Page 4 of Go Alone

Kate steeled herself with another sip of coffee. “Okay.”

“I would rather scrape the gunk off the bottom of last Thursday’s pizza box than eat another one of your attempts at an omelet.”

She rolled her eyes and walked to the coffeemaker to refill her cup, gracing Marcus with her upraised middle finger on the way. Marcus laughed and said, “I’ll make breakfast. It’s okay. You don’t need to be a good cook. You’re pretty.”

“Sexist and nosy, ladies. And single too. Oh, my Heavens.”

She trudged to the kitchen table and gathered her files, shoving them loosely into the two shoeboxes she was using to store them. She’d organize everything later.

She actually was grateful to have Marcus cook breakfast. He was teasing about the omelet, but that didn’t make him wrong. Most of Kate’s adult life had been spent consuming food delivered by teenagers or heated in a microwave. The once routine Sunday dinners at her mom’s house consisted of Catherine Valentine instructing and her daughter following those instructions. As a result, among the other adult skills she lacked, she had the cooking talent of a five-year-old.

Marcus, of course, was an excellent cook. He was pretty much the stereotypical perfect man with his burly build, normally jovial demeanor, and the aforementioned skills in the kitchen. She assumed the bedroom too, since assuming was all she could do on that end.

“You want peppers in your omelet?” Marcus asked.

“I want you to follow your heart,” Kate said, tossing the shoe boxes to the corner of her dining alcove and plopping onto one of the chairs. Watching Marcus cook was almost as good as eating the food he cooked.

“One omelet with peppers from the heart, coming up.”

Kate sipped her coffee, hiding her smile, but not quite hiding her eyes. It was hardest in the morning, watching him shirtless, making an omelet, wearing pants with drawstrings that just begged for her fingers to loosen them. It would be easier when he finished breakfast and they dressed in work clothes and headed to the Field Office. Then they’d be partners, not roommates, and she would have things to distract her from thinking about how cool it would be to be more than roommates.

Her phone rang. Winters.

Thoughts of her fingers looped through the drawstrings of Marcus’s pants vanished. Winters was expecting them at work in an hour, so if she was calling them now, it meant bad news.

It likely meant another Commandment Killer.

Marcus watched her, his face as sober as hers. She answered, and Winters, with her usual brusqueness, got straight to the point.

“We have another one.”

CHAPTER TWO

Assistant Director Victoria Winters was the image that came to Marcus’s mind when he thought of the word classy. She was in her mid-fifties and didn’t look much younger than that, but she wore her age the way a queen wore a crown: like it suited her and looked better on her than it would on anyone else.

Today, she wore a tight navy turtleneck that hugged her body in ways that made him amend the thought about looking her age. Not that he would ever in any universe consider exploring that further.

She complemented the turtleneck with a tan skirt that fell just above shapely knees that looked only slightly toughened. A matching belt held the skirt in place, and a handbag the same khaki color rested on the desk she stood in front of.

Her hair—dyed a brilliant copper red—framed a face as hard and serious as any Master Chief Marcus had ever met. She nodded curtly when they arrived, the only greeting she ever extended, and that only rarely, and handed Marcus a file.

He opened the file and shared it with Kate. Winters spoke while they read.

“Howard Greer, sixty-five, retired zoning commissioner in Millbrook, Ohio.”

“Where’s Millbrook?” Marcus asked.

“Unincorporated community about an hour southwest of Akron,” Winters replied.

Marcus nodded and flipped the cover page over to reveal a photograph of a white-haired African American man with a kindly smile and striking blue eyes. “Good looking guy,” he observed.

“He was before he was suffocated and left for dead with a quart of potting soil in his mouth and throat.”

Marcus grimaced. “Jesus. Another artist.”

“Not necessarily,” Kate said, taking the statement literally as usual. “The potting soil is definitely symbolic, but not all symbolism is art.”

Marcus chose not to point out that he was joking. In fact, now that he thought about it, joking was pretty inappropriate, even if it was just a tactic to stifle nausea. “So what’s the connection to Cox?”