Guilty

by Karen Robards

  And the thing that was really getting to him about it was the knowledge that he had no intention in the world of calling her on it. At least, not where anyone else could hear.

  Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer.

  Straightening away from the wall, he walked toward her.

  “Is she free to go?” he asked Kirchoff. Kate broke off what she’d been saying, interrupted in midspiel, but he didn’t care. Kirchoff, perched in the gold chair, looked up at him with surprise that quickly changed to respect when he saw the veteran homicide detective who was addressing him.

  “Yeah,” he said, and looked at Kate. “I’m sorry to keep you so long.”

  “That’s all right.” She smiled at him, a brave little smile that had Kirchoff practically melting in the chair, and stood up. “If I can answer any more questions . . .”

  “I’ll let you know,” Kirchoff promised, standing, too, and smiling back.

  It was all Tom could do not to roll his eyes.

  Kate’s gaze just touched his as she moved toward him. The medical examiner’s office was still busy in the garage, and, behind him, flashes were popping as investigators finished photographing the premises. They’d already searched the house from top to bottom, dusted for fingerprints, used Luminol for blood, etc. It was after ten now, and things were winding up.

  “Go pack a bag,” he said, low-voiced. “I’m taking you home with me.”

  She stopped, looking up at him in mute surprise.

  “Would you rather stay here?”

  She shook her head.

  “You got any better offers?”

  She shook her head again.

  Kirchoff skirted around them, casting them a curious glance that he quickly averted when Tom met it with a level look. By then, Kate was moving again, heading for the stairs, presumably to pack a bag.

  Tom cursed himself for three kinds of a fool as he watched her go. At least Fish, in whose car they had arrived, was already gone. Otherwise, he’d be getting an earful. An earful of hard truths and common sense that he was too far gone to hear.

  He was standing in the door between the kitchen and the garage, talking to Lally Cohen of the medical examiner’s office when Kate came up behind him and touched his arm through his black wool jacket. With gray slacks, white shirt, and a black tie (he owned just one that wasn’t red), he’d been good to go to work, two funerals, and back to work again.

  “Ready?” he asked her over his shoulder.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded good-bye to Lally and turned to Kate. A small black suitcase sat on its end on the ground beside her. Picking it up—it wasn’t heavy—he headed toward the front door, with her trailing behind him. When he reached it, he opened it and stood back for her to precede him through it, jeering at himself inwardly all the while.

  Clearly, he was a sucker for pretty blondes, too.

  “We’ll have to take your car,” he said when they were outside. “Fish drove.”

  She nodded, pausing for a moment on the porch to look around. Yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the front of the house just beyond the sidewalk, although it had not yet been extended to the driveway, which was still full of vehicles. A patrol car, dark and still, was in front. The white coroner’s van was parked behind Kate’s Civic, waiting for the body to be released by the PPD. Two more black-and-whites, dark like the first one, Kirchoff and Stone’s Taurus, and a few other assorted official vehicles lined both sides of the street directly in front of the house. Earlier there had been an ambulance, but it was long gone, its services not needed.

  The man in the garage was definitely dead.

  “How long do you think they’ll be here?” Kate asked over her shoulder as she stepped off the porch and onto the walkway.

  “Few more hours. You can probably come back tomorrow night, if you want.”

  He followed her down the walk, opened the door for her, tossed her suitcase in the back. Then he walked around the trunk of the car to get to the driver’s seat. The night was clear. The moon looked like a Ping-Pong ball sailing high overhead. The wind blew in his face, surprisingly cold.

  What he was getting ready to do—take Kate home with him—was probably one of the stupider things he’d ever done in his life. And the sad thing was, he knew it and was going to do it anyway.

  He got in. “Keys?”

  She passed them over without comment, and he started the car. Because the van had them blocked in, he drove through the grass to get to the street. As he negotiated the streets of her neighborhood, neither of them spoke.

  “So,” Tom said as they pulled onto the expressway.

  “That was the guy who carjacked you?”

  He’d heard her tell Kirchoff so.

  “I think so.”

  “Who do you think shot him?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Must have given you a turn to see him like that in your garage.”

  “It did.”

  “Thought you were going out of town. To Longwood Gardens, wasn’t it?”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “So you parked Ben with his babysitter so you could spend the night in your house alone.”

  He glanced her way in time to see her narrow her eyes at him.

  “That’s right.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it just last night that I slept on your couch, at your request, because you were scared to death?” In a (clearly useless) attempt to keep himself from getting dragged any deeper into the ongoing debacle that was his relationship with her, he had not arrived until after eleven, when she’d already been in bed. Hank Knox, a grandfatherly patrol officer who owed him a favor, had filled in for him until then.

  “I was worried about Ben.” Her tone was getting snappish. The big overhead streetlights made the interior of the car nearly as bright as day. She was looking pale—maybe it was the lights—and kind of hollow-eyed. But there was no mistaking the thinning of her lips, or the annoyed glint in her eyes.

  “Not about yourself.”

  “That’s right.”

  He digested that, sent her a look. “Remember what I told you that day in your office?”

