Harlequin Intrigue, Box Set 2 of 2 (8 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

“You need me there to back you up?” Max Krolikowski's voice was a deep growly pitch over the cell phone Trent slipped beneath the edge of his black knit watch cap as he climbed out of his truck at the Williams College auditorium.

“Nah, brother,” Trent answered, flipping up the collar of his coat against the clear, cold night. He turned his back to the bitter wind blowing from the north and strode across the cleared pavement toward the massive brick building. “This is personal. We're off the clock.”

“Doesn't mean I won't be there in a heartbeat. I owe you for helping me keep an eye on Rosie this summer.” Max chuckled. “Besides, I decided I like ya. I'd hate to have to break in a whole new partner.”

Trent laughed, too. “Nobody else would have you, you grumpy old man.”

“Bite me, junior.”

“Love you, too.” Stretching out his long legs, Trent stepped over the snow piled between the sidewalk and curb. He noted that the parking lot was crowded with cars and the pavement and sidewalk had been cleared from one end to another by plows. There'd be no footprints to follow tonight unless the perp he believed had been spying on Katie was dumb enough to trek through the drifts. But if the guy who'd shoved her to the floor was that kind of dumb, Trent intended to be here to have a conversation about keeping his distance from the Rinaldi family. “Hey, did you ever hear back from the gym Matt Asher belongs to?”

“I thought we were off the clock.”

“I'll stop thinking about these unsolved cases when you do.”

Trent's booted feet quickly ate up several yards walking around to the front lobby doors of the building while Max grinched around in the background. When his partner came back to the phone, Trent knew he'd been checking the facts in his notebook. “Since the manager didn't seem to know much when we visited this morning, I stopped by on my way home and chatted up the after-work crowd. Several people recognized Matt Asher and Hillary Wells, but couldn't remember if they'd ever seen them in a conversation with each other.”

Trent figured with the discrepancy between their ages—Matt barely being twenty-two and the late Dr. Wells being a professional woman in her forties—that any conversation more intimate than a polite greeting between the two of them might stand out enough to make an impression on at least one of the other gym members. When he suggested the idea, Max concurred. “Asked and answered. No one I spoke to could recall either Matt Asher or Hillary Wells being in the same room together, much less sharing that they were looking for a way to have someone killed.”

The sharp wind bit into Trent's cheek when he turned to the front doors. He hunched his shoulders to stay warm. “So that's not our connection between the two of them. Still, eliminating the gym doesn't mean she didn't have some other connection to Leland Asher.”

“So we keep digging.”

Trent nodded. “I'll ask Katie if she's come up with anyplace else that can tie the two of them together.”

“Or tie Dr. Wells directly to Asher.” Trent heard a soft voice in the background, then something that sounded suspiciously like lips smacking against each other. Max's gruff tone softened. “Rosie says to tell you hi—”

“Hey, Rosie.”

“—and invite you over for dinner sometime before Christmas.”

“I accept. Will you be there, too?”

“Wiseass.” Trent grinned at the reprimand he heard in the background. “Um, the missus says I need to mind my manners. Maybe Friday before we all go see the little man in his play?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Give me a call sometime to let me know if anybody else tries to bother Katie. She's part of the team, too. I don't like the idea of anybody messin' with one of us.”

“That's why I'm here. If nothing else, I'm going to make sure she and Tyler aren't the last ones here and walking by themselves to their car again.” Trent held open one of the glass front doors for a pair of chattering, bundled-up coeds who must have been leaving an evening meeting or practice in one of the fine arts classrooms. He barely saw their bold smiles and flirty eye contact. He silently bemoaned the idea that their interest in him sparked amusement rather than any fraction of the pull that a few ponytail hairs clinging to his shirt had that morning. “Ladies,” he acknowledged to some silly giggles before they hurried past him and he signed off on his call to Max. “I'll keep you posted.”

As soon as he stepped into the lobby out of the wind, Trent pulled off his cap and stuffed it into a coat pocket along with his phone. He removed his gloves and unzipped his coat before heading across the worn marble floor to the auditorium's dark red doors.

