Private S.W.A.T. Takeover

“We’ll get Mabry to the hospital to stitch up his hand and have him evaluated. But he’ll be all right.”

Holden propped his hands at his hips and nodded toward the house. “Take his mother, too. You said she had a history of high blood pressure. Being taken hostage by her own son can’t be good for her health.”

“Don’t worry. She’s on the ambulance, too. We’ll let her decompress, then take her statement at the hospital. I want you to do the same.”

“Go to the hospital?” Other than being hungry as a bear and needing to take a whiz, Holden was in fine shape.

“Decompress. You’re wound up tighter than a cork in a champagne bottle. You’ve been on duty twenty-four hours, standing watch while we tried to talk Mabry off the ceiling for the last eight.” Cutler pulled off his KCPD ball cap and smoothed his hand over his salt-and-pepper hair before tugging the cap back into place. “Your dad would be proud of you today. By wounding Al Mabry, you probably saved his life. And his mother’s. He was an innocent man, a sick man, but I know you were prepared to make a kill shot.”

“Just doing my job, Lieutenant. I turn off thinking about anything,” he lied, “and take the shot you tell me to.”

“Uh-huh.” There was something in Cutler’s sharp, dark eyes that saw more than Holden wanted. So he scuffed the steel toe of his boot on the pavement and looked down to watch a tiny pebble fly against the curb—until Cutler’s words demanded his attention. “Think about this, Kincaid. Before you report for your next shift, I want to hear that you got drunk, got laid or got checked out by the departmental psychologist. I know this has been a tough year for you, and this was a tough scene to work. Go home. Go out. Go to the doc. But take care of yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dominic materialized at Holden’s shoulder, his wiseass grin firmly in place. “Aren’t you gonna order me to go get some tail, too, sir?”

“That’d just be feeding the fire.”

Trip and Delgado joined the circle, laughing out loud at Cutler’s deadpan reply.

“Ha. Ha.” Dom slapped Holden on the shoulder. “C’mon, big guy. We’ll check out the action at the Shamrock after we clean up and get a bite to eat. Drinks are on me.” He turned to Trip and Delgado. “You comin’ ?”

“You’re gonna pry open that tight wallet of yours?” Trip’s lazy drawl mocked him with awestruck humor. “This I gotta see.”

“Lieutenant?” Dom looked up at their commander. “You’re welcome to join us.”

“I’ll pass this time. My son has a football game tonight. I’ll check in with you guys day after tomorrow. Don’t forget those reports.”

A chorus of “yes, sir’s” quickly changed into a noisy conversation about the new lady bartender at the Shamrock and whether she had any sisters she’d like to introduce to them. Delgado climbed in behind the wheel and started the van while the rest of the team buckled themselves in. Holden had found the woman pretty enough the last time they’d gone to the Shamrock, but for some reason he was having a hard time remembering what she looked like.

He must be off his game big time, to let his feelings about his father’s murder distract him from his work—and his play time—and to let them distract him enough that Lieutenant Cutler had noticed.

He’d been through all the grief counseling, and had been cleared by the department’s psychologist to return to duty four months ago. He hadn’t lied to Cutler or the psychologist about his and his three brothers’ determination to see their father’s killer brought to justice. Even though they weren’t allowed to work the case because of a conflict of interest, Holden, Atticus, Sawyer and Edward had all found ways to keep tabs on the stalledout investigation.

Atticus and his fiancée, Brooke Hansford, had uncovered evidence about a covert organization named Z Group that had operated in eastern Europe before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Before becoming a cop at KCPD, their father had worked with Brooke’s late parents in Z Group as a liaison from Army intelligence. Something that had happened to a double agent all those years ago in a foreign country had gotten John Kincaid killed.

His brother Sawyer and his pregnant wife, Melissa, had dealt with an offshoot of Z Group soon after their father’s funeral. But one of the thugs hired by the group had had a personal vendetta against Melissa. He’d terrorized her and kidnapped their young son. Despite the opportunity to blow open the murder investigation, Sawyer had done what any husband would have—he protected his family. John Kincaid would have done the same—any of Holden’s brothers would have—so there was no blame there. Now, Melissa and their child were safe, but anyone who could tell them anything had been driven into hiding or killed.

And yesterday morning, while Atticus had been reporting on the trip he and Brooke had taken to Sarajevo to visit her parents’ graves—only to discover that it wasn’t her mother’s body that had been buried in that casket nearly thirty years ago—Holden had run smack dab into Liza Parrish. A name he wasn’t supposed to know. A woman he wasn’t supposed to meet.

The lone witness to his father’s murder.

Yeah. He was a little distracted.

A lot distracted.

Liza Parrish could make the scattered pieces of this whole jigsaw puzzle fall into place. His father’s killer would be brought to trial and the Kincaid family could finally find peace.

So why wasn’t she talking? Why wasn’t she telling the detectives assigned to the investigation everything she knew?

And why the hell couldn’t he remember what the sexy bartender looked like, the one who’d slipped him her number at the Shamrock, when he had no trouble whatsoever picturing freckles and copper hair, a sweet, round bottom and an attitude that wouldn’t quit?

