Hot Property (6 page)

She picked up her speed, feeling a bit awkward running in her sandals and miniskirt. She wished she’d chosen to wear a warm-up suit today, but the beautiful spring weather and her sense of blessed freedom had dictated the denim outfit.

Still, stretching her muscles felt good. She’d been too busy to jog lately. She would have enjoyed the exercise more if she hadn’t been worried about Michael watching her, and whether she looked silly.

Everything was going fine until a squirrel darted out of a tree practically under Yoda’s nose. He gave a snort and bolted. Unprepared, Wendy couldn’t hold on to the leash, although she made a valiant effort. The dog’s sudden surge forward jerked her off her feet and onto her chest, dragging her a couple of feet before she let go with a cry of anguish.

Michael was there in an instant. He’d been all the way across the park—he must have flown to her side.

“Wendy, are you all right?” he demanded sharply, though his hands were gentle as he helped her up. “Easy. Nothing broken?”

“Never mind me,” she said urgently. “Go after the dog. I’ll be in big trouble if anything happens to Yoda.” Dismissing her minor scrapes and bruises, she took off after the rottweiller, which had gained a considerable lead on her. He darted across the street, barely missing a collision with a passing car, and galloped into a parking lot.

Wendy put on a burst of speed, her only thought to catch Yoda before he got lost or injured. Mr. Damian loved that dog the way he would his own child. She would never forgive herself if something happened to the animal. Mr. Damian trusted her and no one else to exercise his rotty.

She started to leap off the curb into the street when a strong pair of hands grabbed her, knocking her
off balance. For the second time in two minutes she found herself on the ground not by her own choice. This time Michael Taggert was on top of her.

She was just about to berate him for being some kind of maniac when the hot breath of a passing car whooshed over her.
My God
, she thought, her head spinning,
that car would have hit me!
She’d been so engrossed in catching Yoda that she hadn’t been paying attention.

Her second realization, all in the span of a few seconds, was that having Michael’s big, hard body on top of hers wasn’t such an unpleasant experience. She felt her body responding to him in a purely female way, heating up from the core outward.

“Get off me,” she said through clenched teeth, masking her sudden and inappropriate desire with hostility.

Michael was breathing hard, matching her gasp for gasp. He must have been right beside her through the chase, she thought.

“You almost got yourself killed,” he finally managed. He didn’t move.

She tempered her voice. “I know. I’ve got to find Yoda. Please get off.”

This time he did ease himself away from her. He sprang to his feet and offered her a hand up.

A familiar panting noise caused her to turn and look behind her. There was Yoda, hunkered down on his elbows with his rump in the air, wanting to play.

“So, you think that was funny, do you, Yoda?” she scolded. She placed her hand in Michael’s warm grasp
and allowed him to pull her to her feet. She grabbed Yoda’s leash on the way up. “We’re going straight home, now, and you can forget about that second Milkbone you were going to get.”

She knew she should say something to Michael. The man had just possibly saved her life. But she couldn’t force herself to be grateful. It was easier to focus on the dog.

“You’re bleeding,” Michael said, pointing to a scrape on her knee. A tiny trickle of blood wended its way down her leg.

She swiped at it impatiently. With all the adrenaline in her system, she didn’t feel any pain. “It’s nothing. Let’s just take Yoda home and get on with meeting the artist. I’ve wasted enough of your time today.”

Wendy’s sudden ambivalence toward him cast a shadow on Michael’s morning. He’d actually been enjoying all the detours. Watching Wendy work was educational, not to mention arousing. Throwing her down to the ground and falling on top of her would have been pretty fun, too, if he hadn’t been scared out of his mind. If he’d been even one second later in pulling her out of the street, she would be roadkill.

She didn’t seem to realize how close she’d come to meeting her maker. She hadn’t even thanked him for saving her from certain injury. Instead she seemed withdrawn and even a little bit angry.

“The car that almost hit you,” he said as they walked toward the warehouse building. “Did you realize
it was the same brown Caprice that was circling the block?”

“Really? Maybe he was in a hurry ’cause he spotted a parking place.”

