Page 64 of Accidental Murder
Kayla shook her head. “It’s the last place someone would look for Ashley.” She didn’t see cockroaches. She hoped there weren’t bedbugs. “I shouldn’t have contacted you.”
“I’m glad you felt you could turn to me.” His voice lacked conviction. Fatigue deepened the lines around his eyes. He rose from the bed and clasped her shoulders. “But here’s what I don’t get. Why does someone want you dead? Why kill your clients?”
Kayla broke free and moved to the window. She rubbed her arms as she peeked outside. No cars budged in the parking lot. No people entered or exited the coffee shop next door.
“Why kill your clients?” he repeated.
“I’m not sure, but I’d met with them or had recent phone appointments with each last Monday or Tuesday. That’s the timeline, I think.” She’d tutored Veronica Tuesday, but theappointment hadn’t been written into the datebook, a detail that further cemented her feeling the datebook had become the murderer’s planning tool.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“It’s possible the deaths have something to do with Sara Simmons.” Kayla revisited the possibility the killer or killers believed she’d learned something from Sara, based on Sara’s panicked voicemail, and presumed Kayla had shared the information with her clients. “She didn’t refer me to all of them, but I feel like it’s six degrees of separation.”
“Why did she commit suicide?”
“I’m not certain she did.”
“Crap.” Peter was fiddling with the remote controller trying to turn on the TV. He tossed the device onto the bed. “Why are you smiling?”
“Men and remotes.”
“Tell me more about Sara.”
“Her job required her to challenge a number of entities—corporations, hospitals. Maybe something she learned threw her into an emotional tailspin, something she couldn’t escape. Remember she called me when we were at dinner Monday night?”
“Yes.”
“What if, because of that call, I, and therefore my clients, became targets?”
Peter perched on the bed. “You’ve told this to the police, right?”
“No. I plan to.” All the disappointments in Kayla’s life—the deaths of her parents and the lack of follow-up by the police—had made her defensive. Mistrustful. Could Inspector Sergeant Hanrahan help her?
Plus there was Dennis. When they’d dated, though she’d opened her heart to him, he’d dismissed her theory of shabbypolice work in her family’s deaths with the cliché,Bad things happen to good people. She’d countered,Two hit-and-runs with no convictionsisn’t simply shabby police work.It’s pathetic.
“What’s the plan?” Peter rose from the bed and laid his hand on Kayla’s shoulder.
His touch unsettled her. She pushed past him and retreated to the bathroom where she splashed cold water on her face. She dabbed her skin with a musty towel. “My plan”—she returned to the bedroom and picked up the convenience store bag—“is to sleep. My brain needs to function in the morning.” She removed toothpaste and toothbrushes from the bag and gave a toothbrush to Peter. “Here.”
Peter plucked the toothpaste from her hand. “It’s funny.”
“Nothing’s funny.”
“No, not—” He gazed at her with such tenderness, the kind of look she’d been craving all of her life. How she wished she could bottle it. “Ashley told me once you’ve never been afraid of anything. You fought every boy in grammar school and won. You sued the school board for discrimination when they wouldn’t let you be the kicker on the football team, and you triumphed.” He squirted a thin strip of toothpaste onto his and then her toothbrush, an act so intimate she felt like her knees might give way. “She even said you told the FBI to shine it on when they wanted you to work for them.”
“And look at me now. Scared to pieces by nameless men chasing me through the city.”
They brushed their teeth in silence, taking turns spitting.
“You know I’d change places with Ashley in a second if I could,” she murmured.
“I know.”
Putting words to her feelings opened a floodgate of emotions. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Peter, I feel so guilty being the one who survived. I should’ve been home. I never shouldhave let her talk me into going on a stupid blind date. I could’ve defended myself. She was so . . . so . . .”
Peter cupped her chin in his hand. “You couldn’t have known someone wanted you dead. Even now, you don’t know who it is. Her murder was an accident.”
Kayla whirled away. “Every time I look in the mirror, I see her. Not me. Her! My twin, my soul mate. Half of me is missing, Peter, and I’ll never be able to get her back.” She sagged against the sink.
