I'll Be Seeing You

by Beverly Bird

  “So why not send some gun-toting idiot there?”

  “I was there,” Raphael said simply. “And I had a gun, too.”

  “You were at the Morleys and you were armed! That didn’t stop them!”

  Raphael thought about it. By then, he realized, the gunman had to have known exactly where the rock salt was. He had to have known that Kate was cooking with it, and where. That would have minimized the risk, should have streamlined the retrieval effort.

  And that meant he had been right all along. The leak had come from somewhere within Kate’s Dinner For Two network.

  “We took the van home—I mean, here.” Kate caught herself, though oh, yes, his town house had started to feel like home. That realization almost shook her off her train of thought. “We came back here after Betty Morley was shot at. Then I brought everything inside. Well, you did, after I fainted. Why didn’t anyone just break in here to get it?”

  “Same reasons,” Raphael responded. No one had been stupid enough to take him on—armed—in his own home. No one had even particularly wanted to break and enter here. There wasn’t a crime on the books that didn’t jump several significant notches in severity when it was perpetrated upon a cop, and even the mob had a modicum of respect for that. Killing a cop would draw the death penalty, Raphael thought. Not necessarily so with your average caterer or her clients.

  And there had been other ways. There’d been that inside contact they had within Kate’s business.

  Suddenly, Kate gasped.

  “What?” he demanded harshly.

  “I made herbed oysters for the Morleys!”

  She was getting close to the crux of it, he thought.

  “That was the skillet Betty was holding when she was shot at!”

  Raphael nodded.

  “It went flying! There was rock salt—diamonds—all over that kitchen!”

  And whoever had cleaned up the floor later had probably thrown it all out, Raphael thought. The techies had no doubt ignored it in the interest of finding the bullets and fingerprinting the known areas where the gunman had moved. That part of the cache was irretrievably gone. But there had been plenty left, which spoke to how much there had been in the first place. Kate had used only a small portion of rock salt for that recipe—he knew, because he had been angrily swiping things off the counter himself to get her out of there. Most of the rock salt had been sitting in its bag on the counter—and Betty Morley had been standing right between the bag and the gunman.

  She’d had to be removed. But it hadn’t happened neatly or well, and then all hell had broken loose and the gunman had fled empty-handed.

  Unless Raphael badly missed his guess, oysters would have enjoyed a sudden surge in popularity in the days to come. And Kate would have come under more and more pressure to take this special job or that one. Who had been the McGaffney confidante? Thinking about it, Raphael’s blood hurt as it moved through his veins, like it had filled with chunks of ice.

  “What are you doing?” Kate asked.

  “Making one more phone call before we go downtown.” She hadn’t put it all together yet, but it wouldn’t take her long, he realized. He wanted the last of the answers before it happened. And he wanted to be able to give her his full attention when the truth dawned. Because she’d blame herself, he knew.

  Someone had known that Kate was doing the Morley dinner and the Spellman appetizers. And only two other people could have known about both jobs—her employees. It was time to start checking the DNA of everybody who had been in the house that night—and everybody who should have been there, had Kate not decided that she didn’t need any help.

  He raised Vince Mandeleone on the man’s cell phone. “Where’s the lady?” he asked, then he nodded at the answer. “Okay, while she’s sudsing up and soaping down, I need you to take a little detour through her bedroom. I want a strand of her hair.” It was the fastest, easiest thing to test, he thought. “If she has a hairbrush in there, great. If not, try her pillow. Then call Fox. He’ll pick it up from you and get it to the lab in a hurry.”

  He disconnected. He looked at Kate and decided to make the call to bring in her employees in private, after they got to headquarters.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “Process of elimination. The better half of police work. You’ve figured that out by now.” Raphael found his keys, bounced them on his palm once, then headed for the door before she could think too much about his explanation. “Come on, let’s roll.”

  “Right. Roll.” Kate went to the kitchen, grabbed her purse and ran after him. Only once she was in the passenger seat beside him did she think to ask the obvious. “Where are the diamonds?”

