Читать книгу Beast in the Tower - Julie Miller - Страница 11

“Where were you last night?” Kit looked up from her bowl of soggy cereal and glared at the eighteen-year-old with the spiked golden-brown hair and the annoyingly alert blue gaze, so unlike her own sleep-deprived eyes. Man, the kid had gall.

As relieved as she’d been to find Matt asleep in his bed when Tariq had finally dropped her off at four this morning, Kit suspected her brother’s loud snore had been a ruse to keep her from asking any questions. Granting them both a couple hours of peace, she’d turned off the bedside lamp, planted a kiss on his cheek and silently promised that once she got a little rest and felt slightly more human, a conversation was going to happen.

Welcome to slightly more human.

“I was at the hospital.” Needing something with a little more crunch to sustain her, Kit carried her bowl to the sink and reached for an apple from the basket of fruit on the counter. Kit hissed at the pain that stabbed through her shoulder, and quickly pulled her arm back to her side. “Wow.”

“Kit? You okay?” Was that concern she heard in Matt’s voice? When she turned around, she caught a glimpse of the sweet baby brother she’d once been so close to. But his I-don’t-give-a-damn mask slipped back into place before she could relish the connection. He stuffed a spoonful of cereal into his mouth and chewed around the matter-of-fact question. “Did you get hurt?”

The fist-size bruise that had turned her right collar bone and shoulder joint an ugly shade of purple was apparently going to limit her flexibility for the next few days. But, like the other bumps and aches on her body, it wasn’t going to stop her from looking out for her brother and taking care of the business that needed to be handled today.

“I wasn’t the patient.” She purposefully gritted her teeth and picked up an apple before pulling out a paring knife and returning to the table. She offered Matt the first wedge of fruit. “Want some?”

“I’m good.”

Fine. Don’t even let me feed you. Kit popped the apple slice into her mouth and continued carving. “Actually, I was there for a neighbor of ours. Helen Hodges?”

Matt downed the last of his milk. “The old lady who lives upstairs?”

Surprise, surprise. “You know her?”

“Not really.” When he started to leave the kitchen, Kit reminded him to rinse his dishes and put them in the dishwasher. With a grunt of acquiescence he went to the sink and did as she asked. “I bussed her table a couple of times when she was in the diner. She slipped me a tip because she said the waitresses don’t always share with the guys who clear the tables.”

“She gave you money?”

“Yeah. Twenty bucks one time. I guess she had it to spare. She said to use it for school or to put gas in my car.” Matt turned and rolled his eyes, reminding Kit what a touchy subject that was. “If I had one.”

“I’m sorry that putting off buying a car is a sacrifice we had to make. I figured it was more important to keep a roof over your head. You know you can borrow mine if something important comes up. In the meantime, I’m saving, you’re saving—”

“When, Kit?”

“It’s not that big a hardship to be without a car right now. You work right here, you take the bus to school—”

“What about when I go to college? I’m not taking the bus to California.”

Kit counted off a couple of beats so she wouldn’t jump at the topic. “Are you still planning to go?” She counted off two more before pointing out, “If you don’t get your grades back up this semester, you’ll probably lose your scholarship. And you can’t raise those grades if you’re out all hours of the night and missing classes and not getting your work done. You’ve got a real gift, Matt, as smart as you are. I hate to see you throwing it all away.”

No comment.

She stuck the knife into the core of the apple to keep it safely away from her tense fingers. She had to ask. “Where were you last night? Say, after midnight? Two hours past when I asked you to be home?”

Matt’s to-hell-with-it grin warned her she wasn’t going to get any useful answers. “With friends.”

“What friends?”

“You wouldn’t know them.”

“I should. Invite them over sometime.”

“To do what? Wash dishes?”

“They could eat. I’d be happy to feed them.” Kit rose and joined him at the sink. “I thought you liked doing those fix-it projects around the apartment and diner. Do any of your friends enjoy tearing things apart and rebuilding them the way you do?”

He rolled his eyes. “Right. I’m gonna invite someone over to fix the toaster.”

She had to give him that one. “Okay, so that wouldn’t be my first choice for a fun night out, either. What sorts of things do you do with these friends I don’t know?”

“Play games, mostly.”

“Where?”

He slammed the door of the dishwasher shut. “Dammit, Kit, Mom and Dad never grilled me like this!”

