Karma Patrol (10 page)

Jade perched on the edge of a hard plastic chair in the interrogation room, holding a stirring straw like a pencil and poking dubiously at the surface of the coffee Aaron set in front of her.

“It’s just regular coffee,” he told her, and she shook her head.

“No, it isn’t. It can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because I
like
coffee.”

He couldn’t quite restrain a snort of laughter. “It’s the best we’ve got,” he told her.

She shook her head again, giving him a mournful look. “You risk your lives every day to serve and protect the citizens of New York, and we repay you by trying to poison you. It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Why don’t we get to the topic at hand and leave the criticisms of our hot beverages for a later date?” Luke proposed, his aggravation coming through in both his tone and his body language. “How did you know about the shooter?”

“I didn’t—”

“The concierge says you came into the hotel a good twenty seconds before the panic started outside, and two other desk clerks back him up. I’m sure the video footage from the lobby will confirm that you came in before the shooting started, which makes me wonder why you would come running full tilt into a Midtown hotel lobby in a panic. Unless it was because you already knew there was a shooter out there who was going to start killing people?”

She’d had the car ride over to the station, short though it was, to think of a reasonable story to explain her behavior. Unfortunately, her creativity had deserted her, and all she could come up with was a lame story.

“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

“Uh, no.” Luke stared at her like she was crazy. “It’s not okay. If you have some explanation for your behavior other than that you were aware of the shooter and possibly in league with him, then we need to hear it.”

She sighed, fidgeting with the red plastic straw in her hands. “I needed to use the ladies’ room.”

Luke gave her a flatly disbelieving look. “Are you seriously telling me your alibi is that you had to pee?”

“No,” she said primly, tossing her curls over her shoulder. “My alibi is that I had a
lady problem
I needed to deal with, and the Westin was the closest place with a public restroom. I was panicked when I went in there because I’m wearing winter white.” She raised her arms and indicated her sweater dress, which was indeed cream colored. “I needed to get somewhere I could fix the problem before it became visible to everyone on the street.”

Across the table, Luke was turning an interesting shade of crimson. His partner had buried his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook with the effort it took to hold back his laughter.

“I don’t suppose you can prove that,” Luke said finally, and the expression on his face was that of a man headed for the gallows. In response, Jade reached into her purse, pulling out the little pink pouch she always carried in case of an emergency and unzipping the top before turning it upside-down over the table. Three wrapped tampons tumbled out of the case and onto the table, and she gave him a level glance.

“If you want the specific feminine hygiene product in question, you’re going to have to wait until I’m finished with it,” she told him.

It was his turn to bury his face in his hands. Next to him, Aaron lost the battle with laughter, collapsing onto the table in booming guffaws.

“What did you think?” she added, putting as much wounded innocence into her voice and her expression as she could. “Did you really believe I was—what? In
league
with some crazy gunman? I’m a photographer, for God’s sake, not a murderer. If I did know about the shooting ahead of time, don’t you think I would have been as far away as possible, not traipsing through the intersection where the gunman was going to be shooting?” She shook her head at Luke. “You must think I’m the stupidest accomplice who ever lived.”

“Yeah, well…” He had nothing and he knew it. He glanced over at Aaron, but his partner was too busy laughing at him to be of any use. “You’re free to go, but don’t leave town.”

“How convenient for me that I both live and work here,” she pointed out, tossing the pink pouch back into her bag and getting to her feet.

“Don’t forget your… stuff.” Luke gestured to the tampons still lying on the table, and she reached down to collect them as she raised her eyebrows at him.

“You seemed pretty irritable earlier. Are you sure you don’t want me to leave you one just in case that PMS turns into something more?”

Aaron choked again, and Luke went from crimson to purple. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, she scooped up the tampons and sailed out of the interrogation room before they could change their minds about letting her go.

Luke collapsed into his desk chair, spearing his partner with a death glare before the other man could say anything.

“You—”

“Don’t. Just don’t.”

Aaron snickered, clearly inches away from another outburst of hilarity. “Luke, I have to hand it to you. You were right.”

He knew it was a trap, but he couldn’t resist. “Right about what?”

“That woman is
never
going to have sex with you.”

Luke rolled his eyes as his partner collapsed into paroxysms of laughter. “Oh, sure, it’s hilarious. Don’t tell me you actually bought her story.”

“Story?” Aaron demanded, incredulous. “What’s the alternative, Luke? She’s in league with some crazy bastard who shot up a street corner, and her contribution to the crime was to narrowly escape getting shot and then vaguely incriminate herself?”

Luke grimaced. His partner had a point, and there was no real evidence to support Jade’s involvement in the shootings, but he was also certain that Jade was involved somehow. He could feel it in his gut. He just couldn’t figure out how or why.

The phone on his desk rang and he snatched the receiver off of the base, grateful for the interruption.

“Jackson.”

It was the ballistics lab, calling with the results of their analysis. Luke’s expression grew progressively grimmer as he listened, and when they hung up, he turned to his partner.

“You look like someone died,” Aaron told him, and then considered what he’d just said. “You know. Another someone.”

“That was Irina from Ballistics. She got a match on the bullets used in the shooting this afternoon.”

“And?” Aaron prompted him.

