Falling For You (The Slow Burn #1)

1. Romance Novels

Romance Novels

ANDY

There were parts of me I couldn't access by myself. Not because I was incomplete, but because some things only come alive when someone else makes it safe for them to.

"She comes up to me backstage holding this tutu. Tiny pink thing. Tells me all the other dads are doing it. I look around. None of the other dads are doing it."

Doug switched lanes without checking. I grabbed the handle.

"But she hits me with the please, Daddy, and that's it. I'm done. I'm a grown man putting on a tutu in a room full of kindergartners."

Doug Price. My partner for the last three years, and the only cop I knew who could make me laugh on the drive to a bad call.

"Did you actually wear it?"

He held his phone across the console at the red light. The screen showed a stage full of little girls in pink tutus, and in the middle of them, visible from the waist up because the camera couldn't fit all of him, was Doug Price in a pink tutu, doing a plié next to his daughter.

"Is that a tiara?"

"She put it on me backstage. I couldn't say no to that either."

Doug could clear a room just by standing up.

He was 6'2" and 240 pounds. People crossed the street when they saw the size of him.

He was also one of the softest men I'd ever met.

Patrol in Las Vegas meant the horrific was almost routine.

Doug stayed soft anyway, which said more about him than any commendation on his wall.

The radio crackled.

"419, Code 3. Alley behind 2100 East Bonanza Boulevard. Caller reports a female down, possible stabbing. Victim is not breathing. No suspect description."

Doug tucked the phone deeper into his chest pocket. The laughter left his face as he hit the lights.

"Copy, dispatch. En route."

The woman was on her back in the alley behind East Bonanza. Sex worker, by the clothes. Stabbed twice, the blood pooled dark beneath her shoulder. There were needle marks on her left arm and a small glassine bag two feet from her open hand.

Doug wrote down first officer observations while I worked the body from three feet back.

The tattoo on the inside of her left wrist caught my eye. It was a man's name in heavy black ink. The letters were crude and uneven. It didn't look like the kind of work you got at a tattoo parlor, and it was clearly not something she walked in and asked for.

"Doug. Her left wrist."

He crouched beside me. "Is that a name?"

A cruiser pulled to the curb behind us. Sergeant Elliot Handler stepped out.

Tall, sharp jaw, light eyes, stubble that belonged in a cologne ad.

If the department ever wanted to make the public fall in love with a cop and forget they hated us, Elliot Handler in uniform would be a good place to start.

He pulled off his sunglasses and glanced at the body. "Another hooker on Bonanza. What else is new?"

"Maybe not. This might be a case for Vice and the trafficking task force."

Elliot looked at me for a second. "Canvass the block for cameras. I'll get a second unit out here for witness statements."

I nodded and was just about to turn when I heard it behind me.

"Officer Walsh."

Detective Zeus Alexander was walking toward us.

Gray suit, black tie, and a face lined by thirty years of crime scenes.

In a job that killed people or burned them out, Zeus Alexander was still here.

His parents swung for the fences with that name, and the man delivered.

You hear Zeus Alexander and you expect someone extraordinary.

Then he walks in and you think yeah, that tracks.

"What do we have here?"

"We thought sex worker," I said. "But there's a tattoo on her left wrist. Trafficker's mark."

Zeus didn't answer. He walked past me to the body, crouched, and went quiet for a long time. He started at the wrist and worked outward to her neck, arms, and the bruising around her ankles.

"This isn't a sex worker who got unlucky." He stood up slowly. "Good eye, Walsh. I'm calling Vice and the trafficking task force."

He pulled his phone out and made the call right there.

Elliot watched the entire exchange from six feet away with his arms crossed.

I knew that look. I saw it at the Christmas party, when a detective from Vice spent half the night at the bar asking my take on something from his caseload.

It was there two months ago, when a patrol officer from swing shift walked me to my car talking about a call we'd worked together.

And every single time Zeus Alexander showed up to a scene I was working.

After Zeus stepped away to confer with the crime scene unit, Elliot came over.

"He's really making a habit of that."

"Of what?"

He didn't answer. His eyes were on Zeus across the tape.

"It's just work, Elliot." I said it through my teeth, barely moving my lips, managing my secret boyfriend's ego on a crime scene with a dead woman ten feet away.

