Dangerous Games

Shoulders that were far less broad than Cole’s rose and fell haplessly beneath the orange jumpsuit. “The police arrested me.”

“Before then.”

The expression on Eric’s face was tortured as he tried to remember. “I was at a party. I think.” Frustration ate away at the thin veneer of his confidence. “I don’t know, I passed out.”

“At the party?”

Eric looked as if he was taxing his brain. “No, alone I think. There was this girl—but she wasn’t there when I came to,” he concluded helplessly.

“Where did you come to?” Cole enunciated each word slowly. In a way, he thought, he was dealing with a child, a child that was too frightened to think. Whenever Eric became afraid, he made less and less sense. He remembered that from their childhood.

Eric screwed his face up as he tried to think. “At my place.”

So far, Eric’s story didn’t sound promising. The lawyer, an old family friend with tepid water in his veins, had warned him off the record that the facts looked pretty damning.

“Did you see Kathy anytime that evening?” When Eric didn’t answer, Cole leaned forward across the table. “Did you?”

Like a child caught doing something he knew he shouldn’t, Eric hung his head and stared down at his hands. “Before I went to the party.” Then his head jerked up. “But she was alive when I left her. She was screaming at me.”

“That’s because you weren’t supposed to come around anymore,” Cole reminded him. “She’d gotten a restraining order against you.” It had happened less than two months ago, after Kathy had broken it off with his brother. Quinn, the detective he’d hired, had told him that Eric hadn’t been able to reconcile himself with the fact that they weren’t together anymore.

“I didn’t think she meant it.” An urgency rose in his voice as he tried to make Cole understand. “This is the first woman I ever really cared about. I loved her, Cole. And then just like that, she said it was over.” Color flooded his cheeks. “It couldn’t have been over. I didn’t want it to be over. Why did she have to call in the police?”

“You were stalking her, Eric.” Quinn had been very thorough in his summary, faxing him the details rather than wasting time with a phone call.

“I wasn’t stalking her, I was trying to win her back. I don’t have any practice with that,” Eric lamented. “I never wanted anyone back before.” He hit his chest with his outstretched hand, the reality of it all not making any sense to him. “This was me, Cole, everybody likes me.”

Eric honestly believed that, Cole thought. In some ways, his brother was still very much an innocent, not realizing that what most people gravitated toward was Eric’s money, not his company.

“Not everybody, Eric,” he said quietly.

A storm cloud filtered over his face. “You mean, Mother and Dad?”

Cole truly doubted either of his parents liked anyone, not even themselves. But that wasn’t the issue here. “No, I was thinking about the person who’s trying to frame you.”

The simple statement hit Eric with the force of an exploding bomb. “You think that’s it? Somebody’s trying to frame me?”

Eric’s fingerprints had been found all over Kathy’s apartment. More damning was the ring that had been found in Eric’s apartment. The ring with Kathy’s blood on it. An impression of it had been left on her face where he’d hit her. Something else Quinn told him that Eric didn’t recall. His brother’s memory of the night in question was filled with more holes than a package of Swiss cheese and he’d claimed to have given Kathy the ring because she’d admired it weeks ago.

“Well, it’s either that, or you did it.” He saw Eric drag his hand erratically through his hair. Nerves? Fear? Was he wrong? Had his brother killed the woman in a fit of jealousy? He felt clear down to his bones that Eric wasn’t capable of something like that, but maybe he was letting the past color his vision. “Eric, is there something you want to tell me?”

Eric covered his face with his hands. “I don’t remember.” When he looked up, panic lit his eyes. “Cole, I don’t remember. I get these…” He licked his lips, as if they were too dry to produce the words he was looking for. “Blackouts the doctor calls them…”

Cole never took his eyes off his brother’s face, trying to read every movement, every nuance. Looking for answers to questions that hadn’t been formed yet. “You’ve been to the doctor about this?”

Eric’s head bobbed up and down. “Last May. Dad insisted.”

Cole frowned. So there was someone to testify in a court of law that Eric had periods where he blacked out, where he didn’t remember what he did. Cole felt as if he was staring down into an abyss.

