Dangerous Liaisons

Chapter 2

He shouldn’t have danced with her. Shouldn’t have touched her, shouldn’t have stroked his thumb across her wrist.

Jake scrubbed a hand across his face. Over a week had dragged by since Bill and Whitney’s wedding. Over a week. He had lost track of how many times he’d berated himself on the subject of Nicole Taylor. Even now, his mind kept wandering out of the parked detective cruiser in which he sat and back to the hotel’s glittering ballroom. To the heady feel of her in his arms. To her tempting scent.

To her.

“Dammit!” Setting his jaw, he pushed away the maddening thoughts and focused his mind. He stared out the windshield at the decrepit brick apartment building that looked like a hulking mammoth on the dark, weed-infested lawn. A bare bulb glowed above the building’s crumbling cement porch, sending weak rays into the moonless night. His most reliable snitch had sworn that the girlfriend of Ramon Cárdenas, primary suspect in the drive-by homicide of seven-year-old Enrique Quintero, planned to show up at the apartment building sometime tonight.

Jake had been on the stakeout since sundown. So far, no girlfriend.

He had the cruiser’s windows open; the heat of late September hung heavy in the still night air. In the distance, traffic rumbled along the interstate that cut a swath through downtown. Several houses away, a dog broke into a flurry of barks, ending when a gruff male shout splintered the air. The police radio in the cruiser’s dash crackled softly, the dispatcher sounding as if he were speaking a foreign language.

As if on automatic pilot, Jake’s brain processed the garbled information, which included a female patrol officer notifying dispatch of a Signal 7 at Stonebridge, a swanky gated housing community in the far northwest part of the city. A Signal 7 meant a dead body. One of the Holy Grails of police work was that an unexplained death got treated as a murder right from the start. If his name had headed Homicide’s list to take the next call, Jake would have responded. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch, knowing that the team of detectives pulling night shift this month would head to the scene in a matter of minutes.

Settling down in his seat, he swallowed the last dregs of his convenience-store coffee, then tossed the foam cup over his shoulder. He gave an unconcerned glance at the back seat, littered with the wadded sacks and empty cups from that week’s take-out meals. He had a few days before Whitney got back from her honeymoon—he would shovel out the cruiser before then.

With the bitter taste of coffee still on his tongue, his hand automatically went to the pocket of his chambray shirt, found it empty. He scowled. Dammit, he hadn’t smoked in two months, five days and seven hours. When the hell was he going to stop reaching for the pack of cigarettes that wasn’t there?

Smoking was the least of the things he missed, Jake reminded himself, his mood turning as dark as the night around him. He couldn’t quite forget the bite of aged Scotch. Or the heady feel of a woman. A soft woman with stunning blue eyes. A woman who smelled good enough to make a man wonder how it would feel to have her move beneath him in the dark.

A woman like Nicole Taylor.

He exhaled a slow breath. He could still feel the way her pulse had spiked beneath his thumb. After that, it had taken all of his control not to press his mouth to that soft place on her wrist and find out if she tasted as good as she looked.

Doing that would have only compounded the already idiotic move he’d made when he’d slicked his thumb across her flesh. He didn’t want to start something he knew didn’t have a chance in hell of going anywhere. Didn’t want to sample what he couldn’t allow himself to have.

Yet, because he’d given in to the impulse to hold on to her longer than he should have, he couldn’t forget the gratifying stutter his touch had put in her pulse.

That memory wasn’t the only thing giving him trouble.

Until that night, all he’d wanted was to rid himself of the clawing dream that dragged him to that second in time when a bomb ignited and ripped apart his world. The dream had faded the past several nights, just as the police psychologist had assured him it would. Problem was, his subconscious had replaced that dream with one of Nicole. A dream that, in one way, was far more disconcerting because there was no therapy for it. No way to talk the woman out of his head, no logical way of ridding his system of her.

She was there. Inside him. All of his instincts told him he was going to have one hell of a time shaking her presence. But shake her, he would.

He had learned the hard way that what fate tossed out was not always kind. Learned in the most horrific way how fast a person’s life could change. How, in a slash of time, happiness could transform into grief. Numbing, ceaseless grief.

Before he could switch off his thoughts, he saw again the memorial service crowded with relatives, friends and cops, where music drifted and the cloying scent of roses hung in the air. There had been no caskets—there couldn’t be, not when jagged shards of the plane’s fuselage were all that had been left floating in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d bought one cemetery plot, stood alone in grim silence while a granite headstone with the names of his wife and twin daughters was positioned at the head of the empty grave. He hadn’t gone back to the cemetery since that day.

With the memories closing in on him, Jake rubbed the heel of his hand over his heart. Never again. Never again would he leave himself wide open for fate to deliver another staggering blow. For that reason, there was no room in his life for Nicole Taylor, or any other woman.

