He nodded. “Good call,” he told Kenzie. And then he smiled to himself.
She caught his expression out of the corner of her eye. “What?”
“You realize that we seem to be getting along,” Hunter pointed out.
Kenzie blew out a breath. “It’ll pass,” she responded.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Hunter agreed. And then he smiled again. “But I have to say that it’s nice while it lasts.”
Kenzie found herself shaking her head as she made a left turn. “You know, I really don’t know what to make of you, Brannigan.”
“Why do you have to try to make anything at all out of me?” he asked.
“Because if I’m not careful, I’ll get caught with my guard down, and I don’t like being caught with my guard down,” she answered.
“Tell you what,” he proposed. “Why don’t we focus on finding out who killed your friend’s father and why they killed him so we can figure out what sort of crazy person we have on our hands right now. Once we do that, then we can sort out the small stuff like what to make of me,” Hunter told her. “At least you know that I’m not going to be hacking anyone to pieces, so that should be a comfort to you.”
“Yes, I suppose that there’s that,” she agreed. Pausing, she suddenly said, “That was a nice catch back there.” She looked at Hunter. “How did you know she was going to faint?”
“I didn’t,” he admitted. “I just have really quick reflexes,” he told her. And then he grinned. “See, aren’t you glad you brought me along?”
“Right now, the jury’s still out on that,” she informed him glibly. “And even if it wasn’t, I’d say that the word glad is really stretching the sentiment a bit.”
“Wow, tough crowd,” Hunter commented.
“You better believe it,” Kenzie responded.
A couple of minutes later, Kenzie pulled up in the driveway of the single-story stucco house where, until recently, John Kurtz had lived his life.
Putting the vehicle into Park, she pulled up the hand brake and then looked over toward the detective beside her.
“Okay, you ready to look for a needle in a haystack, Brannigan?” she asked.
“More than ready,” he answered, getting out of the car.
He just hoped it wasn’t going to turn out to be a wild-goose chase.
Chapter 8
John Kurtz’s house was close to fifty years old and was one of the original houses in the second development that was built when Aurora was still only a vague idea in the minds of the family who were the founders of the city. Since then, the boundaries of Aurora had grown and spread out, but no one would have felt that way if all they saw was the small development where John Kurtz had lived.
The faded light gray stucco was badly in need of not just a fresh coat or two of paint but some serious repairs, as well. There were large chips visible along one of the lower edges of the stucco. And when Kenzie looked up at the roof, she was willing to bet that it leaked during the rainy season. Badly. There were more than a few tiles missing from her vantage point and probably more that she couldn’t see.
Hunter noticed the pensive look on Kenzie’s face and guessed what was at the center of it.
“Doesn’t exactly look like a cozy cottage, does it?” he asked.
“It probably was once,” Kenzie answered, trying to picture it when the house was new.
Taking out the key that Connie had given her, Kenzie put it into the lock and turned it.
“He’s not home.”
Kenzie and Hunter turned around to see a thin, wiry older man of medium height wearing jeans that sagged against his body and a plaid shirt. The man was glaring at them from beneath wispy gray eyebrows that resembled angry caterpillars engaged in battle.
He looked at them as if he thought they were intruders and he had taken it upon himself to foil a robbery attempt.
Hunter immediately engaged the man he took to be a self-appointed neighborhood watchman. “Have you seen anyone suspicious hanging around?”
“I seen you two. Now back off or I’ll call the police.” He pulled out a flip phone from his pocket and held it up like a cross meant to ward off vampires. “My grandson gave me this and I know how to use it. I can have the police department here faster than you can blink. The police chief’s a personal friend of mine,” the man boasted.
Kenzie played along and looked impressed. “Really?”
“Yeah, ‘really,’” the man shot back.
“You know my uncle?” Kenzie asked, keeping a straight face.
The old man’s bravado faded a shade or two. “Um, yeah, sure. Who are you again?” the man asked. He stepped forward and squinted at their faces to get a better look at them.
“I’m Detective Cavanaugh and this is Detective Brannigan,” Kenzie told him. They both held up their shields and IDs for the man’s benefit.
The neighbor studied both carefully, then stepped back.
“Detectives, huh?” His protective, defensive ardor faded a little more. But curiosity immediately took over. “You here about John? He’s missing, you know. His daughter’s been looking for him.”
“Yes, we know,” Kenzie answered. “Would you know where he might have gone, Mr...?” Kenzie’s voice trailed off as she looked at the man, waiting for him to fill in the blank.
The man raised his head proudly, introducing himself. “McGinty. Franklin McGinty,” he said, leaning over and shaking each of their hands in turn. The leathery hand lingered over Kenzie’s a shade longer than it had with Hunter’s. “His daughter asked me the same question. I told her I didn’t know.”
Hunter looked at McGinty and made a calculated guess. “But you do know, don’t you, Mr. McGinty?”
