Armed and Devastating

Lou cradled her mug between her hands, shaking her head. “All those men in uniforms and badges and she’s not trying to pick one up.”

“Lou…” Peggy warned. “Don’t put that kind of pressure on her. Brooke is just a late bloomer. When the right man comes along, he’ll see her real beauty.”

“Yes, but you know how dense men can be. It doesn’t hurt to help them find their way.”

Brooke’s blush heated her clear down to her toes now. Louise didn’t have a shy bone in her body—she’d never understood how it made Brooke’s perfectly intelligent brain seize up whenever she tried to break out of her shell and try to get a man she was attracted to to notice her.

Buying herself some time to gather her thoughts and slip her newly forged assertive armor back into place, Brooke picked up her purse from the card table that served as living-room furniture, and dug out a tube of copper-colored lip gloss. Only after she’d put her professional game face back in place did she loop her carryall bag over her shoulder and turn to Louise. “Tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you.” She pointed across the main room. “You stay off that ladder and I’ll make the effort to talk to… three…men today.”

“About something not work-related,” Lou qualified, setting down her mug and smiling with hope.

“Agreed.”

“Then you’ve got a deal.”

“You’re a hopeless romantic, Lou. But I love ya.” Brooke squeezed her aunt in a hug. She traded another hug with Peggy at the back door. “Love you, too.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll keep her out of trouble. You just concentrate on the new job and have a wonderful first day.”

“I will. See you tonight.”

Brooke crossed the sundeck that had yet to have a railing added, and bopped down the stairs at the opposite end. The sun was warm on her face as she crossed the yard to where her car was parked at the curb. The tall, broken grass packed into the dry dirt where Truman McCarthy and his construction crew drove their heavy equipment and supply trucks up to the house reminded her to start pricing carports. When winter hit, it’d be a bear to have to trek through the snow or shovel a path out to the street. And the historical value of the church’s turn-of-the-century exterior wouldn’t allow her to attach a modern garage.

But the remodeling notes were only a minor diversion from the real concern at hand as Brooke dug her keys from her purse. She’d made a promise to her aunt. Now she had to keep it. Talk to a man. Pick one up, if Louise had her way. It could happen. Right. Brooke nearly snorted, squelching her ironic laughter.

Think positive. Be positive. The new and slowly improving Brooke could do this. She just needed to break the task down into smaller, less-daunting goals, and not psych herself out over the bigger challenge of transforming into the social butterfly Aunt Lou believed she could be.

Three men. She could do that. “Hi” qualified as speaking to a man, didn’t it? “I’m Major Taylor’s new administrative assistant” could be an entire conversation at a busy office.

Sure, she’d love to have a man notice her for something more than her computer skills, to have him think she was something special. But she’d pick smaller battles, savor lesser victories, instead of setting herself up for failure. She wasn’t going to let Louise’s fairy-godmother fantasies make or break her day. Or her life.

She’d have plenty of interesting things to do at the Fourth Precinct, meeting coworkers and learning new routines. Plus, there was the work here at home. She had love in her life from her aunts and friends. She didn’t need Prince Charming to make her happy or make her feel complete.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt a girl’s ego to…

A subtle, external awareness seeped into Brooke’s thoughts, short-circuiting the endless debate. The sun was already bright in the cloudless sky, yet a chill slunk down her spine and she halted beside her car.

She slowly turned, seeking the source.

It was that same odd sensation she got watching a DVD by herself late at night, when she was reminded of how Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful timing combined with her ever-churning imagination could totally spook her. Only this wasn’t something she could turn off with the remote.

She zeroed in on a dented tan pickup truck parked a block down the street. Brooke adjusted her glasses at the temple and squinted.

Who was that? She didn’t recognize the vehicle or its occupant behind the steering wheel, though she could make out little more than the man’s snow-white hair. But he wasn’t old, not if the ripples of muscle beneath his T-shirt were any indication. He was almost faceless with his head hunched down into his shoulders and his purple K-State ball cap pulled low over his eyes. Was he lost? Sleeping?

