Authors: Teri Thackston
“Trinity Bay isn’t all that dirty.”
“I don’t like to drink any more of it than I have to.”
His remark had her looking up in surprise. “How often do you
drink water out of Trinity Bay?”
“Only when I swim in it.” Humor set those gold flecks to
sparking. “I have a small house on the shore and I try to do a few laps every
morning.”
The thought of waking up every day to the sigh of the sea
touched her with a sense of peace that she hadn’t felt in a long time. “You
must love it there.”
He opened his mouth to answer but then a shadow swept over
his eyes. Sadness. Pain. Emma wasn’t sure which. Maybe both.
The waitress returned at that moment with his coffee and
both of them sat silently until the young woman left. Then, grabbing a packet
of artificial sweetener, Jason tore it open.
“Did you finish the autopsy on Amalia Campanero?” he asked,
abruptly abandoning the small talk.
“Yes but the lab tests aren’t finished.” Edgy at the
reminder of the morning’s incident, Emma shifted in her seat.
Jason stirred the sweetener into his coffee. “You want to
talk about what happened?”
“It was pretty routine,” she lied. “We didn’t find anything
that was obviously unusual in a shooting victim.”
“I’m talking about what happened to you.” The volume of his
voice dropped, giving it a caring tone and his gaze locked with hers. Locked
and penetrated. “You looked pretty shaken up this morning.”
Emma tried to hold his gaze but couldn’t when it seemed to
reach into the most secretive depths of her body and stir sensations she barely
recognized. She looked down at her hands. Neither could she tell him that she’d
had a hallucination any more than she could tell Marta. He was a cop. Besides,
her personal problems were none of his business.
He continued to stir his coffee, the spoon clinking against
the cup. “I never saw anyone as pale as you who was able to stay on her feet.”
“After being away from work for so long, I wasn’t used to
standing for long periods of time. I just got a little dizzy.”
“It was barely ten o’clock in the morning. You told me you’d
just gotten started.”
The slight question in his tone, the pause as he waited for
her response, drew her eyes upward again.
He tilted his head to one side and studied her face. “And
now, just talking about it, you look pale again. That woman you saw—”
“I’m fine, Detective MacKenzie.” The corners of her mouth
quivered with the effort as she forced a smile. “Really.”
“Call me Jason.” He stopped stirring his coffee as his gaze
continued to roam over her face. “And I’ll call you Emma.”
She blushed hotly as his attention settled on her mouth. His
lips took another slight curve upward. Skitch and Marta were right. This man
could charm the feathers off a bird.
Not this bird, she decided and sat up straighter. “Have you
learned anything more about what happened to me and Brian? Do you know who was
driving the car that hit us?”
“No.” His eyes hardened. “Charlie and I checked out every
body shop in Clear Harbor but there have been no suspicious repair jobs since
that night. We’ve talked to restaurant staff and customers but so far we’ve got
zip.”
He’s a man who doesn’t like to lose, Emma realized as his
brow creased. He’s more like Alan than even Skitch and Marta realize.
Jason pulled his legs under the table and sat straighter too.
“Tell me your version of what happened that evening.”
“There isn’t much to tell. Brian and I were leaving the
restaurant after dinner. We’d just stepped off the curb and the next thing I
knew, I—I woke up in the hospital.”
He picked up his coffee cup. “You didn’t see anything? No
car? Maybe other witnesses?”
Emma shook her head.
Jason considered her over the rim of his cup. “You and Brian
were good friends?”
“Yes. You knew him well too, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” He sipped his coffee. When he spoke again, the
sadness in his tone surprised her. “He started with the ME’s office about the
same time I made detective. We worked several cases together and got to know
each other pretty well.”
“He might have mentioned you once or twice.”
“Only once or twice? Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. Brian
always was jealous of my natural charm.” He allowed himself a fuller smile.
To Emma, that smile was like the flare of a match in a deep
cave. The sudden heat made her miserable. And annoyed. She hadn’t been divorced
long enough for his smile to do
that
to her.
