"So, Ms. Torres." Agent Hashemi leaned back in his chair and let the words hang as she moved back to stand behind the straight-backed guest chair. She glanced around the office, noting the relative plush of his office compared with her own meager, cramped one.
Clearly Hashemi expected her to fill in the unspoken blanks. She shifted her position, gripped the back of the chair, and put on her best prosecuting attorney's look. "Agent Hashemi," she countered.
Except for his initial reaction, the federal agent was a cool one. He now sat in front of her as relaxed and unruffled as if they'd never met, as if nothing had ever happened between them. She'd give him points for his professionalism. The opposite of her, where every cell in her body worked double time to control her emotions.
The sense of betrayal that sucker punched her the moment Mrs. Roberts had announced her, hit again like a mortal blow. Trying not to betray her agitation, she gripped the chair more tightly to keep him from noticing her trembling hands. And to keep him from looking down at her.
Over the years, when interrogating suspects, she'd learned to stand over them to indicate her superiority. Right now she needed to feel she had more power than Agent Hashemi, even if it were an illusion. She'd get down to brass tacks, but she'd make him work for every scrap of information.
Rafe cracked first. She had hoped he would. She was very, very good at the power play game. However, his voice was all reason and rationale when he spoke. "Should we continue now that the awkward part is out of the way?"
Rafe. She had to stop thinking of him as Ashraf, call me Rafe. The shortened name reminded her of how she'd groaned his name aloud. She shook her head abruptly and prayed the color in her cheeks didn't betray her thoughts. "That's probably a good idea."
She reached for the briefcase she'd left by the chair, propped it open on the edge of his desk, and extracted a thin file. She pushed it across the desk to Agent Hashemi. Watched him frown and heft it in his hand, noting the weight of it. He stood and sat on the edge of his desk, their eyes nearly on the same level. He looked first at the folder then at her and back again to the file. "The Diego Vargas report?"
She nodded.
After a long moment, he opened the manila folder and quickly perused the contents. It didn't take long. "What's this?" he grated out, slapping the file down on his desk.
Bella forced sarcasm into her voice. "Isn't it obvious?"
His face burned under the burnished color of his skin and he drummed his fingers on the desktop. "Where's the rest?"
"It's all there," she answered pointing to the meager file, "all the official stuff. Any other material on Vargas is work product. My personal work product." She watched the truth dawn on him. She didn't really need to add the rest, but she did anyway. "I'm not required to turn over work product to anyone." She paused and smiled sweetly. "Not even to the federal government."
Hashemi eyed her with irritation and reached for his phone. "We're not on opposite sides concerning Vargas, you know."
She raised her eyebrows, and he shook his head as if dealing with a recalcitrant child.
"You know it'll take less than a minute to get what I need," he threatened, his voice mild but his jaw clenched.
"Maybe, maybe not," Bella replied. "Charles Barrington may eventually coerce me into giving you the rest, but do you really want your investigation to stall that long?"
Rafe didn't like the smug look on her face. If she wanted to play hardball, she would learn he'd invented the game. "What makes you think your information's that important. You sound pretty sure of yourself."
"I am. I have to be." She shrugged slender shoulders. "A woman in a man's world and all that."
He let his right hand relax on the phone and tapped the skimpy file with his left. "Are you trying to tell me that you have no other official notes except what's in here?"
She nodded, as if satisfied with the strength of her position, and sat down, crossing her legs at the knees and tucking her skirt around them like a prissy school teacher.
Rafe didn't like the game she was playing, but he'd bet he was better at it than her. He was curious about only one thing. Why would she lead an investigation in this impractical way? Wouldn't it be easier for her to copy her notes and pass on the originals to him? Run a quiet parallel investigation of Vargas? Why make a big fuss over jurisdiction when she had to know she'd lose in the end? What was her hidden agenda?
He eyed her speculatively. "What about the rest of your investigative team? The cops' reports, witness interviews?"
While Isabella stared at her lap, Rafe's intuition told him she was wondering how much to tell him. And that fact informed him she was holding back much more information than he'd initially supposed. She flat out didn't trust him. He didn't trust her either, but her hesitation pissed him off. "Look, sooner or later I'll get everything. Why not cooperate with me?"
"What's in it for me?"
He knew what she meant and it sounded like blackmail. She wanted to continue on the investigation. He considered what it would cost him and how much she could compromise the direction he was taking the case if he didn't cooperate with her. On the other hand, did he really want to work with her? See her every day? That seemed like a recipe for disaster.
He almost decided to tell her she could go to hell, but thought about how he needed to switch his headquarters anyway. Diego Vargas lived in Sacramento and Rafe would have to fly up to Bigler County, which bordered on Sacramento County, right away. He suspected Vargas' drug dealings had their origins up north, not here this close to the Mexican border. At least, that was part of his latest strategy – he didn't think Vargas was getting his drugs from Mexico.
