Софи Келли - Paws Аnd Effect

I sat down beside him for a moment. He put two paws on my leg and I stroked the white fur at the top of his nose.

“I won’t be very long,” I said.

He lifted his head and nuzzled my chin.

“I love you, too,” I said.

There was no traffic on Mountain Road and very little all the way to Marcus’s house. I pulled in behind his SUV and walked around the house. The light was on in the kitchen. He must have heard the truck pull in, because the back door opened as I stepped onto the deck.

Marcus was barefoot and shirtless. He hadn’t shaved yet and his dark hair was still damp from the shower. “Kathleen? Is everything all right?”

I nodded, crossed the distance between us and wrapped him in a hug. He hugged me back, then took a step back, hands on my shoulders. “It’s not that I’m not happy to see you but it’s six thirty in the morning. What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you and I couldn’t wait.”

“All right,” he said. “Come in. It’s cold out there.”

We went into the kitchen and I sat across from him at the table.

“So what do you need to talk to me about?” he asked, pulling on a T-shirt that had been over the back of his chair. His blue eyes were narrowed with concern. “Is it . . . Are we okay?”

I reached over and put both my hands over his. “No, no, no. It’s not us.” I made myself smile at him. “We’re fine. We’re better than fine.”

I saw him relax a little. Then a shadow seemed to pass over his face. “It’s Dani, isn’t it,” he said.

I nodded. “I’m so sorry. She . . . didn’t fall off that embankment by accident.”

His mouth twisted to one side. “I probably shouldn’t ask you how you know that.”

“It would be better if you didn’t,” I said.

“What happened?”

I told him what Hope had shared with me. He had to know that she was the source of the information, but neither one of us said her name.

“She didn’t text me, Kathleen,” he said. “I gave her my number and I told her she could call me, but she didn’t.”

“That’s good,” I said. “You can show them your phone.”

He shook his head. “Even though I don’t text I still get some spam. I clear it out once a week.”

My heart sank.

Marcus was meticulous and organized and I knew he would have a system in place to deal with those unwanted texts, just the way he did with so many other things.

“You deleted them all,” I said. Inside I groaned.

He gave an almost imperceptible nod. “Last Friday.”

Anyone who knew Marcus would know it was completely in character for him to do something like that.

“If this were my case I’d think it was suspicious,” he said. “But I give you my word that Dani didn’t send me any texts the day she died. She didn’t ask me to meet her.”

The only thing I could think of was that someone else must have answered that text, and then, realizing it was Marcus’s phone, deleted the original message and the reply out of embarrassment. Maybe it had been someone at the station who had mistaken his phone for their own. It seemed far-fetched but what other explanation was there? I knew Marcus generally kept his cell in his pocket but it was possible he’d set it on his desk for a moment and gotten distracted.

“I don’t need your word,” I said. “I know you. And everyone else who knows you knows that you had nothing to do with Dani’s death.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” he said, “but you know that police investigation is based on following the evidence, and from what you’ve just told me that evidence leads to me.”

“You told me once that an investigation is a little like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. First you have to make sure you have all the pieces. Then you have to start putting them together to form a picture and sometimes you can’t be sure how one piece fits until you get some of the others in place.”

He laughed, which was the last thing I was expecting.

“What?” I said.

“Kathleen, when I said that to you I was trying to impress you. I was trying to make what I do sound more like an art than just the facts, ma’am.” He got to his feet, touching my shoulder as he moved behind me.

“Yes, police work is a process, but it’s also an art,” I pointed out. “It’s as much instinct and feeling as it is observation and fact-finding.”

“I think instinct and feelings are how you figure things out,” he said as he poured a cup of coffee for each of us, “not me.”

He was right. The conflict between feelings and facts had been the major source of turmoil between the two of us. It had taken a case that was very personal to Marcus for us to start to see things from the other’s perspective.

He came back to the table with our coffee. He waited until I had taken a sip, then he spoke. “What else do they have? There has to be more than just those texts. You wouldn’t have come out here this early just for that.”

“Marcus, where are your extra keys?” I asked.

“In the bedroom on my dresser.”

I got up and went down the hall to the bedroom. The keys were in a pottery bowl that he’d told me his sister, Hannah, had made when they were kids. I snagged the keys with one finger. The round metal fob from the drive-in wasn’t attached. Somehow I’d known it wouldn’t be.

I went back to the kitchen.

“What is it?” Marcus asked, turning in his seat to look at me.

I dropped the keys on the table in front of him. He got it immediately. He pressed his lips together for a moment. “Where was it?”

“Under her body,” I said softly.

His face twitched. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t—”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my cheek against his hair. It smelled like baby shampoo. “I know,” I said.

“It must have gotten lost when Thorsten had my keys.”

“That’s possible.”

“And someone picked it up.”

I didn’t say anything.

Marcus eyed me slowly, shaking his head. “You don’t think John or Travis . . . ?”

“No,” I said. My stomach did a queasy flip. “They have theirs.”

His forehead creased. “You think it’s a setup?”

It was the conclusion Hope and I had come to. Someone—the real killer—wanted to make it look as though Marcus had murdered Dani. “Nothing else makes sense,” I said. “We just have to figure out who’s behind it.”

He twisted around to look at me. “No. I don’t want you involved in this in any way.”

I took a step backward and folded my arms over my midsection. “I’m already involved. I’m not going to sit around twiddling my thumbs or making stinky crackers for the boys while someone sets you up for murder, so if we’re going to argue about this let’s hear all your arguments now because I have things to do.” I made a beckoning gesture with one hand and waited for him to tell me this was a police matter and I had no business getting involved.

Instead, he stood up, pulled me against him and gave me a kiss that made me forget—for a moment at least—what we’d been talking about. “I love you,” he said.

I laid my head against his shoulder. “I love you, too,” I said. I tipped my head back to look up at him. “If this is our new way of fighting about things, I like it.”

He smiled and kissed me again, on the forehead this time, so I didn’t temporarily lose all my senses. “Somebody is trying to make it look like I killed Dani, Kathleen. This is dangerous.”

I was starting to see the kisses were more about distracting me than anything else. I broke out of the embrace and took a couple of steps backward so the counter was at my back and there was some air space between me and his broad, muscled shoulders.