Kansas City Secrets (3 page)

Verifying for a second time that every room of the house was empty, Rosemary returned to the kitchen to brew a pot of green tea and fill a glass of ice to pour it over.

Her hands were shaking too hard to hold on to the frosty glass by the time she'd curled up on the library sofa with the dogs at her feet and the lights blazing. She should turn on the TV, read a book, sort through another box of papers and family mementos that had become her summer project, or get ready for bed and pretend she had any shot at sleeping now.

Rosemary deliberated each option for several moments before springing to her feet and circling around behind the large walnut desk that had been her father's. She opened the bottom drawer and pushed aside a box of photographs to unlock her father's old Army pistol from its metal box. It had been years since he'd taken her and Stephen target shooting out at a cousin's farm in the country, so she couldn't even be sure the thing still worked, much less remember exactly how to clean and load it. Still, it offered some measure of protection besides Duchess and Trixie. She pulled out the gun, magazine and a box of bullets and set them on top of the desk.

Then, even if they thought she was some sad, lonely spinster desperate for attention, she took a long swallow of her iced tea, picked up the phone and called KCPD to report the latest threat.

Chapter Two

Detective Max Krolikowski was a soldier by training. He was mission oriented. Dinkin' around on a wild-goose chase to see if some woman had talked to some guy about a crime that had occurred ages ago, just in case somebody somewhere could shed some new light on the unsolved case he and his partner from KCPD's Cold Case Squad were investigating, was not his idea of a good time.

Especially not today.

Max stepped on the accelerator of his '72 Chevy Chevelle, fisting his hand around the steering wheel in an effort to squeeze out the images of bits and pieces of fallen comrades in a remote desert village. He fought off the more troubling memory of prying a pistol out of a good man's dead hand.

He should be in a bar someplace getting drunk, or at Mount Washington Cemetery, allowing himself to weep over the grave of Army Captain James Stecher. Max and his team had rescued Jimmy from the insurgents' camp where he and two other NCOs been held hostage and tortured for seven days, but a part of Jimmy had never truly made it home. Eight years ago today, he'd put his gun in his mouth and ended the nightmares and survivor's guilt that had haunted him since their homecoming.

Max had found the body, left the Army and gone back to school to become a cop all within a year. Getting bad guys off the streets went a ways toward making his world right again. Following up on some remote, random possibility of a lead on the anniversary of Jimmy's senseless suicide did not.

“Whoa, brother.” The voice of his partner, Trent Dixon, sitting in the passenger seat across from him, thankfully interrupted his dark thoughts. “We're not on a high-speed chase here. Slow it down before some uniform pulls us over.”

Max rolled his eyes behind his wraparound sunglasses but lifted his foot. A little. He snickered around the unlit cigar clenched between his teeth. “Tell me again why we're drivin' out to visit this whack job Rosie March? She's hardly a reliable witness. Murder suspects generally aren't.”

Tall, Dark and Hard to Rile chuckled. “Because her brother—a convicted killer with motive for killing Richard Bratcher—is our best lead to solving Bratcher's murder, and he's not talking to us. But he is talking to his sister. At least, she's the only person who visits him regularly. Maybe we can get her to tell us what he knows. Besides, you know one of the best ways to investigate a cold case like this one is to reinterview anyone associated with the original investigation. Rosemary March had motive for wanting her abusive boyfriend dead and has no alibi for the time of the murder. She'd be any smart detective's first call on this investigation. It's called doing our job.”

Max shook his head at the annoyingly sensible explanation. “I had to ask.”

Trent laughed outright. “Maybe you'd better let me do the talking when we get to the March house. Somehow, I doubt that calling her a
whack job
will encourage her to share any inside information she or her brother might have on our case.”

“I get it. I'm the eyes and the muscle, and you're the pretty boy front man.” Max plucked the cigar from his lips as he pulled off the highway on the eastern edge of Kansas City. “I'm not in the mood to make nice with some shriveled old prune of a woman, anyway.”

“Rosemary March is thirty-three years old. We've got her driver's license photo in our records, and it looks as normal as any DMV pic can. What logic are you basing this I'd-rather-date-my-sister description on?”

Max could quote the file on their person of interest, too. “Over the years she's called in as many false alarms to 9-1-1 as she has legit actionable offenses, which makes her a flake in my book. Trespassing. Vandalism. Harassing phone calls. Either she's got a thing for cops, she has some kind of paranoia complex or it's the only way she can get any attention. Whatever her deal is, I'm not in the mood to play games today.”

