Chapter 2
It was almost two in the morning when Liam’s
cell phone rang, but he was still awake. Particularly vivid
nightmares like the one the night before tended to cause insomnia
in a man, or a beast.
Still, the phone startled him. He
didn’t get a lot of calls. He wasn’t even sure where his phone was.
He rarely answered it, to the frustration of both his fellow Kill
Team members and his mother.
Who would call him at two in the
morning while he was in the States?
He got out of bed and walked toward the
sound. By the light of the moon coming in through the bare window,
he saw a pair of jeans on the floor. The jeans were
ringing.
He glanced at the lit screen on the
phone. It didn’t identify the caller. He wasn’t generally a curious
man; curiosity was dangerous, but he answered it
anyway.
“Yeah?”
“Liam?” The voice was tiny and filled
with emotion. It scratched the surface of his memory, but he
couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
“This is Liam,” he said
cautiously.
“Liam . . . it’s Mai. I. . . Remember
me? I came into the shop today. I’m sorry to call you in the middle
of the night.” She took a breath. She had the quiet calm in her
voice of someone on the verge of losing it. “I didn’t know who to
call. Your number, it was on my hand. I . . . just dialed it
without thinking.”
He sat down, leaning against the wall;
the floorboards were cool under his bare butt. “What’s the matter,
Mai?” He was good in an emergency. The best.
“The . . . the police are on their way.
My uncle Donato. My dad’s brother who’s been living with us. He’s
dead. Murdered.”
Liam felt his jaw tighten, though the
rest of his body remained relaxed. “Who killed him?”
“I. . .I don’t know. Oh, God, there’s
so much blood. You wouldn’t think an old, skinny man like him would
have this much blood.” She seemed to be talking more to herself
than to him now. “Who would do such a thing? Kill a harmless old
man?”
Liam thought he heard the sound of
police sirens in the background.
“Liam?” she whispered. “I’m scared.
There’s no one else I can call. Could . . . could you
come?”
“Come?”
“Here. I. . . don’t know if I can do
this alone. I don’t want to get my cousins involved. Oh, God,” she
muttered. “The police are coming and they’re going to ask questions
and . . .” She let the sentence trail off into
silence.
Of course Liam couldn’t go to the
human’s house in the middle of the night. He was sorry her uncle
had been murdered, but that wasn’t his problem, was it? He was in
enough trouble with the sept as it was; he couldn’t go running
around in the middle of the night, running to the rescue of HFs.
Not even pretty ones.
“They’re here,” she whispered. “Could
you please come?”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say
no. Surely there was someone she could call: a friend, a relative.
But he could tell from her tone of voice that when they met, she
had felt the same inexplicable connection he had. Had this been
their fate from the moment she walked into his shop?
He got her address.
Liam didn’t like cops, policia, jingcha, gingchaat. Which was okay, because
they didn’t like him either. He arrived on his motorcycle, a 1936
BMW R5 he’d taken off the hands of a serial killer in Berlin not
long after the war. No need to waste such a great bike on a dead
man.
He parked a good way down the street
and entered the property from the back. Dogs usually got chased
away from crime scenes, but no one seemed to pay any attention to
common housecats. No one noticed the tabby that walked past the six
state and town police cruisers, the ambulance, and the fire truck.
What the hell the fire truck was doing there, he didn’t
know.
He smelled the blood before he walked
through the open door of Mai’s shop. She was right. It was
a lot of blood. It was arterial blood, thick
and sweet. He had to take a deep breath to keep from getting lost
in the scent of it.
Inside the cute little antiques shop
was human chaos at its worst: local and state police, EMTs, the
firemen who had apparently gotten lost on the way to a fire and
stopped at a murder scene, neighbors who had slipped in before the
police had time to put up the familiar yellow tape, all talking,
walking in circles. Expressing their disbelief.
Liam slipped under a nice pre-1900
Victorian rosewood sewing table to get a better look. Amid the
mostly male voices, he heard Mai’s. She was talking softly, but he
refused to allow himself to focus on her voice. It was too
distracting. He padded to the body, then around it, taking care not
to get his kitty paws bloody.
In the end, they had killed the old man
by simply slitting his throat. Once you cut the carotid artery, the
victim has only minutes to live because the blood comes directly
from the aorta, pumping hard from the heart. When you bleed out
from your carotid, you don’t just leave a nice, neat pool of blood.
