Kansas City Secrets

by Julie Miller

  With her neckline unbuttoned in deference to the summer humidity, despite the house’s air-conditioning, Rosemary mindlessly rubbed her knuckles over her collarbone and the neat dots of puckered scar tissue there. Once, she’d thought it romantic that Richard had sent her notes and poems and pictures, just as her father had sent them to her mother. But now she was wondering why she’d ever kept the tangible reminders of her own foolishness. He hadn’t even written the first letter until she’d mentioned how her parents had made such an effort to stay connected when they’d been apart. Now she could see it had all been part of his master plan to make her fall in love and accept his proposal. Weighed down by responsibility and sadness, desperate for someone caring and positive in her life, she must have been an easy mark for a smooth operator like Richard.

  “Idiot,” she grumbled, reaching out to toss the entire stack into the trash can beside the desk. But then she realized that half of the envelopes hadn’t even been opened. A check of the postmarks indicated he’d sent these in the weeks between her breaking off their engagement and filing a restraining order against him, courtesy of his older brother, and Richard’s death.

  Against her better judgment, she opened the first envelope and pulled out the familiar parchment with the letterhead from his father’s law firm. Rosemary shook her head as she read his dramatic scrawl. “I’ll end the affair with Charleen. I’ll work on my weakness with other women. I love you. I still want to marry you.”

  There was no apology for the arm he’d put into a cast or the cigarette burns that marred her skin. Not even an acknowledgment of the cruel coercion he’d used to force her to sign the prenup guaranteeing him a share of her settlement money. Just a blithe pronouncement of love. Funny, if she’d been thinking clearly back then, she’d have seen that all the sentences were “I” statements. Maybe if she’d picked up on those egocentric clues when they were first dating, she could have spared herself the mistake of giving her heart to the wrong man.

  Rosemary returned the letter to its envelope and reached for her wineglass to wash away the taste of disgust with a crisp pinot grigio. The trash was too good for these reminders of that sick relationship, so she dropped it and the rest of his letters into a box and set it aside. This winter, she’d burn them with the first fire in the fireplace. She smiled as she raised the goblet to her lips to take a sip.

  But a flicker of shadow in the window behind her reflected off the glass.

  Her stomach clenched. Wine sloshed over her hand as she spun around. Nothing. Just the blinds swaying with the current of air blowing from the AC vent. She inhaled a deep breath, willing her heart rate to slow down.

  Probably just the headlights of a car driving past.

  But then Duchess lifted her head, growling a low warning in her throat. Trixie jumped to her feet and barked, startling Rosemary. “What is it?”

  She set down the wineglass with a trembling hand, running a quick mental check. Doors locked. Windows locked. Alarm system armed. Lights on. Dogs at her—

  Rosemary screamed at the explosion of shattering glass outside. Trixie sprang from the couch as Duchess leaped to her feet. Both dogs dashed to the front door. A man-size shadow darted past the blinds. Someone was on her front porch. Why didn’t the alarm go off?

  The dogs’ frantic barking nearly drowned out the second explosion of smashing glass. The translucent light filtering through the blinds suddenly went dark and she realized someone out there was breaking the lights. Pounding on the porch railing and furniture outside.

  Avoiding the door. Avoiding the windows. Avoiding doing any damage that would trigger a siren and flashing lights.

  Shrinking away from the assault on her house, Rosie screamed again at the crunch of metal on metal. “Stop it.” She hugged her arms around her waist. “Stop it!”

  But a crystal-clear moment of clarity fired through her brain, snapping her out of her chilled stupor. What if the intruder smashed through the door next and turned whatever weapon he was using on her dogs?

  Or on her?

  A wailing alarm couldn’t help her then.

  Rosemary lowered her hands into fists. “Duchess! Trixie!”

  The barking paused for a second, then started up again, warning away the intruder at their door. Rosemary snatched her cell phone off the desk and ran into the hallway, grabbing their leashes off a foyer chair and joining the canine alarm. “I’m calling the police!” she shouted. “Get out of here! Now!”

