Priced to Kill

by Margaret Evans

  The fire snapped around the logs, its warmth spreading around the room.

  Laura felt surrounded by family love, something she had known for fifteen years when it was yanked from her. She wanted the feeling to stay as long as possible, at least while she was tucked up in an afghan and sipping hot cocoa in this cozy room on this particularly frigid day. She glanced out the window at the snow zombie she and Connor had built and realized it was the only one they had ever built together. During their childhoods, it had always been a contest between them, something she had never won. One snowman was in his yard, and a snow fairy stood in hers. Today, their working together felt good, and the fresh air had left her feeling clear-headed.

  “Chief, tell us a story about when I was little.”

  He looked at her, considering the request, and glanced at his wife, Alison, who was already chuckling.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Laura asked.

  “No,” Connor responded for them. “It’s just that they think there’s so much material from which to choose. Especially things I was involved in.”

  She hid a smile as Michael Fitzpatrick decided on a tale worthy of telling and began.

  “You were little—about five, I think. Connor was six. Alison’s car wouldn’t start and I know very little about cars, so Ian, Connor and I were outside looking under the hood, touching, poking, looking. Of course, I did what I always did when I couldn’t fix something. I called your father. And you know what that meant,” he said, looking at Laura.

  She nodded. “I went everywhere with him.”

  “Yes. And of course, Connor starts right in with, ‘What’s she doing here?’ Frank and I ignored him and started talking about football, the stats, the trades, the injuries, and how the Vikings were likely to do the next season since they hadn’t made the playoffs this time around. Nobody noticed that you were standing at dead center in front of the car, staring at the components under the hood. Then, all of a sudden, you pointed your finger toward where the distributor cap is and announced that you saw a loose wire.”

  “Oh, my gosh, I think I remember this,” Laura said.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Connor said.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t,” the chief replied. “You said, ‘What does she know? She doesn’t know anything about cars. She’s a girl.’ None of us knew anything about cars except Frank, but that wasn’t the point. Laura got mad and shouted at Connor, ‘I know a loose wire when I see one, and I know a loose cannon when I see one.’”

  Laura recalled the incident and shook with laughter.

  “It probably would have ended there except that Ian told Connor he was a loose cannon and they got into a brawl over it. We ignored them and Frank looked where you had pointed and did indeed find a loose wire near the distributor which turned out to be the problem. You were short and you saw something we couldn’t see without really getting down and dirty with the stuff under the hood.”

  Laura smiled at the chief’s description of the stuff under the hood.

  “Once fixed, the car started. That made Connor even madder.”

  “Daddy always said it didn’t matter if you knew about a thing or not, just look it over and see if something doesn’t look right to you. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can spot something really quickly.”

  “Well, it worked very well that day. Maybe too well for Connor.”

  “You’re not still upset over that, are you?” she asked Connor, incredulous. “How many years ago was that?”

  “Ian still calls me a loose cannon.”

  “I used to hear Daddy say that about the people in the news on TV, sometimes when politicians were making speeches. ‘That’s a loose cannon if ever I saw one, and I know when I see one.’ I didn’t even know what it meant, I just wanted to say it to someone and when you made me angry, I said it to you.”

  “Your dad’s fresh pair of eyes thing worked well for me when Connor spent the summer after his college graduation at the station, going through old cold cases. Some were so old they had dropped off the Cold Case Deck. He helped us clear up three or four of them, I think. Saw things we missed because we’d been drowning in the middle of them.”

  “Six,” Connor corrected. “I helped you close six.”

  “That might be a good case for getting some summer interns from the college just to look over all the old cases, the ones in the Deck and the really old ones. What can you lose?”

  “We’ve tried that but had little luck in closing any others.”

  “That’s because Connor was born to be a cop,” Laura said. “You need to find someone with his uncommon thinking skills.”

  They all turned toward Laura.

  “Oh, no!” she laughed. “I’m just a bean counter.”

  “You’re a bean counter with uncommon thinking skills,” Connor commented.

  “You know, Chief,” Laura continued and changed the subject, warmed by the afternoon and the company, “I’ve looked through that box Daddy gave you and I have some questions about what’s in there.”

  Michael shook his head.

  “I never looked inside.”

  “But maybe if I showed you what was in there, you could help clarify some of it for me?” She was thinking of the objects in the envelope whose meaning she couldn’t guess.

  When Chief Fitzpatrick indicated he’d be willing to try, Laura thanked him, and then it was time to go. On the way out, she took several shots of the snow zombie and had the chief take a few of her and Connor standing beside it with her iPhone. She wanted memories of this day to think about, rather than all the disturbing thoughts she’d had lately.

  twenty-seven

  In the shop on Monday, Laura was putting together her Valentine’s Day window displays and heard a knock on her door around eight-thirty in the morning, too early for anyone except possibly Harry Kovacs.

