by Holmes, Dee
“Then you’re saying someone came in after that and killed him?”
“Yes.” Maybe the same someone who claimed to have seen her drive away. Or an accomplice. That could mean someone had been waiting for her to leave, that Steve’s murder had been timed for a precise moment. It was several hours before she’d returned for the treasured items, and by that time that “someone” was long gone. Kathleen scowled, new questions rushing through her mind.
“But why?” Clarke asked.
“Why was Steve murdered? I don’t know why, or have the vaguest idea who would do it.”
“So why are they trying to pin it on you? Someone out to get revenge against you? It could go down as an unsolved case. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“But the first time a deputy sheriff has been murdered in Rodeo. From what I read in the papers you sent, the town was shocked and outraged. A dead deputy sheriff, and no arrest? The entire department could be fired for incompetence if someone isn’t convicted.”
“But why you?”
“Maybe it’s easier than tracking down the real killer. Maybe the real killer is someone the police want to protect.” That seemed bizarre, but not unlikely. “They need a credible suspect, and with all the domestic-abuse cases, a woman in a desperate situation killing a brutal husband isn’t that uncommon.
“Steve had a problem, and for too long I tried to solve it by being the perfect wife. I finally realized it wasn’t my responsibility to be perfect, it was his to stop beating me up. But the point is that I had a believable motive for killing him—one the town of Rodeo would believe. If the police don’t look for other plausible suspects, my disappearance makes me look even guiltier. While the cops are chasing around trying to find me, the townspeople are feeling secure that the police are doing their job. The sheriff’s office, meantime, can bask in the praise that they were quick, precise and professional carrying out their duty to identify Steve’s killer.”
“So you’re saying they don’t care who did it, just that they make an arrest?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure he was alive when you left?” Clarke asked.
Kathleen caught her breath. “Wait a minute. What kind of question is that?”
“Nothing. Never mind—”
“You can’t figure out why they want to frame me, so you assume I’m somehow responsible? You think I killed Steve and put it out of my mind? Denial?” She could feel a sickish feeling clog in her throat.
“Kat, the guy was a bastard to you. He probably deserved killing. But why did you stay and put up with the abuse? My God, you were married to him for more than five years!”
Kathleen gripped the phone so hard her hand ached. “I stayed because I loved him. Because I thought he would change. Because he kept telling me he wanted to change. Two days before I left, he tried to choke me after telling me that if I ever tried to leave him again he would kill me. I knew then that he was never going to change, so I made plans to go, and I went. There you have the five years in a nutshell. I’ll spare you the pregnancy I never had, the friends I never made, the music I wasn’t allowed to play.”
Clarke was silent for a long moment, then said grimly, “If I’d been there I would’ve killed the son of a bitch.”
Kathleen shuddered. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Wait, Kat. Don’t hang up. Listen to me. I don’t give a flying frig who killed him, and if you did blow him away, I would never say anything to anyone, but I’m worried about you. I know what happens when you think the world is out to get you. Being a gay man has shown me how suspicious even ordinary things can seem. After a while, you get weird, you know, delusionary, and you’re jumping at every move and always looking over your shoulder.”
“Paranoia?” she asked through gritted teeth.
“Yes.”
Kathleen wanted to scream and she wanted to burst into tears. “What do you suggest, Clarke? That I call the local police and turn myself in?”
“Nothing is gonna happen to you,” he assured her. “A good lawyer could get you off on that new domestic-violence defense. The way things are now, you’re gonna be running the rest of your life.”
“Ah, and the alternative is going to prison for a crime I didn’t commit. Or if I’m very lucky, and get acquitted, I can just spend the rest of my life as a woman who killed her husband and got away with it. That sounds like a swell way to live.”
“Better than what you have now, Kat.”
“No, Clarke. Not being hunted, not having the cops trying to frame me for a murder I didn’t commit, that is better than what I have now.”
