Framed

by Karen Leabo

  The next time she woke up she was alone in the bed, and the sun was shining with obnoxious cheerfulness through Kyle’s bedroom window. How long had she slept?

  She jumped out of bed in a near panic. She had to go get her car. Where were her shoes? Where was Kyle?

  She jerked the bedroom door open and was immediately assailed by the scent of coffee and bacon, and the unmistakable sound of cooking noises...and whistling. Cheerful whistling.

  What in the hell was there to be cheerful about? she thought, annoyed, as she padded down the hall in bare feet. As she passed through the living room, she noticed things she’d missed last night—the group of family photos arranged haphazardly on a shelf in the living room, the mismatched furniture that somehow managed to look cozy, the huge stereo system and a ftoor-to-ceiling collection of CDs. She had an impulse to check out the titles, but then she remembered the urgency of her situation and resisted.

  She found Kyle in the kitchen, busily tending to a skillet full of bacon and another pan with scrambled eggs. He was shirtless, barefoot, wearing only jeans, and the sight of that awesome bare chest made her suddenly remember her behavior last night.

  Her face grew warm, and she couldn’t seem to find any words to explain herself or apologize.

  He noticed her and smiled. “Hi. Feel better?”

  “What time is it?” she demanded.

  Unruffled by her lack of civility, he checked his watch. “Almost ten.”

  “What? Oh, heavens, what about my car? I have to—”

  “It’s done. I tried to wake you up earlier, but you were about as responsive as a hibernating bear. So I called Lynn, and she and I went and picked up your car.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “I knew the approximate location. In daylight it wasn’t so hard to spot.”

  She was unutterably relieved to have that problem solved. “I feel so stupid...”

  “You were exhausted.” Kyle dumped the scrambled eggs onto two plates. “I hope you’re hungry.”

  “I really should get home...”

  “Not until you eat.”

  She was suddenly hungry. She hadn’t been eating well, and the mountain of eggs and bacon and toast Kyle piled onto her plate was too tempting to turn down. “All right, twist my arm. I’ll eat. Don’t you have to be at work or something?”

  “It’s my day off.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t kept track of such things. She had no idea what day it was. She sat obediently at the kitchen table, and he placed the food in front of her, then sat across from her with his own plate. Her attention was torn between the delicious-smelling food under her nose, and the delectable man slightly farther away.

  “I should put on a shirt,” he said, though he made no move to do so. “I always get half-naked to cook because I hate getting grease on my clothes. My mother would be horrified if she saw me sitting at the table like this.”

  “You’re not offending me,” she said, trying not to stare at that broad, muscular chest as she took her first bite of eggs. They were the best eggs she’d ever tasted. “I mean, we slept in the same bed. At least, I think we did. My memory is a little fuzzy.”

  She’d been trying to make light of her needy behavior from the night before. She could see what had happened much more clearly now, and she cringed at the memory of her own wantonness. Her fatigue had somehow knocked down her normal barriers of caution, her inhibitions.

  Kyle wasn’t smiling. Of course he wasn’t, she thought, staring down at her food. He probably considered her behavior last night a major annoyance. He’d only wanted to help her out of a jam, not serve as her emotional crutch.

  “Oh, we slept together, all right,” he said, “for a few hours, anyway. I wouldn’t forget something like that.”

  “I wish I’d been awake to enjoy it,” she quipped.

  Finally she won a smile from him. “I’m sorry you missed it, too. It wasn’t half-bad.”

  She relaxed slightly and took another bite of toast. It was going to be all right. Maybe she could survive the humiliation of throwing herself at a man who simply wasn’t all that interested, steamy kisses notwithstanding.

  “I really wasn’t myself last night.”

  He grew serious again. “I understand.”

  “Do you? I hope so. I feel like I’ve taken advantage of you. You offer help and I’m all over you like a rash.”

