Chapter One

Two Years Later

Jack Sutton was freezing his ass off and remembering another stakeout on the very same corner two years earlier that had been a whole lot more interesting—not to mention warmer.

Valentine Cross, with her sassy smile and her denim miniskirt. And those red hand-tooled leather cowboy boots that had never seen the inside of a barn but had managed plenty of action in the eighteen months they’d been together.

They might still be together if he hadn’t panicked during an attack of macho idiocy and asked her to marry him. Their fights had escalated and the silences between them had become so long that he’d been afraid she was going to wake up one morning and decide they were just too different to stay together.

Six months and he could still remember the scent of her skin, the taste of her lips, the feel of her breasts pillowed against his chest. Her cry as she rode him while he watched her face as she climaxed. He shuddered and his partner Emmett tapped him on the shoulder and pointed at the alley across the street from where they were parked. He could just make out the bulk of a shadowy figure.

The figure turned out to be a bundled-up man taking a leak. They weren’t here for someone forced to piss with only a brick building to break the frigid wind. Emmett had gotten a tip that some kid had been stupid enough to finance a serious gambling jones with a mysterious money man who’d been gaining a vicious reputation owing to the nature of his debt-collecting practices.

The kid may have deserved an ass-kicking for being stupid but he didn’t deserve to be dead. Besides that, they liked knowing everyone who did “business” in the neighborhood and the money man seemed to have sprung from nowhere fast.

“That’s kind of a nice coat,” Emmett observed when the figure walked out of the alley and stood just outside the street light’s glow. “And the dumbass has earphones and wouldn’t hear someone walk up on him if they were wearing combat boots.”

“I think the dumbass is listening to instructions,” Jack hissed while he looked through his binoculars and watched the kid’s lips move. “Or giving them.”

Something wasn’t right.

“How long have you known this snitch?”

“I’m thinking not long enough,” Emmett whispered right before an SUV with tinted windows whipped around the corner and gunfire erupted.

The kid jumped into the speeding vehicle, whose barrage of firepower was concentrated on their unmarked car and the dumbasses who should have known better.

Thank God none of them could hit the broad side of a barn but the ricochets were a little more interesting than Jack cared for. They’d drawn enough fire that, by the time they’d righted themselves, given chase and called it in, the little pricks had vanished.

McCoy was going to ream them. This was their second car in a month that was going to need body work.

* * * * *

“Sutton!” The sharp demand drew more than his attention when Captain Archer McCoy barked from his open office door. He was holding a file and he didn’t look happy. Great.

There were a few snickers but everyone pretended to be working as Jack followed McCoy back into his office and shut the door. He took the chair in front of the desk when his silver-haired captain darted a brisk nod toward it.

“If this is about the car,” Jack started.

“Forget the damn car,” McCoy growled then ran a rough hand through his hair. “Emmett’s looking into why his snitch burned him.”

That’s when he noticed for all of his spit-and-polish appearance, the man looked as if he hadn’t sleep in days and his office reeked of fast food and burned coffee.

McCoy sat down and slid a slim dog-eared and coffee-stained folder across the desk. “I want you to investigate a suspicious missing persons report. The husband reported her missing and swore out a complaint claiming that she assaulted him.”

Jack flipped through the folder once, glancing at the photograph of a pretty young blonde who’d been missing nearly a month. “Are we looking at her for the assault charge or do you suspect something else?”

“That’s what I want you to find out. You can find the husband here,” he said, sliding an austere white business card across the table. “He told the EMTs who responded to the 9-1-1 call that he was on the phone trying to get his wife into rehab when she clocked him, emptied out his wall safe and ran.”

“Do we know how much was in the safe?”

“He claims only a couple of hundred.”

“Wouldn’t get her far,” Jack mused, taking a closer look and trying to get a clearer picture of the woman’s guarded expression.

“No, it wouldn’t and I’ve run out of leads. She doesn’t have any family to speak of and the friends list is pretty small and consists of women she’s served with on committees. I got the impression she kept pretty much to herself.” McCoy cleared his throat and Jack glanced up and didn’t like what he saw. McCoy was rarely hesitant and it didn’t bode well.

“What?” he asked, though he was pretty sure he didn’t want to know.

“Most people don’t know how to disappear so thoroughly without some kind of support system. Say a fairy godmother with a perfect hiding place. Which, I have to tell you, I’m really hoping for. Otherwise, I have to wonder about the blood on his clothes that matched her blood type,” he said, and shrugged as if he were having trouble trying to convince himself of something. “That could have happened when she broke the vase over his head but without a body, live or otherwise, all we have is a missing person fleeing an assault and battery charge.”

