Deathwatch (12 page)

She shot a darting glance his way.
“The new neighbor brought them over.
Wendy White.
Have you met her?”

He nodded.
“Seems cheerful.”

“
And then some.”
She turned back to her work.
“I guess she can bake, but she can’t cook.
She’s over at the diner three times a day.
For every single meal.”
She glanced at the time on the microwave.
“She’s probably there right now.
She comes like clockwork, at nine, then one, then five.”
 

He watched as she slapped the dough around a little then began stretching it.
He wanted her relaxed enough so she’d tell him what he wanted to know, so he didn’t push.
He stepped away from the kitchen island and went to wash the tomatoes, but his phone rang.
He glanced at the display, picked up
.
 

“
Wanted to let you know we picked up Eduardo and his crew.
They’ll be cooling their heels in jail tonight.
Are you coming in to press charges in the morning?”
Harper asked.
 

Murph glanced at Kate.
“It’s the police.
Want to press charges?”

Fear widened her eyes.
She shook her head rapidly.

“
We’ll let it go this time,” Murph told Harper.
“You make sure you put the fear of God into those little bastards.”
 

A moment of silence passed on the other end, then,
“
You know what we say about people who don’t press charges, right?”
 

He did.
In general, cops preferred to see criminals face the music.
“There are extenuating circumstances.”

“
All right.
I’ll see if I can scare them straight.
And I'm keeping the knives.”
 

Murph thanked Harper and hung up, went back to helping with the tomatoes.

Kate worked on the doug
h.
“
I grew up in Northern California,” she said after a minute.
 

That explained the slight accent he hadn’t been able to place.

“
I was in and out of foster care for most of my childhood,” she said in a matter of fact tone, looking at her hands instead of him, as if distancing herself both from him and the story.
“I was a pretty prickly kid.
Defensive.
Didn’t trust anyone.
I sure as hell didn't like anyone.
And I didn't think I needed anyone either.
Then I was adopted by the best people on earth when I was twelve and my sister was a baby.
I love my family with all my heart.
I miss them like crazy.”
 

She swallowed.
“I am who I am because of my adoptive parents.
They saw beyond the hard shell.
Before them, my attitude pretty much kept everyone away.”

He tried to picture her as a little wildling and the image came easily enough.
“What made you give them a chance?”

“
It wasn’t any one particular thing.”
She paused.
“One foster mom had me play poker for money in a dingy basement at a friend’s house from time to time.
I was good at it.
Anyway, after the Bridges adopted me, Ellie found out I liked cards.
 

“
She learned to play just so we’d spend time together.
It was her way of communicating with me.
She treated me as if I was her own daughter.
She said, ‘Life is like a poker game.
You get good cards and you get bad ones.
Sometimes you get a lot of bad ones, one after the other.
When that happens and then suddenly you get a good hand, some people think they don't deserve it and they toss it back.’”
 

She shook her head at the memory, a faint smile playing over her lips.
“I told her throwing in a good card was stupid.
And she told me how coming to their family could be a good card.
It could be the winning card if I had the courage to pick it up.”

She paused again.
“She talked to me like nobody talked to me before.
Like she really cared about me and Emma.
She said things I could relate to, made me think.
I mean it wasn’t as easy as that, but somehow she gently nudged me onto the right path little by little.
Anyway, I met a kid named Marcos Santiago in the system,” she continued.
“Our lives kept crossing paths.
Even after he aged out of foster care, we touched base with each other every once in a while.”
She filled her lungs.
“Then he was killed.
I was there.”

He lifted a hand to stop her.
“
The
Marcos Santiago?”
He’d been a cop long enough for the name to be familiar to him, even if Santiago had operated on the other side of the country.
 

“
You were there the night he was shot?
By Rauch Asael.”
As a cop, he kept track of the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
He shook his head to clear it.
“Asael is after you?”
 

Just saying the words stunned Murph a little.
Did she even know how much trouble she was in?
Asael was as nasty as they got, wanted on three continents.
“
Why aren’t you in witness protection?”
 

“
I don’t trust the system.”
She stretched the dough, working with quick, efficient movements.
 

Murph put the clean tomatoes into a bowl for her.
“Rumor had it, Santiago wanted out, and his business partners didn’t like it.
Why were you with him that night?”
Kate didn’t strike him as a stone-cold criminal who’d run in those kind of circles.
“I don’t remember the reports saying anything about a witness.”