“Cole, is it bad?”

Cole folded his hands in front of him. “I won’t lie to you, Eric, it’s not good.”

Eric bit down on his lower lip to keep from whimpering. A tiny bit of noise escaped anyway. “Then I’m screwed?”

“No,” Cole said firmly, “you’re not.” If his brother was innocent, he was going to prove it. Even if he had to resort to the proverbial movement of heaven and earth to do it.

Eric grasped his hand between both of his. Eric’s hands were clammy. “You’re going to get me out?”

Cole gave one of Eric’s hands a squeeze, trying to infuse a little courage into his brother. “I sure as hell am going to try.”

Eric’s eyes shone with a sudden onset of tears. “You’re the only one, you know, the only one who cares what happens to me. You always were.”

Any minute, Eric was going to go to pieces. He knew all the signs. Like the time there’d been a locker search and the principal had found a nickel bag of marijuana in Eric’s locker. The only way to save his brother was to say that he’d been the one to leave it in Eric’s locker. But this was a great deal more serious than a three-week suspension.

“Don’t fall apart on me, Eric. I need you to focus, to keep it together. Try to remember what happened that night, what you did and, more important, who saw you do it. Work with Holland, he might be a friend of Mother’s and Dad’s, but he’s also one of the best lawyers around.” Cole saw that none of this was getting through to Eric. He looked like a frightened rabbit. “I’m going to see what I can come up with on my end.”

Eric brightened. “You’re my only hope, Cole.”

Truer words were never spoken, Cole thought, leaving the rest unformed even in his mind. “We’ll get through this, Eric. We always have before.”

As Cole rose, his brother suddenly leaped to his feet. Coming around the table, Eric threw his arms around him and embraced him.

Cole had never been a demonstrative man by nature. He’d been through too much, seen too much at home to leave the door to his emotions unlocked. It was the only way he had managed to survive. But this was his brother and he loved Eric beyond any rhyme or reason.

After a beat Cole closed his arms around his younger brother and gave him what he knew Eric needed most at this moment. He needed to have someone love him.

For a long moment Cole did nothing, said nothing, only hugged him.

“I’m scared, Cole,” Eric sobbed against his shoulder.

He knew that. Knew, too, that he was scared for him. But that was something he wasn’t about to admit out loud. Eric needed to think that his older brother was a rock. Confident. Unafraid.

So he perpetuated the illusion. As he always did. “Hey, it’ll make for a good story once it’s behind you. And it’s going to be behind you,” he promised with conviction. Eric pulled his head back and Cole saw a hint of a shaky smile forming. “It’ll give you something to impress people with.”

Ever since Eric’d been in elementary school, his brother had been a weaver of stories, colorful stories that drew the listener in and bonded him with the teller. It was his one gift.

Eric nodded, fighting more sobs. “Yeah,” he mumbled, trying to muster up feeling, “a good story.”

Crossing to the door, Cole knocked once. The next moment, it was being opened and the same guard that had accompanied Eric into the room stepped inside. He was holding handcuffs.

“I’ll be back soon,” Cole promised. He fought a sinking feeling as he saw Eric being handcuffed again. Unable to watch, Cole walked quickly out of the room.

Rayne pulled up the hand brake on her secondhand Honda. It’d been a gift from her father when she’d graduated from the police academy, coming to her with more than forty thousand miles on it. She intended to keep it until it was pronounced dead by Joe, the mechanic they all used.

The lot behind the restaurant was crowded and it had taken her two passes before she’d found a spot to park. Getting out and locking the door, she wasn’t completely sure what she was doing here.

She supposed, as she made her way to the large red entrance doors, that it was curiosity that brought her. That, and the fact that she felt as if she were taking a dare. She wasn’t the kind to back away from a challenge. Ever. And there’d been a challenge in Cole Garrison’s deep blue eyes.

The cold and noise of the outside world faded the instant she crossed the threshold. A soft, subdued murmur of voices greeted her as did a petite Asian hostess dressed in what Rayne took to be authentic Chinese garb. The menu the woman held in her hand was almost half as large as she was.

“Table for one?”

