Buch lesen: «Love By Association»

For Lynda Kachurek, who started out as a fan and became a friend. I am very thankful you sought me out...

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

IT FELT WEIRD being in an interrogation room out of uniform. Not that thirty-two-year-old Chantel Harris spent much time interrogating suspects. She was a street cop, not a detective. But in the twelve years she’d been a cop, she’d been called in to sit with suspects on occasion and to help with questioning a time or two.

Even worse than being out of uniform was entering the room on stiletto heels, with makeup on her face and with her blond hair, which usually lived in a ponytail, cascading down her back in artfully curled waves.

“Excuse me, miss, but... Chantel?”

She almost turned and walked right back out as Detective Wayne Stanton—a friend from academy days—whooped. And grinned.

“Impressive, Wayne,” Chantel said, trying not to become too fond of the way the silk lining of her pants slid along her legs as she sat. Cops couldn’t afford Italian-made silk-lined clothes. Shrugging out of the matching slate blue jacket, she drummed her blunt-cut fingernails on the table. “Let’s get through this.”

“Actually, you’re the impressive one,” Captain Reagan said, coming in behind her and closing the door. “You clean up nice, Harris.”

“Thank you, sir.” The undercover assignment had been her idea. Hers and Wayne’s. She had no doubts about her ability to do the job. Or her desire to catch the rich scumbag who thought his money and power gave him the right to knock his wife around.

“I might make one suggestion, though.” The captain was holding back a smile.

“What’s that, sir?”

“Before you go to the fundraiser tonight, stop off at one of those walk-in nail salons—I believe there’s one on the corner of Dunbar and First. Get yourself some acrylic nails. No rich society woman’s going to show up with fingers that look ready and able to pull a trigger.”

He had a point. “Yes, sir.”

“The money you received was enough to buy you the clothes and things you need to see you through a six-week stint?”

Six weeks had been the operation’s initial approval window. Chantel hoped she could either get proof in that time or enough evidence to warrant an extension on the assignment.

“Yes, sir. I found a secondhand shop in LA that sells high-end designer clothes.”

“So just to be clear—” the captain looked at her and Wayne “—you’ll work your regular tour, with pay. For this operation you have your project budget, but your time spent is on a volunteer basis.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir,” Wayne echoed. While the detective wouldn’t be undercover, he was not only going to be the person to whom she reported, but he would also be doing follow-up, including information dissemination.

The captain shook his head. “You’re both really committed to this High Risk team.”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison. By bringing together members from all professions that came in contact with victims of domestic violence, creating an information pool that ensured that doctors and schools and legal aid and child protective services were all on the same page, the team was preventing domestic-violence deaths. Chantel had seen firsthand evidence...

The captain sat back. “You know, when I first read the memo on this team, I thought the folks in charge were nuts.”

Chantel’s jaw tightened as she bit back the ready defense that sprang to her lips.

“But I have to admit...domestic violence statistics, even here in Santa Raquel, are down remarkably.”

She relaxed.

“And you.” He nodded toward Chantel. “You know better than most...”

“Yes, sir.”

She’d first visited Santa Raquel from San Diego two years before, as a favor to a friend who believed his wife had been taken by her abusive ex-husband. Wayne, who’d been a member of the Santa Raquel police force, had helped her—also on his own time—and they’d saved a woman’s life.

As far as anyone knew, it had been Chantel’s first personal experience with domestic violence. And while she’d always known that what had happened with her stepfather had been a crime, she’d only in the past months begun to realize just how hideous his treatment of her had been. Helping Max and Meri Bennet had changed her in a lot of ways. Not only in how she viewed love. Through them she’d found her calling, found a way to put her own past to good use. To make lemonade out of her lemons. She was meant to help other women who, though they may have the strength of Hercules, couldn’t always fight their battles on their own. Innocent women who’d been betrayed in the vilest ways by the one person they were supposed to be able to trust above all others.