Thin shoulders moved up and then fell in a vague shrug. “Not exactly. But if I was to guess—and I didn’t want to tell his daughter this because fathers don’t admit these things to their daughters—” he confided to the pair in a lowered voice, “but if I was to guess,” McGinty repeated, “I’d guess that he went off with that lady friend of his.”
Instantly alert, Kenzie and Hunter exchanged looks. Was this a break, or just the idle speculations of an old man with too much time on his hands?
“What lady friend?” she asked McGinty.
“The one I seen coming here a couple of times about three weeks ago.” McGinty pressed his lips together, as if he realized that he was being judgmental, but it was his civic duty to tell these detectives everything. “If you ask me, she seemed like she was too young for him. Yes, sir, I’d say that old John was out of his league with that one.” He leaned in closer again. “But men do foolish things when they lose the love of their lives after all those years.”
Having unlocked the door, Kenzie opened it farther and gestured for McGinty to come inside with them.
“You’re talking about his wife, Edith, aren’t you?” she asked.
McGinty nodded, pleased that she knew the woman’s name. “That I am. Fine lady, Edith,” he pronounced. “John just kind of fell apart when she died. He kept on hoping right until the very end that she was going to come around. You know, recover,” he confided. “But she didn’t,” McGinty told them sadly. “We all figured he’d be one of those people who died right after they lost their partner. But old John, I guess he turned out to be too darn ornery to die.”
“We?” Hunter questioned, picking up on the word the other man had used. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“The people in the neighborhood,” McGinty said. “What’s left of them.” The man went into another narrative. “This was a tight neighborhood once upon a time. But people sold their houses and moved away. Or they died. Either way, there’s only a few of us old originals left.” His voice trailed off for a moment.
“Could you describe this woman?” Kenzie asked.
“I only seen her from across the s
treet a couple of times, and my eyes, they’re not what they used to be,” McGinty admitted. And then he launched into a detailed description. “But she was a blonde with what they used to call an hourglass figure.” He paused to smile to himself. “She was a little taller than John, but that’s ’cause she wore those fancy high heels. And she wasn’t real friendly either,” McGinty added.
“What makes you say that?” Hunter asked, curious what had prompted that opinion.
“Well, I yelled ‘hi’ to her when I saw her, but she didn’t say anything back.” He frowned. “Just acted like she didn’t even hear me, and I know she did. I’m not the shy, retiring type, you know?”
No, he certainly wasn’t, Kenzie thought. “What was Mr. Kurtz like around her?” she asked the talkative neighbor.
“Funny you should ask that,” McGinty commented. “John acted like someone had put a spell on him. You know, kinda like a teenager or something. But like I said, I only saw her a couple of times. For all I know, he didn’t go off with her at all. But I never seen anyone else here, so my final guess is that he did,” McGinty concluded proudly, looking at the detectives to see if the pair went along with his opinion.
“Well, you’ve been a tremendous help, Mr. McGinty,” Kenzie said, subtly ushering the man toward the door. “If you think of anything else, anything at all,” she emphasized, “please don’t hesitate to call.” She took a card out of her pocket and handed it to the neighbor. “Anything at all,” she repeated.
The old man squinted at the writing on the card, trying to get the letters into focus.
“I’ll be sure to do that.” He slipped the card into his breast pocket, then continued on his way toward the door. “I sure hope that old John didn’t just become a cliché.”
“How’s that again?” Hunter asked, unclear as to what McGinty was saying.
“You know that old saying, Detective.” McGinty paused dramatically, then said, “‘There’s no fool like an old fool.’ Let me know if you find John,” McGinty said, crossing the threshold.
Hunter could see by her expression that Kenzie was debating telling the man the truth about his missing neighbor.
“I promise that we’ll let you know,” Hunter called after the departing figure, speaking up before Kenzie could.
“I’ll just close the door behind me, Detectives,” McGinty volunteered.
“Thanks,” Hunter replied, still raising his voice to be heard. He turned toward Kenzie once the door was closed. “You were going to tell him, weren’t you?”
“Just as a warning,” she responded. “There might be someone out there preying on defenseless old men who live in the area.”
Hunter grinned. “Why, Detective Cavanaugh, is that a conclusion you just jumped to?” he asked. “I thought that was against your religion.”
She frowned. It looked as if their truce was over. “The only thing ‘against my religion’ is putting up with smart-mouthed detectives.” She glared at him pointedly before beginning to rifle through the drawers of Kurtz’s desk.
“Then I guess we’re both out of luck, Detective, aren’t we?” Hunter asked her, his grin settling into a smile.
“Not necessarily,” Kenzie answered. “Despite, according to Connie, her father’s total resistance when it came to looking for female companionship, Mr. Kurtz was obviously ‘keeping company’ with a member of the opposite sex, as they used to say.”
“Wonder if that ‘company’ was what caused him to lose his head,” Hunter mused.
Kenzie winced. “Do me a favor. Try not to be so graphic, please.”
“Sorry, just trying to lighten up what has all the markings of a very dark situation,” he told her.
