“Miss Stanley?” I turned to find Drum’s dad, Detective Dillon looking at me, his signature suspicious expression in place. “Is something wrong?”
“Maybe.” The look in his eyes killed any urge I might have to confess. “My sister’s here. Somewhere.”
“Really.”
I didn’t like the way he said it, but I had no choice but to follow him through two doors. Far too quickly I found myself looking at my sister. At least I had police protection. I looked at said protection. Their mutually shocked expressions, made me realize I’d be a fool to count on them for anything until they had time to assimilate the fact that we were twins and they’d gotten the wrong one.
Rosemary didn’t have to assimilate anything. She knew what she wanted to do. Her fingers curled into claws. She started toward me.
Time to play the guilt card. “So, how was your date with Mike?”
* * * *
An interrogation room in a police station is not a good place to be left alone with your thoughts. Dillon and his partner Willis, whose fish-like visage made me itch to sketch him, took Rosemary away to arrange her release, leaving me to ponder my situation. The pondering was not fruitful. I didn’t know if asking for a lawyer would make me look guiltier or if a strip search would be better or worse than my yearly pelvic exam?
With my thoughts doing a mouse-on-a-wheel, I needed a distraction. Since illustration is my usual response to stress, I produced a battered sketch book and a piece of pencil from the deep depths of my purse. A few swift strokes and Cochran appeared on the page wearing prison stripes. I added tiny caricatures of Willis and Dillon doing a Russian dance on either side of him. Willis was a fish, of course. Dillon was a dog, a yippy, dust-mop dog.
Dillon. I paused and frowned into the distance. He was, I was sure, my enemy. Wait until he found out I’m sort of dating his son. I’d never get out of jail.
Jail. How had I got into this mess? My fingers moved as my thoughts roamed back to the how. Dates, deaths and car chases tumbled together. Had I really seen the round-headed man at the Tandoor? And how much should I tell the cops about Kel?
Not that I had that much to tell—
The door opened. I jumped, spilling pad and pencil onto the floor. The pencil rolled across the uneven linoleum floor and came to rest against Dillon’s shoe.
“Sorry.” I crouched to retrieve my stuff. Willis bent to help me and our heads collided.
“I didn’t mean to assault you,” I gasped.
He grinned and scooped my pad out from under my hand. “Try to relax, Miss Stanley. We’re not ogres.”
I looked past him to Dillon. He didn’t look like he agreed with his partner. Then he stepped on my pencil.
“Sorry.” He picked up the pieces and tossed them onto the table. Both pieces rolled into an indentation in the surface on one side. It looked like it was from beating heads there. A tiny, sympathetic ache formed around my eyes, then fanned out along my forehead.
“You’re an artist?” Willis flipped through my sketch pad.
“Sort of.” I twitched as he got closer and closer to the page with the sketch I’d just done of him.
“I’ve seen this bug before.” He looked up. “You the one does the cockroach books?”
“Yes.” Was this going to help or hurt my cause?
“My sister’s kids love your books. I don’t suppose you’d autograph one of these for them?”
What? Was I going to say no to a cop?
“Sure.” I reached for the book. Dillon cleared his throat. “Was that wrong? I’m not trying to bribe him. Really. I’m a law abiding person. I’m probably the most law abiding person you’ve ever arrested. I’ve never even gone in an out door or taken tags off my pillows!”
Dillon sighed. “You read mysteries, don’t you?”
“Yes, but I can stop anytime.”
“How about this one?” Willis held up the page I’d just done. In center place, larger than the rest, was my roach with him and Dillon doing their dance. “I think they’d like this one. This one kind of looks like you, Dillon.”
He stopped, his stocky, fish-shaped body going all stiff.
Law suit time.
I snatched the sketchbook from him and slammed it shut. “I’m sorry. That’s part of a work in progress.”
“Can we get down to business?” Dillon paced across the narrow room, his hands shoved in the pockets of his suit pants. His tie was listing toward his left ear. I got the feeling he blamed me for all of it.