  His teeth flashed in a hard grin as he rolled the Explorer out of the driveway. “In my pocket. I’ve already put the word out on the street while you were getting dressed. You no longer have them. I do.”

  The normally quiet Robbery Homicide Unit was crowded with chaotic activity when they arrived. Kate took it all in, then she unobtrusively stepped back to press her spine against the wall. She watched the frenetic scene from the edges. And everything she saw made her stomach knot more.

  It was over.

  Something like despair rose in her throat, but she got a grip on herself. There was still time. All they knew for sure right now was why an armed man had been popping up at her job sites. It remained to be seen who that man was. Or why diamonds had been dropped in her rock salt in the first place. Still, as she watched Raphael, she knew he would have those answers by nightfall.

  How had she ever thought he was indifferent? How had she ever believed that first night that he didn’t care about the man lying facedown in her salad? The energy in him now was volatile. It etched his frown deeper. It made something in his eyes seem sharper, lit inside by a green fire. He moved around his desk restlessly, stretching the phone cord as far as it would go to grab something out of the fax. Occasionally, he would look up, cup the phone against his neck and give an order to someone in a voice that was notched just a little lower and more dangerous than she had ever heard it. He had something to sink his teeth into now, for the first time since this had started.

  “There’s a waiting room down the hall.”

  Kate looked to her right. It was Raphael’s partner, Fox. Unlike Raphael, he was calm, leaning one shoulder lazily against the wall. She wondered if he ever got perturbed about anything.

  Kate gave her head a little shake. “I want to watch.”

  “There won’t be much to see until all the DNA comes back.”

  Something nipped at the pit of Kate’s stomach with Fox’s words. The DNA, she thought. There was something about that she needed to think through, something that bothered her. But Fox was waiting for a response. “How long will that take?” she asked.

  “The way we’re doing it? Maybe another four hours.” At her frown, he shrugged. “We just want enough of a match right now for a warrant. There are a lot of different levels of DNA testing. DQ-Alpha just matches twenty-four points, and our police lab can do that. It’ll give us a suspect. Later, we’ll send the specimens out to one of those highfalutin brain factories where they’ll do the more complex tests for trial evidence.”

  “Ah,” she said, barely understanding because her gaze was drawn to Raphael again. Then she looked at Fox sharply. “Four hours?” Her legs were already achy from standing against the wall for so long.

  “Close to that.”

  Kate sighed and let her gaze linger on Raphael one more moment. “I’ll wait in the lounge then.”

  Fox nodded. “You’ll be more comfortable there.”

  He watched her go a little speculatively. Then he observed his partner’s gaze follow her out. For a long moment, Raphael seemed to forget who he was talking to and why. There was naked emotion in the other man’s eyes. Fox grinned.

  Oh, how the stubborn did fall. The dude’s crazed dating days were over.

  Kate dozed in a cracked plastic chair in the waiting ro
om. When she woke, her spine felt as though someone had rammed a bent steel rod inside it.

  How could she have possibly slept? she wondered groggily. Her only explanation was that she’d been awake through so much of last night.

  Last night.

  Her heart skittered away from the memory. It should have been something she cherished forever, she thought, sitting up and burying her face in her hands. It should have been precious, exquisite, always and forever shining in the corners of her mind. How many times in a woman’s life was she loved like that? Raphael had known just where to touch her. And how. She replayed it in her mind, shivering a little. It had been as though they’d shared lifetimes together instead of a week. And even now, she could still feel the warmth of his skin against her palms.

  Then he had tarnished everything with that crazy talk this morning.

  Kate let out a low moan without realizing it. She looked at her watch. She was startled to see that nearly four hours had passed. She’d slept more soundly than she’d realized.

  She got up and went in search of coffee. She knew from her visits here where it was. She found the little lunchroom tacked at the back of the floor. Then she glanced at the compact refrigerator and winced. It reminded her of Belle. In all the rush of this morning, they’d left the dog at home.

