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“The neighbor call the police?”
“Yes.” Eve looked even unhappier. “Officer Pruitt again. He confronted Joel instead of making any effort to knock on doors and find out whether anybody else had seen it happen.”
As far as Ben knew, Ed Pruitt was a competent police officer. Either he wasn’t ambitious, had scored poorly on the tests that led to advancement or liked being first responder. Whatever the reason, he had stayed in uniform through his career and had just passed his twenty-fifth year on the job.
“You sure he didn’t?” Ben asked. “Or is that what the boy told you?”
“Well...” She frowned at him. “You’re right. Pruitt is leaning hard on Joel for no other reason than because Mr. Rowe doesn’t like him, though.”
“Cops do get tunnel vision sometimes, just like anyone else,” Ben said mildly.
“Are you implying I have, too?”
He didn’t think she’d appreciate being told she looked cute when she bristled.
“Nope. Just saying we’re not perfect, hard as we try.” One side of his mouth quirked up. “Well, I might have achieved that exalted state, but...”
Eve’s laugh erased her wariness. “Right. A perfect detective would have arrested the guys who hit that jewelry store, wouldn’t he have?”
His smile turned into a grimace. “That’s a low blow.”
She laughed again. He liked the sound, a merry ripple that was almost a giggle.
He picked up the dessert menu, tucked behind the catsup and salt and pepper shakers. “Pie?” he asked, even though he also felt an itch to call Nic and find out what was up. He could make an excuse and go to the john....
“I couldn’t.” Eve looked down at her empty plate ruefully. “I missed lunch, so I was starved, but I still don’t know how I stuffed all that in.”
He’d kind of wondered that himself, but he’d noticed that Eve rarely completely relaxed. She fidgeted, she tapped her foot, she paid attention to everything going on around her. Energy hummed through her. He’d be willing to bet she burned more calories than average for her size and weight.
He’d also really like to find out how it felt to go to bed with a woman whose engine never idled. He doubted she’d be passive. The thought was enough to make him shift a little uncomfortably.
She noticed, but only said, “I’d love a cup of coffee, though. I’ll watch you eat. And maybe steal a bite or two, depending on what you order.”
Damn it, Nicole could wait.
Ben went for cherry pie a la mode, and she stole more than a couple of bites. Sharing with her was fun, and it gave him an excuse to prolong the evening. Since they’d met here, like last time, and Eve would be driving herself home, her inviting him in wasn’t going to happen. A good-night kiss would have to be hasty, given that it was raining, weather that was more common than not in western Washington at this time of year.
While they waited for the waitress to return with change, Ben braced himself for Eve to take offense, but had to say, “This is my weekend with Rachel.” That sounded kind of bald, so he added, “If you want to think about Sunday night after she’s gone...”
If her expression changed, he couldn’t tell. “Oh, I usually have Sunday dinner with Mom and Dad.” Her tone was pleasant. “Do you have any special plans?”
“Maybe a movie Saturday.” Rachel liked to bake, too, so he’d bought some shaped cookie cutters and sprinkles and what have you so they could have some fun with sugar cookies. He was a little embarrassed to admit that. Plus...damn it, he couldn’t help picturing Eve with them, that rippling laugh delighting Rachel as much as it did him.
But letting her get to know Rachel better implied something he didn’t intend. He didn’t want his daughter to become attached to one after another of the women in his life.
As Eve walked out of the café ahead of him, he tried to decide if she’d understood the signal he’d sent by not suggesting she join him and Rachel this weekend, or whether she just thought he was being cautious about jumping in too quickly.
If he were smart, he’d come right out and say, “I’m not looking for anything long-term,” but he couldn’t seem to make himself do that, and he knew why: he wanted Eve, and he’d never have her if he was that blunt.
What if he hurt her, a woman who’d been hurt by too many people?
The worry made shame curl in his belly.
He kissed her good-night anyway, even though cold rain ran down his neck while he was doing it.
But he dialed Nic’s number even as he walked to his own car.
* * *
“YOU THINK THEIR haul is stashed under one of their beds?” Seth asked, frustration adding an edge to his tone.
Frustration Ben shared. Neither of them knew where to go next with this, and new crimes were pulling them away. The amount of time they could give to investigating the jewelry store heist was diminishing.
“Why not?” he said. “They must know we’re not even close to getting a warrant.”
