By the time she had her bedroom back in order, she returned to the kitchen to find the place clean and Frank seated at her small table.
“Thank you,” she said as she looked around the room and then sat at the chair across from him, her internal defenses automatically kicking in.
“Are you sure there’s nobody else I need to look at for this?” Frank asked.
“Not that I can think of off the top of my head,” she replied. There was no point in bringing Matt into this, especially when they already had a viable suspect to investigate.
“Then I’ll check out Michael Arello and get back to you. If we find out he’s responsible for this, I’m assuming you want to press charges.”
Marlene frowned. Did she really want to go there? “Can’t you just give him a stern talking-to?”
Frank raised a dark eyebrow. “Really? Is that the way you want to handle this? He’s stolen twice that we know of and now this. Maybe it’s time for more than a stern talking-to.”
Marlene shook her head. “Maybe so, but it isn’t coming from me. If Michael is the one who broke in here, then he’ll figure we’re even. I fired him and he messed up my house. I don’t want to press charges. I just want to forget the whole thing.”
Since he was a man of the law, she knew it was difficult for him to understand why she wouldn’t want to press charges, but she just wanted it all to go away as simply and quickly as possible.
“Marlene Marie!” The familiar voice came from outside and was followed by the stomping of feet that belonged to Marlene’s older sister, Roxy.
There was no knock on the door, but it flew open, and Roxy stood there, her dark eyes filled with worry. “Are you okay?” she asked Marlene.
“I’m fine. Everything is fine, so you can get that fire out of your eyes,” Marlene exclaimed.
Roxy released a sigh of relief, raked a hand through her riotous curls and then smiled at Frank. “Jimmy told Steve and Steve told me that there had been a break-in here and I freaked out.”
“Does Steve know you’re out running the streets alone?” Marlene asked. As much as she adored her older sister, there were times when Roxy drove her crazy with her need to mother both Marlene and Sheri.
Roxy didn’t answer and instead focused her attention on Frank. “So, what have we got here?”
“We have nothing. It’s all taken care of,” Marlene said firmly.
“We think maybe Michael Arello did a little payback today,” Frank said.
“Payback for what?” Roxy asked.
“I fired him from the store last night for stealing,” Marlene explained.
“That little creep. He needs a good butt-kicking and I know just the man to do it,” Roxy said. “I’ll make sure Steve tells Michael what for.”
“Roxy, boundaries,” Marlene replied. “Frank has this. It will all be taken care of.” She just wanted both of them gone now. It was getting late, she was exhausted and she wanted to make arrangements for Larry Samson to come first thing in the morning and replace the door with solid locks.
She’d be fine for the night with the dead bolt locked. This entire evening just felt ugly, and she’d had enough ugliness in her life to last throughout eternity.
She stood in hopes that it would be an indication that she was done for the night. She pulled her much-shorter dark-haired sister into a quick embrace. “Don’t worry. I’m fine. It’s all under control.”
Roxy gave her a tight hug in response and then stepped back. “Okay, I know Frank will take good care of you. Call me if you need anything.”
“You know I will,” Marlene assured her, although they both knew Marlene probably wouldn’t.
As Roxy said goodbye and clomped back down the stairs, Marlene turned and looked at Frank pointedly. “I guess that’s my cue.” He got up from the table and walked toward the door. Marlene remained in place, not wanting to get close enough to smell the pleasant spicy-scented cologne she’d noticed emanating from him earlier.
“I’ll probably check in with you sometime tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll be here until about noon or so, and then after that I’ll be at the shop.”
“Then I’ll talk to you at one place or the other,” Frank said, and with another surprising smile that shot an unexpected burst of warmth through her, he left.
She locked the door behind him and leaned against it. She closed her eyes and tried to will away thoughts of Detective Frank Delaney.
From the moment her aunt Liz had gone missing and the case had been assigned to Detectives Steven Kincaid, Frank Delaney and Jimmy Carmani, Frank had been under her skin.
His low, deep voice shot a secret thrill through her, a gaze of his eyes made her feel as if he were attempting to breach the defenses she’d erected so high.
There was no way she intended to let him in. There was no way she intended to even let her sisters in completely. She’d come back to Wolf Creek as damaged goods and nobody would ever get close to her again.
* * *
It took Frank exactly ten minutes to find Michael Arello after leaving Marlene’s apartment. The kid was an easy find. He was with a bunch of his buddies playing pool in the back area of the Wolf’s Head Tavern.
Frank didn’t miss that twice Michael had targeted the Marcoli family. The fact that both times he’d been caught stealing food was definitely odd.
And Frank didn’t like odd, especially when there was a woman who’d been missing for over a month and Michael had been caught stealing food for more than one person twice now. Although why a twenty-two-year-old would kidnap a sixty-five-year-old woman and keep her hostage for this length of time was beyond imagining.
Frank motioned to Michael with a simple nod of his head. The tall, dark-haired man walked toward him slowly, with eyes that darted everywhere but at Frank.
“Yeah?”
