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“Pop,” she growled in warning.
“I’m done meddling,” he said. “I promise. You want some cake?”
He might actually be done meddling, at least for now. But he’d meddle again because he loved her, and she’d always cherished his interference. Except for this. Maybe because he was right. “Yeah. Let’s get some cake before the others eat it all.”
Chapter One
Shady Oaks Retirement Village
Scripps Ranch, San Diego, California
Monday, November 7, 11:20 a.m.
Kit McKittrick allowed herself a moment to feel pity as she stood over the body of the elderly man lying dead on his apartment floor in the Shady Oaks Retirement Village. Then she squared her shoulders and proceeded to do her job.
The mood in the dead man’s living room was subdued. The ME was examining the body while CSU took photos and Latent dusted for prints, but there was little of the normal scene-of-the-crime chatter to which Kit had become accustomed in the four and a half years she’d been in Homicide.
Everyone spoke in hushed whispers, like they were in church. Because it kind of felt like they were. Haunting melancholy music from a single piano was coming from the speaker mounted on the victim’s living room wall. The music wasn’t loud, but it was overwhelming nonetheless. Kit wanted to turn it off, because the music was so sad that it made her chest hurt and her eyes burn.
But neither the speaker nor its volume controls had been dusted for prints, so she couldn’t touch it yet. Until then, she could only square her shoulders, ignore the music, and focus on getting justice for Mr. Franklin Delano Flynn.
The cause of death of the eighty-five-year-old white male was most likely the butcher knife still embedded in his chest. But she’d learned long ago not to assume. Still, a butcher knife to the chest was never good. It was a long wound, the gash in the man’s white button-up shirt extending from his sternum to his navel. Whoever had killed him had to have had a lot of strength to create such a wound.
The victim had been dead long enough for his blood to dry, both the blood that had soaked the front of his shirt and the blood that had pooled on the floor around his torso.
His eyes, filmy in death, stared sightlessly up at the ceiling. His arms lay at his sides, his hands slightly curved. Not quite flat, but not quite fists, either. It wasn’t a natural pose for the victim of a homicide who’d fallen after being stabbed. She wondered if his killer had repositioned his arms.
Mr. Flynn had been a hardy man, broad-shouldered, tall, and still muscular. Not in bad shape for eighty-five, she thought. He wore dark trousers, the pockets turned out, as if he’d been searched.
His shoes were black oxfords, buffed to such a shine that she could nearly see her own reflection. She wondered if he’d come home, surprising his attacker, or if he’d welcomed his killer into his home.
His living room had been ransacked, books knocked off shelves, knickknacks strewn on the floor. The sofa cushions had been slashed open, foam stuffing on the floor as well. The man’s bedroom was in a similar state. The drawers in the kitchen had been opened and emptied, their contents dumped on the counters. Flour and sugar containers had been dumped on the kitchen’s tiled floor. Someone had been looking for something and had left a terrible mess.
Kit wondered if they’d found what they’d been looking for. She wondered if Mr. Flynn had fought back.
Kit crouched on the victim’s right side, leaning in so that she could better examine his hands. The knuckles of his right hand were scraped and bruised, but his fingernails were what caught her attention. They were mostly gone, clipped way past the quick, down into the nail bed.
That he’d fought back was a decent assumption, then. His killer hadn’t wanted any evidence to be found under the man’s nails.
“Time of death?” Kit asked the ME, who knelt on the other side of the body.
Dr. Alicia Batra glanced up, a slight frown creasing her brow. “Less than twenty-four hours, according to the first responder, who talked to the facility director. The residents in this part of the building live independently, just like in any other apartment, except that they have to pull a cord every morning by ten a.m.” She pointed over her shoulder to a cord on the wall in the breakfast nook. “If they don’t pull it by ten, the staff assumes they need help and comes in to check. The victim supposedly pulled the cord yesterday at ten, but not today. When the staff checked in on him, they found his body.”
Supposedly? “The first responders told Connor that the victim was found by one of the nurses,” Kit said, her partner, Connor Robinson, having arrived at the scene an hour before. He’d already reviewed the crime scene and was somewhere downstairs, making sure the witnesses were properly situated in separate rooms while they awaited questioning.
“A nursing assistant,” Alicia corrected. “She’s downstairs with Connor. He said you had something personal to do this morning, but he didn’t say what. Is everything okay?”
Kit appreciated that Connor had been discreet with the details of her morning meeting, but Alicia was a friend and this was happy news. “We were at social services with Rita. She’s decided she wants to be adopted and Mom and Pop took her in to start the process. She asked me to go with her, too.”
Which had filled Kit with a lot of affection and more than a little pride. She’d known most of the foster kids to go through McKittrick House since she’d landed there nineteen years ago, but Rita was special. They had a bond.
Alicia’s smile was brilliant. “I’m so happy!”
Kit smiled back. “Me too. I asked Connor to keep it under his hat because we didn’t want any media attention, what with Rita’s mom’s murder case coming to court soon, but that didn’t include keeping it from you.”
Alicia’s brows rose. “How’s it working out with Connor?”
“Pretty good. We’re getting used to each other.” Connor Robinson was Kit’s new partner of six months. At thirty-two, he was a year older than Kit, although he’d been a detective for only eighteen months to her four and a half years. He was something of an overgrown frat boy who spoke before he thought, although he was improving. There were times that he could be incredibly insightful and kind. “I still miss Baz, though.”