The frustration still simmering, he ran a background search on a guy he liked for a more conventional holdup at a corner grocery store and gas station. The perpetrator had kept his head down and his face shielded by a hoodie, but watching the footage from the surveillance camera, Ben kept thinking, I’ve seen this guy before. His stature, the way he moved, the dart of his hand as he snatched the money... The name had come to Ben in the middle of the night, a lightbulb bursting on.
“Oh, yeah,” he murmured now, when he saw that Henry James Whitmore—otherwise known as Whit—had been picked up a couple more times since Ben had last collared him. In fact, Whit had been released from a six-month lockup three weeks ago.
Ben shook his head. Some people never learned.
His phone rang and he reached for it absently. The number looked familiar, but didn’t belong to anyone he knew well.
“Detective Kemper, this is Julie Silveira from Child Protective Services. I heard from Michelle Baker.”
“Did you?” he said softly. Something in his voice had Seth swiveling his chair to look at him. “Thank you for calling.”
A minute later, he hung up, his grin triumphant. “Ken Hardison’s girlfriend just surfaced. She says she’ll talk to us.”
Seth was already rising to his feet. “Now?”
“Sounds like. I have an address.”
She’d been hiding out at a friend’s house in Everett, an hour’s drive away.
Michelle Baker turned out to be painfully thin, with lanky, dull hair and the physical mannerisms of someone who had become conditioned to try to appear deferential—or maybe she was going for invisible, if only subconsciously.
“He always said he’d never let me go,” she said after she’d looked nervously up and down the street before letting them in the front door of the run-down place a few blocks from the community college. “I’d have liked to stay with my sister, but—” her shrug had a defeated quality “—he’s been knocking on her door every day or two since I took off. I told her to be careful.”
He asked about her child, and Michelle said she was napping. “He never hit Courtney,” she said, “but that last time, she saw what he did to me and I just didn’t know what to tell her.”
They refused coffee and talked briefly about measures she could take to protect herself, but Ben could tell she wasn’t convinced, and he couldn’t blame her. Hardison’s history suggested he was just the kind of guy to be enraged by a restraining order.
She looked from Seth to Ben, her confusion apparent. “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? ’Cause I never got two detectives before when I complained.”
“No. I’m sorry.” Ben cleared his throat. She seemed more comfortable talking to him than to Seth, which wasn’t unusual. Seth’s rougher face and bulkier build were intimidating to a certain kind of witness. “We’re not usually involved in domestic violence calls.” Until they escalated into homicide, of course, but he wasn’t about to say that. He explained that Ken’s name had come up in the course of their investigation into a recent robbery, and they were hoping she’d be willing to tell them if she’d heard him making plans.
“Um... I heard some stuff.” She ducked her head, hiding her face behind her hair. “I shoulda told somebody,” she said softly. “I felt bad when I saw about it on TV. I mean, them hurting that guy.” She looked up. “He didn’t die, did he?”
“Why don’t you tell us what you heard before I answer any questions,” Ben said gently.
“That jewelry store,” she said, looking surprised. “That’s what you’re here about, isn’t it?”
He smiled at her. “Yes, it is.”
After agreeing to be recorded, she began, “See, he was real mad about getting fired.”
At the end, Ben asked if she’d be willing to testify in court as to what she’d heard. When she hesitated, he told her honestly he couldn’t guarantee Hardison would be convicted, but if he was, he’d be put away for a good, long time given how brutal the assault had been on the store owner and how serious his injuries.
Her face firmed and she squared her shoulders. “I’ll do that. After he hurt me so many times, he don’t deserve any loyalty from me.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Ben smiled at her as he rose to his feet. “You’ve been an excellent witness, Ms. Baker.” He extracted a promise from her to inform him of any moves, and told her he’d keep her informed. Seth thanked her, too, then grinned at Ben as they walked to their car.
“I have Dietz on speed dial,” he said.
Jennifer Dietz was the Deputy Prosecuting Attorney they’d been working with on this investigation.
“Call her,” Ben agreed.
* * *
NICOLE CROSSED HER arms and adopted a combative stance as she waited with Ben for Rachel to rush to her room to grab her rolling pink suitcase. “What if you get called in to work?” she asked. “Tell me you have somebody responsible to watch over Rach until I can pick her up.”
They’d only had this same conversation twenty or thirty times. Had she dredged it up again because he’d been incautious enough during their phone conversation Wednesday to mention being out for dinner? Dumb to let it slip, given that Nic had been friendly, wanting to talk about an issue she had with Rachel’s teacher.
