping it around his forearm. “I’m going to have bruises on my tailbone and elbows, thanks to you.”

“Me?” he scoffed. “That guy attacked you. He had a gun. You didn’t have any backup.”

“I didn’t need any backup.” She’d been half joking when she’d asked for the hanky. The old-fashioned habit of carrying one reminded Olivia of her Grandpa Seamus, touching a mushy place inside her...for about two seconds. Gabriel Knight was certainly no sweet, old grandfather. With a determined shrug of her shoulders, Olivia denied any softening in the animosity she felt toward this man and pulled the knot tight, drawing the skin on either side of the cut together and stemming the ooze of blood. “He was running, not fighting. I had him.”

“You were on the floor.”

Unlike her vocal brothers, a tightening of his lips was the only complaint Gabe made about her nursing technique. As soon as he started to lower his arm, Olivia pushed it back up. “I had the vantage point to retrieve my weapon. But you got in the way and I couldn’t use my gun. Now a potential killer, or a possible witness, at the very least, is on the loose and we’ve got no way to track him.”

“That was no innocent bystander.” Gabe curled his fingers into a claw in front of her face. “My hand was on the knife with his. I’ve got his DNA under my nails.”

Olivia released him and backed away a step. “Is that why you jumped into a situation I had under control? Just so you could swipe some DNA from a suspect?”

“Call a CSI and find out if he’s in the system. At the very least, I can give a description. White male. Late twenties, early thirties. About five-nine, wiry build, receding hairline.” The intensity around those cobalt eyes relaxed and he grinned at her dubious glare. “I’m a professional observer. I’ve got an excellent eye for detail.”

The leather of her jacket creaked as she crossed her arms in front of her. He thought he’d one-upped her? Solving crimes was her job, not his. And she was damn good at it. “Yeah, well did your eye for detail notice the perp didn’t have any blood on him until you got cut? Bashing in somebody’s head creates a lot of spatter. If he killed Ron Kober upstairs, then he changed his clothes and stashed them somewhere. That’s probably why he was opening and closing doors.” Olivia’s gaze dropped to the buttons on Gabriel Knight’s shirt as her thoughts took a left turn into facts that made less sense. “Why club the victim over the head when he already had two weapons on him?”

Although it had been a rhetorical question, Mr. Thought-he-knew-better-than-she-did answered, “Weap-on of opportunity? Were there signs of a struggle up there?”

More like signs of a good clean-up job. Not exactly the kind of painstaking task she’d associate with their panicked, high-speed attacker. Olivia pulled her phone from her pocket. “I’m calling Detective Kincaid to give him a description of the intruder, and let him know to search the building and vehicles in the area for soiled clothes.”

Fully in detective mode now, Olivia glanced around the alley, poking inside trash bags and around a stack of discarded office furniture while she reported the incident to Sawyer Kincaid. Once she hung up, she went to the nearby Dumpster to look inside. But Gabriel Knight had eavesdropped on every word; his eyes had watched every move. Now he came up beside her, lifting the lid from her hand and holding it open while she searched.

“This is a police investigation, Mr. Knight. Your services are not needed, nor are they welcome.” She pointed to the stain on his coat. “You’d better go have a doctor look at that.”

“If solving Kober’s murder leads me to solving Danielle’s, I’m not going anywhere.”

A drop of blood fell from the crimson moisture soaking his sleeve into the stinky remnants of office lunches and cleaning supplies. Groaning in resignation, she palmed his shoulder and pushed him back, catching the lid and closing it.

“You’re contaminating another potential crime scene.” She moved between him and the Dumpster, forcing him to retreat one more step. “Along with any DNA you might have picked up from your attacker.”

“Your attacker, too.”

Shaking her head, Olivia pulled her radio off her belt and made another call to Sawyer Kincaid and the other officers in and around the building. “This is Detective Watson. I was searching the trash in the alley behind the building. But I’ve got an injured civilian in need of medical attention I have to see to. I’ll leave the gun the perp dropped with one of the CSI’s out front, but you’ll have to get somebody else to comb the area back here.” She shivered beneath the unblinking intensity of Mr. Knight’s piercing blue eyes. Didn’t the man have business of his own to tend to besides insinuating himself into hers? “By the way, your eye for detail missed the jimmy marks on the door. That’s why he had the knife, and most likely how he got inside. Still can’t explain the gun, though. What I saw upstairs was a crime of passion, of opportunity. Why get your hands dirty when you can kill someone from a distance?” That probing gaze never wavered from her face, even when she drifted into her thoughts and back again. “What, you’ve got nothing to say for once?”

“You’re not getting rid of me, Olivia.” He leaned in, refusing to back down. “Either I’m part of this investigation, or I’m a long, tall shadow dogging your every move.”

Feeling the chill of his real shadow falling over her upturned face, a proximity alert went off inside her. An unexpected urge tingled through the tips of her fingers. Shaking her head, Olivia stepped to the side before she forgot she was a cop and did something stupid like slap that arrogant taunt off his face...or touch his chest to see if his heart was thumping as wildly against his rib cage as hers suddenly was.

Every self-preserving instinct she had warned her to leave Gabriel Knight and those annoying shivers he triggered right here in the alley. But Olivia had a badge and responsibilities and a hardwired sense of right and wrong she had to answer to that made her feel obligated to drive him to the ER to get his wound stitched up. “Come on. My car’s out front. Keep it elevated.” She took his elbow and pushed his injured forearm up and helped him hold it above the tempting location of his heart. “I’ll take you to the hospital.”