Badge of Honor Read online

  "Kit," he said as he separated from the stream of passengers. "You got the taxi duty? How are you?"

  "Fine, sir." She thought his mouth twitched slightly, but couldn't be sure. "How was your trip?"

  His mouth did twist then, into a wry grimace. "It was … tiring."

  "I—" She bit off the rest, horrified that she'd almost said, "I can see that." This was the chief, for crying out loud, she told herself. "I'm sorry to hear that," she said instead. "Captain Mallery said it was a vacation, so I—we all hoped you were relaxing."

  If he noticed the choppiness of her conversation, it didn't show. But then, the chief was a gentleman to the core and would never comment on her nervousness. Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was the same man who could take charge with complete authority in a crisis or could be as tough as necessary on the street. But she'd seen him do it, and more than once.

  He glanced at her, then said quietly, "I went to visit Anna's parents."

  Kit's breath caught. "I … didn't know—that you … kept in touch."

  "They're still my family." She knew his parents had died, as had hers, in a car accident when he'd been in his twenties, and he was, also as she was, an only child, so she wasn't surprised when he added, "About all I have, now." He shrugged, as if it didn't matter.

  And you're all they have left of Anna, too, Kit thought sadly.

  He rarely spoke of Anna, and she'd had no idea he was still close to her parents. But it wasn't surprising. He'd deeply loved his wife, and he was the kind of man who would take ties like that very seriously. She was a little surprised that she was so sure of that, but she was. And it didn't mean anything, not really. It only made sense to try and know a little bit about him, since he was the chief.

  There was a great deal of safety in that title. It was easier to distance herself from the rank than the man, the man she'd worked alongside for fourteen years now, the man she'd laughed with when they were both on the street, the man whose promotions she'd celebrated, the man who, she suspected, had been behind her assignment to detective, the man she'd watched quickly advance through the ranks without losing the trust of those who became subordinates, the man any one of the Trinity West cops would trust with their lives.

  And then the probable reason for the trip struck her, and she said the words without thinking.

  "Her birthday…"

  "Yes. It's very hard for them."

  And it's easy for you? Kit knew the answer and felt a tightness in her throat. She had known and liked Anna de los Reyes. They had met when Miguel was still a sergeant. Kit had come to consider her a valued friend and had felt welcome in their home. When Anna died, a gaunt, hollow-eyed shadow of the vital, intelligent, loving, beautiful woman she'd been, Kit had railed against God, fate, medicine and anyone or anything she could think of. And at all of them all over again for doing this to Miguel de los Reyes, one of the finest men she'd ever met.

  And suddenly she was incapable of seeing him as only a rank, only the chief. He was a man, a man who had been hurt deeply but had somehow found the courage to go on. A man she had admired for years. A man she admired even more now.

  "I'm sorry." It was all she could manage to get out.

  The chief looked at her—he was one of the few men she knew who made her five foot eight seem a nice, petite height—with an oddly intent expression.

  "I know," he said softly.

  Flustered by his tone and the way he was looking at her, Kit turned hastily away and gestured toward the escalator that led to the baggage claim. "The car isn't too far," she said. "When they start unloading your flight's bags, I'll go bring it around front."

  He seemed to hesitate for a moment, then nodded, and they started to walk. Kit was conscious of the faintly spicy scent of his aftershave, the same one he'd used for years, that always made her think of him. She was conscious as well of his long-legged stride and knew from experience he would have shortened it had she not been able to keep up. But her legs were long enough to cover nearly as much ground. They fit well together—

  She recoiled from that thought as if it was an already agitated hornet's nest. He's the chief for God's sake, she told herself fiercely.

  But he was right there, too close, and she was always so darned edgy around him. She tried to think of something else, anything else, but the only thing that came to mind was Carmela Rivas's passionate accusation.

  Fine thing, she thought, when the idea of a killer cop is the only thing powerful enough to keep your mind where it belongs.

  It was going to be a long ride to Trinity West.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  «^»

  Miguel de los Reyes liked the way he didn't have to shorten his stride for Kit to keep up with him. It didn't happen often. Not that he minded when he had to do it with other people—it was a matter of simple courtesy, and he knew his above average height made it necessary with some men as well as women. But Kit stayed with him easily with those long legs of hers.

  He remembered when Trinity West had challenged the upscale Marina del Mar cops to that charity softball game in the spring, to raise money for Kelsey Gregerson's halfway house. For most of the players, the most memorable moments had been when Quisto Romero had squared off at the plate against his old partner, now Marina del Mar sergeant Chance Buckner, who, it turned out, had a wicked curveball, or when Chance's songwriter wife, Shea, had sung the national anthem in her clear, lovely voice.

  But to him, the most memorable moment had been Kit Walker, clad in shorts and the team's white baseball jersey, diving across the infield to make a one-handed catch of a line drive that should have driven home at least a couple of runs. She had flown, her long, slim body stretched out as she reached for the ball … and he had realized her legs went on forever.

  God. He grimaced, rubbing a hand over his face. He must be tired when he gave in to that kind of thinking. He had no business even noticing Kit's legs. Not only was she an old and valued friend, she worked for him, and that way lay trouble of a kind he never wanted to deal with.

