Gallagher Justice

Justice is in her blood...

Fiona Gallagher hails from a long line of Chicago lawmen, and has fulfilled her heritage as a prosecutor, driven to put away the slime of the streets. But now she’s going head-to-head with the police force, on the trail of a cop gone bad…

Detective Ray Doggett is hell-bent on preventing Fiona from getting in too deep. The determined prosecutor has gotten too close to exposing the truth about the crime ring…and about him. Forcibly attracted to Fiona, he’d been sent undercover to investigate corruption—not fall in love. That is far too dangerous…for both of them.

Previously published.

Gallagher Justice

Amanda Stevens

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Also available from Amanda Stevens

Mira Books

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Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

CHAPTER ONE

IT WASN’T A NOISE THAT awakened Fiona Gallagher, but a scent. A sultry, provocative fragrance that carried a subtle note of sandalwood.

She tried to rouse herself to investigate, but the dream kept pulling her back under.

“You always smell so good.”

He tangled his hands in her hair. “How good?”

She looked up with a smile and then showed him. Heart pounding, Fiona bolted upright in bed, her frantic gaze searching the far recesses of the room. It was dark, but enough light filtered in from the street that she could make out all the corners, all the nooks and crannies.

Nothing stirred, not so much as a ghost. She was alone, safe and sound in her second-floor apartment protected from intruders by a series of locks and dead bolts her brother, Tony, had helped her install when she’d first moved in six years ago. No one could get in. She was fine.

Except...she wasn’t fine. She’d been dreaming about David again, dreaming she was still in love with him. That only happened these days when she was under a lot of stress.

The DeMarco case had brought back the nightmares, she thought wearily. As a prosecutor for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, Fiona had come face-to-face with evil before, more times than she cared to remember. But there was something about Vince DeMarco’s eyes... the way he looked at her...that sly smile...

There was something about him that reminded her of David.

Falling back against the pillows, she wiped a hand across her brow. Seven years since that night and David Mackenzie still had a hold on her, one so powerful that sometimes, during moments of weakness, she imagined his scent in her apartment. Heard his voice over her telephone. Saw his smile on every defendant.

Even fully awake now, she could still smell his cologne, but she knew it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. She and her therapist had hashed out her hallucinations a long time ago. “The scent is symbolic, Fiona. Not of David, but of your guilt.”

Her guilt smelled like sandalwood. Good to know.

Realizing she would never fall back asleep now, Fiona got up and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Pressing the towel against her skin, she studied her reflection in the mirror. Outwardly she looked the same as she always had, but deep inside, where all her dark secrets lay hidden, she’d undergone a drastic metamorphosis.

You can’t go through what you did and expect to walk away unchanged, Dr. Westfield had warned her.

She couldn’t expect to ever have a normal relationship again, either, but then, relationships were overrated in Fiona’s opinion. She had her cat, she had her career, she had HBO. What more did a girl need really?

Flipping off the light, she returned to her bedroom long enough to pull on a robe over her pajamas, then she padded on bare feet down the hallway to the living room. Her apartment was small, cramped and drafty, with lots of creaking floorboards and noisy water pipes, but Fiona didn’t mind. The quiet, once-elegant neighborhood on the Near North Side of Chicago with its well-kept lawns and shady streets more than made up for the inconveniences.

And it was a long way from Bridgeport, she reminded herself ruefully as she glanced out the window at the fog-shrouded street below her. Maybe not in miles, but in culture and attitude.

Her parents had grown up in the same blue-collar neighborhood on the South Side where they still lived in the same house they’d bought when they first married. They had the same neighbors, the same circle of acquaintances, the same values and expectations. They’d raised four kids in that neighborhood, and two of Fiona’s brothers had moved only a few blocks away from the family home.

By contrast, the ambitious, thirtysomething professionals who flocked to the renovated brownstones in Fiona’s neighborhood guarded their privacy like rabid rottweilers. She had a nodding acquaintance with only a handful, knew even fewer by name. Like her, most of them came home late—briefcase in one hand, cell phone clutched in the other—to close themselves off from the rest of the world until it was time again to rush off to work the next morning.

There were hardly any families in the neighborhood, no children playing on the stoops. The streets were sometimes almost unnaturally quiet, and if this deepened Fiona’s sense of isolation and the occasional bout of loneliness, well, there was also no one there who knew about David. No one to look out their front window when she drove home each night to shake their heads and wonder how such a nice girl like Fiona Gallagher, someone with her brains and education, the daughter of a cop, no less, could have fallen in love with a killer.

