Crazy Cool (13 page)

She let out a heavy sigh and buried her face back in her hands—and just sat there, for a long time, without saying a word.

“I’m having a hard time connecting the dots,” she finally said, looking up. “Fireworks, maybe some ruined paintings, my tiara, those pictures, a piece of my dress . . . you. What’s the point of all of it?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“But you think we’ve got a perverted pyromaniac photographer on the loose, and you’ve already narrowed the suspects down to the seven Prom King guys?” She dragged one of her hands back through her hair. She only got partway before her fingers got caught in the tangles. Working her fingers free, she gave up on her hair and continued. “Most of whom I don’t ever want to see again. So your answer is no. I won’t be calling a bunch of guys who I thought were my friends, but who turned out to be terrible jerks, and asking them out for double cappuccinos. I don’t care how drunk they were. I don’t care that charges were never filed against them. Also, with you in control here and the police on the case, and Alex waiting for me at home, I don’t see much need for a bodyguard, either, thank you very much. So if we can just call this quits, and call me a cab, and get me back to Toussi’s before my mother gets there, or to a hotel, if she’s already in residence, that would be great. I’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

“Six,” he said, figuring it was now or never.

“Six what?” she asked after a short pause, her gaze narrowing the slightest bit.

“There are only six suspects, six Prom King boys left. Ted Garraty was killed last night at the Botanic Gardens. Murdered.”

The dumbfounded shock on her face made him feel like the world’s biggest jerk. She’d had to be told, and he’d put it off long enough, but there had probably been a better way. He just didn’t know what it could have been.

“Ted was—was murdered?” she finally choked out.

“A clean hit.”

She stared at him for the longest moment, a dozen emotions crossing her face, each of them fleeting, each of them bounded by confusion and disbelief.

“I think,” she finally said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

C
HAPTER

13

W
ELL, THAT HADN’T
gone too badly, he thought. Now she knew the worst of it, knew she was in serious trouble, knew she couldn’t just walk away, knew she was stuck with him—and it had made her lose her toast, and her tea, and everything else she’d had in her stomach.

She’d kicked him out of the bathroom—he checked his watch—approximately one hour and ten minutes ago, which he would have found nearly unbelievable, except he knew all about her and bathrooms. They were her favorite place. They’d practically lived in the bathroom at the Brown Palace. It was where they’d showered, and made love, and where he’d watched her dry her hair, and lotion her legs, and pretty much all-around drive him crazy.

About ten minutes after she’d thrown him out, he shoved a suitcase full of her things and her purse in for her. She assumed her secretary had sent them over, and he hadn’t had the heart to tell her Alex didn’t have a clue where she was, and that he’d simply gone back to Toussi’s last night and gotten all the stuff himself, without her secretary/bodyguard noticing he’d broken in and was basically robbing the place—one more reason he’d be damned if he left her with only Alex Zheng between her and whoever was behind this mess.

It wasn’t that her secretary was completely incompetent. Hawkins had broken into far more secure places than a fifth-floor apartment in a run-down building. Between the two of them, he and Dylan had “tested the security” at two nuclear power stations and half a dozen high-risk overseas U.S. Air Force, Army, and naval bases for the home team. When it came to bad guys, they’d pillaged and looted their way through corporate offices, foreign embassies, private compounds, and public estates without ever leaving a trace.

The sound of a door opening at the far end of the loft brought his head up. She was coming out of the bathroom. Or so he thought. Nothing else happened for the next few seconds, except he slowly rose to his feet from where he’d been sitting in a chair by the fire.

He wasn’t sure what he expected, but when she finally walked through the door, he knew he’d just been outclassed, outgunned, and kicked back down to the minors. All he could do was stand there and remember to keep his jaw off the floor.

This was it. This is what she’d done to him thirty days in a row, every single day without fail, all those years ago. She would go into the bathroom looking mussed, and tumbled, and warm from bed, looking imminently edible and like she was his—and she’d come out an hour later dressed to kill, like he couldn’t have her on his best day, even if he won the lottery, saved the world, and was proclaimed King.

It had intimidated the hell out of him at nineteen. At thirty-three, he liked it. He liked it a lot. He liked the challenge of it: all that perfectly blown-dry, silky, “don’t touch me” hair, the mouth he knew she’d spent five minutes putting lipstick on, the soft skin a guy was supposed to touch, but not too much.

And the dress. So help him God, he’d thought it was a shirt when he grabbed it out of her closet and threw it in the suitcase, a very red shirt. He’d even packed a pair of white pants to go with it.

