A Touch Of Heat (H.E.A.T. Book 2)

  Contents

  Title & Copyright

  More Books By Nicola Claire

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Review Request

  About The Author

  A Touch Of Heat

  H.E.A.T. Series, Book Two

  By Nicola Claire

  Copyright © 2014, Nicola Claire

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-473-30645-8

  nicolaclairebooks.blogspot.com

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organisations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Cover Art by Nicola Claire

  Image credit: 123RF Stock Photo

  Image # 10897826

  More books by Nicola Claire:

  Kindred Series

  Kindred

  Blood Life Seeker

  Forbidden Drink

  Giver of Light

  Dancing Dragon

  Shadow's Light

  Entwined With The Dark

  Kiss Of The Dragon

  Dreaming Of A Blood Red Christmas (Novella)

  Mixed Blessing Mystery Series

  Mixed Blessing

  Dark Shadow (Coming Soon)

  Sweet Seduction Series

  Sweet Seduction Sacrifice

  Sweet Seduction Serenade

  Sweet Seduction Shadow

  Sweet Seduction Surrender

  Sweet Seduction Shield

  Sweet Seduction Sabotage

  Sweet Seduction Stripped

  Sweet Seduction Secrets (Coming Soon)

  Elemental Awakening Series

  The Tempting Touch Of Fire

  The Soothing Scent Of Earth

  The Chilling Change Of Air

  The Tantalising Taste Of Water (Coming Soon)

  H.E.A.T. Series

  A Flare Of Heat

  A Touch Of Heat

  A Twist Of Heat (Novella)

  A Lick Of Heat (Coming Soon)

  Elite Series

  Elite

  Cardinal

  Citizen

  For: The aunts & my mum.

  Love ya.

  Chapter 1

  “You know me better than most.”

  No one owns life.

  But they can certainly own death. All it takes is a knife to the gut or a gun to the head or a well placed fist to the temple. Or, in the case of the mottled body lying before me, large hands strong enough to asphyxiate their victim.

  Whoever did this owned it. They looked into the face of death and claimed it as their own.

  I crouched down and stared at the ring of bruises against her slender neck. Deep purple, a colour as a child I’d found appealing. As a police detective it meant the rupture of underlying blood vessels, usually achieved in a violent manner.

  Life was hard. But death was often brutal.

  She had dark hair, tangled around a perfectly made up face. If she cried in her last minutes of life, the murderer erased the evidence. And reapplied her mascara.

  Her lips were cherry red, but underneath the lipstick they’d be blue. Her eyes were sightless, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t seen her killer. I stared at the dull brown irises and wondered what her last look at life had been.

  Her clothes were sleek and designed to be sexy, elegant evening wear that looked incongruous against the polluted inner city backdrop of her final resting place. She’d been out on the town, partying. Alone? With a crowd?

  Location and mechanism, it always meant something.

  “Does Hart know you’ve asked me to consult on this?” I asked, my eyes still trained on the deceased.

  The sound of soft footfalls came from over my shoulder, but I didn’t turn around. The dead require attention. And the only police officer near me would be Detective Sergeant Ryan Pierce. He’d cleared the scene before I arrived. All the better to hide my involvement.

  “He knows,” came in his deep, rumbling voice.

  “Does anyone else?”

  “No.”

  I forced the sigh, that wanted out, back down.

  Three weeks I’d been on “assignment” to another emergency service. Three weeks I hadn’t stepped foot in Central Police Station. Three weeks Pierce and I had met off-sight, pretending my career wasn’t teetering on a jagged edged, bottomless abyss.

  The woman waited on silently for someone to find her justice.

  I was sure it wasn’t going to be me.

  “It’s personal,” I said, standing up and dusting down my black trousers. They weren’t dirty, but death makes you feel unclean.

  “He used his hands,” Pierce agreed.

  “But the placing,” I said, waving at the woman’s staged position. Arms outstretched, ninety degree angle to her supine body, legs crossed at the ankles, face tilted to the side, eyes sightlessly looking towards the entrance of a nightclub as though praying someone would step out that front door and miraculously save her.

  Or maybe the hope I saw was all on me.

  “Yeah, the placing,” Pierce murmured. “Looks like she’s lying on a cross.”

  I lifted my gaze to the club the body lay in front of. The Whiskey Lounge. An innocuous enough name for a Karangahape Road establishment. Especially one down the red-light end of the long street we were on.

  “You think the club is important?” Pierce queried.

  “Don’t you?”

  He grunted his agreement. “Adult entertainment venue. One of dozens in this area.”

  “Sex sells.”

  “And obviously can kill.” Pierce looked down at the body.

  Silence as we both contemplated the finality of that statement.

