by Cara Summers
Cilla covered his hand with hers, and when he turned his to link their fingers, she held on. “Understandable. There were times when I entertained fantasies of making my father suffer because he was always too busy at Christmas and he made my mother so unhappy.”
“The problem is that the statue of St. Francis I prayed to has special prayer-granting powers. My friends Gabe and Nash—their prayers have all been answered. The church where the statue now resides has become a Mecca for tourists.”
“So…you not only think he’s alive, you think you’re going to find him.”
“Something like that. I hope to God I’m not going to end up killing him.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think he’s mixed up in what’s going on now.”
When the phone on his desk rang, Jonah reached for it. “Yes, Virgil? Sure, bring Carmen and Ben up.” He turned to Cilla. “Virgil says that Carmen might have the answer to a question you were asking her earlier today.”
Cilla got that clutch in her gut the instant that Carmen stepped off the elevator. Ben, a tall young man with dark hair and his mother’s smile, followed her. He had a laptop tucked beneath his arm. Bringing up the rear of the small parade was Virgil pushing a cart.
“I brought refreshments,” he announced, and then began to unload trays of sandwiches and drinks on the glass table.
Carmen spoke to Jonah first. “I’ve got Dickie and Pete covering the closing of the club. But when Ben called and told me he remembered something from six years ago at the St. Francis Center, I thought you’d want to know right away.”
Jonah moved from behind his desk to take her hands. “You did the right thing. Cilla and I feel like we’ve been bumping into brick walls all day.” He turned to Ben. “Why don’t you show us what you’ve got?”
“Photos mostly. I was pretty snap-happy in those days. Father Mike asked me to record most of the events at the St. Francis Center. He got me the camera and provided the film. When I looked through the pictures I started to remember.”
A flush spread over Ben’s face as he spoke. “There was this young woman who volunteered at the center. She was eighteen or nineteen. I was fourteen and a little immature.”
“Smitten is what you were—puppy love,” Carmen said as she placed a hand on her son’s arm. “The first time it hits you, you fall hard. And Ben had it bad. When he brought his laptop into Interludes and showed me some of the pictures, I started to remember, too.”
“And you thought Ben’s crush might connect to what’s happening now,” Cilla prodded.
Ben glanced at his mother. “The thing is, as big a crush as I had on this girl, she had an even bigger one on Jonah. She was a volunteer. She helped out in the office and sometimes she worked with the younger boys. But whenever Jonah was there, she practically stalked him. I didn’t stand a chance. She was following him while I was sort of doing the same thing with her—but with my camera.”
He held out a photo to Jonah. “I brought my laptop, but when I came across this one, I blew it up and printed it out. Mom told me about the presents you’ve been receiving, and I thought you’d want to see this.”
Cilla moved to Jonah’s side as she studied the picture. In it a young blonde woman stood in front of a Christmas tree. The camera had caught her in profile, offering a gift to Jonah—a green box tied with red ribbon.
Cilla felt it then. Not a tingle, but something pushing at the edge of her memory.
“Do you remember her?” Ben asked.
“Vaguely,” Jonah said. “Let’s see if we can connect the laptop to the TV and we can view the pictures on the big screen.” He led Ben over to the U-shaped couches in front of the TV.
Carmen turned to Cilla. “I may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but you said to tell you anything that seemed out of the ordinary about that Christmas season six years ago.”
“I did.”
“You think what’s going on now goes back that far?” Virgil asked.
“It’s a theory,” Cilla said.
“I was here in the San Francisco area back then,” he said. “Jonah opened Pleasures the summer of 2006, and he hired me away from a sweet little place in Sausalito where I’d been tending bar for a couple of years.”
“I was here, too. Fresh out of the police academy, my first year on the streets.” Cilla felt something again—just a little tug. “Jonah was here in San Francisco, too. He was looking for this building. Can you stay for a while, Virgil, and look at Ben’s pictures?”
“Sure.” Virgil crossed to Jonah’s desk phone. “I’ll just let my assistant manager know where to call me.”
A few minutes later, they were all seated on the couches in front of the flat-screen TV over the fireplace. Ben tapped keys on his laptop and a series of photos began to appear.
“Mom told me to start with December,” Ben explained.
There were candid shots of a Christmas party in progress—kids of various ages opening presents, eating cake. Jonah was in a couple of them handing out presents. And she was pretty sure she spotted her boss, Gabe Wilder, dressed up as Santa and wearing a beard.
There were posed shots, one with a large group standing around the Christmas tree, another with the priest she knew as Father Mike standing with a smaller group around a statue of St. Francis. They were all wearing coats and hats and waving at the camera.
“The Christmas party was early that year, and the weather was mild,” Ben said. The next series of shots were all taken on the basketball court. Once again, Cilla was able to recognize Jonah and Gabe. They seemed to be refereeing games for the boys and girls who went to the center.
But there was another person who was beginning to look familiar, too, a tall, slender young woman. The same woman Ben had captured handing the present to Jonah. She wasn’t young enough to be one of the kids. And not pretty exactly. You might not have been able to pick her out in a crowd except for the long blond, Alice-in-Wonderland hair.
