Believing Again (8 page)

On the other hand, she didn’t think keeping it light and casual after tonight would be easy. They’d gone speeding from a kiss in the kitchen to this uncharted emotional territory where she didn’t know anything about the terrain or the rules and wasn’t even sure she wanted to know either.

She felt the bed shift with his weight as he moved. “Hey,” he said softly. “You okay?”

Opening her eyes, she saw him propped on one elbow, peering down at her, a worried look on his face. It was now or never. She had to set the tone for the rest of the evening, maybe for the rest of whatever would be between them. “No, I’m not, Jake.”

She swore his breathing stopped for a moment. “What’s the matter? Was something … ?”

Shaking her head she hastily said, “There was a promise made about dinner. I’m starved and all we’ve done since I got here is hang around your bedroom. I didn’t even get the chance to finish my martini.”

An amused look replaced the worried one. “Hang around my bedroom? That’s what you call what we’ve been doing? Interesting choice of words.”

“Well, I didn’t want to get into too much detail since apparently I talk too much.”

“Ah, this is payback. Gottcha.” He untangled his legs from hers. Tracing a line from her forehead to her chin before briefly kissing her, he said, “If madam would like to join me in the kitchen, she can drink her martini while I finish up dinner, which will be served in about thirty minutes.”

He sat up. She moved close to him, her fingers drawn to his back where she found even more scars, reluctant now to leave his bed even though she knew she had better do it while she could. “Okay, I’ll get dressed … ”

“Aren’t you going to stay the night with me?” he asked.

“Oh, I hadn’t thought … Are you asking me to stay?”

He glanced back over his shoulder and grinned. “Yeah, I am. I want to see if you’re still so chatty in the morning. Call it a scientific experiment.”

“How can I say no to science?”

“Good. Then don’t get dressed.”

“Dinner in the nude? You’re joking.”

“Yes, I’m joking. My mother would find out and there’d be hell to pay. We weren’t even allowed to come to the dinner table bare chested, let alone bare naked.” He disappeared into a large walk-in closet as he spoke.

Raising her voice so she was sure he could hear, she asked, “A — how would your mother find out? B — if I shouldn’t get dressed but we’re not eating in the nude … ?”

He was wearing one terrycloth robe when he reappeared and holding another. “In answer to A, God knows how but she would find out. She has her ways. I’ve learned not to question them. As for B, here, wear this. I have multiples.”

“For emergencies like this?” She took the robe, realizing when she wrapped it around herself that it was too big.

“No, as you can tell, it’s my size, not yours. I have a weird aunt who gives my brother and me each a robe every year. Has ever since we were teenagers. We’ve tried to get her to stop but it hasn’t worked. Apparently she believes that males are very hard on robes and need to have them replaced annually. We usually donate them to a shelter but I haven’t cleaned out my closet in a while so I have a buildup in there.” He gestured to the now closed closet.

Half an hour later, she’d finished her martini and he served dinner. She’d never eaten such an elegant meal dressed only in a robe. It was almost as good as the sex had been — the dinner, that is, not the robe. The coq au vin was delicious, as was the crusty French bread, the salad, and the perfect red wine. After they ate, Jake suggested they wait for dessert. Danny volunteered to help clean up the dishes. Then, when the kitchen was spotless, he admitted that she was the only dessert he wanted.

She was happy to volunteer for that, too.

Monday morning Danny was humming her favorite Blind Pilot song as she got off the elevator, and accidentally plowed right into her boss, Lt. Chris Angel.

He squinted his eyes at her and reared his head back. “Did I mistake the day? It’s Monday, isn’t it? How come you’re so damn cheerful? Must have been some weekend.”

“It was okay.” Sure her expression would betray
how
okay it had been and invite curiosity, she moved the conversation to his five daughters, a subject she knew would divert him. “How about you? You have college kids home for the weekend?”

“No, we took the two high schoolers to Eugene to visit their sisters. I swear, with the amount of money we shovel into the University of Oregon for those three, you’d think the university would have champagne and caviar waiting for us when we visited.” His smile was rueful as he shook his head. “But it
is
Monday, no matter how cheerful you are. And as soon as you get yourself organized I want you and Sam in my office to bring me up to speed on the transient camp murders.”