She flinched at his burst of temper, but swallowed hard to keep her cool. That was pain she saw in the tight press of his mouth. The angry glare in his eyes was just the mask that couldn’t quite hide the truth. She wanted to reach up and touch his scruffy cheek. But somehow she had become the enemy and she wasn’t sure her comfort would be welcomed, so she stuck her fists down into the pockets of her robe instead. “They had seventeen years’ experience taking care of you—I’m new at this. I’m doing my best. I wish you’d help me, not work against me. You never acted like this when Mom and Dad were around.”

“Yeah, well, they’re not here, are they?” He scowled down at her.

“The diner is our home—”

“This place killed them!” He raked his fingers through his permanently unruly hair and stalked across the room. “You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t here to see them…like that. They were trapped. All the exits were blocked. There was nothing they could do but die.”

“Matt.” Enemy or not, Kit hurried across the room and wrapped her arms around his waist. He stiffly refused to respond, but when he didn’t pull away, Kit held on. “It was a terrible loss, a tragic accident. But it wasn’t anybody’s fault. I promise you, those smoke alarms and CO2 detectors you installed will give us all the warning we need. And Mr. Kronemeyer’s crew is putting sprinkler systems throughout the building. We’ll be perfectly safe.”

With a scoffing laugh, he pulled away. “A few gadgets won’t make things right. Haven’t you noticed things have changed since we were kids? You were gone for six years, sis. This isn’t the same place you left behind.”

“I know the neighborhood has gone downhill. But there are still good people here. You have to believe in that.” She wanted him to believe in her, in them. “It will never be the same without Mom and Dad. But you and I are still a family. We have to talk to each other. We need to be able to trust each other.”

“I need to get to school.”

Cinching the pink chenille tie tighter around her waist, Kit followed him to the back door where he shrugged into a sheepskin coat with frayed sleeves that were too short for his arms. “Where’s your new coat? The Chiefs jacket I gave you for Christmas?”

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t know? I spent a small fortune on that thing. It was what you wanted.” I know, I know. “Besides a car. So what happened to it?”

He hauled his book bag up onto his shoulder. “I’ll get it back.”

“That’s not what I asked.” She pulled the knit scarf he’d left behind off its hook and looped it around his neck. “Matt, last night Helen Hodges was attacked in the alley. The man who hurt her was wearing a red-and-gold Chiefs parka.”

He shooed her hands away. “So now you think I’m beating up old ladies in the alley?”

She hated to admit that, for a split second, the possibility had crossed her mind last night. She prayed she knew her brother better than that. “Of course it wasn’t you. But if she was handing out large chunks of cash, you might have told someone. Maybe the same someone you loaned your coat to?”

“No, he wouldn’t do that.”

“Who, Matt?” She retreated from the blast of cold air that hit her when he opened the back door. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m trying to understand why someone would hurt that woman. And why no one but…” She shook her head to dispel the vivid tactile memories that flooded her body with heat. I will repay my debt to you. She wasn’t ready to mention the tall, gruff-voiced mystery man at the hospital, or else she’d sound like the crazy, irresponsible sibling. “I’m trying to understand why no one seems to know her or where she lives. Why your coat may have been worn by one of the men who attacked her. Who attacked me! If you have answers, I want to hear them.”

“So you can report me to the police? I didn’t do anything wrong last night.”

“But you won’t say what you were doing. Or who you were doing it with.” Kit grabbed on to the door and asked again. “What happened to your coat?”

“I have to get to school. Before you jump my case about that, too.”

“Matt.” He was out the door. Kit stepped out onto the concrete stoop to keep his long, lazy stride in sight. “I need you at work at four-thirty. And tomorrow morning you meet with your counselor. I expect you to keep the appointment this week.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, ducking beneath the steel scaffolding and heading toward the street.

“And pull up your pants. There’s a dress code at school, remember? You’ve got a cute butt—you should show it off.” Even that teasing truth failed to get any more talk out of him. He was leaving without a backward glance. Flannel pajamas couldn’t keep the wintry breeze from blowing against her skin and raising goose bumps. “I love you.”

But he was gone. Kit hugged her arms around her middle and shivered. Cold as she was, alone as she felt, there was an odd heat centered between her shoulder blades that caused her to turn around and peer into the empty expanse of the alley behind her.

Maybe not so alone.

Was someone watching her? Had one of the workmen come early? Right. Like flannel pj’s and fuzzy slippers would merit a whistle or two.

She lifted her gaze to the parking garage on the opposite side. There weren’t even any cars moving there yet. There was no one else here. She was safe.

