Unauthorized Obsession (Unauthorized Series Book 3) (6 page)

Kara leaned back in her chair, esteem in her eyes. That was as good of an any rags to riches, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own bootstraps story she’d ever heard. This was a man after her own heart.

Sergeant Aria Gale dropped her face in her hands and rubbed her temples. It had been a long day. She liked to work on Saturdays because it was easy to find people at home. Today had been mostly fruitless though. First she had tried to interview the family of Tiffany Stewart’s boyfriend. His mother, a heavyset woman wearing a greasy shirt and a baseball cap had kept her on the porch, refusing to invite her inside.
Yes he was still missing, no she hadn’t heard anything since the last time she had talked to the cops, and no she didn’t know anything else.
She’d yelled at Aria for doing nothing but eating donuts all day and not finding her boy eight years ago, then stepped inside, slamming the door behind her.

Aria had wanted to ask several other questions, but it was obvious the mother was a dead end. She hadn’t been able to turn up any other family so she had decided to head out to the prison. There were several people in the prison she needed to talk to regarding the case.

The first one was Margaret Timmon’s boyfriend, Peter Stevens. Peter was serving the last six months of a four year sentence for three counts of burglary. Stevens had been convicted on the counts of burglary because the stolen items had been found in his car and in his house, and he had been unable to provide a satisfactory alibi during the times of the burglaries. The guard said he was a decent prisoner, never one to start trouble. He did have a bad habit of bitching about how he was innocent, but so did ninety percent of the inmates in the Worshaw prison. The difference was, when Stevens got started, he worked himself into a frenzy and frequently had to be placed in confinement until he calmed down.

When she’d walked into the interview room, Stevens had been sitting calmly at the table, watching her closely.

“Mr. Stevens, I would like to talk to you about your allegations that you are innocent and you were set up.”

Stevens had leaned forward, bitterness and anger on his face. “I’ve been in this hellhole for over three years, and
now
someone comes to see if I'm really innocent or not! When I only got six months to go? You gonna bust me outta here early?”

“That depends, Mr. Stevens. What kind of evidence can you provide to corroborate your statement-”

“Evidence! I can't provide any fucking evidence. That’s your job. You're the cop!”

“Calm down, Mr. Stevens, I am trying to help you. Just answer my questions and we’ll see where we can go from there.”

She had asked him about Margaret and about Margaret’s stalker. He didn’t remember much and got angry at her several times for the questions. He had demanded to know why all she wanted to talk about was Margaret. Did she think Margaret was the one who had framed him? Why would Margaret do that? Aria had shaken her head and tried to deflect the questions and keep him on track. When she asked if he ever had any idea who Margaret’s stalker might have been he finally became suspicious. And when she had asked if Margaret had had any friends or past love interest that had expressed a desire to get back at him for dating her, she had seen the light bulb go off in his head.

“That’s who did it! The same guy who was stalking Margaret! And you mean to tell me that you guys haven’t been able to find him after all this time? What kind of a McDonald’s operation are you running in Westwood Harbor? You cops couldn’t find your own asses with both hands in broad daylight!”

After that the interview had devolved to such a point that Aria had left, knowing she wouldn’t get any more out of him. But he was tapped out; he didn’t know anything else anyway.

Her next stop had been to see Dawn Reinold about her hair. She had to leave the men’s facility and walk across the street to the women’s facility. When Aria arrived, Dawn was waiting in an interview room, her shirt folded up to show her stomach and her arm draped casually over the back of the chair. Aria surveyed her. Her hair was still quite short, and seemed uneven on one side. Her eyes jumped in their sockets and her skin looked sallow and pale. Aria shook her head. Apparently Dawn could find drugs, even in prison.

She had sat down and tried to interview Dawn anyway, but hadn’t come away with much. Dawn claimed she didn’t remember anything from that night but she thought her cellmate, Tita, had been the one to cut her hair off because they didn’t like each other. Aria had tried to determine Tita’s real name but had come up empty. Even asking the guards had yielded nothing. Aria wanted to speak to the guards who had been on duty that night, but the sergeant on duty couldn’t find the roster. He said he would put a request in with Human Resources to see if they had a back up, and he would get back to her.

