Secrets and Lies (6 page)

She peeped around the officer to look out the window. He was right; the passenger side back tire was now flat. She hadn’t noticed that before. “Can’t I just take the tire off and give it to you all?”

“Well…um…” The officer stammered.

“She has a ride home, officer.”

The officer, obviously feeling as if he had been saved from an argument, quickly fled the building.

“I can drive myself home. I don’t need to ride you to get there.” He smirked, he actually smirked. “What’s so funny?”

“I think you meant you don’t need to ride
with
me to get there.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No; it’s not.” He laughed. “Come on. I should get you home before you have any more of those Freudian slips.”

She looked up at him. He was still smiling. What could she possibly have said that was so funny? She played the words over in her mind trying to think of how she could have messed up the sentence. It wasn’t until he had her seated in the car that she realized what she must have said. She moaned. “Brilliant, Thena.” She mumbled before he got in the car. Clearly she had left out the crucial word, “
with”
, in that sentence. Could she embarrass herself any more today or was this it? God, she hoped that was it.

“Are you okay?” He started the car, the engine purred smoothly.

“What about my car?”

“It’ll be fine.”

“I need my car for work.” She had a Moped, but she rarely drove it anywhere. She only had it because while she was in college it was easier to navigate the campus area in that than in her car. In the winter she took the train, and in the summer she used her Moped. She hadn’t brought herself to sell it—although she really should have. She hadn’t driven it in months. Maybe she should be glad she still had it because, provided it was still working, she would need it to get to work. She tried to think if she had to meet with any clients within the next few days. She hoped not, otherwise she was going to have to pull up to the meeting on her Moped—that didn’t seem confidence provoking.

“I can get you to work it you need a ride.”

“That’s crazy. It wouldn’t make sense for you to put yourself out. I’ll figure it out.” Besides the Moped might still work. If it did still work then maybe she could take it to where Kyle was working and borrow his truck for the day in order to meet with clients. She would rent a car, but she was going to need every penny she had to pay Thomas’ bill.

“Rent a car,” he suggested. “I can take you to the rental agency now if you want.”

“No.” She answered so quickly that she startled herself. “I mean, no, that’s okay. I really have it figured out. Not to worry.” She sighed as she turned her attention to the view out the windshield. “Oh, turn right at the light.” She was thankful for the break in conversation. “It’s shorter this way.”

“Do you take the shortcut often?”

“Depends on which direction I’m coming from. When I come from my office then I take the shortcut. My office is actually about fifteen minutes north of your office, which generally means with traffic it’s about forty-five minutes.” The traffic in the city was murder in and of itself. “If I come from a work site it just depends on where we’re working. Right now we’re working south of my home so I don’t need to avoid the freeway to get home.

He avoided the turn off she had advised him of taking. She pointed out the window as he breezed by his turn. “You were supposed to turn right there.”

“You shouldn’t get used to taking the same route home so often. You never know who’s following you, or waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me?”

“How do you know somebody won’t figure out your travel pattern and wait down the least busy road of your route for you to come driving along? Anything can happen then. A flat tire, an arranged car accident, anything. And then you’re screwed.”

“With my pants on,” she added before cupping her hand over her mouth and shaking her head. She was batting a thousand today and unfortunately the home runs she was hitting were leading her straight to the home plate of humiliation. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Chapter Three

D
igging for answers always had a way of yielding results. Unfortunately the answers Thomas received weren’t always the truth.

“So where’s the body, Dustin? Did it just get up and walk away?”

Dustin slammed his fist down on the cold slab in front of him. “That’s what I’d like to know. I put the body back in there. I went to lunch; I came back and she was gone. I mean gone! If I hadn’t checked I wouldn’t have even known.”

“This is going to nearly kill Thena,” he mumbled. He couldn’t imagine being the one to tell her the body was gone. She had just found her mother and now she was missing again.

“I did notice something in my unofficial once over. I can’t confirm it without an autopsy, but I think she was embalmed. It would explain the lack of serious decomposition”

“You mean whoever killed her took the time to make nice and preserve her?”

“No, I mean whoever killed her decided to be a complete bastard and embalmed her while she was still alive.”

Thomas felt rage threatening to break his control. What a hellish way to go for anybody, but especially this woman. “I’m going to have to tell Thena the body is missing.”

“I know. She should hear it from you and not the detectives. Although I don’t think they’re in a rush to tell her anyway.” He rolled his eyes and uttered several curses. “And Thomas…there’s more.”

There was always more. No matter how messed up he thought a case was it usually had a way of getting worse. “Tell me,” he crossed his arms over his chest.

“McNamara says the victim was probably involved in something illegal at the hospital before she disappeared. Evidence apparently points toward it and she thinks whoever Mrs. Davis crossed came back for the body to properly dispose of it before any evidence could be found to point to them.”

“Tarnish the dead,” he had seen it before. Instead of working a case from every angle McNamara would always take the easy way out and the easy way usually meant writing the case off by tarnishing the deceased. He wouldn’t let it happen this time. He would find out what happened to Mrs. Davis, then and now. “If you find out anything about where the body vanished to give me a call.” Although he doubted Dustin would ever see that body again, let alone find out where it had managed to disappear to.

“Are you going up to talk to McNamara?”

He didn’t want to, but he would. He was a professional, even if she couldn’t be. “Yeah, I’m on my way up.”

“You know she’s still pissed at you; right?”

“Yeah, I know.” How could he forget? His constant rejection of her blatant attempts to get him into her bed had caused a rift between him and the department. Before that he hadn’t had an issue. Even when he need answers on a case that took him into their jurisdiction somebody would assist. Since his last rejection of her affection he would be lucky if he could even get a cup of coffee in that precinct.