“Of course.” I sat down and looked cooperatively at Willis. He didn’t look as friendly as before. A distraction was in order. “I’m surprised you got onto my sister so fast.”
“We’re not quite as incompetent as the media like to make out,” Dillon snapped.
“And when she was identified in the line-up—” Willis shrugged, settling into a chair facing me.
“The man with the dust-mop dog. I knew it. His dog was pooing on someone’s lawn, you know.”
“This will take less time if you’ll wait until we ask you questions,” Willis said, amusement creeping back into his eyes.
Dillon leaned toward me again. “Let’s start with the bullet holes in your sister’s car. Where they came from? Why you were seen speeding from the scene of Carter’s murder?”
“Uh, because I didn’t want to get shot?”
Dillon slammed his hands against the table. “Don’t mess with me!”
I cowered in my cower-resistant seat. “I’m not. You don’t have to scare me into spilling my guts. I’ll spill them without the act.”
I looked at Willis, then Dillon. They looked confused.
“What act?” Willis finally asked.
“Good cop, bad cop.” They looked at each other, then me again. I hastened to reassure them. “Don’t feel bad. You do it very well. It’s just that I was expecting it. I can pretend I don’t notice if you want.”
Willis gave a half laugh, half snort and rested his arms on the seat back. “You’re a very, unusual woman, Miss Stanley.”
“Oh no. I’m hopelessly ordinary. That’s what makes this whole thing so weird.”
“Don’t you think its stretching things a bit to call murder weird?” Dillon asked, pacing around to loom over me.
“Murder isn’t normal,” I felt the need to point out.
Dillon looked inclined to puff up again, but Willis laughed and said, “Can it, Ken. Miss Stanley is cooperating. You can badger our next witness.”
With an air of forbearance, Dillon hooked a chair with his foot and straddled it like a rebellious teenager. I gave him a “teacher look,” which seemed to disconcert him. Satisfied, I looked helpfully at Willis.
Willis’ lips twitched, but all he said was, “Let’s take it from the top. Why did Carter’s killer shoot at you?”
I explained about the choir practice and Mrs. Macpherson while Dillon beat an impatient tattoo on the floor with his foot. When I paused for breath, he jumped on me with, “The Carter house isn’t on your way home, Miss Stanley.”
“I know. I was thinking, you see.” I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the table. “I’m trying to get out of bugs and into romance novels, but it’s not as easy as some people think it is. I was mulling my book and not watching where I was going. And when I stopped, I realized I was lost, well, not exactly lost, I was in my subdivision, just not the right part of the subdivision. That’s when I drove by her house.” I shrugged. “It was just a coincidence.”
“A coincidence?” Dillon fixed me with an official glare. “Want to hear another coincidence?” I had a feeling I didn’t, but he didn’t wait for my assent to tell me, “Paul Mitchell was killed with the same gun that killed Carter.”
“Two murders in two days is pushing the coincidence envelope pretty far,” Willis added.
“The same gun?” I sagged back. Maybe it had been the round-headed man I saw in the parking lot? This was not good. “This really isn’t my week.”
“Carter volun
teered at a youth center that helped teens get off drugs,” Willis said. “We found drugs on Mitchell’s body—”
“But it couldn’t be drugs.” I turned to Dillon. “According to your son, Paul Mitchell was a major straight arrow kid. No way would he be using the stuff.”
“My son?” Dillon began, puffing up once more, but the door opened again. Of course we all looked. In the opening I saw yet another cop. Behind him were two men in suits.
“What’s up?” Willis stood up, his body going tense at the sudden interruption.
“They’re here for Miss Stanley.”
“What?” Dillon jumped up. “We’re not through with her yet.”
The cop shrugged. “Their paperwork is in order. She belongs to them now.”
She? Who? Me?
