Death Comes Knocking (The Thea Kozak Mystery Series, Book 10)

by Kate Flora

  There had been hours between when we found the detective and the woman we believed was Jessica Whitlow dead and when I got on the plane. Hours when Charity could have called him. Why hadn’t he come here to look after his sister instead of somehow finding me and getting on my plane? It didn’t make much sense. I asked Andre what he thought, and he agreed.

  “Nothing about this makes much sense,” he agreed. “Like why, if Jessica Whitlow was here with her, was Charity using Whitlow’s name? Surely figuring out Whitlow was a federal agent would have a piece of cake for someone who’s internet savvy.”

  “There weren’t signs of a second person staying in that house. Not that I saw,” I said. “So was Whitlow staying somewhere else and just dropping in to check on Charity? Did she inadvertently bring trouble with her?”

  It was a puzzle too big for my tired brain. I said, “Did I tell you I have to go down to Massachusetts for a meeting tomorrow?”

  He shook his head. “Did I tell you I have to go up to Bangor for a meeting tomorrow?”

  “Nope.”

  “Just don’t have that baby in Massachusetts,” he said. “I want MOC to be a Maniac right from the start.”

  “Fear not. Our child is going to be a maniac.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  On the plane, I’d been looking forward to a warm bath and an early night, and that’s where I was heading after we finished the dishes. But quiet and the job of homicide detective, never mind the job of a crisis consultant, was often not in the cards. I was upstairs, gathering nightgown and robe, visions of lavender bubble bath in my head, when someone knocked on the door.

  “You go ahead with your bath. I’ll get it,” Andre said.

  After nine was not a proper hour for visitors. That meant we were likely receiving a visit from some form of the constabulary, never mind that we were some form of constabulary. I lingered in the bedroom with the door open as he answered the door and admitted a man and a woman. I could tell that much from their voices.

  “Is your wife home?” the female voice asked.

  “She’s gone up to bed.”

  “We need to speak with her,” the man said.

  There was no reason for them to be here. I held my breath, waiting to hear what Andre would say.

  “And you are?” he asked.

  I could hear the rustle of IDs being produced. A long silence while Andre examined them.

  “What’s the nature of your business with my wife?” he asked.

  “It’s about Charity Kinsman,” the man said. “It is urgent that we find her.”

  Send them away. I beamed the thought to Andre. He knew everything I knew, and none of it would help find Charity.

  He must have been seeing something I wasn’t hearing, because he said, “Let me see if she’s still awake. Why don’t you go sit in the living room and I’ll be right back.”

  I quietly closed the bedroom door. Why was he doing this? It was late. I was tired and in no mood to speak with more people who would act like Malcolm Kinsman. Demanding. Skeptical. Unbelieving. I was too tired, and I had to get up early in the morning.

  MOC agreed. It was the baby hour, when the little beast got to frolic. To be sure I understood, I was given a couple of hard kicks. I grabbed my side, groaning, trying not to curse my child. That’s when Andre opened the door, and immediately went into dad-to-be mode. “Is it the baby?” he asked.

  “Not getting born. Just kicking. This may not be an acrobat. It may be a kickboxer.”

  “What joy,” he said. “I’m afraid we have visitors.”

  “What do they want?”

  “You.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Marshals Service.”

  I dropped onto the edge of the bed, shaking my head. “Tell them they can’t have me. Tell them I don’t know anything. You know I don’t have anything to tell them.”

  “It’s important,” said a voice from the doorway. The two pushy, impudent SOBs hadn’t bothered to wait downstairs. They were right there in my bedroom door.

  Fifteen

  Living with Andre, watching him struggle to solve cases and get justice for victims when witnesses aren’t forthcoming, has given me a lot of incentive to cooperate with public safety when they need my help. But not right now. Not when they’ve barged into my bedroom and invaded my personal space.

  Andre read the situation and wisely got out of my way.

  “You were asked to wait in the living room, weren’t you?” I asked.

  The man didn’t respond. The woman nodded.

  “So go back down there and wait.”

  The woman looked at the man, who said, “Look, Ms. Kozak, it’s urgent. We need—”

  “You need to go back downstairs and wait in the living room. I am not having this conversation, or any conversation about death or violence or Charity Kinsman in my bedroom.”

  Andre probably didn’t care so much. He was willing to interview anyone, anywhere, that would advance an investigation. I was sure these two were the same. But I was a woman whose last dream house had been tainted by a body in the living room. I was not tainting this bedroom with an interrogation. I just wasn’t.

  MOC, who didn’t want to be left out, delivered a solid kick that made me gasp.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked.

  Through gritted teeth, I said, “Go. Downstairs. Now.”

  I dropped onto the edge of the bed, feeling ridiculous having to argue with intrusive strangers while clutching my frilly blue nightgown. I watched my chances of a soothing bath vanish.

  When they finally left, it felt like there was more air in the bedroom. Between Kinsman on the plane and my work at Eastern Shore, I’d had enough human contact. Or conflict. Or demands. I dumped my things on the bed and stood up. “You didn’t have to let them in,” I said.

