07 It Had to Be You Page 6

  “Friends don’t sneak out in the middle of the night,” she said, hating that they had an avid audience soaking up the exchange. “And I didn’t steal anything.” She recognized one of the cops. He’d been in the shop to buy flowers for his girlfriend. She spoke directly to him. “I’ve never stolen anything. Not once in my whole life.”

  Well, except she had. She winced. “Okay,” she said, “so maybe one time I took a lip gloss from the drugstore, but I was twelve and stupid and my mom made me take it back. I had to work there for free for a whole day to make up for it. I haven’t stolen anything since.”

  The second cop was rubbing his temple. Men did that a lot around her. Apparently she gave good headache.

  “You have to believe me,” she said. “I didn’t take any cash. How much is missing?”

  “All of it,” Teddy said tightly. He was wearing khakis and an untucked, white button-down shoved to his elbows. He looked like he’d walked right out of a GQ ad, but instead of feeling her heart sigh, it hardened. The dreamy quotient of Teddy Marshall had run out.

  “So you just showed up here to accuse Ali?” Luke asked him.

  Teddy stared at him. “Seriously, who the hell are you?”

  “Detective Lieutenant Luke Hanover.”

  “My landlord?”

  “Ex-landlord,” Luke said.

  Ali’s stomach was somewhere in the vicinity of her toes, so she couldn’t process the exchange of testosterone at the moment. “So what now?” she asked the first cop.

  “You come to the station for some questions, ma’am.”

  “Even though I didn’t do it?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Ali,” she managed. “You keep saying ma’am, and I want to look over my shoulder to see who you’re talking to. Why can’t you just question me right here?”

  “That’s not policy, ma’—”

  At her glare, he wisely swallowed the “ma’am” part.

  “Look, Ali,” Teddy said, clearly attempting to soften his voice. Once upon a time that might have charmed her, but not today. “You’re pissed at me,” he said. “I get that. So just give us the money back, and we’ll all go to our separate corners. No harm, no foul.”

  “I don’t have the money; I didn’t take it!”

  When the two cops just looked at her, she let out a breath. “I didn’t.”

  “Go through her stuff,” Teddy said wearily. “There isn’t much. It shouldn’t take long.”

  Luke put a hand to Teddy’s chest, halting his forward progress. “No one’s searching her or the premises,” he said, still calm but with one-hundred-percent authority. “Not without consent or a warrant.”

  Ali turned and looked at him for the first time. He was in black board shorts, still damp enough to cling to his body. No shirt. Bare feet. A towel was slung over his shoulder, his hair wet and uncombed.

  He’d been in the water, she realized, swimming or maybe on the paddleboard she’d seen leaning against the back deck. She wasn’t sure if she was grateful for his intervention or pissed that he clearly thought she needed the protection from a search due to what they might find.

  “I didn’t do it,” she told Luke. “They can search.”

  “Good.” Teddy pushed his way in through the door. “Where’s the stuff you took out of Town Hall, Al?”

  “I brought the floral arrangements to the senior center yesterday,” she said. She pointed to her purse and the box of small ceramics on the foyer bench. “That’s all that’s left from the auction.”

  Teddy reached for the box, but the first cop stopped him. “It can’t be you, Marshall, sorry,” the cop said, and grabbed the box.

  Ali heard all her things clink together. “Careful—”

  She broke off when he pulled out the pine tree pencil pot.

  “What the hell?” Teddy said incredulously. “You gave that to me.” He turned to Ali, brows knit together. “You stole it out of my office?”

  “Took back,” she corrected. “I took it back because you didn’t deserve it.”

  “You stole it. Where’s the money, Ali?”

  “I didn’t take the money!”

  The first cop pulled something out of the pot.

  “Jesus,” Teddy said as they all stared at a bank bill wrapper, the kind that was used to hold together a stack of money, exactly like the bill wrappers that’d been used on the auction money.

  He whirled on her now, eyes furious. “Where’s the money?”

