Jenna Ryan - Mistletoe and Murder

“It’s Clare,” she stage-whispered across the desk. “And you don’t have to celebrate Christmas. Use it as an excuse to eat, drink and be merry.”

He glanced at the captain’s office. “I’ll think about it,” he said, and moved on before she could push for more.

“You’re such a social animal, Knight.” O’Keefe gave him a hearty slap between the shoulder blades. “Did you even notice that she was coming on to you?”

“I noticed.” But he was absorbed again in the report he’d copped downstairs and by one name in particular. “Do you know James Barret?”

“I swear you’d be better off dead.” O’Keefe gave his head a sorrowful shake. “Yes, I know him. You’ve heard of the Barret Brown Furniture Concept, right? Well, J.B. is half of that rapidly expanding business.”

“It says here that his partner, Ben Brown, died under questionable circumstances six years ago.”

“Really?” O’Keefe peered over his shoulder. “What file are you-ah, I should have known. Belinda Critch. They weren’t my cases, Knight, and they sure as hell weren’t yours.” He caught the back of Jacob’s jacket. “Hold on. I need caffeine, and the coffee inside’s complete crap.”

Jacob skimmed the file. His instinct told him it should be fatter. “Dylan Hoag,” he read while his ex-partner dropped quarters into a vending machine.

“Belinda Critch’s brother.” O’Keefe fished in his pockets. He deposited quarters until a cup plopped down. “I think he works for a security company. Maybe he owns it. You still take yours black?”

“Yeah.” A steaming cup appeared in Jacob’s hand. “Patrick North’s name is here. I don’t know much about him.”

“Doctor Death.” O’Keefe set a palm over the printout. “Why are you doing this?”

Jacob raised his head, absorbed the thrust of his ex-partner’s stare. “Because Critch is after us.”

“Damn, I knew it. What happened?”

“He missed his bed check twice. Romana and I went to the transition house last night. When we left, Critch followed us in a truck. No visible license plates. He knocked a mailbox onto a civilian, apparently yelled a threat out the window and took off.”

“Well, hell.” O’Keefe ran a hand through his unruly brown curls. “That’s not good.”

“According to the witness who heard what Romana and I didn’t, Critch plans to string us along with threats before he kills us.”

“Where’s Romana now?”

“I dropped her off at her place around midnight. The building’s secure,” he added before O’Keefe could object. “I checked it out myself. Even if Critch could get past the front entrance, he’d need a code to access her floor, and her door’s state-of-the-art. Her father made sure of it.”

“Be glad he did.”

He was, but the mild derision couldn’t be helped. Or if it could, he wasn’t interested in making the effort. For a moment, he saw his own father’s face, twisted into an unrecognizable mask. Blocking the image, Jacob drank his coffee. “Why does the captain want me?”

“Probably to tell you Critch has disappeared.” Another round of quarters clinked into the machine. “You gonna fill him in on the details of your shift?”

“Only as far as the Parker case is concerned.”

“Figured as much. Jacob.” O’Keefe stopped him when he would have walked away. “Do us all a favor, and let someone else handle this.”

Jacob smiled past his shoulder. “While I do what?”

“Take a well-deserved vacation. Go to Tahiti, or Fiji or Hawaii. Swim. Drink. Get laid. Hell, connect with your mother’s family.”

“Yeah, right. I’ll rehash my mother’s life in New Zealand and follow it up with her death here in Cincinnati. Thanks, but I’d rather stay and do battle with Critch.”

“He’s obsessed, Jacob.”

“I’m not a rookie, Mick.” He countered O’Keefe’s frustrated stare with a steady one of his own. “I won’t let him hurt her.”

“Or you.”

A faint smile crept in. “Or me.”

O’Keefe rumpled his hair again. He reminded most people of a tall, well-built teddy bear, with his perpetually kind face, his soulful eyes and a mop of brown curls that were only now, in his mid-forties, beginning to creep back from his forehead. But Jacob knew the man behind the facade. He’d worked with him for eight years-and had seen firsthand just how deceptive teddy bears could be.

The eyes before him grew troubled. “You know she’s not your type, don’t you?”

He’d been waiting for this, Jacob reflected, and made himself look away. “I never thought she was.”

“But you’re interested.”

“No.” Jacob met his eyes. “I’m not.”

“Hmm, you lie so well, I can’t tell the difference anymore. You don’t want her, she doesn’t want you-or probably me, either, for that matter, but I’m a hopeful schmuck who needs to be rebuffed to his face before he’ll give up. My kid likes her.”

Jacob glanced down at the file. “Why don’t you send Romana to Hawaii for the holidays?”

O’Keefe opened his mouth, but it was a more velvety voice that replied, “Won’t work, Knight. Romana’s not a run-and-hide kind of person.”

She strode up to them from the side, smiled at O’Keefe, then went toe-to-toe with Jacob. If she’d been a hothead like Mick’s ex-wife, she’d probably have punched him. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. If nothing else, a punch would ease the gridlock of tension and mounting desire in his stomach.

“What are you doing here, Romana?” Jacob kept his tone calm and his expression neutral.

A sideways glance drew O’Keefe into her answer. “I got a phone call forty minutes ago. The guy claimed to be an elf, said he wanted to go over my Christmas wish list with me. Since I’d just stepped out of the shower, I told him my only wish was for him to hang up. To which he replied, ‘Wrong answer, cop saver. What you should wish is to be a cat. But even nine lives won’t help you now. Santa Critch is going to hunt you down and poison your holidays. Sad to say, Romana Grey. You’ve seen your last merry Christmas Day.’”

SOMETIMES, ROMANA REFLECTED with a shudder, a photographic memory was just plain creepy. The verse at the end of Critch’s early morning phone call sang in her head all day.

In the same elfin voice he’d used-which only made the effect that much freakier.

Naturally, the call was untraceable. Critch had stolen a cell phone from a Cincinnati resident who’d been standing, half-asleep, at a bus stop. He’d used the device for his own purposes, then ditched the phone. Mission accomplished, from his perspective.

From Romana’s, life carried on. She wasn’t prepared to let Critch affect it, even on the smallest level.

After leaving the police station, she spent Saturday morning and most of the afternoon Christmas shopping with two of her sisters-in-law and six nephews under the age of five. As a rule, she enjoyed taking them to toy stores, loved watching them bounce on Santa’s knee; however, by five o’clock, even her abundant energy was sapped. In fact, she was so wiped out that the path lab at the hospital was starting to look good.

Or not, she amended as she pushed through the side door and began her solitary descent.

Organ music wafted out of invisible speakers. Critch’s rhyming threat jangled in her brain. “Sad to say, Romana Grey, you’ve seen your last merry Christmas Day.”

“Jerk,” she muttered, and, twitching a shoulder, pushed through another door.

An attendant she didn’t recognize passed her in the antiseptic green corridor. The woman wore headphones and a blank expression as she hummed along to a hip-hop song. But even her off-key humming was better than the churchlike version of “Sleigh Ride” currently playing on the path lab’s sound system.