Kansas City Secrets (7 page)

But Rosemary slung her purse over her shoulder and urged him back to his chair. “I can call a taxi. I know you have work to do.” Besides, she'd already spent most of the patience and socializing she had in her today and needed some time alone to decide how best to manage—or avoid—all this attention suddenly being thrust upon her. She needed to set her emotional armor back into place. “But thank you. And thanks for running interference with Charleen.”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “My pleasure. If you say you didn't kill Richard, then I believe you. And I'll defend your innocence until my dying breath.” He tugged her closer and Rosemary put a hand on his stomach to keep him from completing the embrace. Still, he lowered his head to rest his forehead against hers. “Even if you did kill that bastard brother of mine in self-defense or because he deserved it, I'll defend your innocence.”

Um, thank you? Her chest tightened at his declaration of support that sounded vaguely as if it wasn't real support at all. Before he could dip his lips to hers, Rosemary pushed away. “I didn't kill Richard.”

“Of course not.” Why didn't that throwaway remark sound as convincing as it might have even an hour earlier? When Howard circled back to his chair, Rosemary hurried to the door. “I'll talk to you soon.”

Not too soon, she hoped. But she kept the thought to herself and closed the office door behind her.

* * *

A
FTER
 
A
 
WALK
 
with the dogs to maintain their training and give them exercise, several laps in the pool to work her vexation with Howard out of her system, and chicken from her back patio grill for dinner to fill her stomach, Rosemary settled down in the library with a glass of wine to attack another box of family papers and photographs.

Sorting through items from her and Stephen's past, as well as those things that had belonged to her parents, served several purposes. From the most practical—the long-term project gave her something meaningful to do with her time since the suspicion of murder had made it practically impossible to find a teaching job at any certified school. The settlement gave her plenty to live on, but she was a grown woman with two college degrees and a fertile brain. If she couldn't occupy her thoughts and work toward goals, she'd go mad. One of those goals was to possibly sell this place, or at least clear out enough space so she could significantly remodel the interior. There were a lot of good memories here. But there were a lot of bad ones, too. And while the familiarity of her childhood home made it a little easier to cope with the grief, panic and uncertainty of these past few years, there were days like this one when the same-old, same-old felt more like a prison where she was destined to live out her days as the neighborhood pariah—the woman who'd benefited from her parents' deaths, the woman who'd gotten away with murder.

Instead of letting the loneliness and fear take hold, Rosemary plunged into the never-ending—sometimes sentimental, sometimes sad—task of sorting papers, mementoes and heirlooms into piles of things to treasure, items to store or sell and things to throw away.

And so, with the drawn shades and night outside her windows closing her into solitude, Rosemary sat on the thick braided rug in the middle of the library floor, with piles of letters and photographs spread out around her. Duchess stretched out on the cool wood at the edge of the rug while Trixie claimed the couch.

Humming along with the Aaron Copland ballet music playing softly in the background, Rosemary smiled at an image of her father in his Army pilot's uniform, taken a few years before her birth. He'd had that freckled, youthful look for as long as she'd known him, even when his hair had started to gray. Not that the silver strands were that noticeable with his hair cropped so closely to his head. He used to joke that it was time for a trip to the barber if a strand of hair so much as tickled his ear.

Memories of her father drifted to another man with the same broad shoulders and buzz cut. Max Krolikowski was taller than her dad, thick chested and muscular instead of lean and lanky, more tawny haired than strawberry blond. And he certainly lacked that boyish smile. But she could picture the gruff detective dressed in a similar uniform. She could picture him in a gritty, action-packed war movie. What was she thinking? There was nothing fake about Max Krolikowski. She could picture him marching across an asphalt tarmac, boarding a troop transport like the one her father had flown, heading off to fight in a real war.

Rosemary's blood rushed a warning signal to her brain. She shouldn't be picturing the surly detective at all.

With a guilty start, she tucked the tiny snapshot back into the envelope with the letter to her mother. Max Krolikowski was nothing like the quiet gentleman Colonel Stephen March had been. Why couldn't she let her fascination with that rude excuse for a cop go?

