by Beverly Bird
Hours, he thought. What right did he have to make Kate hang around until dawn? She was right. There was no real need to keep her close anymore.
He didn’t want to let her go. And she couldn’t wait to get out of here. But then, he’d pretty much known that all along.
Temper replaced his adrenaline—and how the hell could she do that to him again and again? This woman could evoke both a headache and heartache with scarcely a glance.
“Martin, give her a lift. You’re off shift right about now anyway, aren’t you?”
The man who’d been standing next to Janaya nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Okay, then. She’s all yours.”
His voice was so cold, so practical, so flat. Kate fought against the urge to make a sound. Whatever came out of her throat would be wretched. She followed the officer to the door without looking back.
Then she passed Janaya, and she caught the other woman’s frightened eyes. She needed to get away from Raphael, but not so much that she could abandon someone who mattered to her. She turned back one last time. “Janaya had nothing to do with this, you know.”
Raphael was already directing Allegra and the other detective into an interrogation room. Fox was taking Beth Olivetti away. Raphael glanced her way impatiently.
All she wanted to do was leave him, to get away from him now that this was over. “Thanks for the input, Sherlock. I’ll keep it in mind.”
His response fractured something inside her. Kate clamped down on it hard so it wouldn’t show. She nodded once, smartly, and left with the police officer.
Chapter 17
It was twenty past four in the morning when Raphael left headquarters. Dew had started to bead on his Explorer. The sky was still black, but dawn tickled its edges. He got behind the wheel and sat for a long moment as the wipers cleared the windshield.
There was always a bone-deep fatigue when he closed a case, when the energy that had carried him through the hunt washed out of him. But this was different. This was a hollow kind of pain.
He wanted to go to Kate. He did not want to go back to his empty town house. What in the hell had she done to him?
Suddenly, Raphael was as angry with her as he had ever been. It only spiked his temper more that she wasn’t even here so he could let her know about it. The second—the nanosecond—the coast had been clear, she’d gone racing off. And in her wake, the life he’d liked perfectly fine just one short week ago seemed suddenly empty.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Huh?” Raphael felt his muscles jerk inside his skin. His neck snapped as he turned his head to look at the passenger seat.
It was the dog. The dog?
“Well?”
“Well, what?” Raphael answered automatically. Then he realized he was talking to a dog.
He shoved at the driver’s side door with all his strength and leaped out of the Explorer. He stood beside it a moment, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. He was beyond exhaustion. He was hallucinating that a dog was talking to him.
He leaned forward an inch, then two, and looked cautiously into the car. Belle was still there.
“Here’s what we’ve got,” she said. “We’ve got a lady who’s crazy about you. You’re crazy about her. So you’re just going to let her go home?”
Raphael stared. Belle had a man’s voice. She had a familiar man’s voice. Belle’s voice was coming from behind him.
Raphael jerked out of the vehicle again and turned around. Fox stood behind him.
“What’s wrong?” Fox asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Uh, nothing. Nothing at all.”
“So, are you going to go after her?”
Raphael’s jaw hardened. “No way. I’ll be damned if I’m going to tag after her like some kind of homeless puppy, sniffing and wagging my tail and begging for her attention. Not in this lifetime. Not for any woman, and sure as hell not for one who couldn’t wait to be rid of me.”
“She didn’t want to go.”
“Sure, she did.”
“Wrong.”
“She left!”
“Like she had a choice.”
He wasn’t going to answer. No way, Raphael decided. He stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and glanced at the stars.
Fox kept coming. “It’s all a crock. You know it and I know it. All that slop about Anna. Sure, you’ve felt guilty about her. Yeah, I’ll bite that but you’re not half as scared about what could happen to Kate as you are over what could happen to you now that you’ve met her. Hey, pal, what’s worse, worrying about her or living without her the rest of your life? Because if you don’t go after her, that’s about what’s going to happen. She came after you once. I don’t see her doing it again. Now it’s your turn.”
He was dispensing advice now? The man who dated a different woman every night, searching for Ms. Right? Raphael slid behind the wheel again, giving serious thought to running Fox over.
Then he realized that Belle was no longer in the passenger seat.
Nor was Fox standing beside the Explorer any longer.
Gone? Both of them? What the hell?
He twisted around and craned his neck to look into the back seat. Nothing. He got out of the truck again and went around to the back to spring the door and peer into the cargo area.
More nothing.
“Get back here, you nasty little beast!” The dog had been here. Fox had been here. Damn it, he was sure of it.
Fox thought he was afraid of what Kate could do to him? She’d already done it! He was losing his mind without her.
Raphael got into the Explorer and shoved the SUV in gear.
He drove for the bridge. The dog, that cranky—okay, weird—little mongrel would be there where they’d left her. And what did he think that would prove?
He was losing his mind.
But Fox’s words kept ringing in his head. When he got home and found Kate’s van still in his driveway, the sight hit him like a punch. Then he opened the door to his empty town house, and the silence was like a wall.