She glanced up to see Bosco, Gail’s black-and-white cat, stroll into the room and leap gracefully onto the bed. He walked across the papers, nosing her knee before crawling across her legs. Then Kathleen heard another sound and looked toward the doorway.
Lisa Rawlings, wearing a pink gingham sunsuit and a sagging bow in her hair, was crawling through the doorway and headed right for Bosco.
“Sweetheart, where did you come from?” There was no sign of Booth or Mavis or anyone else.
Lisa pointed to Bosco, grinned and said something that sounded like “kitty.”
“Got company?” Clarke asked.
“The little girl from upstairs. I have to go. Someone is no doubt looking for her.”
“Want Tim to keep gathering stuff on this?”
“Yes. And tell him thanks from me.”
“Oh, don’t worry, he’ll probably send you a bill. Research is how he makes his living.”
“How fortunate for me,” she said, feeling cranky and out-of-sorts. Clarke’s solution had all the appeal of a tour of Sing Sing, and learning that his lover was going to stick her with a bill at God-knows-how-much per hour only added to her annoyance. She replaced the phone on its cradle and moved it to the nightstand.
Lisa had pulled herself to her feet, using the bedspread for handholds. Her small fingers grabbed at one of the pages, and Kathleen rescued it and Lisa before she fell. She swept the pages into a messy pile, gathered up the child, kissed her neck and settled her on the bed beside a purring Bosco.
“If you’re here, then Daddy is either frantic or he left you with another careless baby-sitter.” The plump baby wiggled and stretched to touch the cat. “Be gentle. Like this.” Kathleen took Lisa’s hand and drew it across the cat’s fur. The little girl squealed and did it again. Then she reached for Bosco’s tail and Kathleen diverted her. “Kitties don’t like to have their tails pulled. Can you hear him singing?” Lisa gave Kathleen a wide-eyed look when she placed a finger to her mouth in a shushing sound. “Listen.” Bosco purred, his eyes half-closed, as both Kathleen and Lisa petted him.
“Lisa! Thank God.” A very pale Booth came to a halt inside the doorway, then sagged against the jamb. “I thought I’d lost her.”
“She followed Bosco.”
“Bosco?” He looked at the cat, who eyed him with studied boredom. “Is it yours?”
“Gail’s. And your daughter is fascinated.”
“She’ll have to get unfascinated. I don’t like cats.” He came forward, prepared to sweep his daughter into his arms.
“I think Bosco is offended.”
“Let him use one of his nine useless lives to get over it.”
“That’s a horrid thing to say.”
“Yeah, well, at the moment, I’m not feeling polite. I just went through hell when I looked up and she was gone.”
“So you owe a debt of thanks to Bosco for coaxing her in here and not into the street. And another debt of thanks to me that I left the door ajar for Bosco to come in.”
“The next mouse I run into, I’ll send his way. As for you, Lisa and I will buy you dinner.”
She eyed him skeptically. “That’s a lot of thanks for one slightly ajar door.”
“We’re a generous and grateful pair.”
Kathleen nuzzled the baby’s neck. She should say thanks but no thanks, but she sensed Booth w
ould become even more suspicious. For the time being she decided to say nothing. “So how did she escape you?”
Bosco leaped off the bed and scooted around the corner as Lisa struggled to get off the bed and follow. Kathleen distracted her by giving her a set of plastic keys Booth had pulled from his pocket.
“I came downstairs to get the mail, put her down while I sorted through it, then Alfred stopped to ask me about a house break-in on the next block.” Alfred Spottswood was the elderly man Kathleen had met at Booth’s that first night. “The next thing I knew, she was gone.”
“She’s very quick and curious, isn’t she?” Kathleen glanced up at Booth. He was wearing a red T-shirt and old, faded jeans that fit him so well, Kathleen had to look away. She concentrated on Lisa.
“ ‘Quick and curious’ is an understatement. This morning I turned around and there she was, trying to climb up the kitchen drawers to get the cookies on the counter.”
