Kansas City Cover-Up. Julie Miller

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       Chapter Two

      “Are you deaf or stupid, Mr. Knight?” Gabe halted on the seventh floor’s concrete landing at Olivia Watson’s voice. “I’ll bet it’s neither one. You’re just too damn arrogant to think that the rules apply to you, aren’t you?”

      It was the husky undertones coloring that voice, not the words themselves, that turned him to face the detective.

      She glared at him from the bottom of the stairs, her chest subtly expanding and contracting beneath that trim leather jacket. It hadn’t taken the police as long as he’d expected to notice him sneaking through to the back stairs and chase him up six flights of steel and concrete. This one was smart. Determined. Ticked off.

      “Detective,” was all the verbal acknowledgment he gave her. Because the hammer of his traitorous pulse was already acknowledging way more than it should, given that she was a cop, she was a Watson and she wanted to shut down his investigation.

      The badge she wore like a necklace, the gun resting on the curve of her hip, and the accusation filling her green? gray? gold?—curiously indefinable eyes did little to diminish her striking beauty. She might wear her sable dark hair in that mannish cut and talk the same sarcasm and suspicion the male cops he knew used, but there was no mistaking the femininity in that husky voice and her leggy, athletic build—or his damnable reaction to them.

      For the six years he’d been obsessed with finding Dani’s killer, he’d been anything but a fan of KCPD. That another woman, a cop—Thomas Watson’s daughter, no less—should get him thinking randy thoughts about stripping off all that hardware and attitude didn’t sit real well with his celibate devotion to the fiancée he should have saved. His curious fascination with the mysteries surrounding the lady detective who’d tracked him down rankled his long-held contempt for the police department that had failed to bring Dani’s killer to justice.

      “I need you back downstairs,” she ordered. “Now.”

      Thanks. The sharp command took the sexy out of her voice and made it easier for Gabe to dismiss his far too male reaction to her.

      He moved to the edge of the landing, toward the woman attempting to stop his return to the taped-off office suite on the tenth floor. “There’s no such thing as a perfect crime, Detective. Only an inability to see and understand the clues that are there. If you aren’t willing to find the connection between the two murders, I will.”

      With a curt nod, he turned to the next set of steps, skipping a stair and another pointless conversation with KCPD.

      “Don’t make me pull my gun, Mr. Knight.”

      He stopped and leaned over the railing. “Why don’t you join me and do some real police work, instead of standing there, trying to make me think you can stop me.”

      “Trying?” The curse that followed definitely wasn’t feminine. Gabe laughed and climbed the steps. He heard her charging up the stairs after him.

      Good. He’d goaded at least one KCPD cop into taking some action. Even if she argued every step of the way, Detective Watson’s presence would get him back into Ron Kober’s office so he could pick up what the CSIs and detectives were saying, and he could get a closer look at the crime scene for himself.

      But Gabe’s smug smile flatlined when he felt a strong tug at his shoulders. “What the—”

      “You are officially trespassing in a restricted area.” Olivia yanked his jacket halfway down his arms, twisting them back and restricting his movement long enough to snap a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. She wrapped her hand around his elbow and turned him to face her. “And you’re annoying the hell out of me. Now, either go out front with the other reporters, or I’ll happily escort you to a jail cell myself.”

      Locking his hands behind his back wasn’t going to stop his investigation. “I know Dani Reese is in your cold case files.”

      “Fine. I’ll look it up when I get back to the precinct. You’re still leaving.”

      With a tug on his arm and a dare to defy her challenge bringing out the green in her eyes, Gabe reluctantly fell into step beside her and headed back down the stairs. She might have changed his direction, but she hadn’t silenced his voice. He calmly explained his reasons for ignoring her order to clear the building. Again. In case Olivia Watson had more bravado than brain cells going for her. “I’m trying to speed the process here, Detective. Dani was getting inside information on strong-arm tactics and a possible mob connection to Senator McCoy’s campaign. Six years ago. And now he’s running for reelection?”

      “I get your timeline. And I get that the events are too serious to dismiss as coincidence. You said Kober was feeding your fiancée intel on the senator’s campaign?” Her fingers tightened around his arm as they turned the corner—probably standard procedure to provide extra balance to a man in handcuffs. But his pulse leaped at Olivia’s firm grasp on him, momentarily distracting him from the questions laced with skepticism. “How do you know that? Were you working the story, too?”

      “No. It was Dani’s big scoop. She was trying to make a name for herself. I didn’t even realize what she was onto until it was too late.” Taking a deep breath, he pushed aside his lusty reaction to Detective Watson’s touch and let his heart fill with its customary guilt and grief. It wasn’t hard to replace Detective Watson’s changeable eye color with the sky blue beauty of Dani’s soft gaze in his mind. “I started reading the notes she had saved on a zip drive one night. I found Kober and Senator McCoy’s name, along with the draft of a story on kickbacks from Leland Asher.”

      Olivia’s pace slowed. “The alleged crime boss?”

      “You know there’s nothing alleged about the way he conducts business. That man has more ways to launder money than an industrial linen service. When I confronted Dani about the scope of what she was working on—and warned her of the danger—she got mad and stormed out. By the time I found out where she was meeting her contact, it was too late.” He stopped on the landing, needing to set his feet to withstand the memory that chilled his blood like a ghost passing through his body. He should have stopped Dani that night. He should have gone with her. He should have covered СКАЧАТЬ