Page 45 of Secrets Beneath the Waves (Beach Read Thrillers #2)

CHAPTER

TWO

Dante wheeled into a parking spot behind the station.

In a desperate bid to clear away the cobwebs, he scrubbed his face with both hands, stubble rasping beneath his fingers, before shouldering open the car door.

What a night. First that disaster of a date with Jules Adler, which had ended when he returned to their table to discover she had taken off without bothering to say goodbye.

Fitting.

The second he’d shoved open the door and stalked into his empty apartment, he had hauled all three sisters into an online chat, during which he had let them know in no uncertain terms that they were to immediately take down his profile and that, going forward, they needed to stop interfering in his life.

A little harsh, but hopefully he had finally gotten through to them.

The only reason Dante had agreed to go out with Jules was that he’d turned down the last ten women they had presented to him, and he really wanted to get them off his back.

Nothing to do with her profile or any kind of reaction he may or may not have had to it.

That would have been crazy. After what happened with Carina three years ago, he was definitely not interested in getting involved with another woman.

Which, for some reason, his sisters could not seem to grasp.

Of course, they were all happily married, which meant he must want to be as well, right?

Wrong.

Dante reached the front entrance of the Calgary police station where he worked and pushed inside, forcefully enough the door banged against the wall behind it.

After tossing and turning for hours following the call with his sisters, he’d finally drifted into a restless sleep around two in the morning.

Then, at three, he’d been jerked from his shallow slumber by the buzzing of his phone. A summons to come into work.

The receptionist, Mona, was a gruff woman in her sixties who treated Dante like a recalcitrant teenage son she needed to keep in line.

Most of the time, he got the sense she was going back and forth between wanting to hug him and feeling the urge to ground him.

She often did the former and he half expected her to try the latter one day.

Mona turned from the filing cabinet as he approached. “You look terrible.”

No doubt. He’d barely slept in thirty-six hours and had done little but splash cold water on his face and run his fingers through his hair before heading out fifteen minutes earlier.

“Thanks, Mama Mona.” For fun—because goodness knew he hadn’t had any of that last night—Dante pressed a quick kiss to her cheek.

“Go on with you.” She smacked a file folder against his chest. “Witness is in room three. Not being very cooperative, apparently. The chief wants you to get a few more answers as well as a sketch of the perpetrator.”

“Understood.” Flipping open the folder, Dante ambled along the hallway lined with interview rooms, scanning the report.

Twenty-eight-year-old woman strangled to death.

He winced. Calgary didn’t have that many homicides in a year, usually less than a couple of dozen, and each one hit home.

Perpetrator in the wind. One witness. He reached interview room three and turned the knob to push open the door, his eyes still on the paper. Witness’s name was…

At the sound of a low groan, he glanced up, his brain taking a few seconds to compute what his eyes were telling him.

The woman he’d been on a date with only a few hours earlier huddled on a hard plastic chair on the far side of a small table, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, knees drawn to her chest. She looked even smaller than she had in the pub, when he’d expressed doubt about her ability to do her job. He winced again.

“Jules?” Dante stepped back, checked the door—yep, number three—and then walked into the room and closed the door behind him. His head was spinning from more than lack of sleep. Jules had witnessed a murder last night? When? How?

He crossed the room, set the folder on the table, then nudged aside a blank notepad to lean in and press both palms to the table, his eyes probing hers.

“Are you okay?” Now that he was actually looking at her—something he’d barely done on their date—and she wasn’t sitting in the dark, shadowy corner of the pub, he could see that her eyes were an unusual and mesmerizing combination of blue and green.

She shrugged. “I mean, other than the fact that the last few hours were likely the worst of my life, sure. I’m great.” She tilted her head, the clump of short, shimmering hair she’d tucked behind one ear tumbling loose. “You really are a cop.”

“And the official police sketch artist, yes. Why, you didn’t believe me?” Dante pushed himself up from the table and pulled out the chair across from her.

“I wasn’t sure what to believe. Is your name actually Dante de Marco?”