“Murders? Plural?”

“Yeah, the guy on life-support died yesterday. Guess you were too busy having a good time to hear.” He clearly had his own ideas about what she’d done over the weekend. And, judging from his comment, they were uncomfortably close to reality.

Sam was at his desk already. “L.T. wants to see us in a half hour, Sam. The second vet from the camp died.”

“Yeah, I know.” He looked her up and down. “You look remarkably happy this morning. Apparently he finally asked you out.”

Sam, she knew, would not be as easily diverted as their boss had been but she had to try. “Who’s he?”

“The doc. He finally made his move. It’s about damn time. He’s been sniffing around you for weeks.”

“Sniffing around me? Jesus, Sam, you make me sound like a bitch in heat.”

He had the grace to look abashed. “You know I didn’t mean that. He’s just awfully slow. I’d have asked you out weeks ago.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t even go there. That’s too weird for words.”

He was doing a poor job of looking offended. “What’s wrong with me? There’ve been plenty of women who’ve thought I was a hot guy.”

“Yeah, your wife — my friend — included. And none of them your partner.”

“Since all my partners until you have been men, it’s goddamn unlikely any of them thought I was a hot guy.” However, he was not about to be deterred. “You haven’t answered my original question although your need to move this conversation in another direction leads me to an affirmative answer. What did you do?” He was smirking as he asked the question.

Danny played it straight. “We had dinner.”

The smirk changed to curiosity. “Oh? Where? Was it good? I’m looking for someplace to take Amanda for our anniversary.”

She hesitated for a few moments. “He made coq au vin for me at his house.”

“Christ, I don’t need to ask what you did for dessert. I assume you were putty in his hands after that.”

If she’d been prone to blushing, remembering what they’d done for dessert would have turned her flaming red. “When have you ever known me to be putty in anyone’s hands, Sam?”

“You have a point.” He waited for her to continue but when she didn’t, he collected some notes from his desk. “If you’re not going to give me any details, we might as well work. Let’s go see what we can thrash out about this asshole who’s shooting up the city’s homeless. That way the doc can concentrate on the next meal he’s cooking for you, not on worrying about his patients.” And he headed for their boss’s office.

Forty-five minutes later they’d hashed it all out and had decided a more extensive visit to the Veterans’ Medical Services Clinic was in order. It wasn’t merely the availability of cardboard sign material there that led them to that conclusion, although Jake’s clinic
was
the most likely source. Sam had visited Outside In, the other place where East State Medical Supplies, Inc. had donated supplies, had seen their indoor recycling bins, asked who had access to the cardboard and concluded it was a less likely source because of their process of handling recycling. Not to mention that Outside In treated street teens, not homeless vets.

The determining factor, however, wasn’t the cardboard. It was that all three shooting victims got care from Jake Abrams at VMSC. It was hard to know the significance of that fact. Had Jake somehow put his patients in danger? Or was someone trying to get at him through them? Did he know something he wasn’t telling them or, more likely, did he have information he didn’t know he possessed? If he did, how could they figure out what it was?

Sam and Danny headed for Old Town, the part of the city where many of the social services for the homeless were housed, and where VMSC was located. They planned to interview as many of the staff and volunteers as they could to see what additional information — if any — they could gather.

Sam had cruised by the clinic when he was checking out their recycling bins. Danny hadn’t ever been there. She wasn’t sure if she wanted Jake to be there or not. She was curious to see him working but she wasn’t sure how they’d react to each other after a weekend that was pretty much spent in bed exploring each other’s bodies. Merely thinking about their hot weekend together was enough to make her pulse pound.

But it could be awkward. She’d never been involved with someone she met through an investigation. Not that anyone suspected Jake Abrams of being the killer. They’d already established where he’d been at the time of all the shootings and it was nowhere near the homeless camps.

