Wedding Takedown Read online

  Rio’s waist.

  “You’re okay, babe.”

  Babe.

  The cocoon of their embrace evaporated as effectively as if Rio was a hypnotist and he’d snapped her out of a trance. A trance she couldn’t afford to wander into, not if she was going to keep her emotions regarding Rio in check. It’d taken this long to finally accept there was no hope for them. This was the same man who went undercover, whose life was at risk each and every day he went to work. Definitely not the kind of man she envisioned herself with for the long run.

  “I’m okay. But she’s not, is she? Is she dead, Rio?”

  “Yes, she’s dead. Do you know who it is, Kayla?”

  She blinked. Rio was every inch the cop. She knew more than ever what mattered most to Rio. Being a detective.

  “Yes, I know her. Knew her. But not personally. I mean, not well. She was in our yoga class until she had to quit because she’d taken on this job with the mayor. It was going to be her big break into politics. She was so young, Rio, so alive. She was asking, begging for help. And I couldn’t do anything...” She didn’t finish, didn’t have to as she looked at the body of the woman, facedown and forever still.

  “Did you catch a look at who did this to her?”

  “Only a glimpse. Mostly I heard him. Big, booming deep voice. He was really angry from the sounds of it. I heard her scream. Then a gunshot—the first shot was while they were still inside the barn. As I got closer I heard her talking. She was speaking low, probably trying to convince him not to hurt her. After he threw her out here, she asked me for help, Rio. She was still alive, but the second shot killed her.” Her insides turned bilious as she recounted the horror. “I’m sorry.” She turned and tried to run but ended up on her knees at the side of the barn door, retching. Rio kept his hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. The reassurance in such a simple gesture was immeasurable. She soaked up his energy, hoping it would soothe her heaving stomach.

  Facing him again, she tried to look anywhere but at Meredith. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to apologize for.” His eyes were dark and unreadable.

  “You’ve never barfed at a scene, I’ll bet.”

  “You’d be surprised.” Gently he led her off to the side, away from Meredith’s still form. “Keep telling me what you remember, Kayla.”

  “Okay.” She clasped her hands in front of her. If only she’d come tomorrow morning, instead...

  “Did he see you or your van?”

  “No, I don’t think so. The van’s too far down the drive and he didn’t come outside until after he threw her out here. He heard me and asked ‘Who’s there?’ He knew I was out here, heard me, but you showed up and spooked him. I made it look like I was running into the darkness around the woods, but then I doubled back and hid behind one of the buildings next to the barn. Right after I heard sirens and then saw the lights from what must have been your car, I saw him run past, not looking for anyone, from what I could tell. When he took off for the woods, I went inside.”

  Thank God.

  “It might have been me, but probably it was the sirens scared him away.” Rio paused. “Any chance it was a woman with a deep voice?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I don’t think so. It definitely sounded like a man and he had heavy footsteps. The silhouette was masculine, large. I heard him urinate against the side of the building. And he’d started to pull apart the pile of hay bales where I was hiding. Most women can’t lift a bale and toss it as quickly as he did. If I hadn’t made a run for it, or you hadn’t shown up, he’d have seen me within seconds.”

  Rio’s expression remained neutral except for the compassionate light in his eyes. A light she’d once thought he might be able to focus on her for more than a round of mind-blowing sex, a light that might warm her long past the early heat they’d shared. But Rio was a cop, from the top of his raven hair to the bottom of his sexy feet—which she’d noticed on the few occasions she’d seen him naked. He had limitless compassion, for victims and the community he protected. There wasn’t any room for personal relationships in Rio’s world. And no room for understanding her need to have a man with a more stable profession in her life.

  She’d tried dating a cop, another SVPD detective, before Rio and it didn’t work out, either. Of course, now that same cop was engaged to her friend Zora, so the reality was that when things were supposed to work, they did.

  She and Rio weren’t supposed to work.

  As soon as she’d found out Rio was a cop, she’d felt the warning tugs from her heart but ignored them. Because she and Rio had shared a chemistry she’d never experienced before. But in the cold mornings after they’d made love, she’d had to get honest with herself. She couldn’t take the chance of a future full of loss due to Rio’s profession. Once she’d found out he’d been assigned to work her brother’s case, she’d used that fact to call off their brief relationship.

  “If it hadn’t been me, someone from SVPD would have been here. We weren’t going to let you get hurt.” Rio’s confident tone was another one of his professional tools. She didn’t disagree with him, but she acknowledged that if the killer had decided to shoot through the hay, she might be lying here as dead as Meredith, who was sprawled in the mud path with her briefcase in front of her and all her pretty floral files spilled out in a haphazard fan. Organization didn’t matter in death.

  “Detective Ortega, we’ve got some footprints out behind the barn and Officer Pasczenko found two shells.” A fresh-faced police officer stood next to them, his eagerness to get the job done reassuring in the dark night.

  “Tell the forensics teams. They’ll be here soon if they aren’t already.”

  “You want me to tell them, Detective?”

  “That’s what I said, Officer Ogden.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The officer’s obvious pride at being trusted to complete the communication would have been heartwarming if Kayla wasn’t frozen in shock.

