Tempting Danger

Table of Contents

 

 

It was the way Lily refused to see him, as if she could pretend she didn’t feel the pull as long as she didn’t look directly at him. He took two steps closer, stopping near enough that her scent welcomed him, even if the rest of her did not. The jump of his heartbeat warned him to make this quick.

“Yes, we’ll go,” he said. “But first . . .” And he leaned in to plant a kiss on her frowning mouth.

He expected a punch, and not just from the kiss. He’d already decided to let her connect. But he didn’t expect to land on his butt in the dirt.

Rule stared up at her, astonished. She’d hooked her leg behind his knee, pulled—and down he went, before his mouth even touched hers.

“Ask, don’t assume.” She opened the car door. “Oh, and you can give me that explanation,” she said, climbing in, “on the way back.” And she slammed the door shut.

TEMPTING DANGER
MORTAL DANGER
BLOOD LINES

 

 

 

CHARMED
(with Jayne Ann Krentz writing as Jayne Castle, Julie Beard,
and Lori Foster)

 

LOVER BEWARE
(with Christine Feehan, Katherine Sutcliffe,
and Fiona Brand)

 

CRAVINGS
(with Laurell K. Hamilton, MaryJanice Davidson,
and Rebecca York)

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TEMPTING DANGER

 

A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / October 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Eileen Wilks.

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-09912-4

 

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This book is dedicated to my agent, Eileen Fallon, who hung in there through thick, through thin, through writer phone calls. Just want to say, “Hi, Eileen—this is Eileen. It wouldn’t have happened without you.”

HE
didn’t have much face left. Lily stood well back, keeping her new black heels out of the pool of blood that was dry at the edges, still gummy near the body. She’d seen worse when she worked Traffic Division, she reminded herself.

But it was different when the mangling had been done on purpose.

Mist hung in the warm air, visible in front of the police spotlights, clammy against her face. The smell of blood was thick in her nostrils. Flashes went off in a crisp one-two as the photographer recorded the scene.

“Hey, Yu,” the officer behind the camera called. He was a short man with chipmunk cheeks and red hair cut so short it looked like the fuzz on a peach.

She grimaced. O’Brien never tired of a joke, no matter how stale. If they both lived to be a hundred and ran into each other in the nursing home, the first thing he’d say to her would be, “Hey, Yu!”

That is, assuming she kept her maiden name for the next seventy-two years. Considering the giddy whirl she laughingly called a social life, that seemed possible. “Yeah, Irish?”

“Looks like you had a hot date tonight.”

“No, me and my cat always dress for dinner. Dirty Harry looks great in a tux.”

O’Brien snorted and moved to get another angle. Lily tuned him out along with the other S.O.C. officer, the curious behind the chain-link fence, and the uniforms keeping them there.

Spilled blood draws a crowd as easily as spilled sugar draws flies. The members of the public attending this particular crime scene probably didn’t come from this neighborhood, though. Here, people assumed that curiosity came with a price tag. They knew what a drive-by sounded like, and the look of a drug deal going down. The members of the public craning their necks for a glimpse of gore were probably customers of the nightclub up the street. Club Hell did attract a distinctive clientele.

The victim didn’t look as if he came from around here, either.

He lay on his back on the dirty pavement. There was a Big Gulp cup, smashed flat, by his feet, a scrap of newspaper under his butt, and a broken beer bottle by his foot. Whatever had torn out his throat and made a mess of his face had left the eye and cheekbone on the right side intact. One startled brown eye stared up at nothing from smooth skin the color of the wicker chair on her mother’s porch. Name-brand jeans, she noted, the kind you find in pricey department stores. Black athletic shoes, again an expensive brand. A red silk shirt.

The silk of the right sleeve of that shirt was shredded over the forearm. Three deep gouges there—defensive wounds. That arm was out-flung, the hand lying palm up with the fingers curled inward the way a child’s will when it sleeps.

His other hand lay about twelve feet away, up against one of the poles of the swing set.

A playground. Someone had ripped this guy’s face off in a playground, for God’s sake. There was a hard ache in Lily’s throat, a tightness across her shoulders. She’d seen death often enough since she was promoted to Homicide. Her stomach no longer turned over, but the regret, the sorrow over the waste, never went away.

He wasn’t young enough to have enjoyed those swings recently—mid-twenties, maybe. She put him at about five ten, weight one eighty. Weight lifter’s shoulders and arms, powerful thighs. He’d been strong, perhaps cocky in his strength.

Strength hadn’t done him much good tonight. Neither had the .22 pistol he’d apparently brought with him. It rested near the severed hand, as if it had fallen from those fingers once death relaxed them.

“Careful, Detective. Don’t get your pretty dress dirty.”

Lily didn’t look away from the body. She knew the voice, having taken the man’s report when she first arrived. “More crime scenes are contaminated by police officers than civilians. You have a reason for bringing your big feet over here, Phillips?”

“I’m ten feet from the body, for Chrissake.”

Now she looked at him. Officer Larry Phillips was one-half of the responding unit. Lily hadn’t run across him before, but she knew the type. He was over forty, still on the streets and sour about it. She was female, twenty-eight, and already a detective.

He didn’t like her. “Believe it or not, evidence has been found more than ten feet from the victim. What do you want?”

“Came to let you know none of the helpful citizens over by the fence admits to having seen anything. They were partying at the club, left together, and saw the pretty lights flashing on the squad cars. Came over to see what was going on.”

“Club Hell, you mean?”

“That’s where you’ll need to look for your killer. The lab won’t learn squat about this one.”

“There are other types of evidence.”

He snorted. “Yeah, maybe he dropped a calling card. Or maybe you agree with my partner. He thinks a puppy dog did it.”

She glanced at the gap in the chain-link fence that served as an entry, where Phillips’s partner—a young Hispanic officer—was one of the officers handling crowd control, taking names and addresses. “Your partner’s a rookie?”

“Yeah.” Phillips took a wrapped toothpick out of his pocket, peeled the cellophane off, and stuck it in his mouth. “I explained about puppy dogs and how they don’t usually bite a hand off in one chomp.”

Phillips wasn’t stupid, she acknowledged. Just annoying. She nodded. “A fit man can usually fight a dog off. Not much sign of a fight, and there’s that pistol. . . .” Which the victim had probably been carrying, though it was just possible there’d been a third person at the scene. She shook her head. “The beast must have hit him quick.”

“They’re fast, all right. Poor bastard probably didn’t have time to know his hand was gone.”

“He had good instincts, though. He tried to pull his head down, protect his neck. That’s when he lost some of his face. Then it ripped out his throat.”