Cuff Me(41)

Both because she’d been in Florida for three months, and because in the month she’d been back, they’d both been thoroughly stumped by the Lenora Birch case.

Funny how she’d almost missed his barked commands to drop whatever she was doing and come over.

This interruption in particular had been welcome. Jill had been sitting on the center of her bed, surrounded by bridal magazines and trying to get excited about… something. Anything.

What did it say about her that the latest trend in bridal bouquets (yellow roses were apparently “in”) didn’t even cause a blip on her radar, but a lead in a homicide case revved her motors?

Right now, Jill didn’t care.

Because she and Vin were back. She could feel it.

She knocked at his door, but he didn’t answer, so she let herself in.

“You know, you should really lock your front door,” she called, shrugging out of her coat. “Being a cop and all.”

Still no answer. She walked toward his living room and found him precisely where she expected to. Where she’d found him a thousand times before.

Scribbling frantically at his whiteboard.

She watched him for a moment. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, a surprising change from his usual black. The muscles of his back rippled beneath the thin fabric as his arm moved furiously across the board, scribbling whatever was going through his head at warp speed.

His black marker was starting to run out, and Jill wordlessly went to the small, utilitarian desk in the corner and pulled out a fresh pen.

She moved to his side, uncapping it and then fluidly swapping the dying pen in his hand with the fresh one in hers.

He barely paused. Didn’t grunt so much as a thank-you, and Jill smiled.

She’d missed this.

She tossed the dead pen in the trash and then settled down on his couch to wait.

And wait, and wait.

She tried to read his notes as he wrote them but his handwriting was atrocious, and he kept moving back and forth from one end of the board to the other.

Finally, finally he stopped, although likely it was more a function of him running out of space than his brain slowing down.

He capped the pen.

Stepped back, and stared at the board.

He held up the marker without turning around. “Thanks for this.”

Jill lifted an eyebrow. Acknowledgment of her usefulness. That was… new.

She pushed off the couch and moved beside him so they stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Actually, more like shoulder to waist, since he was several inches taller.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

He tossed the marker on the coffee table, then linked his fingers behind his head, turning in a circle.

“I had a breakthrough.”

She smiled. “Yeah, I figured.”

He glanced at her then, seeming to see her for the first time since she’d arrived, and he dropped his hands, looking her up and down.

“You’re in your pajamas.”

She glanced down at her pink-and-white-striped flannel pants and white tank. “Well, you called me at nine o’clock on a Sunday night. Not quite my bedtime, but let’s just say I’d put my ball gown away for the evening.”

He’d already turned back to his boards. His main one—the one he called the board—was more barren than last time she’d seen it, and the stack of papers on the table told her that he’d recently decided he was on the wrong track.

“Talk to me,” she said patiently.

“We’ve decided that pushing someone over a railing smells more like impulse than premeditation, right? If you’re going to show up at someone’s house with the intent to kill, you take a gun, maybe a knife—”

“Right,” Jill said. “You don’t think, ‘gosh, I want to off someone; I’m going to wait until they’re in a prime position on the second-floor landing and then push them.’”

“Exactly. So we’ve been operating under the assumption that this is a crime of passion.”

“Right…” she said, waiting.

“It is a crime of passion, but we got the passion wrong,” he said, turning to face her, eyes excited.

Jill shook her head. “Explain?”

“Something’s been bothering me about the way she died,” he continued hurriedly. “We know that someone pushed her, likely in a fit of rage.”

“Sure, but that’s not all that unusual—”

Vincent held up a finger. “No, what’s been bothering me is that everything we’ve learned about Lenora Birch says that she’s not the type to provoke someone. Almost everyone we’ve talked to, from the housekeeper to her boyfriend, said she’s hard to rattle. Cool to the point of being cold.”

Jill nodded, still having no idea where he was going with all this.

“Everyone except one person said that,” he said.

Jill chewed her lip as she mentally ran through every conversation they’d had, every person they’d interviewed.

“Her agent,” Jill said. “The Lenora that her agent described was a different person. Fiery, temperamental, passionate.”

“Exactly.” He took a step nearer, his eyes blazing. “Passionate. This was a crime of passion, but not of the romantic, sexual nature. If Lenora could be provoked into saying something that would piss off another person to the point of murder, it means they would both have to be fired up.”