In their own way, though, they were still proud of Fiona in the old neighborhood. She was a rising star in the State’s Attorney’s office, a tough, bare-knuckles prosecutor who fought crime just as ferociously as she battled her inner demons. In the past six years, she’d won every major case, including a high-profile murder trial that had put her on the radar of Chicago politics.

Fiona had been so ruthless in her cross-examination of the defendant, a well-known businessman, that a reporter from one of the local papers had dubbed her the Iron Maiden, the prosecutor who wasn’t afraid to take on anyone, including the rich, powerful and politically connected.

“No one is above the law,” she’d been quoted in the papers, and if she and her brother, Tony, were the only ones who could fully appreciate the irony of her motto, that was just the way it had to be, Fiona had long ago decided.

Turning from the window, she walked over to the small dining table she used as a desk and surveyed the usual mess: an empty Diet Coke can, a greasy paper plate with a half-eaten slice of pizza, stacks of files, police reports and a yellow legal pad with a blank sheet of paper staring up at her.

She’d been working on the closing argument for the DeMarco case when she’d staggered off to bed just after midnight. Staring at the blank page now, Fiona frowned. She hadn’t made much progress earlier, and she knew why. She was nervous about this case. Nervous in a way she hadn’t been in years.

It was a rape case, for one thing, and, aside from the fact that she’d worked almost exclusively on homicides for the last four years, rape cases were notoriously unpredictable. In this instance, there wasn’t even DNA evidence to corroborate the woman’s testimony. Vincent DeMarco had used a condom. He was also a cop, a veteran detective who worked under Frank Quinlan’s command.

Quinlan was one of those clout-heavy cops who was virtually untouchable. Fiona had found out just how well connected he was when she’d cooperated with an Internal Affairs investigation into Quinlan’s interrogation methods.

A man she’d successfully prosecuted for murder, who was currently serving a life sentence at Stateville, had brought a lawsuit against the police department alleging that Quinlan and some of the detectives under his command, including DeMarco, had forced his confession by using physical and verbal intimidation, i.e. torture.

Fiona had been outraged. She always set out to win in the courtroom, but the last thing she wanted was to send an innocent man to prison or have a legitimate conviction overturned because of sloppy investigative work or police misconduct. It reflected badly on her and on the office of the state’s attorney, and she took the allegations personally.

Eventually the lawsuit was dropped, and Quinlan was exonerated by a police review board. But to this day, he carried a fierce grudge against Fiona. He’d refused to cooperate with her in the DeMarco investigation, partly out of loyalty to one of his own cops, but mostly, Fiona suspected, because he wanted to see her fall flat on her face.

A possibility that seemed more likely with each passing day. The case wasn’t going well and Fiona knew it.

She stared at the blank page for another moment, then jotted down the first statistic that came to her mind. One out of every three women in this country will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. One out of every three...

When the phone rang, she continued to write as she automatically reached behind her for the cordless unit on the counter. Then her hand froze as she realized the time. It was after two o’clock in the morning. No good news came after two o’clock in the morning.

“Hello?”

“Fiona? It’s Guy Hardison.”

At the sound of her boss’s voice, Fiona frowned. “Do you have any idea what time it is? What’s going on?”

“I just heard from Clare Fox,” he said referring to the police department’s deputy chief of detectives for the North Side. “We’ve got a problem. Could be a big one.” The smooth, polished timbre of his voice always took Fiona by surprise. Like her, he’d been raised in Bridgeport, but any trace of the stockyards had long since been stripped from his speech.

He was Fiona’s immediate supervisor in the Homicide/Sex Crimes Unit and over the years, the two of them had managed to hammer out a fairly congenial working relationship in spite of their sometimes huge philosophical differences. Guy was a shrewd, ambitious prosecutor who’d long ago mastered the art of political expediency and compromise. Fiona had not. Her passion for justice was only equaled by her temper and by her natural inclination to leap before she looked, a tendency that almost always landed her in hot water.

“A woman’s body was found in an alley at the corner of Bleaker and Radney tonight,” Guy continued. “Looks like a professional hit, and if it is, the press will have a field day. It’s just the kind of thing some ambitious reporter would love to sink his teeth into, particularly considering the latest headlines.”

He was alluding to a recent Justice Department report that showed Chicago moving ahead of New York in the number of murders per year. The crime statistics had made the front page of all the local papers, and the mayor, facing reelection in a few months, was livid.

