More Than a Hero
“So you were talking to yourself when you called me a vulture. Some people consider that worrisome. Not me, though. I talk to myself a lot when I’m working.” He set the beer on the table and laced long, strong fingers around the stein. “What did you think of the reviews?”
“What reviews?”
He grinned again, and she had to admit that, arrogance aside, there was a certain charm to it. “Aw, come on. Don’t tell me that you or the munchkin didn’t go online as soon as I was gone to find out what you could about me.”
Rather than admit the truth, she frowned. “Don’t call Lissa that.”
“So…what did you think?” Norris prompted.
Kylie summoned a cool smile. “I think you’re smug and conceited, but I didn’t have to go to the Internet to learn that.”
“I’m not conceited. I’m confident. There’s a difference.”
“But you admit to being smug?”
He shrugged. “No one’s perfect.”
She liked his easy manner. Liked his grin. Was even starting to kind of like his smugness…until he went on.
“Including your father.”
Her spine stiffened. “You think the senator mishandled the Baker case.”
Another easy shrug rippled the fabric of his shirt. “I think Charley is innocent.”
“Why? Because he told you so?”
The easiness disappeared in a flash—no doubt chased away by her snide tone. “I’m not naive, Ms. Riordan. I’ve spent a lot of time with more convicted murderers than you can even name. They write me letters, call me, send me e-mails. They tell me things they’ve never told anyone else. Yes, Charley told me he’s innocent. My gut tells me he’s innocent. More importantly, the evidence raises reasonable doubt.”
Kylie leaned back, crossed her legs and folded her arms across her chest. A body-language expert would say her posture meant she was closed off, not open to hearing what Norris had to say, and he would be right. She knew her father—knew his morals, ethics and beliefs. He didn’t send the wrong man to prison. “Such as?”
“The whole basis for Charley’s arrest and conviction was his affair with Jillian Franklin, and yet there was no evidence that it ever happened. No one ever saw them together. His wife swears his time was pretty much accounted for—if he wasn’t at work, he was with her or their son. Jillian never mentioned him to any of her friends. His fingerprints weren’t found anywhere in the house. Nothing connects them.”
“Illicit affairs are generally conducted in secret.”
“This affair appears to have been fabricated to serve as a motive for Charley to kill Jillian.”
Anger swept through Kylie with a force that made her tremble. “My father never fabricated evidence.”
“I didn’t say he did. It could have been the sheriff’s department.”
“All you have is Charley Baker’s side of the story, and he’s in prison. He obviously can’t be trusted. You know nothing of the facts.”
He remained as calm as she wasn’t. “That’s what I’m here for. The facts—or an approximation thereof.”
“So you can include them in your book—or an approximation thereof,” she said sarcastically.
He merely smiled. “My books are as accurate as they can be under the circumstances. I rely on trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, public record, interviews, letters—whatever sources I can find. The most recent crime I’ve written about took place eleven years ago. Time affects people’s memories. They want to make themselves look better—or, on occasion, worse—than they really were. I present what I find and I let the readers draw their own conclusions.”
“And hope for a new trial to boost the sales of your book.”
His grin was unexpected and all the more powerful for it. “So you did look me up.”
She stared stonily at him. “You won’t get a new trial out of this one. If my father believed Charley Baker was guilty, he was guilty.”
They were sitting there staring at each other when the waitress approached with a platter of ribs, baked beans and coleslaw. “You planning to eat here or go back to your table?”
Norris held Kylie’s gaze a moment longer before turning to the waitress. “I’m going back to my table.” As she walked away, he slid to the edge of the bench, stood up, then grimly said, “No one’s father is infallible. Not mine, and sure as hell not yours. Enjoy your meal, Ms. Riordan. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around.”
She knew it was petty, but as he walked away she muttered, “Not if I see you first.”
Jake’s motel was about a mile from downtown, a small place that had started life as a motor court back in the heyday of getting your kicks on Route 66. Tiny stone buildings, each consisting of a bedroom and a bath, formed a semicircle around the office, disguised as a giant concrete tepee. It was tacky, but his room had a high-speed Internet connection and plenty of space to spread out. That—and running water—was all he needed.