The sudden ring of his cell phone cut through the still night air, jolting him from his thoughts. Jake clicked the unit on, said his name.

“It’s Ryan.”

“What’s up, boss?”

“Any luck on the surveillance?”

Lifting a brow, Jake propped his elbow in the door’s open window. Lieutenant Michael Ryan didn’t usually call to check on the status of a stakeout. “Negative. I plan on giving it another couple of hours for Cárdenas’s girlfriend to show. Unless you’ve got something else you need me on.”

“That’s why I called. I want you to take the Signal 7 that dispatch put out about ten minutes ago,” Ryan stated, then gave the location that had been broadcast on the radio.

“I heard the uniform call it in.”

With a habit he’d picked up from a veteran street cop when he was a fresh-out-of-the-academy rookie, Jake grabbed a pen off the dash, angled his hand to catch the pale wash of a streetlight, then jotted the address on his left palm. “Any reason you don’t want Gianos and Smith on it?” he asked, referring to the detectives pulling night shift that month.

“It’s not that I don’t want them on it,” Ryan commented. “In fact, Gianos gave me a call from the scene—he and Smith were wrapping up an interview a couple of miles from there when the call came out. After Gianos got ID on the woman who found the guy’s body, he figured he’d better give me a heads-up. He was right. Taking that into consideration, I think it’d be best to put you on this one. Since you’re without a partner while Whitney’s on her honeymoon, Gianos and Smith can give you a hand with follow-up interviews and paperwork if you need help.”

“Okay.” Jake glanced across the street at the apartment building that seemed to breathe neglect. He wouldn’t get a lead on Cárdenas tonight, but he would get the bastard. He’d made that promise to himself and to little Enrique Quintero’s grieving mother. Jake knew too well what it felt like to lose a child.

“So, Lieutenant, who’s the woman who found the body?” he asked as he switched on the cruiser’s ignition.

“Your partner’s new sister-in-law, Nicole Taylor.”

Jake began to swear, slowly, steadily, as he stomped the accelerator and the cruiser shot from the curb.

Fifteen minutes after he’d hung up from talking to his boss, Jake pulled to a stop in a pool of light at the wrought-iron gate that blocked the entrance to the exclusive housing community. To his left sat a tidy security building; to his right, small spotlights hidden in manicured shrubs illuminated a brick wall with Stonebridge in flowing brass script.

He tugged his gold badge off the waistband of his faded jeans. “Sergeant Jake Ford,” he said, flashing the badge at the guard on duty inside the building. While the guard logged him in, Jake noted the nearby panel of buttons where visitors could contact one of the residents to get buzzed through the gate if the guard wasn’t around.

Inching the cruiser forward, Jake waited while the gate drifted open on silent gears. On the far side of the gate sat several sprawling houses, outlined in the glow of gas lamps that lined the street like rows of tiny moons. Even at night, the houses all looked massive. About one hundred times too massive for a cop’s salary, Jake decided as he steered the cruiser through the entrance and along the well-lit street.

After checking the address he’d inked on his palm, he turned a corner. The pulse of a blue-and-red strobe from the scout car parked in a circular driveway had him bearing down on the accelerator.

The house beyond the driveway was brick, and as immense as the others in the neighborhood. Jake figured if the stiff owned the house where his body had wound up, he was a very rich stiff.

Seconds later, Jake inched the cruiser past the medical examiner’s black station wagon. He parked behind the lab’s crime scene van, then climbed out. As he reclipped his badge onto his waistband beside his holstered Glock, the night air settled around him, still and gauzy, full of humidity.

Yellow tape had been strung from the house’s columned front porch to manicured shrubbery, then fanned out to loop around two of the matching gas street lamps. From the back seat of the scout car that sat idling in the driveway, Jake caught the glint of light off golden-blond hair.

Nicole.

While he ducked beneath a stretch of crime scene tape, it registered in his brain that the last thing he expected to feel when he saw her was pleasure. As if sensing his presence, she turned her head, her gaze meeting his through the scout car’s back window. The stress in her eyes tightened Jake’s throat, had him hesitating with an inexplicable need to go to her, to comfort. He set his jaw. She had found a dead body—whether it was a homicide or a natural death, proper procedure was for him to get the facts from those already working on-site, then view the body himself before he talked to any witness. Doing that gave the investigator a better idea of what questions to ask. And an edge on knowing if a witness was lying, which happened a lot during homicide investigations.

“Evening, Sergeant.”

Jake turned, relieved to have his attention pulled from Nicole to the female officer who approached him. She looked on the official side with her blond hair pulled back from her earnest face and a silver clipboard in one hand.

“Evening.” The first time he’d worked with the patrol officer was at a scene a couple of weeks ago, and her name had slipped his mind. He checked the brass tag above the right pocket of her gray uniform shirt: C. O. Jones.

