“Miss delaGarza?”
“Well, Detective Callahan. Did you hear about Lindy Nolan? She was driving my car and someone ran her off the road. She says they were following her.”
He ignored my sarcasm, speaking in a monotone. “Can you come by the station tomorrow? I’d like to talk to you.”
“I’ll check with my attorney.”
“No need to bring Nichols. This is a statement on the possible attack.”
“Possible? She’s in the damn hospital. Even as a journalist I wouldn’t call it an alleged attack.”
“Have you had threats made against you?”
The question jarred me and my pulse quickened. “Threats? Like what?”
“Notes, letters?”
Coldness washed over me as I thought of the letters I’d picked up at the station the previous week. “Only about a hundred letters. Maybe more.”
“Why don’t you bring them with you. I’d like to see them.”
“Why? I don’t have them. I…shredded them.”
“Shredded them?” He sounded incredulous.
“I can get more.”
Damn, that sounded wrong. I rushed to explain. “I got dozens of nasty letters last week. More probably came in to the station this week. I’ll have someone pack them up and send them to you. They were so vicious I couldn’t stand to read them. That’s why I shredded them.”
“I see. As a public figure you would receive a lot of mail.”
“Has it occurred to you geniuses that while you’re so busy suspecting this public figure, you’re letting the real private guy off the hook? Maybe he was trying to kill me because he thinks I saw something and that’s why he ran Lindy off the road.”
A pause lingered between us, but when he spoke, it was with the old crisp note of barely controlled civility. “I think you’ve seen too many movies. What time can you come by?”
“I’ll check with Oliver and get back to you. And yes, I want Oliver there. Torres is liable to chain me to a chair until I confess.”
“We’re not that bad.” His chuckle was a surprise.
“Right.” I was about to make another sarcastic comment, but then I remembered something. “Did you know I own half the wine shop?”
“Yes.”
Had they discovered he stole my money? “We were business partners and intended to continue even though our personal relationship was over.”
Who could argue that? The only person who knew the truth was dead. I adopted a business-like voice.
“Can I get into the shop or is it still a crime scene? I need to check his books and see if there are any customers expecting special shipments.”
“We have his books but we’re finished with them. You can pick them up tomorrow.”
I hung up with a smile and turned my attention back to the list. I marked off “get books” on the Action Steps page. The next time Professor Sam Patterson studied my homework, I was going to get an “A”.
****
“This is a bad idea.” Brad frowned at my board before flipping through my notebook.
We sat in my office after dinner. He had come over at my request since I still felt uncomfortable about being home alone. The security company wouldn’t reinforce my system until the next day. I showed him my board, thinking he would approve, but he agreed with Hank.
“Police should handle this.”
“You said the killer could be watching me.”
“Then hire a bodyguard or PI. Do you want me to find someone for you?” His voice was eager and he watched me like a puppy waiting for a treat.
“That’s sweet, but I have professional help—a retired LAPD homicide detective named Sam Patterson. The board and notebook were his ideas.”
“Good. Let him do the dirty work.” He closed the notebook and the subject. “Let’s go back upstairs and I’ll make you a drink. You need to relax.”
No argument there. It was nice to have someone who wanted to pamper me. He’d picked up dinner and made a salad while I showered and changed into a new silk lounging gown. For the first time in days, I felt human.
Settling onto the hard sofa, I grimaced. “Do you like shopping? I’ve decided to get new furniture. Normally I’d take Delia, but since she’s not here...” I gestured toward him as he approached holding two martini glasses. He held one out to me and sat beside me.
I sipped it, swishing the cold liquid in my mouth and savoring the taste. “Perfect.”
“This is more like it. You should be shopping, not worrying about this killing.” He leaned toward me and I was aware of his arm on the back of the sofa and the whisper of his breath on my bare skin.
“I know shopping. I haven’t done much investigating since I was a reporter and that was years ago.” Taking another drink, I leaned my head back and let the liquor do its relaxing work. Maybe he was right. I’d provided Sam a good start. Now he could take over.
“I’ll go shopping with you, especially if it keeps you out of trouble.”
I shot him a teasing grin. “Being with you won’t get me in trouble?”
His fingers pushed a lock of hair back on my forehead. “Could it?”
A quick breath escaped me as memories shot through my brain—and body—of the day his gentle fingers massaged my shoulders.
His eyes were warm as his handsome face lowered until it was a few inches from me. I could see the light stubble of a late afternoon growth on his sculpted chin. I brushed his chin with the palm of my hand, letting the rough layer tickle my hand.
“You might be more deadly than the killer.”
His lips curved into a smile and he caught my hand. He squeezed it and touched it to his lips in a gentle kiss that made my insides tingle.
“I hope so.” Keeping hold of my hand, he put his glass on the coffee table and took my glass from me. Our eyes held as he leaned toward me again.
My stomach tensed, and a tiny spark of awareness swept through me. I sensed that the moment had come—the tantalizing pause between awareness and action. The next step would be the first kiss.
His face moved toward me and I closed my eyes and waited, ready to accept whatever was coming. Suddenly, it was as though something jerked my head back, like an invisible rubber band attached to the rear of my skull. I pulled my hand from his. “Wait!”
