Hot Property (3 page)

“Worth about four grand,” Michael said casually. “Pretty good pay for running a few errands.”

He was just about to congratulate himself for scoring a point when the door opened. No knock, no apology. Michael whirled around. “What the hell …”

His voice trailed off. Standing just inside the doorway was a man whose square face he knew well. From newspapers. From TV. But never at the police station.

“Hello, Nate,” the newcomer said to Wendy’s lawyer. “Glad you could get here so quickly.” Then he turned to Michael. “Are you the man responsible for Wendy Thayer’s arrest?”

Michael stood up and faced the man. “Yes, Mr. Mayor. Sir.”

“There’s been a mistake.” Clifford Munn, Dallas’s mayor, was an imposing figure of a man with clean, chiseled features, gently graying hair, and a real expensive power suit. He also could thunder when he wanted to.

“She delivered stolen museum pieces to a fence,”
Michael tried to explain. “I saw that with my own eyes.”

“It’s a mistake,” Munn said again, a bit calmer now. “I know this woman. She shops for my wife. We’re having a party in one week. A big party.”

Ah, yes. The retirement party for Captain Patterson, a forty-five-year veteran of the department.

“If Wendy’s in jail,” the mayor continued, “she can’t shop for the party, can she?”

“Well, no, sir.” Michael resisted the urge to tug at his collar, which suddenly felt tight.

“If Wendy can’t do the shopping, my wife will have a nervous breakdown. What’s your name?”

“Sergeant Michael Taggert.” Michael didn’t add the “sir” this time. He did not deserve to be dressed down as if he were a green Police Academy grad just because the mayor was having a party.

Munn narrowed his eyes. “You’ve applied to the Bureau.”

“Yes, sir.” Oh, great. How did hizzonor know that? Wait a minute. Michael remembered the campaign promises now. Clifford Munn. Tough on Crime. Former FBI special agent, retired on disability after being injured in the line of duty. Damn, damn, damn.

“I keep my hand in things,” he said, answering Michael’s unasked question. “Listen, Mr. FBI Wannabe. Wendy Thayer isn’t a criminal. You straighten this out in time for my party, or I’ll personally see to it your application keeps an appointment with a paper shredder.” He turned and slammed the door on his
way out, giving Michael no chance to react, no chance to defend himself.

He looked over at Wendy. She was actually smiling. The shark attorney was trying not to laugh. And suddenly the whole tone of the interrogation changed. Michael no longer held all the cards.

“I told you I knew the mayor,” she said. “So what do you say you quit harassing me and let me help you find Mr. Neff?”

Michael’s police-issue sedan sputtered like an antique tractor as he started it up the next morning at the crack of dawn. All right, so Wendy Thayer was right about the muffler.

What an awesome creature that woman was. In all his umpteen years in law enforcement, he’d never encountered a suspect as alluring as Wendy—or as unlikely. He’d like to believe she was innocent. But there was too much smoke coming from her direction.

His car coughed and died. Gritting his teeth with determination, as if that could somehow help the ailing car, Michael started it up again. Sometime that day he’d have to turn the car over to the motor pool for repairs and get a loaner.

But not now. Now he had to drive over to the Southeast Station and track down the two patrol officers who’d checked out the house on Monty. About the only chance he had of catching them and questioning
them in person was to grab them on their way out of their morning briefing, before they hit the streets.

His thoughts turned to Wendy again during the short, pre-rush-hour drive east on I-30. He’d been too eager to pin the theft on her, he decided. She was the first, the only, real break he’d had on the Art Deco Museum case, and he badly wanted to mark this one solved. Not that he believed she was a blameless pawn. No one who shopped for a living could be innocent, and she was too smart to be a mere pawn.

But she had to be working for someone. If he could catch that someone, and Wendy turned state’s evidence against him or her, it would be a win-win situation. Michael would have a feather in his cap, and Wendy would probably get off with a slap on the wrist, making the mayor happy.

Of course, Wendy’s business would be in a shambles, he thought with a twinge of guilt. Which of her customers would ever trust her again? Then he marveled at the workings of the male mind when confronted with hormones. If she was a thief or a fence or a pack mule, she
deserved
to lose her business. He had no reason to feel guilty for doing his job, despite the number Mayor Munn had tried to lay on him.

The Southeast Station was a hive of activity as the night shift gave way to the day. Michael found a parking place, showed his badge at the front desk, then slipped into the small auditorium where officers were briefed before starting their patrols. As soon as he identified the captain in charge, he approached and made his request.

“Gonzales is in the break room,” the captain said amiably. “I just saw him.”

“Thanks.”

Michael followed the smell of stale coffee to a small break room where a knot of blue-uniformed officers scarfed pastries and laughed at an off-color joke. He remembered with fondness the days of street patrol, the camaraderie, the black humor.

“Gonzales?” he asked the group.

“Right here,” a young, barrel-chested man said. “I’m Gonzales. You must be Detective Taggert. Is there a problem?”

“No, not really,” Michael assured him. The other officers left him and Gonzales in private. “I just wanted a little more detail on that house you checked out for me.”

“On Monty,” the officer confirmed. “Not much to tell. It was completely empty, clean as a whistle.”

“Were the utilities on?” Michael asked, taking a cue from Wendy’s question during the interrogation.

“Yeah. The lights worked. But there was no sign that the place was occupied. If any kids or homeless people had been shacking up there, we’d know it. In fact …” Gonzales paused to remember. “The place was unnaturally clean. No junk mail or newspapers stacking up, either.”

Michael jotted that down in his notebook. It wasn’t much. “Anything else? Even something that doesn’t seem important?”

Gonzales hesitated. “This is gonna sound stupid. But I swear, I smelled banana bread in the kitchen.”

