Get a Clue

'So we're going to be together?' she asked with so much hope in her voice that it almost hurt.

Did hurt. Cooper wondered if he'd ever been so hopeful. If so, his job, his world, had stomped it out of him long ago.

'We're going to be together,' Dante said, sounding both fierce and shaky.

'Now, then.'

'No.' Dante let out another laughing groan. 'Soon as we can get back to my place. In town.'

'That might be days!'

'Shelly-'

'Come to me tonight. Please.'

'Shelly-'

'Please,'

They were never going to come out of there, Cooper thought. He'd lifted his hand to knock again when Dante said, 'Where's the guest?'

'Which one?'

'The cop.'

Again, Cooper lowered his hand.

'I don't know,' Shelly answered. 'But he seemed… intense.' Her voice hitched. 'Didn't he?'

'Cops get that way over dead bodies.'

A long silence followed, and Cooper's unease grew. What did they know that they weren't saying?

And would they tell him now if they thought he'd been eavesdropping?

Swearing to himself, he left them to their closet and went to find Lariana or Patrick. He just hoped they weren't in another closet somewhere knocking it out, because all this lusting in the house was getting to him.

As was one tough, soft, sweet-yet-hot Breanne Mooreland. She was really getting to him, but that in itself had just gotten complicated, very complicated.

Chapter 15

You can’t date a man and not plan on being disappointed. It comes with the territory.

– Breanne Mooreland's Journal Entry

The house was quiet, almost eerily so as Cooper moved through it, looking for Lariana and/or Patrick. In the main hallway, he stopped.

A huge, round saw blade, about three feet in diameter, hung on the wall outside the great room. On it was a beautiful, incredibly pleasing-to-the-eye landscape of the house and the woods around it, so clearly, amazingly painted, right down to the ripples on the lake, that Cooper would have sworn that it was somehow lit from within.

Curious about who would hang something now, today of all days, he headed down the hall toward the sound of running water, and found Lariana scrubbing the already spotless floor of the bathroom off the foyer. She had a brush in one hand, a bottle of cleaner in the other, and was virtually attacking the tile just below the sink with a vengeance that spoke volumes about pent-up emotions.

As Cooper had already noticed about her, Lariana didn't look much like a maid. Even while scrubbing as if her life depended on it, she maintained some inexplicable sophistication and elegance. Oddly enough, she wore a different outfit than she had earlier, black jeans so tight they looked like barely dried, spray-on paint and a silver, long-sleeved top with slits in the sleeves, revealing her toned arms. Bent over as she was, with her jeans sliding south, he got a good look at a tattoo low Oil her spine.

TROUBLE, it read in cursive.

Trouble? He could believe it. 'Spill something?' he asked.

With a startled scream, the brush went flying. Whirling around, she put a hand to her chest and stared at him, chest rising and falling with hummingbird-rapid breathing.

He nodded to what she'd been doing. 'Scrubbing pretty hard there.'

She narrowed her eyes. 'Maybe you have nerves of steel, Superman, but the rest of us don't.'

Leaning back against the doorway, he crossed his arms over his chest. 'Meaning?'

'Meaning that after this morning's little surprise, I needed to keep my hands busy.' Indeed, they shook as she retrieved the brush. 'That's not a crime.'

'Are you frightened, Lariana?'

'Only an idiot wouldn't be. If someone killed Edward-'

'If.'

She nodded once. 'If. Then it's one of us. Or one of you. Either way, we're all stuck here together. Not exactly comforting.' She said this while continuing to scrub with a vengeance. 'It's not like we often find dead bodies.'

He noticed the more upset she was, the heavier her accent. 'Why are you cleaning this particular bathroom?'

Her eyes narrowed and she sat back on her heels, swiping her arm over her forehead. 'Just because you're a cop somewhere else, in another life, you don't get to ask questions as if I'm guilty of something.' She went back to her frenetic cleaning, but when he just stood there, she once again sat back and glared at him. 'Dios mio. Just do it. Ask. Ask me whatever you want.'

'What do you think I want?'

'To know if I have an alibi.'

'Okay,' he said. 'What were you doing between last night and this morning?'

'Sleeping.'

Not exactly the truth, he knew. She hadn't been sleeping, she'd been doing Patrick. 'When was the last time you saw Edward?'

'When he was screaming his lungs out at Shelly yesterday before either you or Breanne arrived.'

'Why was he doing that?'

Lariana already looked as if she was sorry she'd said it. 'I do not know.'

'What was Shelly doing?'

She shrugged.

Cooper sighed. 'Fine.'

'Really? Because you don't seem like it's fine.'

'Lariana, we have a dead man in the cellar. I just want to know everything there is to know.'

'I suppose you cannot help yourself.'

'I suppose not,' he said with a ghost of a smile. It was true, he couldn't. Questioning, investigating, was just a part of him. Always had been. As a kid he'd sought to find the hidden mysteries in things. As an adult he'd gone into criminal science with a head for ferreting out the scum of the earth. He'd ended up in vice and had stayed there, even as it had slowly sucked the soul right out of him. The last case, a drug traffic ring, had taken him six months to crack, and at the end, in a fateful shootout he'd never forget, he'd had to decide which of two perps to shoot. The one he hadn't gone for had spun around and killed another cop.