FATAL FORTY-EIGHT: A Kate Huntington Mystery (The Kate Huntington Mysteries Book 7) (16 page)

They hustled out of the secret room. “Move back,” Rose said. She made to pick up the lamp on the dresser, but it didn’t budge.

Then Skip heard a click and a whirring noise. A section of wall swung closed over the hole. Rose shoved the dresser back in front of it.

Once out in the tiny hallway, they turned their lights off. “Watch your step,” Skip whispered. He felt his way down the dark stairs.

~~~~~~~~

Rob hoped he made a convincing drunk as he told his befuddled story in a slurred voice–how he’d parked his car down one of these here side streets, so’s his wife wouldn’t see it and know he was at the corner bar, again. He waved his arm in the general direction of the major thoroughfare three blocks away. Certainly there was some bar up there somewhere that he could claim he’d just left.

 The cop had listened politely at first, but now he was showing signs of irritation. “Look, mister, you don’t even know which street you left it on. I can’t hardly call in a stolen car report without knowing where exactly it was stolen from.”

“Thas true,” Rob slurred. “Maybe it ain’t stolen at all. Maybe I just lost it. Now how’m I gonna ’splain that to my wife?” He scratched his head and faked a drunken stumble. “Guess I’ll just havta walk home is all.”

He caught a hint of movement in his peripheral vision, a darker blur against the darkness beside the duplex.

The cop started to swivel his head in that direction.

Rob stumbled into him.

“Hey there, buddy.” The officer steadied him on his feet. “Maybe you should sleep it off in the drunk tank.” He reached toward the radio on his shoulder.

Rob clasped his hands in front of him. “No, please, occifer, please don’t. My wife, she’ll kill me fer sure if she gets a call from the police station.”

The cop had turned his back to the house again, and was studying the middle-aged drunk in front of him.

Rob caught another hint of movement behind the young man’s head. “Honest, sir.” He made a show of trying to stand up straight and look sober. “I can walk home.”

The cop dropped his hand away from his radio. “Okay, I guess. Do you know where home is?”

“Oh, yesh, sir.” Rob pointed off behind him. “It’s thataway. I knows the way like the back a my hand.”

“Okay,” the cop said, distracted. He was looking around.

Rob could only think of one thing that would grab the cop’s attention again.

Hope I don’t get arrested.

He opened his fly and started peeing on the sidewalk.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

3:45 a.m. Sunday

Kate paused in front of the police station’s doors. Was she calmed down enough to go back in? She’d lost track of how many times she’d circled the block. Probably not the best idea to be traipsing around by herself in the wee hours of the morning, but she’d known she wasn’t fit for human company after receiving that reply from Skip. Besides, she’d been taking aikido for years and was pretty good at defending herself.

She snorted softly. Any fool who tried to accost her right now would not fare well. The mood she was in, she’d pound him into the sidewalk.

Julie Wallace’s words echoed inside her head,
If he’s
your
husband, then why the hell isn’t he wearing a ring?

If
he’s my husband? Almost sounded like the bitch didn’t believe it.

Nope. Still too worked up.

She started walking again, jamming her hands into the pockets of her jacket. She shivered. Her jacket was too lightweight, she tried to tell herself, for middle-of-the-night jaunts this time of year. But the night air was mild. She wasn’t physically chilled.

The shiver was coming from the cold dread in her stomach, not for Sally this time, but for her own marriage.

In the past, she’d been able to quell the little spurts of jealousy when some woman would throw herself at Skip. And her anger had always been directed at the woman, for having the audacity to go after another woman’s man. Never at him. She trusted him.

But this time…

She was watching this young woman make a play for her husband right before her eyes. And she wasn’t totally sure Skip wasn’t encouraging her. Otherwise, why in the hell had he taken his wedding ring off?

They were only a few months away from their seventh anniversary. Was he having the proverbial seven-year itch? She never would have thought it possible.

Her stomach churned.

This is ridiculous! Skip’s not that kind of man.

But people changed. She knew that. She’d dedicated her life to helping people change for the better, but sometimes things went the other way. She’d seen that often enough in her work, too. A client’s loving husband or wife turned into a stranger, no longer willing to support their spouse emotionally–sometimes even turning cold and vicious.

She shuddered. A vise squeezed her heart.

Thx
? That’s all he had to say when she accused him of having a girlfriend?

She felt nauseous. Her head throbbed.

She had circled the block again. The station’s doors loomed before her. She had to get herself together here, get back to helping with the search for Sally.

Kate was shocked out of her self-absorption when she entered the detectives’ bullpen. Charles Tolliver and Tim Cornelius were nose to nose in the aisle between the empty cubicles.

I thought Judith sent him home.

Obviously he hadn’t had any better luck with sleep than she had.

Charles exploded. “What do you mean she isn’t suffering?”

Tim had the advantage of an inch in height, but Charles had weight on his side, in addition to the adrenaline coursing through his system. His broad chest heaved. The muscles in his arms bulged as he clenched and unclenched his fists.

Kate rushed forward.

But Charles was already taking a swing at the FBI agent.

