MULTIPLE MOTIVES (The Kate Huntington mystery series Book 1) (9 page)

She knew she should try to clean up the blood on the porch before her in-laws got there, but she wasn’t sure her stomach was up to the task. She found an old throw rug in the laundry room on the back of the house and put it over the stain.

Her eyes stinging, she untied the remnant of yellow crime scene tape still attached to the porch railing.

~~~~~~~~

Two long days went by with no change in Mary’s condition. Rob stopped by the hospital as often as he could. The family was taking turns, two or three at the hospital at a time, the others going back to Kate’s house to get some sleep.

Her parents and siblings seemed to be buying Kate’s stoic facade, but he knew better. She normally had a voracious appetite. Watching her pick at the carryout food offerings he brought to the hospital told him a lot.

Wednesday evening, he walked into the ICU waiting area. Kate was alone. She shifted forward in her chair, nose in the air, sniffing.

“Oh, you wonderful man!” she said when she spotted the grease-stained bags in his hand.

He held out one of them. She grabbed it and pulled out a Big Mac and fries. Spreading out the feast on her lap, she dug in.

Hope sprang up in his chest. “Any change?”

Her face sobered. She shook her head, her mouth full of food.

Crap! No improvement in Mary’s condition. Just Kate’s appetite adjusting to the new normal.

He sank down on the chair next to her. “Is your family sticking to the two-by-two rule?” On Monday evening, he’d taken her aside and pointed out that none of them were safe on their own. So far, whoever was doing this hadn’t gone after anyone who was with another person. Kate had brought up the one exception, when the jackass had shot at him and Shelley. But Rob wasn’t sure the shooter had realized they were together. He’d been standing to one side, holding the door open as Shelley came out, when the biker rode into the path of the first bullet.

Kate swallowed a bite of her burger. “Yeah, but it’s been tricky at times. I don’t want to tell them everything that’s been going on. They’re already worried sick about Mary.”

Rob thought a certain amount of worry was in order for the eldest O’Donnell daughter as well, but he kept his mouth shut. Not his family, not his call.

Kate paused in her attack on her food. “I’ve been trying to convince myself that you and I are the only ones in danger, and Mary was just mistaken for me. But Liz was attacked first, so apparently family members aren’t exempt from whatever vendetta somebody has against us.”

“This guy, he’s got to be related to a mutual case,” Rob said. “I’ve got my staff working on identifying those cases we were both involved in. Once Mary’s out of the woods,” he didn’t want to think about any other outcome, “we’ll have to try to figure out which one.”

“We keep saying
he
, but maybe it’s a she. A woman, no matter what her weapon, would be less likely to tackle two people at once.”

“True. But would a woman be carrying around that much rage?”

“Oh, yeah. Quite possible,” Kate said. “Just because this level of aggression is much more common in men, doesn’t mean it can’t happen in women. Close to one percent of females have antisocial personality disorder.”

Rob shuddered. “As in one out of every hundred women would be capable of doing this? That’s a scary statistic.”

“Then you don’t want to know the percentage of men,” she said. “Hey wait, what about Liz and the girls? How are you keeping them safe?”

He took a deep breath.
Here we go.

“Not to worry, that’s taken care of.”

“How so?” came the garbled response as she resumed eating.

“I’ve hired bodyguards.” He said it as nonchalantly as he might say he’d gotten extra pickles on his sandwich.

Kate’s mouth fell open, which wasn’t a pretty sight since she’d just shoved several fries into it.

“One goes with me everywhere, one stays at the house with Liz.” He ignored her expression as he took a bite of his own burger, with extra pickles.

A few seconds went by while he chewed, and Kate digested the concept of bodyguards. Finally she asked, “What about the girls?”

“Shelley’s staying in Maine for summer classes. I’ve tried and tried to think of a way to keep Sam safe without disrupting her life. Couldn’t find one. She’d be too vulnerable at school. And she’s so rebellious right now, whatever restrictions I put on her, she’d probably ignore when I wasn’t looking.”

“If this weren’t so serious, I’d laugh at the mental image that just popped into my mind, of Samantha climbing out her bedroom window. So what are you going to do?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her, and that mental image isn’t the least bit funny to a father, even under normal circumstances.” Despite his words, he felt his mouth quirk up on one end. “She pitched a fit but I packed her off to her grandmother’s in Ohio for the duration. Mom’s going to home school her for the rest of the school year.”

Kate chewed on more fries. “You think they’re far enough away?”

“I hope so. It’s the best I can think of. Why were you so surprised about the guards?” He intentionally brought up the subject again. “I’m not giving this jackass any more opportunities to hurt the people I love.”

“It must be costing you a fortune.”

“It is, but worth every penny. At least Liz can get around now so we don’t need the aide anymore. … Uh, I hired a guard for you as well.” Taking advantage of Kate’s shocked silence, he quickly added, “I’m paying for it. I know the mortgage insurance paid off your house, but you’ve got car payments now.”

She opened her mouth to protest. He cut her off, his voice soft, “I can afford it, Kate. I count you among the people I love.”

He couldn’t help but grin at the expression on her face. “I do believe I’ve rendered you speechless.”

She gave him a half smile back and opened her mouth again.

A shout came from the inner sanctum of the ICU. Kate jumped up, the remnants of her dinner sliding from her lap. She raced toward the door. Rob plopped his food on the empty chair beside him and followed her.

In Mary’s room, Jack and Kate were hugging and jumping up and down. “She opened her eyes! She opened her eyes!” Jack shouted.

They ignored the nurse who was trying to quiet them, but instantly shut up when a weak voice from the bed said, “Would you two eejits keep it down. I’m tryin’ to sleep here.”

Rob got a quick glimpse of Mary’s pale, bruised face, eyes closed again but a faint smile on her lips, before the nurse hustled them out of the room.