But she wasn’t wearing pants, white or otherwise, just the shirt, pulled down to the point where it passed the border into “dress” territory—so help him God.

She was The Slayer in a pair of black cat’s-eyes sunglasses, Katya “The Slayer” Dekker. She didn’t look like Bad Luck. She looked like sex and Red Hots, like double-dipped chocolate cherries and cool whipped cream—like she wouldn’t melt on a hot day, but like she might, if you were lucky . . . if you did it right, like she might melt in your mouth.

She’d melt for him. He knew it down to his bones. She’d damn near done it last night.

But he wasn’t going to touch her—not when he had her right where he needed her. Cooperating, he hoped.

All he had to do was keep from getting slain himself.

Right. That’s all he had to do.

He did not have to let his gaze slip and slide around her curves like a set of slicks in the rain. He didn’t have to stand there sending up silent prayers of gratitude to the gods of Lycra, or wondering what had happened to the laws of genetics. It was Saturday morning, coffee time, time to rock and roll.

“If you can book a couple of these guys in before lunch, that would be great,” he said, holding up the printout Skeeter had made for him with the current phone numbers and addresses for the Prom King boys. Four lived in Denver or close by, one was in Maryland, and one was missing, no current address available.

Without a word, she held out her hand, and he obeyed like a hound dog coming to heel, crossing the room on her command.

“There’s been a change of plan,” she said when he handed over the paper.

“No, there hasn’t,” he said, immediately wary.

“I’m going with you.”

“No,” he said more firmly. “You’re not. You’re staying here.”

He couldn’t actually see her eyes behind the dark glasses, but he felt the look she was giving him—and it was pure “don’t mess with me” attitude. She hadn’t had that look at eighteen, and though he admired it, he couldn’t say he liked it, especially when it was directed at him. He needed to be in charge here.

“You’ll get twice as much information twice as fast with me as you will without me,” she said.

Possibly, but it wasn’t a chance he was willing to take. “I don’t want you anywhere near these guys.”

“I did some thinking in the bathroom.”

Dangerous territory,
he thought, though he didn’t say a word.

“And you’ve got two choices,” she continued. “Take me with you and get what you want; or go alone and find out your cover has been blown. I can make sure these guys don’t talk to you, and I will.”

Son of a bitch. She was serious.

“Don’t work against me, Kat.” It was as much a warning as a plea. He didn’t want her hurt, and that meant he had to catch the bad guys as quickly as possible, before they could get to her. His gut was telling him it was him they wanted, nailed to a cross, just like last time—but that didn’t mean she was safe.

K
ATYA
watched the subtle play of emotions on his face, mostly anger and a whole lot of worry, which was fine. He needed to be worried. She
had
done some thinking in the bathroom, serious thinking, putting aside her horror at Ted’s death, and Alex’s betrayal, and the simple disaster of the auction going up in balls of flames—and what she’d realized was that he was in at least as much danger as she was, maybe more.

By his own admission, he didn’t know who had gotten him assigned to the Botanic Gardens, and neither of them knew who had planted the tiara and the awful photographs in her apartment, but it would be ridiculous to assume the two events weren’t somehow tied together—and that meant trouble, big trouble, for him.

She couldn’t sit idly by, letting him handle everything, and just hope for the best. She couldn’t . . . and still live with herself. She had to step in and do what she’d tried and failed to do during his murder trial. She had to try to protect him.

“I either go with you, or I go on my own. Your choice.” She wasn’t budging on this, for her sake as well as his—but it wasn’t easy holding her ground.

His gaze had narrowed to a dangerous degree. His jaw looked tight enough to snap.

“Fine,” he said, not sounding any too happy about it. “My choice, my rules, which means I give the orders.
All
the orders.”

She agreed with a short nod. He could give all the orders he wanted—that didn’t mean she’d follow them.

T
IM
McGowan needed a haircut, and a shave, and a shower, and a clean shirt after the baby had spit up on him. Hawkins also figured he needed about two fewer kids than the five he had, or a wife whose high-powered job didn’t send her to Europe or one of the coasts two weeks out of every four.

Tim had not been able to meet them for coffee. They’d had to go to his big house in one of Denver’s more exclusive suburbs, and after about two minutes at his kitchen table, Hawkins had felt like he needed a shower, too. There’d been milk and cereal everywhere, kids everywhere, cartoons blaring, two dogs trying to eat as much of the cereal as they could wolf down before they got caught, and just an overall general stickiness to the whole situation.