  Footsteps pounded across the slats of her porch and faded into silence. The man was running away. “Duchess, sit. Come here, Trix.”

  As silence fell outside, Rosemary regained control of the dogs. Kneeling between them, she hooked them up to their leashes and pulled them back from the door. Did she dare unlock it to see what was going on? Trixie, especially, was ready to charge whatever danger was on the other side of that door, and Duchess’s low-pitched growl indicated that no one here felt entirely safe. She almost wished it was a random act of vandalism or attempted burglary. But she’d dealt with too many threats these past few days to believe she was anything but the intended target. She transferred both leashes to her left hand and pulled out her cell, her thumb hovering above the 9 on her screen.

  But was calling KCPD again really an option for her? Was there any cop out there willing to help a murder suspect?

  Rosemary pocketed her phone and waited a good two minutes, until the growling subsided and she got Trixie to sit beside the bigger dog. That meant whoever had been on her porch was long gone. It was safe to open the door, right?

  Ignoring the thumping pound of her heart inside her chest, Rosemary typed in the disarm code, unhooked the chain and dead bolt and twisted the doorknob. Still in her bare feet, she stayed inside the locked storm door to survey the damage. There was shattered glass everywhere. A broken table. The intruder had taken a bat or crowbar or some other heavy object to the lights on either side of her door, plunging her porch into darkness. But there was enough light shining out from the foyer to see the dented black metal mailbox hanging by a screw from the siding beside the door.

  Once she was certain the intruder had left, she pulled the leashes taut and nudged open the storm door.

  “Oh, my God.”

  There was enough light to read the note hanging from the flap of her mailbox, too.

  Murdering whore.

  Justice will be done.

  She swayed on her feet, shock making her light-headed for a moment. Her landline rang in the house behind her and she jerked in surprise, sending the dogs into another barking frenzy.

  Avoiding the broken glass beneath bare feet and dog paws, she pulled Duchess and Trixie back into the house and locked the storm door. After the fourth ring, the machine in the kitchen picked up, and a man’s garbled voice echoed like a creepy whisper throughout the house. “I can see you, Rosemary. I know you’re alone. Those dogs can’t protect you. I know you’re afraid.”

  The shiver that shook her body nearly robbed her of breath. She didn’t remember slamming the front door or releasing the dogs or pulling her cell from the pocket of her dress.

  But some shred of a memory stopped her from completing the 9-1-1 call.

  KCPD had blown off her last report of a threat. She didn’t need anyone patronizing her fears—she needed to feel safe. She wanted to prove to the police she wasn’t lying—that she was the victim now, just as she’d been six years ago. With the dogs at her heels, Rosemary ran to the answering machine at the back of the house. But she had no intention of picking up the phone or even erasing that sick message. She had no intention of dealing with Dispatch and being put on hold or winding up as a footnote on some report.

  Instead, she pulled the phone book from beneath the machine and looked up an address.

  She knew where she could find at least one cop tonight.

  Chap
ter Five

  Max swallowed a drink of beer that had lost its chill and set the mug down on the rim of the pool table at the Shamrock Bar. He leaned over, blinking his bleary eyes and lining up the shot, tuning out the drone of conversations around the room and the jingle of the bell over the bar’s front door. “Six in the corner pocket.”

  He tapped the cue ball and grinned as the pink ball caromed off the rail and rolled into its target. Finally, something was going right today.

  He’d circled to the end of the table to assess his best angle for dropping the seven ball before realizing the noise level of the thinning crowd had paused in a momentary hush. Even his opponent on the opposite side of the pool table seemed to have frozen for a split second in time.

  “She’s new.” Hudson Kramer, a young cop with a shiny new promotion and the subsequent pay hike burning a hole in his pocket, lay down his cue stick and combed his fingers through his hair as glasses clinked and conversations started up again. Was the game over? Hud’s mouth widened with a lopsided grin as his eyes tracked movement behind Max. “Wonder if she’s lost. Maybe she needs a friend to help her find her way.”

  With Kramer’s grumble of protest at having his shot at winning back the money he’d lost tonight interrupted, Max turned and saw the last person he’d ever expect to see in a bar. “I’ll be damned.”

