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“I have said it before and it bears saying again…WOW! Jacey Ford is a first-class storyteller. She drops you right in to the story and keeps you hanging there with every word. If you enjoy a little action and adventure with your romance, don't miss out on a Jacey Ford book! Characters are well rounded and the story is very well paced to keep your interest at all times. Partners-In-Crime features two other fantastic tales, I Spy and Dangerous Curves. While you can read Dead Heat as a stand alone, I suggest reading the other two just for the enjoyment of a fantastic read!"   Thia McClain, The Romance Readers’ Connection

“Suspense, action, and romance are pulled together into an exciting story you won’t want to miss. Pick up the well-written and compelling Dead Heat today.”  Patti Fischer, Romance Reviews Today

“Thrilling conclusion to this suspenseful series.”  Morgan Chilson, Fresh Fiction

“Ford delivers a compelling, fast-paced, sexy tale with the last of her Partners in Crime trilogy, which strikes a nice balance by pairing a lively romance with darker issues. Sam is a commanding hero, and Daphne is definitely his match. Her struggle to embrace life again with the help of his strength and love is touching.” Tara Gelsomino, Romantic Times BOOKClub

“Dead Heat is dead on target providing an absolutely fantastic read. With a kick a** heroine, an explosive storyline and a number of surprises, this action packed suspense is impossible to put down. Jacey Ford started her Partners in Crime series with Dangerous Curves and I didn't know if she could top the suspense/thriller atmosphere in it. She did in I Spy. Now, Ms Ford has outdone herself with Dead Heat and shown me once again why she became a "must buy" author for this reviewer. Jacey Ford's intriguing characters, fluid style of writing and spot on talent for pacing suspense combines to make Dead Heat a terrifically intense thriller. The romance is the decadent dessert that adds the perfect touch to this enthralling tale which is why it earns 5 Blue Ribbons from this reviewer. Ms Ford ends her Partners in Crime series with a bang and just like a fireworks finale, Dead Heat is not to be missed.” Belle Rouge, Romance Junkies

Chapter One

2/8/2006

"I thought I'd find you here."

Daphne Donovan didn't bother looking up from her dollar-twenty-five cent cup of coffee as the man slid his stocky frame into the booth across from her. Outwardly she appeared calm and unruffled--uncaring, even--despite the thought that ran through her head: I'm so busted. She raised the heavy porcelain cup to her lips, ignoring the heat coming through the too-hot cup and burning her fingertips as she pretended to take a sip.

"I was just following up a final lead before my meeting with the client," Daphne lied, without so much as a blink or a flicker of her eyes to give her away.

"Yeah? What sort of lead?" her brother, ex-NYPD cop and current New York Times bestseller Brooks Madison asked, resting one arm along the top of the booth.

Despite his Ivy League name, Brooks looked more like a heavyweight boxer than a member of the Republican Party and he was currently leveling his best don't-give-me-any-shit look directly at her. But it took a lot to intimidate her. Certainly, one dirty look from the guy she'd hero-worshipped since the day her mother had dragged her reluctantly into the Madison household when she was twelve wasn't enough to do it. Maybe it would have worked if Brooks hadn't always been so nice to her, letting her tag along with him even if it meant he had to endure the ridicule of his friends. Daff thought Brooks treated her a bit like a three-legged dog--with mild affection despite the fact you sometimes had the urge to tie tin cans to its tail just to see it hop around. But maybe that's just what it felt like to be a little sister. Since she'd been an only child until dear old Mom left her at Brooks's dad's house and pulled the Ol' Disappearing Woman act, Daff didn't know if the way she felt about the man she thought of as her brother was normal or not.

Probably not, since nothing in her life had ever been normal.

