by Julie Miller
Since they clearly weren’t going to charm any information from this woman at this hour, Corie jumped on the first plausible lie that sprang to mind. “Yes, he is. That’s why we’re looking for Jeff. I’ve locked myself out of our apartment. He has keys.”
The woman dropped her gaze to the keys dangling from Corie’s fingers before arching the sternest eyebrow she’d ever seen. “I’m calling Mr. Stinson. He’ll deal with you.”
The door closed on Corie’s thank-you.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Matt teased, easing Evan from her arms until the building super arrived.
“Yeah. But I’m getting us into the apartment, aren’t I?”
Well, technically, Wally Stinson was getting them into Jeff Caldwell’s apartment.
Mr. Stinson looked less than thrilled when he stepped off the elevator in a pair of slacks and a wool robe hastily pulled on over his pajamas. His ring of master keys jingled as he shuffled along, smoothing his comb-over into some semblance of coverage on top of his head. “This isn’t your place, Mrs. McGuire. Yours either, Mr. Taylor.” He glanced over at the door to 613. “Miss Alice wasn’t too happy that your noise in the hallway woke her up.”
Corie didn’t point out that his noisy key ring jangled more loudly than their knocking had. “It’s vital that we speak to Mr. Caldwell. I think he broke into my apartment.”
Wally frowned, debating whether or not her claim had any merit. “You said that before, that you think he jiggered with your oven.”
“That’s right.”
“Any proof?”
Corie touched the door. “I think it’s in here. I want to talk to him about it, but he isn’t answering.”
Mr. Stinson pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “That’s because he works most nights at a distribution center. He only helps me during the day. Now y’all go on about your business and let the good people in this building get some sleep.”
“That’s even better.” Corie darted in front of him to stop his retreat. “We could go in there without him knowing, see if any of my stuff is in there.”
“I haven’t gotten any complaints about other tenants being robbed.” First this man had accused her son of setting fires, and now, like the woman in 613, he seemed to be calling her a liar. “Why would you think this man is stealing from you and messing with your things?”
She glanced over his head to Matt’s steely expression. And when he nodded, Corie confessed what she suspected was true. “He’s my ex-husband.”
Wally’s posture withered for a moment. “Ah, hell. I had no idea. We went through something like this with my daughter. Her no-account ex cleaned out every television and computer in the house when they were getting divorced. He pawned most of it.” Wally gave her a pitying look and patted her shoulder as he changed direction and pulled out the key to unlock Jeff Caldwell’s door. “If that’s the case here, if he’s taking or breaking your stuff, I’ll fire him on the spot. But like I said, he usually isn’t here nights.”
“Then this is the perfect time to look, right? Thank you, Mr. Stinson.”
Mr. Stinson opened the door to a dark apartment. He turned on the light, and the place didn’t look that much more welcoming, with a card table and chairs set up in the living room, and an old recliner facing a state-of-the-art television. There wasn’t a single decoration or personal item anywhere.
Matt placed Evan back in her arms and led the way inside, his gaze constantly moving to take in every detail. “Doesn’t look like he stays here much at all.”
“Do you see what he took from you?” Mr. Stinson asked.
“What?” The super startled her from her inspection of a stack of porn magazines beside the recliner. He’d bought them retail. There was no subscription name or address on them. “There’s hardly anything here.”
“What did he take?”
Her sanity, peace of mind and well-being. But, of course, Mr. Stinson assumed a much more monetary reason for Kenny, er, Jeff, to be in her apartment. “Do you mind if we look around?”
“Your boyfriend already is.”
Boyfriend. She really was getting used to having others link her and Matt together as a couple. She wondered if he minded.
She didn’t. She didn’t mind being linked to Matt Taylor at all.
“Corie.” Matt’s quiet tone filled her with more dread than a shouted warning would have. Hugging Evan tighter to her chest, she followed him to the kitchen. He put out his arm to keep her from moving any closer than the archway.