Kathleen laughed and straightened the bow in the baby’s hair. “You’re going to make your daddy gray.”
“Already has.”
“Really, Booth. It’s hard to believe one full-grown adult male can’t handle one little bundle of pink gingham.”
“Actually, in the kitchen I was distracted.” He lifted Lisa up and settled her into his arms. “I was too busy watching a certain neighbor named Kathleen climb into her car wearing a sexy sundress, and she looks even sexier in the middle of her bed.”
A rush of heat swelled inside her. Booth hadn’t moved. Lisa was trying to put the plastic keys into his shirt pocket. While he held the baby firmly, his undivided attention was on Kathleen. All her senses tingled into one fluid melody that both enchanted and alarmed her. It had been a long time since she’d had such an impulsive arousal, and rather than shrink from it, she found herself wanting to hold on to it.
For so long she’d felt nothing with Steve and had even wondered if she’d been irretrievably burned by her marriage. Obviously she hadn’t, but at the same time, Booth Rawlings created a real problem for her.
She slanted a look at him and found him watching her, his dark eyes smoky and serious; she couldn’t miss a kind of patient anticipation that seemed to say, “It’s only a matter of time. Me and you. Alone. Naked. Hot.”
Kathleen wriggled a little, trying to separate herself from her own erotic images.
“Yeah,” he murmured as if reading her thoughts.
“I can’t,” she whispered back, wincing because she’d been so quick to answer.
His gaze swept down her. “You want to.”
She shook her head.
“Liar.”
Before Kathleen could fashion a response, Bosco returned and leaped onto the bed.
Lisa began to squirm to get down, and the spell was broken. When Booth wouldn’t release her, she started to howl. “Now what’s wrong?”
“She wants to pet Bosco.” Kathleen took the struggling Lisa, who immediately quieted and allowed Kathleen to take her hand and stroke the kitty.
Booth didn’t move, watching with a kind of measured amusement. Lisa was enthralled with the cat, and when Kathleen reached behind her for her iced tea, Booth handed it to her. Their fingers brushed, and Kathleen felt the effect race through her like a jolt of electricity. She glanced away, and in that instant panic seized her. My God, the papers! All this time, the very thing she’d wanted to keep hidden was spread out like Thanksgiving dinner. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
She was sitting here having sexy thoughts about Booth, while he was probably reading enough of the scattered papers to send his curiosity into high gear.
Lisa had curled against her, thumb firmly in her mouth, sleepy now. “Could you take her?” Kathleen asked him.
“We could prop some pillows around her and leave her here. Let me get these papers out of the way.”
Kathleen grabbed his wrist, and he swung around to look at her. Distract him. She had to distract him.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She curled her hand around the back of his neck and stretched her body up to kiss him.
CHAPTER FIVE
BOOTH TOOK FULL ADVANTAGE. She tasted of sweet tea and summer heat, and if his daughter hadn’t been wedged between them he would have eased her down on the bed and taken the kiss deeper.
“Very nice,” he murmured when she pulled away.
“Impulse.” She licked her lips, savoring him.
The gesture electrified him. He tried to shake off the disturbing feelings, which had far too much significance for such a short kiss. But the fact that the woman who hadn’t even wanted a friendship a few days ago was now in his arms made the kiss even more pleasantly puzzling.
“I think we shouldn’t be in the bedroom.” She’d pulled herself together, the mask back in place, and if he couldn’t still taste her, he might have thought he’d imagined the moment. She handed Lisa to him and got off the bed, tossing the papers to the floor on the far side.
Booth halted when she gestured toward the door. “Aren’t you going to pick them up?”
“Later.”
“Not important, huh?”
“No.”
He didn’t believe her. She’d been too succinct and definite; had given no explanation, no casual dismissal. Since he had no reason to expect her to explain, he blamed his overly suspicious mind. What bothered him was that suspicions about Kathleen were becoming more and more firmly entrenched.