Wendy’s two cats, Bill and Ted, wrapped themselves around her ankles when she got home at seven the morning after her arrest.

“I can’t walk,” she complained, trying to nudge them aside as she closed the front door behind her and set down her purse. “It’s only been one day. You have dry food available. You can’t be that hungry.”

They were, and they let her know it. Bill started gnawing on her clog, and Ted jumped up on the coat tree in her entry hall and tried to climb onto her shoulder. They yowled in harmony.

“Blame Michael Taggert, not me,” she groused as she herded her brood into the kitchen, praying she had another couple of cans of food in the cupboard. “He’s the one who testified at my arraignment and made me sound like a conniving felon.”

Wendy was convinced it was Taggert’s fault the judge had set her bail at an unreasonable hundred grand. She’d had to come up with 10 percent in order to post bond—not an easy feat given that she’d pumped all of her assets into Born to Shop.

“Here, chicken livers and gizzards, your favorite flavor.” She dumped two cans of smelly cat food into Bill and Ted’s bowls, which silenced the yowling. Frenzied purring accompanied her as she left the kitchen and headed into the bathroom. She had just enough time to shower, dress, and drive to the office before her employees started arriving.

On the way out the front door fifteen minutes later
she began mentally organizing her workday and the tasks to be delegated. Without breaking stride she grabbed her newspaper from the front walk, then chucked it into the back of the van. Maybe she could read it later. First she had to figure out how to clear her name. She didn’t believe she could trust the good detective to find the real thief, since he was so convinced she was the guilty party.

Wendy opened the window to her van and let her hair air-dry as she drove the ten minutes from her garden apartment in North Dallas to her storefront office in the Preston Royal shopping center. She’d thought long and hard before relocating from her spare bedroom to this uptown address—she paid some of the highest rent in the Metroplex. But the additional visibility, combined with her cable TV ads, was paying off. She was finally making some serious money. Her goal, once she got her small-business loans paid off, was to give herself a fat raise.

Now that goal seemed a long way off. Mounting a legal defense against these spurious theft charges—especially since her attorney was notoriously pricey—wouldn’t be cheap.

She tried hard to push her problems aside as she pulled into a parking space under Born to Shop’s green-striped awning. No matter what was going on in her life, she had to keep the business functional and efficient. Customers gave you one chance in this business. She’d discovered the hard way that if she was later than promised, if she forgot anything, she wouldn’t get a call back.

Let’s see, today was a dog-walking day, she remembered. Before she got out of the van, she consulted her electronic organizer: Mrs. Frazier’s Pomeranians, Mr. Damian’s rottweiler. She could probably delegate the poms to one of her employees, but the rotty was hers alone. No one else could deal with him.

A tap on her window distracted her. She looked up. Her heart gave a jump of recognition, then sank. Michael Taggert was scowling at her through the closed passenger window. Idly she wondered what that gorgeous face of his would look like graced with a smile.

She ran the window down. “I just got out of jail an hour ago,” she snapped. “If you want to take me back, you’ll have to catch me first.” She put her hand on her keys, still stuck in the ignition, and glared at him, daring him to whip out his handcuffs.

“I’m not here to arrest you.”

“Then why—”

“Can we go inside, maybe have a cup of coffee?”

He sounded almost … what, hopeful? Wendy found that hard to believe. Where was the arrogance, the superior attitude?

“If you want privacy, my office isn’t the place,” she said cautiously. “Besides, I don’t want to advertise my predicament to my employees.” As dear as they all were to her, like her own family almost, they were as prone to the temptations of gossip as anyone. She couldn’t afford for any of her clients to find out she
was a jailbird. They trusted her with their cars, their housekeys, sometimes even their children.

She unlocked the door. Without hesitation Michael climbed into her van, filling it with his overwhelming presence. Funny, she’d thought the van extraordinarily roomy until now.

“I saw a convenience store around the corner,” he said. “I’ll spring for the coffee.”

She considered turning him down flat. But her curiosity overcame her. Why was he suddenly making nice? She restarted the van’s engine and pulled out of her parking space. “The Exxon station down the block has better coffee, and it’s only seventy-nine cents.”

He nodded. “Then by all means, the Exxon station it is.”

As she turned out of the parking lot, she sensed a restlessness beside her, something she couldn’t put her finger on. Maybe he didn’t like her driving. Some people, some men in particular, were nervous passengers. James, the macho jerk, she recalled with a frown, had refused to let her drive even when they took her car.

“I’m a good driver,” she said. “You don’t have to worry. I’ve never had an accident.”

“A few parking tickets, though,” he quipped. “But your driving doesn’t bother me.”

So. He’d checked up on her.

She pulled into the gas station. Neither she nor her reluctant host said anything as they entered the attached Snack Shop. Michael poured them two large coffees and paid for them at the window. Wendy
doctored hers with cream and sugar. The silence continued until they returned to her van.

Wendy had never been known for her patience. “Okay, what’s up? Why are you being so …” She struggled for the right word.
Nice
didn’t cut it. “… so nonconfrontational?”

“As opposed to yesterday? Yesterday I was trying to browbeat a confession out of you. Today I’m not.” “Then what do you—”

“I want your help. I need your help. And you may not realize it, but you need mine. My testimony in a courtroom could make or break you.”

She considered this. Mondell had warned her that Michael Taggert was a formidable opponent, particularly in open court. His performance at the arraignment was just a warm-up. What jurist could fail to be intimidated into believing anything he said? She decided Michael had a point.

“So you’ll temper your testimony in exchange for …” She let her voice trail off as a series of X-rated thoughts crossed her mind. Surely he wasn’t suggesting that! She’d heard such things happened all the time, but Michael didn’t seem the type to have to manipulate a woman into … well, he wasn’t suggesting that, was he?