It didn’t stop the sheer terror from reaching her, though. The place was a science lab and an engineering station all rolled into one. There were stained measuring cups and hot plates on the counters. Jars filled with that clear, yellowish sludge that had coated the hood of Matt’s truck and bubbled the paint up and melted his windshield wipers as it had burned. The same goo they’d found in the alley fire and inside her oven. There was an open toolbox with pliers and screwdrivers and a tinier metal box that looked like it was filled with delicate dental tools. On the floor was a box of wires and technical equipment—packaged disposable cell phones, computer chips, something that looked like bundles of firecrackers. On the opposite counter, there was a stash of three whiskey bottles whose labels matched the one that had shattered against Matt’s truck. There were diagrams stuck to the refrigerator with magnets. There was a picture mounted there, too.
A well-worn, often-touched, picture of Evan when he’d turned one. They’d gone to the photography studio that day after Kenny had made her redress their son in a suit and Velcro tie instead of the cute baby blue overalls she’d put him in. There was a big D in the picture behind the posed shot—a D for Danny Norwell.
Even though he was sound asleep, she cupped the back of her son’s head and turned him from the disturbing sight. The tears that stung her eyes were angry, fierce. This was her old life, the one she thought she’d escaped from. “This is Kenny. He used to have a setup like this in our garage back in St. Louis.”
“Who’s Kenny?” Mr. Stinson asked.
“Jeff, of course,” she hastily corrected herself. “I guess he goes by Jeff now.”
Matt had his cell phone out, snapping pictures. “I’m calling Uncle Cole. He and Agent Rand will definitely want to see this.” He turned her toward the living room. “Stay here. I want to check out the rest of the place. Mr. Stinson, you’ll stay here and watch her.”
Although issued as an order, not a request, the older man nodded.
“We’ll be fine,” Corie assured him. “Just be careful.”
Once Matt headed down the hall to the other rooms, Mr. Stinson pulled out one of the folding chairs for her, but she was too keyed up to relax. Not here. Not with evidence that pointed to the arson fires Matt had been forced to deal with. “Is this a meth lab?” the older man asked, nodding toward the kitchen.
“Something like.” One thing Kenny had never whipped up in the garage was drugs. He’d always said he needed a clear head to work with the compounds he did create for clients who wanted a job done a certain way. “Some of those chemicals are combustible and flammable.”
“What would he need those for?” Wally asked.
“Starting fires.”
“Not in my building. He... I never knew any of this was here.” Mr. Stinson ran his fingers through what was left of his thinning hair. “He knew his way around electricity, carpentry, plumbing—all of it. I played poker with him and a couple of his buddies one night.”
“A couple of his buddies?” Corie almost sank in the chair as her knees wobbled beneath the weight of her suspicion. But she had Evan in her arms. She needed to be strong. Smart. Smarter than Kenny. “Does one of them have a dark, almost black beard? The other is tatted up. He’s a redhead with freckles.”
Wally nodded. “Yeah. Harve and—”
“Jordy.”
He
seemed surprised that she knew the men’s names. Hell, she was surprised to know such things. Corie didn’t know whether to be angry or feel foolish that she’d been in the dark about the danger creeping into the corners of her life for so long. “Do you know their last names?”
Wally scratched his head again, sorting through memories. “Jeff Caldwell, of course. Jordan Cox—we made a few jokes about his name. And Harve...” He snapped his fingers as the name fell into place. “Harve Mohrman. He told me he met Jeff in—”
“Jefferson City?” Prison. Harve and Jordy were prison buddies of Kenny’s. Even Kenny’s alias was a nod to his stay in the pen. Jeff Caldwell? Jeff City? Jeff C?
“Yeah. How did you know?”
Matt reappeared from the hallway, a dangerous purpose to his stride. “We need to go.”
“Why? What did you see?”
He scooped Evan from her arms to hurry her along. “We may be disturbing a crime scene.”
