by Beverly Bird
“I supported you.”
Raphael was too angry to answer.
“I may well have done what you did, Montiel, in my younger days,” Plattsmier said. “However, I would not have done it in front of an Eyewitness News Action-Cam. That’s why the commissioner was distressed with you.” He paused, then his temper showed. “It’s why I couldn’t save you a suspension. Damn it, do you think I wanted you out? If I’d wanted you out, you’d still be out. Internal Affairs wanted to suspend you for three months. And I wouldn’t have let Fox catch this case. Then you’d have no way in on it at all. As it is, you’ve just got to cool your heels for another few hours and you guys will be a team on it.” He paused, and some of the anger went out of him. “Between the two of you, you’re the best I’ve got in the area of organized crime. So let’s let bygones be bygones and do our respective jobs here.”
Raphael heard what Plattsmier didn’t say. The case was going to blow wide open. The city of Philadelphia was on the verge of an ugly mob war. None of them doubted it.
Which made Plattsmier right. They had work to do.
“Take her for now, like Fox said.” Plattsmier thrust a thumb at the brunette.
Raphael glanced her way, and damned if she didn’t do it again, that deep indrawn breath, that squaring of her shoulders. “I have a name,” she said stiffly.
Plattsmier wasn’t impressed. He rarely was. “Good,” he said. “Give it to him.” He pointed at Raphael and left the room.
Raphael looked at Allegra. He wanted to talk to her. Allegra traveled in these circles. She’d probably know more about this murder than Charlie Eagan and his supporters had forgotten. And all of that information would be pertinent to the case.
Three more hours.
While he chilled, waiting for the clock to chime midnight, he’d have to see what he could do with this shoulder-squaring brunette with the wild hair. “Let’s go into the kitchen,” he suggested.
He went ahead of her. As Kate followed him, her chest began to hurt and it felt hard to get air. A man had just been killed! She’d held herself together, had called the cops, had kept that crazy blonde from ruining any evidence the authorities might need. She’d done everything right! And this cop, this Montiel, seemed to think it was all just some kind of reunion with his pal out there in the other room.
Kate’s stomach felt sour. If she didn’t keep her hands tightly fisted, she knew they would begin to shake again. She bit back a groan as she stepped around the broken china on the floor and sat on one of the stools next to the kitchen’s center island. She was cold to the bone in spite of the heat. Maybe the dead guy’s air-conditioning had finally kicked on.
To keep her teeth from snicking together, she asked, “What did you do?”
Montiel glanced at her, then he poked his nose into the baking sheet with the potato thins. To Kate’s disbelief, he popped one into his mouth.
“Stop that!”
He looked at her again. “What, you’re saving them for McGaffney?”
“No! No, of course not. It’s just…”
He watched her levelly. Kate found she couldn’t explain why she was so appalled.
It was his irreverence, she decided. He stood there, not so much tall—maybe five foot eleven—but with the kind of presence that seemed to bleed life from everything else in the room. He had dark blond hair, golden really, and it was unkempt and too long. She doubted if he had shaved since morning. The T-shirt he wore, a well-washed and faded blue, was untucked. He had bottle-green eyes, but as he waited for her to finish her perusal they went to the color of the sea on a cloudy day. They’d hold secrets, Kate realized.
Where had she gotten that from?
The answer was there beneath his infuriating indifference to what had just happened. It was at odds with it. Kate had never had a talent for nuances, except maybe in recipes. She had never been very good with people, or with reading them. Yet she felt a certain intensity beneath Montiel’s who-gives-a-damn manner.
He’d come to investigate a murder and he was eating her potato thins. But his eyes were darkening and turbulent.
“What did you do?” she asked again, more softly.
“With what?” he countered, moving on to munch a scallion.
“What did you do to anger the commissioner so you can’t work until midnight?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re here to figure out anything you saw or heard tonight.”
He was eyeing the one remaining filet now. “Miss dinner?” she asked.
That brought his gaze to her again sharply. “What?”
“If you’re that hungry, I’ll reheat it. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just…stale.”
“Stale.”
“Prepared, then permitted to return to room temperature.”
Permitted? Who used words like permitted in casual conversation? The fact that she did irritated the hell out of him. Coupled with the fact that he was exiled with her in the kitchen, it made Raphael’s voice rough and gravely. “I coldcocked Gregg Miller on Eyewitness News.”
Kate felt something like shock move through her system, feather-light and cold. She’d almost forgotten her question. “That killer? The one…”
“The one,” he agreed flatly. “Then I caught a thirty-day suspension from Internal Affairs for my trouble.”
“Why? Why did you hit him?”
“What he did wasn’t enough?”
As near as Kate could remember, Miller had killed four women, had held the entire city in the grip of terror for the better part of a month. She hadn’t really followed the news broadcasts all that closely. Between her catering business and her second job cooking at a diner, between all the chores one had to do in order to keep on top of life, there’d been precious little time for her to peruse the media accounts of the murders. But she knew Miller had been preying on single women in their late twenties and early thirties.
Kate frowned. “You’d need more,” she decided.
