Red Alert (16 page)

“That doesn’t sound very concrete,” Erik said as he pulled off the highway, headed for his place in the ’burbs.

“True, except that we can’t find him entering the building.”

That got Erik’s attention. “All the entrances are videoed?”

“Yes, and my people are good. We’ve got a decent shot of the lower half of his face, and new recognition software on beta-testing from the feds. We can’t find him entering the hospital that day or five days prior.”

“No ID?”

“Not yet. We’re having to extrapolate the upper
half from averages, and haven’t hit on anything. But when we showed the picture around, one of the construction workers recognized him. Said he threw the kid off the site the day Dr. Corning went into the cement form.”

Ice sluiced through Erik’s veins. “And he’s just telling you this now?”

“Said he’d forgotten all about it until he saw the picture. Sadly, that’s life with eyewitnesses.”

“You looking for the punk?”

“Of course, but you know how it is.”

“Right.” Contrary to the popular media’s view of police work, it wasn’t easy to find someone who didn’t want to be found. “You want to fax me a copy of that picture?” Erik asked, knowing Peters wouldn’t have shared info if he hadn’t been planning to do just that.

“It’s on its way. You headed home?”

“Yeah. Did the locals report anything hinky?”

“Nothing,” Peters said. “She didn’t try to sneak out, and nobody tried to get in.”

“Thanks.” An invisible band loosened from around Erik’s chest. Part of him had expected Meg to climb out the window and take off, just to prove she could.

Then again, maybe it was a bad sign she hadn’t tried it. Maybe it meant—

Nothing. It didn’t meant a thing. She was who she was, nothing more, nothing less.

The detective’s voice gained a note of finality when he said, “Call me if there’s anything I should know.”

“Same goes,” Erik said before he disconnected the call. But both of them knew the Chinatown detectives would share exactly as much as they wanted to. Erik wasn’t a cop anymore.

Wouldn’t be one ever again.

The brief thought reminded him of the climbing wall. Eight years earlier, he would’ve climbed it without a harness and laughed at the simplicity. That afternoon, it had taken him nearly an hour, and he was already feeling the burn of sore muscles.

He shouldn’t feel ridiculously pleased that he’d made it to the top and back again. Because he did, and because he wasn’t yet ready to lose that feeling, he tucked it away for future reference. When this was over, maybe he’d try physical therapy again. Hell, maybe he’d skip right over PT and just start pushing himself.

Then he turned into his driveway and thoughts of the climbing wall fled at the sight of lit windows and the shadow of a woman passing from one room to the next on the lower floor.

The cop in him cringed at the easy target she presented, though their perp had yet to use a firearm. But the man in him focused on her outline, on the strong, womanly curves that sometimes became lost beneath the force of her personality, the stress of the situation.

Meg was a beautiful woman.

But she’s not for you,
his saner self reminded him.
You’re not for her.

“I know,” he said, but that knowledge didn’t stop
him from wishing he looked neater, smelled cleaner and moved faster as he parked the car and climbed the front steps. It didn’t stop him from thinking that this was the first time he’d felt anticipation as he reached for the doorknob of his own house.

He was gratified to find it locked and to find the outer keypad armed and beaming a solid red light. He tapped in the required code and used his spare key, then tapped in the second code in the coat closet, resetting both alarms. With some thought of letting her know he’d arrived and then heading straight upstairs to shower, he stuck his head around the corner, into the living room, knowing he’d last seen her silhouette heading toward the kitchen.

The smell of cooking—rosemary and something warm—punched straight to his gut with its unexpectedness, sending him back a step into the marble foyer.

When was the last time he’d come home to cooking? Not since that last night with Celia. Before that, he had to go back to the years B.C.—Before Cop—when the invitations to family functions had still arrived regularly, when he’d felt comfortable going home for Sunday dinner with the ’rents, his older brothers and their families. Back when his grandfather had been alive and his family had at least made an effort to understand why he couldn’t be like them.

