LITMIR.BIZ

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It wasn’t much—for most people, he wouldn’t think of it as anything. But with Tracie, it was progress.

      “Starting to?” Frustration edged back into Jonas’s tone. “Look, we’ve got a gunman on the loose and we’ve just lost a witness. We don’t have time for you to ease your way into this. Tracie Crandall knows way more than she’s telling, and until we learn what she knows, we run the risk of losing more lives on this, maybe yours.” Jonas paused, and his voice dropped an octave to take on bone-chilling seriousness. “If you can’t handle this, Heath, tell me now, and I’ll put in someone who can.”

      “I’m on it.”

      Tracie took a long soak in the tub, but she couldn’t seem to wash away the chill she felt after watching Tim pass away in her arms. She dressed in her comfiest yoga pants and an oversized sweatshirt, and joined Gunnar in the kitchen, where her bare cupboards offered little to console her. Even Gunnar whined when she poured him the same old dry dog food.

      “Sorry, buddy,” she whispered when he looked up at her with pleading eyes.

      She jumped at the sound of the doorbell. “You expecting anyone?” she asked the dog.

      Gunnar cocked his head to the side and barked once before trotting off toward the front door. Tracie followed him and flipped the switch for the porch light. The broad-shouldered silhouette at the door appeared to be holding a pizza box. Tracie let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

      She looked down at her dog. “I didn’t order pizza. You?”

      Gunnar ignored her and poked his head through the doggie door.

      Taking her cue from her dog, Tracie drew closer and peeked tentatively through the sheer curtains.

      “It’s me. Heath,” her partner mouthed as he peered back at her through the gap in the shades.

      Tracie jumped back and opened the door. “What are you doing here?” She grabbed Gunnar by the collar before he could attack.

      Heath stepped into the house holding the pizza above his head. “Since you turned me down last night, I decided tonight I wouldn’t bother to ask.” He looked at her with challenge in his eyes.

      Tracie hardly noticed his look. Instead she stared at her dog, who was nuzzling Heath’s free hand playfully while the Coast Guardsman attempted to pet him.

      “Beautiful,” Heath nodded to Gunnar. “Part Great Dane?”

      “Mostly German shepherd, I think.”

      “But bigger,” Heath noted.

      “Uh-huh.” Tracie looked quizzically at Gunnar. “He likes you,” she said softly.

      “You sound surprised. Should I be insulted?”

      “Oh. No.” Tracie shook her head and tried to focus her thoughts. “It’s just that—” She stopped. She needed to convince Heath to leave, but at the same time, the pizza smelled so delicious. Her stomach growled. “What?”

      “Gunnar hated Trevor,” she admitted in a small voice.

      “Gunnar—” Heath looked down at the dog with a bright smile “—you’re a smart dog.” He crouched a little lower, still holding the box high above his head.

      Instead of leaping up and snatching away the pizza as she’d have expected, Gunnar planted his front paws on Heath’s knees and licked his chin.

      Swallowing her surprise, Tracie took a deep breath and prepared to tell Heath to leave. But the savory aroma of the pizza tickled her nostrils, and her stomach gave another grumble. She looked at her dog. Gunnar thought Heath was okay. And the day had certainly been an exceptionally trying one. Perhaps she could relax her rule just a little, under the circumstances. But what good was a personal policy if she didn’t always stick to it?

      Heath reached back through the open front door and grabbed a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.

      Tracie realized she’d been outmaneuvered. She tried one last protest. “Neither of us will get any sleep tonight if we drink that.”

      Turning the bottle so she could clearly see the label, Heath corrected her. “It’s caffeine-free.” He gave her another one of his bothersome grins that told her he knew he’d won. “Where can I put this?”

      With a sigh, Tracie led the way to her kitchen.

      THREE

      Heath wished he knew how to set Tracie at ease. She ushered him through the house like a museum tour guide who hadn’t learned her lines yet.

      “This is my living room. Sorry about the mess.”

      “You weren’t expecting me,” Heath assured her, taking in a room that wasn’t so much messy as cluttered, with built-in oak cabinetry halfway installed along the outside wall, piles of books awaiting the finished shelves and a solid-looking window bench stained but not varnished between the ceiling-high bookshelves. “Besides, it looks like the mess belongs to your handyman, not to you.”

      Tracie looked up at him and blushed. “I’m the handyman.”

      Glancing back over the cabinetry, Heath took in the solid craftsmanship. “I’m impressed. It looks like you know what you’re doing.”

      “I don’t, really.” Tracie tucked a few tools discretely on a shelf.

      Heath noticed the brand name of the drill just before she set it aside. Gerlach Tools—his family’s business. Fighting back the urge to look closer and see what line the drill came from, he continued on as Tracie led him through the room to her kitchen. No, it wouldn’t do at all to give away that much of his identity. If she knew who he really was, she might ask how he got into the military, and he didn’t feel at all confident that he could maintain his cover story if she began to ask him personal questions. Too much of his real-life history didn’t match up with his cover story. The last thing he needed was to blow his cover.

      Heath learned all manner of interesting tidbits from Tracie about life in the Coast Guard. He found out what to do when the copier jammed up, whom to call when a toilet backed up and how best to lie low when Jake got fired up. But he couldn’t seem to steer their conversation toward anything personal, not without Tracie heading him off, going silent or even leaving the room to check the porch light or investigate imaginary noises in the basement.

      He ran into a little more success when he brought the conversation around to the topic of the diamond smugglers. It seemed she was as intrigued as anyone about how they’d run their operation under everyone’s noses for so long.

      “None of the men we’ve captured will tell us anything—where the diamonds are coming from, or how they’ve been transporting them. The boats we captured contained a small number of stones—a few handfuls. Nothing like the reports we’ve heard from gemologists. They claim these fake rocks have taken over a major niche in the market. People have been paying top dollar for them for years, thinking they were getting real diamonds of superior color and clarity.” She tossed a pizza crust to Gunnar before helping herself to another piece.

      Heath smiled, glad to see her enjoying the food he’d brought. Tracie looked like she’d skipped too many meals. He tried to keep his tone casual, to keep her talking about the smugglers without getting suspicious of his curiosity and clamming up. But as he’d suspected, the woman who’d worked so hard to keep him at a distance had a flood of thoughts and theories pent up inside her. As she began to trust him, her dam began to crack.

      “What I don’t understand,” she continued after she’d washed down a bite of pizza with a swig of soda, “is why no one figured out something was wrong a long time ago. I mean, we no sooner discover these smugglers than multiple gemologists come forward and announce these fakes have been out there for over a decade. Granted, the diamonds were excellent imitations—chemically and optically identical to real diamonds. But how could synthetics sneak by so long on the national market? And why can’t the

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