  She pulled back a corner of the window drape that shrouded her display from the world until it was complete. It was Connor. She grinned in delight, climbed out of the display and opened the door. The subfreezing gust of wind that came with him as he entered her shop sent shivers through her. He pulled the door shut quickly behind him.

  “I’m on my way to work,” he said and somehow he looked so much like he had all those years before that her heart melted. Could they really erase that gap and pick up where they’d left off? She guessed the real question was whether or not there was actually something to pick up, something that might last.

  “Want some coffee? I just made a pot.”

  They sat in the kitchenette, silently working on their respective mugs of hot brew. Finally, Connor spoke. “Can we talk?”

  “About a case?”

  “Why would I talk to you about a case?”

  “You seem to need my help lately. How’s our snow zombie holding up? Did you put a big, scary open mouth on it?”

  He leveled a glance at her.

  “It’s fine, yes, I did, and no, I wanted to talk about us. We barely got started yesterday.”

  She nodded.

  “I understand,” she teased. “You’re still upset you couldn’t make the snowman by yourself, let alone come up with the idea of a snow zombie—my idea, as I recollect. And I looked at the pictures your dad took of it and us, along with the ones I took. It’s clearly one of our most successful ventures and one of my better ideas.”

  But this morning, Connor was like a turtle whose direction you want to turn, but it kept returning to its original course.

  “In the interest of speeding up our catching up, just tell me what it was like for you in Maryland. Generally. I can’t seem to get anything out of you.”

  As I can’t seem to get anything out of you, either.

  “They’re a little on the clique-ish side in Maryland. Plus the kids had known each other most of their lives, kind of like here. Three months in
to school, right before Thanksgiving, I decided I didn’t like being an outsider and didn’t want new friends, so I told Rose I wanted to be home-schooled. And that was that.”

  He stared at her.

  “For eleven years, you made no friends except for Kayla. You know I don’t buy that. You’re not telling me something about high school. Did something happen that you don’t want to share?”

  She looked down into her coffee.

  He saw the change in her expression and reached a hand across to hers.

  “If you can’t share it or don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay. I—I just wanted to know how you were and what I missed.”

  In her silence, he watched her morph from resignation to making a decision.

  “I went to math class one day, and noticed several kids whispering and looking sideways at me while we waited for the teacher. I’d only been there for a few weeks, and of course, you knew that Rose was the school counselor. I hadn’t made any friends yet, and some of the girls were downright rude, but there was a boy who’d actually been nice and said hello a few times. He was the boyfriend of one of the really mean girls. I think now, looking back on the whole incident, that she was probably just jealous that he had said hello to me. Anyway, this day, the girl turned to me, in front of the whole class and said really loud, ‘I heard your parents were murdered. Did you do it?’”

  Connor’s eyebrows went up, his face darkening as she continued.

  “Just then the teacher walked in and I stood up and faced the girl and said loudly for everyone, including the teacher, to hear, ‘How dare you say that to me. My parents were murdered, and there is a federal and multi-state task force working on finding their killers. How dare you ask me if I did it!’ You could have heard a pin drop. Even the teacher was flabbergasted. I walked up to her and told her she was a nice teacher but that I wouldn’t be back. And I went to the principal’s office, told him what happened, he called my aunt—who came immediately from her office in the counseling room—and I announced to both of them that I wanted to be home-schooled and I would not return to this school under any circumstances.”

  She sipped her coffee, not looking at Connor but feeling the waves of his anger.

  “What did Rose say?”

  “She backed me up. She’d worked in that school for a long time as a counselor and knew how cruel some kids could be. She demanded these kids be put in sensitivity training and recommended mandatory community service in a hospice. I found out later that’s exactly what the principal did. Put them to work in a hospice. I also heard that their parents hit the ceiling, especially that girl’s parents, but the principal stuck with it. Can you imagine 15- and 16-year-olds with dying people? I don’t imagine it took them very long to develop some kind of understanding about how it feels to lose someone you love. But maybe I’m wrong and it’s just wishful thinking, and it had no effect. I guess we’ll never know.”

  She looked into the distance, remembering. Her face grew softer.

  “What about you?” Connor prompted, his cop face gone. He’d had no clue what had lain hidden behind her brave face. It was pretty hard to surprise him these days, after all he’d seen as a police officer.

  She could hear the muted anger in his voice. If he’d been there, she figured he’d have thrown them all out of a second-story window. Or worse.

  “I was home-schooled, had no friends, no social life except for all of Rose’s friends who came almost every day to teach me a skill or an art. I studied hard, got my diploma, did not go to a cap-and-gown ceremony, went to Community College for a year, because it’s harder to get into the University of Maryland if you’ve been home-schooled, for some reason. But you can transfer in pretty easily after the first year. So that’s what I did. Fresh start, new people. Nobody knew me or cared about my history. People were from all over the state and country. It was nice. Met a few people, went to movies, went out shopping together, out for pizza, usual stuff. Then the roof caved in.”

