Night Shift (3 page)

“That wouldn’t do either of us any good.” Even as she let out the pent-up breath, he laid a hand on her shoulder. “Look, I’m worried about you, Cilla. All of us are.”

It touched her, and, as always, it surprised her. “All he does is talk.” For now. Scooting her chair toward the turntables, she prepared for the next music sweep.

“I’m not going to stand by while one of my people is harassed. I’ve called the police.”

She sprang up out of her chair. “Damn it, Mark. I told you—”

“You told me.” He smiled. “Let’s not go down that road again. You’re an asset to the station. And I’d like to think we are friends.”

She sat down again, kicking out her booted feet. “Sure. Hold on.” Struggling to concentrate, she went on-air with a station plug and the intro for the upcoming song. She gestured toward the clock. “You’ve got three minutes and fifteen seconds to convince me.”

“Very simply, Cilla, what this guy’s doing is against the law. I should never have let you talk me into letting it go this long.”

“If we ignore him, he’ll go away.”

“Your way isn’t working.” He dropped his hand onto her shoulder again, patiently kneading the tensed muscles there. “So we’re going to try mine. You talk to the cops or you take an unscheduled vacation.”

Defeated, she looked up and managed a smile. “Do you push your wife around this way?”

“All the time.” He grinned, then leaned down to press a kiss on her brow. “She loves it.”

“Excuse me.”

Cilla jerked back in what she knew could easily be mistaken for guilt. The two people in the doorway of the booth studied her with what she recognized as professional detachment.

The woman looked like a fashion plate, with a flow of dark red hair cascading to her shoulders and small, elegant sapphires at her ears. Her complexion was the delicate porcelain of a true redhead. She had a small, compact body and wore a neatly tailored suit in wild shades of blue and green.

The man beside her looked as if he’d just spent a month on the range driving cattle. His shaggy blond hair was sun-streaked and fell over the collar of a denim work shirt. His jeans were worn and low at the hips, snug over what looked to Cilla to be about three feet of leg. The hems were frayed. Lanky, he slouched in the doorway, while the woman stood at attention. His boots were scuffed, but he wore a classically cut tweed jacket over his scruffy shirt.

He didn’t smile. Cilla found herself staring, studying his face longer than she should have. There were hollows beneath his cheekbones, and there was the faintest of clefts in his chin. His tanned skin was taut over his facial bones, and his mouth, still unsmiling, was wide and firm. His eyes, intent enough on her face to make her want to squirm, were a clear bottle green.

“Mr. Harrison.” The woman spoke first. Cilla thought there was a flicker of amusement in her eyes
as she stepped forward. “I hope we gave you enough time.”

Cilla sent Mark a killing look. “You told me you’d called them. You didn’t tell me they were waiting outside.”

“Now you know.” He kept a hand on her shoulder, but this time it was more restraining than comforting. “This is Ms. O’Roarke.”

“I’m Detective Grayson. This is my partner, Detective Fletcher.”

“Thank you again for waiting.” Mark gestured her, then her partner, in. The man lazily unfolded himself from the doorjamb.

“Detective Fletcher and I are both used to it. We could use a bit more information.”

“As you know, Ms. O’Roarke has been getting some disturbing calls here at the station.”

“Cranks.” Cilla spoke up, annoyed at being talked around. “Mark shouldn’t have bothered you with it.”

“We’re paid to be bothered.” Boyd Fletcher eased a lean hip down on the table. “So, this where you work?”

There was just enough insolence in his eyes to raise her hackles. “I bet you’re a hell of a detective.”

“Cilla.” Tired and wishing he was home with his wife, Mark scowled at her. “Let’s cooperate.” Ignoring her, he turned to the detectives again. “The calls started during last Tuesday’s show. None of us paid much attention, but they continued. The last one came in tonight, at 12:35.”

“Do you have tapes?” Althea Grayson had already pulled out her notebook.

“I started making copies of them after the third call.” At Cilla’s startled look, Mark merely shrugged. “A precaution. I have them in my office.”

Boyd nodded to Althea. “Go ahead. I’ll take Ms. O’Roarke’s statement.”

“Cooperate,” Mark said to Cilla, and led Althea out.

