* * *
Steve was just about to get into his car to head home, disheartened by the lack of leads in Liz Marcoli’s whereabouts, when his cell phone rang.
It took him a moment to recognize that the frantic, half-comprehensible woman on the other end of the line was Roxy.
“Roxy, slow down. I can’t understand what you’re saying,” he exclaimed.
“There were knives.... Somebody tried to kill me. I’m in the kitchen. You have to come now. Please hurry. Come to the back door and be careful—there’s a killer out there. Somebody just tried to kill me.”
Before he could get any more information out of her, she hung up. Heart thudding, he jumped into his car and took off, wondering what in the hell was going on at the Dollhouse.
A killer? Knives? Was Roxy just overreacting to some crazy situation, or was something terribly wrong? She’d said something about the kitchen and knives.... What in the hell did that mean?
He blew out of his parking space like the devil was chasing him, and within minutes he pulled up next to her car in the back parking area of the Dollhouse.
He instantly drew his gun, unsure what to expect but remembering Roxy’s warning that there was a killer somewhere out there.
He got out of his car, closed the door and crouched down, making himself a smaller target for anyone who might be out there with him. He narrowed his gaze and moved it from the left to the right, seeking a source of danger.
The Dumpster made an effective cover for somebody to hide behind, but there was really nothing else that impeded his view of the general area.
Heart pumping, still unsure of what the situation was, he began to make his way toward the Dumpster, needing to clear the area before he advanced into the building.
Though what he wanted to do was rush inside and assure himself that Roxy was okay, he reminded himself that she’d made the phone call, so she had to be all right. He needed to think like a cop, not like somebody who might care for the woman inside.
He was grateful for the nearby street lamp that illuminated the back of the large Dumpster. Although the light was faint, it was enough for him to see that there was nobody there, no threat, no killer waiting to pounce—nothing.
He circled the Dumpster and then headed toward the house, his gun firmly in his hand, his heart still thudding a quickened rhythm.
The back door was locked, and a large trash can lay on its side nearby. He looked back over his shoulder and then rapped on the door. “Roxy, it’s me. It’s Steve. Open the door.”
She appeared at the window of the door like a wraith, her face blanched of color and her eyes wide and dark with fear. She fumbled with the lock but finally got it open and stepped back, as if afraid that danger might somehow follow him inside.
“Did you see them?” she asked, her voice breathy and higher in pitch than usual.
“See who?” he asked as he holstered his gun.
“Not who—what. The knives. Didn’t you see the knives in the door frame?”
He gazed at her in confusion, feeling as if he’d suddenly entered the Twilight Zone. He turned and flipped on the overhead light, wanting to see her face with more illumination than the security lights in the kitchen provided. “Roxy, what are you talking about?”
“Somebody threw knives at me as I started to enter the back door.” Her voice trembled, and her eyes remained huge.
Steve opened the door and looked out. “Roxy, there are no knives in the door frame.”
She flew to the door, her face even more pale as she looked at the wood around the door. “They were there. I didn’t imagine them. I swear I saw them. I heard them.” She ran her fingers over the frame and stopped. “Here,” she said and then turned to the other side and lightly touched the wood. “And here.”
Steve checked the areas she indicated, stunned as he felt the deep gouges that would be consistent with very sharp knives thrown into the wood and then obviously removed.
He pulled her back into the kitchen and closed and locked the door behind him. He led her to the small square table shoved against a wall in the kitchen and motioned for her to sit.
“Tell me exactly what happened.” He took the chair opposite hers.
“Marlene and Sheri and I spent the evening hanging posters around town, and it was dark when I got back here. When I got inside I noticed that Gus hadn’t taken out the garbage, so I carried it out to the Dumpster and emptied the can.”
She placed her hands flat on the table, and he couldn’t help but notice that her fingers trembled. At least some of the color had returned to her cheeks, and her skin no longer looked pasty and pale.
“I’d just reached the back door when I felt something fly past my head and heard the sound of something slamming into the wood next to me. I turned my head and saw the hilt of the knife sticking out, and at that moment another one flew and hit the wood on the other side of me. Less than an inch... They were both less than an inch from slamming into my head.”
She took a moment and drew a deep breath, as if to steady herself. “You believe me, don’t you? You believe me, Steve?” A touch of higher color filled her cheeks as her chin shot up.
He thought of the gouges he’d felt, slashes in the wood that would be more apparent in the light of day. “Don’t lift that chin at me,” he said. “I believe you.” Not only had he felt the gouges, but he couldn’t imagine what reason on earth she would have to lie about what had happened.
A shudder stole over her. “Whoever it was, while I was cowering by the walk-in, he must have come right up to the door and taken his knives with him.” She tilted her head sideways and eyed him curiously. “Do you think this has something to do with Aunt Liz?”
Steve raked a hand through his hair, wishing he had a definitive answer for her. “I don’t know,” he finally replied. “My gut says it isn’t related, and that would beg the question of who you might have ticked off lately.” He pulled his pad and pen from his pocket.
