UNDERCOVER TWIN (2 page)

Heather didn’t know where her sister was. The police had refused to answer any of Heather’s questions about Lily. And no one had come back to update Heather or even give her the infamous phone call prisoners on TV shows always got. Not that she had anyone to call. Lily was her only family. Her friends had given up on her long ago when she’d started working seven days a week to try to build a P.I. business. And Nick... She shied away from that thought.

She was so tired. She wanted to rest her head against the wall behind her, but she was too afraid of lice, or something worse, that might be clinging to the surface. Instead, she stood a few feet away, trying not to touch anything, trying to pretend the speculative looks from the other women didn’t send shivers up her spine. She was also trying her best not to give in to the urge to cry.

She was appalled that tears kept threatening to course down her cheeks. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried, or the last time she’d even wanted to cry. She had Nick to thank for her jangled nerves. He’d judged her without giving her a chance to explain. He’d assumed the worst. Fine. Let him think what he wanted, but if there was any chance he was going to be the one to interrogate her—if anyone ever did bother to interrogate her—she wasn’t going to let him see her with red eyes and tearstained cheeks.

She didn’t want him to know how much his betrayal had hurt her.

A buzzing noise sounded and the door opened. A policewoman stood in the doorway and motioned for Heather to step out. “Miss Bannon, your lawyer is here.”

“My lawyer? But I haven’t even had a phone call.”

The policewoman shrugged, her lack of interest stamped in her jaded, world-weary eyes. “Do you want to see your lawyer or not?”

Heather figured the police had made a mistake, that the lawyer was there for some other prisoner. But if playing along meant she’d get out of the foul-smelling cell for a few minutes, she wasn’t going to argue. She stepped into the hallway.

The door buzzed closed behind her, and the policewoman led her down the hall to a door stamped with the words
Interview Room.
As she went inside, she braced herself, expecting to see Nick or a police officer waiting to grill her with questions. Instead, a stranger in a suit that looked like it must have cost at least a thousand dollars was sitting at a small table. He gave her a friendly smile and stood to shake her hand.

“Miss Bannon, I’m Anthony Greary, your attorney. A mutual friend hired me to help you out of this unfortunate situation.”

The door closed behind Heather. She shook the attorney’s hand and sat. “Mr. Greary, who is this ‘mutual friend’?”

“Someone who prefers to remain anonymous.”

The fine hairs on the back of Heather’s neck stood at attention. “I don’t suppose this friend is the man who gave my sister those bricks of cocaine?”

Greary glanced at the door and cleared his throat. “As I said, I’m here to help.”

She had her answer. And it really sucked, because she’d
so
looked forward to a good half hour or more out of her cell. She pushed back her chair and stood. “I think you have me confused with my sister. My name is
Heather
Bannon. My sister is Lily. We’re identical twins, but I assure you, we’re nothing alike in any way that matters. And I guarantee we don’t have any mutual friends.”

“There’s no confusion. I’m here to get both you and your sister released.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say that one of you has something my employer wants returned.”

Cold fear iced over Heather’s insides. He had to be talking about the cocaine. What would happen if he found out she’d destroyed one of the bricks, and the police had the rest? Her hands started shaking. She clutched them together and gave the lawyer a false smile. “Like I said, there’s been a mistake.” She strode to the door and banged on the glass window.

A policeman Heather hadn’t seen before opened the door, a surprised look on his face. “You have fifteen more minutes, ma’am.”

“There’s been a mistake. This man isn’t my lawyer,” Heather said.

The cop looked past her into the room. He shrugged and led her back down the hall to the holding cell. At the door, he paused and pulled a key card from the pocket of his shirt.

“Wait,” Heather said, desperation lending her voice a high-pitched tone. She
really
didn’t want to go back into that cell. What if the other women had banded together while she was gone? What if they’d formed an alliance, like on those reality TV shows, and had decided to beat up the new girl just for fun, as a way to pass the time?

Panic was making her think crazy thoughts. But crazy or not, she couldn’t help the tight feeling in her chest and the way her lungs were laboring to draw an even breath. She had to get out of here. Maybe she could talk to Nick for a few minutes and straighten this out. She hated to beg, especially when she’d rather punch him than look at him, but if she was here much longer they’d have to take her out in a straitjacket.

