LITMIR.BIZ

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making sure she doesn’t get whacked over this. Fox is going to spend some time with her first before Mandeleone takes her home and bunks on her sofa.”

      “That’ll last one night.”

      The voice cackled. They all knew Allegra, by reputation if not by experience.

      “Anyway, Fox said to tell you to keep your cell phone with you. He’ll touch base as soon as he’s finished with Allegra.”

      “Will do.” Raphael signed off.

      He was beginning to get a feel for things here. When Plattsmier had assigned him to the caterer, all he’d heard was his own blood rushing in his ears. But now he could see how things would play out.

      In two hours, he and Fox were legit again. They would be running this investigation. Raphael was just going to have to do his part with the rigid little brunette in tow.

      She was going to be his personal albatross for a while. There was no getting around that. The commissioner wasn’t going to let bygones be bygones quite yet. But Plattsmier, damn him, had accommodated them all—Raphael and the commish and himself as well. The commissioner would get his extra ounce of Raphael’s blood by saddling him with the witness. And Raphael was on the case so it had a prayer of getting solved.

      The panel van tucked into the driveway of a garage just ahead of him. He stopped the Explorer in front of the entrance. A moment later, he saw her heading up the tunnel again, coming toward him on foot. Her head was down and too much of that crazy hair spilled forward to hide her features. Not bad features, he thought grudgingly, as he remembered them. Small, almost delicate. Then his eyes narrowed. For the first time he realized that she was towing a small red wagon behind her, and it was loaded.

      Raphael drove a shoulder against the Explorer’s door and flung it open. He left the SUV idling in the street and jogged around it to meet her.

      Whatever he had been about to say died in his throat when she looked at him. Her eyes were huge and bleak. They were indigo, he realized, more blue than blank.

      “I don’t even know your name.” She whispered it as though it were the saddest thing in the world.

      “Montiel.” His voice was hoarse. Probably, he thought, with the restraint it took not to try to comfort her again. Don’t touch me. He never made the same mistake twice.

      “No, I meant your first name.”

      “Oh. Raphael. Rafe’ll be fine.” Then it struck him. He hadn’t questioned her yet—that was by design. Once he’d gotten the lay of the land from Plattsmier, he’d known he’d do better to wait until midnight. But he hadn’t even asked her name. He opened his mouth, and she cut him off as though reading his mind.

      “It’s Kate. Kate Mulhern.”

      “Kate.” It was pretty. It made him think of sunflowers and Kansas. Oh, hell, maybe she wasn’t that bad.

      She waited for him to offer to take the wagon from her. It was heavy and hard to pull. It would be an overture, she thought, an olive branch of sorts so maybe they could get through this night somewhat amicably until his superiors let him leave her alone again. But he only watched her.

      Kate pulled her shoulders back. She moved around him, dragging the wagon.

      “So how fast do you think you can run with that thing behind you, Kate Mulhern?” His voice took on an edge again.

      “As fast as I have to. But it’s got to come with me. I’m not leaving it in the van, no matter…no matter…” She trailed off without pausing in her march.

      What had happened tonight, he finished for her. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out if she was as cold as the moon in January—what kind of woman would have the presence of mind to sit on Allegra after finding a body in her salad?—or if, in fact, she was falling apart. He didn’t have the chance to ask her. She whipped around the corner of the garage entrance with the wagon, out of sight.

      Raphael had to run to catch her. She stopped in front of glass doors on the corner. Pale light spilled from a dim lobby. He looked at his Explorer.

      “Don’t move an inch until I come back.”

      He went to the SUV. He parked it illegally in the nearest space and stuck his PPD card on the dashboard. It would do for the rest of the night.

      He grabbed his cell phone and a tape recorder from the glove box and went to where she stood. She yanked open one of the glass doors and pulled the wagon in after her. It started to swing shut again before Raphael followed her, and it almost took off his nose.

      He had a spare moment to look around the lobby. There were a handful of hot spots—a lot of fake ferns in one corner that could conceal a man, and a reception desk that someone could easily hide behind. There was no doorman.

      Kate was punching the elevator button. He caught up with her.

      “What’s through there?” He nodded at a nearby door.

      “Stairs.”

      “What floor do you live on?”

      “The third.”

      There were too many ways up, he thought. He didn’t like it.

      “The elevator stops running at midnight,” she said, as though reading his mind.

      “Sounds like a real witching hour.”

      She looked at him quickly, and he thought she might smile. Then the elevator opened, and she simply nodded and towed the wagon inside. Raphael stepped in after her.

      The elevator spit them out on the third floor. She moved down a short corridor and thrust a key into the lock of a door.

      The apartment was something of a hodgepodge, and it startled him. He’d expected something stark and agonizingly organized. Rigid, maybe stuffy. Instead, there was a lot of wood, none of it matching. An old sideboard sat against one wall—it had been pressed into service as an entertainment center—and an afghan that was the color of the sun was draped casually over the back of the sofa. The rear wall was all windows, open to the summer night. The sounds of the city were close—a horn blared briefly, tires rolled over asphalt, a dog barked somewhere. It felt like a home.

      “You live alone?” he asked. “No kids, no husband?” Extra people, he thought, would complicate things.

      “No, there’s no one. My roommate moved out in April.”

      She pulled the wagon into a tiny kitchen sectioned off from the main room by a breakfast bar. When she looked at him again, her eyes seemed very dark, almost black. She’d left one light on in the living room, but all it did was throw shadows across her face.

      “How long are you going to be here?” she asked.

      She bit off the ends of her words as though she was in a hurry to get them over with, he thought. But her voice was low, vaguely throaty. Raphael shrugged as though it had touched his skin. “I don’t know.”

      “You’re sleeping on the sofa.”

      “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

      That stung, even knowing, as Kate did all too well, that she was not the kind of woman who stirred men to passion. “I meant,” she said, “that this is a one-bedroom unit.”

      “And I meant that the sofa’s just fine with me.”

      Her hands were shaking again. Kate looked at them, then she fisted them on the counter. “You’re waiting to question me until after midnight, aren’t you?”

      “Yeah.”

      Kate looked at a mantel clock that sat on the sideboard turned entertainment center. Healthy green plants were piled on either side of it. She took a deep, fortifying breath. “Then I’d better put on some coffee.”

      Chapter 3

      The

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