She gave a weak laugh. “You’re probably going to need a bigger notebook if you really want me to answer that question. You might as well write Gus down as the first name because I intend to give him all kinds of hell first thing in the morning for not taking out the trash earlier tonight.”
“I’ll definitely need more paper if you’re going to start with the names of the people you intend to tick off in the future,” he said.
Although he kept his tone light, his concern over what had just happened had his nerves nearly jumping out of his skin. An inch or so in either direction with those knives, and Roxy could have been badly hurt or killed.
And even though she had attempted a joke, her hands had yet to stop trembling and her eyes still held the horror of the close encounter with death.
“I know I make a lot of people mad,” she admitted. “I’m brusque and don’t always hide my temper. I want what I want when I want it. I expect people to work as hard as I do. I—”
“Roxy.” He placed a calming hand over one of hers, knowing instinctively that she was about to go off the rails and into an emotional tailspin. “We’ll figure this out.”
“Like we’ve found Aunt Liz?” The instant she said the words, she pulled her hand from beneath his and slapped it over her mouth as her eyes widened. He saw the sheen of sudden tears. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.” She dropped her hand back to the table. “That’s what I’m saying—my mouth gets ahead of my brain too much of the time.”
He didn’t even try to deny what she’d said about herself because they both knew it was true. “Okay, so I really need to know if in the last couple of days your mouth has worked overtime to make somebody mad enough to want to hurt you.”
“You mean besides you?”
He couldn’t help but admire her spirit, but if he was going to get to the bottom of this newest mystery, he h
ad to keep her on track. “Besides me,” he replied, his gaze somber and his lips unsmiling.
“I know this is serious,” she said. “But you don’t have to look so mean.” Her lower lip trembled ominously.
The last thing he wanted was to make her cry. “I’m not trying to look mean, but we need to stay focused on the fact that you could have been seriously hurt.”
“Or killed,” she added. “But honestly, I can’t think of anyone who I’ve been ugly with lately. Of course, the last four days I’ve been pretty much focused on finding Aunt Liz.”
“What about staff here? Anyone who might have a grudge against you?”
“No, I’ve got a great staff here, but there are people at the Golden Daffodil restaurant who hate my guts.”
Steve raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“I was working there as head cook before I opened the Dollhouse. When I left, I took my secret personal recipes with me, and the owner of the Golden Daffodil tried to tell me that the recipes were hers. She also wasn’t thrilled when she realized I intended to open here and become her competition.”
“Is the restaurant business so competitive that she’d try to kill you?” he asked incredulously.
“I’ve been open here for almost four years. If Rita Whitehead was going to kill me, I imagine she would have done it right after I left the Golden Daffodil.”
“Think harder. There has to be somebody. Those knives didn’t magically appear. They were thrown specifically at you,” he said, surprised by how his heart jumped at the thought of anything happening to her.
Roxy was nothing more to him than an occasional waitress, a woman searching for her missing aunt and now the near victim of a crime. She was nothing more to him than a job, so there was no reason his heart should do anything whenever she was around.
“I need to call Jimmy and Frank and get them over here to take a look around outside and see if they can find something the person might have dropped or inadvertently left behind. I did a cursory search around the Dumpster, but we need to do a more thorough search.”
He grabbed his phone from his pocket and contacted both of his partners. It took only a couple of minutes to explain the situation to them.
“They should be here in the next few minutes,” he said after hanging up.
“I’ll make some coffee.” She jumped up from the table as if grateful for something to do. “Do you think I should make some sandwiches?”
“No, coffee is just fine.”
As she prepared the coffee, neither of them spoke. Why would somebody want to harm Roxy? Granted, she was outspoken, brash and a firecracker that probably exploded too often. But the price for that shouldn’t be death.
Had she stirred somebody up with her questions about Liz? Had she somehow gotten too close to someone and now was perceived as a threat?
He’d be a fool not to think that this was a viable possibility. “I may have been wrong and spoken too soon,” he said.
She turned around from where she’d been pulling mugs from a cabinet and gazed at him curiously. “About what?”
“About whether this is tied to your aunt’s disappearance or not. Maybe it isn’t about you personally, but maybe you made contact with somebody who had something to do with Liz’s disappearance, and that person now sees you as some kind of a threat.”
She set four mugs on the table, fear once again emanating from her eyes. “If that’s the case, then I’ll never be able to figure out who threw those knives. I’ve probably talked to a hundred people since Aunt Liz disappeared, and I don’t remember hearing anything from anyone that would make me a risk. How on earth will I know where danger might come from again?”
Her entire body trembled, and she slammed her hands down on the table, as if embracing anger rather than the fear that was obviously overwhelming her. The shine of tears in her eyes grew more visible.
Steve had no idea what she might do next. She could scream in frustration, throw a cup across the room or crumble into a weeping mess.
