Liz Scott replied while using a small brush to dab pale blue paint near the room’s sole window. The pane was open, letting in a breeze heated by the bright morning sunshine.
“But Diaz got the ball rolling,” Liz added. With her long coppery hair piled on top of her head, and the tube top and baggy overalls she wore, she in no way resembled the kick-ass cop she was.
“Wouldn’t that have put Rafe in danger?”
“After spending two years in stir, taking on a street gang probably seemed like a walk in the park.”
“I suppose so.” Allie closed her eyes. Seeing Rafe yesterday had forced the sharp-edged guilt she’d harbored for years to the surface.
She opened her eyes when Claire Castle settled a hand on her arm.
“Having Rafe walk into your shop yesterday must have been a shock.” The owner of the antique shop next door to Silk & Secrets had dressed for a day of voluntary labor in tattered jeans and a faded khaki shirt. The house they toiled in was being readied for a woman who’d escaped her abusive husband and had been living in a shelter with their kids. With help from the Friends Foundation, she was getting a fresh start.
“A total shock,” Allie agreed, and squeezed Claire’s hand.
One of the best things about having close girlfriends was knowing you could count on their support. Allie had opened her shop on the same day Claire finalized her purchase of Home Treasures. They’d met Liz that same night when she’d encountered them on the sidewalk outside their shops, drinking champagne toasts and attempting a tipsy ceremonial burning of a photo of the sexy federal agent Claire had walked away from.
After hearing Claire’s tale of love gone bad, Liz torched the picture herself. Since then, the friendship among the three had flourished.
Now, Claire was married to the sexy Fed and Liz was engaged to a gorgeous detective, who’d transferred from the Shreveport PD to the Oklahoma City force.
In Allie’s experience and twenty-seven years of observation, she had only ever witnessed love go bad, crash and burn. Seeing her friends genuinely happy in their relationships was an ongoing learning experience.
Turning back to the wall, Allie put more muscle into wielding the paint roller. “In fact, when I looked up and saw Rafe, I thought I was dreaming.”
“When you called to tell me Diaz had shown up, you sounded more like you’d had a nightmare,” Liz commented. “Which is why I checked him out.”
“How did he manage to take down a gang?” Claire asked.
“He’d finished getting his college credits while in prison, so he had a degree in accounting when he was released,” Liz replied. “His uncle owned a restaurant and needed a bookkeeper. Apparently he was uneasy about having his nephew do the job, but in the end he agreed.”
Allie replenished the paint on her roller. “Why was the uncle uneasy? Because Rafe had been in prison?”
“No. The uncle was being forced by a street gang to launder drug money through his business in lieu of paying them for protection. It didn’t take Rafe Diaz long to figure out what was going on. His uncle admitted the same thing was happening to other business owners in the area.
“Diaz got them all to agree to let him install surveillance equipment in their shops. Then he taped various gang members picking up payoffs. He took the recordings and the account books to the cops, and worked a deal to get immunity for the business owners on the money laundering. Between white-collar crime and the gang unit, they put away every member of the gang.”
“Impressive,” Claire said while positioning tape along the top of a baseboard.
“Word of mouth about what Diaz did was a boon to his PI business,” Liz added.
“He wanted to be a cop,” Allie said. “That’s one of the things I remember about Rafe. His conviction ended that.”
“But it was expunged, right?” Claire asked. “Doesn’t that mean the slate was wiped clean?”
“That’s what it’s supposed to mean,” Liz answered. “In truth, cops don’t like ex-cons. There are some cops who’ll always view Diaz as the guilty party, who caught a break and walked. That’s not right nor fair, but it’s the cold, hard truth.”
“Which is totally wrong because none of what happened was Rafe’s fault,” Allie said, frustration honing her voice to an edge. “He was innocent. But the evidence the police had seemed to point to his guilt.”
“What happened to Rafe was awful,” Claire said.
“It sucks,” Liz agreed. She stepped back and scowled at her work area. “So does my paint job. I’m sure there’s some technique to this, but all I know how to do is slop the stuff on and wait for it to dry.” She sent a look across her shoulder. “Al, why don’t you just pronounce me a failure? Then I’ll slink on home.”
Glad for change to a lighter subject, Allie stepped across the room to get a close-up view of Liz’s work.
“It looks fine to me,” Allie said. “But if you think your painting’s not up to par, I can transfer you to the scraping team. They’re starting on the outside of the house after lunch.”
Pursing her lips, Liz gave her work another considering look. Then she shook her head. “On second thought, I think I’m getting the hang of using this brush.”
Rafe braked his car in front of a small house that had paint peeling off it like dead skin. Sawhorses sat on the porch. Frowning, he rechecked the card the clerk at Silk & Secrets had jotted the address on to verify he was at the right place.
He was.
The clerk had told him Miss Fielding was spending the day painting in the Paseo District. Because this area of the city catered to emerging artists and trendy galleries, Rafe figured he’d find her in an art class, sketching some nude male model, which would have been right up the alley of the sexy party girl he’d known in college.
He climbed out of his car just as a beefy workman wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt, jeans and a tool belt lashed beneath his bulging belly lugged a ladder from around the side of the house. Not quite the male model he’d envisioned, Rafe thought as he headed across the yard.
Moments later, he followed the workman’s directions to the house’s back bedroom. The smell of fresh paint hung heavy in the air.
At the bedroom’s doorway he paused, taking in the lone woman working with her back to him. She was wearing an old, tattered pair of jeans with frayed hems. A rag stuck out of one of the back pockets. Her T-shirt looked as if it had once been beige but had been washed so often that it had faded to a soft cream. Her hair was stuffed up into a ball cap and her scuffed work boots were spattered with the same light blue paint she was rolling onto the wall.
“I’m looking for Allie Fielding.”
At the sound of his voice she jolted and did a fast, twisting about-face. The momentum of the turn had her fumbling the roller, dripping paint on the floor.
She glanced down, then looked back at him, her blue eyes glinting. “You scared me to death!”
For
