Kansas City Secrets. Julie Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ boyfriend dead and has no alibi for the time of the murder. She’d be any smart detective’s first call on this investigation. It’s called doing our job.”

      Max shook his head at the annoyingly sensible explanation. “I had to ask.”

      Trent laughed outright. “Maybe you’d better let me do the talking when we get to the March house. Somehow, I doubt that calling her a whack job will encourage her to share any inside information she or her brother might have on our case.”

      “I get it. I’m the eyes and the muscle, and you’re the pretty boy front man.” Max plucked the cigar from his lips as he pulled off the highway on the eastern edge of Kansas City. “I’m not in the mood to make nice with some shriveled old prune of a woman, anyway.”

      “Rosemary March is thirty-three years old. We’ve got her driver’s license photo in our records, and it looks as normal as any DMV pic can. What logic are you basing this I’d-rather-date-my-sister description on?”

      Max could quote the file on their person of interest, too. “Over the years she’s called in as many false alarms to 9-1-1 as she has legit actionable offenses, which makes her a flake in my book. Trespassing. Vandalism. Harassing phone calls. Either she’s got a thing for cops, she has some kind of paranoia complex or it’s the only way she can get any attention. Whatever her deal is, I’m not in the mood to play games today.”

      “Some of those calls were legit,” Trent pointed out. “What about the abusive fiancé?”

      “Our murder victim?”

      “Yeah. Those complaints against Bratcher were substantiated. Even though someone scrubbed the photos and domestic violence complaints from his file after his death, the medical reports of Miss March’s broken arm, bruises and other injuries were included as part of the initial murder investigation.”

      “But the woman’s never married. She’s only had the one boyfriend we can verify.” Okay, so a fiancé who’d hurt her qualified as low-life devil scum, not boyfriend, in his book. But Rosemary March had money. A lot of it. Even if she had three warts on the end of her nose and looked like a gorilla, there should be a dozen men hitting on her. She should be on the social register donating to charities. She should be traveling the world or building a mansion or driving a luxury car or doing something that would make her show up on somebody’s radar in Kansas City. “The woman’s practically a recluse. She has her groceries delivered. She’s got a teaching degree, but hasn’t worked in a school since that plane wreck her parents were in. She’s probably a hoarder. Her idea of a social outing is visiting her brother in prison. If that doesn’t smack of crazy cat lady, I don’t know what does.”

      “It’s a wonder you’ve never been able to keep a woman.”

      Max forced a laugh, although the sound fell flat on his eardrums. Somehow, subjecting a good woman to his mood swings and bullheaded indifference to most social graces didn’t seem very fair. But there were times, like today, when he regretted not having the sweet smells of a woman and the soft warmth of a welcoming body to lose himself in. Looked as though another long run or hour of lifting weights in the gym tonight would be his only escape from the sorrows of the day. “I make no claims on being a catch.”

      “Good, ’cause you’d lose that bet.”

      He wasn’t the only cop in this car with relationship issues. “Give it a rest, junior. I don’t see you asking me to stand up as best man anytime soon. When are you going to quit making goo-goo eyes at Katie Rinaldi and ask her out?”

      “There’s her son to consider. There’s too much history between us.” Trent muttered one of Max’s favorite curses. “It’s complicated.”

      “Women usually are.”

      This time, the laughter between them was genuine.

      When Max and Trent both got assigned to the Cold Case Squad, their superior officer must have paired the two of them together as some kind of yin and yang thing—blond, brunette; older, younger; a veteran of a hard knocks life and an optimistic young man who’d grown up in a suburban neighborhood much like this one, with a mom and a dad and 2.5 siblings or whatever the average was these days; an enlisted soldier who’d gone into the Army right out of high school and a football-scholarship winner who’d graduated cum laude and skipped a career in the pros because of one concussion too many. Max and Trent were a textbook example of the good cop/bad cop metaphor.

      And no one had ever asked Max to play the good-cop role.

      But their strengths balanced each other. He had survival instincts honed on the field of battle and in the dark shadows of city streets. He was one of the few detectives in KCPD with marksman status who wasn’t on a SWAT team. And if it was mechanical, he could probably get it started or keep it running with little more than the toolbox in his trunk. As for their weaknesses? Hell, Detective Goody Two-shoes over there probably didn’t have any weakness. Trent wasn’t just an athlete. He was book smart. Patient. Always two or three steps ahead of anybody else in the room. He was the only cop in the department who’d ever taken Max down in hand-to-hand combat training—and that was because of some brainiac trick he’d used against him. And he was one of the few people left on the planet Max trusted without question. Trent Dixon reminded Max of a certain captain he’d served under during his Army stint in the Middle East. He would have followed Jimmy Stecher to the ends of the earth and back, and, in some ways, he had.

      Only Jimmy had never made it back from that last door-to-door skirmish where he and the others had been taken prisoner. Not really. Oh, Max had led the rescue and they’d shipped home on the evac plane together after that last do-or-die firefight to get him out of that desert village. They’d been in Walter Reed hospital for a few weeks together, too. The two men he’d been captured with had been shot to death in front of him. Jimmy hadn’t cracked and revealed troop positions or battle strategies, and he’d never let them film him reading their latest manifesto to use him as propaganda. But part of Jimmy had died inside on that nightmarish campaign—the part that could survive in the real, normal world. And Max should have seen it coming. He’d been responsible for retrieving their dead and getting their commander out of there. But he hadn’t saved Jimmy. Not really. He hadn’t realized there was one more soldier who’d still needed him.

      He’d failed his mission. His friend was dead.

      Despite the bright summer sunshine burning through the windshield of his classic car, Max felt the darkness creeping into his thoughts. The image of what a bullet to the brain could do to a man’s head was tattooed on his memories as surely as the ink marking his left shoulder. He’d known today would be a tough one—the anniversary of Jimmy’s suicide.

      Trent knew it, too.

      “Stay with me, brother.” His partner’s deeply pitched voice echoed through the car, drawing Max out of his annual funk. “Not everybody’s the enemy today. I need you focused on this interview.”

      Max nodded, slamming the door on his ugly past. He rolled the unlit cigar between his fingers and chomped down on it again. “This is busywork, and you know it.” Probably why Trent had volunteered the two of them to make this trip to the suburbs instead of sitting in the precinct office reading through files with the other detectives on the team. Max didn’t blame him. Teaming with him, especially on days like this, was probably a pretty thankless job. He should be glad Trent was looking out for him. He was glad. Still didn’t make this trip to the March house any less of a wild-goose chase when he was more in the mood to do something concrete like make an arrest or run down a perp. “Rosemary March isn’t about to confess or tell us anything СКАЧАТЬ