ILL-TIMED ENTANGLEMENTS (The Kate Huntington mystery series #2) (19 page)

Kate closed and locked the door, then deposited the tray on the dresser. Betty was still making notes on her posterboard lists of suspects. “Be back in a minute,” Kate said.

After she stepped through the doorway, Rob closed the door between the rooms. He gestured toward the small table by the window.

They sat across from each other. “Kate, how well do you know Skip Canfield?” Rob said in a neutral voice.

Kate gave him a funny look. “I’m getting to know him. Why do you keep asking me that?”

Rob ignored her question. “Did he tell you that he has a temper?”

“No, although…” Kate flashed back to the scene right after her encounter with Joe. “I know that he can get a bit intense at times.”
As can you,
she thought,
like right now!

“Did he tell you that he quit the state troopers after he blew up at his superior officer?”

Kate’s eyes narrowed. “No, he didn’t mention that. And how is it that
you
know that?”

Rob held up his hands, as if to ward off her anger. “Kate, I know you’re going to be pissed, but please hear me out. I had Fran run a background check on Canfield.”

Kate stared at him in disbelief. “You did
what
?”

“Let me finish, please. I also called a buddy of mine who’s a retired state trooper.” Rob started talking faster as he saw the anger erupting on her face. “He made some calls and found out about the blow up. Canfield quit after
eleven years
on the force, and without notice. Then he drifted from job to job for three years. I don’t consider those the actions of a stable or responsible man.”

Kate was beyond pissed. A small part of her mind was trying to process what he was saying about Skip. But most of her mental energy was being directed toward
not
telling this man she had loved as a friend for over a decade exactly what he could do with his background check. How dare he go behind her back and check up on one of her friends!

Through clenched teeth, she said, “Apparently I didn’t make myself totally clear at breakfast. I
thought
I’d conveyed the message that you needed to back off.”

“I’m sorry, Kate. I’d already told Fran to order the check. If nothing negative had come back, I would have dropped it. But…”

When Kate didn’t say anything, he added in a softer voice, “You’re vulnerable right now, so soon after Ed’s death.”

“Rob, I am not a child. I’m thirty-nine years old and I have an advanced degree in psychology. I
know
I’m vulnerable right now, which is why I am
not
willing to date yet.”

“I just didn’t want you getting… attached to this guy,” he said. “And then finding out later that he wasn’t on the up and up.”

“And what about quitting a job after an argument with his boss makes the man not on the up and up?”

“He didn’t tell you about it, did he?”

“The subject of past employment has not yet come up in conversation. I can’t believe…” Kate stopped herself, realizing she was too angry to continue this discussion. They were dangerously close to the edge of a precipice. If either of them said the wrong thing…

She stood up.

Rob misread the look on her face as dismay about the information on Canfield. He started to rise from his chair and reach out to give her a hug.

“Don’t!” Kate held up her hand to stop him.

Rob froze.

“I can’t believe you did this,” she said. She turned and walked toward the door between the rooms.

“Kate, please! I just didn’t want you to get hurt.”

She turned back and looked at him. His big frame was sagging; his face was pale, his eyes anxious.
This hurts! What you’ve done,
she thought, but managed not to say out loud.

Some of her anger dissolved, replaced by the sadness and disappointment lurking behind it. He started toward her. She held up her hand again.

“You need to leave me alone now, Rob, before I say something I’ll regret later.” She went through the door, closing it carefully behind her.

•   •   •

Kate jolted awake in the middle of the night. She knew she’d been dreaming and it hadn’t been good, but she couldn’t remember the details.

Trying not to wake Betty, Kate got up and went into the bathroom, closing the door before fumbling in the dark for the light switch. She stared into the mirror. Her eyes were a washed-out gray, rimmed in red.

She was feeling claustrophobic. With Betty in the same room, she couldn’t turn on the light to read, or watch TV to distract herself from her thoughts. She couldn’t go out into the living room. Skip would wake up and want to know what was going on. And she couldn’t get in her car and go to Denny’s because there was a rapist running around Lancaster.