“Jones,” he added. With more than a little effort, he kept his gaze off the scout car where Nicole sat. “You responded to the initial call, right?” he asked, remembering that it had been a female officer who’d called in the Signal 7.

“Affirmative.” The red-blue lights from the scout car winked in rhythm as she jotted his name on the crime scene log.

“Who’s the victim?”

“Man by the name of Phillip Ormiston.”

Jake arched a brow. “Of Ormiston Funeral Home fame?”

“The same. He owns the entire chain.”

“Any idea yet on cause of death?”

“The M.E.’s assistant is inside checking the body, but I haven’t heard anything for sure. To me, it looked like Ormiston just dropped dead in his entry hall. No blood, no sign of trauma that I could see. According to one of the neighbors, Ormiston was into fitness. He jogged around the neighborhood and played racquetball a couple nights a week at a gym called Sebastian’s.”

“Maybe Ormiston’s biorhythms took a dive into a negative zone,” Jake muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” He moved his gaze to the scout car. Nicole’s back was to him now, her gaze glued to the house’s open front door. While he watched her, she raised her left hand and slowly curled her fingers through the metal security screen that kept the person in the back seat separated from the officer in front. For some reason he could not fathom, Jake’s chest tightened at the thought of her being caged inside the black-and-white.

“That’s who found Ormiston’s body,” Jones said, her gaze following his. “Her name’s Taylor. Nicole Taylor.”

“Yeah.” He remet the officer’s gaze. Jones had done things by the book—she’d checked the scene, secured it, then put the person who discovered the body in her scout car while she advised dispatch to contact Homicide.

He also had procedure to follow, Jake reminded himself when he again felt the pull to walk over and open the car’s back door. Right now, it was his job to find out what Nicole had already told the officer on the scene.

He nodded in the direction of a sleek red Jaguar parked in the circular drive. “Is that Miss Taylor’s?”

“Yes. The registration checks to her.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That Ormiston is a widower and a client of the dating service she owns.” As she spoke, Jones pulled a business card off her clipboard and handed it to Jake. He glanced down, saw it was identical to the card Nicole had tried to slide into his pocket while they danced. The remembered feel of her warm flesh beneath his palm rose in his brain like a seductive phantom.

“Can you imagine a man with Ormiston’s money needing to hire somebody to find him a date?” Jones asked.

Frowning, Jake jabbed the card into his shirt pocket while picturing again the way Nicole had worked the crowd at the wedding. It wouldn’t surprise him to find out that some of the men who signed with her company hoped to get a date with her.

“What does she say about her relationship with Ormiston?”

“She claims their association was purely business.”

When Jake realized he felt stupidly pleased, he scowled. Any other woman, he thought, shoving his fingers through his hair. Why the hell couldn’t it have been anyone else on earth sitting in the back of that scout car instead of the woman who’d crowded his thoughts for days? And nights. At this point, the best he could hope for was that Phillip Ormiston had dropped dead from a nice, tidy aneurism.

“What reason did Miss Taylor give for being here?” he asked.

“She said Ormiston didn’t phone her with a report on the last date he’d had through her service. That’s apparently a standard thing for clients to do. He also hadn’t shown up tonight at the gym for his scheduled racquetball game. When he didn’t answer his phone, Taylor says she got worried and decided to stop on her way home to check on him. She referred to it as an extension of the customer service she offers her clients.”

Jake looped his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans. “How did she get in the house?”

“She said she didn’t realize the front door was only partially closed until she knocked. When she did, it swung open. She walked in, saw Ormiston lying on the far side of the entry.” Jones paused. “She touched the body.”

Jake expelled a muffled curse. “Why?”

“She said she thought he’d maybe fallen and hit his head, that he was unconscious.” Jones glanced toward the house. “The way he’s lying there, I can see how she’d think that.”

“If Ormiston was dead, he couldn’t have buzzed her through the security gate. Did she say how she got in?”

“No. If you need me to, I can check with the guard to see if he let her in. And if so, why he did without authorization from the person she was visiting.”

“Do that. Also find out if Ormiston had any other visitors tonight. Any idea who the victim’s next of kin is?”

“Ormiston’s a widower, with one son who lives a couple of miles from here. The neighbor I talked to is getting his address so we can make the death notification.” Jones angled her chin. “You want me to do that, or will you?”

“I’ll do it after I’m through here.” Jake looked back at the scout car. Nicole’s gaze had not moved from the house’s front door; her fingers were still threaded through the security screen. His stomach tightened. Dammit, she wasn’t under arrest, he knew that. She wasn’t a suspect. She was a witness, waiting to be interviewed. Maybe, he thought ruthlessly, his reaction to seeing her caged was because it hadn’t been that long since he’d been locked in a cell, charged with eight counts of murder.

“I need to have a look at the body,” he grated. Turning, he stalked across the pristine lawn toward the house while Jones took two strides to his one to keep up. “While I’m inside, Jones, I want you to do something.”

