Page 108 of Jack

“Obstruction, trespassing, and given the complaint of the suspect, assault.”

“He hit me with a hockey stick!”

She grabbed one wrist, then the other, cuffed him. “Tell it to your lawyer.”

Aw.

* * *

“You don’t have to be a child to get in over your head.”

For a long second there, Harper had thought—yep, in over my head.“You’re lucky I didn’t use my ninja moves on you.”

Next to her, in the passenger seat, Tommy laughed. A low rumble that even now sounded a little menacing, but she kept trying to see past the burliness and tattoos to the teddy bear inside.

The guy who’d started to tear up with worry in his expression when he’d told her that she couldn’t leave—not when she might be the only connection to Penelope and, most of all, to answers to Sarah’s murder.

“Sorry to scare you. You’re just the only one who knows how to find Penelope. Her listeners—which include me—know something is wrong.”

And that had had her sticking around because—how did he know that Penelope was missing?

He’d unhanded her nearly immediately, hands up, as if realizing his own actions. And then he’d made her coffee and spent the last hour scrolling through the fan comments on thePenny for Your Thoughtsforum.

“She usually posts every day, and especially on Fridays, before her podcast drops, but we haven’t heard a thing on her forum since Tuesday. And there isa lotof speculation. Some think it’s a publicity stunt. Others are sure she got grabbed.”

“She has a lot of fans.” Harper had been on the forum before with Jack and now searched for any posts that might look threatening.

Which of course allowed Jack to walk into her head.“I don’t like letting people down.”

She’d shaken him away and asked Tommy again about Turbo. He’d pulled up the nightclub’s website on his laptop and checked the hours.

“I need to be back at the rehearsal long before this opens,” she’d said to his suggestion that they go there and ask about the security team.

“Turbo is owned by Holden Walsh’s management company. What if we talk to him, ask him if anyone on his staff matches the description of the intruder?”

She’d given him a look that made him raise his hands in defense.

“I’m not suggesting we accuse him of anything. Maybe we’re searching for a guy that Sarah saw at Turbo. Walsh was her ex—certainly he wants her murder solved.”

“Unless he did it,” she said. “We could be setting ourselves up for trouble.”

“Then,” Tommy said, “he gets nervous and sloppy and next thing we know, he leads us to our masked man.”

“Zorro.”

He’d smiled at that. At leastsomeonethought she was being cute.

You’re brilliant.

Nope. Not brilliant. A dreamer.

And maybe foolish as she drove with Tommy, an hour later, through the tangle of traffic leading to the S & W Development office in St. Paul. She still had over an hour before her dance lesson with Jack.

But finding Penelope took priority. Jack probably wouldn’t want to dance with her anyway.

“You know, I would never hurt Sarah.” She glanced at Tommy now as he looked out the window, away from her. “She didn’t see the guy I’d been. Just the guy I wanted to be. We were friends, and yes, I hated that she was with Walsh, but . . . she’d never go for a guy like me anyway.”

Traffic had slowed to a standstill on 94, but they’d nearly reached the Wall Street exit.

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