MULTIPLE MOTIVES (The Kate Huntington mystery series Book 1) Read Free Page B

there.”
    Kate rushed out of the center and down the hall to Rob’s law firm. She waved at Fran as she swept past her desk, then tapped on Rob’s half-open door.
       “Come in.”
       She closed the door behind her. He sat at his desk, looking over some papers in an open file folder.
    “You’re never going to believe the conversation I had earlier with the biggest jerk in the world.” In an irate voice, she summarized the phone call with Detective Phillips.
    Rob sat back in his chair and looked pointedly at her fists clenched at her sides. “Calm down, Kate. He’s just doing his job.”
    She willed her fingers to uncurl. “Easy for you to say. You weren’t talking to the…” Several words came to mind that she didn’t normally say out loud. She settled on “jackass.”
    “Oh, he’s questioned me twice already, and I’m sure he’ll be back around again. Once he’s finished his fishing expedition with my colleagues and friends.” Rob’s voice was grim. “The spouse is always the first suspect in a murder or attempted murder.”
    Kate stared at him. The word murder had rendered her temporarily speechless, a rare experience for her.
    After a long pause, she said, “Well, considering the possibility that you were behind Liz’s accident–or non-accident if indeed it was intentional–that’s one thing. But it sounded to me like he’d already proposed marriage to the theory and was about to waltz it down the aisle.”
    ~~~~~~~~
    Friday at noon, Kate sat back in her desk chair with a sigh. It had been a tough morning, topping off a bad week. “TGIF,” she muttered. Taking a bite from her ham sandwich, she mulled over the session she’d just had with Cheryl Crofton, a pregnant, domestic violence survivor. Cheryl’s estranged husband had gotten his hands on her phone number. Thank God he still didn’t know her new address.
    He’d called her the previous weekend, and of course they’d argued. Now that Cheryl felt relatively safe from her abusive spouse, her anger was surfacing. An all too common reaction, as Kate knew. Cheryl had ended the conversation by informing him he now had to talk to her lawyer, Robert Franklin, instead of to her.
    “Has he threatened you?” Kate had asked.
    “No, not really. He just keeps sayin’ he’s gonna make me come home.”
    “I don’t want to frighten you, but sometimes after the woman leaves, a wife-batterer becomes more violent. I suggest you get your phone number changed. If you tell the phone company someone’s harassing you, they might change it for free.”
    “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not scared. I bought a gun and a friend of mine’s teachin’ me how to use it. I’m never gonna let nobody intimidate me again.”
    Kate had reservations about Cheryl as a gun-toting mama but she’d kept them to herself. She didn’t want to undermine her client’s newfound assertiveness, and the threat of a spurned wife-batterer turning deadly was real. At least she was getting lessons on the gun’s proper use, which hopefully would include safety instructions.
    Kate chomped down on the dill pickle spear the deli had delivered along with her sandwich. As she chewed, her mind turned to her first session that morning. Multiple personalities–or dissociative identity disorder as it was now called–was more common in women, but Jim Lincoln was the second man with the disorder whom Kate had treated in her twelve-year career as a psychotherapist.
    Jim was quiet and shy by nature. In addition to the D.I.D.–which was tough enough to treat–he was still confused about his sexual orientation at age twenty-nine. He’d grown up in rural western Maryland, in the foothills of the Appalachians. His seductive mother had fondled him as a child and eventually moved on to even more inappropriate sexual behaviors. Meanwhile his homophobic father had beaten him on a regular basis. At age four, his father started taking him to Ku Klux Klan meetings to “teach him how to be a