The Colors of Hate - 26

“Sorry I’m late,” Dean said when Kirby opened the door to let him into the apartment.

“It’s okay. You did say you might be. It gave Reid and me a chance to watch a movie I just picked up. Are you hungry?”

“Starving.” Dean looked past Kirby to see Reid sitting on the sofa in the small living room and nodded to him. “But you don’t have to make anything. I’ll survive until I leave.”

“It’s in the fridge. Have a seat and I’ll go nuke it.”

Trailing after him instead of sitting, Dean leaned against the counter to watch while Kirby took the food out, put it on a plate then stuck it in the microwave. “What if I hated Italian?” Dean asked, chuckling.

“Who in hell would hate Italian?” Kirby replied in mock horror. “Besides, if you did it would just mean I’d have tomorrow night’s supper already on hand.”

“Good point.” Dean’s eyes flicked to the microwave then back to Kirby. “Is that how you do all your meals? Take-out I mean.”

Kirby shrugged. “I keep odd hours a lot of the time, just like you do, so yeah, mostly. Don’t you? Do take-out that is.”

“Sometimes, unless… I do know how to cook, and I like to.”

Grabbing the chance, hoping it wouldn’t send Dean running to the living room, or further, Kirby said, “Maybe sometime you can show me.”

Dean’s eyes widened. A small smile lit his face. “Maybe, sometime, I could.”

“When all this is over of course.”

“Of course.”

The insistent ding of the microwave ended the conversation, but not the feeling Kirby had that perhaps Reid had been right.

* * * *

Reid waited until after Dean had finished eating before returning to the aborted conversation from that afternoon.

“As much as all of us might like to focus on Mr Jones as the killer, there are other suspects to consider. Dean, you probably won’t like this but your sister is one of them.”

Dean started to bristle before he took time to think about it. “All right, I suppose I can see why, from your point of view. She told me she and Ange had words at the club—because of Jim. But come on, do you really think a brief argument would set her off to the point she’d track Ange down and kill her? And,” he looked at the two detectives, “she would have had to track her down since Ange left with Jones.”

“Did she know where Ms Westcott lived?” Reid asked.

“Of course. But she wasn’t killed there, was she?”

Kirby shook his head. “No she wasn’t. Her condo was a mess, but one she created. She was not the neatest person ever to come down the pike.”

“Then Ange never went home, so how could Carrie have found her? Or Jim as far as that goes, since he was with Carrie until they separated after supper.”

“All it would have taken was a phone call asking Ms Westcott to meet her somewhere else,” Reid pointed out.

“True. But don’t you all track any calls she’d have gotten around that time?”

Kirby smiled at him. “Good thinking and we do, and we did. She didn’t get any calls after she’d left the club. Not even any voicemails.”