Soul Rest: A Knights of the Board Room Novel (14 page)

Despite the curled lip and tough guy expression, he had long, thick lashes and a boy’s mouth. She tended to notice such things, though it didn’t ever make her foolish enough to lower her guard. Behind those thick lashes were hostile eyes. His fingers were twitching as if he had a habit…one that had to do with looking for an excuse to show how badass he could be. “Do you think someone wrote that about DeeDee or the dog?” she asked in a companionable tone, as if she considered them a valuable source for her story. That often disarmed a tense situation, because people did like to feel important. “That’s what’s written on the ground here. ‘Dead Bitch.’ Or maybe it was unrelated. A warning for someone hanging around here? Did the ladies get into a fight with one another?” She looked toward the hookers.

“We don’t know no DeeDee,” the tall boy said.

“Oh hell yeah, Dogboy. Remember, she had the great big titties.”

Celeste’s gaze snapped back to the boy as Dogboy shoved his friend. “Shut up, Bobby. You don’t tell no one you know a dead person. Cops lock you up just for that. They looking for someone to pin it on.”

“Aw, why do they care about dead pussy like her? She was just a ho.”

Celeste glanced at Bobby but brought her gaze back to Dogboy. What she saw in his face made her increase her grip on the handgun she had tucked in a reinforced pocket holster in her coat. She knew how to shoot it with decent accuracy without having to remove the gun from its present location. She’d practiced at the range with a cheap jacket she’d bought at the Goodwill. But she always preferred to use her wits as her first defense. The gun was the last. “Wouldn’t you want someone to care if someone killed you?” she asked.

“Listen to her. She’s like our foster momma, Dogboy. She don’t know that our real brothers watch out for us.” Bobby gave her a hard grin, his eyes sparkling a little too bright. Probably pumped up on some of the product they were selling. “We take care of anyone who fucks with us,” he said.

Dogboy didn’t agree or disagree with that, but his unfriendly look fastened on her face, didn’t waver. She was reminded of a snake watching prey. “That includes nosy reporters,” he said.

“I’ll keep that in mind. But a reporter can also be a friend…Dogboy, was it?” Her gaze shifted deliberately to the “Dead Bitch” impression on the ground. She was pretty certain the dark-brown remnants were some type of blood. The dog’s blood? Or maybe DeeDee’s, which was why enough of it was still there for her to see. What were the chances the words had been written in the approximate spot where the dog had been left seven days earlier? And possibly where DeeDee herself had been killed. If so, the crime techs would have likely combed the area and photographed that evidence. But did they know about the dog?

She needed to pull her head out of her ruminating ass, because apparently her pensiveness had been noted and hit a nerve. “Listen, bitch…” Dogboy reached under his shirt for what she was sure would be a gun or knife he could wave in her face. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to deal with that kind of posturing. She was pretty sure he wasn’t planning to shoot her in broad daylight in front of two hookers and the sparse scattering of nearby neighbors, despite their houses being dilapidated enough to suggest they were mostly inhabited by junkies and “didn’t see nothin’” ostriches.

She planted her feet and prepared to defuse. But before Dogboy could follow through, his friend caught his arm. “Save it, D. Five-O.”

As the boys and the hookers melted away, she stayed in place, pulling out her notebook to write a few things down. A few seconds later, the police unit pulled up next to her, now standing all alone in the circle. “Celly?”

She turned. Mike had his window down, and she could see that Billy was riding with him. District 1 sometimes had a shortage of units, causing the officers to have to double up. Though Billy had completed his obligatory four months of rotation through the districts that completed his BRPD academy training, someone had made the intelligent decision to have the rookie ride with Mike. She wondered if it had been Leland.

She bent enough to wave at Billy. “Hey, boys. Out trawling for pussy? Or donuts?”

Mike shook his head at her. “This isn’t a great place for you to be hanging out.”

“That’s my life, Officer. Same as you.”

“You don’t have any on you, do you?” Billy asked. “Donuts?”

Mike shook his head and tossed her a resigned look that said it all.
Rookies.
Though she expected he would have been happy if she had donuts as well. Sometimes she did, and it always amused her when they asked. Men did tend to think with their stomachs. “Not today. Got caught up in following some leads and didn’t get past the bakery. I thought you two weren’t supposed to be talking to me. Your big, bad sergeant said so.”

