Dead Reckoning (35 page)

“Kate, what the hell were you thinking?” he said between clenched teeth.

“You should have let me kill him.” She barely recognized the voice that squeezed from her throat.

They reached his truck. He opened the passenger side door and shoved her inside. She sat motionless and watched him jog around the front of the truck, then slide behind the wheel. Without speaking he started the engine and pulled onto the street.

He made a U-turn at the intersection, then sped east. It took several minutes of silence for Kate to realize what kind of shape she was in. She could feel her entire body trembling. She could hear her breaths coming too fast, too shallow, and she knew she was an inch away from hyperventilating. Cold sweat slicked the back of her neck and forehead.

“Put on your seat belt,” came Frank’s voice from beside her.

But Kate was working the coat from her body. She was burning up. At some point each breath had turned into a choking sob. She could hear them echoing inside the cab. Inside her head. Nausea churned in her stomach. She could feel the acid burn of vomit in her throat. The bitter taste of bile filling her mouth.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said.

Frank turned onto a side street and pulled over. Kate threw open the door and stumbled from the truck. She made it three steps before vomiting. Another step and she went to her knees. She threw up again, then dry heaves racked her body. Weak and off balance, she fell forward. Her palms hit the gravel. Her arms were shaking. Her head drooping. She could see her hair hanging down. She spat and choked back sickness. But now it was the sobs choking her.

Vaguely she was aware of footsteps behind her. A gentle hand on her back. “You’re going to be all right,” Frank said gently.

Kate didn’t think so. She didn’t think she’d ever be okay. She couldn’t stop crying. Couldn’t seem to rally the strength to stand or raise her head. It was as if what had happened back at that apartment had zapped the last of the strength from her body.

After what seemed like an eternity, Frank slid his hands beneath her arms and helped her to her feet. Never letting her go, he guided her back to the truck, opened the door, and lifted her. Somehow, she made it onto the seat.

She was leaning back with her head against the rest when he climbed in. Without speaking, he pulled his cell phone from his belt and punched in numbers.

“I’ve got her,” he said in a low voice. “I need for you to get someone over there to pick up the car. Yeah, but I don’t want her alone. I’ll give you ten minutes, then I need to call 911.” A moment of silence. “She shot the son of a bitch, but I think he’s going to be all right. Yeah. I’ll take care of her.”

Sighing, he closed the phone, clipped it to his belt, and turned to face her. “How did you lose the cop who was watching you?”

Kate had forgotten about the cop she’d left at the Turtle Creek Convalescent Home. She looked at the glowing numbers of the clock on the dash and was astounded to see that only twenty-five minutes had passed since she’d left Kirsten. It seemed like a lifetime.

“I left him at the convalescent home.”

“You went out the back door?” Frank asked.

She nodded.

He put his hands on the wheel and stared straight ahead. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to drive you over there. You’re going to walk in the back door. I’m going to go in the front. Then we’re going to leave together and go back to your place. And we’re going to fucking talk about this.”

“Frank, you probably don’t want to get involved in this.”

“I’m already involved.”

 
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 9:14 P.M.

Frank usually didn’t have a problem figuring out his feelings. He was a black-and-white kind of guy. Cut-and-dried. He liked to keep things simple. But there was nothing simple about his feelings for Kate. Throw attempted murder into the mix and he had himself a real conflict.

He couldn’t believe by-the-book Kate Megason had come within an inch of premeditatedly killing a man. Frank simply couldn’t get his mind around the image of her holding that gun, her eyes wild, a very dark intent cemented in her expression. How the hell was he supposed to handle this?

But Frank knew what he had to do. He waited ten minutes then drove to a strip mall a few miles from Perkins’s apartment and used a pay phone to call 911. “Someone’s been shot. Fourteen twenty-one Pioneer, Apartment 6, in Grand Prairie.” He hung up before the dispatcher could ask any questions.