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
“What is it? A dead body?” Something worse than that? Something about her? Evan?
“Corie...”
She evaded his outstretched hand and hurried down the hallway, peeking into the first bedroom, the bathroom, ending up in the bedroom that was located where hers would be on the floor above them. As she entered the room, a sudden shock of cold seeped through her coat and clothes and chilled her skin.
But there was no window open. In the middle of January, there was no air-conditioning running.
It was the room itself, filled with hate and vengeance and the kind of obsession found only in horror and serial killer movies.
The smell got to her first. Something burned and pungent, like incense or a hundred scented candles. There was no furniture in the room besides a table and chair and a cardboard box that looked suspiciously like the one she’d set outside on her fire escape for the neighborhood cats.
Three of the four walls were a sick shrine to her. Pictures from her wedding to Kenny. Pictures from her childhood. Pictures of her waiting at the bus stop near Pearl’s Diner, sitting on a bench on campus talking to a professor, monitoring recess duty at her school. There were pictures and newspaper clippings of fires, the shells of burned-out buildings, fiery car crashes and the charred remains of bodies. The images papered the walls and were decorated with bits of yarn pinned to the walls. Burned matches and broken lighters, even a perfume-size bottle of that flammable goo, hung from different strings. Spray painted over the collage of pictures were words and phrases like child-stealer, kill the witch and worse.
The fourth wall was tainted simply by being in the room with all the angry, vile images. It held pictures of Evan. Formal ones from when he was very young to candid shots of him on the playground at school here in Kansas City and one of him standing in the bed of Matt’s truck, illuminated only by a streetlamp. If the kitchen had been the workspace of an arsonist, then this was his place of worship.
Corie couldn’t move. She couldn’t think, couldn’t feel.
She could only startle when Matt walked into the room behind her, thankfully, having left Evan resting someplace where he couldn’t see this. “Looks like he’s been using the fire escape to go up to your apartment. That’s possibly how he got in and out of your place.”
It hadn’t been a noisy alley cat pacing on her balcony. Kenny had been there, right outside her bedroom window, and she’d never even suspected.
There was so much hate, so much obsession in this room. She didn’t know whether to scream or cry or simply surrender to the inevitable.
“Come on, sweetheart. Nobody needs to see this except the police.” Matt turned her into his arms and walked her out of the room.
She leaned into him, grateful for his strength and support. “I never had a chance of living a normal life when I left Kenny, did I.”
Chapter Twelve
Another two hours had passed by the time Detective Cole Taylor and NCIS agent Rand had finished their interviews and left Corie’s apartment to go back down to apartment 612, where a team from the crime lab was processing the evidence in the elusive Jeff Caldwell’s apartment and members of the KCFD were safely packaging and removing the flammable chemicals and fire-starting devices her ex-husband had kept there.
They were as certain Jeff Caldwell was Kenny Norwell as she was, although no one could find him. And they were certain he was the man a mobster named Chad Meade had hired to do some jobs for him, including torching a car and a building and covering up the scene of a murder. Cole Taylor and his NCIS partner had left discussing the possibility of Kenny turning state’s evidence against Meade.
If they could capture him.
If he didn’t find another way to hide himself in plain sight and never be found again.
Matt’s uncle had also promised a round-the-clock watch on their building while his parents, brothers, sisters-in-law and extended family members she’d lost track of stopped by to bring food, offer a place to stay and trade hugs, handshakes and promises of support that extended to Corie and her son...because Matt said they were important to him. Corie had never seen such an outpouring of love before. Certainly, the Taylors were nothing like life with her family or Kenny had been. She’d met so many Taylors, she couldn’t remember all their names, much less put faces to which branch of the family belonged with whom. But each and every one of them had made her feel as welcome as Mark and Amy had the other night. Like she was a part of something bigger than herself. Part of that family she’d always wanted. An extended family where she could let her son visit a grandparent and know he would be safe and nurtured and loved in a way Kenny and her mother never could.
