Black Oil, Red Blood

Chapter 8



I parked the car, grabbed Lucy, and walked toward him as nonchalantly as I possibly could.

“Is this a social call?” I asked.

He didn’t smile. His expression didn’t change.

“Put your dog inside and shut the door.”

I did, and let me tell you, Lucy wasn’t happy about it. She barked and whimpered up a storm. Apparently she was not a fan of the great Jensen Nash. I was starting to wonder who was. Apart from his amazing looks, he didn’t seem to have a lot of other appealing qualities.

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” Nash said.

Whoa. “Wait a minute,” I said.

Nash fingered his handcuffs. “You have the right to remain silent.”

“About what?” I demanded.

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

I didn’t turn around. “I’m familiar with my rights,” I said. “I waive them because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Nash sighed. “You can drop the act. I know you just broke into Schaeffer’s house.”

D’oh! Busted! But how? And if he was certain of that fact, why was he here now instead of there, then? I was absolutely positive I had replaced everything exactly the way I found it. He couldn’t possibly be certain it was me, or even that anyone had been there at all. I thought fast, trying to figure out how to react, what to say.

I settled on busting out with a hearty, faked belly laugh. Miles and I were both practiced up on our fake laughs, seeing as how sometimes we needed Dick to believe that he truly was the funniest attorney on the planet. This, of course, happened only when we really wanted or needed something from him. The rest of the time, we just tried to avoid him as much as we could.

“Where on earth would you get an idea like that?” I said. “Listen, I know it’s been a long day for both of us, and we’ve both been drinking. . .”

“It’s no good, Chloe. I know you were there.”

I didn’t flinch. “You are mistaken,” I said through my teeth.

Nash leaned forward, his gaze piercing my own. I refused to look away, maintaining eye contact.

His lips came within inches of my face. I felt a certain electricity zoom up my spine against my will. It ought to be criminal for any one man to possess the amount of sex appeal Nash had. I was temporarily mesmerized.

“I was not mistaken,” Nash insisted. His fingers encircled my left wrist slowly. His hands were hot but not sweaty, his grasp gentle but firm. “The neighbors called because they saw a car. When I got there, the car was gone, but I went inside, and I could smell your perfume,” he said.

His warm breath, smelling of spearmint, caressed my face in a way that felt disturbingly intimate.

“Detective Nash.” I gingerly pulled my wrist away from his grasp. “Are you trying to tell me you are going to arrest me because you walked into Schaeffer’s house and smelled my scent? You know I spent a fair amount of time there, right?”

Nash’s fingers found my other wrist. “Ms. Taylor, are you trying to tell me you think I don’t know the difference between the smell of fresh perfume and the faint scent that’s left behind hours after a woman has been gone?”

“I—”

“If so, you have greatly underestimated both my intelligence and my personal charm.”

I slowly pulled my other wrist out of his grasp.

“It’s a commercial perfume. Anybody could have walked in wearing it.”

“Not just anyone in this town wears $500 Michael Kors perfume.” Nash rested his hand on my shoulder and gently tried to turn me around.

I pulled away, the spell broken. I was angry now—for many reasons, not the least of which was discovering that Nash was women-wise enough to know that I had paid $500 for my perfume back in the days when I actually had money. Men weren’t supposed to know those kinds of things. And if they did, they were definitely not to be trusted.

“Do. Not. Touch. Me.” I flung his arm away from me. “How stupid do you think I am? You haven’t got a warrant.”

“But I have probable cause.”

“You saw nothing. We are not at the scene. The opportunity for arrest without a warrant has passed.”

“I’ll have a warrant in five minutes.”

“That’s five more minutes you have to wait before cuffing me. And if you so much as try it before then, I’ll have myself out of your custody on procedural grounds so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

Nash lifted his hands and spread them, palms out. The traditional “hands-up, don’t shoot” pose.

Inside, Lucy sensed I was in trouble and started up a steady stream of growling.

“You’re freaking my dog out,” I said, in an attempt to change the subject.

“I hear,” he said.

“Well, stop it.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to get lost.”

Naturally, he didn’t move. His harsh façade finally cracked into the beginnings of a grin, but just barely. Time to try another tactic. The roots of an idea were beginning to creep into my consciousness. Maybe if I worked things exactly right, I could come out of this not only unscathed, but actually ahead. I drew a deep breath.

“Listen to me, and listen good,” I said. “A man is dead. You’re looking for evidence to put someone away, and besides the deceased and the killers, I’m the only person who knows where that evidence is.”

The momentary softness I had seen in Nash’s features instantly disappeared. “I’m listening.”

“I’m not admitting anything, but hypothetically, what if I told you that I know exactly where Schaeffer’s file boxes are, and that ten of them are missing?”

“Hypothetically?” he asked.

I nodded. “Hypothetically.”

“Well then, hypothetically, I’d wait for my warrant to come in, and then I’d arrest you and take you back to the station and interrogate you until you told me what I wanted to know.”

“And hypothetically,” I said, “what if I told you you don’t have time to do that?”

“And why wouldn’t I have time?”

“Because the files will be gone before the night is out if you don’t go to Schaeffer’s house and get them right now.”

I wasn’t sure I believed this myself, but it seemed like my best shot at both getting out of this sticky situation and getting an armed escort back to Schaeffer’s place.

“What makes you think that?”

The building blocks of the case for going back in immediately assembled themselves in my mind even as I spoke. While I had previously written Dr. Schaeffer’s paranoid tendencies off as the actions of an academic eccentric, perhaps there really was a piece of sensitive information in the files I didn’t know about that someone else was after. That theory made sense under the circumstances. After all, PetroPlex fought the kind of toxicity and safety negligence claims I brought against them every day, and no one had turned up dead before. And since there were file boxes left, there was no guarantee that whoever was in Schaeffer’s house before wouldn’t be back—and the sooner the better.

“Those boxes contain crucial evidence against PetroPlex. And I know for a fact that all forty of them were at Schaeffer’s house for his last-minute review the night he was murdered. I also know for a fact that he kept the boxes hidden in a secret place, because he was almost clinically paranoid.”

“Okay,” Nash said. “And how would you know there are now ten of those boxes missing?”

“I don’t,” I lied. “I only hypothetically know, remember?”

Nash shrugged. “Okay, whatever.”

“If there are ten boxes missing from the secret place, that means someone else knows the secret. They’ll be back for the rest of the boxes as soon as they can. I’m guessing you ran them off responding to the murder scene—or was it a torture scene? And you kept them away with crime scene personnel crawling all over the place. But now that your people are gone and it’s dark, they’ll be back fast—before your people find the boxes first.”

“How do you know my people are gone?”

“It’s dark.”

“Crime scene techs work in the dark.”

“I have a feeling,” I said.

“Uh huh.” Nash shifted his weight and ran his fingers through his hair. “Where is the secret place? Or wait. Let me guess. You can’t tell me. You have to show me.”

“Yep.” I nodded as innocently as possible.

“You’re just prolonging the inevitable,” he said. “Don’t think this is going to get you out of an arrest. I’m going to get my warrant any minute.”

I was seriously on the verge of losing my temper. “Fine. Go ahead. Arrest me. You’ll just be wasting time on me you could be devoting to Schaeffer’s case. You know I’ll have myself lawyered out of your custody in no time.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“So are we going, or what?”

Nash wanted to say no. I could see that even through his all but expressionless face. But he wouldn’t.

He stopped short of saying yes, instead turning towards his car and motioning for me to follow. I did.

He opened the back door for me.

“I don’t think so,” I said, sliding into the front.

He sighed, but thankfully, that was the extent of his protest.