Again.

Marissa groaned, dropping her forehead onto her folded hands. She honestly didn’t have it in her to walk on eggshells for another eighteen months as she tried to get these guys to respect her. To like her. She could live without the liking her part. Maybe. But the respect was important. She couldn’t do her job without it. If they all treated her the way Jackson Waverly was treating her at the moment, then none of them would come to her when they needed to. And these guys really, really had to have somewhere to go when they needed to.

Screw it. She wasn’t going to sit there crying in her cold coffee. Hiding in her office. She was going to grab this bull by the horns, aka one Jackson Waverly, and convince him to stop blaming her for what was admittedly a harsh mistake. The only way she was going to do that was by hovering over him and helping him look for Docia. Even if it pissed him off more. She had to help him somehow in the hope that it would balance the scales a little in his head and he would leave off thinking about siccing his new dog on her. She didn’t need his adoration or anything. As long as he moved on to civil, she would be all right with that.

She grabbed her cup of cold coffee, dumped it into her ficus, offering a hasty apology to the poor thing, and with a quick wriggle to set her wrinkled skirt straight on her hips, she moved out into the bullpen.

Strategically, the coffeepot was right across from Jackson’s desk. It allowed her to come up close to them and listen and peer at their progress as they all leaned over Jackson’s computer monitor, obviously in anticipation of an immediate result. Yes! Luck was on her side. The coffeepot was empty, giving her another reason to linger as she slowly prepared the coffee and waited for it to brew.

Then she had an epiphany.

“You know, if your guys are smart, they’re going to figure out that you’ll be doing this,” she said before considering that they’d just spent hours on this little project. When several pairs of eyes narrowed on her, and one set outright glared at her hard enough to make her hair singe, she tried to quickly finish her thought.

“They would have avoided the obvious cameras, but they didn’t. They went right through the 9W camera, let you get a good look at them, and went right through the toll camera, heading south.… Well, what if it was on purpose? I mean, you have to assume they know you’re a cop, right? I mean, if they know anything about your sister, that is.”

Stares.

“Instead of being cops thinking like criminals, why not be criminals thinking like cops?”

It didn’t surprise her that Jackson was the first to let light dawn. She could see it in his eyes.

“The turnabouts. They went through one of the ‘Officials Only’ turnabouts after getting on the south toll road and went in the other direction! We should be looking at the north booth footage as well in case they used one of the turnabouts.”

“I’ll get everything from here to Albany to start. I doubt they’d have time to get much farther than that if they had to go to the south turnabout first, then head back,” said one of the detectives, the young one. Now that was a dynamic she found amusing. Here was this cop, detective grade, and he was eager to make an impression on Waverly, who for all intents and purposes was still just a uniform.

But it didn’t surprise her that many members of the SPD saw Jackson as more than a uniform. He and Chico had had all of their backs at one point or another. When it came to hunting bad men in the pitch-black woods of the leading edge of the Catskills, a well-trained team like Waverly and his dog had meant everything to them.

The other two cops hanging around Waverly, including Avery Landon, took the opportunity to stretch their legs, leaving Jackson alone with the footage he’d been rifling through and Marissa, who was still hovering over the coffeepot.

“Little late for that, isn’t it?” he said, nodding to the caffeinated brew dripping with agonizing slowness into the pot. “In fact, why are you still here?” he wanted to know, narrowing his eyes on her. It wasn’t suspicious so much as the look of a man trying to solve a puzzle. The concentrated, dogged look that had been on his face for hours now.

“Just getting some work done. Usually it’s not so populated this time of night and I can catch up on my notes in peace,” she lied, smooth as glass.

Well, perhaps not all that smooth, because he didn’t look very convinced. But she couldn’t go by the jaundiced eye he was using on her since he’d been looking at her sideways for days now.

She suddenly wished the cranky old coffeepot would quit all its spitting and gurgling and just go about the business of producing coffee already. It was one thing to deal with an angry Jackson Waverly when there was a crowd of law-abiding cops in the room and quite another to deal with the still-furious officer one to one.

“So what made you think of the turnabouts?” he asked her abruptly.

“The problem with a lot of beat cops is they spend their days coloring in the lines. Adhering to laws and seeing to it that others do the same. But undercovers have to do just the opposite in a way. Figure out how to stay law-abiding while pulling off the outside appearance of a criminal. I remembered that once a UC cop said to me that it’s not the stupid criminals you have to be afraid of. That regular cops mostly deal with the stupid criminals. But the smart ones … those are the scary ones. Though in the end their hubris tends to get the best of them. But before that happens, a lot of damage can be done. I just thought, if these guys are smarter than the average criminal, they will figure out how to deceive you. They probably planned how they were going to take your sister long before she stepped foot outside of the hospital.”

“But that doesn’t wash,” Jackson said, leaning forward in his chair toward her, making the fabric of his shirt pull taut across the expansive width of his shoulders. Marissa pretended not to notice and quickly turned to splash coffee into her cup. The glass pot clattered against the ceramic cup when her hand shook a little.

She was not noticing how well built he was. Na-uh. Just like she’d never noticed how fine an ass he had. Nope. Never. She must have heard about it through office gossip, otherwise how would she even know his ass was finer than fine ever could be? Yeah. That was it. “How would a criminal smart enough to evade detection like this be stupid enough to make a spectacle of shoving a girl off a bridge? Everything about it screams cheesy, Cro-Magnon thinking.”