To her relief, he frowned suddenly, as if he hadn’t meant to
smile at all. “There were traces of blue automotive paint on his clothes but it
was a common shade. Not enough to tell us what kind of car hit him.”
“I know,” she said, sitting up straighter, determined to
control her reaction to him. “I read his autopsy report and the report from the
crime lab.”
Jason’s frown deepened. “That had to be unpleasant.”
“I wanted to see if there were any clues there.”
“No useful ones from what I read. Not from the accident
scene either.” His jaw tensed. “Like the clues at the Campanero crime scene.
You said you don’t have your lab results yet but did you find out anything from
her autopsy?”
Emma’s stomach clenched as an image of the dead woman swept
into her mind again. Carefully, she answered, “She died as the result of a
gunshot wound to the face.”
“That was obvious from the photos. What else?”
“Her wound was not self-inflicted.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Like what?” Emma’s temper flared as the stress of the day,
of this conversation, of his very presence got to her. “Was there anything
unusual in the way she died? Not beyond the fact that she was murdered. Was she
drunk or drugged? No. That much I could tell by the condition of the one eye
she had left. Were there any obvious signs of rape? No. Did she—”
“I get it.” He raised both hands in the air. “You found
nothing that will help us catch the guy who killed her.”
“That’s right.” Her ribs began to ache as her stomach
tightened but her outburst wasn’t spent. “And I can offer nothing to help you
find who killed Brian. I guess I’m about as useless as you are, Detective.”
Guilt tore through her as pain flashed in his eyes. In the
heat of the moment, she’d forgotten that Brian had been his friend too. Beneath
the hard, assessing cop’s stare, something almost vulnerable peered at her. For
an instant, Emma believed that other urge inside her. The urge to help him.
She twisted her fingers together in her lap. “I didn’t mean
to say that. I want to help you, really. I believe it was an accident but I
want to know who hit us. I want to know why Brian is dead and I’m…not.”
He shoved a hand through his hair. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry
too.”
The last of Emma’s anger dissolved as she watched his
fingers sift his thick dark hair. The strands gleamed in the light, moving like
silk over his rough fingers.
Confused by her shifting emotions, she looked down at the
tangle of her own fingers clenched in her lap. “Do you have any suspects in
mind? On Ms. Campanero, I mean.”
“No.” He lowered his hand to the table. “She came from
Mexico when she was a little girl. Her parents died about twenty years ago and
she never married.”
Emma thought of the words her strange vision had spoken. “What
about siblings? Maybe she had a brother…or a sister,” she quickly added.
“Why would you think that?”
Looking up, she found him watching her again and his regard
made her uncomfortable. She half feared he could read her mind and knew exactly
why she’d made the suggestion.
Muscle tensed over her ribs. “I guess I just wish she had
someone to mourn her. It’s sad that she died alone.”
“She wasn’t alone,” Jason said. “Her killer was there.”
“Yes. Well. I hope you find out who it was.”
“Don’t worry.” He tilted his head and studied her more
closely. “It may take me a while to solve a case but I usually find out
everything I want to know.”
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, Jason sat alone, staring into his coffee.
He wondered why he’d lied.
I usually find out everything I want to know.
He damn well couldn’t seem to find out anything lately.
He shook off his moodiness and thought about Emma. She didn’t
look like the woman he’d seen in the emergency room two months ago.
Blood-matted and gravel-littered hanks of hair had become a gleaming auburn
mass. Her bruises had faded and her eyes…his lower body tightened every time he
thought about her haunted eyes.
He shifted in his seat. He didn’t need a distraction like
that. Pushing away his coffee cup—along with thoughts of her—he stood up.
“Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”
Jason looked at the newcomer leaning on the chair Emma had
recently vacated. Guilt nipped him. “Maggie. How’s it goin’?”
“Goin’ good, Jason.”
