Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
H arbor
While Katrina changed, I set the now-clean kitchen table with the cheerful checked tablecloth I’d bought. I used the cardboard drink holder with the hot chocolate and coffee as a centerpiece, found the bamboo disposable plates, and placed the pastries I’d bought on one of them. I had wanted to buy her flowers, but the florist in town had closed already, and the sad-looking roses at the local grocers didn’t suit her. This cabin was still nowhere near good enough for Katrina Valdez, but at least she wouldn’t freeze or starve overnight.
From the sound of the water running, Katrina was getting cleaned up. That was good. She deserved a rest.
I turned on my hotspot and powered up my laptop. John extended access to all the good private investigation websites, courtesy of the Hunter’s Guild.
She emerged from the bathroom looking like a flannel-covered angel. She left her long hair down and combed through it with her fingers. “Ooh, are those pastries? They’re not from Sugar Kisses, are they?”
I had no idea what the shop was called, but the minute I decided to go to town for supplies, my mouth watered at the thought of snickerdoodles. “I’m not sure. Laura and Sasha work there.”
Katrina clapped her hands. “Excellent! Sweet and Salty has much better food than Sugar Kisses.”
A warm rush of pleasure pooled inside of me. Being with her made me forget I pushed the collection of cups toward her. “There’s hot chocolate, decaf coffee, or tea. I didn’t know what you liked.”
“Look at you, you hunter gatherer.” Katrina grinned, and she looked so damn beautiful, I wanted to kiss her right then. It was a good thing I was disciplined, but she tested every ounce of my resolve. “I like mochas. No whipped cream, a little heavier on the chocolate.”
“Okay.” I took the collection of cups, ignoring the way the scent of the soap I’d chosen for her wafted around me like happy little clouds. Lilies and lavender.
Springtime and sunshine, that was Katrina.
I picked an empty cup, then poured some of the coffee into it, topping it up with more of the hot chocolate. “No whipped cream, just the way you like it.” I handed it to her. Did I let my fingers linger a little too long against hers? Yes, and I wasn’t sorry about it. I had never met a woman like her, someone who made me respond the way she did. Who made me feel like she wanted to know me.
A man could only take so much.
“Thanks.” She cradled the cup in her hands like it was a ring box from Tiffany’s, and damn if I didn’t want more than anything to give that to her. “These pajamas are amazing. I’m finally all warm and dry.”
I didn’t want her warm and dry. I wanted her hot and wet, writhing underneath me.
I kept my attention on my computer screen, willing my body to listen. “I’m glad they fit.” My voice sounded strained, probably because most of the blood was flowing southward. If I concentrated on work, maybe I could shove my attraction for her into a corner. “Can you give me your old address?”
“What’s that?” She moved a kitchen chair to sit beside me and sipped from her drink, moaning a little. “This is so delicious.”
There went the resolve to calm down my erection.
I grunted and shifted in my chair to give myself some space. Friction was a heartless bitch. “I have access to closed circuit feeds in Milwaukee. If you give me your old address, we can tap into some of the public feeds, like from red light cameras or storefronts or whatnot. Most security cameras aren’t even necessarily trained on your house, so it’s good to get a few different perspectives.”
“This is vastly more than I ever got from my public defender.” Katrina leaned in closer and gave me her old address. With a few taps on the keyboard, I managed to pull up footage from a red light camera aimed toward her driveway. “Is this legal?” she asked.
“Mostly. It’s less legal to do this.” I opened another window on my laptop and, with another few clicks, tapped into the security footage from the house that was across from her old place.
“Wow.” Her eyes widened. “You can just do that?”
She didn’t sound disappointed, but I wouldn’t have blamed her. It was better this way. She deserved to know the kind of guy I was. I wasn’t all bootleg mochas and pastries. I wasn’t innocent and sweet. I was a liar and a bruiser. No matter how much I liked her or wanted to help her out, at the end of all this, I was still going to deliver her to the Milwaukee authorities and collect my bounty.
Wasn’t I?
“If you don’t want me to do it, I won’t.” My fingers hovered over the keyboard.
She placed her hand on my arm and squeezed. “I want you to. Please. I don’t belong in jail. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
That I believed. “I can’t promise that the video from the time of the event hasn’t been erased.”
Katrina squeezed again. Now she had the sweet scent of mocha mixing with the lilies and lavender. I’d remember that when I kicked myself in bed two nights from now after turning her in. It was a torturous form of penance. “Thank you for trying. It happened on January the nineteenth, around two in the afternoon.”
“Give me a few minutes.”