Focusing on happier times, she retied the ribbon around the bundle of letters her mother had kept from the correspondence she and her father had traded when he'd been away on his first post after graduating college on his ROTC scholarship. Remembering the love her parents had shared chased away her troublesome thoughts, and Rosemary rose up on her knees to reverently place the love letters in a box marked
Keep
.

She hiked up the wrinkled hem of her dress to crawl over to the box she was sorting and pull out another stack of bound envelopes. But as she sank back onto the rug, her smile faded. “What are these doing here?”

In the chaos surrounding Richard's ultimatums and his subsequent murder, she must have tossed these letters into the wrong box. They weren't correspondence between her mother and father, but a bundle of envelopes from Richard addressed to her.

With her neckline unbuttoned in deference to the summer humidity, despite the house's air-conditioning, Rosemary mindlessly rubbed her knuckles over her collarbone and the neat dots of puckered scar tissue there. Once, she'd thought it romantic that Richard had sent her notes and poems and pictures, just as her father had sent them to her mother. But now she was wondering why she'd ever kept the tangible reminders of her own foolishness. He hadn't even written the first letter until she'd mentioned how her parents had made such an effort to stay connected when they'd been apart. Now she could see it had all been part of his master plan to make her fall in love and accept his proposal. Weighed down by responsibility and sadness, desperate for someone caring and positive in her life, she must have been an easy mark for a smooth operator like Richard.

“Idiot,” she grumbled, reaching out to toss the entire stack into the trash can beside the desk. But then she realized that half of the envelopes hadn't even been opened. A check of the postmarks indicated he'd sent these in the weeks between her breaking off their engagement and filing a restraining order against him, courtesy of his older brother, and Richard's death.

Against her better judgment, she opened the first envelope and pulled out the familiar parchment with the letterhead from his father's law firm. Rosemary shook her head as she read his dramatic scrawl. “I'll end the affair with Charleen. I'll work on my weakness with other women. I love you. I still want to marry you.”

There was no apology for the arm he'd put into a cast or the cigarette burns that marred her skin. Not even an acknowledgment of the cruel coercion he'd used to force her to sign the prenup guaranteeing him a share of her settlement money. Just a blithe pronouncement of love. Funny, if she'd been thinking clearly back then, she'd have seen that all the sentences were “I” statements. Maybe if she'd picked up on those egocentric clues when they were first dating, she could have spared herself the mistake of giving her heart to the wrong man.

Rosemary returned the letter to its envelope and reached for her wineglass to wash away the taste of disgust with a crisp pinot grigio. The trash was too good for these reminders of that sick relationship, so she dropped it and the rest of his letters into a box and set it aside. This winter, she'd burn them with the first fire in the fireplace. She smiled as she raised the goblet to her lips to take a sip.

But a flicker of shadow in the window behind her reflected off the glass.

Her stomach clenched. Wine sloshed over her hand as she spun around. Nothing. Just the blinds swaying with the current of air blowing from the AC vent. She inhaled a deep breath, willing her heart rate to slow down.

Probably just the headlights of a car driving past.

But then Duchess lifted her head, growling a low warning in her throat. Trixie jumped to her feet and barked, startling Rosemary. “What is it?”

She set down the wineglass with a trembling hand, running a quick mental check. Doors locked. Windows locked. Alarm system armed. Lights on. Dogs at her—

Rosemary screamed at the explosion of shattering glass outside. Trixie sprang from the couch as Duchess leaped to her feet. Both dogs dashed to the front door. A man-size shadow darted past the blinds. Someone was on her front porch. Why didn't the alarm go off?

The dogs' frantic barking nearly drowned out the second explosion of smashing glass. The translucent light filtering through the blinds suddenly went dark and she realized someone out there was breaking the lights. Pounding on the porch railing and furniture outside.

Avoiding the door. Avoiding the windows. Avoiding doing any damage that would trigger a siren and flashing lights.