Crap. He could almost hear the gears whirring in McCoy’s mind. He should see smoke coming out of his ears any minute now. Wait for it.

“So we have a pissed-off husband willing to file charges.”

“He says it’s the only way he’s going to be able to get her into rehab,” McCoy said, his voice as grim as his expression. “When we asked about his wife he said her main interests were her damn self-help books and late-night talk radio.”

As in Cross My Heart? Double-crap. He didn’t need to ask, he knew now why he wasn’t being reamed for the bullet-ridden car and losing the suspects. For one brief, insane moment he almost wished one of the bullets had dinged him bad enough to have an excuse not to be able to take this case.

Valentine Cross was going to love having him walk back through her door again. “You do realize that Val and I haven’t been together in six months,” he said and had to swallow a groan when McCoy shot him a determined gaze.

“We got a call earlier while you were out joyriding. Apparently she’s pissed off someone else and they decided to re-decorate her house. This guy wasn’t as artistic as the last one. I hear she has a collection of fluorescent-orange graffiti to come home to.”

“You think cleaning a little spray paint off her walls will make her so grateful she’ll give up the location of Bea Wylde’s safe house? I thought we had an unofficial hands-off policy.”

“I need to know if I’m looking for a corpse or a felon, Jack, and I don’t care what you have to do to find out if Val knows anything. Because if you don’t, I will. And if she’s helping to hide someone she shouldn’t be, I will throw the book at her.”

Jack didn’t like being threatened and the weird part was, McCoy didn’t look as if he was too pleased with himself either.

“Why not just bring her in for questioning?”

McCoy looked as if he wasn’t going to answer but then he cleared his throat. “Because I don’t want the husband to know where we’re looking or what we’ve found until I have a chance to find Evie Masterson first.

“I tracked down the information that she filed for divorce about a year ago but never went through with it. It doesn’t seem to have been common knowledge and hubby didn’t bother to tell us that.”

Well, Jack could tell him what was about to become common knowledge. When Valentine found out what was going on, all hell was going to break loose.

“Is there anything else?”

He didn’t think it was possible but McCoy’s jaw got even tighter. “I was told to stop spending resources investigating this case, so this is unofficial and you don’t talk to anyone but me.”

* * * * *

Valentine Cross leaned across the console and dropped her voice an octave to seduce her listeners and please her producer, Pete Suvarski, who sat enclosed in a glass booth directly in front of her.

“This is Valentine Cross and you’re listening to Cross My Heart. What’s on your mind, Kansas City, besides the below-zero temperatures and that you’re up at three a.m. listening to me?”

Pete chuckled into her earphones. “You’ve got Bea Wylde on one, Jubal Horn on two and Corbett Sands is breathless on three.”

Valentine hit three. “Corbett, are you outside in this?”

“Wait,” he said, background static adding to the gravelly command. “Bad reception.”

She had no idea where he’d accessed a phone but that was the least of her worries. There was another front moving in that could have the potential of shutting down the city.

“Your reception’s bad because we’re in the middle of an ice storm. Why aren’t you in a shelter?”

“They’re full up…turned around…can’t remember…the other one is,” he said, leaving Val to fill in the blanks as his phone cut out.

“Corbett?”

There was only dead air and Pete shook his head. She mimicked pushing buttons but Pete was already contacting the volunteer calling tree that would put out an alert for the aging veteran whose street of choice was well known. Someone might be able to find him shelter. Not a perfect plan but Val had learned early that this wasn’t a perfect world.

Bea Wylde or Jubal? She punched one and hoped Jubal would get tired of being put on hold or that Pete would get through to someone who would take the phone away from him.

“So, Bea, what are the Wylde Women of Kansas City up to these days?”

“Tell me you like to play dress-up for a good cause.”

“Will there be black vinyl involved?”

Bea laughed her throaty, bad-girl laugh. “Depends on the designer who’s donating time but I wouldn’t be surprised. We’re planning a benefit fashion show and auction to help support Wylde House. A little birdie with a broken wing thought you might volunteer to help us get the word out.”

“You tell your little bird that I’d be happy to help. Just give Pete the information and we’ll get you some publicity on this, Bea.”

She transferred Bea back to her producer and eyed the flashing light on number three before she picked it up. “Who gets phone privileges in juvie lock-up at three in the morning, Jubal?”

“Depends on who you know. What are you wearing?” he asked in a rush, the asthmatic wheeze in his voice making her wince.

