Spontaneous - Brenda Jackson [31]
“Kim?”
She tilted up her chin, scowling fiercely. “What?”
“Are we or are we not a team? Do we not want the same thing here?”
She sighed and looked up at him. “Yes, but I want to know everything I can about Villarosas and those two cases. Did you bring those reports with you?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I intend to read them. If Edward is innocent I’ll be the first to apologize to him and Mom for doubting him, but if he’s guilty of any crimes then I want to make sure he pays for what he’s done.”
9
KIM PUT DOWN the documents she’d been reading for the past hour and rubbed her eyes. As a nurse she was used to reports, some even thicker than the three-hundred-page document Duan had given her. However, most of them were medical in nature and reached a conclusion at the end, a diagnosis. Although a lot of information was documented from various sources in this investigative report, there was no definite finding.
“Here, looks like you can use this.”
She smiled when Duan placed a cup of coffee in front of her. “Thanks.”
He eased into the chair beside her. After she’d started to read the report he had pulled out a laptop. For the past hour they had worked in amiable silence, the only sounds in the room those of her turning pages and him clicking on the keyboard.
But the one thing she was constantly aware of was his presence. Just knowing he was there within arm’s reach was a comforting thought. All she had to do was sniff the air to breathe in the manly scent of his aftershave. Occasionally she would glance over at him, see how intense he was, and she realized how seriously he took his job as a private investigator.
She’d never been a woman who needed or even desired to have a man underfoot, but having Duan here with her felt good. And knowing they were, as he called it, a team made it even better. After giving her the report, he had reminded her that he had asked her to consider him as a pretend fiancé before she’d mentioned Villarosas’s name. That was the only comforting thought in this entire thing.
She took a sip of her coffee. It was good. Not for the first time, she wondered if there was anything Duan Jeffries wasn’t good at. She glanced back down at the report, thinking he’d certainly made it easy for her to follow along. The highlighted sections might as well have been her own, and all the questions he’d jotted on sticky notes were the same ones she would have asked.
“Is the report boring you with all that investigative jargon?”
She glanced over at him. Earlier he had been sitting on the sofa with the computer in his lap. Now he had placed the laptop on the table to take a break and enjoy a cup of coffee with her. And he had changed clothes. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and he was in his bare feet. He looked at home. Sexy.
“No, I find all that stuff interesting and I’m amazed at how police officers and detectives can tie it all together and bring the case to a conclusion.”
“Trust me, it’s not always easy,” he said, smiling over at her. “And in a lot of cases there are loose ends, things that don’t add up.”
She nodded. “Yes, I saw those.”
“And the sad thing is that without time, resources and money, those loose ends are never thoroughly checked out. There are a number of them listed in the report, but without proof it all boils down to speculation.”
“And a lot of legal loopholes to slip through.”
He held her gaze for a moment, then nodded.
She gave a frustrated sigh, beginning to understand more about him and his work. A couple of weeks ago she’d asked him to tell her about himself, the good, the bad and the ugly. This had been his bad. The inability to right a wrong because of legal loopholes.
“I refuse to let this be one of them, Duan. I will never be satisfied until I know the truth about what really happened to those women, and we don’t have months or years to find it out. There has to be something else we can do. Every day Mom is