She couldn’t stand around taking care of him, though. She needed to catch Tony before he disappeared on her, but she couldn’t leave the boy here alone. So she popped down the hall to find Susan doing reports in the conference room.
“Susan, I need a hand for a moment.”
Kat darted back down the hall at Susan’s nod. The woman followed her with quick strides back to the break room. The kid was still sitting there in a small pond and focusing on getting the sludge from the mug down his throat.
Kat turned back to Susan with a pleading look. “Sorry for this, but someone needs to keep an eye on him while I have a quick word with the boss.” Taking Susan’s acceptance for granted, Kat dived back down the corridor to Tony’s office. She breezed in without knocking, closing the door behind her.
She stood before his desk, dripping quietly onto the carpet as Tony looked up and stared at her for a long moment. Then he leaned back in his chair and grinned like a baboon.
Kat had been in too much of a rush to consider her appearance, and she wondered what she must look like, but she didn’t dare check in the mirror to see. Well, she’d always taken care to dress professional for this job before. She knew she’d appeared sharp enough when she gave him the interim report just this morning. He’d best remember that.
She stepped over to one of the filing cabinets and grabbed herself a towel from the top drawer. She talked as she scrubbed her hair dry. “I found Rossiter.” Then she remembered about the boy and snatched a second towel to take back with her.
“And?”
Kat fluffed her hair back out as best she could with her hand. “You can find what’s left of the sergeant over by the Green. He was trying to kill this kid.”
Tony wasn’t grinning any longer. “Kill a kid?” He’d leaned forward to listen to her.
“I’ve got him parked in the break room for now, but I need to get back and dry him off.”
Tony looked irritable. “Who is he, and what’s going on, and are you seriously telling me you left a dead body on the Green?”
Kat tossed the used towel over the back of a chair. “David Belue. You’ll want to hear his story.” So would Kat. If Tony thought she’d already heard, then maybe he’d let her stick around and listen.
“How about you?” Tony sounded miffed. “Can you tell me your story, or do you need to go change clothes first?”
It would be nice, she thought, but there was too much that needed doing in a hurry. “I’m good. And yes, there’s a corpse on the Green.” She was gratified to have Tony’s full and complete attention.
Kat pursed her lips as she weighed exactly what she would say next. She probably shouldn’t explain about patrolling alone at night—even if Tony were already aware of what she was doing, it would best be left unstated.
“I found the kid sitting on one of the benches. I don’t think Rossiter even knew who I was—he just went straight for the boy with a knife. I did what I had to do. The sergeant is dead, and I brought the kid back here.” End of story.
Tony opened his mouth a few times, but bit off whatever he’d considered saying, which she thought wise of him. In the end, he stood and walked to his office’s back door. “Where exactly is the body?”
Kat told him and watched him go, then she took another of Tony’s towels. She took them back to the break room, where she found David more alert and gulping down a mug of freshly brewed coffee, with plenty of honey no doubt.
Susan must’ve been busy cleaning. Because the floor was dry for the moment, and the kid no longer sat in the middle of a lake. Now she was rummaging through the cupboards.
Susan pulled down a plastic-wrapped package and waved it at Kat. “I’m trying to find something to just zap, to get hot food for the poor kid. It’s either popcorn or some of those frozen frog legs.”
Kat blinked. None of her colleagues should be deprived of their popcorn. “He needs protein.”
Susan shrugged and replaced the popcorn and turned to the fridge. “I’ll get it going, but then I need to get back to my own job.”
Kat nodded and watched as Susan suited action to words and then left. While she waited on the frog legs, Kat handed David the pair of towels—pleased to see him get right to work drying himself off more. And his color was coming back.
She refrained from saying anything until he had started to eat. “My boss—” Which wouldn’t mean anything to this kid. “Chief of Internal Security Anthony Nelson. He’ll want to hear what you have to say for yourself. But he won’t be back for a bit.”