He stooped a little to peer through the cloudy glass window near the top of the door and saw a hazy tableau of the Cratchit family lifting their pewter mugs in a toast. He smiled when he spotted the little boy with the old-fashioned crutch tucked beneath his arm. Tyler's smudged face was easily the most animated of all the children onstage as he said his lines. There was a lot to admire about Katie's son. Trent didn't remember having that much confidence at that age, except maybe playing sports—but certainly not speaking in front of an audience. “Way to go, Tyler.”

Trent shifted his gaze to the sloping rows of seats in the shadows between the lobby and the brightly lit stage. There wasn't much of an audience to be nervous about tonight. There was a skinny, graying man in a turtleneck pacing back and forth between the curved rows of seats. There were some obvious family of the cast scattered around, one running a handheld video camera, another snapping pictures with her phone. And there sat Katie beside a pile of coats in a chair in the middle of it all. Her downturned head made him think she was working on something in her lap instead of watching the rehearsal. Her laptop? Didn't that woman ever take a break from work? Was there something obsessive about learning the truth about that long-missing girl? Or was Katie reading more about Craig Fairfax, the man who'd tried to steal an infant Tyler from her and murdered her high-school pal Whitney Chiles?

“Come on, Katie Lee.” His low-pitched whisper reverberated against the glass. She carried the weight of too much life experience on those slim shoulders. She didn't need to take on any more trouble. “Just enjoy the show.”

If Katie was going to put in overtime making sense of the cases the team was working on, then he should do the same. Remembering his main reason for driving out here tonight, Trent detoured up the stairs to the tech booth in the balcony. He pulled out his badge before knocking on the door. The two men inside running lights and sound seemed willing enough to chat.

“Detective Trent Dixon,” he identified himself, learning the men's names were Chip and Ron. “You guys know anything about a power outage here in the auditorium last night?”

“Yeah, I heard about the blackout,” Chip, a balding man in metal-framed glasses, answered. “And how Katie foiled a break-in. But that's not on me. I locked up the booth when I left. And the work lights in the auditorium and backstage were still on. I walked out with Doug Price, the director. He turns everything off when he leaves—after the cast and crew are gone.”

Only an innocent woman had been left behind in the dark. “Is there a way to turn off the work lights but turn on the rope lights to see backstage?”

Chip pulled down the lights at the end of the scene, then raised them slightly for the stage crew to come on and change the set for the next scene. Then he nodded. “The rope lights just plug in. Unless there was a power outage and everything in the building was dead, it'd be easy enough to throw a few switches backstage yet leave those on.”

So the details Katie had shared about last night meant the blackout was deliberate. But whether the intent had been to trap her inside the theater or to cover up an intruder's escape, it was impossible to tell. “Did you see any signs of someone tampering with your light board?”

“It was just like I left it.”

Ron, the sound guy with his cap sitting backward on his head, agreed. “The booth was locked up tight when I came in at six to set the microphones for rehearsal tonight. If anybody was in here, he had to have a key.”

“And the director is the only person in the play with a key?” Trent would make a point of introducing himself to Doug Price.

Ron shrugged. “Except for campus security. Or maybe someone in the theater department. But all their productions are done for the semester. That's why we can be in here now.”

The crew left the stage and both Chip and Ron went back to work. “Lights up.”

Trent thanked them for their cooperation and went back down to the auditorium, sneaking in the back while Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghostly Spirit of Christmas Future walked onstage. After his eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, he spotted Katie's hot-pink sweater and headed down the aisle toward her. When he got closer, he could see that she was looking at a crumpled piece of paper instead of the flat screen of her laptop.

So she wasn't working. But her head was down and she was rubbing her fingers back and forth against her neck beneath the base of her ponytail, as if a knot of tension had formed there. She was so intent on whatever she was reading that she jumped when he slipped into the seat beside her.

“Sorry.” He nudged his shoulder against hers to apologize for startling her, then nodded toward the paper she was quickly folding up. “What's that?”

