by Alice Sharpe
Tess fitted the key in the lock, and they both held their breaths as she turned it.
“No go,” she said, but Ryan had to try it for himself and it was a measure of how fond she was growing of him that she allowed him to do so without much irritation. Maybe he’d have a magic cop touch or his superior strength would turn the trick!
But it didn’t, and in the end, they had to accept that X-Cell wasn’t the right place.
“Might as well try Stanley’s. You know where Hawthorne Street is?”
He sent her a dry look that reminded her he’d not only grown up in New Harbor, he was a policeman here and he knew damn near every street.
They finally spotted a slightly lopsided and much rusted sign announcing Stanley’s Storage pounded into the ground at the mouth of a narrow gravel road. The road led between an old bowling alley on one side and an even older truck stop on the other. The muddy road eventually ended in a muddy turnaround in front of an aluminum building with twenty separate outside doors. A big mud-spattered truck hooked up to a flatbed trailer occupied a good deal of the parking lot. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, nor was there an office or a gate. Stanley’s Storage appeared old, decrepit, standing on one leg, so to speak. Tess knew the moment she saw it that it was exactly the kind of place Katie would choose in which to secrete away the artifacts of her old life while she created a new one.
“I hate to state the obvious, but there aren’t 119 units here,” Ryan said.
What they found were exactly twenty units with the numbers starting at one hundred. Katie’s locker, if it was Katie’s locker, was the second to the end.
Ryan drove up to the front of it and parked the car. The rain had stopped and for a moment they both sat looking at the corrugated aluminum door.
“You try it,” Ryan said at last, looking around him as though expecting half a dozen bad guys to be on their tail.
Before Tess could slide out of her seat, Ryan caught her hand. “Don’t get your hopes up too high,” he said.
His gray eyes filled with concern as he squeezed her hand.
Hope for what? That there would be a box of cold hard cash in that garage so they could use it to get to the mastermind of this crime? Or hope there was no money. While that fact alone wouldn’t salvage her father’s reputation, it wouldn’t pound another nail in his coffin, either. Tess shuddered at the metaphor that had leaped to mind.
The key fit the lock and the lock turned.
Tess took a deep breath.
Ryan had joined her and now rolled up the door.
The room was packed floor-to-ceiling with boxes so close together they presented a unified wall of cardboard seamed with the tiniest of cracks. The impressive stack began about a foot inside the door and continued on forever, or at least it seemed they did.
“Wow,” Ryan said, his voice hushed. “There must be hundreds of boxes in this place.”
“We’ll never get through them all in time,” Tess said, glancing at her watch. It was after two o’clock.
Ryan wiggled his fingers in a slight gap and tried to pull out one of the boxes in the middle, but the fit was too tight and it wouldn’t budge.
A loud growling noise caught both their attention at once, and they turned in tandem to see a backhoe crawling along the road from an area behind the building in which they stood. It was carrying a small metal container like those used on container ships.
The backhoe driver was a ruddy man wearing a blue windbreaker and a baseball cap sporting a tractor logo. Grayish hair curled around his cherubic face and damn if his eyes didn’t twinkle. He stopped the big piece of machinery in front of Ryan and Tess and turned off the engine. Leaning forward, he said, “Where have you been, young lady? I was getting worried about you. So was Doris. Oh, my gosh, look at you. Are you okay?”
“I was in an accident,” Tess said. She fell back on her standby and added, “It left me a little rattled. I don’t always remember things.”
The man’s expression turned sympathetic. “My goodness, Katie, is that a fact?” He looked suspiciously at Ryan and added, “Don’t recall you ever coming with her before, young man.”
“I’m her cousin, Ryan Hill,” Ryan said. “I’ve been helping Katie. She just today recalled this unit so we came out to make sure the rent was paid and everything was dry after all this rain we’ve been having.”
“Don’t worry about that. “We may be a little lackadaisical out this way, but the place is dry and warm, just like advertised and she paid her rent up for four months so there’s plenty of time left. Doris will be all torn up to hear you been hurt, Katie.”