“How about, ‘Can I help you, Detective Delaney?’ Now, let’s try it again.” Frank kept his voice low and with more than a hint of steel.
“Can I help you, Detective Delaney?” Michael asked with just enough attitude to irritate Frank but not enough to call any more attention to it.
“As a matter of fact, you can. You can tell me what you’ve done today from the moment you woke up this morning to this very minute.”
“Is this some kind of a joke?” Michael asked. As Frank merely stared at him expectantly, Michael cast his gaze to the left and expelled a deep sigh. “I got out of bed around ten and then spent most of the day looking for a job. I finally ended up here a couple of hours ago to have a few beers and enjoy some pool time with my buds.”
“I’d think it would be easier to get a job if you hadn’t stolen from the previous two jobs you’ve had. You got a problem with the Marcoli sisters?”
Michael’s gaze met his briefly and then again slid to the side. “Not particularly.”
“What about Marlene? You got a problem with her or did you get it all out of your system when you were trashing her apartment?”
Michael took a step backward, his body tense, and Frank knew instinctively that the kid was responsible for the mess at Marlene’s.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Michael mumbled.
“I think you do, and you’d better hope that we don’t pull any of your prints off the broken dishes we gathered as evidence. My advice to you would be to stay as far away from the Marcoli family as possible.”
“I’ll take that advice. Are we done here?” Michael asked.
“For now,” Frank replied. He watched as the young man ambled back to his friends. Even though instinct wasn’t evidence, Frank would bet his badge that the person who had been inside Marlene’s apartment earlier had just walked away from him.
Minutes later as Frank got into his car to head home he made a mental note to hi
mself to check further into Michael Arello’s life. He wanted to know why the kid was stealing food when Frank knew his parents were doing fine and he was certain there was always enough to eat in the household.
He glanced at his watch, surprised to discover that it was nearly eleven. It was too late to talk to the Arellos tonight, but first thing in the morning he intended to speak to Michael’s parents and see if they knew what was up with their son.
Right now it was time for him to head home. It was time to take a shower and get the scent of Marlene Marcoli out of his head, time to go to bed and probably suffer the nightmares that had plagued him since his wife’s death three years ago.
As he drove toward the small ranch house he’d bought five years before, he thought about everything that had happened over the past month.
Many lives had changed the day that Liz Marcoli had gone missing from her house. There had been no signs of foul play, but the three nieces she had raised as her own children had known something was dreadfully wrong.
As the days passed with no word from Liz, it became equally apparent to Frank and his two partners that something wasn’t right, as well. It just wasn’t normal for a sixty-five-year-old woman to walk away from her life and her loved ones without a word, and with her car in the driveway and her purse containing her wallet with all her identification and credit and bank cards left in the house.
To date her finances hadn’t been tapped and there had been absolutely no leads. It was as if she’d just gone “poof” and disappeared into the air.
Not only had Liz gone missing, but during the past four weeks Roxy, the eldest of the three Marcoli sisters, had her life threatened by, of all people, Stacy, the ex-girlfriend of Frank’s partner Steve. That particular threat had been removed when Frank had been forced to shoot Stacy to save Roxy’s life. Steve and Roxy were now a couple and Steve had been reunited with his seven-year-old son, who had been kidnapped by Stacy and had been missing for two years.
So far that was the only positive that had come out of this case. Liz was still missing and they’d only recently uncovered the cold case of another woman, Agnes Wilson, who was around the same age as Liz and had simply vanished from her home two years before.
Remembering that cold case had done two things...it had galvanized the detectives to compare the two cases and hope that they found some similarities that might lead them to Liz Marcoli, and it had discouraged them in reminding them of their failure to find out what had happened to Agnes.
Frank pulled into his driveway and from the shine of the nearby streetlamp noted that the lawn needed tending, the shutters at the windows needed painting and there was a general air of neglect about the place.
The soul weariness that always assaulted him when he arrived here hit as he got out of his car and walked to the front door. He’d get to the yard work in the next couple of days, not for himself, but rather out of respect for his neighbors.
He opened the front door to the absence of sound, the absence of scent. There hadn’t been a sense of homecoming here for a very long time.
This was just a shelter, nothing more, a place to shower and occasionally grab a meal, but home had died with Grace. They’d had only one year together as husband and wife, but Frank would spend eternity with the weight of the guilt of her death on his shoulders.
He took off his jacket and flung it over the top of a living-room chair, then removed his holster and gun and emptied his pockets on the coffee table in front of the sofa. The brown-and-beige sofa was a sleeper, but he never made the effort to pull it out. It was covered with a white sheet and a bed pillow.
For the past three years the living room had been Frank’s bedroom. He’d been unable to force himself to return to the room that he’d once shared with Grace.
If he were smart, he’d sell the house, find another place to start over and call home, but so far he hadn’t been motivated to do the work to get the place market-ready.
From the living room he headed to the bathroom, where he started the shower, stepped out of his shoes, and then stripped off his slacks and shirt, his white briefs and socks, and threw them all into a waiting laundry basket.
