Gemma Jones looked at the thumbnail-sized sketch that was on the front page of the local section of the Sun-Sentinel. She looked back up and peeked outside her cubicle at the young man seated in his glass-enclosed office down the hall. The blinds were closed, but the door was slightly ajar and she could see him talking on the phone at his desk.
Damn it if that sketch didn’t look like Derrick.
But Derrick Poole? No way. He was … too quiet. Too boring. Too smart. Too cute. Too … well, everything and anything that made up a normal guy who you might want to take home to your mother. Who you actually did want to take home to your mother – if only he’d ask.
Gemma chewed on her pen cap. Wasn’t that how it worked out in true crime books? Wasn’t it always the quiet ones? The smart ones? The ones no one ever suspected? Bundy was a handsome law student. Rader was an usher in his church. Scott Peterson was a father-to-be and sold fertilizer for a living. She rolled the pen cap around in her mouth. Police seek ID of suspect in rape and murder of Palm Beach dancer.
Killers don’t work at debt consolidating companies, do they? They don’t help people put their financial houses back in order. Gemma’s useless bachelor’s degree was in English, but Derrick – his was in accounting. Accountants weren’t murderers. Lawyers, doctors, postal workers – yeah, they could gut their own moms, but never accountants. They were too anal, too precise. They knew the odds of getting caught and found it too risky. Never wanted to make a mess. She chuckled to herself, because the thought of a neat, anal-retentive murderer somehow struck her as funny.
Derrick was polite, sweet, quiet. If she thought he was a psycho, she never would’ve sat next to him in the lunchroom, wearing her nice perfume and her sexy blouses, hoping he’d ask for her number. She would’ve known there was something odd about him.
But the one thing every true crime book she’d ever read made clear was – you never really do know. Two weeks ago, coincidentally or not, Derrick had shaved off that not-quite-a-beard-thing he’d been growing on the lower half of his face. His lunchroom explanation? ‘It just wasn’t working on me. My mom didn’t like it.’ Gemma had thought it incredibly endearing that a twenty-nine-year-old man still cared about his mom’s opinion. She tapped her pen on the thumbnail-sized sketch. The murder suspect had a beard. The dancer had been dead for a while, according to the article.
She peeked over her Formica cubicle again. He was standing next to his desk, talking on the phone. Damn. And he was cute, too. Not in an obvious way, but more like a sophisticated way – like a painting that you look at for a while and realize the subject in it has nice features. You warm to it. You start to like it, appreciate it. And you wonder why it was you never thought the guy was hot at first glance, when it’s so bloody obvious now. Tall, Dark and Not Obviously Handsome – that was Derrick Poole. She watched him as he spoke on the phone. His easy smile, dressed in a crisp white button-down and shiny blue tie. With that gruff on his face and his long hair that he kept slicked back in a low pony, he had a rebellious, bad-boy look about him. Now he was clean-shaven, but even sexier. An accountant by day and a rock star when the sun went down. The dress shirt and tie came off and he jammed on a bass guitar shirtless, his carved chest covered in colorful tattoos, none of which said ‘Mom’. The fantasy made her smile.
Or an accountant by day and a murdering rapist by night.
Sad. There was no way she wanted him to ask her out now. Well, ask, yes, but she couldn’t say yes until she found out for sure that he wasn’t a murderer. She’d have to call the police. They’d do all their police things – background checks and fingerprint checks and DNA checks, she supposed – and either confirm or deny that he was the guy they were looking for.
If he was a rapist, well, that made no sense, because she would’ve given it up to him without a fight. And if it all turned out to be a case of mistaken identity – which she was 95 per cent sure it would be – and Derrick had a doppelgänger out there with a mean streak and a taste for strippers, well, that was kind of sexy. Not that he was a murderer, but that her sweet, harmless Tall, Dark and Not Obviously Handsome looked a little bit more like a bad ass and a little less like … an accountant. He looked like a guy who was accused of murder, and that somehow made him tougher, heartier, meatier, sexier, manlier. Without, of course, being an actual murderer. It was like having the cake without all the damn calories.
But first she had to make sure that was what he wasn’t. No sense in getting Momma Jones’s hopes all high when he might be headed to the electric chair. After the ribbing she took on the last loser she’d brought home, she wasn’t suggesting a Sunday dinner with the family until her badass accountant’s name was cleared. She’d have to try and keep her name out of this, too. No one else in the office was staring at him strangely, or doing double-takes at the morning paper. If Derrick should find out that she was the one who’d called the police and told them he looked like a murder suspect – well, she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to want to start a relationship. There would be some serious trust issues that would be hard to get past.
Gemma folded the local section, tucked it under her arm and grabbed her cell off her desk. She smiled at Derrick as she walked past his office. He was still on the phone, but he smiled back. She could feel his eyes on her as she walked down the hall and stepped out of the building.
It was all rather thrilling, she thought giddily as she lit up a butt. A little bit of workplace drama to make the day pass faster. She sat in her car and dialed the number that was in the paper.
‘Palm Beach Sheriff’s. Homicide. Detective Evans speaking. Can I help you?’
‘Yes. Um, Detective Nill, please. He’s Homicide.’ Ooh – that was fun.
‘Hold.’
The line went completely silent. Not even elevator music. That made sense – you were calling a homicide unit; everything about it screamed serious. It’d be inappropriate to be caught humming along to Hall & Oates. Gemma flipped down the cosmetic mirror and checked her smile and her breath.
‘Homicide. Detective Maldonado.’
‘Detective Nill please.’
‘Can I ask what this is in reference to?’
‘The picture in the Sun-Sentinel this morning,’ Gemma answered, lowering her voice to a whisper even though no one was around. She tried to contain her excitement.
‘I can help you with that. Do you have information?’
‘Well, I work with a guy who looks a lot like that sketch. The one of the guy who murdered that stripper.’ She flipped the mirror back up and her heart stopped.
Derrick Poole was standing outside her car window.
And he didn’t look very happy.