Getting grabbed from behind twice in the same morning made her paranoid, that was all.

Still, Kit hurried inside, unable to shake the eerie feeling of being watched until she locked the door behind her. Releasing the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding, she hustled her own butt to get showered and dressed and off to explore the building before visiting Helen.

Helen Hodges hadn’t just formed out of the mist. There had to be a tangible clue somewhere in the Sinclair Tower that would let Kit know where the woman belonged. There had to be something to tell her more about the mystery man she seemed to belong to.

WHAT WAS THAT WOMAN up to?

Damon propped his feet on the desk and leaned back, sipping his coffee and watching his first-floor neighbor chatting up the construction crew on a row of monitors. She’d already walked the halls on three floors, peeked into unused offices and invited herself into one of the model apartments.

She was certainly a curious specimen. Thorough and methodical in a way that Damon could relate to—friendly and outgoing in a way he was not. But what was she looking for? Though he couldn’t hear the words, he could read the nonverbal cues of posture and gestures, and tell she was asking questions.

About what? The building? The remodel? The attack? Helen? Him?

If he’d had half of this high-tech, personally enhanced security system installed throughout the building eighteen months ago, he’d have seen the enemy coming that night. He’d still have his original notes. He wouldn’t have had to build a new lab or play games with that hacker. He’d have the full use of two good hands and both eyes.

His wife wouldn’t be dead.

Damon inhaled deeply, carefully controlling his emotional response to all he had lost. He no longer allowed his thoughts to be clouded by sentimental attachments. Beyond Helen, of course.

That was excuse enough to acquaint himself with his first-floor neighbor. Helen would want to thank her, want to do something kind and generous to repay her. But until his housekeeper regained consciousness, Damon would evaluate this would-be friend for her. Though his security cameras had caught the vicious, faceless attackers on tape, Damon had seen the danger too late. Caught up in the throes of his nightmares, he’d failed to protect Helen when she’d needed him most.

He wouldn’t fail to protect her again.

If his first-floor neighbor proved to be as straightforward and caring as she appeared to be, then Damon would personally write a check for whatever thank-you gift Helen wished to bestow on her. But if she’d discovered Helen’s connection to the wealthy SinPharm empire and intended to take advantage of her grateful nature, then he’d have his executive liaison, Easting Davitz, close the woman’s restaurant and kick her out of the building.

But for now he was content to collect data and observe the subject in question. He’d organize the facts and determine his opinion of her later.

He already knew everything about Katherine Elizabeth Snow that a piece of paper could tell him. He set his coffee mug down on the stack of information his security team had pulled for him this morning. The printout said she was twenty-six, never married, had one brother in high school, and was a partner in a restaurant business she’d inherited from her late parents. She stood five-six, weighed a healthy 130 pounds, and was a practicum short of earning a Masters in criminal justice studies to go with her chemistry degree from Central Missouri State University.

As he watched her wave goodbye to the workers, he added a couple more facts to his list. Katherine Snow made people smile, and her worn blue jeans hugged a sweet, round bottom that was every bit as firm and sexy to look at as it had been to press against in the hospital lobby last night.

Damon jerked as if an unseen hand had slapped him in the face. Damn. Where had that thought come from?

“What are you thinking, Doc?” He warned himself away from the random memory that snuck in from his subconscious mind. Last night’s tussle had been about communication and maintaining his anonymity—not whether or not a thirty-nine-year-old man could still get his rocks off with a woman after more than a year of mourning and celibacy.

But before Damon could get his focus back around the fact that he was spying on Katherine Snow for Helen’s sake, and not his own baser interests, she disappeared into the stairwell, capturing his curiosity in a different way. “Now what?” He drifted closer to the monitor. “Where are you going?”

Mental note: add security cameras to stairwell.

He didn’t like being at a disadvantage, but instead of standing there like some adolescent fool, damning his left hand for having just enough functional nerve endings to remember what the swell of her breast had felt like in his unintended grasp, Damon turned his attention to a more familiar purpose. He crossed the lab and shut off the Bunsen burner beneath the variable ingredient of this morning’s test formula. The liquid was hot enough to destabilize the molecules and recombine them with the regeneration mixture he’d already synthesized. When the new formula cooled, he’d add it to a petri dish along with a few skin cells from a volunteer subject who shared the same allergic predisposition Miranda had exhibited, and see if normal, viable tissue would grow.

This time Miranda’s Formula would work.