“Please, I need to talk to Nick Morgan and explain,” she said. “He’s one of the DEA agents who—”

“I know who he is, ma’am. But Special Agent Morgan isn’t here. And he specifically said that if you asked for him, he didn’t want to talk to you.”

Heather closed her eyes, squeezing them tight against the ridiculous urge to cry again.
How could you, Nick? How could you judge me like this and throw away what we had, like I never even mattered to you?

She opened her eyes and cleared her throat. “I believe I’m entitled to a phone call. I need to call a lawyer to arrange bail.” Not that she could afford it. About the only thing she could offer as collateral was a four-year-old dinged-up Ford Focus that had an outstanding loan balance higher than what the car was worth.

“I’ll set that up,” he said. “But you need to wait in the cell for now.”

She managed not to whimper, barely. The policeman opened the door and impatiently motioned her forward. She steeled herself, took a deep breath and stepped inside. The odor of vomit hit her, making her eyes water, crushing the last remaining shred of affection she’d ever felt for Nick Morgan.

Chapter Two

Heather stood at the counter, rubbing her wrists, before taking the pen the policeman offered her. She could still feel the metal rubbing against her skin, even though the handcuffs had been removed. How long before she could forget that terrible night at the dance club, and being locked up for an entire weekend?

She scrawled her name across the form and handed it to the policeman in exchange for the belongings that had been taken from her when she was arrested. She deliberately checked her credit cards and cash in front of him. If the police didn’t trust her and thought she was so dangerous that they had to lock her up, she wasn’t going to trust them, either.

Satisfied nothing had been taken, she grabbed her keys. Wait. What good would that do? She plopped the keys back on the counter.

“Sir, officer, my car—”

“Is in the parking lot outside the station.”

Relief had her smiling back at him in spite of her intentions. “Thank you.” Darn it. She nearly bit her tongue. Why was she thanking him for moving her car from the club where she’d been falsely arrested? Bringing back her car was the least the police could do. Then again, it wasn’t this police officer’s fault. It was the DEA’s fault.

One
particular
DEA agent’s fault.

“Don’t thank me,” the officer replied. “Thank Special Agent Nick Morgan. He dropped your car off this morning, right after you arranged bail.” He turned away to help someone else standing beside her.

Why would Nick bring her car back for her? She certainly didn’t think it was because he cared about her. If he cared about her, he wouldn’t have arrested her. Or at the very least he would have come to see her, maybe even helped her arrange bail. As expected, the bail bondsman had rejected her car as collateral. She’d had to max out almost all of her credit cards to get out of jail. Having already emptied her savings to help Lily when she’d shown up a few weeks ago, Heather now was down to a paltry three hundred dollars in her checking account, and about five hundred dollars of available credit on her last credit card. No, Nick hadn’t dropped her car off because he cared. He’d dropped it off because it was his job.

She grabbed her keys and hurried toward the exit. When she stepped outside, she was tempted to drop to her knees and kiss the ground. But she’d already suffered enough humiliation this past weekend. She didn’t want to add to it by having someone see her on her hands and knees. Instead, she settled for pausing long enough to take several deep breaths of fresh air, reveling in the pine scent from the nearby trees that was worlds different from the air in the holding cell.

Going home to a hot shower was at the top of her list of priorities. After that, she’d call the client she was originally supposed to meet Saturday morning and try to convince him, without telling him any details, that she’d had an emergency and still wanted his business. She couldn’t afford to lose a client right now, not when her business was just beginning to make a profit and she had no more credit cards to fall back on to pay her bills.

Other than groveling to her client, she had no plans to work today, even though it was Monday. She hadn’t taken a day off in nearly a year. And there was no way she could work right now. She needed some time to recover from her ordeal, and she needed to talk some sense into her sister. They also both needed to speak to the pro bono lawyer the court had appointed to defend Heather, and figure out what they were going to do about the drug charges.

The police had told Heather that Lily had been bailed out by the slimy lawyer who’d spoken to Heather about their “mutual friend.” Heather would talk Lily into firing Greary. Lily would have to somehow pay the man back for the money he’d spent on her and use the pro bono lawyer Heather had been assigned. If Lily was going to survive this fiasco, owing money to a drug dealer’s attorney was not the way to start.