  “Rose was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.”

  She nodded, finally looking at him.

  “Then I spent the next two years studying and taking care of her. I graduated and she came to the ceremony in a wheelchair. She lived to see me get my C.P.A. and my first job. Then she was gone. By then I had three very good friends from college who were my support system. One of them is Kayla, the realtor whom you all met last Christmas—she’s renting Rose’s house right now. Gives me a little extra income. I’m in close touch with the other two. Couldn’t have made it without them. They all encouraged me to come back here, unlike Rose who always told me to look forward, not backward. I didn’t really need any encouragement to come back; I always wanted to return here. So here I am,” she finished. “Sorry if that wasn’t what you thought you’d hear.”

  He looked into the remains of his coffee, then up at her.

  “I had no idea. Nobody should have to go through what you did and then have some stupid kid say something like that. Nobody. The fact that it was you makes it even worse for me to imagine.”

  She wondered if he would share something from his years without her, but her wish didn’t come true. There had to be something he didn’t want to talk about.

  “Now you know all my secrets and why I kept dodging your questions.”

  “Laura, I really don’t know what to say. I’m upset that happened. Sorry I pushed you so hard.”

  “It’s okay. It’s the past. I probably should have told you before this. The right moment never seemed to come up.”

  She checked the clock. “Oh! When do you have to be at work?”

  “Eleven. Late shift.”

  She did a double-take.

  “You come in here at 8:30, tell me you’re on your way to work, and now, at 9:30, I find out you don’t have to be there for another hour and a half?”

  “I thought we could talk. Am I keeping you from anything besides your front windows?”

  She shook her head.

  “But I sense something about you the past couple times I’ve seen you,” she continued. “Like there’s something going on. I’m guessing it’s to do with your job. If you can’t tell me what it is, I’ll understand. Just know I can tell and I’ll be thinking about you.”

  He thought it was unfortunate at times that she could read him so well.

  “We have to give up another officer for budget reasons.”

  Her eyes grew big. She knew how short-handed they were.

  “And Brianna’s pregnant,” she added.

  “She hasn’t announced that,” he said, “and neither have we.”

  She waved it away.

  “Small town. What’s your plan?”

  Why did people keep asking him that? Why did they all assume he would even have a plan? And Laura couldn’t possibly know how badly this affected the unit’s operation. Or maybe she did.

  “Working on it,” he said and drank more coffee.

  Small talk continued until 10:45 when Connor rose to leave. It had been a startling morning. He was glad she’d told him what happened in Maryland, but he realized he’d gotten it without having to share his years.

  His hand was on the doorknob and he turned again to face her. “Next week’s Valentine’s Day. I mean, we’re…sort of…not dating…kind of trying to get to know each other again. Why don’t we have dinner on Valentine’s Day?”

  She was touched. “Dinner sounds perfect.”

  “Let’s make it our first date.”

  When she grinned and nodded, he let go of the doorknob and reached for her, pulling her into his arms and kissing her.

  “I want to see more of you than I have lately. I want more. I just want to make sure that’s what you want, too.”

  Her eyes softened. How long had she waited for this?

  “So we can totally skip past this catching up thing and go right where we b
oth want to be.”

  “I’m glad, more than you know. So we’re on for dinner and can celebrate new directions.”

  “Agreed. But on that day, during that dinner which will be our first official date, you have to tell me one thing that happened to you while I was gone that you don’t want to tell me about but something I should know.”

  When Laura returned to fixing her front window display, she recalled how uncomfortable Connor had looked when she’d made her condition for the Valentine’s Day dinner. Smiling at the thought that he considered he’d gotten away with something without having to give anything in return, she found new inspiration in the arrangement of her wares. There were more flounces to the fabrics and more dimension to the arrangement, just as she felt more dimension to her growing relationship with Sergeant Connor Fitzpatrick. Especially since she considered she’d pulled one over on him.

  And it really hadn’t been as hard to share her experience in a high school in Maryland, as she’d feared. It was almost a relief, now that he knew. She even smiled, thinking they could really never return to where they had been before her parents were killed, but she did like the direction in which they were headed now.

  Empress Isabella perched on the top of the backing screen lolling her glorious tail back and forth in the air behind her, giving Laura pause when she heard the purring. How was she balancing? But so much the cat did was beyond her comprehension that she just accepted it, as she would have to accept that nobody else saw the cat but herself. The entire time Laura and Connor had shared coffee in the kitchenette, Isabella had sat, preening herself, in the third chair at the end of the table, between the two of them, looking first at Connor, then at Laura, as if the cat were at a tennis match.

  When the last pink heart pillow was placed on the pink and red toned afghan in the window, Laura stood back and looked at it critically, tipping her head this way and that. That’ll work, she thought. But she wondered if Connor would really talk to her on Valentine’s Day. It was more likely he’d find a way out of her demand or come up with another distraction.