Kat still looked good, though. She didn’t have a Fruitio or a Crunch Flake on her anywhere, and he’d just peeled another one off his jeans and tossed it out Roxanne’s window.

He downshifted for the red light and glanced in her direction.

“I don’t think Tim is our man,” he said.

“No kidding,” she said, tilting her head and looking at him over the top of her sunglasses.

“You didn’t think so, either. That’s why you started with him, isn’t it?”

“Tim was always a decent guy. He actually came to Paris to see me at the—uh—place where I was staying, to apologize, to make sure I was okay. The only reason he ran into that alley was to try and make the other boys back off.”

“I don’t remember seeing anyone trying to rescue you.”

“Tim had asthma as a kid. Always carrying his inhaler around. He was probably the only one there that night that I could have outrun. When you pulled up, he was still at the other end of the alley.”

Hawkins thought that over for a minute. It was possible, he decided. It had all happened so fast. One of the boys could have been coming into the alley instead of going out.

“He didn’t seem too upset about Ted.”

“He wasn’t really part of that crowd of boys,” she said, lifting her hair up to catch the breeze coming through the window. The day was definitely heating up. “We all just kind of ended up together prom night. I think he thought the other boys were all too spoiled, and too fast, and headed for too much trouble. What happened to Jonathan only proved him right. He’s too nice to say it, but he probably feels the same way about Ted, bad apples coming to no good end and all that.” She lifted her other wrist up and checked her watch. “I really do need to at least stop by the gallery. This is Nikki McKinney’s first major show, and I’d like everything to go well for her.”

“So Ted was a bad apple?” he said, ignoring her request.

“You’re killing me here.”

A fleeting grin curved his lips. She was nothing if not persistent, but it was a no-go. They’d been over this at the loft, about a hundred times. She’d called Suzi Toussi in to help Alex Zheng get the show together, and that was as much involvement as he was willing to allow. Whoever had murdered Ted was still out there, and all the clues pointed to its being someone she knew, and worse yet, someone who knew her. She wasn’t leaving his sight, and he didn’t have time for an art show.

“He was a jerk,” she said with a sigh, letting her hair fall back down over the front of her shoulder. “A terrible, disgusting jerk, and out of all of them, I guess he’s the one I’d put my money on for taking those pictures, but he’s dead.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t take the pictures.” The light changed, and he slid Roxanne up into first.

“No,” she admitted, automatically bracing herself, her hand sliding onto the armrest on the door. “I guess not, but he sure as shoot wasn’t the one who put them in my apartment.”

“Why not?” He shifted up into second and then cast a quick glance in her direction. It was stupid, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d noticed she always crossed her legs for second gear—and sure enough, she did it again. He didn’t know what it meant, but he found it fascinating. Or maybe it was just the way she crossed her legs he found fascinating.

“Because the only thing Ted Garraty has been breaking into with any regularity is doughnut boxes. He must have gained about fifty pounds over the last thirteen years, and he wasn’t just heavy. He was out of shape, dissipated. No way could he have climbed five flights of stairs, and he wouldn’t have fit in Toussi’s elevator.”

She had a point. The elevator was small, damn small, wonderfully small.

He cleared his throat, shifted into third, kept his gaze straight ahead, and asked a question he already knew the answer to. “So who’s next? Robert Hughes?”

“Bobba-Ramma Hughes,” she corrected him.

“Bobba-Ramma?” He shot her a skeptical glance.

Her cell phone rang inside her purse, muted, insistent, maybe getting a little desperate, but like the last five times it had rung, she ignored it. They both knew who it was. Alex. He’d been calling every two minutes since she’d turned the phone on ten minutes ago. Suzi must have arrived with her assistants by now and informed him his boss was not coming in or coming home today.

“That’s what he told me when I called,” she said. “He’s not plain old Bobby anymore. He’s Bobba-Ramma, the Prince of East Colfax Avenue. Apparently, he decided against going into his daddy’s stock-brokerage business and bought himself a high-end strip club, which sounds like an oxymoron if I ever heard one.”

Skeeter had notated the club on the hot sheet, The Painted Pony, but nothing had been said about “Bobba-Ramma.”

“You think he’s our guy?”

“He certainly qualifies as a pervert,” she said without hesitation. “He always has. He was suspended twice our senior year for exposing himself in the boys’ bathroom, and once for exposing himself in the girls’ bathroom.”