She had considered that. “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s two different criminals?”

One of Jackson’s brows lifted suddenly. He straightened in his seat. “But what are the odds that two different scumbags are after my little sister all at the same time? I mean, the worst she’s ever done in her life is jaywalk.”

“As far as you know, anyway,” she countered. Damn. Why didn’t she just keep her mouth shut? He was glaring at her again.

“My sister shares everything with me,” he barked at her. “And she’s as straight as a goddamn arrow.”

“Everything?” she asked archly. After all, if she was in for a penny … “So, you know who she slept with last week? You know if she sleeps in her undies or without? Or what size her fat jeans are?”

“Fat jeans?” he echoed, coloring magnificently as she made him think about his sister in ways most brothers disliked thinking about their sisters.

“Yes. Every woman has fat jeans. The jeans we wear when we’ve spent too much time indulging in sweets or other bad things. They usually come out around the holidays.”

“What the hell does any of this have to do with—”

“I’m just proving to you that you do not know everything about your sister. You think because you are her brother and because you raised her that you know her inside and out. I promise you that because you are her brother and because you raised her, you absolutely do not know her that intimately. You’re like a father figure to her, as much as you are a brother. Not to mention you’re a cop. That’s why she doesn’t tell you about things like other cops hitting on her in spite of the Waverly Law.”

“Y-you know about—”

“Of course I do. More than one cop has come to me in a conundrum over your stupid little Waverly Law. Frankly, your sister is a grown woman and you have no say in who she dates. You ought to quit being such a control freak. Maybe if you did, you’d be in the loop enough to know why one or even two criminals might be after her.”

Marissa walked away from him, keeping her spine erect, falling back on her mother’s old adage that perfect posture made up for whatever inadequacies a woman might feel inside. At the moment, Marissa was wishing she could figure out when to keep her opinions to herself as far as Jackson Waverly was concerned. She did it day in and day out with everyone else, doling out advice as professionally as she should, but with Jackson …

She could hear him jump out of his chair, his footsteps hot behind hers.

“What cops? Who’s been talking about my sister?” he demanded.

Oh. She just had to.

She smiled at him over her shoulder. “Now, you know I can’t tell you that. That would break confidentiality.”

She heard him literally growl at her back.

“You are the most infuriating woman I have ever met! It’s no wonder you don’t have anyone to go home to this hour of the night!”

If heels could leave skid marks, the industrial floors of the station would have been burning up from hers. She came to a halt so fast that it sent him crashing into her as she was rounding on him in anger. She shoved him back off her as coffee flew everywhere.

“Ow! Damn it!” she spat out, flinging the scalding liquid off her hand. “What the hell do you know about who I do and do not have to go home to?” she demanded of him. “It’s not as though anyone around here ever bothered to ask me about my personal life! So tell me, Waverly, just how do you know I don’t have the most understanding husband in the world waiting for me at home?”

Jackson brushed coffee off his shirt and smirked at her, making her want to bean him with her coffee cup … after dumping the remainder of its contents over his head, that is.

“One, you don’t wear the most understanding husband in the world’s ring on your finger. Two, you are always here. Always. No Friday night dates. No disappearing for afternoon delight. None of it. And three, you’ve never brought him to any of the barbecues and whatnot … that is, when you’ve deigned to go slumming with the rest of us commoners.” He put his face close to hers. “And four, as smoking hot as this body of yours is, your attitude could freeze the Hudson River from here. No guy I know of would let his special bits get that close to an ice queen like you.”

She understood that he was just lashing out at her, a continuing remnant of his fear and fury, but that didn’t make his mean-spirited assessment hurt any less. The trick was keeping him from knowing that. That would be far more damaging than the feeling itself, and she refused to give him any sort of satisfaction.

“You know, Waverly, I really wish that was true, because right now I’d pay good money to be able to freeze those tiny little bits of yours right off and slap them on the corner of my desk as a reminder to all the macho ignoramuses just like you not to mess with me!”

Marissa slammed her cup down on the nearest surface hard enough to crack it, then with a sharp turn she marched off to her office, hoping he would follow her just so she could have the satisfaction of slamming the door in his face.

But just before she crossed the open gap between the bullpen and the offices, the two detectives working with Jackson hurried in and crossed her path, ruining her delightfully perfect exit, damn it.

Of course, she was going to regret losing her temper later … but for the moment she wanted at least a few seconds to savor it.

“Jackson! We got them. Northbound on 87! Looks like they got off at the Windham exit.”

“Finally!” Jackson said, moving in the opposite direction of Marissa to grab his coat. “Let’s take this up there and see if we can—”

“Get in trouble for working out of your jurisdiction?” Marissa said dryly. “Sure, why don’t you go do that?”

You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was still and staring at her. Marissa threw them a smug smile, then finished walking toward her office.

“Oh, and before you go and do that, you might want to call the rental companies in town about that truck. A Lincoln Navigator like that? Probably has LoJack or a GPS in it. You know, in case it gets stolen. But hey, what do I know? I’m just that annoying bitch of an ice queen sitting in an office scheming up ways to ruin your lives, right?”

She slammed the office door on them, realizing she had had her satisfaction after all.