Now he unclenched his jaw enough to allow him to speak. “You’ve met Mrs. Chaffee. She’s watched Rachel a couple times before. Rachel likes her.”
“What if she’s not home?”
He kept his voice low, but wasn’t able to strip it entirely of anger. “I haven’t yet left my daughter alone, and I won’t. She’s as safe with me as she is with you.”
“Daddy?” Speaking from right behind her mother, Rachel sounded uncertain. He hadn’t heard her returning.
“Hey, kiddo.” Tilting his head to see past Nicole, he smiled at his little girl. “You sure you have everything?”
“Uh-huh. Bye, Mommy.” She submitted to a hug from her mother, then took Ben’s hand and trotted down the porch steps happily with him.
His last glimpse was of Nicole still standing in the doorway, even from a distance radiating hostility.
He tried to call up a recollection of the last time there’d been warmth between them and failed. Passion, yes, but it had been forever since he and Nicole had had fun talking over dinner, or since she’d asked about his day and seemed to care. And, yeah, he had asked about her day, and cared.
He heard his own voice. You’re saying that Nic drawing a line in the sand over the hours I worked was...a diversion. He rejected the thought between one blink and the next. No, there’d been love, all right. He just wished he knew what had killed her love for him.
“So, pumpkin, how was school?” he asked, looking in the rearview mirror to see Rach, and listened to her chatter.
She worked her way around to negotiating mode. “Can we have pizza, Daddy? You said—”
“We’re not going out tonight,” he told her firmly. “If you want pizza tomorrow after the movie, that’s what we’ll have. Tonight, I’m making tacos, which I know you like.”
She giggled. Which made him remember Eve’s laugh, but, no, he wasn’t going there.
“And for dessert,” he added, “we’re making cookies.”
“Can we make chocolate chip?” she begged.
“Nope, we’re doing cutout cookies like people make for Christmas, except we can make hearts and trees and unicorns and all kinds of shapes instead of reindeer and stars.”
Her face brightened. “With frosting?”
“And sprinkles.”
“That will be fun,” she decided, and bounced in her booster seat.
Unfortunately, he’d overestimated her attention span. She happily cut out enough cookies to fill one cookie sheet, “helped” him spread frosting once they’d come out of the oven and decorated about two cookies before asking if she could watch a movie now.
If she’d chosen How to Train Your Dragon 1 or 2, or even The Lego Movie, he might have joined her. But Frozen? He swore she watched it every time she came, and he knew she had it at home, too.
So he put the DVD in for her, poured her a glass of milk, gave her a couple of cookies and set himself to cutting out, baking and decorating a couple of dozen more. Slapping on frosting, he wondered how different it might have gone if Eve had been here. He bet she could have made decorating cookies fun.
* * *
ROD CARTER FINALLY agreed to meet with Eve on Saturday morning. It wasn’t as if she’d had any more interesting offers for the weekend. So why not work? she thought wryly. In an attempt not to think about Ben and Rachel and what they were doing, she turned her mind to Joel, who had sounded scared the last time they talked.
She had suggested a coffee shop, wanting to separate Rod from his wife and also be able to talk without either Joel or Gavin overhearing. She was already seated in a comfortable, upholstered chair with her chai, staking out a reasonably private corner, when he arrived ten minutes late.
“Sorry,” he said, when he joined her after getting his coffee. “Ah, Lynne wanted me to say how sorry she is that things aren’t so good with Joel. She’s really trying, you know.”
His discomfiture suggested he didn’t believe that, but Eve decided to steer away from challenging the statement right away.
“I’m sorry you weren’t there to talk the last couple times I’ve come out. You know Joel a lot better than your wife does.”
Lines deepened in his forehead. “I thought I did.”
“I gather Mr. Rowe is a difficult neighbor.” Eve sipped her tea.
Rod grunted. “You could say that.”
“Do you know who besides Joel has annoyed him?”
“Who hasn’t?” he muttered. “He reamed me out a month or so ago when some dog knocked over my garbage can and I wasn’t out there early enough in the morning to pick up all the crap.”
“Gavin?”
“Oh, Gavin has his car souped up and Rowe bitches about the racket.” He brooded briefly. “There’s no pleasing him. Guess he was never young.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a teenager in the neighborhood he likes.”
“Or a kid of any size. Trick-or-treaters don’t knock on his door, I can tell you that,” Rod said with feeling.
Time to lay it out. “Do you have any reason to believe Joel would be pulling these tricks on Mr. Rowe?”
