Minka #4
“Looks that way.” Archer’s eyes follow the numbers—eleven, twelve, thirteen—so when we reach the fifteenth floor and the door zings open, he tugs me out again and into… storage? “They say love is blind, so maybe she didn’t care that his prospects weren’t as bright.”
“Why are there a million chairs up here?” Striding from the elevator, I drag my knuckles over one turned upside down, the wheel snapped, and the frame bent. “Why waste this space?”
Archer merely shrugs and leads me across the floor, clutching on and holding my hand tight enough to ensure I keep moving.
“I’m not sure if Benjamin was receiving death threats prior to this.
Not sure if they went out to meet up with his killer.
If they went to negotiate an issue, or if his death is pure bad luck. ”
“Those are microscopes.” I stumble and attempt to turn back to the pile of perfectly good lab equipment. “Archer! Those are good. Why are they up here?”
“Fletch and I are gonna comb Molly’s socials over the next few days and pick out every detail we can find.
If this was a targeted attack, chances are we’ll find the clues somewhere in her videos.
If it was just bad luck, then we’re gonna have a much shittier time trying to find our killer.
So far, we have no weapon, no prints, no motive, and no witnesses besides the girl who might not want to be alive once she wakes up and finds out her boyfriend is dead anyway, and a young cop who saw nothing but heard multiple someones fleeing the scene. ”
“Well, that microscope is broken.” I point at the one with a dangling, limp viewer. “But all the others look fine. I wonder if Raquel knows they’re up here?”
“Dunno.” He grabs a door and whips it open, revealing a dingy gray stairwell… and… stairs.
“We’re already on the top floor.”
“Almost.” He hauls me in and upwards, around a single bend, then through an unlocked door that opens to…
“Holy cow.” I step onto the George Stanley rooftop and look out at a city already warm, the horizon glowing with the quickly rising sun. Light hits me square in the face, illuminating my eyelids so, even closing them, does nothing to shield my eyes.
And yet, a long, crooked grin takes control of my face and curls my lips up.
The air up here is fresher, still tinged with the morning cool we’ll get only for a mere few more minutes before the day truly jumps into full swing and the sun burns that freshness away.
In the west, a plane leaves Copeland Airport, soaring into the sky at what seems to be an impossible angle, then disappearing into the clouds—few as there are—and leaving nothing behind but the lingering roar of its engines.
“I didn’t even know we could come up here.
” I drop his hand, but only so I can walk the half-dozen steps nearer to the edge.
I don’t dare go too close. I have no desire to look over the side and down into the street that will soon buzz with worker bees heading toward their offices.
But I smile and explore, newly re-energized.
Best of all, I find no chairs up here. No discarded drink bottles or food wrappers. No cigarette butts.
No signs of life.
“Dibs.” I spin back and grin. “I’m calling dibs.”
“On… the roof?”
“Yup! I’m the chief, so I have the authority to claim this as mine. When I need to escape, I can come here. When I need quiet, I can come here. When I need better cell reception—”
He snorts. “You’ll come up here.”
“How’d you know?” I walk back in his direction and let him be the reason I stop. Our chests clashing and his arms wrapping me up close. “Happen across the blueprints while at the hospital?”
“No.” He buries his lips in my hair, sliding the tip of his nose along the top of my ear.
“But I was in the hospital when a helicopter arrived on top, and I got to thinking. The rest was luck.” He pulls back, holding my arms and stroking my biceps with his thumbs.
“You like it up here? Even though you don’t love heights. ”
“I love aloneness.” Except, I prefer it with you.
“This is the most alone I can be in this entire city, while still being in it. It’s a shelf I can sit on while watching everyone else go about their day.
It’s a viewing gallery, like med students are forced behind to watch their first surgeries.
” I meet his eyes and beam. “This might be my third favorite place in the entire world. Thank you for showing me.”
