LITMIR.BIZ

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out the man’s name and bring him in before the day was out.

      Breakfast was a banana she peeled and ate between leaving her front door and reaching her vehicle in the carport.

      She was on her way to the precinct less than half an hour after she’d woken up.

      

      Tracking down the mysterious intruder turned out to be a lot easier than she ever imagined.

      Arriving at the precinct, Taylor went straight up to her squad room. Her intention was to drop off her purse at her desk and then go in search of the sketch artist.

      She stopped dead ten feet short of her goal.

      The intruder was there, sitting in the chair beside her desk, looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

      Taylor’s first instinct was to draw her weapon, but she banked it down even though training a gun on him would have been immensely satisfying. The man obviously wasn’t a criminal. A criminal didn’t just waltz into a squad room and make himself at home. Although, approaching the scene from another angle as she played her own devil’s advocate, that could actually be the perfect cover.

      Either way, the stranger obviously had a hell of a lot of nerve.

      Taking a deep breath, Taylor crossed the rest of the way through the room to her desk.

      As if sensing her presence, the stranger turned his head and looked right into her eyes a moment before she reached him.

      “You,” she spat out, making the single word sound like an angry accusation.

      An accusation that apparently left him unruffled. The stranger merely smiled that maddening smile she’d previewed last night.

      “Me,” he affirmed.

      Instead of throwing her purse into the bottom drawer, she dropped it in. But she satisfied her need to blow off steam by kicking the drawer shut.

      “Who the hell are you?” she demanded, barely keeping her voice down. “And how did you get out of those handcuffs?”

      “Handcuffing your dates these days?”

      Focused only on the stranger, Taylor almost jumped. The question came from her brother, Frank, another homicide detective. Frank had chosen that moment to come up behind her. Fresh off solving a serial-killer case and riding the crest of triumphant satisfaction, her younger brother grinned at her.

      “You know the department frowns on taking their equipment for personal use.” He moved so that he stood next to the annoying stranger.

      Taylor struggled to keep from telling her brother to butt out. “This isn’t a date, this is a suspect,” she bit off.

      “A suspect?” the intruder echoed, still smiling that annoyingly sexy smile that seemed to undulate right under her skin, shooting straight to her core and warming it. “For what?” he asked innocently.

      As if he didn’t know. “For the murder of Eileen Stevens,” she snapped.

      “A suspect?” her brother repeated in disbelief, then looked, stunned, at the seated man. “Laredo?”

      Taylor’s eyebrows narrowed over eyes the color of the midmorning sky. “Who the hell is Laredo?” she demanded.

      “I am,” the stranger told her affably. The next moment, he half rose in his seat and extended his hand to her. “J. C. Laredo,” he introduced himself. “I came in to see if we might be able to have a successful exchange of information. I would have asked last night,” he went on, “but you looked a little too hot and perturbed to listen to reason.”

      “Taylor hardly ever listens to reason,” Frank told the man as if he was sharing some sort of a family confidence.

      “Taylor also has excellent hearing and is standing right here,” she pointed out angrily to her brother, struggling to hang on to her temper.

      She felt Laredo’s eyes slide over her torso as they took full measure of her. Slowly they went from her head down to her toes. It took all she had not to shiver.

      “You most certainly are,” Laredo agreed in a voice that told her he highly approved of the body he’d just inventoried.

      Frank leaned his head in toward Laredo and said, “I think you got her angry. I’d be careful if I were you. Taylor bites heads off when she’s angry.” With that, Frank began to retreat.

      “I’ll keep that in mind,” Laredo promised. His eyes shifted over to Taylor. “Taylor, is it?” he asked, rolling the name over on his tongue as if he were tasting it for sweetness. Satisfied, he smiled. “I think we got off on the wrong foot last night.”

      Frank was obviously still within hearing range because she heard her brother chuckle to himself and murmur, “Like that never happened before.”

      Taylor took a deep breath, struggling to get her surprisingly frayed temper under control. She was going to kill Frank when she got the chance. Never mind that he was two months shy of his wedding. She’d be doing her almost-sister-in-law a favor. Frank could be god-awful annoying when he wanted to be.

      “All right,” she said, her voice straining to sound civil as she faced the man sitting at her desk. “This is the season for goodwill toward men. I’m listening, Laredo. What were you doing at Eileen Stevens’s apartment last night?”

      Since the man had gotten out of the handcuffs, she saw no point in asking how he had managed to elude the security guards in the building’s lobby. That had obviously been child’s play for him.

      Laredo answered without missing a beat. “Probably the same thing as you.”

      She didn’t like playing games unless they involved a board and little colored game pieces. “You said you weren’t a cop.”

      The look on his face was innocence personified. “I’m not.”

      “Then you weren’t doing the same thing that I was,” Taylor concluded curtly. “And you weren’t supposed to be there.”

      Instead of arguing the point with her, Laredo surprised her by nodding his head. But just as she began to wonder why he was being so agreeable, he admitted, “I bent the rules a little. But I am investigating her death.”

      She highly doubted that there were two investigations going on at the same time. They hardly had enough people to sufficiently cover all the city’s crimes now. If another branch of law enforcement was involved, someone would have told the Chief of D’s, who in turn would have warned her.

      Handsome or not, this character, she concluded, was full of hot air. “By whose authority?” she asked, thinking that she was just giving him enough rope to hang himself.

      She wasn’t expecting the answer he gave her.

      “Indirectly, her mother, Carole Stevens. I’m actually doing this as a favor to my grandfather. He used to date the dead woman’s mother,” he confided.

      Taylor felt far from enlightened. Was this man just making this up and hoping his charm would fill in the gaps?

      “You’re contaminating a crime scene as a favor to your grandfather?” she challenged incredulously.

      “I know enough not to contaminate the crime scene,” Laredo assured her in a voice that she found as irritatingly patronizing now as she had the night before. The next moment, he reached into his pocket. Every nerve ending went on the alert and she started to reach for her sidearm out of habit.

      Laredo noted her reaction. “Relax,” he told her in a voice that could have easily been used to gentle a wild animal. “I’m just reaching for my wallet, not my Saturday night special.”

      She deeply resented the smirk she heard in the man’s voice.

      “Do you own one?” she wanted to know.

      The term referred to a weapon that was the common

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