Beau muttered a curse and captured her mouth with his.

Elizabeth sighed and settled against him. The kiss was soft and sweet. His skin was warm and smelled of his cologne, and she inhaled it deeply into her lungs while her mouth caressed his.

Under other circumstances she would rather have her derriere tattooed with a snake than be caught in the middle of an embrace like this where any stranger might see them.

But how could she step away when she had thought about being in his arms like this, secretly yearned for it, for so many months now? When she had imagined this kiss so many times—and was discovering that the reality of it far, far exceeded any fantasy?

She would have to go back to her dull, insular existence soon enough. For now, she wanted to savor every second.

The Quiet Storm
RaeAnne Thayne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

RAEANNE THAYNE

lives in a graceful old Victorian nestled in the rugged mountains of Northern Utah, along with her husband and two young children. Her books have won numerous honors, including a RITA® Award nomination by the Romance Writers of America. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers. She can be reached through her Web site at www.raeannethayne.com or at P.O. Box 6682, North Logan, UT 84341.

To speech therapists everywhere.

Special thanks to Robert Hale, editor of the Waggoner Cruising Guide, for his invaluable help to this dedicated landlubber about all things nautical.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 1

The ice princess was nervous.

From his post by the door of the precinct break room, Beau Riley watched the woman perched on a plastic molded chair in front of his desk. She sat prim as a schoolgirl, with spine-cracking posture—knees perfectly aligned, shoulders back, those huge blue eyes focused neither to the right nor the left.

He might have thought she was carved from a thin glacial sheer except for her hands, which trembled ever so slightly.

No. Scratch that, he corrected himself, looking a little closer. She was more than nervous. She was scared to death. Elizabeth Quinn, multigazillionaire publishing heiress, looked ready to jump right out of her skin.

He had to admit he wanted to let her stew in it a little longer, let her sit there until perspiration popped out on that lush, perfect lip, until she was as jumpy as a grasshopper on a hot sidewalk.

The vindictiveness of the impulse startled him. Was his ego really so fragile?

Maybe. He had plenty of reason to dislike this particular rich bitch.

Still, curiosity was a far stronger element of his psyche than petty vengeance. He had to find out. What the hell was she doing perched at the desk of one of Seattle PD’s finest? What would possibly make the ice princess come down from her crystal palace to mingle with the rest of the world?

Whatever she was doing here, he wouldn’t find out unless he talked to her. With one hand fisted around the handle of his favorite Sonics coffee mug, he sauntered to his desk and loomed over her.

As he neared, she drew a deep breath as if gearing up for a firing squad, then she lifted her gaze to his. He wanted to think he saw an instant of shocked recognition in those cool-blue eyes, then she shielded whatever emotion might be lurking there.

“May I help you?” he asked, his voice sharp as an ice pick.

She blinked a little at his tone, and those pretty white hands fluttered just once then tightened on the strap of a slim little nothing of a purse he was willing to bet cost more than his month’s salary.

“Are you…” Her voice faltered and she closed her eyes. After a few seconds she opened them again. He was intrigued to see that the nervousness had given way to determination. “Are you Detective Riley?”

So it wasn’t a mistake. She was here looking for him. He narrowed his eyes as his curiosity kicked up a notch. Last time he’d seen her, she hadn’t been nearly as eager to talk to him.

“Yeah. I’m Riley. Who wants to know?” He couldn’t resist asking the question, even though he knew exactly who she was.

Muscles worked in her throat as she swallowed. “My name is Elizabeth Quinn. I’m a…friend of Grace Dugan’s. She gave me your name and said you might be able to help me.”

Ah. Suddenly things began to make more sense. He should have known Gracie had her meddling little fingerprints all over this somehow. His temporarily sidelined partner damn well ought to have enough on her plate with a husband like Jack Dugan, a new baby, an energetic seven-year-old and that big house out on Bainbridge Island.

But Gracie wasn’t content with that. Oh, no. She wasn’t happy unless she was coming up with new and creative ways to tangle up his life.

He swallowed a frustrated growl and turned his attention back to the latest complication perched in front of him. Damn. Why did it have to be Elizabeth Quinn? She probably needed a traffic ticket fixed or some other piddling thing.

He wanted to order her away from his desk. Wanted to snarl that he had real police business waiting for him and didn’t have time for this today. Before he could open his mouth, though, he caught sight of her hands again. Those long, slender fingers looked strangely vulnerable clasping that ridiculous bag. Closer inspection showed that instead of the glossy polish he might have expected, the nails were bare and looked as if they’d been chewed almost to the quick.

The sight shouldn’t have moved him. He was a hardened police detective who had seen the worst life had to offer. Still, a funny little twinge caught in his chest.

“How can I help you?” he finally asked.

Elizabeth Quinn pursed those lush lips, so at odds with the rest of her prissy, back-off demeanor. She followed his gaze to her hands, then looked back at him, and the sudden pain etched into her eyes like acid on glass took him by surprise.

It had been there all the time, he realized, just buried beneath all the nervousness.

“I need you to find a murderer,” she whispered.

Okay. He wasn’t expecting that one. He edged back in his chair and frowned. “We have a chain of command for these kinds of things, Ms. Quinn. If you’re here to report a crime, I can point you in the right direction. Other than that, I’m not sure how I can help you.”

Her chin lifted. “I’ve been through just about every link in that chain of command, Mr. Riley. I’m ready to hire private investigators, but Grace suggested I come to you first.”

Lucky him. He made a mental note to wring Gracie’s pretty little neck the next time he saw her, and blew out a breath. “What is it you expect me to do?”

She had an odd habit of pausing before she spoke, as if weighing the wisdom of every word. Beau caught himself leaning forward so he didn’t miss anything.

“I’m here to ask you to reopen a case that has been closed.”

“We don’t close murder cases until a suspect is convicted.”

“This case was closed because the death was ruled a suicide. But it’s not. I know it wasn’t. You people have it wrong, no matter how damning the evidence might seem. Tina never would have killed herself. Never. She might have been depressed and…and in trouble but she would never have done anything that drastic.”

Whoa. Where did all this intensity come from? The ice princess had suddenly vanished, leaving behind a passionate woman with snapping blue eyes and flaming color.

He wouldn’t have expected that such emotion lurked inside the brittle shell of Elizabeth Quinn. He had to wonder what other heat might be hidden there.

“I’m sorry. You’re going to have to give me a little more than a first name to go on here. Tina who?”

It was fascinating to watch her control click back into place. One minute she radiated fire, the next she sat before him composed and cool. She waited just a heartbeat more, then she spoke softly. “Tina Hidalgo. My friend. Three weeks ago she was found dead in her apartment. Shot.”

Her mouth with its elegant pink tint gave a tiny quiver and straightened again. “There was no sign of forced entry, no fingerprints but her own on the gun, and she left a note.”

“Sounds pretty cut-and-dried.”

“Yes, that’s what the other detectives—Speth and Walker—concluded. But they’re wrong.”

He had seen this reaction before. Suicides were often the toughest cases a cop had to work. In their grief and denial, the people left behind often struggled to face the fact that their loved one would ever take such a final step. They often preferred to focus their anger not on the deceased but on the cops with the nerve to put such a stark label on their loss.

He didn’t want to add to her grief, but it would be cruel to give her any hope that he could help her. “Ms. Quinn, I’m sorry about your friend. But Marc Walker and Dennis Speth are both fine detectives. They wouldn’t have closed the case unless they had ruled out any possibility of homicide and unless the medical examiner signed off on their findings. I’m not sure what you would like me to do.”

“Grace seemed to think you might consider taking another look at the facts in the case.”

No fair dragging Gracie into it again. He was definitely going to have to have a talk with her.

“Are you party to any facts in the case that Detectives Speth and Watson don’t know?”

She was quiet for several beats. “I don’t think so. But I’m not sure they gave proper…proper consideration to some of those facts.”

“Such as?”

Again that little pause, then she drew a deep breath. “Tina has a son. A beautiful little boy, Alex. For reasons I won’t go into, he lives with…with his grandmother and with me, but Tina loves him.”

Raw grief swam in her eyes for just a moment, then she composed herself. “She loved him,” she corrected. “Tina was a good mother who loved her son. She never would have left him like that. I know she wouldn’t. She was trying to get her life straightened out so Alex could live with her again. We just talked about it the evening before she…before she died.”

“Ms. Quinn—”

“Please. Will you at least look at the facts of the case and see if you can find anything the other detectives might have missed? Grace said she would do it herself if she could access the files.”

Beau ground his back teeth. If he didn’t agree to help Miss Priss, he could just picture Grace storming the precinct to comb through the report herself, dragging her newborn and her stepdaughter, Emma, along with her. Gracie wouldn’t let the fact that she was supposed to be on extended maternity leave for at least another six months stop her.

Whether he wanted to or not, he was going to have to help Elizabeth Quinn. Damn. For anyone else in the world, he wouldn’t mind agreeing to take a look at the file—what could it hurt?—but it stuck in his craw like a bad piece of haddock that he had to humor someone like her.

He pictured her the last time he’d seen her, at the event Grace had conned him into attending by using a potent combination of guilt and blackmail.

