Free Touch of Evil by C. T. Adams, Cathy Clamp Page B

basket.
    "You wrote the wrong date on here, Ma'am. Today's the 17th, not the 16th."
    I furrowed my brow and looked at the checkout display, but didn't believe what I saw. "No, today's the 16th. I just flew in at the airport this morning."
    The customer behind me in line interrupted. "No, it's the 17th all right." He pulled from his basket a newspaper and handed it to me. Oh, man! It was the 17th! No wonder Joe's been calling over and over. He was afraid of exactly what happened! I'd slept for over twenty-four hours! Eek!
    I owed my brother a major apology.
    4
    I was huffing and puffing by the time I reached the building. It wouldn't have been so bad had I not taken the last two blocks at a dead run. But the shriek of the burglar alarm, combined with the sight of flashing police lights at the entrance to my building gave me an incentive to hurry.
    It had to be my apartment. None of the others have an alarm. I looked up and saw a cop standing on the fire escape outside my apartment. A second one joined him on the fire escape landing, and spoke into his radio before heading down the iron steps.
    I hurried to where Connie stood just inside the front door, talking animatedly to a third uniformed officer.
    "Kate—you're back! I thought your brother said you'd be out of town until tomorrow. But I should have known when I saw your truck in the garage."
    I blinked in surprise. Joe hadn't said anything about actually visiting with one of the tenants.
    "What's going on?" I dropped my backpack and grocery sacks onto the floor and turned my
    attention to the cop. He was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, with short blond hair and wide blue eyes. He had a fresh-scrubbed look and the kind of soft skin that made me think he'd have a hard time growing a beard.
    "We got a call from the alarm company about a possible break in. When we arrived, Ms. Beltaine here met us at the front door and said the owner of the building was out of the country. . . ."
    "My name's Kate Reilly, I'm the owner of the building."
    He nodded and wrote that fact in his notebook.
    "Ms. Beltaine here says she saw a teenage female running away from the scene right after the alarm went off, but by the time we got here she was long gone. The ladder to the fire escape was pulled down, so my partner and Officer Phillips went up to investigate further while I took Ms. Beltaine's statement."
    He nodded in the direction of the two uniformed officers who had come down to join us. Both were large men of middle age with close-cropped hair. The redhead on the left had a small brass name plate that said Scott. By process of elimination, the brunet carrying a crow bar must be Phillips. His face looked familiar, but it took a long moment before I recognized where I'd seen him before. Joe had introduced us—after Phillips' neck brace had saved my life. A weird coincidence after the dream I'd had earlier. I promised myself I'd check with him and make sure Joe really had built him a second brace, and see whether he'd found anyone willing to manufacture and sell them—as soon as we finished dealing with this mess.
    "Ms. Reilly." He shifted the handkerchief and pry bar to his left hand long enough to extend his latex covered right for me to shake. "Good to see you again. Sorry about the circumstances."
    "Me too."
    Officer Scott had a soft tenor voice that seemed odd coming from such a bulky body. "We took a look around. It looks like she got scared off before she got inside, but you'll need to come up and take a look around and let us know for sure." I gathered up my grocery sacks and started over to the elevator, the cops and Connie at my heels. I wasn't sure why she chose to come along, but it seemed a little ungracious to ask her not
    to—particularly since she was the only witness. We rode the elevator in silence. The hallway we exited into wasn't large. Since I had taken all of the third and fourth floors for my apartment, I'd claimed virtually all