“Sure,” Brianna readily agreed. “It can wait until we get back. I’m easy.”
Slanting her a quick look, Jackson murmured more to himself than to his partner, “Well, that answers that question.”
She waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, she finally asked, “What question is that?”
“If your nose grows when you tell a lie,” he said matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t.”
Brianna didn’t take any offense. She didn’t think of herself as being small-minded or petty. But she did feel that she needed to set him straight.
“I don’t lie, Muldare.”
Jackson found it hard not to laugh at that. “You’re also not easy to get along with.”
“I’ll refrain from pointing out that that’s like the pot calling the kettle black,” she informed him. The man was definitely a challenge, but she did enjoy a challenge. “Just get your mind back on the case.”
“Gladly.” Jackson counted to ten—slowly—in his mind. Then, just as Brianna reached over to turn the radio on in an effort to terminate the almost suffocating silence in the car, he asked, “You really think this woman we’re traveling all this way to see is going to be able to tell us anything useful?”
“I don’t know,” Brianna replied honestly. “I’m hoping she’ll say something that might trigger something else. Half of all crimes wind up being solved by accident.”
A frown darkened his handsome, chiseled face. “That’s not exactly reassuring.”
“Oh, but it is,” she contradicted, “because accidents happen all the time, and in the end, it really doesn’t matter just how you figured something out as long as you did.”
He shook his head. She was just spouting a bunch of rhetoric, most likely because the woman liked hearing herself talk. It could be worse. She could have a voice that sounded like nails dragging along a chalkboard.
“Still say this is a wild-goose chase. After all, all the other people we’ve interviewed in the last few days didn’t enlighten us,” he reminded her.
She studied his profile. The man could have been chiseled out of granite. “You’ve always been a pessimist, haven’t you?”
He didn’t even have to think about his answer. The path he was on had been set years ago. “Pretty much. Although I’m not a pessimist,” he corrected. “I’m a realist.”
“Reality can be pretty nice at times.”
They might both be police detectives, but they came from totally different worlds. Hers was made up of roses, his was the thorns. “Not from my point of view,” he answered.
Sympathy filled her. “Hard life right from the beginning?”
All right, he’d been polite enough, Jackson thought. “This is a car, O’Bannon, not some shrink’s couch. Stop trying to act like one,” he warned sharply.
“I’m not trying to shrink you, Jackson,” she protested, because she really wasn’t trying to do that. “I’m trying to be your friend.”
“I don’t remember advertising for one,” he told her shortly. He caught himself before his temper erupted. “Look, you’ve got your view of the world, and it seems to be working for you. I’m happy for you, but don’t try to tell me that life’s all sunshine and roses, because it’s not,” he said with emphasis. “Not when your mother walks out on you and your old man tries to drown the pain every night in a sea of alcohol while your little brother tries to find his peace in any drug he can get his hands on.
“Damn it,” he cursed, angry with her, angrier with himself, “why do you keep pushing like this?” Jackson snapped. He hadn’t meant to tell Brianna anything, least of all what he’d just allowed to spill out. But somehow, despite his resolve to keep everything to himself, the words had come pouring out of their own accord.
“Because once it’s all out, then you can deal with it. We can deal with it,” she emphasized.
There was fury in his eyes when he glared at her. “There is no we,” he told her coldly.
But Brianna had been raised holding her own against three brothers and, on occasion, her sister as well. She wasn’t about to back off.
“There are two people in this car,” she pointed out very calmly. “Two people form ‘we.’”
Jackson blew out a breath, trying his best to hang on to his temper. Trying not to tell Brianna off or curse at her for invading his life like some sort of insidious virus. Most of all, he wanted her to keep her distance from him because the woman was getting to him in ways he was trying very hard to resist. Damn it, why didn’t she have the kind of face that stopped clocks instead of his heart?
“Why hasn’t anyone strangled you yet?” he asked.
He heard her laugh, as if his comment really amused her. It wasn’t meant to. “I’m very fast on my feet.”
“I’d keep my running shoes on if I were you.”
Brianna nodded. “Duly noted.”
He could hear the smile in her voice. The woman really was one of a kind.
Jackson drove faster.
* * *
“You’ve got company, Irene,” the tall, muscular aide at the residential senior-care facility said.
Irene Jessop slid her hand primly over the housedress covering her lap, as if pressing the wrinkles with her palm would somehow make her garment—and thus her—more presentable. Looking up through her bifocals, she blinked several times before earnestly asking, “Do I know you?”
Brianna sat down on the bed next to Irene’s wheelchair. “We’re from Aurora. I’m Detective O’Bannon, and this is Detective Muldare. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
The woman’s eyes brightened. “I remember Aurora,” Irene said. “I think I’m from there.”
“You are,” Brianna told her kindly.
Irene nodded, absorbing the information. Her eyes took on a sparkle as she gazed at Jackson. She appeared far more interested in the tall, good-looking man standing next to the person asking her questions.
She flashed a smile at him. “You want to ask me any questions, honey?”
Brianna knew when to take advantage of a situation. Rising from the
