Partner-Protector. Julie Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ out the phone book and looked up a number. The call could wait until morning, but there’d be fewer people around to laugh this time of night.

      She knew that woman had been all alone. Wouldn’t be missed.

      Kelsey understood the feeling without having to see it in a dream or vision or impression.

      That meant she was the only one who could help.

      Conscience, and a promise to her grandmother said she must.

      Pushing aside her own fears and stiffening her spine, Kelsey took a deep, fortifying breath and dialed.

      “K.C.P.D. Crime Hot Line,” a tired, bored voice answered.

      Not for the first time in her life, Kelsey wondered why she’d been cursed.

      “I’d like to report a murder.”

      Chapter One

      “You’re assigning me to The Flake?”

      Detective Thomas Merle Banning stared across the office at his captain, Mitch Taylor. Nice back-to-work-after-Christmas present.

      Yeah, right.

      “Actually, I’m assigning her to you.” The distinction wasn’t any comfort. “You’re the detective, she’s the departmental consultant.”

      “She’s the nutcase everybody jokes about in the coffee room.”

      “Nonetheless, she’s expecting to meet with you later this morning.”

      How the hell had he gotten so lucky? He no longer had anything to prove, did he? His arrest record was solid, his aim good enough to earn a marksman’s pin, his reports spotless down to the minutest detail. And no one who knew him—with two rare exceptions—dared call him nerdy Merle to his face anymore. He’d long since outgrown terms like rookie and computer geek.

      But this smacked of some kind of practical joke or penance.

      “Why don’t you just shoot me now and put me out of my misery?” He marched across the room in his determined, rolling stride and faced Mitch across his desk. “I thought you were putting me on the cold-case detail for the next few months while Ginny’s on maternity leave.”

      “I am.”

      “Then put me on a desk. Let me work. Don’t waste my time with this woman.”

      “This woman believes she’s seen something that can help one of those cases.”

      With his regular partner, Ginny Rafferty-Taylor, assigned to extended bed rest for the last trimester of her pregnancy, Merle had already been taken off the active homicide investigation team and relegated to sorting through boxes of dead-end cases. He hadn’t argued the reassignment because Captain Taylor had played to his ego, telling him he had a real knack for uncovering details others missed and patiently piecing together random clues to complete investigative puzzles.

      But no amount of ego stroking was going to make this right. He worked with the smartest, prettiest, classiest woman on the planet. Not UFO-chasing, crystal-ball-reading, hocus-pocus crackpots. It was hard enough to lose Ginny. But to let another woman try to take her place as his partner?

      Make that departmental consultant.

      Merle scrubbed his palm across his clean-shaven jaw and shrugged. “The Flake?”

      “She has a name.” Captain Taylor’s resonant voice reprimanded him like the father he’d lost so long ago. “Kelsey Ryan. She has a degree in criminal justice studies and teaches a course in psychic forensic science over at University of Missouri-Kansas City.”

      Psychic science? Wasn’t that some kind of oxymoron? “What the hell is that? Since when does K.C.P.D. rely on psychobabble to solve cases? She’s nothing but a PR nightmare. No one will take me seriously if she’s attached to me. I’d rather work alone.”

      He pulled back the front of his tweed jacket and shoved his hands into the pockets of his khaki slacks, pacing the confines of the small office. The twinge in his right knee was more pronounced with the bitter temperatures plaguing the city these past few weeks. But pain was just something a mature man lived with. Banning had been on the force for seven years now, had been a detective for five. He’d long since outgrown his naive new kid on the block status.

      Taking a couple of bullets that left his body scarred and his soul ancient beyond his twenty-nine years did that to a man.

      In those seven years of service, he’d unholstered his weapon only twice while on duty. He’d been forced to kill a man each time.

      Those were the kinds of odds that sobered a man’s way of thinking. Made him understand the value of cold, hard facts and leaving nothing to chance.

      That’s why this made no sense.

      He stopped and looked into his superior’s sage brown eyes. “Why me, Captain?”

      For such a big, robust man, Mitch Taylor was surprisingly gentle as he adjusted the framed picture of his wife and young son on the desk in front of him. When he sat down, Merle took the clue and eased into a chair on the opposite side. The old man wanted to talk, and Merle had learned it paid to listen to the veteran cop.

      “One thing I’ve learned about you over the years, Banning, is that you’re smart. You don’t just learn from your books and computers, but from people. From mistakes and successes, your own and others’. I’m counting on the fact you might be willing to learn something from Ms. Ryan, too.” The captain nodded toward the blind-covered windows that separated his office from the rows of desks and cubicles that formed the Fourth Precinct detective division. “I can name at least a half-dozen men out there who’d just brush her aside. But I can count on you to be gentleman enough not to laugh in her face when she tells her story.”

      Merle couldn’t stop the sarcasm from bleeding into his voice. “You want me to work with her because my mother taught me good manners?”

      “Someone has to talk to her. Take her statement, at the very least. If there’s any credibility to what she has to say, I know you’ll be fair.”

      The captain thought Kelsey Ryan was that important? Or was this more ego stroking to bribe him into taking a job nobody else wanted? He still wasn’t about to accept this assignment wholeheartedly, but there was a certain wisdom in pleasing the boss. “All I have to do is take her statement?”

      Captain Taylor nodded. “She claims she can help with the Holiday Hooker murders.”

      “Let me guess. She thinks she was a hooker in another life.”

      That one actually made the old man smile. “Don’t dismiss her yet. We can’t afford to alienate any citizen right now.” He shoved this morning’s Kansas City Star newspaper across the desk and pointed to a headline near the bottom of the front page.

      K.C.P.D. No Closer To IDing Remains Of Infant Girl

      “Ouch.” The discovery of a baby Jane Doe’s body in one of the area landfills more than two months ago had galvanized the entire department from homicide to missing persons to traffic cops. Every man and woman on СКАЧАТЬ