“
The FBI held that back.”
She closed her eyes for a second.
“I know Marcos wasn’t one of the good guys, okay?
But he was good to me.
We were with the same foster family once.
The mother was okay, but when she wasn’t home, the father turned mean.
He came after me once.
Marcos put himself between us and fought the guy off.
The lowlife claimed Marcos attacked without reason.
Social Services believed him.
They pulled Marcos and dumped him into a group home.
He had it bad there.
One of the older kids abused him.”
 

She made a helpless gesture with her hands.
“
The system failed him from the moment he was born, so he decided to work outside the system.
I know it wasn’t the right thing to do.
I told him that all the time.
But he wasn’t a monster.”
 

Murph narrowed his eyes.
“You were close?”
Lovers?
 

“
Friends,” she snapped out the single word, her eyes flashing with impatience.
“That night he invited me over for drinks.
I spilled something on my dress, went to the bathroom, took too long.
When I came out—”
 

She swallowed hard.
“He lay crumpled on the carpet.
His throat was cut, but he was still alive.
He was looking at me.
I don’t know if he called out.
He had the music turned up.”

She paused for a second, looking fragile for the first time since he’d met her.
Even in the middle of the night with an intruder in her bedroom she hadn’t looked like this.
She’d held a gun at his chest.
Now her eyes filled with uncertainty and grief.

He almost reached out for her.
He knew what it felt like to witness the death of a friend, to be helpless to do anything but watch the life drain out of him.
But she pressed her lips together and gathered herself.

She was good at keeping her act together under duress, he was beginning to learn, even if they hadn't known each other all that long.

She pressed her lips together for a moment.
“
I saw a shadow moving toward the window.
I caught a glimpse of the killer's face in the glass.
He saw that I saw him.
He started to turn.”
She paused.
“But then the twins came in the front door, so he just kept moving forward and he was gone the next second.
He’d come down from the roof in the window cleaning box and cut a hole in the glass.
That’s what the FBI said.”
 

“
And you were the only one to see him?”
 

“
The twins were just inside the door.
The wall of the foyer stood between us.
They were laughing as they came around.
And then they were screaming, rushing back out.”
 

“
What twins?”
 

* * *

Kate rubbed her arm.
Marcos had gotten caught up in the whole living-larger-than-life thing.
“The twins were his girlfriends.”

She didn’t think he’d ever taken a woman seriously.
She was the only one he’d ever bothered to keep in touch with long-term, the only one who was outside the life of crime he lived.
Marcos never wanted to settle down, never wanted a family of his own.
Didn’t want to bring a kid into this messed up world, he used to say.

“
And then what happened?”
Murph brought her back to the story.
 

“Nothing good.”
She had the dough thin enough so she slapped it onto the baking stone then brushed it with olive oil to make sure that the tomato sauce wouldn’t get it soggy.
“
About two weeks after the murder, the killer found me and put a bullet through the windshield of my car while I was driving to work.
I was reaching over for my coffee mug at the same split second or I would be dead.
I drove into a tree.”
 

“
That’s where the scars come from.”
 

“
Yes.”
She touched a hand to her throat, then dropped it.
“The FBI decided I should fake my death.
If my funeral drew Asael, they could catch him.”
She tossed on the toppings, then smothered everything in soft, moist mozzarella.
 

“
But they didn’t,” Murph observed.
 

She pushed the pizza into the oven.
Staying busy kept her going.
“Somehow Asael figured out the trap.
I took off.
If nobody knows where I am, nobody can give me away.”

“
How long do you plan on running?”
 

“
Until they catch him.
He’s going to run out of luck someday.”
Basically, she was counting on Asael running out of luck sooner than she did.
 

Murph rubbed the side of his thumb over his lower lip.
“That can’t be easy.
Always watching, always wondering.
It’s like that in the army, but we get to relax when we’re on base.
There’s security there.
A soldier can lie down and close his eyes in his barracks and feel safe.
It balances out the intensity of being on patrol.”
His expression turned somber.
“But you don’t get a break.”

As she stared at him, she felt the old tightness inside her loosen a little.
That he would understand so completely made her suddenly feel lighter.
“It’s like a deathwatch.
You know, when relatives gather to wait for someone to die?
I feel like I’m always waiting for my own death.
I’ve been to my own funeral, and now I’m doing my own deathwatch.
It’s all backwards.”