“No, I’m supposed to be meeting someone.”

Rayne looked past the woman’s shoulder and scanned the subtly lit room. She spotted Cole sitting in a corner booth located just beyond an incredibly large fish tank. An array of lights broke through the water, shining on a variety of saltwater fish.

But her mind wasn’t on fish, it was on the man she’d come to meet. Setting down his menu, he sensed her entrance and looked in her direction.

Even at this distance, his eyes seemed to lock with hers.

“Him,” Rayne told the woman, pointing Cole out.

The woman inclined her head, turned on a very high, very thin, heel and led the way to the rear of the dining area.

Cole half rose as she approached the table and remained that way until she’d taken her seat. Old-fashioned manners. Who would have thought?

“Sorry I’m late,” Rayne murmured, accepting the menu from the hostess without looking.

He wore the same clothes he’d had on earlier, except for the coat, and looked as crisp and relaxed as if he’d stepped out of some magazine meant for the discerning man. Obviously his day had gone better than hers. In between her trip to the cemetery, she’d wrestled with a mountain of paperwork, then got called away to investigate a shooting at a convenience store. If she had her way, all convenience stores would be outlawed. Or at the very least, renamed inconvenience stores.

She was more than half an hour late. It was obvious by the set of his jaw that he didn’t like waiting. His tone did little to mask his shortened temper. “I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”

“I don’t leave people dangling,” she informed him crisply. “When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. Just not always in the allotted time frame,” she added after a beat.

She didn’t like being late, she really didn’t. Whenever possible, she went out of her way to try to be early. But most of the time it was as if the forces of nature conspired against her, by either causing her to sleep through what was the loudest alarm she could find, or by conjuring up extra vehicles on the freeway, or by arranging things so that they went awry.

“Admirable quality.” He saw his waiter approaching their table. “Do you want to order?”

Rayne nodded. She knew exactly what she was in the mood for and gave her choice to the waiter, passing on the drink. Cole, she assumed, had already ordered. “Been waiting long?”

“I was here at six.”

Which meant that he’d been sitting here for half an hour. She refused to feel guilty about that. She wasn’t the one repaving the main thoroughfare. “Maybe you should have picked an Italian restaurant. At least you could have nibbled on the bread sticks.”

“I would have ruined my appetite. Chinese food is worth waiting for.” He paused only long enough to allow his eyes to slide over her. “As were you.”

“Someone else might call that a line.”

“Someone else doesn’t know me.” He waited until the waiter, who’d returned almost instantly with their orders, set the plates down and withdrew. “I don’t waste my time with lines.”

Once the meal was in front of her, she realized just how hungry she was. The only thing supplementing the huge breakfast she’d had was an energy bar she’d found in the back of her desk. It had been far too long since her last meal. No wonder she felt a little light-headed.

“Then you’re nothing like Eric,” she told him as she dug in.

“Not really,” Cole said, noting Lorrayne was a woman who ate instead of picked at her meal. Considering how small she was, he had to admit he was pleasantly surprised. “How well do you know my brother?”

The information was at the tips of her fingers. The D.A. had already asked her the same question. She wasn’t the only Cavanaugh who was acquainted with the accused. Because her cousin Janelle, an assistant in the D.A.’s office, had also gone to school with Eric, the D.A. hadn’t assigned her to the case.

“We dated a couple of times in high school.” Then, in case Cole was attempting to recall whether he’d been aware of that sequence of events, she told him, “You’d left town by then.” He looked surprised that she would have known something like that. “You took up a great deal of the conversation on our first date. Eric idolized you. Said he wanted to be just like you, but didn’t have the discipline.”

And then she smiled.

He found the look disarming and infinitely appealing. He wondered if she used it as a weapon. “What?”

“As I recall, you didn’t have all that much discipline.” She’d made short work of her egg roll and was onto to the main course without missing a beat. “Didn’t you almost get expelled once?”

“Minor misunderstanding. They found some marijuana in Eric’s locker that was mine.”

“Was it?” Her tone was mild. A little too mild in his opinion.

“That’s what I told the principal.”

