Dangerous Reunion (Love Inspired Suspense) (2 page)

“I can’t remember his name right off. He was a tourist, and neither one of them wanted to talk about what they were fighting about. I suspected it might have been a drug deal gone bad, but I couldn’t prove it. Neither one had drugs on them, and they didn’t want to press charges. I let them go with a warning.”

“Did you write down the other man’s name?”

Doug nodded. “It’s in the report. I’ll check it out when we get back to headquarters.”

Kate sighed. “Well, if he was a tourist, he could be gone by now. The ferries stay busy shuttling visitors back and forth to the mainland. But if Jake Morgan was dealing drugs like we’ve been trying to prove, his customers are going to have to look for another source.”

Doug glanced at the body again. “Is there anything you need me to do?”

“We’ll need to check all of Jake’s hangouts and see if anybody remembers seeing him last night.”

Doug nodded. “I’ll get on that right away. Anything else?”

She pursed her lips and studied the body. “His clothes are wet. He must have been lying here at high tide.” She turned to Grady. “What time was high tide last night?”

Grady cleared his throat and stepped closer. “Hoigh toide was at three o’clock this morning.”

Doug’s eyebrows arched. “Hoigh toide?”

Kate nodded. “People who’ve lived on Ocracoke all their lives have a special language, Doug. Sometimes the long
i
in a word becomes like the sound in
boy. Hoigh toide
is ‘high tide.’ So we know he died sometime around 3:00 a.m.” She glanced at her watch. “I phoned Doc Hunter right after Grady called me about finding Jake. I thought he’d be here by now.”

Doug pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Do you want me to give him another call?”

She shook her head. “He was just finishing breakfast. Said he’d be here as soon as he pulled on some clothes. We’ll give him some more time, but thanks, Doug.”

Kate stuck her sunglasses in her shirt pocket and focused on the scene at her feet. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the concentration on Doug’s face. Fresh from college with a degree in criminal justice, he was eager to get some experience. He’d told her he thought he could learn a lot about working with people on the quiet island. She doubted, though, that he ever thought he’d be investigating a murder before breakfast on a warm summer day.

Grady stuck his hands in the pockets of the cutoff jeans he was wearing and inched forward. “Can I do anything to help?”

She shook her head. “No, but thanks. We’ll just wait for Doc.”

Kate turned, walked to the edge of the water and gazed out to sea. The fishing skiff she’d noticed earlier still sat anchored offshore. A slight breeze ruffled her hair, and she frowned at the chill that penetrated her body. It began at her feet, traveled up her legs and spread upward until the cold prickled her scalp.

She had never felt this sensation before, but she’d often heard her father, a career law enforcement officer, talk about the feeling he’d had several times at crime scenes. An icy inkling, he called it. He couldn’t explain why it happened or where it came from, but he knew without a doubt that it served as a premonition that danger lurked nearby and things weren’t always what they seemed. Was that what she was experiencing now?

Kate shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted in an effort to get a better view of the boat, but it was too far away. She looked over her shoulder at Doug. “Do you still have those binoculars in your cruiser?”

“Yeah. Do you need them?”

She nodded. “I’d like to check out that boat on the water.”

Doug hurried to his car and was back in minutes with the binoculars. He handed them to her. “Why are you looking at that boat?”

“Just curious,” Kate answered.

She held the binoculars to her eyes and stared across the waves toward the skiff. The figure of a man standing upright in the boat came into view. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and jeans. But it wasn’t what he was wearing that made her heart skip a beat. It was the fact that he held a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and he appeared to be staring straight at the scene on the beach.

An irrational thought flashed into her head—she was being watched, studied like a specimen beneath the lens of a microscope. Almost as soon as the thought entered her head, she dismissed it. The man was a tourist, probably a fisherman who had stopped to see what was happening on the beach. She was overreacting because of the morning’s events.

She started to turn away, but something drew her back to the boat. She put the binoculars to her eyes again. The man stared back at her. Who was he? Why was he out there, and why was he watching her? Could he have a connection to the murder or the shooter?

Doug inched closer to Kate. “What do you see?”

She pointed at the boat that hadn’t moved. “There’s a man looking at us.”

He tilted his head to the side and frowned. “Aw, that’s just some fisherman who’s curious about what we’re doing.”

Kate glanced over her shoulder at Jake’s still form in the sand and back at the skiff. The memory of bullets flying over her head sent a tingle down her spine. “I guess so. But it’s the only boat around, and it’s near a murder scene. When I saw it, I had this strange feeling that we were being watched.” She handed Doug the binoculars. “I can’t see anything on board that makes me think he’s a fisherman. See what you think.”

