Free Kansas City Cover-Up by Julie Miller

white blouse. “Looks like you got a little banged up, too.”
    “I’ll live.”
    “Coffee?” he offered.
    “Sure. With cream if you have it.” He pointed to one of the guest chairs and invited her to sit while he headed out to the break room.
    By the time he returned with two insulated cups, Gabe had let enough of his cynicism and doubt creep back into his thoughts to temper his libido. He closed the door with his foot to block out the noise from the main room and handed Olivia her drink. “So where do we start?”
    Gabe resumed his seat behind his desk while Olivia popped open her lid to swirl the coffee and creamer together and allow some of the steam to escape. “At the beginning. When we don’t have a clear lead, we usually look at the victim. What can you tell me about Danielle Reese?”
    “Looked like an angel. She liked baking and knitting and having fresh flowers around the condo. But that was more about being an overachiever than a homebody. She never could sit still. She came from a small town in Kansas—Cottonwood Falls. Got her journalism degree at the University of Missouri and moved to the big city, determined to be a success and never have to go back to where she came from. She loved her parents, but the pace of a small town bored her. She wanted the diversity and excitement of the city and the job. She wanted a Pulitzer. She wanted to make a difference.”
    Olivia pressed the lid back onto her coffee and took a sip. “Did she normally investigate suspected connections between organized crime and politics?”
    Gabe shook his head, remembering the first time he’d seen the dewy-faced blonde lugging an armload of boxes to her desk in the middle of the reporters’ pool. “She was willing to learn her craft, build her reputation. She took every assignment from covering wedding announcements to interviewing local human interest stories. But she always wanted to get into hard news.”
    “That’s when you started mentoring her?”
    “Yeah. I let her tag along on some of the tamer assignments I had—reporting on school bond debates, weather stories like the floods we had a few years back. She’d draft a story and I’d read it, tweak it. I shared a couple of bylines with her.” Dani’s eagerness to learn and excel, her youthful energy and attentiveness had been an aphrodisiac to his ego. “Pretty soon she didn’t need me to get the story or write it. By then, things had gotten personal between us. I proposed. She accepted.”
    Olivia set her cup on the edge of the desk and pulled her phone from her pocket, ostensibly to type in details of their conversation. “So you moved in together and continued your Svengali relationship with her. On the sly. You said you had to sneak a look at her notes? That she was keeping that last investigation a secret? Even from you?” She paused in her typing to meet his gaze.
    He resented the Svengali allusion. Sure, maybe their relationship had started out like that, but once they became a couple, he and Dani had been equal partners. There’d been nothing more he could teach her. It wasn’t until the late nights and the missed dinners and the calls that went straight to voice mail that he’d gotten worried enough to find out what she was keeping from him. And then he realized he hadn’t taught her nearly enough about surviving a dangerous investigation.
    Gabe took a drink that scalded the guilt from his throat. “Do you even know what she looked like?”
    Olivia shook her head. “Just the crime scene photos. And those...are pretty rough.”
    That was an understatement. She needed to see the face of the woman he wanted her to fight for. Gabe set down his cup and crossed to the row of gray metal filing cabinets along the east side of his office. Without being asked, Olivia followed him to the top left drawer. “Here.” He pulled out the framed photo that had once sat on the corner of his desk and handed it to her. “This was our engagement picture, taken