  “But you might be able to help,” he said.

  That didn’t improve my temper. “How? I don’t know anything I haven’t already shared. You could have told them that. Are they legitimate? Did you check their IDs?”

  His sigh might have been prompted by our unwanted guests or by my stubbornness. I really didn’t care. “They have Marshals Service IDs,” he said. “And they did apologize for the intrusion.”

  “Not to me.” I glanced down at my bare feet. It seemed almost indecent to entertain agents of our federal government in bare feet, but putting on shoes was too hard right now. I put them on in the morning when I had to, and took them off when I got home. That was enough. I gestured toward the door, “Lead on,” I said. I let him go first, and heard him offer them coffee as I followed him down the stairs.

  One of the agents was in “my chair” and the other seemed to be taking up most of the couch, which didn’t seem very friendly to me, given that they were invading my house. I settled for Andre’s chair. He invited them in, he could shove the couch-hog aside. I held out my hand to the woman who’d had the temerity to barge into my bedroom.

  “Your credentials.”

  For a moment, I thought she was going to refuse, that showing them to the man of the house should have been enough. Then she pulled out the folder and gave it to me. Her name was Alice Harmon and yes, it appeared that she did work for the Marshals Service. Of course, I didn’t know how easy it was to fake such documents. I gave it back and got his. Frederick Olson. Alice and Fred sounded so small-town and old fashioned. Harmon and Olson like a law firm.

  “So why are you here?” I asked.

  “We already told your—”

  “Don’t do that,” I interrupted. He looked surprised, so I explained. “I have no idea what you told my husband, do I?”

  Gad. Did they think we were living in the nineteen fifties? Even back then, when Andre would have been the anointed head of the household and I was just the little woman, I still wouldn’t have known what they’d told Andre.

  The woman. Alice. Maybe thinking a softer, gentler touch was called for, said, “We need to speak with you about Chari
ty Kinsman.”

  I waited for a question. My silence seemed to puzzle her, which was odd, because she was a professional with a government agency and I a mere consultant. But silence was a powerful thing, and I didn’t surrender mine easily.

  Finally, she said, “About what Charity has told you regarding her situation, and about where she has gone.”

  What was it with these people? Why did everyone think I was Charity’s confidant and knew where she’d gone?

  “The only thing I know about her situation is that she was moving into the cottage across the street and fixing up for herself and her baby. That she’s having a girl and plans to name her Amaryllis and call her Amy. That the baby’s father picked the name.”

  I stopped because that really was all I knew.

  “You never met Jessica Whitlow?”

  “I was never introduced to Jessica Whitlow. I did meet someone who may have been Jessica Whitlow in the driveway when she helped Charity and me get a crib off the roof of my car.”

  “Did Charity tell you anything about her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see Jessica at the cottage?”

  I couldn’t see how this would help, but I said, “Besides her helping with the crib? From my window, I saw the woman I now believe is Charity Kinsman standing in her driveway appearing to be having an argument with a taller blonde woman. There was a black Honda parked in the driveway.”

  “What were they arguing about?” the man asked.

  Cripes, I was missing sleep for this? I decided to go with silence again. Then, figuring a demonstration was best, I said, “Come with me.”

  I led them back upstairs to the big window in the hall that looked down over our rolling lawn to the street. I pointed at the window. “I saw them from here. Obviously, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Only that the woman who had introduced herself as Jessica, who I now believe is Charity, seemed angry.”

  I went back downstairs. My feet hurt. My back ached from the airplane seats.

  In the living room, we took our places again as Andre came in with coffee and a plate of cookies that Rosie must have brought. I had the mean thought that I didn’t want to waste her good food on these two. Coffee was handed around, and then the man said, “Did Charity tell you about her situation?”

  “She was very careful not to reveal anything about herself, other than what I’ve already told you about her and the baby.”

  I looked at Andre, unsure whether I should tell them about the note and the little box of IDs.

  He nodded.

  “When I came back from my doctor’s appointment two days ago, there was a note on the floor of the hall that had been pushed under the door.”

  “We need the note,” Alice said.

  “We have it. The state police,” Andre said. “Part of our homicide investigation. We also have the box mentioned in the note and its contents. I can give you photos, or if you want to come to the crime lab, we can show you the actual items.”

  “We need it all,” the man said.

  Now Andre was also being quiet.

  This was getting them nowhere and I needed sleep if I was going to function in the morning. A functioning brain is what they pay me the big bucks for.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we don’t have anything else for you. I have to sleep. I have a meeting down in Massachusetts in the morning.”

  Neither of them appeared to have heard me.

  “Why were you searching Charity’s name on the internet last night?” the man said.

  “Because I was worried about her. And curious about who she was and why she was here.”

  “Are you aware that other people are also looking for her?”

