Designed for Murder (Killer Style) (8 page)

Chapter Eight

“Style is primarily a matter of instinct.”

—Bill Blass

T
wenty-three minutes later, according to the ridiculous timer at their table, Carlos put his fork down on his empty plate. It was hard to go wrong with bacon, and Pippy’s sure hadn’t.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. “Yeah,” he answered.

“You need to bring her down to the station,” Reggie said, his voice sounding as tired as Carlos suddenly felt.

“What did the lab say?”

Mika perked up at his words, and she shot him a questioning glance.

“You’ll find out when you get here, but don’t let her out of your sight.” Reggie paused. “I don’t have anything solid, but this case just went D-bag.”

Carlos hung up without bothering to say good-bye. If Reggie was using the Maltese Security code words for Diamond Tommy Houston being involved, that meant other ears were probably listening in. Harbor City’s biggest crime boss had a bunch of dirty cops in his pocket—not to mention judges and politicians. If he was involved, Mika wasn’t just running from a random whack job, she was fighting for her life.

Playtime at Pippy’s was over. He grabbed the check and stood up. “Come on, we gotta go.”

T
he drive to the station with Mika was shrouded in silence punctuated by the satisfying snap as Carlos popped his knuckles. Reggie’s cryptic warning continued to run on a loop in his head while he parked the car in the lot and walked to the front entrance. The station loomed above them,
worn gray stone and grimy windows.

Mika jolted to a stop at the doors. Color drained out of her face. Either she was still riding the roller coaster of emotion from talking about her sister’s death or she was an even better actress than Ivy. Even thinking of the two of them in the same sentence made his stomach turn. Mika was nothing like Ivy.

“You okay?” Carlos asked, unable to stop himself from reaching out and tucking a stray hair behind her ear.

“I’ll live.” She shrugged off his touch. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

After giving their names to the bored officer sitting behind the front desk, they were hustled into a small room and the door was shut behind them. There was a coffee pot, a small sink, and cabinets on one wall along with a corkboard with a sign-up sheet for the police vs. firefighters hockey game. They had obviously decorated to look as little like an interrogation room as possible and had missed the mark by a mile.

A narrow table sat in the middle of the room—two chairs on one side and a single chair with an opening cut into the arm that was the perfect size to slip through the chain on a pair of handcuffs. A two-way mirror took up half of the wall across from the single chair. A small surveillance camera stood sentinel near the ceiling on the wall opposite the two chairs. The green light blinking above the lens testified to its operational capabilities.

This was not going to be a friendly chat.

The door opened and Reggie walked in. He wasn’t smiling.

“Thanks for coming in so quickly, Mika. We appreciate it.” Reggie turned to face Carlos. “Why don’t you wait in the break room? This shouldn’t take long.”

That would totally explain the ice in the air.

Every nerve in Carlos’s body was on full alert. “I think I’ll stay.”

“But I don’t need any information
from
you,” Reggie said.

The emphasis on
from
was slight, but it was there. He didn’t need information from Carlos, but he had it for him. Why keep the information off the police department’s computer system if he was going to share it now? Who else was snooping for the same information? There was more going on here than just a strong whiff of Diamond Tommy. Reggie might be alone, but the setup in the interrogation room that wasn’t an interrogation room had Carlos’s skin crawling.

He wasn’t alone. Mika looked as nervous as a three-legged cat trapped in a cage with a pack of junkyard dogs. If she twisted her fingers around her hair any harder she was going to break the silky strands in half.

“I want Carlos to stay,” she said.

“That shouldn’t be a problem, unless this isn’t just a
friendly
chat, right, Reggie?”

The detective eyeballed him, sending a less than subtle fuck-you message before curling his lips into a big fake smile and dropping a folder marked
preliminary results
on the table. “Knock yourself out, ’Los. We’re
all
friends here.”

There it was again. Just enough of a push on the word
all
to communicate that it wasn’t just the three of them. The light on the camera stopped blinking and turned a solid green.

Carlos gave Reggie as small of a nod as possible and sat down in one of the chairs on the left. Following his lead, Mika sat beside him. The move left only one option for Reggie unless he was going to prowl the room. Narrowing his eyes at Carlos, he sat in the suspect’s chair. The detective was playing the part of bad cop to the hilt.

“Thank you for coming in today, Miss Ito. We appreciate your cooperation.”

She curled her fingers around the arms of the chair, her knuckles nearly white. “I’m glad you guys are finally looking into this.”

