Chapter 13
Haven stared at the map and realized she couldn’t focus.
Marcus’s warning about the killer not accepting her escape and the fact that he could circle back wasn’t news.
She’d figured that out as soon as she’d heard about Angela.
She’d been cautious, overly cautious with everything.
But she wasn’t going to live in fear. What she really needed was to run, but she couldn’t do that …
according to the doctor. Not yet anyway.
She glanced over at Marcus. “I need a change of scenery. Come to my place. We can order Chinese and keep going.”
Marcus looked up from the file he was reading. “Sounds good.”
That was it. No production. She'd been right about him. He was the yin to her yang, and they fit together. He was handsome to the point that he should’ve been a model, but he was also down to earth, unguarded, and one of the hardest workers she’d ever met.
Oh, and she couldn’t forget the fact that he was six feet four inches of sexiness in a crumpled suit.
She’d flirted with him at the diner. The man had blushed and then scowled at his chicken and dumplings as if it had confused him after she’d winked at him.
It was cute. He’d obviously not known what to make of her.
Getting the man to pay attention to the fact that she saw him as a man and not just a cop might take the direct route.
Good thing she had absolutely no problem with being direct.
* * *
Her apartment was twelve minutes from the precinct, which was one of the reasons she'd taken it. The other reasons were the second bedroom she used as an office and her reserved parking slot. An additional benefit was the fact that her landlord was not her previous landlord, who’d been a catastrophe in human form.
She was not a person who needed much from a living space.
She needed it quiet, she needed it functional, and she needed a kitchen table big enough to spread files across without losing things.
Marcus walked in, looked around once, and said nothing about the notepad on the coffee table or the case timeline she'd taped to the inside of the office door. She appreciated that. People who made snide comments on her organizational systems were people she did not need in her apartment.
She called the Jade Garden from memory. Beef and broccoli, fried rice, spring rolls, sesame chicken. She looked at Marcus. He held up two fingers. She added another order and hung up.
“Forty minutes,” she said.
“Good.” He was already looking at the map she'd pulled out. “Walk me through your geography read again.”
She walked him through it. He pushed back on two points.
She pushed back on his pushback. They were twenty minutes into a disagreement about the Calgary to Fargo leg when she realized she was enjoying herself, which was an odd thing to realize in the middle of a serial homicide discussion, but there it was.
He didn't mansplain. He didn't manage her.
He just argued, and he argued well, and when she had the better point, he moved on without making it weird.
The food arrived. They ate standing over the map because sitting down felt like giving up momentum, and neither of them was built to do that. The beef and broccoli was good. The spring rolls were better.
“The corridor bends here,” she said, pointing at Nashville with a chopstick. “It's not the end of the route. He was going somewhere.”
“South. Southeast.” Marcus looked at the map. “He had a job waiting.”
“Which we can't trace yet because we don't have enough on the employment angle.”
“Webb's working it.”
“Webb's working twelve things.”
“Welcome to a task force, but I’ve also pulled some strings and have a full-time Guardian computer specialist assigned to him.” He ate. “What’s your read on Paulson?”
“Territorial but not useless. He'll come around when he realizes you're not trying to keep him out of the collar.”
“I'm not interested in the collar.”
“I know that, but he doesn't yet.” She looked at him. “Give him something. Let him feel like he contributed. He'll be fine.”
Marcus looked at her. “That's very politically sophisticated for someone who told me she has no sense of self-preservation.”
“I said inappropriate sense of self-preservation. There's a difference.” She picked up a spring roll. “I'm excellent at managing people I need. I'm terrible at managing people I don't.”
“Delvecchio?”
“Del manages himself mostly. I just point him at things.”
He laughed. The real kind, not the polite kind. She could tell the difference, now.
They worked through the food and past it.
The containers went in the trash, and the files stayed on the table.
The map stayed on the floor, and they went through two pots of coffee.
They looked at the victimology from the employment angle and then from the geographic angle.
Then from the timeline angle, and they kept arriving at the same place.
Technical. Skilled. Legitimate travel. A schedule with enough flexibility to absorb the prep time but structured enough to be consistent.
He knew these cities.
He'd been to all of them before. Had to have been.
She wrote it down. Marcus was already writing it down. They looked at each other's notes, discovering they’d said the same thing in different handwriting.
“Imaging equipment,” she said.
“Still top of the list.”
“We need to cross-reference service call records across all ten cities with the victim windows.”
Marcus nodded. “Webb's on it.”
“Webb’s on it, but remind me to ask him if he needs more help. Whatever it takes to catch this bastard.”
He pointed at her. “Write it down.”
She wrote it down. He wrote it down. Two people who did not trust themselves to remember things they hadn't written down.
She found this deeply compatible. Her life was run off stickies, notes, reminders, and alarms she put on her phone.
When you had so much going on in your mind, the little prompts worked well.
She smiled at the thought that he needed the reminders, too.
They seemed to be cut from the same cloth.