“Doris?”
“Doris! The wife! Hell, you really did get conked on the head, didn’t you?”
“I’m on the mend,” Tess said. “Uh, I know this sounds nuts, but you’re making it sound as if I came here off and on once I rented the unit.”
“All the time,” the man said. He’d finally straightened up and Tess could see an embroidered name over his chest pocket. She was apparently talking to Stanley himself. “Two or three times a week.”
Tess looked at the wall of boxes and said, “What did I do here?”
He shook his head and smiled. “Don’t rightly know. I’m not a spy. Besides, you rolled the door closed after yourself and as you paid the rent it weren’t none of my business. But ever so often you come back to the office where the wife does the books and I loaf around when I’m not moving these containers around and ate some of the wife’s cookies. She thought you were lonely.”
Tears stung Tess’s eyes.
“Now don’t go crying,” Stanley said. “Doris will hit me over the head with a file cabinet if she hears I made you cry.
“It’s okay,” Ryan said as he put a brotherly arm around Tess’s shoulders.
“There’s fresh coffee and peanut butter cookies if you’ve got the time,” Stanley said.
“I can’t today,” Tess said. “I’d like to another time, though.”
“Anytime you want and that’s a fact,” Stanley said warmly. He nodded at Tess, turned the key, and the tractor roared. Tess watched him rumble back the way he’d come with a bittersweet smile on her lips.
Stanley didn’t know it, but he’d just given her a new glimpse of her sister. A woman devastated by loss who apparently looked through her things two or three times a week, a woman who ate cookies with a middle-aged couple and who struck them as lonely.
Once again she silently sent the message: Katie, wake up! But this time it wasn’t sent with desperation. This time it was sent with love.
“We’ve got thirty minutes or so to find fifty thousand dollars,” Ryan said. “I guess we’d better get started.”
Chapter Ten
“The trouble is we have no proof Jim Kinsey is your father’s accomplice.”
Beside him, she stiffened, he supposed at his choice of words. They’d relocked the storage garage after tackling a row or two of boxes and finding nothing but clothes on top and books below.
This was one of those enigmatic things he found so head-shakingly compelling about Tess. On the one hand she would stand there and swear her father had to be innocent, framed. Of course there was no pay-off money, she’d argue, because her father hadn’t done anything except be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
On the other hand, she searched through dozens of books looking for hidden bills—just in case. She was a thoughtful, intelligent woman when it came to anyone but the father and sister she hadn’t known existed a few days before. With them she struggled to believe in their perfection one hundred percent.
Didn’t she understand no one was one hundred percent anything?
“From what you told me about this Kinsey guy, he sounds like a perfect candidate for the arson,” Tess said.
They were parked a few houses down from the big mustard-colored house fronting Kinsey’s place. According to Kinsey’s girlfriend, Kinsey got off work at 3:30 p.m. and it was almost that now.
Ryan said, “If so
, it’s just a matter of breaking him to discover which of our suspects paid him to start the fire.”
“How does my father fit in? Where’s the connection to Lingford or Doyle or Kinsey or Irene or Madeline or Desota…did I miss anyone?”
“I don’t know, but it’s there. What we know for sure is there’s one force attempting to recover fire money from Katie Fields and another force scared of what the new woman in Nelson Lingford’s life might discover, again Katie, only this time masquerading as Caroline.”
Ryan fell silent as he tried to get the facts straight in his head. Over Tess’s shoulder, he watched a man in a tan raincoat and a colorful blue-and-white neck scarf saunter down the opposite sidewalk. The man carried a shopping bag under his arm. He exchanged a greeting with an older woman standing on the porch of a royal-blue house shaking out a rug. Coming the other direction, two boys on bikes sped along the sidewalk, darting into the street to avoid the walker without glancing behind them.
Kids. The neighborhood reminded Ryan of the kind in which he and Peter and his sisters had been raised. A good place for kids and older people, nothing like he’d ever envisioned for himself. So why did he all of a sudden feel a flicker of interest in this domestic scene?