“What’s that, Sergeant?”

Jake paused at the brick steps that led up to a porch lined by tall, fluted columns. “Move Miss Taylor to my cruiser.”

“To your cruiser?”

He wanted Nicole out of that cage; he wasn’t going to waste breath trying to explain why when he didn’t understand it himself. “That’s right, Jones, to my cruiser. Think you can handle that?”

“Sure thing, Sergeant.”

“Tell her I’ll talk to her as soon as I get done inside.”

Jake took the steps two at a time. As he strode across the porch, he toyed with the seeds of suspicion that, when it came to Nicole Taylor, he was destined to act like an idiot.

When he walked through the wide front door, he saw the usual contingent of forensic people milling in the foyer. Opposite the door, a curving staircase of gleaming oak swept up to the second floor. The sight of Phillip Ormiston’s body lying facedown at the base of the staircase centered Jake’s thoughts on business.

He recognized the man crouched beside the body as Zack Upchurch, the M.E.’s assistant.

“Evening, Zack. What can you tell me?”

“Evening, Sarge.” The man used his tongue to nudge a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Not a whole lot at this point.”

Jake nodded. No matter what time of the day or night he ran into Upchurch, the man’s brown hair was always standing in spikes, as if he’d come to whatever scene he’d been called to directly from bed.

“Any idea of time of death?” Jake persisted.

“Twelve hours, give or take.” The surgeon’s gloves Up-church wore gave his hands a grayish hue that matched the dead man’s face. “Have to wait until we get him on the table to give you a better idea.”

A flash of light to his left had Jake turning his head. Beyond an arched doorway, a lab tech wearing a blue jumpsuit snapped pictures in a living room with paneled walls, acres of matching upholstered furniture and a shiny hardwood floor.

Detective Wes Gianos, a tall, swarthy man, stood near the room’s green marble fireplace, talking into a cell phone. When he saw Jake, he raised a hand.

“Ford just got here,” Gianos said into the phone as he walked across the expansive tapestry rug toward the entryway. “Smith and I will head there in a few minutes.”

“Got another call?” Jake asked as Gianos clicked off his phone and slid it into the pocket of his suit coat.

“This one’s on the east side. Got two DRTs,” he said, using cop shorthand for victims who were dead right there. “One shot, one stabbed. Sounds like the Gun and Knife Club is hard at work.” Gianos nodded toward the staircase. “Meet Phillip Ormiston. Did the uniform outside bring you up to speed?”

“Yes. Any sign of a struggle in the house?”

“No. Smith and I also checked for signs of forced entry on the doors and windows. Didn’t find anything.”

“Any drugs around?”

“Negative.”

Jake stepped forward. Leaning in, he examined the body, making sure not to touch anything that would get the forensic types all bent out of shape.

Dressed in a tan linen shirt, dark slacks and leather loafers, Ormiston looked as though he’d lain down on the marble floor to take a nap. His dark hair, fading to gray at the temples, lay sleek against his head. Beneath the spill of light from a crystal chandelier, a diamond winked from the ring on his left pinkie finger; a thick gold bracelet circled his wrist.

Jake figured he could mark robbery off the list of motives if it turned out someone had killed the man.

He met Upchurch’s gaze. “Any sign of trauma?”

“None that I’ve seen so far. Nothing visible on his neck. No defense wounds on either hand. This guy’s big and has the look of someone who works out, so it’s not like he couldn’t have fought back.” The M.E.’s assistant rose. “I’ll get a sheet from my station wagon, then turn him over. Maybe we’ll find something on the front of him, but I’m not wagering money on that.”

Gianos waited until Upchurch went out the front door, then looked at Jake. “Since Ryan wants you on this case, I didn’t question Nicole Taylor. Figured you ought to handle that.”

“Not a problem.”

“There’s something you need to check in the kitchen before you talk to her.” As he spoke, Gianos aimed his thumb across one shoulder in the direction of a brightly lit hallway that led toward the rear of the house.

“What’s that?”

“There’s a basket from a bakery on the counter, partially filled with muffins. A couple of empty wrappers are inside, so you’ve got to figure Ormiston sampled a few.”

Jake furrowed his brow while his mind fell into sync with Gianos’s thoughts. They had a healthy-looking man with no sign of trauma who seemed to have dropped dead while walking across his entry hall. “You saying you think he was poisoned?”

“I think I don’t know what to think.” Gianos shrugged. “Look, I know Nicole Taylor is Whitney’s new sister-in-law and her brother Bill is the number two man in the D.A.’s office.”

Mentally, Jake missed a step. “What’s that got to do with Ormiston maybe getting poisoned?”

“Could mean nothing…or something. All I know is there’s a card with Nicole Taylor’s name on it tied to the muffin basket.”