I'd had this same conversation with him before.

At first the jealousy registered as endearing, even flattering.

My boyfriend, not wanting other men near me.

When he made sergeant and had input on partner assignments, he paired me with Doug.

Everyone knew Doug was devoted to his wife.

He wouldn't dream of looking at another woman.

But the police force was still ninety percent men.

I still had to talk to them, work with them, stand next to them at crime scenes.

Somewhere along the line his jealousy became something I managed.

"It pisses me off." Elliot walked off to meet the second unit that had just pulled in.

He let it go. He always let it go, eventually.

After the detectives took over, the radio sent us to a trench collapse. That was patrol. You cleared one scene and the radio was already sending you to the next. On a quiet shift, we'd run twelve calls. In summer, it could hit twenty. Las Vegas didn't take breaks and neither did we.

West Sahara was backed up for two blocks when we arrived. A utility crew had been cutting into the road to get at a water main. Open trench, broken asphalt, orange cones pushing traffic into a single lane. A section of the wall had collapsed and a worker was in the hole, waist-deep in dirt.

Doug and I were there to keep traffic moving while the fire engine blocked half the road. I was rolling my eyes before my feet hit the pavement. Engine 110. A-shift. I knew exactly which crew was on scene.

"Any call becomes a good call when Officer Walsh rolls in."

Blonde hair, blue eyes no woman with a pulse could pretend she didn't notice, and a devastating smile he never had the decency to put away. Wyatt Brooks would have been easier to ignore if he wasn't so damn annoying.

"Brooks." I kept walking toward the perimeter. "Is anyone hurt?"

"Worker's stuck in a trench collapse, waist-deep. Stable, talking, just can't get himself out. We're rigging the extraction now."

I could acknowledge that Wyatt Brooks was good at his job. We'd crossed paths a dozen times on shared scenes. Car accidents, structure fires, the overlap between cops and firefighters that Las Vegas generated on a daily basis.

On one of those early scenes, I missed a detail on a safety issue with the perimeter I'd set.

It was minor, nothing that made the report, but Brooks caught it before it became a problem.

I was grateful. I respected the competence.

Then he opened his mouth and started flirting, and the competence disappeared behind the charm.

After that, every time he showed up on scene, all that registered was the grin.

"I'll take the west end," Doug said. "You take the east."

We directed traffic while the fire crew worked the trench. By the time the traffic thinned enough for me to look back, the worker was out. Muddy, embarrassed, sitting on the back of the ambulance while a paramedic checked him over.

I walked to the engine to exchange information with Captain Thompson for the incident report. He signed off, thanked me, and turned back to his crew. I was heading back to the cruiser when I heard that voice.

"Looking forward to the next one, Officer Walsh."

I didn't turn around. "No, you're not."

"I always am."

I got in the cruiser and closed the door. Through the window, I watched Wyatt Brooks walk back to his crew. He said something that made one of them shove his shoulder, and when he laughed I caught the flash of a dimple I didn't need to notice.

By the time we got back to the precinct, it was past six. Shift ended an hour ago.

I had six incident reports to file, plus supplementals, contact logs, and the full crime scene documentation from the morning.

In law enforcement, everything that happens on the street gets documented.

Even telling a tourist to put his pants back on outside the Bellagio still generates a contact log, and that five-minute encounter would mean an additional twenty minutes of paperwork.

I started with the woman on East Bonanza. Event number, date, time, location. Incident type: homicide. Victim: unidentified female. No name, no date of birth, no next of kin. Just a body in an alley and a tattoo that said she belonged to someone who wasn't coming to claim her.

Unidentified female. I'd typed those words before. Six months ago, a woman in a park off Fremont. Same box checked. Same empty fields.

"Hey, Walsh! That tip on the domestic from Tuesday?"

Brandon was pulling on his jacket as he crossed the bullpen toward my desk. "Complainant followed up. You were right, there was a second address. Wanted to say thanks."

"Glad it helped."

He tapped the edge of my desk twice and kept walking. I smiled. Brandon was one of the good ones. Big guy, quiet worker, three kids he coached basketball for on his days off. The force could use more of him.

Across the bullpen, I caught Elliot watching. He didn't say anything, so I went back to my report.