“Okay,” she bit off the word. “In my off hours, I thought I’d try to find my cousin, Mary. Mary White Bear. She’s a runaway. Just before I left Mission Ridge, someone told me that they thought they saw her in Aurora.” Again Julianne lifted her chin pugnaciously. He’d agitated her and part of her was almost spoiling for a fight. “Satisfied?”
Questions about the woman before him began materializing in Frank’s head at a prodigious rate. “No.”
Her eyes narrowed into annoyed slits. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that, is there?”
Now there they had a difference of opinion. He allowed a smile to curve his mouth. “You could tell me why you thought you had to lie about that and keep it to yourself.”
She hadn’t told Randolph about Mary and she got along with the Captain fairly well. Julianne couldn’t see herself voluntarily sharing something so personal with a stranger. She shrugged carelessly, combing her fingers through her hair and sending it back over her shoulder. She said the first thing that came to mind. “I figured you wouldn’t want me distracted.”
“I don’t,” he agreed firmly. “But what you do in your time away from the job is none of my business.” And then, because there was an aura of danger about this woman he needed to find out more about, he qualified his statement. “Unless you wind up killing someone.”
Julianne looked at him sharply, adrenaline rushing through her veins. Had he looked into her background? Did he know about her uncle?
Frank saw the heightened awareness, saw the wary look that entered her eyes. White Bear, he realized, just might be capable of anything. If she turned out to be a loose cannon, he wanted her off his task force. “Did you wind up killing someone last night?”
“No.”
Well, that was a relief. But he was still going to keep an eye on her. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been a hardship. But her looks were distracting and he couldn’t afford to be distracted, not until the killer was caught and this case was closed.
“Okay then, I’ve got no problem with you looking for your cousin during your downtime.” Turning away from her, he began to walk toward the cubicle that served as his office. “Can I see it?”
“See what?” she asked warily.
This woman trusted no one, he thought, as more questions about her came to mind—the first being why was she so distrustful? “The photograph you were showing around. Maybe I’ve seen her,” he added when she made no effort to retrieve the photograph from her purse.
Maybe he had, Julianne thought.
No stone unturned, remember?
She was going to have to do something about her defensiveness, Julianne silently upbraided herself, taking her purse out of the desk’s bottom drawer. Opening it, she pulled out the photograph of her cousin and held it up to him.
The girl in the photograph looked like a younger version of Julianne. She had incredibly sad eyes. “Pretty girl,” he commented.
“She would have been better off if she wasn’t,” Julianne answered grimly, looking at the photograph herself.
“Meaning?”
Julianne raised her eyes to his. “Meaning that she looked a lot like my dead aunt. And the first one who noticed was my uncle.”
Her tone of voice had Frank quickly reading between the lines. Incest was a crime he could never quite wrap his head around. It was just too heinous. “So she ran away from home before he—”
“No,” Julianne contradicted angrily, “she ran away from home after he…”
She deliberately let her voice trail off without finishing the sentence, but there was no mistaking her meaning.
Frank took a breath. Maybe that was why this woman was so angry. It would have certainly made him angry to have a cousin of his violated by the very person who was supposed to protect her.
“Sorry to hear that,” he said, his voice as full of feeling as hers was monotone.
She thought he honestly meant that and it made her regret the tone she’d taken with him. When she reached for the photograph he was still holding, he didn’t surrender it immediately.
“Why don’t I have copies made of this?” Frank suggested. “Pass it around to the beat cops. Maybe one of them will see her and get back to us.”
Us. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she hadn’t asked for his help, but she swallowed the words. She had to start trusting someone somewhere along the line or she was just going to wind up self-destructing. That wasn’t going to help Mary at all.
Julianne pressed her lips together. Time to take the hand that was reaching out to her, she silently ordered. Taking it didn’t automatically make her weak.
“That would be good, yes,” she agreed.
But just as he began to head for the copy machine, the phone on Riley’s desk rang. Since he was closer to it than Julianne was, Frank picked it up.
“McIntyre.”
Julianne saw his face darken as he listened. His eyes went flat.
“We’ll be right there,” he said grimly before hanging up. “C’mon,” he told her, putting the photograph down on her desk. For now, it was going to have to wait. “They just found another body.”
The Dumpster was clear across town behind a popular restaurant that served Chinese cuisine, buffet style.
Gin-Ling’s was a popular food source for the homeless. Confronted with the all-you-can-eat philosophy, more than half the patrons who came to Gin-Ling’s had a tendency to overload their plates. Discovering that their stomachs weren’t really as large as they’d surmised usually followed shortly thereafter. Since the restaurant didn’t provide doggie bags, most people left the uneaten portions on their plates.
Most evenings, the twin Dumpsters behind Gin-Ling’s were filled to overflowing.
This time, one of them was more “overflowing” than the other.
Parking his Crown Victoria sedan at the end of the alley bordering the crime scene, Frank got out. As he began to make his way to the Dumpster where the newest gruesome discovery had been made by a homeless man with, it turned out, a very weak stomach, he pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his pocket and started to put them on.
Mentally, Frank wished he had coveralls on instead of the suit he was wearing. But when he’d dressed this morning, he hadn’t been planning on undertaking a safari through a Dumpster.
Just before he reached the Dumpster under scrutiny, Frank glanced toward Julianne and saw that she was putting on her own pair of plastic gloves. He noted that her mouth was set grimly and recalled what Riley had told him last night. The detective from Mission Ridge wasn’t used to homicides.
“You up to this?” he asked her suddenly.
Busy taking in everything around her, significant or otherwise, it took Julianne a second to realize that McIntyre was talking to her.
“Excuse me?”
He stopped walking. “Riley said that you mentioned that the woman who was killed in Mission Ridge was your first dead body.” These things could be pretty unsettling and he didn’t want to be sidetracked by a detective throwing up her breakfast.
Julianne wasn’t sure where the detective was going with this, only that she probably wasn’t going to like it. “So?”
“So,”