  Rosemary March’s copper-red hair was pulled back in a bun that wasn’t anywhere as neat and tidy and screaming old maid as it had been this morning. Fire and ice. The unexpected metaphor buzzed through his head at the sight of several loose, wavy red strands bouncing against her pale cheeks and neck as she moved. The idea of her letting all that hair flow freely around her shoulders and tunneling his fingers into a handful of it hit him like a sucker punch to the gut. Max sat back on the edge of the table, propping his cue stick against the floor to hold himself upright as she approached.

  He must have had too much to drink and was conjuring up hallucinations. He closed his eyes and muttered a curse, wondering why he wasn’t conjuring up images of babes on swimsuit calendars instead of Miss Priss with the sharp tongue and crazy ideas.

  He opened his eyes again. Nope. She was real. And she was excusing her way past a couple of tables and a cocktail waitress, heading straight toward him and the pool tables. She’d exchanged the dressy sandals for a pair of flip-flops, but she still wore that white, high-necked dress from this morning, looking as virginal and out of place in a bar at this hour as he’d felt at her house this morning. Didn’t mean she didn’t look all kinds of pretty to a half drunk, half horny bastard like him.

  “Ah, hell,” he muttered again, wishing he’d said no to that last beer so he could control that little rush of misplaced excitement at realizing she’d come to see him.

  “Detective Krolikowski?” She stopped a couple of feet in front of him, her fingers tightening around the strap of the purse she hugged in front of her. Mistaking his dumbfounded silence for a lack of recognition, she tilted those dove-gray eyes to his and introduced herself. “Rosemary March? We met this morning? I’m not armed, I promise.”

  “I know who you are, Rosie. You here for a drink?” When the waitress slid between the redhead and the nearest table, Max automatically reached out. Rosie pried at his hand when he tugged on the strap of her purse to pull her out of the other woman’s path. Her hips jostled between the vee of his legs and his thigh muscles bunched in a helpless response to her unintentionally intimate touch there. Max instantly popped his grip open and let her scoot around his leg into the space beside him. Ignoring his body’s traitorous response to a warm, curvy woman, he held up two fingers to capture the waitress’s attention. “Wait. You probably want something fancier than a beer. Wine? One of those girly things with an umbrella?”

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  Oh, he was in a bad way today. After waving off the drink order, he turned on the edge of the pool table and pulled a long, copper-red wave away from the dewy perspiration on Rosie’s neck. Warm from her skin, he rubbed the silky strand between his thumb and fingers. “So is this you lettin’ your hair down? You go to a bar, but you don’t drink? Or is this a temperance lecture for me? Couldn’t get enough of puttin’ me in my place this morning, eh?”

  “No, I... What are you doing?” She jerked away, snatching her hair from his fingertips and tucking it behind her ear. “This was a dumb idea.”

  Max pushed to his feet and thumped the tip of his cue stick on the table in front of her, blocking her escape. “Hold on, Rosie Posy. What are you doing here?”

  Her shoulders lifted with a deep breath and she turned, staring at the collar of his shirt before tilting her wary eyes up to his. “I overheard you and your partner talk about coming here. The Shamrock Bar. I looked up the address in the phone book.”

  “Do you ever give a straight answer to a question?” He hunched down to look her right in the eye. “That’s how you found me. Now tell me what you want. Let me guess—you’re a pool hustler, and you’re here to win ten bucks off me to spite me for being such a jerk this morning.”

  Hud Kramer walked up behind her before the shocked O of her mouth could spit out an answer. “I bet she could take you, Max.”

  Max bristled at the interruption. Why was that kid grinning? “Shut up.”

  Rosie turned to include both men in her answer. Sort of. If looking from one chin to the other counted. What was that woman’s aversion to making direct eye contact? With that tart tongue of hers, he couldn’t really call her shy. But something had to be going on to make her subvert that red-haired temper and any other emotion she might be feeling. “I haven’t played for a long time. I used to be pretty decent back in college when I’d go out with friends, but I don’t think I’d win.”