“Who are you, Freud?”
That snapped her spine straight again. “You’d see death in your line of work nearly every day, I would imagine. But you don’t run about—what did you call it?—cold-cocking suspects all the time. Or do you?”
“Tell you what, you’re better with these crunchy things than you are with analysis.”
Her stomach rolled again at the bite in his tone. “You don’t like me.”
“Do you like me?”
“Not particularly.”
Well, she was honest, he thought. He almost grinned. But she’d done it again. Words like particularly didn’t belong in general conversation. Then Raphael heard himself answer her and he felt a dull inner pang even as his words hit the room.
“We were bringing Miller out of the van,” he said, “for his arraignment. I’d taken him in the first place, so I wanted to be part of the detail. He knew all about me through his spree, during the whole investigation. He made it his business to know who was closing in on him. So he turned around just as he was being led through the courthouse doors. He looked at me, and he said—”
Miller had said what Raphael hadn’t yet told anyone.
Raphael hadn’t made excuses for his behavior that day. What he’d done, he’d done. And he’d taken the fall. He clamped his mouth shut.
This had all the melodrama of an excellent story, Kate thought. “He said what?” she breathed.
“Don’t tell me,” Montiel drawled. “You’re heavy into cop shows.”
Kate blinked. How had he guessed? She almost denied it, but what would be the point? “Books, mostly. There’s a certain element of escapism there.”
“Element? Damn it, can’t you just talk?”
“I am talking!”
“No. You’re giving a lesson in vocabulary!” And he didn’t know why it bothered him so much. Maybe it was just his overall mood. But he doubted it.
“I was just asking a question.” She sniffed.
Raphael found himself answering her—again. “He t
old me that Anna was the best of the lot. He told me how she screamed. Damn it, he picked her because she was associated with me!”
There was a stretch of silence in the kitchen, drawn out enough to thin the air. Kate’s heart hurtled over a beat. “Anna Lombardo?” One of Miller’s victims, she remembered. Maybe the last. And then Kate understood. She cleared her throat carefully. “You knew Anna.”
“Yeah.” He took a knife from a drawer and cut into the steak. “I knew Anna. We’d been seeing each other.”
“You loved her.” It was, she thought, a heartbreaking story.
But Montiel laughed in a raw sound before he chewed and swallowed. “Not yet.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’d only met her two weeks before she died.” But maybe it could have been something, he thought. They’d never know. Miller had strangled her with piano wire.
“Montiel.”
The voice came from the kitchen door. They both turned sharply, almost guiltily, as though they’d been caught in the act of something they shouldn’t have been doing. It was that man, Kate realized. Plattsmier. And the other one, Fox. Both stepped into the kitchen. Kate watched the three of them confer near the doorway.
Something was happening.
There was a lot of gesturing. Then something changed in Montiel’s expression. His jaw hardened. His eyes went thin, but just before they did, Kate saw them shine like glass.
He turned to her. “Clean up your stuff, Betty Crocker. You’ve got five minutes, then I’m taking you home.”
Kate came off the stool. “I don’t need a ride.”
“Good. Because you’re not getting one.”
Her heart was hammering almost as hard as it had done when she’d found the body. The air in the kitchen felt suddenly humid and heavy, and it made it hard for her to breathe again. “Then I don’t understand what you’re implying.”
“I’m implying that I’ll follow you in my own vehicle.”
“To where?”
“To your home. We just covered that.”
“But it’s not necessary.”
“It is if I’m going with you. I’m not leaving my Explorer here. And it looks as though you’ve got yourself one damned overqualified baby-sitter.”
With that, he threw the fork he had been holding into the sink. It bounced right out again with the force of his strength. Impossibly, it landed prongs-down in a single scallion.
Kate closed her eyes briefly. It was that kind of a night.
Chapter 2
Kate broke all her own rules. She chucked the shells from the oysters Rockefeller into her client’s trash—he was hardly in a position to pass on word of her unprofessionalism. She dumped the rock salt back into its bag without checking off a use on her master list. She did a cursory cleanup and grabbed a wine bottle off the counter on her way out the back door. She paused in the alley and chugged from it.
Then she looked around quickly to make sure no one—heaven forbid, Montiel—had seen her. She was alone.
Everything went out of her. Kate leaned weakly against her panel van. What had happened here tonight? And why was it necessary for that cop to follow her home? Kate could not remember a plot she’d ever read that had involved the authorities baby-sitting a witness, unless that witness had turned State’s evidence. But she didn’t have any evidence to turn.
Suddenly, her heart nosedived into her stomach. Was she actually a suspect? Did they think she had killed that man?
She needed a lawyer.
“Okay, Betty Crocker, lead the way.”
Kate came away from the van quickly as Montiel left the kitchen door and came into the alley. She tucked the wine bottle behind her. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“What for?” He jiggled the handle of her panel van. “Unlock this thing.”
“Absolutely not.”
He turned back to her slowly. There was a streetlight on a nearby corner. It flung mild light into the alley, just enough that she could see something tic at his jaw.
