Marilyn Pappano - Killer Smile

This rain deserved more than a damn .

Finished shaking, he trotted up the remaining steps and followed Ben inside the station. It had been a post office back in the day and was as stately a building as any he’d ever been inside. The floor was marble, and so were the panels that went four feet up the walls. Here in the lobby, the ceiling was fourteen feet high, with the original chandelier still in operation. Sound echoed out here, but as soon as he walked behind the tall counter and into the station proper, with its lower ceilings and ugly industrial rugs, the echoes faded.

A row of brass hooks mounted on a gleaming oak plank hung on the wall just inside the doorway. He hung his soppy coat there and picked up the towel he’d left earlier, making half an attempt to dry his face and hair.

“Dan’l, you had a visitor,” Cheryl called from her desk. She was the chief’s secretary, but she pretty much handled the entire office. Though taking messages and making notes on comings and goings wasn’t technically her job, what was the use of working for the police chief, she declared, if she didn’t get to poke her nose into everyone’s business?

“Daniel,” he muttered under his breath.

She looked over her glasses at him. “I thought you’d given up trying to correct me years ago.”

He had. The best way to deal with annoying people, his dad had taught him, was to ignore them. Once they saw that their actions were no longer annoying, they stopped.

The best way to deal with annoying people, his father had disagreed, was to knock the crap out of them every time they annoyed you. Eventually they learned to leave you alone.

Both of his fathers were right. Ignoring people worked fine sometimes. Body-slamming them to the ground was sometimes the better option. But Cheryl was on their side, more or less, and Chief Douglas wouldn’t take kindly to Daniel body-slamming her.

“Who was it?” he asked, hanging the towel back on its hook so it could dry.

“She didn’t say.”

Hmm. He knew an awful lot of she s, though most of them wouldn’t just drop in on him at work. “What did she want?”

“She didn’t say.” Cheryl slurped the last of her coffee from a giant mug that proclaimed her Queen of the World, and then wheeled her chair off the mat behind her desk and across the floor to what she called the beverage center. It was only fifteen feet. She could have walked with less effort.

“Was it about a case?”

“She didn’t say.”

He ground his teeth as he watched her fix her coffee. Wishing that someone else, even one of the inmates in the jail in the back, had talked to this visitor, he gritted out, “What did she look like?”

“She didn’t—Oh. She was pretty if you like size twos who look like they just strolled in off the beach, and what man doesn’t? I’m pretty sure she was wearing tinted contacts because I don’t believe anyone has eyes that shade naturally. Oh, and she was wearing the cutest dress, sleeveless, scooped neck, with a fitted bodice and a drop waist with a little pleating that gave it really nice movement when she walked. And her shoes! OMG.”

Bewilderment joined Daniel’s annoyance. All this talking, and had she actually said anything? He didn’t know what size two meant in women’s clothing. Small, he presumed. He would also presume the unnatural eye color was blue, green or some shade of purple. But scooped neck? Fitted bodice? Drop waist?

“So, she was a small woman in a cute dress?”

Cheryl scowled at him. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

From his desk in the back, Ben snorted again. Daniel was glad he provided entertainment for the guy. That could be his new purpose in life. Or he could just go ahead and strangle Cheryl like he’d wanted to since fifteen minutes after meeting her. He would even write up the inventory of his own personal possessions, take his own fingerprints and lock himself in the holding cell. No jury who’d ever met Cheryl would find him guilty.

“Next time someone comes in, get a name, would you?” he groused, heading past her desk to his own in the back.

“I asked, but—”

Everyone else in the room—three detectives, five uniformed officers preparing for shift change and two dispatchers in their alcove to the left—all chimed in together, “She didn’t say.”

Sometimes he hated this place.

No one in the department had a private office besides the chief and the assistant chief, who was out of town for training. The detectives had desks clustered in the rear of the large room and conducted interviews in the conference room off to the right. Normally, he was okay with that, but there were days when a person needed a little privacy and right now, as he kicked off his wet shoes and peeled away his dripping socks, was one of those times.

“She makes LA look better every day,” Ben said from his desk a few feet away.

“I thought you’d never been to LA.”

“I haven’t, but I don’t need to see it to know it beats working with Cheryl.”

Wringing first one sock, then the other, over the trash can, Daniel scowled at him. “She likes you.”

“No, she just has more fun with you.”

Ben turned back to his computer, where he was making one of his infamous lists. He had one for everything, probably even sex, and reviewed them regularly. It was the way he worked. Daniel preferred keeping information in his head and staring into space while letting his subconscious brain piece it together. It was the way he worked.

Though in his lifetime there had been no shortage of people pointing out that his way looked an awful lot like daydreaming. He didn’t care. He produced results. That was what mattered.

Footsteps echoed in the lobby, but he didn’t turn to look at the newcomer. They had a desk sergeant for that—and, of course, Cheryl. Plus Morwenna, one of the dispatchers, was nearly as nosy as the secretary, just in a much more pleasant manner.

Ben’s chair creaked as he swiveled to face Daniel. “Do you want to interview the suspect or the victim in the morning?”

“Victim.” It was an easy choice. Ben was more comfortable with suspects, and he’d handled far more domestic assault cases. Daniel had too much experience with bullies and related far better to the victims. It was odd that empathy was one of his better traits as a detective when most people thought he came down on the lacking side of the emotional scale.

“Deal. So...you don’t know any pretty size-two blondes with a fondness for black dresses with fitted bodices?”

“What do you know about fitted bodices?” Then Daniel stopped typing mid-word, and he looked up at Ben. “Cheryl didn’t say the dress was black.”

“That’s some good detecting there, son.” Ben nodded toward the front counter.

As Daniel slowly swiveled his chair, he realized the room had gone quiet and everyone was waiting expectantly, their gazes shifting from him to the counter and back again. When his own gaze got there, he saw why. There was the blonde, tall, pretty, not small—just a couple inches shorter than him—but slim and curvy and definitely looking like a California beach girl. Her hair was super short—last time he’d seen her, it was long enough to wrap his hands in—and to anyone who didn’t know her, she looked like a ray of sunshine on a dreary day.

But he knew her.

He’d been engaged to marry her.

Until she’d dumped him in front of every single friend and relative they’d had.

What in hell was she doing here?

Natasha Spencer would bet there wasn’t a person in the room who had any idea how much it was killing her to stand there and let them—let Daniel—stare at her. She used to have a lot of nerve—more then than now. Back then, she would have dared them to look their longest and hardest. She even would have done a few model-on-the-runway turns so they could form their impressions, back and front. Now she just stood, half a smile frozen on her face, and wished for a sudden case of amnesia. People always stared, but if she didn’t know why, she couldn’t care.