  “I…” At a loss, she shook her head. “I didn’t know that was in there.”

  The cops looked at each other, faces impenetrable, their entire demeanor shifting from fairly relaxed to on guard and far more alert.

  “Oh no,” Ali told them. “This isn’t what you think. That bill wrapper must have been in there when I took the pot.”

  “So you admit to taking the pot, ma’am?” the first cop asked.

  “Well, yes, but…” She trailed off at their expressions. Clearly, they thought she was full of shit. She didn’t dare turn to look at Luke to see if he felt the same. “I didn’t steal the money,” she said, suddenly feeling very small and very alone. “I didn’t.”

  Teddy blew out a breath and shoved his fingers through his hair. “What now?” he asked the two cops.

  “Do we still have your permission to search the premises?” one of them asked her.

  “You don’t need her permission,” Teddy said. “I shared this place with her. It’s half mine. I give you permission.”

  “Wrong,” Luke said with that same steely authority in his voice. “You no longer live here or have rights to the property.”

  Again, Ali didn’t know whether to be touched or upset. She went with upset. “Search,” she said. “Please. You’ll see…”

  They started with the living room and kitchen. Luke stood by, watchful. Impassive.

  Not Ali. Her thoughts raced. Why was Teddy was acting so sure that it’d been her? Had he set her up? And what was the motive for that? Did he think that would keep her quiet about what he’d been doing in his office that night? “Where was the money in the first place?” she asked.

  “In my locked bottom desk drawer,” Teddy said stiffly. “As you very well know.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, just as stiffly. But she’d gone through his desk looking for the pencil pot. Had there been a locked drawer? She didn’t think so. “You sure you locked it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure sure?”

  “Jesus! Yes!”

  But Ali knew that expression and defensive tone. He wasn’t sure. “You’re lying about being sure,” she said. “What else are you lying about, Teddy?”

  Both officers straightened and gave him a long, appraising look. He raised his hands. “Hey, I’m the wronged party here! I put the briefcase in the bottom drawer to keep it locked up until the bank opened so I could deposit it. Hell, it was all just for show to begin with. Most of the money that had been actually collected was in electronic form. But we wanted to display cash that night to make it look impressive and to encourage more donations. I had it in my bottom desk drawer. I just…”

  “What?” asked one of the cops.

  Teddy sighed. “Okay, so maybe I can’t remember if I locked the drawer. I was in a hurry.”

  “Doing what?” Ali asked, knowing damn well what—just not who.

  “It’s not pertinent,” Teddy said.

  The cop looked pained, and the look he gave Teddy said he didn’t appreciate being put in the position of having to push. “It’s pertinent. What did you do directly after putting the money in your bottom desk drawer?”

  Teddy opened his mouth, and then closed it. After a long pause, he sighed again. “Melissa Mann.”

  “What?” the cop asked.

  Teddy sighed. “I was doing Melissa Mann.”

  There was a beat of stunned silence.

  Melissa Mann was a local manicurist, fun and sweet and pretty. She worked at the Hair Today salon
a few doors down from the flower shop. Ali absorbed the hit and stared at Teddy.

  Surprisingly, he had the balls to meet her gaze, an apology there behind his lingering temper. “I’m sorry, Ali. But we’d been over for a while.”

  That was not even close to true, but she didn’t dispute it. Because dammit, he meant for him. It’d been over for him, and she’d not paid close enough attention to notice. But hell if she’d admit to being stupid.

  “So you had Melissa in your office,” the second cop said, “with the money.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Apparently money is an aphrodisiac.”

  Ali felt the snarl catch in her throat and thought about how satisfying it’d be to wrap her fingers around his neck, but the witnesses were problematic. If she was in trouble for a crime she hadn’t committed, she could imagine how much trouble she’d be in for murder.

  A hand settled on her shoulder. Luke’s. Clearly she’d projected the murderous urge…

  Teddy took in the touch and narrowed his eyes.

