Agent-in-Charge. Leigh Riker
her alive.
Chapter Three
“Tell me again. Everything that’s happened since you went to my office.”
Graham paced in front of Casey’s living room sofa where she sat with Willy at her feet. Every step Graham took carried his scent to her nostrils, made her pulse rise another notch.
“If we kick this around enough,” Graham insisted, “we may find a reason for the attacks on you.”
As he spoke, she tried even harder not to recall her last sight of his long, lean body, his dark hair and eyes, his high cheekbones. She didn’t need her eyesight to know he wasn’t wearing that surprising grin now.
Casey rested a hand on Willy’s warm shoulder and went through her story one more time. Her drive to Graham’s office—her last drive on her own—the elevator ride upstairs, then leaving for the garage, hearing the speeding car too late. The sketchy details never seemed to satisfy Graham. He insisted they were missing something that could tell them why she had become someone’s target.
“Again,” he said when she finished for the third time. “You were at Hearthline in the first place because…?”
“I know you told me never to go there.” Casey sensed he was not only frustrated by the lack of information she could supply but also irritated. So was she. “Too bad. It wasn’t enough that you spent the bulk of your time there after our move from New York to Washington.” For her, an unwanted move that had forced Casey to sell her art gallery—and become, since then, unemployed. “Before the accident, I’d been in the neighborhood after searching for another business site not far from Dupont Circle. I had an appointment near the Mall. And Hearthline.” But the question remained: even before the divorce, why didn’t her then-husband want her to see his new office?
Now they were divorced and she had to protect herself from a possible killer. She also needed to safeguard her heart from Graham.
If he walked past her once more with that woodsy aroma intermingled with the pheromone-laden scent of man, she might lose her mind. Better to tell him what she could, even when that meant exposing herself.
Casey cleared her throat. “I wanted to drop off the rest of your belongings.” She told him about the carton. “You’d left them behind.”
His tone sharpened. “Where’s the box now?”
“Why, I—” She frowned. To be honest, if she had thought about it during her painful recovery, she’d repressed the memory, like that face in the elevator. “I have no idea,” she said lamely, as puzzled as he was.
Graham cruised by the sofa and Casey bit back a moan. “When you woke up, the box was gone?”
“At the hospital, yes. I assumed one of the nurses or someone in Emergency had put it aside for me, but when I was released no one seemed to know anything about the carton. I’m sorry,” she added. “Things were chaotic. I hope nothing inside was valuable, sentimental….”
“That’s not the point.” Graham was clearly losing his patience. “This may be important. What exactly was in that box?”
She tried to relax. Graham too believed that her “accidents” were deliberate, a step forward since yesterday in learning who wanted her dead. She had to do what she could with her now-limited abilities to help catch that killer. Which, right now, meant cooperating with Graham.
“There was a trophy or two—bowling or golf—a few pieces of jewelry you never wore, some toiletries, that kind of thing.” Irish Spring. Aramis. She paused, wondering if her loss of sight would mean a lifetime of frustrated fantasy. “Are you saying someone ran me down, stole the box—or if not, then entered my apartment to find it? Tried to scare me in the revolving door when he didn’t? Why would someone want your stuff?”
“I don’t know.” He took a deep breath that only seemed, paradoxically, to emit more testosterone into the air. “It’s a long shot but we have to consider everything. Maybe this guy is writing a book—Most Boring Man in the World. And you had his research.”
Casey half laughed but could have groaned. “I wouldn’t say that.” Graham might be the too-dedicated civil servant with no time for his now-ex-wife, but he’d never bored Casey. All he had to do was walk into a room, and despite her resolve not to, she reacted to his presence.
Like a knife blade of desire, she could sense him with every fiber of her being, hear his familiar footsteps, touch his skin without intending to and feel the heat. But, most especially, she could smell him, his male scent, that tangy aftershave. And almost taste him on her tongue again. Hyperaware, Casey absorbed every shift of his body when he moved. She needed to distract herself.
“There’s nothing about your life or mine—the life we shared once—that would appeal to a killer. I sold pretty pictures, Graham.” Past tense. “You push papers around on a desk at Hearthline.”
She heard him pace some more. “There must be something else that triggered those attacks.”
When he stopped in front of her, Casey gazed up at him, wishing she could see even a hint of shadow. She saw nothing, yet she didn’t have to. That same, slow burn flared low inside.
Graham had his mind on other things. Real things. Murder, she thought. Concentrate.
“If someone wasn’t after the box, then what?”
Not long ago, Graham would have soothed her, brushed his finger across her mouth, kissed her until she couldn’t breathe. She imagined it now. Hot, dark, compelling…as if he were someone else, that dangerous someone she’d first assumed him to be.
“Come on, Casey. Think. From what happened recently, it doesn’t seem likely that you went to Hearthline to return my stuff and out of the blue someone decided to whack you. This guy has been tracking you. He pushed you into that revolving door yesterday after letting himself into this apartment. With very few traces left behind, I might add. There’s something you haven’t told me, or perhaps even remembered….”
That quickly, another memory resurfaced. Casey wanted to send it scurrying back into the far recesses of her mind along with the pain she’d suffered. But that wouldn’t help find a potential killer. The words tumbled out.
“I saw a man.”
“What man?”
“I don’t know. But he may have been coming from Hearthline that day. I watched the indicator drop down from seventeen.” Graham’s floor. “I was waiting in the lobby with that box for the same elevator to go up. When he stepped out, our gazes met. And locked.”
“You knew him. And vice versa.”
Casey shook her head. “I’m not sure. I had the odd feeling that I’d met, or seen, him somewhere…maybe some time ago. But I couldn’t put a name with his face.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Casey bristled. “Well, for one thing, in the last months of our marriage, you never took that much interest in what I did. You were gone so much that I finally stopped telling you about my days. Why would you care now about my chance meeting with some guy in an elevator?”
“You know why.”
She grabbed at straws. “There were other people on the elevator. It stopped at other floors on the way down. Maybe he didn’t even get on at Hearthline. He probably has no connection to this whole mess….”
Graham disagreed. “Let me be the judge of that. What did he look like?”
Casey struggled for the image. “Tall, but probably an inch or two less than you. He had blond hair. He wasn’t that remarkable, Graham.” When she finished her vague description of him and the two men she thought he’d been with, she added, “At least I assumed they were together.”
Graham expelled a breath, as if he’d been holding it while she