Kansas City Countdown

by Julie Miller

  Wow. Wasn’t she the social butterfly? Not. Based on Helmut Bond’s comments and that call, it was looking more and more like she had no personal life. Unless snubbing Hellie’s attempts to date her had bruised his ego enough to want some kind of retribution. Otherwise, logic seemed to indicate that she should be concentrating on work and client issues to see who had a motive to kill her.

  Keir ended the call and tucked his phone back into his pocket before entering the key code into the security pad beside the gate. He waited for the gates to slide open and shifted the car into Drive again. “Weiss has a good reputation in town. Maybe you should consider hiring one of his bodyguards until we find out who did this. At least keep someone on the premises to monitor any activity.”

  “You’re not volunteering for the job?” The words were out of her mouth before she realized how teasing could sound like an anxious plea. The gates closed behind them with an ominous clank and Kenna jumped in her seat. Suddenly, she felt trapped, as if something or someone was closing in on her. She tried to mentally shake off the vague instinct—or was it a memory?—with little success. Maybe she hadn’t been teasing, after all. She leaned back against the headrest, taking the nervous hitch out of her tone. “I’m getting used to having you around.”

  “These past twenty-four hours have been...interesting.”

  “Said the master of understatement.” Kenna matched his knowing grin and relaxed a little more. Apparently, she’d been very good at being alone before the assault. She’d find a way to be good at it again.

  Like the other mansions in this old-money neighborhood, the size of the two-story home with painted white columns and a black iron chandelier hanging over the front door seemed a little pretentious. Still, she loved the tall locust and pine trees, with trunks so thick she wouldn’t be able to hug her arms halfway around one. There were spots of color, too, that caught her eye and made the yard feel much more inviting than the house itself. The long driveway that wound up the hill to the house was lined with hedges of spirea bushes that were budding with white and pink flowers.

  The colorful splash of tiger eyes, begonias and other annuals potted in two concrete urns on either side of the front door added a touch of warmth to the cold redbrick. “This was my parents’ house. We moved here when the firm became a success. My mother had all those spirea bushes planted. I remember them hosting big parties here when I was growing up.”

  “Do you remember being here yesterday?”

  “No.” She was remembering a more distant past. She shivered at the possibility that she would never be able to fill that most important blank spot of her memory.

  “If things seem familiar, at least you can trust that I’ve brought you to the right place.” Keir slowed his car in the circle drive at the front of the house, but instead of stopping, he pressed on the accelerator. “Hold on.”

  “The code Hellie gave me opens the front door,” she reminded him.

  But his blue eyes had narrowed and he was pulling back the front of his jacket and hooking it behind the holster of his gun. Keir was unbuckled before he shifted the Charger into Park in front of the three-car garage on the south side of the house and opened his door. “If everything’s locked up tight, why isn’t the garage?” The third door stood wide-open. She’d been looking at flowers, thinking about her mother and worrying about being alone, while he spotted a potential break-in. “Stay put. I want to check this out.”

  “Don’t...” Her heart thundered in her chest as a forgotten fear tried to take hold. The fact that he pulled his gun and was cradling it between both hands was reason enough to wonder if he’d just discovered the scene of her attack, reason enough to be concerned about the wary cop entering the open bay without proper sight lines or backup, reason enough to find the locks on the Charger’s door and secure herself inside. “Be careful,” she whispered when he crept around the corner into the garage and disappeared.

  Several seconds ticked by, a minute perhaps, and Kenna found herself staring at the clock on the dashboard. It was one fifteen. “One. Time is running out,” she murmured, repeating the echo of a memory she couldn’t quite hold on to. “There’s a deadline.”

  What deadline? What did the number one mean? What couldn’t she remember?

  Kenna combed her fingers into her hair and cupped her scalp, as if she could stem the flow of memories seeping out of her head. Without Keir here to ground her, she was quickly spiraling into confusion and despair. She shifted her gaze back to the open garage door. “Hurry back, Detective.”