Watching her ?

He shifted in his seat and Brooke quickly turned away, avoiding any possibility of eye contact by staring down at her fingers on the door handle. “Paranoid much?”

Her nerves about starting the new job had gotten the better of her common sense, that was all. This was a regular old Monday morning in the middle of July, not a Hitchcock movie. And the Wildcat fan was nothing more than a man in a truck.

Brooke lifted her chin, determined to dispel her suspicion. She saw her aunts through the tall, narrow church windows, moving inside the house. There was a trio of boys two houses down, marking the bases for an early-morning whiffle ball game. Farther down the street, she spotted another neighbor, Mrs. Boyer, hanging on to the leash of her Labradoodle puppy as they practiced their daily walk.

All normal. All familiar.

Except…

Him.

“Stop it.” Brooke yanked open the car door and tossed her bag across the seat before she was tempted to look his way again. The man was probably one of Truman McCarthy’s construction workers, who’d shown up early for his shift and was waiting for his foreman to arrive. She was the only one who spent so much time with the thoughts inside her head that she could turn a harmless observation into a threat. No one else in the neighborhood seemed to think anything was out of place. Why should she?

Dismissing the man, the truck and the creepy sixth sense her imagination had concocted, Brooke hiked her skirt a notch and climbed inside to start the car and drive away.

But only a few minutes later, she began to wonder if her imagination had been playing tricks on her, after all. Stopped at a light before turning onto the highway which would take her into downtown Kansas City, Brooke checked her rearview mirror. Her breath hitched and she looked again.

Three vehicles behind her. Waiting to turn onto the same highway.

The stranger in the dented tan pickup truck.

Chapter Three

“I’m familiar with the program, sir.” Brooke hugged two software documentation manuals to her chest, wondering if Mitch Taylor had any idea how much space his broad shoulders and thick, barrel chest took up in her small, freshly painted but otherwise undecorated outer office. “But it’ll certainly be helpful to go through the formal training tomorrow.”

“Good.” His deep, commanding voice seemed to bounce off the safety glass on the door between their offices. “I’m competent when it comes to computers, but I’ll be counting on you to understand all the tricky stuff.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And unless it’s the commissioner, my wife or one of my sons or daughter calling, I don’t want to talk to anyone before the morning briefing.”

“Won’t the watch commanders handle the briefing of each shift?”

“They’ll handle the briefing. But they’ll meet with me first.”

“Yes, sir.” Brooke jotted the note on the pad at her desk. Watch commander meeting—no calls but the ones that count. She set down her pen and looked up. “Any other daily routine items I should know, Major Taylor?”

“Today, just handle the phone. Get your feet under you, unpack these boxes, and we’ll figure out the rest as we go along this week.”

“Yes, sir.”

A smile softened the rugged line of his jaw. “It’s Mitch. You don’t have to use the Mister or Major or sir when it’s just us talking.” He extended his long arm across her desk. “Welcome to the Fourth, Brooke.”

She reached out to shake his hand, “Thank you, sir—” Her shaky smile relaxed into the real deal. “Thanks, Mitch.”

“That’s better.” He seemed to approve of her effort to blur the line between efficiency and informality. Pulling back the front of his jacket, he propped his hands at his waist, subconsciously emphasizing the badge clipped to his belt, and giving her a glimpse of the gun and holster he wore beneath his right arm. Mitch Taylor was clearly a man who led men, but he seemed to have a little more teddy bear in him than his grizzly reputation had led her to believe. He surveyed her office, stopping when he spotted the plants she’d set on one of the empty bookshelves. “I see you have a fan club.”

Way to impress the boss, Hansford. He’d left flowers on her desk for when she arrived that morning, and she hadn’t said boo about them. Brooke set the stack of manuals on the corner of her desk and crossed to the shelf, fingering the delicate white petals and reading the attached card that welcomed her and wished her luck.

“Thank you for the daisies. They’re…” A lovely gesture. A bright addition to the office. One of my favorite flowers. “They’re nice.”

