Better Read Than Dead (19 page)

Milo stepped into my living room without a word, and waited for me to close the door and retake my seat before talking to me. I could feel his eyes moving from me to the glass of wine to the flat expression of my face. I braced for the reprimand I knew was about to follow.

But Milo surprised me. Instead of a lecture he took a seat on the couch next to my chair, his eyes drifting to the muted TV. After a moment he asked, “Whatcha watchin’?”

“Great show.”

“The greatest.”

“Jennifer Garner can sure kick some ass, huh?”

I nodded dully. “And take names while she’s at it . . .”

“Yeah . . .”

Silence.

Irritated by Milo’s presence, I purposely sipped a little more wine; my buzz was intensifying but I didn’t give a hooey. Milo looked at me pointedly, but I ignored him. I wasn’t going to stop drinking on his account.

Finally he asked, “Abby?”

“Yeah?”

“You got any beer? Or are you just a red wine kind of gal?”

His question stunned me. I had expected something completely different to come out of his mouth, a lecture of some type, for my drinking alone, or for not returning his calls. Being asked to be a polite hostess never even dawned on me. “In the fridge,” I said. “Dutch still has some Bud in there from August.”

Milo smiled kindly and got up. “Thanks,” he said as he moved into the kitchen.

My eyebrows shrugged as I heard him open my fridge and extract a beer. He came back into the living room and grabbed the remote from the table.

Here it comes,
I thought regretfully,
the lecture.
Instead Milo unmuted the TV and we watched the rest of
Alias
together in companionable silence. It was the first time in weeks I’d felt myself completely relax, like I was finally able to exhale after holding my breath for so long.

At ten o’clock the credits rolled, and Milo muted the TV again. The room grew heavy with silence, and then as I looked at him he said to me in a voice barely above a whisper, “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”

I nearly dropped my glass of wine. “What?” I asked, giving him my full attention, “What are you sorry about?”

“I should have listened to you. If I had just listened to you that woman would still be alive, and we’d probably have that bastard in custody.”

“What are you talking about?” It was probably the wine, but I honestly could not compute what Milo was trying to tell me.

“The clue you gave me about the post office. It was so obvious, and I completely ignored it. Instead I had all my men wasting their time at the local grocery stores. We weren’t patrolling anywhere else, and that basically laid out the red carpet for this guy to make his move somewhere else.”

My mouth fell open. I could not believe Milo was taking the blame. “Milo . . . it wasn’t
your
fault.
I
was the one who told you to look at mailmen, not specifically the post office. If I’d just said
watch the post office
you would have, and
I
could have prevented this. It’s not your fault; it’s mine.”

Now it was Milo’s turn to look astonished. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“No, I’m dead serious. I mean, what good is it to have me work on this case with you if all I do is point you in the wrong direction? I should have figured it out. I should have covered all the bases, and I fell short. Here you were counting on me to help you, and I blew it, and now this woman is dead.” Tears had welled up in my eyes, and try as I might I couldn’t prevent them from pooling over to make tracks down my face.

Milo looked at me with such compassion that it only made me feel worse, and I swallowed hard to hold down the sob that wanted to burst from my throat. Finally he said gently, “Abby,
you
were the one who told me I had the wrong guy in custody.
You
were the one who mentioned a connection with the post office.
You
were the one who came up with a tire iron and a ski mask, and thanks to you, Abigail Cooper, we now have a lot more to go on. There is no way you hindered this investigation, and the truth is quite the contrary: You’ve been a true help from day one.”

His words were my undoing. I was fragile enough, exhausted, stressed out, and vulnerable, not to mention shit-faced, and I couldn’t help it: I buried my head in my hands and sobbed like a little girl. I felt Milo sit down on the edge of my chair and wrap an arm across my shoulders as he patted me on the back and whispered in my ear that everything was going to be okay.

Finally I’d collected myself enough to sit back, and Milo handed me a tissue from the Kleenex box on my coffee table. “Here,” he said gently.