“I’m sure you are,” Reggie said. “You’re a textile designer, is that right?”

Mika nodded.

“I’m not much of a fashionable guy myself. Does that mean that you import fabrics?”

“No. Designers come to me with a vision of what a garment will look like and a fabric preference. I design the pattern and work with manufacturers to get the fabric created.”

Reggie took down a few notes on his yellow notepad. “Is that done here in the U.S.?” he asked without looking up.

“Not usually,” she said.

Carlos sat back and forced himself into stillness even as the urge to snatch the preliminary results folder up off the table ate at him. This was going somewhere. He hated not knowing exactly where, but he didn’t have much of a choice other than to sit back and watch the action bounce between the two of them. A year ago, being in the background wouldn’t have bothered him—amazing how falling in love with a psycho killer changed things.

“How often do you get together with your LARP group for an event?” Reggie asked, his tone a little too calm for comfort.

Mika felt it. He could tell by the way her back was ramrod straight and the way her nails dug into the chair’s battered Naugahyde arm.

“It depends on the season, but every weekend when it’s nice.”

“And there’s lots of people and commotion at these events?”

“Sometimes as many as a hundred,” Mika said.

“But no outsiders?” Reggie asked. “Only fellow LARPers?”

“We hold the weekends at Central Square Park. The park rangers don’t close it down for us, so there’re usually other people around. Sometimes they end up in the middle of a battle, which is a real pain in the ass.”

“Interesting.” Reggie flipped open the preliminary results folder. “And you made all of the vestments?”

Mika nodded.

Reggie turned over a page in the folder, his finger tracing a line down the middle as if he was looking for a specific bit of information. Finally, he tapped the bottom right-hand corner of the paper and pushed it so it accidentally-on-purpose faced Carlos. Lt. Tom Kilburn. That was the name typed on the bottom of the report, and he knew it well. The Maltese team had identified him as a Diamond Tommy’s probable stooge on the force.

Reggie steepled his fingers and brought them to his mouth as if he were deep in thought. “How long have you been a drug mule?”

The world screeched to a halt.

“What?” Mika’s voice went up an octave.

“The material was soaked in liquid cocaine—the latest way that scumbags are getting drugs across the border.” Reggie stood up, all righteous fury. But in this case, the manufactured kind that allowed him to stand in the surveillance camera’s line of sight and push the open folder toward Carlos without it seeming obvious. “But you know all about that, don’t you?”

Carlos scanned the report, trying to take in as much as he could before Reggie picked it up. His brain spun into action. He’d read about this in one of the forensic science journals at the office. The cocaine was mixed into alcohol until it dissolved. The material was then soaked in the tainted liquid, and by the time the alcohol evaporated, the cocaine remained behind in the fabric. It was stiff, like Mika’s vestments, and a good 30 to 40 percent heavier than it was before, but unless customs inspectors knew what they were looking for, they never noticed.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” Mika’s voice wavered. “Why would I do that to my friends? They were hurt.”

“An accident? A way to cover your tracks? Hell, maybe you have a real sick sense of humor.” Reggie pulled out a single sheet from the folder and pushed it toward them. “Money troubles do crazy things to people.”

Carlos glanced down at the paper. It was Mika’s financials. Maxed credit cards. A bank balance that was circling zero. Her car had been repossessed. Totally circumstantial, but with the right judge, her financials combined with the fact that she’d made the vestments could be enough for a search warrant.

Reggie planted his hands on the table and loomed over Mika. “Where’s the rest of the tainted fabric, Miss Ito?”

Carlos jumped in before she could answer. “If you had any proof that she was a drug mule, she’d be sitting in that chair.” He nodded toward the suspect chair where Reggie had sat.

Reggie lifted his palms off the table and stood straight, letting his bulk do part of the talking for him. “You have motive and opportunity, Miss Ito. The LARP events are the perfect opportunity for a little dealing, but my guess is that your buyer got anxious and couldn’t wait. Demand is up and supply is low, except for what your court is wearing. My lieutenant likes you for this, and I have a line of six more open cases waiting for my attention. There’s not time for you to waffle on this. Help me and I’ll talk to the DA about a deal.”

Instead of shrinking under the onslaught, she lifted her chin and glared at the detective, but the jiggle in her knee gave her away. “I don’t know anything.”

“No one believes that, Miss Ito.”

