“Valri’s overworked and underpaid. It’ll take more than coffee,” Kenzie told him as they left the back room, headed for the computer lab. “You have any extra money on you?”
The sound of his responding throaty laugh shimmied up and down her spine.
Chapter 12
Valri looked only mildly surprised when she saw Hunter and her cousin coming into the computer lab.
“I have got to get them to put up a no-trespassing sign on the door,” Valri murmured almost more to herself than to them.
“This won’t take long,” Hunter promised her, then, to sweeten the deal, he added, “We’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”
“You already were out of my hair, remember?” Valri pointed out.
“This time for sure,” Kenzie told her cousin, adding weight to Hunter’s promise. “We just need a little bit more help.”
“‘Said Noah to his sons after they brought in all the lumber to build the ark,’” Valri quipped. She sighed, as if resigned to the situation. “Go ahead. Tell me what you need.”
As succinctly as possible, Hunter told her of the roadblock their investigation had encountered. The photographs were fakes, as were the profiles. Someone, presumably the same person, was behind creating all of them. Was there a way to find out who that was?
Valri pressed her lips together as she shook her head. “Sorry, not possible,” she told the two detectives at her desk.
Kenzie felt the same sense of letdown she’d experienced at six when she’d discovered that there was no Santa Claus.
“I thought you specialized in the impossible,” she said to her cousin.
“The impossible, yes,” Valri replied. “This, however, would take sorcery, and computer technology doesn’t cover black magic,” she told them. Kenzie could see that Valri was just as frustrated as they were. “I’m really sorry, but my energies are better spent focusing on things I can do. So unless you have a fingerprint or some trace of DNA we could use as a first step, I’m afraid I can’t help you with this.”
Resigned, Hunter nodded. “Thanks for trying,” he told her.
“Talk to the crime scene investigators,” Valri suggested as her cousin and the cold case detective began to leave the lab. “They might have dug up something when they found the victim’s head and hands.”
“Yeah,” Kenzie answered unhappily. “Mud. They dug up mud. And, more than likely, the killer probably wore gloves when he handled the body parts before he buried them.”
Valri was already back to typing on her keyboard. “Well, you know where to find me if something does turn up.” She nodded at her desktop as she typed. “Chained to my computer.”
* * *
“I was really hoping that Valri could come up with something,” Kenzie said as they went back to her floor together.
Hunter was already searching for another avenue to steer the investigation.
“Well, like she said, she can’t just conjure up answers for us,” he told Kenzie. “Maybe we’ll have better luck trying to find and talk to Anthony Pagliotti’s family or friends.”
Just then, Kenzie’s phone began to vibrate. It had to be angled inside her pocket in an odd way because her whole pocket began to move.
“Is that your phone,” Hunter asked, nodding at her side, “or are you just excited by my idea?”
“Don’t get carried away,” Kenzie told him sharply as she took out her phone. Swiping it open, she said, “Cavanaugh.” The moment she responded, the person on the other end began talking. Loudly.
“Wait, slow down. I can’t understand what you’re saying.” Kenzie saw Hunter raise an eyebrow as if to silently ask her who was on the other end of the line. The next word out of her mouth, he had his answer. “Connie, please, stop crying. We’ll be right there.” Closing her phone, she looked up at Brannigan. “That was Connie Kurtz.”
“I figured that part out,” he answered drolly. “Why is she crying and why do we need to be right there?” he asked.
“It seems that Connie just went to her father’s bank to notify them of her father’s death,” Kenzie told him. “They in turn notified her that he had closed out his accounts over two weeks ago.”
“Accounts?” Hunter questioned. Things began to fall into place. “He had more than one?”
“Just a checking account and a regular savings account,” Kenzie answered. “And before you ask, the accounts weren’t anything overwhelming. They just represented a lifetime of frugality.”
“Could the bank have made some kind of a mistake about his accounts being closed out?” Hunter asked her. “Confused them with someone else’s accounts?”
Connie had provided an answer to that question in her rather disjointed narrative. “Connie did say that her father had been banking at the same bank for the last thirty years. They knew him there. There was no mistake made,” she concluded.
Resigned, the pair made a U-turn just in front of the squad room and headed back on the elevator. Again.
“I wonder if the elevator gives out frequent flier miles,” Hunter cracked as they got into the elevator car and pressed for the first floor.
“If it doesn’t, considering all the time we’ve spent riding up and down on it in the last couple of days, it should,” she commented.
* * *
“Was he alone?” Hunter asked her out of the blue as they got back into Kenzie’s vehicle.
She started up the car and then looked at Brannigan, confused.
“Was who alone?” she asked.
“Kurtz. The victim,” Hunter specified. “Was he alone when he made his bank withdrawal?”
She eased into the flow of traffic, narrowly avoiding one car that had come flying into their lane, then zipped into the next lane at the last moment. People were still going to work at this hour and this driver was apparently late.