Nice? With her back to her boss, Brooke rolled her eyes. A dozen eloquent thank-yous had run through her head, and all that came out of her mouth was They’re nice? No wonder Louise worried about her ability to carry on a personal conversation with a man.

“Glad you like them. Though, I will confess, my wife, Casey, thought of them.”

“She has good taste,” Brooke stumbled on, fighting to get her thoughts ahead of her words. She turned to face him. “Tell her thank you, too.”

“I will.” Including his wife seemed to please him, which pleased Brooke. “We’d better get to work then, hadn’t we?”

“Yes, sir.” He held up a cautionary finger, and Brooke almost laughed. “Right, Mitch,” she corrected herself.

With a wink, he opened the adjoining door between their offices and left her to get acquainted with bookshelves and file drawers, a state-of-the-art computer system and boxes of supplies that needed to find a home.

That was one. Louise better not be climbing that ladder. Brooke had only two more conversations to go.

Standing a little straighter and smiling more easily, Brooke opened the blinds covering the windows of her outer office, spying on the stream of uniformed and plain-clothes officers outside. The shift must be changing for there to be so much traffic leading from the bank of elevators to the sergeant’s desk and main room beyond. From her hallway, cubicle walls blocked her view of the detectives’ desks and interview rooms. And she already knew the conference and break rooms were around the corner down another hall. Mitch Taylor’s quick tour this morning had already familiarized her with the layout of the Fourth’s headquarters building, if not with all the people on the other side of that glass.

Turning away before her confidence wavered, Brooke took off her jacket and hung it on the back of her chair. She resumed organizing file cabinets and her desk in a way that would be most efficient for her. After depositing an armload of paper onto the bottom bookshelf, she paused to stretch and admire her flowers.

She didn’t get gifts delivered to her very often, but this morning she had three plants to brighten her office—the daisies from Major Taylor and his wife, a pot of draping English ivy from her aunts and a pink carnation with a hand-scrawled note from the pseudo big brother she didn’t have a crush on, Sawyer Kincaid. Do great, kiddo! You’ll rock the Fourth. Love ya, Sawyer.

“I love ya, too, big guy.” Atticus’s older brother Sawyer was easy to like, easy to talk to—maybe because he was so crazy in love with his new wife and stepson that Brooke knew there’d never be another woman in his life, so she never felt any pressure to fill any other role besides sister. Equally likely was that Sawyer, unlike his enigmatic brother, was always out there with his emotions. He spoke what he thought—whether he was angry or being goofy or falling in love. There were no secrets or second-guessing with him.

“Ah.” Revelation. Maybe it was her love for puzzles and the challenge of solving mysteries that fueled her crush on Atticus Kincaid.

And maybe it was the safety of knowing he was a mystery she was never going to crack that only made her think she had a thing for him. If he was unattainable, she could pine away without ever having to put her fragile sense of self out there.

And she’d called Aunt Louise a hopeless romantic.

“Too much thinking,” Brooke chided. Her overly analytical brain was great for computers, but it could wreak havoc on a gal’s love life.

Knowing that focusing on something outside herself was the best way to curtail the sabotaging train of thought, she picked up Sawyer’s gift and moved the bloom to her desk where she could enjoy it as she dove back into her work. The number of times she answered the phone and transferred or took messages over the next two hours gave her a pretty good idea of just how busy she was going to be in this new position—and how much she was going to love it.

Brooke was more than ready to take a break at eleven-thirty. She pulled a bottle of water from her bag, kicked off her pumps beneath her desk and sat back to wiggle her toes and admire her handiwork. The layout of her computer and desktop now made the best use of light and workspace. Her shelves were pleasingly arranged and gave her easy access to the items she’d need most. And her chin-high file cabinets had been alphabetized and organized within an inch of their lives.

Really, all that was left were the personal touches that would make the new surroundings feel like her own place. The flowers helped for now, but she’d bring a couple of reading books to keep on the shelves for her lunch break, maybe frame some of the photographs of the reconstruction project at home and hang them on the wall above the file cabinets.

