Authors: Kassandra Lamb
The house was quiet, the kids already in bed. Peaches appeared out of nowhere and rubbed against their legs, meowing pathetically as if she were starving. Kate knew better. Maria would have fed her before retiring to her third-floor apartment.
No appearance from Toby, which meant that Maria had put him in the laundry room where he normally slept, or Billy had snuck him into his bedroom again.
Kate stopped in the living room and turned to Skip. “Sweetheart, I would have been home in time, if there hadn’t been an accident on the Beltway.”
He looked down at her for a long moment, his eyes the murky brown they became when he was worried or pissed. She had no idea which he was right now.
“You could’ve called.” His voice was neutral, too neutral.
Butterflies fluttered in her stomach. “I was going to. I did, once I was past the accident. It was a little tense, with people rubbernecking and such.”
And besides, you had already called Manny.
But she didn’t particularly want to bring that up. She was hoping she didn’t have to admit that she´d completely forgotten about the PTA meeting.
“Look,” she took both of his hands in hers, “tonight was important to you, and I haven’t been supportive enough about all this. I’m sorry. But I was so proud of you up there. Your speech was perfect.”
He looked down at her for another moment, his face unreadable. Then he blew out air and pulled her to him. Wrapping his arms around her, he rested his chin on the top of her head. “Thanks for coming straight to the meeting.”
She slowly let out the breath she’d been holding. She was off the hook. Ignoring the nagging guilt that lurked under her relief, she relaxed against his solid body.
Her stomach growled. She pulled out of his arms and took his hand to lead him to the kitchen. “I never had dinner. You want anything?”
“I think I’ll have a beer.”
That surprised her a little. Skip almost never drank, except at parties, and then not much. Tonight had taken even more out of him than she’d realized.
She opened the fridge and got him a beer. “Did I tell you how excellent your speech was?” she said as she handed it to him.
He finally grinned at her, his first smile of the evening.
Smiling back, she fished her dinner plate out of the fridge and put it in the microwave. When it dinged, she brought the plate and a fork to the table and dug in.
Five minutes later, the plate held only a few smears of sauce and Skip was grinning at her again.
“You definitely know how to enjoy food.” He chugged the last of his beer. “I think I’m gonna take a shower.”
He usually showered in the morning. An evening shower indicated it had been a particularly stressful day. He said the hot water helped him relax. Tonight she figured it might also help wash away those high school memories.
While she waited, she might as well do some research. She sat down at the computer and called up the website Liz had found for her–the historical archives of St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church. She skimmed for any references to a Father Bill.
In the section from the early 1990's, she spotted a picture over the name, Father William Coleman. No wonder Josie had called him Father What-A-Waste. He was a handsome young man. He’d be in his fifties now.
Wait a minute!
Josie wouldn’t have been calling the priest that in first or second grade. When had she crossed paths with him as a teenager?
Kate glanced back at the computer and froze as another face jumped out at her from the screen.
A man with hard, brown eyes and a scraggly beard.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Guilt rode shotgun as Kate drove to work the next day. She’d intended to tell Skip about the threatening note after his shower, but she’d lost her nerve. He’d had a stressful evening, she’d told herself. He didn’t need to be worrying about her right before bedtime.
They’d snuggled together, spoon-style. He’d kissed her on the temple. “Do you mind if we don’t make love tonight? I’m beat.”
“That’s fine.” She was secretly relieved. Making love would have made her feel worse.
Now she couldn’t tell Manny about the note, or show it to him, for fear he would mention it to her husband. And the longer she went without telling Skip, the worse it would be when he finally found out.
Oh the tangled web we weave…
Kate instructed her Bluetooth to call Judith Anderson. She got past the precinct’s receptionist by saying that she had information related to one of the lieutenant’s cases. It was true, even if the case wasn’t active right now.
But Judith wasn’t in. Kate left a message saying she would come by at lunchtime with some evidence. Hopefully the detective would be there so she could pick her brain some more, but regardless she wanted to get the note to her as soon as possible. Kate was hoping it would give Judith sufficient cause to re-open the case.
