Crossing Danger: A Shelby Nichols Adventure (9 page)

“Um...well...the truth is, I didn’t have it when I talked to you last night.”

Dimples’ eyes bulged, and his fists clenched again, so I decided to fess up.

“You’re right...I came here last night after I left you at the hospital and got it. I thought maybe the crime scene people would still be here so I wouldn’t be alone and it would be okay to look around. But I promise I didn’t break in. When I got here the door wasn’t closed tight. I just pushed on it and it opened...so you can’t arrest me.”

Dimples stared at me with his mouth wide open before he snapped it shut. His breath puffed out of his flaring nostrils, and his shoulders drooped a little. “You just lied to me. I can’t believe it.”

“Well...yes...but you were freaking out. How could I tell you the truth when you thought I was stupid to come get it in the first place?”

“I never said...”

“Oh, I know. You didn’t have to say it...but I could tell you thought it was stupid and you’d need to do your duty and arrest me or something.” I crossed my arms and took a deep breath. “But now that you know, don’t tell Billie, okay?”

He shook his head, hardly believing I could ask him something like that. “I think you should give me the damn thumb-drive.”

“No way...at least not yet. Just pretend you don’t know I have it, and let’s figure out who did this to Billie.”

“Shelby...if it wasn’t safe for Billie to have it, what makes you think it’s safe with you?”

“No one knows I have it.” I was a little worried about the man who sort of saw me last night, but since he didn’t get a good look, it was probably okay.

Dimples closed his eyes and held the bridge of his nose with his fingers. Between not getting any sleep last night, and the trauma of Billie getting shot and nearly dying, a monster headache was coming on. Having this conversation with me just made it worse.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Do I look okay?” he snapped.

My breath caught, but then I realized he’d only said that in his mind, and I tried not to feel bad while he got his temper under control.

“Let’s just say it’s been a long night...and now this,” he said out loud.

“Yeah...I’m really sorry. Let me talk to Billie about giving you the thumb-drive...or maybe I can make a copy and give that to you while I keep the original. Then she’d have access to it, and you’d both be happy.”

“Just forget about it for now,” he said, mostly because he was tired of the whole thing. Why did Billie have to do this stuff anyway? Not trusting him was hard, but he understood her logic. Still, didn’t she know how hard this was on him? Now she was into something that almost got her killed. How could she do this to him?

“Did they get any fingerprints?” I asked, hoping to take his mind off Billie and me.

“Yeah...they’ll run them today and let me know if they are a match for anyone we have in the system.”

“Good. Maybe something will turn up.”

He was pretty sure the guys who did this wouldn’t be that stupid, but he nodded anyway and glanced around the trashed apartment. “I’m just sorry this place is such a wreck. I don’t want Billie to come home to this mess.”

“I’ll help you clean it up before she comes home. When do you think they’ll release her from the hospital?”

“I don’t know...probably next week.”

“Okay...that gives us plenty of time. Just call me when you’re ready to start. We’ll have it back to normal in no time, and she won’t have to worry about it. Sound good?

“Sure, that should work.”

“Good. Um...so, what’s going on with Chloe? Did you find out anything about those two cops?”

“Oh yeah.” He ducked his head. “I...uh...turned that over to Bates. With everything that happened to Billie last night, I just couldn’t think about it.”

Too shocked to respond, I stood there gawking at him.

He noticed my silence and pursed his lips. “He should be calling you. I told him to make sure he included you when he talked to them.” We both knew that might not happen and, with a flush of remorse, Dimples whipped out his phone to call him.

“Wait,” I said. “I’ll call. You have enough to worry about. If he gives me a hard time, then you can talk to him.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes. In fact, I’ll head over there right now, and you can go back to the hospital.”

He shook his head. “I need to work on finding who shot Billie.” A thought that maybe she might have some clues popped into his head. “Hmm...wait a minute...maybe talking to Billie is the best way to go. Do you think she has any idea who did this?”

I remembered her thoughts about who might have stolen the thumb-drive from her desk at work. “Yeah. I think she might. You should ask her.”

He smiled, and it was a relief to see those dimples come out after so long. “Good. Then that’s where I’ll start.”

We both headed to the door at the same time. He was thinking that he had the upper hand now that he knew our little secret, and he wasn’t going to let Billie bulldoze him. She needed him, and he’d be damned if she tried to do this without him. “Call me if you need any help with Bates,” he said.

I nodded and hurried to my car, grateful it wasn’t me talking to Billie. Of course, talking to Bates wasn’t going to be a picnic either. I just hoped he hadn’t done anything stupid and accused any of those cops without me.

***

I strolled into the precinct with my I.D. badge around my neck, my head held high, and my best ‘don’t mess with me face.’ I probably should have called Bates first, but with his attitude toward me, I was afraid he’d tell me not to come. Ugh! Today was not going how I’d wanted. My simple plan to talk to the cops, find the one who’d done it, and send Chloe home to her parents wasn’t so cut and dry. Not with Bates in charge.

I rounded the corner and there he was, sitting at his desk looking over some paperwork. I listened to his thoughts for a moment, but he was only focused on the task before him and it didn’t get me anywhere. Taking a deep breath, I marched over to his desk.

He caught sight of me, and his face scrunched up like he’d just taken a bite of something sour. His thoughts about me weren’t much better and, if I had an inferiority complex, I would have burst into tears. Instead, I just got mad.

“Hello Bates.” I tried to sound cordial, but it was hard when he was thinking such mean thoughts. Instead, I sent him a killer smile to make up for it. He picked up on my fake smile and frowned.

“You should have called,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “I could have saved you a trip.”

“What do you mean?”

