Hard Evidence (9 page)

"I think Holly's right," Sophie said. "He likes you."

"Oh, well, lucky me! I suppose if he loved me I'd be in federal prison."

Then, to make matters worse, Tom had spent forty-five minutes after the I-Team meeting grilling her for every detail of her arrest, clearly gearing up to bellow in Chief Irving's ear. It had taken every evasive trick she knew to keep from giving him the arresting officer's name. In the end, she'd had to resort to the truth.

"I can't give you his name. He's an undercover officer."
And I want to punch him right in his sickeningly handsome face
.

Tom hadn't been pleased, but, as a staunch advocate of reporter-source confidentiality, he hadn't been able to object.

Now she was a full twenty minutes late. She could only hope Chief Irving hadn't given up on her. She hopped out of the car, locked it, and hurried to the nearest stairwell, rehearsing her questions as she ran up the steps, the staccato click of her heels reverberating off the concrete walls.

If there was so much violence between gangs and the city's homeless, why was so little being done to combat it? How many reports of attacks against the homeless had they received over the past five years and how many had they investigated? What was being done to protect homeless youth from gangs and other street predators?

It wasn't the news story she was looking for. It didn't answer the question of who'd killed the girl. But it was a worthy issue on its own, and she felt sure there was at least some connection between all of this and the shooting.

¡Por favor, senor, ayudeme! ¡Me van a matarl

Please, sir! Help me! They're going to kill me.

The girl's terrified screams echoed in Tessa's mind, made her stomach knot.

Gunshots. Shattered glass.

So much blood.

Lost in her thoughts, Tessa ran headlong into a wall of chest and found herself staring up into a pair of dark blue eyes.

Julian.

Startled, she jerked back from him, lost her balance.

Strong arms grabbed her, steadied her, held her fast. "We just keep running into each other, don't we, Tessa?"

He was dressed as he'd been the first night she'd seen him—dark hair tied back in a ponytail, black leather jacket, jeans. His jaw was clean shaven, his eyebrows dark slashes on olive skin, his lashes long. And those lips…

She remembered only too well what it felt like to be kissed by those lips, the shock of it, her body's response. She wished he'd been bald or toothless or had a vicious scar on his face— anything to make him less handsome. Somehow just the sight of him was enough to make her mouth water and her brain go blank. Then she remembered how much she disliked him.

"What are you doing here?"

Clever, Tessa! He's some kind of cop. What do you think he's doing here?

"I'm the 'shadowy criminal type,' remember? Criminal types belong at the police station." He bit his lower lip, measured her through narrowed eyes. "But if I didn't know better, I'd say you're following me."

The opposite was closer to the truth, and they both knew it. He hadn't run into her by accident last night. He'd tracked her down.

She laughed. "Why on earth would I want to follow you? It's not as if you're going to get all chatty and tell me what angle you're working on this shooting."

"Not likely." Then his mouth turned up in a slow, sexy smile that made her insides skitter. "Maybe you're hoping I'll kiss you again."

Heat rushed into her cheeks, and she gaped at him. "You're delusional, Darcangelo!"

He grinned a self-satisfied, smug grin that told her he knew exactly what that kiss had done to her. "Am I?"

She forced her expression to go ice cold and pulled herself out of his grasp. "I hate to wound your male pride, but I haven't given that little peck on the lips a single thought. Besides, that wasn't really a kiss."

Head high and shoulders back, she stepped around him.

Julian was tempted to laugh. She might pretend to have sleet for blood, but he'd never known a woman to melt down quite like she had over a single kiss, pretend or otherwise. He could
feel
her arousal. But why argue with her about it when he could prove it?

In one move, he had her up against the wall, her wrists shackled by his hands, her arms stretched out on either side of her head. "You're right. That wasn't a kiss, but this is."

"Wh-what the—?"

"Shut up." He ducked down, brushed his lips down the curve of her cheek, ran the tip of his tongue over the whorl of her ear. She smelled good enough to eat, her perfume subtle and sexy and so female. Hungry for her, he sucked her earlobe into his mouth, pearl earring and all.

He heard her quick intake of breath, felt her body tense.

"You… are sooo… arrogant!"

"I said shut up." He released her right wrist, cupped her chin, tilted her head upward.

Then he kissed her deep and hard.

And she melted.

Her body seemed to go liquid, every soft, feminine inch of her pressing against him. The contact sent a bolt of lust blazing through his gut, made him painfully hard, his erection straining to be someplace more welcoming than his jeans.

