CHAPTER NINETEEN
Later that morning Grant stood in Lieutenant Pete Kerrigan’s office with a cup of hot coffee in his hand. Pete sat behind his desk trying to convince his boss that there had to be a connection.
“Think about it, sir. We’ve only had one mass shooting in Belgrave in its seventy-seven-year history. Just one. Yet in a matter of days we’ve have two back-to-back? Come on now, Chief. Some things make sense and some things don’t. There has to be a connection.”
“A connection to what?”
They all looked when they heard that voice. It was RJ walking into Pete’s office.
“Those two mass shootings have to be connected,” Pete said.
“They have to be,” RJ agreed.
“But chief don’t think so.”
RJ looked at Grant. But when he did, he smiled. “Look at you.”
Grant frowned. “What are you looking at me for?”
“You shaved.”
When RJ said it was when Pete noticed it too. “That’s true.”
“Your suit isn’t wrinkled. Your eyes aren’t bloodshot.”
“I didn’t know you had blue eyes, chief,” Pete joked. “I thought their natural color was red.”
He and RJ laughed.
“Very funny,” said Grant, although he said it in a way that allowed his men to feel at ease teasing him. He was in a good mood.
“What gives?” RJ asked. Then he remembered last night and how Grant didn’t immediately head back to his car when RJ told him Nash wasn’t putting out. “You got some, didn’t you?”
Grant’s demeanor immediately changed. He wasn’t about to let his captain disrespect Marti. “Knock that shit off, RJ.” He even pointed at him. “Now I mean it. And that goes for you, too, Pete. She’s here to do a job and you guys will stop trying to get in her panties and start accommodating her.”
“Okay.” RJ knew he was on the right track, but he also knew Grant could be a bear if you got on his wrong side. “I apologize.”
“You apologizing?” asked Pete. “Believe that if you want, Chief.”
“I’m not saying there isn’t a connection,” Grant said, but Pete interrupted him.
“Speaking of the devil,” Pete said, and Grant and RJ looked out of his window that faced the front parking lot. Marti was getting out of a patrol car.
Grant’s heart squeezed with affection as soon as he saw her. Although she was dressed in her usual elegance, this time in a red herringbone jacket, a light-blue sheer shirt and red slacks, he remembered vividly how she looked in that shower with no clothes on at all. And how desperately he wanted her then. And still wanted her now.
“Wonder what it’s like to have a piece of that?” Pete asked as they all looked at her with lust in their eyes.
“Didn’t Grant just tell you to cut that shit out?” RJ said.
Pete grinned. “You tapped that last night when you took her to her hotel. Didn’t you?”
Grant looked at Pete.
And Pete quickly realized the chief wasn’t going to play that game. “I was joking around, chief, honest. I’ll cut it out.” Then Pete and RJ glanced at each other as if their boss was taking it way too serious for it to be nothing.
They continued to watch Marti as she walked over to her car that had been left at the station overnight and grabbed some papers off of the front seat to stuff into her briefcase.
“You think she’s sending bad reports to the AG about us?” Pete asked the chief.
“Don’t do anything bad and she won’t have any bad reports to send,” Grant responded.
“But what if she make stuff up. What if she’s a liar?” asked Pete.
“She’s no liar,” Grant said with such confidence that his two senior staff members glanced at each other again.
Outside, after Marti had finished stuffing more paperwork into her briefcase and locked her car again, she began heading for the entrance. She’d already felt a sense of excitement when she saw the chief’s Mercedes parked in his designated parking space, because it meant he was in the office and she would hopefully get to see him again.
Not that she thought it was wise to be so giddy about some man when she was only in town to do a very specific job, but she couldn’t help it. After last night, he won her over. She was already warming to him simply because he treated her so well, but the way he treated her last night took that warm to hot. She had the hots for him. He did things to her body that no man had ever done. Not even her husband during their best days.
He left her a note to let her know he had gone home to change. He told her that one of his officers would be there at nine-forty-five to pick her up, and that he wanted her to eat breakfast before his man arrived. When he wrote that he liked his women with meat on their bones, she smiled. When he then wrote that she’d better behave, she laughed. They had that kind of relationship. Very sincere and even playful. Which wasn’t either one of their personalities. That was what made it special to her. Then he wrote that she could call him Grant, and he signed his note with the letter G. Just G. Which felt special to her too.
But it wasn’t until she was walking into the station did she realize that something remarkable had happened to her last night. She realized that she didn’t cry herself to sleep for the first time in four years. That loneliness and longingness didn’t overtake her when the darkness came. Because she was in Grant’s arms. And his arms felt like a cocoon. She felt safe and secure there. It felt like home.
She heard conversations coming from Lieutenant Kerrigan’s office and when she looked in that direction and saw Captain Jeffers and the chief, she headed for that office. A part of her was hesitant. She knew their relationship, such as it was, had to remain under wraps around his men. But she was never a faker. Could she truly hide that excitement she felt just knowing she would be around Grant again? She even remembered how scared she was when she first woke up and realized he wasn’t there. She thought he might have viewed what they did last night as a big mistake, and he wanted out already. Until she saw his note.