Because he’s busy disposing of a dead body. Kat didn’t feel the need to share that with the kid, who was still an unknown quantity to her. She suspected Tony knew more that he wasn’t sharing. But maybe if she listened closely she would pick up some clues when he questioned David.
She looked at the boy, who now had half a frog leg hanging out of his mouth. “So consider how you can explain things. But save your story for my boss.”
He looked up at her as the frog leg disappeared. “I don’t need to consider anything.”
“I said save it. Can’t you listen?” Kat heard herself snap, and it reminded her that this kid wasn’t the only one in need of repair. She tossed in one of the microwave popcorn bags, and while it popped, she went back to massaging her shoulder.
Kat wished she’d taken Tony up on his offer to go change clothes, because they were feeling quite waterlogged now, but it would have to wait a little longer. But she could pour herself a mug of freshly brewed coffee, and she did. Black.
She sat down across the table from David with her coffee and her popcorn. It felt good to get off her feet for a moment. She sipped coffee and munched popcorn while she considered the boy.
While Tony had ended up sharing Chief Gray’s file, he’d continued to refuse to let her see the Belue woman’s. The woman who had been working as her father’s right hand for a number of years now. Kat wondered if that was Tony’s own stubbornness or her father’s at work, and rued that she’d never paid much attention to the glorified secretary.
She’d not even known the woman had a son. Or I would’ve looked up his file. Then she’d know more about him, assuming Tony hadn’t removed that file as well. Those qualified to attend FedU, as the students called it, were supposedly pretty bright, though she hadn’t seen evidence of that in David. Kat had seen too much stupid behavior from those very same students to give much credit to their screening process. She thought it likely strings had been pulled.
Then she saw Tony poke his head around the corner and wink at her. She downed the rest of her coffee and stood, reaching over to grab the kid with one hand while she kept the bag of popcorn in the other. She took them both down the hall to Tony’s office, ready to be entertained.
She sat David down in one of the chairs facing Tony’s desk and whipped the wet towel away, throwing it onto the other chair—then she stood off to one side, leaning against a filing cabinet and munching her popcorn.
Tony glared at her for a moment. Then he focused in sharply on the boy. “You’re David Belue? Verity’s son?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tony took a long moment before asking another question. “How do you know Sgt. Rossiter?”
The boy nodded in approval. “From the beginning.”
David sat up straight in the chair and stared into the distance. “Rossiter was in charge of supervising the guard detail assigned to protect my work crew in the buffer zone. But the man barely spent any time there, and when he was around, he was always fiddling with what I assumed was his FURCS pad. Now I think it might have been a regular cell phone. It seemed off to me, and when I realized that he might be trying to find where he could get a signal from an outside cell tower I became suspicious.”
The kid described how he’d decided to try and follow the sergeant. How that led to his finding out about Chief Gray, at least enough to feed his suspicions, and how neither his boss nor his mother nor Lt. Henson had seemed inclined to do much without more evidence. Whi
ch was why he had decided to start his own investigation.
David detailed what he’d seen following the sergeant and what he’d guessed from that. How seeing Rossiter’s surreptitious exit from his own house had led him to investigate their part-time housekeeper Crystal, and how that had eventually led him to discover Caroline Sanderson’s skullduggery.
Kat fought the urge to laugh as she listened to his description of her mother’s performance. She paused with a handful of popcorn halfway to her mouth, afraid of choking as she pictured Caroline behaving like a spy in a cheap thriller. Which would be par for the course, really.
She lost her sense of humor, though, when she heard what the boy had found on his mother’s workpad. And when he told how he’d hoped to keep her from being exposed. She thought David was coming clean with them, but Tony would evaluate his story better than she. What irked Kat was this untrained kid, acting on his own hook, had hauled in a bigger catch than her own investigation.