How could a woman do that? It was like they had some kind of innate power that when they left a place, they could just suck all of themselves out of the air, also. There was no scent of her here any longer. The air was still, like all the currents of her being had left it. Raphael swore aloud and went to look for the dog.
He went upstairs to his bedroom. Kate’s overnight case was still on the chair in the corner where it had been for the last many days. Every item inside was folded with military precision. He stared at it and waited for the usual annoyance. It didn’t come. Hey, pal, what’s worse, worrying about her or living without her the rest of your life?
“Pooch!” he called out. “All right, listen, you nasty little monster, come out here now. Angel, my foot.”
There was only silence.
Raphael made a quick tour of the town house. His head was pounding by the time he finished. He tried to remember if they had taken Belle to headquarters this morning—maybe he just didn’t remember. Maybe she really had been in his truck—not talking, of course—and she had run off without him noticing.
No, he thought, they definitely hadn’t taken the dog with them. She should have been here. Dogs just didn’t disappear out of closed and locked town houses into thin air. Then again, they didn’t talk, either.
It was all the excuse he needed. Five minutes later, Raphael found himself driving over the bridge toward Kate’s apartment.
Kate couldn’t sleep without his snoring. How could that be? No one could get so used to something in one short week that she couldn’t live without it!
She’d live without him. She’d be fine. He’d just been…a hiccup in her life. And probably, she reasoned, rolling over in bed for the countless time, the stress of the whole week, the danger, the bizarre circumstances had magnified everything she thought she felt for him. She certainly didn’t love him. In another week, she’d look back at all this and marvel at
how easily she could lose her mind.
Kate pressed her face into the pillow and cried.
She wept until her eyes burned and her throat ached. He was gone. Her pulse thumped in misery. Her heart sounded like a drum in her chest. Then she lifted her face from the pillow, craned her neck, and frowned.
It would have been poetic if her heart really had pounded like that while it broke, she thought. But it wasn’t her heart. It was someone at the door.
Her gaze flew to the bedside clock. It was not even five-thirty in the morning.
Panic seized her. Maybe she’d cut off the police protection too soon. Maybe someone didn’t believe that Raphael really had the diamonds. Or maybe there was more to all this than the gems. She hadn’t stayed long enough at headquarters to find that out. Maybe someone felt she really needed to be killed, after all. But would they knock on her door to do it?
Kate pressed a fist to her mouth and put her feet to the floor. She should call Raphael. Yes, that was what she would do. She gave a small cry of panic, then his voice drifted into the apartment.
He was out there in the hallway shouting loudly enough to wake up every neighbor on the floor!
“Kate, if you’re in there, open up! Five seconds! Then I’m breaking down the door.”
Kate scooted off the bed and ran to the living room before he could make good on his promise. She flung open the door. “Are you out of your mind?”
He looked exhausted, Kate thought, something shimmying in the area of her heart. It was all she could do not to offer him coffee.
She looked like she’d been crying, Raphael thought, and his heart moved in his chest again the way it had been doing from the first moment he’d set eyes on her. It took everything he had not to reach out for her.
Raphael looked over her shoulder into the apartment. There was no sign of the Chihuahua. Had he really expected there to be? Like the little beast was on some kind of sunrise mission, sprinkling golden angel dust and words of wisdom on both of them? He felt like a fool. He stepped inside, past Kate, anyway. “Where’s the dog?”
Kate looked at him and scowled. “We left her at your place.”
“She’s not there.”
“She has to be there. Where would she have gone?”
“I’m telling you, she’s not.” There really had been something weird about that beast, Raphael thought. “You know, we never really talked about this, but do you think…”
“She really is an angel?” Kate came inside and closed the door behind her.
“Well…yeah.”
Suddenly, Kate’s skin pulled into gooseflesh. She remembered that Belle had done the same thing to Shawna in the end, disappearing into thin air on the streets of New York. In that moment, Kate knew it really was over, only this time there was no happy ending. “I guess…you know…it’s possible.”
“But a Chihuahua?”
They looked at each other, then they shook their heads and spoke at the same time. “Nah. No way.”
Kate almost smiled. She pressed a fist to her lips so he wouldn’t see her mouth tremble. “You should go.”
“Yeah.” Raphael hitched his weight but stood where he was. “I got the rest of the story after you left. I was right. McGaffney turned traitor. It was one of his own guys who killed him.”
She didn’t care, Kate thought. He had to leave. She could not stand being this close to him, knowing how he felt about her. But she found herself nodding woodenly. If there was one thing she knew, it was that he wouldn’t leave until he was good and ready. Better, she thought, to let him say what he wanted to say, then goad him toward the door again.
Apparently, she thought, she was better at goading men than she’d ever realized. And all it had brought her was heartache.
“Those diamonds were hot,” Raphael said. “They were stolen. They would have been fenced, but McGaffney grabbed them and tucked them away to cool off. He told his associates they’d been stolen right from his safe. Joe figured it for a scam. He was the one who sent Allegra in that night.”
Something sad shifted inside Kate. “She killed McGaffney?” Allegra’s grief had seemed so genuine. Nothing was ever as it seemed.
