Xander nodded. He didn’t prompt her or push, and even though Tara knew it was Interview 101 to use as little guidance as possible with a witness, his calm, comforting gaze took a tiny sliver of the tension out of her chest.
“She said she was hurt. The operator asked where she was, and she said she was here. Home.” Tara looked at the dilapidated house, with the blue lights throwing eerie shadows over the broken porch boards and the splintered doorframe she could just make out from her spot in the cruiser, her gut dipping. “She said there was a man, but she couldn’t tell if he was still there. That her head felt funny. She didn’t say much after that. Oh!” The memory slammed into Tara with a burst of awareness. “She said something about what the man had said to her, but she didn’t say what it was. She just said, ‘he told me not to’.”
At that, Xander’s brows lifted. “But she didn’t say what he told her not to do?”
“No, she must have passed out.” Tara stuffed back the fear that went with the thought. She had to be strong. She had to. “But Amour is supposed to testify against Ricky Sansone next month, and if he found out she’s the informant who gave us the intel that led to his arrest and that she’s testifying against him, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.”
“What makes you think that?” Xander asked, and what? He had to be kidding.
“Um, don’t you think the whole murder/gun-running thing is a bit of a giveaway?”
Xander paused. “I think it’s something to explore, yeah. But Amour knows Sansone, right?”
“Of course,” Tara said slowly. “She works for him at his club.”
“So, if he’d kicked in her door and tried to kill her, she’d probably recognize him,” Xander led, and Tara connected the dots with a curse.
“And if she’d recognized him, she definitely would’ve said so on the phone.” Still… “Sansone is smart, though. He’s out on a million-dollar bond. As badly as he’d want to do the job himself, if he knew Amour was an informant, he wouldn’t risk getting caught.”
“He also probably wouldn’t have left her alive,” Xander said, his expression softening at Tara’s wince. “Sorry. Did she say anything else that you can think of?”
“No.”
Xander shook his head. “Any detail you can remember, even a small one, that might help ID who did this to her?”
Tara’s frustration bubbled, and she took a deep breath to counter it. “No.”
“A background noise, a voice, maybe? Anything like that?”
Just like that, the last strand of Tara’s patience snapped. “No. Look, pull the nine-one-one recording if you don’t trust me. Then you’ll have the whole thing, word for word, complete with background noises and voices and Amour begging for help you can’t give her.”
Tears pricked her eyes, hot and begging to fall, and oh, no. Not tonight. She would not lose control of this situation, and she sure as hell wouldn’t be weak enough to cry in front of Xander goddamn Matthews.
A beat passed, then another, before Tara couldn’t stand the ear-punching silence or his wide, unreadable stare any longer. “I’ve told you everything I can remember. Can we go to the hospital now? Please.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, his voice as indecipherable as his stare as he closed his notebook and turned away from her.
3
Xander sat in the luxurious leather passenger seat of Tara’s BMW and stared straight at the windshield. They’d traded less than a dozen syllables since he’d finished taking her statement, and those had only included necessary back-and-forth about taking her car to Remington Memorial so she’d have a way home. She hadn’t apologized for lighting into him—not that Xander had expected her to. Yeah, he’d only been trying to do his job when he’d questioned her, and yeah again, sometimes the small details that seemed inconsequential could blow a case wide open. But in his eagerness to catch the asshole who’d assaulted Amour, he’d lost sight of the fact that Tara had been on the phone with her directly after it had happened. Listening to someone she clearly cared about in pain. Frightened. Maybe even dying.
Tara might’ve been unrelentingly tough every other time Xander had clapped eyes on her—including when she’d tried to have him brought up on a laundry list of criminal charges two years ago—but in that moment, she’d been vulnerable. Enough to bring tears to her big, brown eyes.
Tears he had put there, albeit inadvertently, and damn it, he needed an olive branch.
“So, ah. Your car is really nice,” Xander said, and Christ, as far as olive branches went, that was barely a twig. Also, a colossal understatement, since his ass was currently parked in a seat that had programmable lumbar support and a built-in cooling system, in a vehicle that had probably cost more than he’d made in the last two years combined. Maybe three.
Tara blinked and sent him a lightning-fast glance of surprise before saying, “Thank you.”
Her delivery was a little on the prim side, but since she hadn’t said “fuck you” instead of “thank you”, Xander took the tiny victory. “How long have you had it?”
One corner of her mouth lifted into a hint of a sardonic smile. “You don’t have to make small talk with me, Xander. I appreciate the courtesy, but I know you probably don’t like me very much.”
“That’s a little extreme,” he said, unable to tell if he was more shocked or turned on by her lack of tolerance for anything resembling bullshit.
Tara shrugged. “Considering tonight’s circumstances, I wouldn’t blame you if it were still accurate.”
“Still,” Xander repeated. He hooked the end of the word upward until it became a question, and Tara’s dark auburn brows popped.
“Well, yes. I assumed there was already no love lost from two years ago.”
Fuck. He should’ve known the past wouldn’t stay in the past. It never goddamn did. “That was a long time ago.”
Tara fell for the way he’d notched his tone right at its most easygoing setting, because she said, “Maybe. But my office still tried to send you to jail for a really long time.”
“Bygones.” Xander realized he’d sent the word through his teeth, and damn it, he needed to breathe. “It all turned out fine in the end.”
The look on her face said she wanted to argue (hello, attorney), but Xander about-faced the subject. “Anyway, I owe you an apology for tonight.”
“What?” Tara breathed. Under any other circumstances, he might’ve gotten a thrill at shocking her thoroughly enough to make her ridiculously lush mouth fall open like that. But he stood the ground he’d just stolen.
“Amour is your CI, and you two obviously have a good relationship. Interview protocol is designed to gain useful information, not overwhelm the person being questioned. I overstepped when I kept pushing you for details, and for that, I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” Tara paused, and in less than a blink, the uncharacteristic softness in her expression got back to business. “Well, don’t be. I’m not.”
Xander’s laugh held equal parts humor and disbelief. “Okay, not to put too fine a point on it, because I do have some pride, but you handed me my lunch back there. Respectfully, I’m not really sure I’m buying that you’re not sorry I pushed.”