JANE'S WARLORD

by user

  And how had Arvid run like a freaking gazelle carrying the weight of a full-grown woman—in the dark, in brush so thick even the cops had a hard time forcing their way through? What was the son of a bitch, Superman?

  Tom sighed, rubbing his stomach as he trudged toward the victim’s house. They had no choice but to continue the search, though the sheriff had grumbled he’d rather wait until there was more light. Unfortunately, they couldn’t afford to do that, not with Arvid holding a hostage. Jane could be dead by morning.

  Assuming he hadn’t butchered her already.

  None of this shit made sense. She must have been covering for him, but why? Tom would have bet his badge Jane Colby was not the kind of woman who’d turn a blind eye to murder. He’d known women who rationalized their lovers’ crimes, up to and including the rape of their own children, but Jane just didn’t fit the profile.

  Yet she’d looked Tom in the eye and sworn Arvid wasn’t the killer. He’d believed her, too, though he normally had a pretty damn good idea when he was being lied to.

  So what the hell was going on?

  Adding to the general fun and games, he now had to go talk to the victim’s roommate, who’d been cooling her heels ever since she’d arrived more than an hour ago. All the poor woman wanted was for someone to tell her what the hell happened, and since the coroner was off talking to the vic’s immediate family, the sheriff had sent him out to handle it.

  The deputy had put the woman in a patrol car; they didn’t want her going into her house until they’d had time to finish processing the scene. Cynthia Myers had been killed outside, but they still needed to go over the house, if only to close any loopholes Arvid’s defense attorney might use later.

  As he approached the car, the front passenger door opened and the woman got out. “Are you the detective?” she asked. “Can you tell me what happened? Nobody’s talking. Who did this? They said Cynthia’s dead. What... ?”

  He sighed and gestured toward the open passenger door. “Why don’t we sit in the car, Miss ...”

  “Terri Jenson.” She knotted her shaking hands together and obediently got back in.

  With a sigh, Tom walked around to the driver’s side. He always hated dealing with survivors, but unfortunately, it was part of the job. And a good rapport with family and friends of the victims could be invaluable to solving a case. He got in the car, pushing aside the officer’s clipboard and ticket book so he could sit down.

  “I was at work when one of the neighbors up the road called and said there were police at my house,” Jenson told him. “She said ... she said Cynthia was dead.” Her eyes filled.

  Tom studied the woman sympathetically. She was a short, slender brunette, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, both clean. Not quite thirty, he decided, scanning her haggard face. She was probably pretty, at least when not dealing with the murder of a close friend.

  “I’m afraid your neighbor was right,” he said gently. “Cynthia was attacked outside your house earlier tonight by a man with a knife.”

  She flinched. “Do you know ... who did it?”

  “Her boyfriend identified—“

  Tern’s eyes widened. “Who?”

  “Her boyfriend.” Tom reached into a pocket and pulled out his notebook, flipped it open. “Jason Anderson. He told us—“

  “I don’t know who you talked to, but it wasn’t her boyfriend.”

  Tom blinked at her. The woman stared back at him with an expression of indignant alarm. “You seem pretty sure about that,” he said cautiously.

  “I should,” she told him, her voice sure and cold. “Cynthia and I have been lovers for the past five years.”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He dragged a hand through his hair, fighting the cold, sick feeling that was trying to take root in his guts. “Are you sure she didn’t have a male friend you don’t know about?”

  “Cynthia did not date men,” Terri gritted. “If a man told you he was her boyfriend, you were talking to her killer.”

  By the time Tom pulled into his own driveway, it was pushing dawn. His eyelids were gritty, and a headache was throbbing a relentless bass beat behind his forehead. He’d spent the past three hours trying to find Jason Anderson, who had mysteriously vanished.

  As far as he could determine, Terri Jenson was right. Virtually every word hi Anderson’s statement had been a he. The address he’d given them was a vacant lot, the phone number was a dummy, and they could find no mention of anybody named Jason Anderson in Tayanita County, either in the phone book or in criminal records, not even as an alias.

  Tom had also done a computer search on the name with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Half a dozen Jason Andersons had popped up, all in other counties, but the ages and descriptions hadn’t matched.

  It was beginning to look as if what Terri said was true.

  Anderson—or whatever his name was—had killed Cynthia Myers, and possibly the other women as well. He’d accused Baran Arvid to throw off the cops while he escaped. But why had Arvid run? Even if he hadn’t realized it made him look guilty as hell, Jane damn well should have known.

