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Money aside, no one was as good a cop as Gideon Raintree seemed to be. Most of the murders he’d solved were drug related, which meant he could very well be connected to someone in the community of dealers. Someone high enough up to be able to buy his own cop. Was her new partner involved with the criminal element in Wilmington?
I talk to dead people my ass.
The houses on this strip of the beach were impressive, but space was at a premium, and they had been built very close together. One colorful house after another lined this street, and Raintree’s tastefully painted gray was one of the finest. Why hadn’t anyone ever questioned his lifestyle?
Every detective she knew wanted to work homicide. It was high-profile; it was important. And yet five months after his partner’s retirement, Raintree was still working alone—or had been, until she’d come along. The new chief had told her the other detectives weren’t interested in working with Raintree. They didn’t want to get lost in the shuffle, always being second man on the team, or else they knew Raintree liked to work alone and didn’t want to be the one to rock the boat. In other words, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Hope had never minded rocking the boat.
Maybe there were completely reasonable answers to all her questions about Raintree, but then again, maybe not. She had to know, before she got herself in too deep. Before she trusted him, before she accepted him.
She knew in her gut that Raintree was a liar. Of course he lied on a regular basis: He had a penis. The question was, how deep did the lies go?
Hope parked her blue Toyota down the street, where someone was having a gathering and an extra car wouldn’t stand out, and walked back to Raintree’s house. It was unlikely she would see anything this late at night, but she was so curious and wound up that she couldn’t possibly sleep. Since her mother never went to bed before 2:00 a.m. and the apartment over the shop was small, sleep wasn’t all that easy to come by, anyway.
The house, the expensive suits, the cars…Raintree was definitely into something.
The recently retired partner, Leon Franklin, came off as clean as a whistle when she looked into his background. Franklin had a little money in the bank, but not too much. A nice house, but not too nice. And everyone she’d talked to said Gideon Raintree was the brains of the operation. He got every homicide case in Wilmington, and he solved them all. It just wasn’t natural.
Hope slipped into the darkness between Raintree’s house and the less subtle yellow house next door. She’d dressed in black for this outing, so she blended into the shadows. She wasn’t going to peek through a window and catch Raintree red-handed, but the more she knew about this guy, the better off she would be. There wasn’t any harm in just looking around his place a bit.
Movement on the beach caught her attention, and she turned her head in that direction. Speak of the devil. Gideon Raintree was coming in from a swim, too-long hair slicked back, water dripping from his chest. He stepped from the sand onto his own private boardwalk and into more direct lighting. When the light from his deck hit him, she held her breath for a moment. He wore old, holey jeans that had been cut off just above the knees and that hung too low on his waist, thanks to the weight of the water. He wore nothing else, except a small silver charm that hung from a black cord around his neck.
“Gideon,” a singsong voice called from the yellow house next to his. He stopped on the boardwalk and lifted his head, then smiled at the blonde who was leaning over her own balcony. Hope hadn’t seen so much as a hint of a smile like that one all day. Yeah, the guy was definitely trouble.
“Hi, Honey.” Raintree leaned against the boardwalk railing and looked up.
“We’re having a party Saturday night,” Honey said. “Wanna come?”
“Thanks, but probably not. I’m working a case.”
“That girl I saw on the news?” Honey said, her smile fading.
“Yeah.”
Another woman, a brunette this time, joined Honey at the balcony railing. “You’ll have the case solved by Saturday,” she said confidently.
“If I do, I’ll drop by.”
Both women leaned over the railing. They were wearing skimpy bathing suits, as any self-respecting beach bum would be on a warm June night. They practically preened for their neighbor’s benefit.
Raintree was the kind of man a shallow woman might go for, Hope imagined. He had the looks and the bank account, and an obvious kind of charm that came with self-confidence. With those eyes and cheekbones, and the way he looked in those cutoffs, he might make a silly woman’s heart race.
Hope had never been silly.
“Why don’t you come on up now and have a drink with us?” Honey asked, as if the idea had just popped into her head, though she’d probably been planning to ask her studly neighbor up from the moment she’d seen him on the beach.
“Sorry. Can’t do it.” Raintree turned toward his own house—and Hope—and it seemed to her that he actually looked directly at her. “I have company.”
Hope held her breath. He couldn’t possibly see her there. Someone else was coming over, or else he was making an excuse to be polite. As if any red-blooded male would turn down “drinks” with Honey and the brunette bimbo.
“Company?” Honey whined.
“Yeah.” Raintree leaned against the walkway railing again and stared into the dark space between the two houses. “My new partner stopped by.”
Hope muttered a few soft curse words she almost never used, and Raintree smiled as if he could hear her. That was impossible, of course. As impossible as him seeing her standing in the shadows.
“Bring him on up,” the brunette said. “The more the merrier.”