Swallowing a curse, Kenzie said, “I have no idea. Why? What are you getting at?”
“Maybe Kurtz’s mystery woman accompanied him. Or hung around outside, waiting for him to close out his accounts,” Hunter said.
The light was changing to red. Kenzie gunned her way through it, making it through the intersection by just a hair.
Glancing at Hunter, she smiled. “You’re thinking surveillance camera,” she suddenly realized.
Hunter nodded, hopeful. “That would make life a lot easier for Valri. She might be able to actually match a face to someone in the facial recognition database.”
“You’re assuming that this woman’s face is actually in some database,” Kenzie said.
He didn’t bother to deny it. “That I am.”
“That’s a stretch, Brannigan,” she told him.
He chose to see it differently. “It’s called taking a leap of faith. Sometimes in our business, that’s about all we have to hang on to—faith.”
And that way, she thought, led to disappointment. “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she told him. “Maybe Mr. Kurtz went alone to make the withdrawal.”
“If you were this mystery femme fatale, would you trust your mark enough to send him off on his own to get your future nest egg?” Hunter asked.
“Femme fatale?” she questioned.
He shrugged. “I was watching an old film festival last weekend,” he told her.
“Well, to answer your question, I wouldn’t, but then I’ve been told that I’m not the average woman,” Kenzie answered.
He considered the description an apt one. There was nothing average about the vivacious detective. “No, that you are not,” he agreed.
Just for the tiniest second Kenzie felt as if there was some sort of veiled communication going on between Brannigan and her. The next second, she discarded the thought. This was not the time to allow her imagination to run wild, she thought.
“But let’s just say for the sake of argu
ment that some things are just universal—like greed. At the very least, we can get the bank’s security tech to look through that day’s surveillance tape for us.” Hunter looked around at the passing scenery and realized that he had no idea where they were headed. “Not that I mind going on a joy ride with you, but just where are we going?”
“To meet Connie at her house. She’s about fifteen minutes away from the bank where her father usually conducted his transactions,” she said, once again flying through another intersection as the light began to turn red.
That brought up another matter. Hunter realized that he didn’t know all that much about the victim. “Was he retired?”
“From what I found out, he was planning to be by the end of the year,” she answered.
“Retired from what?”
“From engineering,” she said. And then she frowned. “You would think an engineer would be more careful than that.”
Hunter laughed dryly. “A high IQ has nothing to do with matters of the heart—or knowing how to cope with loneliness, for that matter,” he told her. “From what you told me about your friend’s father, he was a one-woman man. When he lost that woman, he kind of got lost himself.” Hunter sighed as he looked straight ahead. “Lost men do desperate, stupid things.”
Something in his voice caught her attention. So much so that she slowed down at the next intersection and for once didn’t fly through a changing light.
“Are you speaking from experience?” she asked.
He frowned at the woman next to him. “Why do you do that?”
Kenzie had no idea what he was talking about. “Do what?”
She was playing dumb, Hunter thought. She knew damn well what he meant.
But to move things along, he explained, “Turn everything I say into some sort of indictment against me?”
“I don’t do that,” Kenzie protested a little too quickly and heatedly.
“Yeah, you do,” was all he said and for once, the gregarious detective allowed silence to mushroom through the interior of the vehicle.
* * *
Just before they pulled up in front of Connie Kurtz’s house, Kenzie made an impulsive decision and parked at the curb two houses away.
Pulling up the hand brake, she forced herself to look at Hunter. The words felt like cotton in her mouth, but she pushed them out.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “You have a reputation and some of the things you say just remind me of—”
“Of?” he asked, waiting for her to complete her sentence.
Kenzie took a breath. At the last second, she lost her nerve and didn’t say what she’d intended. Instead, she said, “Of the kind of guy who doesn’t play by the rules and who just thinks that the world revolves around him.”
Hunter looked at her for a long moment. He made a calculated guess. “That wasn’t what you were going to say, was it?”
Her back went up. “So now you’re a mind reader?” she accused, her eyes flashing.
He made a mental note to talk with Finn or Murdoch about Kenzie’s former engagement the first chance he got. All he knew was that she’d been engaged—and then she wasn’t.
“Let’s just go in there and see if we can find out something we can work with from Kurtz’s daughter,” Hunter said.
Not waiting for Kenzie to pull her car up into Connie’s driveway, he got out and started to walk to the woman’s front door.
Kenzie pulled her car up into her former friend’s driveway, getting there at the same time and coming within a hairbreadth of clipping her temporary partner in the leg.
He jumped back out of the way. “Hey!”
Getting out, Kenzie slammed the driver’s side door and then hurried to catch up. “You’re supposed to wait for me,” she shouted at him.
To which he rejoined, “You’re supposed to make me want to wait for you, not run for my life to keep from becoming a hood ornament.”
Kenzie was about to make a scathing retort when the front door flew open. It was obvious that Connie had been standing there, waiting for them.
