Framed

by Karen Leabo

  “I figured it was an ugly prank, and I called the guy a bad name and hung up. But then I started thinking—could it really be Terry?” Warming now to the topic, Jess was leaning forward, her face more animated than it had been since she’d walked into the room. Her cheeks pinkened, and her eyes sparkled.

  And Kyle shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “You see,” she continued, “Terry has a fondness for practical jokes, as I’ve told you. And I was thinking, wouldn’t this be the greatest practical joke of all? Faking his own death, then framing me for it? Calling me up to taunt me?”

  “Why would he do something like that?” Clewis asked, totally skeptical.

  “To pay me back for breaking up with him, for kicking him out of my house. Don’t you see?”

  Clewis leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands below his chin. “You expect me to believe that this man, this scorned man, would abandon all of his material possessions, steal your knife, your shower curtain, your rug, plant blood in the bathtub and washing machine—all to frame you for his nonexistent murder?”

  “I don’t expect you to believe anything,” Jess said coolly. “I’m presenting a possibility to you. And while it sounds far-fetched, you don’t know Terry the way I do. A practical joke of this magnitude is perfectly consistent with his personality.”

  “I’ll, um, keep it in mind,” Clewis said with barely concealed amusement. He stood and stretched. “You can go now. I’ll be in touch.” He sauntered out of the room.

  “You were right,” Jess said dejectedly to Marva. “He didn’t believe me. That’s exactly what Terry’s counting on—that no one would believe such a crazy story.”

  Beyond the two-way mirror, the breath caught in Kyle’s throat. “It sounds like Jess is telling the truth about that crank phone call,” he murmured.

  “Don’t be so naive,” Easley said, still lurking behind him. “She knows there’s a two-way mirror. She knows others are probably observing her.”

  Kyle didn’t want to believe that. Her emotions seemed too real to be some kind of elaborate put-on. Then again, he had little experience with criminal minds, other than the drunks and druggies and petty thieves he’d encountered when he was a patrol officer. His entire investigative career had been in missing persons.

  Kyle had had numerous opportunities to transfer to a different division—auto theft, burglary, homicide—but he’d preferred to stay right where he was. Finding people was challenging to him, and rewarding. It was the only area of police work that, more often than not, yielded a happy ending—returning a runaway teen to her family, locating the old person who’d wandered away from a nursing home. He liked tying up loose ends.

  This homicide stuff was something else again. He didn’t think he was cut out for catching murderers. It wasn’t that he had a problem believing a stranger could kill. Hadn’t he been suspicious enough of Jess before he’d started to know her? But when it came down to suspecting someone you knew, someone you were starting to like just a little...

  Like Melissa, his former partner’s wife. Widow. He’d known the woman had a drug problem, but he’d refused to see the violence lurking below her surface. Because he’d known her. Liked her. Wanted to believe the best in her. And then it had been too late.

  Thankfully he wouldn’t have to worry about any such inner conflict with Jess Robinson. Once he reported his observations from the interrogation to Clewis, he was officially off this case, and back to his comfortable role in missing persons.

  Jess’s back hurt, and her throat ached from so much talking. She didn’t even want to calculate how many hours that ogre Clewis had kept her in that uncomfortable chair, browbeating her until it was a given that she would lose her temper.

  Oddly, though, this interrogation hadn’t seemed as painful as the one she’d had with Detective Branson. She’d known from the start that Clewis was out to get her, that truth and justice were less important than winning, getting the better of her.

  But when she’d first met Kyle, she’d sensed a man who was digging for the truth—tough when he had to be, but not vindictive. So his brutal questions had felt more like a betrayal.

  “What now?” she asked Marva, once they were safely alone in the elevator.

  “We try like hell to find that turkey ex-boyfriend of yours. You really think he’s alive?”

  “With every bone in my body. This whole setup has Terry’s fingerprints all over it.”

  “Do you have the means to hire a private investigator?”