  “And afterward?” the first police officer asked him.

  Teddy was still eyeing Luke’s hand on her shoulder. “I gave Melissa a ride home.”

  “You gave her a ride home,” Ali repeated slowly. “Let me see if I have this right. You stood up your girlfriend, dumped fifty thousand into your desk, maybe forgot to lock the drawer, had sex with Melissa, and then gave her a ride home and left the money there.”

  Ted grimaced again. “Listen, I realize that makes me look bad.”

  “Actually,” Luke said, “it makes you look like a douche.”

  Teddy flushed an angry red. “Which still doesn’t make me a thief.”

  The cops moved on to check the rest of the house, including the bedroom Ali had been using. They went through her drawers, which was embarrassing enough, but then the closet. One of the cops pulled out the Fun ’N Pleasure bag that she’d gotten as a gag gift for her birthday from her sister. “No,” she said quickly. “Wait— That’s not mine—”

  Cop number two pulled a Catwoman costume from the bag and then a massive, eye-popping neon-pink vibrator.

  Teddy gawked at the sheer size of the thing. “You have a vibrator?”

  “It was a gag gift,” Ali said, sure she was as pink as the vibrator.

  Still standing stoic and steady as ever, Luke eyed the items without a word.

  “You have a vibrator,” Teddy repeated in disbelief. “Is that why we hadn’t had sex in two months?”

  Once again Luke’s hand settled on Ali. Just as well since there were two—no three—cops watching. So she didn’t go for Teddy’s throat, a fact she considered a real feat of restraint.

  But it wasn’t restraint at all. It was burning humiliation, anger, and something else.

  Terror.

  And that terror was tripled when the cops finished searching both the house and her truck. Though they didn’t find the money, they took her downtown anyway.

  Chapter 6

  Luke stood in the center of his living room, which looked like it’d been tossed by a couple of thieves.

  Hurricane Ali.

  He didn’t know what to make of the fact that she’d been caught with the bill wrapper. Nor did he know what to make of her being taken to the station for questioning.

  But he did know one thing. Marshall—he refused to think of him as Teddy—had rubbed him the wrong way.

  Still, this wasn’t his problem. He didn’t know Ali from Adam. What he did know was that he didn’t want to get involved. He was on break from getting involved. In spite of what his commander wanted, he had nineteen days left on his leave, and he planned on using every single one of them to do jack shit. He was looking forward to it.

  But for reasons he couldn’t explain, he couldn’t dispel the image of Ali at the station, sitting in an interrogation room, in trouble.

  He’d always believed in the system. He’d had to. It was what had made his job so important to him. Take down the bad guys and let the courts keep them down—that had been his life, his entire reason for being.

  But then that very system had failed him. And he’d failed too. He’d failed the people who believed in the system. And now he was taking a break from people so he couldn’t fail again.

  Which in no way explained why, instead of putting the house back together, or hell, going back to paddleboarding, he ended up in front of his laptop.

  He’d already done that basic search on Ali, but he hadn’t gone far. He picked up where he’d left off. Her mother had a record: two arrests for assault and battery, one, apparently, for the baseball bat incident Ali had told him about. Both times the charges had been reduced, and Mimi Winters had been let out on time served. Ali’s sister, Harper, had a record as well, for indecent exposure.

  Nothing for Ali. Though going back further, he caught a few additional times where she’d been questioned, one for an incident involving her science teacher, who’d allegedly been sexually inappropriate with his students. Christ, he hoped she hadn’t been one of them. Leaning back in his chair, Luke stared at his screen. He already knew that she was protective, loyal, and tough as hell. Now he also knew that she’d grown up knee-high in shit, and yet somehow she appeared to come out of it with a sweet kindness that was to-the-bone genuine.

  And she was innocent in regard to the money. He felt it deep in his gut.

  He researched Ted Marshall next. There’d been the basic search done when Marshall had applied for the lease, but Luke went deeper without remorse, because something wasn’t right.