Maggie Richardson managed a small movie theater he’d once
frequented. They had dated a few times but not exclusively. Maggie hadn’t liked
that even though he’d told her up front that he was just looking for a good
time. When his sister died and he stopped asking Maggie out, she’d reacted with
spite. Tyrone had caught her about to pour sugar into the gas tank of Jason’s
Mustang and arrested her for vandalism. Jason had dropped the charges but she’d
hated both men ever since. After that Jason became more particular about the
women he allowed into his life.
Disdain twisted Maggie’s lips as she hooked a thumb over her
shoulder. “That your latest little chickie?”
Jason didn’t want to resent the insult to Emma but he did.
“The lady,” he said slowly, “is a doctor.”
“Oh. You got a medical problem?” Maggie lifted an eyebrow as
her gaze went to his crotch. “Stud?”
Jason drew a couple of bills out of his jeans’ pocket and
dropped them on the table. “I have to go.”
Putting away his wallet, he headed for the door. Feeling
Maggie’s glare between his shoulder blades, he experienced a powerful urge to
watch his back. And to drive his Mustang straight to a garage for a thorough
check-up.
* * * * *
Sitting on the edge of her bed that night, Emma thought
about Amalia Campanero…the unscathed Amalia who had appeared in the autopsy
suite as a shadowy figure. Emma wondered if she would ever be able to shake
that eerie image. Perhaps if the old woman’s murder was solved…
Grabbing a tube of gardenia-scented body lotion off her
nightstand, she drew her legs up on the blue gingham quilt and went to work on
her scarred left shin. Jason MacKenzie would figure out the Campanero case. He
seemed determined to solve not only that case but her own hit-and-run as well.
Massaging the lotion into her skin, she thought about the
look she’d seen in his eyes this afternoon. It hurt him deeply that he couldn’t
find Brian’s killer. She wanted to ease his hurt but she didn’t understand why.
She shouldn’t feel anything personal for him. And in light of the warnings she’d
received from Skitch and Marta, she’d be wise to forget him.
But he had stirred a restlessness in her that she couldn’t
deny and forgetting him would be difficult. Especially when he had seemed
interested in her too.
But his appeal and reputation weren’t all that made her
resist her unexpected attraction. She feared the emotional risk of losing
herself in another strong man like her ex-husband. Independence felt good and
she had no intention of losing it just because a pair of dark brown eyes could
heat her—
“That’s enough thinking about Jason MacKenzie,” she
muttered, putting aside the lotion and sliding under her quilt.
She reached for the switch on the bedside lamp. Sudden
unease stopped her from turning it off and her gaze shifted from the pool of
lamplight to the darkness beyond it. Shadows lurked in the bedroom doorway.
Silent, watchful shadows. Still more darkness crouched between an old pine
armoire and the Bentwood rocker that had once belonged to her grandmother.
Focusing her gaze on that rocking chair, she half expected it to move.
This is nuts, she thought, huffing out a breath. That woman today
was a figment of my imagination. No ghost is going to appear in my bedroom.
She reached out to snap off the lamp and then leaned back on
her pillows and closed her eyes to the darkness. Immediately, in her mind, she
saw the face of Amalia Campanero.
Sitting up, Emma switched on the lamp again. Maybe, she
thought, I
should
let myself think about Jason MacKenzie.
Then, half sitting against the headboard, her fingers
clutched around the bedclothes, she tried to go to sleep with the lights on.
And thoughts turned to dreams…
A fire crackled, fragrant with charred pine smoke,
casting light and shadow against the ceiling. Undertones from the nearby bay
layered a surging bass rhythm beneath the rustle and snap of the flames. A
mattress on the floor, layered with soft old flannel sheets caught the light
and the warmth and the shadows.
The shadows.
Emma’s heartbeat quickened. A man eased over her. Jason.
The heat of his naked chest brushed her bare breasts, tickling and tantalizing.
His lips sought the hollow at the base of her throat, nuzzled, drifted lower.
