MULTIPLE MOTIVES (The Kate Huntington mystery series Book 1) (36 page)

By seven, the setting sun was behind the building, casting the back parking lot in shadow. Now the light in Kate’s window made it obvious hers was the only occupied office on the back of the building.

They had decided to keep the trap set until nine, a likely time that Kate might call it a night.

By eight-forty, nothing had happened, and Kate was a nervous wreck. She dreaded the thought that they would have to go through all this again tomorrow night. But another part of her was starting to feel relieved. Maybe the perp wasn’t Cheryl after all.

Was that a noise out in the hall, or just her anxious imagination? She strained to hear in the silence of the deserted building.

Then she definitely heard several sounds at once–a scratching noise, a soft crack and distant rapid clicking.

Kate jumped out of her chair, barely catching the pistol as it started to tumble from her lap. She raced to the wall switch and doused the light. Then she stared at the door resting back against the office wall, on the
other
side of the doorway. No way was she crossing that open space to get to the door and close it.

Her cell phone began to vibrate, purring and dancing around on her desk.

A day late and a dollar short, guys!

A bubble of hysteria tried to escape from her throat. Her racing pulse made her ears ring.

She took a deep breath and backed away from the doorway, sliding her right shoulder along the wall to steady herself. She stretched her arms out in front of her as she had been taught, grasping the gun in both hands.

A figure stepped into the doorway, silhouetted against the light from the outer office. A distended belly hung across the threshold.

Her heart sank. She held her breath.

A roar and a flash of bright light. The back of her desk chair disintegrated.

She gasped.

The figure turned toward her. A low voice growled, “Got ya now, bitch!”

Kate clenched her jaw. She squeezed the trigger.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

She sagged against the wall, trembling fingers fumbling for the light switch. Her gaze focused on the ghostly pale face of the woman she had just shot.

The ghost, still standing, looked down at the floor. “Frank, what the
hell
have you done?”

Kate shook her head, her mind stalled. She followed Cheryl’s line of vision to a man lying in the doorway. Blood was spreading across the T-shirt stretched over his beer belly.

Relief washed through her. She caught movement in her peripheral vision. “Don’t shoot!” She yanked Cheryl out of the doorway.

Rose and Mac converged on them, guns aimed at the man on the floor. Ignoring the blood, Rose cuffed the man’s wrists together. Footsteps pounded up the stairs.

“Is he dead?” Cheryl asked in a tone that said she wasn’t quite sure how she’d feel about the answer either way.

“No,” Mac growled.

The bodyguards swarmed into the outer office. At the sight of Rose and Mac standing over a bleeding, handcuffed man, they raised their gun barrels toward the ceiling.

“Somebody call Rob and Liz,” Kate said. Skip was already talking into his cell phone. She heard a trio of relieved shouts from ten feet away.

Cheryl looked again at her husband. She shook her head. “He called and said he was gonna take care of those, quote, ‘people who were keepin’ us apart.’ Then he hung up. I remembered you were working late, and I got a
real bad
feeling.” She tilted her head toward the empty reception desk. “I called but just got voicemail, so I hightailed it over here to warn you.”

Her voice became child-like. “I was so scared he’d hurt you.”

Kate wrapped her arms around her trembling client and whispered in her ear, “It’s okay, honey. We’re both safe now. He’s never going to hurt either one of us again.”

Mac had stepped around them to lean over and pick up the .32 lying on the floor.