“And they were a match to the bullets used in the shooting on Forty-Eighth Street this morning.”

“Son of a bitch,” Aaron murmured. “We’ve got a serial killer on our hands.”

That was the piece that had been missing from the crime scene that morning, the source of the unpleasant feeling in his gut when they’d examined the area where the bodies had been found. It was also the worst-case scenario he and Kalindi had discussed, and he exhaled sharply when he realized what that meant.

“You know the FBI is going to want in on this,” Aaron persisted, voicing the thought that had just crossed Luke’s mind, and he nodded.

“They’ll call it domestic terrorism and snatch the case right out from under our noses. By tomorrow morning, we’ll be completely out of the loop. Grab Captain Hawkes, would you?” he requested, glancing over at the bulletin board where they’d put the photos and notes from their investigation into the Forty-Eighth Street shooting. Their hastily assembled task force hadn’t gotten very far in trying to draw political connections between the Serbian national and the New York senator, and Luke suspected they’d been wasting their time looking for any sort of connection. If the shootings were random and the killer was a sniper whose goal was to terrorize the city, then he wouldn’t have cared who he killed. Any connections between the victims would be coincidence.

If the killings were random, then Jade Bailey was either the luckiest photojournalist in the world or she’d had enough advance warning to flee the scene of the second shooting before it started.

Luke Jackson didn’t believe in luck. He knew what he was going to be doing after the FBI took over the case.

Thoroughly rattled by her brush with death, and rattled in a completely different way by her interaction with her soulmate, Jade decided to let Midtown West take care of itself for a few hours. She considered going home, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to face her tiny apartment after spending an hour in the equally tiny interrogation room at the police station. Instead, she headed toward Central Park. It was outside her catchment area, so she would feel a little less guilty about sitting down and people watching without interfering.

She took a seat on an empty bench near Merchants’ Gate, curling her legs underneath her and feeling the tension start to drain out of her muscles as she finally relaxed. It had been a long day, even by her standards, and the sun was still up. She wasn’t sure how much more stress she could handle.

As though Fate had heard the thought and decided to poke at her, her phone rang. She groaned as she dug through her purse, trying to decide who was going to add to her stress level now. Maybe it was Celia, calling to tell her Destiny Division had decided to have her fired for interfering with their investigation. It might even be her soulmate, trying to track her down so he could arrest her for conspiring with the shooter.

The name flashing in the caller ID was both a surprise and a relief, and she accepted the call with pleasure.

“Hey, Talli,” she greeted her baby sister, glancing at her watch reflexively. “Isn’t it the middle of the night where you are?”

“We’re only six hours ahead,” Talli laughed, her voice tinny over the intercontinental connection. “I just got back from dinner. I’m heading out to a club with Pierre.”

“Pierre, huh? Is he your Parisian flavor of the week?”

“Hey, I won’t know if Karma Division approved my request for a permanent placement here until six months from now. I have to experience as many of the local flavors as I can in case I get recalled back home.”

“I’m going to start calling you Baskin-Robbins,” Jade threatened.

Talli snickered. “What about you, big sis? I’m guessing you haven’t sampled any of the local flavors up north.”

Jade felt the silly grin spreading across her face but was powerless to stop it. “I found him, Talli. I found my soulmate.”

There was a moment of silence and then a delighted shriek. “No
way
! Seriously? Is he cute? Oh my God, you waited like three decades for him to show up, he’d better be a total Adonis. Did he fall head over heels in love with you? Is he your love slave now?”

“Actually, he tried to arrest me.”

“Oh, very funny,” Talli laughed. “Is that some sort of kinky innuendo? Because I don’t want to know that much about my sister’s sex life.”

“No, he really tried to arrest me,” Jade admitted. “He’s a cop, and he thinks I’m in league with a serial killer.”

“Whoa.” The humor was gone from Talli’s voice. “Jade, are you serious?”

“It’s not a big deal, Talli,” she said, surprised by her sister’s concern. “I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I know you aren’t a serial killer. All I’m saying is, now that you’ve met this guy, shouldn’t he be so in love with you that he refuses to believe anything bad about you?”

“Not all bonds kick in at the same speed,” Jade defended, although Talli’s words sparked a nagging concern that maybe Shannon had been right at lunch and there really was some consequence to meeting her soulmate ahead of schedule. “Maybe he’s a slow responder. Or maybe he’s fighting it.”

“He may not be in love yet, but you are, aren’t you?”

Jade didn’t respond, but her sister didn’t need her to.

“Jade, be
careful
. You know what happens when a soulmate bond is unevenly distributed, and I am not flying to New York to bail you out of jail when you get arrested for going all
Fatal Attraction
on a cop.”

“It’s going to work out, Talli,” Jade insisted. “I have faith in Interpersonal Relations, even if you don’t. Plenty of soulmate pairings start out rocky, but they always work out for the best. June and Johnny Cash, Evita and Juan Peron—”

“Sid and Nancy,” her sister challenged. “Bonnie and Clyde. Hitler and Eva Braun. I know it doesn’t fit into your fairy tale fantasy of how your life is supposed to turn out, but there are plenty of examples of soulmate bonds that ended badly for everyone involved. The bond makes people jealous and irrational—”