  “What day?”

  “The day you got mad at me because I gave Ben a ball.”

  “You mean the day you tricked me into reaching for the ball so that you could see if I was right- or left-handed?”

  “That’s the one. I said, you’re a lousy liar, because your face gives you away every time. Just for the record, that still applies.”

  She sat bolt upright in the seat. Her chin quivered. Her eyes spat fire at him.

  “That’s it. I’ve had it. I’m sick of being questioned, questioned, questioned every minute I’m with you. You turn this car around right now and—”

  “Forget it.” He interrupted her in full tirade. “It’s not happening, Katrina Dawn Kominski.”

  That shut her up. She sat there gaping at him like he’d slapped her face.

  It was a full minute before she said anything else.

  “You’ve been investigating me.”

  “I’m an investigator. That’s what we do.”

  “Was it fun? Snooping into my life?”

  “Not fun. Necessary.” The Fitzwater exit—his exit—was coming up on the left. He switched lanes in preparation.

  “So you know all about me, huh?”

  The brittleness of her voice told him how deep the scars of her past went: so deep that she was doing her best to cover up any hint of hurt or shame about it. He almost kicked himself for bringing it up.

  Almost. But if he was going to fall head over heels for a woman who seemed to lie almost as easily as she breathed, the first thing they needed to establish was some small beachhead of truth.

  “I know a lot. I know you had a tough childhood, that your husband died, that you’ve done a truly admirable job of pulling yourself and Ben up by your bootstraps ever since.” They were on the ramp now, whizzing down toward Fitzwater in It
alian-centric South Philly. His place was just blocks away. He glanced at her, his voice gentling. “Why don’t you tell me the rest?”

  She glared at him. “What are you, the good cop without the bad cop?”

  He turned right on Fitzwater. “I’m not being a cop now, Kate. I’m just asking.”

  “Oh, right. You’ve been trying to catch me in a lie ever since you and your partner first showed up in my office. You were there in the courtroom that day. You saw how it all went down. How can you possibly imagine that I had anything to do with that?”

  “I don’t think you did have anything to do with that.” He turned onto Seventh. His place—the end segment of a triple row house known locally as a Trinity (as in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost)—was just up the block. So close to the Italian Market, the Italian-food mecca that stretched out over three blocks along Ninth, the street was busy, like most in the area on weekend nights. Cars rattled across cobblestones that had once been paved over but were now missing most of their covering.

  Tourists walked the uneven sidewalks in pairs and small groups until long past midnight. There were streetlights on the corners, but most of the bulbs were out. Parking could be a problem. Crime could be a problem. The architecture was less than inspiring: old three-story brick buildings, each exactly the same as the last; concrete steps leading up to aluminum-framed screen doors; rusting metal awnings arching over tiny front stoops.

  In other words, home sweet home.

  “Then what’s the point of this?”

  “I think something else is up with you. You’re lying about something, you’re scared of something, and way too many evildoers seem to be popping up in your life for it to be a coincidence. A case in point being this dead guy tonight.” He shot her a quick, assessing glance as his parking space, protected by a sawhorse with a sign that said Reserved for Police, which he’d made in self-defense against the tourists, came up on the right. Double-parking beside the car next to it, he got out, picked up the sawhorse, set it on the sidewalk, and then got back into the car. She was sitting there with her arms crossed over her chest, looking royally pissed. Which was fine with him. He was feeling kind of pissed himself, and every bit of it could be traced back to her. Or more accurately, his reaction to her.

  “Go to hell,” she said through her teeth as he eased the Civic into the space. “And leave the keys in the ignition. As soon as you get out, I’m leaving.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He put the transmission in park, turned off the car, pulled the keys out of the ignition, and handed them over to her, which just made her look pissier than ever. “Where are you going to go that comes complete with police protection? Because, not that I mean to worry you or anything, but you probably want to keep in mind that somebody killed that dude in your garage.”

  Then he got out of the car. She still hadn’t moved when he made it around to her door, so he opened it for her. She got out without a word. He retrieved her suitcase and tucked his sawhorse under one arm, she clicked the button to lock the car doors, and they proceeded across the sidewalk and up the quartet of narrow concrete steps that led to his front door.

  Then he stepped back to let her precede him inside. By the time he had the door locked again and the sawhorse stowed away in its usual spot, she was in his living room, which—because she was in it—he saw through fresh eyes.

  With an inner wince.

  Unlike her, he hadn’t tried to make a home. This shotgun-style town house was where he slept, watched the occasional ball game on TV, did laundry, and cooked when he got tired of eating out. Otherwise, he was never in it. The room was good-sized, rectangular, with one wall given over to an ornate mahogany fireplace with a mirror built in over it. The couch was old, cracking black vinyl, big and comfy but nothing to look at. The chairs didn’t match. The tables (okay, one was a box) didn’t match. There was a floor lamp and a table lamp (perched precariously on the box), and a rug on the floor. A plasma TV took pride of place in a corner. The few pictures were on the mantel; they were framed ones of family, placed there by his mom, who clucked over his lack of decorating skills and frequently offered to do the job herself, which he just as frequently declined.

