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“Of course they do, dear. You’re smart and you’re knowledgeable and—”

“And the judging is going to start soon.”

“We’ve got everything under control.” Helen’s cadre of volunteers had followed at a discreet distance. When she looked over her shoulder, they nodded in unison. “See? No problemo.” Helen gave me a nudge toward the door. “Go do what you need to do; I’ve got everything under control.”

She did. And I was grateful.

Which explains why in the elevator on the way up to Thad Wyant’s suite, I called down to the gift shop and had a dozen roses sent to Helen’s room.

Chapter Eight

“D
ON’T TOUCH ANYTHING
.”

They were the first words out of Nev’s mouth when I walked into Thad’s suite, and I understood the wisdom of keeping my hands to myself, but really, it was too bad. He hadn’t been kidding the night before when he said he had to get back to the station and work on the case. He was wearing the same khaki suit and that same god-awful tie. The good news was that he apparently kept a clean shirt at the station; the blue Oxford cloth shirt had been replaced by one in a shade of beige just this side of oatmeal. With his fair skin, light eyes, and monochromatic outfit, Nev looked worn out, and my fingers itched to smooth away his wrinkles. It would have done nothing to relieve the bags under his eyes, but it would have played into my irresistible impulse for neatness.

A tendency apparently not shared by Thad Wyant. Unless…

“The room was ransacked?” I asked, and at the same time, I glanced around in horror at the clothing tossed over chairs and the couch, the empty beer bottles on the credenza against the far wall, and what had been the contents of the welcome bag we gave conference attendees spilled half on the dining table, half on the floor.

“Hard to say.” Nev had been talking to a crime-scene tech just as I walked in, and he finished up with the woman, and she went off to check out the bedroom. That taken care of, he stepped toward me. “It was like this when we got here last night to seal the room and get started on the investigation, but I don’t know…” He looked around, too, and I guess Nev and I had one more thing in common than just murder, because he shivered at the sight of the chaos. “Maybe somebody was in here looking for something, or maybe our Mr. Wyant was just a plain old garden-variety slob.”

“It actually wouldn’t surprise me.” I carefully stepped between the couple days’ worth of newspapers scattered across the carpet and a chair where a piece of Thad’s luggage was opened and half unpacked. “It’s hard to believe that a man who was so precise in his work could be so…” Words failed me, and I guess Nev understood because he shook his head in sympathy.

I had no doubt he was going to get right down to business. After all, that’s why Nev had asked me to meet him up in the suite the conference was providing for Thad. That thought hit me like a ton of bricks, and I realized there was one more thing Nev and I had in common. I was thinking business, too.

“Will we have to keep paying?” The question popped out before I could edit it, and I didn’t want to sound cheap, but…“We were covering his expenses,” I explained. “And if Thad is checked out…”

“Yeah, permanently.” Dark humor. No doubt, it was one of the things that kept cops sane in the face of the evil and stupidity they encountered every day. “I think you’re off the hook. Unless you’d like to move Kaz in here.”

Impossible, since Thad’s room was considered important to the investigation, and no way they’d let someone else stay there and mess up whatever evidence might exist there, so I knew Nev was joking.

Unless he wasn’t.

I gave Nev a careful once-over, wondering as I did what was going on behind that calm, oatmeal exterior, and I guess I had at least a bit of the answer when he broke off eye contact.

“You knew Kaz was waiting in the hallway for me last night,” I said.

Nev gave me a lopsided grin. “It’s kind of hard to miss a guy trying to look inconspicuous behind a potted palm.”

“I did.”

“You had other things on your mind.”

“So did you.”

He shrugged. “I told you I wanted to walk you back to your room because I didn’t like the thought of you wandering around the hotel by yourself at that hour. So really…” The tips of Nev’s ears turned a shade of red that looked particularly vivid with his pallid outfit. “Really, I had you on my mind,” he said. “I knew Kaz wasn’t any threat to you.”

“You could have warned me he was lurking.”

“You let him stay in your room?”

Was that a personal question? From Nev? Or was he just doing his job and keeping tabs on the guy who’d already admitted he’d been squatting in the basement laundry room where the murder had been committed?

Before I could decide, the tech called Nev into the bedroom, and I was left on my own.

“Don’t touch anything,” I reminded myself while I strolled through the room and took as close a look as I dared at the mess. The carry-on Thad had with him at the airport was tossed in one corner, open, and I nudged it with the toe of my shoe (that doesn’t count as touching) just enough so that I could peek inside and see that it was empty.

Hands on my hips, I looked around, wondering where Thad might have put the Geronimo button and, more important, if it was still there.

“So what do you think?”

When Nev stepped back into the living room, his question snapped me out of my thoughts, and I spun to face him.

“About this disaster? Or about you asking where Kaz spent the night?”

Something told me Nev wasn’t caught off guard very often, so I had every right to smile when he flinched.

“Natural curiosity,” he admitted.

I wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. “Not really,” I pointed out.

Nev’s cell rang, and I cursed my luck. At this point in my life, I wasn’t looking to jump into a serious relationship with Nev or anyone else. But I did think he owed me an explanation. If there was more to our friendship than the occasional dinner and a movie—or if there could be—I had every right to know.

And an obligation to do my part and not play games.

I waited until Nev finished his call.

“I didn’t know what else to do with him, and the hotel is full so I couldn’t get him a room of his own. Kaz did stay in my suite,” I said. “In the living room. On the couch.”

Nev did his best to control a smile. “It’s none of my business.”

“It isn’t, but I don’t mind telling you. Kaz and I are…” It was difficult to explain. “
Friends
is the wrong word.”

“But you do have a history.”

“Undeniable.”

“And you do still have feelings for him.”