Even when he was faking it, the detective was damn good at his job. He’d rattled Mika’s cage hard. It was an old interrogation technique—push and prod until you found a weak spot, and then go in for the kill. It wasn’t a finesse move, but it worked. Mika’s knee was bouncing like a jackhammer, and she was going to chew a hole into her lip if she kept worrying it like she was. He needed to get her the hell out of here.

“Enough, Reggie.” Carlos pushed up from his chair. “We’re out of here, Mika.”

He helped her up and led her to the door.

“This is a one-time offer, Miss Ito,” Reggie said. “Think about it before you walk out that door.”

“I don’t know anything.” Mika strode out.

Carlos lingered halfway out the door, patting his pockets as if he was looking for his keys. The green light on the camera clicked off. “How bad?”

“It’s coming from up on high from someone above Kilburn, and it’s rolling down like a massive mudslide,” Reggie whispered.

Carlos needed to get Mika out in front of it, before they got caught up in the downhill slide. Until this case was over, she was his responsibility. “Thanks.”

“’Los.” Reggie rubbed the back of his neck. “Be careful. This thing stinks, but that doesn’t mean she’s not in on it.”

He’d like to think he didn’t need the reminder, but after last night, maybe he did. If he didn’t want to get duped for a second time by a hot woman with a penchant for Magic Battledome, he needed to stop thinking with his dick and instead use his head to solve this case so he could get back to his new life.

Chapter Nine

“Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself.”

—Coco Chanel

M
ika couldn’t breath. She’d made it out of the police station, into Carlos’s car, and put the seat belt on before her lungs gave out and her vision turned blurry. A drug mule.
A drug mule!
It was crazy. The most illegal thing she’d ever done was drink underage, and even that hadn’t been
until college. The pinch in her chest made her wince. She sucked in a thin breath, then another and another until her vision cleared.

Carlos steered his car through Harbor City’s streets, his hands on ten and two. He didn’t even slide a sideways glance her way as the vein in his temple bulged against his skin. It was as good as a blinking neon sign over his head to denote his mistrust.

It shouldn’t hurt…but it did.

She twisted in her seat and looked at him, willing him to believe her. “I’m not a drug mule.”

“Okay.” But his hard tone signaled his suspicion.

She laid her palm on his thigh. “Really.”

He pulled the car over and parked in the back corner of a bank on the edge of Harbor City’s fashion district. The lunch hour had just started, and the sidewalk was crowded with designers, seamstresses, interns, and others in the business who were hurrying to the many bistros lining the street. Carlos picked up her arm by the wrist and moved it back to her own lap.

Embarrassment burned her cheeks. She’d rather screaming fury than this cold detachment. Especially after last night. Not that she expected a proposal, but there had been something extra to how he’d touched her—something almost reverent that she’d never experienced before.
Mi cielo.
My heaven. Right now, it felt like hell.

Keeping his gaze focused on the people filing past, he popped the knuckles on his left hand. “If it’s not you, then we need to figure out who it is.”

She pressed her hand to her stomach. “You don’t believe me.”

He turned to face her. Where last night there had been a warmth in his chocolate brown eyes, now there only remained a dull lukewarm flatness. “I don’t believe most of what people tell me.”

It was like he was a rule-book-following, just-the-facts vampire—except at sunset he turned into a human being instead of a bloodsucker. The realization set her heart hammering against her ribs as the fury she’d been craving from him rushed through her veins. The asshole. She hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, and sitting on the bench, acting like her judge and jury, had obviously given him a butt full of splinters.

“Who peed on your cornflakes?”

Not even a flicker of emotion crossed his face. “It doesn’t matter.”

Her hand was on the door latch before she realized what she was doing. The metal latch felt cool against her overheated skin. All she wanted to do was break free from the oppressive atmosphere in the car, but it wasn’t the right move. She could feel it in her gut as sure as she knew the moment she’d started dancing with Carlos at Feeny’s that he wasn’t just an ordinary guy. The stakes were beyond higher now. The people she loved needed her—and she needed him to figure out who was behind the attacks. Total jerkface or not, she needed him to solve this case before more of her friends got hurt—or worse. No one knew better than her that blood didn’t wash away easily from responsible hands.

She released the latch, one finger at a time. “So what now?”

“Where did you get the material for the vestments?”

“Durning Imports.”

“You know them well?” he asked.

“I worked for them as an in-house designer before I branched out on my own. I’d design the fabric and it would be manufactured outside of the U.S. and shipped in. They still give me the employee discount, so I get most of my material from there.” She paused, remembering the detective sliding the paper showing the pitiful financial picture of her life. “Money’s tight.”

