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MORGAN LAY BESIDE COLE, her mind awhirl. They’d made good use of his other housewarming presents, but she couldn’t keep from wondering if he was too good to be true. He seemed to care about her, put her first—and not just in bed—and was going out of his way to help her.
She wondered if his claim that he accepted her for who she was would survive with time. He was a cop. A man who’d been brought up in a contractor’s household. She’d been a celebrity, traveled the world. Had money. Would that come between them? Love conquers all might work in fiction, but this was real life.
Who says you’re in love with him, or he’s in love with you? This was all about friendship. Take what he’s offering, give him what you have. But keep a padlock around your heart for now.
He stirred, caressed her arm. “What’s bothering you?”
How could he know her so well already? He’d been asleep, hadn’t he? While they’d made love, she’d existed in the microcosm of her bed, herself, and Cole. Or so she thought. Was there a part of her still thinking about Austin, a part Cole picked up on? He couldn’t have read her mind, sensed her doubts, could he?
“Thinking about Austin,” she said. A half-truth, but a truth nonetheless.
“It’ll work out.”
Easy enough for him to say. A feeble attempt to make her feel better. Maybe, coming from Cole, it did.
She pulled aside the covers and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “I’ll scrounge something for dinner.”
“Scrounge is my go-to meal. I’ll let Bailey out.”
Morgan wrapped herself in her robe and opened the bedroom door. Bailey, bless his doggie heart, lay curled up in the hall, seeming to accept there were times he wasn’t allowed in certain places. He tilted his head and thumped his tail, as if asking What’s next?
“Cole’s going to take you outside.” She bent down and rubbed him behind his ears.
After a repeat of the previous night’s dinner, Morgan asked Cole more about the judge he’d mentioned. “Can I call or email her, or does communication have to go through a lawyer?”
Which would be yet another expense.
“Before you do anything, you should document everything you’ve done to help Austin. From what you’ve said, you have a strong case, but I’m not a lawyer. I go to court to testify, but dealing with traffic citations or drunk and disorderly cases is nothing like custody battles. I’ve never been involved in any of those.”
“I have credit card statements, but they don’t itemize what was purchased the way a grocery store receipt does. When I bought him food, it was along with my own stuff.” She did a mental rundown through what she’d spent on Austin, places she’d taken him. Movies, concerts. The zoo. Parks. “It never occurred to me to save receipts. I paid for his music lessons. Mr. Nakamura, his teacher, would vouch for me there.”
“You paid him by check?” Cole asked.
“Sometimes, or by bank transfer.”
“There are records of those,” Cole said. “Is there a chance Austin’s mom would have mentioned she thought you should have him to anyone else? Even in passing? It might help your case.”
“The only person I know is her neighbor, who’s being very helpful. I’ll ask her”
Her beanstalk had shot another ten feet into the air. As her belly twisted with tension, Bailey trotted over and dropped a tennis ball at her feet.
“Trying to cheer me up, are you?” She picked it up and rolled it across the room. He scampered after the ball, scrambling to keep his footing as he turned to bring it back.
She tossed it again. “Hard to stay upset around such cuteness.”
“Fur therapy.” Cole tossed the ball. “Any progress on the ledgers?”
Morgan told him what she’d done. “You know what? We’ve been trying to connect those pages of numbers to something that would have upset the housekeeper. What if it was a one-time thing that set her off?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. People get upset about things that don’t make sense to anyone else.”
“You’re telling me,” Cole muttered.
She got the sense he had plenty of stories from his work as a cop. She went on. “What if Uncle Bob did something that rubbed her the wrong way, and she blew it out of proportion and has been holding a personal grudge all these years? Maybe he grabbed the last package of cookies at the store. Cut her off in traffic. Didn’t give her his seat on a crowded bus. Nobody else we’ve run across seems to have anything bad to say about him.”
“Good point. I guess short of dragging her into an interrogation room and turning on the bright lights, we’ll never know.”
Morgan smiled at Cole’s teasing. “What? No rubber hoses?”
“We prefer to save those for more hardened criminals.”
She chuckled. “Cop humor is almost as good as fur therapy. What made you decide to become a cop?”
His face shuttered. He hurled Bailey’s ball into the kitchen.
~~~
COLE KNEW HE HAD TO tell Morgan about his past. About Jazz. About what happened. He wasn’t ready to do it now, though. He stood. “I’ve got to be at work early. I’ll come back after shift tomorrow for the final sanding, and then the wall will be ready to go.”
Morgan stood, toe to toe, staring him down, fire in her eyes. “That’s it? I’ve opened up my past—bared my soul—and you say you have to be up early for work when I ask you one simple question? You leave now, you don’t need to come back. I’m sure Tom would be happy to sand the drywall.”
He sat. Pushed his hands through his hair. “It’s not a simple question.”