A log broke and the fire surged greedily into it,
shooting light across the ceiling to disperse the shadows. But the shadows
lunged back.
The shadows.
Emma woke with a start. Darkness enveloped her and for an
instant her heart tripped. The shadows surrounded her, murmuring and reaching,
stirring the scream that hid in the depths of her fear.
Light flashed, vanquishing the lurking darkness for an
instant of time. But, in that instant, reality reached her.
My bed. I’m in my bed.
She turned her head on the pillow. The bedside lamp was off.
So was the digital display of her alarm clock. The power was out. The
crackling, snapping sound from her dream…light flashed again, outside and
thunder rumbled. Rain struck the bedroom window, its patter like the lick of a
flame at a log.
Emma pushed herself upright in the bed. A storm. It’s just a
storm.
Two storms, she realized a second later. One outside her
apartment, the other inside her. Her body was warm and moist from the internal
tempest and her pulse throbbed in intimate places. Images from her dream, of
the man at the center of it, lingered in her mind, driving that pulse to a more
urgent pace.
She resisted. She had somehow repressed the memory of such
dreams before and allowing them free thought now could only lead to trouble.
But as the outside storm intensified and the shadows appeared to move around
her, she found such thoughts as reassuring as they were troubling. Lying down
again, she pulled the sheets up over her head and let those thoughts take her
back to sleep.
* * * * *
Early morning sunlight streaked through the window behind
Jason’s desk as the last of the storm clouds dispersed. The brightness
blanketed the old photograph lying on top of the Campanero case folder. Jason
figured the picture was about forty years old. The crime scene boys had found
it inside a shoebox under the bed in the victim’s bedroom.
In the photo, Amalia Campanero sat on a swing with a young
man whose arm draped her shoulders. There was a faint family resemblance
between the two, something about the eyes and the set of each chin.
Fiddling with a cracked ballpoint pen, Jason sat back and
considered that resemblance. Emma St. Clair had suggested a sibling innocently
enough but Jason had a hunch she might be right. In fact, her suggestion touched
off a little alarm at the back of his head that shouted, “Pay attention!”
He tapped the pen against his desk and wondered if Emma’s
casual suggestion had risen from a similar instinctive alarm. Brian Reiser had
once told him that doctors relied on hunches as much as cops did. Emma St.
Clair struck him as sharp enough to be in tune with her more instinctive
nature. She certainly had the most intelligent eyes he’d ever seen. Intelligent
and sexy at the same time, those eyes seemed to peer right inside his brain,
find his libido and stroke it until—
Dropping the pen, Jason tried to force the beautiful medical
examiner out of his mind. She got in the way there far too often since he’d
left her in that restaurant yesterday. A major distraction was what she was.
Grabbing his computer keyboard, he dragged it forward. The
gold shield displayed in the center of the blue screen taunted him as he tried
to remember what combination of keystrokes would take him to the search option.
But memory failed him. He’d told Emma that Charlie wasn’t computer-literate but
the truth was, he was the one with the problem. During computer training
classes two years earlier, he’d been more interested in the stacked blonde
running the sessions than in learning the lessons.
He glanced at the phone. The system administrator, Janice,
didn’t usually get into the station until nine o’clock. She was probably still
in bed. But did that matter? It had been a while but she’d never minded him
waking her before.
Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine Janice lounging in her
king-sized bed. Instead, Emma’s face gazed up at him from those ice-blue satin
pillows in his mind, her auburn hair spilling in waves around her. The image so
startled him that his fingers twitched on the keyboard. The computer bleeped.
“Frick,” Jason muttered and darted a glare at his partner’s
empty desk. If Charlie would just get to work and give him a hand then he
wouldn’t be thinking about big beds and blondes who turned into redheads in his
mind.
Narrowing his eyes, he stared harder at the screen, as if
doing so would make the machine tell him the magic keystrokes. Instead, by the
time Charlie showed up five minutes later, Jason was about ready to toss the
computer out the window.