At the end of the recitation, Tony stood up and loomed over the boy. “I’m glad you’re finally telling me all this. It would’ve been better, though, if you’d shared your suspicions with me from the start and stayed out of it yourself. You almost got killed. You almost got Officer Miles killed, even if she doesn’t realize it. And the Lord only knows what other consequences your actions may have had.” Tony gave up the glaring. “I know you’re tired, David, but I’m going to take you through everything again, in more detail.”
Tony glanced at Kat with a twinkle in his eye. “But first, I need to have a word with this young lady.”
Tony walked around his desk and brought Kat over to the office door. He spoke quickly, keeping his voice low. “We need to understand exactly why Rossiter wanted to kill David, and particularly why now. Something precipitated that move. Maybe I’ll have a better grasp of the possibilities once I’ve gone through it with him one more time.”
Kat was too tired to think, at least for now, but she would have to try to work it out later. “Alright, what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to go home.” Tony was holding her by her still soaked shirt. “Get into some dry clothes and get some rest.”
“Okay.” She didn’t want to argue. Besides, she wasn’t interested in listening to the boy re-tell his story. She wanted to hear Tony’s thoughts about all this. But she couldn’t force him to share.
“I’ll find someone else to escort the boy over to his dorm room, once I’ve finished with him.” Tony opened the door for her. “And tomorrow I’ll talk to you about what’s going on, what you need to know.”
Kat nodded and slipped out the door. She did need the rest, and now she’d be looking forward to getting some more information out of her boss. But she didn’t want that exchange to be one-sided. And as she was going home, she could use the opportunity of ‘bonding’ to drag something out of her mother. And bring that to the table, for Tony.
As Kat was headed out the door into the rain, Hope reached out and took the popcorn bag out of her hand and replaced it with an umbrella. A nice thought, Hope, but too late. Still Kat snapped open the thing as she stepped out into the night.
She could’ve gone one better and driven one of the carts home and saved her weary legs in addition to arriving faster. But by the time it had occurred to her, she was already trudging past the Green. She couldn’t help but glance at the spot where Rossiter’s body had lain, though it was hard to see it now.
Part of her training had been preparation for a situation where one had to take a life, but the possibility had always seemed so remote. Now Kat had killed someone, but she was too tired to remember how she was supposed to deal with that. She would wait for Tony’s inevitable lecture to remind her.
When she got home, she let herself in the front door and dropped the umbrella in the hall and went looking for Caroline. Only half past ten and surely the woman would be awake, somewhere. Kat didn’t have a clue where, though, and it took ten minutes before she found her mother in her father’s study.
She’d poked her head in to see Caroline curled up in one of the big leather chairs. With a book and a cup of cocoa. She walked in and considered what approach to take, waiting for her mother to notice her presence.
Caroline raised her head from her book and immediately set her things down and hurried over to grab Kat’s shirt in both hands. She rubbed the wet fabric and frowned. “Darling, you must get out of these clothes right away.”
Kat frowned back. “I’d rather intended to, after I’ve got a pot of coffee brewing.” She removed her mother’s hands and started to turn.
Caroline reached out to snag Kat’s arm. “What you need is a nice mug of hot chocolate. You’ve had too much coffee already, I expect.” She pushed her daughter out the door and down the hall. Not to the kitchen where Kat wanted to go, but all the way to the bottom of the stairs.
“Mother—”
“Hush. I’ll make it for you and bring it up. You hurry up and change—into that fuzzy robe I gave you for your birthday. Then you can relax.”
Kat sighed. But she decided she’d best humor Caroline, since she hoped to put her enough at ease to discover something. She’d consider how to accomplish that after getting comfortable.
She felt her mother’s eyes on her back until she was halfway up the stairs, then heard Caroline walk off in the direction of the kitchen, to make some hot chocolate for her daughter. Kat wondered why the sudden turn to domesticity. By the time she’d stumbled to her room, though, she didn’t care anymore.
Kat was just glad to peel off her soggy clothes. She even donned the thick red robe her mother had suggested, pulling it tight around her. It felt good. And at least the thing wasn’t pink.