“That’s right, Doc. Jinx it.” Inhaling deeply, Damon buried that twinge of emotion and turned his back on his work. He didn’t believe much in the power of positive thinking anymore. He believed in cold, hard facts. Either the formula would work or it wouldn’t. But he refused to hope.

Time to return to the security monitors and the less formal experiment at hand—his observational study of Katherine Snow. This time, he swore to remain purely objective.

But there was still no sign of her on any of the screens.

“Where are you?” An educated guess would indicate she’d continue her previous pattern and climb the stairs to the fifth floor. But unless she’d twisted an ankle, she should have shown up by now. “Unpredictable, hmm?”

Odd for a scientist. Maybe she was following some logical pattern of her own design. Unexpected. But far more engaging than waiting for a mixture to cool.

With a few quick keystrokes on the computer, he pulled up the cameras for the sixth and seventh floors. With no movement detected on either level, Damon switched to views of the lower floors. There was plenty of activity to observe in the lobby, where his current contractor, J. T. Kronemeyer, was arguing on the phone wedged between his shoulder and ear, and handing out assignments to his foremen.

But no Katherine Snow.

Damon typed in more commands. He accepted the challenge she unknowingly presented. “I’ll find you.”

Eighth floor, ninth floor. Where had she gone?

He absently massaged his brow bone, easing the phantom eye strain that settled behind the patch masking the left side of his face. “Come out, come out, wherever you…” Damon smiled and blew up the image on screen three. “Gotcha.”

Breathing deeply after what must have been a quick, steady climb, his subject stepped out into the hallway on the thirteenth floor.

Feeling something akin to victory coursing through his veins, Damon raised his mug to his unwitting opponent and drained the last of his coffee. As he watched Katherine Snow squat down to study something on the tile floor, her quizzical expression piqued his own curiosity.

What was she doing on a cordoned-off floor, anyway? One that Kronemeyer’s renovation crews hadn’t even gotten to yet? The previous company Easting had hired, and subsequently fired for too many delays and “misplaced” supplies, had replaced the exterior windows, stripped the doors and added structural reinforcements to bring the settling walls up to code. But the thirteenth floor belonged to a different phase of the remodeling project. It wouldn’t see any finishing work for several months. Miss Snow had no business being there.

Yet there was something beyond his camera angle that caught her eye. She stood and made the odd choice to walk along the edge of the tiled hallway. Why not take the middle path others had used?

Others?

“Curious.” Damon typed as he sank onto the stool in front of the monitors. Was that…? He squinted his good eye and blew up the image on the screen. Footprints. In the thick layer of plaster dust that coated the floor. Fresh prints. Recent.

And Katherine Snow was following them.

“No, no,” he admonished the monitor, wishing he could transmit some sort of telepathic warning to her. “You don’t belong there.”

Neither did the footprints.

“Be smart. Go back.” Damon was already shrugging out of his lab coat. Had she heard a sound earlier? Was she following someone? Before any definitive answers could form, she turned a corner and disappeared from sight. “Damn.” He tossed the coat and pulled up the next camera to find a shot of her. “Come back to me.” He was searching. Searching. “C’mon.”

Was that a door? Two? Three, hanging back in place? As Damon panned down the hallway, he discovered that some unsanctioned work had taken place. Floors thirteen through twenty-five should have been stripped down to bare bones. No way had Kronemeyer’s crew gotten ahead of schedule. Since that electrician’s unfortunate death, the missing crew member and the superstitious rumblings about the curse of landing a job at the Sinclair Tower, Kronemeyer’s men couldn’t even catch up. So who’d authorized replacing the doors?

“Where are you? Yes!” Damon shook a triumphant fist when her fresh-scrubbed face reappeared.

She was trailing her fingers along the wall, slowing her step as she reached the second door. Damon’s pulse quickened to a bolder beat, feeling the same edgy anticipation reflected on her face.

“Don’t do it.” But his fingers were turning in the air, right along with hers, as she reached for the doorknob. He was just as curious as she to know what lay on the other side.

The instant the door swung open, two arms snaked out and latched on to her wrist.

Damon jumped. “What the hell?”

Man’s hands. Suit-coat sleeves. Dragging her into the room out of the camera shot.

Damon cursed and ran from the lab. He swiped his key card through the security lock that accessed his private elevator and typed in the activation code. Once in, he pressed thirteen over and over until the doors slid shut.

Objectivity be damned. Katherine Snow was in trouble.

And he owed it to Helen to keep her safe.