Her eyes met his. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

He’d never bothered telling anyone the real story. There didn’t seem to be a point. “Eric wouldn’t have been able to put up with suspension. He probably would have dropped out.” Not that graduating high school and going on to college had managed to do very much for his brother. It had been just another excuse to continue floating. Cole had hoped otherwise.

“So you took the fall for him. No wonder he thought of you as a saint.” She stopped to take a sip of her tea. “You didn’t drop out,” she recalled.

He smiled more to himself than at her. “Someone convinced me I needed an education.”

“Oh?” Interest peaked, she cocked her head. “Someone in the Addams Family?”

He grinned. The woman had remembered the analogy he’d made earlier. But there was no way that his grandfather could have been considered part of the circus that comprised his family except in the strictest sense of the word “family.”

“My father’s father. He was a black sheep, like me.” A fondness came into his voice. It was the money his grandfather had left him that now allowed him to do what he felt was his calling. And to be his own person, unlike Eric who had always been tied to his parents’ purse strings. “He was the one who told me that the way a black sheep keeps from getting sheered is by learning to stay ten steps ahead of everyone else.”

“And do you?” she wanted to know. “Stay ten steps ahead?”

He knew she was pulling information out of him. More information than he was accustomed to volunteering, but for now, it amused him to watch her at work. So he played along.

“At least five.”

Because she identified with what he was saying, she laughed softly. It wasn’t all that long ago that she’d followed the same path. “That sounds more like the credo of a con artist than an educated man.”

He thought of the paths he’d followed before he’d settled down to his present way of life. He’d been a little of everything, including a mercenary for a while, taking on all life had to give just to feel something, anything. Adrenaline coursing through his veins when his life was on the line in the jungles of Bogota was as close as he got to experiencing anything.

“I’m guilty of both.”

She was surprised he admitted it. “And are you still a con man?”

His smile locked her out. “At present, I’m a respected businessman.”

But she apparently wasn’t one to accept a locked door and back away. “What sort of business?”

He put it in the most nebulous of terms. “I buy houses that need work—then work.”

She’d done a little homework before coming to meet him. It helped to have an in with someone in the IRS. His last form had referred to him as a builder. And there had been numerous charitable contributions cited, as well. “You make it sound simple.”

He shrugged as he finished his main course. “At bottom, most things are.”

Finished, as well, she pushed aside her plate and reached for her fortune cookie. “Interesting philosophy. But it’s usually hard to get to the bottom.”

He watched her long, slim fingers crack the golden shell. “Never said it was easy.” He indicated the paper she cast aside. “Aren’t you going to read your fortune?”

“I don’t believe in the clairvoyant powers of a cookie.” But because he was watching her, she glanced at the slim paper. You will find love soon, it read. Yeah, right. She raised her eyes back to his face. “What do you want with me?”

The prepared answer was not the one that rose in his mind. The word “want” all but shimmered in front of him. A man could want a woman like Lorrayne. She was more than pleasant to look at, the rebelliousness in her eyes having not quite been tamed by the position she’d assumed. Everything appealing and attractive had conspired to join forces within Lorrayne Cavanaugh. The last job in the world he would have said she’d been drawn to was that of police detective.

But a police detective was exactly what he needed right now. If there were other needs unexpectedly raising their heads, he would just have to ignore them.

He was fighting the clock. The D.A.’s office was out for blood. Eric’s blood. Even if his brother wasn’t guilty, everyone thought he was and appearance was enough to appease the masses.

He had to change that. But he couldn’t do it alone.

“I want you to help me prove that my brother’s innocent.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m part of the Aurora police force.”

She began to refill her cup, but he took the teapot from her and did the honors himself. “I noticed. That’s why I came to you.”

Ignoring the tea, she began to slide out of the booth. “I’m afraid there’s more than a slight conflict of interest here.”

Cole took hold of her wrist. “Just hear me out.”

Training told her to shake off his hand and to keep walking. Instinct told her to stay. She’d learned that the Cavanaugh instinct was more than just a pleasant myth her father liked to regale them with. It was based on the truth. They could all testify to that.

With a sigh, Rayne settled back in the booth. “Okay, talk.”

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