Guilty as Sin (19 page)

John stood from the table. “Something about Tricia?”

Kate nodded. “I can’t get into details, but Tommy thinks he might have found something worth looking into.”

The muscles around John’s mouth tightened. “Tommy?”

“Ibarra,” Kate clarified.

“Oh, I know which Tommy you’re talking about. I didn’t realize you two were getting so chummy again. I can never get a break when he’s around.”

The butterflies of excitement sank like rocks in her stomach. “That’s inappropriate, and completely unfair. Tricia’s father asked Tommy to help with the investigation. It’s in Tricia’s best interest that Tommy and I put aside whatever differences we have in order to find her. I think you should do the same.”

John grimaced. “You’re right,” he said with a sheepish look on his face. “Something about that guy rubs me the wrong way.”

Kate didn’t think it was wise to tell him the feeling was mutual.

“And I’m sorry for saying that. I know you’re here as a professional and your only focus is on the case. In fact, it was probably unfair of me to insist you have lunch today with so much going on.”

Kate gave him a noncommittal shrug.

John leaned down, a sly smile on his face. “Even so, I’m
not going to apologize for it. I had too much fun catching up with you. But I promise not to force my company on you until this mess is all over.”

“It’s hardly torture,” Kate said, and leaned up to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. She waved to Magda and thanked her for lunch as John walked her to the door.

K
ate arrived at the sheriff’s station ten minutes later. The dispatcher, a woman Kate recognized as one of the volunteers from the day before, directed her to CJ’s office. “CJ’s running a little late—he had a domestic violence call clear over by Priest Lake that he had to respond to, but Tommy’s already back there.”

Kate thanked her and walked back to the office, trying to ignore the knot tightening in her belly as she anticipated spending any time alone with Tommy in a small enclosed space.

She took a bracing breath and pushed the door open. He was sitting at the small table in the corner, his tall, muscular frame managing to make the furniture look like it had been built for children. He gave her a cool nod in greeting. She did the same, trying not to notice the way the sun streaming in from the window made his thick, short hair come alive with a riot of red and gold highlights or the way his biceps strained the sleeves of his black polo shirt.

She joined him at the table, and he pushed a stack of papers toward her. “You can start with that,” he said, not bothering to look up as he spoke. “I’m still gathering additional info about a few more potential leads.”

Okay, so no small talk. And why should there be? They were both professionals, working on this case, and whatever
had happened between them in the past was dead and buried and had no relevance in their lives now.

She’d never had a colleague so studiously ignore her as Tommy was doing now, his eyes locked on the computer. He’d been the one to call her there, she thought. And now he wanted to pretend she didn’t exist?

As she sifted through the papers, she felt a little devil tap her on the shoulder, the one she’d never known existed until she met Tommy Ibarra. The one that urged her to do things that were totally out of character. Who convinced her to lie, and sneak, and offer her virginity up on a platter to the first boy who made her secret parts tingle.

Now that devil urged her to ignore all the leave-me-alone signals Tommy was putting out there. “So how did you get all this information?” Kate asked as she began looking through the papers.

Tommy looked up, his expression stony. “Some of it’s public record. The rest you probably don’t want to know.”

Kate scanned what looked like someone’s medical chart from a Boulder area hospital. “Don’t you worry about getting caught?”

“It’s my job not to get caught. That’s why my clients hire me.”

Kate wrinkled her nose. “But couldn’t you be arrested? Can’t they?”

Those acre-wide shoulders lifted and lowered in a shrug. “I don’t worry about it much.”

“But don’t you worry about what your clients are doing with that information?” she pressed.

His dark gaze met hers, deadpan. “Many of my clients hire me to find pieces of information no one else can find. I give them what they want, and they pay me well for it. What they do with that information is their business.”

Kate stared blankly at the sheet of paper in front of her until the letters started to swim. Despite his behavior over the last two days, it was still hard for Kate to wrap her head around how the Tommy she had known had become so cynical, so cold. She’d done this, she realized. She and her father, when he’d tried to rip Tommy’s world apart as much as their own had been.

“How did you get into this?”

Tommy arched a dark brow in question.

“This business. I thought you’d end up taking over the ranch, like your father wanted. I never knew you were even into computers.”

Tommy’s mouth quirked to the side, the first crack in his stony expression she’d seen. “Me neither, until I got into the Army. I’d studied a little computer science in college, but when I joined the Ranger Corps I was assigned as the lead communications specialist for my regiment. Turned out I also had a knack for surveillance, both the physical and cyber kind. After I got out I had enough contacts who were familiar with me and my skills to start my own business.”

“I know Sandpoint has grown, but it doesn’t seem like it would generate the kind of demand that would pay for that house of yours.”

Finally, a little smile glimmered in his eyes as he looked up from his computer screen. “As long as I have access to the Internet and a phone line, I can work anywhere. But I also have an office and a place in Seattle, and I work with several larger firms that hire me as a contractor. I only spend about half my time here.”

“And the rest of your time jet-setting around the globe,” Kate prodded.

“Mostly just around the States. I got my share of jet-setting in my Ranger days.”

