Hot Trick (A Detective Shelley Caldwell Novel) by Patricia Rosemoor Page A

in more than props and escapes. There was something about her…but he had to focus.
    “Keep doing what you’re doing. Familiarize yourself with everything.”
    Silke shrugged and continued on to one of the cabinets with multiple doors. Sebastian let her open and close them and step inside the cabinet herself before broaching his true reason for calling her here.
    “So what does your sister think about your work?”
    “Shelley? She’s mostly supportive.”
    “Mostly?”
    “It’s not that she doesn’t want me to have a career in show biz. She’s just security conscious.”
    “You mean in a financial way.”
    “In every way. She is a cop, you know.”
    “I got that.”
    Silke stepped out of the cabinet and eyed him closely. “You’re interested in her.”
    “Curious,” he corrected, “about you both, how you came to be so different.”
    Silke laughed. “Sometimes I think we’re two halves of a single person. But then I think that’s probably true of all siblings, right?”
    “Maybe some.”
    Talk about your sister. Reveal something personal.
    Silke twitched and said, “As different as we are, I know that Shelley will always be there for me.”
    Deeper. Her hopes…and fears.
    Seeming uncomfortable, Silke asked, “Did you say something?”
    “Me? No. I was just listening.”
    Had she sensed the suggestion? Suggestion hadn’t worked on Shelley, either.
    “Shelley would do anything for me,” Silke went on, “and I would do anything for her. That’s just the way it is with siblings.”
    “Not with all siblings. Not all relationships are as rosy as you’re painting them to be.”
    Tell me a fact that no one else knows about your sister.
    “Hey, are you trying to get into my head?”
    “What?”
    Silke gave him an intense stare. “You are interested in Shelley, aren’t you? That suggestion stuff won’t work with her.”
    “Suggestion?”
    “We have built-in mind radar—the twin thing, you know. We can keep each other out. Or anyone else.”
    Whether Silke realized it or not, she’d just given him a bit of personal information about her sister, a reason why he hadn’t been able to suggest Shelley in the crowd after the attempted theft. It was a start.
    Sebastian knew he would have to handle Silke carefully if he wanted to know more about Shelley. How to get to her.
    How to make her dreams— of him —come true.
    Taking Shelley away from Jake DeAtley was the first step in his plan to destroy the bastard. Sebastian hoped losing the woman he loved would devastate Jake, but he wouldn’t be satisfied until Jake knew what it felt like to have everything he cared about stripped away.
    Until he, too, was left with no one and nothing.

Chapter Twenty
    “Maybe Larson will get a bead on whoever sent that email,” Norelli said after checking in the laptop as evidence and turning it over to the department computer geek.
    “We can hope.”
    The addy on the email didn’t exist. If anyone could track down the email through layers of fake addresses, Marcia Larson could. And then we would get a judge to sign an order forcing the ISP to give over the name of their client. Bobby Rafferty would no doubt insist on doing it himself.
    I decided to check on the hunt for Casey Brogan. I looked for the uniformed officer who’d been doing the search for me and found him in the coffee room.
    “Yeah, there are a couple of Brogans on the south side, but no Caseys,” he said. “I even went out to a couple of the addresses to check in person. It’s like the guy doesn’t exist.”
    Which made me wonder where a banshee might live.
    I headed back to my desk, going over the events of the last twenty-four hours in my mind.
    A man who might or might not exist, and might or might not be a supernatural creature.
    Thieves who magically escaped from a paddy wagon.
    A magician who tried to get into my mind.
    I didn’t like the way things were adding up. We still hadn’t interviewed Sebastian’s staff—something yet to be