by Julie Miller
She accepted his apology, but not the immediate dismissal of his frantic concern. “Is there something on that flash drive or in that report you need for tomorrow’s board meeting? Are you worried about industrial espionage? Someone stealing a formula? You haven’t been yourself lately. And I don’t think it’s job stress.”
“You have no idea.” Charles Landon was a tall, healthy man. He doctored his shortcomings and maintained a cyclist’s trim figure to keep up with the wives who were getting younger with each subsequent marriage. But the sigh that sagged his shoulders now left him looking haggard and old. “You have a good head on your shoulders, Elisabeth. You’ll need that.”
Cryptic. “For what?”
He sank back down in his chair, his pensive smile making as little sense as his outburst over the missing data had. “Just book me on that flight to the Caymans. I have a lot of work to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Beth watched his graying head bowed over the report for a few seconds before leaving his office and softly closing the door behind her. She set her planner on her desk and pulled up the number for the travel agent the company typically used on her phone. But she stopped short of punching in the number.
Instead, she pulled open the center drawer of her desk and looked inside, moving aside pens and paperclips to look beneath them. Nothing that shouldn’t be there.
She opened the top left drawer and moved the stapler back to the right-hand side where she liked to keep it. A blip of awareness, of something not as it should be, stopped her.
She opened the drawer again. When had she moved her stapler?
With sharper focus, closer study, she opened the rest of her drawers. Then she pushed back her chair and crossed to the shelves and file cabinets lining the wall on either side of her window. Here and there she found something that was slightly off—a tray of computer disks with the lid down but not latched, the bent tab of a file folder, a pot of English ivy sitting on the edge of its saucer.
The cleaning crew sometimes moved her family pictures and other knickknacks when they dusted. But inside her desk?
Had her boss gone through her office?
She glanced back at Charles Landon’s door. Just how important was that missing data? Could his job be at stake? Hers?
Some of that same paranoia from last night crept back to life inside her, drumming beneath the wound at her temple. Did someone think she had that memory stick?
She’d tear her garage apart top to bottom if she had to, pull up the carpet in her Jeep. But no way had that flash drive been on her desk or among her things. She hadn’t taken it.
Slipping her hand inside the pocket of her wool slacks, Beth closed her fingers around the business card she carried with her. Kevin Grove had said to call him if she remembered anything about the attack—or if something bothered her.
This bothered her.
Someone had searched through her things.
“THERE’S NO ID on this vic, either.”
Two bodies in one day. Two elderly men dead in the same neighborhood down by the Missouri River docks. This morning’s had been discovered in an alley by a homeless woman, this one by a security guard checking vacant properties in the area.
The muscles around Kevin’s left shoulder ached—partly because he’d taken a hit man’s bullet there last year and today it was a whopping eight degrees outside. In the fourteen months since that compromised safe house shoot-out, he’d learned that cold and the beat-up places inside him didn’t always get along. And yeah, it’d been an extra long day, working his second homicide on next to no sleep. But mostly, he was aching inside because both of the victims had been men his grandmother’s age. And the thought of some bastard preying on anyone as frail and beautiful and deserving of long life as Grandma Miriam squeezed a vise around his heart.
There was plenty inside of him aching. But not a bit of it showed on the outside. Not when he had a job to do.
Kevin stuck the tip of his pen inside the pocket of the dead man’s tattered flannel shirt and raised the flap, just in case he’d missed a clue. But as he’d suspected from the moment he and Atticus had walked into the abandoned riverfront warehouse, this poor old guy was a John Doe. With a grunt of resignation that fogged the air, Kevin tucked the pen back inside the tweed blazer he wore under his coat. Without a name to start from, their investigation had just gotten a lot more complicated.
“How old do you think this one is?” Atticus knelt on the opposite side of the nearly bald man, carefully cataloguing their observations in his notebook. “Late seventies? Eighties? If he didn’t have that hole cut in his gut, I’d say he died of old age or exposure.” He traced an imaginary circle in the air around the victim. “But the stabbing didn’t happen here. There’s not enough blood for this to be the primary crime scene.”