“The police department is taking a lot of heat from both the mayor and the press.” Guy’s voice sounded tense, as if he might be catching some of the flak himself. “Clare wants to make sure this one is handled strictly by the book. No mistakes. No one walks on a technicality. She’s asked for an ASA on the scene to advise.”

He paused. “I’m assigning you as lead prosecutor, Fiona. You’ve got credibility with the press right now, and they like you. Plus, another capital murder conviction under your belt could make certain people sit up and take notice.”

Fiona wondered if he was throwing her a bone after the DeMarco case debacle, or if he had an ulterior motive up his sleeve. “You said Radney and Bleaker, right? That’s Area Three.” Frank Quinlan’s territory.

“You’re not afraid of Frank Quinlan, are you, Fiona?” His voice held the merest hint of a challenge, one he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist.

She scowled. “Hardly.” She’d proved that, hadn’t she?

“Then get over there and make sure his detectives don’t screw up the investigation before they even make an arrest. Take Milo with you.”

Milo Cherry was Fiona’s second chair. He was a young, eager prosecutor with a quirky sense of humor and a nearly photographic memory.

After several tries, Fiona finally managed to reach him on his cell phone. She could hear music and laughter in the background, and assumed he was at a late-night party or nightclub, which surprised her, considering they were due in court at nine that morning. But as long as he did his job, came through in a crunch, his social life was none of Fiona’s concern. And he certainly didn’t seem to mind being summoned at such an ungodly hour. He readily agreed to pick her up in ten minutes.

Fiona hurried to get dressed, and in the flurry of activity, she completely forgot about the nightmare that had awakened her earlier. But on her way out, the dream came back to her suddenly and she paused at the door, the uneasy notion that David Mackenzie’s ghost might be lurking on the other side niggling at her confidence.

For one brief moment, she couldn’t bring herself to turn the dead bolt, to step into the dimly lit hallway, to go downstairs and wait for Milo by the front door. She couldn’t seem to move at all.

This was crazy, she told herself firmly. David Mackenzie was dead. It wasn’t his cologne she smelled in her apartment. He wasn’t the killer who had dumped that poor woman’s body in an alley. David was dead and buried, and he wasn’t coming back.

But as Fiona mustered her resolve and stepped out into the hallway, something made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

For one split second, she could have sworn she felt an invisible presence in that hallway. A ghost from her past that had risen from the grave to demand justice.

CHAPTER TWO

THE MURDER OF RAY DOGGETT’S first wife had haunted him for twenty years, but it had been on his mind more than ever lately. She’d been on his mind. He didn’t know why, but he’d been remembering little things about Ruby that he hadn’t thought of in years. Things she’d said. The way she dressed. Her smile. He’d been dreaming about her, too, and obsessing about the murder.

That was why Frank Quinlan’s call earlier had hit him so hard. “...a body found in the north alley of Bleaker and Radney. Young, female Caucasian. Get your ass over there, Doggett. Sounds like a bad one.”

In all the years Doggett had been with the Chicago PD, he’d seen his share of homicides. He’d seen some he knew he would never forget. But it wasn’t another young woman’s death that was eating at him tonight so much as the fact that her body had been found in an alley. That brought back memories.

Ruby’s body had been left in an alley, too. She’d been missing for three days when they found her.

The call had come in from dispatch just after midnight, Doggett remembered. He and his partner, Joe Murphy, had the third watch that night and they responded to the call immediately. But by the time they arrived, another squad car was already on the scene. Murphy got out and headed down the alley, but instead of following him, Doggett walked slowly toward the street. He’d spotted something beneath one of the streetlights.

He recognized the shoe at once. A red high heel trimmed with ruby rhinestones. The kind of shoe an unsophisticated farm girl from Indiana might think was glamorous.

“Look, Ray! Aren’t they beautiful? Don’t you just love them? They’re my ruby slippers. Get it? Ruby’s slippers...”

Doggett turned and started running toward the alley. Murphy met him halfway down, grabbed his arm, threw him up against the wall when Doggett fought him.

“Take it easy, kid.”

“Let go of me, Murphy. Let go of me, damn you. It’s Ruby.”

“I know.”

Doggett closed his eyes. He’d been praying he was wrong, but Murphy’s words confirmed his darkest fear. “I have to see her. I have to see for myself—”

“No, you don’t. You don’t need to see her like that.”

“Let go of me, damn it!”

When Doggett tried to fight his way free, Murphy strong-armed him again. “You can’t go down there. You hear me? It’s bad, kid. Blood all over the place. You don’t want to look. That’s not the way you want to remember her.”