  “Marva, I don’t even have the money to pay you,” Jess said, exasperated.

  “Don’t you worry about that. We’ll work it out. This is a high-profile case, and if I get you off, the publicity will have my phone ringing off the wall. That’ll be payment enough. But a P.I. wants cash up front. What about relatives? Parents?”

  “I’m afraid I exhausted their resources with my previous legal defense in Massachusetts.”

  Marva shook her head. “Man, for a little white-bread girl from the suburbs, you sure know how to get into trouble.”

  “I know how to pick my men, you mean,” Jess said. The elevator opened onto the first floor, and Jess started to step out, but Marva stopped her.

  “Uh-uh. Reporters, waiting like vultures.” The doors closed again. “I’ll take you the secret back route.” Sure enough, Marva led Jess up to the second floor, along several obscure corridors and down a dimly lit staircase. They went through a door marked Official Personnel Only, and ended up at a back door near a Dumpster. Not a reporter in sight.

  Jess looked up at the skyline and got her bearings, then tried to remember where she’d parked. “Thanks, Marva. I’ll see what I can do about scraping up some money for a P.I. and give you a call. Hey, I could have a garage sale and sell all of Terry’s things!”

  Marva’s eyes widened and she clutched her chest as if she was having a coronary. “Think, girl. From now on, every move you make, you think about how it will look to a jury. Got that?”

  Jess’s heart sank. “Right,” she said, properly chastised. “I’ll find the money somewhere else.”

  They parted company, and Jess made her way through the parking lot, dotted with anonymous-looking government-issue cars and Kansas City Police Department squad cars. It was three o’clock—shift change. Doors were opening and slamming, engines were starting up.

  She wasn’t sure what made her pause and focus in one particular direction, at one particular tall man with raven hair and a certain way of carrying himself that demanded attention as he walked toward an unknown destination in the parking lot.

  She followed him, not knowing why. “Detective Branson?”

  He swiveled, and his eyebrows flew up at the sight of her. “Ms. Robinson.”

  “Jess. I think you can call me Jess now that you’re no longer investigating me. That’s right, isn’t it? I mean, you dumped me over in homicide.”

  “That’s correct. Is there something I can do for you?” he relaxed slightly, though his navy blue eyes remained wary.

  “I guess I...no, not really.” What did she want? she wondered. Why was she standing here like some major geek, just staring at his handsome face?

  “Do you have questions? I can’t tell you anything about the investigation, but if you have any general questions about the process—”

  “Do you know any private eyes who work on credit?”

  The out-of-the-blue question seemed to surprise him. He put a hand to his chin in a gesture of deep thought that struck her as exaggerated. All right, so maybe it was a stupid thing to ask. Who could blame her for trying?

  “Not offhand. What do you need investigating?”

  “Oh, it would take too long to explain.”

  “I’ve got time. I’m off duty. Have you had lunch?”

  Lunch! She hadn’t even had breakfast. She’d been positively nauseated this morning at the thought of submitting herself to more questioning. Suddenly her stomach felt as if it might cave in on itself i
f she didn’t get something in it.

  She was on the verge of accepting when she thought about the sorry state of her pocketbook. She patted it. “I’d probably better go home and have a peanut-butter sandwich.”

  “My treat,” he said hastily.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged, then resumed walking, expecting her to follow along. “Why not? Couldn’t hurt my reputation any to be seen with a pretty woman.”

  She did follow. She was drawn to him even as she feared him. “What about being seen with a murder suspect?”

  He shrugged again. “If anyone looks at us twice, maybe they’ll think I’m trying to extract information from you.”

  “And is that what you’re doing?”

  He opened the passenger door of a red Mustang. “I’m off duty. If you crumble and confess, I’ll be obliged to pass along the information to the proper authorities. Barring that, I’m not planning to run and tell Clewis about every word out of your mouth, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He smiled at her.

