Hour Game

"Well, I'll help you," said Williams. "I need to attend the post anyway." He added, "It's becoming damn routine."

As they were all walking out, King stopped Sylvia. "Are you okay?"

She looked at him with a sickened expression. "I think it's possible Kyle committed suicide."

"Suicide! Why?"

"He may have suspected I was on to his drug dealing."

"But killing himself, that's a little drastic. And the guy struck me as spineless. And there was no suicide note either."

"Cowards kill themselves, Sean. They're afraid to face the consequences of their actions."

"And, what, you're blaming yourself?"

"If it was suicide, I can think of no other reason than my suspicions."

"That's not fair to you, Sylvia. You didn't ask the guy to steal drugs."

"No, but-"

"Before you beat yourself up over this, why don't you do the post? As good as you are, you can't predict what happened until you do that."

"But even the post won't tell me if the overdose was accidental or intentional."

"The bottom line is, it was Kyle's choice. You had no control over it. And life is full of enough legitimate guilt without us adding the guilt of others to our burden."

Sylvia managed a weak smile. "You're a very wise man."

"I've had lots of practice. Primarily dealing with my own stupid mistakes."

"I'll call you when I'm done with the post."

"I sincerely hope this is the last one you'll have to do for a long time."

As he started to turn away, she said, "Last night was the most fun I've had in years."

"I can say the same."

As King and Michelle drove off, Michelle looked over at him. "Am I wrong, or have you and Sylvia rekindled your romance?" He shot her a glance but said nothing. "Come on, Sean, don't feed me that line about my being your partner and not your shrink."

"Why not? It's still a valid point."

She slumped back in her seat with a defeated expression. "Okay. Fine."

"What do you care anyway?"

"I care because we're right in the middle of a very complicated murder investigation, and we don't need the best detective on the case and thebrilliant medical examiner being distracted by a romance."

"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were jealous."

"Oh, please!"

"I said if I didn't know better. And don't worry, right now everything else takes a backseat to this case." He paused and added, "I saw you and Eddie hugging."

She looked at him angrily. "You were spying on us!"

"No, I peeked in the window as I was going to the door to see if you were in there. I didn't know you two were trying to crawl inside each other's bodies."

"That's so unfair, Sean. I was just thanking him for a painting he did of me."

"Oh, he painted a portrait of you? That should make his intentions quite clear."

"He's unhappy."

"And it's not your job to fix that unhappiness," he retorted. "So just let it go, Michelle. The last thing you need right now is for your judgment to be clouded."

Michelle looked ready to argue but remained silent.

King continued, "He's an attractive, fun and nice guy who's had more than his share of tragedy, and to top it off he's caught in a miserable marriage. You wouldn't be the first woman in history to want to help a man like that."

"You sound like you've experienced stuff like that."

"The world is full of stuff like that. And none of us are immune to it."

"Okay, okay, I get the message. So where to now?"

"We're going to see Roger Ca

"That's interesting."

"You haven't heard the most interesting part. The late Mrs. Ca

"Really? Where?" Michelle asked.

" Battle Enterprises. Care to guess which executive she was servicing?"

"Bobby Battle!"

"You win the prize."

CHAPTER 60

NO ONE ANSWERED their knock at the Ca

"That's fu

"At least the housekeeper should be here."

Michelle went over and peeked inside the garage window. "Well, there are two cars in there, a big Beemer and a Range Rover. Unless he pays his housekeeper extremely well, I don't think they belong to her."

King put a hand on the front door, and it swung open. Michelle saw this and immediately took out her gun and rejoined King.

"I swear to God," she whispered, "if he's in there dead with a dog collar around his neck and wearing a watch pointing to the number six, I'm going to scream for an entire week."

They made their way quietly inside. The front room was empty. They cleared each subsequent room before moving on to the next.

Michelle heard the noise first, a grunting sound, appearing to come from the back of the house. They hustled there and looked around. They saw no one, but the sound repeated itself, followed this time by a clanking noise of metal on metal.

Michelle motioned to a door at the end of the hall. King nodded, moved forward and slowly pushed it open with his foot while Michelle covered him. King peered inside, tensed and then relaxed. He opened the door and motioned for Michelle to join him.

Ca

"What the hell are you doing here?" he demanded.

"I called this morning. You said one o'clock was fine. It's one o'clock. Nobody answered the door and it happened to be open."

Ca

"Happens to the best of us," said King. "We can wait if you want to clean up."

"No, I think we can just get down to it. I can't imagine this will take long. Let's sit outside. I made some lemonade."

They went into the large backyard, which had a lap pool, spa and a small cabana-style building as well as intricately pla

"Beautiful," commented Michelle.

"Yes, I love it back here."

"It all looks fairly recent," said King. "And you haven't lived in this house that long, have you? What, three years or so?"

Ca

"Public records are just that, public. You're retired now. From accounting?"

"Twenty years seemed long enough to worry about other people's money."

"Well, now you have plenty of your own to worry about. I guess accounting pays better than I thought."

"I've made some good investments over the years."

"And your late wife worked too, at Battle Enterprises. She was executive secretary to Bobby Battle, wasn't she? In fact, she was working there when she died in that car accident?"

"Yes. It's not exactly a secret."

"I didn't see you at Battle 's funeral."

"That's because I didn't go."

"You hadn't kept in touch with the family?"

"Just because my wife worked there doesn't mean we were friends with them."

"I found a picture of your wife while I was doing my background research. She was a very beautiful woman; had even won some local beauty pageants."

"Megan was extraordinarily attractive, yes. Does this line of conversation have some point?"

"The point being that I had to hunt up pictures of your wife because there are none of her in your home. Nor are there any of your son."

"You mean, not out in the public areas."

"No. When no one answered the door and we found it open, we thought there was something amiss, so we went room to room, including your bedroom; there are no photos at all of your family."