Aria ground her teeth in frustration and sat down at her desk to search the alias computer for Tita. She immediately came up with hundreds of results. Apparently Tita was a Hawaiian nickname meaning
tough girl
. She sighed and began to weed through them, crosschecking the names of each woman to see which ones had been in prison when the incident had happened. After an hour, she had only gone through eighty-four names.
She really needed an assistant
, she thought, laughing at the concept. Would she trust anyone to do this job? It was tedious and boring and easy to make a mistake, which could leave the entire investigation at a standstill. No, she was better off doing it herself.

Her mind flashed to Officer Price. She bet Officer Price would do this job well though - she seemed like an extremely hard and efficient worker. Aria would have recognized herself in Officer Price five years ago, but now she had no ambition left. At this point, all she wanted to do was keep plodding on and not spend any time thinking about her life. A promotion right now would mean nothing but heartache, especially when the chief and her coworkers noticed that her husband didn’t come to the ceremony. But she wouldn't think about him right now. She wouldn't think about what her jilting husband and betraying sister had done. She couldn't afford to think about it. If she did she would spiral down into an aching black hole of misery that no one would ever be able to pull her out of. She'd had a tiny taste of what being in that hole was like and she could never go back there. She would die if she did.

Aria set the steel in her spine and turned her thoughts back to the case. She hoped this Tita would be her big break. If she could find who put Tita up to it, she could figure out who this guy was. The sooner she found the guy the better; she had a bad feeling that the stalker and Officer Price were going to personally clash somehow, and it was going to happen soon.

Kara leaned forward, watching Zane’s dark eyes closely. She had so many questions about him. She felt drawn to him, like he’d been a part of her life for a long time, but somehow she’d forgotten him.

“Have you always worked in construction?”

He shook his head and took a pull on his beer. “No, I was in the Army from 2001 to 2004. I did one tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. When I came home I wandered around aimlessly for a while and dealt with some depression issues and then my dad’s buddy hired me to help him in his company as a favor to my dad. I didn’t have any construction experience so he started me in the office, coordinating the crews and their workloads. I started working with a carpenter, learning the trade. I was good at it, but I was always better at leading the crew, solving problems, and brainstorming better ways to do things. Over time, my boss let me take over his job with the assistance of one of his contractors. He wanted out. Eventually he let me buy his business. I went to contractor’s school and the rest is history, as they say.”

“Wow,” Kara breathed. “Did you ever think that’s what you would end up doing when you were a kid?”

Zane smiled at her, the cocky smile, and the light she saw in his eyes charmed her.

“No, when I was a kid I wanted to be president.”

Kara’s eyes widened. That was one of her most secret dreams, but one she had never shared since she’d been seven years old and had to write an essay on what she was going to be when she grew up. She had written that she wanted to be president, and a few of her classmates had snickered. She had turned around to see who was laughing and it was most of the boys. Reggie Bryant had actually said, “Girls can’t be president.” Kara had looked to Mrs. Cash to refute that statement, but all Mrs. Cash had said was, “According to the Constitution, girls can be president. It just hasn’t happened yet. Maybe in forty or fifty years.” Kara had felt immediately conflicted. The first part of Mrs. Cash’s words should’ve made her feel better, but the tone with which she had said them had been completely hopeless. That had been the beginning of Kara realizing how things were different for her because she was a girl. She had vowed to herself to always do what she wanted to do, girl or not, but her dream of being president had partially died that day anyway. For now, she would just set her sights on chief of police and see where that took her.

Zane looked deep into her eyes. “I always wanted to be John F. Kennedy, minus the assassination.”

“And surely minus the womanizing too?” Kara asked.

“Of course,” he said – too quickly and with a slippery note to his voice. Kara raised an eyebrow at him.

