lost the urge to smile. “You’re about to feel worse.”
“Why?”
“The way the department has it figured—and I agree with them—is that something went way wrong here tonight.”
“Then tell me.”
“McGaffney is…was…flamboyant. It wasn’t his style to entertain ladies at home, especially when they look like Allegra. If he was home, he was alone. Everybody knew that. So tonight was out of pattern.”
She still didn’t get it.
“His killer—or killers—didn’t know you or Allegra were there.” He fought the urge to ask what exactly she had been doing there. He hadn’t seen anything in that house that would have required a caterer. But that would come later, after midnight. “We can’t keep a lid on both of you being here. Not indefinitely. The press are vultures. That’s why I’m going to stick close to you for a while until this either blows up or cools down.”
He reached and gave her a hand up. Kate came to her feet unsteadily. “They’ll try to hurt me?”
“Honey, you’re as good as dead unless someone is around to stop it.”
Kate looked at him sharply. When she did, something happened to the streetlight in the distance. It blurred and tilted.
Raphael’s instinct to protect started in his toes. She swayed, and he grabbed her shoulders. “Hey—”
“Don’t touch me.”
Raphael jerked his hands back. Anger drummed behind his eyes, giving him a headache. “That should be no problem.”
“I didn’t…I mean…” Kate trailed off and closed her eyes. Damn him. He had all the compassion, the sensitivity, of a rock. He’d laughed with that other cop in the dining room with a dead man no more than two feet away. She could talk until sunup, and he wouldn’t understand that she felt as though any kindness right now would shatter her.
In all her twenty-eight years, she had never really known fear. Now it made her palms sweat even as everything rational inside her struggled with what he’d just said, picking for some way to convince herself it wasn’t true. You’re as good as dead.
She couldn’t believe any of this.
Kate stepped around him, holding herself together. “I’m going home.”
“And that might be where?”
Did she have a choice? She’d let him tag along, she decided, until she could figure this thing out. “South on Second. The corner of Bainbridge. I rent space in a garage on Bainbridge for the van. It’s called Lucky’s.”
“Not tonight it’s not.”
Kate made a strangled sound.
She went around to the driver’s side of the van. When she got behind the wheel he tapped on the passenger side window. Kate ground her teeth together. She shot the key into the ignition and let the big engine rumble. “See you on Willings,” she muttered. Then she put the van in gear and rolled off, resisting the urge to look at him in the mirror.
Raphael jogged through the town house and out the front door onto Willings Alley. Until this night, until this very moment, he hadn’t known there could be so many facets to his temper. He felt reasonably sure that in the last hour he’d experienced all of them. The little fool! She’d driven around to the main alley by herself like there was no possibility whatsoever that someone could have waited on the corner for her, to end it then and there.
His Explorer waited for him. Raphael jumped behind the wheel with a second to spare before her atrocity of a vehicle lumbered into the alley. She beeped at him and kept on driving. Raphael swore and made an illegal U-turn to follow her. She was the most irritating, stiff-spined, starched, tsking, hardheaded, cop-show-watching, nosy fool he’d met in his fourteen years on this job. And she’d sat on Allegra.
Raphael grabbed the radio handset from his dashboard. “Who’s got Allegra?” he demanded when he got reception and was patched through to the watch commander.
“Vince Mandeleone,” said a disembodied voice.
Mandeleone. Fox’s rookie partner for the month. He wasn’t a rookie to the department, but to the Robbery Homicide Unit. “I’m back with Fox in two hours.” Even Raphael thought he sounded like a jealous lover.
“Yeah, that’s the word,” came the voice soothingly.
“So how come they’re not sending Mandeleone back down?”
“He did some good stuff this last month. They’re keeping him up.”
That was okay. Raphael didn’t want to hurt the kid, he just wanted his own space back. But something stuck in his craw. “They’re letting him question Allegra?”
“Hell, no. I thought you meant who was 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