~~~~~~~~

An hour later, the chief neurologist, who’d gone home and had to be called back in, came out of the ICU to talk to the family now gathered in the waiting area. The doctor reminded Kate of an elderly gnome–a head shorter than herself with wisps of white hair sticking out in all directions.

“This is a very good sign,” he said.

Pete looked like a little boy who needed to go to the bathroom. He was rocking from one foot to the other, wanting to hear what the doctor had to say but desperate to see his now conscious wife.

“Go on back and sit with your wife, son. I’ll fill you in later.”

Pete raced for the door as the doctor turned back to the rest of them. “She seemed to understand me when I told her she was in the hospital and I was her doctor. There are no obvious signs of long-term damage but we’ll have to wait and see how her memory is, et cetera, as she continues to recover.”

The doctor looked around at their still worried faces, then added, “She’ll live, folks, but she’s not out of the woods in terms of other possible complications.”

Kate let out a pent-up breath. Muscles that had been tense for days started to loosen.

“She knew who Kate and I were,” Jack said. “She called us idiots.”

The doctor’s expression said he wasn’t convinced this meant Mary had recognized them. The nurse probably told him they’d been acting like idiots at the time.

“Any signs of paralysis?” Kate asked.

“Doesn’t seem to be. She was able to squeeze my hand and wiggle her toes. Her reflexes are normal. I’ll run some other tests in the morning. You folks should go home now. I’d rather you not go in to visit again until morning. You did your jobs brilliantly. You called her back to us. Now she needs sleep, Mother Nature’s best healer.”

“Please, doctor,” Kate’s mother said, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. “I…,” she looked up at her husband beside her, “…we need to see our baby for ourselves, for just a minute. Please.”

The doctor hesitated only a second. “I understand, but keep it short. Send her husband out and I’ll tell him what I just told all of you.”

As their parents went through the ICU door, by unspoken agreement, the O’Donnell siblings and Phyllis put their arms around each other in a circle. They leaned forward, eyes closed, foreheads almost touching.

Tears of relief were streaming down Kate’s face.
Thank you, Lord!

She felt Rob’s big hand on her back. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he whispered as he slipped past her.

CHAPTER TEN

Sitting in her sister’s hospital room with her family on Friday afternoon, Kate knew she had a problem. And she needed to solve it soon because the patient was making rapid progress.