Back in the car, he took Northwest Highway east to Bachman Lake Park. The park was in a tough neighborhood and deserted for the most part at this hour. Frank parked the truck in the shadows of an oak tree. Leaving Kate inside, he took the jogging path toward the lake, then cut over to the water’s edge. He pulled the Jennings pistol from his pocket and threw it into the water.

“And now you’re an accessory to attempted murder,” he muttered. “Shit.”

He jogged back to the truck. Kate was leaning forward with her face in her hands. Frank wanted to be angry with her. A part of him
was
angry with her. Furious, in fact. How could she do something so utterly self-destructive?

He’d always seen a big black dividing line between right and wrong. That was one of the things that had made him a good cop. There were no gray areas when it came to breaking the law. Until tonight, anyway, a nagging little voice pointed out.

Her actions clearly fell on the wrong side of the law. But as an ex-cop, Frank had a pretty good idea of what had happened to her and her sister eleven years ago. He’d seen the inhumanity of man against man up close and personal too many times not to have the images branded into his brain. He knew that sometimes bad things happened to good people. And he knew that sometimes good people did bad things.

Tonight Kate fell into the latter category. Frank had not only looked the other way, but he’d helped her cover it up. Now he was faced with the task of figuring out how the hell he was going to handle the rest of it.

Tense silence filled the cab as he drove to the Turtle Creek Convalescent Home. He parked at the rear of the complex. “Go to your sister’s room and wait for me,” he said.

Kate nodded and reached for the door handle.

But one look at her face and he wasn’t sure she could make it into the building, let alone fool the cop into thinking she’d been sitting next to her sister’s bed for the last hour. Leaning over, Frank put his hand on her arm and squeezed gently. “We’ve got to make him believe you’ve been here, Kate.”

Her eyes were large and fragile. “I can do it.”

He watched her walk away and enter the building through the back door. He drove around to the front and parked in the lot, next to her car. The off-duty Dallas cop was parked a few cars over. He rolled down the window when Frank approached.

“How’s it going?” Frank asked.

“Slow. The way we like it, I guess.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” He glanced toward the building. “She been in there long?”

The cop looked at his watch. “A little over an hour.”

“I gotta talk to her about a couple of things.” Frank moved away from the cruiser and waved. “Have a nice evening.”

He’d never told anyone to have a nice evening in his freaking life. If the man had known him, he would have known immediately that there was something terribly wrong. But he hadn’t been able to think of anything else to say that would sound even remotely normal. He sure as hell couldn’t say what was on his mind.

He took the steps two at a time to the front entrance. The lights were dim, but there was a nurse at the station staring into a computer monitor.

“Can you tell me where Kirsten Megason’s room is?”

“Down the hall on the right,” said the nurse.

Realizing visiting hours were long past, he smiled sheepishly. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

She smiled. “Oh, don’t mind the rules. No one else does.”

Frank forced a smile. He’d never liked places like this. Hospitals. Retirement homes. Funeral homes. They all made him uncomfortable as hell and in a hurry to get out.

He turned down the hall and walked quickly to Kirsten Megason’s room. He knocked and entered without invitation. The room was small and homey with yellow curtains and stuffed animals lining the windowsill. A pink comforter covered the bed. An old Three Dog Night ballad floated from the radio on the sill. But none of the homey touches could change the fact that this was a hospital room or that the person in the bed was never going to get better.

Kate was standing next to the bed. She looked up when he walked in, and Frank was taken aback by her appearance. She’d cleaned up in the bathroom, but she still looked like the walking dead herself. Her face was the color of new snow. Her eyes seemed too dark and too large for her face. She was holding her sister’s hand so tightly her fingers were white.

He looked at the woman lying in the bed. He knew she was Kate’s sister, but there was no resemblance. The woman lying as still as death looked thirty years older. Her hair was lifeless and thin. Her face was sunken, her flesh slack over jutting facial bones. Her eyes were open, but sightless and utterly blank.

Jesus.

Worried that he wouldn’t be able to conceal his revulsion, he quickly looked away.