Kenzie nodded absently as she tried to think. “If you were a lonely widower, how would you go about finding a potential romantic partner?”
As she continued searching through a desk full of papers, Kenzie threw the question out on the floor, not really expecting Hunter to answer. Certainly not expecting him to laugh at her.
But he did.
Hunter looked at her in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”
She knew where he was going with this, but in her mind she had already ruled out the internet.
“This is an older man, Brannigan,” she reminded the detective. “Not some kid born attached to a keyboard.”
But Hunter wasn’t buying her dismissal. “Doesn’t matter,” he told her as he rifled through cabinet drawers in the kitchen. There seemed to be endless clippings shoved into one drawer. The edges were all curling and turning a darker color. “You heard McGinty. He was proud of the fact that he knew how to use his cell phone.”
“Maybe,” Kenzie allowed. “But he’s probably an exception to the rule. Connie told me that her father absolutely hated technology. He wasn’t patient enough to pick it up.”
“Maybe he developed patience,” Hunter speculated. “Maybe he got so bored with feeling empty that he took a class so he could learn how to open up ‘the wonderful world of the internet.’ If not a class, maybe a book. There are hundreds of illustrated how-to books to show even someone who can’t read how to find their way around a computer and, consequently, eventually stumble their way onto the internet. From there it’s only a short hop, skip and a jump away from finding dating sites.”
Kenzie shook her head, still resisting the idea. Connie had said that her father was dedicated to the memory of his late wife. They had fought about her even suggesting that he go onto a dating site. “I don’t think that—”
But Hunter was certain that he was right about this. “There are dating sites for all ages, all backgrounds these days. Hell, there’s probably a dating site that helps lonely dolphins swimming in Hawaii to connect. There’s certainly a site designed to help the discerning over-seventies club connect.”
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“This.”
She turned around from the papers she was sifting through and saw that he was holding out a page that had been carefully printed out. It was a profile page that had the words Second Time Around written across the top of it. She grabbed the paper from him.
“You might have led with that,” she told him, taking the page from him.
There was a glimmer of mischief in his eyes. “What’s the fun in that?”
She looked at the man, exasperated. Was everything just a huge game to him? Didn’t the man have any principles?
“We’re not here to have fun, Brannigan,” she told him. “We’re here to solve a murder, possibly more than just one.”
“Some of us consider that to be fun,” Hunter told her.
She looked at the URL across the bottom of the page that Hunter had discovered and typed that into her phone. A webpage popped up.
“Son of a gun, there it is. Now all we have to figure out is whose profile he accessed—or who accessed his profile,” she added.
“I’d say that the first order of business is to see if Kurtz had a computer hidden away somewhere in the house,” Hunter told her.
A quick search of the orderly house showed that there was no desktop computer.
Disappointed when they came up empty, Kenzie sighed, “Nothing.”
Hunter looked at her. “Who says he had to have a desktop computer?”
It just stood to reason to her. “If the man was going to spend time typing, he’d need a desktop with a large screen.”
Hunter shook his head. “Not if the old boy wanted to keep this ‘vice’ of his hidden in case his daughter suddenly popped over. Think about it. If she saw a desktop, that would have forced him to admit that she was right.”
He’d forgotten one key piece of information, Kenzie thought. “But John and his daughter were estranged, remember?”
Hunter discarded the argument. “Estranged people come around all the time,” he told her. He could have pointed
out several incidents involving former girlfriends, but he decided it was wiser to focus on her instead. “You always play by the rules, Detective?”
Because she believed in being truthful, she couldn’t say yes.
“Not always,” Kenzie admitted. She felt as if he was talking down to her.
“I’m willing to bet that neither did Connie’s father. See if he’s got a laptop hidden in one of his closets or under his bed.”
Kenzie felt it was a losing battle, but she was nothing if not thorough. She was determined to prove Brannigan wrong.
She didn’t.
There was a laptop under the bed in John’s guest room. Pulling it out, she placed it on top of the bed. “I really hate it when you’re right,” she grumbled.
“Cheer up. I promise to be wrong the next time,” Hunter told her.
He took the laptop into the kitchen, placed it on the table, plugged it in and turned it on. Less than a minute later, a home screen popped up. As did a request to log in.
“Son of a gun, the old boy had a password,” Hunter marveled, impressed despite himself. “Who would have thought it?”
She slanted a glance at Hunter, but he wasn’t rubbing it in when he could have. “I guess he was more devious than his daughter thought.” The other detective began to type, hitting Enter each time. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trying out a few of the obvious passwords,” he answered.
Kenzie frowned. “Do you have any idea how many of them there are?”
“Some astronomical number that’s beyond my ability to count,” he responded. Hunter blew out a breath after the fifth attempt. “This could take forever.”
“It could take you forever,” Kenzie corrected.
Hunter gave her an exasperated look. “But not you,” he guessed.
“No,” she answered glibly, stretching the game out a second longer, “not me.”
Hunter went along with her. He’d accept any port in a storm, he thought. “I take it you’re some kind of computer wizard.”
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