The tests the doctor had run the day before had shown that Mary’s reasoning abilities were intact. Jack had decided to verify this for himself. “If two trains leave Philadelphia at the same time, one doing sixty miles an hour and the other a hundred miles an hour, how long will it take each of them to reach Baltimore which is two hundred and twenty miles away?”

Mary’s response had reassured Kate that her personality hadn’t changed a bit. “You’ve gotta be kidding, you eejit. I’ve got a killer headache here and you want me to do math in my head!”

Mary’s long-term memory also seemed fine, but she had no recall of the day she was attacked and only vaguely remembered visiting with Kate that weekend. Her last clear memory was of her sister greeting her at the airport. Kate had to keep reassuring their parents that this was normal with severe concussions. Mary might never retrieve all of those memories, especially for the day of the attack.

There was no paralysis but Mary was having coordination problems. It was a little dangerous to let her reach for her own water glass. And if she did manage to get it to her face without spilling it, she couldn’t get the straw to go into her mouth. The doctor had expressed optimism, however, that she would re-learn how to coordinate her movements, with the help of some physical therapy.

Jack had flown back to his job and girlfriend that morning. Pete and her parents were sharing Ed’s car between them and tended to come to the hospital together, so Kate wasn’t too worried about their safety.

Besides her father was no dummy. With his daughter’s attacker still at large, Dan O’Donnell was sticking close to his wife’s side. And the last two mornings, he’d stood on the porch as Kate had walked to her car and driven off to work. She’d felt like she was ten years old again, when her father would watch the corner bus stop from the front window of their house until his daughters were picked up for school.

What Dad didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to tell him if she could help it, was that a very tall, muscular guy with the unlikely nickname of Skip was now discreetly guarding her, following her every time she left the house.

Mary’s gnome of a doctor bustled into the room. He had a big smile on his face. Kate suspected she’d just run out of time.

“Well, young lady,” he said to her sister, “you’re doing so well, another day or two, and you can probably go home.” He put up his hand at the look of glee on Pete’s face. “Not to California, just to your sister-in-law’s house. It’s going to be some time yet before your wife is up to traveling.”

As the family all started talking at once, Kate stood and moved over next to the doctor. She whispered, “Doctor, could I speak to you for a moment?”

Kate walked a good fifty feet away from Mary’s room before stopping. “Unfortunately, my sister isn’t safe at my house,” she began the opening she’d been rehearsing in her head. “There have been several attacks against me, my friend Rob Franklin, and our family members in the last couple months.”

The doctor raised his bushy white eyebrows at her.

Despite her mental rehearsals, the next part did not come out smoothly. “My husband… he was mur… ” She swallowed hard. “Killed by this maniac six weeks ago.” A tear trickled from the corner of her eye. She ignored it. “Rob and I think Mary was attacked because the killer thought she was me.”

The doctor was frowning. “The police didn’t say anything about this when they questioned me regarding your sister’s injuries.”

Kate shrugged. “The police have been less than helpful. The guy investigating my husband’s case, well, let’s just say he’s not the most competent detective out there. I know Mary’s not in the best shape to travel. But she won’t be safe unless we get her out of Maryland. And I don’t want my family to know all this. They think the attacks on my husband and sister are unrelated. I need to get them away from me so they’re safe. If they knew what was going on, they’d never leave.”

The doctor again raised an eyebrow. “Maybe some of them
should
stay to protect you.”

Kate sighed. How could she begin to explain to a stranger the jumble of feelings that she’d barely sorted out in her own mind? Of course she was afraid for herself. But the feelings of guilt and terror that someone else she loved could be harmed because of her, those feelings were much stronger.

“Thank you for your concern, Doctor.” She tried for a reassuring smile but wasn’t sure she’d pulled it off. “I’ve got a bodyguard. And my friend and I are going to try to figure out who’s doing this.”

The doctor thought for a moment, then nodded. “Come with me.” He headed back down the hall.

Once in Mary’s room, he said, “I think your sister must be sick of having you hanging around, young lady. She’s convinced me to let you go home,
all the way home
, to California.”

Pete cheered. Mary tried to give her husband a high five, but kept missing his hand. She giggled.