Killer Secrets

by Marilyn Pappano

  “No.” He shrugged. “We have the weapon.”

  “Just noticing that I have a similar weapon.”

  “The witness who actually found the body rules you out as a suspect. She was in the backyard before you. You couldn’t have done it.”

  “Before last week, I’d hoped I would never see another dead body as long as I lived,” she muttered. Gripping her loppers, she began checking the flower beds for blooms past their prime yet still taking energy from the plant. Some clients wanted the dead heads collected and thrown away. Mr. Carlyle had wanted them dropped to the mulch, where the seed pods would dry out and raking, wind and rain would scatter the seeds for new plants next year.

  “How many bodies have you seen?” There was a touch of disbelief to his voice. Not counting bodies prepared for burial, he would rightly assume people outside law enforcement and the medical profession rarely saw dead people. But she wasn’t just a person, and most generalizations didn’t apply to her.

  There was a lot to be said for never speaking impulsively. She rarely found herself in a situation where she had to come up with a response that seemed reasonable, answered harmless questions and didn’t lead to others.

  She was moving on to another flower bed when he caught her arm. “Mila?”

  She made her expression blank as she looked at him. She ignored the warm, gentle pressure of his hand on her, and the spicy fragrance of his cologne, and the fact that he stood close enough that she could hear his steady breathing. She ignored all that and focused on giving the kind of answer he needed to let the conversation go.

  “I told you last night that my parents died when I was eleven.” Her voice sounded as flat as a fires-of-hell-temperature beer. “It was a car wreck. Gramma and I were in the car in front of them. We saw what happened and went back, and...” A heaving breath shook her shoulders. The worst/best night of her life stole all her emotions, her breath and sometimes a little bit of her sanity.

  Sam’s hand gentled even more. “I’m sorry, Mila. I should have let it go. It hurts me that you had to go through that. Thank God you had your gramma.”

  She let her gaze settle on his hand, right above her elbow, his big fingers holding her so lightly. Monday evening he’d touched her hand. Today it was her arm. If he kept moving in that direction, when would he reach her face? How many first touches could she get from him?

  “I don’t cry about it,” she said, forcing a touch of belligerence into her voice. Gramma had told her that everyone dealt with loss differently. She didn’t have to weep or mourn—not because she truly didn’t feel that way, but because she was an individual, and if she confirmed that with defensiveness, people always assumed it had been a horribly traumatic experience that she had trouble coping with. That way she and Gramma could keep their secret.

  “Nobody gets to tell you how you should feel, Mila. Some things are too big for tears.” His thumb moved slowly back and forth with just enough pressure that she could feel her muscles and nerves underneath it relax. Thanks to the shirt, though, she couldn’t feel his skin, the texture, the heat.

  How bad would she look if she said, “Hold on a moment,” then stripped down to her tank top and put his hand right back where it was? Probably like she was a few shades too traumatized for him to pursue any interest in. She knew people thought she was odd. She didn’t want them thinking she was freaky, too.

  Especially Sam.

  * * *

  Thursday after work found Sam in one of the few family-friendly places to get a drink in Cedar Creek: the Thunder Lanes Bowling Alley. He wasn’t the best bowler on the police department’s team, but more important, he was better than the Cedar County sheriff and the Cedar Creek fire chief.

  The bowling alley was loud and smelled of people, feet and pizza, cheap frozen ones that the owner bought by the dozens and the staff stuck in microwaves. The nachos, also thoroughly processed, were better, the buffalo wings not half-bad, and the popcorn was the best in town, with loads of real butter.

  He wondered if Mila liked popcorn. If he showed up one night with a big tub of it and suggested they have a movie night, would she turn him down or invite him in?

  Ben sprawled on one side of Sam, Lois on the other, beers in hand. “Is there any reason we have to bowl in order to have an evening out with a drink?” Lois asked, her voice raspy from talking over the noise.

  “If we want to keep bragging rights over the sheriff’s office and the fire department, we do.” Ben was a good bowler, and since he’d broken up with his last girl, most of his nights were free. Lois was a good bowler, too, but her husband wasn’t thrilled about her spending her free time with the guys from work.

  “You know, Tim could come with you,” Sam pointed out.

  She made a pfft sound. “Yeah, like you ever brought dirty-girl lawyer up here. Like you would bring Mee-lah-gro up here.”

  Sam scowled. “What do you know—”

  She waved him into silence. “Oh, please. Gossip is the heartbeat of this city, and I am the cardiologist who monitors it. You know I hear things.”

  She had a pretty extensive network, too, because Cedar Creek had grown beyond its little-town boundaries a long time ago. “I don’t suppose any of your sources can tell you who the new killer in town is.”

  “That’s ugly. We only gossip for good.”

  “I imagine the victims would have thought it pretty good if you prevented their deaths,” Ben remarked.

  “People aren’t quite sure what to think.” Lois tapped her red nails on the base of her beer bottle. “No one knew Evan Carlyle, so they find it hard to get really worked up over that, and just about everyone in town had wished evil on Curt Greeley, so it’s hard to get worked up over him, too. It’s murder, but it feels like murder with a purpose. Not like someone picking people at random.”