  What was he finding? Evidence of a struggle? A horrid shrine to her injuries, decorated with streamers of bloody gauze? A perp lying in wait? Finally, Keir reappeared at the open door. Alive. Unharmed. Six feet of broad shoulders and piercing blue eyes and shielding strength. Kenna released a pent-up breath, silently chastising her wandering thoughts and ping-ponging emotions. But she didn’t waste any time scrambling out of the car when he holstered his gun and waved her over to join him.

  “I found your car,” he announced.

  “My car?” Shivering at the cooler temperature inside the shaded garage, or maybe the frissons of anxiety still firing through her system, she hugged her arms around her middle. “It’s here?”

  “I don’t think it ever left.” He pointed to the cream-colored Lexus trimmed with gold parked in the first bay. Its shiny surface and luxury appointments were a stark contrast to the paint-chipped pickup with mud and gravel caked around the tires and wheel wells parked in the open bay behind her. “You don’t own this truck, do you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Crinkling her nose at the dank smell of churned-up soil, Kenna circled around the truck to the potting bench and workstation at the back of the garage while Keir pulled out his phone and called someone to say he wanted to run a plate number. “Your car is clean—no signs of blood or a struggle of any kind—so I think we can rule out a carjacking.”

  Eliminating what couldn’t have happened was some kind of answer, wasn’t it?

  What else could the open garage and dirty truck tell them? She ran her fingers along the brightly painted ceramic pots and bags of potting soil and fertilizer stacked on the workbench. She traced the outlines drawn around the tools hanging from the Peg-Board above the bench. Something seemed familiar here among the hand shovels, rakes and pruning shears. A long, thin shape drawn in magic marker indicated a spade had once hung here. But the skinny shovel was missing. Was that significant? Was her brain trying to recall something important? Or was she just remembering her late mother’s penchant for beautiful flowers and an award-winning garden that had helped turn this imposing mansion into a home? “Look how neat this work space is compared to that truck that’s been off-roading. They don’t belong to the same person, do they?”

  “It’s not registered to you,” Keir confirmed, disconnecting the call and joining her between the truck and the bench. “The truck belongs to a professional landscaping company. Probably someone you hired. I don’t like that whoever parked it here left the garage door open, though. There’s a locked door between here and the main house. I already made sure it was secure, but still... Kenna? Where are you going?”

  Her nose had picked up another scent, more pungent than the earthy dampness of the fresh mud clinging to the truck. “Do you smell that?”

  “Kenna, wait.”

  As soon as she opened the door that led to the backyard, a gray wisp of smoke curled around her, triggering a silent alarm inside her. The trail of smoke on the early afternoon breeze was easy to follow. Was the house on fire? Jogging over the flagstone path, she darted through an open gate and followed a vine-covered arbor up to the slate-tiled patio at the back of the house. She spotted the fire that was more smoke than flame burning in a round fire pit at the corner of the patio. A few feet beyond that she saw a wheelbarrow with the missing spade and the backside of a man
in a dark green shirt and muddy jeans bent over the four-foot-high brick wall that surrounded the outdoor space. He held a bucket of white paint in one hand and a large brush in the other.

  “Hey, you. Sir.”

  The man swiped another streak of whitewash over the bricks, then wiped away part of it with a rag to let some of the bricks show through with a pinkish color. He dipped the brush into the paint again, oblivious of her approach.

  “Hey!”

  He startled when she raised her voice, slopping paint on the slate at his feet. He muttered a curse and set the brush in the bucket to pull a second rag from his pocket and kneel to wipe up the spill. But he didn’t turn or acknowledge her as she walked up behind him.

  “I’m talking to you. Who are you? What are you doing on my property?”

  “Kenna, stop.” A firm hand clamped around her upper arm and pulled her back a step.

  “I can handle—”

  But Keir’s broad shoulder was suddenly wedged between her and the intruder. “I’m Detective Watson, KCPD. Sir, I need you to identify yourself.”