“No. Joe did.”
Suddenly, she made the connection. “Joe? Bonnie Joe? From the restaurant?” Her gaze flew to him. “We were right there in that restaurant with a cold-blooded killer?”
He almost smiled. “We were right there in that restaurant with a whole lot of cold-blooded killers. I’d guess that most of the men in that room had blood on their hands.”
And yet he’d taken her there with him anyway, Kate thought. So when, at what point, had he decided that she wasn’t up to being a part of his life?
“Allegra’s job the night McGaffney was killed was to locate the diamonds,” Raphael continued. “Which she did. She wasn’t in the bathroom when McGaffney went down. She was in the study, looking for the cache. I honestly don’t think she thought Joe was going to kill him. She says not. And by the time we got to all this information, we’d already struck a deal for a lesser sentence if she’d just spit it all out. There was no sense in her lying.”
Kate was interested in spite of herself. “So how did the diamonds get in my rock salt?”
“When she came back to the dining room, she had the pouch stuck in the front of her dress. She found Phil dead, and you were there. She was supposed to leave the premises right away and turn the goods over to Bonnie Joe outside. But you were in the way, already calling 911. She didn’t dare risk it.”
“So she followed me into the kitchen and dumped them into the rock salt while my back was turned, while I was on the phone.”
“Yeah. Then you sat on her.” This time Raphael did grin at the memory of the first time he had seen her. “Anyway, the next thing she knew, the police were all over the place, and Joe took off.”
Kate swallowed carefully. “Then I cleaned up the kitchen and took the diamonds with me.”
“You can bet that wasn’t part of anybody’s plan.”
“Beth?” she asked. That, she realized, she really did want to know. “They put her in place days before McGaffney was killed.”
“Beth’s real name is Lilly McCall.”
“But you checked her out!”
“I checked out Beth Olivetti. Who, by the way, really is a mother of two with a flair for baking. But she’s too busy with her twin toddlers to take on a part-time job. Lilly helped herself to the woman’s name, her Social Security number, everything.” Kate stared at him, stricken. He’d known it would bother her. She was that way. “It’s not that hard to do if you know how. They just checked the registration list at one of the local colleges, found a culinary student who physically resembled Lilly and adopted her personal info so everything would mesh when I checked her references.” He began to pace. “It was all set up from the beginning. Allegra suggested to Phil that he should call Dinner For Two so they could be alone together, but all she really wanted was to pour a lot of your wine down him so she’d have relatively unrestricted access to the house. Lilly was supposed to have been at McGaffney’s that night, too. Her purpose was to keep you out of the way while all this went down. You were necessary to the meal itself, but you were supposed to stay in the kitchen. Lilly was supposed to have been going back and forth to the dining room.”
Then McGaffney had let her choose the menu, Kate thought, and she hadn’t needed help. “But why not just grab McGaffney off the street and…you know, throw him in the back of a big, black limousine and put a gun to his head and make him tell where the diamonds were?”
This time Raphael couldn’t help but laugh. “That might have worked on TV.”
Kate sat straighter, snapping her shoulders back indignantly. “Why not for real?”
“He would have told them anything to save his life. He wouldn’t have told them where the diamonds really were. It would have been a wild-goose chase.”
“Ah.” Some of the air went out of her.
“Allegra
was under some pressure, too, in the end. There were a few who didn’t believe she’d spilled the gems into your rock salt, who thought she was trying to make off with them. Luckily for her, she’s Joe’s current lady. Still, that would only have protected her for so long. She was desperate to get the diamonds back and turn them over to the family before somebody decided to take her out.”
“She was desperate enough to try to kill Betty Morley,” Kate whispered.
“She claims she was just trying to scare her into running from the room. If Betty had done that, Allegra would have grabbed the rock salt and would have been gone.”
All the last, little pieces, Kate thought.
Raphael realized there was nothing left to explain.
He needed to go back to the door. He needed to let himself out of here, get back in his Explorer and go home. He needed to sleep for a day, he told himself. He’d stop on the way and buy another six-pack of beer to replace what she’d guzzled when she’d suddenly started changing on him. Maybe he’d get some cereal, something easy to eat that didn’t need to be cooked.
The prospect was damned annoying.
“Don’t shut me out.” Even he wasn’t sure if the growl in his voice was from temper or desperation. “Don’t shut the door on me now just because this is over. I never wanted that. Damn it, I told you yesterday morning that I didn’t want it!”
Kate stared at him. The change in topic had her heart galloping.
“Okay, you want me to spill my guts? Fine. The best thing that ever happened to me was being assigned to you. You came into my house and you—you made it smell good.”
Kate choked. “Smell good?”
“With all that stuff you were always cooking.” With the scent of you.
Kate made a small sound of pain. Raphael panicked. Words again. He couldn’t find the right ones. He wasn’t reaching her. “You made it feel good! Damn it, I’m trying to tell you that I want you to come back there!” I want you to come back and stay. It rocked him. But in that moment, he knew it was true.