In addition, she’d sparked a personal and intimate interest from the very beginning, which might be why he kept trying to find excuses for her odd behavior. But Booth had been a cop for too long to be sucked in by feminine gestures—impulsive or otherwise. Perhaps it was just as well she’d refused the baby-sitting offer. It was one thing to ponder a personal relationship with her, but taking any chances with Lisa was out of the question.
The truth was that Kathleen didn’t fit the mold—whatever the hell the mold was—of an average woman, new in town and attempting to fit into the community. As for her unimportant mail—who fixed iced tea and settled with the phone in the middle of her bed just to surround herself with unimportant papers? He remembered his sister following a similar ritual when she got a letter from a boyfriend. Opening and reading it was an event that demanded privacy and atmosphere, and woe to anyone who barged in at the wrong time.
In this case, though, that they were love letters was unlikely. There were too many pages, and they’d been reproduced by a printer. From the quick glance he’d had, the papers had looked more like a file of some sort, or a report. Then there was the fact that she’d turned the papers over when she’d swept them aside. Had she done that because she was naturally private or was she deliberately hiding them?
Neither was a crime, he reminded himself, forcing his thoughts away from asking questions he guessed she wouldn’t answer anyway. Then again, if he could get a look at just one of those pages... He damned himself for not looking more closely when he’d had the chance.
“It was nice to see Lisa again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.” She went back and pulled the bedroom door firmly closed. Then she took her iced-tea glass to the kitchen and returned. She gave him an exasperated look when she saw he still hadn’t moved.
“You’re a puzzlement, Kathleen Yardley.”
“A woman’s prerogative.”
“No relationship, not even a friendship, and then that kiss. Very curious.”
“It didn’t mean anything, you know.” She straightened a stack of paperback books, fixed a window shade and opened the door for Bosco.
“Really.” He shifted Lisa into a more comfortable position. She’d fallen asleep. “Then why are you still thinking about it and fluttering around like you’re not sure what to do next?”
“I am not fluttering. I’m waiting until you leave.”
He laid Lisa on the couch, then picked up a small trio of pictures from a bookcase. The snapshots had been taken on a farm or ranch of a man and woman and three children,
one of them a little girl. Before Kathleen snatched it from his hand, he thought he saw some cattle in the background.
“It’s Gail’s family. Your investigative nose is too obvious.”
“And you, my mysterious Kathleen, always seem to give me something new to think about.”
“And what, pray tell, have I done now?”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“The kiss?” She laughed, giving a dismissive shrug. “Please, no analysis. You’re very attractive and, well, I just wondered what kissing you would be like. Now, can we stop talking about it? My goodness; it’s been discussed far longer than it lasted.” She turned her back to indicate she didn’t expect a response.
Booth remained silent and instead, stepped into the common hallway for Lisa’s stroller, which was exactly where he’d left it after returning from a walk the afternoon before. If he’d placed his daughter there while he’d been sorting his mail and talking to Alfred, she wouldn’t have followed Bosco, and right now he’d be wending his way through his least favorite place—the grocery store. Which, he reminded himself grimly, he still had to endure.
He got the stroller, swept out the mail he’d tossed there before he’d gone looking for his daughter. He moved Lisa from the couch to the stroller, where she continued to sleep.
Kathleen had gotten a watering can and was giving a drink to a trailing plant with blotchy leaves. Then she straightened some magazines and put last night’s newspaper into a wicker wastebasket. Booth watched her for a few minutes, guessing she was staying silent in the hopes that he would leave. Then again, if she could be unpredictable, so could he.
A small spinet piano stood in one corner of the apartment, and Booth took advantage of its presence to remark, “Porky said you played.”
“What? Oh, the piano. Yes.”
“Your friend Gail plays, too?” He assumed so, since this was her home.
“Yes. We were both music majors in college.”
“Where was that?”
She placed her hands on her hips. “The Juilliard. And you’re being nosy again.”