As he stepped beneath the hot spray, he tried to keep thoughts of Marlene out of his head, but no matter how hard he tried she intruded. There was no question that he was drawn to her physical beauty, but he suspected he was also attracted to the very characteristics that put other people off. Her coolness, her tight control over her emotions, or perhaps it was a lack of any real emotions that he found oddly appealing.
Living with Grace had been filled with drama and emotion and passion. It had been invigorating, exciting and utterly exhausting.
If he ever decided to have any kind of a relationship with a woman again, he’d pick somebody like Marlene...cool, calm and an unlikely candidate to want anything deep or meaningful.
As he dried off he thought of that moment when he’d looked into her eyes and saw the hint of secrets, of something dark and haunting. Had he only imagined it? After all, she’d just had a break-in into her private quarters. Maybe he’d mistaken fear for something more mysterious.
In any case, he knew exactly what Marlene Marcoli wanted from him and it had nothing to do with any kind of a personal relationship. She and her sisters wanted their beloved aunt Liz found alive and well.
But with over a month of no contact and few clues to follow, Frank wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic about the case.
They had one man in their sights who was a potential person of interest. Edward Cardell had been secretly dating Liz, and on the morning of her disappearance he had gone to a mountain cabin to spend a couple of days. The detectives had had dogs brought in to see if they could pick up any of Liz’s scent at the cabin, but they hadn’t.
That didn’t take Cardell off their list of possible suspects. As far as they knew, Cardell was the last person to speak to Liz before she disappeared. He’d had a secret relationship with her and was pushing for her to make it public. That much the detectives knew.
But had there been a fight that had escalated and had Edward killed Liz? Unfortunately, there was no evidence to support the theory.
As Frank pulled on a pair of boxers that he slept in and left the bathroom, he wondered who on his team would be the one to break the news to the Marcoli sisters that what the lawmen were doing now was more a recovery effort than a true search.
Although none of the three detectives had actually spoken the words aloud, Frank believed Liz Marcoli was dead and he knew his partners, Steve and Jimmy, agreed.
Chapter 3
She’d had the horrible nightmare again the night before. It was unusual to suffer through it two nights in a row, but Marlene suspected the break-in was what had prompted the night terror to once again disturb her sleep.
She now sat at the tiny table in her apartment, waiting for Larry Samson to arrive with a solid new door and strong locks. She’d already been downstairs to speak to Minnie, who had been horrified by the fact that somebody had broken into the apartment and angry when she’d told Marlene she thought she’d seen Michael Arello hanging around the building around four yesterday afternoon.
The strong possibility that it had been Michael was actually a relief. She could handle an angry kid who broke dishes and overturned plants to vent his anger. What she couldn’t handle was anything from her past leaping into her present.
She jumped and spilled her coffee as a knock fell on her door, even though she’d been expecting the arrival of Larry. It just went to show that she wasn’t as cool and calm as she wanted to be.
“Morning, Marlene,” Larry greeted her as she opened her door.
“Good morning, Larry,” she replied.
“Sorry about your problems last night, but I’m going to fix you up just fine. I’ve got a new solid-core door downstairs that nobody
is going to come through and it’s got both a good solid key lock and a dead bolt.”
“Sounds wonderful to me.” She grabbed a paper towel and sopped up the spilled coffee. “Do you need me to do anything?”
“Not a thing, except stay out of my way.” Larry grinned, exposing a missing front tooth.
“That I can do,” Marlene replied. “I’m going into my bedroom. Help yourself to the coffee if you want any.”
“Will do, thanks.” He turned and disappeared from the door, his heavy work boots clomping on every step downward.
Larry Samson’s old red pickup was a familiar sight around town. Unofficially he was the handyman everyone used for everything from fixing faulty plumbing to repairing a wooden porch.
He had the kind of weathered, wrinkled face that made it impossible to guess his age. He might be in his fifties; he could be in his seventies.
Marlene knew he wasn’t married and that he lived in one of the cabins in the mountains that cradled the small town of Wolf Creek. He was as much a part of the small town as the Wolf’s Head Tavern, which was rumored to have been the first official business built to form the town.
Once in her bedroom she made up her bed and grabbed the laptop. Seated in the center of the pink bedspread, she turned on the laptop and found the files of recipes she had been keeping for years and continued to add to whenever a creative baking idea struck her.
There had been a time when these special recipes were meant to be the cornerstone of her own bakery on Main Street. The plan had always been that she’d work the store with Sheri until she had the seed money to start her own business.
Marlene’s Magic Bites—the place would have a pink-and-black awning over the door and inside not only big glass display cases for her goodies but also tall tables with stools for anyone who wanted to sit and enjoy their sweet bites inside.
Now it was a dream that would never be realized, a dream that had died, along with most of her soul, in Pittsburgh. She closed the file and instead pulled up the list of store inventory and made a note of what she and Sheri needed to order in the next couple of days.
Lethal Lawman Page 3