He parked in the narrow space that separated his room from the next and climbed out of his truck as a white car slowed to a stop behind it. The seal of the Riverview Police Department decorated the door.
He took his duffel bag, an attaché and the backpack that held his computer from the passenger side, slung the straps over his shoulders, then stood a moment in the fading light, trading looks with the young officer behind the wheel. Jake didn’t speak, and neither did the cop, though he did make a show of calling in Jake’s tag number to the dispatcher.
Resisting a grin, Jake climbed the steps and let himself in, flipping on lights as he went. The chief criminal investigator for the Davis County Sheriff’s Department twenty-two years ago was Coy Roberts, currently Riverview police chief. If he thought Jake could be intimidated by a cop barely old enough to shave, he was mistaken.
He’d expected a lack of cooperation from the primary subjects in the case. He suspected they’d arrested, prosecuted and condemned the wrong man. If it was merely a mistake, they, like most people in authority, wouldn’t want to admit it. If it was deliberate, naturally they would want to hide it. After all, they had reputations, careers and freedom to protect.
Reputations and careers made off Charley’s case. Coy Roberts had been elected sheriff six weeks after Charley’s conviction. Jim Riordan had been elected to the district attorney’s office soon after. The case had been a boost to Judge Markham’s bid for a seat on the state supreme court, and Charley’s court-appointed lawyer, Tim Jenkins, had parlayed the media attention into a big-bucks criminal defense career.
Everyone had come out of Charley’s case better off than before. Except Charley.
Jake booted up the computer on the square table that served as a desk, then signed online. He checked his e-mail, then Googled Kylie Riordan.
He got a lot of hits, most of them having to do with her father. She worked for him and had since graduating from Oklahoma University and according to an article on old oil families, she still lived in the family mansion. That aside, he found only one entry of any real interest.
Senator’s Daughter to Wed, the headline read. There’d been no mention of a Riordan son-in-law in the search he’d done. She still used her maiden name and she’d worn no ring on her left hand. So what had happened to the wedding?.
The article was from the Riverview paper, three years old, and focused as much on the senator as on Kylie. The prospective groom was, at the time, a lawyer as well as a newly elected representative to the statehouse, one of the up-and-coming power players.
The photo that accompanied the article was…It seemed wrong for a writer to find himself at a loss for words, but Jake was. There was Kylie, in all her goddess beauty, wearing a smile that could make a man weak, looking beautiful. Sexy. Unattainable.
It was arresting. It would have caught his attention even if he hadn’t had two run-ins with her in the space of a few hours, even if he’d never had the good luck to see her in the delectable flesh.
What she didn’t look like, he thought, was a woman in love. Had she hidden it well? Or had her father arranged the match as some kind of political alliance? Who had called it off—the bride, the groom or the senator? Had she been relieved at her narrow escape or heartbroken by her loss?
He preferred to think relieved.
Without considering his reason, he saved the picture to a folder, then shut down the computer. It wasn’t even eight o’clock—far too early for bed—but he was too restless to work. Taking the computer and the attaché with him, he went back out to the truck, backed out of the parking space and pulled onto Main Street. In the rearview mirror he caught a glimpse of a white car pulling onto the street a hundred yards back. Chief Roberts’s flunky?
There was a lot about Riverview that Jake didn’t remember. He’d lived more places by the time he was ten than most people saw in a lifetime. His father had wanderlust, his mother had liked to say. For a time it had charmed her, but then she’d gotten tired of the moves, the new jobs, trying to make a place a home for a few weeks or a few months but never more than a year. Since the divorce, she’d lived in the same small town. She’d put down roots and nurtured them carefully.
Jake drove the length of Main Street, then Markham Avenue, the other primary thoroughfare. The school he’d attended for six or eight months was located two blocks off both streets, its red brick more familiar than any other place he’d seen. Sacred Heart Church was on the same corner as before, but the old building was gone, a newer, blander version in its place.