The cop gave way for the identical suits. It wasn’t just their conservative gray suits, white shirts, or proper ties that matched. Their blank, cool faces were almost identical, too. Only their hair was different, one light and one dark.
A mouth moved in the face of the light-haired guy, exposing a straight line of white teeth. “Will you please come with us, Miss Stanley?”
I clutched my purse to my chest, too shocked for words.
Willis had plenty to say. “She’s our witness. You can’t waltz in here and take her. Not till we’ve finished getting her statement.”
Like identical marionettes they pulled open their jackets, extracted matching leather wallets and flipped them open. Dillon took a hard look, then wheeled away.
“You damn spooks think you can do whatever you want.”
Willis’ face was tight with rage. “What possible interest could the CIA have in the murder of a math teacher in the suburbs?”
“I’m afraid we’re not at liberty to answer questions,” the dark-haired partner spoke this time.
Dillon slammed his hands down on the table, catching the point of my broken pencil and sending it sailing through the air. “You’re out of your jurisdiction. This is our case.”
The pencil hit the wall, then floor, where it rolled back between Dillon’s feet.
Neither spook reacted. Light hair said, “It’s still your case. You’ll just have to solve it without Miss Stanley. Like the man said, she’s ours now.”
They closed in on either side of me, grabbed my arms, and swept me out the door and down the hall. There was one brief check to our exit. A uniformed officer approached me holding up a familiar looking glue gun.
“Miss Stanley? I think this is your sister’s. We forgot to give it to her when she reclaimed her personal items.”
I recognized Rosemary’s monogram on the side. She loved that glue gun almost as much as her car. Still gripped by suits, I signed something, took the gun and shoved it in my purse. The spooks started us toward the exit again, my dragging feet barely brushing the floor, the glue gun cord slapping against my legs.
“It’s all right, Miss Stanley. Trust us,” dark hair said.
Trust the CIA? I don’t think so.
Outside a long, dark limo waited. They stuffed me in it with insulting ease. I landed untidily in a lap. A familiar smell teased my nostrils. I didn’t even have to look. But of course I did.
Kelvin Kapone.
Not a private investigator. A spy.
TWELVE
“Would you believe me if I said I’m not a spy?”
“No.” I slid off his lap and onto the seat next to him. “Why should I believe anything you say? You told me you were a private detective.”
“You told me I was a private detective.”
“You agreed with me.”
“I didn’t disagree with you. There’s a difference.”
“Only to a spook!” I straightened as much as I could in the soft, deep seat and looked haughtily out the window.
“And what would you have done if I’d told you I was CIA?”
I shrugged to indicate my total lack of interest in him or his lies. And then made the mistake of looking at him to see how he liked the cold shoulder.
The back seat of the limo closed us in a dim intimacy that put interesting shadows across his clean cut face and highlighted his bright, white smile. He smelled of soap and after-shave, the expensive kind. His eyes held a nice mix of remorse and an engaging invitation to freely forgive, to come bask once more in their warm blue light.
“I wouldn’t have believed you,” I admitted, giving him a dark look. “Why would I expect James Bond to dive through my sunroof in the suburbs?”
He looked penitent, though his eyes lost the remorse and filled with wicked humor. “If it makes you feel any better, I was being chased on my own time. I went there because my mother asked me to.”
“Your mother? Are spies allowed to have mothers?”
“If we don’t have one, then one is issued to us.”
How could he keep his face so serious, while his eyes laughed so outrageously?
“If I’d known…” I began.
“You didn’t need to know.”
I looked up at that. “Oh really? And now I do?”
“Let’s just say the local police don’t need to know.” Then he had the nerve to grin at me.
It was practically atomic in intensity and stirred up all the things I shouldn’t be feeling. This guy was totally out of my league. I was a Baptist children’s book author. He was a CIA agent. End of story. So why did my lips curve in a smile loaded with idiocy? I shook away idiocy and asked, “How did you know I was at the police station?”
“Would you believe, we have our ways?”