  “I’d be happy to give you a few tips, Red.” The younger cop seemed to take any answer as encouragement to his lame flirtations. “Aren’t you going to introduce us, Max?”

  But when Hud leaned in, Rosie flinched back, maybe sidling closer to what was familiar, if not necessarily what she considered friendly. Max shifted in an instinctively protective response, and her hair tangled with the scruff of beard on his chin, releasing her warm summer scent. His pulse leaped and he was inhaling a deep breath before he could stop himself. Rosie March might be a baffling mix of mystery and frustration, but she exuded a wholesome, flowery fragrance that was far more intoxicating than the beer he’d been drinking.

  Max growled, irritated by how much he noticed about this woman. And he was even more irritated that the younger detective had noticed it, too. “Get out of here, Kramer.”

  A soft nudge to the chest with Max’s pool cue backed Hud up a step, but the young hotshot was still smiling. Yes, the woman had rebuffed him in favor of the older detective who needed a shave and an attitude adjustment. But Hud wasn’t about to lose to him twice in one night. “Our game isn’t finished, Krolikowski. I have a feeling I’m about to make a comeback.”

  Groaning at the taunt, Max set his cue stick on the table and pulled out his wallet. He reached around Rosie to hand a ten-dollar bill to the young officer. “Here. Take it.”

  “You’re conceding defeat?”

  “I’m conceding that you annoy the hell out of me and I’m tired of puttin’ up with you. Now scram.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kramer took the sawbuck with a wink and a mock salute and headed straight to a green vinyl seat in front of the polished walnut bar to order a refill.

  With more room to avoid him now, Rosie quickly stepped away and moved around the corner of the table. “I’m sorry you lost your money. That wasn’t my intention.” She pulled open the flap on her purse and pulled out her wallet. “I only wanted to talk to a police officer.”

  Now she wanted to answer questions? Max scanned the booths and tables around the bar. “Take your pick. The majority of the men and women here work in some kind of law enforcement.”<
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  “Could I talk to you?”

  He looked down to see her holding out a ten-dollar bill. Muttering a curse, he pushed the money back into her purse. At this late hour, every young stud in the place was looking for any unattached females who might be interested in one last drink and a chance to get lucky. They wouldn’t know that Rosie was a person of interest in a murder investigation. They wouldn’t care about her eccentricities or that she could rub a man wrong in every possible way. Like Kramer, they were noticing the outward appearance of innocence and vulnerability. They were seeing the promise of passion in the red flag of Rosemary March’s hair. Maybe they were picturing what it would look like down and loose about her bare shoulders, too.

  Even in his hazy brain, Max knew she didn’t belong here.

  “Let’s get out of here. Robbie?” He looked to the Shamrock’s bearded owner at the bar, and tossed some bills on the table to pay for his tab. “Come on.”

  Grabbing Rosie by the arm, he turned her toward the door. Whatever she wanted from him, he wasn’t about to go toe-to-toe with some young buck who wanted to pick her up just for the privilege of finding out. Although she hurried her steps beside him to keep up, she tried to shuck off his grip. But Max tightened his fingers around her surprisingly firm upper arm muscles and didn’t let go until he’d ushered her out the front door into the muggy haze of the hot summer night.

  He took her past the green neon sign in the front window so that curious eyes inside wouldn’t get the idea that she might be coming back before he released her. He plucked a fresh cigar from his shirt pocket and leaned back against the warm bricks. “Now talk to me.”

  Once he released her, she took a couple more steps and turned. “You smoke?”

  “Not exactly.” He tore off the wrapper and stuffed the plastic into his pocket. Then he held the stogie up to his nose, breathing in the rich tobacco scent until he could rid the distracting memory of fresh summer sunshine from his senses. Light from the street lamps and green neon sign in the window reflected off the oily asphalt of the street behind her, making her seem even more out of place in the dingy surroundings. At least he didn’t have to deal with Kramer or anybody else hittin’ on her out here. Max set the cigar between his teeth and chomped down on it. “Make sense, and make it fast, okay?”