Kevin pointed to the end of the dead man’s grimy parka sleeve. “He’s not homeless, either. He’s got some meat on his bones and his fingernails are clean. I doubt these clothes are even his.”
Atticus closed his notepad and stood. “Christmas crime-scene cover-up. Not the way I’d planned to spend my holidays.”
“Him, either.” Bracing his hands on his thighs, Kevin rose, as well.
Atticus grinned at the morbid joke before acknowledging the tall brunette woman who ducked beneath the half-open loading dock door and approached their location inside the warehouse. “M.E.’s office is here. Let’s back off and let them do the prelim on the body while we scout out the rest of this place. Where do you want to start?”
“How about with my fist rammed down some bastard’s throat?” Okay, so a few of those emotions were leaking out. Inhaling a deep breath, Kevin tried to shake off those lingering emotions. “Two elderly vics, both stabbed to the point of mutilation, no blood at either crime scene. You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Atticus nodded. “These are dump sites. And I’ll hazard a guess that the two deaths are related.”
“I wouldn’t bet against it.”
“Do we have a serial killer?”
A female voice joined the discussion. “More like a cover-up for a botched surgery.” Dr. Holly Masterson-Kincaid, the wife of Atticus’s oldest brother and the crime lab’s chief medical examiner, set her kit down with a weary sigh. “You two do realize that some of us would like to have a few days off around the holidays, right?” She smiled at Atticus and winked a greeting to Kevin. “You boys need to stop finding dead bodies for me.”
Atticus raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, you’re not the only newlywed in the family. The sooner we find answers, the sooner we can all get home to the people we care about.”
Yeah. Kevin would get right on that. With Miriam in a nursing home and Sheila thankfully out of his life, it looked like it would be Daisy and him and a big empty house for Christmas morning. Maybe he’d get Daisy to give him a kiss on New Year’s Eve.
Of course, peachy lips with a touch of sass in them sounded much more appealing than a big black nose and dog slobber.
Hell. Where had that thought come from? Kissing Beth Rogers wasn’t gonna happen. Not in any reality he needed to be a part of. He shouldn’t have carried her in his arms, shouldn’t have memorized her sweet and spicy scent—shouldn’t have watched over her house or worried about why someone would want to hurt her. Every memory of freckles and pale skin stimulated something in him that was more man than cop.
He’d be wiser to concentrate on the dead bodies than dwell on his lingering fascination with the girl next door.
“So you finished the autopsy from this morning’s vic?” he asked, bringing an awkwardly abrupt end to Atticus and Holly’s conversation regarding the Kincaid family’s holiday plans.
“Yes.”
He didn’t miss the subtle signal from Atticus to Holly that she should just ignore his partner’s Scrooge-ish mood and give them her report.
“Your John Doe from this morning had his liver surgically removed. Post mortem. I believe the other stab woun
ds were meant to mask the incision.” She knelt down beside the corpse on the warehouse floor and pulled his clothing aside. “This one has the same injuries. I won’t know for sure until I compare tool marks, but I’d say your two vics were dispatched by the same perp.”
“The M.O.s match,” Atticus agreed.
“You harvest an organ to sell it on the black market.” As she covered up the body, Kevin worked the possible scenarios through his head. “Or to remove evidence of some kind from the body.”
Holly rose to stand between them. “Or to cover mistakes by someone who shouldn’t be practicing medicine anymore.” She squeezed Atticus’s arm, and winked up at Kevin. “Why don’t you two go do your hunt and search thing while I take care of the body? I’ll get us out of here as soon as I can.”
Kevin nodded in agreement. “I need some fresh air. I’ll check outside—see if I can spot anything to indicate who might have dumped him here.”
“I’ll start canvassing the neighborhood,” Atticus volunteered. “Maybe we’ll luck out and find somebody who saw something.”