She’d applied for a position on the Santa Raquel police force, as well as with the High Risk team developed by The Lemonade Stand—a unique women’s shelter right there in Santa Raquel. The place where Meri Bennet—wife to Chantel’s close friend, Max Bennet—had run when her ex-husband, a Las Vegas police detective, had threatened the lives of her husband and young son.

In the time since Meri’s rescue from the hands of a madman, Chantel had not only grown to know her, but to consider her one of her closest friends.

When she thought about what would have happened to her if Max hadn’t been so adamant that his wife was in trouble...if Chantel hadn’t loved him enough to have enlisted Wayne’s help...

The captain tapped the table. “So, I’ve read the reports. We’re all on the same page here, and unless I hear from Stanton that we have a problem, I’ll expect normal reports on this sting until otherwise noted.”

“Yes, sir.” As a beat cop, Chantel wasn’t used to sitting down for one-on-one conversations with a department captain.

She wasn’t used to hobnobbing with the rich and famous, either. She hoped, during her debut that evening at the auction being hosted to benefit some art foundation, that she wasn’t as tongue-tied and awkward as she felt right then.

The captain seemed to have dismissed them, but he was still sitting there. And until he stood, she couldn’t. “I just have one question...”

“Yes, sir?” Wayne answered for the two of them.

“This collage thing... You don’t think this is overkill? The department’s money, going undercover, working your ass off for no compensation because some kid pasted pictures on a board during art class?”

“The boy’s father has a sealed juvenile record, sir,” Wayne said, immediately pointing out the information they’d found when they’d started asking questions about the wealthy, respected and well-known Morrison family, who lived just a few miles from them in nearby Santa Barbara.

“I understand. He hit his younger brother with a baseball bat.”

“The boy died.”

“That was more than forty years ago. Plus, as we’ve already said, the record was sealed.”

“Hospital records show that Mrs. Morrison is accident-prone.” Wayne was all business as, in his suit and tie—daily attire for him now—he sat forward, facing the captain.

“I understand. She’s not the only woman who appears to suffer from the malady. Believe me, I want domestic violence to stop. I don’t want anyone to suffer abuse at the hands of loved ones. I’m just trying to understand, between you and me, why we’re going to all this trouble because of a collage.”

Wayne looked at her, and Chantel found her tongue.

“The artist who works in the schools doing collages with students, Talia Paulson, volunteers at The Lemonade Stand, sir. She has now had formal training in domestic violence counseling. She works with all students, but part of her purpose is to read the collages, as a way to pinpoint problems students might be having that the adults in their lives are either unaware of or not tending to.

“Anger issues, self-concept issues, grief... It all comes out not only in the photos these kids choose, but in organization and color expression, too.”

She had Captain Reagan’s full attention now. And though she felt like a bug under his microscope, she respected the man and needed his buy-in.

Not to do the job. The project was already approved. But for her own sense of...she didn’t know what.

“Ryder Morrison is a straight-A student in a well-touted private school. He also used to be a star swimmer and was damned good at surfing, too. In the past year, he’s become withdrawn. Never wanting to leave home, or seemingly leave his mother’s side. Talia was called in. What she saw in Ryder’s collage alarmed her to the point that she called the High Risk team immediately.”

“I read the report,” Reagan said. “What was in the collage? That’s what I’m asking.”

“Baseball bats. A series of them, hidden among a collection of surfboards, sticking out of the leg of a pair of swim trunks, as a tattoo on a businessman’s arm. The bats were all small, and all black. The other thing that stood out was a collection of ads—all women selling house-cleaning supplies like furniture polish and floor wax. They also were spread throughout the other clear interest groupings. All of those were rimmed in red and purple. Colors that typically signify love and blood. Bruising. There were other things, but those were the most standout. Talia was alarmed and called us. Wayne checked it out and found not only that Mrs. Morrison was prone to being hurt—bruised—but that Mr. Morrison had had an episode with a baseball bat...”

“Did anyone think about asking the kid about any of this?” Reagan asked. “I didn’t see anything about it in the report.”

“His parents refused to let him speak with us,” Wayne dutifully reported.

Chantel looked at Captain Reagan and made a split-second decision to trust him. He was a powerful man in the small police force. She wanted to know they had him on their side.