“I never would have imagined you in the military, much less special forces,” Kate mused. Not then, anyway. Now Tommy’s military experience seemed to have seeped into every cell in his body. It was in his steady, impassive gaze, the way he held his body, perfectly still yet vibrating with readiness.

This time when he looked at her his dark gaze was sharp, challenging. “Oh, yeah? How did you imagine I turned out after what happened?”

Kate swallowed hard as she realized her mistake in admitting that she’d thought about him at all. She felt her face heat as she remembered some of what she’d imagined, the fantasies she’d spun. Her very favorite had been the one where she left school one day to find Tommy’s truck parked outside. He’d be leaning against it, wearing a T-shirt and worn jeans, a sly smile on his face and a knowing glint in his eye. He’d pin her up against the truck and kiss her like he’d been dying for the taste of her.

Then… oh God, just thinking about it made her want to melt into a puddle of embarrassment, though he couldn’t possibly read her thoughts… Then he’d pull an engagement ring out of her pocket and ask her to marry him. Of course she’d say yes and drive back to Idaho with him.

“I imagined you here, working with your father on the ranch, most likely married with a couple kids,” she said simply.

“There was a time in my life when it easily could have gone that way, though I don’t know that my father and I could ever see eye to eye enough to work that closely together. As it is, he can only stand me coming around to help a couple days a week.”

Kate gave him a little smile and went back to her reading.

After a few moments Tommy broke the silence. “You know, I never spent much time imagining what happened to you.”

The knife dug deeply into her chest and just as quickly withdrew. “I didn’t have to, not with you popping up on the news all the time. I couldn’t get away from you no matter how bad I wanted to. Apparently I still can’t.”

And back in went the knife.

Why should it matter, she scolded herself, especially when the feeling was mutual. Wasn’t it?

She didn’t have much time to stew on it before CJ burst in the office, his brusque “What have we got?” a sharp reminder that she had a job to do.

And once again Tommy was proving too much of a distraction.

Tommy hit a key on his computer that made the printer start humming and spit out several more pages. “Here’s some more info on the shuttle driver.” Tommy gestured with his chin. “He’s already in your pile.”

Kate grabbed the pages, and while Tommy gave CJ the highlights, Kate focused all of her attention on parsing the data Tommy had gathered.

He was thorough, no doubt about that. He’d collected school, driving, employment, and medical records for over half a dozen possible suspects.

Two hours later Kate had arranged all of the information in order of priority. “The top three are the handyman, Robert Walford, his roommate, Dillon O’Brien, who helped him out at Frankel’s sometimes, and Vitaki Korcu, the son of the overnight nurse who drove his mother to and from work.”

As CJ made phone calls to the local law enforcement in Boulder, Tommy went to work tracking down any information he could find about the top three men’s recent credit card activity to see if there was any evidence that they’d headed this way.

Though nothing was solid yet, Kate couldn’t suppress
excitement bubbling through her blood along with the slight easing of the knot in her stomach as she felt one more nudge of optimism thanks to the information Tommy had gathered.

She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but as she drove back to the townhouse, she couldn’t keep from thinking that maybe, just maybe they were about to get a break.

The envelope was on her windshield the next morning when she went outside. She instinctively looked around, even though it could have been placed there any time in the last twelve hours. At this early hour, there still wasn’t much activity. Kate picked up the envelope carefully and with no small amount of trepidation.

Being a marginally public figure, Kate had gotten her share of harassing notes and phone calls.

Then again, it could be nothing but a marketing brochure, although she noticed none of the other cars parked along the street had anything tucked under their windshields.

She opened the envelope to find two pieces of paper inside. The one was plain printer paper, the message typewritten in black text: “They didn’t find her in time. Will this time be any different?”

A jolt of adrenaline shot through her as she pulled out the second page. It was a photocopy of a news article. The headline read “Local girl, 16, Missing.” The accompanying photo showed a pretty girl with big eyes and a wide smile. Her long, light hair—it was hard to tell the exact hue from the black-and-white photo—was held back from her face by a headband.

Kate went on to read the article describing how Ellie Cantrell, a sixteen-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, went
missing on her way home from cheerleading practice. She looked at the dateline of the article. October 12, 2001. Nearly ten years ago. At the time the article had been written, the girl had been missing for three days.

Goose bumps broke out all over her body as she read her mother’s reply to speculation that the girl had run away. “Ellie is a straight A student. She volunteers as a Candy Striper at the hospital.” The statements from Ellie’s friends matched those of her parents, describing her as a nice girl, a studious girl, not big into partying.

No one who knew her could point to anything in her life that would motivate her to run away. “Ellie’s really tight with her parents,” said one friend. “Running away isn’t something she would do.”

Kate took the article and went back into the townhouse. Within minutes she had her laptop going and had logged into the St. Anthony’s Web site to access the comprehensive database of missing persons.

It took her only a few seconds to pull up Ellie’s record. And to find out the young girl’s fate.

Her throat tightened as she looked at the field marked “Status.” It was filled with the single word: “Deceased.”

Kate brought up her Web browser and did a search on Ellie Cantrell, which led to thousands of results. Kate clicked on the headline that read “Missing Omaha Teen’s Body Found.”