  The workman was shorter than Keir, so she didn’t get a look at his face even when he stood. But she wanted to see his face, see if she recognized him as staff or a friend or maybe something terrifying. Minding Keir’s cautionary stance, she shifted half a step and peered around his arm.

  Not that it did her any good. The man tilted his downturned gaze to hers, but nothing about his dark eyes or the perspiration-dotted points of skin in his receding hairline seemed familiar. Maybe she’d gotten whacked on the particular part of the brain that remembered faces. That particular blank spot in her memory was worse than inconvenient.

  Kenna gave her head a slight shake and swallowed a curse of her own as the man pulled a set of earbuds from his ears and let the wires dangle around his neck. “I’m Marv Bennett. Marvin. Boy, you two sure gave me a fright. I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

  “Do you have ID on you, Marvin?” Keir asked, putting away his badge.

  “Ms. Parker knows me.”

  She jerked her gaze up to look at him again. His face was as unrecognizable as the man beneath the shadowed hood.

  “You won’t vouch for me?” The man sounded surprised.

  “Your ID,” Keir insisted.

  Since looking at the stranger working in her backyard hadn’t triggered anything helpful, Kenna walked over to the fire pit. Her eyes watered at the smoking chemicals, thorny bits of stalks and charred leaves tossed in the pile of ashes. Her mind instantly went back to the letter filled with dried rose petals. Did she have a thing for roses? Were they a secret message that she and a lover she couldn’t remember shared? What did that little twisting in her gut mean as she watched the plants swell and pop and then shrivel with the heat? Or was this just an unfortunate coincidence?

  Kenna blinked her eyes and turned away to see the man pulling a wallet out of his pocket and showing his driver’s license to Keir. There was a logo on his coveralls, but she couldn’t read it from this distance. He kept his face slightly averted, in deference to the man with the badge, she supposed. “You’re burning my rosebushes?”

  Seeming more eager to talk to her than to the cop asking him about the truck in the garage, Marvin Bennett angled his ruddy face toward her. “I thought you’d tossed those in there. Found ’em when I came in this morning. Looked like somebody lit a fire in there, but with all the rain it didn’t catch. That’s why I added the kerosene.” His mouth eased into a gap-toothed smile. “I figured you got impatient and started the project without me.”

  “What project?”

  The smile faded. He twirled his finger in the air, indicating the plants around him. “Pulling out these old rosebushes. The ones we’re replacing around the patio wall. You know we struggled with leaf blight last year.”

  She’d dug up the flowers and started this fire? When? Like the potting bench in the garage, the ruined flowers did seem to have some significance to her. But her stomach was queasy at the sight of the smoking plants. Was it sadness over losing something that had been so important to her mother? Was she sensing something beyond the reach of her current cognitive abilities? Or was she simply irritated that the man in charge of her garden didn’t seem to be very competent, and she’d had to do his job for him? Kenna thumbed over her shoulder. “There’s still some green in them. They’re not going to burn.”

  “I could have told you that. I would have chopped ’em up and composted them. But you’re the one who said you didn’t want to risk the bacteria spreading to other plants.”

  She’d talked to this man before? His posture shifted when she didn’t respond.

  “Two days ago? Remember? You said you wanted this taken care of as soon as possible, but I warned you the ground was too wet to plant the new roses because we wouldn’t have the proper drainage. Now, I hear your mama had a legendary green thumb, but I think you need to listen to me. That’s what you hired me for, isn’t it?” He tried to move around Keir, but her rescuer put out his hand to block the gardener from moving any closer to her.

  Looking vaguely offended, Marvin stuffed his wallet back into his pocket and retreated a step. “You didn’t call the cops on me, did you? Were the fumes getting to you? I didn’t mean to bother you, ma’am. And I’d have called to tell you I was coming, but I didn’t think you’d be here today.”