  “Taken advantage? Honey, there’s something you ought to know about men. When you ask them to sleep with you, it’s not taking advantage. When they get in bed with you when you’re half-unconscious, that’s taking advantage. You have nothing to apologize for, okay?”

  “Neither do you,” she said quickly. Did he think he’d done something wrong, for heaven’s sake? She looked him in the eye so he couldn’t mistake her sincerity. “It helped me sleep, to have you there, because I knew I was safe.”

  Kyle took a long draw of coffee. “You weren’t that safe.”

  Ah. So she’d once again misread the situation. And she realized now that they were in a very dangerous gray area. She couldn’t trust herself; he’d just told her she couldn’t completely trust him. They ought not to be spending this much time together. If they continued, the consequences were almost inevitable.

  She concentrated on her meal, shoveling down the food as fast as she dared without calling attention to the fact that she was anxious for breakfast to be over.

  “So where’s my car?”

  “Back at your house.”

  “You’ll have to take me home, then.”

  “Eventually. When you’re ready to face the world again. I should warn you, the reporters and photographers were hanging out at your place early this morning.”

  “But I can’t stay here!” she blurted out.

  “Why not? It’s the last place anyone would think to look.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll get us both in trouble. What if your boss finds out? Marva’s going to freak out as it is.”

  He toyed with a piece of bacon. “I won’t get in trouble. I’m not officially on the investigation anymore. Even if someone found out you’re here—which they won’t—what I do on my own time is my business.”

  She wasn’t sure she bought his unconcerned act. Surely cops weren’t encouraged to fraternize with criminal suspects, whether they were connected with the case or not.

  “Just the same,” she said, “I should get home. Think you could loan me cab fare?”

  “I’ll take you.”

  She shook her head. “Someone could see you. I’m not being paranoid about this. Have you ever been harassed by the press?”

  He shrugged.

  “You will be, if some smart-ass reporter connects you to me in any way but a professional one. It could hurt my case, and it wouldn’t do you any good, either.”

  He looked at her, indecision playing about his face, then set his coffee cup down with a clunk. “All right, you’ve convinced me. How about I drop you off at that library close to your house, and you can call a cab from there?”

  It was a good plan. “I can live with that.” But, she had to admit, the idea of hanging out here with Kyle was much more appealing than the thought of facing her home, with all its little reminders of the trouble she was in—the cutup hall carpet, the missing kitchen knives, and Lynn with her law books.

  “You can stay if you want,” he said, reading her mind. “It’s okay.”

  “Maybe just for a little while.” It was so quiet here.

  They were silent for a few minutes. Jess sipped black coffee and flipped disinterestedly through the entertainment pages of the newspaper, carefully avoiding any section that might contain news of her case. Marva, she knew, was keeping track of news coverage so Jess wouldn’t have to torture herself by reading and hearing about the half-truths, speculation and innuendo.

  “I’m not scheduled to work today,” Kyle said, “but I do have to go to the station and catch up on some of the stuff I’ve been neglecting—writing up reports, re
turning phone calls. It’ll take a few hours. You can hang out here, watch TV, relax. I’ll grab some take-out on my way home, we can have lunch here, then I’ll run you over to the library. How does that sound?”

  Being alone here didn’t sound half as nice as being with him. “Sure, that’ll be fine. Say, as long as you’ll be working, maybe you could do some kind of background check on Kevin Gilpatrick.”

  “It’s been done. Except for a few minor brushes with the law—no convictions—he’s clean.”

  “I was thinking you could check out some other things—like if he owns any property somewhere else, someplace he could stash Terry.”

  “Mmm,” Kyle said noncommittally. He was studying the sports section.

  “I’m serious. I know Kevin’s involved—I could see it in his eyes that night we caught him making the phone calls. I’ll bet you Terry was staying at Kevin’s house until then. Then they probably thought things were heating up too much, so they moved him to a safer place.”

  “That’s pure speculation, Jess.”

  “Haven’t you ever followed a hunch?”