Society benefits weren’t his thing. He would never have agreed to go to that one if it hadn’t been a fund-raiser for Grace’s pet project, an after-school program for troubled inner-city kids—and if she hadn’t thrown in the reminder that she was eight months pregnant and needed all the moral support she could find.

He had been standing by one of the food tables on Jack Dugan’s vast, pine-shaded deck overlooking the Sound, munching on some kind of lobster thingy that barely made a mouthful and wondering when the hell he could finally leave, when he spotted her. The Grace Kelly look-alike in an ice-blue sweater, matching slacks, designer shoes and one row of discreetly elegant pearls that made her look as if she’d just walked out of some exclusive photo shoot for Town & Country.

Just another bubbleheaded, self-involved socialite, he figured. Still, something about her intrigued him. Rear Window had always been one of his favorite movies.

He watched her from the other side of the huge deck for a long time: the furrow of her forehead as she concentrated on what the elderly matron in the garish purple suit was saying; the way she tucked her smooth blond hair behind her ear with slender fingers; the soft smile that captured her mouth at something the older woman said.

After a moment he watched her excuse herself and wander to an empty spot on the deck facing the water. She stood there for a long time, gazing out at the Sound. She looked lonely. Isolated, removed from the crowd, just as he felt. Unable to help himself, he finally began to move purposefully through the milling people toward her.

When he reached her side, he had murmured something inane about the sunset, just as an opener. He didn’t even remember what, but he knew she had to have heard him. She froze but didn’t respond at all and an instant later she turned abruptly and walked away from him, leaving him astonished and uncomfortably aware that his face was burning.

He’d never considered himself a particularly vain man but he sure as hell wasn’t used to women completely ignoring him. As brush-offs went, this one had been particularly brutal.

It still stung, he had to admit. Two months later.

He didn’t want to help her. He wanted to tell her to take a dive right into the Sound. But she had Grace on her side. What the hell else was he supposed to do? After a moment, Beau blew out a breath. The only way he was going to get rid of her was to humor her.

“Look, Ms. Quinn, I’ll check out the file. I don’t think I’ll see anything there that Speth and Watson missed, but I’ll take a look. That’s all I can do.”

As Elizabeth registered his words, she felt as if a weight the size of the Cascades had just been hefted from her shoulder.

He was going to help her find who killed Tina! She wasn’t going to have to do this alone.

Ohthankyouthankyouthankyou. The words jumbled up in her head, in her throat, shoving together like boxcars on a derailed train. She froze for an instant, painfully aware he was watching her, expecting some response. Slow down. Think. With fierce concentration, she managed to sort the words out, after what she hoped wasn’t too awkward a pause.

Thank. You. Thank you.

She murmured the words, then rose. She had to get out of here. Soon. She could feel her composure begin to crack apart like fragile antique glass. If she wanted to get through this meeting without it completely shattering, she was going to have to wrap things up quickly.

Coming here, facing Beau Riley, had taken every ounce of strength she possessed. More. Her insides were shaky, hollow, and her head pounded from trying so hard to concentrate.

She didn’t do at all well with strangers or with confrontations. But she had to remember Alex. This was all for him. She couldn’t let that sweet child grow up with one more strike against him, the stigma and pain of believing his mother had committed suicide. As she well knew, he would have enough to deal with throughout his life. He didn’t need this, too.

Tina did not kill herself. Elizabeth knew it better than she knew the blasted alphabet.

If she had to face a thousand gorgeous police detectives to prove it, she would do it for Alex.

She wasn’t sure exactly how, but by some miracle she managed to say goodbye and to hold the fraying edges of herself together until she could escape from the dark-eyed, intense Beau Riley.

Somehow she made it out of the precinct and through the echoing parking garage to her car. She unlocked the door and slid inside, then sagged against the leather, wanting nothing but to stay right there in a boneless, quivering heap.

Beau Riley. She pressed a hand to her stomach, finally admitting that not all of the fluttering there stemmed from stress and nerves. An unmistakable sizzle of awareness was there, too, along with a huge dose of mortification.

She should have known. Beau Riley, the detective Grace swore would help her, was the same man she had encountered at the Dugans’ party a few months earlier.

Beau Riley was the man she had treated with such abominable rudeness, only because every single word in her head had vanished when he approached her, looking male and gorgeous and terrifying.

Rather than stand in front of him gaping like an idiot, she had chosen escape.

Did he remember her? Of course he would. Not many men could forget a major-league rejection like that. For one fleeting moment she wished she could rush back into the police station and explain why she had turned her back on him. If only she could assure him her behavior had nothing to do with him, but with her.

She couldn’t, of course. Even if she managed to find the right words, she could never explain to someone as self-possessed as Beau Riley how stupid and awkward she was. She could never tell him that no matter how hard she tried, she didn’t understand every word he said to her.

How could she blurt out to a stranger that the wiring inside her head sometimes decided to go haywire and when it did, she couldn’t even find a simple word like hello?

She blew out a breath. He must think she was the rudest person on the planet. The ice princess. She knew people called her that. It was a far better label than the ones she’d heard as a child.

Freak.

Moron.

Stupid.

She would take ice princess any day. The hand still pressed to her stomach clenched into a fist. She would just have to let him go on believing her cold. If he was willing to help her find who killed Tina, she didn’t care what he thought of her.

She closed her eyes but his image still burned in her mind, as it had far more often than she cared to admit since the night of the fund-raiser, until Tina’s violent death three weeks ago had pushed away anything as frivolous as thoughts of a gorgeous man.

Tina would have called him a major hottie. Elizabeth managed a smile even as grief pierced her again whenever she thought of her friend.

He was very different from the polished, smooth executives her father had paraded home in the months before his death a year ago, eternally hopeful that one of them would take his dimwitted daughter off his hands.

Beau Riley had little in common with those tame, docile men like her one-time fiancé, men who cared more about their manicures than about things like truth and justice. She knew it instinctively.

The bleat of her cell phone shattered the quiet inside the Lexus before she could dwell more on the detective.

She gazed at the phone as it rang a second time, tempted to ignore it. Talking on the phone was always a challenge when she couldn’t use body language and facial expressions as cues.

One look at the incoming number told her she had no choice but to pick it up. Luisa never called unless it was important.

“Hello?”

Silence answered her for a moment, then Luisa’s melodious, soothing voice reached her. “Mi hija? I worry for you.”

Elizabeth didn’t need to see the older woman’s sweet, plump face to comprehend the concern and love in her voice. Some of the tension in her shoulders began to seep out. “I’m fine. I’ll be heading for the…” Big. Water. Float. She could see the blasted thing in her mind but the slippery word evaded her.

“I’ll be home soon,” she finally said.

Ferry! That’s what she meant. The ferry. She almost blurted it out but she knew Luisa had enough experience with her conversational idiosyncrasies after all these years that the occasional lurch didn’t faze her at all.

“How is Alex?” Elizabeth asked instead.

“Taking a nap,” his grandmother answered. “Did you talk to the policia?”

“Grace’s friend agreed to look at the file. I think he will help me.”

The other woman didn’t answer and Elizabeth swallowed her sigh. Luisa wasn’t convinced that her daughter had been murdered. She wanted Elizabeth to let the whole thing drop, to allow the police ruling to stand. As painful as it was to think her daughter had ended her own life, Elizabeth suspected Luisa feared digging too deeply into Tina’s wild, troubled world.

“I’ll be home soon,” she finally repeated. “Give Alex a kiss for me when he wakes up and tell him I’ll take him down later to watch the…” Swim. Quack. This time she forced herself to concentrate until the word came to her. “To watch the ducks.”

She hung up the phone and stared out the windshield at the dim, unnatural light inside the garage. Despite Luisa’s reservations, Elizabeth knew she was doing the right thing by pursuing this investigation, no matter how difficult she might find it.

For Alex and for Luisa.

And for Tina, who had never called her stupid.

An hour after Elizabeth Quinn walked out of the precinct, Beau could swear her subtle perfume like just-ripe peaches still lingered in the air, sweet and fresh and oddly innocent.

Like her.

He frowned. Now why the hell would such a thought enter his head? He didn’t know about the innocent part but he knew for sure she wasn’t sweet. She was cold and snobby. The ice princess, who didn’t have the time of day for a cop unless she wanted something from him.

Somehow the nickname didn’t jibe with the quiet, solemn woman who had faced him with trembling hands and chewed-to-the-quick fingernails.

There was more to Elizabeth Quinn than her reputation. He had a feeling she was far more complex than the facts of the case she had asked him to look into.

With a sigh he turned back to the file. What did she expect him to find that the other detectives couldn’t? The file told a grim story of a troubled woman who had hit rock bottom.

Tina Hidalgo, age twenty-eight, had been found by a nosy neighbor peeking through open blinds. She was dead of a gunshot wound. The Glock with only her fingerprints on it—the Glock she had purchased illegally the day before she died—was on the floor, underneath her dangling fingers. The medical examiner said the bullet entry and exit were consistent with a self-inflicted injury.

She had powder burns on her hand.

And she had left a note, short and succinct.

I’m sorry.

He looked at the copy of the note included in the file. Her girlish handwriting with its big loops and rounded letters looked shaky, but that was only to be expected by someone under severe emotional strain. It definitely matched other samples of her writing, also included in the file.