“Hope he wasn’t too rough on you,” Mike said. “Leland’s a good man. One of our best.”

“I have a pretty tough hide. If you think good things about him, I’m on board.” Too much on board, in fact. She missed him. She really did. She didn’t want to wait until the next session or even freaking Wednesday. Why was she letting him set the rules?

“So why’re you hanging out in a cul-de-sac with these teenage troublemakers, Celly?” Mike grinned at her. “You looking for an underage stud? I’d have to haul you in for that.”

“I have all I can handle from you, Mike. I see you and my loins are all aflutter.”

“Don’t tell my wife. She scares the shit out of me. Says if she ever suspects my parts have been anywhere they shouldn’t be, she’ll cut them off.”

“That woman’s a keeper.” Celeste considered her notes. “There was a dog killed here about ten days ago.” Squatting, she pointed to the scrawled writing with her pen as Mike leaned through the window to see. “I’m think that’s ‘Dead Bitch,’ though it’s been compromised at this point. Had a lot of trash over it. Animal control thought the dog might have been hit by a car, but the owner believes the dog was murdered. Maybe beaten or stabbed.”

“Christ, people who’d do that to an animal…” Billy had left his car to stand in front of Mike’s grill and see what she was doing. Obviously a dog lover himself, the idea of it made his eyes and jaw much harder, showing her a face that wasn’t nearly as green as she’d thought.

“Right there with you,” she said. She thought about Dogboy’s eyes. There was something dead there, so focused. Unlike the TV shows, sometimes a crime could be straightforward. Most criminals weren’t masterminds. Usually the hardest part was finding the first couple of dots to connect. After that, the picture might draw itself, leaving the detectives only the tedious, painstaking chore of verifying every dot to build a strong case. However, all she had right now was a wacky theory. “I’m sure the techs got the blood, but I’m looking at a possible connection to DeeDee, the prostitute who was stabbed here. That one I was just talking to, Dogboy. I think he probably knows something about it, and he might also have been involved in that laundromat owner beating last Monday.” She gave Mike a faint, grim smile. “Don’t worry. If any of my speculations start to feel more solid than old Magnum, P.I. episodes, I’ll shoot them to the lead detectives on their cases. Marquez is handling DeeDee’s, right?”

“Yeah.” He shook his head. “I’m glad you’re not my wife, Celly. You’d give me gray hairs.”

“You already have gray hairs, Mike. I think she’s doing a good job all on her own.”

Billy chuckled. “I like Magnum, P.I.”

“Who doesn’t?” She stabbed a finger at him. “Okay, what street are we on? Nope, no looking. That’s cheating.”

“Um…” He paused, then brightened. “Compton Court.”

“Yes.” She gave him a fist bump, mildly amused when he flushed a little. Christ, he was young. District 1 officers all had to learn the maze of streets by memory, because the less savory elements would take down signs or switch them to screw up the police when they had to respond to calls. She’d gotten in the habit of testing the rookies because, in truth, she felt like a protective big sister toward them. Sometimes she couldn’t stop that feeling from opening the part of her that missed her two younger brothers, a part that needed to remain tidily closed.

“All right, Rook. Ass back in the car. You’re lucky you got it right, or I would have made you buy our next meal.” Mike shifted a similar reproving look to Celeste as Billy returned to the passenger side. “Are you about done here? We’ve got to keep doing our rounds, and I’m not leaving you out here by yourself.”

“Yes, sir, Officer.” Giving him a little salute and a wink, she tucked the notebook back into her purse. “Getting back into my car right now.”

Despite the teasing, she was touched that they waited until she started her engine and pulled out before they left the cul-de-sac. When she was younger she’d had her run-ins with the police, typical for a teen with a chip on her shoulder toward authority figures. Toward anyone she perceived as trying to act like a father. Like criminal behavior, her personal shit wasn’t rocket science. She didn’t know why people paid a shrink to tell them the obvious.