  Not home, she corrected herself. She’d slipped with that same phrase this morning before they’d come here, and she’d just barely caught herself then from the blind and painful mistake of her tongue. It was Raphael’s home, not her own. She would be going back to her apartment any time now.

  Over. Something hurt inside her in a cold way, deep inside her bones. What had happened to her, that she didn’t even want to go to her own apartment? Everything had happened, she thought, and everything could be summed up in one word: Raphael.

  Kate found change in her purse and shoved it into the coffee machine. The liquid that came out was pale and tepid. She tossed it back in one long swallow anyway, grimacing.

  Over. At least, Kate thought, she’d found the courage last night to instigate what had happened between them. She had those memories…and too many conflicting ones from this morning to contemplate now.

  Kate crumpled the empty cup in her hand. There’d be time to sort through that and make sense of it later, she decided. For now, if Raphael didn’t already know who the gunman was, he would as soon as the DNA results came in. Which should be any minute—

  Kate’s thoughts broke off.

  She threw the paper coffee cup at the trash can suddenly and ran from the room. She raced up the hallway to the homicide unit. The DNA! Raphael had only asked for one hair, to her knowledge.

  She found Raphael, Fox and another man hunched over Raphael’s desk, studying something. She jerked to a stop just before she reached it.

  “It was Allegra. You think it was Allegra. The only DNA you have to compare her hair to is what you took out of Belle’s teeth.”

  Fox and the other man stepped back. Raphael’s gaze found her. Something in her heart cracked at how tired he looked. He got to his feet. He caught her arms in his hands, his thumbs making gentle circles on her skin. Soothing her. Thinking of her first. Heat bubbled up inside to gather like pulse points beneath her skin where he touched her.

  “No,” he said finally. “I asked for three specimens. We just got the results back. One of them is a dead-on match to what we took out of Belle’s teeth.”

  “Three?” Her mind swam around that, unable to make sense of it.

  Raphael turned her around, nudging her a little until she was seated in his chair. He sat on the corner of his desk and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Kate, I need you to think about this. Were you ever, at any point, planning to make oysters for the Spellmans that night?”

  Her gaze fastened on him. “Of course, I was. Rockefeller is one of Faith’s favorites. But I changed my mind at the last minute. I couldn’t be there to finish things off myself, and it’s a reasonably delicate recipe to do right, so—” She broke off, and her eyes widened as she understood what he was implying.

  As if on cue, more people entered the room. A dark-haired detective had an agitated Allegra Denise by one arm. Two other officers accompanied Beth Olivetti and Janaya Thomas, her employees. Kate sprang to her feet. She rushed at them. And in that instant one of them recoiled from her approach, and she knew.

  Janaya had been with her from the inception of Dinner For Two. But she had hired Beth only four days before McGaffney had been killed. When had this nightmare actually started?

  She spun to Raphael disbelievingly. And what she saw in his eyes nearly chopped her off at the knees. “You’ve known this all along.”

  He shook his head. He looked too haggard to argue about it, but something in his eyes sharpened and heated anyway. “No. Only since we found the diamonds this morning, and even then it was just an educated guess. It stood to reason that someone was tipping McGaffney’s guys off to your Dinner For Two moves, suggesting the ones where you’d take the rock salt with you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to be sure first.”

  “You were protecting me.”

  He raised one shoulder in a shrug, but there was nothing of Fox’s laziness in the gesture. The movement seemed somehow dangerous. “And if I was?”

  “It’s my business! They’re my people. It was my mistake!”

  “No.”

  “I hired her in the first place!” She spun to Beth. “What were you going to do? Feed me all the requests that involved oysters? Tempt me with the jobs until I just had to take one no matter what was going on in my life, no matter how many people might have died? Were you going to get me there and then knock me off, too?” Kate remembered suddenly how she had come to take the Spellman job. Beth had said she’d gone to her apartment for her purse and that Faith had called a second time.