  He acknowledged her point with a nod. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  That was the best she could expect, she supposed. His lack of enthusiasm served as a gentle reminder that though Kyle was concerned and helpful, he was still a cop. He had his responsibilities, his loyalties, his own convictions about her case that fell somewhere between Clewis’s and her own. He was not completely her ally.

  Kyle had almost cleared his desk and was thinking about how best to check on Kevin Gilpatrick’s property holdings when Bill Clewis made a rare appearance in missing persons. “Branson. Thought I might find you here, nose to the grindstone. Track down any runaway teenagers today?”

  He said it as if Kyle’s job was insignificant. But that didn’t bother Kyle. He liked his work. He would be really happy to get back to it and leave murder cases to his more cynical colleagues.

  “Yeah, I did track down a runaway. Her father beat her up, and she was hiding out in a homeless shelter. She’s now safely with family services and her dad’s been arrested. How about you? You catch any murderers today?”

  “Nope,” Clewis replied with a self-satisfied smirk. “As a matter of fact, I lost one. Your innocent little angel flew the coop.” He threw this out casually.

  While his heart started up a staccato rhythm inside his chest, Kyle carefully schooled his features to reflect only mild surprise. “Jess Robinson?”

  “Who else? I called her this morning to get her in here for some more questions. I thought a good night’s sleep might have improved her memory about that knife. But you know what? She wasn’t there. Her kid sister’s voice was shaking when she told me Jess was staying at a friend’s house.

  “Which friend’s house, I ask. She says she doesn’t know. I remind the sister that Jess is supposed to be available for questioning at all times. The sister says not to worry, Jess’ll call in. I say, my aunt Fanny. She don’t call in by noon I’m calling the judge to get her bail revoked, and then I’m putting an APB out on her.”

  Kyle tried his best to hide his growing alarm. If Jess went back to jail it would crush her, destroy what little resilience she’d managed to hold on to.

  “It’s twetve-thirty.” Clewis tapped his watch. “No call. You wouldn’t happen to have any ideas where to look, would you?”

  Kyle took a deep breath. “I know where she is. She hasn’t flown the coop.”

  Clewis’s eyebrows flew up. “Where might that be?”

  “She’s staying with a friend, like her sister said. Trying to get some relief from the press. They’re harassing her. Oh, speaking of harassment,” Kyle said, deftly changing the subject, “I caught the crank phone caller red-handed. It was Kevin Gilpatrick. He’s in this thing up to his eyeballs, and I think you should haul him in for questioning.” If Jess was right—that Kevin was hiding Terry—a friendly little encounter with Clewis ought to convince him to bail out of Terry’s practical joke.

  “I got better things to do than chase my tail with that one,” Clewis said dismissively. “So you gonna tell me where the babe is, or what?”

  “I’ll have her call you,” Kyle said casually, as if it was no big deal. He returned his attention to his paperwork, hoping Clewis would go away.

  Clewis crowed. “She’s at your house!” he concluded, clapping his hands like a demented preschooler. “I shoulda known you were protecting her. So you’re not making any headway with her, huh?”

  Kyle didn’t know how to answer that. On the one hand, their original good cop-bad cop plan was working nicely. Jess was warming up to him, confiding in him. Getting intimate, even. But the thought of telling Clewis any of that made his stomach turn. Jess was growing to trust him. It seemed heinous to violate that trust.

  But wasn’t that what he’d set out to do in the first place?

  She hadn’t told him anything the least bit incriminating, he reminded himself. Until she did, Clewis didn’t have any right to know the details.

  “When I caught her crank caller, she was grateful,” Kyle said. “She warmed up to me a little.”

  “A little? She spent the night at your house! Wait’ll I tell Easley—”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Clewis. She went to a friend’s house last night.” That was the story they’d agreed on.

  “You trying to tell me nothing happened? You got a babe like that warming up to you, and nothing happens? Branson, you’re a pathetic excuse for a man. I’d have had her ten times over.”

