Secret Admirer. Amanda Stevens
name—had catapulted him to prominence. He’d soon developed into one of the division’s hottest and most watched detectives, but even so, Eve doubted he would have been assigned to work such a high-profile investigation if it hadn’t been for his partner. Clare Foxx had been a well-known and respected detective at the time, but it had been Tony who had finally broken the case.
Eve had still been working vice at that time, but she and the rest of the department, along with the entire city, had followed the investigation, hoping and praying just like the cops who searched for the child that little Julie Betts would somehow turn up alive. The team of detectives had spent hundreds of hours on the case, combing every square inch around the victim’s home and school, following up on one flimsy lead after another. Tony had taken it upon himself to widen the search, using his off-duty time to scour gutters and trash bins. And then he’d found her.
Eve closed her eyes, knowing the words in the report by heart, but picturing in her mind how it all must have gone down that day.
It had been twilight when Tony had found the child, thrown away like yesterday’s useless garbage. She’d had on a pink dress, and her hair was in pigtails tied with pink ribbons. One of the ribbons was missing, and Tony had felt certain it had been taken by the killer as a souvenir or a trophy.
When the bloodstained ribbon had later been found in a shoe box stuffed under Robert Betts’s bed, Tony had gone after the man’s throat. Clare had managed to pull him away, but not before Robert Betts claimed his rights had been violated. He’d filed assault charges against Tony, even though he hadn’t had a prayer of getting off once the DNA found on the ribbon had been matched to his seven-year-old daughter’s.
In a way, the Julie Betts case was what had brought Tony back into Eve’s life. After Ashley’s funeral, when she’d seen how grief stricken Tony was, Eve had told herself that it was time to get over her schoolgirl crush and get on with her life. And she had. She’d graduated from college, gone to the academy and then concentrated on her career. She’d even had a serious relationship or two over the years.
But then the prominence of the Betts case, the manhunt and subsequent notoriety Tony received after the arrest, had made Eve think about him more and more. She had almost gone to see him back then, to tell him that she understood why he had done what he had. After weeks of searching, it must have killed him to find that little girl’s body. Eve had a feeling he’d never gotten over it.
To most people in the department, Tony Gallagher was a rogue, a loner who didn’t play by the rules. But Eve knew he was much more than that. He was a cop who cared too much. A cop—and a man—worth saving.
But the question was, did he believe that about himself?
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