In the ensuing silence, Cilla tapped a cigarette out of her dwindling pack and lit it with quick, jerky movements. Boyd drew in the scent longingly. He’d quit only six weeks, three days and twelve hours ago.

“Slow death,” he commented.

Cilla studied him through the haze of smoke. “You wanted a statement.”

“Yeah.” Curious, he reached over to toy with a switch. Automatically she batted his fingers aside.

“Hands off.”

Boyd grinned. He had the distinct feeling that she was speaking of herself, as well as her equipment.

She cued up an established hit. After opening her mike, she did a backsell on the song just fading—the title, the artist, the station’s call letters and her name. In an easy rhythm, she segued into the next selection. “Let’s make it quick,” she told him. “I don’t like company during my shift.”

“You’re not exactly what I expected.”

“I beg your pardon?”

No, indeed, he thought. She was a hell of a lot more than he’d expected. “I’ve caught your show,” he said easily. “A few times.” More than a few. He’d lost more than a few hours’ sleep listening to that voice. Liquid sex. “I got this image, you know. Five-seven.” He took a casual glance from the top of her head, down her body, to the toe of her boots. “I guess I was close there. But I took you for a blonde, hair down to your waist, blue eyes, lots of … personality.” He grinned again, enjoying the annoyance in her eyes. Big brown eyes, he noted. Definitely different, and more appealing than his fantasy.

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Didn’t say I was disappointed.”

She took a long, careful drag, then deliberately blew the smoke in his direction. If there was one thing she knew how to do, it was how to discourage an obnoxious male.

“Do you want a statement or not, Slick?”

“That’s what I’m here for.” He took a pad and the stub of a pencil out of his jacket pocket. “Shoot.”

In clipped, dispassionate terms, she ran through every call, the times, the phrasing. She continued to work as she spoke, pushing in recorded tapes of commercials, cuing up a CD, replacing and selecting albums.

Boyd’s brow rose as he wrote. He would check the tapes, of course, but he had the feeling that she was giving him word-for-word. In his job he respected a good memory.

“You’ve been in town, what? Six months?”

“More or less.”

“Make any enemies?”

“A salesman trying to hawk encyclopedias. I slammed the door on his foot.”

Boyd spared her a glance. She was trying to make light of it, but she had crushed out her cigarette and was now gnawing on her thumbnail. “Dump any lovers?”

“No.”

“Have any?”

Temper flashed in her eyes again. “You’re the detective. You find out.”

“I would—if it was personal.” His eyes lifted again in a look that was so direct, so completely personal, that her palms began to sweat. “Right now I’m just doing my job. Jealousy and rejection are powerful motivators. According to your statements, most of the comments he made to you had to do with your sexual habits.”

Bluntness might be her strong suit, but she wasn’t about to tell him that her only sexual habit was abstinence. “I’m not involved with anyone at the moment,” she said evenly.

“Good.” Without glancing up, he made another note. “That was a personal observation.”

“Look, Detective—”

“Cool your jets, O’Roarke,” he said mildly. “It was an observation, not a proposition.” His dark, patient eyes took her measure. “I’m on duty. I need a list of the men you’ve had contact with on a personal level. We’ll keep it to the past six months for now. You can leave out the door-to-door salesman.”

“I’m not involved.” Her hands clenched as she rose. “I haven’t been involved. I’ve had no desire to be involved.”

“No one ever said desire couldn’t be one-sided.” At the moment he was damn sure his was.

She was suddenly excruciatingly tired. Dragging a hand through her hair, she struggled for patience. “Anyone should be able to see that this guy is hung up on a voice over the radio. He doesn’t even know me. He’s probably never seen me. An image,” she said, tossing his own words back at him. “That’s all I am to him. In this business it happens all the time. I haven’t done anything.”

“I didn’t say you had.”

There was no teasing note in his voice now. The sudden gentleness in it had her spinning around, blinking furiously at threatening tears. Overworked, she told herself. Overstressed. Overeverything. With her back to him, she fought for control.

Tough, he thought. She was a tough lady. The way her hands balled at her sides as she fought with her emotions was much more appealing, much sexier, than broken sighs or helpless gestures could ever be.

He would have liked to go to her, to speak some word of comfort or reassurance, to stroke a hand
down her hair. She’d probably bite it off at the wrist.

