Raven (Kindred, #1)

ONE-3

“And you’d never seen him before?”

Zara had already answered all of Officer Kraft’s questions. The whole area was roped off and the scene was swarming with cops and other relevant professionals. Timothy was dead and there wasn’t any amount of talking that would change that.

Her thoughts were meandering around in her mind in their own haunted bubbles. Floating and sinking, they tried to arrange themselves in some sort of order that made sense. But she was struggling to remember what she’d said a few seconds ago, so it was unlikely she’d be able to remember the course of the night with any kind of clarity, certainly not while her fatigue was making it harder to think.

“No, he approached me at Purdy’s,” she said and her head moved in a haphazard shake. “We talked and when the bar closed, he walked me down here. We were just standing here. We kissed and then, boom, he was gone.”

The cop’s lip twitched. “You were very lucky. This professional had his target in sight. You could easily have been hurt.”

“A professional?” she asked, letting her gaze fall to Tim’s sheet covered form.

While hiding in the alley she had been in fear for her life. But it hadn’t occurred to her that this was any kind of professional hit. Her fear had been for a mugger, an opportunistic robber who had seen them on the corner and hoped to steal himself a few bucks after eliminating Tim who might have been a threat to the criminal’s safety.

If it was a professional job, then Tim was something more than he’d portrayed himself as. She could’ve been caught in the crossfire, been collateral damage in a battle she hadn’t even known was going on. Considering this made some of her melancholy give way to anger and confusion. Those emotions were easier to get a handle on than grief.

“You’re certain you didn’t hear anything?” the detective asked. “Or see anything?”

“No,” she said, still languishing in the near miss and the idea that she could have lost her life tonight. In a single instant, she could’ve been snuffed out and suddenly her work at CI didn’t seem quite so significant. “I didn’t see anything. There was no one on the street. Aren’t there security cameras on any of the buildings around here?”

CI was on the perpendicular street. It was a couple of blocks over so it was too far away to reveal anything about this crime, which frustrated her because it was the only video footage she’d have direct access to or the authority to release to the cops.

“We’ll be checking that out, Miss Bandini. Would you like an officer to take you home?”

Snapping out of her semi-daze, she made eye contact with the detective. “Are we finished?”

“Yes, we’re finished,” Kraft said and retrieved a card from his breast pocket to hand her. “If you think of anything else...”

“I’ll call you,” Zara said, snatching the business card and slipping it into the front of her purse.

Glad to be dismissed, Zara was escorted away from the scene and past the barricades. She refused the offer of a ride from the cops and instead hailed a passing cab. Shock was still vibrating through her, so it took her a couple of tries to give the driver her address. When they were on the way, she relaxed and told herself that the safety of her apartment and her uneventful life was just one car ride away and that when she got there everything would go back to normal.