  “This was supposed to be a simple trip to do some preplanning for a wedding.”

  “Whose wedding?”

  “Cynthia Charbonneau. The mayor’s daughter. She’s planning a last-minute ceremony for next weekend. Her mother called and offered me a generous retainer fee for the extra work it’s going to take. I couldn’t turn her down, even in the middle of the spring rush.”

  “Would you have otherwise?”

  “Turned her down? No, I don’t base my business on rumors about my clients. And she’s been a good regular customer—she has a standing order for a fresh arrangement each week.”

  Rio’s silence conveyed his agreement. Damn it, but she wished she wasn’t still so in tune with him. That she didn’t notice that in his black T-shirt and the casual blazer he looked like some kind of freaking model.

  It would be much easier if Rio looked like a toad.

  But even if he looked like the ugliest creature on earth, she’d still have a problem. Because Rio Ortega was the most loving, most generous man she’d ever met.

  He was also the most career-driven—at times arrogant but always professional—law-enforcement worker she’d ever known. And she’d known plenty.

  “Do you think it’s true, Rio? Do you think the mayor rigged the election?”

  “I can’t comment on that, Kayla. But what I can say is that if it smells like manure, chances are that’s what it is. No matter how pretty the field it’s in.”

  “You’re never short on your own kind of poetry, Rio.”

  “You should have stuck around, Kayla. I could have regaled you with all kinds of fancy words.”

  The heat in her cheeks was immediate, as was her desire to close the short distance between them and press her body against his. But anger reined her in as she realized that was his intent—to remind her of the hot nights they’d spent together when she’d agreed to date him late last fall.

  Before he’d told her he was a cop. A detective. His not telling her about his career was what
she’d used as her defense against his potent invitation to take their relationship deeper. She’d argued that she couldn’t be with a man who wouldn’t reveal who he was or what he did right from the get-go. The mere thought of being with someone who went undercover for unknown lengths of time stressed her out.

  And admittedly she still felt a little stupid for not facing her trepidations about his profession before she’d gone to bed with him, much less started to fall for him.

  “I’m sorry, Kayla. You’ve just had a terrible shock and I’m giving you grief. We’re going to have to continue this at the station—I need your statement. Do you mind going with Officer Ogden and getting started? You don’t need to be out here in the cold any longer. I’ll be along shortly.”

  “I can drive myself.” She needed the reassurance of her van. It was a second office, and a reminder that she wasn’t just an almost-victim of a crime, or a murder witness.

  “Let Officer Ogden drive you. I’ll have another officer bring your van to the station.”

  The real Rio was back, the one with whom she could get herself into a lot of trouble. His hand was on her elbow, his warmth soothing.

  “I’m all right, honest. I’ll follow Officer Ogden there.”

  “It’s not a question, Kayla. It’s protocol. You were at the scene of a murder. We have to take a look at the van before you get back into it.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You’re treating me like a suspect?”

  Rio’s mouth was a thin line. “Damn it, Kayla, I know you’re not a murderer. But I can’t make any exceptions—”

  “When it comes to your job. I think this is right about where we left off last year, isn’t it?”

  She wrenched away her arm and stalked over to Officer Ogden, who stood next to a Silver Valley PD sedan. Kayla had no idea why or how it had happened, but she’d found herself at the mercy of the law again.

  * * *

  Rio watched as Kayla got into the patrol car with Ogden. Forensics would do a formal check of her van later.

  He’d learned through years of police work to never rely on just his eyes. The criminal could have had an accomplice or circled back and hidden in the roomy van. Kayla hadn’t thought of that—she’d only recognized that he needed to be scrupulous about inspecting her van. He saw it all the time—witnesses and victims felt as if they were being victimized a second time by the work the police needed to do to ensure justice prevailed.

  It stung more than usual because the witness was Kayla. He’d relived those few weeks with her more than he’d ever admit to himself, always questioning whether they still might be together if he had told her from the beginning what he did and what case he was working on.

  He hadn’t expected to have those feelings after that first night. But when one night turned into a week, he’d had to tell her that he didn’t work only as a detective. He often went undercover. She hadn’t been happy to find that out. When her brother’s case came up, he could have passed it to another detective, could have done a lot of things to preserve at least their friendship.

  But she found out first, when she’d been in the same diner as Rio. He’d been eating a quick lunch with three uniformed officers. As a detective he almost always wore civilian clothes, his weapon holstered under a jacket or blazer. That day he’d finished up a long undercover case and was still dressed to fit in with the members of the drug ring he’d infiltrated. Baggy jeans, big gold jewelry and his baseball cap on backward. The warmth and rush of awareness he associated with Kayla had hit him when he’d looked across the booths and found Kayla staring at him. She’d been dining with her girlfriend from yoga class Zora Krasny.

  The “oh, shit” moment had been the end of their relationship.

  She wouldn’t even look at him now as she sat in the police car, staring straight ahead through the window.

  Kayla’s pallor shook him more than he cared to admit. The woman he’d thought he might be falling for was strong and quick to defend anyone, from her employees to a surly customer.