“Gold lamé gown and rhinestone tiara—you know, standard Goddess uniform,” she answered, smoothing her jade-green sweater over her worn jeans.

“You’re going to hell for being a nonbeliever. You know that don’t you? Women like you need to be dealt with.” She heard a muffled struggle and then Jubal screaming, “Get off me, you son of a bitch!” before the line went dead.

“Yes, Jubal, but until we go back to the dark ages it looks as if you’re not going to get your wish anytime soon,” she told the little vandal who’d broken in and spray painted a sort of post-modern Madonna on her living room wall three months earlier.

The evening progressed with Bea calling back with more information about her group, Wylde Women of Kansas City, after Tessa Miles, another regular, called in with a lecture about the dangers of cults who preached fornication for the masses. Since Bea had been a paid fornicator in her day, Tessa felt she was stoning material.

Afterward, Pete spent the next couple of hours fielding calls from people wanting more information about how they could support Bea’s efforts to fund the safe house for the victims of abuse, whom the courts seemed powerless to help.

Tessa marshaled her forces and the debate was still raging when Valentine was ready to sign off. Pete held up a hand-lettered sign informing her that a men’s shelter had made room for Corbett and Jubal had called back but he wasn’t putting him through.

By the time Valentine had signed off with her signature, “It’s not a perfect world but if there’s anything I can do to help, I will. Cross my heart,” and hung up her earphones she was too tired to do anything but negotiate the ice-slicked streets home. She ordinarily used the twenty minutes to listen to something jazzy and upbeat to unwind but it took twice that time tonight and all of her concentration to negotiate the nearly deserted streets. She was half-past bone-tired by the time she attempted the uphill incline of the skating rink that doubled as her street.

Applying steady pressure to the accelerator she listened and groaned as the wheels of her rusty Ford Escort spun. She tried two more times and each time ended up sliding back down the same few inches she managed to negotiate. Damn.

The curtains parted at her neighbor’s house across the street. Mrs. Hennessey could apparently sleep through ambulances delivering to K.U. Med a few blocks over but let Val so much as open her own front door at six in the morning and the binoculars came out along with the three cats that lived with her on a permanent basis. They all lined up as mesmerized as if she were the latest television reality show. The rest of “senior citizen’s street” remained blissfully unconcerned.

She gave up and angled her wheels, tapped the gas and inched into the snowbanked curb at the bottom of the hill before setting the parking brake. Winter in Kansas City was always an adventure but tonight’s storm had added an extra layer of ice to the three feet of snow they’d already gotten.

She slipped her purse over her shoulder and swept her spiky red hair under a pink stocking cap. Her boots slid when she swung her legs out of the car and tried to stand so she dug the black stiletto heels into the ice and used them as picks to get to the semi-shoveled sidewalk. She was halfway up the hill when she recognized Jack Sutton’s empty brown Ford pickup parked in front of her house.

Valentine went hot and cold at the same time and could have sworn her heart skipped a beat. What the hell was he doing here?

Maybe he’d come to return his key. He could have mailed it six months ago.

Maybe he missed the sludge she called coffee. She was out of milk so he was out of luck because it was the only way he’d drink it.

Maybe he was through issuing ultimatums about getting married.

He hadn’t wanted to take no for an answer and had scoffed at her fear that one day he’d resent the fact that he was losing promotions because of something she had done or said or both.

Then again, maybe she’d missed the memo about hell freezing over because for the past six months she’d figured that’s what would need to happen to get him to walk back through her door again.

He’d spread ice-melt on the steps and her concrete slab front porch. He had to have brought it with him because he’d instinctively known that she probably didn’t have enough on hand. It wouldn’t start working until it got a little warmer but that was Jack, still looking out for her as if she were helpless. Once upon a time that might have made her angry. Today, it reminded her of how well he knew her and all of the little considerate things he’d done when they’d been together.

Right before he’d turned into a macho jackass.

She could hear him stomping to the door before she reached it. She closed her eyes and heard the door swing open.

“Who have you pissed off this time?” he growled in a voice so deep its rough promise curled inside of her like a dark vine trying to take root. She shivered and opened her eyes.

Slavic cheekbones a woman would sell her soul to possess were shadowed by dark stubble. He was dressed in his basic uniform of a dark tee shirt and jeans. It was winter so he was wearing boots instead of leather lace-up tennis shoes. Even scowling, he was handsome—if you liked wiry junkyard dogs with a double dose of bad-boy attitude.

“I piss off a lot of people. It’s hard to say.” She fought to keep her voice even, to keep from reaching for him. “Why are you in my house?”