While the outpouring of love and support had gone a long way to help her bury the images from Kenny’s kill the witch room, she had no doubt Kenny was targeting her now, tormenting her for his own pleasure or because he wanted her off her guard, giving him an opportunity to steal back the son he’d accused her of taking and punishing her for daring to want something better, safer, more loving than the world that Kenny and his crime buddies offered.
Somewhere along the way, Corie had gotten her second wind. Anything she could do to help the police helped Evan, and she’d do anything for her son. She’d brewed several pots of coffee and served up multiple snacks brought by each of her guests. With all the comings and goings, no matter how quiet they’d tried to be, Evan had awakened at two thirty. He’d eagerly talked to Pike Taylor, petted his K-9 partner, Hans, and arranged a tentative play date with Pike’s son, Gideon. He’d carried his plastic dragon with him the entire time he’d joked with Mark and Amy and played host to their indulgent guests.
She would carry the fear, the sense of impending doom for them both. Seeing her son so happy tonight was worth anything she’d gone through in her life—and anything that was yet to come.
But now that all the Taylors were gone, save for one tall, overbuilt firefighter who she feared would give his life to protect her and Evan, she had a different problem on her hands.
Matt was exhausted. He’d hinted at having a rough day on the job, and she suspected that was the reason he’d been so late getting to the diner in the first place. As he hugged his mother and father and locked the door behind them, Matt leaned back against the door and exhaled a deep breath. He looked haggard and tired—always incredibly strong—but now suddenly vulnerable somehow. He’d done so much for her, so much for Evan. Maybe now he’d let her do something for him.
Corie crossed the room. She watched him breathe in deeply and open his eyes to give her one of those almost-there smiles before she reached up to gently cup his stubbled jaw. “You smell good,” he murmured in a husky voice.
“And you look exhausted. Come with me.” She linked her arm through his and walked him over to her sofa. “You’ve been this big presence hovering around the room all night, keeping watch. Now it’s your turn to relax and regain so
me of your strength. Sit. I’m taking watch over this apartment tonight.”
He folded his long legs and sat back against the cushions, although his dark, hungry gaze never left her. “Corie—”
“No.” She placed a finger over his firm lips, silencing whatever protest he was about to make. “I don’t remember which brother it was, but they promised that someone would be watching the building all night. I’m in charge inside these walls. You can drop your guard for a little while and rest.”
“I am beat,” he admitted, his lips brushing like a caress against her fingertip. “But I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something more I could be doing to stop this maniac and protect you.”
“Atonement?” She nudged his knees apart and moved between them to sit on his lap. It put her in the rare position of being eye level with him, and she made the most of it by leaning forward to press a lingering kiss against his lips. His hands tightened on her thigh and hip as he sighed against her mouth and then deepened the kiss. Although his deliciously languid possession of her mouth kindled the good kind of fire deep inside her belly and made her breasts feel heavy with anticipation, she also suspected his leisurely response spoke to his fatigue. The man had a physical job. He’d had a physical night putting Harve and Jordy in their place and dealing with his truck. Then there was the emotional roller coaster of discovering Kenny’s dangerous workspace and heinous obsession room. Plus, for a man who leaned to the introverted, quieter side of things, dealing with all the police and family and firefighters who’d been in the building these past two hours had probably taken a toll on him. She wondered if exhaustion was a strong enough word for what he was feeling right now.
And so, because this was about what Matt needed, and not the deliciously sinful and cherished way his mouth and hands made her feel, she broke off the kiss and tipped his head to gently press her lips to the shadows beneath each handsome eye. Then she hugged him close and whispered against his ear. “You don’t owe me anything. You don’t owe anyone another piece of your heart and soul and protection and dedication. You’ve repaid the price for that fire you set as a child a hundred times over. Set your crusade aside for a few minutes and let someone take care of you for a change.”