I took the tissue and wiped my eyes, sniffing loudly, and mouthed
Thanks
to him.

“So that’s why you didn’t return my calls? All this time you felt guilty?”

I nodded as I blew my nose and reached for another tissue.

Milo chuckled and said, “And I thought you were angry at me, and that’s why you didn’t call me back.”

“Why would I be angry at you?” I asked, surprised by that declaration.

“Because I didn’t listen to you. Because I was so sure we had the right guy in custody.”

“You still holding him?” I asked, curious about what they would do with Jeff Zimmer.

“No, we reduced the charges and let him go on bond.”

“Reduced the charges?”

“Peeping Tom is an illegal activity.”

“Oh . . . the photos,” I said, remembering the pictures he’d taken of Cathy without her knowledge.

“Yeah. Cathy’s boyfriend has already moved all of their belongings to another side of town, so Cathy won’t have to live next door to Zimmer when she gets out of the hospital.”

“Good for them.”

“We also found Karen Millstone’s car—remember I asked if you could tune in on that for us in one of the messages I left you?”

“Yeah,” I said ducking my head. Milo had pleaded with me to come into the station and help find Karen’s car. The police suspected the rapist might have stolen it, and if I could get a bead on its location, then maybe they’d have an idea where this guy lived.

“It wasn’t stolen after all, but was parked in your parking structure, about four floors up.”

“You mean the one across the street from my office?”

I asked, a little alarmed that death had come so close to where I worked.

“Yeah. We found some shopping bags in the car from a couple of the boutiques down the street, and we think she parked her car in the structure because it’s centrally located between the local shops and the post office.”

I thought about that for a minute. The post office was right next door to the parking garage, but it had a parking lot of its own, which explained why, when detectives first searched the post office’s parking lot, her car wasn’t found. Still, it creeped me out that the killer had been less than a block away. Had I seen him? Had I walked right past him on the street as he went on his way to kill Karen Millstone? I shivered involuntarily as the thought gave me goose bumps.

“We think she was attacked shortly after she came out of the post office. We found a few letters from her PO box in her purse, so we know she was killed after she left the building. Surveillance cameras in the lobby of the post office show her entering at around eight thirty, and leaving about three minutes later.”

“Wasn’t the post office closed at that time of night?”

“Yes, but if you have a post office box you can access it anytime; there’s a small section of the lobby that’s always open.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking as my radar began buzzing, but at the moment I was in no mood to answer the call.

“So you going to come back and help me solve this case?” Milo asked after a moment.

I stared at the tissue wadded up in my hand. Tonight I just couldn’t say yes. “I don’t know, Milo. I think I just need a little time to come to grips with all this, and maybe in a few days I’ll feel okay enough to help, but right now I’m just tired and I need a break, you know?”

There was a mixture of disappointment and compassion on Milo’s face as he squeezed my shoulder. “Sure thing. That’s fine,” he said as he got up and carried his empty beer bottle and my nearly empty glass of wine to the sink. He came back and extended his hand, helping me up out of the chair. “It’s time for me to head on home. I haven’t seen much of my wife lately, and I’m starting to miss her, if you catch my drift. . . .”

I smiled at the way he made his eyebrows dance at the “catch my drift” part and I walked him to the door. “Thanks for coming over.”

He paused before opening the door and said, “You know, it’s not up to you to always get it right. Sometimes you’re supposed to understand it only so far, and because the message comes to you doesn’t mean that it’s your sole responsibility to figure it out. Okay?”

His words were like a balm on an open and ugly wound, and I squeezed his arm as he walked through the door, thanking my guides for sending him here tonight.

After locking up I went upstairs to bed with Eggy in tow and slept straight through for the first time in days.

The next day was spent mostly in bed. I’d purchased a space heater for my bedroom, which helped considerably with the temperature, and Eggy and I did nothing all day but lounge. I snacked on potato chips and homemade guacamole, watched three movies back-to-back, ordered a delivery of my usual from Pi’s and never got out of my jammies.

