Deathtoll (Broslin Creek Book 8) Page 8

  She opened the refrigerator and hid behind the door. “Cheese, half-empty milk bottle, a jar of pickles with just three spears left, half a stick of butter, wilted lettuce, various condiments,” she told Linda, breathing easier when she heard the front door close behind Murph. “I suppose everything will have to be thrown out from here.”

  The idea was enough to distract her. She hated wasting food. It went against her grain. Never would she ever forget the desperate hunger of her childhood years.

  Aaand… She was not going to go there either. She was going to leave the past in the past.

  They worked until noon, making excellent progress, then everyone went home for lunch and on to their own afternoon plans, which for Kate meant going to work.

  Murph should have been there too, but his pickup wasn’t in the parking lot when she pulled in.

  As she removed the key from the ignition, her phone rang.

  “Mom just called,” Emma said. “She bought the tickets. They’re definitely coming. Early. They’ll be here first thing next Wednesday.”

  “That’s great.” Kate got out of the car. “I’ll call Shannon at the B and B. I only reserved Saturday and Sunday.”

  “I can take care of it if you want me to.”

  “Okay.” Kate had a full schedule. “Sure. But please make sure Shannon knows we’re paying for the extra days.”

  “She sounded a little wigged out.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah. She told me she just realized the reason for men living shorter isn’t because they take stupid risks. It’s because women go through menopause. I’m pretty sure the implication was they take out their husbands.”

  “She needs a vacation.”

  Emma laughed. “Seriously.”

  “We’ll make sure they have the best minivacation ever.”

  Kate reached the front of the building just as they hung up.

  A twenty-something man in army fatigues and a baseball hat waited at the front door, shifting from one foot to the other, drumming his fingers on his leg, his other hand gripping a metallic cell phone. Kate had him pegged as a new patient, nervous to go in, not sure what to expect. Good thing she’d arrived when she had. They could walk in together. She could chat with him a little and allay his fears.

  “Hi.” She climbed the front steps. “I’m Kate. I work at this earthly paradise. Are you here to check in?”

  “Ian McCall.” Six foot five at least, a hefty chunk of solid muscle, he stopped fidgeting only long enough to look her over. “I need to be here.”

  “Murph Dolan handles the intake. Let me walk you to his office.”

  “The woman inside said he was running late today. She said I could talk to you instead.”

  So, he had gone in already and even talked to one of the staff. He was having some first-day jitters, but he hadn’t left. He was committed to treatment. Excellent.

  Kate smiled. “I used to help Murph with evaluations. I can start the process while we wait for him to arrive. Why don’t we head to my office? I don’t know about you, Ian, but I could use a cup of coffee.”

  She walked past him, held the door open for him, noted how he kept twitching, his gaze darting around, his entire body tense. They were close enough for her to notice that his hair wasn’t just messy. It was choppy—as if maybe he’d cut it himself. Possible PTSD, although that wasn’t her diagnosis to make. As the head therapist, Maria would be handling that.

  “Where are you from, Ian?”

  “Virginia.”

  “Is that where you were stationed?”

  He shook his head. “Fort Bragg.”

  “How many tours?”

  “Three. Two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. Joined at eighteen, deployed right after, back-to-back.”

  “Thank you for your service. We are honored to have you here.”

  He didn’t respond, just watched her with a quiet intensity as she unlocked her office.

  Three patients were gabbing at the end of the hallway, two men and a woman. The woman laughed loudly at something. One of the guys patted her on the shoulder. Ian turned his back to them and shook his head, as if the loud chatter was a swarm of flies buzzing around his ears.

  “Mind if I close the door?” he asked.

  “Of course not.”

  Kate hung up her coat and bag, then dropped her phone onto her desk. She’d set aside an hour for paperwork that morning, so she didn’t have an appointment right away. She could afford to spend some time with Ian. He’d come this far; she didn’t want him to change his mind and leave.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I think sometimes soldiers find it difficult to ask for help. You’re supposed to be strong, the strongest, warriors. You’re supposed to be defending others.” She kept smiling. “But asking for help is not an admission of weakness. Just the opposite.”

  She turned to her pod coffeemaker that sat next to the printer. Sometimes she didn’t have enough time to run to the cafeteria for a cup between patients, so she finally bought herself a machine. “How about coffee? I only have one kind, breakfast blend. Is that all right?”

  “Yeah.” He stepped over to the treatment room to peek in.

  She popped in a pod, then filled the water reservoir and set one of her mugs under the spout. While she waited for it to be filled, she said, “Feel free to sit anywhere you’d like.”

  She had two visitor’s chairs in her office, although she only ever had one patient in there at a time. She had two chairs because sometimes just offering people a choice set them at ease, made them feel as if they were in control.

  “Sugar and cream? Powdered creamer, actually.” She held up the box. “I’ve been thinking about buying one of those small dorm fridges, but I haven’t had a chance yet.”

  “Black.” He paced the small room instead of sitting.

  Kate set the mug on his side of her desk, then popped in a pod for herself. “You’ll like Hope Hill. We do pretty good work here. Okay, I might be biased.” She gave an easy laugh as she bent down to plug in her laptop. “How much do you know about our programs?”