Daff took a sip of scalding coffee, careful not to let the man across from her know that it was burning her throat as she swallowed. "I followed Dean down here yesterday and watched him walk into that electronics store over there," she said, indicating a storefront across the street with her chin. The windows were brightly painted with red hearts and yellow flowers announcing the upcoming Valentine's Day sale. Daff suspected that on February 15, the hearts and flowers would be replaced with cherry trees and stovepipe hats for an upcoming Presidents' Day sale, while the prices of the merchandise remained unchanged.

"Convenient," Brooks muttered under his breath as the waitress who had brought Daff's coffee sidled up to the table and gave him the once-over about three times.

"What can I get you?" she asked.

Brooks looked across at Daphne and said, "You eaten?" with a quirk of one brow.

Daphne swallowed and curled her fingers around her cup of coffee, fighting a sudden wave of nausea. She couldn't eat here. Just the thought of it made her gag.

Brooks sighed and looked so sad for a moment that Daphne lowered her head to hide the sudden tears welling up in her eyes. God, she hated that. She was disgusted with both having her brother feel sorry for her and the tears that never seemed far from the surface these days.

"I'll just have coffee," Brooks said, and the waitress disappeared after giving him a disappointed shrug.

Desperate not to talk about what was really on both of their minds, Daphne squeezed her cup tighter and blurted, "Dean bought a cheap clock radio. Nothing fancy. Didn't even have a CD player or anything."

Her brother reached out and laid a hand on her arm. "You shouldn't have followed him down here," he said quietly.

Daff clenched her teeth and blinked rapidly to stop the tears from falling into her coffee. "I'm being paid to find out what he did with my client's money. I can't do that if I don't run down my leads."

"I could have checked this one out for you," Brooks said.

Daphne lifted her head to look out the window beyond her brother's shoulder. The sidewalk outside was filled with the usual array of busy New Yorkers, their eyes straight ahead, hurrying past without looking either right or left. The world was gray, the air filled with a heavy wet dust that seemed to color the people walking past. The occasional car or bus sped by, but traffic seemed lighter, horns honked almost timidly, on this stretch of roadway. Beyond the street stretched the World Trade Center redevelopment site. Progress was slow. From day to day, it was difficult to tell that anything had changed. Yet Daff remembered what it had looked like on September 11, 2001. She remembered the devastation, the heat, the stench. She remembered being overwhelmed by the sheer massiveness of the tragedy. And as one day passed into the next as they searched the rubble, futilely looking for survivors, she remembered thinking that nothing in her world would ever be right again.

"Please tell me you haven't been coming here every day," Brooks said, sliding along the booth until he was sitting sideways, so that he, too, could see the massive construction site. "You promised me that you'd stopped."

Daphne took a swallow of her finally cooled coffee as the waitress arrived with a fresh cup for Brooks. She didn't waste a lot of time placing the cup in front of Daff's brother before disappearing again. The two cups of coffee they'd ordered wouldn't net her more than a buck or two in tips, so why bother?

"I told you, I just came down here to check out what Dean was doing at that electronics shop. I kinda figured him for a high-end stereo sort of guy and thought maybe he'd be cracking open his secret piggy bank for a new Bang & Olufsen sound system. Turns out he just needed an alarm clock. And since I'm supposed to be meeting with my client on Water Street in"--Daff paused to glance at her watch, even though she knew exactly what time it was--"forty-three minutes, it didn't make sense to hoof it back to the Upper East Side." This, of course, was a complete lie. Well, maybe not a complete lie , because she was meeting with her client on Water Street in forty-three minutes. And she had followed Joshua Dean to an electronics store yesterday where, as she'd discovered half an hour later after slipping a twenty to the sales guy who had waited on Dean, he'd purchased a plain Jane alarm clock and nothing else. So what if the electronics store was in Greenwich Village and not downtown? And so what if, yes, okay, she had been coming down to Ground Zero every day since taking on her latest assignment? It was her life. She could spend it however she liked.