  "Are you all right … sir?" she asked as they came to a halt beside the large, oval baggage carousel.

  That tentative "sir" shook him out of that lingering reverie. "Fine," he said, glancing at her. He'd always liked long hair on a woman, but there was something exceptionally appealing about her short, tousled blond hair, perhaps the way it seemed to play up lovely hazel eyes that seemed as changeable as the sea, sometimes green, sometimes gold.

  Something in her expression made him realize he was staring at her, and he said quickly, "I was just thinking about … Cruz. And how he badgered everybody into that softball game."

  She laughed lightly, with no trace of reluctance or resignation. "He'd do worse than that for Kelsey. He's crazy about her."

  "She's a dynamic woman. That halfway house of hers is piling up an enviable success rate with runaways already."

  "Yes," Kit agreed, and Miguel wondered if she was agreeing to both. He knew she and Cruz were close, and he had even suspected it might have once gone beyond friendship, but there was no sign in her demeanor or in those expressive eyes that she was anything less than delighted for the happiness Cruz Gregerson had found.

  "Tell me, what's happened in the last week?"

  She gave him a startled look. "I … I'm sure the captain kept you filled in better than I could."

  He smiled at her. "He kept me posted. But in keeping with the rolling downhill theory, I know there are things that never filter up that high."

  She smiled at him and finally seemed to relax, to look at him as she had when there hadn't been this gulf between them. Sometimes he hated this part of his job, where people he liked and admired were stiff and uneasy around him because of those four gold stars on his uniform collar. You'd think I'd be used to it, he thought. Cops were always set apart, and he'd had twenty-three years of being one.

  "Really, nothing unusual," she said. Her brow furrowed for a moment, as if something con
trary to her words had just occurred to her, but she went on without explaining. "Cruz wrapped up that counterfeiting case he was helping the feds on, Ryan popped that bar owner who was running underage hookers, and patrol made a good drug bust, a couple of keys of coke." She gave him a sideways look. "Max hit on it."

  Miguel smiled in satisfaction. Sending their single canine for drug-sniffing training had been his idea, and he'd had to do some fancy number-crunching to come up with the funds. "I'm very glad to hear that."

  She grinned, and his breath caught. "It almost got by the humans," she said. "It was hidden in a fancy birthday cake, and the field sergeant thought Max was just hungry. But Joe insisted Max knew better, so they finally made a little cut through the top of the cake, and there it was."

  He chuckled, unable to resist the humor of the story—or her cheer. And suddenly the weariness of the past week seemed to retreat a little.

  "And what about you, Kit?"

  "Me?" She seemed startled.

  "How are you doing? I know you need help in there, but we're so short-staffed right now—"

  "I'm okay. Things have been relatively quiet. I miss Gage, of course—he did the work of three—but I'm staying even."

  They all missed Gage, Miguel thought. The detective had been an integral part of the team. They'd known how hard he worked, how many hours he put in, that he'd lived, breathed and slept the job, but until he'd gone they hadn't realized just how big a hole he'd leave behind. But Miguel knew there wasn't anybody who had begrudged him. Gage had been teetering on a precipice, obsessed beyond reason with the job, and all of them had been dreading the inevitable crash. And then Laurey Templeton had come along and pulled him from the edge of the abyss, changing the haunted, driven cop they'd known into a happy, contented man. As much as they missed him, they all welcomed his salvation as if it was their own. Gage was more than well-liked at Trinity West.

  "Have you heard from him lately?" he asked.

  "I talked to Laurey last week." She grinned again, and Miguel thought what a lovely expression it was, lighting up her eyes like that. "She said he's so busy exploring up there around Seattle she's afraid he's never going to get a job. She's going to suggest he open a sporting goods store or something."

  Miguel laughed again. "I'm glad to hear he's taking a long vacation. He needed it. Deserved it."

  "Yes," Kit said softly.

  "You were worried about him."

  "I think I knew he was on the edge, but not how close."

  "I remember when you came to me about him."

  She smiled rather shyly. "And you backed me up, made him take that time off. Did I ever thank you for that?"

  "You did, but it wasn't necessary. You were right. It had to be done. And I thought all the more of you for your concern."

  Something in the way she looked at him then made him restless somehow. But the clank of the baggage carousel starting to move, indicating his bags were about to arrive, served as a distraction.

  "I'll go bring the car around," she said. "I presume you're going home first?"

  He shook his head. "To the station first. My car is there, and I'll take it home from there—after I see what has piled up while I was gone."

  She looked at him as if she was thinking he should go straight home and to sleep but didn't dare say so. And he wasn't sure he would disagree with that, but as tired as he was, he was also feeling a bit unsettled.

  "I'm hoping the pile will be so huge it will make me want to avoid it," he said wryly. "Then I'll go home and sleep for about twelve hours."

  She looked startled, then, as if unwillingly, that grin spread across her face again. "I think that's an excellent idea."