  He clenched his jaw, unclenched it, the muscles in his cheeks tightening, then relaxing. He was watching her every move, monitoring every foot of space around them, as if expecting a surprise attack to materialize from thin air. “Saw people talking about it in an online vet group.”

  “Then you probably know we use nontraditional therapies in addition to traditional methods. Massage therapy, acupuncture, reflexology, ecotherapy, the works. Would you be open to something like that?”

  He shrugged again. “A couple of guys online swore you helped.”

  “I’m glad. It’s nice to know people leave here feeling healed.” She smiled, but he didn’t smile back.

  Desperation filled his eyes, his face too tight, his muscles too tense for just a basic conversation.

  Kate turned her back on the coffee, giving Ian her full attention. “All right. Let’s look at your paperwork.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  His fingers clenched and unclenched at his sides. He was close enough to grab her across the desk, although she didn’t think he would. But maybe because of his size, she felt him looming, and she wished he would sit down and calm down instead of getting visibly worked up.

  Kate calmed her own speeding heart first, seamlessly moving into yoga breaths, to change the energy in the room. Deescalate. Make him feel safe. “No problem. We can just talk. Like I said, Murph is the paperwork guy anyhow.”

  Ian’s chest heaved as if he’d been running. He stared at her for an uncomfortably long moment, then went back to pacing, but kept his eyes on her. “All everybody ever cares about is the paperwork and the damn VA.”

  “We care about our patients. I promise you that. But here’s the thing. You know how healthcare works,” Kate said in the most apologetic tone possible. “It’s layers of bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy. Places like this? We have to have a referral.”

  When he stepped toward her a
gain, she hurried to add, “If you don’t have the papers with you, I can get that done right now. Just takes a phone call.” She nodded toward her phone, not quite daring to reach for it. “What do you think? Then we can move on to the important stuff.”

  If he let her use the phone, she could call Murph. If she babbled on about admissions, making no sense, Murph would know something happened. He was probably in the building already. He’d be over in a minute. She could keep Ian talking until then.

  Kate kept her smile going, kept her cool. “How about we get that out of the way, then sign you right up for treatment?”

  “You pick up that phone, and the next thing I know, a padded van shows up.” Ian’s darting gaze focused, stilled. “You’ll call someone to have me locked up in a looney bin.”

  “You can listen to every word I say.”

  “No phone call!” he shouted, jabbing at the air with his cell phone as if with a weapon.

  Dammit, dammit, dammit.

  Kate inched back, not that a few more inches would make a difference, if he became violent. She was trapped behind her desk, couldn’t run.

  Ian waved his hand and kept yelling. “When the government said go, I went. Every time. Now when I say I need help, you give me the goddamn help!”

  Chapter Ten

  Asael

  “Can I interest you in a slice of fresh pecan pie?” the homey-looking waitress at the Broslin Diner asked Asael.

  He sipped his decaf and shooed her away as he checked his messages, noted the code automatically forwarded from another number. The code identified one of his regular clients, an eccentric oil billionaire who used him to eliminate regulators and business rivals.

  Asael called the man back, and while the call bounced from secret server to secret server, he wondered about his next project. He usually disposed of the man’s overseas opponents in a straightforward manner. They didn’t require much finesse. If anyone suspected foul play, it only increased the oil baron’s reputation.

  Western competitors needed more planning and a degree of separation. For example, if a rival executive, in the middle of negotiations, received a call that his father had died of a sudden heart attack, his mind would no longer be in the game. He’d want to close the deal and get out of there, rush home on his private jet.

  “Thank you for calling me back, friend,” the client on the other end said.

  The overly familiar address annoyed Asael, but he never corrected the man, who got a charge out of pretending he had an assassin for a friend. Most of Asael’s clients were weird in different ways. And this one paid better than any of the others.

  “How can I help?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about your last assignment.”

  Asael straightened in his booth, alert. “Any problems?”

  “No, my friend. I was merely wishing I could have been there…” He trailed off suggestively.

  Asael waited.

  “Next time,” the man said after a couple of seconds, “if there was a way for me to…”

  “I’m not sure that would be safe.”

  “What I mean is, maybe a video could be arranged.”

  “And if that video proof is found in your possession?”

  “Maybe not a job connected to me, then. Maybe something you do for someone else? Whatever the client pays for the hit, I’ll double it for the opportunity to view live footage.” The man’s voice thickened as if with arousal. “I want to feel like I’m there.”

  Creepy fuck. Then again, the world was full of freaks. Asael sipped his decaf. The question was, did he want to keep this particular client?

  He set down his cup softly, the touch of ceramic and wood not even a whisper. “I’ll see what I can do, my friend.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Murph

  “Did you just dump garbage on my desk?” The captain snapped his eyebrows together.

  Murph dropped into a chair and nodded at the crumpled burger wrapper in the plastic bag he’d rescued from the carrot muffins. “All I’m saying is, you didn’t put this in Betty’s garbage the day you were there. Gabi didn’t have a burger either. I asked her. And the first time I checked that trash can, the wrapper wasn’t in there.”