For the first few days that she'd been back in Manhattan, she'd been able to stay away. Then, like an alcoholic promising herself that she could stop after just one drink, she'd taken that first sip. Now, six months later, she was addicted again. Her day wasn't complete without a stop at the site of one of the country's greatest tragedies.

A tragedy Daphne could have stopped . . . if only she'd been better at her job.

Suddenly, Brooks sat up, slamming his coffee cup on the table so hard that hot brown liquid sloshed over the rim. "Damn it, Daff--" he began in his best God-damn-it-stop-lying-to-me voice.

Daphne settled back for the lecture she knew was coming and idly looked back across the street at the electronics store. Two men wearing identical black overcoats were entering the store, the taller of the two holding the single front door open for the shorter man. She squinted to get a better look at them, grunting when it seemed that Brooks had paused and was waiting for some sort of reaction. Satisfied that she was listening, her brother continued, but Daff's attention was on the men outside. They had paused just inside the store, their backs to the glass door. She couldn't see much through the painted windows, but something--call it a sixth sense or just the voice of experience--made the flesh on the back of her neck tingle.

She scooted out of the booth and held up one finger to get Brooks to stop for a second. She knew that once he got into one of his sermons, he could be hard to shut up. He always seemed to think he knew what was best for her. Even when she was a kid, he hovered over her, questioning her decisions, and always doing it in such a way that she couldn't accuse him of bossiness. It took her years to realize that he was manipulating her. At first, she had thought he was just being protective of his new "little sister."

"Do you really think you should eat that third bowl of ice cream? Last time, you woke up in the middle of the night with a stomachache," he'd remind her.

And Daff would think, Oh, yeah. I did get sick, didn't I? Then she'd put the ice cream back in the freezer, secretly pleased that he cared enough about her to stop her from doing something that would only hurt her in the end.

God knew nobody else in her short life had ever tried to shield her from harm.

But Daff soon discovered that the price you had to pay for this kind of love was that your business was no longer your own. Brooks was always sticking his nose where it didn't belong--talking her out of running off with Rob Whatsisname at seventeen and convincing her that if Rob really loved her, he'd be waiting for her when she finished college in four years (he didn't, and he wasn't); encouraging her to apply for a job with the FBI even though she was certain she'd never make the cut. Hell, he'd even been the one to force her out of Manhattan and down to Atlanta to form Partners in Crime, a corporate services firm, with her two best friends, Raine Robey and Aimee Devlin, after she'd resigned from the Bureau. For that alone, she probably owed Brooks her life.

Too bad it was worth so pitifully little.

Daff sighed and continued to watch the men across the street as she tossed a five-dollar bill on the table to pay for her coffee. "I'll be right back," she said, ignoring her brother's frustrated glare as she walked out in the middle of his speech.

The cold late-winter air slapped her in the face as she pulled open the coffee shop's door. Inside, the air was warm, moist almost with the heat coming off the grills in the back as the cooks served up hot pancakes and fried eggs. But Mother Nature mocked the humans' pitiful attempt to control their environment--yes, they could heat a few hundred square feet to ward off her chill, but once outside, she ruled with a frigid fist.

Daff didn't bother pulling her leather coat closed in the front. It wouldn't make much of a difference anyway, and she welcomed the stinging wind that pelted her through the thin jacket. Early on in her career with the Bureau, she'd tailed a child molester who'd left behind a victim who cut thin lines all over her body with a razor blade to release the pain trapped inside her after the attack. At the time, Daff had had a difficult time understanding why the girl--an innocent victim--would harm herself in such a manner.

But now she understood that need for release.

She fought it herself every single day since 9/11/2001, when the terrorist she'd been tailing had helped hijack a plane and drive it into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Her gaze was drawn inextricably to the reconstruction site as she weaved through the backed-up traffic on Liberty. It didn't look anything like it had after the attacks; the gaping wound had been cleansed by bulldozers and bandaged with fresh concrete, but the scar was still there, if only in the hearts of the people who walked by, their voices hushed by a solemnity that didn't exist anywhere else in the city.