She walked across the floor of the small bathroom and back again, and cracked her shin on the toilet. “Shit!” she said softly. She couldn’t even pace.

Sitting down on the side of the bathtub, she propped her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. The porcelain edge was cold through the thin fabric of her nightgown.

What the hell was she doing here, sleeping in a strange bed miles away from her child, trying to catch a killer who had so far eluded the entire Lancaster police force? In the morning, she should just pack up and go home.

Most of her didn’t even want to wait for morning. But a smaller, more rational part knew that if she did that, with things the way they were right now with Rob, the rift could become irreparable. Her eyes stung, but she refused to let herself cry.

Damn the man!
What had he been thinking, invading Skip’s privacy like that?

But then her mind couldn’t help but turn to what Rob had found out. Ending an eleven-year career by blowing up at his boss and quitting without notice did not fit with what she knew about Skip Canfield. He was one of the most laid-back people she’d ever met.

And although she didn’t know much about his life, she had thought she’d had a good sense of his personality. After all, the man had camped out on her sofa for weeks, after Eddie’s murder, and he’d helped them trap his killer. She realized now that, on several occasions, Skip’s calm personality had helped to steady her during that awful time.

There had to be some logical explanation for the information Rob had discovered. Kate certainly knew, from the work that she did, that someone could hide an explosive nature under a layer of charm.

She shook her head. No, Skip Canfield was not a superficial charmer, nor was he an impulsive man. She could not possibly have misread him like that. Her ability to read people was well honed by her training and years of experience as a therapist.

And the only time she’d ever seen the man angry was after her encounter with Joe, and that short-lived outburst had stemmed from fear for her.

Arrgghh!
Kate grabbed a hunk of curls in each hand. “Damn you, Rob Franklin,” she whispered out loud, “for planting this seed.”

Okay, what am I going to do about Rob?
She knew she couldn’t leave. Even though she had Edie as a good excuse, one the others would buy without question, Rob would know the real reason. And he would be hurt… terribly hurt, that she would withdraw from him like that without trying to work things out.

As angry as she was with him right now, she still loved him dearly and couldn’t intentionally hurt him. But her brain was too tired to figure out how to deal with this. He’d crossed a line he shouldn’t have crossed, and she wasn’t sure how they would find their way back to where they had been.

Suddenly she was so tired she was afraid she’d slide right off the side of the tub onto the floor. Better go back to bed and see if she could get some sleep. Tomorrow was going to be stressful enough without being sleep-deprived.

She decided she would do her best to pretend everything was okay, until she could figure out what else to do.

•   •   •

Earlier, when they had been planning how to set their trap, Rob had worried that he might not be able to stay awake. After his confrontation with Kate, that was no longer a problem.

Shortly after two in the morning, he thought he heard a noise. He got up quietly from where he had been laying, wide awake and fully clothed on Aunt Betty’s bed, and tiptoed into the living room. There was only a tiny bit of ambient light in the apartment. Rob moved quietly across the room, then reached down to the settee to wake Rose.

And felt nothing but air. He patted around on the settee. It was empty. “Rose, where are you?” he whispered.

“Damn thing’s too slithery,” came the whispered reply from the floor.

“I thought I heard something, outside the door.” They both were quiet, until they heard it again, a soft scratching sound.

Rob was still looking down into the darkness on the floor, assuming that was where Rose was. He felt warm breath on his neck and jumped. “Get Mac,” Rose whispered right next to his ear.

He did as she told him. Feeling his way along the living room wall to the den doorway, he then found the end of the sofa bed in the dark and shook Mac’s foot. Mac was out of bed in an instant, poking a gun barrel into Rob’s gut. “It’s me, you idiot,” Rob hissed.

“Who you callin’ an eejit,” Mac growled softly. “You’re the one almost got shot.”

“Someone’s trying to get in,” Rob whispered.

They crept back into the outer room just as the front door swung silently open and a dark figure slipped inside. Rose flipped the light switch by the door. Gun in her hands, she barked, “Police! Don’t move!”