Elizabeth Quinn had left out a few interesting little tidbits during their meeting. Like Tina Hidalgo’s drug problem. The night of her death, she had enough heroin in her system to launch the space shuttle.

Elizabeth had also neglected to tell him her friend had been fired the week before from her sometime-job as a stripper for frequent absences from work—and even more damning, this wasn’t her first suicide attempt. Seven years earlier, she’d had her stomach pumped after swallowing a bottle of painkillers.

It was a clean case. Speth and Watson hadn’t missed anything. He set his pen down and rubbed at the ache between his eyes he always got when he read too much.

He wasn’t going to enjoy telling Elizabeth Quinn his conclusions. He could just picture that devastated grief in her pretty blue eyes again.

“What’s all this?”

Beau looked up from the file. He’d been so engrossed in trying to figure out how to break the news to Ms. Moneybags Quinn he hadn’t noticed the return of his temporary partner.

“Hey, Griff,” he greeted the clean-cut, scrubbed detective. Fresh off patrol, J. J. Griffin was eager to learn the ropes in the violent crimes division. He was a little too idealistic, maybe, but Beau figured that shine would wear off after another month or two.

“How was the dentist?”

Griff flashed his teeth. “Great. Not a single cavity, as usual. I’m telling you, it’s all about flossing.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

The kid ignored his dry tone and picked up the case file. “This is that Hidalgo case Speth and Walker caught, isn’t it? I thought they told the lieutenant in yesterday’s briefing they were signing it off as a suicide.”

“They did. I’m just taking another look for a friend of the victim’s.”

“That classy piece I saw sitting at your desk before I took off?”

Beau decided he didn’t like the slightly besotted look in Griff’s pretty-boy eyes. He grunted an assent.

“What are you looking for?” his partner persisted.

“The friend doesn’t agree it was self-inflicted. She thinks we’re missing something.”

“Like what?”

“If I knew that, the case wouldn’t still be closed, now would it?”

In his relentlessly cheerful way, Griffin didn’t appear to take offense at Beau’s curt tone. He pulled a chair over. “Mind if I take a look?”

Beau shrugged. If the kid wanted to waste his time, too, he wasn’t going to stop him.

He was examining the medical examiner’s report again when Griff plopped a photograph on top of it. “What’s this smudge here?”

“Where?”

The kid pointed it out. Beau frowned and reached into his desk drawer for a loupe for a closer look. What he saw through the magnifier sent red flags flashing all over the whole case.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

“What is it?”

“Her wrist is bruised. See? Right there?”

“Like she was tied up?”

He looked carefully at the autopsy photo. “No. They’re not deep enough for that. And only the right hand is bruised.” The writing hand, the trigger finger.

As if someone had held her wrist just long enough to force her to write that brief note. And then held it tight and helped Tina Hidalgo commit suicide.

Why hadn’t CSI picked up on it? And why wasn’t it in the ME’s report? Maybe because the rest of the facts in the case pointed so overwhelmingly to suicide.

It still might be, he reminded himself. Tina Hidalgo could have gotten those bruises hours—or even days—before her murder.

But all his cop instincts were warning him that everything in this case wasn’t as it appeared at first glance.

It looked like Elizabeth Quinn would get her way after all, probably just as she always did. Her friend’s case would go back into the active pile, which meant he was going to have to see the ice princess again.

He didn’t even want to think about whether his tangle of emotion at the thought was dread or anticipation.

Chapter 2

Several hours after her visit with the terrifying police detective, Elizabeth still couldn’t quite seem to catch her breath.

She sat on a bench near the water’s edge watching Alex toss stick after stick into the shallows in the hope that his new puppy would chase after it.

He wasn’t having much luck. Although she was a yellow Labrador, Maddie either didn’t have the retriever instincts of her breed or she didn’t quite catch the concept of fetch just yet. Instead of bounding into the water after the stick, she planted all four of her gangly legs on the rocky beach and watched the boy with a bemused expression on her jowly face.

Probably the same expression Elizabeth had worn at Beau Riley’s desk earlier—that slightly panicked what-am-I-supposed-to-do-now? look.

The detective’s opinion of her shouldn’t matter at all. She knew it. But she hated imagining what he must have thought of her sitting in front of him with her thoughts and words atangle. Pathetic. He must have thought she was absolutely pitiful, and he had probably agreed to help her only so he wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore.

She sighed, angry with herself for continuing to dwell on this. Was she so narcissistic, so desperately eager for approval, that she really cared why the man had agreed to help her? His motives didn’t matter. Finding Tina’s killer was the important thing.

Still, she couldn’t help wondering with bitter regret why he seemed to bring out the worst in her, first the night of Grace Dugan’s fund-raiser and then today at the police station.

Most of the time she was far more composed. She could go days without stumbling over her words or missing more than the occasional conversational beat.

If she did start to have trouble, she had learned over the years that she could invariably hide the worst of it behind a veneer of chilly reserve.

It was just her bad luck that Beau Riley—the first man she’d been attracted to since Stephen—made her forget all her usual defenses, made her feel just like a stupid, stuttering girl again.

And there was the real trouble, she admitted. She was attracted to him, to that masculine combination of dark wavy hair, green eyes and lean, dangerous features.

She knew better. Experience could be a cruelly effective teacher. A man as brash and confident as Beau Riley would want nothing to do with someone like her.

Alex grunted suddenly, and she looked up from her grim thoughts in time to see him throw the last stick from the pile he’d collected so carefully into the water with more pique than precision. He made a garbled series of sounds, each more frustrated sounding than the last as he glared at the dog he had adored until now.

Elizabeth mentally kicked herself. Usually she was far more attuned to Alex’s moods. Why hadn’t she noticed his mounting frustration over his inability to make Maddie do what he wanted? If she had been paying attention—instead of brooding over her encounter with Beau Riley—she would have picked up on the signs and headed this minitantrum off at the pass.

She, of all people, should have sensed it. Heaven knows, she had enough experience herself with that same suffocating frustration over the past twenty-seven years.

Rising swiftly from the bench, she touched Alex’s shoulder so he would face her. As soon as he turned, she had to fight the urge to kiss that adorable scowl off his little face.

Don’t give up, she signed.

Maddie’s a stupid dog, he responded, his hands that were still chubby with baby fat a little clumsy with the signs.

No she’s not. We need to work a little harder to teach her what we want. I’ll help you.

Alex’s bottom lip stuck out. I don’t want to. Maddie’s a stupid dog, he repeated.

Not stupid. Young. She won’t learn unless we take the time to teach her. Come on, I’ll help you.

For the next half hour they worked with the dog, trying to teach her to obey the hand signal for fetch. Elizabeth was tempted several times to use verbal commands with the dog but she resisted, remembering the advice of Alex’s speech pathologist.

Maddie was Alex’s dog, a birthday gift from her and Luisa a month ago, just a week before Tina’s death. As her master, he should be able to command her. Since the boy’s oral speech was unreliable to nonexistent, his speech therapist thought it best to use only hand signals with the dog.

With a little instruction, Maddie was a smart thing, Elizabeth thought as the dog finally managed to figure out what they wanted from her. At last, she eagerly bounded after the stick and brought it back to Alex, who giggled and let her lavish doggie kisses on his face.

His frustration forgotten, the boy and dog wrestled happily in the thick carpet of grass above the shoreline. Elizabeth returned to her bench, content to watch them, her love for this sweet child a thick ache in her throat.

She remembered that first moment she had seen him, shriveled and red and already squalling his little heart out. Tina had asked her to be her labor coach, so she had been there throughout that miraculous day he entered the world.

Every time she thought about seeing him born, she wanted to weep with joy that she had been allowed to play such an important role in his life.

She’d been there, too, at the routine six-month well-baby check with Tina when his pediatrician first suggested the child couldn’t hear. And at the subsequent specialist appointments when the doctor’s suspicions had been confirmed.

She loved him as fiercely as if he had been her own child, and she wanted to do all she could to make sure he lived a happy life and grew up to be a confident, self-assured young man who would never look at his hearing impairment with any kind of shame.

While they worked with the dog, storm clouds had begun to gather over the water. It was getting late, and Luisa would probably have dinner ready soon, she realized.

She had waited just a moment too long to herd the boy and dog inside. By the time she managed to get Alex’s attention to sign that it was time to go in, the first drops of rain began to pelt them.

She and Alex raced for the house, laughing as Maddie jumped around them with excitement. By the time they made it to the back door off the kitchen, the skies had opened in earnest and they narrowly escaped getting drenched.

Inside the vast, gleaming kitchen, they were met by the luscious aroma of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies baking and by Luisa holding out the cordless phone to Elizabeth.

“For you.” Luisa didn’t bother to hide her disapproval. “I was taking a message when I heard you come. It’s the policia. That detective.”

Elizabeth froze, gazing at the phone as if it had suddenly barked at her like Maddie. She hated the funny twirling in her stomach but she couldn’t seem to control it.

She wasn’t at all sure suddenly if she could handle another encounter with Beau Riley just yet. Maybe in a few days.

She almost instructed Luisa to take his number so she could call him back after she had a chance to muscle up the courage. Then Alex brushed past her, caught in the gravitational pull of the cookies, and the words tangled in her throat.