Shrinking away from the assault on her house, Rosie screamed again at the crunch of metal on metal. “Stop it.” She hugged her arms around her waist. “Stop it!”

But a crystal-clear moment of clarity fired through her brain, snapping her out of her chilled stupor. What if the intruder smashed through the door next and turned whatever weapon he was using on her dogs?

Or on her?

A wailing alarm couldn't help her then.

Rosemary lowered her hands into fists. “Duchess! Trixie!”

The barking paused for a second, then started up again, warning away the intruder at their door. Rosemary snatched her cell phone off the desk and ran into the hallway, grabbing their leashes off a foyer chair and joining the canine alarm. “I'm calling the police!” she shouted. “Get out of here! Now!”

Footsteps pounded across the slats of her porch and faded into silence. The man was running away. “Duchess, sit. Come here, Trix.”

As silence fell outside, Rosemary regained control of the dogs. Kneeling between them, she hooked them up to their leashes and pulled them back from the door. Did she dare unlock it to see what was going on? Trixie, especially, was ready to charge whatever danger was on the other side of that door, and Duchess's low-pitched growl indicated that no one here felt entirely safe. She almost wished it was a random act of vandalism or attempted burglary. But she'd dealt with too many threats these past few days to believe she was anything but the intended target. She transferred both leashes to her left hand and pulled out her cell, her thumb hovering above the 9 on her screen.

But was calling KCPD again really an option for her? Was there any cop out there willing to help a murder suspect?

Rosemary pocketed her phone and waited a good two minutes, until the growling subsided and she got Trixie to sit beside the bigger dog. That meant whoever had been on her porch was long gone. It was safe to open the door, right?

Ignoring the thumping pound of her heart inside her chest, Rosemary typed in the disarm code, unhooked the chain and dead bolt and twisted the doorknob. Still in her bare feet, she stayed inside the locked storm door to survey the damage. There was shattered glass everywhere. A broken table. The intruder had taken a bat or crowbar or some other heavy object to the lights on either side of her door, plunging her porch into darkness. But there was enough light shining out from the foyer to see the dented black metal mailbox hanging by a screw from the siding beside the door.

Once she was certain the intruder had left, she pulled the leashes taut and nudged open the storm door.

“Oh, my God.”

There was enough light to read the note hanging from the flap of her mailbox, too.

Murdering whore.

Justice will be done.

She swayed on her feet, shock making her light-headed for a moment. Her landline rang in the house behind her and she jerked in surprise, sending the dogs into another barking frenzy.

Avoiding the broken glass beneath bare feet and dog paws, she pulled Duchess and Trixie back into the house and locked the storm door. After the fourth ring, the machine in the kitchen picked up, and a man's garbled voice echoed like a creepy whisper throughout the house. “I can see you, Rosemary. I know you're alone. Those dogs can't protect you. I know you're afraid.”

The shiver that shook her body nearly robbed her of breath. She didn't remember slamming the front door or releasing the dogs or pulling her cell from the pocket of her dress.

But some shred of a memory stopped her from completing the 9-1-1 call.

KCPD had blown off her last report of a threat. She didn't need anyone patronizing her fears—she needed to feel safe. She wanted to prove to the police she wasn't lying—that she was the victim now, just as she'd been six years ago. With the dogs at her heels, Rosemary ran to the answering machine at the back of the house. But she had no intention of picking up the phone or even erasing that sick message. She had no intention of dealing with Dispatch and being put on hold or winding up as a footnote on some report.

Instead, she pulled the phone book from beneath the machine and looked up an address.

She knew where she could find at least one cop tonight.

Chapter Five

Max swallowed a drink of beer that had lost its chill and set the mug down on the rim of the pool table at the Shamrock Bar. He leaned over, blinking his bleary eyes and lining up the shot, tuning out the drone of conversations around the room and the jingle of the bell over the bar's front door. “Six in the corner pocket.”

He tapped the cue ball and grinned as the pink ball caromed off the rail and rolled into its target. Finally, something was going right today.