But the black-clad, ski-masked figure did not obey. Instead it whirled around. Rose couldn’t shoot without risking hitting Mac or Rob. And she was too close to Mac’s line of fire for him to risk a shot.

The figure plunged back out the door. They took off to give chase. Rob and Rose collided in the doorway, giving the intruder a precious moment to get around the corner and into the atrium area.

All three of them raced after. The foliage rustled on the opposite side of the dimly lit atrium. They bolted toward the spot, but nothing was there.

Mac gestured that they should split up and go around the outside of the plants. He started in one direction, with Rob and Rose going the other way, all of them squinting into the dark foliage to detect anyone who might be hiding there. They had gone about halfway around when they heard the soft swish of the building’s outer door opening. They whirled in time to see a dark silhouette disappearing out into the night.

Again they gave chase. There was no moon and the outside lighting, clustered in front of the building and in the nearby parking lot, left large pockets of pitch black along the sides of the building. “Go back inside,” Mac hissed at Rob. He didn’t want his inexperienced friend getting shot in the dark by one of them. He and Rose split up and took off around the building.

When they jogged back down the hall to Betty’s apartment ten minutes later, Rob was standing in the open doorway.

“No sign of the bastard,” Mac growled softly.

“I screwed that up, didn’t I?” Rob whispered.

“Not your fault.” Mac was silently chastising himself for not insisting that Skip be the third member of their team.

They decided there was no point in disturbing the others just to report failure. They could wait until morning to share the little bit of additional information their adventure had provided.

•   •   •

As Kate came out of the bathroom the next morning, towel-drying her curly mop, she could hear Liz’s voice through the bedroom door. Betty was still asleep, which had Kate concerned. The older woman was usually an early riser.

Quickly pulling on her clothes, Kate tiptoed to the door and quietly slipped out into the living room of the suite.

Skip whispered a summary of nocturnal events that he had gleaned from Liz’s side of the conversation, as she continued to commiserate with her frustrated husband.

Finally Liz said into the phone, “I’m thinking we should all come over there, even Betty. She and I have some information to share and we can all confer to decide where to go from here… We’ll just make sure someone is always guarding her.”

Liz dropped her voice and echoed Kate’s concerns. “Another day with nothing to do, cooped up in this room, I’m not sure that’s really good for her. I think she’s getting depressed… Okay, we’ll grab some breakfast and be over in a little while.”

Over their room service breakfast, Liz gave the others the physical description, such as it was, of the previous night’s intruder. “Most useful information is that the killer is average height and build and fairly physically fit, to be agile and fast enough to get away from them.”

“We already knew he or she had to be strong enough to lift that pot off the ledge,” Skip said.

Liz looked at him in confusion.

“Dear Lord,” Kate exclaimed. “We didn’t tell you about that?” Betty scowled at her for taking the Lord’s name in vain.

“Sorry, Betty.” Kate turned back to Liz. “Somebody tried to drop a potted plant on our heads, out in the atrium… When was that anyway?” she asked Skip.

“Tuesday. No wait, it was Monday, late afternoon.”

“Were you hurt?” Liz asked, alarmed.

“No, other than a few bruises the next day from Hulk Hogan here diving on top of me,” Kate said.

“Hey, I resent that. I’m much cuter than Hulk Hogan.”

“True, he doesn’t have your boyish grin,” Kate said.

Liz was looking from one to the other of them, stifling her own grin. “So how strong would one have to be to knock those pots off?”

“Somebody just brushing against them wouldn’t do it,” Kate said. “Which is what Mrs. Carroll kept insisting happened.”

“There’s a little side on the shelf to keep them from being knocked off. Someone would have to lift the pot up over that,” Skip explained.

“Or maybe pull the pot a little bit toward them,” Betty said. “And then get it rocking so they could tip it over the edge.”

“That might work, too,” Skip said, forking in his last bite of scrambled eggs.

He turned to Kate. “Want to show me where that Home Depot is? I think it’s time for a stronger lock.”

Liz nodded her agreement with that idea. “We’ll head on over.”