Leaning over Jason’s shoulder, Charlie squinted at the
screen and chuckled. “The great detective.” With one finger he thumped the “Invalid
Password” message displayed on the screen. “How long have you been trying?”
“Too long.” Jason’s jaw ached as he spoke through clenched
teeth. “If they’d let me use my birth date like I wanted—”
“Birth dates are the first thing hackers try when they break
into computer systems. Didn’t you pay attention in the systems security class
last year? Oh, I forgot. You were too busy trying to seduce the instructor. I’ll
use mine.” Reaching around Jason, Charlie quickly typed several letters.
Seconds later a list of inquiry options appeared on the screen.
Backing off, Charlie slid a cinnamon roll into the space
between Jason and the keyboard. “Maybe you forgot your password because you’re
busy mooning over our pretty medical examiner.”
“I wasn’t mooning over anyone,” Jason lied, avoiding Charlie’s
gaze. “Lots of people forget their passwords.”
As Charlie lifted another cinnamon roll out of a paper bag
on the desk, Jason could see that his partner didn’t believe him. He knew too,
that Charlie worried about him. Jason had tried not to obsess over his recent
losses. But it was tough to ignore a Fate that seemed determined to destroy
every close relationship in his life. Only his relationship with Charlie and the
man’s small family seemed immune. At least so far.
Shaking off that disturbing thought, he grabbed the pastry. “You
got something for me besides sugar and cholesterol?”
“I can’t give you a name but I can tell you that your hunch
was right. A man killed Ms. Campanero.”
“Fifty-fifty chance of being right on that one.” The
cinnamon roll and his own frustration with the computer enticed Jason enough to
leave the keyboard alone for a few minutes. “But how do you know for sure?”
Charlie reached inside his suit coat. “After much time and
effort, I found a boy in Ms. Campanero’s neighborhood who swears a man was
living with her at the time of her death.”
Jason raised an eyebrow. “A good, unmarried Catholic girl
like Amalia?”
“The boy thought we might be interested in the man so he
drew this.” Charlie dropped a sheet of lined school paper on the desk. Drawn in
pencil across the blue lines was a decent sketch of a man. “Take off a few
wrinkles, add a little hair and lift the mouth…”
“And he looks like this guy.” Jason placed the drawing
beside the shoebox photo. Excitement tickled his gut. “Your witness drew this?”
“He’s in the honors art class at Clear Harbor High School.”
“Convenient. Why does he think this man killed her?”
“The boy was selling raffle tickets around the neighborhood
for the art club three days ago. He said Senorita Campanero always supported
school projects, so he went by her place and saw this guy through a window.
Said he was arguing with her. It got so ugly, the kid ran off.”
“What are the odds that this guy is Amalia’s brother and
that he’s in the country illegally?”
Charlie pulled up a chair. “Move over and let’s find out.”
Jason slid aside, letting Charlie take his place at the
computer. The older man tapped a few keys and brought up a search screen, then
typed in the name “Campanero”. Several seconds passed before search results
appeared.
“Look at that one,” Charlie said, pointing to the last of
three displayed photographs on the computer screen.
Jason held the boy’s sketch and the old photo near the
screen image. His blood coursed a little faster. The similarities were too
close to ignore. “I think that’s him.”
Charlie clicked a couple of keys more to bring up detailed
information on the last photo.
Jason read the data. “Jaime Campanero. Citizen of Mexico.
Hmm. Looks like
Señor
Campanero makes frequent uninvited trips into our
country. Deported three times in the past seven years, arrested once for
running drugs. The only witness against him was found in a Houston alley with
half his face blown away. The drug charge was dropped and he was sent back to
Mexico again.”
“I’ll order the ballistics report on that murder and compare
it to what our people got on Amalia Campanero.” Charlie clapped Jason on the
back. “A good morning’s work, my friend.”