“Third?” He sets a gentle kiss on the very tip of my nose. “The first being our apartment? Or the bar? Or your own autopsy suite?” He pauses and considers. “New York? Jamaica? On the boat?”
“The waterfalls are number one.” I push onto my toes and nibble on his bottom lip.
“It’s the edge of the world, where land meets ocean and the earth opens up in a strange, nonsensical way that is nothing less than magical.
It’s where we get to exist, just me and you, and swim and play and make love and set everything else on pause.
” Lowering to flat feet, I drape my hands over his shoulders and tug him down with me. “My second favorite is our bedroom.”
He snorts. “Dirty girl.”
“Or the boat. Or the plane. Or inside your truck. Or in the stairwell of our apartment building. Or literally anywhere else where you’re right there with me.”
He exhales, soft and content. “Perfect girl.”
“It’s wherever you are.” The sun rises behind me, burning the small line of exposed skin at the back of my neck between where my collar ends and my ponytail begins.
“My favorite place is wherever I get to exist in the quiet and have you right there with me. Which is incredibly ironic, considering, before you, I would have sworn my favorite place was alone. Alone alone.”
“I appreciate you making room for me.” He suckles my bottom lip between his teeth.
Tasting. Taunting. “You could so easily have given me the physical benefits of knowing you, but nothing more. And chances are, I might’ve accepted that, since I wouldn’t miss what I hadn’t yet experienced.
You’re beautiful, and you’re excellent in bed. ”
I choke out a fast, noisy snicker. “Pig.”
“I was looking to fuck, Chief. Back then, I wanted your body and, if I was lucky, a chance to bicker with you sometimes. But now I know what sizzles beneath the surface. I know how deeply you feel, even when you try to hide it. I know how incredibly relieved you are that Doctor Chase is safe, so I wanted to bring you somewhere you could be alone for a moment—alone, with me—to feel your feelings and process that relief.”
“I sniffled.” I lean against his powerful chest and turn my face to rest over his heart. “When he told me, my nose did this weird thing. So then I instructed him to close the door on his way out, because I wanted him to leave before he realized my nose was doing that thing.”
“So many big feelings.” He runs his hands along my back, sliding them under my coat, then under my blouse, until it’s just his palms touching my bare skin.
“That poor doctor will never know how worried you were about him. He’ll never understand the way your eyes changed the night Patten called to give you the news, or the way you hardened and took that responsibility on your shoulders, even when you weren’t on shift at the time of the incident.
He’ll never know the textbooks you’ve read some nights since then, updated textbooks with new data surrounding HIV treatment.
And he’ll never know about the weird thing your nose did today.
” He inches back and waits for my eyes. “But I know. And I vow to protect your heart at all costs. Because it’s special and fragile and so, so fucking sweet, I mourn every single day the possibility I could’ve settled for just sex back before I knew better. ”
“But I’m fantastic in bed.” I sniffle and lay my cheek on his heart again. “The sex is good, so you’d have accepted what I gave you and said thanks.”
“And doing so would’ve been a tragedy. You ready to go home?”
“I suppose Aubree could do rounds.” I get caught up in a long, noisy yawn that holds me captive and sends tears to my eyes.
Not weird, emotional, relieved-Doctor-Chase-is-okay tears.
But normal, eye-squeezing tears that remind me how wiped out I am.
“I wasn’t built for all-nighters, Detective Malone.
But I’m not gonna go home and sleep unless you are, too.
” I scrub my hands over my face. “Can you take a few hours?”
“Yeah.” He drops a kiss on my lips. “I’m good for a few hours down. Then you have a dress fitting at three. We’ll set an alarm so we don’t sleep through it.”
“Ugh!” I spin out of his arms and reconsider walking to the edge of oblivion. “I haven’t changed sizes since I last tried the dumb dress on! Why the hell should I keep going? Didn’t they hear, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?”
“Einstein?”
I grab his hand and march us toward the door. “There’s no documented evidence that Einstein wrote or spoke those words. People just say he did. Insanity.”