He'd circled to the end of the table to assess his best angle for dropping the seven ball before realizing the noise level of the thinning crowd had paused in a momentary hush. Even his opponent on the opposite side of the pool table seemed to have frozen for a split second in time.

“She's new.” Hudson Kramer, a young cop with a shiny new promotion and the subsequent pay hike burning a hole in his pocket, lay down his cue stick and combed his fingers through his hair as glasses clinked and conversations started up again. Was the game over? Hud's mouth widened with a lopsided grin as his eyes tracked movement behind Max. “Wonder if she's lost. Maybe she needs a friend to help her find her way.”

With Kramer's grumble of protest at having his shot at winning back the money he'd lost tonight interrupted, Max turned and saw the last person he'd ever expect to see in a bar. “I'll be damned.”

Rosemary March's copper-red hair was pulled back in a bun that wasn't anywhere as neat and tidy and screaming
old maid
as it had been this morning.
Fire and ice.
The unexpected metaphor buzzed through his head at the sight of several loose, wavy red strands bouncing against her pale cheeks and neck as she moved. The idea of her letting all that hair flow freely around her shoulders and tunneling his fingers into a handful of it hit him like a sucker punch to the gut. Max sat back on the edge of the table, propping his cue stick against the floor to hold himself upright as she approached.

He must have had too much to drink and was conjuring up hallucinations. He closed his eyes and muttered a curse, wondering why he wasn't conjuring up images of babes on swimsuit calendars instead of Miss Priss with the sharp tongue and crazy ideas.

He opened his eyes again. Nope. She was real. And she was excusing her way past a couple of tables and a cocktail waitress, heading straight toward him and the pool tables. She'd exchanged the dressy sandals for a pair of flip-flops, but she still wore that white, high-necked dress from this morning, looking as virginal and out of place in a bar at this hour as he'd felt at her house this morning. Didn't mean she didn't look all kinds of pretty to a half drunk, half horny bastard like him.

“Ah, hell,” he muttered again, wishing he'd said no to that last beer so he could control that little rush of misplaced excitement at realizing she'd come to see him.

“Detective Krolikowski?” She stopped a couple of feet in front of him, her fingers tightening around the strap of the purse she hugged in front of her. Mistaking his dumbfounded silence for a lack of recognition, she tilted those dove-gray eyes to his and introduced herself. “Rosemary March? We met this morning? I'm not armed, I promise.”

“I know who you are, Rosie. You here for a drink?” When the waitress slid between the redhead and the nearest table, Max automatically reached out. Rosie pried at his hand when he tugged on the strap of her purse to pull her out of the other woman's path. Her hips jostled between the vee of his legs and his thigh muscles bunched in a helpless response to her unintentionally intimate touch there. Max instantly popped his grip open and let her scoot around his leg into the space beside him. Ignoring his body's traitorous response to a warm, curvy woman, he held up two fingers to capture the waitress's attention. “Wait. You probably want something fancier than a beer. Wine? One of those girly things with an umbrella?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

Oh, he was in a bad way today. After waving off the drink order, he turned on the edge of the pool table and pulled a long, copper-red wave away from the dewy perspiration on Rosie's neck. Warm from her skin, he rubbed the silky strand between his thumb and fingers. “So is this you lettin' your hair down? You go to a bar, but you don't drink? Or is this a temperance lecture for me? Couldn't get enough of puttin' me in my place this morning, eh?”

“No, I... What are you doing?” She jerked away, snatching her hair from his fingertips and tucking it behind her ear. “This was a dumb idea.”

Max pushed to his feet and thumped the tip of his cue stick on the table in front of her, blocking her escape. “Hold on, Rosie Posy. What
are
you doing here?”

Her shoulders lifted with a deep breath and she turned, staring at the collar of his shirt before tilting her wary eyes up to his. “I overheard you and your partner talk about coming here. The Shamrock Bar. I looked up the address in the phone book.”