Doug put the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the small craft. After a moment, he handed the binoculars back to her. “I can’t see any fishing rods or fish bags, but they could be lying flat on the deck. It’s hard to tell from this distance what he has onboard, but it looks like he’s leaving.”

Kate reached for the binoculars and stared through them at the boat that moved slowly up the coastline. The lone man stood at the controls, his back to her. The hood still covered his head. She followed the boat’s progress until it became a dot on the horizon.

Lowering the binoculars, she frowned and shook her head. What was the matter with her? Just because there had been a murder on the beach didn’t mean she had to suspect every person she saw. The man in the boat was just a tourist who could have been stopped offshore for any number of reasons. She had more important things to do than stand around wasting time. Taking a deep breath, she turned back to Jake Morgan’s body.

He stood at the controls of the fishing skiff as he guided the boat along the coastline of Ocracoke. This really was a beautiful place—a nice place for families to vacation. Maybe that statement should be revised, he thought. Perhaps he should say that this island was a beautiful place at the present time. You never could tell what might happen in the future.

Take this morning, for instance. Nobody had expected to find a body on the white sands of a beach voted the most beautiful in the nation, but there it was. A dead man right where families with children would be playing later. What was that deputy thinking at the moment? Was she shocked at what she’d seen on the beach?

He glanced at the binoculars lying on the seat behind him and smiled. From his observations, she’d appeared to be efficient in her handling of the crime scene. If she thought that was something, wait until she saw what he had planned. She was about to face the biggest test of her career.

Opening the throttle, he tilted his head back and sang the opening line from one of his favorite songs, “The Winner Takes It All.” That was what he intended to do—take it all.

K
ate glanced at the clock on the squad car’s dashboard as she pulled to a stop in front of the building that had housed the Ocracoke Police Station for the past thirty-five years. Ten o’clock. She didn’t realize it had gotten so late.

Doc Hunter, who was also the island coroner, had taken longer than she expected to complete his assessment of Jake’s body. In the end, though, he’d agreed with her that Jake had been murdered. She’d followed the ambulance that transported the body to the island health center, but her visit there had yielded no new leads. At this point, she could only hope the state lab in Raleigh could discover something during the autopsy—a requirement of all suspicious deaths.

Her phone conversation with Sheriff Baxter on the mainland had also delayed her getting back to the station. “You know I consider you second in command in our department, Kate, and I trust your judgment,” he’d said. “I’m shorthanded on the mainland, and I need you to take care of this case. Just keep me posted on what’s going on. Okay?”

He’d been relieved to turn the matter over to her, and she didn’t mind. But she still had a flash of fear every time she remembered those bullets whizzing past her and Grady’s heads.

She glanced in the rearview mirror and caught sight of Doug pulling his car to a stop behind her. He stepped out and waved before he disappeared into the building. It didn’t take much to figure out that Doug couldn’t wait to see Lisa Wade, the dispatcher. He’d been smitten the first day he arrived on the island. Kate kept hoping that Doug would see how Lisa felt about Calvin Jamison, the third deputy on the island, but so far he didn’t appear to have noticed.

Kate exited the car and stopped beside the curb to observe what she referred to as the Souvenir Shuffle. No matter what time of the day or evening during the summer months, tourists packed the streets of the only village on the island to search for that special something to take home from vacation.

Now with the sun climbing higher in the sky, the village had awakened, and tourists had emerged to begin their days. In their straw hats and tropical island T-shirts, they looked better suited for a beach in the South Pacific instead of a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina.

Families on bicycles crowded the narrow, two-lane road that twisted and turned through the village. Once the island had been discovered as a vacation destination, bicycles had become the choice of transportation. She’d given up keeping a count of all the bicycle rental places on the island.

A man jogged past, and the memory of Brock returned. Her stomach churned. She asked herself the question that had flashed in her mind over and over since their encounter: what was he doing on Ocracoke?

During their college years, he’d told her often that he didn’t know how she’d stood growing up on such an isolated island twenty-five miles off the coast of North Carolina. He’d spent all his life in Raleigh, and he intended to live and work in a city.

She’d thought he would change his mind once he came to realize how peaceful life could be on the island, but she’d been wrong. He’d deserted her at a time when she needed him most.

Now he’d come back. But why? All she wanted was for him to stay as far away from her as possible. Something had died in her the day he boarded a ferry and left her behind to cope with the most frightening time of her life. She doubted if she’d ever trust anyone with her heart again.

Shaking her head to rid it of the troubling thoughts, she climbed the two front steps of the building and pushed into the station. The cool interior calmed her and felt good on her hot skin.

