Detective On The Hunt

JJ was impressed that Quint had been so observant. With those dark glasses he’d had on, of course, she couldn’t see where his gaze was directed, but it had felt as if it was on her the whole time. Obviously not.

“Didn’t take her long to figure out where the best doughnuts in town are, did it?” Douglas murmured.

Though the comment wasn’t directed at her, she responded with a little shrug. “Cops and doughnuts. What can I say?”

He smiled briefly at the stereotype, then opened the laptop and began clicking away. She’d never had a chief who was anywhere near her age, but she would bet Sam Douglas was even a few years younger. He didn’t wear a uniform—Chadwick always wore a uniform with four shiny gold stars on his collar to ensure everyone recognized him as the head honcho—but instead was dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. A soft-looking gray cowboy hat was on the file cabinet to the left of his desk, leading her to expect cowboy boots on his feet if she could get a peek.

You’re definitely not in Carolina anymore, JJ.

“Okay, Detective Logan—we don’t stand on ceremony much around here. All right if I call you JJ?”

She nodded.

“I’m Sam, and he’s Quint.”

Wow. She’d never had a chief who was that casual, either. Even the last one, her mentor, had never invited her to use his first name. He’d believed in good work relations, but there was a line that should never be crossed.

“You didn’t ask what we know, but we’ll tell you anyway. You have the address of the house Maura’s renting. You know she drives a little red car that cost more than a lot of people’s houses around here. I’ve never met her myself, but my officers have handled four disturbance calls at that address for loud parties and given her three—no, four citations for speeding.”

Disturbance calls at that big house at the end of that lonely street. Those must have been some parties.

“Quint gave her three of those tickets.”

She shifted her gaze to Quint. He hadn’t changed position—he still leaned against the table—but his posture seemed fractionally more rigid, his expression harder. She was half surprised he could open that taut jaw to add, “I also answered one of the disturbance calls with Ben.”

Sam frowned. “Why was Ben answering a disturbance call?”

“He was in the office when it came in. Loud party, forty or so people, lot of booze.”

JJ called to mind the area across the hall that served as reception, dispatch and detective squad, including a very tall, very broad-shouldered muscular man. “I’m going to guess Ben is the big guy out there at one of the desks.”

Sam nodded. “Six foot four, solid muscle, can make you confess to anything just so he’ll go away and stop looking at you. No matter how drunk people are, they never want to take on Ben Little Bear.”

She envied that. When she was in uniform, all the drunks had wanted to take her on. She’d been forced to perfect her combat skills and had developed quite an affection for her nonlethal resources: baton, pepper spray and Taser.

“When was the last time you saw Maura?” Sam asked Quint.

“The day I gave her that last ticket.” Quint’s scowl was slightly more fierce than his normal expression. “About two months ago. She was doing forty-eight in a twenty.”

JJ smiled faintly. “That sounds like Maura. The day her parents gave her that car, she got stopped for speeding in town and again in the county. Notice I said stopped, not ticketed. The officer and the deputy let her go when they realized who she was. I wrote her father a ticket once. Got called back to the station and royally chewed out.”

“Must be nice to have so much influence.” Cynicism made Quint’s voice dry as parched sand.

“I can live without it.” She crossed her legs and let her foot tap air a few times. “At home, we have a dispatcher named Carla and a patrol officer named Patrick who know everything there is to know about everyone in town.”

Quint and Sam exchanged looks before the chief answered. “That would be Morwenna and Lois. Quint, why don’t you show her the conference room and I’ll get them.”

Quint straightened to his full height easily and fluidly. She, on the other hand, felt the stiffness of two days’ driving and another few hours’ sitting. While she was here, she needed to make time for regular runs, long walks or—her gaze slid from his golden hair over his chest, his narrow waist and narrower hips, down long legs to the black tactical boots he wore—ah, yes, physical activity of some sort.

Without realizing it, she’d registered at some point that, unlike Sam, he wore no wedding ring. She had only two hard-and-fast rules in her romantic life, and one was that she didn’t dally with married men. She’d pulled enough enraged wives off their husbands’ girlfriends, hands filled with hair and fingernails leaving deep gouges, to know the best sex in the world wasn’t worth that.

The other rule was that her butterflies had to twirl and her heart had to pitter-patter.

Check on the butterflies. And—she caught the slight increase of her heart rate—check on the pitter-patter.

But what were the odds she’d be here long enough to thaw him out?

Showing JJ to the conference room took about five seconds: out the door, turn right, go to the next door. Quint flipped on the overhead, then went to open the blinds on the tall windows. The light flooding the room illuminated the intricate crown molding, original to the building, along with the battered table, cast-off chairs and unwanted desks bunched against one wall.