“Not those kinds of feelings.” I walked over to the window and looked out. Thad’s room was on the opposite side of the hotel from mine. Where all I could see from my room was buildings and more buildings, Thad’s view included a wide swathe of Lake Michigan, glittering in the morning sun. “There are times I want to shake Kaz until his teeth rattle,” I told Nev. “There are times I’d like to punch him in the nose. But there are times I want to help him out, too, and I’ve convinced myself that’s the worst thing I can do, so I do my best to back off and back away. Like I said, we aren’t friends, but there are times I think we can still be friendly. But just so you know, there is never, ever a time I think we could still be married.”

Was that a sigh of relief I heard from Nev?

Unfortunately, I didn’t turn around fast enough to confirm it. I did see that, with our personal issues settled (at least for now), he was all set to get back to the investigation. He pulled a small leather notebook from his back pocket and reached for a pen. “What can you tell me about Thad Wyant?” he asked.

“Not much more than I told you last night. Oh, and something I found out this morning.” I recounted what Daryl had told me, and Nev took copious notes. “Do you think Daryl saw Thad’s killer?”

“Do you?”

Leave it to Nev to remember what I’d told him the night before about not wanting to get involved in another investigation
, and to respect my wishes. Leave it to Nev to ask my opinion without asking my opinion. Thinking about his question, I strolled over to the minibar, which was just like the one in my suite. “You want to know if I think Daryl’s telling the truth. I can’t say.” I left out the part about how Daryl wanted to get to know me better in a way I didn’t want to know him, and settled for “I never met him before the cruise on Sunday night, and I’ve only chatted with him a couple times since.”

“But he confided in you.”

“He did.” There was no question about it. “Daryl is a little… Well, you’ll see when you talk to him. I guess
dorky
is the right word, even if it does sound mean. He doesn’t seem to have any friends here at the conference, and he’s not Mr. Personality. I think because I’m the only person he knows here, he turned to me.”

“Fair enough.” With his leather notebook, Nev waved me closer. “Look at these things, will you, and tell me what they are.”

He pointed behind the couch, where Thad—or whoever had trashed his room—had tossed a pile of stuff, and when I got over there, he handed me a pair of latex gloves like the kind I’d seen crime-scene investigators wear on TV. I slipped them on and bent closer to the pile for a better look, picking my way through it carefully so I could put it right back the way it was when I was done.

“Plastic sleeves for keeping button trays protected, card stock for mounting the buttons—”

I glanced over my shoulder at Nev. “These are the things Langston Whitman said Thad stole from his booth down in the dealer room. And that awl with the cherry handle…” I remembered the scene down in the linen room, and the awl that had been thrust into Thad’s neck, and I sat back on my
heels. “Langston was right. Thad did steal all this stuff, and one of the things he stole ended up being the murder weapon.” I yanked off the latex gloves, stuffing them in my pocket, and hugged my arms around myself. “How creepy is that?”

This interested Nev, and he made a note about it, then offered me a hand up.

It wasn’t until we were toe to toe that we realized we were still holding hands and scrambled to untangled our fingers.

I was glad. Not that I didn’t enjoy the sensation, but the last thing we needed was a skin-to-skin moment with a crime-scene tech in the room just beyond and murder on our minds.

I told myself not to forget it. “Why would a man like Thad need to steal button supplies?” I spoke even as I glanced around the room again and didn’t see a sign of what I was looking for. “And where are the buttons? If he needed card stock and sleeves, he must have had buttons to mount. More important, Nev, where’s the Geronimo button?”

“As far as we can tell…” He lifted his arms, taking in the entire suite. “There isn’t one button in this room, and believe me, we’ve looked everywhere.”

My stomach turned to ice. “Then whoever killed Thad…” My mouth was suddenly dry, and I ran my tongue over my lips. “They killed him to steal the Geronimo button?”

“Too early to know.”

Of course Nev would say that. He didn’t understand button collecting—or button collectors. Not really. If he did, he’d know that collectors took buttons very seriously. “It’s an important button,” I said by way of explanation. “I hate to think that any collector would value a button over a life, but if somebody wanted the Geronimo button bad enough…”

He scribbled a few more notes. “How valuable?”

It wasn’t often I was put on the spot. Not when it came to buttons. I am, after all, one of the country’s leading experts. Still…

“It’s hard to say,” I admitted. “The button itself… Well, according to the articles I’ve read that Thad wrote about the button, it’s made of mother of pearl. What we in the business call MOP.” I remembered this would not mean to Nev what it would to a collector and explained. “Don’t think of the pearls that are found in oysters out in the ocean. Mother of pearl was harvested from mussel shells found in the Mississippi River. Hundreds of thousands of MOP buttons were made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Button production was a huge industry in places along the river.”

“Hundreds of thousands translates into not so valuable.”

“Except that we know Geronimo owned the button and sold it to a man who came to visit him. That takes it from just another vintage button into a whole new realm.”

Nev understood and he nodded. “Impossible to pawn and hard to resell.”

“But so satisfying to keep in a personal collection and call your own!” I was afraid I sounded a little too wistful, so I shook away my pleasant button daydream. “I can’t believe anyone here at the conference—”

“Would kill for a button? Come on, Josie, you said it yourself. It would be something of a coup to own that button.”

“But if you can’t ever tell anyone…”

“I’ve seen people kill for weirder things: a pair of sneakers, a jacket, some skewed notion of how they’d been done wrong. Of course, killing for a button—” He realized what he’d almost come right out and said, and he bit off his words.

“Don’t apologize.” I held up a hand to stop him before he could start. “I get it. Most people don’t understand about button collecting, and there’s no reason they should. Buttons are small; they’re common. From the outside looking in, this whole button-collecting thing looks as crazy as crazy can be.”