“You don’t want to push me right now.”
Kate held her ground but her voice quavered a little. “I simply want a few explanations before I allow you in my vehicle—and besides, you said you had your own.”
“I do. It’s out on Willings. You’re going to drive me around. And damn it, you’re going to stop elocuting while you do it.”
When she opened her mouth to protest, he came toward her and he did it fast. Kate gave an involuntary cry and took a step in retreat. She brought her hand up to ward him off.
Unfortunately, it was the one with the wine in it.
His gaze flashed to it. “Misdemeanor. Slap on the wrist if you have no priors.”
“What?”
“For stealing the wine. Is that why you wanted a lawyer?”
“I brought the wine!”
“Did you charge McGaffney for it?”
“Of course!”
“Then you’re a criminal if you leave here with it. Unless he gives his permission.”
“He’s dead!” Then she realized that he was deliberately provoking her into forgetting her question. “Why won’t you just talk to me?”
“Because you do it funny.”
“I do not!”
He turned his back to her. “Come on. Drive me around to Willings and give me some vague directions in case I lose you in traffic.”
“Some cop,” she muttered.
A stillness came over him. “Come again?” he said neutrally.
In for a penny, she thought. “Aren’t you trained for this? For tailing people?”
“What I’m trained for,” he said without looking at her, “what I’ve spent fourteen years working my way up in the ranks for, is a hell of a lot more than what I’m doing right now. I’m not happy about that. So if you’re smart, you’ll stop ticking me off.”
Kate knew suddenly that that wouldn’t happen if they stood out here for days. She rubbed him the wrong way, and that made her heart sink in a way that was all too familiar.
“I just want to understand,” she said quietly.
He finally looked at her. “Do you know who that guy was? The dead one?”
“Of course. Phillip McGaffney.”
“Not his name. Who he was.”
“I—” She broke off, took a deep breath. “No.”
“Second in line for the O’Bannon throne.”
“O’Bannon?” She knew the name from somewhere, but couldn’t place it.
“Some say third in line. There are probably a hundred or so gun-wielding idiots in this city who think that Charlie Eagan damn well ought to replace O’Bannon instead. Ten to one, those are the guys who killed McGaffney.”
Kate finally understood what he was talking about, and it almost knocked her legs out from under her. “You’re talking about, like…the mob?”
“I’m talking about like the mob.”
Kate gave up the effort. She sank slowly to sit on the street. “I served dinner to a member of the mob?”
“Don’t lose any sleep over it. They eat just like the rest of us.”
“I served dinner to a member of the mob.” She looked up at him. “The woman?”
“She’s known in these circles, too.”
“I tackled her.”
Though Raphael had thought five minutes ago that he would never smile again, he felt a grin pull at his mouth. “Wish I could have seen that part.”
“She was being stupid.”
“Allegra is known for it.”
“Allegra…” Kate whispered it, giving a name to the very strong, very tall woman who had been trying to fling herself all over Phillip McGaffney’s body. “I don’t feel very well,” she murmured.
Raphael lost the urge to smile. “You’re about to feel worse.”
“Why?”
“The way the department has it figured—and I agree with them—is that something went way wrong here tonight.”
“Then tell me.”
“McGaffney i
s…was…flamboyant. It wasn’t his style to entertain ladies at home, especially when they look like Allegra. If he was home, he was alone. Everybody knew that. So tonight was out of pattern.”
She still didn’t get it.
“His killer—or killers—didn’t know you or Allegra were there.” He fought the urge to ask what exactly she had been doing there. He hadn’t seen anything in that house that would have required a caterer. But that would come later, after midnight. “We can’t keep a lid on both of you being here. Not indefinitely. The press are vultures. That’s why I’m going to stick close to you for a while until this either blows up or cools down.”
He reached and gave her a hand up. Kate came to her feet unsteadily. “They’ll try to hurt me?”
“Honey, you’re as good as dead unless someone is around to stop it.”
Kate looked at him sharply. When she did, something happened to the streetlight in the distance. It blurred and tilted.
Raphael’s instinct to protect started in his toes. She swayed, and he grabbed her shoulders. “Hey—”
“Don’t touch me.”
Raphael jerked his hands back. Anger drummed behind his eyes, giving him a headache. “That should be no problem.”
“I didn’t…I mean…” Kate trailed off and closed her eyes. Damn him. He had all the compassion, the sensitivity, of a rock. He’d laughed with that other cop in the dining room with a dead man no more than two feet away. She could talk until sunup, and he wouldn’t understand that she felt as though any kindness right now would shatter her.
In all her twenty-eight years, she had never really known fear. Now it made her palms sweat even as everything rational inside her struggled with what he’d just said, picking for some way to convince herself it wasn’t true. You’re as good as dead.
She couldn’t believe any of this.
Kate stepped around him, holding herself together. “I’m going home.”
“And that might be where?”
Did she have a choice? She’d let him tag along, she decided, until she could figure this thing out. “South on Second. The corner of Bainbridge. I rent space in a garage on Bainbridge for the van. It’s called Lucky’s.”