“Ooh, my pictures.” The thought reminded her of the photos of Peggy and Lou that she liked to keep on her desk. Spinning her chair around, she picked up the box from beside the desk and pulled it up onto her lap. Smiling as she removed the lid and fingered through the precious items inside, Brooke sorted through sentimental knickknacks, framed certificates and diplomas and pulled out the two photographs. “There you are, ladies.”

Brooke propped the box on the corner of the desk as she stood, arranging the pictures at the top of her desk calendar blotter. Reenergized by the familiar memories, she continued to unpack and decorate, padding around the office in her stocking feet, finding just the right spot for everything.

But as she reached into the bottom of the box, her heart seized up. “Oh, John,” she whispered reverently. “You found it.”

She sank into her chair as she pulled out the worn leather journal where she’d kept a log about the highs and lows of her life at work. She had several similar journals locked up in a trunk at home. She’d kept many such books in the years of her life since adolescence, when a visit to the counselor over her near inability to talk at school—and the resulting ulcers and hives that were sure indicators of stress—had led to the advice that she express her thoughts and emotions in whatever way she could. She’d punched pillows and squeezed worry dolls. Shouted and cussed in the privacy of her aunts’ basement. And if she was too shy to talk, she could write things down—her dreams, her fears, her anger and compassion, who she liked at school, why her aunts were being too strict, what she and her friends had done together that was particularly exciting and more. The adolescent therapy had evolved into a personal history of sorts over the years.

This particular journal, in which she’d first conceived the idea of finding an historic structure in a quiet suburb to remake into the perfect blend of rich character and modern amenities, had gone missing a couple of months before her boss’s death. For a few awful days, Brooke thought she’d sent it out with a package of evidence reports to the state lab. She’d turned her desk and purse and file cabinets inside out, searching for the lost journal, and had even called a friend in the KCPD archives, asking her to check through the boxed-up files that had been shipped from the deputy commissioner’s office. In the end, Brooke had accepted that she’d set the book down at a lunch table or park bench and had walked away without it. It would have been thrown out by the time she went back to look for it.

But John had found it, bless his heart. A sticky note on the front read For Brooke in his slanted, distinctive scrawl. Even after he was gone, he was, “Still looking out for me, aren’t you?”

Brooke opened the book and found a second sticky note inside the front cover. Forgive me this one said. “For what?” she mused, frowning. She’d forgive him anything. “Did you stick this in your briefcase by mistake? Read a couple of pages?” She talked to the book as though the man who’d snuck it back into her personal belongings could hear her. “Trust me. The content of this book is tame compared to what I’ve got at home.” No mention of how good-looking his sons were, or how grateful she was to be accepted as part of his family. Just business stuff. Just things she didn’t mind sharing at work. She hoped.

Oh, Lordy. What if some of those really personal things had found their way in here? Like a page of curse words over a particularly frustrating day, or something equally embarrassing?

Thumbing through the pages, Brooke figuratively held her breath and reminisced. There was the day she’d first started in John’s office, replacing his retiring assistant. She’d been so nervous. John had seemed so commanding, so busy that morning. She half suspected he hadn’t even noticed that she’d arrived. He’d been in the middle of a task force investigation and something on the case had broken. After he’d snapped an order for her to get online and find out everything she could about Wolfe International’s accounts in London and the Cayman Islands, Brooke had slid behind her desk and gone right to work with little more than an exchange of names. He’d seemed pleased—even impressed—when she set the printouts on his table in the briefing room that afternoon. He’d called her into the office at the end of the day, apologized and informed her that he’d be taking her to breakfast the next morning—if she could stand to spend time with an old grouch like him.

Brooke rolled her eyes at the smiley face she’d drawn at the end of that entry. “I decided I liked you, after all.”

When she turned the page to read how much more smoothly day two had gone, Brooke gasped. There, in the margin, next to her own neat writing was a scrawled comment from John.

“I knew I liked you that first day, too,” it read.

He had read the journal. “Oh, please don’t tell me I wrote anything stupid in this one.”