  “What I don’t get,” Pierce began, “is that K Road is one of the busiest in Auckland. Twenty-four seven. How did he do it, even if it was done elsewhere, how did he kill her and then stage her right here on the footpath in front of so many potential witnesses?”

  I turned in a full circle and took in the businesses opposite, the flats above the premises, their blinds all closed, the cars parked down the street with raindrops over their paintwork. It wasn’t raining now, but it had rained last night. The woman’s body was lying directly on wet concrete.

  Her clothes were otherwise dry.

  There were three strip clubs, two fast food outlets, four standard nightclubs, and a semi-private gambling-come-gentleman’s-club establishment that stood out like a sore thumb. It begged you to notice it. It pulsated with the need to be recognised. The
big brother lauding over its smaller, less impressive siblings.

  My eyes took in its shiny black marble walls, mysterious black painted windows, and the gold writing above its door. The lack of neon flashing lights made a statement of its own.

  Sweet Hell.

  I looked back down at the woman.

  “You don’t need me for this,” I commented quietly.

  Pierce was an exemplary cop, and if he was just pulling me out of my fugue in order to give me something other than my own emotionally fucked up self to think about, then I wasn’t sure I could handle the embarrassment.

  Or anger. There was a lot of that in amongst the turmoil right now as well.

  “You have solid contacts in this area,” he said, voice hard and unforgiving. As though he could see my self doubt and he refused to acknowledge it. “I need you to canvas your informants and tell me what they know.”

  I finally turned to look at him. Ryan Pierce was tall, buff, and put together like a biker who was trying to go clean. He wore pressed twill trousers with a crisply laundered blazer, that contradicted the scuffed thick soled boots on his feet. His intense brown eyes stared out of a gruff goatee wearing face, but his voice was smooth as silk and richly layered. As though he’d attended private school and hadn’t quite lost the cultured accent.

  “This is more than a crime of passion. More than a drug purchase gone wrong,” he said. “My hackles are up on this one, Keen.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. My gut was telling me this was only the start. The staging too precise. The location too conscious. The mechanism of injury too obvious.

  This was act one. But how long the play would be, I didn’t yet know.

  The familiar sensations of guilt and rage and desolate loss swept through me. Familiar, only in so much as they had been so for the past three weeks. This was not me. This was not the Lara Keen I had always prided myself on. This person I had become was irrational and emotional and one step away from the loony bin.

  I still dreamt of Carl. I still dreamt of him dying.

  And he wasn’t even dead.

  I ran a hand over my my face feeling fatigued beyond measure. Disturbed sleep did that to you, and mine had been fragmented to such a degree that I had taken to “sleeping” in my recliner chair, staring out the bay windows of my lounge. Wondering if he watched me from across the street. Wondering if he couldn’t sleep either.

  Three weeks. Three weeks of knowing my partner and mentor had killed five people in a warped sense of duty to protect me.

  I didn’t need him to protect me. I needed him out of my head.

  You knew me better than most.

  I didn’t know him at all. Because if I had, I would never have thought a twenty metre fall from the top of the Melons Bay cliffs would have killed the man. I would never have given up looking for his body in the surf.

  And I would have then been able to prevent the death of five men.

  “Keen,” Pierce started, taking a small step towards me. I held up my hand to halt him.

  It was bad enough that I’d been sidelined out of CIB. It was bad enough that he was throwing me a bone with this case. Mine certainly weren’t going anywhere. The HEAT arsonist had been quiet. And finding the traitor in our midst had stalled at Cawfield.

  No. I didn’t need Ryan Pierce’s sympathy.

  “I’ll check in with my guys and let you know,” I said, determinedly moving off down the street.

  “Where’s your partner?” he called out. The tone of his voice informing me that he was going for a lighter parting than the one we were currently having.

  I stopped and turned to look at him, a small, amused smile spreading my lips. Then looked at my watch.

  “Right now, he’ll be running up the Sky Tower’s 1267 steps.”

  Pierce let out a huff of laughter.

  “Complete with breathing apparatus and fire fighting gear on?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I thought you’d be there to catch him when he collapses at the end. Wipe his brow.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the man. “When have I ever given you the impression that I’m at all motherly?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not your maternal instincts I was talking about.”

  My smile grew. “Whatever,” was the only comeback I could think of.

  I nodded to the forensics team as they moved in with screens and lights and mechanic sized tool kits full of crime scene investigation paraphernalia. The crinkle of their crepe white overalls and shoe covers lending a strange accompaniment to Auckland City waking up for another promising day. But what exactly today would promise was yet to be seen.

  The past twenty one days had been a thick haze of pain and regret and utter confusion. I didn’t do confusion well. I didn’t do idleness well, either. I didn’t do a lot of things but lately I was doing them all.