He jerked back as though I’d slapped him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rush you.”
I touched his chin with my fingertips. “It’s okay. I...wanted...”
I didn’t know what to say, but I knew sex was not the answer. I’d never shared Delia’s “if it feels good, why not?” motto.
“It’s too soon, I guess... Rick’s only been gone...well....” It sounded like the excuse it was. Rick had been gone from my life for weeks.
Brad’s smile filled with sympathy as he stroked my hair. “I understand, Kimberly. But you know I find you incredibly sexy.”
“Because of who I am? I might not have that role much longer.”
He took my hand again and his voice rang with boyish hurt. “How can you think that?”
“Would you would find me sexy if I was a maid changing the sheets in your hotel room?” I asked, thinking of Kimmie D’s old life.
He lifted my fingers and brushed them across his lips. “We’d be wearing out those sheets.”
I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
He caught my chin and turned my face toward him and kissed me quickly on the lips. “I’m in no rush. Whatever happens, it’ll be worth the wait.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Mira Loma PD, Friday 10:00 a.m.
Dressed in a pale lime pantsuit with my hair tied back, I projected cool-as-a-cucumber style as I arrived to meet Callahan. Oliver had been delayed on a case, but he provided me with strict instructions on what I could say. Instead of the interview room, Callahan led me to his cluttered desk in the open squad area.
“Did you talk to Lindy?” I asked.
“Detective Torres is intervie
wing her. Tell me why you think you’re being followed.”
I repeated the information from the first moment I felt uneasy. Callahan jotted notes on a tablet, nodding every so often, but he never asked a question.
When I concluded, I reached into my purse. “I’ve come up with a list of people who might want to kill Rick.” I pulled out a duplicate of my suspect list.
He put it on the desk, not checking it as he flipped through pages of the notebook. “Let’s talk about Wells for a minute. Tell me about his gambling.”
Of all the things he could ask, that surprised me. “What do you mean?”
“Did he do a lot of gambling?”
Where had this come from? “Super Bowl, World Series, March Madness. Football pools.”
He nodded, his eyes cool, giving nothing away. “No Lakers, no boxing, no Vegas?”
With his financial problems? I almost asked. “We used to go to Las Vegas quite a bit. For a while we went every month.”
“Uh-huh?” His eyes flickered to me, scrutinizing me. I sensed he was searching for something. “Did he enjoy it?”
“Rick could have developed a serious gambling problem. A couple of weekends he lost thirty thousand dollars. One weekend it was creeping toward sixty, before he started winning it back. At that point I put my foot down. I wasn’t going to lose thousands just to stay in a gaudy hotel room and get free meals. We stopped going.”
Callahan stroked the side of his face as though he had a beard. What did he know? Was this something to tell Sam?
“Was he gambling?” I asked, thinking about my lost money.
“Possibly,” he said and turned back to a folder on his desk.
Gambling made sense. We had a lavish lifestyle, but this might answer how he managed to spend so much of my money.
“I worried he could become compulsive about it,” I continued, hoping for a response. “His eyes would glaze over at the slot machine or he’d sit at the blackjack table for hours, convinced he had a system. Every roll of the dice was going to bring a fortune. I could watch when he was winning, but when he lost, he became morose and mean.”
“Mean?” That grabbed his attention and he sat forward. “In what way?”
“He’d get verbally abusive. Not to me. He knew better, but to others. Waitresses, dealers.”
“What do you mean he knew better than to be abusive to you?”
That sounded like a question Oliver wouldn’t want me to answer, but I sensed Callahan might read more into it if I didn’t. Besides, the reason was simple. “I’d leave him there and come home. Several times I took his car so he had to fly back.”
Callahan stared at me for a moment, and he started to say something and then stopped. Could Rick have been going to Las Vegas without me? We never questioned each other if we made separate weekend plans. There were weekends he had business meetings or I might go to a spa. We kept in constant touch by cell, texts, and email. It would have been easy to say he was in San Francisco and be in Vegas instead.
I glanced around the room, digesting what I’d learned, and spied Hank. As though he knew I was there, his eyes flashed across the expanse of desks and met mine. I turned away, but I could sense him moving toward us.
He stopped by the desk, not acknowledging me, addressing Callahan. “I’ll send you notes on what Brookings said about the threat against his daughter.”
Callahan leaned back on his chair and nodded. “Thanks for going over, Chief. Brookings is a prick. Where does he get off saying he’ll only speak to the chief? Like we’re nothing but errand boys. What the fuck was so important?”
Brookings? As in Bobbi the Bimbo? As in the Pilgrim—Miles Standish Brookings? Callahan’s frustration amused me. Finally! Someone he couldn’t push around!
Hank handed him a manila envelope. “See what you think. You might send that glass to the lab, but they passed it around, so if it had viable fingerprints, they’re gone. Might be something on the note, though.”
Hank fierce blue eyes flickered to me for the first time. “Miss delaGarza, can you come by my office before you leave? I need to discuss the security work my father was doing on your behalf.” His voice was loud enough to carry beyond me and Callahan. He was attempting to get my connection to Sam out in the open.