  And her heart, at least, crumbled, just a little around the edges. If she’d seen that smile just once when he was interrogating her, she would have tried harder to please him. It was a very appealing expression, especially on such a formidable man.

  “You should smile more when you question a suspect,” she said, climbing into his car without further hesitation. In for a penny, in for a pound, she figured. “Especially women suspects. You’d charm the truth right out of them.”

  He appeared slightly embarrassed by her comment, maybe even puzzled. He looked now as if he were making an extra effort not to smile as he closed her door.

  Really, she was the one who should have been embarrassed. She hadn’t meant to sound flirtatious, but that was probably how he took it. She vowed to keep the rest of this meeting strictly business. And what business, exactly, did she have with him?

  She wanted to tell him about the phone call—that was it. Clewis either hadn’t thought it was important, or he flatout hadn’t believed her. She wanted to get an honest, professional opinion from someone who didn’t have a stake in her guilt or innocence—someone who could listen impartially.

  “You like greasy hamburgers?” Kyle asked, adjusting the vents on the car so that some of the warm air from the heater poured in her direction. His personal police scanner squawked and crackled, and he turned it down.

  “Sure.” Beggars couldn’t be choosers, she reasoned.

  “Town Topic is not too far.”

  “Sounds fine.”

  On the short drive, she restricted her conversation to comments about Kansas City’s ever-changing skyline and the growing popularity of the downtown theater district. It wasn’t until they were ensconced in a red leatherette booth in the deserted Town Topic diner that she found the courage to bring up her new theory about Terry’s premeditated disappearance.

  “I got a phone call the other night,” she began, between bites of a chili-cheese dog that tasted like heaven. “At 2:00 a.m. I think it was from Terry.”

  “Oh?”

  She proceeded to describe the phone call, word for word, as best she could. “The voice was muffled, like someone put a cloth over the receiver. But it could have been Terry. It sounded like Terry—not so much the voice, maybe, as the cadence. The accent. The word choice. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Sure,” he said. He took a bite of his hamburger and stared out the window, as if fascinated by the passing traffic.

  Then it hit her. Throughout her entire explanation, he hadn’t once looked at her, eye to eye. And that wasn’t his style. He was a direct-gaze kinda guy.

  She went out on a limb. “You already knew about this, didn’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?” But his face turned slightly ruddy, answering her accusation.

  “You were watching through the two-way mirror.” She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and threw it down on the table. “Why did you let me go through that whole long explanation? Why didn’t you stop me? Oh, never mind. What was I thinking, believing you might have an inkling of understanding? You cops stick together.”

  She started to scoot out of the booth—destination unknown—but he grabbed her wrist.

  “Wait. Please.” His grip was loose, not at all painful. Nonetheless, it sent a shock wave of panic through her.

  She jerked free. “Don’t do that. Don’t ever do that. I know you’re stronger than me. You don’t have to prove it.”

  Rather than reacting with anger, which was what she expected, he appeared merely bewildered. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, just to stop you from leaving. Yeah, I observed your interview with Clewis. I was looking for inconsistencies in your story, but I didn’t see any and I told Clewis so. I’m on your side, lady, and I’m about the only one who is.”

  “You believe me, then?” She knew she sounded as eager for a word of support as a puppy is for a pat on the head.

  “Let’s just say I’m keeping an open mind.”

  “And everyone else already has me convicted,” she said glumly. She sat back down on the edge of the booth, poised for flight if need be.

  “It’s a sensational case. Detectives and D.A.’s make their careers with cases like this—provided they get solved. Ultimately everyone wants to get to the truth. It’s just that some of us pursue it a little more zealously than others.” The expression of distaste on Kyle’s face indicated exactly what he thought of Bill Clewis’s methods.

  Oddly, that little bit of nonverbal communication made Jess feel the first tentative bond between herself and Kyle Branson. “So if you were observing, you know he didn’t believe me about the phone call. He probably forgot about it the moment he walked out of the room.”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “I don’t disbelieve you. But you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t swallow your theory about his framing you for a nonmurder. That’s pretty outlandish.”