“Do you ever give a straight answer to a question?” He hunched down to look her right in the eye. “That's how you found me. Now tell me what you want. Let me guess—you're a pool hustler, and you're here to win ten bucks off me to spite me for being such a jerk this morning.”

Hud Kramer walked up behind her before the shocked O of her mouth could spit out an answer. “I bet she could take you, Max.”

Max bristled at the interruption. Why was that kid grinning? “Shut up.”

Rosie turned to include both men in her answer. Sort of. If looking from one chin to the other counted. What was that woman's aversion to making direct eye contact? With that tart tongue of hers, he couldn't really call her shy. But something had to be going on to make her subvert that red-haired temper and any other emotion she might be feeling. “I haven't played for a long time. I used to be pretty decent back in college when I'd go out with friends, but I don't think I'd win.”

“I'd be happy to give you a few tips, Red.” The younger cop seemed to take any answer as encouragement to his lame flirtations. “Aren't you going to introduce us, Max?”

But when Hud leaned in, Rosie flinched back, maybe sidling closer to what was familiar, if not necessarily what she considered friendly. Max shifted in an instinctively protective response, and her hair tangled with the scruff of beard on his chin, releasing her warm summer scent. His pulse leaped and he was inhaling a deep breath before he could stop himself. Rosie March might be a baffling mix of mystery and frustration, but she exuded a wholesome, flowery fragrance that was far more intoxicating than the beer he'd been drinking.

Max growled, irritated by how much he noticed about this woman. And he was even more irritated that the younger detective had noticed it, too. “Get out of here, Kramer.”

A soft nudge to the chest with Max's pool cue backed Hud up a step, but the young hotshot was still smiling. Yes, the woman had rebuffed him in favor of the older detective who needed a shave and an attitude adjustment. But Hud wasn't about to lose to him twice in one night. “Our game isn't finished, Krolikowski. I have a feeling I'm about to make a comeback.”

Groaning at the taunt, Max set his cue stick on the table and pulled out his wallet. He reached around Rosie to hand a ten-dollar bill to the young officer. “Here. Take it.”

“You're conceding defeat?”

“I'm conceding that you annoy the hell out of me and I'm tired of puttin' up with you. Now scram.”

“Yes, sir.” Kramer took the sawbuck with a wink and a mock salute and headed straight to a green vinyl seat in front of the polished walnut bar to order a refill.

With more room to avoid him now, Rosie quickly stepped away and moved around the corner of the table. “I'm sorry you lost your money. That wasn't my intention.” She pulled open the flap on her purse and pulled out her wallet. “I only wanted to talk to a police officer.”

Now she wanted to answer questions? Max scanned the booths and tables around the bar. “Take your pick. The majority of the men and women here work in some kind of law enforcement.”

“Could I talk to
you
?”

He looked down to see her holding out a ten-dollar bill. Muttering a curse, he pushed the money back into her purse. At this late hour, every young stud in the place was looking for any unattached females who might be interested in one last drink and a chance to get lucky. They wouldn't know that Rosie was a person of interest in a murder investigation. They wouldn't care about her eccentricities or that she could rub a man wrong in every possible way. Like Kramer, they were noticing the outward appearance of innocence and vulnerability. They were seeing the promise of passion in the red flag of Rosemary March's hair. Maybe they were picturing what it would look like down and loose about her bare shoulders, too.

Even in his hazy brain, Max knew she didn't belong here.

“Let's get out of here. Robbie?” He looked to the Shamrock's bearded owner at the bar, and tossed some bills on the table to pay for his tab. “Come on.”

Grabbing Rosie by the arm, he turned her toward the door. Whatever she wanted from him, he wasn't about to go toe-to-toe with some young buck who wanted to pick her up just for the privilege of finding out. Although she hurried her steps beside him to keep up, she tried to shuck off his grip. But Max tightened his fingers around her surprisingly firm upper arm muscles and didn't let go until he'd ushered her out the front door into the muggy haze of the hot summer night.