She propped herself up in bed and realized she was feeling quite cozy. If Caroline wished to pamper her by serving cocoa in bed, Kat would go along with it. Maybe it would disarm the woman. She’d just rest her eyes while she thought of what questions to ask.
She woke to find her mother standing over her with the cup of cocoa in hand. She started to reach for it, but her shoulder gave an awful twinge. Indeed, her whole body was aching now. She grinned up at Caroline to show she was alright, but allowed her mother to set the mug down into her hands.
Kat tried to recall everything she’d learned tonight, and the questions Tony had. She grabbed at the memory of his parting words. She felt sure she could puzzle out something to help him, especially if she managed to worm something out of Caroline. But she’d have to be subtle.
“Verity Belue,” Kat found herself blurting out.
Her mother gave a very satisfactory start. Then Caroline controlled herself. “What about the woman?”
Kat heard quite a tale in her mother’s tone. “So you do know Ms. Belue?”
Caroline sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’ve met her.” She watched as Kat began to sip her hot chocolate. “She’s efficient. Not your father’s type.”
Kat heard the defensive note again. So Verity was nothing like Caroline and perhaps that worried her. “How long has she worked right by his side?”
Her mother shifted and stared into space. “Six or seven years now.” Caroline bared her teeth in a fake smile. Obviously aware that Kat was needling her. “The woman’s likely infatuated with Miles. We do seem to idolize these strong silent types, until we learn better.”
Kat grinned. “And you learned better?”
Caroline reached out to place her palm on her daughter’s forehead. “I think you might be running a fever.”
Kat didn’t want her mother to change the subject, just when it looked to be getting interesting. If she really feels that way about Ms. Belue, why the secret meeting? She scrutinized Caroline’s face as she asked her next question. “Haven’t you thought about getting together with her to discuss Dad?”
“You definitely have a fever.” Her mother’s face was a complete blank. Her mother, the actress.
Kat ignored that and sipped a little more of the cocoa as she wracked her bra
in. She needed to keep Caroline talking about this Ms. Belue. The woman could’ve discovered David’s intrusion on her workpad, which would explain Rossiter trying to kill the kid. But that assumed she would sanction the murder of her own son—Kat had trouble with that. Still, the woman was central to what was happening, and Kat wanted to find out more about her.
“I’m fine, Mother. But you must have more to say about Ms. Belue.”
Caroline sniffed. “You have to drink up all your hot chocolate. It’ll help you relax.”
Kat complied to keep her mother on the hook. “Okay, now spill it.”
Caroline took the empty cup from her daughter and placed it on the nightstand with a sigh. “She’s a nice lady.”
Not the kind to order her son murdered, then? Kat wondered what really caused Rossiter to go after David. And Tony wanted to know why now. “Is that all you can say?”
Her mother ignored her. “Some things you just can’t do on your own, you know. That’s a lesson you still need to learn, sweetheart.”
“Back to Ms. Belue—”
“I hope you don’t have to learn it the hard way.”
Kat started to lean forward. Then the thought occurred to her. The reason David with his amateur investigation would have to be killed was that he’d discovered too much. Obviously. They would have to know what he had discovered, though, somehow. But the reason for taking the kid out now would be because the conspirators were ready to take action, and soon. Otherwise the investigation into David’s death would threaten whatever they planned. She had to talk to Tony.
“Mother, I have to go.” Kat began to get out of bed, or tried.
Caroline grabbed her daughter’s shoulders and pushed her back down. “You’ve caught something, darling. I’m not surprised the way you run around all night, but you’re not going anywhere now.” Her mother removed a couple of the pillows and pushed Kat down flat on the bed. “What you’re going to do is get plenty of rest. So you can recover.”
Kat struggled, but Caroline held her down with ease. Am I really that weak? “It’s urgent business. There are things I need to do.” Kat tried to remember what she’d done with her FURCS pad. She could send Tony a message. “Find my pad.”
Starting the Slowpocalypse (Books 1-3 Omnibus) Page 18