She sighed. Damn it. She did and didn’t know why she’d blurted out that safe word, but did Leland have to be such a hard-ass about it? She should just say fuck it, to hell with it, and walk away. Except she wouldn’t. The same thing that had pissed her off and scared her, his steady control of all of it, his composed reaction, kept that yearning for him unabated, especially since she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Time to get her head out of her dysfunctional ass and reach out to her contact at social services. See if she could get a name on that “foster momma” of Dogboy’s. As she pulled out her phone, it chirped, notifying her of a text. She received texts throughout the day from sources, editors, advertisers. Sometimes she heard from the only two women she counted as personal friends. Her siblings didn’t reach out unless they needed something.

So though she told herself not to expect it would be anything other than any of the above, she still checked. Her heart leaped in that very annoying, schoolgirlish way when she saw it was Leland.

He didn’t ask for a response, and she didn’t give one, not for forty-five minutes. But when she did, she responded with one word. 

§

He opened the door when she reached his porch. He’d showered after his shift, because he was dressed in jeans and T-shirt. He also had that shampoo, soap and faintly damp smell a person carried when he was fresh out of the shower. She wasn’t sure how to process the wave of pleasure that swept over her, seeing him framed in the doorway. “Hey there,” he said.

“Hi.” She didn’t know what else to say, but she didn’t have to say anything. He extended his hand and she placed hers in it. It was unsettling, how much that first touch did to settle her nerves. It had been that way the night at the convenience store as well. If Leland Keller had a spirit animal, it was the grizzly bear, the same animal to whom she’d compared him then. The bear’s ponderous stride and the easy peace in the golden-brown eyes said that he didn’t go looking for a fight. But he was calmly prepared for one, because he was the biggest and baddest of all the bears.

She thought the polar bear might be bigger, but she liked her analogy, so she left it alone. In addition to those qualities, Leland possessed a devastating sensual warmth and tenderness, such a noticeable contrast to his obvious strength, it made a woman feel protected and guided…controlled, in all the best ways.

Exercising all those traits now, he led her into the house, closing the door and taking her to the one room she hadn’t yet seen, just beyond his bedroom and the one bathroom. The room was empty, no furniture, the two windows covered with thin paper shades that allowed in light but screened the view. A ceiling fan slowly turned, moving the air.

The walls were painted a cloudy blue, except for a black mark on one of them that looked like a long ribbon falling out of the sky. A mat the size of a picnic blanket was spread in the center of the room. Next to it was a braided coil of cotton rope, a brown velvet scarf arranged in a figure eight, and a fleece throw in dark blue, folded in a precise square.

He dropped to his heels at one edge of the mat. “Come sit in front of me, Celeste.”

She hesitated. “Do you need me to…undress?”

“No.” He looked at her from head to toe. “You look nice.”

She thought she looked okay. She’d come straight from her talk with Dogboy’s foster mom, so she was still wearing her street garb of jeans and cross-trainers, her shirt a fitted button-down over a thin tank. She had pulled off on the side of the road before she arrived here to freshen her makeup and fiddle with her hair, but what would have been a polite compliment from a stranger or family member had a different, more attentive feel when it came from him. Maybe he’d missed her, too. The way he emphasized the word
nice
, the way he looked at her, made her self-conscious in a pleasant way. Under his regard, she tried not to fidget, to remember to stay in control. On top of things.

Imagining just the reverse, him on top of her, nearly locked up her mind. His body between her thighs, her heels crossed over his hips and flexing ass, his arms braced on either side of her like pillars to a building that would never fall, always sheltering her.

So much for staying in control. She couldn’t even control her own mind. “Do you want to talk about what happened last time?”

He shook his head. “I know what happened last time. So do you. It’s all part of this, Celeste. It’s all right. You didn’t do anything wrong or anything I didn’t expect. You understand?”

Talking was her defense, her way of drawing people closer or driving them away, depending on what was required, but he simply took away her need to talk.

“Take off your shoes and come sit down with me,” he said.

Setting down her purse, she came.

Protect, guide and control. Exercising all three of those traits now, he drew her down on the mat. He had her kneel facing away from him, and put his hands on her shoulders. He was kneeling as well, only on one knee, the other foot braced on the floor, that knee against her shoulder. He slid his hands down her arms and back up again. Up to her neck, taking a firm grip along either side of her collarbone. “Close your eyes.”