Meg appeared in the doorway separating the U-shaped kitchen from the foyer, and stopped dead. “You’re home!” She lifted a hand to her throat, then dropped it to fiddle with a dishtowel she’d tucked in
the waistband of her business-like black trousers. She wore the tailored white blouse she’d had on earlier in the day, but had discarded the soft green blazer and her tall black boots. A tentative smile touched her lips. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“You made dinner.”

The flatness of his words dimmed something in her eyes. “Yes. I needed to keep myself busy. To keep moving. Otherwise…” She gestured to the world beyond the sensored windows, dark now with the quick fall night. “I hope you don’t mind that I snooped in your cabinets for food and pans.”

A shadow moved through her expression, there and gone so fast he almost missed it. But he caught it, and the fleeting, furtive glimpse put him on guard. The smell of food gained a scheming edge.

“It’s fine. Smells good.” Reduced to monosyllables, he gestured upstairs. “I’m going to grab a quick shower.”

“A fax came for you. A picture.”

He nodded. “They think that’s the guy. Recognize him?”

“No. I wish I did. It would make more sense, be more…reasonable in a way, not like any of this is reasonable.”

Her guarded expression told him that by “this” she didn’t only mean the attacks, but also the tension that had snapped into the fragrant air between them, along with the cooking smells.

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” he said. “We’ll talk then.”

He stumped up the stairs and tried to ignore the growing howl in his leg. The long unused bottle of painkillers in the master bath beckoned, but he didn’t dare. He needed to keep his mind sharp.

Because one thing was clear to him. She hadn’t cooked just to keep herself busy. She’d cooked to soften him up.

She wanted something.

Chapter Eleven

Meg retreated to the kitchen, to the familiar acts of checking the sautéed veggies and sauce, and boiling water for the pasta she’d found. Erik’s plentiful food stores indicated that he either cooked or had someone cook for him, but almost everything was dried, boxed or frozen for the long haul, suggesting that his cooking schedule was erratic at best.

That fit with what she knew of the man. He was driven. He slept in his office as often as she slept in the lab.

And now she knew why.

Her fingers faltered, sending the lid clattering onto the heating pan of water.

“It doesn’t change anything,” she said, but she strained to hear the shower upstairs as her brain reviewed the sparse, sensationalized details she’d found in a newspaper clipping in Erik’s office.

No wonder the detectives were cutting him an unusual amount of slack on the current case. Lieutenant Erik Falco had been a damned hero.

She heard an uneven footstep upstairs. She’d peeked into the master bath earlier and stepped out immediately, unsettled by the basic masculinity of the black-and-green marble and the scent in the air, a mix of soap and attitude. But it had been the sight of the prescription painkillers—sealed over, unopened—that had unnerved her the most, mute testimony to a life he hadn’t chosen, a pain he fought daily.

How could she not respect that? How could she not—

“Your water’s boiling.”

At the sound of Erik’s voice in the doorway, Meg squeaked and spun, face flaming suddenly hot when she realized he’d been watching her, and hotter still when she saw the glitter in his eyes. She wasn’t sure whether it was irritation or attraction, but there was no mistaking the growing tension between them, the wary intimacy of being alone together in the big, sturdy house with police patrols on the half hour and motion sensors on the doors and windows.

She stared at him, seeing that his shower-wet hair was roughened to damp spikes where he’d toweled it dry. He wore another of his button-down shirts, though this one was soft with a lack of starch, and hung untucked over a pair of faded jeans. His feet were bare, his jaw unshaven, giving him the look of a wealthy playboy relaxing at home.

Which wasn’t far wrong, aside from the playboy part. She doubted he’d played in a long time. It wasn’t in the nature of the man she’d come to know over the past week.

The man she’d come to desire. To need.

The truth of it drove her back a step, away from where he stood motionless, leaning against the door frame in a pose that was part casual, part necessity. He could have been framing himself for a photo shoot, an ad for jeans maybe, or an expensive, gritty cologne. Something sexy and masculine and self-possessed.

He arched one eyebrow. “The water?”

“Right.” She forced herself to focus on the simple act of guesstimating two people’s worth of pasta. She told herself she could handle this. She could—

“What’s wrong?” His voice spoke from too close behind her. She stiffened and he continued, “You seem nervous. Did something happen?”

