Page 36 of After The Storm

Confused, she shook her head. “No, it was. I might not know anything my boss was trying to show in those documents, but I’ve seen that show once or twice. He would have used it to indicate something about New Orleans’ finest.”

She had no idea what he was talking about with his church and pew comment, but she knew her old television shows. Her mother had an odd obsession with programs from before Kate was born, so many a nights she missed the shows her friends were watching because her mother decided some seventies show was more interesting. That very reason was why she begged her parents for a TV for her fourteenth birthday.

So even though Roman seemed to have all the answers, this time she had him.

Smiling, he shook his head like she just had. “No, Hawaii Five-O was about an elite group of state police officers who answered exclusively to the governor.”

He sounded so damn sure of himself that she didn’t want to argue about this anymore. In truth, she couldn’t say he was wrong.

Huffing her irritation at the whole subject, Kate folded her arms across her chest. “State police. Cops. All the same, if you ask me.”

“As I said, right church, wrong pew.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have to worry about the cops in this town being after me. New Orleans cops would gleefully go along with whatever the state police told them to, so it’s the same church and maybe the other end of the same pew. Six and one half dozen of another.”

Her frustration began to make her sound like an idiot. She knew that, but it didn’t stop her.

“I’m not saying you don’t have to worry about the police, Kate. I was just correcting a common mistake people make about Hawaii Five-O.”

“Are you some kind of Hawaii Five-O expert, or did you study all the sixties and seventies cop shows, Professor Know It All?” she asked as she leaned back against the headboard.

“Well, my major was police shows, but I minored in TV shows set in the islands,” he answered with a chuckle. “Just wait until we get to anything related to Magnum P.I.”

Smart ass.

Kate had never met a man who could combine being sexy, cute, and arrogant all at once. It made it very hard to dislike him. Impossible really.

Swallowing her pride, she quietly asked, “Are you able to figure out anything from these things Jonas wrote?”

“No, but I’m not giving up.”

He may not have felt like throwing in the towel, but she felt like an utter failure and wanted nothing more than to escape from this whole entire mess. She knew she couldn’t, but that didn’t change the fact that she wanted to.

“Well, have at it. I’m going to grab a bath. Maybe it will give me some epiphany.”

Roman didn’t say anything, so she slid off the side of the bed and headed toward the bathroom. Five minutes later, she stood naked and ready to step into the tub, hopefully to drown all her worries underneath a mountain of bubbles that grew by the moment in front of her.

But before she could begin to enjoy her own personal spa time, Roman called out, “Kate! Come here!”

Quickly, she grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her. Hurrying out into the room as she knotted it between her breasts, she rushed over to next to the bed to see what all the yelling was about.

“Is the place on fire? What’s going on, Roman?” she asked as she looked around their hotel room for what had excited him.

He looked up from the laptop and pointed at the screen. “Look! Bingo!”

Leaning in to see what he was talking about, she read the document he’d been looking at and her mouth dropped open. She turned to look at him and found she couldn’t even find the words.

“I know,” Roman said with a smile. “It’s like your boss is talking from the grave. I know it’s not the entire case wrapped up in a bow, but at least we know why he worried about the cops if anything happened to him.”

Kate turned back to read Jonas’s words telling them that Samuel Darnell had come to see him after a series of run-ins with the New Orleans police and the Louisiana State Police. He believed he was being harassed because his cousin had been a whistleblower in a sexual harassment case against the department.

But Jonas found out that his cousin had nothing to do with why the police suddenly became interested in him. The cops weren’t interested in a claim by some woman that one of New Orleans finest got handsy with her when she worked as some clerk for the department for a few months three years ago.

Roman touched the laptop screen at the very end of her boss’s writing, and Kate read his words out loud. “This case isn’t about the client’s cousin. This is about something else, something much bigger. I think this goes all the way up to the top.”

Letting out a sigh, she barely caught the towel as the knot between her breasts came undone and almost gave Roman a show. She scrambled to keep her body hidden as excitement about what she just read made her want to jump around the room celebrating.

“I was right! I knew he hadn’t lied to me about not trusting the cops,” she said, smiling so broadly that her cheeks began to ache. “Now do you believe me?”

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