Devil s Due Page 0,2

have a gun - a wholly unusual circumstance for her - but that wasn't an issue. Neither did the man facing down McCarthy.

"Stewart," McCarthy said. "Hey. Thanks for coming."

Ken Stewart. Kansas City Police Department, Detective First Class. Lucia let the adrenaline course a little faster, let her heart rev up another couple of beats per minute. Stewart was, at best, unpredictable. At worst...Jazz's bitter assessment came back vividly: He's got the winning personality of a rottweiler raised by wolves. He'd always struck her as volatile, but now she was convinced he was a Molotov cocktail in search of a lit match.

"You think I'm here to smile and kiss your feet like these other assholes?" Stewart asked, and took another step into McCarthy's space. McCarthy didn't back away. He tilted his head a few degrees to continue to stare into the other man's eyes. "You hear me? I'm not letting you just walk away from a mass murder, you bastard. If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to make you pay."

McCarthy said nothing for a few seconds, then glanced at Lucia. "Detective Ken Stewart," he said, calmly and steadily, "meet Lucia Garza. Since she's a witness to you threatening me, you should probably be formally introduced."

"Oh, we've met," Lucia said crisply, as Stewart turned around to look at her. He had blue eyes, too. Crazy ones, shallow as glass. His skin looked pasty, unpleasantly shiny, and his hair stuck up in greasy spikes. Very unattractive indeed.

He tried the crazy-eye with her. She stared back, a faint smile on her lips, until he whipped back around to McCarthy and muttered something under his breath, then pushed past to talk to the prosecutor.

It was comforting to see that the prosecutor didn't look any happier to see him, especially when she entered ground zero of his body odor.

McCarthy took a deep breath, let the coldness fade from his face, and said, "Sorry about that." He came the last few steps to join her, but his attention was still on the other man, who was haranguing the prosecutor in a low, furious voice.

"No problem. It isn't the first time Detective Stewart and I have locked horns."

"No?" That got his attention, with a vengeance. He was wearing a blue sport coat that was too large for him, blue jeans that were perfectly acceptable, and a plain, open-collar shirt. No tie. Relaxed for a court appearance, but then he'd been there to get out of jail, not to try to avoid going in. He smelled of a particularly cheap aftershave and an underlying astringent scent that was probably prison-issue, as well.

"He's made a run at Jazz a few times," Lucia murmured.

Ben started walking toward the courthouse doors. She kept pace. "Bet she handed him his nuts on a platter," he chuckled.

Lucia grinned. "I don't think she bothered with the platter."

"Yeah, she's not much in the kitchen. So...where is she? I admit, I kind of expected to see her..." McCarthy opened one of the doors and stepped aside to let Lucia pass. She glanced at him, but there wasn't any calculation in his eyes. It was automatic gentility. He wasn't even aware of doing it. She suppressed another smile as she thought of how little gestures like that would have chafed on Jazz. She liked her independence and saw every common courtesy as an infringement upon it. Jazz should have been born in the Old West, where she could have made a living on the frontier, riding rough, drinking hard and swearing at the top of her lungs. Calamity Jazz.

McCarthy was fishing for an answer to a question he hadn't asked. Lucia obliged. "Truthfully? Borden and I kept her away. We didn't want her presenting a clear target." James Borden had volunteered to keep her distracted - not exactly a sacrifice; the man had been madly in love with her for almost a year - and the significant lack of Jazz's presence this morning might mean that they'd finally tipped over from flirting to...something more.

Or alternatively, knowing Jazz, it could mean she'd had a massive fight with Borden, gotten drunk, belligerent, taken on a motorcycle gang in a fistfight, and was celebrating her victory with a hospital visit.

McCarthy looked somber. "She okay?"

"She's fine."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure." Again, a little white lie. Jazz was all right in one sense, in that the past few months had made a huge change in her life. Since the day Jazz had been given her first red envelope - the same day