Rose’s quiet but firm voice stopped him. “Mac, don’t touch that gun. Legal or not, it’s evidence.”

~~~~~~~~

Rob, Liz and Dan arrived a few minutes after the back-up officers and the ambulance Rose had called for. She was handcuffing the prisoner’s wrist to the side bar of the paramedics’ gurney, when Lieutenant Cody threaded his way through the now crowded room.

Rob took him aside and pointed out that the two women he needed to question were both pregnant and had just been through a harrowing experience. “I’m sure you don’t want to be responsible for adding to their stress level right now.”

The lieutenant got the hint. He took a short statement from Kate and Cheryl, then told Rob to bring them to the police station the next morning.

Detective Phillips arrived as Rob was asking Ben to escort Cheryl home. This time Rob was more direct. “Keep that man away from us, Lieutenant, or I
will
be filing a lawsuit against the police department tomorrow morning for harassment and dereliction of duty.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

A good part of Friday was spent at the police station, being interviewed and then asked to wait while one of the others was questioned. Then everyone was interviewed again.

Lieutenant Cody conducted most of the interviews. Phillips was nowhere to be seen, much to Kate’s relief. The lieutenant wanted them to start at the beginning with the hit-and-run.

Finally, their statements were being typed up to be signed.

At the end of her shift on Saturday, Rose stopped by the house. Kate called Mac and asked him to bring something over from the restaurant for their dinner. While feasting on spinach pie and Maryland crab soup, Rose filled them in.

The judge had denied Crofton bail, and he had been transferred to the county jail’s infirmary that morning. Rose, as the arresting officer, was being allowed to be present during the interrogations. No one had ever caught on that she had failed to report everything to her commanding officer.

Crofton had been assigned a public defender, who was trying to keep him from talking. But the physical evidence the police had gathered–both from the truck he had borrowed from a friend and from the motel room where he’d been holed up–was damning.

Rose rattled off the list. Threads caught in a bolt on the truck’s bumper matched the skirt Liz had been wearing when she was hit. A shotgun, syringes, and an almost empty bottle of animal tranquilizer were found in his room. The tool box in the back of the truck had contained a stun gun and a baseball bat with dried blood on it–Mary’s blood type.

A few of Crofton’s hairs were on the backpack in the Franklins’ backyard. The bomb in the backpack was the same type used in Ed’s murder, which unfortunately was the only link with that crime. However, the State’s Attorney was planning to charge Crofton with first-degree murder anyway. The bombing fit the rest of the pattern.

“No jury’s likely to believe that two murderers were stalking you at the same time, Kate,” Rose said.

“Humph. They knew how annoyin’ she can be, they might,” Mac teased.

Kate shot him a mock glare. “The lesson here is never underestimate wimps. Apparently when he no longer had Cheryl as a punching bag, his anger built up enough to give him the gumption to come after us. He probably figured that, without our support, Cheryl would go back to him.”

Her heart thumped in her chest as she braced herself for the next topic of conversation. “Dad, Mac, I’ve got some news.” She took a deep breath. “I, uh, I’m pregnant.”

The two men sat in stunned silence. The range of emotions crossing her father’s face would have been comical if Kate hadn’t been so afraid that anger would win out.

Finally he stood up and lumbered around the table. He pulled her out of her chair and engulfed her in a big hug. Mac let out a whoop so loud it rattled the windows.

The smile on Rose’s face actually stuck around for more than a few seconds.

~~~~~~~~

At twelve-thirty on Wednesday, Kate was sitting in Mac’s Place, waiting for Rob. At Liz’s insistence, he was only working half days while his body continued to recuperate from his ordeal. But Kate was concerned about how well his mind was healing.

He arrived and lowered himself carefully onto the bench across from her in the booth. “How you doing, Kate?”

“Pretty good, all things considered. How about yourself? And how’s Liz?”

“She’s good. Oh, this is for you.” He handed her a slip of paper. “She took the liberty of rescheduling your doctor’s appointment to next Wednesday.”

“Wow. She got me in again that soon?”

“Yeah, they were resistant but she pointed out that kidnappings and attempted murder were damned good reasons for broken doctor’s appointments.”

“Well, thank her for me, and I will definitely keep this one.”

He gave her a worried look. “So how are you really doing, Kate?”

She studied his drawn face, the dark circles under his eyes. He’d given her the opening she needed, but she would answer his question first, before turning the tables on him. “I know I should be angry, and I’m sure that feeling will surface eventually. But right now I’m mostly relieved, and also… I’m not even sure what to call it. It just sickens me that my work brought about Eddie’s death.”

Tears pooled in her eyes. She opted to ignore them. “I had a long talk with Sally Monday. I told her I wasn’t willing to take any more domestic violence cases for awhile. And maybe never again.”

As one of the pools broke loose, Rob dug out his handkerchief and handed it to her. Dabbing at her eyes, she managed a weak smile. “I think I have a whole washer load of these now.”