  Kenna closed her fingers around the sleeve of Keir’s jacket to remove the blockade and stepped up beside him, appreciating his effort to protect her, but needing answers almost more than she needed to feel safe. She tucked her hair behind her ears, deciding which question she wanted to start with. But the gardener’s mouth rounded with a soft whistle before she could speak. “Oh, wow. Ms. Parker, what happened to you? Are you okay?”

  For a while there, she’d forgotten the damage done to her face. Hating that others could be so distracted by her unfortunate appearance, she quickly feathered her long bangs back over her cheek and forehead. “Why didn’t you think I’d be at home?”

  “You always go into the office on Saturday mornings. When you said you wanted the project handled ASAP, I just assumed that as soon as the rain let up a bit, I could...” The man stared at her face long enough that she ended up averting her own gaze to the pattern of light gray and charcoal threads running through the shoulder of Keir’s jacket. “I can come back another time to finish up. I wanted to get those new rosebushes planted before the soil got too muddy. Weatherman says we’re supposed to get more rain tonight and tomorrow. You sure got a lot of stitches. Were you in a car accident?”

  Kenna hugged her arms around her middle and turned her face completely away from his curious concern, feeling her breath lock up in her chest at the wave of helpless self-consciousness sweeping through her.

  But Keir’s smooth, authoritative voice took up the interrogation she couldn’t continue. “How long have you been here today, Mr. Bennett?”

  “Since eight thirty.”

  “If that’s your truck, you must have seen Ms. Parker’s car in the garage. Why didn’t you think anyone was at home?”

  “Yeah, I thought that was weird, but, well, the house was dark—shades were drawn on most of the windows. I’ve been here all morning and nobody said boo to me. Ms. Parker almost always comes out to talk about the garden if she’s in. You know how she likes to be in charge.”

  Kenna’s chin came up at what almost sounded like an insult. But Bennett chuckled and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Besides, it isn’t my business to be too curious about where a pretty lady spends her nights. I’m sure she spends them with you, of course,” he added hastily, as if the thought that she or Keir might be offended came a few words too late. “I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

  Keir wasn’t laughing. He didn’t correct the man’s assumption about spending the night together, either. “How long have y
ou worked at the Parker Estate?”

  “Couple of years. That’s how long I’ve worked for Riley Greenscapes, at any rate. I guess they’ve been mowing the grass and taking care of the yard here a lot longer than that.” A defensive note crept into his tone as the questions kept coming. “Hey, I’m not asking for overtime because it’s Saturday. As long as I put in my hours and I’m not disturbing the household, I’ve got permission to be here. We have a contract to do regular upkeep of the yard and garden.”

  That didn’t make sense. The suspicious attorney in Kenna found a strength the depleted woman couldn’t seem to hold on to. She peeked around Keir’s shoulder to look directly at the gardener. “Then why are you painting?”

  Marvin shifted on his feet with an embarrassed chuckle. “Well, um, no offense, ma’am, but when you pulled out the old bushes, some of the ground must have settled behind it. I guess the roots and weathering over the years dislodged the mortar holding it together. This section here was all tumbled down when I came here this morning. I didn’t want you to hold me responsible, so I put it back as best I could and replaced the dirt, but I couldn’t get the bricks to all line up like before, and some of the red was peeking through. Thought if I painted it, you wouldn’t notice the difference. I found the paint and brush out in the garage. Like I said, ma’am, I didn’t even know you were here. I’ll put out the fire if that’s bothering you.” He picked up the shovel, scooped up a spade of dirt from the wheelbarrow and tossed it onto the smoking yard waste. “And I’ll get that wall finished right away.”

  “Your repairs look fine.” When had she worked in the garden? Was it a hobby of hers? An homage to her late mother? Or was she such a tyrant that she’d attempt to complete the job herself if the hired help couldn’t get it right? Kenna’s headache seemed to be coming back. She rubbed at her temple. “Have you seen or heard anyone on the property or in the house?”