stopped. So did she. He wasn’t surprised. Most cops he knew didn’t go anywhere without some form of weapon. His surprise was that he hadn’t thought to ask her. Now he faced her, his gaze focused tightly as it moved down, then back up her body. Almost immediately, he spotted the slight bulge beneath her jacket on the left side indicating something holstered there, but he didn’t assume it was the only weapon.
Her white shirt was fitted, hugging her breasts and stomach, and couldn’t have concealed a thing. Her jeans, faded soft blue and showing signs of long-term wear, were snug over her hips and clung to her muscular thighs and calves, all the way down to the brown leather boots peeking out from beneath the hems.
Nothing special, he reminded himself.
“What is it?” he asked with a nod toward her caramel-colored suede jacket.
She pulled back the left side to reveal the black-and-yellow Taser holstered grip forward on her waistband. An easy position to draw from for a right-handed person. No doubt she normally wore her pistol on the right. No chance for a mix-up unless a person was an idiot.
“Is that all?”
A smile crinkled her eyes. “Where could I hide anything else?” Then a nod toward the Challenger. “My weapon’s locked in the car.”
Confirming what he suspected: JJ Logan was in Cedar Creek on a job—the reason Sam had sent him out to retrieve her in the first place. Sam liked to know what was going on in his town. Quint…he didn’t care that much anymore.
“Should I leave the Taser in the car?”
Quint shook his head. “Everyone inside is armed, too. You’re not a threat.”
She gave him a look halfway between hurt and insulted. “Don’t be so sure of that. You don’t even know me yet.” Smiling, she began moving again, reaching the bottom step before he gave himself a mental shake and followed.
He knew one thing: he didn’t want to know her. His life was steady. Predictable. Not happy, but the normal that had been forced on him. He didn’t need any upsets to his routine. He was going to deliver JJ Logan to Sam’s office, go back to his vehicle, forget he’d met her and get back to work. Back to the solitude he preferred.
Maybe not actually preferred, but had chosen. Or had it chosen him?
You can’t change the world, someone had told him, but you can change the way you react to it. And he had changed the only way he knew how. No reactions whatsoever. If he didn’t lose control, then he didn’t have to struggle to regain it.
JJ reached the double doors before he did, opened one and stepped back so he could enter first. It didn’t bother him. In Cedar Creek, courtesies like that weren’t assigned by gender. Whoever was there first did the honors, and sooner or later the honoree would do it for someone else.
She stopped a few feet inside the door to look. He was in and out of here five or six times a day. He rarely noticed the furnishings anymore, but JJ certainly did. The lobby was marbled, high-ceilinged, chandeliered and grandly staired. Behind the gleaming wooden counter, though, the ceiling had been dropped to a regular height with ugly acoustic tiles, and so much furniture had been crammed in that there was little breathing room.
Quint used to have his own office. Now, in the event he needed a desk, he used one of the two unclaimed ones against the back wall. One had two uneven legs, and the other was so scarred on top that it was impossible to write legibly without borrowing a solid surface from elsewhere.
The chief’s secretary, Cheryl, looked up and over the top of her glasses. “Sam’s in his office.”
Quint acknowledged her with a nod, seeing that everyone else was looking at them, too: Daniel Harper and Ben Little Bear, two of the detectives who’d once answered to him; Morwenna Armstrong, dispatcher and coqueen of local gossip along with Lois Gideon, their first female and first turquoise-haired officer; and three other patrol officers checking in for something or other. Quint knew they were interested in the visiting detective, not him, but bitterness stirred in his gut anyway. That sourness—regret or, more likely, shame—made its presence known damn near every time he came into the station.
He gestured to the hallway this side of the staircase. Too narrow to be called a corridor, it had been chopped out of other spaces and just barely allowed two people to pass without bumping shoulders, and that was only if one of them wasn’t Ben Little Bear. It was lighted by cheap ceiling fixtures circa the ’70s, and two of the four had burned out. Waiting for someone else to do something about them hadn’t worked, so maybe Quint would drag out the ladder before he went home today and change the bulbs. It was something to do.
Something to put off that moment of pulling into the driveway of his and Linny’s house. Of climbing the steps knowing the house was empty. Of opening the front door and walking into a space where her fragrance didn’t sweeten the air, where her laughter didn’t ring, where her presence was insubstantial.
The first door down the hall opened into Sam’s office. Quint rapped a little sharper than necessary, feeling the sting in his knuckles, then opened the door. He’d radioed in when he parked outside, so Sam was expecting them. This time, Quint stepped back and let JJ enter first. “Chief Douglas, Detective Jennifer—”
She cleared her throat.
“Detective JJ Logan,” he finished. “I’m headed back out—”
“Come on in, Quint. You should probably hear this.” Sam rose from his desk and shook hands with JJ, then directed her to one of two chairs in front of his desk.
Quint stiffened. No, he shouldn’t probably hear this. Whatever JJ was doing in Cedar Creek couldn’t have anything to do with him. Sam—he needed to know. Little Bear, Harper, the other detectives—they might need to know. But Quint was just a patrol officer. He wrote tickets, broke up brawls, handled domestic disputes. He didn’t need to be in the loop on the important stuff any more than the newest rookie out there did.
But he wasn’t about to argue with Sam, especially in front of a stranger. Reluctantly, he pivoted back into the room, closed the door and, ignoring the empty chair, leaned against the edge of the table butted up to one wall. It gave him a good head-on look at his boss, with only a peripheral view of JJ.
“I bet you got a call this morning from South Carolina,” she said pleasantly.
“I did,” Sam agreed.
“From Chief Chadwick?”
“It was.”
Though JJ’s tone hadn’t changed when she spoke her boss’s name, something about it, or about her, reminded Quint of the question she’d asked out front. Is your chief good, bad or indifferent? Not idle conversation, then. His intuition was willing to bet that she put Chadwick as squarely in the second category as Quint put Sam in the first. Personality conflict? Professional differences? Was Chadwick a bad chief, was JJ a bad cop or did the truth fall somewhere in the middle?
That feeling rousing in his gut felt vaguely like curiosity, maybe even plain old interest. How long had it been since he’d been interested in anything?
Maybe he’d been wrong outside. Maybe he did want to know more about JJ Logan.
