Hot Pursuit by Suzanne Brockmann Page A

first arrived, he’d all but peed in possessive circles around Assemblywoman Bonavita, who’d finally gone into her office to escape him on the pretense of making a phone call.
    At about the same time, Alyssa had sent Lopez, Gillman, and Vlachic out with Jenn, to scope out both Maria and Jenn’s apartments.
    Mick Callahan hadn’t liked the way gleamingly handsome Gillman had said “See you later,” to the assemblywoman. It had made him pissy.
    Extra pissy. It had been clear from that moment he’d walked in that he felt threatened by their very presence.
    “I don’t get,” he said now, in his tough-guy New York accent,“how it’s going to help Maria to have
you
here, bringing additional attention to her situation. What she needs to do is keep her head down and let this bullshit pass.”
    “I’m pretty sure, detective,” Alyssa shot back, “that keeping her head down was removed from the options list when someone broke into this office and put an animal’s heart in that desk drawer.”
    The entire drawer had been removed and taken to the lab to verify that, indeed, it was a pig’s heart in there, as Sam had suggested. It had to be. Nearly everyone was going on the assumption that it wasn’t human—the idea that it could be was just too awful to consider. But Alyssa did consider it, and until they got the results from the lab, until they located Margaret Bell-Thorndyke—aka Maggie Thorndyke—and the cell phone from which the mysterious-voiced man had made that call, she was putting both her team and the clients into lockdown mode.
    And yes, it was likely that when Ms. Thorndyke was found, she would discover that her cell phone had been lost or stolen. The police were tracking it right now, hopefully to some disgruntled butcher’s shop.
    But until they had some solid answers, Alyssa was taking precautions.
    All of the assemblywoman’s interns, both male and female, had been called and advised to come into the office only if they had a scheduled interview with Alyssa. And Maria and Jenn, both, were going to have a Navy SEAL or two guarding them, around the clock—at least until the security systems at the office and in their apartments were installed and running.
    “If Maria hadn’t waited nearly a week for your team to arrive,” Callahan pointed out acerbically, “she would’ve had a security system in place. Maybe even a camera—”
    “Do you often engage in wishful thinking about your cases, Detective?” Alyssa asked. “Because in my experience, I find that doesn’t help.”
    “And what I find doesn’t help,” he said, “is turning something like this into a media circus. You publicize this, then we
will
have a story.”
    Callahan was one of those men who walked into the room and looked over the tops of the heads of all of the women as he tried to find the man who was in charge.
    He probably didn’t do it consciously. But he’d done it today-walking right past Alyssa to introduce himself to Sam.
    It was a hot button for her, she had to admit. And it had made her put more than the usual amount of steel in her voice when she’d set him straight. “Over here, Detective.
I’m
in charge.”
    At that point, she still could have won him over—it wasn’t too late. It was clear, just from looking at him, that he was the kind of too-attractive, too full-of-himself man who said things like, “I have a way with the ladies,” and called his spouse “the little woman.”
    Alyssa could have smiled at him in a way that would have made him think that she was respectfully acknowledging the obviously enormous size of his penis. And maybe she could have swallowed her ire and done it if she truly believed that he had more than a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming more to Maria Bonavita than her pet cop.
    But he didn’t. It was clear that Maria was uncomfortable around him.
    “I have no intention of publicizing any of this,” Alyssa told him. “At this time, that wouldn’t serve the