  My hands fisted, my breaths came out in ragged puffs, the cold air condensing before my lips. I forced my fingers to unclench, sucked in a deep breath and held it, counting to three in my head, and then releasing it over a further count of three. Rinse and repeat.

  It worked. I was no longer hyperventilating, but it did jack shit for the inside my head. The vice around my heart.

  I was a fucking wreck.

  As I didn’t actually have far to go, I left my car where it was parked and walked, thinking the fresh air might help me.

  Nothing could help me right now. Not Pierce. Not Hennessey, my shrink. Not even Damon.

  And definitely not Carl.

  Taking in the sights and sounds of Karangahape Road early on a Friday morning, I watched the harried Queen Street suit wearing workers and the more relaxed AUT students heading towards Myers Park and the shortcut down to Mayoral Drive and the city campus there. Mixed in with the inner city apartment dwellers out for their breakfast at various cafés, because God knows they couldn’t possibly pour a bowl of cereal in their mini kitchenettes at home. And finally the street workers, finishing up for the night, weary looks of exhaustion combined with creased lines of despondency on their haggard faces.

  Or maybe that was just me. Everything had a pall of desperation to it. Even the body I’d just left in the tender care of scientists to unravel had been forlorn.

  Death is miserable.

  I rounded the corner and stepped into Eagle’s domain. The chances of finding him here at this hour were negligible. But someone would see me and tell one of his team and Eagle would know I’d been here. I’d long since realised that Eagle and cellphones were not going to work. He occasionally phoned me, from a public phone box or a pay phone in a bar. But Eagle liked face to face contact. His whole career was based on it.

  He relied on his clients seeking him out. And even though Eagle and I had an unusual professional relationship, I was sure I was still firmly placed in the category of client.

  But as suspected, he wasn’t here. Just a couple of homeless street dwellers, their scattering of boxes and layers of newspapers to keep themselves warm, and a can of blue paint sitting forlornly between them.

  Blurred eyes squinted up at me out of grime stained faces, blue coloured snot running in rivulets down past their chins. For a second it was all I could focus on; glue-like mucus the colour of Smurfs. But the acidic stench of aromatic hydrocarbons filling the air broke my morbidly fascinated stare. One of the men carefully reached out a hand and pulled the thinned paint towards his body, cradling it as though it was a precious living thing.

  “Seen Eagle?” I asked, making sure to keep well out of kicking reach. I purposely didn’t flash my badge.

  “Nah. No one by that name comes ‘round ‘ere,” the one holding the paint tin said. The other was tipping over sideways about to pass out.

  “This is his stretch,” I pressed, leaning back against the wall casually and holding the drugged out paint sniffer’s eyes, letting him know I was calling “bullshit.”

  “Not last night,” the guy grumbled and rolled over onto his side, hugging th
e paint tin, placing his back to me. His eyes darted up from behind stringy strands of hair. Aware and wary.

  I frowned down at the men, but knew I’d get no further aid, so walked into the darker reaches of K Road hell.

  This little alley was all Eagle’s. If any other street worker chose to ply their wares here they’d meet a hard fist and swift kick to the solar plexus, ensuring Eagle and his team reigned supreme. Everyone knew it. Hell, he even had regulars who came here time and again. The kid gave good service.

  But the end of the alley was bare. And I mean, completely bare. No rubbish. No cigarette butts. No discarded condoms or rubber gloves. The stench of urine and the musky scent of ejaculate still hung on the air, but the usual pleasantries of the sex industry were all gone.

  I tipped my head to the side and stared at nothing, feeling my stomach clench and my sluggish mind reel.

  The bum was right. Eagle hadn’t been here last night. And last night, being a Thursday, was an easy cash cow for the likes of Eagle. The build up to the weekend always brought the compulsive purchaser out crawling the curb.

  I turned on my heel and came face to face with the no longer passed out huffer. The one not hoarding the paint tin all to himself. He opened his mouth and displayed a fine set of crooked blue teeth, his thick tongue looking like a bloated, necrotic organ. I held my breath as he went to speak, taking a surreptitious step backwards and placing my hand on the butt of my gun inside my jacket, flicking the safety catch on the holster, ready to draw if need be.

  He let out a cackling laugh; wet and crackly, a lung infection not aided by the toluene in the thinner. And shook his head, hands up in a peace offering. His stained fingers clutching a piece of paper.

  Black with gold writing.

  I raised my eyebrows and carefully reached out with my free hand to take the flyer. He relinquished it with another one of those too knowing chuckles, then turned his back to me and staggered towards his now fully tripping partner.

  I waited until he’d settled himself back down in amongst the mess of detritus he called a home and then flattened the grease and blue snot stained advertisement out in the palm of my hand.