It was his irreverence, she decided. He stood there, not so much tall—maybe five foot eleven—but with the kind of presence that seemed to bleed life from everything else in the room. He had dark blond hair, golden really, and it was unkempt and too long. She doubted if he had shaved since morning. The T-shirt he wore, a well-washed and faded blue, was untucked. He had bottle-green eyes, but as he waited for her to finish her perusal they went to the color of the sea on a cloudy day. They’d hold secrets, Kate realized.
Where had she gotten that from?
The answer was there beneath his infuriating indifference to what had just happened. It was at odds with it. Kate had never had a talent for nuances, except maybe in recipes. She had never been very good with people, or with reading them. Yet she felt a certain intensity beneath Montiel’s who-gives-a-damn manner.
He’d come to investigate a murder and he was eating her potato thins. But his eyes were darkening and turbulent.
“What did you do?” she asked again, more softly.
“With what?” he countered, moving on to munch a scallion.
“What did you do to anger the commissioner so you can’t work until midnight?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re here to figure out anything you saw or heard tonight.”
He was eyeing the one remaining filet now. “Miss dinner?” she asked.
That brought his gaze to her again sharply. “What?”
“If you’re that hungry, I’ll reheat it. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just…stale.”
“Stale.”
“Prepared, then permitted to return to room temperature.”
Permitted? Who used words like permitted in casual conversation? The fact that she did irritated the hell out of him. Coupled with the fact that he was exiled with her in the kitchen, it made Raphael’s voice rough and gravely. “I coldcocked Gregg Miller on Eyewitness News.”
Kate felt something like shock move through her system, feather-light and cold. She’d almost forgotten her question. “That killer? The one…”
“The one,” he agreed flatly. “Then I caught a thirty-day suspension from Internal Affairs for my trouble.”
“Why? Why did you hit him?”
“What he did wasn’t enough?”
As near as Kate could remember, Miller had killed four women, had held the entire city in the grip of terror for the better part of a month. She hadn’t really followed the news broadcasts all that closely. Between her catering business and her second job cooking at a diner, between all the chores one had to do in order to keep on top of life, there’d been precious little time for her to peruse the media accounts of the murders. But she knew Miller had been preying on single women in their late twenties and early thirties.
Kate frowned. “You’d need more,” she decided.
“Who are you, Freud?”
That snapped her spine straight again. “You’d see death in your line of work nearly every day, I would imagine. But you don’t run about—what did you call it?—cold-cocking suspects all the time. Or do you?”
“Tell you what, you’re better with these crunchy things than you are with analysis.”
Her stomach rolled again at the bite in his tone. “You don’t like me.”
“Do you like me?”
“Not particularly.”
Well, she was honest, he thought. He almost grinned. But she’d done it again. Words like particularly didn’t belong in general conversation. Then Raphael heard himself answer her and he felt a dull inner pang even as his words hit the room.
“We were bringing Miller out of the van,” he said, “for his arraignment. I’d taken him in the first place, so I wanted to be part of the detail. He knew all about me through his spree, during the whole investigation. He made it his business to know who was closing in on him. So he turned around just as he was being led through the courthouse doors. He looked at me, and he said—”
Miller had said what Raphael hadn’t yet told anyone.
Raphael hadn’t made excuses for his behavior that day. What he’d done, he’d done. And he’d taken the fall. He clamped his mouth shut.
This had all the melodrama of an excellent story, Kate thought. “He said what?” she breathed.
“Don’t tell me,” Montiel drawled. “You’re heavy into cop shows.”
Kate blinked. How had he guessed? She almost denied it, but what would be the point? “Books, mostly. There’s a certain element of escapism there.”
“Element? Damn it, can’t you just talk?”
“I am talking!”
“No. You’re giving a lesson in vocabulary!” And he didn’t know why it bothered him so much. Maybe it was just his overall mood. But he doubted it.
“I was just asking a question.” She sniffed.
Raphael found himself answering her—again. “He told me that Anna was the best of the lot. He told me how she screamed. Damn it, he picked her because she was associated with me!”
There was a stretch of silence in the kitchen, drawn out enough to thin the air. Kate’s heart hurtled over a beat. “Anna Lombardo?” One of Miller’s victims, she remembered. Maybe the last. And then Kate understood. She cleared her throat carefully. “You knew Anna.”
“Yeah.” He took a knife from a drawer and cut into the steak. “I knew Anna. We’d been seeing each other.”
“You loved her.” It was, she thought, a heartbreaking story.
But Montiel laughed in a raw sound before he chewed and swallowed. “Not yet.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’d only met her two weeks before she died.” But maybe it could have been something, he thought. They’d never know. Miller had strangled her with piano wire.
“Montiel.”
The voice came from the kitchen door. They both turned sharply, almost guiltily, as though they’d been caught in the act of something they shouldn’t have been doing. It was that man, Kate realized. Plattsmier. And the other one, Fox. Both stepped into the kitchen. Kate watched the three of them confer near the doorway.
Something was happening.
There was a lot of gesturing. Then something changed in Montiel’s expression. His jaw hardened. His eyes went thin, but just before they did, Kate saw them shine like glass.
He turned to her. “Clean up your stuff, Betty Crocker. You’ve got five minutes, then