The victim’s daughter didn’t even bother with a greeting.
“All of it,” Connie cried. “She took all of it. How could my father have been so blind? It’s like I never even knew him,” she lamented.
The next moment, Connie dissolved into tears, draping her arms around the first available person in front of her, which right now turned out to be Hunter.
Holding her for a moment, Hunter told the grieving daughter, “If it’s any comfort to you, he probably didn’t even know himself. Grief makes people do strange, impulsive things just to be able to feel like their old selves again. Your dad missed your mother, missed having a partner to love and to care about him. It sounds like this woman took advantage of that.”
Fresh tears came to Connie’s eyes as she nodded her agreement with his assessment. “I should have been there. Why didn’t he come to me? Why did he turn away like that?” she cried.
Very carefully, Hunter turned her around and coaxed her back into the house. He kept his arm comfortingly around the sobbing woman.
“Sometimes strangers are easier to talk to than family members or friends. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t his fault,” Hunter told her. “It just was.”
Observing him with her old college friend, Kenzie kept quiet. It was obvious that what he was saying was comforting to Connie. It seemed to be helping her regain her composure and to put a small distance between herself and the grief and shock she was experiencing.
Swallowing her tears, Connie nodded. “I guess you’re right.”
“Why don’t you sit down for a second,” Hunter told her, leading her to the sofa. “Pull yourself together.” Once she sat down, he sat down next to her, taking her hand in his in a further act of comfort. “This is going to keep hitting you in waves,” he told her. “You think you’ve got it under control and then suddenly, bam, there it is again, washing right over you like an unexpected huge tidal wave, sucking away your very air. But it’ll get better,” he told her.
Connie looked at him with huge, watery eyes. “Will it?”
He acted totally convinced of what he was saying. “Given time, it will. You just have to give yourself permission to hurt at first,” he said.
She nodded like a child who was promising to do better.
Thinking that she would never get a better opportunity to ask than now, Kenzie inserted herself into the conversation. “Connie, when you called me, you said something about your father closing out his accounts,” Kenzie prompted.
Connie pressed her lips together. “Every last penny,” she whispered. “When I called the bank, I never expected to hear anything like that.”
“Nobody does,” Hunter assured her comfortingly.
Connie wiped the back of her hand across her wet cheeks as she sniffled. Taking out his handkerchief, Hunter leaned over and gave it to the sobbing woman without a word.
“Thank you,” Connie murmured.
Kenzie felt almost single-mindedly cruel, trying to urge the conversation along in the right direction. But she felt that they were on the clock. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the killer was even now looking for another victim to rob and kill.
“Could you tell us the name of the bank and where it’s located?” Kenzie pressed. “We’d like to question the bank president.”
Connie took a deep breath, as if she was struggling to collect her thoughts.
“No hurry, Ms. Kurtz,” Hunter told her. “Take your time.”
Responding to Hunter’s words and his tone, Connie seemed to pull herself together right in front of their eyes.
“It’s First Interstate National,” she told him. “Dad does—did,” she corrected painfully, her voice nearly cracking, “all his banking at the branch on Alton and Yale,” she told them. After taking in another shaky
breath, she offered, “I can come with you.”
“No, we’ll take it from here,” Kenzie assured her. “You’ve been more than helpful. You need to try to pull yourself together.”
“Do you have someone staying with you the way Kenzie suggested?” Hunter asked.
Kenzie looked at him in surprise. The fact that he said it was her idea stunned her.
Connie nodded. “My cousin Rachel. She just stepped out to get some lunch for us when I made that phone call to the bank.”
As if on cue, a petite redheaded woman walked into the house, carrying a large pizza box.
“Connie?” she asked quizzically. Her attention was focused on the two people who hadn’t been there when she had gone out.
“We were just leaving,” Hunter told the redhead. “I’d say you came just in time,” he added, nodding at the pizza box in her hands. “Looks like it’s hot. You’d better put it down before your fingers start to feel the heat,” he told her.
Connie’s cousin stared at the good-looking man leaving the premises. She looked like a woman whose mouth was watering.
“I will,” she said. Belatedly, she put the box on the coffee table, still staring after the departing stranger.
Her reaction was not lost on Kenzie as she followed in Hunter’s wake. He really did need to beat them off with a stick, she thought.
Chapter 13
Kenzie searched for a way to give Hunter a compliment. She wanted to be fair—he’d been kind to the bereaved woman and that seemed to comfort her—but she didn’t want what she said going to his head. In her opinion, the man’s ego was already large enough.
“What you said back there to Connie,” Kenzie began, and then paused, trying to find the right words.
Hunter suppressed a sigh as he got into the car. There was undoubtedly a lecture coming on. “What’d I do wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, starting up the vehicle. It rumbled to life. She could feel his eyes on her, probably waiting for her to say “but.” She glanced in his direction before pulling out. “That’s just it. You were very nice and understanding.”
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