Cilla felt the tug again.
“I do remember that girl,” Jonah said. “Her name was Elizabeth something.”
“Baxter. Elizabeth Baxter,” Ben said. “I didn’t have the courage to even say a word to her. Not that she would have paid any attention to me. She only had eyes for you, Jonah.”
Jonah frowned. “Nice girl. Quiet. I was so busy then, working part-time at G.W. Securities, still volunteering at the center, and trying to line up places that Mrs. Fortune and I could see in San Francisco.” He paused, his frown deepening. “I’d forgotten all about her. But earlier that fall, someone had started leaving notes in my mail slot at the center. All of them signed by a secret admirer.”
“What kind of notes?” Cilla asked.
“Silly stuff. Poems, sometimes with pictures of flowers on them. I just ignored them. I figured they were harmless enough.”
Ben clicked on his keyboard and brought up a shot of the young blonde woman putting an envelope in a mail slot. “Here I am, super stalker in action.”
Jonah rose to his feet, moved closer to the TV screen. “Then there were gifts—little things—a paperweight with my initials, a framed photo of Gabe and me shooting some hoop. I still didn’t think anything of it. I was too busy.”
When Ben brought up the picture of Elizabeth handing Jonah the green box, Cilla moved to his side. “What was in the box?”
“A ring. And a note telling me that she’d fallen in love with me. That we were destined to be together.”
“What did you do?” Cilla asked.
“Father Mike had had to leave the party early to say a vigil mass at the Capuchin monastery. But I felt that I had to do something immediately, so I asked Gabe to stay. He and I met with her together after the party, and I gave her back the ring. I talked to her. Or tried to. I told her that what she was going through was normal. We all get a crush on somebody. It’s part of growing up.”
“That’s the same speech that Mom gave me,” Ben said.
“Not that it worked,” Carmen said. “Pupp
y love is tough.”
“Well, with Elizabeth, what I said seemed to work. She said something about some people being destined to be together, and that when we died and came back in another lifetime, we would find each other. I don’t know what I’d expected, but when she left, she was smiling. And Gabe thought I’d handled it pretty well.”
Pausing, Jonah ran a hand through his hair. “I never thought any more about it. That night I left for San Francisco to scout out places for Mrs. Fortune to look at. Finding the right building and making Pleasures a reality kept me away from the center for a while. When I finally did go back, she wasn’t there anymore.”
“She stopped coming to the St. Francis Center before Christmas,” Ben said. “She told everyone that she was moving away. The day she made the announcement, I took several shots. To remember her by.” He brought up more photos on the screen.
Cilla’s stomach knotted as she moved closer to the TV. She tapped a finger on one of the images. “Can you enlarge this one, Ben?”
“Sure.”
As soon as he did, the memory that had been nagging at her slipped into place and her stomach sank.
“She cut her hair,” Cilla said.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Everyone was kind of shocked. But she said she was about to begin a new life and she was leaving everything about her old life behind. She was so looking forward to starting fresh.”
“I’m pretty sure I remember her, too,” Cilla said. “I didn’t recognize her when she had the long hair because it was short like this when I first saw her. If I’m right, she did leave her old life behind. And she did it right here in San Francisco.”
She paused to study the picture on the screen again. But it was almost a perfect match to the one she’d carried in her head for years. Moving closer, Jonah linked his fingers with hers.
“She was one of the first cases I was assigned to during my rookie year on the force,” Cilla went on. The details flooded into her mind. “Joe Finelli was my partner then. It was Christmas Eve and we’d pulled the night shift. We got the call around late Christmas Eve. A drowning. We weren’t sure where she went in, but her body was discovered floating beneath one of the piers. A Jane Doe. No ID. No one in the area was ever reported missing.”
“I remember reading about it,” Virgil said. “A couple of days after Christmas, an artist’s sketch ran in the local papers. On TV, too.”
“We never got an ID,” Cilla said. “All she had on her was a note. It had been sealed in waterproof laminate. It read, ‘I’m leaving for a whole new life. This time I’ll be with my true love.’”
“Good Lord,” Jonah murmured. “She committed suicide because she believed it was the only way she could be with me? How could that possibly be?”
“If she was into that reincarnation stuff, she might have believed that dying was the fastest way to get to the next life where you and she could be together,” Ben said.
Carmen put an arm around her son. “Or it could be that she was a total nutcase. All the loonies are not in the loony bin.”
Cilla kept her fingers linked with Jonah’s when she turned to Ben. “Did Elizabeth ever mention any relatives?”
“Not to me directly,” Ben said. “I never did get up the nerve to talk to her. But when she worked with the younger kids, she used to tell stories about her twin brother and her uncle. They were both in the military.”
“If she was telling the truth, we should be able to trace them.” Jonah moved to his computer.
“I’ll update everyone else,” Cilla said, pulling out her cell.
Virgil gestured to Carmen and Ben. “You guys are coming with me. The chef has a dessert he’s creating tonight for the staff to test.”