Zane pursed his lips and shook his head. “Okay, okay. You got me. When I was a kid, I used to think it was okay because it was Marilyn Monroe and she was the most beautiful woman in the world. But I’ve learned since then that you can’t chase beauty all your life. Everybody is going to age or have bad days or not look their best sometimes, and there are more important things than outward beauty. But I do still have a soft spot for Marilyn Monroe.”

Now his soft smile looked more self-conscious to Kara. She reached out and squeezed his hand. What he had said was beautiful.

He twined his fingers in hers. “What about you? Did you always want to be a cop?”

Kara considered her secret briefly, but decided to share. She knew he wouldn’t make fun of her. “No, I wanted to be president too.”

He leaned forward. “Really? And now?”

She sighed. “Now I realize I’m not in the right circles to ever become president, so I’ve lowered my sights a little.”

“To?”

Kara bit her lip and willed her suddenly-churning stomach to relax. “Police Chief,” she said softly.

Zane looked at the ceiling, his eyes far away. “That would be amazing. I bet you’d be really good at it too.”

Kara’s muscles unwound and her stomach gave one final flip-flop, then finally did relax. “What makes you say that?”

“I can just tell. You’re a good cop.” He lowered his eyes while he was saying it though, and Kara had the fleeting feeling he was hiding something else from her.

He lifted his gaze again and stared into her eyes, making sudden tingles shoot down her spine. “I guess that means no kids in your near future.”

“Yeah, maybe not ever. I’ve never been one to feel that motherly instinct. And I’ve got too much I want to do, you know?”

Zane nodded. “Me too. At this point, I think I might just sit the whole family thing out. My dogs are enough work for me.”

Kara laughed and opened her mouth to tell him about Duke, but before she could, the tempo of the music changed and he asked her if she wanted to dance. She did.

They stayed on the dance floor for three songs, the last one a breathy ballad in which Clint sang about true love and deep memories. Zane held her tenderly and Kara's heart began to slip a notch. Her mind started to clamber about too much too soon, but she shut it down quickly. She deserved to enjoy herself for at least tonight. She wasn’t going to read anything into this. She would think about tomorrow when it came.

When the dance ended, Kara noticed their food was at the table, getting cold. She tapped Zane on the shoulder and pointed it out. He laced his fingers through hers and led her off the dance floor. Kara dropped her eyes down his body, enjoying the view. On the back of his left leg she saw more stray dog hairs and she brushed them off.

“Oh, hey, you never told me the story about your dog’s names,” she said as they sat down at the table.

“Oh yeah,” he said, his face growing momentarily sour.

She held out her hands. “If you’d rather not tell it, that’s okay.”

“No, it’s not that bad. It’s just my ex-girlfriend gave me those dogs. Actually, my ex-fiance. They were an early wedding present. Then she cheated on me and I called off the wedding. She tried to take the dogs back but I loved them and I didn’t want to give them up. They had been a gift, you know? They were my dogs. She took me to small claims court and she lost, but she had named them before she gave them to me and she said if she couldn’t have the dogs she wanted the names. I told her I would rename the dogs.”

Zane had looked weary as he recounted the story in as few words as possible, but now he smiled. “She was a 90s TV fanatic. Guess what their names were?”

Kara’s world narrowed slightly as she remembered the blonde woman in the park. “Xena and Hercules,” she said dully.

Confusion spread across Zane’s face. “How did you - hey, are you okay?”

As much as Kara had told herself she wasn’t going to read anything into this night, she was distressed by how quickly infatuation could turn to a dull and biting anger.
Why had he told her he didn’t want kids? He already had one.
She might as well end the date right now. There was no reason for her to be with someone who was already lying to her. She waited to hear the rest of it, her hopes crushed by his deception. He looked at her with concern and didn’t say anything, so she prompted him.

“Aren’t you going to tell me about your little girl?”

“My what?” Zane’s eyebrows shot skyward and he leaned back in his chair, his palms open. “What are you talking about?”

Kara shook her head. She thought she had finally found a nice guy, a handsome, thoughtful man, but in reality, was he just another liar?