those forgotten victims whose memory often died with their closest family and friends.
So why was she here to assist two perfectly capable detectives when there was a stack of her own investigations back at HQ to sort through?
“There must be a connection to one of our dead file cases. But if there is, I don’t see it yet.” She glanced up at her new partner, Jim Parker—back from the dead himself after a particularly harrowing undercover assignment for the Missouri Bureau of Investigation. “Do you?”
Jim’s green eyes surveyed the room the way she had. “I recognize Ron Kober from the newspapers. Besides owning a Top 50 company here in KC, he helped get Adrian McCoy elected to the State Senate a few years back. Looks like he was doing pretty well on his own, without the senator.”
Olivia arched a dark eyebrow. “Until today.”
She liked Jim well enough, respected his reputation as a cop, appreciated that he got her sarcastic sense of humor. But after that humiliating debacle with her last partner, learning to trust him was hard. Thankfully, Jim was a newlywed, completely crazy about his wife, Natalie, and showed nothing but a friendly professional interest in his relationship with Olivia. Still, she found herself thinking about her words before she spoke to him, guarding her thoughts and feelings, which was no mean task for a woman with her volatile Irish roots.
“A man with this kind of money probably has plenty of enemies,” Jim suggested.
An angle which she was sure the lead detectives were already exploring. Still didn’t explain why she and Jim were here. She looked back down at the body, willing the corpse to speak and share his secrets. But she wasn’t psychic and dead men didn’t talk. However...
Her eyes went past Kober’s body to a scrap of torn paper underneath the desk. She snapped a picture with her cell phone before reaching over the dead body to pick it up with the sterile gloves she wore.
Jim crouched down beside her. “What did you find?”
Olivia turned the tiny square over between her thumb and index finger. “Four numbers. I don’t know. It may just be a piece of trash.”
“Looks like a torn-up piece of stationery.” Jim picked up the wastebasket beside the desk and set it between them to sort through its contents.
But there were no other little hand-torn shreds like this one. “Could be the last digits of a phone number.”
Jim replaced the wastebasket and stood. “Or part of an address or social security number.”
“Or a locker number or part of a combination lock.” Olivia straightened beside him, spotting a pad of dove-gray paper on the desk that matched the piece in her hand. She picked it up and angled it in the light to see if she could read any indentations in the surface. But there were too many marks from previous notes to make out anything specific. “Maybe it’s just a testament to their housekeeping service not doing its job, and isn’t related to the crime at all.”
Just in case, though, she jotted the 3620 in her notebook before handing the scrap of paper and Kober’s scratch pad over to the CSI.
She tucked her own notepad into the pocket of her short leather jacket and peeled off her gloves, following Jim to the door. “So if this isn’t our case, why are we here?”
Jim nodded to the detectives hovering over the weeping woman across the room. “Hendricks and Kincaid are taking lead on Kober’s murder here. Sawyer Kincaid called us in as a courtesy.”
Frowning, Olivia stuffed the gloves into the back pocket of her jeans. “And he didn’t say why?”
“He just said it was a directive from higher up.” He touched her shoulder to indicate he was taking a detour. “Looks like they’re wrapping up that interview. I’ll go ask if they can make sense of any of this yet.”
While her golden-haired partner crossed the room, Olivia indicated she’d head on downstairs and meet him at the car.
She shouldn’t have acknowledged the visceral impact of the short black hair and chiseled cheekbones of the man waiting just outside the office door as she passed him. Admitting any kind of gut-kick attraction to a man was, at least, an inconvenience, and, at most, a huge mistake. Her relationship with Marcus had taught her that.
But the man’s piercing blue gaze locked on and followed her through the doorway. The skin at the nape beneath her short hair tingled with awareness at his interest. Only, she wasn’t sure if it was sensual nerves fluttering to attention, or an alarm going off. Either way, she wasn’t about to flutter for any man, and she wasn’t going to ignore those survival instincts that warned her of danger.
Olivia stopped in the middle of the assistant’s office and turned to face Mr. Tall Dark and Staring. “May I help you?”
He pulled back the front of his tan corduroy sport coat and tucked his hands into the pockets of his jeans, assuming a casual stance she wouldn’t match. “I can tell you why you’re here, Detective Watson.”
Her chin jerked up ever so slightly at the stranger calling her by name. Un-uh. That wasn’t an advantage she’d allow. Her hand instinctively came to rest over the Glock holstered to her belt. “Do I know you, Mister...?”
“Not really.” The man straightened from the wall where he’d been leaning, and she could see he stood a good five or six inches over her five-foot-seven-inch height. “Ron Kober is the man my fiancée Danielle Reese was getting inside information from for a story she was writing when she was murdered six years ago.”
“Danielle Reese?” Why did that name sound familiar? Didn’t matter. This guy was still a couple steps ahead of her in the conversation, and she didn’t like it. “You didn’t answer my question. Who are you?”
“Gabriel Knight.”
Was that supposed to mean something to her? That deep, succinct announcement made it sound as though he thought he was somebody important. But she’d have remembered a face like that. Not exactly handsome with all those sharp, unsmiling angles, but definitely interesting.
Olivia blinked, silently reprimanding herself for even noticing such irrelevance. It was more important to note that she saw no sign that he was wearing a gun, and since he hadn’t flashed a badge to identify himself, he couldn’t be a cop. Gabriel Knight must be a curiosity seeker who’d probably lied to the uniformed guard about having some kind of information on the case so he could get close enough to see the dead body.
“Sir, did one of the detectives ask you to come past the crime scene tape for questioning?” He didn’t answer. Proof enough for her that Gabriel Knight was trespassing on the crime scene. She thumbed over her shoulder to the hallway. “Then you can’t be in here.”
“I’ve got press credentials.” He tugged at the cord hanging around his neck and pulled a plastic card from his shirt pocket. “I’m covering the murder for the Journal.”
A reporter? “Yeah, well my badge outranks your little piece of plastic. If you’ll wait out front with the other reporters, the press liaison will be downstairs to give a briefing in a few minutes.” She took him by the arm and turned to escort him into the hallway, but the man didn’t budge.
“You need to talk to me.” His voice was low and articulate, and, without being a breathy whisper, was for her ears alone. “I have information on this case. That’s why the officer out front let me through.”
“Then you should talk to Detective Kincaid or Detective Hendricks.” She released him to point out the big man with the dark hair and the black man with the diamond stud in his left earlobe in the other room. “I can introduce you when they’re through with their witness.”
But Gabriel Knight grabbed her elbow and pulled her back beside him. “You may not read the paper, but I know who you are, Detective Watson. You and your partner are part of the cold case team, working older, unsolved crimes. Like the murder of Dani Reese. She was an investigative reporter, a colleague of