He glanced around, then spoke in a low voice. “I checked out those cops...they were both on assignment in different parts of the city at the time Chloe would have seen them. So there’s no way it was either of them.”

“But...that can’t be right. Dammit Bates! You should have waited for me.”

He shook his head, thinking
don’t get your panties all twisted in a knot
, and motioned me to an out of the way corner where no one could hear us. “It wouldn’t matter. She must have gotten it wrong. Are you sure she saw a badge? Maybe what she thought was a badge was something else.” He knew both cops and had even worked on a case with one. It couldn’t be either of them. They were the good guys. They’d never do anything stupid like that.

I knew Chloe had seen the badge, since I’d seen it in her mind...unless her mind had played tricks on her and she’d imagined it? No, I couldn’t go there. She’d been too traumatized to make something up like that. It could only mean we were looking in the wrong place. “Does the FBI or other kinds of agents wear badges on their belts?”

His eyes narrowed. “I suppose...”

“Maybe we should look there.”

“Possibly,” he said. “But you have to remember that she didn’t get a good enough look at the guy for a positive ID. I mean...she picked two different people from the photos. What makes you think looking at other agents would be any different?” He wasn’t sure he believed her story. He believed she saw someone, but a cop?

“I’m sure she told us the truth,” I said.

“Sure she did,” he said. “At least what she thought was the truth. But you have to remember she’d just seen her boyfriend get killed right before her eyes. With that kind of trauma, she might have imagined a police badge when it could have been something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like a belt buckle or something.”

“It wasn’t just what she saw,” I countered. “It was what she heard too.”

“Okay...so what exactly did she hear?”

I sighed and thought back, trying to remember her exact words. “She heard him talk to someone on the phone about taking the cash and drugs. I think if she heard his voice again, she’d recognize it. Would you be willing to let her listen to their voices? She wouldn’t have to be in the same room for that.”

“Why? Didn’t you understand when I told you it wasn’t either of them? That they weren’t anywhere near that house and their partners confirmed it?” He called me a few choice names in his mind and my temper flared.

“Shhh...keep it down will you?” I glanced around the room, but luckily, no one paid special attention to us. “Look, I don’t care about that. A partner could just as easily be involved. Maybe that’s who he was calling. The thing is...you don’t know for sure, and if you’d waited for me when you talked to them, we wouldn’t be having this argument.” Now I was calling him names in my mind, and for once I wished he could hear what I was thinking.

“Yeah...right.” His voice rose in anger. “Because you’re never wrong about anything. You’re the mighty Shelby Nichols with some kind of psychic power that tells you without a doubt what someone has done, and you don’t even have to lift a finger to prove it. You just know. Well...I’m sorry, but there’s no way in hell anyone can do that.”

I took a step back, totally floored by his vehement outburst. That’s when I noticed that everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing to listen, and they were all staring at us. I heard a few random thoughts that Bates had lost his cool, but he did have a point. What they’d seen me do was kind of freaky, but freaky cool.

I was grateful for that last thought, and the tension fell from my shoulders. Bates realized he’d caused a scene and sent a few icy glares at those still staring. That got them moving, and the moment passed, even though it still lingered in their minds.

Bates’ animosity hit me like a tidal wave. He was thinking that I did something he couldn’t explain and it scared the crap out of him. He tried to convince himself that there was a reasonable explanation for what I did, and I was just good at reading people’s emotions. But he hated that I had the audacity to call it premonitions, like I was psychic or something.

It was preposterous...and put him on edge. I had to be working an angle. People who said they were psychics usually did it for the notoriety or the money. Maybe that’s how I was building my reputation as a P.I. to get clients.

What if I was using my role with the police department as a pretense for something else? Maybe I was informing on them? He knew I had ties with Joey “The Knife” Manetto. Maybe I fed him information. What he didn’t understand was how I had fooled everyone in the department. They were all idiots to put their trust in a fraud. The chief even paid me to consult with them...and it made him so mad he could hardly stand it.

Anger, along with a touch of worry about Uncle Joey, sent my heart racing. “I don’t care what you think,” I said quietly, hearing enough to last me a lifetime. “I want Chloe to listen to their voices. She’s an innocent kid, and she deserves that much.”

“Well it’s not up to you, is it? I’m the head of this investigation, and I don’t take orders from you.” He was thinking Chloe got herself into this mess, so she wasn’t entirely blameless, and my little guilt trip wasn’t going to work on him.

Could this get any worse? “Then what are you going to do about it?”

He was thinking he might have to let Chloe listen their voices, but he’d be damned if he told me that. “I’d like to talk to Chloe myself. Everything we know about this is second-hand from you. I want to hear what happened from her before I decide how to proceed.”

Raw anger surged through me, tightening my hands into fists and thinning my lips. I inhaled through my nose, and my nostrils flared. He made it sound like I was making all of this up to get attention, and I couldn’t possibly have anything worthwhile to add since I was a fake. It took all my effort to let out my breath and calm down enough to speak.

“Then by all means,” I got out through clenched teeth, “let’s go talk to her and clear this up. But Bates,” I waited until his gaze locked with mine. “Once we do, I don’t ever want to have this conversation again.”

I stabbed daggers at him with my steely gaze. If looks could kill, he’d be so dead.

It didn’t cow him one bit. In fact, he smirked just a little. “You’re right. I think I should talk to her.” He was thinking he should have insisted on talking to Chloe yesterday and saved himself all the trouble of dealing with me.

“Fine. I’ll meet you there.”

“Who said you were going?” he drawled.

I inhaled sharply. He couldn’t possibly mean that, could he? “I’m going whether you like it or not.”