He glanced at Tess, who was deep in thought, and knew why. It was her. Right at the beginning she’d asked him if he believed in love at first sight and because she so obviously thought it was nuts, he’d said no. The truth was he wasn’t sure. Besides, this wasn’t first sight, this was many sights later and all he knew for certain was that it was increasingly difficult to imagine a future without Tess Mays at its hub.
Did he love her? Heaven help him, he thought maybe he did. But he knew she didn’t love him. Not yet….
“Assuming you’re right,” Tess said, “what now? Do we wait for Kinsey to call and arrange a drop-off?”
“I love it when you talk cop,” he said, leaning forward and kissing her.
She looked startled by his kiss, seemed to shrug off its impact like a duck sheds water. “I was wondering. What about the paintings recovered from the fire? Have they been authenticated?”
“You’re thinking someone could have stolen the art and then burned down the house as a ruse? Donovan said that was their first thought, too. The insurance company would love to prove it. But the restoration company in charge of the few remaining paintings confirms their authenticity, plus witnesses outside the family put the entire collection in place as late as the very afternoon before the fire.”
Tess wrinkled her brow as she thought. “She’s a lot stronger than she looks,” Tess said after a moment.
“Who?”
“Madeline Lingford. She moves pretty quickly when the mood hits her.”
“The wheelchair thing is real. The woman was in an accident years ago. Her first husband died in the crash. Despite all the pampered care she receives, she still does a lot for herself and that’s why she’s strong.”
“Did you check her out?”
“Thanks to HIPPA her medical records are sealed. We have no reason to subpoena them. Anyway, let’s concentrate on step one and that’s interviewing Kinsey although I’m wondering if Doyle found out what Kinsey did and decided to cut himself in. Let’s see. We have your dad acting as a torch or lookout, Kinsey with a knowledge of fires and some third party paying for the job. Oh, and then there’s whoever is searching Katie’s apartment.”
Tess nodded woodenly. Despite her banter, Ryan saw fatigue etched on her face. They’d made love half the night and then spent a long day gathering facts and he’d just blatantly mentioned her father’s guilt. She hadn’t protested. She looked bushed. And terrified.
He made a snap decision and started the car. He drove around the block, pulling to a stop at the end of the alley. From this vantage point, he could see the shiny black SUV parked kitty-corner on the cement slab.
“And that’s where Kinsey put his first fifty grand,” Ryan said. “In that car. Look at the chrome. Well, at least we know he’s home. I guess he left work early.” Ryan glanced at Katie’s cell phone resting on the counsel between them. “Why don’t you give him a call and see what he has to say?” He dug a scrap of paper out of his pocket. His partner, Jason, had given him Kinsey’s number off an arrest sheet for a DUI made a few days before.
“No!” Tess said at once. “I don’t want to talk to him yet. I have to psych myself up first. Let him call us.”
Ryan leaned across the gearshift knob and gently kissed her panic away. “I’ll call,” he said. “We don’t have the money. It’s time to change the game plan.”
She’d closed her eyes when he kissed her, a gesture that made something funny happen in his chest. “Shouldn’t we wait?” she murmured.
“I hate waiting,” he said, smoothing a strand or two of her brilliant red hair behind her ear, longing for the day when it would again be blond, when she’d look at him without fear in her eyes, when he could talk to her about something other than their current predicament. Another constriction in his chest—not a heart attack, at least not the medical kind. He pictured his poor old heart ratcheted from his open chest like the engine out of a car, hanging above him, a big ponderous, sorry-looking thing, horribly exposed, yearning for a chance at happiness. Face it, if he proved Tess’s father guilty without a doubt, she might cut his heart free to crash back into its hiding place.
He rubbed his eyes. Maybe she wasn’t the only tired one. Picking up the phone, he said, “Don’t say a word, I don’t want Kinsey to know you’re here with me in this car.”
“But what are you going to say?”