“Talia spoke with Ryder,” she said. “He told her that he’d overheard something, but that when he’d asked his mother about it she’d told him he’d misunderstood. We don’t know what he was referring to. But that had been his reply when Talia had asked him about the significance of the baseball bats. He said they were black to represent misunderstanding.”

“A bit deep for an eleven-year-old.”

“Kids who are forced to grow up quickly tend to be that way.” Chantel knew.

Reagan frowned. “So you think what this kid overheard was something about his father killing his little brother?”

Wayne’s head tilted a bit as he said, “Stands to reason. It’s pretty clear that whether it’s something he overheard, or something going on in his home, Ryder has had a complete personality change in the past year and neither of his parents are acknowledging it.”

Chantel added, “They say his behavior changes are no more than a phase, due to his burgeoning adolescence. And because there are no signs of physical abuse against him, no sign that he’s being mistreated at all, there’s no more we can do to gain entrance through a front-door approach.”

“That family is in danger, sir,” Wayne told him. “The boy is clearly afraid.”

“I’m willing to work triple shifts without pay if need be to prevent Mr. Morrison from hurting his son. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if Ryder ended up hurt or, God forbid, dead because we did nothing.”

“Not to mention Mrs. Morrison,” Wayne added. “Her life is clearly even more in the balance than her son’s since she’s already exhibiting signs of having been abused. According to hospital records, she’s had a broken arm, a broken collarbone, multiple contusions on the back of her head and ribs broken in her back. Those are the injuries she sought medical help for. We have no idea how many others there have been. As you saw in the report, we’ve had three doctor notifications of suspected abuse over the past several years, but each time, both parties deny any wrongdoing. It’s clear she’s not going to press charges. Or even stand up for her son. She won’t let him talk to us.”

While it was true that Leslie Morrison had refused police access to her son, Chantel wasn’t as certain as Wayne that the woman wouldn’t stand up for him. She believed it was more a case of the woman keeping her son safe by covering for her husband—and taking his abuse herself.

Reagan shook his head, picking up his folder. “So, she won’t press charges against the bastard.”

The statement hung there between the three of them. Questions choking them with their lack of answers.

Until it became clear that the only way any of them were going to find the peace they sought was by getting back to work.

“You be careful out there,” Reagan said to Chantel as she walked down the hall of the station like she’d been born in fashionable heels. She’d been practicing in her apartment all week.

“I will, sir.”

“This man, if he’s guilty of all that we suspect—he’s dangerous.”

“I know, sir. Which is why we need a cop in there keeping an eye on things. Don’t worry. I’ll have my gun with me at all times.”

He nodded as he left them. Then it was just her and Wayne, standing by the back door.

“You got me on speed dial?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Then go get them, Chantel. You’re born to do this job. If anyone can pull it off, you can.”

She hoped so.

Going against bad guys didn’t give her pause. Drug dealers. Thieves. Rapists. She was trained to take them down.

But act all girlie and glamorous? A woman who could laugh in all the right places and move like she wanted every man in the place to look at her?

That wasn’t her style at all.

CHAPTER TWO

“COME, ON, JULES, you know how much I hate going to these things by myself.” Thirty-one-year-old Colin Fairbanks stood outside his twenty-seven-year-old sister’s suite on the north end of the estate home they shared, talking to her through the door she’d just refused to open.

“Not tonight, Col.” Her voice was strong. Determined.

She wasn’t crying, didn’t sound damaged...tonight. Still...

Her door opened, and she stood, looking beautiful and...normal, in jeans and a sweater that matched the blue in her eyes. “I’m in the middle of a project,” she told him.

He could see the artist’s lamp lit over the table, the stool that she’d obviously been perched on. Paper and pencils were spread across the tilted surface.

A project. Writing and illustrating children’s stories that she wouldn’t send out to agents or publishers. The collection was building. Colin had had a friend of his print some up for her to see—thinking that if she saw them as real books she’d be driven to find a publisher.

“I asked you two weeks ago to accompany me tonight,” he told her. “You know way more about art than I do. And...”

