Kansas City Cover-Up

The moment the idea of Gabe Knight stripping off her clothes and joining her on top of this table popped into her hazy thoughts, she knew she had to end the embrace.

“Gabe.” She offered him one last breathless kiss, then pushed her fingers between their lips. “Gabe, we have to stop.”

“I know.” With a throaty growl, he pulled away, dropping little kisses to her fingertips as he retreated. “I know you’re right. I don’t like it. But you’re right.”

Despite the rumpled coal-dark hair and the collar she’d wrinkled with her eager hand, his deep blue eyes were as clear and focused as ever. “So why did you kiss me? And yes, I know, it was a team effort. But I’m interested in your motives.”

Motives? She hadn’t thought that far ahead. Still trying to regulate her own breathing, Olivia ran her fingers through her own hair, dismissing the probing question. “Don’t analyze it, okay? Just accept the thank-you.”

“That was more than a thank-you.”

Kansas City Cover-Up

Julie Miller

JULIE MILLER is an award-winning USA TODAY best-selling author of breathtaking romantic suspense—with a National Readers’ Choice Award and a Daphne du Maurier Award, among other prizes. She has also earned an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award. For a complete list of her books, monthly newsletter and more, go to www.juliemiller.org.

I wanted to take a moment to remind readers that my Precinct books, while set in a real place, are works of fiction. Kansas City is a safe, welcoming place to visit—full of history, art, music, theater, beautiful fountains, fun activities, great sports, fabulous places to shop, yummy barbecue and some of the friendliest people in the country.

With thanks to my family and friends in Kansas City.

Thanks, too, to the police, fire and rescue, city engineers and other public servants who serve KC and the surrounding metropolitan area.

My stories may be fiction, but Kansas City is real and wonderful—a great city to live in or visit.

Hope to see you there!

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

“How is this a cold case?” Detective Olivia Watson squatted down beside the body with the bashed-in head lying on the plush office carpet.

The pool of blood looked fresh enough. The alleged murder weapon, a civic volunteerism trophy from the dead man’s own desk, had already been bagged and packed away by the CSI trading notes with the medical examiner nearby. A uniformed officer and two building security guards were holding back a bevy of shocked and grieving office staff from the Kober & Associates PR firm, as well as curious onlookers from other businesses in the building beyond the yellow crime scene tape that blocked off the victim’s outer office door. The two Kansas City PD detectives on the far side of the room interviewing the distraught secretary who’d discovered her boss’s body after her half-day spa appointment seemed to have the crime scene well under control. So why call in representatives from the Fourth Precinct’s Cold Case Squad?

Olivia rested her forearms on the thighs of her dark wash jeans and studied the sixtyish man’s still features again. The glass-and-steel high-rise in downtown Kansas City was almost as new as the murder itself. She was used to working cases with pictures out of dusty boxes and autopsy reports that raised a lot of unanswered questions. She’d worked with skeletal remains and mummified corpses and alleged victims whose bodies had never been found at all. Most people assumed the Cold Case Squad was an easier gig than working a fresh investigation. She liked to think of it as a smarter assignment, requiring more insight and diligence than other divisions at KCPD.

Olivia was a third generation cop, like two of her three brothers. And the third one worked in the medical examiner’s office. After two years in a uniform, five years in vice and the past year working cold cases, she’d learned that killers who’d eluded capture and thought they’d gotten away with murder often proved to be more devious and more dangerous than any other criminal out there. It was her job to track down those killers and finally get justice for those forgotten victims whose memory often died with their closest family and friends.

So why was she here to assist two perfectly capable detectives when there was a stack of her own investigations back at HQ to sort through?

“There must be a connection to one of our dead file cases. But if there is, I don’t see it yet.” She glanced up at her new partner, Jim Parker—back from the dead himself after a particularly harrowing undercover assignment for the Missouri Bureau of Investigation. “Do you?”

Jim’s green eyes surveyed the room the way she had. “I recognize Ron Kober from the newspapers. Besides owning a Top 50 company here in KC, he helped get Adrian McCoy elected to the State Senate a few years back. Looks like he was doing pretty well on his own, without the senator.”