Daphne's coat flapped in the breeze and the chill bit at her exposed ears and fingers as she stepped onto the sidewalk outside the electronics store. Yes, she welcomed the pain because it reminded her of the part she'd played in the tragedy that had happened here.

Without hesitating, she pulled open the door of the store she'd been watching from the diner and stepped inside, intentionally barreling into the man with the long trench coat who was supposed to be guarding the door. He spun around and reached out to grab her, but Daphne had anticipated his move and ducked out of the way before he could take hold of her.

"What the fuck?" he blurted, startled as his hand closed on empty air.

Then he raised the shotgun he'd had trained on the huddled clerks in the far corner, but Daff had anticipated that move, too. She used the would-be thief's momentum to her advantage, diving toward the man's right arm and thrusting upward, bringing the heel of her boot down on his instep at the same time. The man squealed in pain and instinctively loosened his hold on the gun. Daff clasped her hands together and brought them down on the back of the thief's head. Both man and shotgun clattered to the floor.

Daphne picked up the weapon, hurriedly glancing around the store for the second thief. When she didn't seem him, she figured he was probably in the back hunting for a safe, though Daff could have told him that most store owners weren't stupid enough to leave cash overnight in their stores. Robbing an electronics store at nine-thirty in the morning was a stupid mistake that only an amateur would make. But that didn't surprise her--she'd had these assholes pegged as newbies as soon as she'd seen them enter the store wearing their identical coats and not even bothering to hide their faces from the surveillance cameras mounted overhead.

She turned to the clerks huddled together on the floor and silently waved toward the door, indicating that they should get out before the second thief returned. One of them, a slim Asian woman with long black hair, hesitated, looking from Daphne to the doorway marked Employees Only and back again. Daff waved again, this time extending her thumb and pinkie to mimic a phone. The woman nodded sharply and ran out behind her co-workers, who hadn't given Daphne's order to leave a second thought.

Like they said, it sure was hard to get good help these days.

The crook on the floor groaned and Daphne scowled. She didn't have her cuffs on her and, short of shooting the guy, didn't have another way to incapacitate him until help arrived--when and if it ever did. It could take the cops an hour to get here at this time of day, which is why she'd sprinted across the street herself when she realized what was going on. If something had gone wrong during this heist, these two amateurs might have panicked and killed one of their hostages.

When the guy on the ground didn't move again, Daff left him there as she crept to the back of the store.

She positioned herself behind the heavy metal door, the shotgun raised to the point where she guessed the second thief's chest would be when he came out from the back room. He didn't keep her waiting long, obviously having kept one eye on the surveillance monitor in the back and knowing what was waiting for him in the other room.

Great. I'm always up for a challenge, Daff thought as she leaped back out of the way of the door as it was flung open from the other side. It slammed into the wall right where her head had been seconds before. She'd have had a broken nose and a couple of black eyes if she hadn't moved. Not to mention one hell of a headache. That is, if the impact hadn't killed her.

The thief roared as he lunged through the doorway, the sound a cross between a wounded water buffalo and a freight train's whistle.

Daff cringed and ducked as the man fired his shotgun, hitting the wall just above her head and leaving a hole about the size of a walnut in the plaster. She rolled to the left and pushed herself up to a standing position, her booted feet planted firmly, shoulder-width apart, the barrel of her own weapon aimed at the thief's shaved head.

"Drop your weapon," she ordered, staring into the man's flat gray eyes. He was young, probably no more than sixteen, but unlike his partner, he had the look of someone who had killed before. Something in the eyes gave it away, Daff thought. A deadness that bespoke how little he valued another human life.

He smiled a thin-lipped smile and shook his head. "I don't think so, bitch," he said, his voice full of mockery as he slowly raised the barrel of his own gun to her chest, daring her to shoot him before he got off his next shot.