She kissed my cheek again, and it made every scar on my body tingle. “I’ll get you something. What do you like to drink? I’m guessing coffee, black.” She lowered her tone when she said it, like she was imitating me. I liked that way too much. Women didn’t normally tease me.
“Coffee, yes. But sweetener. A little cream.”
“Okay.”
She stood and picked up the cup of coffee, then moved into the kitchen. It was simultaneously a relief and agony to have her move away from me.
I clicked around on the websites, searching for a camera with the best viewpoint of her driveway. Lucky for me it was the public red light camera. The city kept records for no more than thirty days, so it was doubly fortunate that we hadn’t passed that threshold. I queued the recording to the time she mentioned. “It’s ready, whenever you are.”
Katrina exhaled, and slid the coffee in front of me. “Okay. I’m ready. Exonerate me, Harbor.”
“Let’s see what we’ve got first.”
I hit the play button, and the two of us waited. Beside me, I could hear Katrina suck in her breath.
She used to have a nice house. Small, cheerful. Window boxes out front that in the summer probably overflowed with flowers. The driveway was plowed, but it looked like there hadn’t been fresh snow in a while, because brown patches showed through the white on her front lawn.
There was a 2017-era truck in the driveway, silver or gray on the black and white image, with a beat-up rear bumper. The license plate was fuzzy, but it looked like a Wisconsin tag. “That’s my car.” Katrina pointed at it. “I paid for the damn thing, but he never let me drive it. I had to take public transit every day from home to work to my studio.”
“What kind of studio?” Impressive. I almost sounded like I didn’t already know.
“I’m a sculptor.” She looked down, her long lashes trailing against her cheeks. Fuck me, she was gorgeous. “I’m not famous or anything. Obviously, or I’d have the money to have this kind of information already. Right now, I’m not even a sculptor. I have a job landscaping at the resort.”
“That’s really cool. If I was on social media, I’d have to follow you. Though I’m not much of an art guy.”
“I’ll bet you could surprise me,” she said softly. There was something in her tone, something soft and suggestive and unsure, that sent all kinds of thrills spinning inside of me.
Instead of saying anyting, I clicked through to another photo from the red light camera log. An electric vehicle speeding through must have triggered it, but the car didn’t obscure the view of Katrina’s old house. One guy in a dark-colored hoodie was at the side of the car, with another at the front door. It looked like the second guy was fiddling with something beside it. It was difficult to tell from a still photo.
“That’s Pete,” Katrina said, pointing to the second guy, who was wearing a backward John Deere hat. “That’s where our front porch cameras were.”
“So he’s disabling them.” I rotated to a different view, from a house across the street.
“Is there a continuous feed?”
I shook my head. “Red light cameras only record when someone runs a light. Here’s another view from your neighbor’s doorbell camera. We’ll get ten seconds of video here.”
“Oh my God.” Katrina steepled her hands in front of her face, her eyes glued to the laptop screen. I watched her reaction as, very clearly, the friend in the hoodie got into the driver’s seat of the truck. Her ex-husband left the front porch, jumped up and down a few times as if ramping himself up, then stood in the driveway. The friend rolled into him, bumping Pete out of the driveway and onto a patch of snowy dirt, then drove the Toyota away.
Katrina’s breathing sounded ragged in my ears. “Play it again.”
Blessing the years of training I had with surveillance imaging in my past careers, I rewound the video. I knew what had to be said. “A good defense attorney will say it’s impossible to identify who the friend is from this footage. And I don’t know how long this house keeps their security. Your new lawyer would have to get a warrant for this to hold up in court. There’s no zoom on most CCTV or security cameras. We’ll also need proof you were in the studio at this time. Do you have a bus pass that we can check trips on or something like that?”
Tears welled up in her eyes as she stared at the screen. “I can’t believe this.”
Tentatively, I raised one hand and patted her back slowly. “I’m so sorry, Katrina. We can try to make it right. This is proof he’s an asshole. He stood deliberately behind your car.” I wished I could have done more. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” She deserved everything, but there were so many more hoops for her to jump through.
I wondered if she hated me a little, if I complicated this further.
Then, to my immense surprise, Katrina launched her arms around me and held on tightly. “Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. You have no idea what this means to me.”
I was no saint. I could be reserved, sure, but at the end of the day, I was still just me. More than a little lost, a little broken. But this gorgeous woman wanted me. Maybe for now, for this brief instant. It was all I had.
So I hugged her back. She was soft and yielding, all flannel and sweetness.
How long did it take me to fall headlong into love with this woman?
The space of a hug.