Cheater

Book 2: The San Diego Case Files

by Karen Rose

Genres: Police Procedurals; Romantic Suspense; Suspense

Synopsis

*Pre-order the brand new novel in The San Diego Case Files series from Sunday Times bestseller Karen Rose*

READERS LOVE KAREN ROSE:

'Karen Rose never disappoints!'

'The characters are so well described you feel as if they are real people'

'I love this author's writing. Each book is like meeting up with old friends'

'I just couldn't put it down, I'd definitely recommend this author'

'It is just painstaking waiting for her next novel'

Release date: March 26, 2024

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 464

Sample

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."

"Of course you do. He was your first partner in the homicide department, after all."

"We worked together for four years, and I've known him four times that long." Baz Constantine had been the detective who'd investigated the murder of Kit's sister, sixteen years before. As an angry fifteen-year-old, Kit had assumed the man hadn't cared about finding Wren's killer, but she'd soon learned that he cared far too much. He'd encouraged her as she'd grown from that angry teen into a responsible adult, helping her realize her goal of becoming a homicide detective.

She understood why Baz had retired after having a heart attack, though that didn't make her miss him any less. But wishing he were here wasn't getting justice for Mr. Franklin Delano Flynn.

"Why did you say the victim 'supposedly' pulled the cord at ten a.m. yesterday?" Kit asked.

"Because rigor has fully passed. I would have thought he'd still be in the final stages of resolution, given his musculature. But he is elderly, so we'll see what we see when I get him on the table."

"Can you lift his left hand?"

Alicia did so, and Kit frowned. The fingernails on his left hand had also been clipped to the nail bed, but there was also a strip of pale skin on his ring finger where a ring had been. "He was married. I'll need to find out where his wife is."

"Husband," a man said behind her. Kit looked around to see CSU's Sergeant Ryland holding a photo encased in an evidence bag. "All the photos were out of their frames, the glass shattered. This one was lying on top of the pile, so I grabbed it for you to check out."

"Thank you." Kit, hands already gloved, reached for the photo, snapping a picture of it with her phone in case she needed it later. In the photo, the victim and another man stood side by side, the victim's right arm around the other man's waist. They wore black suits and brilliant smiles, and each man had his left hand extended, showing off their shiny gold wedding bands. The iconic door of San Francisco City Hall was in the background.

"He's considerably younger in this photo than he is now," she said, frowning at the feeling of déjà vu that she got from the picture. "At least ten or twenty years. Any idea of when it was taken?"

"Not yet," Ryland said. "But there'll be a record of the marriage."

So they had a gay man stabbed to death in his own apartment, the place ransacked. They'd have to at least consider the possibility that this had been a hate crime.

She started to hand the photo back, but a memory was struggling to the surface of her mind, so she refocused on the taller of the two men-Mr. Franklin Delano Flynn.

"What's wrong?" Ryland asked.

Her frown deepened. "I have the feeling that I've seen this man before." She darted a quick glance at the victim's ashen face as he lay dead on his living room floor, then looked back at the wedding photo. Yes, she'd definitely seen him before.

"Where did you see him?" Ryland asked.

Kit stared hard at the picture, mentally sifting through all the faces and places in her mind, but nothing was clicking. "Can I see the rest of the photos?"

Ryland handed over a stack. "These are the ones we've bagged so far."

Kit examined each one. They were mostly photos of the deceased with his husband, taken in faraway places-Cairo, Rome, Paris. A few featured another couple, a woman and a man, and there were a few with two other women, both elderly.

Nothing here helped. Until she got to the bottom of the stack. Here was a much younger Franklin Delano Flynn, holding up a mug of beer, a somewhat reluctant smile on his face.

"This," she said softly. "This place. Look at the walls, the pictures."

Ryland looked over her shoulder, sucking in a surprised breath. "That's Julio's."

Yes, it was. Kit knew this place well. Knew the faces in every photo that hung on its walls. She'd been studying them since the first time she'd entered its battered wooden doors.

The first time . . . And then the memory snapped into place. "Oh. I was twenty-one and Baz took me to Julio's for a birthday drink, because I was finally legal."

"The cop bar," Alicia murmured. "I've never been there."

"It's a dive," Kit said with a fond smile, "but we love it. I remember the day because Baz told me to change out of my uniform-I was still in the Coast Guard then-before he picked me up, because we were going to the bar. I was so excited, because I'd heard so much about it." She studied the victim's face in the photo thoughtfully. "This man was there. Baz introduced us."

"He was a cop?" Ryland asked, his eyes going wide.

"He must've been." Kit drew in a sharp breath, because now she remembered it all. "Oh my God. Not just a cop, Ryland. He'd been a homicide lieutenant, retired for twenty years by that point. I remember being tongue-tied."

"You were tongue-tied?" Alicia asked, surprised. "No way."

"In the presence of greatness like this man? Oh yeah. Baz was, too. This guy had been the homicide lieutenant when Baz was still a rookie. Baz talked to him at the bar sometimes. Said he was open and helpful, really encouraging to young cops. Baz considered him something between a mentor and a hero. Baz was so excited when he saw him that day. The man hadn't been at Julio's since his retirement. When Baz introduced us, I got chills. I'd read articles about him and he was a kick-ass detective before he was made lieutenant. But his name wasn't Flynn. It was Wilson. Frank Wilson."

"Frank Wilson?" Ryland exclaimed. "I've heard of him from some of the old-timers. This is him?"

"I believe so," Kit murmured. "I wonder if he changed his name after he married the other man in this photo." She gave the photo back to Ryland. "This could be another high-profile case."

Ryland sighed. "I was thinking we were about due. It's been, what? Six months?"

Six months since they'd stopped one of San Diego's deadliest serial killers, throwing their entire homicide department into disarray. They were finally getting their acts together again and now they had a dead, high-ranking retired cop. "Yep. I guess we are due."

"Should I expect your lieutenant to breathe down my neck again?" he asked.

"Probably." Lieutenant Navarro had recently returned from personal leave and was chomping at the bit for something big to do. "Was there anything missing from the bedroom?"

"Possibly a computer," Ryland said. "The router and Ethernet cable are still there, but the desk is empty. There's a dust-free space the size of a laptop, so that one was stolen is a reasonable guess. The bedroom is in the same state as the rest of the apartment-photos, papers, books all over the place. It'll take us a while to get through it all, but we'll be as quick as we can."

"Okay. I need to find Connor and we'll get started. First thing we need to do is inform Navarro." Their lieutenant would take care of informing the hierarchy. She cast a glance at the speaker on the victim's living room wall. "At least I'll get away from the music."

"Why?" Alicia asked. "It's beautiful."

Yes, it was. It was also too damn sad. "I'll find out what CD he's listening to and if it was his norm," Kit said, evading Alicia's question because she didn't like to talk about things like feelings on the job. She suppressed a shudder at the thought.

"There's no CD player, Kit," Ryland said. "Just an old-fashioned stereo. I'm still looking for where the music is coming from."

Even more reason to get out of here. "Let me know when you find it. See you guys later."

Kit left the apartment, nodding to the officer guarding the door. "Do you know where the common room is?" Because that was where Connor had told her to meet him.

"Yes, Detective. Go down the elevator to the ground floor, turn left, and it's at the opposite side of the building from the lobby. Most of the residents on this floor are in the common room. They were asked to stay out of our way, so they gathered there."