Tim blocked the blow with a forearm, then grabbed Charles’s other wrist and twirled him around. He pushed the wrist up behind Charles’s back. “Damn it, man. Don’t make me arrest you.”

Kate tugged on Tim’s sleeve. “Calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. He’s the madman. I was just trying to reassure him that this guy doesn’t hurt his victims while he’s holding them.”

Charles struggled against Tim’s hold. “Not physically maybe,” he yelled, “but can you imagine what this is doing to her head?” His struggling morphed into shaking. “Being trapped like that.” His voice broke.

Tim let him go.

Charles crumpled to his knees, covering his face with his hands. “Oh, baby, baby. Where are you? Why can’t I help you?”

Tim looked helplessly at Kate.

Fighting back her own tears, she made a shooing motion at Tim. He backed away. She knelt down beside the sobbing man, whose face was now pressed against his knees. He’d clasped his hands behind his neck and was rocking back and forth, incoherent ramblings coming from his lips. The only discernible word was
baby.

The vise around Kate’s chest tightened. Her throat closed. She could barely take in enough air to talk. “Charles, we’re working on finding her. We’re gonna find her. Come into the conference room.”

No sign that Charles had heard her. His shoulders shook. His fingers dug into his scalp, pulled on his hair.

“Please. Come with me. Let us tell you what we know.”

Shoes shuffling beside her. She looked up. Tim shook his head.

She scowled up at him, her eyes trying to convey,
I’m not going to tell him everything.

She laid an arm across Charles’s back. He quieted some, sat partway up. She got to her feet and tugged on his arm.

He let himself be helped up and led to the conference room door.

Tim pushed ahead of them and hastily gathered the papers and files on the table into a pile. He turned over several sheets of paper on top of it.

Kate got the hint. She wasn’t to identify the suspect.

She pulled out a chair for Charles. He dropped into it. She noted that he still wore the same clothes as Friday night–khaki slacks, now quite rumpled, and a snug-fitting, henley shirt in a burnished bronze that would have complemented his skin tone, if that skin weren’t tinged with gray.

Dear God, I hope
he
survives this.

Tim sat down a few chairs away, giving them space, and giving Charles the option to ignore his presence.

Kate flashed him a quick half-smile, then turned her attention back to Charles. “Take a deep breath, okay?” She pumped as much warmth into her voice as she could, to counterbalance the almost parental tone of her words. “Get those brain cells oxygenated so you can process what we’re going to tell you.”

Charles took a breath, not all that deep. It came out on a shudder, but he seemed to settle into the chair.

Kate tried to take a deep breath of her own. She was only half successful. The vise was still there but it had eased up some. “We’re pretty sure we know who this guy is.”

His head snapped up. “Who is he?”

“We’re not going to tell you, because we can’t afford for you to go off half-cocked to try and find him.”

He glared at her.

She gave him a firm look back. “You want me to lie to you?”

His face softened. “No.”

“I’m gonna tell you as much as we can without jeopardizing the investigation. We know who he is and we’re learning more about him every minute. Eventually… soon, we’ll learn some piece of info that will give us the key to where he’s got Sally. And we
will
get her away from him.”

Charles didn’t say anything. He was watching her face intently.

Kate prayed her expression looked like she believed what she was saying. She did believe what she was saying. She had to. Anything else was too…

She jerked her mind back to the task at hand–reassuring Charles. “How would you describe Sally’s personality? What’s she made of?”

He blinked. “She’s a lady.” A pause. “But she’s tough.”

Kate nodded. “She’s a survivor. Hell, she’s spent most of her adult life teaching other people how to be survivors. She’ll get through this. You’ll both get through this.” She remembered a coping technique Rob had once shared with her. “A year from now, maybe a few months from now, you two will be happy again, enjoying your retirement. And all this…” She waved her hand in an arc from the pile of files and papers to the profile, written in stark black letters on the whiteboard. “This will just be a bad memory.”

“A nightmare,” Charles whispered.

“Yes, a nightmare. But you will have woken up from it, and it won’t be your reality anymore. It will be long over.”

He stared into space.

She hoped she was getting through. “Keep your eye on that place,” she whispered hypnotically. “Down the road, when you’re loving her and she’s loving you and all this is just a bad dream.”

Slowly he turned to her. “What can I do to help?”

She held her breath, no clue how to answer that.

“Mrs. Huntington and I were about to confer on where to go next with all this,” Tim said. “Could you give us a few minutes? There’s some lousy coffee down the hall in the break room.”

Charles looked from one of them to the other, then he stood up. “Okay.” He shuffled toward the door. At the last moment, he turned. “Can I get you some, Kate?”

“That would be great. I definitely need some caffeine about now.”

He nodded once, then turned and left.

Tim stood up and gently closed the door behind him. He smiled at Kate. “You were fabulous.”

She flopped back in her chair and blew out air. “Thanks, but what the hell do we tell him when he comes back?”

They were at an impasse, unless Skip and the others had found something in that house in New York.

She tried to resist the temptation to hope they would find Sally there. But hope stubbornly whispered in the back of her mind,
Maybe, just maybe.