Yeah, any time they got a break made it a good morning.
Grinning, Jason gestured with his cinnamon roll. “What? You
couldn’t afford an espresso to go with this?”
* * * * *
Emma leaned her cheek against the knuckles of one hand and tried
to concentrate on the report on her desk. A stack of folders stood at her
elbow. Others waited in a basket on the credenza behind her. She had mountains
of work to do but her thoughts kept returning to what had happened in the
autopsy suite on Wednesday.
“Just your imagination,” she muttered for the hundredth time
and then lowered her damp hand to her lap. She’d seen her physician that
morning and he’d assured her that her head injury had not been severe enough to
cause hallucinations after nine weeks of recovery. She was stressed, he’d
determined and had prescribed a mild anti-anxiety pill to get her through this
tough time of returning to work. Emma hadn’t mentioned her ridiculous notion
about ghosts.
She hadn’t allowed herself to think about Jason MacKenzie
anymore, either. Not that certain thoughts didn’t try to intrude. But when she
was awake, she was more in control than when she was caught in the twilight
edge of sleep. That time when golden eyes and hard, masculine hands could
soothe away nightmares.
Taking a careful breath, she tried again to concentrate on
the report. The subject, a sixteen-year-old girl, had died of a heroin overdose
two weeks earlier. Judging from the attached crime scene photograph—the
position of the body on a rumpled bed, drug paraphernalia neatly arranged on
the nightstand—it had been a self-administered overdose. Tracks on the girl’s
arms were numerous, running from her wrists to her armpits, indicating
prolonged and regular drug abuse. Her problem couldn’t have been more apparent
if she’d stood on a street corner and announced it to the world.
Or stood in an autopsy suite and told one Associate Chief
Medical Examiner.
Turning the photo over, Emma sat back and closed her eyes.
She had not autopsied this body, had never seen the girl before opening the
folder. She would not allow herself to imagine that the girl’s spirit could
appear before her. The souls of the dead did not hang around after their bodies
expired. They did not appear to the living. They went on to…to…
Emma wasn’t sure where they went. Heaven. Hell. Some kind of
metaphysical limbo reached via a warm golden tunnel. Or maybe the dying just
dreamed themselves into oblivion.
It didn’t matter. She had imagined Amalia Campanero’s spirit
because she was stressed. She should accept that fact, move forward with her
work and be grateful that she had no post mortems scheduled for the rest of the
day.
She’d hoped that sitting on the sidelines for a couple of
days, doing paperwork, would help her forget what had happened on Wednesday.
But the image of Amalia Campanero continued to taunt her.
A chill shuddered through her. Opening her eyes, she sat
forward. “Get a grip,” she muttered and reached for the next page of the
report.
A shadow fell over her desk. “Talking to yourself?”
Emma looked up with a start. “Alan!”
Her ex-husband smiled at her from the other side of her
desk. “Hello, Emma.”
Rising, she clutched her hands over her stomach and tried to
calm her racing heart. She hadn’t seen Alan in months and certainly hadn’t expected
to experience this rush of emotion at seeing him again. But she was fragile
now, a victim of her own imagination and he’d always had the power to quicken
her pulse with his shimmering blue eyes and lean runner’s body. The fact that
she was already halfway to Nervous, USA only strengthened his effect today.
“I had business in town,” he said. “I wanted to know how you
were so I thought I’d see if you’re free for dinner.”
She forced her fingers to untwine, then reached out to close
the folder that lay open on her desk. Temptation teased her but she resisted. “I
don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” He stepped closer to the desk, bringing a scent
of spicy cologne with him. A lock of his blond hair fell forward over his
forehead. “Two old friends? What’s wrong with that?”
“We’re divorced, Alan, because you cheated on me.” Picking
up the folder, she held it in front of her thrumming heart like a shield. She
tried to remember how easily he had manipulated her emotions before. “I’d say
there was everything wrong with us having dinner together. And how did you get
up here anyway?”