He tried to meet her eyes and couldn’t. “It’s not me who is accusing Joel! It’s that son of a bitch next door.”
“Your wife seemed to be taking the accusations as fact.”
“She’s just pacifying the old man. Letting him think we’re dealing with it.”
“So you don’t believe Joel retaliated against him?”
He hesitated. “I don’t want to. Lynne...”
Eve waited him out.
“I’ve been working long hours lately.” He was a PUD lineman, and during winter in a wooded county, outages occurred with every windstorm.
Eve nodded her understanding.
“Lynne sees more of the boys than I do. Joel...he seems to resent her some, or at least she thinks so. He’s been a lot quieter lately. Kinda withdrawn. I thought he and Gavin would hit it off, but Joel hasn’t acted interested.”
Eve let herself look surprised. “He didn’t say anything like that to me.”
At last Rod met her eyes. “Would he?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “I think he would. He’s been pretty open with me.”
Rod looked away again. Wondering what Joel had told her?
“It’s just teenage pranks.” Once again, he didn’t sound as if he quite believed what he was saying.
“Mr. Rowe could have been badly hurt by the rock through the window. That showed a degree of malice.”
Aforethought, she added silently.
He shifted in his chair, took a drink of his coffee, twitched a little. “Eve, I don’t know what I can tell you.”
They discussed Joel’s school performance, which was still excellent, his decision to go with the University of Oregon, Gavin’s adjustment to a new high school.
“He already has a girlfriend,” he said with a chuckle. “One of the cheerleaders, wouldn’t you know. Cute little thing.”
Eve hoped Joel hadn’t had his eye on that same cute little thing. She wouldn’t put it past Gavin to target a girl just because Joel liked her. Then she felt the smallest bit guilty about the antipathy she felt for a sixteen-year-old boy she really didn’t know that well.
She gave up shortly thereafter and let Rod make a hasty escape. Although she’d finished her tea, she sat where she was for a few more minutes, thinking. No great ideas came to mind. Her best hope was that the tricks had come to an end. As annoyed as she was at Officer Pruitt, his interest must surely be making the perpetrator nervous. He—and she couldn’t help seeing Gavin’s smug face—might not have believed Clement Rowe would call the police. Nothing had happened since Tuesday. Five days. That was good, right?
* * *
“IS SOMETHING UP?” Eve’s mother asked after passing her the butter. “We haven’t heard much from you lately. Or seen you.”
Her dad didn’t comment. A quiet man, he only continued eating, although Eve had no doubt he was paying attention.
She cast her mind back. In fact, the last time she’d seen her parents had been the Friday night at Seth’s when she’d met Ben for the first time.
“Just busy,” she said, and told them a little about Joel’s troubles. She’d bragged about him before, so they looked surprised.
“But he sounds like such a nice boy!” her mother exclaimed. “Surely no one really believes he’d try to hurt an old man.”
“I don’t. His foster father isn’t being as supportive as I’d like, though.”
“Boy has a lot to lose,” her dad remarked.
“I keep thinking that, too,” she agreed. “A few months from now, he’ll be gone. Doing something like this, he’d be risking his full ride to college. He’s too smart to do that, even if he had a nasty streak, which I swear he doesn’t.”
Eve talked a little more about her work, hoping to divert her mother from her curiosity about what had been occupying Eve’s time. For some reason, she didn’t want to talk about Ben. Maybe she was afraid to jinx the tentative beginning they’d made.
But she should have known Mom better than that. Into the first pause, she said, “You’re surely not working twenty-four hours a day.”
“Well, not quite. I actually did work yesterday.” She hesitated, conceding defeat. “I’ve started seeing someone. A guy, I mean. We’ve had dinner four or five times, seen a movie.” She shrugged. Silence answered her.
“Goodness,” her mother finally said. “Is this anyone we know?”
Damn. They did know Ben. No way she could lie.
“Ben Kemper, Seth’s partner. The man who came to Seth’s for dinner that night, with his little girl. That’s where we met.”
Her mother had gone very still. “Yes, of course I remember meeting him.”
“His little girl is so cute.”
“Yes.”
Dad watched Eve with a somber expression.
“Is something wrong?” she finally asked. “Did you not like him? Or you’ve heard something about him—?”
“Not at all. I’m just wondering why you didn’t mention him. You must have known we’d be interested.”
Oh, wonderful. She’d hurt their feelings. These days, her specialty.
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