Alex. She had to remember Alex. Maybe Detective Riley already had new information about Tina’s death. He didn’t strike her as a man who wasted any time. She had no choice but to talk to him and find out if he’d learned anything.

She wiped suddenly clammy hands on the jeans she’d changed into after she returned from the city, then took the phone from Luisa.

With a grim feeling that she would need all the concentration she could muster to hold her own with him, she slipped out of the kitchen and into the music room down the hall.

“Hello?” she finally said, despising the thready edginess in her tone.

“I thought maybe we were cut off.”

In contrast to her own nervous squeak, the detective’s voice was deep and commanding, a smooth, rich bass. He had shades of the South in his voice, she discovered. Not much, just a hint of a drawl, like a slow-moving Georgia creek hidden in thick timber.

Her mind went blank for a moment but she fought hard to regain composure. “No. I’m sorry. I needed to find a…quiet spot to talk.”

“Big party going on?” Not exactly cordial in the first place, that voice dropped several degrees. He must not have a very high opinion of her if he thought she could come to the police station one minute speaking of her best friend’s murder, then return home to throw a soiree.

Of course he didn’t have a high opinion of her. The first time they’d met, she had given him the coldest of shoulders and the second time she had sat at his desk all but wringing her hands like the helpless heroine of some silent film. He must think she was a complete idiot.

Stupid cow. Stupid, tongue-tied cow.

“No party,” she said finally, trying her best to silence the taunting ghosts of the past. “Just the usual chaos.” A boy, a puppy and Luisa, with her mournful eyes and disapproving frowns. “Has something happened?”

“Yeah. Something’s happened. My partner picked out something in the crime-scene photographs the other detectives must have missed. It might not mean anything, but it’s worth checking out.”

Excitement flickered through her. “What is it?”

There was just the slightest delay before he spoke. She wouldn’t have noticed it except it was the same pause she employed while she concentrated on trying to pick her words carefully. She had the impression the detective didn’t want to answer her question but he finally spoke. “Some unusual bruising on one wrist.”

“Bruising? What kind of bruising?”

Again he hesitated. “What you might expect to see if someone were to grab your wrist tightly.”

Oh, Tina. Elizabeth drew a sharp breath as a host of terrible images slithered across her mind, of fear and violence and a terrible death. She sank down onto the piano bench. What had happened to the sweet, innocent girl who had loved to dance and to swim and who used to sit at this same piano for hours with her picking out “Chopsticks” and “Heart and Soul”?

“Ms. Quinn?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Thank you. I…I did. I do.” She drew a ragged breath. She had known this wouldn’t be easy. “So what now?”

“I’m still trying to figure out how this slipped past the medical examiner and what else they might have missed. I’ve got a few other leads on this end. I’d like to talk to neighbors, co-workers, that kind of thing. I have to warn you, I don’t know how far we’re going to get. Coming in cold to a three-week-old murder is about as easy as trying to find hair on a frog. The trail cools a little more with every passing day.”

“I know. But thank you so much for helping me. I…can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

There was another pause, then he cleared his throat. “I’d like to take a look at her personal effects, too. See if she left an appointment book or address book or something that might give us a little more to go on. Can you tell me where I might find her belongings?”

“Here. Everything is here. The landlord wanted her apartment cleared so he could make it ready for another tenant but we…we weren’t ready to go through her things yet. Luisa and I had them packed into boxes and brought here after the other detectives cleared the scene.”

“Mind if I take a look at them?”

“No. I…of course not.” She rested a hand on the sudden fluttering in her stomach. He wanted to come here, to her home. “When would be convenient for you?”

“What about tomorrow afternoon?”

So soon? The fluttering turned into a whole flock of nervous butterflies. But she couldn’t very well refuse, not when she had practically begged him to investigate the case. “Yes,” she finally said. “Tomorrow would work.”

She gave him directions to Harbor View from the Dugans’ house just a mile away, and a few moments later they ended the conversation.

After she hung up the phone, she rose from the bench and crossed the thick carpet to the tall, mullioned windows overlooking the Sound. Rain still battered against the glass and stirred the water into a choppy froth. The sun had almost set and the lights of the city across the water had begun to twinkle and dance.

She watched them for a long time before she realized slow tears were trickling down her cheeks like the rain against the window. She swiped at them, grateful she’d had the wisdom to come in here away from Luisa and Alex.

It didn’t escape her attention that she had grieved far more for Tina in the last three weeks than she ever did throughout her father’s long, lingering death from cancer or after he finally died last year.

She had grieved a long time ago for what would never be between her and Jonathan Quinn. Maybe by the time he died she had no more tears left inside her for the cold, exacting man who never had any interest in trying to understand the daughter who tried so desperately to please him.

Luisa and her daughter had been far more of a family to her than her own father. Of course Tina’s death would hit her hard.

Knowing she was justified in her pain didn’t ease it at all. She stood in the dark music room for a long time, until the rain slowed and her cheeks were dry once more.

Beau glared at the phone. “I don’t care about your backlog, Marty. That’s no excuse for incompetence. Any first-year medical student would have picked up on bruising like that. How could your guy have missed in an hour-long autopsy something my rookie partner saw after thirty seconds of looking at a grainy crime-scene photograph?”

He listened to the medical examiner give the old familiar bull about his staff being overworked and underpaid. On the surface Marty Ruckman might seem like the consummate politician trying to cover his rear, but Beau knew him well enough to know the coroner cared as deeply as the detectives about finding justice for the dead.

“Whatever the reason, Marty,” he finally said, “we both know this was a major screw-up and it’s up to you to make it right. I want you to personally go over the autopsy records and see what else this guy missed. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He hung up without saying goodbye and thumbed an antacid off the roll in his desk. He didn’t need this today. He and Griff had a dozen other active cases, and he really didn’t have time for this kind of bureaucratic baloney first thing in the morning.

And where the hell was his partner? Every time he turned around, the kid disappeared.

He was about to send out an APB when he saw a curly-haired blond dynamo heading toward his desk. His mood immediately lifted.

“Hey, it’s my best girl. This is a surprise!”

Emma, Gracie’s seven-year-old stepdaughter, launched herself into his arms. “Hi, Beau. Grace said I could come back and see if you were here while she talked to her boss. I didn’t have school today so Grace and me are gonna have lunch downtown and go shopping for new clothes and maybe go to the park if Sean’s not too grumpy. Hey, guess what? I lost another tooth last night and the tooth fairy brought me two whole dollars and I’m saving it for a new Barbie.”

When she slowed down to take a breath, he dutifully admired the hole where her tooth used to be, handed her one of the candy bars from his secret emergency stash and asked her how her new baby brother was working out.

She gave him a disgusted look. “He’s boring. I thought he would be able to play by now. Mom and Dad and Lily say Sean’s just about the smartest baby in the world but I think he’s dumb as a rock. All he does is sleep and eat and cry.”

He laughed—he couldn’t help himself—and kissed her blond curls. “He’ll grow out of it. Trust me. Pretty soon he’ll be picking the lock to get into your bedroom and inventing all kinds of ways to tease you.”

He thought again that Emma was by far the best thing to come out of Grace’s marriage to Jack Dugan two years earlier. Beau was still withholding judgment about the cocky millionaire flyboy who had captured Gracie’s heart. Dugan had lifted her out of a dark, desolate place when no one else could reach her and he made her happy, so that counted for something. But he was also a reckless, arrogant son of a bitch.

His daughter, on the other hand, was a complete doll. Almost as cute as Marisa had been at that age.

Unexpected pain punched him hard in the chest at the thought of Grace’s daughter, and he glanced at the framed picture on his desk of a laughing, beautiful girl with dimpled cheeks and long glossy braids. Three years she’d been gone. Sometimes he could hardly believe it had been that long since they’d taken a trip on his boat or shared a picnic at the beach or played one of their fiercely competitive games of Horse at the basketball hoop hanging from Gracie’s little garage.

It had been three years since she’d been killed in a drive-by shooting outside her school, and he still missed her fiercely.

Jack Dugan and his daughter had forced their way into Grace’s life and helped ease her grief and guilt. He should be grateful to the man, and he was. But a part of him still felt small and selfish for wondering why he couldn’t seem to find the same kind of peace.

“You want some paper to color on while you wait for your mom?” he asked Emma.

Little lines fanned up between her eyebrows as she tried to decide. “How about if I make you a paper airplane? My daddy just taught me how.”

“Great. I’ve been needing one of those.”

He handed her some scratch paper out of his drawer and grinned at her frown of concentration as she folded the paper with the precision of a laser surgeon performing a frontal lobotomy.

She was almost finished when he spotted Gracie heading toward them. As usual, the air around her seemed to crackle with energy as she made her way through the squad room to his desk. Despite her lack of height and delicate appearance, she was a fierce cop who cared passionately about her cases.

Just now she looked far from that hardened detective, loaded down with a baby carrier and a Winnie the Pooh diaper bag. He relieved her of both and urged her to sit down.

Emma looked up and flashed her gap-toothed grin. “Hi, Grace. I’m making Beau one of my super-duper high-flyer airplanes Daddy taught me to make.”

She grinned at her stepdaughter as she pulled little Sean out of the baby carrier. “And I’m sure Beau will find some way to make trouble with it. Like launch it at the lieutenant when his back is turned.” She turned back to Beau. “Sorry I took a little longer than I’d expected. I didn’t mean to let Em just run free. Were you in the middle of something when she came back?”