Sitting up straight, Brooke read through the journal page by page. She found another comment about how it creeped him out at first to have this quiet stranger predict his needs—sometimes before he knew them—as well as keep him on schedule. Brooke smiled when she found the note about how crazy he thought she was to buy the old stone church. “Waste of an inheritance,” it said. “Too big a money pit for a sweet thing like you.” Then, a page later, he wrote a lengthy missive about his fascination with the history of the church after she’d given him a tour and described her plans for the conversion. He’d gotten caught up in the building’s history and how it related to the settlement of the city and how he’d love to tackle a similar restoration project when he retired. He was impressed with Brooke’s businesslike approach and her determination to maintain the integrity of the historic design when it came to the remodel. He called her a “damn lucky girl to be able to pursue a dream like that.”

Tears, both told-you-so happy and I-miss-you-so regret, filled her eyes and blurred her vision until she had to reach up beneath her glasses and wipe them away. She turned the page to discover a boxy sketch with letters that didn’t form words, and symbols that made no sense.

“This isn’t mine.” She shook her head at the curious creative expression John had drawn in her journal. “And you said I was crazy.”

The phone rang, startling Brooke from the trip down memory lane. The journal fell to the floor when she jumped. “Good grief.” Pressing a hand to her racing heart, she took a deep breath and picked up the receiver and her pen. “KCPD, Fourth Precinct, this is Major Taylor’s office.”

“Miss Hansford?”

“Yes?”

“This is the front desk downstairs. There’s a Tony Fierro here to see you. He says you’re expecting him?”

“Oh. Um…” The job interview for the handyman. Was there a problem? “Do I need to go down there to see him, or can he come upstairs?”

“It’s up to you, ma’am. I can give him a visitor’s pass.”

Just a security protocol. Nothing to worry about. She needed to end her trip down memory lane and start looking to the future again. “Then, as soon as he clears security, go ahead and send him up, please.”

“Will do, ma’am.”

Once the call ended, Brooke squatted to get her shoes. But her sleeve caught the corner of the box and pulled it down to the floor beside her, spilling its contents. “Attack of the Killer Klutz strikes again,” she muttered, shifting onto her hands and knees to right the box and retrieve papers, books and some wayward pencils. Her necklace and charm swung out like a pendulum from the front of her blouse, and she paused to catch it and tuck it back in. In the midst of crawling and tucking, something caught her eye. She squeezed the charm in her fist as she studied the image beneath her. “Is that my house?”

Hovering over the open pages, Brooke peered down at the now-sideways drawing. “What were you up to, John?”

There were dots and arrows and scribbled phrases marking the picture. Apparently, he’d thought he had a better plan as to how she should redesign the stone church’s interior. From this angle, what she’d excused as a meaningless doodle now looked like a crude architectural drawing.

No. Like a map.

But to what?

Brooke’s heart beat a little faster and new brain cells awoke.

“That is my house.” She traced the lines with her fingertip, identifying the original altar area of the church that had since been lined with windows and converted into a sun porch. “Three,” she read aloud. Had he wanted to add more rooms? “It’s a supporting exterior wall, John. You can’t budge rock like that. Three plug-ins? Three windows? Three…what?” More scribbles took shape. “B6N-NR.” An arrow pointed to an archway.

“B. 6. N. Basement? Brick? Board? North…Room?” Brooke squinted and rotated the drawing, as though better vision or a different angle would help the jumbled characters make sense. “There is no north room.”

No basement, either. Just a crawl space.

“Lose something?”

A deep, familiar voice, laced with amusement, greeted her from the doorway.

Atticus.

Brooke snapped the journal shut and jerked her head up. He leaned against the door frame, one hand behind his back, looking as perfectly at home in that tailored suit as he did wearing the gun and badge at his belt.

Meanwhile, she was shoeless, scattered and practically sprawled on the floor.

Every self-conscious cell in her body flooded her brain, blocking rational thought as words automatically popped out. “Mitch isn’t here. He’s gone to lunch.”

He chuckled, low in his throat. “Hi to you, too. I stopped by to see how you were settling in.”