Michael didn’t think so. There’d been something almost deliberate in the way that car had barreled down the street without hesitation, and the driver hadn’t even stopped after the near-accident.

In all the confusion, Michael still had managed to memorize part of the license plate. The Caprice was a few years old and not a very common color. He intended to track down the driver and find out what the hell he or she was up to. At the very least, he would turn the person over to the Traffic Division for reckless driving.

Wendy reinstated Yoda in his apartment and, despite her threat, gave him another Milkbone. Minutes later they were back in her van headed for the police department’s Physical Evidence Section on Cantegral. Michael tried to get Wendy talking again, but she answered his questions with monosyllables, so he gave up.

Although Michael hadn’t made an appointment with the artist, Linda Bashier was almost always available, and today was no exception. They found her in her second-floor cubbyhole of an office, messing around with modeling clay.

The moment Linda and Wendy met, Michael could tell they would get along. Wendy’s reticence disappeared as soon as she entered Linda’s area. Her natural
curiosity rebounded, and she launched a series of endless questions about the artist’s work.

“What’s this?” she asked, examining a life-size model of the head of a young male, made out of clay.

“It’s a facial reconstruction,” Linda replied. “A badly decomposed body was found near the Trinity River, and we couldn’t identify it. So I take the skull and, using certain standard measurements, build a face of clay around—”

Wendy gasped. “You mean there’s a human skull under there?”

Linda shared a wink with Michael. “Yes. I boil it in an acid solution to clean off—”

“Whoa, whoa,” Wendy said, holding up her hands in a warding-off gesture. “That’s more than I wanted to know.”

“Sorry,” Linda said. “I forget how repugnant some people find my work. Shall we get busy?”

The two women settled at a desk with a sketch pad and a thick book that contained facial features of every description. Linda would help Wendy remember every detail, then combine them into a drawing, or perhaps a couple of different ones showing the suspect with and without hair, with and without glasses. Michael planned to circulate the drawing among all the cops, snitches, and other criminal elements, hoping someone would recognize the mug.

During the two hours it took to come up with the composite drawing, Michael made a few phone calls and took care of his stranded car. Unfortunately, the motor pool didn’t have even a bicycle to spare as a
loaner, so he was stuck without wheels. That meant that if he wanted to pal around with Wendy anymore, he would still be the victim of her whims.

The prospect wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as it should have been.

He spent the rest of the time on the phone with banks and utility companies, following leads on Neff and the mysterious Pat Walters. The bank, it turned out, did have an account for Bernard Neff. They were tracking down the person who’d taken the original account information.

Unfortunately, the account had been cleaned out through a series of ATM withdrawals over the past several weeks. It sounded as if Wendy’s friend had plans. Maybe he’d even set Wendy up to be caught, to clear the way so he could move cleanly on to his next heist.

At least he hadn’t gotten those last few thousand dollars from the sale of the art deco jewelry, Michael thought. The cash and the jewels were locked up tight in the evidence room.

Bored, Michael decided to wander over to visit Cecil Wanstadt, the resident fingerprint expert. The shiny surface of the topaz on one of the art deco necklaces had yielded a single, fairly clear print. Wanstadt had quickly determined that it didn’t belong to Wendy or to the fence she’d sold the jewelry to. He’d submitted it to the computer fingerprint database to see if a match could be found.

Michael discovered Wanstadt hunched over a keyboard in the room that housed the computer, which
the fingerprint expert guarded as if he were a dog with a big bone. On his computer screen were two huge thumbprints, one complete, one partial, which Wanstadt was comparing ridge by ridge.

When calling out Cecil’s name yielded no response, Michael had to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention.

Wanstadt jumped, then broke into a big grin. “Hey, Taggert, what are you doing on this side of the tracks?” he asked as he stood and offered a handshake.

“Came to harass you. Any luck with the jewelry print?”

The older man shook his head. “The computer spit out four candidates for comparison, but when I eyeballed ’em, none matched.”

Michael felt disappointment settle inside his chest like a lead weight. That was the way this case had gone from the beginning, one dead end after another. Although it was encouraging that Wendy’s prints hadn’t been found on the jewelry, she was still his only suspect. If something more concrete didn’t turn up soon, she was in a heap of trouble, and so was he.