“I’m going to make him a deal he can’t refuse.” One look at Tess’s troubled face, and Ryan relented a little. “I’m going to tell him we’re having trouble getting the money and need another day. I’m going to let him know I’m watching him so he doesn’t get any funny ideas about hurting you or Madeline Lingford or the grump. I’ll tell him that when we find the money he’s welcome to it, all he has to do is give us one little name and leave you and everyone else here alone.”
“Why would he agree to that?”
“Because he’s greedy. He could have killed you already if he wanted to. He doesn’t want you dead, and he doesn’t want you so angry you call the cops. He doesn’t think you know who he is. Once he figures out I’m on to his identity and willing to pay up to get rid of him, he’ll wait a few more hours for the payoff. If I were him and I was playing the middle against the ends, I’d be hankering to leave town, wouldn’t you?”
“You don’t know any of that for certain.”
“Nothing’s for certain,” he agreed.
He punched in the right numbers. The phone rang and rang.
“Maybe he’s asleep,” Tess whispered.
“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he’s not even home. Stay here while I make sure his place only has one door. Keep the car locked.”
Before she could react, he got out of the car and ran back to the main street, approaching the house from the side, going through a neighbor’s yard, peering over a hedge. He could see the back and the north side of Kinsey’s place from this vantage point. No doors.
He ran back to the car. “Okay, keep your head low. It’s time to check out Kinsey.”
He started the engine and drove down the alley, parking in back of the SUV, blocking its path of escape. The other two sides of the small house were visible. The door opened onto the alley. Despite the car, the place looked deserted.
“Stay here,” Ryan said as he eased open his door and got out. To avoid making any noise, he didn’t close his door completely. He drew his gun and, holding it up against his chest, moved toward the small house. He touched the hood of the SUV—cold.
So what brought Jim Kinsey home early? The promise of fifty thousand dollars? Maybe the man planned on taking the money and running, maybe the girl at the apartment house was about to be left high and dry and didn’t know it yet.
The house itself was tidy but extremely small, painted the same
color as the big house. There wasn’t much of a yard though a vigorous hedge surrounded three sides. As the door was closed and the drapes were drawn, Ryan found himself at an impasse when it came to further snooping.
He was considering his options for getting inside without breaking the law when Tess came up beside him, hugging herself, biting her lip.
“I’m not going to be afraid of him,” she announced in a whisper, her voice wavering.
“Good.”
“I mean it. He’s probably the one who scared the daylights out of me yesterday, but today I have you and you have that big gun. Shoot him if he gets near me, okay? Let’s knock.”
And with that, she reached across his chest and pounded on the door. What the woman lacked in experience, she made up for with bravado. Her pounding brought no answering noise from inside the house. The place was small; if someone was home, it wouldn’t matter if they’d been asleep, they’d be awake now. Anyway, does a man getting ready to collect fifty thousand dollars at gunpoint take a nap?
If Kinsey was home, he knew they were at the door. Bullets went right through doors. Ryan turned to knock Tess out of the way if he had to, but she was already in motion. Not bound by his considerations about observing the law, or his gut feeling that Kinsey could blast through that door at any second, she turned the knob and waltzed into the house.
The door led directly into a small square living area that was dark due to the draped windows, but light came through the open door, flooding the area in front of it.
And center stage in the light was a man, face purple, dead eyes bulging, swollen tongue protruding from between lifeless lips, a black cord all but buried in the tight skin of his neck.
Tess stopped in her tracks and gasped.
Gun raised, Ryan stepped in front of her, one arm twisted, clutching her hip as she buried her face against his back.
The dead man sat slumped in a red chair, the only piece of upholstered furniture in the room. Next to him, a straight-back chair looked as though it had been dragged out of the kitchen. A bottle of cheap whiskey sat on a small round table between the chairs. A glass, half-empty, sat beside the bottle. A second glass seemed to have rolled out of Kinsey’s hand and landed by his right foot. He wore black boots, caked with mud, black jeans, a denim shirt.