AT 3:00 A.M., HE SAT IN HIS car and watched as the lights at Pleasures blinked off one by one. Except for those on the third floor.
They were still on. The two of them were still working, trying to find out who he was.
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel as he pushed down hard on the anger. Thanks to the bungling of his partner, they had to be one step closer to identifying him. When the red mist appeared in front of his eyes, he blinked it away.
He’d nearly given in to his anger when he’d seen what had happened in the alley outside Cilla Michaels’s apartment. From his vantage point at the mouth of the short alley, the plan he’d devised had seemed to be going according to schedule.
Cilla was leading the way down the fire escape. And the limo driver who’d dropped them off was pacing at the front of the building, checking his messages on his phone.
Then his partner had changed the plan. Suddenly, Cilla was dangling feetfirst over the railing. He was supposed to kidnap her and kill her someplace else. So they would have to look for her and spin their wheels.
And Jonah Stone would know what it was like to lose someone he loved.
But the plan might still have worked. The drop from the second story could have killed her. It would certainly have injured her and caused Stone both suffering and distraction.
But she hadn’t been the one who’d dropped to the cement in the alley.
She hadn’t been the one who’d been taken away unmoving in an ambulance.
The red mist had blurred his vision several times as he’d followed the ambulance to its destination. An emergency room. So his partner was alive. But the police would have his fingerprints. They’d be able to trace his identity.
That would take time. And it would take even more time for them to put things together and find him. If they ever did.
As one of the lights blinked off on the third floor of the club, his hands tightened on the steering wheel again. They were going to go to bed now. And they’d make love. This man who should have loved Elizabeth would make love with the woman who was trying to spoil everything.
And they shouldn’t be sleeping. This was time they were supposed to spend chasing their tails. And it wasn’t his partner’s fault. No, it was the woman’s fault. He’d had the perfect plan. But she wasn’t supposed to be in it.
Time, he reminded himself as he rested his forehead against the steering wheel. It was still on his side. And he was good at measuring people and finding their vulnerabilities. A new plan began to form in his mind. He could still take her out of the picture. Still make Stone experience what it was like to lose the person you loved most in the world.
He could still avenge Elizabeth’s death.
Tomorrow night at Pleasures.
15
THE APARTMENT WAS SILENT except for the hum of his computer. Jonah studied the two screens on his desk. They were scrolling and sifting through data. As soon as Carmen and her son had left, Finelli had called to report the bad news that the name Paul Michael Anderson was an alias with a driver’s license, a car registration and a social security number that only dated back one year. Cilla had contacted Gabe to report on their progress and divide up the work. Gabe was digging into Elizabeth Baxter, and he wouldn’t be reporting in until he was sure he had everything.
Jonah had opted for the more complicated assignment, tracking down who Paul Michael Anderson really was. Following his best hunch, he was running the photo on Anderson’s driver’s license through military databases, hoping for the real name to pop.
Which would take time.
A glance at the bottom of his computer screen said 3:00 a.m. Time to call it a night. Flash had deserted him for one of the window seats over an hour ago. He turned in his chair, intending to tell Cilla it was time for a break, and he saw that she’d already fallen asleep on the couch. Rising, he moved closer.
Moonlight fell in rectangular patches across the floor. Other than that the room was dark, save for the dim glow from a table lamp and the computer screens. She lay curled up like a child, her hand beneath her cheek. Her face looked fragile, her wrists delicate. He’d never thought of her as either, he realized.
It had been her aura of strength and of competence that had drawn him from that first meeting of eyes. But he�
�d never watched her sleep before. Not even in the dreams that had haunted him for so many long silent nights. But when he’d dreamed of her, when he’d tossed and turned hoping to find her in his bed, sleeping had never been part of his fantasy.
No, what he’d wanted more than anything was a repeat of that long, sexy night they’d spent in that hotel room in Denver. Wanted it with a desire that had begun to boil in his blood. Looking at her now, he couldn’t bring to mind why he’d waited so long to go to her and take what he’d wanted. What he still wanted.
Only now, he wanted more. And he knew that the wanting wasn’t going to stop. The qualities he was seeing in her as she slept, the vulnerability that she kept so carefully hidden were pulling at him and arousing him even more than the fearlessness that he found so admirable.
When he reached the couch, he dropped to his knees and pushed a dark curl of her hair off her forehead.
She stirred, just as he wanted her to. And when she opened her eyes, he watched the cloudiness of sleep fade into recognition and desire.
I want you. Neither of them had to say the words aloud. Keeping his eyes on hers, he took her hands and drew her up with him as he rose to his feet. They undressed each other in silence, not touching except for the brush of a fingertip—on his chest, at her waist. Over his shoulder, down her arm.
Cilla had been dreaming of him before he’d awakened her, wanting him with the same intensity that she’d been experiencing for so many nights. When he’d touched her to push her hair back, she’d thought for a moment that she was lost once again in the dream that she’d had for so long. Her mind had already been filled with him, her body heated in anticipation. But this time she wasn’t dreaming of his touch. He was real.