away the maddening thoughts and focused his mind. He stared out the windshield at the decrepit brick apartment building that looked like a hulking mammoth on the dark, weed-infested lawn. A bare bulb glowed above the building’s crumbling cement porch, sending weak rays into the moonless night. His most reliable snitch had sworn that the girlfriend of Ramon Cárdenas, primary suspect in the drive-by homicide of seven-year-old Enrique Quintero, planned to show up at the apartment building sometime tonight.
Jake had been on the stakeout since sundown. So far, no girlfriend.
He had the cruiser’s windows open; the heat of late September hung heavy in the still night air. In the distance, traffic rumbled along the interstate that cut a swath through downtown. Several houses away, a dog broke into a flurry of barks, ending when a gruff male shout splintered the air. The police radio in the cruiser’s dash crackled softly, the dispatcher sounding as if he were speaking a foreign language.
As if on automatic pilot, Jake’s brain processed the garbled information, which included a female patrol officer notifying dispatch of a Signal 7 at Stonebridge, a swanky gated housing community in the far northwest part of the city. A Signal 7 meant a dead body. One of the Holy Grails of police work was that an unexplained death got treated as a murder right from the start. If his name had headed Homicide’s list to take the next call, Jake would have responded. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch, knowing that the team of detectives pulling night shift this month would head to the scene in a matter of minutes.
Settling down in his seat, he swallowed the last dregs of his convenience-store coffee, then tossed the foam cup over his shoulder. He gave an unconcerned glance at the back seat, littered with the wadded sacks and empty cups from that week’s take-out meals. He had a few days before Whitney got back from her honeymoon—he would shovel out the cruiser before then.
With the bitter taste of coffee still on his tongue, his hand automatically went to the pocket of his chambray shirt, found it empty. He scowled. Dammit, he hadn’t smoked in two months, five days and seven hours. When the hell was he going to stop reaching for the pack of cigarettes that wasn’t there?
Smoking was the least of the things he missed, Jake reminded himself, his mood turning as dark as the night around him. He couldn’t quite forget the bite of aged Scotch. Or the heady feel of a woman. A soft woman with stunning blue eyes. A woman who smelled good enough to make a man wonder how it would feel to have her move beneath him in the dark.
A woman like Nicole Taylor.
He exhaled a slow breath. He could still feel the way her pulse had spiked beneath his thumb. After that, it had taken all of his control not to press his mouth to that soft place on her wrist and find out if she tasted as good as she looked.
Doing that would have only compounded the already idiotic move he’d made when he’d slicked his thumb across her flesh. He didn’t want to start something he knew didn’t have a chance in hell of going anywhere. Didn’t want to sample what he couldn’t allow himself to have.
Yet, because he’d given in to the impulse to hold on to her longer than he should have, he couldn’t forget the gratifying stutter his touch had put in her pulse.
That memory wasn’t the only thing giving him trouble.
Until that night, all he’d wanted was to rid himself of the clawing dream that dragged him to that second in time when a bomb ignited and ripped apart his world. The dream had faded the past several nights, just as the police psychologist had assured him it would. Problem was, his subconscious had replaced that dream with one of Nicole. A dream that, in one way, was far more disconcerting because there was no therapy for it. No way to talk the woman out of his head, no logical way of ridding his system of her.
She was there. Inside him. All of his instincts told him he was going to have one hell of a time shaking her presence. But shake her, he would.
He had learned the hard way that what fate tossed out was not always kind. Learned in the most horrific way how fast a person’s life could change. How, in a slash of time, happiness could transform into grief. Numbing, ceaseless grief.
Before he could switch off his thoughts, he saw again the memorial service crowded with relatives, friends and cops, where music drifted and the cloying scent of roses hung in the air. There had been no caskets—there couldn’t be, not when jagged shards of the plane’s fuselage were all that had been left floating in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d bought one cemetery plot, stood alone in grim silence while a granite headstone with the names of his wife and twin daughters was positioned at the head of the empty grave. He hadn’t gone back to the cemetery since that day.
With the memories closing in on him, Jake rubbed the heel of his hand over his heart. Never again. Never again would he leave himself wide open for fate to deliver another staggering blow. For that reason, there was no room in his life for Nicole Taylor, or any other woman.
The sudden ring of his cell phone cut through the still night air, jolting him from his thoughts. Jake clicked the unit on, said his name.
“It’s Ryan.”
“What’s up, boss?”
“Any luck on the surveillance?”
Lifting a brow, Jake propped his elbow in the door’s open window. Lieutenant Michael Ryan didn’t usually call to check on the status of a stakeout. “Negative. I plan on giving it another couple of hours for Cárdenas’s girlfriend to show. Unless you’ve got something else you need me on.”
“That’s why I called. I want you to take the Signal 7 that dispatch put out about ten minutes ago,” Ryan stated, then gave the location that had been broadcast on the radio.
“I heard the uniform call it in.”
With a habit he’d picked up from a veteran street cop when he was a fresh-out-of-the-academy rookie, Jake grabbed a pen off the dash, angled his hand to catch the pale wash of a streetlight, then jotted the address on his left palm. “Any reason you don’t want Gianos and Smith on it?” he asked, referring to the detectives pulling night shift that month.
“It’s not that I don’t want them on it,” Ryan commented. “In fact, Gianos gave me a call from the scene—he and Smith were wrapping up an interview a couple of miles from there when the call came out. After Gianos got ID on the woman who found the guy’s body, he figured he’d better give me a heads-up. He was right. Taking that into consideration, I think it’d be best to put you on this one. Since you’re without a partner while Whitney’s on her honeymoon, Gianos and Smith can give you a hand with follow-up interviews and paperwork if you need help.”
“Okay.” Jake glanced across the street at the apartment building that seemed to breathe neglect. He wouldn’t get a lead on Cárdenas tonight, but he would get the bastard. He’d made that promise to himself and to little Enrique Quintero’s grieving mother. Jake knew too well what it felt like to lose a child.
“So, Lieutenant, who’s the woman who found the body?” he asked as he switched on the cruiser’s ignition.
“Your partner’s new sister-in-law, Nicole Taylor.”
Jake began to swear, slowly, steadily, as he stomped the accelerator and the cruiser shot from the curb.
Fifteen minutes after he’d hung up from talking to his boss, Jake pulled to a stop in a pool of light at the wrought-iron gate that blocked the entrance to the exclusive housing community. To his left sat a tidy security building; to his