Manny was waiting in the hallway outside her office.
She unlocked the door and they entered the waiting room. “I hate to ask this of you, Manny, but could you hang out here today, as my bodyguard?”
“No problem. You got reason to believe you’re at risk?”
“Nothing concrete,” she said, hating the lie. “But I think I’m getting close to something on this case, and I’ve had the niggling feeling for days that someone was following me.” That at least was true, although she suspected it was her imagination.
“Anything I can investigate?” Manny asked.
“Not yet. I’ve got Liz Franklin doing some computer research for us.” She’d shot off a quick email to Liz the previous evening, asking her to check out Father William Coleman and the man with the scraggly beard. The archives had identified him as Gary Jones, the janitorial supervisor in the late 1980s to early 1990s. And while Liz was at it, could she find out where Josie went to high school? It might not have been Bryn Mawr.
“After work,” Kate told Manny, “we may have something to go on.”
.
At lunchtime, Kate returned a phone call that couldn’t wait and then told Manny she needed to make a quick trip to the police station.
“Why don’t you ride with me?” he said. “Then we don’t have to worry about getting separated in Towson traffic.”
She agreed.
Manny didn’t ask what was in the large manila folder she clutched as she sat in his passenger seat. He got her to the precinct in record time.
Kate fished a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse. “You want to get us some fast food for lunch while I’m in there?”
He tilted his head to one side, studying her. “Sure,” he finally said.
The young officer on the front desk–a male this time–informed her that Lieutenant Anderson was in and could see her.
“Thank you, Lord,” Kate whispered under her breath.
She succinctly told the lieutenant when and where she had found the note, and what it said, then handed over the envelope.
Judith opened it and fished the note out by pinching the top edge between the fingernails of her thumb and index finger. She studied it for a moment, then slid it back in the envelope. She got out a large evidence envelope and wrote on it. Then she slid Kate’s envelope into the larger one. “You need to leave this alone. It’s gotten too dangerous.”
“Does that mean you’ll reopen the case?”
Judith gave her a pained look. “We’re pretty busy right now.”
Kate gritted her teeth. “Come on! You can’t tell me to let it be and then say you aren’t going to investigate either.”
“Let me see what our lab finds when they examine the note. We’ll take it from there.”
Kate wasn’t sure what that last sentence meant, but she let it slide. Checking her watch, she decided not to bring up the other stuff she’d found out from the journals. No point in making herself late getting back to the office if Judith wasn’t interested.
A small voice in her head said she was being petty, but she was too pissed to listen to it.
Then she spotted a cardboard box in the corner. The label said
J. Hartin
.
“Is that the stuff from Josie’s condo?”
“Yeah. I haven’t gotten around to taking it back to the evidence room.”
Kate resisted the temptation to ask why she’d gotten it from the evidence room in the first place. The lieutenant wasn’t as disinterested in the case as she pretended to be.
What the hell’s going on here?
“Anything interesting in there?”
Judith started to roll her eyes, aborted halfway, then sighed. “Not much. Just her phone and such.”
Kate sat up straighter in her chair. “Her cell phone? Can I see it?”
“It’s password protected.”
“So your lab can’t break the password?”
“We don’t normally need to. We get the phone records from the carrier.”
“So who did she call that last day or two?”
Judith sighed again. “We never requested the records, since it was ruled a suicide.”
Kate made herself count to five–she didn’t have time to go to ten. “May I see the phone?” She held out her hand toward the box.
Judith hesitated a moment. Then she stood and walked to the table where the box rested, opened it and extracted the phone. She turned it on and, carrying it by its edges, brought it to Kate.
Kate took it and tried several possible passwords, beginning with Buster, then Sphinx. When she ran out of ideas, she stared at the phone for a moment, wishing she could break it open like an egg and spill out its secrets.
