The Quiet Storm

I’m sorry.

He looked at the copy of the note included in the file. Her girlish handwriting with its big loops and rounded letters looked shaky, but that was only to be expected by someone under severe emotional strain. It definitely matched other samples of her writing, also included in the file.

Elizabeth Quinn had left out a few interesting little tidbits during their meeting. Like Tina Hidalgo’s drug problem. The night of her death, she had enough heroin in her system to launch the space shuttle.

Elizabeth had also neglected to tell him her friend had been fired the week before from her sometime-job as a stripper for frequent absences from work—and even more damning, this wasn’t her first suicide attempt. Seven years earlier, she’d had her stomach pumped after swallowing a bottle of painkillers.

It was a clean case. Speth and Watson hadn’t missed anything. He set his pen down and rubbed at the ache between his eyes he always got when he read too much.

He wasn’t going to enjoy telling Elizabeth Quinn his conclusions. He could just picture that devastated grief in her pretty blue eyes again.

“What’s all this?”

Beau looked up from the file. He’d been so engrossed in trying to figure out how to break the news to Ms. Moneybags Quinn he hadn’t noticed the return of his temporary partner.

“Hey, Griff,” he greeted the clean-cut, scrubbed detective. Fresh off patrol, J. J. Griffin was eager to learn the ropes in the violent crimes division. He was a little too idealistic, maybe, but Beau figured that shine would wear off after another month or two.

“How was the dentist?”

Griff flashed his teeth. “Great. Not a single cavity, as usual. I’m telling you, it’s all about flossing.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

The kid ignored his dry tone and picked up the case file. “This is that Hidalgo case Speth and Walker caught, isn’t it? I thought they told the lieutenant in yesterday’s briefing they were signing it off as a suicide.”

“They did. I’m just taking another look for a friend of the victim’s.”

“That classy piece I saw sitting at your desk before I took off?”

Beau decided he didn’t like the slightly besotted look in Griff’s pretty-boy eyes. He grunted an assent.

“What are you looking for?” his partner persisted.

“The friend doesn’t agree it was self-inflicted. She thinks we’re missing something.”

“Like what?”

“If I knew that, the case wouldn’t still be closed, now would it?”

In his relentlessly cheerful way, Griffin didn’t appear to take offense at Beau’s curt tone. He pulled a chair over. “Mind if I take a look?”

Beau shrugged. If the kid wanted to waste his time, too, he wasn’t going to stop him.

He was examining the medical examiner’s report again when Griff plopped a photograph on top of it. “What’s this smudge here?”

“Where?”

The kid pointed it out. Beau frowned and reached into his desk drawer for a loupe for a closer look. What he saw through the magnifier sent red flags flashing all over the whole case.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

“What is it?”

“Her wrist is bruised. See? Right there?”

“Like she was tied up?”

He looked carefully at the autopsy photo. “No. They’re not deep enough for that. And only the right hand is bruised.” The writing hand, the trigger finger.

As if someone had held her wrist just long enough to force her to write that brief note. And then held it tight and helped Tina Hidalgo commit suicide.

Why hadn’t CSI picked up on it? And why wasn’t it in the ME’s report? Maybe because the rest of the facts in the case pointed so overwhelmingly to suicide.

It still might be, he reminded himself. Tina Hidalgo could have gotten those bruises hours—or even days—before her murder.

But all his cop instincts were warning him that everything in this case wasn’t as it appeared at first glance.

It looked like Elizabeth Quinn would get her way after all, probably just as she always did. Her friend’s case would go back into the active pile, which meant he was going to have to see the ice princess again.

He didn’t even want to think about whether his tangle of emotion at the thought was dread or anticipation.

Chapter 2

Several hours after her visit with the terrifying police detective, Elizabeth still couldn’t quite seem to catch her breath.

She sat on a bench near the water’s edge watching Alex toss stick after stick into the shallows in the hope that his new puppy would chase after it.

He wasn’t having much luck. Although she was a yellow Labrador, Maddie either didn’t have the retriever instincts of her breed or she didn’t quite catch the concept of fetch just yet. Instead of bounding into the water after the stick, she planted all four of her gangly legs on the rocky beach and watched the boy with a bemused expression on her jowly face.

Probably the same expression Elizabeth had worn at Beau Riley’s desk earlier—that slightly panicked what-am-I-supposed-to-do-now? look.

The detective’s opinion of her shouldn’t matter at all. She knew it. But she hated imagining what he must have thought of her sitting in front of him with her thoughts and words atangle. Pathetic. He must have thought she was absolutely pitiful, and he had probably agreed to help her only so he wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore.

She sighed, angry with herself for continuing to dwell on this. Was she so narcissistic, so desperately eager for approval, that she really cared why the man had agreed to help her? His motives didn’t matter. Finding Tina’s killer was the important thing.

Still, she couldn’t help wondering with bitter regret why he seemed to bring out the worst in her, first the night of Grace Dugan’s fund-raiser and then today at the police station.

Most of the time she was far more composed. She could go days without stumbling over her words or missing more than the occasional conversational beat.

If she did start to have trouble, she had learned over the years that she could invariably hide the worst of it behind a veneer of chilly reserve.

It was just her bad luck that Beau Riley—the first man she’d been attracted to since Stephen—made her forget all her usual defenses, made her feel just like a stupid, stuttering girl again.

And there was the real trouble, she admitted. She was attracted to him, to that masculine combination of dark wavy hair, green eyes and lean, dangerous features.

She knew better. Experience could be a cruelly effective teacher. A man as brash and confident as Beau Riley would want nothing to do with someone like her.

Alex grunted suddenly, and she looked up from her grim thoughts in time to see him throw the last stick from the pile he’d collected so carefully into the water with more pique than precision. He made a garbled series of sounds, each more frustrated sounding than the last as he glared at the dog he had adored until now.