Daff stared at the dead-eyed criminal--the first of his kind she'd run into since leaving the Bureau after 9/11--and couldn't help thinking that he was no different than the terrorists she'd been tracking before she resigned. Hating indiscriminately, no doubt blaming others for his lot in life, and taking no responsibility for making things better himself. Most likely, he felt subjugated, as if people had nothing better to do than keep him mired in the sewer that was his miserable, pathetic little life.

The trigger felt hot beneath her finger. The smallest bit of pressure was all it would take.

If she fired, so would he. She saw it in his eyes. He wasn't afraid to die as long as he took her down with him.

All she had to do was tighten her grip and her pain would end, the last four-and-a-half years erased.

She hadn't told Brooks this yet, but her case here was finished. Two days ago, she'd discovered where Joshua Dean had hidden the money he'd embezzled; the surveillance she'd done yesterday had simply been a way to pass the time until her final meeting with the client this morning. And Aimee--damn her--had somehow managed to land Daff a new case down in Naples, Florida, starting next week. Trailing some stupid bank president's errant girlfriend, no less. Talk about a meaningless waste of time.

Daphne felt her eyelids getting heavy. But how could she leave here again? Who would tend to her ghosts once she was gone?

It would be so easy to pull the trigger, to let it all end here.

And would she find the absolution she so desperately needed as she lay here, her blood pooling around her on the cold linoleum floor, just yards away from where she'd lost her soul on 9/11/2001? Would she finally find the peace she sought? Or, instead, would the darkness claim her forever, knowing that now she'd never be able to make things right?

She stared into the soulless eyes of the man across from her and wondered if she had the courage to take that chance.

Slowly, she lowered the shotgun until its barrel was pointing at the floor.

The thief snorted, his mouth drawing up into a cruel sneer as he jabbed his shotgun into Daff's sternum, right below her heart. She refused to wince or even to blink.

"You are one dumb bitch," he said, obviously assuming he now had the upper hand.

"What makes you think that?" Daphne asked, leaning one hip nonchalantly against a glass-topped display case containing a wide array of digital cameras. She felt a bit like Bugs Bunny in the old cartoons, leaning against Elmer Fudd's shotgun and munching a carrot while taunting the hunter with his usual, "What's up, Doc?" But, with her name, her talisman wasn't the sarcastic rabbit, but the beleaguered Daffy Duck who, despite his best efforts to deflect hostile fire, always seemed to be the one in the crosshairs.

"You got nothing to fight with," the thief said. "You're stupid you think I won't kill you."

Daphne shrugged and kept her gaze steady on his as she mimicked his words back at him. "Yeah, and you're stupid you think I'd lower my gun if my backup didn't have a bead on your empty head," she said.

The thug jerked around, but he was too late. Brooks was standing behind him, his Sig-Sauer P229 now pressed against the thief's temple.

"Police. Drop your weapon," Brooks ordered, his voice colder and harder than Daphne had ever heard.

Must be doing his bad cop impression.

It pissed her off that the creep let his shotgun slide to the ground at Brooks's command, when he'd virtually ignored her when she'd told him to do the same thing. Fucking discrimination, that's what it was.

She heard sirens coming closer as Brooks cuffed the guy, and she wondered why her brother was wandering around New York City with his gun and his handcuffs as if he'd never quit the force. Maybe he was just trying to get into character. Brooks had written a bestselling thriller series starring alcoholic ex-NYPD cop Jack Richmond. If Brooks was working on a new book, it was possible he had donned the cop gear to get inside Richmond's head again.

When her brother finished cuffing the thief, he turned to face her, and all thoughts of Brooks's writing career fled Daphne's mind. He was pissed. Royally, furiously, looking as if he'd like to shake her until her brains fell out of her head, pissed.

"How the hell did you know I was there?" he growled as the first blue-and-white pulled to a stop outside the electronics store.

And Daphne had to look away because she couldn't bear to see the hurt in his eyes when she answered softly, "I didn't."

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