  The golden boy had certainly sailed through life so far. He’d been raised here in town, was captain of the football team, and had gone on to the University of Washington, graduating with a degree in political science. He’d not gotten into law school, so he’d come back to Lucky Harbor. He paid his bills on time, golfed, and had a fantasy football team that did pretty well. He’d been pulled over three years ago in Kent with a hooker in his car, but the story had later been amended to describe the woman as being an “exotic dancer.” Marshall sat on several charitable committees in Lucky Harbor, and as the town clerk, no one had a single negative thing to say about him. He was well known and well liked.

  Luke was experiencing bad flashbacks from the whole senator nightmare. Not that Marshall was a secret stalker and murderer. No, Luke suspected he was exactly as he appeared—a guy for whom things either came easy or not at all, because he was just on the wrong side of lazy.

  Which also told Luke something else. Marshall wasn’t the thief either. He didn’t have it in him.

  So the question was, did Marshall really believe Ali had taken the money? This was a tough one because there’d been something in the man’s eyes, something in his tone, that hadn’t rung true to Luke.

  He’d been lying.

  But about what exactly?

  Luke made a call to Sheriff Sawyer Thompson. Sawyer had run wild in his youth, only a few years ahead of Luke. Their paths had crossed professionally on several occasions, most notably when Luke had helped Sawyer track down one of his perps in San Francisco not too long ago.

  They bullshitted back and forth for a few minutes, and then Luke asked about Ali.

  She was still being questioned. Having the bill wrapper in her possession looked bad, real bad, Sawyer said, but it wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest. He said that a toe ring had been found in Marshall’s office couch, and it didn’t seem to belong to anyone who had business being in Marshall’s office.

  Or to Melissa Mann.

  Luke hung up and chewed on that for a few minutes. Not your problem, he told himself. But he was still mulling it all over when his cell rang.

  “How’s the brooding going?” Sara asked.

  He frowned at his sister through the phone. “I’m not brooding.”

  “Of course you are. You’re a professional brooder.”

  Luke pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did you call for something in particular or just to piss me off?”

  “Well
, fun as it is to piss you off, I did call for a reason.” But then she hesitated.

  Shit. “What?” he asked. Sara had come out of prison determined to fix her life. Luke had done whatever he could, paying for rehab—twice—sending her to school—also twice—and finally sitting in the crowd with pride and relief when she’d eventually graduated with her teaching credentials. She now worked with troubled kids in an alternative high school in the Bay Area, and he couldn’t be more proud of her.

  But she was still a colossal pain in his ass. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yes. I just…”

  “Whatever you need, Sara. You know that.”

  She sighed, sounding exasperated. “Okay, stop expecting me to be in trouble every time I call.”

  He felt a twinge of guilt, but there’d been years when that had been true. Not that he wanted to remind her. “I don’t do that.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “But this time, you’re the one in trouble.”

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “Really? Is that why you took off for Lucky Harbor—Lucky Harbor, Luke, where you never go anymore? You ran away from the press. What was that?”

  “I needed a vacation,” he said.

  “Is that it? Really?”

  “Yes,” he said, trying to assuage the worry he heard in her voice. “I told you, I had three weeks of leave that I was going to lose if I didn’t use.”

  There was a beat of silence, as if she was trying to assess the truth from two hundred miles away. “Don’t make me come up there,” she finally said. “Because I totally will.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, relieved she’d backed down. “I’m just…relaxing. Hanging out.”

  “Good. Then you can also give grandpa a hug for me.”

  “Sara—”

  “He’s old, Luke. And getting older. Do it for me.”

  The doorbell rang. Saved by the bell. “Gotta go.” Luke clicked off and walked through the house, looking out the window at the white Dial-A-Ride van in his driveway. Ah, Christ. He opened the front door and faced the entire gang of Lucky Harbor’s biggest troublemakers: Lyle Lyons, Cecil Elroy, Joseph Wykowski.