Blood Orchid (Holly Barker 3)

Now it was her turn to be silent.

“If I thought you were in any danger . . .”

“How do you know I’m not?” she demanded.

“All right, I’ll say this much: It sounds as though someone is doing something around here, and they want to know if the chief of police is on to them. They probably think they’ll pick up something in your house or listening to your calls.”

“That’s a reasonable hypothesis,” she said. “Tell me more.”

“I can’t say any more than that. Suffice it to say that Harry wouldn’t have sent me up here if he didn’t think there was something to investigate. I mean, the Bureau has pulled hundreds of agents off investigations in order to concentrate on terrorism, since the events at the World Trade Center.”

“So it would take something pretty important for Harry to put an undercover agent on it right now.”

“It would take something pretty important to Harry,” Grant said.

“As opposed to important to the Bureau as a whole or to the defense of the country?”

“You know,” he said, laughing, “the Bureau could use you as an interrogator. You’d have a terrorist spilling the beans in no time at all.”

“You may as well fold now, Grant,” she said. “I’m going to get it out of you one way or the other.”

“I’m looking forward to the other,” he said. “I think.” He pulled into her driveway and stopped in front of her house. A motion detector switched on the exterior lights.

Grant walked her to the door. “How about dinner this week sometime?”

She fished a card out of her handbag and wrote her home and cell numbers on the back. “Call me,” she said.

He leaned forward to kiss her.

She turned her head a little and took the kiss on the corner of her mouth. “It was a nice evening,” she said. “I think I’m going to enjoy interrogating you further.” She unlocked the door, and Daisy greeted her, nuzzling her fingers.

“You’ll find me an impenetrable wall,” Grant said.

“Yeah, sure,” she said, closing the door behind her.

18

Holly awoke with a feeling she had not had for a year—desire. She stretched her body to its full length, fingers reaching for the headboard, toes reaching for the foot. The resulting feeling was like a tiny orgasm, something she thought she had lost interest in. Clearly a cold shower was in order.

She settled for a cool shower, and she thought about her dinner date of the evening before. A dinner date! Who would have thought it? And who would have thought that she could have Harry Crisp to thank for such an event? Her next job, she mused, was to pry from Grant Early what his assignment was, and, she reflected, she was willing to do just about anything she had to to find that out.

Who were these FBI guys that they could send an agent undercover into her jurisdiction, tell her about it, then refuse to tell her why? She’d see about that.

Her phone rang. She grabbed a towel and, still dripping wet, grabbed the phone by the john. “Hello?”

“Good morning, it’s Hurd.”

“Morning, Hurd. What’s up?”

“Somebody phoned in a floater in the Indian River about half an hour ago. Patrol car checked it out, and it was real. The ME is on the way. I thought you’d like to take a look.”

“Where?”

“About three hundred yards south of the North Bridge. Sounds like somebody tossed him off the bridge, and the tide took him down. He came to rest against somebody’s dock.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” she said. “Don’t let anybody take the body away before I’ve seen it.”

“Right.”