“Some of those calls were legit,” Trent pointed out. “What about the abusive fiancé?”

“Our murder victim?”

“Yeah. Those complaints against Bratcher were substantiated. Even though someone scrubbed the photos and domestic violence complaints from his file after his death, the medical reports of Miss March's broken arm, bruises and other injuries were included as part of the initial murder investigation.”

“But the woman's never married. She's only had the one boyfriend we can verify.” Okay, so a fiancé who'd hurt her qualified as low-life devil scum, not boyfriend, in his book. But Rosemary March had money. A lot of it. Even if she had three warts on the end of her nose and looked like a gorilla, there should be a dozen men hitting on her. She should be on the social register donating to charities. She should be traveling the world or building a mansion or driving a luxury car or doing something that would make her show up on somebody's radar in Kansas City. “The woman's practically a recluse. She has her groceries delivered. She's got a teaching degree, but hasn't worked in a school since that plane wreck her parents were in. She's probably a hoarder. Her idea of a social outing is visiting her brother in prison. If that doesn't smack of crazy cat lady, I don't know what does.”

“It's a wonder you've never been able to keep a woman.”

Max forced a laugh, although the sound fell flat on his eardrums. Somehow, subjecting a good woman to his mood swings and bullheaded indifference to most social graces didn't seem very fair. But there were times, like today, when he regretted not having the sweet smells of a woman and the soft warmth of a welcoming body to lose himself in. Looked as though another long run or hour of lifting weights in the gym tonight would be his only escape from the sorrows of the day. “I make no claims on being a catch.”

“Good, 'cause you'd lose that bet.”

He wasn't the only cop in this car with relationship issues. “Give it a rest, junior. I don't see you asking me to stand up as best man anytime soon. When are you going to quit making goo-goo eyes at Katie Rinaldi and ask her out?”

“There's her son to consider. There's too much history between us.” Trent muttered one of Max's favorite curses. “It's complicated.”

“Women usually are.”

This time, the laughter between them was genuine.

When Max and Trent both got assigned to the Cold Case Squad, their superior officer must have paired the two of them together as some kind of yin and yang thing—blond, brunette; older, younger; a veteran of a hard knocks life and an optimistic young man who'd grown up in a suburban neighborhood much like this one, with a mom and a dad and 2.5 siblings or whatever the average was these days; an enlisted soldier who'd gone into the Army right out of high school and a football-scholarship winner who'd graduated cum laude and skipped a career in the pros because of one concussion too many. Max and Trent were a textbook example of the good cop/bad cop metaphor.

And no one had ever asked Max to play the good-cop role.

But their strengths balanced each other. He had survival instincts honed on the field of battle and in the dark shadows of city streets. He was one of the few detectives in KCPD with marksman status who wasn't on a SWAT team. And if it was mechanical, he could probably get it started or keep it running with little more than the toolbox in his trunk. As for their weaknesses? Hell, Detective Goody Two-shoes over there probably didn't have any weakness. Trent wasn't just an athlete. He was book smart. Patient. Always two or three steps ahead of anybody else in the room. He was the only cop in the department who'd ever taken Max down in hand-to-hand combat training—and that was because of some brainiac trick he'd used against him. And he was one of the few people left on the planet Max trusted without question. Trent Dixon reminded Max of a certain captain he'd served under during his Army stint in the Middle East. He would have followed Jimmy Stecher to the ends of the earth and back, and, in some ways, he had.

Only Jimmy had never made it back from that last door-to-door skirmish where he and the others had been taken prisoner. Not really. Oh, Max had led the rescue and they'd shipped home on the evac plane together after that last do-or-die firefight to get him out of that desert village. They'd been in Walter Reed hospital for a few weeks together, too. The two men he'd been captured with had been shot to death in front of him. Jimmy hadn't cracked and revealed troop positions or battle strategies, and he'd never let them film him reading their latest manifesto to use him as propaganda. But part of Jimmy had died inside on that nightmarish campaign—the part that could survive in the real, normal world. And Max should have seen it coming. He'd been responsible for retrieving their dead and getting their commander out of there. But he hadn't saved Jimmy. Not really. He hadn't realized there was one more soldier who'd still needed him.

He'd failed his mission. His friend was dead.

