LITMIR.BIZ

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to do.

      According to the thumbnail bio she’d gotten from the woman’s law firm, Eileen Stevens was currently juggling twice that. A criminal lawyer intent on leaving her mark on the world—and making a great deal of money while she was at it—Eileen was regarded as being at the top of her game. The list of clients that the law firm’s office manager had surrendered earlier indicated that all of Eileen’s clients were high-profile people, people who could pay top dollar for top-notch representation.

      Someone obviously didn’t think that Eileen was so “top-notch.”

      Closing the door behind her, Taylor stood for a moment just inside the foyer, trying to imagine what it felt like to come here at the end of a long, bone-wearying day. A sense of antiseptic sterility slowly penetrated her consciousness. Even the Christmas tree, silver with ice-blue decorations, felt sterile as it stood aloof in the center of the room.

      “Home” to her had always meant a feeling of warmth and security.

      Well, not always, Taylor silently amended.

      A feeling of warmth and security was the atmosphere her mother strove to create for her and her three siblings when they were growing up. It had actually been achieved only when her father was out on assignment. An undercover cop, his work would take him away for weeks at a time. Her mother, Lila, also on the police force, came home nightly, no matter what. She was there to check their homework, to make sure they behaved. There to give them the love and support they needed so that they could turn out to be decent human beings.

      To give him his due, her father had been an okay guy in the beginning. Taylor could remember laughter in the house when she was very young. But the laughter faded in the later years as jealousy started to eat away at her father. He blamed it on her mother’s partner, Brian Cavanaugh, a kind, handsome man who came off larger than life. Initially friends, it got to the point that her father loudly complained that he couldn’t compete with or compare to Brian. The growing insecurities that haunted her father, giving rise to arguments, made for an atmosphere of almost stifling tension whenever he was home.

      And then everything changed.

      Her mother was wounded in the line of duty. Lila McIntyre would have died if Brian hadn’t stopped the flow of her blood with his own hands, holding her until the paramedics arrived, refusing to be separated from her even as she was driven to the hospital.

      Her father used the incident as an excuse to shame Lila into retiring from the force, saying a mother of small children had no business putting herself in harm’s way. Wanting only peace, Lila went along with it for the sake of her marriage—and her children—until Frank, the youngest, was in high school. Against her husband’s wishes, she came back to the police department. Trying to compromise, she took a desk job rather than go back on the street.

      Life took a few really strange twists and turns after that. Taylor’s father, still working undercover, was suddenly executed, a victim of a drug dealer’s hostility. Only it eventually turned out that it had been her father who was the hostile one, staging his own death and stealing the enormous amount of money that was to have been used to stage a sting.

      In the end, justice was served. Her father was really dead now and Brian Cavanaugh, a man she had tremendous respect and admiration for, was her stepfather. It was only fitting since over the years he had been more of a father to her and her sister and brothers than her actual father had been.

      Brian, now chief of detectives, had been the one to send her out on this case. He’d also offered to restructure a few things within the department so that she could have a temporary partner assigned to her until Aaron and his whistling teeth came back.

      But she hated disrupting things and said she’d go solo until Aaron’s leave of absence was up. Besides, she didn’t relish the idea of breaking in someone new, especially if it was just for a finite amount of time. She could muddle through.

      Taylor frowned now as she looked around. She had no doubt that what Eileen had probably spent to furnish just the living room could have kept the children of a third-world nation eating oatmeal for breakfast for the next two years. Maybe three. And yet, for all its tasteful, enormously expensive decor, there was absolutely no warmth to be found in the room.

      No warmth anywhere, she concluded as she moved about the area with its snowstorm-white furnishing, making her way to a state-of-the-art kitchen that was too immaculate.

      All amenities seemed for show, with no soul evident anywhere. Was the late Eileen Stevens an ice princess, or just haughtily devoid of color and shading?

      Taylor found herself feeling sorry for the woman.

      “What were you trying to prove, Eileen?” she murmured.

      Plastic gloves on, Taylor skimmed her fingertips along the pots hanging from the ceiling like so many slavishly dusted, oversize wind chimes. There had to be a reason for all this decadent hemorrhaging of money, she thought.

      “What were you trying to make up for? Were you trying to bury your conscience? Or was there an insecure little girl hidden inside those Prada suits, thumbing her nose at anyone and everyone who had ever made fun of her while she was growing up?”

      She made a mental note to find out if the woman had any relatives in the area.

      Living well was supposedly the best revenge. And although this was not living well—just living expensively—Taylor knew that many felt their success, their actual self-worth, was reflected in the amount of “toys” they managed to amass.

      “Didn’t do you any good, did it, Eileen, spending money on all this?” she murmured under her breath. “You still turned out to be mortal.” She walked back to the living room. “Who got to you, Eileen? Who did this? An ex-lover? A jealous underling you treated like dirt? Or some client who wanted his money back because you couldn’t get him off the way you promised?”

      She had yet to carefully go through Eileen’s caseload. She made a mental note to do that first thing in the morning, review the woman’s past clients as well as her current ones. With any luck, by morning the medical examiner would have gotten around to doing the autopsy. He was a prickly man who marched to his own drummer and refused to listen to anyone else’s. But he was good.

      “She didn’t have any lovers.”

      Her heart instantly jumping up to her throat, Taylor spun around on her heel. She had her weapon out before she completed the turn. Both hands were wrapped around the grip, its muzzle pointed and meaning business, by the time she found herself facing the source of the voice behind her: a tall, good-looking, dark-haired man in his early thirties.

      “Hands in the air!” Taylor ordered, aiming her revolver dead center at his head.

      Rather than jump to obey, the stranger watched her as if she was the one who was out of place, not him. “Hey, calm down, honey,” he cautioned. “I’m one of the good guys.”

       Honey?

      The hell he was. Taylor found the man’s deep, steady voice with its hint of a smile irritating, not to mention patronizing.

      Honey? Was he for real?

      “Hands in the air!” she ordered again. She cocked the trigger, her blue eyes blazing. “I’m not going to tell you a third time!”

      “Yes, ma’am.” The stranger acquiesced. But when he raised his hands, they went only as high as his shoulders. At what looked like six-three and in excellent physical condition, he all but towered over her.

      There was definitely amusement in his eyes.

      Was he a psychopath, coming back to review his handiwork? Eileen Stevens had been found bound and gagged. Cause of death looked like strangulation. From the wet marks on the comforter beneath her body, a wet leather strip had been tightly tied around the woman’s throat and then apparently allowed to dry. As it did, it slowly shrank, depriving her of air until she finally choked to death.

      It had struck Taylor as a particularly cruel way to kill someone.

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