As much as his father’s murder challenged his ability to focus on his work, little Miss Liza with the sass and curves—and answers—kept nagging at him like an itch he couldn’t scratch. If he couldn’t get his head together, he’d be a bigger danger to his team than the bad guys they were trained to neutralize.

Cutler realized that.

“Yo, big guy.” Dom smacked him on the shoulder, pulling Holden from his thoughts. “I said whoever got Josie’s number first would have to buy the second round of drinks tonight. You in?”

Josie. Right. That was the bartender’s name. Yet it was hard to razz his buddies about the fact he already had her number, when he couldn’t even recall the color of her hair.

But copper-red? Short—almost boyishly cropped and sexy as hell? That he could remember.

He was so screwed. Faking a lightheartedness he didn’t feel, Holden fixed a grin on his face and turned to Dom. “You’re on.”

It was a hollow victory. But right now he’d take whatever victory he could get.

HOLDEN’S LONG STRIDES ATE UP the pavement as he ran the abandoned Union Pacific railroad bed. It had been reclaimed as part of an exercise trail along Rock Creek, near the Kansas City suburb of Fairmount, and would make for a scenic run in the daylight, with the red, gold and orange leaves of the old maples and oaks rising along the hills to his left and flattening out to the residential streets to his right.

Pulling back the cuff of his sweatshirt, he pushed the button for light on his watch and checked the time. At 11:27 p.m., however, the deserted path was gray and shadowed beneath the cool moonlight. Still, it was a good place to get away from the traffic and crowd near his downtown apartment without venturing too far from the amenities of the city.

Hanging out with his buddies at the Shamrock hadn’t provided the cure Lieutenant Cutler had prescribed. Al Mabry was fine and full of remorse now that he was back with his doctors at the Odd Fellows Psychiatric Hospital. His mother, Delores, was resting comfortably at Truman Medical Center for a night of routine observation. No one had been seriously hurt. Holden had made a good shot. They should all be celebrating.

But the beer and noise had given him a headache. The greasy food had been tasty enough, but it had sat like a rock in his stomach. As for the women? Well, when doing a little flirting began to feel like a polite chore he had to perform, Holden knew he needed to get out of there.

With the honest excuse of a long day and a longer night before that dragging him down, he shook Dominic’s hand, warned Delgado and Trip to keep an eye on him, and left. Instead of heading home, though, he found himself at his Fourth Precinct police locker, changing into his gray sweats and running shoes. After a brief chat with his brother, Atticus, who was there to pick up Brooke for a late dinner after a meeting with her boss, precinct commander Mitch Taylor, Holden pulled on his black KCPD stocking cap and headed across town.

Sleep might have been a wiser choice, but Holden was more inclined to get his blood and adrenaline pumping, and cleanse himself of this restless apprehension from the inside out.

Normally, he was content to work out in the precinct’s gym or run the streets near his apartment. But tonight, he needed something fresh and different to shake him out of this funk. The brisk dampness in the air would clear his head, while every turn on the route would reveal something new to pique his interest.

And if the path just happened to lead him past the address where Liza Parrish lived, then that could be excused as coincidence. The houses were close to the road, but set far enough apart to almost give the feeling of living out in the country. Probably at one time in Kansas City’s history, this had been farmland, but with expansion and annexations, the neighborhood was inevitably being transformed into suburbia. As he passed a quarter mile of grass and trees, he realized how this must seem like a different world from the downtown animal clinic where Liza worked an internship through the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine.

“Are you looking up what I think you are?” Atticus had caught Holden sitting at a computer in one of the darkened precinct offices. Leading his fiancée by the hand, he’d entered the room before Holden was even aware of his presence.

Brooke peeked around Atticus’s shoulder with a wry smile. “Sorry. We were on our way to the car when I mentioned that I’d seen you here. He figured out the rest.”

His smarty-pants older brother never missed a trick, so there was no sense in lying to him. Holden folded the print-out he’d made and shut down the computer. “Yeah. I checked out the public information available on Liza Parrish. Brooke just told me where to find it on the computer.”

“You helped him?” Shaking his head, Atticus turned to Brooke. “Honey, we talked about this. As much as it galls me to sit on the sidelines, we have to let Grove and his men run their investigation.”

Brooke adjusted her glasses on her nose and softened her expression into a smile that always seemed to turn his brother’s suave control into mush. “That’s not what you said this summer, when we were on a hunt to decipher the clues your father left me. You were certainly involved in the investigation then.”

“Yeah, well, we both know what kind of danger that ‘investigation’ put you in. I don’t want to see anyone else get hurt.”

She lay a calming hand on Atticus’s arm. “All I did was show Holden a shortcut to the public access files on the computer. So he wouldn’t accidentally trigger any security protocol that might alert Grove or anyone else to his search.”

Holden circled around the desk and draped an arm around her shoulders. “I knew if I had a computer question, Brooke was the source to go to. I didn’t mean to get her into trouble.”