  Bing gave his long-suffering police captain sigh, kicking his feet out in front of him and leaning back in his chair. “You think you remember every piece of garbage in a nearly full can from a glance?”

  “Linda Gonzales says Betty cut out fast food. She was watching her blood sugar.”

  “I’m watching what I eat too.” Bing looked pointedly at the half-eaten grocery store coffee cake on the corner of his desk, not that far from the garbage. “We all slip up now and then.” He pushed the bagged-up burger wrapper back toward Murph.

  Murph left his potential evidence where it was. “What would it hurt to dust it for prints?”

  “If you miss police work so much, I hear Avondale PD is hiring.” But then the captain’s next words were said with concern. “You had a rough deployment a few years ago. You lost friends in Afghanistan, then you came home and got caught up in Kate’s mess. It’s not healthy to live in a constant state of hyperawareness.”

  “Kate is safe. Mordocai and Asael are gone. That’s all in the past.”

  “You had to use deadly force to save her from Mordocai.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’d kill the bastard again.”

  “I’m not implying that you didn’t do the right thing, the same thing I would have done under the circumstances. I’m trying to tell you that you’ve been under considerable stress before you headed off for three years in witness protection with Kate, every second of which you spent looking over your shoulder. Living like that would make anyone a little paranoid. Listen, you’re back in Broslin. Relax. The PD is on the job. You don’t have to keep up this level of vigilance.”

  The man was starting to tick off Murph. “You think my brain is bored, so I’m making up shit.”

  “I’m saying you might be seeing things that aren’t there.”

  He didn’t want to fight with Bing, who’d always been a friend, but he couldn’t let this go either. “What if Betty’s fall wasn’t an accident?”

  “Who would push her? Why? Can’t think of anyone who had problems with her. Nothing was taken from her house. What’s the motive?”

  “Maybe someone—” Murph began to say, but the captain’s phone interrupted.

  Bing glanced at the screen. “The coroner.” He picked up the call and listened with an unreadable expression, before saying, “I appreciate the heads-up. Thanks.”

  Then he hung up and flashed an extended, assessing look at Murph. “He’s sending over his report within the hour.” He paused for a moment, then another, and then he finally spoke. “Betty had some subcutaneous bruising on her chest.”

  “Consistent with a hard shove.” Murph rubbed the heel of his hand over the armrest of his chair. “I’d rather have been wrong.”

  Bing snapped up the plastic bag between them, then pushed a button on his desk phone. “Could you come into my office, please?”

  Harper Finnegan popped in two seconds later. He had a new energy lately, an almost palpable contentment. He used to be Officer Casanova. Then he’d fallen hard for Allie Bianchi, settled down with her, and these days, he was fifty shades of happy bastard. Murph tried not to envy him too bad.

  “Captain,” Harper said. “Murph.”

  The captain handed him the bagged burger wrapper. “I need you to dust this for fingerprints. Top priority. Betty Gardner’s case.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  When Harper was gone, Murph asked, “Are you upgrading the case to suspicious death?”

  Bing gave the idea consideration. “Not yet. The bruise could have any number of causes. Betty could have fallen against anything inside. A doorframe, the fridge, whatever. Maybe she was dizzy. Then she went out for some fresh air, a loop around the house. But her blood pressure dropped again, and she fell out the
re too, the wrong way this time, her head against concrete.” Before Murph could protest, Bing added, “We have no proof that says otherwise.”

  “I want to help.”

  “I want you to stop investigating.” Bing pronounced his words with a slow care that spelled a warning. “You are no longer a member of this department. If there was foul play involved, the perpetrator’s lawyer is going to have a field day in court with your civilian interference. It’s going to discredit my case.”

  The tension between them was new. The captain tended to be a reasonable man. The general mood at the PD was friendly camaraderie. Of course, Murph hadn’t been a part of the PD for a while. They were no longer on the same team, didn’t have the same goals. The captain wanted all rules and regulations obeyed, while Murph wanted to keep Kate safe, whatever that required.

  He didn’t want a fight, though, so he stood. “I’d better get to work.”

  He called Kate from his pickup to see when she might have a minute to talk. He wanted to tell her about the contusion on Betty’s chest. When he bounced to voicemail, he hung up. She was probably with a patient.

  Murph was at the center in minutes and swung by her office, but her door was closed. He didn’t knock, didn’t want to interrupt her session.

  He was walking away, halfway down the hall before he heard a man shouting in there.

  He backtracked. “Kate?” He tried the door. Locked. “Everything okay?”

  “Busy, Murphy! I’ll come and find you when I’m done.”

  Her voice was carefully calm, and yet… He knew her, her moods and tones. She wasn’t simply busy. Nor would she lock herself into her office with a patient. “Okay. I got some paperwork, but afterwards, maybe we could grab some coffee in the cafeteria?”

  “Sure, Murphy. Looking forward to it.”

  Liar. He hadn’t been able to grab a cup of coffee with her in weeks. She’d gotten good at pretending that she was always busy. She’d even brought in her own coffee machine so she could more easily avoid him. And on top of all that, she never called him Murphy. Nobody but strangers did. To all his friends, he’d always been Murph.