“No. I was all done yelling by the time she got here, so she missed all my better cuss words.”

“Uh-oh. Trouble with a case?”

If Emma hadn’t been there with her wide eyes and her avid curiosity, he would have unloaded on Grace about it. Hell, she ought to be working the case with him, since this one was her baby. Besides, Grace had always had a way of seeing patterns and flags that evaded everybody else.

But since she couldn’t very well pack that cute dark-haired new baby on her hip while she went out on interviews, he was on his own.

He shrugged and chose to change the subject. “How’s the kid? Is he sleeping through the night yet?”

Grace sighed. “Not yet. He still thinks he needs to eat every two hours. Kind of like someone else I know,” she said pointedly.

“Hey, we’re both healthy, growing males. We need our food.”

She snorted and he grinned back. He and Grace had been partners on and off for a dozen years, first on patrol and then as detectives. They knew each other inside and out and loved each other deeply, just not in a romantic way. She’d always been like an annoying little sister to him, but he couldn’t imagine his life without her.

“What brings you down here?” Beau asked. “I didn’t think we’d have to see your ugly mug for at least another few months.”

She made a face with features that were small and delicate and, he had to admit, far from ugly. “Keep it up and you won’t have to see it for longer than that.” She paused. “Actually, Beau, I just talked to Charlie about extending my maternity leave by another six months. I’m going to fill out the paperwork.”

He stared at her, grim images of spending more time with an eager puppy of a partner like J. J. Griffin. He did a quick mental calculation. “A whole year? You’re taking a whole year off? You were just getting back in the groove!”

“I’m sorry, Beau. I should have told you before I talked to Charlie and filled out the paperwork.”

“Why do you need a whole year?” He knew he probably sounded like a spoiled little kid whose best friend was moving away but he couldn’t seem to help it.

“When you have children, maybe you’ll understand. I didn’t have many choices with Marisa. You know what it was like for us. I was all she had and she was barely a few weeks old when I had to go back to work just to pay the rent. This time everything is different. I’ve discovered I’m not in a big hurry yet to rush back to all this. I just need a little time with Em and the baby. But I’ll be back, I promise.”

“Not for a whole year!”

“Come on, Beau. J.J.’s a good cop. You’ll break him in. Besides, you still have to promise to keep me up-to-date on what you’re working on. I’ll still be around so you can bounce cases off me. What put you in such a temper earlier?”

He held up the Hidalgo file. “This.”

She read the name on the tab. “Tina Hidalgo. Why does that sound so familiar?”

“You should know since you’re the one who sicced her friend on me. Elizabeth Quinn, remember? You told her I would look into the closed case for her.”

She caught on quickly. “You saw Elizabeth? Are you reopening it?”

He nodded with a glare.

“She must be so relieved.”

“I don’t know about that. She’s a hard nut to crack.”

“She’s just quiet. When you get to know her a little better, you’ll find out she’s a real sweetheart.”

He wasn’t so sure. He had a feeling sitting in an ice-cold stakeout car in the middle of January would be warmer than spending any more time with Elizabeth Quinn.

Grace frowned at him as she settled the baby back into the carrier. “You’ve got that look on your face again, Beau. She is a sweetheart. She’s just a little reserved with people she doesn’t know. Be nice to her, okay?”

“I’m nice to everyone,” he growled.

Before Grace could answer, the lieutenant’s booming voice carried through the whole squad room.

“Riley! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Beau sent a quick glance to Emma, still folding what was turning into a whole fleet of paper airplanes. She had stopped working and was looking at him wide-eyed.

“Uh-oh.” Gracie stood up. “Sounds like you’ve stepped in it again. This looks like a good time for us to run. We have a lunch date, anyway. See you later, Beau. Why don’t you come out for dinner next week? I’ll call you.”

She kissed him on the cheek, then waited for Emma to do the same before leading her by the hand toward the door, the baby carrier in the other hand, just before Charlie reached his desk.

Short, thickly built and in his midfifties, Charlie Banks was just about the best cop Beau had ever known. He had sharp instincts and a pit bull’s temperament when it came to investigations. A native of Boston, he still spoke with a hard New England accent and had little patience for stupidity.

“I just got off the phone with the medical examiner,” he growled. “Imagine my surprise when he informs me you have reopened an investigation two other fine detectives of this department ruled a suicide. You mind telling me when the line-of-command fairy dropped by and granted you a free pass?”

Beau winced. He supposed he should have told Charlie what he was up to. “I told a friend of Gracie’s I would look into the matter for her. I spotted a red flag or two so I’m just double-checking some things.”

“Riley, how many damn times do I have to tell you? You can’t just hotshot around here, picking and choosing the cases you want to work on. You’ve got twenty active case files on your desk as we speak. Until you clear a few of those, you don’t have time to run around digging up self-inflicted gunshot cases.”

“What if it wasn’t self-inflicted? Look at this photograph. Doesn’t that look like a bruise on her wrist?”

Charlie squinted at the autopsy photo. “It’s a smudge on the film. That’s it. Certainly not enough to warrant any more use of this department’s time and energy.”

The lieutenant saw a smudge on the print; Beau saw a woman who loved her son and inspired deep loyalty in her friends.

“Charlie, I’ve got a hunch about this one. You mind if I work it on my own time?”

His boss looked at him for a moment, then rolled his eyes. “You need a life, Riley.”

“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know. So are we good on the Hidalgo case?”

“Your time is none of my business. Do what you want. Just don’t do it when you’re supposed to be working other investigations. You come up with something besides a hunch and a smudge on a photograph and we can talk about reopening the case. Until then, you’re on your own.”

Beau watched Charlie walk back to his office, then looked once more at the driver’s license photo clipped to the manila folder. Tina Hidalgo had been pretty. He could see the signs of it even in the grainy picture. Underneath the hard, brittle shell of worldliness, her mouth was sweetly curved, like a ship’s bow, and her eyes were the same color as cinnamon sugar.

Maybe she did kill herself. Maybe he was wasting his time. But everyone deserved somebody to stand up for her, even a junkie stripper like Tina Hidalgo.

Chapter 3

Elizabeth Quinn’s house was exactly as he expected—huge, elegant and imposing.

Later that evening, Beau paused outside immense wrought-iron gates and studied the place. The massive structure was redbrick with rows of black shutters marching across the face. It was set back from the road amid glossy, perfectly manicured lawns on a chunk of waterfront property that must have set dear old Dad back a few bucks.

He turned down the volume on an old Emmy Lou Harris CD and pressed the buzzer, flashing his badge and a curt wave to the security cam. A few seconds later the gates slid open, and he drove up a smooth-as-black-silk driveway.

The Quinn estate—Harbor View, according to the sign out front—had probably never seen anything as disreputable as his old pickup, he thought with a small grin. Maybe it was about time they did.

Old money had never impressed him like it did some cops, although very few people in Seattle except Grace knew why. Beau didn’t want it spread around that he had seen more than enough of it in his lifetime to know how controlling and corrosive too much of it could be.

He walked to the door and rang the buzzer, listening to the low murmur of chimes inside the house. A small, plump Hispanic woman in her late forties opened the door almost before the last echo faded away. He was glad to see she wasn’t in one of those pretentious little black-and-white uniforms like the help in his grandmother’s home had been forced to wear. Instead she was dressed in jeans and a brightly patterned cotton T-shirt.

“Welcome, Officer. Please come in.”

Something about the tightness around her mouth warned him she wasn’t exactly thrilled to have him there. He wondered why but didn’t have time to dwell on it before she led the way through an elegant foyer down a confusing series of hallways and finally to a large room at the rear of the house.

The first thing he saw was a wide bank of floor-to-ceiling windows with a killer view of the downtown Seattle skyline across the water.

The second thing was Elizabeth Quinn.

Wearing jeans and a thick, cream-colored turtleneck sweater, she sat on the floor with her back to the door, plopped down right in the midst of what looked like a whole convoy of toy trucks involved in some massive pileup. In front of her was a dark-haired little kid who looked to be a couple of years younger than Em. Both Elizabeth and the kid were gesturing wildly.

It took Beau a few beats to figure out what she was doing waving her hands around like that. Sign language, he realized. The boy was hearing impaired, at least judging by those aids in his ears, and the ice princess was communicating with him.

In a million years he never would have expected to find her like this, cross-legged on the floor playing with a little kid. He suddenly remembered a flash of their conversation from the day before.

Tina has a son. A beautiful little boy. He lives with his grandmother and with me.

This must be the kid. The file hadn’t even mentioned him, so of course it wouldn’t have included the information that he had a hearing impairment. Was the woman who answered the door his grandmother, then? Tina Hidalgo’s mother?

Why did she fairly crackle with animosity toward him? Didn’t she want her daughter’s case reopened? What did she have to hide? the cop in him wondered.

In a cool, emotionless voice the older woman announced his presence. “The policeman is here.”

Elizabeth whirled around and looked up at him, two bright splashes of color scorching her cheeks. “Oh. You’re early.”

“A few minutes. The ferry wasn’t as crowded as I expected.”

“I…come in.”

