LITMIR.BIZ

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whatever’s simmering there. On those occasions, I pay a second pair of hands to serve.”

      “How many employees do you have?”

      “Two now. They’re on call. If one can’t do it, the other one generally can. Actually, I just hired Beth four days ago.”

      Raphael’s antennae twitched. That was convenient. It would bear some looking into. “Beth who?”

      “Beth Olivetti.”

      “Who’s your other employee?”

      “Janaya Thomas. She’s been with me for about two months now.”

      “But no one was with you tonight?”

      “No. I just told you that. McGaffney gave me carte blanche to prepare whatever I wanted so I could streamline the meal.”

      “Okay. Let’s move on to that. To what you did tonight.”

      Kate nodded, sitting forward again. She didn’t entirely understand all his questions, but she was beginning to enjoy this—in a matter of speaking. It was intriguing, she admitted, watching him work through what had happened. “I didn’t hear anything.”

      His eyes narrowed. “Let me ask the questions, okay?”

      “But that was what you were going to ask next, right?”

      It had been, but he’d be damned if he’d say so.

      “Anyway, I didn’t. I just took the steaks to the dining room and there he was. Splat in the salad.”

      “No gunshot.”

      “No.”

      The killer had used a silencer then, Raphael thought. But she’d been right there in the kitchen, through a solitary door. “What about a…like, pffting sound?”

      She thought about it. “I didn’t hear anything like that. But then, there was the matter of the dog.” As soon as the words left her, Kate felt her face go scarlet.

      Raphael sat forward, his eyes narrowing sharply. “What dog?”

      Kate got to her feet unsteadily. She looked warily at the door, where the little beast had once slept religiously whenever Shawna had gone out. Love, murder and mayhem. Belle had trailed those things behind her like a banner. And she had also saved Shawna’s life.

      As she had saved Kate’s tonight.

      It had been Belle, Kate realized. Because if she had taken those steaks to the dining room—the first steaks, twelve and a half minutes earlier—she could very well have walked in on the killer. McGaffney’s skin had still been warm when she’d felt for his pulse. He hadn’t been dead long.

      Her heart caught, and Kate hit her chest with her fist to start it again. “Uh, I had just finished the steaks,” she explained. “The first steaks, that is. There was a crash. She…this dog…came in through the back door I’d left open. She got up on the center island somehow and stole a steak and knocked one of my plates over. I had to cook two new ones.”

      Raphael frowned. “A dog came in and stole a steak.”

      “Correct.” She really bit that word off.

      “Did McGaffney have a dog?”

      “Not that he mentioned.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think it was his.”

      “So where did it come from?”

      “I just told you that. The back door.”

      “Uninvited?”

      “Well, I certainly didn’t offer her a nine-dollar-a-pound tenderloin!”

      “Maybe it smelled the food.” Raphael frowned. There was more to this, he realized. Unless he badly missed his guess, something really bothered Kate Mulhern about this dog. “Go on.”

      Kate shrugged meticulously. “There’s nothing left to say. The whole thing set me behind twelve and a half minutes.”

      “Knock it off,” he growled, deciding to get a little rough with her.

      Kate flinched a little. “Knock what off?”

      “You’re hiding something.”

      “I am not!”

      “Honey, I’ve been asking questions like this for a lot of years and I know evasion when I see it.” Her eyes wouldn’t quite meet his, he thought. Then she surprised him.

      “Okay!” she cried. “Okay. You want to know the truth? I know that dog.”

      It wasn’t what he had been expecting. “So you’re saying what—it followed you there or something?”

      “Or something.” Then she gave a giddy laugh that bordered on the hysterical. “Four months ago, my roommate was walking to work. Some homeless woman stopped her and gave her a dog. That dog. And while Shawna was trying to figure out what to do with it, she was mugged.”

      “Yeah?” Raphael frowned, wondering what this had to do with anything.

      “And Gabriel Marsden rescued her.”

      “Gabriel Marsden, the writer? The ex-cop?”

      “The one who was on the run from that crazed Broadway producer at the time. The producer who was trying to kill him.”

      Raphael was starting to get it. A little. He remembered the story. It had captivated newsmongers for broadcasts on end.

      “Shawna ended hooking up with him and they spent the better part of two weeks running for their lives.” Kate took a deep breath. “With the same dog I saw tonight.”

      Raphael felt dazed. This was turning into the oddest witness interview he’d ever conducted. Why didn’t that surprise him?

      “Shawna named her Belle. Belle saved their lives—a couple of times, actually. And then she just disappeared into Manhattan once Gabriel and Shawna had brought the killer down.”

      More cop jargon, Raphael thought, wincing.

      Kate didn’t tell him that Shawna and Gabriel had become convinced that the Chihuahua was…well, some kind of an angel. “Anyway,” she finished quickly, getting back to McGaffney, “when I went out there the first time, with the appetizers, McGaffney and Allegra were just sitting there talking. And when I took those plates back, I thought they might be getting, well, tipsy.”

      “Tipsy,” Raphael repeated. Another word he rarely heard in normal conversation.

      “They’d gone through one bottle of the wine already. His glass was empty.”

      He didn’t want to admit that her powers of observation were extraordinary. But she must have picked up on something in his expression. Kate shrugged.

      “It’s my job. I keep trying to gauge how things are going, you know, to pick up on any little telltale signs. I still feel a little anxious about all this. Success isn’t all that comfortable to me yet.” Then, for the first time since he had met her, she smiled.

      The reflex was crooked, a little self-deprecating. And it changed her face. He realized for the first time that there was usually something hard and determined about her jaw, and that it was part of what had been irritating him from the moment he’d found her perched on Allegra’s back. But when she smiled, everything changed. There was a dimple at the left corner of her mouth—just one, without a matching counterpart. She looked wistful and soft.

      He cleared his throat. He didn’t want her to have a dimple. And if she did, then he damned well didn’t want to notice it. “What about the next time you went to the dining room?”

      “That would have been to take them their salads. And another bottle of wine.”

      “And after that?”

      “I went back to get their salad plates. She was gone

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