“I told you I would think about it. I never said I’d go.”

In ten years’ time he’d managed to cajole, beg and probably guilt her into attending a handful of functions with him. Ten years of her life she’d never get back.

“Come on, Jules. A few hours out of your Thursday night is all I’m asking.” The law firm of Fairbanks and Fairbanks—named for his father and grandfather, both deceased—represented a good many of the contributors who would be attending this evening. It was expected that a Fairbanks be there.

He’d probably be instrumental in the closing of more than one deal that night. Which was fine with him. He liked the challenge afforded him by his job as sole owner of Santa Raquel’s most powerful law firm.

“I know you want me to think you need me there because of the art.” Julie nodded. “But you and I both know you’re just there for the legal contract part, Colin, not the value designation. We also both know you don’t have to go alone. Just put out the word that you want a date and you’ll have your pick.”

Her smile was almost reminiscent of the loving scoundrel Julie had been until her senior year of high school. But not quite. That shadow of perpetual resignation ruined the effect.

“And if I go alone, I’m going to spend what parts of the evening I’m not overseeing potential negotiations fending off whatever women manage to get to me first.”

Her eyes shone with sympathy, and a hint of the old mischief.

“Amber Winslow’s going to be there,” he told her. The woman—a classmate of his from the private high school they’d both attended—was a leech. And newly divorced.

In the olden days Julie would have been all over protecting him from that particular worm.

“So are the Smyths.”

He hadn’t heard, or he wouldn’t have asked Julie to accompany him. He was surprised actually. Smyth wasn’t a big supporter of the arts.

But that was that. As desperately as Colin wished his little sister could move on, he also understood why she couldn’t. In the ten years since David Smyth had gotten away with brutally raping her at a party, Julie had not seen him. Even from a distance. She’d refused to be anywhere that either David Jr. or his father, David Sr.—owner of one of the last family banks in the state—were in attendance.

In spite of the fact that that meant she was cut off from much of the social circle in which she’d grown up and thrived.

Not to mention losing the close relationship she’d had with Margaret Smyth, David Jr.’s mother.

With David Sr. being their father Michael’s closest friend, they’d all grown up together. When Colin and Julie’s mother had died, Margaret Smyth had been like a mother to them...

“Jaime told me they were on the confirmed guest list.”

Julie’s friend from grade school who’d moved to New York before high school, Jaime Mendonthol, had a couple of paintings in the evening’s fundraising auction. She was in town, and the two women had met for lunch the day before.

Jaime had been the reason Colin had been so hopeful that his sister would agree to the night out. Missing Jaime’s local show would be hard on her.

“I knew, anyway. Leslie Morrison sent me the guest list.”

Leslie Morrison, wife of James Morrison, owner and CEO of Morrison Textiles—a third-generation company that had been using Fairbanks and Fairbanks as lead counsel for more than seventy-five years—was, as far as Colin knew, the only person in their circle who knew what had happened to Julie the night that David Smyth slipped a drug into her drink and then proceeded to sexually violate her in every way possible.

Most people knew of, or had heard rumor of, a liaison gone bad between the two of them. But word among “friends” was that their sexual relations the night of the party had been consensual.

“Friends” including Santa Raquel’s esteemed police commissioner.

When it had become clear that Julie wasn’t going to get justice—due in large part to a law enforcement system that was willing to look away if the right money was involved—she’d begged Colin to keep the incident a secret. To preserve as much of the life she’d led as she could. He’d wanted to move, leave the country, even. Start over in Italy or someplace else beautiful enough to distract his little sister from the horror she wasn’t ever going to completely escape.

Julie was the one who’d convinced him they needed to stay home. Pointing out, rightly so, that a lot of people depended on Fairbanks and Fairbanks, trusted them, in a world where having an attorney in business was an absolute must. Pointing out, as well, that if he closed the firm, they’d not only put a couple dozen attorneys and more than a hundred support staff out of jobs, but they’d lose the income necessary to keep their family home on the California coast—a home their grandfather had built from scratch.