He located the courthouse and jail where Charley Baker had spent his last weeks in Riverview. Chief Roberts’s house, in the neighborhood where all of the town’s old money had settled. Tim Jenkins’s showplace where the new money lived. Judge Markham’s place, stately and impressive, and Senator Riordan’s home, even statelier and more impressive.
Riordan had lived in the house for more than thirty years, but everyone still called it the Colby mansion. He’d had dreams and determination but not much else when he’d married Phyllis Colby and her family fortune. Given her money and his ambition, the only surprise was that he hadn’t already moved into the governor’s office and used it as a springboard to get into politics on the national level.
Built of sandstone blocks, the house reached three stories and was surrounded by grounds that spread over an entire block. A wrought-iron fence kept the lush plantings in and the common folk out. Somewhere inside there Kylie Riordan was…doing what? Watching television? Working? Maybe thinking about Jake?
It would only be fair.
He drove past one other house, where Therese Franklin had lived with her grandparents since her parents’ deaths. It was in the old-money neighborhood, too, though nowhere near as fancy as the Riordan place. But then, nothing in Riverview was.
When he turned back onto Main Street, the same white car followed. It must be a slow night in town if Roberts could assign an officer to watch him.
Or was it a sign of how much Roberts and the others were worried about what Jake might find? If they didn’t have anything to hide, there would be nothing for him to find.
But Jake suspected—hoped?—that was a mighty big if.
Chapter 2
Kylie’s college roommate had described her energy level before sunrise as obscene, and nothing had changed since then. By the time she parked outside the office downtown on Wednesday morning, she’d already run three miles, finished the senator’s veterans’ group speech, made a half dozen phone calls back east and sorted through all his e-mails as well as her own. She’d accomplished enough that she could have taken time for a leisurely breakfast at the tearoom two doors from the office, but instead she was going to have her usual—a protein drink and an orange at her desk.
She’d hardly settled in when the private line rang. Balancing the phone between her ear and shoulder while she peeled thick skin from the orange, she answered with, “Hello, sir.”
The senator chuckled. “How’d you know it was me? It could have been Vaughan.”
She rolled her eyes at the mention of the Speaker of the House, one of a half dozen friends who’d accompanied her father to the Keys. David Vaughan was handsome, charming and ambitious—a younger version of her father, except that while her father aspired only to the governor’s mansion, David’s eye was on the U.S. Senate and beyond. Neither of them made a secret of the fact that they thought she’d make a damn fine senator’s wife or even First Lady.
Not in this lifetime.
“Listen, honey, I wanted to tell you there’s this writer who’s supposed to come to town—”
“Jake Norris.”
Silence for a moment, then her father’s grim voice. “So he’s there. Have you met him?”
“He came by yesterday to see you. He has an appointment for a week from Thursday.”
“Damn. Maybe he’ll give up before then.”
She closed her eyes and an image of Norris appeared, dark and handsome, that whiskey-smooth voice of his saying, I’m not conceited. I’m confident. There’s a difference. He wasn’t going to give up and go away just because everyone wanted him to.
“He’s writing a book about Charley Baker,” she said, refocusing on the orange to get the image out of her mind. “Do you remember the case?”
“It was a double homicide—a death-penalty case. Of course I remember it.”
“Was there any doubt as to Baker’s guilt?”
“None.” The word was bitten off, the tone certain.
“Then why not go over the facts of the case with Norris and be done with it?”
The senator snorted. “The facts are the last thing he’s interested in. Have you read any of his books? He’s an opportunist. He takes things out of context, twists facts, sensationalizes everything. Hell, who’d pay good money to read about an open-and-shut case like Baker’s? There aren’t any unanswered questions. There isn’t any doubt about his guilt. The only one who says Charley Baker is innocent is Charley Baker. His own wife believed he did it. She didn’t even stick around for the trial. She took the kid and disappeared.”