  “As I told Detective Clewis, if you knew Terry, you’d realize it’s exactly the sort of outrageous stunt he would pull. But, no, I don’t expect you to swallow the theory whole. If you’d just acknowledge that it’s even an outside possibility, I’d feel better.”

  He nodded. “I can go that far.”

  Hope welled up in her heart. “So what should I do to prove it? I mean, I can’t afford a P.I., so it’s up to me to figure out where the bastard’s holed up. What would you suggest?”

  He appeared to give her request some thought. “Make a list of every friend and acquaintance of his you can think of, no matter how tenuous the link. Get their addresses. Don’t call them, though. You’ll want to show up unannounced.”

  “You mean, just drive from house to house hoping to blunder upon him?”

  “If he’s alive, he’s got to be somewhere. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Be rude, if you have to. Intimidate. Try to catch someone who’s being evasive or won’t meet your gaze—like you just did with me. With a little guidance and some long hours, you can be your own P.L”

  “You really think I can?” His suggestions excited her. He was such a quick thinker. Why hadn’t she thought of canvassing his friends’ houses? It made so much sense.

  “If you think you’ve figured out where he is, don’t move in yourself. He might be dangerous.”

  “Who, Terry?” Jess snorted. “I’ll call the cops, then sit on him till they get there.”

  “He might be dangerous,” Kyle repeated, emphasizing every word. “You yourself said he needed psychological intervention.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “If your theory proves true, he’s gone to a great deal of trouble to hurt you,” Kyle reminded her, “and in my opinion he’s a very sick man. He might be dangerous. Don’t underestimate him. Don’t approach him on your own. Call the cops. Promise me you’ll do that.”

  The intensity of his gaze skewered her like a shish kebab. “I would feel real bad if something happened to you as a result of your followi
ng all this advice I’m giving you. You’re going up against someone who’s potentially dangerous without any protection, without any backup. Don’t take chances.”

  “All right,” she agreed, although no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t picture Terry as a violent person. Vindictive, petty, conceited, but never violent. She shivered, more as a result of the way Kyle was looking at her than from any real fear of Terry.

  “Bill,” Kyle said the next day as he approached Clewis’s desk.

  Clewis looked up. “Yeah?”

  “I have some interesting information about the Terry Rodin case.” Yeah, he’d promised Jess he wouldn’t go running back to Clewis with whatever she’d had to say to him yesterday at lunch. But he wasn’t tattling about some incriminating slip of the tongue, he reasoned. He was telling the lead detective on her case something that might help clear her. And that was different.

  Clewis smiled faintly, the way he would with a troublesome but amusing dog. “Yeah?”

  “I think there’s a good possibility Jess is innocent.”

  Clewis rolled his eyes. “This is news? You thought she was innocent yesterday.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m even more convinced now. She wanted me to recommend a private eye, to help her find Terry—alive. I don’t know that Terry is alive—” Kyle kept thinking about all that blood in the tub and sink at Jess’s house, and the wallet and keys under her mattress “—but I think she believes it. And I think that phone call she told you about is for real.”

  For a moment, Clewis looked confused. “What phone call?”

  “The crank call? The guy who said he was Terry, looking for his body?”

  “Oh, that,” Clewis said dismissively. “Why didn’t she bring it up first thing? Why did she wait until the end of the interview, when her position looked hopeless? It was a last-ditch effort to introduce some doubt into the case. A failed effort, I might add.”

  “She said her attorney didn’t want her to bring it up, simply because it did sound nutty.”

  Clewis shook his head. “Don’t be so damn naive, Branson.”

  That was the second time in twenty-four hours that someone had accused him of being naive. He wasn’t, dammit. Melissa Palladia had cured him forever of the rose-colored-glasses syndrome. He was simply considering the evidence, considering all theories, all possibilities, looking at the case from every direction. It was what a good investigator did.