He gave her a small smile back. “Is Sally going along with that?”

“Well, she’s not happy about it. We decided that I wouldn’t take on
any
new cases for now, since I’ll be taking maternity leave in a few months. And I’m only going to work part time after the baby’s born.”

“Can you afford that?”

“Well, actually yes. It turns out Eddie and Paul Richardson took out partners’ life insurance policies a few years ago. The insurance company sweetened the deal with a good price on personal policies, for a million dollars each.”

Rob’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t know about it?”

“No, and we’ll never know now why Eddie didn’t tell me. Although it fits with his personality, to quietly take care of things behind the scenes, without a fuss.” Tears were leaking out of her eyes again.

“Yeah, that would be like him,” Rob said in a soft voice, his own eyes shiny.

She wiped her cheeks with his handkerchief.

Rob sat back and let out a low whistle. “So you’re a rich woman now. Damn, it’s a good thing Phillips
is
so lazy. If he’d found out about that policy, he would’ve arrested you for sure.”

“Paul didn’t like the detective’s attitude, so he neglected to mention the insurance policy. That’s why he held off telling me about it as well, hoping the case would be solved quickly. He figured if it came out later, he’d just pretend it had slipped his mind.”

The waitress appeared beside their booth. “Sorry about the wait, folks. What’ll it be?” They ordered their usual crab cake sandwiches, with salad and fries respectively.

“So, how about yourself? How are
you
doing
really
?” Kate was watching his eyes. For a brief moment she had her answer, before the emotional shutters began to close. “Don’t bother with the macho cover-up, bub.” She pointed her thumb at her chest. “Closest friend here, who also happens to be a shrink.”

He gave her a small grin, then his expression sobered. “Honestly, I haven’t been sleeping all that well.”

“Nightmares?”

“Yeah, almost every night. And the stuff I dream about, it doesn’t make sense.”

Before Kate could respond, he went on. “While I was there, in that basement…” He looked away. “I thought it was Cheryl who’d kidnapped me.” He stared at the condiments at the end of the table.

“I felt… I don’t even know what to call it. I think I felt some of what a woman would feel who’s been kidnapped by a rapist. Maybe not as physically vulnerable. But the thought of her watching me through that peephole and coming in when I was passed out, it really….” Rob shuddered slightly as his voice trailed off.

Kate had never felt the feeling he was trying to name, but she’d heard it described all too often by her clients. There was no good word for it–that sense of being stripped bare, figuratively if not literally, and at the mercy of someone who sees you as an object to be used rather than another human being.

She wanted to tell him how normal it was that he’d felt that way, under the circumstances. But she caught herself. There were things a therapist could say that a friend, especially a female friend, could not. If he knew just how well she understood that dehumanizing feeling, he might never be able to look her in the eyes again.

He was staring down at the table. “It really creeped me out, for lack of a better way of putting it.”

Then he looked up and his voice took on a frustrated edge. “But that wasn’t what really happened. Her son-of-a-bitch husband was the kidnapper. Yet the stuff I’m dreaming, it’s as if it had been Cheryl. That’s totally crazy, isn’t it?”

“Not at all.” Kate reached for his hand resting on the table. “Emotions aren’t always logical. You felt some intense feelings during a scary experience. The fact that some of your perceptions of that experience turned out to be inaccurate later, when you had more information, well, that’s pretty much irrelevant to your emotions. It was what you experienced at the time, and the stress of that trauma is causing the nightmares.”

Rob looked at her in disbelief. “Are you telling me I have PTSD?”

“Yes, and I’d be surprised if you didn’t have at least some post-traumatic stress symptoms. You were kidnapped, and your life was in danger!”

His expression was now an odd mixture of relief, anxiety and embarrassment.

She squeezed his hand. “Rob, the definition of trauma is something so overwhelming that we can’t process it emotionally at the time it happens. Even the strongest people may struggle with processing those emotions later. Indeed, stronger people are
more
likely to push aside their feelings so they can act to get themselves out of the bad situation. Which is exactly what you did. But those feelings don’t just go away, not until we let ourselves feel them, so we can get them out of our systems. And telling ourselves it’s over or that we shouldn’t feel that way doesn’t work.”