Carlos looked at her, really looked at her, and censure snapped in his eyes. “Why is that?”

“You ever started a business? It’s not cheap.” Not when measured in blood, sweat, tears, and money. She’d put everything she had into starting her own textile design studio, plus a lot that she didn’t in the form of credit cards. That was a year ago. Money was finally rolling back into the business. It wasn’t a flood, but it wasn’t a constant drain anymore, either.

The
pop-pop-pop
of Carlos snapping his way toward knuckle arthritis broke the silence in the car before he turned the key in the ignition and the motor purred to life. “Let’s go chat up the good people at Durning Imports before the cops do. Where’s it at?”

“Not far. Fifty-eighth and Alexander.”

He pulled out of the bank parking lot and took a right onto Fifty-eighth street. It was a sixteen-block drive, but traffic was streaming along. After a few blocks, they went from a mix of residential and commercial to the solely commercial fashion district with its large industrial buildings that had been divided up decades ago and refurbished into sewing rooms, design studios, and import business headquarters. Durning Imports was in a ten-story brick building a few blocks down.

“Tell me about them.”

“It’s a family business run by a father-and-son team, Horace and Roger Durning. They’ve been in business forever.” She tried to picture the cue-ball-bald Horace and harmlessly preppy Roger as evil drug lords. The image would have made her giggle if she hadn’t been stuck in the car with the one man in the world who was so damned determined to think the worst of her at every turn. “There’s nothing hinky about them at all.”

They passed by the brick building with the Durning Imports sign and he maneuvered the car into a tight parallel spot half a block away. “What about the employees?”

“They’re all long-term people. I was the first person to quit in, like, fifteen years.”

“What are they, a cult?”

She snorted, offended on the Durnings’ behalf. “No, they’re good people, which maybe you’d see if you didn’t just look for the negative in everything.”

“We’ll see.”

He reached across the car to the passenger side, leaning so close to her that she couldn’t help but inhale his warm, inviting scent, and popped open the glove box. While she tried to rein in all the hormones that had woken up and decided that assholes made the best lovers, he fished out a small case the size of a slim deck of cards, seemingly unaffected by being near her. It wasn’t until he leaned back against his own seat and slipped the case in his pocket that his words penetrated.

“What do you mean, ‘we’ll see’?”

“You keep father and son busy; I’m going to take a look around, see what I can find.”

The Durnings had hired her straight out of fashion school. They’d given her a chance. Snooping around their office seemed a lot like betrayal. If there was any other choice…

“This is ridiculous.”

“It’s what I do,” he said. “So you’re going to have to trust me.”

Like he trusted her not to be involved in a drug scheme that was hurting her friends? “Do as I say and not as I do, huh?”

“Don’t take it personally.” Carlos took the key out of the ignition and reached for the door.

“Are you kidding me?” How could she not? Everything about this was personal.
Her
friends were getting hurt.
Her
apartment had been broken into and trashed.
She’d
been attacked. The police had accused
her
of being a drug mule. She nearly vibrated in her seat with barely repressed frustration and red-hot anger. “Don’t take it personally?”

He flushed. “Look, last night—”

“Didn’t mean anything.” She forced a coldness into her tone to cover the hurt piercing her chest and pulled down the visor mirror to check her hair and give herself an excuse not to look at him. “Look, there’s an attraction. So what? I’m comfortable with my sexuality. We’re grown-ups here. It’s just fucking. We had an impulse and we went with it. We know better than to think it’s anything more than that.” She flipped the visor closed. “So what’s your plan?”

He winced, but the twisted expression was gone almost as soon as it appeared. “You distract them so they don’t notice when I slip away that I’ve been gone for a while.”

“Got it.” She opened the passenger door and stepped out into the fall sunshine, glad for a simple pleasure in a day that had gone straight to shit.

Carlos looked at her over the top of his car. “Just be careful.”

“Don’t worry.” Pulling on her best tough-chick persona, the one she relied on as the Silver Queen during battles in Central Square Park, she leveled an ice-cold bitch glare at him. “I’m not a girl who lets herself get hurt.”

T
here hadn’t been time to fix what he’d said to piss her off, even if Carlos had known how to do that. Truth was, he had a damn good reason for why he went from one warm bed to another without bothering to learn last names or much of anything besides what made the nearly anonymous women come—until he’d woken up with a note from Mika on his pillow. She brought it all back, everything he’d spent the past year trying to forge
t.