She scrambled to her feet. The boy rose, too, watching him out of huge, thickly lashed eyes that didn’t appear to miss anything. Beau started to greet him, then remembered the boy wouldn’t hear the words. Unsure if the boy could read lips, he finally opted for a wave and a smile.

“This is Alex,” Elizabeth said, signing for the boy’s benefit as she spoke. “Alex, this is Mr. Riley.”

The boy smiled shyly and held out his hand like a perfect little gentleman. Beau tucked his grin away and crouched to his level, shaking the offered hand solemnly.

“I need to talk to our visitor for a while so you can go play with your…” Elizabeth paused for a moment as if her mind wandered or she forgot the words she was signing while she spoke aloud. “Grandmother,” she finally said. “Abuela. Can you do that? I’ll try to tell you a story before bed.”

The boy nodded. Picking up one of the trucks—a miniature blue Peterbilt with bright orange flames licking down the sides—he hurried past Beau with another shy smile and slipped his hand into the older woman’s.

A young, leggy yellow Lab Beau hadn’t noticed before bounded up from a corner and padded after them, leaving Beau alone with Elizabeth in the surprisingly comfortable, lived-in room at odds with the formality he’d seen in his quick glimpse of the rest of the house.

Elizabeth nibbled her lip for a moment then blew out a breath. “Alex is…was Tina’s little boy.”

“And his grandmother?”

“Luisa. She’s been housekeeper here since I was a baby. She and Tina lived in an apartment above the kitchen.”

The woman was a tangle of contradictions. She wore what was probably a three-hundred-dollar sweater to play trucks on the floor with her housekeeper’s grandchild and she spoke of them more like family than servants. He had to admit he was intrigued in spite of himself.

“Nice digs,” he finally said, scanning the recreation room’s plump leather couches surrounding a huge flat-screen TV. Watching Sonics games here would be almost as good as courtside seats.

Not that he would ever have the chance for either, he reminded himself. This was business. Strictly business.

She shrugged. “It’s too big for just me and Luisa and now Alex. I’ll probably sell it eventually but I hate to give up the view.”

He shifted his gaze reluctantly from the TV to the city landscape across the water. “I can see why.”

“I’m sure you’re anxious to begin,” she said after a moment. “Tina’s things are stored in…”

Her voice trailed off, and she paused for a few seconds. The color that had begun to fade now returned. “A room upstairs,” she finally finished. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you the way.”

He gestured to the door and she led him without a word to retrace the route he and the housekeeper had taken from the front door, then up a long, curving flight of stairs rising from the entry.

She wasn’t much of a chatterer, he couldn’t help but notice. Was it snobbishness or just reserve, as Grace had said? He followed her up the stairs, trying hard not to ogle her long, luscious legs in whitewashed blue jeans. They weren’t designer threads, he observed, just plain old off-the-shelf Levi’s that looked as if they’d been well-worn. Another piece to the puzzle.

At the top of the stairs she took off to the left and he followed her past at least ten closed doors.

How the hell many rooms were in this mausoleum anyway? he wondered. If the Quinn publishing fortune ever took a downturn, she could always open a medium-size hotel.

Finally they reached the end of the hallway and she opened the door. Inside he found a good-size bedroom where a small huddle of cardboard boxes had been stacked neatly against a wall. Not many boxes, he noted, maybe not even a dozen. A pitiful legacy for a woman who had walked the earth for twenty-eight years. The thought made him sad.

Elizabeth seemed to be on the same wavelength. “It’s not much,” she said, her voice small and sorrowful. “I’m not sure what you hope to find here.”

“I’m not, either. I’ll know when I see it.”

“Would you prefer if I left you alone?”

He smiled a little at the barely concealed eagerness in her expression. Obviously, something about him made Miss Millionaire Quinn nervous. He had to admit he liked the sensation.

If it was true what Grace said, that Elizabeth was only reserved around people she didn’t know, maybe she just needed to spend a little time with him to thaw some of that ice.

“No, stay. You might see something out of place, something I would otherwise miss.”

Elizabeth stared at that small smile, at the way the sun-bronzed skin creased at the corners of his mouth and the sparkle in those green eyes. That smile was entirely too appealing for her peace of mind. It made him seem far too approachable, not nearly as terrifying, and she wondered what he would do if she snapped at him to knock it off, to just keep his blasted smiles to himself. She couldn’t, of course. Not if she didn’t want to appear any more ridiculous than she already did with her awkward pauses and jerky, stop-and-go conversation.

Staying here with him was the last thing she wanted to do. Every instinct in her shouted for her to escape while she could, to put as much distance between them as possible, which in a house as sprawling as Harbor View was a fair span. But she couldn’t do that, any more than she could politely ask him to please refrain from smiling in her presence.

Instead she forced herself to pull a low ottoman nearer the boxes. She perched on it with her hands folded in her lap and tried hard not to stare at the way the powerful muscles in his back flexed under his casual black golf shirt as he hefted a large box from the stacks and lowered it to the floor.

They lapsed into silence as he unfolded the flaps of the box and began sorting through the contents. It was so difficult seeing these things of Tina’s that she had used and loved lying forlorn, jumbled together in boxes.

Neither she nor Luisa had been able to bring themselves to sort through the boxes yet to decide what they would keep and what they would give to Goodwill.

She found it disconcerting—heartbreaking, even—to see these bits and pieces of Tina’s life examined by a stranger, no matter that she had brought him into this, no matter how well meaning his motives.

I’m sorry, she mouthed, with a prayer that Tina could hear her.

“So the victim—Tina—was the daughter of your housekeeper?”

Caught up in her thoughts, it took her a moment to register the sudden question. She blinked. “Yes,” she answered carefully. “I was only a few months old when they moved in. My mother died a short time after I was born and Luisa raised me.”

“Luisa, not your father?”

She thought of her father and the wide, unbreachable chasm between them. “He was…” Distant. Cold. “Busy. He had little time for a young child.” Especially one who tried so hard to please her father that when she finally did start to talk, years past the normal time, her words never came out right when he was around.

Beau Riley raised one of those dark eyebrows as if to encourage her to say more, but she stubbornly resisted, choosing to change the subject instead. “Tina and I were only a year apart so we were constantly together. Really, we were more like…like sisters than anything else.”

“How long did she live here?”

He was subtly interrogating her. She knew it and fought a burble of panic at having to answer a long string of questions. But if it would help him get a better idea for Tina’s life, she would try. “After high school we both moved to L.A. We shared an apartment while I attended college and she tried to find work as a model.”

That was where the wildness in Tina had first emerged, while Elizabeth had been desperately trying to pass her classes. She hadn’t noticed the changes at first, too consumed with her own struggles, trying to focus on her school-work with the awful specter of one more failure looming over her shoulder every second.

As the months passed, they had grown further and further apart until they would go days without their paths crossing even though they shared living space. Elizabeth spent every waking moment at the library and Tina had a jampacked social life and worked two jobs while she waited for the big break that never arrived.

“But you both came back?”

“Yes. My father was ill. I returned to care for him.” Though he didn’t want her here, even at the end.

“And Tina?”

She relaxed, discovering it wasn’t so very difficult to talk with him after all. For all his disconcerting abruptness the other day in his office, Detective Riley obviously must have a great deal of practice listening to people. “Her modeling career wasn’t going well. She came home to find work and it was during that time she became pregnant with Alex. After that, she stayed so Luisa and I could help with him.”

“Is the boy’s father involved in his life?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t know who he is. I wish I did, but Tina would never tell us.”

That had stung, she had to admit. But it was just another in the tangled web of secrets her friend had kept from her and Luisa, secrets she had ultimately taken to her death.

“Tina was…troubled, Detective. Angry.”

“Angry at who? The kid’s father?”

She thought about it then shook her head. “I don’t think so. She loved her son very much. ‘He’s a gift,’ she used to say. ‘A sweet and precious gift.”’ To her chagrin, her voice broke on the last word. Sudden tears choked her throat, burned her eyes.

Her heart ached to think what Tina would miss as her son grew up. She wouldn’t see his baby fat melt away or send him off to his first school dance or be able to buy him his first razor. She would miss teaching him to drive and arguing with him about curfews and preparing him for college.

She wouldn’t miss those things, though, Elizabeth vowed fiercely even as she wiped at her tears with a handkerchief she dug out of her pocket. She and Luisa would take care of Alex. They would love him and teach him and never, ever make him feel as if his disability made him any less of a person.

She looked up and found Detective Riley watching her out of those intense dark eyes that seemed to see right past her defenses.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“Don’t be,” he answered, his voice gruff, then he turned back to sorting through Tina’s belongings. He might have only been trying to avoid an overemotional woman but she didn’t think so. He was giving her time and space to compose herself. The unexpected kindness warmed her far more than she wanted to acknowledge.

As a hardened detective he must have seen many grieving friends and relatives, she thought. And perhaps some who didn’t grieve. That was probably harder.

Why did he do it? she wondered. Grace Dugan said he was one of the best detectives in Seattle. When he works a case, Beau is relentless, like a junkyard dog with a bone. He’ll gnaw it and gnaw it until he shakes out the truth.

She was suddenly very grateful to have this particular fierce detective on her side, no matter how nervous he made her.

They worked through several boxes with only the occasional comment or question from Beau as to whether she recognized items or noticed anything missing.