  It had all been a lie.

  Raphael watched the scene through narrowed eyes. He had the sure sense that things were spinning fast out of his control. Somehow, he knew, he was in the process of losing her. Right here. Right now. It made no sense but there it was—and the feeling was strong. And damn it, he had too much else on his plate right now.

  He hadn’t wanted it to happen like this.

  “Kate. Calm down. It wasn’t Beth’s DNA that matched.”

  She scarcely heard him. She felt so stupid! So used by an employee she’d trusted, and so naive in Raphael’s eyes! He’d thought he had to protect her. That she couldn’t stand up to the truth.

  She mattered, he’d said. But he didn’t know her at all.

  Suddenly, she understood all of it—their conversation this morning, and the way he’d held himself back from touching her all those days before she’d taken matters into her own hands. She thought of Anna again, and knew, somehow, that he would not have shielded that woman. He would never have thought it was necessary. Not Anna, the polished, smart, savvy attorney.

  A woman unlike herself, Kate realized with a deep, sharp pang. She was a woman with crazy hair he kind of liked, a woman it was okay to roll around in the sheets with for however long they had to stay together—assuming she insisted on it—but who would never be allowed to share his dangerous, slimeball-filled, killer-riddled life. That was what he’d been trying to tell her this morning. She was a woman he had to keep tucked on the side, a woman he had to coddle and lie to. She was too much of a draining responsibility to be anything more.

  Not a partner, not someone he could love, not even a friend. A liability. Kate put a steadying hand on the nearest desk.

  Well, she would know all of it now. She wouldn’t be coddled anymore, damn it. “Whose DNA matched?”

  Fox and Raphael exchanged looks, and both were grim.

  “Mandeleone let Allegra go out to get her hair done,” Fox said. “When nothing happened for days after the McGaffney hit, when it didn’t appear that she was in any real danger and that you were actually the target, Mandeleone relaxed a bit, d
ropped his guard.”

  Allegra? Kate felt staggered.

  “Mandeleone dropped the ball,” Raphael said harshly.

  “And she went to the Spellmans’ instead of to the hair-dresser?” Kate’s head spun. “She wasn’t in the van waiting to grab me. She was in there looking for the rock salt. But it wasn’t there—it was at home—and she woke Belle up and—and she shot her!”

  “The gun might have just discharged when she was struggling with the pooch,” Fox said comfortingly. He flicked a glance at the other woman. “I’ve known her a long time. I can’t seriously see her shooting to kill an animal. She’s not that cold.”

  Allegra tipped her chin up as though to deny his judgment.

  “Let me finish up here,” Raphael said. “Then I’ll take you home and we can talk.”

  Home. Kate knew which place he meant. He was talking about her once-upon-a-time haven, her own small apartment. Now, at last, she knew that was for the best.

  She found her voice again. “Can’t I go now?”

  “What?” Raphael scowled.

  “I want to go home now.” She laughed a little shrilly. “Who’s going to kill me at this point? You’ve got the diamonds and you said everyone knows it.”

  “Actually, they’re in a vault downstairs.” What difference did that make? he wondered, something kicking at his chest, something he hadn’t seen coming. Now he was nitpicking. What the hell had she done to him?

  “That’s my point. I have nothing anyone wants any longer. I’m not in danger. There’s no more need for police protection.” It would be easier this way, she realized frantically. One of the cops could give her a lift home. Then she would never even have to say goodbye to him. If that made her a coward, then so be it. She seized on it. “There’s nothing for me to do here. You don’t need me. Just let someone give me a ride.”

  Raphael looked at Beth, at Janaya and at Allegra, who continued to glare at him coldly. He felt his adrenaline trying to drain and leave him. So much to do yet, he thought. It would take a few hours just to break Allegra all the way, to get all the details of her complete involvement. Already he knew she wasn’t going to go down easily, DNA proof or not.