It spurts. It splatters. On the floor, on your bathrobe, on the
Sheffield armoire you were held against as
your throat was cut. Bastards. Mai was right. Why would someone
kill a harmless old man in a ratty flannel bathrobe? In an antiques
shop in the middle of the night in a sleepy town in southern
Delaware?
Tail straight in the air, he leaned in
to the body to get a better look at the only apparent wound on the
body. The blood smelled heavenly.
Upon closer feline inspection, he saw
that there were, barely visible, additional marks on the old man’s
neck, inflicted antemortem. Somebody had been trying to get him to
talk. . . .
Mai wrapped her arms around herself.
Everyone was talking at once and she felt light-headed. They had
her father seated behind the store’s counter, his little rat
terrier cradled in his arms; an EMT was taking his blood
pressure.
“I want to see my brother.” Her dad
kept saying it over and over again. “Where’s my brother? Where’s
Donato?”
“Ma’am?”
Mai looked up at the state trooper
addressing her. She hadn’t caught the question. “I’m sorry. What?”
She wiped her snotty nose with the balled-up tissue in her hand.
Her feet were cold. She was wearing her old terry scuffs, no
socks.
“About what time was it when you got up
to check on your uncle?”
“I. . .I didn’t get
up to check on him. I got up to pee, and then I was thirsty,
so I was going downstairs to get a glass of water. His bedroom door
was open. That was when I realized something was wrong and I went
in to check on him.” She didn’t tell them that the old man usually
locked his door when he went to bed.
“And what time was that?” He was taking
notes, writing on a little pad of paper in itty-bitty
handwriting.
“Um. About one-forty. Maybe one
forty–five.” She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. A lot
of hair from her ponytail had come down and it kept falling in her
eyes.
“You searched the house for him first?”
The guy was tall. Not bad looking.
“Sure. I checked the usual places
first: the bathrooms, the kitchen. When I didn’t find him, I
checked the other rooms in the house.”
“And you found your father, Mr. Ricci,
but not your uncle?”
“My father was asleep in his bed. He
woke up when he heard me walk into his room. I asked him if he knew
where Uncle Donato was and he said he didn’t. I told him to stay
put and I would find him.”
“And then you checked here? Why did you
come into the store, Miss Ricci?”
Okay, so he was cute, but he was also
obtuse. Mai looked up at him, knowing it wouldn’t be a good idea to
sound like a smart-ass, considering the circumstances. “Because he
wasn’t in the house. It was the next logical place to look. There’s
a breezeway between the house and the back door to the shop. I
followed the breezeway and found the door unlocked.”
“So you just walked in?”
“It’s my shop. I
just walked in.”
“Were the lights on or off?” the other
trooper asked.
She had to think for a minute. “Off. I
walked in, called his name, and flipped on the light
switch.”
“You weren’t concerned there was an
intruder?”
“My uncle wasn’t in his bed. The door
to the shop was open and I keep a set of keys in the kitchen, which
were missing. I assumed he’d used the keys to let himself
in.”
“Your uncle walk around in the middle
of the night often?”
She thought for a second, then lifted
her gaze to meet the trooper’s. “Actually, he did. “
He waited for her to go on. She waited
for his next question.
“And this is exactly how you found the
body?” He glanced in the direction of Donato, still lying on the
cement floor.
“Right there,” she
answered.
“You didn’t move him, check for a pulse
or anything?”
“No, I didn’t touch him. It was pretty
obvious he was dead.”
“And how did you know he was
dead?”
Really
obtuse.
“That’s obviously a lot of blood.” Her
arms still clasped around her, she motioned in that general
direction with her elbow. “And his eyes were still open, only I
could tell he wasn’t seeing anything.”
“Hey! Get that cat out of here!” a
voice shouted from the direction of the body. Someone was taking
pictures. The flash kept going off.
“Can you tell me what’s missing here in
your store?” the trooper continued.
“Not for sure, not without doing an
inventory, but like I said when you first arrived, I’m sure that a
chest of Italian silver plate is gone. It was there in the window.”
She indicated the window the burglar had broken. He must have
reached through it to unlock the dead bolt on the front
door.
“And your alarm system?”
She sighed. She’d answered this
question before, too. “I guess my uncle shut it off when he let
himself into the shop.”