Why Leslie Morrison kept the secret, Colin didn’t know. Nor did he know, for sure, how she’d known what had happened. He’d just come home from law school one day, shortly after that horrible night, a twenty-one-year-old kid trying to raise his sister after their father’s heart attack the year before and their mother’s death from hepatitis the year before that, and found Leslie and Julie sitting on the couch.

Not all that unusual, seeing that Leslie chaired the county’s Pet Adoption and Rescue Fund, a charitable fund that raised much of the money that helped support more than twenty shelters and neutering programs in a thirty-mile radius along the coast. Julie had run for and won election to junior chair of the fund her sophomore year in high school.

She’d been sitting on the committee’s board ever since. Now with a college degree in finance, Julie was also part of the Sunshine Children’s League—which raised funds for children without families, providing funding for basic necessities but also some scholarships to California state universities.

She attended luncheons and organized fundraisers. She shopped at the stores she loved and occasionally went to dinner with a girlfriend or two.

But she didn’t date. She never frequented dinner establishments where she might run into a Smyth. She hadn’t been back to Santa Barbara—home to the Smyth mansion where the rape had taken place—in ten years.

And she almost never attended evening social functions.

Colin gave up trying to change her mind that night.

* * *

FROM THE MINUTE she walked into the glitzy ballroom Thursday night, Chantel changed. As though she’d been born to wealth, her persona slid over her, oozing a confidence that surprised her as she entered the elegant party in the five-star resort on the Pacific coastline.

For that night she was a woman of privilege. And she was a woman on the prowl. Not unlike most of the unattached—and probably some of the attached, as well—women there. But unlike the rest of her unlikely peers, Chantel, while prowling for a man, wasn’t there for personal gain. She wanted to pick up a man as badly as any of them. Maybe worse.

But she wasn’t hoping he’d take her home. To the contrary. She wanted him locked up in an eight-by-eight cell, where she knew he’d never be able to hurt his wife again. Picturing the key to the cell flying through the air and landing in the ocean beyond the wall of windows at one end of the elegantly appointed room, Chantel sent a silent promise to Ryder Morrison that he wasn’t going to spend the next several years watching his father beat up his mother. Or living in fear that his father would someday come after him with a baseball bat as he had his own little brother so many years before.

Not that arresting the man would guarantee that. They needed to build a case against him, find ample enough proof that no matter who came to the powerful man’s rescue, the prosecutor could still win a conviction.

It wouldn’t be easy. James Morrison was a respected and very rich man who’d funded many of the seated politicians in California’s congress. He probably had blackmail goods on others.

And that was where she came in. With her blond hair curling over her breasts, the ample cleavage that was visible in the V of the black, figure-hugging and glittering gown she’d worn for her debut evening as the daughter of an East Coast millionaire newly settling in California, Chantel remembered the mantra that Wayne had been repeating almost hourly the week since they’d won approval for this sting.

Patience.

“Undercover work isn’t about going in and getting it done,” he’d told her. “It’s about taking the time to become intimate with the life you’re infiltrating.”

Used to being the one who bulldozed ahead and made things happen, Chantel paused just inside the door of the richly decorated room. She’d passed her first test—handing off her invitation at the door.

Gleaned from the police commissioner himself. A man she’d never met, a man who wouldn’t be acknowledging her presence that night—though he would surely be there, even if just to put in an appearance.

He’d agreed to the sting, wanted her to get Morrison if he turned out to be guilty of beating up his wife.

But he was expecting Chantel to clear the textile magnate’s name. Morrison and Commissioner Paul Reynolds were golf buddies. They went way back.

Or so she’d been told.

Still, she couldn’t know the commissioner. Not newly arrived from upstate New York as she was.

And she wasn’t about to get cozy with James Morrison, either. No, her job was to infiltrate the community. Become friendly with those who knew Morrison. People who could let things drop that a police officer might be able to use to find the dirt on him. The truth about him.

Her job was to find out the man’s deepest secrets, and if those secrets involved raising even a little finger to his wife or son, to expose him for the criminal that he was. She was there to get the proof...