“What are you doing here?” She dropped her voice to a whisper to match his before turning to the coats beside her. “Oh, shoot. I left my bag backstage.” Without missing a beat, she stuffed the paper inside the pocket of her coat.

Okay. So that wasn't suspicious. He eyed the navy wool coat where the letter had disappeared. If that was some kind of threat... “Everything okay?”

“What? Oh.” She pulled her lime-green scarf from the pile and folded it neatly on top of the coat, burying the missive beneath another layer. Right. So they were back to her keeping secrets and suffering on her own when he knew damn well he could help. “It's Tyler's letter to Santa. He said he doesn't believe in Santa Claus anymore but that he wrote the letter for my sake. I've always sent one out for him...mostly so I can read it and see what's tops on his wish list.”

It was a plausible explanation for the frown between her brows. “That's a hard transition to go through the year they stop believing in the magic and hope of Christmas.”

The frown eased a tad and she leaned toward him so they could talk without their voices carrying up to the stage. “He's still got plenty of hope, judging by the extent of that wish list. But other than some bad grammar, he sounds...” She sank back against the chair on a whispery sigh. “In a lot of ways he's still my little boy. But in some ways he's growing up way too fast.”

Trent stretched out and slipped a friendly arm across the back of her seat. “That growing-up stuff is inevitable. You do know that, right, Mom?”

She gave his ribs a teasing tap with her fist. “I know. And it certainly beats the alternative.” That brief glimpse of a smile quickly faded. “When I think of some of those cases I've read through this year, like that missing teenage girl and baby—like my friend Whitney back in high school—I know we're lucky to be here. But I can't help thinking I've cheated him somehow, that I haven't given him everything he needs, that he feels he has to be all grown-up to take care of me. He doesn't, of course. But maybe he doesn't believe that I can take care of him.”

“You're a terrific mom, and he knows that. All little boys want to try on being a man for a while, especially when they know they've got someone there to back them up in case the experiment isn't as exciting or safe as they thought it would be.” Trent dropped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to his side in a friendly hug. “Tomorrow, he'll be a kid again. I promise.” When she leaned against him, her fresh-as-a-daisy scent drew his lips to her hair and he pressed a kiss to her temple.

“Don't do that.” Her hand at his chest pushed him away and she sat forward in her seat, moving away from the touch of his arm, as well. “If Tyler sees, I don't want him to get the wrong idea about us.”

“The wrong idea?” Well, hell. “That peck was just a show of support between friends. A woman is damn well gonna know when I intend my kiss to mean something more.”

She turned with a surprised gasp. “Trent, I didn't mean to insult—”

He put up his hand to silence her apology. Yet when his gaze fell on the naturally rosy tint of her lips and lingered, the spike of resentment firing through his blood blended with a yearning he hadn't acknowledged in years. She shouldn't draw that pretty mouth into such a tightly controlled line, and he shouldn't have this urge to ease it back into a smile beneath his own lips. Maybe he had crossed a line without realizing it. Because, right now, every male cell in his body was wishing for a little privacy so he could kiss her just once the way he'd always longed to. But he hadn't had the skills as a teenager, and as an adult he didn't have the permission to even try.

For a long time now, he'd imagined if they could share one real, passionate kiss, he'd find out that this desire simmering in his blood was just the remnants of a teenage fantasy. He'd discover the spark wasn't really there. He and Katie would share a laugh over the awkward encounter, and he'd finally be able to get this useless attraction out of his system. Inhaling a cautionary breath, Trent pulled his hand back to rest on the arm of the seat, letting his shoulder form the barricade she wanted between them.

“It won't happen again.” At least, he hoped he could keep that promise. “I'd never do anything to jeopardize my friendship with you or Tyler.”

But as Trent faced the stage again, adjusting his long legs in the narrow space between the rows of seats, his eyes were drawn to the show's director, Doug Price. The pacing had stopped and the older man's dark eyes were trained on the seats where he and Katie sat. Tyler wasn't the only one she needed to worry about seeing and misinterpreting a quick kiss.