From her seated position behind the dispatch desk, Lisa Wade jumped to her feet and rushed to Kate. “Are you all right? I was scared to death when you called in that you were under fire.”

Kate smiled. “I’m fine, Lisa.”

Lisa studied her for a minute before she turned back to her desk. “You’re having a rough morning.”

If she only knew how hard it had really been. Kate rubbed her eyes. “Yeah. Any calls?”

“Doc Hunter called. He said the EMTs will leave on the four o’clock ferry with Jake’s body. If you need anything else, let him know.”

Kate was about to respond when Calvin Jamison walked in from the back room. “Calvin, what are you doing here?”

He held a cup of coffee toward her. “I just poured this for myself, but you probably need it more than I do. I went by the Sandwich Shop to get some breakfast, and I heard Grady talking about Jake. I thought you might need me. Besides, I don’t have anything better to do.”

Kate glanced at Lisa, who always seemed to glow when Calvin was around. And who could blame her? Calvin reminded Kate of one of the muscular men she saw on TV ads for the latest invention to sculpt your body into perfect shape. He worked out every day, and it had paid off. With his dark complexion and black hair, some women on the island were glad to get a speeding ticket just so they could catch another glimpse of him when they came in to pay the fine.

“Thanks, Calvin. You can help Doug with patrol and the vehicle checkpoint for the noon ferry while I fill out the paperwork on the murder.”

He nodded and walked toward the door. “Glad to. First I think you ladies deserve a morning treat. I’ll go pick us all up something to eat on break.” He stopped at Lisa’s desk and smiled down at her. “I won’t be gone long, Lisa. Do you want me to bring you a latte and a muffin from the Coffee Cup?”

Lisa’s face beamed. “That would be nice, Calvin.”

He glanced at Kate. “What about you?”

“Nothing for me, thanks.”

Break time wasn’t on her mind at the moment. She still hadn’t shaken the feeling she’d had when she spotted that fishing skiff offshore. Then there was Brock Gentry. When she added a murder and a shooter to the mix, it was no wonder it was all running together in her head.

Calvin winked at Lisa and glanced around at Doug, who’d stood beside his desk across the room ever since Kate entered. “Ready to go, partner?”

Doug didn’t answer. He picked up his hat and moved toward the front door. He didn’t look at Kate or Lisa as he followed Calvin outside.

Lisa didn’t glance at Doug as he walked by. Instead she directed her attention to her computer screen and bit her lip as if she was lost in another world.

Kate’s heart pricked at the look on Lisa’s face. Once she had been in love, too, but nothing good had come of that. She hoped Lisa would fare better than she had.

Kate walked into her office, dropped her sun visor on her desk and entered her private bathroom. She closed the door behind her, placed her hands on the small sink and peered into the mirror. Her tanned face stared back at her. She pressed her fingers to her cheeks and brushed the skin that was no longer as soft as it had been six years ago. Tiny creases at the corners of her tired eyes would be wrinkles before long. It was easy to see how the responsibilities and disappointments in life had taken a toll on her.

She wondered what Brock had thought when he saw her on the beach. What did she care what he thought? He meant nothing to her anymore, and she was sure he felt the same way.

Kate sighed and shook her head. With one last glance in the mirror, she pulled the door open and stepped into her office. She frowned at the sound of Calvin’s voice and moved into the outer office. He stood at Lisa’s desk.

“I thought you’d left.”

Calvin’s white teeth flashed behind his smile. “I forgot to ask Lisa if she wanted a blueberry or a banana muffin. But I’m leaving now.”

Kate tried to suppress a grin. “It’s nice to know you aim to please.”

Calvin’s face flushed, and he headed toward the door. He pulled it open and backed through it, but he stopped and turned to the person he’d bumped into. “Oh, sorry, sir. I didn’t see you there. Come on in. Can we help you?”

He stepped aside, and Kate’s heart plummeted to her stomach at the sight of Brock Gentry walking in the door. Brock smiled and stepped around Calvin. “Thanks.” He glanced at Kate. “I need to see Deputy Michaels.”

“She’s right there.” Calvin pointed to Kate, then waved to Lisa. “Be back in a minute with some muffins.”

Kate stood frozen in place as Brock walked toward her.

“Are you Mr. Gentry?” Lisa asked.

“Yes.”

Lisa glanced at Kate. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you Mr. Gentry called a few minutes ago and asked if you were in.”

He approached and stopped in front of her. “I hope this isn’t a bad time, but I need to talk with you. Can you please spare me a few minutes?”

