He asked, “What are you worried about? Me telling you that I might be a target?”
Her attention snapped to him. “I’m not sure I believe that.”
“Neither am I.”
“Okay.” She stared down at her plate, at her barely touched pastry. “Belief is a dangerous thing sometimes. Best not to ignore the possibility, though.”
He agreed, but he didn’t want to press the issue. She had enough to concern her without worrying about him. He sought to give her a bit of reassurance. “I’m a hard guy to kill.”
“That’s patently obvious. You’re sitting across from me and, given your job, being here is an achievement.”
“It shouldn’t be, but I guess it is.” Unable to stop himself, he reached across the table to take her hand. His heart stuttered when her fingers wrapped around his and tightened.
There was such fatigue and sorrow on her face. He felt bad for bringing all this to her door. His brother’s murder clearly concerned her, and she would have worked as long and hard as it took to solve it even without him. But he’d added to her concerns.
He spoke. “I’m sorry I’ve made this case harder on you.”
She made a slight negative movement with her head. “It would have been hard anyway.”
“But the sheriff was keeping you out of it until I arrived.”
Her eyes grew fierce. “I wanted to be on this case. It wouldn’t have been long before I’d have demanded it. Yeah, I knew Larry, but I didn’t know him well enough to lose my objectivity. Don’t blame yourself for that.”
His brow creased as anger with himself began to grow. “Then I showed up, looking like trouble. You had to run around to try to prevent me from going ballistic all over the county.”
At that, a small laugh escaped her. “It hasn’t been that difficult.”
“Because you were willing to work with me. But I’ll be honest. Much as I hate to admit it, when I arrived here I did want to tear a few people apart. Obviously, I didn’t know who.”
She raised a brow. “Do you still want to?”
“Tear someone apart? Sometimes, but the urge isn’t as strong as when I arrived here. I think you’d be safe not worrying about that.”
She squeezed his hand again, then withdrew hers. He regretted the absence of her touch immediately. Damn, he was starting to get tangled up between grief, anger and the pull he felt toward Cat.
She nibbled some more at her Danish, then brought the coffeepot to the table, refilling both their mugs. “We might have made some real strides today,” she remarked.
“Possibly. There’s always some uncertainty in a combat situation. I’m used to it. But this feels like nothing except uncertainty.”
“That’s where it’s at right now,” she agreed. “Sometimes murders never get solved. I won’t lie to you. But something different was going on with Larry. I’m convinced he was a target, not an accident.”
He agreed. “Why hasn’t his house been released? There has to be a reason.”
He watched her chew her lower lip. Then she said, “The murder was brutal. We’re preventing curiosity seekers from sneaking in there as long as we can.”
That probably told him more than he wanted to know. He yanked himself away from images that immediately popped to mind. If anyone knew brutal, he did. Her choice of modifier certainly spoke volumes. Given what she did for a living, she’d probably seen multiple murder scenes.
He felt sick, facing a suspicion he’d avoided but now couldn’t. What the hell had been done to Larry, and how much did he really want to know?
But Cat’s consideration of the possibility that someone had tracked Larry from elsewhere also spoke volumes to him. She felt something much bigger than a burglary had occurred.
But she wouldn’t talk in detail without evidence. She’d made that clear at the outset, and he had to respect her position. She might speculate about motives, but that kind of spitballing was part of her job. Turning things around and around until she saw her way to a solution.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
He wasn’t opposed, but he studied her. “Am I giving you cabin fever?”
“Right now this job is giving me cabin fever. The research must be done.”
“But at the office, you’d have a lot more people to talk to than just me.”
“That’s true, but I’d still spend almost all the time reading. Plus, this new idea...well, I want to talk it over with Gage, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.”
Ten minutes later they stepped outside into the night wearing jackets. The temperatures were falling again, and Duke wondered if he smelled snow on the air.
It was easy, though, to bend into the night breeze, strolling alongside Cat.
He didn’t need another run. What he needed was company.
TWO MEN, DRESSED completely in black, with ski masks over their faces and black camouflage cream around their eyes, came around the rear of Matt Keller’s tiny little house. Concealed by the night and their clothing, they looked like darker shadows in the pale starlight. The moon was gone, concealing them even more.
They had scoped the house a couple of hours earlier after darkness had arrived, peeking into windows until they had a mental image of the interior. Mostly they knew which room they needed to get to.
Unfortunately, that room was a tiny ell, barely a jog in the hallway beside the bathroom and just in front of Matt’s bedroom. Behind the ell, however, was a mud porch that might be useful. But they agreed they’d prefer their entry point to be as far as possible from the bedroom, which meant the front of the house, in case they made any noise while getting past the door.
They were prepared for creaking floors in such an old house. They had night-vision goggles to keep them from stumbling into things. They figured there wouldn’t be any hidden