He hoped the mayor was bluffing about nixing Michael’s application to the FBI, but what if he wasn’t? He figured he had a few more days’ grace, but then he would have to prove Wendy’s guilt or innocence to get himself off the hook.

“Hey, Tagg, that you in the computer room?” an anonymous voice called from the main squad room.

Michael stuck his head out the doorway. “Someone want me?”

A detective he’d seen often at the courthouse pointed at the phone. “Call for you. Line four.”

Michael picked up the extra extension in the computer room. “Taggert here.”

“It’s me, Joe. I was just talking to Smythe.”

Wayne Smythe was another detective in Theft. “Yeah?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

The lead weight in Michael’s chest doubled in size and sank to his gut. “What? Spit it out.”

“Four houses burglarized in the last five months were owned by clients of Born to Shop.”

“It gets worse,” Joe said.

Michael braced himself. “Go ahead.”

“Whoever committed the burglaries got around the security alarms.”

Michael flashed back to Wendy punching in the security code at Yoda’s owner’s apartment building. “Is there more?”

“Oh, yeah. The diamond earrings we found in Wendy’s purse. You know how they weren’t part of the estate jewelry stolen from the museum?”

“Yeah?”

“They belong to a Mrs. Howard Pitts.”

“One of Wendy’s clients,” Michael guessed.

“You got it.”

This new development shed a really ugly light on Wendy. Yet something didn’t feel right about it. It was too neat. Surely if Wendy were routinely ripping off her clients, she would fake a forced entry, maybe set
off the alarm on her way out the door with the loot. Otherwise she would have to know she was implicating herself.

“Thanks, Joe.” Thanks for making a bad day worse.

“Smythe wants to bring her in for another interrogation.”

Now Michael’s insides felt like solid lead, no more room for expansion. Poor Wendy. He’d never sided with a perp, even a possible perp, before. Still, he didn’t relish the thought of the wringer his coworker, Wayne Smythe, would put her through. That guy could make hardened felons, gang members, and ex-cons cry. “Let me see if I can get her to come in voluntarily, okay? She’s already in the system. No need for handcuffs and warrants.”

Joe laughed. “You’re getting soft, Tagg.”

Michael didn’t rise to the bait. “Maybe so.”

He got a few more details from Joe before he ended the call. Just as he hung up, he became pleasantly aware of a fragrance he was coming to know: Wendy. He turned, and she was standing by the door in the computer room.

“I’m done,” she said. Her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. “Wait till you see what Linda came up with. It looks exactly like Mr. Neff.”

Michael had a hard time coming up with a pleasant rejoinder. He had a sudden visual image of Wendy in prison blues. Maybe that shark lawyer of hers could work out a deal, especially if the mayor remained on Wendy’s side. But with this new evidence that had
come to light, even the mayor would have a hard time believing in Wendy’s innocence.

Then why was Michael so anxious to believe there was an alternative explanation?

“Michael?” Wendy looked at him questioningly. “Don’t you want to see it? Linda’s putting the finishing touches on it now.”

“She’ll fax it over to me when she’s done, I’m sure,” Michael said curtly.

“Is something wrong? You look … funny.”

“Yeah, something’s real wrong.” He consulted his notebook. “Hopkins. Lamb. Pitts. Yarbrough. Names sound familiar?”

Wendy paled. “They’re all clients of mine. Why?”

“They’ve all been burglarized in the last few months.”

“Oh, Mrs. Lamb said something to me about that. They took her silver, her furs. But I hadn’t realized there was a rash of—wait a minute! You think I had something to do with it?”

At her shrill question several heads turned. Wendy, bristling with outrage, ignored them.

“What I think is immaterial. Detective Wayne Smythe wants to talk to you.”

Wendy’s head was spinning as they walked outside the Physical Evidence building into the warm, pleasant spring day. Things were going from bad to worse! Her spirits had been momentarily bolstered by the super-accurate drawing she and the artist had produced.
But for every step forward she took, it seemed she took two steps back.

Now the police thought she was a museum thief
and
a second-story woman.