"I won't promise anything, but maybe we can work something out," he finally answered, sliding back from his desk. At the surprised look on her face, he added. "No promises. Understood?"
"Absolutely." She smiled like a child who'd gotten away with something on Daddy's watch.
He had the distinct feeling she'd just played him. What the hell had he gotten himself into? Isabella Torres was much craftier than he'd thought. "Now what about the rest of those documents?"
She grinned. "They'll be waiting for you when you arrive in Sacramento."
"Our Mr. Vargas has his fingers in a hell of a lot of enterprises," he said, pulling out his own thick book on Vargas and watching her eyes grow larger. "What particular part of his criminal activities are you looking at?"
Before she could respond, the noisy buzz of a cell phone sounded inside his pocket. He reached inside his jacket and removed it, held up a forefinger to forestall her answer, and flipped it open. A feeling of relief surged through him. Lupe Rodriquez. Thank God.
He'd already beaten himself up over ignoring his intuition in the alley and getting the two of them assaulted. Since then, an irrational idea had begun to worry him, the thought that the blood in the alley belonged to Lupe Rodriquez and Rafe was guilty of not protecting his informant better.
"Sorry, I need to take this." He swiveled his chair toward the window, his back to Torres. "Lupe, what the hell… " he barked into the phone before being interrupted.
It was Lupe's phone but not Lupe's voice.
"Lupe's not here anymore." A deep voice with a slight accent.
"Who the hell is this? Where's Lupe?"
The voice ignored the question. "Lupe's not anywhere anymore. And you should be very careful, amigo, or you might be next."
The cell phone went dead in his hand.
"What's wrong?" Isabella asked, her finely arched brows drawing together at the sharp sound of his response. "Lupe – that's the man who was with you in the bar last night, isn't it?"
He couldn't answer her, couldn't even look at her. If anything had happened to Lupe because Rafe had been… God, he didn't want to think about the possibility.
"Is this about what happened last night?" Her voice sharpened to a razor's edge of frustration and curiosity.
Rafe made his face as hard and glacial as the spot in the middle of his chest felt. "How can you ask about something like that now?"
Her face flushed prettily and somehow that made him angrier. Lupe might be dead and she was thinking of their tryst? Irrational to blame her, he knew, and so he clenched his jaw to keep from making a complete jackass out of himself.
Understanding dawned on her and her words stumbled over themselves. "Oh God, no. I didn't mean that. I meant the attack in the alley."
"Sorry," he said shortly, annoyed with himself for having thought the worst of her. Irritated that his own mind had gone to sex first.
"What's wrong," she asked again, her voice more insistent this time.
But he ignored the question, grabbed his cell phone, and speed-dialed Detective Max Jensen. He turned his back on her for the second time in as many minutes.
"Yeah?" Max's voice seemed distracted.
"Can you hurry up the forensics on that blood?" Rafe looked over his shoulder to see Isabella leaning across the desk, her brow furrowed in concentration.
Eavesdropper.
"Fuck you, Hashish," Max returned good naturedly. "No greeting, no hello? And here I thought your eleven o'clock appointment was about getting laid."
"Why would you think that?"
"Duh. Maybe because the woman I saw when I left your office was exactly your type? Porcelain skin, hair like a Hershey's chocolate bar. Oh, and the legs, don't forget the legs, man."
Damn Max's powers of observation. "Cut the poetic crap." Rafe lowered his voice. "The blood in the alley might belong to Lupe."
"Aw, fuck me!" Max was the only person who knew Lupe was a C.I. for the DEA, and he knew that only because he and Rafe had been friends since college and were still tight. Lupe's safety depended on complete anonymity. Rafe's too.
"Sure, buddy, right away. I'll get on it immediately." Max hesitated, his voice strained. "But Rafe?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't worry about it, okay? It's probably just the animal blood anyway. Lupe's smart."
"Yeah, sure. You're right. But, Max, just in case… "
"I'll get right back to you."
Max hung up with a click, and Rafe sat staring at the phone in his hand.
When he turned around to face Isabella, he worked hard to keep the emotion from his face. Lupe had been his C.I. for almost three years, infiltrating Vargas' gang and passing the information on to the DEA.
He swiped his hand across his face. He needed a shave, he thought irrelevantly. He looked at Isabella, momentarily forgetting why she sat opposite him and what she wanted. She lifted her brows expectantly.
And then he recalled that Lupe had a pregnant girlfriend and… Jesus! But there was nothing he could do about Lupe or his girlfriend right now.
The low rumbling of his stomach reminded him that he'd missed breakfast this morning. "I'm leaving," he said abruptly, replacing his cell phone in his jacket and striding toward the office door. When he looked back, Isabella still sat there, turning to stare at him. "Well, come on," he snapped. "If you want to work this case with me, you'll have to move faster than that."
Max would check out the blood and call him back as soon as he knew anything. Rafe couldn't worry about Lupe now.