Being around her was like having an itch between your shoulder blades far enough down that there wasn’t any way to reach it on your own.

The door buzzed and Mika shot him a narrow glare as she wrapped her delicate fingers around the handle. “Be nice.”

“Aren’t I always?”

She didn’t bother to respond, just yanked open the door and walked into the lobby. The receptionist informed them that the elder Durning wasn’t in today, but the son was on his way out to see them. A set of double doors swished open, and a man who must be Roger walked out. It took about two seconds to peg the son in his artfully aged jeans, white dress shirt, loosened tie, and tight-fitting baby blue sport coat as being of the douchetastic variety—especially with the six-hundred-dollar haircut of a young politician in the making.

Roger strode across the lobby and took both of Mika’s hands in his, kissing her palms like a man who had a fucking prayer of a chance. Carlos hated him on sight. Mika giggled at something the guy had whispered, and he hated the guy even more.

A good two inches taller than Carlos, Roger towered over Mika as they stood together off to the side in the sandstone and wood lobby and exchanged air kisses. She curled her delicate hand into the other guy’s maw and led him over to where Carlos stood, silently planning how to accidentally dropkick the dude.

“Roger,” Mika said, smiling up at him. “I want to introduce you to my friend, Carlos Castillo.”

“
Hola
, my
hermano
.” He slapped a hand on Carlos’s back. It was a friendly gesture, but the excessive force said otherwise, and his smile was wide and full of malice. “How’s it going?”

At least they were on the same page here, even if Mika was blissfully unaware of the pissing match going on right in front of her.

Ignoring the butchered Spanish accent and the pat meant to knock him off his feet, Carlos smiled without any warmth and took his proffered hand for a handshake. “Great, man.” He squeezed, hard.

Roger’s eyes widened. Carlos winked at him before releasing the other man’s hand. The logical side of him sent a cease-and-desist order, but the caveman inside him who’d spent the past two nights losing himself between Mika’s sweet legs wouldn’t listen. Carlos might not get to keep Mika, but for as long as they were together during this case, no one else was getting close.

“So what brings you down here?” Roger flexed his hand and pivoted his body so he effectively cut Carlos out of the conversation. “You didn’t use up the whole bolt we gave you a few weeks ago already, did you?”

“Nah, I’ve got close to half of it left, but I wanted to bounce some ideas about a textile that a client wants and hoped you’d have some samples I could look at for inspiration.” She looked up at him with just enough interest to make Carlos’s pulse thrum against his temple.

She was distracting Roger, just like they’d talked about, but it turned him all growly. If he didn’t watch it, he’d be puffing out his chest next. Not exactly the reaction he wanted to have about a client who could well be up to her pretty neck in drug dealers. He doubted it, but he couldn’t discount it completely. Not yet.

“Excellent.” Roger practically preened. “Let me take you in the back and show you what we’ve got and you can tell me all about your new digs. I hear you’re not having to work out of your living room anymore.”

“No, thank God.” She slipped her hand into the crook of Roger’s arm before turning to Carlos. “I know you’ll be bored out of your mind with all of our shop talk. Do you want to hang out up here? I promise we won’t be long.”

They disappeared behind the inner doors. Pushing back his knee-jerk need to follow, he focused on the point of this whole exercise: getting a peek at Durning Imports’ records and leaving behind a few tiny presents. The wireless listening devices in his pocket were top of the line, remote controlled and motion activated. A little addition he’d added was the ability to feed the overheard conversations to Maltese Security, where they could be recorded and analyzed. He just needed to figure out how to get inside the Durning inner sanctum.

“Stupid computer,” the receptionist grumbled.

He gritted his teeth to stop from grinning at the piece of luck. There was a God, and He was looking out for Carlos today. “Something I can help with?”

“Not unless you can make this POS stop acting like it’s possessed. It keeps freezing up.”

“That’s my specialty.” He walked behind the receptionist’s desk. Her hardware was about five years out of date, which usually translated to the operating system being just as old. He went with the go-to fix for a glitchy computer, powered it down, and then leaned against her desk. “Let’s give it a second.” He held out his hand. “Carlos.”

“I know.” She drooped her eyelids to half staff and shook his hand, lingering a little longer than necessary. “Kimmie.”

Uncertainty shifted his stomach. Okay. This was not normally his area. Cam was the resident flirt at Maltese, not Carlos, and as his interactions with Mika had proved, he was better with software than people. “Does it always act like this?”