“I want you to think about the past few months, see if you can come up with anything, however small and unimportant, that might have led to this.” His tone had changed again. It was brisk now, brisk and dispassionate. “We can’t bring every man in the greater Denver area in for questioning. It doesn’t work that way.”

“I know how cops work.”

The bitterness in her voice had his brows drawing together. There was something else here, but this wasn’t the time to dig into it.

“You’d recognize the voice if you heard it again.”

“Yes.”

“Anything familiar about it?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you think it was disguised?”

She moved her shoulders restlessly, but when she turned back to him she had herself under control. “He keeps it muffled and low. It’s, ah … like a hiss.”

“Any objections to me sitting in on tomorrow night’s show?”

Cilla took another long look at him. “Barrels of them.”

He inclined his head. “I’ll just go to your boss.”

Disgusted, she reached for her cigarettes. He closed his firm hard-palmed hand over hers. She stared down at the tangled fingers, shocked to realize that her pulse had doubled at the contact.

“Let me do my job, Cilla. It’ll be easier all around if you let Detective Grayson and me take over.”

“Nobody takes over my life.” She jerked her hand away, then jammed it into her pocket.

“Just this small part of it, then.” Before she could stop him, he reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear. “Go home and get some sleep. You look beat.”

She stepped back, made herself smile. “Thanks, Slick. I feel a lot better now.”

Though she grumbled, she couldn’t prevent his waiting until she signed off and turned the studio over to the all-night man. Nor did her lack of enthusiasm discourage him from walking her out to her car, reminding her to lock her door and waiting until she’d driven away. Disturbed by the way he’d looked at her—and the way she’d reacted—she watched him in the rearview mirror until he was out of sight.

“Just what I needed,” she muttered to herself. “A cowboy cop.”

Moments later, Althea joined Boyd in the parking lot. She had the tapes in her bag, along with Mark’s statement. “Well, Fletcher”—she dropped a friendly hand on his shoulder—“what’s the verdict?”

“She’s tough as nails, hardheaded, prickly as a briar patch.” With his hands in his pockets, he rocked back on his heels. “I guess it must be love.”

She was good, Boyd thought as he downed his bitter coffee and watched Cilla work. She handled the control board with an automatic ease that spoke of long experience—switching to music, to recorded announcements, to her own mike. Her timing was perfect, her delivery smooth. And her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

She was a package full of nerves and hostility. The nerves she tried to hide. She didn’t bother with the hostility. In the two hours they’d been in the booth together, she had barely spoken a word to him. A neat trick, since the room was barely ten by ten.

That was fine. As a cop, he was used to being where he wasn’t wanted. And he was just contrary enough to enjoy it.

He liked his job. Things like annoyance, animosity and belligerence didn’t concern him. The simple fact was that negative emotions were a whole lot easier to deal with than a .45 slug. He’d had the opportunity to be hit with both.

Though he would have been uncomfortable with the term philosopher, he had a habit of analyzing everything down to its most basic terms. At the root of this was an elemental belief in right and wrong. Or—though he would have hesitated to use the phrase—good and evil.

He was savvy enough to know that crime often did pay, and pay well. Satisfaction came from playing a part in seeing that it didn’t pay for long. He was a patient man. If a perpetrator took six hours or six months to bring down, the results were exactly the same. The good guys won.

Stretching out his long legs, he continued to page through his book while Cilla’s voice washed over him. Her voice made him think of porch swings, hot summer nights and the sound of a slow-moving river. In direct contrast was the tension and restless energy that vibrated from her. He was content to enjoy the first and wonder about the second.

He was driving her crazy. Just being there. Cilla switched to a commercial, checked her playlist and deliberately ignored him. Or tried to. She didn’t like company in the booth. It didn’t matter that when she had coolly discouraged conversation he had settled back with his book—not the Western or men’s adventure she had expected, but a dog-eared copy of Steinbeck’s
East of Eden.
It didn’t matter that he had been patiently quiet for nearly two hours.

He was there. And that was enough.

She couldn’t pretend that the calls had stopped, that they meant nothing, that her life was back on its normal track. Not with this lanky cowboy reading the great American novel in the corner of the booth, so that she had to all but climb over him to get to the albums stored on the back wall. He brought all her nerves swimming to the surface.