Kevin wasn’t holding his breath. Swapping out his plastic gloves for wool-lined leather ones, he turned up his collar against the stiff breeze off the ice-chunked river and went outside to begin a systematic search.
Like the alley this morning, there wasn’t much to find. He had a crime-scene investigator photograph some tire marks in the snow drifted against the base of the loading dock, but enough new snow had fallen to make casting them impossible. The CSI scooped up a sample of an oil leak in the same location to take back to the lab for analysis. But there was no blood, no footprints, no sign of a struggle. And it was too cold for potential witnesses to be lurking about.
He hadn’t found any answers for Beth Rogers at lunch, and he wasn’t finding any answers now. This was turning out to be one hell of a productive day.
Kevin was sitting inside the cab of his SUV, running the heater and thawing out when his cell phone buzzed. Night had fallen, shrinking the world outside to the distance of his headlights—but not so small that the outside world couldn’t find him.
Muttering half a curse, he pulled the phone from his belt. This had better not be another body. Chief Taylor had warned that this was a stressful time of year for some people, but come on.
He read the number. Unnamed. At least he could rule out the dispatcher’s call to another crime scene. That knowledge didn’t necessarily improve his frustrated mood.
He opened the phone. “Yeah?”
A beat of silence, a whisper of breathing.
“Kevin?” His entire world changed with that one word. The breath rushed out of his chest, leaving a rare tranquility in its wake. And, hang it all, he was dangerously close to smiling. “I mean, Detective Grove?”
He liked Kevin better.
“Beth?” Any sense of calm was fleeting. Other instinctive reactions took over. There was an out-of-breath quality to her hushed tone. And the way she cleared her throat to mask the catch of emotion made his own voice grow husky. Every wishful, aching cell in his body went on instant alert. “Why are you whispering?”
“I think…”
Were they going to play this game again? So he might not be the easiest person in the world to talk to—just answer the damn question before he got really worried. “You think what?”
“I think someone’s following me.”
Chapter Five
She was an idiot. A full-blown, bona fide idiot.
Beth cradled the hot chocolate between her hands, wishing she could blame the steaming concoction for the heat that suddenly flooded her cheeks. She peeked over the rim of her plastic cup and watched two small children launch themselves into the arms of the man who’d been staring at her across the bookstore’s second-floor cafe.
Not a stalker. Not her attacker. Just somebody’s dad who happened to be built like a linebacker.
She took a drink of the hot chocolate, hoping the sugar and caramel and cream would jump-start her sleep-deprived, paranoid brain.
Who wouldn’t stare at a woman with a purple cheekbone and a gauze bandage covering the side of her head? The young father had probably been wondering what size of truck had hit her. Or maybe he was embarrassed that Beth had bumped into him browsing the romance section of the store. He’d seemed so out of place that she’d been suspicious of his presence among the love stories. The sensation of being overrun by a man of considerable size and strength was still fresh enough in her mind that she’d panicked.
He’d come inside the busy store just after she had, hadn’t he? Followed her up the escalator? Just happened to turn into the same section of books? With some nefarious purpose in mind, he had to be following her, right? Sheesh.
A woman who must be his wife pushed a stroller up with a third child, greeted him and leaned down to exchange a kiss. As the man stashed the romance novel he’d selected beneath his coat next to him on the bench seat, the heat in Beth’s cheeks intensified.
Idiot. This time of year? Thousands of shoppers enjoying the lights and stores on the Plaza? He’d been buying a gift for his wife.
Beth turned away from the lively family tableau and drank the rest of her cocoa. Even though embarrassment rendered the sweet froth nearly tasteless, she needed the warmth of it to fortify her before she picked up her phone and placed a second call to Detective Grove. She wouldn’t mind trading more quips with her villainous-looking neighbor, but Beth knew the polite thing was to call him back before he drove all the way through downtown K.C. on a false alarm.
