tugged his gold badge off the waistband of his faded jeans. “Sergeant Jake Ford,” he said, flashing the badge at the guard on duty inside the building. While the guard logged him in, Jake noted the nearby panel of buttons where visitors could contact one of the residents to get buzzed through the gate if the guard wasn’t around.
Inching the cruiser forward, Jake waited while the gate drifted open on silent gears. On the far side of the gate sat several sprawling houses, outlined in the glow of gas lamps that lined the street like rows of tiny moons. Even at night, the houses all looked massive. About one hundred times too massive for a cop’s salary, Jake decided as he steered the cruiser through the entrance and along the well-lit street.
After checking the address he’d inked on his palm, he turned a corner. The pulse of a blue-and-red strobe from the scout car parked in a circular driveway had him bearing down on the accelerator.
The house beyond the driveway was brick, and as immense as the others in the neighborhood. Jake figured if the stiff owned the house where his body had wound up, he was a very rich stiff.
Seconds later, Jake inched the cruiser past the medical examiner’s black station wagon. He parked behind the lab’s crime scene van, then climbed out. As he reclipped his badge onto his waistband beside his holstered Glock, the night air settled around him, still and gauzy, full of humidity.
Yellow tape had been strung from the house’s columned front porch to manicured shrubbery, then fanned out to loop around two of the matching gas street lamps. From the back seat of the scout car that sat idling in the driveway, Jake caught the glint of light off golden-blond hair.
Nicole.
While he ducked beneath a stretch of crime scene tape, it registered in his brain that the last thing he expected to feel when he saw her was pleasure. As if sensing his presence, she turned her head, her gaze meeting his through the scout car’s back window. The stress in her eyes tightened Jake’s throat, had him hesitating with an inexplicable need to go to her, to comfort. He set his jaw. She had found a dead body—whether it was a homicide or a natural death, proper procedure was for him to get the facts from those already working on-site, then view the body himself before he talked to any witness. Doing that gave the investigator a better idea of what questions to ask. And an edge on knowing if a witness was lying, which happened a lot during homicide investigations.
“Evening, Sergeant.”
Jake turned, relieved to have his attention pulled from Nicole to the female officer who approached him. She looked on the official side with her blond hair pulled back from her earnest face and a silver clipboard in one hand.
“Evening.” The first time he’d worked with the patrol officer was at a scene a couple of weeks ago, and her name had slipped his mind. He checked the brass tag above the right pocket of her gray uniform shirt: C. O. Jones.
“Jones,” he added. With more than a little effort, he kept his gaze off the scout car where Nicole sat. “You responded to the initial call, right?” he asked, remembering that it had been a female officer who’d called in the Signal 7.
“Affirmative.” The red-blue lights from the scout car winked in rhythm as she jotted his name on the crime scene log.
“Who’s the victim?”
“Man by the name of Phillip Ormiston.”
Jake arched a brow. “Of Ormiston Funeral Home fame?”
“The same. He owns the entire chain.”
“Any idea yet on cause of death?”
“The M.E.’s assistant is inside checking the body, but I haven’t heard anything for sure. To me, it looked like Ormiston just dropped dead in his entry hall. No blood, no sign of trauma that I could see. According to one of the neighbors, Ormiston was into fitness. He jogged around the neighborhood and played racquetball a couple nights a week at a gym called Sebastian’s.”
“Maybe Ormiston’s biorhythms took a dive into a negative zone,” Jake muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.” He moved his gaze to the scout car. Nicole’s back was to him now, her gaze glued to the house’s open front door. While he watched her, she raised her left hand and slowly curled her fingers through the metal security screen that kept the person in the back seat separated from the officer in front. For some reason he could not fathom, Jake’s chest tightened at the thought of her being caged inside the black-and-white.
“That’s who found Ormiston’s body,” Jones said, her gaze following his. “Her name’s Taylor. Nicole Taylor.”
“Yeah.” He remet the officer’s gaze. Jones had done things by the book—she’d checked the scene, secured it, then put the person who discovered the body in her scout car while she advised dispatch to contact Homicide.
He also had procedure to follow, Jake reminded himself when he again felt the pull to walk over and open the car’s back door. Right now, it was his job to find out what Nicole had already told the officer on the scene.
He nodded in the direction of a sleek red Jaguar parked in the circular drive. “Is that Miss Taylor’s?”
“Yes. The registration checks to her.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That Ormiston is a widower and a client of the dating service she owns.” As she spoke, Jones pulled a business card off her clipboard and handed it to Jake. He glanced down, saw it was identical to the card Nicole had tried to slide into his pocket while they danced. The remembered feel of her warm flesh beneath his palm rose in his brain like a seductive phantom.
“Can you imagine a man with Ormiston’s money needing to hire somebody to find him a date?” Jones asked.
Frowning, Jake jabbed the card into his shirt pocket while picturing again the way Nicole had worked the crowd at the wedding. It wouldn’t surprise him to find out that some of the men who signed with her company hoped to get a date with her.
“What does she say about her relationship with Ormiston?”
“She claims their association was purely business.”
When Jake realized he felt stupidly pleased, he scowled. Any other woman, he thought, shoving his fingers through his hair. Why the hell couldn’t it have been anyone else on earth sitting in the back of that scout car instead of the woman who’d crowded his thoughts for days? And nights. At this point, the best he could hope for was that Phillip Ormiston had dropped dead from a nice, tidy aneurism.
“What reason did Miss Taylor give for being here?” he asked.
“She said Ormiston didn’t phone her with a report on the last date he’d had through her service. That’s apparently a standard thing for clients to do. He also hadn’t shown up tonight at the gym for his scheduled racquetball game. When he didn’t answer his phone, Taylor says she got worried and decided to stop on her way home to check on him. She referred to it as an extension of the customer service she offers her clients.”
Jake looped his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans. “How did she get in the house?”
“She said she didn’t realize the front door was only partially closed until