She noticed an odd sheen on the surface. Placing the phone flat on her palm, she tilted it this way and that. The sheen had a pattern to it, left by the oil from Josie’s finger.
B is for Buster.
She carefully touched the top left corner of the pattern and traced the letter B. The phone unlocked.
Judith had been watching her silently. “Why didn’t I think of that?” she said, letting it slip that she’d been trying to unofficially unlock the phone’s secrets.
“Dumb luck, and I have the same kind of phone. I remembered that it has the option of using a pattern on the screen to unlock it, rather than a password.”
Kate went to recent calls. Her own office number was the last one. Before that were three calls in a row to and from the same number. But there was no name next to it. She dug in her purse for a pad and pen and wrote the number down. They were the only calls Josie had made or received that morning.
Kate glanced at her watch. She was out of time.
Judith held out her hand for the phone. “I’ll look it over and let you know if I find anything useful.”
“But you won’t reopen the case?”
Judith stared at her. Her cop mask slipped for a second, and Kate saw worry and frustration in her eyes. “I can’t. And I can’t tell you why.”
Kate reluctantly turned over the phone.
As she started to rise, Judith reached out and put a hand on her arm. “Be careful.”
“I will be. I have one of Skip’s men with me, as a bodyguard.”
Judith nodded, her mouth set in a grim line.
In Manny’s car, Kate held the chicken sandwich he’d bought for her in one hand and fished her own phone out of her pocket with the other. She’d silenced it before entering the police station, and it had vibrated several times while she’d been in Judith’s office.
She checked missed calls. Four of them, all from Rob.
Crap!
She’d completely forgotten that it was Wednesday and she had a lunch date with him. She checked voicemail. Four messages, increasingly frantic.
Her stomach churned. She dropped the sandwich onto its wrapper on her lap and called Rob back.
“I am so, so sorry,” she said as soon as he answered. “Something happened and…” Her throat closed. She’d never before forgotten their lunch date, not in the decade plus that they had been meeting for lunch on Wednesdays.
“Are you okay? What happened?” Rob’s voice was anxious, not angry.
But she wasn’t sure the anger wouldn’t come when he found out she’d just plain forgotten.
“Yes, I’m fine. I, uh, received a threatening note, but keep that under your hat because I haven’t had a chance to tell Skip yet.”
Manny shot her a sideways glance.
“Threatening as in?” Rob asked, his tone even more worried.
She repeated the words of the note to him.
“When did this happen?”
Her stomach clenched, but she couldn’t lie to her best friend. And Manny was sitting right beside her. He’d know she was lying. She could only hope that Rob was in an understanding mood. “Yesterday. I took it to Lieutenant Anderson during my lunch break.”
“Why haven’t you told Skip?” Now his voice sounded ominous.
With good intentions, she and Skip had kept things from each other in the past, trying not to worry the other one. As Rob knew, that hadn’t worked out so well, had even put them in danger.
“I’m going to tell him tonight. He had a presentation at the PTA meeting last night, about bullying. I didn’t want to upset or distract him before that. And he was kinda stressed afterwards.” This was probably more than she should be saying in front of Skip’s employee. Manny could be trusted to be discreet, but still…
Guilt and anxiety surged through her. She felt lightheaded and nauseous.
What the hell am I doing?
Tears stung her eyes and it took all she had to fight them back. She was falling apart. Where was the confident, forthright woman she’d once been?
“You okay?” Worried voice again.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she managed to get out without her voice shaking. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “I’m kinda burned out, I guess. Trying to do too much.”
“So Judith is going to take over the investigation now. You can let it go and get back to your own life.”
“Uh, not exactly.” She glanced over at Manny.
His eyes were on the road ahead as he drove. “I see nothink, I hear nothink,” he said in a credible imitation of Sergeant Shultz from the old show,
Hogan’s Heroes
.
A chuckle bubbled in her chest but she suppressed it. She knew she was dangerously close to losing it, and that chuckle might just turn into hysteria. She gave Manny a small smile instead.