At some point, the overhead light got to be too much, and she turned on the lamp instead. Softer. Better for the end of a long day. The map was still on the floor. The files were still on the table.
She looked up at 11:15 p.m. to see Marcus was asleep.
He'd done it without fanfare, which she respected. No gradual tipping. No performance of trying to stay awake. He was reading the Fargo file, and then he wasn't. His head was back against the couch, and he was out like someone had pulled a plug. The file was still in his hand.
She took the opportunity to look at him.
He looked younger asleep. His dark lashes were long against his cheeks, and even relaxed, the muscles in his shoulders and neck displayed a physique that had to be hereditary.
Working a job like they had, daily gym routines to bulk up were subject to one hell of a lot of disruption.
She took the file out of his hand carefully.
Stacked the files on the coffee table away from the edge.
Pulled the blanket off the back of the couch and dropped it over him without ceremony because he didn't seem like a man who needed ceremony. Then she turned off the lamp and went to bed. She stared at the ceiling, thinking about a man. This time, he wasn’t a suspect.
He was a cop, an interest she’d found outside of a case …
or because of a case … That was an anomaly in itself.
She didn’t have much time to date. She’d tried to three or four times over her time as a detective, but every time she got a call out, or when she wasn’t paying full attention to her date because she was running a case in her mind, the situation …
devolved. To the point that her last romantic relationship had ended with him telling her to date her badge because it was the only thing she truly loved.
That hurt for a bit, but it was also true.
But with Marcus…the thing that she loved, her job, was a shared passion.
She smiled at the ceiling. He was just as enamored with the chase as she was.
It wasn’t something that would drive a wedge between them, it was something that had brought them closer together.
* * *
She woke up to the smell of bacon and lay still for about three seconds, processing that information before she realized that she didn’t have any bacon.
She'd done a cursory inventory last night when she'd been trying to figure out what to tell Marcus was available for breakfast, and the honest answer had been coffee, possibly eggs, depending on how adventurous they were, and an English muffin of ambiguous age. There had been no bacon.
There was bacon now, and it smelled fabulous. Everything was better with bacon. She’d heard that somewhere and agreed one hundred percent.
She got up. Pulled her hair back and didn’t bother to braid it. After making sure her sweats and t-shirt were presentable, she walked out to the kitchen.
Marcus was at her stove. He'd clearly made a grocery run because the counter had orange juice on it.
There was bread in the toaster, eggs in a bowl, and a pan situation happening that smelled like an omelet was in progress.
The coffee was already made. The table was set.
The files were in a neat stack on the counter out of the way.
He heard her and turned around.
They were approximately three inches apart.
She hadn't accounted for the size of him in her kitchen. She should have. The math had just failed to translate into spatial reality until right now. She looked up. Way up. She could’ve stepped back.
She didn't.
She toed up and kissed him. It was quick, real, and she had zero regrets for surprising the hell out of him.
“Thank you,” she said. “For bringing me in on this case.”
He looked at her for one second. Then put his hands on her hips, lowered, and kissed her back.
Slower. Like he'd been thinking about it and wasn't in a hurry now that he'd started. The shiver that went through her was a whole body shake, and no exaggeration, it was the best kiss she’d received. Ever.
He lifted away, winked at her, and said, “You're indispensable to the case and to me.”
She stepped back and looked at him before she smiled and quipped, “Glad you recognize that fact.” Then she spun and got a plate out of the cabinet because something had to happen with her hands.
Indispensable.
She turned the word over while he finished the omelet, and she buttered the toast that popped up and then poured the orange juice. They sat down at the kitchen table with the files stacked neatly on the counter and the map still on the living room floor.
She ate.
Indispensable. To the case, obviously, to the case.
She was the only person on the task force who’d looked this man in the face.
She had the behavioral read, the personal experience, and the local knowledge.
Of course, she was indispensable to the case.
That was the obvious and correct interpretation.
Maybe. But he’d said to him, too. That was the part that she was spinning on repeat inside her brain. He probably meant as a coworker. And still … that kiss … wow … She glanced over at him. His self-satisfied expression made her raise her eyebrows. “You good over there?”
“Better than good. You?” He took a bite of toast.
She smiled. “That sounds about right. This, between us, probably isn’t a good idea.”
“The worst idea of the decade.” He nodded and then winked at her again.
“We can’t let it interfere at work.” She took a sip of coffee.
“We’re both far too professional and driven to let it do that.” He cocked his head as if waiting for her next comment.
She glanced over at the files. “Webb needs help today,” she said.
“Already texted him.” He ate another bite. “Eggs okay?”
“Eggs are great.”
They were, objectively, excellent eggs.
She did not look at him. She looked at her eggs and thought about being indispensable.
And to be honest, she was okay with being indispensable because he’d made such an impact on her that being without him on this case—and off this case—would suck.
But her brain also noted, without being asked, that the kiss had sent huge sparks through her that had never fired in that intensity before …
and she was damn happy about that. She couldn’t wait to see where those sparks led.