He tapped the nametag pinned to his uniform. D. de Marco . “Are you actually a firefighter?”

“I am.”

“So, you really can lift a hundred-and-sixty-pound man.”

The barest hint of a smile crossed her lips.

Although she dropped it quickly, Dante couldn’t stop the fleeting thought that, if he was in her life, he would happily dedicate every spare moment to making that smile appear often.

He blinked. In her life? The woman could barely stand to have him in the room. Hence the groan when he strolled in.

Focus.

“All right then.” Dante pulled the notepad closer as he reached for a pencil. “Now that we have established neither of us was lying to the other, let’s continue that trend, shall we?”

Jules narrowed her eyes. “Are you suggesting I would lie about what I saw?”

He scanned the few notes his colleague had made on the report after talking to her earlier.

Hoover had noted that the witness did not seem to want to share many details about what she had seen.

Not that unusual. Typically, it meant the person had temporarily blocked out what he or she had witnessed because it was so traumatic.

Either that or they had something to hide.

“I’m not saying you’ll lie, only that you don’t seem that eager to give us a lot of information. ”

“I told the other officer everything I could.”

Dante rested his fingers on the report. “It says here that you witnessed a murder.”

She swallowed. “I did.”

He glanced at the paper. “At eight-forty-five last evening?”

“That sounds about right.”

“Weren’t we…”

“On a date then? Technically, yes. When you left to go to the men’s room, I stepped out into the alley running alongside the building to get some air.

I planned to come back in and tell you I was leaving, except that, before I could, I heard a woman scream.

I came out from behind a dumpster to see that man…

” Her voice broke, and she pressed a fist to her mouth.

“Take your time. It’s okay.” Dante said the words by rote, the way he’d been taught and the way he’d said it to a hundred witnesses before.

This situation was so unlike any he’d been in, though, that he could barely get them out, with shock and self-recrimination sending currents of white-hot pinpricks stinging across his flesh.

Jules hadn’t left without talking to him. While he was still in the pub, she’d been just outside the building, witnessing a man murdering a woman in cold blood. If he hadn’t been such a jerk to her, she wouldn’t have even been there. None of this would have happened.

At least, she wouldn’t have gotten dragged into what had happened.

He felt sick. Even so, he had a job to do.

Everything she had told him so far was already in the report, so he didn’t bother writing it down.

Instead, he focused on mentally shaping his emotions into a ball with both hands, as though working with wet clay, setting the ball in a small box in his mind, and slamming the lid closed.

“Tell me what you saw when you came around the dumpster.”

Jules lowered her fist to one knee. “He had her pinned against the wall and was choking her. She was struggling, but then she went limp. I made a noise, and he let her fall to the ground and turned around and started walking toward me.”

The hot pinpricks turned ice cold. The man had seen her? Jules could easily have been killed herself. “Did you run?”

“I couldn’t. I was in some kind of trance or something.

He came toward me really slowly, and all I could do was stand there and watch.

Then, when he was a few feet away, his phone went off, and that snapped me out of it.

I was able to reach the door and get inside. I searched for you, but you were gone.”

Dante couldn’t touch that accusation, not tonight, or those emotions would explode out of the box fast. “Did you see his face?”

She hesitated. “I did.”

“Can you tell me what he looked like?” Other than a couple of scant details, the report ended here.

Why was she refusing to describe the man?

Was it too terrifying for her? The woman ran into fire for a living.

Somehow, he doubted she’d been so traumatized by what she’d seen—as horrifying as it must have been—that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, share the specifics.

When she didn’t answer, he lifted his head, the tip of the pencil pressed to the notepad. “Jules?”

A small shudder moved through her. “He was tall. Over six feet.”

“Okay.” Dante glanced at the report. Yep. Hoover had written that down. Also that the suspect was Caucasian, although Dante would still ask, see if the question triggered any other information that would give him enough to start the sketch. “Skin color?”

“White.”

“Hair?”

A helpless look crossed her face as she unclenched her fist and lifted her hand, palm up. “I don’t remember. I didn’t note that.”