  I considered that. “Not aware, as in having any knowledge of her situation, but my instincts and experience suggested she was in trouble, and I was worried about a woman as pregnant as she is on her own. I wondered if she, or she and Jessica, had a back-up plan for her. I hoped they did. I don’t really know what I was looking for. Maybe just some clues about what her story was. Is.”

  “You may have tipped off some very bad people about her whereabouts,” the man said unpleasantly.

  I looked at Andre again. “Look,” I said. “Don’t try and guilt me. There were two men in a black SUV looking for her long before I went on the internet, and one of them ended up dead along with Jessica Whitlow right across the street. If there are ill-intentioned people looking for her, they may have already found her. For all I know, they might have taken Charity and stashed her somewhere. But instead of looking for her, you’re here asking me useless questions when I don’t know anything that can help.”

  Talking to them—so expressionless and unresponsive—was like talking to cardboard cutouts instead of humans. Did they seriously think I knew anything that could be useful, based on a few brief encounters?

  Unmoved, the man reached into an inside pocket of his jacket, crossed the room, and tossed a photograph in my lap. Tossing it? Seriously? Their behavior didn’t make sense. It was almost as if they were trying to act the part of tough government agents.

  Without touching it, I looked down. It was the same picture Malcolm Kinsman had showed me this morning on the plane.

  “Do you know who these two men are?”

  I nodded.

  Andre gave me a funny look. Didn’t he remember me telling him the story of the annoying man on the plane? “You should look at this,” I told him. He picked up the photo.

  Now Fred, pinch-faced and zeroed in on me, was the one who waited. He looked like he was springing a “gotcha!” though I didn’t yet have any idea what he’d got.

  “Charity’s husband, David Peckham,” I said. “I learned it from my internet search after I found a picture of him in the cottage.”

  Fred nodded. “And the other man?”

  “Charity’s twin brother, Malcolm Kinsman.”

  He hadn’t expected me to know the second man, I realized, as he sprang out of his chair and leaned right into my face. “How the hell do you know about Malcolm Kinsman?”

  Sixteen

  Andre got him out of my face with two words and an ungentle hand on his shoulder. His “Sit down,” was not a request, it was a command. There were paragraphs about how they’d misread the situation in those two words.

  Maybe they hadn’t done their homework and didn’t know who they were dealing with. Maybe his accommodating invitation to come in and how he’d gently pushed me to cooperate had misled them, as had his polite offer of coffee. Maybe they had no manners or social proprioception and thought nothing of bullying a pregnant woman in her own home.

  The guy sat.

  “Now it’s your turn to answer some questions,” Andre said. “We’ve had enough bullying about Charity Kinsman’s situation, first from a Boston detective who claimed to be working for the government, and now from you two. My wife has told you what she knows. It’s time we got some background on the situation. Who is Charity Kinsman, why is the Marshals Service involved, and who, besides you, is looking for her?”

  The woman, Alice, got as far as, “We can’t…” before Andre held up a hand.

  “We’ve got two homicides connected to Charity Kinsman, one body found in her driveway, the other in her house, so don’t play the ‘government secrets’ card with me. Your information is critical to our investigation.”

  Alice said, “It’s confidential and…”

  She looked at Fred, and there was something in that look. Maybe he was her boss and she was looking for direction, but I thought it was something else, though I didn’t know what. Maybe the real detective in the room had some thoughts.

  Andre looked at the two of them. “We’ve been trying to get information about Jessica Whitlow from the Marshals Service and getting stonewalled. You’re here. You can share information with us, or you can go.”

  “But…” Fred began.

  “No buts.”

  Neither of them volunteered anything.

 
“We’re all in the business of protecting people,” Andre said. “It’s not a one-way street.”

  They sat there like two lumps.

  Andre stood. “This is a waste of time. I’ll show you out.”

  I stood, too. “And I’m going to bed. I’d say good luck, because I believe Charity needs some luck, but your attitude and approach couldn’t possibly help anyone.”

  Fred started to say something about Malcolm Kinsman, but it was a question, not an answer. I went upstairs.

  I heard the door shut and a car start. Then Andre’s feet on the stairs. The thump and creak reminded me that we still needed to get them carpeted before MOC arrived. Old houses have many charms, but creaky stairs are not among them.

  He was shaking his head as he came into the bedroom. “I shouldn’t be surprised at that, yet I am. There’s something off about those two.”

  “And you’re the cool-headed professional,” I said from my cocoon in the covers. “I’m just the little woman.”

  “Little?” he said.

  I started to giggle, which was something I rarely did, especially when I was tired and annoyed. But it was funny. “Little whale,” I said. “Whale with sore feet and a backache.”

  “Poor whale.”

  “So you’ll check them out, right? See if there really are two Marshals Service agents named Alice and Fred?”

  “I will.”

  He undressed and got into bed, snuggling against me.

  Watching Andre undress is delicious. I’m sometimes almost overcome by the urge to throw open the window and yell to the world at large, “And he’s mine. All mine.” I am good at repressing such idiotic impulses, though.

  “You okay?” he said. “Sure you should be driving to Massachusetts tomorrow?”