Voice mail. It almost saddened her to think she wouldn’t be hearing that deep, masculine voice again. She imagined he’d have something to say about wasting his valuable time. Still, in the name of good neighborly relations, she had to try. Once his message ended, she left her own.
“Hey, detective. Elisabeth Rogers again. It’s just after seven. I hope you hear this before you get to the Plaza. I realize we live in the opposite direction, and I’m trying to catch you to tell you to head on home. I’ll be going that way myself as soon as I pick up my car from the 47th Street parking garage. At any rate, I’m fine. Just got spooked by my imagination. The man wasn’t following me. Sorry to trouble you.” Her breath stuttered out on a self-deprecating sigh. “It was nothing.”
With the message sent, Beth bundled up in her bright blue parka, cleared her table and headed downstairs to make her purchases. She’d already dropped off her long brown dress coat at the cleaner’s to get the blood out of the wool, and had planned to stop at a railroad hobbyist shop to get a gift for her father. But now she figured the smart plan was to simply climb into her Jeep, go home and get to bed. Once these last 24 hours were behind her, her life would probably go back to being unremarkably normal again.
And Kevin Grove would go back to being the mysterious monster of a man next door.
The cold outside cleared Beth’s head of odd longings and paranoia more effectively than any amount of rational thinking had. “Brr.”
With two books and a holiday-themed jigsaw puzzle weighing down a bag on one side, Beth switched her leather purse to her right arm, sliding it high onto her shoulder and tucking it securely against her side. Icy crystals of snow nipped her face as she waited for a break in traffic to dash across to the median and then on to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.
The J. C. Nichols Plaza, with more than a million Christmas lights lining every rooftop, arch and tower throughout the holiday season, glowed with an air of frosted twilight. Despite the wet weather, the sidewalks were full of shoppers and tourists and those interested in catching a late dinner or show at one of the area’s restaurants, bars and theaters. Burying her chin in the folds of her scarf, she hurried along the sidewalk.
Passing a group of carolers left her humming a favorite carol. A horse-drawn carriage, its passengers bundled up beneath layers of blankets and snapping pictures of the mosaics, frescoes and bronze statues decorating the Mediterranean architecture, made her smile. The
oohs and applause from a group of shoppers gathered in front of an animated store window convinced Beth to stop and watch the show for herself.
Elf-size robots with rosy cheeks and pointed hats came to life beneath a tree decorated with white lights and crystal ornaments. The first one set a shiny package beneath the tree and opened the lid. Beth joined the gasps of delight as a stuffed pony waddled out, followed by a colorful train engine. As they took their place beneath the tree, the second elf opened his gift.
A young couple moved through the crowd, jostling against Beth’s back. She felt a tug at her purse strap and instinctively hugged her bag to her chest. “Hey!”
“Sorry.” Pickpockets enjoyed the influx of shoppers as much as the area’s business owners did. But the woman smiled and the man apologized before plunging farther into the storefront audience.
A quick check showed her purse was still latched. But Beth didn’t relax her posture. After the couple’s disruption, the twenty or so people standing around her seemed to be jockeying for position, bumping her again. A small boy, sitting on his father’s shoulders, moved in front of her, blocking her view of the window. A touch, as light as the breeze and just as chilling, brushed across her back. Another round of applause drowned out her protest.
That was it. She was done. The holiday magic had ended for her. She was going home.
When Beth turned, she caught a glimpse of a big man standing at the fringe of the crowd near the street. For one telling moment, her lips creased with a smile. Kevin. He’d come, anyway.
But just as quickly, her smile vanished. The man was already walking away from her, pulling a cap over hair that was brown, not the color of golden wheat. Definitely not Kevin.
Muttering a curse at the foolish paranoia that had consumed her from the moment she’d hit her head, Beth hustled her boots on down the sidewalk toward the 47th Street parking garage. Six steps, seven. Her subconscious mind screamed at her to stop.
Black wool coat. Black stocking cap.
She spun around, looked back at the crowd. But the man was gone.