  Kate was standing near the fireplace, looking around. He walked past her into the dining room—the rooms opened into each other, three to a floor, and the stairs went up from the dining room—set her suitcase at the base of the stairs, and went into the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator and snagged a beer.

  “You hungry?” he bellowed in her direction, popping the top. “You want something to drink?”

  “No,” she called back.

  Taking a chug, he headed back toward the living room.

  Having her in his house was making him uncomfortable, he discovered. Like he was heading somewhere he didn’t want to go.

  Accordingly, when he stopped in the living-room doorway and discovered that she was picking up pictures from the mantel and looking at them, he scowled at her.

  “Want to fill me in on your juvenile record?” He took another swallow of beer as her big, blue eyes turned from the picture she held in one hand to focus on him. “It’s sealed. I can get a court order to open it if I need to, but it’d be easier if you just told me about it.”

  He watched her shoulders square. “I shoplifted, okay? And I got caught. And I stole twenty dollars from a foster family I was living with. I got caught then, too. And I hit a boy in the head with a soda bottle. That one I spent three months in juvenile hall for.”

  She was looking at him defiantly. He took another swig of beer.

  “That was in Baltimore,” he said. It wasn’t a question, because he knew he was right. “So how’d you end up in Atlantic City?”

  Her face tightened. Her eyes darkened. Her lips compressed.

  And he knew he was onto something.

  “You know what?” she said. “I’m not answering any more questions. It’s your turn. The only thing I know about you is that you’re a homicide detective with a damned suspicious nature and a brother. Do you have other family?”

  Finishing his beer, he lobbed the empty can into a nearly full wastebasket in the corner. Then he leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb and eyed her contemplatively. She was maybe ten feet away, standing in front of the fireplace, looking absolutely gorgeous, a few long blond strands having escaped from her bun to curl around her face, the severe business suit she wore ironically emphasizing the slender femininity of the body inside it.

  Changing the subject when the topic under discussion didn’t suit was practically an art form with her.

  He was willing to go with the flow—for now.

  “I have a mother, three married sisters, my brother, who’s also married, and so many nieces and nephews I’ve lost count. They all live in Philly, so we see each other fairly often. Actually, my mom has a standing Sunday dinner that she tries to shame us all into attending, but I’ve missed the last few.”

  Her face had softened as if the idea of his family appealed to her. “Why?”

  He shrugged. Going into the real reason would, he felt, be stepping onto dangerous ground. “Too busy.”

  “Are your brothers and sisters older? Or younger?”

  “I’m the oldest.”

  Her lips curved into the slightest of smiles. “I should have guessed.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Bossy. Controlling.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  She was looking at the pictures on the mantel and didn’t reply. He tried to think of which ones were up there—he couldn’t really remember.

  “Are these your family?” She gestured at the lineup on the mantel.

  “Most of them, yeah.”

  “Is this a nephew?” She held up the silver-framed picture she was clutching so that he could see it. It was a three-by-five of a plump baby boy in blue corduroy overalls. He was seated on one of those blanket-covered boxes where baby photographers plop babies to take pictures of them. He held a blue-striped rattle in one ha
nd. His eyes were big and brown, he had a mop of black hair, and he was grinning a huge grin that showed two emerging teeth.

  Tom’s heart began to slam in his chest.

  “No.” It was an effort to get the words out. Stupid how, all these years later, it was still so hard to talk about. “That’s my son.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Your son?”

  “He was killed in a boating accident with his mother—my ex-wife—shortly after that picture was taken. Josh—his name was Joshua—was ten months old.”

  “Oh my God.” Kate stared at him, then put the picture back on the mantel and came toward him. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  He straightened away from the door as she touched his arm—stroked it, really—through his jacket. Despite his best efforts, he could feel a familiar tightening at the back of his throat.

  The pain was better. Far better. But it wasn’t gone, and he wasn’t sure now that it would ever completely go away.

  “It happened eleven years ago, so it’s not like it’s some fresh tragedy.” Her eyes were full of sympathy. He tried to make light of his feelings, tried to keep his voice even, because as he’d learned the hard way over the years, having people pity him totally sucked. “Michelle and I had just officially gotten divorced about two weeks before, and she and Josh were out on the Delaware River with her new boyfriend in his boat when another boat crashed into them. Everybody had been drinking. Nobody was wearing life jackets. Not that it would have mattered for Josh. He was killed on impact.”

  The stark recitation gave no clue about the agonies of grief he had endured, about the horror of the funeral with the tiny coffin, about the nightmares he’d suffered for years afterward about his small son lying buried in the cold ground. It did nothing to describe the hell of darkness he’d been lost in until finally, day by painful day, he’d managed to claw his way out.

  “That is so . . . sad.” The catch in her voice made his gut tighten. She was holding on to his arm now, her slender fingers pale as they curled into his jacket. Her lips were parted, and her eyes were huge blue pools of sympathy for him. She was standing close, so close he could smell the soft perfume of her shampoo. “That must have totally broken your heart.”