Phoebe was the commissioner’s daughter. Whether she was well liked or not wasn’t the issue. Everybody feared the havoc she could wreak on their careers. After what she had done to Detective Jameson…well, he understood why the others were afraid of her. He had one advantage over the guys in her precinct; he wasn’t on the city’s dime any longer. He didn’t have to play by their political rules. There was nothing McNamara could do to him, other than refuse to give him information—and even then he had his way. He would find out what he needed to know, with or without her help.

It didn’t take long for him to spot Phoebe in the room. The paint was currently pealing off the walls. He chuckled; it was still the same as it had been the last time he stepped foot in this precinct—dusty, dirty, unkempt, but still habitable. He couldn’t understand how the condition hadn’t bothered anybody. They had one of the most beautifully old police station structures and they had all sat by and watched it go downhill…actually, they had helped it get there. A fresh coat of paint and a little more cleanliness could fix the place up. Instead, they were letting all four floors go to the dogs.

He shook his head. It wasn’t his problem, never was. He wasn’t there to discuss décor and cleanliness with them. He was there to discuss his case. If the building fell down on their heads that would be their problem.

He strode over to Phoebe’s desk. Her hair was an unsightly shade of bleached blond and she had cut it shorter. It was very close to her scalp, which was vastly different from the below shoulder length mess she used to walk around with. The cut didn’t suit her, but then he figured nothing ever would.

It wasn’t that Phoebe was ugly. She wasn’t. She had what most men would go after in a bar. She had big breasts, blue eyes, long legs, slender curves and a way of flirting that would tell any man if she spent more than five minutes talking to him she definitely had plans to take him to bed. That kind of personality attracted some men, and turned others off. It had been a turnoff for him. Not that she was his type to begin with. Dating other cops had never been a good idea. When he worked SWAT he made sure he didn’t get involved with anybody carrying a badge. All the women at his precinct, and this one, knew his rule and while two or three had tried to convince him to have dinner, they had all backed off when he told them no. Phoebe…she was a different story entirely.

He had been the unlucky guy to land in the nineteenth precinct when the commissioner decided it was mandatory to do a two week exchange. About ten of the men he worked with went to other precincts, while men from those precincts took their place. He got the unlucky draw of the nineteenth. The pats on his back and the reassurance that he’d survive the two weeks, “maybe,” they had said, should have been warning enough. They all knew what he didn’t know, but what he found out quickly enough, Phoebe McNamara, a woman who was quickly working her way up the ranks to detective, could tank a man’s career if she didn’t get her way.

It wasn’t until she set her sights on him that he got the full story. She had gone after Detective Jameson, relentlessly pursuing the man despite his married with children status. He had refused her, repeatedly, and she did not like to be refused. The story he received told him just how far she would go, and just how far being the commissioner’s daughter could get her. Jameson lost his job, his pension, the career that he loved, and for what; a few lies and a massive cover up. The only thing he hadn’t lost was his family. His wife believed him, which had to count for something after everything he had been through.

Fortunately for Thomas, two weeks was all he had to put up with, and even then he had made it clear if she put her hand on his thigh again he was going to break that hand off and shove it up her behind. Two weeks and he was out, back to his own precinct with his own squad—career still in tact. Never did he imagine he would have to make contact with Phoebe again, but here he was, making contact for a case. The few cases that had taken him to the Nineteenth were first and third floor department issues—Phoebe was on the second floor. The last time he had a brush with her had been in the parking lot, where once again he told her no. After that, most of the Nineteenth was like ice to him.

He hadn’t been raised in Boston, but he always seemed to fit in. He grew up in the Midwest, along with his sisters until his father relocated to Boston for a job. He was nearly seventeen, which meant he had to move before he finished high school. That meant starting over at a new school, but he never had a problem fitting in and making friends, so he wasn’t worried. Gavin was lucky; he was already in the military by then so the move hadn’t impacted him as much as it had the others. Eve, the youngest McGregor, was just turning seven, not that anybody would think she spent a day in Boston because she didn’t have an ounce of the accent. Like their mother, Eve could turn on and turn off accents at the drop of a hat. Alyssa, the other McGregor, had been thirteen. She took it the hardest. She wasn’t a social butterfly and moving, leaving behind her friends, wasn’t easy for her. She always hated Boston, hated the area, the city, the environment. He imagined that hatred stemmed from her experience with the place, but at least she had family. The McGregor’s stuck together like overcooked rice. You hurt one, you hurt all, and that invoked a wrath very people had ever experienced. Alyssa nearly left Boston the second they put the diploma in her hands. Their parents had insisted she walk the stage at her graduation. Once she did that, she got in her little Volvo and hit the road, heading west. Thomas himself had left for life in the military, and after everything went bad he returned to Boston. He didn’t have a real reason to stay put. His family had all moved away now. His mother out west, his baby sister in the south, Alyssa in Arizona and Gavin was now living the life in South Dakota with London. His father, the jerk that he was, had relocated to New York, New York. Still, despite not having his family situated in Boston, Thomas hadn’t ever thought of leaving. His business was there, established and strong; he wasn’t going to leave that behind to start over. If he did leave it he would probably move to where one of his sister’s was. He worried about them, maybe more than he should. He remembered how it felt, after he joined the Marines, to have his big brother always watching over him from a far. And then when he nearly died, it was like that was all the excuse Gavin needed to smother him with big brother protective love. He smiled. His brother was always his hero, the man he aspired to make proud, but sometimes he wished Gavin could see he didn’t need constant protection. Maybe Eve and Alyssa felt the same way about their brothers’ protective streak. At some point the chains of protection had to be loosened—at least a little. Who was he kidding? Eve and Alyssa were his sisters and he’d protect them until he died, no matter how old they got. He tore his attention away from his sisters, mentally reminding himself to give them a call. He put his attention back on his current reason for being at the Nineteenth.