But that was exactly the way Doggett had remembered her for months after her death. He couldn’t seem to remember her any other way. He hadn’t viewed the body at the crime scene, or even later at the morgue, but he’d witnessed enough crime scenes to imagine the blood-splattered clothing, the vacant, staring eyes.

Twenty years later, that image was still with him, at every crime scene, in every investigation. The knowledge that her killer was out there, unpunished and unrepentant, still kept him awake at night.

Maybe he was getting old, Doggett reflected. Dwelling on the past because his life hadn’t turned out the way he wanted. But to hell with it, because now he had another murder to worry about, another killer to find. That was one thing about being a cop. Always plenty of bad guys out there to occupy his mind.

He pulled to the curb and parked behind one of the squad cars. The dense fog softened the flashing lights, and at such an early hour, the scene was still relatively quiet. No spectators to be kept at bay. No news cameras, yet. It was an almost surreal calm, as if he were still caught in one of his dreams, Doggett thought. But when he got out of his car, the scratchy transmission of a squad unit radio grounded him firmly back in reality.

He followed voices down the alley, showing his identification to the young patrolman manning the perimeter. Then he stepped under the crime scene tape and glanced around.

The buildings that rose on either side of the alley were several stories high, stark and graffiti-tagged, with only a few windows that overlooked the alley. Several blocks over on Rush Street, bars and clubs would still be rocking with the young and the hip who were looking to have a good time or score a few drugs, but the immediate crime scene vicinity was a no-man’s-land, an area trapped between the affluence and glamour of the Gold Coast and the misery and desperation of the projects.

Most of the buildings housed small offices and mom-and-pop businesses that had closed up shop hours ago. Even the cleaning crews had long since gone home. The potential for witnesses was pretty much nil. Doggett wondered if the killer was familiar enough with the area to have planned it that way, or if he’d just gotten lucky.

A few feet from where he stood, a crime scene tech photographed the body from several different angles while another narrated as he videotaped. Deeper inside the alley, flashlight beams bobbed up and down as officers searched the ground for evidence.

The victim laying in front of a trash bin, but in the semicircle of officers and detectives that had formed around the dead woman, Doggett could see nothing but a spill of blond hair. He felt his gut tighten as he mentally braced himself for what else he might see.

Meredith Sweeney, a petite, dark-haired assistant medical examiner, glanced up as he approached, and when she nodded, two detectives from Doggett’s unit, Jay Krychek and Skip Vreeland, glanced over their shoulders. Krychek immediately turned back to the body, but Skip nodded and spoke. He was a tall, thin man with a grim expression and stooped, narrow shoulders that made his rumpled suit jackets constantly ride up in the back.

Krychek was partial to the gangster look—dark shirts, light ties, and in the daytime, he was never seen without his badass cop sunglasses.

“Yo, Doggett, how’s it going?” Skip greeted him.

“Not too bad.”

Krychek turned back around to Doggett. “Took your sweet time getting here.”

Doggett shrugged. “Fog’s a bitch out there.”

“Tell me about it. Playing hell with Forensics. They won’t be able to find shit out here.” Krychek stepped back, making room for Doggett. “Take a look.”

“It’s bad, kid. Blood all over the place. You don’t want to look.”

The woman was lying on her back, eyes closed, her expression almost peaceful. To Doggett’s surprise, there really wasn’t much blood. On first glance, she appeared to be sleeping, but someone who looked like her wouldn’t be snoozing in an alley. She was beautiful, a real knockout. Blond. Young. No more than twenty, if that.

Damn shame, Doggett thought.

There was a dark stain on the pavement beneath her head, and her hair was matted with dried blood. She wore a light dusting of makeup—eye shadow, mascara, pale pink lip gloss—that didn’t detract from her natural beauty. The black dress she wore was short and slinky, her shoes spiked and sexy. Expensive and seductive clothing designed to attract the attention of the opposite sex.

By contrast her jewelry was simple and unpretentious—tiny diamond studs in her earlobes and a pearl ring on the third finger of her right hand. The presence of the jewelry seemed to rule out robbery as a motive.

“She was shot in the back of the head,” Krychek told him.

“Do we know who she is?” Doggett asked.

Krychek shook his head. “Not yet. CSU found an evening bag in the Dumpster that we think belonged to her. The wallet was missing, but they found a phone number scribbled on a piece of paper inside a gold compact. We’re checking the cross directory now to see if we can come up with a name.”