Free Undercover Hunter by Rachel Lee Page B

to him. You could say I got promoted up instead of out.”
    A smile danced across his face, and she allowed herself a dangerous moment to notice how appealing he was. Wrong time, wrong place, but what the hell.
    “So were you routinely a pain in the patootie?”
    “Mostly. But I kept solving cases so, at least for a while, I was fairly untouchable. I couldn’t let things slide. I’m not the type. I’m cursed with a sense of justice.”
    “That’s not a bad thing.”
    “That depends.” She put her fork down and looked squarely at him. “You’ve been a cop for a while. You must have run up against cases that weren’t politically expedient to pursue.”
    “Not many. I take it you ran into that a lot.”
    “The military is an interesting organization. Everything is about hierarchy and promotions. Not so much in the enlisted ranks, but when you get to the officer corps you learn that some people are important. They’ve got connections, they’ve got rank, they’re being groomed for flag rank, whatever. Very political in a lot of ways. I stepped on those toes.”
    “How?”
    “I insisted on investigating and pushing for charges against rapists. A lot of ranking officers wanted to sweep it under the rug. It didn’t look good to admit that stuff like that was happening under their command. It looked even worse when they tried to scare the victims into not reporting the rape. When I got wind of it, I wouldn’t let it go. It’s kind of a good-old-boys network, and they weren’t happy with me.”
    He nodded but didn’t say anything. What could he say anyway? she wondered. She knew enough to realize that a lot of cops weren’t good about investigating rape even in civilian life.
    “And finally you stepped on the wrong toes?”
    “They were all wrong,” she admitted. “But when I brought in an indisputable case against a young officer who’d actually committed the rape against an enlisted woman, my days were numbered. I get that being at war for long stretches can turn people into animals, but...” She shrugged and finally said, “If you don’t insist on some rules, all you have is a mob. Justice.”
    “So why did this guy turn out to be so problematic?”
    “General’s son. You’d have thought I’d taken a dump on the family escutcheon. They wanted me to bury it and I wouldn’t. JAG brought him up on charges. And that’s when I got the killer performance report.”
    “One report was enough to ruin you?”
    She sliced off another piece of steak. “That’s all it takes. But there never would have been another good one after that. No more promotions, either. I had a reputation by then and that was it. I could either resign my commission and get out honorably or I could wait for them to find an excuse to ruin the rest of my life. And they’d have found it.”
    He was silent for a few seconds. “That stinks.”
    “Well, I’m here now, still doing the kind of work I want to do, and I’m more interested in catching this killer than worrying about my former career.”
    “But it left scars.”
    She could feel her eyes go hollow. This was an area she wasn’t comfortable discussing. Emotions. They were tenuous and dangerous. “I really don’t like men,” she said flatly.
    “I can see why.”
    She gave him points for not saying he was different. She’d heard that countless times, but saying it didn’t make it so. A guy needed to prove it to her, and few enough had.
    They were silent through the rest of the meal, leaving DeeJay entirely too much time to ponder the unhappy fact that there was one man she wanted to like and he was sitting right across from her.
    Despite having been raped during her first year in uniform, despite having watched her superiors sweep it under the rug and even threaten her—and she’d been young enough then to be scared by those threats—she didn’t have a hang-up about sex. Sex and rape were very different things. No, she had a hang-up about men. She lived with