“You’re trying to tell me your uncle
was nutty enough to wander around in the dark in his bathrobe, but
smart enough to shut the alarm off when he entered the
building?”
“You know anyone in the early stages of
dementia?” she asked, trying to keep her building anger in
check.
“She’s got a point, Dan,” the other cop
said. “My mother-in-law, she’s got Alzheimer’s. She knows exactly
what day of the week and what time Dancing with the
Stars is on, but she keeps eating cat food. The wet kind,
out of the can.”
Mai felt like she was going to scream.
Uncle Donato was dead on the floor and she knew damned well they
hadn’t killed him for silverware. But she wasn’t going to tell the
cops that. Couldn’t. She took a breath. “You think I could go to
the bathroom?”
“Sure. I guess so.” The trooper made
eye contact with the other one and they both nodded.
Mai went to the little half bath in the
back of the store. After she washed her hands, she splashed water
on her face and glanced into the pretty little mirror over the
sink. She looked scared. Maybe because she was.
Her dad had been pretty unresponsive
when the police arrived. Which was okay with her. She really didn’t
want him talking to the cops before she had a chance to talk to
him. But even if he hadn’t been out of it, she doubted he would
have given them any information about Donato. The Ricci boys might
have had their differences over the years, but they were still
brothers with an oath of loyalty she’d never quite been able to
understand.
When she walked out of the bathroom,
wiping her hands with a paper towel, she spotted Liam. The minute
she saw him, she realized what an idiotic thing it had been to do,
calling him. She didn’t know what she had been thinking. She hadn’t
been thinking, of course. She had just wanted someone here, and she
hadn’t wanted to involve her cousins, for more reasons than she
could list, the first and foremost being that they had all been
against Uncle Donato moving in with her and her father. So she had
called Liam’s number. It was as simple and ridiculous as that. She
rubbed at his phone number on her hand with the paper towel. It
didn’t even smudge. Good old Sharpie.
She wondered if she could just sneak by
him and hope the cops sent him home. Which of course was silly. You
don’t invite a guy to a murder scene and then give him the slip.
She was lacking in dating experience these days, but she was pretty
certain that was a hard and fast rule. Even on a first
date.
He didn’t give her the chance to give
him the slip. He turned and looked at her, making eye contact with
those intense, black eyes. “Hey,” he said quietly.
He was smokin’ hot and she was
embarrassed to have even noticed, given the circumstances. Narrow
jeans, black sneakers, and a leather jacket. His hair was inky dark
and a little long at the nape of his neck. Very
European.
She remembered him saying something
about having just gotten back to the United States.
“Hey,” she managed, letting her gaze
slide to the floor. She crumbled the paper towel in her hand and
bit down on her lower lip. She hadn’t cried yet. Not a tear, but
suddenly she felt like the floodgates were about to
open.
Having some weird sixth sense, he saw
it, too, and before she could muddle over the propriety of it, he
opened his arms and she walked right into them. He was tall and
strong and warm, none of which she was.
“I . . . I’m sorry I called you.” His
leather coat was open and she rested her cheek on the soft T-shirt
he wore under it. She could feel his heart beating; it was
strangely slow, compared to the pounding in her own chest. “I don’t
know what I was thinking.”
He didn’t say anything. No “it’s okay,”
or “I’m glad you called.” He just stood there, his arms around her,
giving her a minute to compose herself.
Snuggled against him, it occurred to
her that she was wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pajama pants
and a long-sleeve T-shirt advertising a 5K she’d run in about a
hundred years ago. No bra. Not exactly the way she wanted a cute
guy or half the town to see her. But what exactly did a girl wear
to her uncle’s murder?
“Mai, I think they’ve got more
questions for you,” Liam said finally. “You up to it?”
“The sooner I answer their questions,
the sooner they’ll leave?” she asked, reluctant to pull herself out
of his warm arms and reenter the lion’s den.
“Something like that.” He hesitated.
“You’re best to just keep answering their questions straight up,
but don’t volunteer any information they don’t ask for. That’ll
just lead to even more questions.”
That had been her
thought exactly.
“You’ll stay until they’re gone?” She
backed out of his arms, looking up at him. He seemed like a
confident guy. Trustworthy. Though just a little scary on some
level; where she was getting that vibe, she wasn’t
sure.
“I’ll stay until they go,” he agreed.
His black-eyed gaze met hers. “Then I have a couple of questions of
my own.”