“Interesting room,” she remarked as she made her way to a chair. “The marble floor is gorgeous, and the moldings are incredible.”

“But everything in between sucks.”

“Except for the windows, pretty much.” She sat at the far end, where sunlight filtered through the blinds. The position would give her a good look at everyone else while she would be shadowy when they looked back. He bet she had all kinds of similar tricks up her detective’s sleeve.

He should ask Sam if he could go now, but Sam hadn’t included that in his instructions. For whatever reason—probably because Maura lived in Quint’s patrol district—he wanted Quint to know all this, and because Quint was damn grateful to have his job, he was going to obey. But he’d still rather be outside, alone in his vehicle, with nothing for company but the radio broadcasts.

JJ’s chair was pushed back from the table, leaving her room to cross her legs again. Her spine was straight, barely touching the back of the chair, and except for the heavy jacket, her clothing clung, shirt hugging her breasts just short of straining the buttons, denim stretching over her thighs. Most women he knew with that kind of posture had suffered through years of ballet or gymnastics. He tried to imagine her in leotards or tights, tumbling or pirouetting on her toes, but the image wouldn’t form. Swinging a baseball bat or breaking a board with her bare foot seemed far more likely.

She brushed her hair back, and sunlight flashed on a stone on her left hand. It was on her ring finger, fiery orange set in gold. A nontraditional engagement or wedding ring, or just a piece of jewelry she liked? He wouldn’t find it hard to believe she was unconventional. Wouldn’t find it hard to believe she was married, either.

Didn’t matter to him either way.

“What is your impression of Maura?”

Embarrassment heated Quint’s neck but luckily burned inward instead of out. From the moment the dispatcher had passed on the call to check the stranger on Maura’s street, he’d known in the back of his mind that this had to do with Maura. Who else on that street was interesting enough for surveillance? The young couple with four kids in the house fifty feet behind where she’d parked? The elderly sisters? The two college girls down the street or Jamey Moran, the deputy fire marshal who was so clean he squeaked?

But the front part of his brain hadn’t wanted to give it any thought. Now he had no choice, so he gave the most superficial answer that came to mind. “She’s a bad driver with too much time and money on her hands.”

JJ tilted her head to one side. “That’s it?”

Acknowledging that he seemed to be getting further away from returning to his vehicle instead of closer, he swallowed a sigh and took a chair near her end of the table, leaving an empty space between them. “I don’t know her. My interaction with her has been less than thirty minutes, all calls combined.”

That was true. But he was leaving out the fact that the last time he’d stopped her, Maura had offered to remedy the not-knowing-each-other thing if he wouldn’t write the ticket. He’d stood there in her driveway—she’d refused to stop until she reached the house—and smelled the sweet scent of her perfume, watched the breeze mold her already-tight dress even closer to her body, and sweet hell, he’d been tempted. He’d been alone so long. So damn alone. Sometimes he’d missed human contact so much that he’d physically hurt with it, and he’d thought…

It had shamed him then, and it did now. He’d thought Maura was no one special. She would never mean anything to him. He could use her to ease his pain and never have to bother with her again. He’d never treated women as disposable, but it had held a strong appeal that day.

Then she’d touched him, and it had had the effect of a gut punch, slamming home one important truth: he didn’t want human contact. He wanted Linny. No one could ever replace her, not for a night, for an hour or a minute, and certainly not some rich girl who thought avoiding a hundred-dollar ticket was worth trading sex for.

Disgusted with himself, he’d removed her hand, a bit of a struggle when she’d already insinuated her fingers inside his belt and didn’t want to let go. She’d pouted, called him a few names, torn up the ticket and let the wind scatter the pieces. And after that, he’d turned a blind eye to her driving infractions, just like those South Carolina cops did. Don’t poke the bear, his father used to say. The next time he might not walk away with his dignity intact.

“She was self-centered. Used to getting her way. She fluttered her lashes and smiled real pretty and expected problems to go away. I have no idea why she settled here. There aren’t a lot of restaurants, no clubs that would appeal to someone like that, no shopping besides Walmart, a couple of small clothing stores and the antique stores downtown, and name-dropping wouldn’t get her anywhere this far from home. Cedar Creek doesn’t have anything to offer her.”

That was the most he’d said at one time in months. His chest was tight, his lungs empty from putting together so many words. It was an odd feeling, hearing so much of his own voice when he generally got through the day with minimal talking.

He drew a breath and turned the question around. “What is your impression of her?”

Her smile was easy. “She was self-centered and used to getting her way. But I don’t think she could really help it, given who she was and where and how she was raised. I don’t think she was strong enough to develop any independence or real sense of character when every soul in her life expected her to be a princess.