In a heartbeat, the kiss turned rough. Teeth scraped skin, bit, nipped. Tongues invaded, clashed, plundered. He felt her hips move, betraying her need. Then her arms wrapped around the back of his neck, and she whimpered.

The sound was like gasoline on the fire already raging in Julian's veins. He groaned, felt his control slip. He hadn't meant for it to be like this. He'd kissed her to wipe that conceited look off her face, to prove to her that she wanted him despite her words last night—not to get caught up in wanting her.

But he wanted her. Right now. Right here.

Trailing little bites down the satin skin of her throat, he slid his hand up her soft nylon-covered thigh and under her skirt to cup her through her panties. They were silk. And they were already damp.

Tessa was lost. She was lost in his scent, in the hard feel of him, the heat of his lips on her skin. If there were some reason she shouldn't be doing this, she couldn't remember what it was. God, she hated him, wanted him, needed him.

She felt the pressure of his hand against her, and her knees went weak. Rather than hitting his hand away, she found herself pushing against the pressure, parting her legs for him. "Oh, Julian!"

Heat spread in a liquid rush through her belly. And when he flicked his thumb over the hard bead of her nipple, she moaned, the sound reverberating up and down the stairwell.

A door opened.

Footsteps.

He growled deep in his throat, cupped her hard, pressed his erection against her belly. Then he whispered. "If you try to tell me next time I see you that you haven't been thinking about fucking me, I'm going to call you a liar."

With that, he released her and was gone.

Shaking, her body on fire, Tessa struggled to compose herself. She straightened her skirt, picked her briefcase up off the floor where it had fallen, and smoothed her hair. How had she let this happen? My God, she'd practically been having sex with him in the stairwell! And she'd enjoyed it!

A police officer passed her on his way down the stairs, gave her a nod.

And then she remembered.

Chief Irving!

She glanced at her watch—
damn, damn, damn
!—and ran the rest of the way up the stairs.

Chapter 9

Tessa took a sip of her latte and tried to read through what she'd written so far. She was aiming for fifteen inches—a news feature about the conflicts between Denver's homeless population and its street gangs. It ought to have been a relatively easy article to write, but she couldn't seem to focus.

She couldn't get the feel of Julian off her lips or the taste of him out of her mouth. Where his skin had touched her, she smelled of his aftershave—spice and leather. Her nipples still tingled, the feel of her silk bra almost unbearable against their stiff tips. The ache he'd caused between her legs refused to go away, leaving her so frustrated she found herself unconsciously crossing her legs in an attempt to make the sensation stop.

Focus, focus, focus, Novak!

What was she going to tell Syd when her article was late— "Sorry, I'm horny"?

Fifteen assaults on homeless people reported this year, all investigated, no arrests. She added a quote from the director of Denver's homeless shelter criticizing the police department and countered it with a quote from Chief Irving about the difficulties of holding anyone accountable when the victims refused to press charges and couldn't be relied upon to testify.

That wasn't a kiss, but this is.

Good lord, if that was his idea of a kiss… ! She felt a flutter deep in her belly.

She'd meant to tell him to stop, to shove him away, but the moment his lips had touched her skin, her brain had shut down and her ovaries had taken over. Clearly, her eggs hadn't gotten the memo about how much she hated him. They liked him just fine. In fact, they liked him more than they'd liked any man she'd met so far.

Not even Scott—the man she'd thought she'd loved, the one man she'd had sex with—had made her feel like this. In fact, the gap between what she'd felt when Scott had kissed her and what she'd felt when Julian had kissed her was so wide there was no way to bridge it. Scott had been pleasant sunshine. Julian was fire.

It's called sexual attraction.

She didn't care what it was called. She wasn't interested. She'd worked hard to build a decent life for herself. She'd scrimped and saved for every college credit, studied hard, worked long hours. She'd done all she could to learn manners, to learn how to dress and how to speak. She'd put poverty and shame behind her. She wasn't going to risk her happiness to satisfy some hormonal urge. She wanted a man who would cherish her, be a reliable and loving father to her children, and encourage her in her career. She couldn't imagine Julian doing any of those things. More than likely he'd forget her name five minutes after they'd had sex.

He did come to your rescue, girl. If Syko and Flaco had gone loco, you'd have been grateful to see him.

That was her eggs talking again. She ignored them.

Homeless teens. Homeless teens were much more likely than any other group of teens to be exposed to drugs, violence, and sexual abuse. Some were so desperate they traded sex for food and shelter, making them easy prey for traffickers and child pornographers. Others sought refuge in gangs, whose members took them in and gave them a sense of family—for a price.