After they opened most of the boxes containing the average flotsam and jetsam of a person’s life—a pitifully few knickknacks, some dishes, Tina’s collection of hatpins—he opened one that sent color climbing up Elizabeth’s cheeks.

These were Tina’s work uniforms. Her feathers and leathers, she had called them—the costumes she had worn while working as a stripper, albeit a well-paid one.

Beau cleared his throat and pulled out a minuscule nurse’s uniform that wouldn’t have concealed a single thing on any self-respecting female over the age of six, complete with thigh-high sheer white stockings and a perky little cap.

An odd, glittery heat uncurled inside her at the sight of such a silly, frilly thing in his masculine hands.

“You didn’t tell me your friend was in the medical profession.”

Oh! He had to know perfectly well what Tina did for a living. She couldn’t think how to respond to his tongue-in-cheek observation, even if she could find the right words.

At her silence, he looked over at her and his teasing grin slid away. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have joked about it. Given the circumstances, it was in bad taste, and I apologize.”

Finally she managed to smile. Tina would have laughed out loud at his comment. And under other conditions, Elizabeth would have joined in. “No. It’s…it was a joke to her. That’s all it was. She thought it was hilarious that she could make so much money for a few hours’ work.” She paused. “She didn’t like being a stripper, but it was helping her improve her life. She was taking computer classes, going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Looking for a better apartment.”

He watched her out of those probing green eyes for a moment, then finally spoke. “She had heroin in her system the night she died. Did you know that?”

Elizabeth nodded. “The other detectives told us. She must have had a…” She had to scramble for the right word. Difficulty? Backtrack? No. Those words fit but they weren’t what she was looking for. She hit on it after what she hoped wasn’t too noticeable a pause. “Relapse. She must have had a relapse. Before that, she had been clean for almost six months.”

“Do you know why she would have purchased a gun the day before she died?”

“I don’t. I’m sorry. She didn’t say anything to us. Maybe she was being threatened about something. Debts, maybe. I know she had quite a few. I tried to help her with…with money. A hundred times I tried to help her but she would only get angry.”

“That must have been difficult.”

“Yes,” she answered, hoping the simple word would conceal the world of pain behind it. When they were children, the disparity between their financial situations hadn’t existed. Only as they grew older had Tina begun to resent that Elizabeth would never want for anything.

Nothing financial, anyway, she thought with old, familiar bitterness. Her father had paid her bills—her tuition, her car, her apartment. Or rather, the trust fund he and her mother had set up for her before her birth paid her expenses. But Jonathan Quinn had given her little else.

To her relief, the detective didn’t seem inclined to pursue that line of questioning. He opened the last box. Halfway through, he found the soft burgundy Coach handbag she had given Tina for Christmas the year before. Another harsh sliver of grief jabbed into her. Tina had adored that purse and had used it constantly.

“Pay dirt.” Beau pulled it from the box. “Just what I hoped to find.”

“Why?” She managed to squeeze the word out around the lump in her throat.

“I don’t mean to sound sexist here but most of you women carry your lives around in their purses. All the little bits and pieces that give a clear picture of who you are, what you do with your days. Makeup, credit cards, appointment books. Everything. I’m willing to bet that somewhere in here hides the key to unlocking the mystery of what really happened that night. We just have to find it.”

Chapter 4

Elizabeth couldn’t contain a small gasp as the detective dumped the contents of Tina’s purse out on the bedspread in the guest room. It seemed a terrible invasion of privacy, letting him paw through the contents. Like reading someone’s diary or opening another person’s mail. A woman’s purse was sacred!

I’m sorry, she whispered again to Tina. Even as she thought the words, she knew Tina wouldn’t have objected. Not if it meant finding out the truth about her death.

“A lot of cops think working a case is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with half of the pieces missing. To me, it’s more like a big, dead-serious scavenger hunt. The clues are there, you just have to know where to look for them. Then work your tail off to figure out what they mean.”

“Is there something I could do to help?”

He glanced over at her and she was startled again by the green of his eyes. “While I read the entries in her planner, why don’t you look through her address book here and put a small check by the people you might know in common? If you see anything unusual in there, make a note of it.”

Elizabeth nodded and took the slim address book from him. Only after she perched next to him on the edge of the guest bed did it occur to her to be uneasy at working in such close proximity to Beau Riley. Despite the solemnness of the task ahead of her, she was suddenly intensely aware of him, his broad shoulders just a few feet from hers, the masculine scent of his aftershave, of pine and sandalwood, the lock of unruly dark hair dipping across his forehead like a comma.

How many women had been tempted to smooth that lock of hair back into place? she wondered. And how many had acted on the temptation? Well, she would most certainly not be among their number.

If not for this case, she would be doing everything she could to stay as far as possible from Beau Riley. He made her so nervous. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so edgy and off balance. It wasn’t a sensation she cared for at all—especially when she knew she should be focusing on finding out who had killed Tina, not on gorgeous police detectives with intense eyes and tousled hair.

Reining in her wild thoughts, she forced her attention back to the book in her hands and began poring through the pages. Most of the names were unknown to her and she assumed they were co-workers or men Tina might have dated. A few names seemed vaguely familiar, as if Tina had mentioned them in passing, but Elizabeth had never been very good at remembering names, especially when she didn’t have a face to assign to it.

By the time she reached the end, she had made small checks by a few dozen names, schoolmates of both of them or acquaintances from their time in Los Angeles but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. If only she had some clue what she was supposed to be looking for. She was terribly afraid she would miss something important and just be too stupid to recognize it.

She turned the last page, to the Zs, then stared at the page. “This is odd.”

She hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud until the detective looked up from the day planner.

“What?”

“Tina has the name of Dr. David Zacharias listed here. I had no idea she knew him.”

Beau sat back. “Zacharias. That rings a bell.” He thumbed back through Tina’s planner. “Yeah. Here it is. She had an appointment with him listed a few days before she died.”

She gaped at him, questions whirling through her mind. “Are you sure? She never said a word!”

“Yeah. It says Dr. Zacharias, three in the afternoon, Tuesday the first. What’s the big deal? What kind of doc is he?”

“He’s a…” Drat, the word escaped her. She closed her eyes for just a second while she tried to find it again, reeling from a complicated mix of astonishment, disbelief and an odd sense of betrayal.

Tina had never said a word. Nothing! How could she have kept it from them?

“He’s a doctor who specializes in treating hearing impairments in children,” she finally answered. “She must have been looking for a consultation for Alex. But this doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe Tina would make an appointment with Dr. Zacharias without telling her mother or me.”

“Well, Alex was her son. Maybe she didn’t feel the need to consult you about his medical care.”

Elizabeth wished she had the words to adequately convey to Beau how unsettling this discovery was. “For three years Luisa and I have been begging her to let us take Alex to Dr. Zacharias. He’s a surgeon whose clinic specializes in cochlear implants in children. It’s one of the best of its kind in the country.”

“Oh, right. I saw a documentary about those a few months ago. Isn’t that a pretty controversial procedure?”

She nodded. “Some people oppose them because they say they’re eliminating the…the culture of the deaf. Some advocates think children with hearing impairments are better off simply adjusting to their challenges, learning ASL and lip reading instead of trying to change the way God made them.”

She respected the point of view, but life experience had shaped her own strong opinions. As a person who had spent most of her life trying to make herself understood, she believed children with hearing impairments deserved the chance to communicate with the entire world, not simply others who were deaf or those who had learned ASL.

“So why didn’t Tina want you to take her kid to see this guy? Did she agree with the anti-implant sentiments?”

“No. It wasn’t anything like that. Her health insurance wasn’t the greatest. It wouldn’t cover the procedure and Tina could be…stubborn. She refused to even consider allowing me to pay for it.”

Oh, how that had hurt. By default, since he had no place else to leave it, Elizabeth’s father had bequeathed her more money than she could ever spend in a dozen lifetimes.

She had wanted so desperately to do everything she could to help Alex, but Tina had been adamant. Alex was her son and she would find a way to take care of him herself.

And yet before her death Tina had made an appointment with Dr. Zacharias without informing her or Luisa. Elizabeth couldn’t even begin to comprehend why. She hated to think this would be just another in the web of secrets Tina took with her to the grave.

“You have any idea why she would make an appointment with this doctor if she wasn’t planning on Alex having implants?”

“I don’t know.” Baffled frustration simmered through her. “Maybe she changed her mind about accepting my help. Or maybe her insurance changed its coverage policy, although I’m sure she would have told us if that were the case.”

“Maybe she found the money to pay for it somewhere else.”

“Where? With hospital costs and follow-up, a cochlear implant costs at least fifty thousand dollars. Where would she find that kind of money?”

He didn’t answer and Elizabeth drew in a sharp breath. He didn’t need to answer. She could tell exactly what he was thinking—if Tina had somehow come up with the money for Alex’s surgery, it had probably come through means either illegal or immoral.

Oh, Tina. What did you do?

“Do you know where she banks?” Beau asked gently.

She had to blink back the hot sting of tears at the compassion in his gaze. He knew how terrible this was for her, digging into all the sordid details of her friend’s life, she realized.

He knew there was a very real possibility they would find out Tina had been involved in something illegal. He probably expected it. This was the very thing Luisa feared, that any investigation would unearth information about Tina’s death—and her life—they would be better off not knowing.