I started to say no, but Callahan emptied the contents of the manila envelope onto his desk. Inside were two plastic bags. One held a lethal looking sliver of glass, the other a note written in large red block letters.
I gasped and both Hank and Callahan jerked toward me.
“Has anyone sent you anything like this?” Callahan asked.
I stared at it, shaking my head and realized that Hank had become very still. My eyes met his, and I could see he was starting to catch the significance.
“Are we finished here?” I asked Callahan, my hand beginning to shake.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, distracted by the glass.
I sensed Hank watching me, but I couldn’t meet his eyes. Because I knew the origin of the glass and the note.
****
Hank stood by his desk, absently rummaging through a folder when I tapped on the open door. He waved me inside without looking up.
“Hank, I need to talk to you. About that note...”
He held up a hand. “Let the lab handle it.”
“But...”
His eyes avoided mine, eyes focused on the folder. “I mean it, Kimberly. If you have anything to say, you’d better have your attorney with you. I don’t want to hear...”—he held up his fingers in a quote sign—“anything ‘off the record,’ that might get it disallowed in court.”
He was right. I needed to discuss this with Oliver. It had been a joke. A terrible joke.
Even though my afternoon at Geneva with Delia was a boozy fog, I recalled that part with the clarity of yesterday. We’d stumbled along the cobbled walkway as we waited for her driver to take us home. We stopped when we saw Rick’s Jaguar convertible.
“I thought you said he wasn’t with her,” I told Delia.
“I’ll bet the lousy Weasel went up the back walkway to avoid us. He probably saw our cars and knew we were in the bar.” She paused beside the open convertible. “We should smash his windshield. There’s a rock garden over there and the valets are all busy.”
“We’d get busted for vandalism.” At least I hadn’t been drunk enough to do that.
“Then let’s leave a note saying we’re after him. Remember what we did to the creep who dumped me senior year? We’d leave notes on his car and it made him crazy. I’ve got a notepad and pen. Think of something obnoxious to say.” She opened her purse and reached inside and shrieked.
“What?”
She lifted out a napkin and unrolled it to show the sharp glass stem from my broken martini glass. “Let’s leave this. I’ll get a key envelope from the valet. You write the note.”
While she was gone, I searched in her purse for a pen. Not finding one, I opted for a red lip liner pencil and scribbled on the napkin. I couldn’t remember the exact words—something about death. I figured Rick would know my handwriting and write it off as the nasty joke it was supposed to be.
When Delia returned with the envelope, we put the glass and note into it and tossed it onto the passenger seat of the car. As Delia’s limo pulled into the drive, we rushed toward it, giggling like school girls.
How Bobbi ended up with the broken stem was a mystery, but it could be another nail in my coffin. I let the memory fade back into its drunken fogbank and turned to Hank.
“Why did you want to see me? Thanks for bringing Sam to oversee the security installation. He said he stayed with you last night.”
“Sam made it sound like the two of you are investigating.” He looked at me, eyes sharp as darts.
“Someone needs to find the killer. What if he’s after me too? Think about Lindy. She was driving my car. The hit and run driver might have been after me.”
Hank waved an impatient hand. “Torres is talking to her, but fr
om what I’ve heard, she was driving too fast and may have been racing the other car.”
“She told me she was careful.”
“You think she’d tell the truth if she was racing? Look, I would appreciate it if you hired a PI and left my dad out of this.”
“All you’re worried about is looking bad for your mayor and people like the Brookings family. I’m sure they’ll give you a nice contribution to your next campaign for providing personal attention.”
“I am not elected,” he said through gritted teeth.
“But you are worried about your job and appearances. Isn’t that why you were making such a big deal out of my ‘security arrangement’ with your dad?” It was my turn to hold up the quote fingers.
The coldness that grew in his eyes was like an approaching glacier. “Look, I know what’s happening. You’re doing your normal Kimberly crap.”
His harsh words smacked into me like a slap of hard wind to my face. “My what?”
He unloaded on me with the force of a blizzard. “You’re a pampered princess who is so damned used to getting your own way that you can’t handle it when the real world invades your private fantasy life! Well, it’s here, lady, and it’s real. But I won’t stand by and let you hurt my father by getting him involved.”
****
Friday, 3:00 p.m.
I wasn’t certain how much to tell Sam about my confrontation with Hank. He had remained at the house working with the security company while I drove to the police station. Now he wanted to go through my list of suspects. He sat in my office, leaning back on his chair, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose as he examined my notes. A bony finger tapped the page. “Girly colors, but this is good.”
His comment was the equivalent of a good grade from a teacher and it improved my dismal mood. My nerves had been on edge since I left the police station. Thank goodness for Sam and the glass of scotch at my fingertips.
“I have Rick’s books,” I said, patting the pile on my desk. “I don’t know if they’ll be much help.” Callahan had them waiting when I left Hank’s office.
Sam leaned over and opened one, frowning at the lines of neat little figures. “Why isn’t all this on a computer?”
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