~~~~~~~~

They were now on the highway, headed south. Skip had wound his way out of White Plains, taking back roads wherever he could do so. They hadn’t crossed paths with SA Wallace. Hopefully, their luck would hold.

He snorted at Rob’s description of narrowly avoiding arrest for indecent exposure by promising the “occifer” he would go home peaceably without further public urination. The chuckles rippling through the SUV’s interior were a much-needed relief after their grim report to Rob about what they had found in Delaney’s house.

Skip opened his mouth. His intended question to Rose was aborted by a huge yawn.

“You want one of us to drive, partner?” she asked from the backseat.

“Maybe in a little while. I was gonna ask how you discovered the mechanism to open that door?”

“I pulled the dresser out,” Rose said. “To see if anything had fallen down behind it. The electric cord on the lamp was pulled snug but the lamp didn’t move. I tried to pick it up but it was attached to the dresser, and then the wall started opening up next to me. Liked to jumped outta my skin.”

Skip let out a short chuckle. “Guess so. Bet it felt like you’d landed in some horror movie.”

“Yeah, especially after what we found in there.” Her voice was grim.

An echo of the icy fingers tap-danced on Skip’s spine.

“Wish I coulda finished checkin’ out that air vent,” Mac said.

Skip thought for a moment, visualizing the layout of the house in his mind. “That vent in the living room was right underneath that room. How much you wanna bet it came out in there somewhere?”

Mac grunted from the backseat.

Skip sat up straighter. “Wait, there was a floor fan in that downstairs closet. Bet he used that to push air up into the room.”

“And maybe to air it out,” Rose said, “after a kill.”

Rob squirmed in the passenger seat.

“Not so sure we should’ve taken this notepad,” Rose said. “We’ve compromised it as evidence.”

Skip opted to ignore that issue for the moment. “Can you tell what it says?”

Her penlight came on in the backseat. “Can’t read it all that well, but it looks like a journal of some kind. Wait, here’s the name. Sarah Walker. Wasn’t that the third victim?”