I stared at him for a full minute before it hit me. I’m slow, but I get there eventually if I have enough really obvious clues.
“You’re—you’re having me followed, aren’t you?”
“You can ID a killer, Bel. Was I supposed to let you wander around unprotected?”
Men. They always insist on being logical. The idea of being followed around when I didn’t know it, made me feel completely illogical. What if I’d done something I didn’t want the CIA to know about? Like…like…I couldn’t think of anything I could do that would even interest them, so I said, “If he’d seen me, wouldn’t he have tried to kill me by now? I mean, we were both at the Tandoor Club last night and no one’s tried to kill me. Except Rosemary.”
“I’d prefer not to wait until it’s too late. You saved my life, Bel.” He leaned close and ran a gentle finger along my cheek, sending chills down to my toes. “I’d like to return the favor.”
I couldn’t breathe. He was too close and his eyes so sincerely blue, how could I deny him anything?
“Well,” I licked my lips and offered grudgingly, “Okay, you can save my life. But I want it on the record that I don’t like being followed without my consent.”
“We try to keep everything off the record.”
I had to smile then. “Spook.”
He grinned again, with the shameless brass of a man who knew he’d just got his way. Since I was used to not getting my way, I asked without angst, “What do you want me to do?”
“How much did they get out of you before my men got there?”
I shrugged. “Not much. We were past Mrs. Macpherson and the flu but just coming up on you and the round-headed man.” I frowned. “Isn’t it kind of mean to not let them know who the major suspect is?”
“For the time being, the fewer people who know about you the better. Police stations are notorious for leaks.”
“Unlike the CIA.”
He pretended not to hear. “I’d like to keep you under wraps until I can find out why Mrs. Carter called me instead of the police.”
“Oh. Did she know? That you’re a spy, I mean?”
“I’m not a spy. I’m an agent,” he said, with obvious pride, “trying to protect my country.”
Whoa, an idealistic spook? Wasn’t that a contradiction in terms? Sure as tooting it shouldn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Too bad what I shouldn’t feel didn’t seem to stop me from feeling it.
&
nbsp; In a move that seemed too natural, he shifted, resting his arm on the seat behind my head. He wasn’t touching me, but I didn’t need fully body contact to feel volcanic.
Enclosed in a field of warmth that was both reassuring and scary, I had to fight an unworthy compulsion to nestle in against him and play helpless female. A small, satisfied smile played with the edges of his mouth. I let myself get side-tracked remembering what it had felt like to have that mouth moving on mine. I might have let the volcano erupt if it weren’t for his very apparent, total lack of repentance.
I gave him my wide-eyed innocent look and asked, “So what have you found out about Mrs. Carter’s death that the police haven’t?”
His gaze shifted just off the right of mine. “We’re still analyzing the data obtained from her purse.”
I made a rude sound.
“What?” He sounded nicely defensive.
“Why don’t you just admit you don’t have a clue?”
“When I signed on with the CIA I had to promise I would never do that.” He looked serious, except for a twinkle at the back of his eyes.
I shook my head. A CIA agent with a sense of humor. Wasn’t that also a contradiction in terms? Though a very nice contradiction. Definitely a dangerous man.
“You know the police think its drug related?”
“Elspeth Carter?” Kel shook his head. “Drugs? I don’t believe it. She was completely opposed to drugs.”
“Not her. The boy, Paul Mitchell. They were killed with the same gun, you know. They told me at the police station.”
“What?” Kel frowned. It didn’t mar his looks one bit. “That doesn’t feel right. I knew she did some work in drug prevention, but it makes no sense.”
“I don’t know about that, but I know that Paul’s friends say he wasn’t the type to use. He was with the Guard, shipping out to the Gulf soon. A real stand-up kind of guy and squeaky clean.”
He ran a hand into his hair, making that question mark clump fall endearingly onto his forehead. I wanted to smooth it back, but lacked permission. And the nerve.
The Spy Who Kissed Me Page 10