Not knowing for sure what was about to happen, he did the only thing he knew to stop any of it. He stepped up to her, wrapped her in his arms and kissed her.
Chapter 8
Roxy’s initial instinct was to shove him away, to ask him what the heck he thought he was doing just grabbing her and kissing her without her consent, without any warning at all. But his lips were so warm against hers and his arms were so tight, making her feel safe and secure.
The night had been filled with such horror, and rather than stopping the kiss, she opened her mouth to him. As their tongues danced together, all thoughts of knives and death momentarily fled from her head and she simply fell into the pleasure of kissing Steve.
She wasn’t even sure she liked Detective Steve Kincaid, but right now she clung to him as if he were a solid rock in a wind-tossed sea, an anchor that kept her from drifting into an emotional storm she feared she’d never leave.
She might not have decided yet if she liked him as a person, but she definitely liked the way he kissed...soft but with a faint hint of demand.
Allowing herself to melt into him, she realized that she could like being held in Steve’s arms, enjoy kissing him and still not be sure that she liked him.
She knew she didn’t approve of what she’d heard about his personal life, but that didn’t matter, not now, not with his mouth plying hers with a heat that warmed the icy chill that had suffused her since the moment she’d seen the knives in the door.
His hands swept up and down her back as the kiss continued, and she pressed herself more tightly against him, certain at that moment that his embrace was the safest place in the world, falling deeper into a sensual haze that allowed all rational thought to leave her mind.
A knock on the kitchen door made them jump apart. Roxy watched in a stunned daze as Steve walked to the door and opened it to admit Jimmy and Frank.
Both of them looked at her with concern. “Roxy, are you okay?” Jimmy, the younger of the two, walked over to her and gently touched her shoulder. His brown eyes held a genuine concern.
She smiled at him. She’d always thought that Jimmy, as the youngest of the three detectives, was the least jaded and the nicest. “I’m fine, especially now that you all are here.”
She didn’t look at Steve. Her lips still burned with the heat of his kiss, and she was afraid that if she looked at him his partners would guess something about the brief intimacy they’d just shared. She’d told Jimmy she was fine, but she wasn’t fine. Her aunt was missing, somebody had thrown knives at her and Steve’s kiss had just confused the heck out of her.
She noticed that Frank carried a medium-size black bag with him that she assumed was a crime scene evidence-processing kit. He looked stern and distinguished, with the hint of premature silver strands at his temples.
Frank was the quietest of the three, always extremely polite but with a distance in his cool blue eyes that reminded her of the way her sister had come home after her divorce.
“Jimmy and I will head outside and see what we can find,” Frank said.
Roxy sank down at the table as Steve showed the two men the gouges in the door frame; then Jimmy and Frank disappeared into the night, leaving her and Steve alone once again.
“You shouldn’t have kissed me,” she said with a touch of censure in her voice.
“Probably not, but I thought you were about to lose it and it just seemed like the appropriate thing to do at the time,” he replied easily, as if the kiss had meant nothing, as if he hadn’t felt the instant chemistry that had soared between them.
“You could at least warn me next time of your intention,” she said, surprised to find herself irritated by his obvious lack of response to the kiss.
She’d officially lost her mind. She had a missing loved one and somebody crazy throwing kniv
es at her from the dark, and all she could think about was how Steve’s kiss had rocked her to her very core.
She didn’t want to like Steve’s kisses. She didn’t want to like anybody’s kisses. Kisses led to other things, to relationships and expectations and ultimately heartbreak. Kisses involved men, and her mother’s men had destroyed her life.
With the adrenaline rush that had screamed through her in the minutes before Steve had arrived now ebbing away, she was left with a bone-weary exhaustion. She got up and poured herself a cup of coffee and one for Steve, as well, then returned to the table.
Once again he sat across from her, his features sober and his eyes darkened as if deep in thought. “We have to work this two ways,” he finally said. “There are two possibilities. The first is that this is somehow tied to your aunt’s disappearance. The second is that it has nothing to do with Liz’s disappearance and is just about you.”
“So what happens next?”
“We wait to see if Jimmy and Frank come up with anything, and by sometime tomorrow I want a list from you of people you have regular contact with and anyone from your past who might have a reason to want to hurt you.”
The very idea made Roxy’s head hurt. “I don’t want my sisters to know about what happened here tonight. It would only frighten them more than they already are about Aunt Liz.”
“Roxy, at some point you’re going to have to realize that your sisters are grown women and don’t need you to protect them from life.”
“Now isn’t the time,” she said firmly. Of course he couldn’t understand her need to shield her sisters from all things bad.
“Do you have siblings?” she asked.
“Nope, I’m an only child,” he replied.
She nodded. “That explains a lot.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Like what?”
“Like your natural arrogance, your sense of entitlement. You were probably shamelessly spoiled.”
Cold Case, Hot Accomplice Page 10