Tessa shuffled through her notes, found the horrifying statistics and a quote from an expert on homeless youth, which she followed with a concerned quote from Chief Irving.

Had she actually wrapped her arms around Julian's neck? Yes, she had. But that wasn't the worst of it. She'd also pressed herself into his hand, parted her thighs, called his name. And this time she couldn't blame it on adrenaline. She'd enjoyed it—all of it.

His mouth on hers. His fingers teasing her nipples. His hand pressing expertly between her thighs. His erection hard and huge against her belly. Julian had brought her more pleasure than she'd ever found with a man—and they'd both been fully clothed.

If you try to tell me next time I see you that you haven't been thinking about fucking me, I'm going to call you a liar.

"Oh, shut up!" It was only when she'd heard her own voice that Tessa realized she'd spoken aloud. Slowly, she looked over her shoulder to find the other members of the I-Team staring at her.

Julian surveyed what was left of Tobias Ronald Grant, age twenty-five. Most of his head was gone. "My guess is a forty-four Mag in the face at point-blank range."

Nothing less than the bastard deserved.

The ME nodded. "That's my assessment, as well. When I examined him, he'd been dead for less than twenty-four hours, placing the time of the murder last Friday evening."

Julian had been in the middle of interrogating a member of the city planning board about his illicit interest in teenage girls when he'd gotten a call from Chief Irving telling him that fingerprints taken off a body they'd pulled out of a trash bin in Commerce City Saturday afternoon were a match for prints taken from inside the basement apartment.

Here was Maria Ruiz's killer, the man who'd pulled the trigger.

So Burien had taken the botched shooting poorly, just as Julian had anticipated. He'd probably shot Tobias in a fit of temper, and then gone about his business, leaving his surviving minions to clean up the mess. It was execution, Burien-style.

"Any other evidence at the site?"

"A fine set of rims, but that's it. Nothing on the body.
Nada
."

"DNA results?"

"We're running him against the samples from the apartment, as well as the samples found in Maria Ruiz's body. We ought to know if there's a match by the end of the week. I don't think we've ever tested so much semen at once in the history of the department. It's pretty disgusting, really."

"Disgusting is the least of it." Julian zipped the bag, pushed the gurney back into the locker, shut the steel door. This was good police work, and he intended to give Irving's men their props. "Thanks. Keep me posted."

"Will do."

Julian walked out of the morgue, down the hall, and out to his track, an uncomfortable stirring in his gut. Of the three murders he'd predicted in the aftermath of the Ruiz shooting, the first was now confirmed. That left old Mr. Simms, who, fortunately, had left the state. And Tessa.

Tessa drove east on 1-70 through to the police department's shooting range on the edge of town. She'd taken time to go home and change into jeans and a T-shirt and had gotten stuck in rush-hour traffic. Fifteen minutes late, she sat in the parking lot, looking at the concrete building, feeling strangely afraid.

She'd never actually fired a gun before, and she didn't want to. Somehow the idea of .actually learning to defend herself ' with a firearm made the violence of that night seem all the more real. She didn't want to admit that she might
truly
be in danger. She didn't want to think that she might have to pull the trigger one day. Aiming her pistol at Julian when she'd still thought him a murderer had been terrifying, and she didn't feel like reliving it, even in the safety of the shooting range.

A part of her wanted to call Chief Irving to cancel, but she remembered how Julian had disarmed her and how stupid she'd felt standing in the alley with a dozen armed gang members afraid to draw her own gun. If she was going to carry it, she had to learn to use it. Besides, whoever Chief Irving had assigned to give her lessons was no doubt already here waiting for her. It would be impolite in the extreme to stand him or her up.

She took a deep breath and forced her butterflies aside. Then she grabbed her purse, got out of the car, and walked up to the front entrance. Not surprisingly, it was well guarded, signs on the walls spelling out rules and regulations. She'd just started reading through them when she heard his voice.

"You're late."

She whirled to find Julian standing behind her. His leather jacket was gone, a white T-shirt stretched across his chest, a leather cord with a dark turquoise stone hanging from his neck. An ominous-looking handgun sat in a black holster strapped to his left shoulder.

If you try to tell me next time I see you that you haven't been thinking about fucking me, I'm going to call you a liar.

She felt her cheeks burn, and the words were out before she could stop them. "Oh, no way! No, not you!"