When a couple stepped out of the police station, Heather moved away from the door and stood off to the side with her cell phone. She called her apartment three times, but Lily didn’t pick up. Sighing, Heather shoved her phone back in her purse and shaded her eyes to look for her car. She spotted her gray Ford sitting in one of the spots right up front.

She headed to her car, but when she unlocked the door and pitched her purse into the passenger seat, she had the oddest feeling someone was watching her. She paused and looked around.

There, at the end of the parking lot, was Nick’s massive black four-wheel-drive pickup. It was too far away for her to see details, but she could tell someone was inside. Was Nick watching her? Was he witnessing her humiliation as she left the police station in dirty, wrinkled clothes, her hair a mess, her makeup washed away long ago courtesy of a coarse rag and a filthy bar of soap she’d had to share with five other women? Was he waiting to see how broken she’d be after spending the weekend in jail?

She straightened her spine and got into her car with as much dignity as possible. It took every ounce of control she had not to slam the car door.

* * *

N
ICK
TIGHTENED
HIS
hands on the steering wheel. The passenger door of his truck opened and his police detective brother climbed inside.

Rafe plopped down beside him. “Is that Heather, in the gray compact?”

“That’s her.”

“You could have come inside and talked to her. That would have been far less creepy than sitting here in the parking lot, like a stalker.”

“She wouldn’t want to see me.”

“How do you know that?”

Nick scrubbed his face and blew out a deep breath. “Because I’m the one who arrested her.”

“Yeah, there is that. But you also made me cash in my only chip with Judge Thompson to convince him to reduce her bail so she could get out of jail. Does she know you arranged that for her?”

“No.” He glanced at his brother. “And she never will.”

Rafe raised his hands. “I’m certainly not telling her, especially since you owe me, big time. You do realize I interrupted Thompson’s weekly golf game?”

Nick winced. “What’s that going to cost me?”

“Babysitting. For a month.”

The dark cloud that had fallen over Nick since the night he’d arrested Heather lifted, if only a little, and he knew he was probably grinning like an idiot. Being an uncle to his oldest sister’s two boys was one of the true pleasures in his life, especially since they loved football as much as he did. If Rafe’s new wife was going to have a baby, Nick would gladly welcome another nephew into the family, or even a niece. Hopefully if the baby was a girl, she’d love sports, because the thought of having to sit through a tea party or playing with dolls had him breaking out in a cold sweat.

“Darby’s pregnant?” he asked.

“Not yet, but we’re working on it.” Rafe grinned. “We’re practicing. A lot. So I’m sure it won’t be long.”

“TMI, brother.
Way
too much information.”

Rafe laughed but quickly sobered. “You didn’t call me out of a meeting to talk about my new bride. What’s up?”

“Operation Key West.”

“The task force that asked you to raid the club and promptly dumped you when Heather came under suspicion?”

“One and the same.”

“I thought you were suspended. You can’t be involved with a task force if you’re suspended.”

“Still suspended, pending an Internal Affairs investigation. But Waverly told me to come here to talk to the head of the task force.”

“Here? Why would he want you to meet him at the police station? Why not meet you at the DEA office?”

“I asked the same thing, but Waverly just told me to get my butt over here for a ten o’clock meeting.” He shrugged. “I was hoping you might have heard something. Captain Buresh didn’t say anything about the DEA dropping by?”

“No, he didn’t.”

Nick stared through the windshield at the vacant spot where Heather’s car had been a few minutes ago. Even now, several days later, he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that Heather had been at that club the night of the raid.

“Maybe the head of the task force is here to discuss another local operation,” Nick said. “Maybe Waverly wanted to make sure I met him before he left.”

“Why would he want that?”

“Waverly’s ticked at me. He might want to make me grovel and apologize for shaming our unit by having a drug-dealing girlfriend.”

Rafe cocked his head and studied him. “From what you’ve told me about her, she doesn’t sound the type to be dealing, just the opposite. She’s been trying to build a private investigation business for years. She works all the time, putting everything she can into growing her client list. Do you really think she’s going to risk throwing that away to deal drugs on the side? Her sister is—”

“Her identical twin.”

“Okay. Not what I was going to say, but I’ll go with that. Being a twin doesn’t make two people the same and you know it.”

“Yeah. Maybe. It did surprise me that she didn’t let her sister’s drug-dealer lawyer bail her out. If Heather had let him help her she could have been out of jail Saturday morning, like her sister. But she didn’t, and she ended up staying in jail the entire weekend because of it.” He shrugged. “I’m not sure what to make of that.”