  He watched her walk away, forgetting entirely to look for his bag as the luggage from the flight thumped steadily onto the rotating carousel. She was wearing neat, white linen slacks and a crisp, pale yellow blouse. She wore a lot of yellow, he'd noticed, and it made her look like the quintessential California golden girl. Except that there was none of the vapidness about her that had given rise to countless jokes about the species. No one would ever mistake Kit Walker for a brainless blonde. There was too much life, too much vivid, snapping intelligence in those hazel eyes. He was lucky to have her.

  Trinity West was lucky to have her, he amended quickly, feeling a bit uneasy with the way his mind had formed the thought.

  He turned to look for his battered black suitcase and tried to put the golden image out of his mind.

  * * *

  Kit sneezed. It was dusty down here in the file morgue, and they didn't have enough clerks to staff the big, dreary room, so she had been hunting on her own for several minutes. Naturally, what she was looking for had been before the cutoff date for microfilming. They were eventually going to do everything, but it was a slow process, and they'd begun with cases that were still open, then gone back in chronological order. And Trinity West was so far behind in this kind of modernization that most of them took what there was gratefully, glad of any help at all in modernizing the process.

  It was a wonder they were even as far as they were, she thought. There had been no money in the budget for new computer equipment, the patrol units were starting to fall apart and had to be a priority, but still the chief had managed to find, somewhere, enough to at least get them started on archiving the old cases. He'd wangled an old system no longer in use out of the city library, and sweet-talked the head librarian into loaning them someone to teach several clerks how to run it, so at least the huge project was begun.

  He really ought to run for mayor, as he joked on occasion, Kit thought as she dug through more files and sneezed again at the dust. He got things done. But she couldn't help but hope he wouldn't. Trinity West couldn't afford to lose him. He'd worked miracles here, at a time when nothing less would have held this place together.

  She thought again of the exhaustion that had shown when he'd gotten off the plane this morning and of the strain she was sure he'd been under, sharing Anna's birthday with her parents, dredging up memories that had to be so very painful. For all that Anna had died nearly six years ago, he mourned her still. He'd loved her so much the consensus around Trinity West was that he'd never remarry, and Kit couldn't help thinking that was very sad. That she had no room to talk was a fact she chose to ignore for the moment.

  This time when she sneezed, it was on dust stirred up from the right file. She double-checked the report number and then pulled the file off the long shelf crammed full of manila folders.

  Her first thought was that it was awfully thin for a murder investigation file. Her second was an audible groan as, after flipping it open and confirming it was the Rivas file, she noticed the signature of the investigating officer.

  Robards. Didn't it just need that? she thought.

  She almost put the file back. She wasn't quite sure why she'd looked it up, anyway. It couldn't be to keep from thinking about those moments when she'd been forced to look at Miguel de los Reyes and see the man instead of the rank. And she didn't believe Carmela Rivas's story that it had been a cop who had beaten her son to death. She believed the woman believed it, but she knew how desperate people were, in the throes of grief, to blame someone or something for their loss. And of late, because of a couple of high-profile cases representing such a small percentage of the overall number of cops that it would be dismissed as insignificant if it was any other group, it seemed the police had become a too likely and too frequent target.

  At the same time, she knew cops were held to a higher standard than almost any other professionals. Whether or not that was fair had been discussed at great length, she knew, and each side had valid points. Kit hadn't dwelt on it—it made little difference to her if it was fair or not, it was, and she thought her energy better spent dealing with it. Of course, she often thought wryly, being a female in a traditionally male job—for that matter, being female, period—had taught her much about dealing with unfairness.

  And Robards, she thought, looking once more at
the signature on the report, was the dean of the school. Unfortunately, the swaggering blowhard was also her boss, the lieutenant in charge of the detective division. And again she almost put the file back.

  She didn't want to deal with him on this. She knew what his reaction would be. He was nothing if not predictable when it came to anyone—let alone a woman—questioning him. About anything. He did his best to make life miserable for them all—even the men of Trinity West called him a dinosaur, and Kit thought it a generous term for a man living so far in the past. He'd been a cop for thirty years and saw no reason to change his tactics just because law enforcement had moved into the twentieth century. He was immovably certain that a change to the old days when cops could, as he put it "kick ass and take no names," would solve every problem in society today.

  That, and getting women and all the other groups he didn't approve of back where they belonged, of course. He'd only made lieutenant because he'd been tight with the former chief, who'd been careful to get as many of his old boys as he could into ranking positions. It certainly wasn't because of his modern ideas and approach.

  She slapped the file folder shut and lifted her hand to shove it on the shelf. It really was awfully skimpy for a murder case, she thought. That made her curious. As did the fact that Robards had done the investigation at all. It was unusual for a patrol sergeant, which he had been at that time, to do paperwork on a crime. That was usually passed off to a street cop, with the sergeant in charge doing at most a supplemental report if he was involved in the investigation.

  She opened the folder again and flipped through the pages. Crime report, supplemental info, property report—Robards's name appeared on the bottom of each as the sole reporting officer. And even more oddly, they had been read and approved not by the watch commander but by the former chief himself. It gave her an odd feeling to see the signature of the man now dead. She'd never liked him much—he'd seemed to her cut from the same cloth as Robards—but he was a cop and he'd been gunned down in the street in a nightmare drive-by shooting.