For one wild, anxious second she wanted to tell Beau Riley she’d changed her mind about doing this, that she had been mistaken to pursue the investigation. How would she ever break the news to Luisa if she and Beau uncovered criminal activity by Tina beyond the substance abuse they already knew about?

She couldn’t back out now, though. She had dragged the detective into this and she had to see it through to the end, no matter what the cost. “I believe she had accounts at First Federal.”

“That’s a starting point, anyway.”

Beau fought an absolutely insane urge to place a comforting arm around her delicate shoulders, to try everything he could to take that pain from her wide, expressive eyes. How had he ever thought Elizabeth Quinn was cold and unfeeling? In just one afternoon with the woman, he was discovering she had a whole sea of emotions churning just below the surface.

He cleared his throat. “I’ll see if I can get a financial statement from them Monday when the banks reopen. And while I’m there, I can see if they know anything about this.” He pulled Tina’s key ring off the bedspread and selected the small, unusually shaped key he’d noticed earlier.

A frown appeared between her delicate brows. “What is it?”

“A key to a safe-deposit box. A First Federal safe-deposit box, if I’m not mistaken.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I’m a crack detective.” He grinned at her, wondering what it would take to get her to smile back. “Actually, because it says First Federal right there on the shaft.”

He didn’t add that his instincts still hummed at him. Whatever was inside that box had something to do with Tina Hidalgo’s death, he could feel it in his bones. Ordinary people didn’t go to all the trouble and expense to obtain safe-deposit boxes unless they possessed something significant—or secretive—they wanted to keep in a secure place.

From all he’d learned about the woman so far, Elizabeth’s stripper friend didn’t sound like the sort to keep a box full of jewels on hand.

“Will the bank let you open her safe-deposit box without some kind of…” With another of those intriguing pauses of hers, she left her sentence hovering between them while that trio of lines between her brows deepened. After a few beats she continued. “Permission. Without a…a warrant or something.”

“You’re right, ordinarily I would need a warrant to get in, something I might have a hard time finagling since I’m working this case on a purely unofficial basis. But they should let you or her mother open it in my presence if one of you is her executor.”

“I am. She named me legal guardian of Alex and executor of her will. Tina was afraid her mother would have trouble with the…the legal system because she isn’t a native English speaker. Ironic, isn’t it?” she mumbled under her breath.

“Why’s that?”

A blush colored those high-society cheekbones. “Nothing. I was thinking aloud. Sorry.”

He waited for her to say more but she closed those delectable lips, so he let the matter drop. “If you have the legal paperwork and her death certificate, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting into her box.”

“I believe she used the…downtown branch most since it was only a few blocks from her apartment. If she had a safe-deposit box anywhere, it would probably have been there.”

“Good thinking. See, your mind is already working like a detective.” He smiled at her again, and this time he was elated to see a little answering lift at the corners of her mouth. “Monday I’ll be tied up in court all morning, but I should be able to meet you around one at the bank.”

“That would be fine. I volunteer at Alex’s school in the morning. I should be done by then. Thank you.”

Uncomfortable with her gratitude, especially in light of his less-than-enthusiastic attitude toward the whole case, he shrugged. “I haven’t done anything yet.”

“You’re here. You listened to me.”

The soft words shouldn’t have affected him so much, but he had to again fight the urge to comfort her, to pat that silky Grace Kelly hair and pull her close and hold her until the pain left those blue eyes.

He blew out a breath and shoved the impulse away. He had to get away from her before he did something completely insane. “I think I’m done here. We’ve looked through all her belongings, right?”

“Yes. This is everything from Tina’s apartment. Luisa might have some older things stored in the attic. I can ask her.”

“Maybe eventually, but I have a feeling we’re on the right track here.” He paused, compelled to honesty. He couldn’t let her get her hopes up because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sit by and watch those hopes dashed against the rocks of hard reality. As he knew all too well, sometimes bitter truth was far more difficult to live with than a comfortable lie.

“You realize this may all be for nothing, right? No matter how badly you might wish otherwise, there’s a chance your friend’s death was exactly as it appeared to the other detectives.”

She was quiet for a moment and she looked fragile and a little lost as she gazed at the pitiful pile of belongings scattered around them. “I know. If all we find are…are dead ends, at least I’ll know I tried. I can live with that as long as I know I did everything I could.”

He hoped for her sake that would be enough. He rose, more to put distance between them than anything else. “I’d like to take her address book and her date book with me if you don’t mind so I can start running interviews with anybody who might have seen her in the days before she died.”

Before she could answer, a knock sounded at the door. Elizabeth rose from the bed with what he sensed was her inherent grace and opened it to the housekeeper.

The woman looked as stern and unsmiling as before. “Dinner is ready if you want to stop for un momentito.”

Elizabeth made a small exclamation and glanced at the slim gold watch at her wrist. “I’m so sorry, Detective. I hadn’t realized it was so late. I meant to invite you to stay but I forgot.”

No way. The last thing he needed was to spend more time with the all-too-intriguing ice princess. He didn’t like discovering all the layers hidden underneath her cool exterior. He started to refuse, but she gave him an imploring look.

“Luisa is a wonderful cook. Please stay. At least let us feed you for all your trouble.”

His refusal tangled in his throat and he shrugged and dutifully followed them down the stairs. Not a good sign. The only other women in his life he had a tough time saying no to were Grace and Emma, and just look how wrapped around their meddling little fingers they had him.

Dinner at Harbor View wasn’t at all the grand affair he would have expected. Place settings were jumbled haphazardly around one end of a huge mahogany table in the formal dining room—by Alex, he assumed, judging by the boy’s proud face. Beau was seated next to Elizabeth on one side of the table while Luisa and her grandson sat across from them.

He had to admit, the food was divine, the best home-cooked meal he’d had since the last time he ate with the Dugans. With that distant, vaguely unapproving look still on her lovely round features, Luisa filled his plate with some kind of spicy casserole, full of peppers and cheese and tamales.

He had two helpings and was trying hard not to make a pig of himself by asking for a third while he watched the three of them converse in the mysterious, gracefully beautiful language of the hearing impaired.

They laughed suddenly, all three of them. He had no idea why and he thought this might be a little like what the hearing world was for a deaf person. Perhaps they were always a little afraid they had missed some kind of joke.

As their laughter faded, Elizabeth glanced at him. That expressive, telltale color climbed her cheeks. “Oh, Detective Riley. We’re excluding you. I’m so sorry. We’re being terribly rude.”

He smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I find it fascinating to watch. What was so funny?”

She signed the words she spoke for the boy’s benefit. “Alex was telling us a story about what one of the other children did at school yesterday.”

“This is the sign for school?”

Whatever he did must have been way off. The three of them shared a look, then the kid burst into laughter. He could see Elizabeth trying hard not to join him, but eventually she lost the battle. She smiled first, something that completely transformed her solemn features, then she gave in to full-fledged laughter.

Her laugh was magic, he thought, entranced by it. By her. It was like walking through a dark, brooding forest and suddenly stumbling onto an enchanted, exquisite waterfall.

Now where the hell did that come from? Beau blinked, astonished at himself for the fanciful image. He wasn’t at all the sort to wax poetic, especially not over a woman in a completely different stratosphere like Elizabeth Quinn.

“What did I say?” he asked gruffly, embarrassed more at his thoughts than by any sign language faux pas he might have committed.

“That’s the sign for cracker. They’re similar but not the same. See, here’s school.”

She showed him and he repeated the sign until he had it right.

“Now how would I say dinner was fantastic?” he asked Elizabeth.

She showed him and he turned to Luisa and copied the signs exactly as she had demonstrated, feeling all thumbs at how much more difficult it was than they made it look.

The housekeeper unbent enough to give him a small smile and touched her left fingers to her chin then brought her hand downward away from her face with her fingers together and her thumb extended.

“That’s thank you,” Elizabeth explained. She repeated the same motion. “And that’s also one of the ways you can say you’re welcome.”

He turned to Luisa again and mimicked her actions. “Now how do I say I like your puppy?” he asked Elizabeth.

This time the signs were a little more complicated but he managed to repeat them to Alex.

The boy smiled with delight, and for an instant Beau was struck by how something in his large brown eyes reminded him of Marisa. Before he could analyze why, Alex’s pudgy hands flew rapidly through a series of a dozen signs, none of which Beau had any clue about.

He laughed a little. “Whoa. What was that?”

Elizabeth smiled again. “He said the puppy’s name is Maddie and she’s learning to play fetch but she’s not very good yet.”

“My favorite game.”

Alex signed something again, words that made Elizabeth give a hard shake of her head and respond quickly. The little boy looked stubborn as he repeated the signs, and Beau was consumed with curiosity.

“What did he say?”

She paused and color flared on those delectable cheekbones again. “He wants you to come outside and play with him and Maddie for a while. I told him no, that you were very busy. I’m sure you have other things to do.”

He ought to say no right now before this complicated woman and her taciturn housekeeper and the cute little boy managed to dig any deeper under his skin. But Alex was gazing at him eagerly out of flashing dark eyes that were painfully familiar and Beau knew he couldn’t disappoint him.

“Tell him I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”

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