“You could always talk to her, give her a chance to tell her side.”

Nick absently studied the rows of cars in front of the police station. Rafe was right. Heather did deserve a chance to explain. And he hadn’t given her that chance. He’d been too angry, thinking she’d betrayed his trust in her. Now that he was thinking more clearly, he knew he’d made a mistake in judging her so quickly. But it didn’t matter now. There was no way to fix this.

“I’m not allowed to talk to her now anyway, not with IA all over me. If I’m seen anywhere near her, I can kiss my career goodbye.”

“You sure know how to pick ’em.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying your judgment in women could use some work. You wasted nearly a year of your life with your on-again, off-again engagement to psycho-girlfriend.”

“She wasn’t a psycho. She was...conflicted.”

Rafe let out a shout of laughter. “Conflicted? Now I know you’ve been talking to my therapist wife way too much.”

Nick grinned. “Maybe. But psycho-girlfriend did have a lot going for her.”

“Like what?”

“She was hot.”

“Everyone you date is hot.”

“She was a professional cheerleader. And very...limber.”

Rafe smiled. “You’ve got me there. All I’m saying is that after everything you went through with her, I figured the next time you got serious about a woman you’d pick someone who—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who said we were serious? We only dated a couple of months. That’s way short of serious territory.”

“Darby and I only dated a couple of
weeks
before we got engaged.”

“That’s because her old-fashioned father knew you two had gotten ‘friendly’ and he shamed you into it. Besides, you two knew each other for years before you started dating.”

Rafe rolled his eyes. “Her father had nothing to do with us getting married. And being on opposite sides in the courtroom doesn’t count as a relationship. Look, all I’m saying is that you need to take a long hard look at your feelings for her before you do something you might regret.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, if she didn’t really matter to you, on a personal level, do you honestly think you would have twisted my arm to get the judge to reduce her bail? And how many DEA agents would have paid to get a car out of the impound lot and would have driven it to the police station for a woman they don’t care about?”

Nick ground his teeth together. “I never told you about that.”

“You didn’t have to.” Rafe gave him a smug look. “I have eyes and ears all over this town. That’s part of what makes me a great detective.”

“Humble, too.”

Rafe shrugged, obviously not caring about Nick’s insult. “As I was saying, you obviously care more about Heather than you’re willing to admit, even to yourself.”

“Since when did you become so touchy-feely?”

“I guess since I married a hot therapist.”

“Whatever. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Not that I ever did.”

“But—”

“Drop it.”

Rafe held his hands up in a placating gesture. “All right, all right. I’ll drop it. You said Waverly wants you to meet with the task force. You have to have some idea of why he’d want you to do that. And don’t give me the line about apologizing for your girlfriend. That’s weak.”

Nick let out a deep sigh. Rafe always could read him, like a Jedi knight using the Force to probe his mind. Or was that Spock on
Star Trek?
Either way, it was damned aggravating.

“My DEA buddies tell me the task force still has Heather and her sister in its crosshairs,” Nick said. “They think Heather’s sister is running drugs for a dealer operating out of Key West. They think Heather’s been helping her sister move the drugs, and that Heather flushed that kilo to try to avoid the sting. They believe she would have flushed all of the drugs if she’d had enough time.”

His brother’s eyes narrowed. “She couldn’t have purposely tried to avoid the sting unless she knew about it ahead of time.”

“Bingo.”

Rafe swore. “That’s the real reason they suspended you. Not because you’re a terrible judge of character and got mixed up with a girlfriend who may or may not be dealing drugs. They think you tipped her off about the raid.”

“If I were them, I’d probably think the same thing,” Nick said. “I’ve been practically living in Key West this past year, building my cover to gather intelligence on the drug activity down there. Maybe they figured I’ve gone in a little too deep, that the past few months I spent up here were more than an extended vacation. Maybe they thought I was helping move drugs up the pipeline, and that Heather and Lily were in on it with me.”

His brother cursed again, impressing Nick. With language like that, Rafe could go undercover as a DEA agent and blend right in with the dealers as if he were one of them. Too bad he’d wasted his talents as a detective and part-time bomb-squad technician in the Saint Augustine Police Department.