At six I called my sister, whom I hadn’t heard from since just before her party on Sunday, to see how the grand event had gone. I got her voice mail and left a message, expecting to get a call back within an hour.

By nine o’clock, however, I still hadn’t heard from her, so I dialed again and got voice mail a second time. This was odd, because even if Cat wasn’t home there was usually a nanny or housekeeper who picked up the phone. Weird.

At ten, exhausted by a full day of doing nothing, I turned out the light and went to sleep, thinking that I’d track Cat down at her office when I woke up the next morning.

 

The phone rang at eight thirty. I’d been awake for about half an hour, but it still pissed me off that someone would call that early. “Hello,” I said into the receiver with all the warmth of an Antarctic winter.

“Miss Cooper?” a gravelly voice said, my last name obscured by a thick accent.

It took me a moment to find my voice. I was surprised that Andros Kapordelis would have the nerve to call me at home, and wondered how he’d come across my unlisted number. “How did you get this number?”

“I have my ways,” he answered elusively. “I have something that I require your talents for. I will send a car this afternoon to get you and bring you to my office. . . .”

“Absolutely not!” I spat, my voice hard as steel. “Listen, Kapordelis, there is no way in hell I’m going to work for you. See, that’s the great thing about being self-employed; I can pick and choose who I will read for and who I won’t, and just so you know, for future reference, clients who kidnap me and have their goons assault me are not among the privileged who are allowed reentry onto my client list! We clear?” My heart was hammering in my chest, and I had to admit my palms had gone sweaty. Would this guy take no for an answer?

There was a pause on the other end of the line, and for some reason this only made my heart beat faster. Finally Kapordelis spoke, but his voice was considerably softer, more menacing and definitely more frightening. “It is not good to turn me down, Miss Cooper. You should reconsider.”

I gulped, but somehow managed to stick to my guns “Listen, Mr. Kapordelis, I’ve refunded your money—with
considerable
interest—and I have humored you by not filing criminal charges for the kidnapping-and-assault thing, and now all I want from you is to be left alone. I will not willingly cooperate with you because you strike me as a violent man. I abhor violence, and I abhor men who condone it. My gift is not a plaything to be used and abused by you at your whim; it is mine to administer to people I willingly choose. There is no way you’re going to talk me into working for you, no amount of money you could offer me. Now you may send your goon after me again, but I swear to you, Mr. Kapordelis, if you do you will still not get what you want from me. Pain blocks my intuition, and the more you exert, the more I shut down, so that won’t work either.”

“There are other ways of persuasion, Miss Cooper. I can see that you have not considered them yet. Perhaps I will demonstrate a few of them for you and see if you change your mind in a few days.”

Before I could say anything more Kapordelis hung up with an ominous click. What other ways of persuasion was he talking about? There were goose bumps all up and down my arms as I set the cordless back in its cradle. I stared at the phone for several minutes as I pondered his cryptic last words. I was really going to have to watch my step for the next few days. It dawned on me just how precarious my situation was as I went into the kitchen to toast my bagel. This guy could hurt me, or even kill me. But there was no way in hell I was going to willingly work for him. It just went against everything I’d become.

When I was in the fourth grade I hung out with a bunch of older kids—mostly fifth-grade troublemakers, who allowed me to hang with them because I always took the blame when we got caught doing some nefarious act. After pulling one particularly nasty prank involving a classmate on crutches and my teacher’s pet hamster, I was sent to the principal’s office. My principal, Mr. Trombly, was a big bear of a man with bushy salt-and-pepper hair, shaggy eyebrows and a soft spot for malcontents like me.

I remember walking into his office and stoically taking my seat, setting my face defiantly and meeting his stare. We looked at each other across his large wooden desk for a long time, each refusing to blink. Finally with a heavy sigh he leaned back in his chair and picked up the report from my teacher with the laundry list of my latest transgressions. He shook his head in a tsk-tsk motion, and eyed me wisely.