delay or just proceed blithely and hope no one noticed. She slid the filets onto two new plates, abandoning the filet that the dog hadn’t eaten. Then she took a deep breath. She felt perspiration slide between her shoulder blades and hoped it didn’t show. She picked up both plates and stepped over the shattered china on the floor. She didn’t even want to consider what that plate had cost her.
She pushed through the door into the dining room, a smile pasted on her face. The sight in front of her made her pulse give another hitch. The man, her customer, was laying facedown in his hearts-of-palm salad.
His date—a voluptuous blonde in shimmering silver—came through the opposite door at the same moment and started screaming.
“Wait a minute, just calm down,” Kate murmured. She eased the plates onto the table. Maybe he had just passed out. Please, don’t let it have been the food.
But it wasn’t the food. Kate’s biggest weakness was detective novels, and cop shows. It was the only vice she indulged in, but she did it with fervor. A thin ribbon of blood ran down the back of the man’s neck. She knew what blood like that meant. It was a gunshot wound to the back of the man’s head.
This job was turning into a nightmare!
Kate forced herself to touch the man’s wrist, even though her fingers shook. His skin was warm and she felt hope shoot into her blood. Then everything inside her recoiled.
No pulse. Kate tried again, and her heartbeat took off. No pulse!
The blonde’s cries changed to howls. Kate did the only thing she could. She stepped around the dead man and slapped the woman hard.
When the blonde’s wails had subsided to hiccups, Kate ran to find a telephone. She fumbled with the buttons twice before she managed to punch in 911. A voice answered immediately—cold, detached, almost mechanical. Kate cleared her throat.
“Uh, yes. Please send someone immediately. There’s a dead man in my salad.”
Lieutenant Detective Raphael Montiel preferred to think of adrenaline as something hot and sharp that hurt the underside of his skin. It was rarely a pleasant feeling.
It drove him hard as he shot his aging Explorer around the corner of Third into Willings Alley. His left shoulder rammed against the window when he jerked the SUV straight again. He didn’t have to look for the address. He knew the brownstone without the police cruisers that hurled red and blue light up against the walls of brick that bracketed the alley. He’d had his eye on the home’s owner for a while.
Phillip McGaffney was dead.
Raphael cursed roundly, most of his fury aimed at whoever had taken McGaffney out—not that the killer had done so in the first place, because that had been inevitable for months now—because the SOB hadn’t waited three hours and forty-two more minutes to do it. Raphael’s suspension from the force lifted at midnight. Now, twenty minutes after the 911 call had come in, his dashboard clock remained stubbornly stuck at eight thirty-eight.
He’d flatten the man who called him on it. McGaffney was his. Two warring factions of Philadelphia’s powerful Irish underground had just begun sniffing around each other thirty days ago when Raphael had taken his suspension in the teeth. He’d spent the last month staving off boredom by continuing to track every move the family made. Lou O’Bannon, the mob’s kingpin, had died ten days into Raphael’s suspension—of cancer, a virtual anomaly in his world. It had been a slow, natural death that had given Phil McGaffney and Charlie Eagan plenty of time to begin recruiting their supporters. Both of them fully intended to take over O’Bannon’s throne.
It had been only a matter of time before full-fledged war broke out between the groups. But Raphael hadn’t expected it to start this way, with Eagan’s boys shooting right for the other guys’ top dog.
He drove the Explorer into half a space between two black-and-whites. The SUV braked to a hard stop, and Raphael was out before it had settled back on its shock absorbers. He jogged across the alley and up the steps to McGaffney’s front door.
“Where’s Plattsmier?” he demanded of the cop manning the entrance.
“Not here yet.”
But his captain would probably be here soon, Raphael thought. “Who’s in charge?”
The officer grinned. “Fox.”
Some of the constriction eased across Raphael’s chest. Having C. Fox Whittington catch this stiff was good. It was very good. Fox was his partner.
Raphael passed the cop and went inside. He began stalking the first floor of the brownstone looking for Fox. Then he stepped into the dining room and his jaw sagged.
It was a long, narrow room with a cherry-wood table in the center. Dark wainscoting traced around the ivory-papered walls. The chandelier in the center of the ceiling was heavy with too much bronze that robbed the sparkling white light of its innocence. There was a door to the kitchen on one side of the room, a door to a hallway on the other.
McGaffney was facedown at the head of the table.
The blood that seeped from the gunshot wound at the base of the man’s skull was congealing now, going tacky and brown. It was nothing Raphael hadn’t seen before. The scene on the floor, however, rocked him a little.
The woman at the bottom of the pile was leggy—very leggy, he thought, given that the metallic fabric of her dress was pushed up nearly to her backside. It was all Raphael could see of her because there was a brunette sitting on top of her, deposited right on the small of the other woman’s back. Her knees were drawn up and her chin rested in her hand. Every once in a while, the leggy woman kicked, but the brunette wasn’t budging.
Raphael had no idea if the brunette was leggy or not. She wore navy blue trousers and a starched white shirt. Raphael had spent his childhood in parochial schools. He hated starch, despised it on mere sight.
“What the hell?” Raphael muttered.
The brunette’s head came up at the sound of his voice. He had never seen hair like hers in his life, Raphael thought. It was a million shades of onyx shimmering to deep copper in the chandelier’s light. He thought maybe it was supposed to be tied back or something, but who could tell? It was wild, with corkscrews zinging everywhere.
She reached a hand up to smooth it as though reading his opinion of it in his eyes. “She’s bigger than me,” she muttered. “It was a fight.”
Raphael cleared his throat. “Come again?”
“It was a fight to keep her away from the table. From him. To keep her from messing up your evidence. Aren’t you a cop?”
“Yeah.” He’d even be an employed cop in another three hours or so.
The woman gave a heartfelt sigh. “It’s about time you got here. She’s all yours.” And with that statement, she stood. The woman beneath her let out a yowl that stirred the hairs at Raphael’s nape. Then she rolled onto her back, sat up and sprang to her feet.
“Philip!” she cried.
Finally, too late, Raphael understood why the brunette had been sitting on top of her. This came to him in the split second before he recognized the other woman. He should have known her from her legs.
Allegra