  Kyle straightened the papers on his desk while he got control of his temper. When he spoke, his voice was low and deadly. “Nothing happened,” he said, enunciating each word. “That’s the difference between you and me, Clewis. I have self-control. I have ethics- And I don’t sleep with a woman just because she’s there.”

  “I do,” said Blayney Cook, Kyle’s partner, who’d entered the room just in time to hear the last sentence of the exchange.

  Kyle shot him a withering look that sent the younger man skulking to his desk to sharpen pencils. He wasn’t in the mood for Blayney’s peculiar sense of humor just now.

  Clewis stared at him, sizing him up like a prize-fighter about to enter the ring. Kyle had the fleeting impression that Clewis would throw a punch if there weren’t a dozen witnesses around in the bull pen. Then suddenly he relaxed, and a wholly unpleasant smile spread across his face.

  “Okay, we’ll play it your way,” he said. “Nothing happened.” Clewis turned and strolled from the room. Had he swallowed Kyle’s story about Jess staying at a “friend’s” house?

  “What the hell was that all about?” Blayney asked in a less than confidential whisper. The room went quiet, as if E. F. Hutton was about to talk.

  “Just Clewis being an ass, as usual,” Kyle said, trying to dismiss the conversation from his mind. But the fact that Clewis had backed down so suddenly bothered him.

  Blayney scooted his chair over closer to Kyle’s desk. “Hey, there’s something you ought to know,” he said in a low voice. “There’s a rumor making its way along the department grapevine. Pure speculation, mind you—”

  “Then why do I need to hear it?” Kyle snapped. He was being more short-tempered than usual with his affable partner, but Clewis had crushed what little goodwill he’d started with that morning.

  “Because it directly concerns you, and it could mean your career, buddy.”

  That caught Kyle’s attention. “Okay, you got me. What’s the rumor?”

  “Well, I guess everybody knows you’re sort of on loan to homicide in the Jess Robinson investigation. Officially the reason is for continuity—you initiated the original missing-persons investigation, you’ve spent time with the babe—”

  “Her name’s Jess,” Kyle said between clenched teeth.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Blayney murmured. “Anyway, it all sounds kosher on the surface. You have an in with her, so your assignment is to cozy up to her and see what you can p
ick up that would help the investigation. Only so far—”

  “I’ve come up with zilch,” Kyle said, resigned. “What can I say? She hasn’t spontaneously confessed where she put the body. I can’t report evidence I haven’t found.”

  “Yeah, but you’re doing just the opposite of what Easley originally wanted. Everything you pick up is pointing to her innocence.”

  “Did it ever occur to any of these yo-yos that she might be innocent?”

  Blayney looked at him speculatively. “You really believe that.”

  “I do. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not some naive bumpkin taken in by a pretty face. She didn’t kill Terry Rodin. Someone framed her. I’m not making things up. I’m reporting evidence as I come across it. I can’t help it if it all points to Jess’s innocence.” He winced inwardly as he thought of some of the things he hadn’t reported. Like the fact that she’d broken into Kevin’s house. And the tip Kevin had given him—to check with the police in Barnstable County, Massachusetts. He hadn’t decided what to do with that just yet.

  “Regardless, you’re still not doing what Easley wanted you to do. Which brings us to the speculation part. Some people think you’re being set up for a fall.”

  “How so?” Kyle shot back, full of skepticism. The Kansas City Police Department had its share of problems, but it protected its own.

  “They want you to sleep with her. When the press finds out, it’ll be all over the front page. It’ll destroy her credibility when everybody learns she was sleeping with a cop. You’ll be out of a job because Easley will deny any knowl. edge of your actions.”

  “He sanctioned this whole thing,” Kyle said. “He practically told me in so many words to sleep with her. Not that I’m planning to—”

  “But she’s at your house now?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle admitted.

  “Hell, man, Clewis is probably calling the papers right now. You saw how he used the press when he found the murder weapon. If I were you, I would get that woman out of my house and keep her out.”