  She was right. It did feel that way. But Sam didn’t have the luxury of caring how it felt. Every death was supposed to be as important to him as the last one.

  “Isn’t there a rule about not talking business at these things?”

  Both Lois and Ben made the pfft sound. Cops were biologically incapable of turning off work conversation in gatherings of two or more officers. It didn’t matter whether there was anything new to discuss, whether they’d argued the same theories or told the same stories a dozen times. It was their nature.

  “Okay,” Lois agreed too cheerfully. “Let’s go back to talking about Mee—”

  “She goes by Mila. Not MEE-lah. Just Mila. And let’s not talk about her, either.”

  “Talk about who?” Simpson asked as he joined them on the bench.

  “Chief’s new...” Ben frowned at Lois. “New what? Friend? Possible girlfriend? Interest? Project?”

  Oh, Sam had a project, all right: to get to know Mila better than anyone else in the world. To make her relax. Smile. Laugh. Touch him back. To kiss her, hold her, see her naked, be seen naked by her. To have a—a thing. Not a fling. A relationship, even though he hated the word for its modern-day sensitivity. He wanted to sleep beside her. Wake beside her. To find out if she and I could become us. To maybe find a future and maybe not, but to have some fun and make some memories along the way.

  Lois studied him, her lips pursed, then said, “I think we should call her his new interest. As in love interest.”

  “As in ‘maybe involved with the murders interest,’ too.” Simpson snickered. “Lock her up downstairs. Sure makes it easy to know where she is any given time.”

  Someone laughed, but Sam didn’t pay attention because his cell was vibrating in his pocket. As he pulled it out, he made his way through various first responders to a relatively quiet place just inside the main entrance. Leaning against the cinder-block wall, he answered.

  “Hey, Chief, it’s Morwenna. We got a call for you, and she wouldn’t leave a message or her name, but you don’t normally get those sorts of
calls, so I thought maybe you’d want to know about it even if there’s nothing to tell. I mean, really, what’s the point of calling if you’re not going to give your name so you can get called back? But, anyway...”

  In addition to answering the nonemergency lines, Morwenna was also a dispatcher, at which times she was perfectly clear and succinct. In casual conversation, though, she couldn’t find her way to a conclusion without a road map. “Morwenna,” he interrupted. “Just tell me about the call. It was a woman—”

  “Yes, how did you—Oh, because I said she. Very cop-ly of you, Chief. So she asked if you were in. I said no. She said oh. I asked if she would like to leave her name and number. I told her sometimes you call or stop in in the evenings, and if you did, you might call her tonight, but if not, it would certainly be in the morning. And she said no, thanks, it wasn’t that important. Hang on.” He heard her on another call, using what he considered her civic-duty-polite voice.

  It could have been any of a thousand women calling. A relative. A citizen. An ex-girlfriend. Or maybe Mila.

  “Okay,” Morwenna said in much too cheerful a voice. “That was Mr. Akins. Said his cat’s up the tree again.”

  Sam grinned. Police work in Cedar Creek had its highs and its lows. “Did you tell him Simpson’s brother would come and get it for him?”

  “Chief, his cat died three weeks ago. He’s having a little trouble dealing with his grief. However, Tank Simpson is going over to talk to the old man. All right, so back to the call for you. I think it was personal, not professional. She didn’t sound upset or distraught or anything, and she was very polite, very quiet spoken. However, maybe she speaks softly because she has a big dog.”

  Hot damn, maybe it was Mila. “A dog?”

  “With a great big bark. You know, the kind that startles you because you didn’t know a dog could sound that big?” Her tone turned teasing. “You know someone with a dog matching that description, Chief?”

  “As it happens, I do.” He looked back over at the lanes, where his buddies were still hanging around, drinking and waiting for their turns. “Listen, call Ben and tell him just this and nothing else—I got a call I had to take. You don’t know from who, you don’t know what about, you don’t know how long it’ll take.”

  She scoffed. “Jeez, I don’t know any of that. You want to at least give me a hint in case you need backup?”

  “See you tomorrow, Morwenna.”

  Odds were the call hadn’t come from Mila, he told himself as he found his truck in the crowded lot. Plenty of women had dogs. But the call was the excuse he needed to stop by her house. To see her even if for just a few minutes.

  When he parked in front of her house, he wondered idly if she had a car, if there was a garage at the back of the property where she kept it out of sight. It was hard to imagine someone her age not having a vehicle. Cedar Creek was small, but not so small that walking all over town in the weather extremes they were accustomed to was easy. Granted, she lived only a few blocks from a grocery store, a post office, a bank, a pharmacy, a liquor store and Braum’s. Most people would say that covered all of life’s necessities right there.

  Somewhere down the street, kids laughed and called. Playing outside on a summer’s evening...that had become rare in his lifetime. If he ever had kids, he wanted to teach them to catch lightning bugs, to lie in the warm, damp grass and watch a caterpillar make its laborious journey, to count the colors in the sunset and listen for cicadas and tree frogs and lonesome train whistles.

  If he and their mother weren’t too tired at the end of the day to do those things. If they didn’t find it easier to park the kids in front of the TV or the computer.