Norris had mentioned a son at the restaurant the night before. Kylie wondered how old he’d been, if she’d seen him around town, spoken to him or played with him. Probably not. She’d been only five at the time of the murders, and her world had pretty much been limited to the few blocks surrounding her house. She hadn’t socialized with kids from the wrong part of town—defined by her mother as any part outside their small neighborhood.
“But, sir, if you talk to Norris, at least you’ll know you’ve given him the truth. What he does with it after that is on him.”
He exhaled loudly, a habit to show impatience with her. “We don’t need all this dragged out again, Kylie. It was an ugly time in our town’s history. It just casts Riverview in a bad light. And think of that poor Franklin girl…Pete died just a few months ago, and Miriam’s got to go into the nursing home. Therese is going to be all on her own. She lost her parents once. It’s not fair to make her go through it again just so Jake Norris can make some money.”
His first arguments didn’t carry much weight. Every town had its crime; no one was going to hold a twenty-year-old murder against Riverview. But Therese Franklin…she was such a fragile creature. Horrified by what had happened to her parents, her grandparents had cosseted and protected her to the point of suffocation. She’d had few friends, little freedom and not much of a life. With the current upheavals, how difficult would it be for her to have that old tragedy opened up again?
“She pleaded with me, Kylie,” her father went on. “She begged me to not let Norris do this, and I told her I would do my best to dissuade him. You know I’m a man of my word.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?”
“Stay away from Norris. Don’t talk to him. Discourage anyone else from talking to him.”
She could do that, could put out the word that her father didn’t want anyone cooperating with Norris, and most people in town would close the door in his face. The fact bothered her more than a little. The man wanted information about a case that was public knowledge—a case that was, according to the senator, open-and-shut. No questions, no doubt, no mystery. So why dissuade him from gathering information?
The town’s reputation and Therese’s state of mind aside, her father’s biggest motivation, she suspected, was his planned run for the governor’s mansion. He’d laid out a timetable for himself twenty-odd years ago, and the only deviation had been her mother’s unexpected death. It was his time to be governor, and no one was going to interfere, least of all a convicted murderer and the writer who thought he was innocent.
How much damage could they do? If her father was accurate in describing Norris’s style, a lot, especially when the Senator would face a popular incumbent. Even an unsubstantiated rumor of wrongdoing could upset a sure-to-be-close race.
“Listen, honey, I’ve got to go,” the senator said. “Just promise me you’ll do as I instructed. I’ll call you again later.”
He didn’t wait for her promise before he hung up. He just assumed, as he always did, that of course she would do as he instructed. After all, she always had, hadn’t she?
Slowly she replaced the receiver in its cradle, ate a segment of orange, then went online and ordered one copy of each of Norris’s books. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her father; she did implicitly. She just wanted to see for herself how Norris approached his stories.
That done, she forced her attention to work and succeeded for a time, until she raised her gaze to the window to give them a break from the dull text she was studying. A dusty red pickup had just pulled into the parking space directly in front of the window and Jake Norris climbed out.
His jeans weren’t so faded, his T-shirt was still tight and his boots were beyond scuffed. Dark glasses hid his eyes, though her interest was lower, on the muscles bunching as he swung an apparently heavy backpack over one shoulder. He slammed the door and locked it, then started across the street without so much as a glance in the direction of the office.
Had she wanted him to look? Wanted him to wonder about her? If she was working, if she was watching him, if she was thinking about him?
She would like to say of course not, but honesty wouldn’t let her. He was the sexiest guy she’d run across in ages, as well as the most annoying. Under different circumstances, she would certainly be interested in a discreet short-term fling with him. Under the current circumstances, that wasn’t an option, but even so, it would be nice to know that the interest wasn’t one-sided.
As Norris stepped onto the far curb, Derek West got out of his patrol car and, after waiting for a car to pass, trotted across the street. He went into the courthouse about twenty feet behind Norris. Coincidence? Or was this part of the dissuasion her father had promised Therese? Since he was out of town, he would have called one of his close friends—probably Coy Roberts—to make sure Norris kept his distance from Therese. A little police harassment seemed right up Roberts’s alley.
