He looked at her. “You mean hear it about your car? Or the stunt you just pulled?”
“It wasn’t a stunt. I was gathering information. It sure as hell wasn’t a burglary, because I have a key.”
“Bullshit. You lifted the key from his barbecue pit. I saw you do it.”
“So what? It’s where Ollie keeps his spare, and he told me where it was!”
She got quiet then. Evidently, she hadn’t realized that when they said round-the-clock surveillance, they meant round-the-clock surveillance. Whenever she set foot outside her house, they had eyes on her.
“Ollie would be fine with it,” she said. “He’d want me to help figure out what happened.”
She sounded determined, but Jeremy caught the tremor in her voice. Kira talked a tough game, like she had everything under control, but she was hanging on by a thread. It was only a matter of time before the traumatic events of last night came crashing down on her. He was all too familiar with how PTSD worked.
He glanced at her. Even in the dim light of the dashboard, he could see that her bruise looked worse now than it had this morning. He hated looking at it, and it bothered him that it bothered him.
They reached his pickup, which he’d parked in front of a purple house with a FOR RENT sign in front. Jeremy got out.
Kira waited for him, and he followed her through a string of neighborhoods, avoiding the freeways that might put a strain on her car. When they reached her house, he parked behind her in the driveway and walked her to the back steps without a word.
She unlocked the door. “Would you like to come in?”
“Yes.”
Surprise flickered across her face.
“I need to do a once-over.”
She ushered him inside and tapped the code into her newly installed keypad.
“Mind if I look around?” he asked.
“Knock yourself out.”
“You have any firearms in the house?”
She shuddered. “God, no. I hate guns.”
Jeremy did a quick walk-through, examining the sensors and cameras. Trent and Keith did solid work, but it never hurt to double-check things. Years in the Marines had shown him the importance of backing up everything, checking everything twice. One is none, and two is one, his CO used to say.
“You have to ignore the mess,” Kira said when he returned to the living room. “My laundry’s everywhere. It looks like a bomb went off.”
“I didn’t notice.”
Actually, he had. He’d noticed everything—the IKEA furniture, the cheap art on the walls, the smallish closet. The lacy black bra on her bedroom floor had definitely caught his attention.
Her spare bedroom was interesting, too. She had a single bed piled with cables and camera equipment. A door on sawhorses served as her desk. She had no fewer than four computers—a desktop and three notebooks, all top-of-the-line. On the floor beside the desk was a tall stack of case files labeled with block-letter abbreviations. So, yeah, her place was cluttered, but there seemed to be a method to the madness.
“How about a drink?” she asked. “Beer? Bourbon?” She tossed her baseball cap onto the sofa and tugged the elastic thing from her hair, and it fell down her back in a dark wave. “I’ve got Gatorade, I think.” She pulled open her fridge. “And orange juice.”
“I’m good.”
“Good? You damn near got shot tonight. That calls for a stiff drink.”
Jeremy had been damn near shot dozens of times and actually shot once. Tonight didn’t even come close.
“I’m good,” he repeated.
“Well, I’m not.”
She opened a cabinet above the oven and stood on tiptoes to reach for a bottle of Jim Beam. He could have helped her, but he liked watching her do it.
She turned and caught him staring. “So, what, you don’t drink?”
“Not on the job.”
She took a glass from another cabinet. “I should have guessed. You guys are professionals.” She looked at him. “Why don’t you just admit it?”
“Admit what?”
“You’re angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Right. You’re not angry that you spent half an hour handcuffed in a police car.”
“Let it go, Kira.”
“Why can’t you just admit you’re pissed off at me?”
“Fine! I’m pissed off!”
He regretted the words instantly and rubbed his hand over his beard.
Kira was smirking now. “See? Was that so hard?”
She poured a generous shot of bourbon, and Jeremy leaned back against the counter and watched her take a sip. He needed to go. There was no legitimate reason for him to be standing in her kitchen, but his feet seemed rooted in place.
“I owe you an apology.” She plunked her glass down.
“Apology accepted.”
“I can admit when I mess up.”
She took another sip, watching him over the rim of her glass.
“I’m upset, but not for the reason you think,” he told her.
She looked at him expectantly. “You need to take us seriously,” he said.
“I do.”
“You called Trent a beefcake this morning.”
Her cheeks colored. “He heard that?”
“We hear everything. We see everything.” Jeremy stepped closer, hoping to intimidate her with his height, but she didn’t look intimidated at all. “And you need to communicate. Keep us in the loop. This isn’t going to work if you don’t.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right. I know. I’ve been doing this a while.”
She folded her arms. “Okay, so let’s play that out. First of all, I didn’t know you were on duty tonight. I thought it was Trent—”
“You don’t need to worry about who’s on duty. We communicate with each other. Telling him is the same as telling me.”
“Okay. So say I’d called up Trent and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to catch a quick shower and then go sneak into the house of my business associate who was murdered last night.’ Trent would have been fine with it?”
“No.”
“Right. No. He would have tried to stop me. And this goes to what I said earlier, which is that I have a job to do, and you guys can’t get in my way.” She rested her hand on her hip and stared up at him.
This was going to be a hell of a case. Jeremy had suspected it the instant he’d seen the client, and it had taken about two minutes alone with her to confirm his suspicions. This woman was headstrong and sneaky as hell.
“Here’s the thing, Kira.”
She sighed.
“Ultimately, it’s up to you. We work for you, not the other way around. So if you want to do something stupid, like go traipsing around a crime scene or go ticking off a bunch of homicide cops, that’s your prerogative.”
“See, that’s exactly my point. What you consider stupid I consider necessary to doing my job. I’ve got”—she checked her watch—“fifteen hours to develop some real intel on what Ollie was doing right before he died, or Logan’s going to fire me. I don’t doubt it for a minute.”
Jeremy doubted it, but he didn’t bother trying to convince her.
“My job matters to me. This assignment matters to me, and I intend to deliver.”
“Why?”
“Why? What kind of question is that? Because I said I’d do this. You probably get a paycheck every two weeks, but I’m paid by the hour. And if I don’t do the job the client hired me for, that’s it, I’m out. And I have to scrounge around for the next thing to pay my bills.”