“That’s no excuse for not answering. Unless you’re a serial killer, and you thought being a cop would be a good way to hide your secret? Who’d ever suspect a cop?”
He glanced up into her expectant smile.
She was right, dammit. “I had a girlfriend once. A serious one. At least we thought so.” He kept his voice to a whisper so she wouldn’t hear it crack. He told her about Jazz, their plans, their love.
“What happened?” Morgan’s whisper matched his. Her hand rested on his thigh.
“I did what was right for my future. Went to school, took my exam. She went to breakfast with a bunch of other seniors. Some crazy, hopped up kid comes in brandishing an automatic weapon, sprays the restaurant because they were out of cherry pie. Killed six people.”
“Your girlfriend—Jazz—was one of them.”
He nodded. “It took too long for the cops to get there. There was a major traffic accident across town involving an officer, and a good portion of the force had been deployed to deal with it. In retrospect, unless cops had been inside the restaurant when the kid came in, they wouldn’t have gotten there in time no matter where they were. It wasn’t a hostage situation, the kid hadn’t made any demands. He just went in, started screaming and shooting.”
Even though Cole hadn’t been there, he’d replayed what must have happened over and over in his head. Had the nightmares.
Sweat trickled down his back. “I gave up college—couldn’t face it without Jazz. Worked for my dad instead. Eventually, I made up my mind the world needed more cops so there were always enough available. Maybe I could save people. Like Jazz.”
“Which is why you keep trying to protect me from myself,” she said. “It’s not because you’re a control freak.”
Cole half-smiled. “Control freak? No way. Sure, when I’m working, I need to have the upper hand with people breaking the law. Because of my job, I see a lot of bad stuff and don’t want it to happen again, especially not to people I care about.”
She ran a finger down his jaw. “You care about me?”
He wasn’t ready to tell her how much. He’d bared his soul the way she had, but he wasn’t ready to bare his heart. Too soon. Too much risk that she’d break it.
He took her finger and kissed it. “Damn straight, I do.”
“Still want to go home?” she asked.
“Want to? No. Need to? Yes. I’ve got paperwork to go over.”
“Paperwork? As in you get homework?”
He laughed. “No, this is about Kirk Webster. I want to look into his past. I still have his journals, and I want to correlate them with some newspaper articles and old arrest reports.”
“To explain the graffiti?”
“That’s my hope.”
“You can’t tell me about it? Is it confidential cop stuff?”
“Not all of it. The arrest reports would be. The newspaper articles are public.”
She tilted her head. “Will you share your ideas?”
Stay awhile longer? A no-brainer. If he didn’t mention Randall Ebersold’s case, she’d have no reason to connect the two. After all, the cases weren’t connected per se.
“When you were reading the journals, what kind of a person did you think Kirk was?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I never kept a journal. To me, it was another word for diary, which I put in the those are for girls category when I was younger. It seems that Kirk didn’t have those reservations. Did you keep a diary?”
She shook her head. “The closest I came was a calendar of appearances. What are you getting at?”
“Did he mention his friends? People he wanted to be friends with?”
Her brow furrowed. “You mean like secret crushes? Wondering if he should ask a girl out? That kind of stuff?”
“Did you read anything where he mentioned any girls?”
She was quiet for a moment. Her eyes widened. “You’re saying he was gay?”
“I think so. I tried reading the journals based on that assumption, and it fit.” Maybe Miss Oberg’s lessons had merit after all.
Cole could almost hear the wheels grinding in Morgan’s head.
She gave a tiny head shake. “There was nothing in the journal entries I read that mentioned any persecution. Nothing about him being beat up, or ridiculed, or any of the other things he might have had to put up with.”
“True. From what I read, he wasn’t specific. Maybe he was afraid his parents would read his journals and he wasn’t ready to talk to them. Gays are much more accepted now, along with all the other sexual identifications, but not everyone’s on board with being anything other than straight.”
Morgan flashed a wry grin. “The circles I inhabited, I met a good number of alternative sexual identities. My parents never made anything of it. They said people were different, and some girls liked boys, and some liked girls, and the same for boys. I guess being exposed to those lifestyles from a very young age meant I accepted people for who they were.”
“Too bad Kirk Webster’s parents weren’t that enlightened.”
Or Randall Ebersold’s.
Morgan went on. “So, you think Kirk wrote the graffiti because he’d retaliated. Which would mean he killed someone. If you found him, would you arrest him?”
“There’s another angle,” Cole said. “Someone killed Kirk and wrote the message on the wall.”
“That’s so sad,” Morgan said. “I think I liked the prank theory better. I’d hate to think this house could have ties to a murder.”
Not the way a cop thought. Cole liked to know the truth, see justice done. “I’ll take Bailey for a quick walk, and then I need to get home. You have a busy day tomorrow, too.”
He left, wondering if either of the detectives would still be working.