He raised an eyebrow. "Shall we get started?"

Julian led her down a hallway, past vending machines offering soda and junk food, around a corner and toward a set of heavy double doors. She tried not to notice how scrumptious his ass looked in blue jeans or how slim his hips were compared to his shoulders or the way his body moved like a cat's. And for a moment she forgot the reason she was here.

He stopped at a counter to the left of the double doors, signed in on a clipboard.

"Darcangelo." An older man behind the counter acknowledged Julian with a nod. "You'll be in fifteen today. What you firing?"

Tessa realized the man was talking to her. She sat her purse on the counter, pulled out the .22, her butterflies returning full force. "This."

"Did you bring your own rounds?" the man asked.

She hadn't thought of that. "Just what's in the cylinder."

Julian frowned. "Give me a hundred. Put it on my account."

Tessa reached in her purse for money. "No, I'll pay for—"

The man slid a box of bullets across the counter to Julian. "There you go."

Before she could object, Julian was walking through the double doors.

The room was a dimly lit cavern with long lanes like a bowling alley. On the far end hung paper targets that looked like the outlines of men. On the other were a series of tall dividers like stalls above which hung numbers. The air smelled strange—gunpowder? Apart from the low thrum of a ventilation system, the room was quiet.

Julian led her to stall fifteen, took the revolver and the ammunition from her, and set the ammunition down on a nearby counter. Then he removed the bullets she had carefully loaded and set them aside, too. "So tell me what you know."

"About guns?" Tessa asked, feeling oddly disoriented. She draped her jacket over a nearby chair and set her purse on the floor.

He handed her back the pistol. "That's what we're here for."

Feeling both embarrassed and edgy, she went through the basic parts of the revolver—the safety, the cylinder, the barrel, the hammer, the handle, the trigger.

He turned her hand over and dropped six bullets into her palm. "Let's see you load it."

She'd have done it more quickly and smoothly had he not been watching, but she didn't tell him that. Something about him standing there, watching her through those dark blue eyes, turned her fingers into thumbs. Careful not to point it at anyone, she slipped the bullets in one by one, then snapped the cylinder into place.

"Good enough," he said. Then he took a couple pairs of safety goggles and what looked like earphones off a nearby shelf. "Put these on."

She set the loaded pistol down on the counter and did as he asked, her pulse picking up. Any second now he was going to ask her to fire the gun, and the thought terrified her.

Knock it off, Tessa. You're stronger than this!

He was giving her instructions. She forced herself to focus on the sound of his voice—deep and warm—and not the rapid beating of her heart. "Keep your eye on the front sight. Never try to hit someone in the head. It makes too small a target.

Aim for center mass—the middle of the torso. A few rounds in the chest and belly will stop anyone."

Tessa took aim, shut her left eye, focused on aligning the front sight with the upper body of the target beyond.

"Don't lock your right elbow. Support your right arm by—"

Bambam! Bambam!

Tessa gasped, her heart exploding in her chest, her knees buckling. The tile floor tilted, sucked her down, even as the pistol slipped from her hands.

¡Ayudeme! ¡Me van a matar!

Julian heard a .45 fire double taps a few stalls down, saw Tessa's entire body jerk. The blood disappeared from her face, and she sank toward the floor.

"Easy, Tessa." He took the pistol, which was about to fall from her hands, caught her around the waist and guided her into a chair.

Bambam! Bambam!

Her body jerked again, and she gave a little cry, her hands fisting in his T-shirt. Her heart was beating so hard Julian could see it against the cloth of her pink shirt.

He pulled off her goggles and ear protection. "It's okay, Tessa. It's just—"

Bambam! Bambam!

She jerked, gasped, her pupils dilated, her eyes almost glazed.

"Damn it!" He pulled her against him, wondering how many rounds the shooter had left. "Cease fir—!"

Bambam! Bambam!

There was no way the shooter was going to hear him.

"Ah, hell!" Julian scooped her up, carried her past the other stalls, and out the exit to the staff lounge, which was mercifully vacant. He kicked the door shut behind him, set her down on an old orange sofa, and sat beside her.

She was shaking violently from head to toe, her breath coming in shallow gasps, her face buried against his throat.

He understood what had happened—she'd heard the shots, and her mind and body had reacted with the fear she'd felt at the moment of the murder. It was posttraumatic stress. He'd seen it claim its share of trained agents over the years. But what the hell was he supposed to do about it? He'd been trained to stalk and kill bad guys, not comfort damsels in distress.