She returned his smile. The thought occurred that maybe she should just have a key made for him, but she quickly discarded the notion. She needed to tamp things down with Jase, not get involved any more deeply than she already was.
But she was definitely happy about the doughnuts. Grabbing a glazed, she sat down at the table next to him. “You said we’d figure out where we were.”
“That’s right. I made a few notes, things we’ve learned so far.”
“Okay.”
“We know Zepeda didn’t kill her. Or at least, after last night, that’s our working assumption. According to Eli, Tina was working for a group of people, not just one pimp, some sort of organized crime ring, something like that.”
“A group located out of town.”
“That’s right.”
“How do we find them?”
“I’m heading over to Reuben’s liquors, see if I can find anything that’ll confirm it as the primary murder scene. I want to have a look before I turn the info over to the police.”
“It was raining that night. Do you think there’s really a chance you’ll find something?”
“You never know. Even if we don’t, the CSIs might come up with something. Those guys are really good. You want to come with me?”
“Absolutely. I’m ready to go anytime. I just need to grab my purse.”
As Jase closed down his laptop, Kate hurried back down the hall. Her purse sat on the dresser in her bedroom. As she walked into the bedroom, a memory arose of last night, and her body flushed with heat. The man was amazing in bed.
When she returned to the kitchen, Jase was waiting, his laptop tucked beneath the thick biceps stretching the sleeve of his T-shirt. He turned off the coffee maker, then waited for her to walk in front of him out the kitchen door.
Very courteous for a big alpha male, she thought. “Did you learn those pretty manners from your mom?” she asked, curious about him as they crossed the living room to the door.
“My mom ran off with a traveling salesman when I was ten years old. Everything I know, I pretty much taught myself or learned in the marines.”
She told herself his past was none of her business, but everything about Hawk Maddox intrigued her. “So your dad raised you?” she asked as they reached the garage and climbed into the Yukon.
“My dad was a no-good drunk,” he said, and started the engine. “A mean one. Same answer, I pretty well raised myself.”
He didn’t tell her not to ask any more questions, but his eyes had gone flat and hard. She understood he’d had to take care of himself, but she wondered if anyone had ever loved him.
The way he looked, the guy was a total chic magnet, but lust wasn’t the same as love. So the question lingered, who had loved him?
Just thinking about theLword in regard to Hawk Maddox made Kate uneasy. They were working together. At the moment they were sleeping together—friends with benefits—but that’s all it was. Though she’d never been involved with a man in a purely physical relationship, that was all it ever could be. And exactly what both of them wanted, she reminded herself.
While her mind had been wandering, Jase had been driving toward Old East Dallas. As they’d left the apartment, she’d noticed he wore his gun on his belt beneath his T-shirt. It had to mean he was ready for some kind of threat. Though the temperature was climbing toward ninety-five degrees, Kate fought a shiver.
Jase pulled the Yukon up to the curb in front of Reuben’s Liquor Store, a flat-roofed building with bars over the windows, a place she remembered passing the night they had gone to Mean Jack’s.
A tall, thin man in a beat-up flat-brimmed straw hat left the store with a brown paper bag in his hand and strolled off down the sidewalk. A kid whizzed past on a bicycle, rolling along without using his handlebars. Other than the few cars passing on the street, there was no one else around.
“Take a look around,” Jase said as they got out of the truck. “Take your time and be thorough. We might get lucky and find the murder weapon or a piece of it, a bit of fabric, could be anything. Look for any indication of blood, a rusty stain in a crack on the sidewalk, a dark smudge on the side of the building.”
Kate nodded. “All right.”
“If you find anything, don’t touch it. We’ll let the CSIs handle it. But I’d feel better calling the cops in if we could find some indication Eli was telling the truth.”
They started prowling, looking for anything that might validate the story Eli had told. The rain that night would have washed a lot of the evidence away. Add to that, for days people had been walking on the sidewalk, going in and out of the liquor store, up and down the alley beside the building. If it was the original crime scene, it had already been contaminated.
Still, there might be something.
Kate kept her eyes on the ground, looking for the tiniest bit of something—she wasn’t sure what. Twenty minutes into their search, she spotted a dark red pattern of spray on the wall that faced the alley.