“Good morning,” she said to the men when she walked over to the office door.
Although nobody said good morning to her, not even the chief, she noticed RJ had glanced at his Rolex. Which begged the question for Marti. She was so concerned about Grant’s lifestyle that she never even considered RJ’s. Had he come to the force as a rich man too? And if he had, what kind of force was this?
“Wish I had your hours,” RJ said as he glanced at his watch.
“Or are you on CP time?” Pete asked with a grin. “RJ told us about that.”
“Her hours are 10 to 5,” Grant stepped in and said, saving her from having to do so. But she felt he still could have at least said good morning back to her.
“Did you have a good night’s sleep?” RJ asked her, and Pete attempted to suppress his grin.
“Yes. Did you?” Marti responded, knowing why RJ would ask that. He was assuming something happened between her and the chief. Unless, she thought with some degree of horror, the chief told him what happened between them!
“I slept well,” RJ said. “Very well. Thank you for asking.” That did it. Pete burst into laughter.
They were really very juvenile to Marti.
“Come on in,” Grant said to her and that, at least, made her feel better.
But it was kind of jarring for Marti to be in the same room with the man that had been inside of her, not once, but twice last night. She still felt those feelings. She still felt that emptiness when she woke up and realized he was no longer inside of her.
For Grant, he wanted in again as soon as she entered the office and stood across the room from him. He knew why she made certain not to get next to him. She wanted to keep it professional while they were on the clock. He understood that. But just seeing her again brought back last night in vivid detail. In that shower. And later in bed. How they ate together and cried together and laughed together. It was one of the most revealing nights he’d ever had.
“We have a debate going on,” he said to her when he could tell she was uneasy. “My men seem to believe the two mass casualty events were connected. I say the jury is still out. What say you?”
But before Marti could say a word, Sergeant Carter came into the office looking flustered. “We got him, chief.”
“Who?”
“The Wafer House shooter.”
As soon as Carter said those words, everybody stood up and began hurrying toward the office exit. “Where?” Grant asked.
“The Lamplight Trailer Park over on Dakota Street. He’s all the way in the back. He refuses to come out.”
“Who’s there now?”
“A few patrol cars. SWAT is on its way.”
“Have the beats evacuate that trailer park,” Grant ordered as they hurried for the lobby, “and tell them to cordon off that entire street north and south.”
“Yes sir. But get this, Chief,” Carter said and all of them looked at him.
“What?”
“He says he’ll only come out if you let him talk to her.”
Everybody stopped. Grant frowned. He was certain he didn’t hear that right. “Talk to who?”
“To her. Lieutenant Nash.”
It was Marti’s time to frown. “Why would he want to talk to me?”
“He didn’t say.”
Everybody looked at Marti. “You know him?” Pete asked her.
“Of course I don’t know him! If I knew him I would have said so already.”
“Then why he wanna talk to you?”
“How should I know?”
But all Grant saw was danger for Marti. “You’re staying here,” he said to her.
“What if I can help get him out of that trailer?”
“She’s got a point, Chief,” said RJ. “He’s a danger to this community. They want him caught, not holed up in some trailer.”
“And if she can help,” Pete said, “we need that help.”
But Grant was never that easily persuaded. “She’s not going,” he said again and began heading for the exit. His men followed him.
Marti did too. “I have a job to do, Chief,” she said, causing him to stop and look at her.
Was she going to defy him? “I said you are not going.”
“It’s my job to be in the field. Not hanging around an office. It’s my job, Chief. I’ve got to do my job.”
Her sincerity was only matched by his concern for her safety. Why would some crazed gunman want to speak to her? But he’d already warned his men to not interfere with her authority. He knew he couldn’t either. He continued heading for the exit.
RJ and Pete hopped in Pete’s car, while Grant, they noticed, opened the passenger door of his car for Marti and then he got in behind the steering wheel. His two men sped off ahead of him, but he was right behind them.
And he was pissed. “If I tell you that you aren’t doing something, don’t you dare defy me in front of my men!” he yelled at Marti.
“I have to do my job even if it means defying you.”
Grant sped through a red light and continued speeding through the streets of Belgrave. Then he looked at her again. “I told you to remain outside and you went into Karney’s anyway. That worked out, yes it did, but it could have gone horribly wrong. This is not going horribly wrong. I don’t care what that lunatic wants,” he warned her, “and I don’t care if it is your job, you aren’t going into that trailer. And that’s not debatable! Do I make myself clear, Markita? You aren’t going in that trailer.”
Marti wanted to remind him that she was supposed to make her own decisions when it came to her observations, even though he was technically her boss while she was in his jurisdiction. But she still had autonomy. The AG’s office made that clear.
But she held her tongue. It was a card she was willing to play if she had to. But for the sake of their brand-new situationship , which suddenly felt frosty again, she hoped it was a card she didn’t have to play.