She sat there a moment, tapping one nail against her desk, before abruptly rising. “Lissa, I’m going to the courthouse,” she called as she passed through the reception area. The girl popped her head out of the file room in time to watch her leave.
She crossed the street and entered through the same side door Norris had gone through. There were any number of offices he could have gone to…but she wasn’t looking for him. She just wanted to see if Derek West was.
The officer was leaning against the wall outside the court clerk’s open door, a broad grin stretching across his face. Voices filtered through the door—Norris’s lower rumble, Martha Gordon’s nasal tones. He sounded angry. She sounded bored. She always did.
Giving Derek a stern look, Kylie entered the office, then closed the door behind her. Norris, leaning on the counter, glanced over his shoulder. For just a moment something flashed in his gaze. Appreciation? Pleasure? Then he turned back to Martha. “You didn’t even check.”
Martha quivered from the top of her gray bun all the way down to the sensible support shoes she always wore. “I don’t need to check.”
“Is there a problem?” Kylie asked, moving to stand a few feet down the counter from Norris.
“This—” Martha’s gaze traveled over what she could see of Norris, and her entire face tightened “—this person wants to see the trial transcript from the Charley Baker murder case. I told him it’s been checked out, but he doesn’t believe me.”
“I asked for the file, and she said it’s not here without even checking,” Norris said, his jaw clenched.
Martha’s face tightened more. If she got any sourer, she would look like a prune. “Why would I waste my time checking when there’s no need? How many requests do you think I get in this office for twenty-some-year-old cases? I can tell you—two. In all the years I’ve been working here.”
“Who checked it out?” Kylie asked.
Martha’s shoulders went back. “That’s private information.”
“Martha,” Kylie chided gently.
Her mouth pursed, Martha went to the card file on her desk, then returned with an index card, handing it to Kylie. Written there in the woman’s imperious hand was Judge Markham’s name, the date he took the file and the date it was due back—several days past. What was his sudden interest in the file?
“Have you called to remind him that it’s past due?” Kylie asked as she returned the card to the clerk.
Martha sniffed haughtily. “I will now that there’s been another request for it.”
“When you have an answer, will you please let me know?” With a polite smile, Kylie caught Norris’s arm and started toward the door.
He dug in his feet, pulling her to a stop. “These files are a matter of public record. You people can’t hide them just because you don’t want anyone else to see them.”
Instead of tugging harder, she squeezed his arm tighter, all too aware of the muscle beneath her fingers that didn’t yield to pressure. “She can’t give you what she doesn’t have,” she said quietly, warningly. “It’s best if you leave now.”
Throwing a dark look at Martha, who returned it balefully, he let Kylie lead him into the corridor. The instant she pushed the door open, Derek West jumped back a few feet, then tried for a show of nonchalance.
Norris let her pull him a few feet before jerking his arm free. She missed the contact immediately and at the same time was grateful for its cessation. She didn’t need to be thinking about the silky-coarse texture of his hair-roughened skin or how he radiated heat or how long it had been since she’d experienced the pure tactile pleasure of touching a man even in so casual a way. If she wanted to touch a man, she could find plenty of volunteers—men who didn’t care who her father was, who didn’t have an agenda, who weren’t her adversary. Who weren’t so complicated. So handsome. So sexy.
“Who has the damn file?” he demanded.
She glanced at Derek, pretending disinterest. “We’ll talk outside.”
He glanced that way, too, then grudgingly nodded. They’d reached the door before Derek pushed away from the wall, and had gone down the half dozen steps before he opened the door. Kylie turned to face him. “Don’t follow me.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Don’t follow him while he’s with me.”
“But—” Derek’s gaze shifted from her to Norris, then back again. Comprehension dawned, though he tried to hide it. “Oh. Okay. Not a problem.” With a nod, he returned inside the building.
Kylie exhaled as she glanced around. They could go to her office or take a seat on a bench in the square. Instead she gestured toward the street. “Let’s walk.”
They’d made it to the corner before Norris asked, “Are you going to report back to Chief Roberts on everything I say?”
“Apparently Derek thinks so.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”