Despite the bright summer sunshine burning through the windshield of his classic car, Max felt the darkness creeping into his thoughts. The image of what a bullet to the brain could do to a man's head was tattooed on his memories as surely as the ink marking his left shoulder. He'd known today would be a tough one—the anniversary of Jimmy's suicide.

Trent knew it, too.

“Stay with me, brother.” His partner's deeply pitched voice echoed through the car, drawing Max out of his annual funk. “Not everybody's the enemy today. I need you focused on this interview.”

Max nodded, slamming the door on his ugly past. He rolled the unlit cigar between his fingers and chomped down on it again. “This is busywork, and you know it.” Probably why Trent had volunteered the two of them to make this trip to the suburbs instead of sitting in the precinct office reading through files with the other detectives on the team. Max didn't blame him. Teaming with him, especially on days like this, was probably a pretty thankless job. He should be glad Trent was looking out for him. He
was
glad. Still didn't make this trip to the March house any less of a wild-goose chase when he was more in the mood to do something concrete like make an arrest or run down a perp. “Rosemary March isn't about to confess or tell us anything her brother said. If she knows something about Bratcher's murder, she's kept quiet for six years. Don't know why she'd start gettin' chatty about it now.”

Trent relaxed back in his seat, maybe assured that Max was with him in the here and now. “I think she's worth checking out. Other than her brother's attorney, she's the only person who visits Stephen March down in Jeff City. If he's going to confide anything to anyone, it'll be to his sister.”

“What's he gonna confide that'll do our case any good?” Max stepped on the accelerator to zip through a yellow light and turn into the suburban neighborhood. Hearing the engine hum with the power he relished beneath the hood, he pulled off his sunglasses and rubbed the dashboard. “That's my girl.”

“I swear you talk sweeter to this car than any woman I've ever seen you with,” Trent teased. “But seriously, we aren't running a race.”

“Beats pokin' along in your pickup truck.”

Besides, today of all days, he needed to be driving the Chevelle. The car had been a junker when Jimmy had bequeathed it to him. Now it was a testament to his lost commander, a link to the past, a reminder of the better man Max should have been. Restoring this car that had once belonged to Jimmy wasn't just a hobby. It was therapy for the long, lonely nights and empty days when the job and a couple of beers weren't enough to keep the memories at bay. Or when he just needed some time to think.

Right now, though, he needed to stop
thinking
and get on with the job at hand.

Max put the sunglasses back on his face and cruised another block before plucking the cigar from his lips. “Just because the team is working on some theory that this cold-case murder is related to the death of the reporter Stephen March killed, it doesn't mean they are. We've got no facts to back up the idea that March had anything to do with Bratcher's death. March used a gun. Bratcher was poisoned. March's victim was doing a story on Leland Asher and his criminal organization, and there's no evidence that Richard Bratcher was connected to Asher or the reporter. And Stephen March sure isn't part of any organized crime setup. If Liv and Lieutenant Rafferty-Taylor want to connect the two murders, I think we ought to be digging into Asher and his cronies. The mob could have any number of reasons to want to eliminate a lawyer.”

“But poison?” Trent shrugged his massive shoulders. “That hardly sounds like a mob-style hit to me.”

“What if Asher hired a hit
lady
? Women are more likely to kill someone using poison than a man is. And dead is dead.” Max tapped his fingers with the cigar on the console between them to emphasize his point. “Facts make a case. We should be investigating any women associated with Asher and his business dealings.”

But Trent was big enough and stubborn enough not to be intimidated by Max's grousing. “Even if she turns out to be a
shriveled old prune
, Rosemary March is a woman. Therefore, she meets your criteria as a potential suspect. Doesn't sound like such a wild-goose chase now, does it?”

Growling a curse at Trent's dead-on, smart-aleck logic, Max stuffed the cigar back between his teeth. It was a habit he'd picked up during his stint in the Army before college and joining the police force. And though the docs at Walter Reed had convinced him to quit lighting up so his body could heal and he could stay in fighting shape, it was a tension-relieving habit he had no intention of denying himself. Especially on stressful days like this one.

Feeling a touch of the melancholy rage that sometimes fueled his moods, Max shut down the memories that tried to creep in and nudged the accelerator to zip through another yellow light.

“You know...” Trent started, “you take better care of this car than you do yourself. Maybe you ought to rethink your priorities.”