Yes, something had happened, but not the way he meant. Not having to do with the danger that threatened from outside, seeming further away than the night beyond the windows. Something had shifted inside her. It felt sudden, but maybe it wasn’t sudden at all. Maybe it had been building for the past five days, ever since he’d entered her office and she’d found herself attracted to a married man who wasn’t married at all.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, telling herself it was the truth. She stirred the pasta and set the timer for the quick boil. Then, not having anything else mundane and cooking-related to focus on, she turned to face Erik.

Sure enough, he was too close, standing in the
middle of the marble-and-granite kitchen, which was done in a warm brown but had seemed sterile and unfriendly when she’d first set foot inside. Now, redolent with the smell of sauce and garlic bread, filled with the presence of the man opposite her, the space seemed anything but sterile.

It felt hot and dangerous. Tempting. Almost like the last few seconds before a free fall, when she used to pause on the threshold between airplane and air, feeling a moment of panic just before she jumped.

She looked up into his eyes, which were higher than she remembered. He was taller than her original perception. Broader. Stronger.

He’d needed to be.

Something of the knowledge must have shown in her eyes, because his darkened and he backed off a step and cursed. “You snooped.”

She’d expected to feel embarrassed, but instead she felt a strange bubble of heat, of laughter. “Of course I did. What did you expect?”

“I—” He broke off, furrowed his brow and paused a moment before he said, “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe I figured you’d find it. Maybe on some level I wanted you to before…” He shrugged. “Before something happened between us that you’d regret later.”

She leaned back against the counter beside the stove, surprised by his admission and by the additional heat it had stirred. “Tell me about the picture in your office.”

His eyes clouded momentarily, then cleared, though they remained somber. “The picture. I’d forgotten.”

She suspected that wasn’t quite the truth, given the lack of dust on the tucked-away frame, but she waited while their dinner cooked at her back.

“I was the youngest,” he finally said, a faint smile ghosting his lips. “My brothers called me the runt of the litter.”

His expression didn’t invite questions, but she didn’t care. Something about the photograph, about the fact that he’d had only that one old shot, had set off warning buzzers in her scientist’s brain. “Are you close to them now?”

He shrugged. “Not particularly. An annual holiday phone call. That’s about it. My brothers have their families. My parents have their travel. And my grandfather passed a few years ago.”

He shifted his weight and lifted his cane to eye level, so she could see the thin ring of dark wood set into the metal barrel. Then he shook his head and dropped it again. “No. We’re not close. They didn’t understand why I wanted to be a cop. There wasn’t ever a big fight, but over time we sort of…drifted.” He shrugged. “It happens.”

“I know.” But though she’d certainly drifted when it came to her parents, Meg didn’t understand how that could happen between siblings. What about the bonds of childhood, of shared experiences? Shared ages and blood?

The timer went off, interrupting and giving her an outlet for the sudden buzz of energy, of restless motion that skittered through her, sending her for the plates she’d set out already. She drained the pasta and
dumped it in with the sauce, then added grated cheese and a dash of oil.

“Sit. I’ll bring it to you.” She gestured to a small, round table set into a windowed alcove at the back of the kitchen.

Hours earlier, she’d decided to skip the stiff formality of the dining room and use the more comfortable, casual kitchen table. At the time, she’d told herself she was thanking him for the use of his place, for saving her butt, and for having been a cop in a situation she couldn’t even imagine. But now she realized the table had another advantage. Or was it a disadvantage?

The tiny alcove was an intimate space, an enclosure that would have their knees bumping. She hadn’t set out a candle when she’d put out the mats and silverware, but with the stained-glass chandelier turned low, she might as well have. The overall effect was one of romance. Seduction.

When she realized that, she also realized he hadn’t moved. He remained standing in the center of the warm brown kitchen, eyes suspicious. “What do you want from me?”

Irritation flared alongside the simmering heat from the stove, from the man. “I don’t
want
anything. Not the way you mean it. I wanted to thank you for letting me crash, for helping me even when you don’t particularly like me.”