  Her defense of herself had been pretty good, too. When she’d found out what his line of work was, any hope of a future with Kayla was crushed under the iron will she employed to break up with him and keep him out of her life. The stress of finding out that her brother, a local firefighting hero recently promoted to chief, was being charged with negligence at his job didn’t help matters. It wasn’t just that, though. According to her brother, Keith, the real issue was her need for control over her life,

  Still, it would have been nice to be the man who’d changed her mind about what she needed. He’d like to be the man who changed her mind about a lot of things, and those included allowing a man to treat her well and to love her the way she deserved.

  He pulled on one of the many pairs of latex gloves he kept in his pocket as he walked over to the crime scene. He silently accepted the wallet one of the forensic team members handed him.

  “We found it in the kitchen. Everything was spilled out of her purse.” Officer Kaufmann was a seasoned forensics expert on SVPD and one Rio enjoyed working with because he always shot straight from the hip.

  “Meredith Houseman.” He scrutinized her driver’s license photo. The name was familiar and when he looked at her body, the business suit, there was no doubt she was the woman Kayla had mentioned earlier.

  “The mayor’s executive assistant.”

  “Yes, sir. Should we call him?”

  “Hell no, not yet. Let’s leave that to Superintendent Todd.” Rio didn’t want the mayor or any of his cronies nosing around his murder investigation. Not now, not at all. He still wasn’t convinced that Mayor Charbonneau was more than a front for the recently reformed cult that was trying to set up shop on the outskirts of Silver Valley. The embezzlement charges against the previous mayor had happened too quickly, too conveniently as far as Rio was concerned. And Mayor Charbonneau’s appearance in Silver Valley just in time for the special election had been suspicious.

  And now the newly elected mayor’s assistant was dead. Murdered at the same place where the mayor’s daughter was supposed to be getting married in a little more than a week.

  “Detective Ortega? We’ve found something unusual on the body.” The county coroner stood in front of him, his normally quiet demeanor agitated.

  “What’s that?”

  “It looks like her ribs were smashed in, probably collapsing at least one lung. She took a brutal beating before she was shot.”

  “Damn it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Rio, you and I both know that while the rumors may prove correct, unless we have evidence of wrongdoing, we can’t ask for a search warrant on the new mayor’s residence. No can do.” Colt Todd, Silver Valley’s superintendent of police, leveled his cool gaze on Rio. There was no sense in arguing with him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We can’t afford to do anything less than what’s perfectly legal and appropriate throughout this investigation. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” Rio couldn’t argue with his boss, not on this one. SVPD had plenty going on at the moment, between providing testimony to put a serial killer behind bars for life, keeping an eye on a cult from New York that was trying to reunite in their jurisdiction and investigating the validity of the evidence they’d collected against the former mayor. Of course, Rio didn’t think for one minute that their former mayor had been involved in any of the charges against her. It was a setup, and he’d bet his last dollar that the new mayor was at least peripherally involved, if not behind the entire scheme.

  “Do you have any leads on the victim?” Todd’s face had its usual neutral expression, but Rio heard the weariness in his tone. SVPD was being slammed from all sides by crimes that, while they looked unrelated, were proving to be linked in damning ways. The major connection was to the former cult members, all convicted felons. SVPD had to have proof to request restraining orders, or to force these suspicious new citizens of Silver Valley to leave by having the state rescind its
permission to allow them to serve probation in Pennsylvania instead of New York.

  “I have a few leads, sir. Two officers are out now, informing the victim’s parents. The victim is Meredith Houseman, age twenty-seven, Silver Valley resident. A graduate of Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland. She had a degree in political science. She worked as a political intern in DC and here in Harrisburg before landing the job with Mayor Charbonneau. She was living at home with her parents while she earned money to go to law school—she’d been accepted by Penn State to study at Dickinson.”

  “Damn shame.” Colt Todd shook his head, his frown deepening to a scowl. “There’s going to be a huge backlash with this, especially the media. They’re still not satisfied Charbonneau got into office legally.”

  Neither was Rio, and he suspected his boss agreed, but it wasn’t anything they verbalized. It didn’t matter, not until they found solid evidence that the new mayor was behind any illegal doings. SVPD wasn’t a small department, with thirty officers and two to three detectives depending upon operational tempo. It was considered midsize and was usually more than enough to serve the twenty thousand citizens of Silver Valley.

  “Debbie’s on it, sir.” Rio referred to the SVPD’s spokesperson. She’d moved up from her job as receptionist when the Female Preacher Killer had been in the middle of his killing spree, wreaking havoc on Silver Valley last Christmas.

  “Great. One more thing, Rio. You’d better sit down for this.”

  Here it comes.

  “You understand that you have to consider Kayla Paruso as a suspect. And then, once you clear her, we need to keep an eye on her. Make sure she’s safe.”

  “She isn’t a killer, sir.”

  Todd held up his hands. “For legal purposes, Rio. I know damn well she’s not a criminal, much less a murderer. But this is the second murder investigation she’s involved in, and she is the only witness to this one. We have no other leads and I will not have the DA or governor coming after SVPD for anything procedurally imperfect.”

  “Yes, sir.”