Catherine Nelson - Zoe Grey 02 - The Trouble with Theft by Catherine Nelson Page B

Ellmann was standing on the
sidewalk waiting for me.
    Ellmann is a very big
man. He’s six-six and solid muscle. I’m pretty sure he could pick up a car if
he wanted to. He has wavy dark hair, which he keeps a little longer, and his
cheeks and chin are covered in a dusting of dark growth. There were few
occasions when he wore a high and tight and went clean shaven. Fine with me;
he’s a very good looking guy.
    His eyes are green, a
more jade color than mine, and have a mesmerizing quality to them. Of Italian
descent, Ellmann doesn’t really have the olive complexion, but he always looks
healthily tanned. His typical work uniform consists of jeans, which fit him
exactly right, and t-shirts, with a few button-down tops thrown in. Today was
no different. He wore a light blue t-shirt that made me want to blow off the
rest of the day and take him home.
    “You look beautiful,”
he said, smiling.
    “I was just thinking
the same of you.”
    He pulled me into him
and kissed me. The take-Ellmann-home idea was gaining intensity and appeal the
longer the kiss went on.
    “Are those handcuffs
in your pocket?” he whispered in my ear.
    “Yeah.” Suddenly my
mind was dreaming of different things to do with those cuffs. I pushed away
from Ellmann. “Uh, should we eat?”
    He chuckled as he
followed me inside, no doubt fully aware of the direction my brain had spun.
Ellmann tends to have an uncanny and sometimes annoying talent for knowing
precisely what I haven’t said. Only one other person in the world can do such a
thing, and that’s Amy. It had taken her years of practice. Ellmann seems to do
it naturally. Most days I like that. Some days it scares me.
    Ellmann had put our name
in and requested a seat on the patio, which was all the more convenient for my
purposes. After a short five-minute wait, we were shown to a table. The
restaurant was crowded, and the sidewalks were packed.
    “How was your day?” I
asked after we placed our order.
    “Pretty good,” he
said, nodding. He took a sip of his drink and leaned back in his chair.
“Finally got a break in that series of muggings downtown. Caught the guy this
morning. We even recovered a lot of what was stolen.”
    “That’s great.”
    “It is. Shortly after
that, though, I got called in on a new case.” He dragged a hand back through
his hair. It’s what he does when he’s stressed or upset. “Caroline Marks was
murdered last night.”
    I may not have known
the name Burbanks, but I knew the name Caroline Marks. She was a big deal in
Fort Collins, her family being sort of like our own version of the
Rockefellers. She was a native, her great-great-great grandfather having been a
key player in founding the town. He’d struck it rich with the railroads, and
while he had left plenty of money to his children, they’d each gone on to do
something remarkable and earn their own fortunes. The Marks family had more
money than the lot of them could ever spend in ten lifetimes.
    Caroline Marks had
married young and become a widow young, the result of something tragic like
cancer, if I remembered right. Never remarrying, she devoted her time to her
children and town. Pretty much every local charity and public event had her
hand in it. Every year, she gave away two scholarships to CSU to local high
school graduates she chose herself. It wasn’t uncommon for her to pay the
hospital bills of a local family in dire financial straits. She’d built a
shelter for the homeless and fully funded the soup kitchen there. She donated
money to the Lincoln Center so they could buy equipment and props for the
community theater. She donated computers and musical instruments to the local
schools. She went to the library and read books to the kids on weekends. She
was like Fort Collins’ own Mother Theresa. It was hard to think of her as being
dead, and that much harder to think of her death as murder.
    Who could have done
something like that? Who would want to kill Mother Theresa?
    “I