Bracing himself, Whit nodded and the attendant—probably the medical examiner’s assistant, he assumed—gently pulled back the sheet from the deceased’s face.
He hadn’t braced himself enough.
Seeing his father like that, lifeless and so incredibly pale, was a horrible shock to his entire system.
“Yes, that’s him. That’s my father.”
His voice sounded almost disembodied to his own ear. The words echoed in his head, tormenting him, long after they had faded from the air.
“Would you like to take a moment?” the detective asked.
No, he wouldn’t like to take a moment. A moment wouldn’t help. A thousand moments wouldn’t help, Whit thought angrily. There was only one thing that would.
Turning away from the glass partition, he looked at the detective and asked, “Do you know who did this to him?”
“The investigation’s just started,” the detective replied.
“So you’ve got nothing,” Whit concluded.
“We do have a person of interest at the precinct who’s being questioned right now,” the man offered.
Whit’s blue eyes, normally so brilliant, were almost flat as he asked, “Who is it?”
“Sir, we can’t discuss an ongoing investigation,” the detective said, nervously hiding behind regulations.
Whit had been trained to detect weakness and uncertainty in any and all opponents. That had been his father’s doing. Whit could tell now that the detective was a man who could be bullied into complying—to an extent.
“You can if that investigation involved my father. Now who is being questioned?” he asked the man more forcefully.
The detective shrugged, as if conducting an internal debate with himself. “I guess you’ll find out soon enough. It’s your father’s assistant. Elizabeth Shelton.”
Whit stared at the man as if he had lost his mind. “Elizabeth Shelton?” he repeated incredulously. The one he’d taken numerous business trips with—the one who stirred his soul, although that was something he never intended to admit.
What the detective was suggesting just wasn’t possible.
The detective nodded, anticipating the next question: Why? “She was the one who found the body and called it in.”
A barrage of words rose to Whit’s tongue like a band of angry villagers storming the manor carrying pitchforks and torches, but he didn’t intend to waste his breath or his time on the detective. He needed to be elsewhere.
“Where is she being questioned?” he asked.
“At the police station. Detective Kramer is handling the case. Otis Kramer,” the other man all but shouted after Whit as the latter hurried to the elevator.
* * *
This was insane, Whit thought over and over again as he hurried to the police station. Completely insane. Elizabeth could no more have killed his father than he could. Whit gripped his steering wheel, channeling his anger, doing his best to regain control over himself. He had to put an end to this farce and get Elizabeth out of there.
He owed it to both her and his father to put an end to the interrogation that was being conducted.
That he had to come to what amounted to her rescue was, in itself, only adding to his internal turmoil.
He’d been avoiding his father’s executive assistant these last few weeks. Totally avoiding any one-on-one contact with her, avoiding even being in the same room as the woman. He had wanted to work a few things through first.
But his feelings in regard to being possibly confronted and maybe even redressed by Elizabeth were trumped by this unimaginably bizarre situation. Just because he hadn’t summoned the courage to face her didn’t excuse him from coming to her aid and extracting her from being interrogated by some overeager detective looking to make lieutenant.
Doing the speed limit and above, Whit arrived at the police station in what amounted to record time. A part of him had been expecting to be pulled over at any moment and given a speeding ticket. Luckily for him, San Diego’s finest were otherwise occupied tonight.
Parking his silver-gray sports car in the lot’s first row, Whit got out of the vehicle and dashed up the concrete front steps, then hurried into the building.
The interior of the precinct was alive with multiple activities, all going on at once. Even so, it was obvious that the murder of Reginald Adair was taking precedence over everything else.
Whit was grateful—if such a feeling could be put into play at a time like this—that the media hadn’t come crawling out of the woodwork yet. One less obstacle for him to deal with.
But they would. They would most definitely come out of the woodwork. He knew that it was just a matter of time before this whole thing became a giant media circus, three rings and all.
The desk sergeant looked up just as Whit approached him. The grumpy expression on the heavyset man’s face melted away as recognition set in. AdAir Corp—its president in particular—made large annual contributions to the policemen’s fund. That earned the company—and especially Whit—respect as well as pledges of complete cooperation should the need arise.
It had arisen.
“We were all very sorry to hear about your father, Mr. Adair,” O’Hara, the desk sergeant, told him, rising in his chair to shake his hand.
“Thank you,” Whit answered, doing his best not to snap the response out. He wanted to move on to the reason why he was here at the precinct, not discuss his father’s murder. “You’re holding my father’s assistant, Elizabeth Shelton, for questioning,” he began.
“Yeah, that’s right.” The sergeant looked up from the ledger he was checking. “Ruiz,” he called out, stopping the first uniformed policeman who walked by at that moment. “Take Mr. Adair upstairs to where Kramer’s questioning that person of interest.”
Elizabeth was a person of interest all right, Whit thought, falling into step beside the officer. A person of interest to him.
Very much so, he thought ruefully as he got into the elevator and rode up beside the diminutive Officer Ruiz. Elizabeth was a person of interest to him despite the fact that he had broken his own rules and crossed the line with her, a line he had sworn to himself that he would never cross.
And he hadn’t.
Not for five years.
Not until that night in Nevada when they’d wound up stranded thanks to an untimely thunderstorm.
Stranded, attracted to one another, with just a little too much to drink—it was a recipe for disaster. He realized that he’d been doomed right from the very start.
It had turned out to be a very volatile combination—for both of them.
Neither one of them, in his estimation, had imbibed enough to be considered drunk—but they had consumed just enough to have the carefully constructed walls around their professional relationship turn into tissue paper.
For his part, he’d been drawn to Elizabeth from the first moment he’d seen her that day she came to work for his father. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her.
But he more than anyone knew that business and pleasure had to be kept at arm’s length from one another. Mixing the two together was just asking for trouble—with a capital T.
But none of that had been on his mind that night in Nevada. All he’d been able to think of was how very much he wanted her.
Outside their hotel window, the wind had howled and the rain had lashed angrily against the glass panes. Inside,