Rosemary’s breath burned in her throat. This had gone beyond excusing those calls as some drunk who’d read her name in the paper. Somebody wanted her scared? He’d succeeded.
“Duchess, heel. Trixie?” The German shepherd fell into step beside Rosemary as she scooped up the poodle. “No one’s going to hurt you, baby.”
She checked the separate entrance that led to the basement apartment where Stephen had lived when he’d gotten older. Good. Bolted tight. Then she took the dogs inside the kitchen and locked both the screen and steel doors behind her before punching in the code to reset the alarm. She flipped on the patio light, gave the dogs each her own rawhide chew and walked straight through to the front door, turning on every light inside and out.
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.
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