“This is Kirsten,” she said. “She’s twenty-nine years old. She was prettier than me. Smarter than me.” A sad smile touched her mouth when she looked at the woman lying in the bed. “This is what they did to her.”

Frank didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure what to feel. The only thing he knew for certain was that he needed to get her out of there before she collapsed.

“Kate, we need to go,” he said.

She’d changed into her regular coat, and it shocked him all over again that she’d had the foresight to wear a coat no one would recognize for her excursion to Danny Lee Perkins’s apartment.

She didn’t give him an argument, but rose on legs that didn’t seem quite steady. She lifted her bag from the floor and put it over her shoulder.

“Can you drive?” he asked.

She nodded and started for the door.

TWENTY-FIVE

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 9:41 P.M.

Frank knew his following Kate back to her place would probably start an avalanche of gossip that would start at the DPD and stretch all the way to the DA’s office. Cops were the worst gossipmongers on the planet when it came to who was sleeping with whom. Even though he wasn’t sleeping with her, the off-duty cop was going to assume the worst.

But there was no way Frank could leave her alone tonight. Not only was she on shaky ground emotionally, but they needed to talk about what happened. About how they were going to handle it.

He parked behind her BMW and waved to the cop in the cruiser who’d parked on the street. Kate had just opened the front door when he caught up with her. She turned on the living room light and worked off her coat on her way to the coat closet. Without looking at him, she hung it up, then walked into the kitchen.

Frank removed his own coat, then draped it over the chair in the living room. He found her in the kitchen, standing at the sink, looking out the window as if the darkness beyond held answers she desperately needed to know. Even from across the room he could see that she was still shaking. Her shoulders drooped slightly, as if the weight of the world were resting upon them.

She looked traumatized standing there in her black turtleneck and jeans, and for the first time it struck him that even her clothes had been chosen for what she’d attempted to do tonight. And still he couldn’t reconcile Kate Megason the ADA and Kate Megason the woman who’d tried to kill a man.

“You look like you’re going into shock,” he said.

She didn’t move, didn’t even acknowledge his words, just stared through the window, her slender shoulders bowed.

Torn between impatience and sympathy, he crossed to her and edged her aside to get a glass from the cupboard. He filled the glass with ice then put it under the tap and handed it to her. “Sip this,” he said. “It’ll help.”

She looked at him and took the glass. “I’m not going into shock.”

Putting his hand over hers, he guided the glass to her mouth until she sipped. “We need to talk about what happened,” he said.

“I don’t know what I can say, Frank. I tried to kill a man.” She lifted her shoulders, let them drop. “It was premeditated.”

“I think this is a little more complicated than that,” he said.

“I wish I’d succeeded.”

“No, you don’t.”

Her mouth tightened. “How did you know?”

“Jack Gamble called me.”

A mosaic of emotions fractured in her eyes. “He had no right. I’m . . . a client. The work he does for me is supposed to be confidential.”

“You’re a hell of a lot more than a client to him, Kate. He cares about you. So do I.” The admittance made him flush. He hadn’t intended to say that. But he’d been thinking it, feeling it.

Tears shimmered in her eyes when she looked at him. “I didn’t mean to drag you into this.”

“I’m here because I want to be here.”

“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”

“Depends on how we handle it.” It disturbed him that he’d covered up a serious crime. Disturbed him even more that he would continue to do whatever he needed to do to protect her.

“The good news is that you have an alibi,” he said. “The police won’t find the gun. The bad news is that Danny Lee Perkins can ID you.”

“He didn’t remember me.”

“Isn’t he the one who’s been stalking you?”

Kate blinked at him as if she’d forgotten about the stalker, a testament to just how horrific this night had been for her. “It’s not him,” she said.

“Are you sure? Maybe you didn’t recognize—”

“Danny Lee Perkins has a speech impediment. He rounds his
r
’s. I’d forgotten about it until I was there and heard him speak. The person on the phone does not have a speech impediment.”