The soft-spoken words sent a warning through her. There was something different about Brock Gentry, and she searched his face for the answer. The self-confident swagger and the slightly arrogant attitude that had always been evident in his manner were gone. The old Brock would never have asked her permission for anything. He would have marched into her office and informed her he was there to speak with her. His blue eyes studied her for a reaction, and she wondered if he thought she might refuse to see him.

The smile he directed at her appeared sincere. If she were meeting him for the first time, she could imagine liking the man who stood before her.

She glanced at Lisa. “It’s okay, Lisa. I know Mr. Gentry.” She looked back at him and nodded toward her office. “Come on in.”

Kate walked to her office, stepped inside and held the door for him to enter. She pointed to a chair in front of her desk. “Please have a seat.” Closing the door, she took a deep breath before settling in her chair. She propped her elbows on top of her desk and laced her fingers. “What can I do for you?”

Brock studied her for a moment before he spoke. “How are you, Kate?”

That was a good question. At the moment she wasn’t sure. She struggled not to betray her anger that he had returned to Ocracoke. “I’m fine.”

He nodded. “Good.” He leaned back, gripped the arms of his chair and let his gaze drift around the office. “I remember sitting in this room and talking with your father. Now you occupy his place here. I ran into our old track coach a few months ago, and he told me your father had died. I was sorry to hear that.”

Kate reached for a stack of papers on her desk and began to straighten them. “Yes, three years ago.”

She glanced at him, and his eyes flickered with sadness. “I sent your father a few emails after we ended our engagement, but he never answered. I guess he blamed me for what happened, but I’m really sorry I didn’t know about his death.”

Kate shoved the papers aside and clasped her hand to keep from striking her desk top. “Would you have sent condolences? I don’t remember you sending any when my mother died.”

He shook his head. “No, I didn’t, but there were reasons for that.”

Her heart pounded in her chest, and she feared that he could hear it. “And what would they have been?”

He raked his hand through his hair. “Come on, Kate. We’d just had a bad breakup. I knew how you must be grieving over your mother’s death, and I didn’t want to cause you any more pain. But I have a standing order at the Baskets and Blooms to place flowers on your mother’s grave each year on her birthday.”

Kate’s eyes widened, and she gasped. The arrival of the bouquets delivered to the cemetery had been a mystery for years. The owners at the flower shop had informed her they didn’t know the identity of the buyer and that payment always came from a mainland law office that wouldn’t reveal their client’s name. She would never have dreamed they were from Brock. “Those are from you? But why?”

He shrugged. “It’s a way I can show how I felt about a remarkable woman.”

A memory flashed into her mind. The day Brock left the island he had taken her mother to the beach, and they had been gone a long time. When they returned, Kate met him coming out of the guest room with his suitcase in his hand. He’d pushed past her and walked out the door. That was the last time she had seen him until today.

Kate took a deep breath. “I—I don’t know what to say but thank you.”

Brock smiled. “There’s no need to thank me.” He shifted in his chair and leaned forward, his arms resting on his thighs. “But that’s not why I’m here. I know you’re busy, and this may not be a good time for me to drop by. But when I saw you on the beach earlier, I knew the sooner I came to see you the better off I’d be.”

Kate frowned. “I don’t understand. If you thought I’d order you off the island when I saw you, you don’t have to worry. As long as you don’t break any laws while you’re here, our paths probably won’t even cross.”

“I know that. But the thing is, I want our paths to cross. I came back to Ocracoke to see you, Kate. I need your help.”

The heartbreak of six years ago boiled up inside of her.
He
needed
her
help? Where was he when
she
needed
him?
She narrowed her eyes. “How could you ask me for anything?”

He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “I know it shocks you, and I wouldn’t blame you if you asked me to leave. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Just please hear me out before you make a decision.”

She picked up a pencil on her desk and rolled it between her fingers. “Very well. What do you want to tell me?”

He took a deep breath. “Let me start by saying that three months ago I wouldn’t have believed I would ever come back here. I knew how you felt about me, and I don’t blame you for that. But I’ve had something happen in my life that has nearly driven me over the edge. I’ve been going to counseling, but nothing has helped.”

The fact that Brock had even used the word
counseling,
much less been involved in it, shocked Kate. “You’ve been to counseling? You used to say that counseling was for the weak. That people who were in control of their lives didn’t need some high-paid shrink to sit and have a pity party with them.”

He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what the old Brock said, but things changed. A few months ago something happened, and my life collapsed around me.”

Kate frowned and leaned forward. “What?”

Brock bit his lip and thought for a moment before he spoke. “When I joined the police force in Nashville, I heard about a ten-year-old murder case. A local man named Robert Sterling was accused of killing his business partner. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. His attorneys had appealed the case for years, but they hadn’t been able to get a new trial.”