  If he ever found a woman he wanted to have kids with who wanted to have them with him. There were so many ifs involved that it really was remarkable how many millions of times it had happened.

  His foot was in midair, two inches above the first porch step, when frenzied barking started inside the house. He climbed the steps, grinning, and called, “Hey, Poppy, it’s just me. Don’t tear the door down.” He hoped the words would assure Mila, too.

  The porch light clicked on, then the door cracked open. Mila smiled at him shyly, partially, through the space, then stepped back to let him slink inside. One of these days, she was really going to smile at him—one of those giant, spontaneous ear-to-ear smiles when the happiness inside was just too much to contain—and when she did, either his heart was going to break for her or it was going to be put back together.

  One of these days.

  For this day, he greeted her with a serious smile. “Hi. I’m returning your call.”

  * * *

  “I didn’t expect her to bother you.” Mila leaned against the dining room door frame, arms folded across her chest while Sam gave Poppy a vigorous greeting. She was inexplicably pleased that he’d come by just to see if she might be the one who’d called.

  “Morwenna passes on everything. I prefer to know when people call me when I’m out.”

  “Even when they don’t leave their name and number?”

  “Aw, everybody leaves their name and number. It made me curious that you didn’t.”

  She shrugged, her hair tickling along her shoulders. “When I dialed, it seemed like a good idea. When she answered, it seemed...not.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  Another shrug. “It suddenly looked silly. Not something to bother the police chief with.”

  “You can bother the police chief with anything. You can bother me with everything.” His gaze narrowed, emotion radiating from him with the same intensity of the steam coming off the pavement after the rain. “What happened, Mila?”

  Her lips thinned, and her hands tightened where she hugged herself. Without a word, she turned. It took all of eight steps to get from her place in the living room through the dining room, into the hall and into the bedroom. There she backed up close to the open door, leaving plenty of room for Sam to step inside.

  When he did, the impact was incredible. The air heated and bristled against her skin. Each breath seared her lungs, and she was pretty sure if her muscles tightened one more degree, at least one of them would break like a giant rubber band and ricochet madly around the room.

  He looked around the room clockwise, taking in the side window, the iron bedstead to which a few flakes of pale green paint still stubbornly clung. He glanced at the night table, the wicker chair squeezed into the corner, the old dresser, then at the two rear windows. The blinds were closed on all three windows, but they hung crookedly on the one nearest the kitchen. One slat was kinked, allowing a tiny view outside, and a loop hung awkwardly from the pull cord.

  “When I come home from work, I put Poppy out, let her in, shower and change clothes. I keep most of my clothes in the hall closet, so I don’t usually come in here until I go to bed.” Her voice was steady but had a troubled tone to it that she wished she could scream away.

  But because she wasn’t a screamer, she calmly went on. “I was cleaning the kitchen after dinner. A breeze came up, and I heard a thumping sound from the bedroom. Poppy came in, whined and went back out, and I came in and found the blinds banging against the window frame in the breeze.”

  Sam slowly turned to face her, his expression grave. “And you didn’t open the window.”

  She shook her head.

  “And even if you had, you wouldn’t have messed up the blinds.”

  She shook her head again. He looked so serious that she felt both validated, for making the call to the police station, and vulnerable, because he thought the call valid, as well. He thought someone had been here. Had invaded her sanctuary.

  “Is anything missing? Has anything been disturbed?”

  She had paced through every room, studied every item, wondering that very question. Last weekend, she had gotten the dead bolt on the front bedroom, its only key with her a
ll day, so that room had definitely been safe, but the rest of the house seemed untouched, too. “No, not unless it was the most meticulous burglar in the world.”

  “Have you looked outside?”

  “No.” She should have. She’d thought about it. How many evenings had she let herself into the backyard and just strolled around? She had gotten as far as opening the back door, and she’d stopped, backed up, closed and locked it again.

  “You have a flashlight?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  He headed that way, spotting the heavy light on top of the refrigerator before she could point it out. “You wait here, and keep Poppy with you.”

  She sat in the dining chair he’d occupied a few nights ago and held Poppy between her knees, rubbing her shoulders and wishing Gramma was there to hold her the same way. She’d never cared much about physical contact, probably because with her parents it had always meant pain. But there were times, Lord, when she wanted a warm body next to hers, a hand on her shoulder, an arm around her. Just a little touch that said, It’s all right.

  Bending, she rested her chin on top of Poppy’s head. The dog’s breathing was shallow; hers was shallow and unsteady. Knowing Sam was only a shout away made her feel safe. Knowing that someone else had been that close troubled her.

  She heard his voice before she saw him again. He came in, cell phone to his ear, his expression fierce. “Yeah, I’ll be here,” he said before disconnecting. “You watered your plants today?”

  She nodded. “The system’s on a timer. Every other day right now, until we get some decent rain.”

  “There are footprints in the bed underneath the window, a size or two littler than yours. Maybe a small woman, maybe a kid.”

  For a moment, her focus went to the fact that he’d noticed the size of her feet. It was silly to even think about. Everyone saw everyone else’s feet. But noticing them struck her as...intimate.