He took her past the green neon sign in the front window so that curious eyes inside wouldn't get the idea that she might be coming back before he released her. He plucked a fresh cigar from his shirt pocket and leaned back against the warm bricks. “Now talk to me.”

Once he released her, she took a couple more steps and turned. “You smoke?”

“Not exactly.” He tore off the wrapper and stuffed the plastic into his pocket. Then he held the stogie up to his nose, breathing in the rich tobacco scent until he could rid the distracting memory of fresh summer sunshine from his senses. Light from the street lamps and green neon sign in the window reflected off the oily asphalt of the street behind her, making her seem even more out of place in the dingy surroundings. At least he didn't have to deal with Kramer or anybody else hittin' on her out here. Max set the cigar between his teeth and chomped down on it. “Make sense, and make it fast, okay?”

He watched the reprimand on her lips start and die. Good. He wasn't in the mood for one of her lectures on the evils of swearing and smoking—one of which he hadn't done for years. She seemed to consider his request for brevity and nodded. “Actually, I want you to come to my house. I had a trespasser tonight. I don't know how long he was there before he started vandalizing my front porch. He broke the lights and left a message in my mailbox. It's...disturbing, to say the least.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a folded sheet of white paper with just her thumb and forefinger and held it out to him. “It's typed like the one I found on the back patio. No signature to say who it's from.”

Straightening from the wall, Max snatched the paper from her fingers and unfolded it. “Somebody threaten your dogs again?”

Her chin shot up and her cheeks dotted with color. “He's not after my dogs. He just knows they're a way to get to me. To scare me.”

“You keep saying
he
.”

“Or she. I don't know who it was. All I saw was the shadow on my porch and the damage after the dogs' barking scared him away.”

Max squinted the words on the note into focus. “Murdering whore. Justice will be done.” Anger surged through his veins and he swore around the cigar. “You should have reported this ASAP to 9-1-1 instead of taking the time to track me down.”

“I don't want to be brushed off with another phone call, and I certainly don't want to be accused of making it up again.”

“What makes you think I'm gonna believe you?”

Her tongue darted out to moisten her lips, and his pulse leaped with a response that told him he was already far too interested in this woman to remain objective. Probably why he was such a growly butt around her. He didn't want to like her. It didn't make sense to like her. And yet, she was doing all kinds of crazy things to his brain and libido.

“To look at you, and listen to the way you talk... You're military, aren't you? Or you used to be? Not just the haircut. But, the way you stand. The way you move. You recognized Dad's gun as Army issue, and you remind me of him when he was young. Except, he was shorter. More patient. And he didn't smoke.”

Hell. Where was she going with this? Suspicion tried to move past the fog of alcohol and put him on alert.

“Dad was in the Army. A career man who retired as a colonel. Isn't there some band of brothers code I can call on for you to help me? Without treating me like a suspect in a murder case?”

Max tilted his face to the canopy of cloudy haze reflecting the city lights overhead. He'd spent the day mourning his fallen band of brothers, cursing his inability to save them all—to save his best friend. He couldn't do this. He couldn't call on that part of him to do his duty and fail again. Not for this woman. Not for a comrade in arms or superior officer he'd never even met. With a self-preserving resolve, he lowered his gaze to hers and handed back the note. “You should have called Trent. He's the reasonable one.”

“No one will listen to reason.” Her hands fisted in frustration. “I need someone who'll help me out of blind faith in my innocence...or out of a sense of duty. Or honor. Besides, I don't know where your partner is. But I remembered you said you were coming here for a drink.”

“That was this morning. What made you think I'd still be here?” A little frown dimple appeared between her eyebrows when she wrinkled up her nose in an unspoken apology. Oh. Her opinion of him was that low, huh? He supposed he'd earned it. And yet she'd sought him out instead of Trent or one of the other off-duty detectives and uniforms inside the cop bar. Maybe he shouldn't alter her opinion of him by telling her he'd gone back to his desk at the precinct and put in his full shift before grabbing a burger and heading to the Shamrock. “How will me going to your place prove you didn't put this note there, too?”