Still, Danny wondered if she should tell L.T. about her relationship with him. Riding the light rail to work that morning she’d debated whether she should ask Sam for advice. He and Amanda had first gotten together when Amanda was suspected of actually being a perp in one of his homicides. But she also knew that giving her partner any more information about her involvement with Jake would fuel his curiosity and make him ask questions she might not want to answer.

During the ride to the clinic in Old Town, she took a chance and broached the subject.

“Sam, do you think L.T. needs to know that Jake and I are … that we’re … well, you know.”

Sam grinned. “Actually I don’t know exactly because you won’t tell me. But I can guess. And my imagination’s running wild.”

Danny began to regret her decision to ask his advice.

Then he redeemed himself. “Seriously, I wouldn’t worry about it. We’ve cleared Jake of any involvement in this other than as a source of information. I’d tell you to be careful with what you say to him about what we find but I know you’d do that with anyone you were with.”

“Yeah, I would.” She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “It must have been pretty complicated getting involved with Amanda when she was suspected of murder.”

“Complicated hardly begins to describe it. But it worked out okay. I mean, how could she resist falling for the man who was not only the best looking guy she’d ever seen but who kept rescuing her from the guys who wanted to make her take the fall for them? I even took a bullet for her.”

“That part I know. I was there, remember?” She snorted trying to suppress a laugh. “I wonder if Amanda would answer the question the same way?”

“She better. But let’s get back to the original question — I only told L.T. about Amanda and me after she became a suspect. This thing with Jake and you isn’t anything like it.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel better.”

“You’re welcome.” He was driving and glanced over at her.

She was sure he was about to say something else but a parking space opened up near the clinic and he turned his attention to pulling into it.

The clinic was in an old storefront and was obviously a bare-bones operation. The waiting area they walked into had an jumble of mismatched folding chairs and plastic patio chairs full of people waiting to be seen, institutional-green paint on the walls, chipped and cracked vinyl floor covering, and curtains on the side windows that hung limply with the exhaustion of too many trips through the washer and dryer. The large front windows were bare.

In what passed for an office, created by a couple folding banquet tables and a few file cabinets, sat a frazzled-looking, middle-aged woman behind the only new-looking piece of equipment in sight — a computer. In addition to working on that, she was juggling two phones and the demands of people who, Danny assumed, were staff members who wandered in and out of her workspace ad lib, dropping charts and notes into her inbox.

It didn’t take Danny long to see that Jake was there. Dressed in a white lab coat over jeans and the cable knit sweater which seemed to be his uniform for working at VMSC, he was hunkered down to listen to an old man in a wheelchair tell what seemed to be a long and involved story. He didn’t hurry the man along even though the front area was full of people waiting their turn to see someone.

The two detectives walked up to the receptionist’s table and Sam showed his badge and introduced himself. “We’d like to talk to some of the staff,” he explained, “one at a time. In a place where we have some privacy.”

The receptionist snickered. “Yeah, right. So would I. But we’re slammed right now. You’ll have to come back another time.”

From behind them, Jake said, “I don’t think that’s how it works with the police, Greta.” Looking over her shoulder, Danny saw the huge grin on his face. “Nice to see you again.” There was no mistaking that he meant Danny but he hurried to include her partner by asking, “How can we help you, Sam?”

“We’re on a fishing expedition,” Sam said. “We’re about ninety percent sure the cardboard in the camps came from here. But no one we’ve talked to seems to know how it got there. They all say it just appears. We think someone here might be the conduit, wittingly or not. So, we’d like to talk to your staff and see if anyone here knows anything. It’s the only lead we have so we’re following up on it.”

“Greta’s right,” Jake said. “The medical staff is slammed right now. But I can rustle up a couple volunteers for you to talk to and one or two of the support staff who can give you a few minutes. If you can make do with that for about twenty minutes, when the lunch line opens at the soup kitchen down the street, our patients will magically disappear and the medical staff will be available to talk with you. That work?”

“Works for me,” Sam said. Jake directed him to the staff coffee room which no one was using because they were so busy and sent in the man who was in charge of handling the recycling and other waste.