  The sheriff had called off the search for the two—a manhunt was ungodly expensive—but he’d still issued a Be On the Lookout for them. He hoped the BOLO would eventually bear fruit or they’d emerge from hiding on their own. Either way, Tom was going to question them thoroughly.

  And then chew Jane out for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty.

  Yawning, he pulled into the two-car garage of the brick colonial he and Christine had shared for the past fifteen years. It was dark in the garage, and he reminded himself to buy that replacement lightbulb he’d been meaning to pick up.

  Wearily, he got out of his Crown Vic and trudged toward the cement steps that led up into the house.

  He sensed the motion barely an instant before the hand closed over his throat, jerking him back against a body that was a lot bigger than his own. Another hand reached into his shoulder holster and neatly removed his gun.

  “We want to talk to you,” Baran Arvid said.

  “What a coincidence,” Tom gasped around the fingers circling his throat. “I want to talk to you, too.”

  Then he drove an elbow back into his captor’s ribs in a blow that should have made the man keel over and gag. Arvid didn’t even grunt.

  “We had nothing to do with the murder, Tom,” Jane Colby said from the darkness.

  “That statement would fill me with more confidence,” he wheezed, “if the Man of Steel here wasn’t choking the shit out of me.”

  The hand around his throat disappeared, but he heard the warning click of his own gun being cocked. He rubbed his throat and glared in the direction of the sound. “Did it ever occur to you to just come to the sheriff’s department and fucking talk to me?”

  “I couldn’t risk being arrested,” Arvid said. “The killer has targeted Jane. If I leave her alone, she’ll end up like the others.”

  “All you had to do was ask for police protection...” Tom bit back the “dumbass” he wanted to add to the end of that sentence. “Under the circumstances, the sheriff would be happy to assign the manpower.”

  Jane sighed. “Y’all can’t protect me from this guy, Tom.”

  “And Bead Boy can?” His headache gave a particularly nasty throb. “Look, I would feel a lot more comfortable if I could see who the hell I’m talking to. Let’s go to the Sheriff’s Department.”

  “No.” Arvid’s tone did not invite debate.

  Shit. He didn’t want them in the house, not with his wife in there asleep. “Then let’s go out on the deck. Christine left the lights on out there.”

  As he led the way out of the garage, he heard the distinctive ring of Jane’s boots on the cement drive. “Just for curiosity’s sake, does the phrase ‘assaulting a police officer’ mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah, and I’m sorry about that, Tom. We just don’t have a lot of options right now.”

  He grunted. This melodramat
ic shit was getting on his nerves.

  Tom walked across the lawn and up the steps that led onto the deck. Leaning a hip against the railing, he watched as Jane followed, the big photographer on her heels. That damn wolf melted out of the darkness after them. He thought about protesting its presence, then decided that would probably be a waste of time.

  Jane fell into the nearest lawn chair with a tired sigh as Arvid took up a post against the railing protectively close to her. The wolf sat on his haunches at her feet.

  “So,” Tom said, “you want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  “That,” the wolf said, “is a very long story.”

  An hour later Jane rubbed the throbbing spot between her eyebrows and eyed the detective. Tom was staring at the frozen playback of the Ripper recording with his jaw hanging open.

  “Shit,” he said at last, “I’ve died and gone to an X-Files rerun. Where are the fucking gray aliens?”

  “About four hundred light-years that way,” Freika said, tilting his muzzle skyward.

  Tom shot him a wild-eyed stare.

  “He’s playing with you, Tom.” Jane said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  She ignored that. She really didn’t think she wanted to go there. “You can see why we couldn’t allow Baran to be arrested.”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head and sat back in the lawn chair he’d dropped into about halfway through their explanation. “But what I don’t get is why you’re telling me all this.”

  “Because we need your help falsifying paperwork,” Baran said.

  Tom gaped at him. “What?”

  “We need to make it look as though I’m under arrest for at least the next three hours.”

  “Aside from costing me my badge, what would that do?”

  “We’ve got to lure Druas in. He needs to believe he has an unrestricted path to Jane, but he’s not going to believe I’m going to just walk off and leave her.”

  “Because he’s from the future, he’s probably got access to the paperwork surrounding this case,” Jane explained.

  “Three hundred years from now?”

  She shrugged. “Why not? Look at all the paperwork that survived from the Ripper murders. And record-keeping wasn’t nearly as good in Victorian England as it is now.”

  Tom frowned, considering the idea. “So how would my falsifying a report help you?”

  “If you leave a paper trail that shows Baran in custody during a particular period of time, Druas will think he’s got a clear field to me.”

  Tom’s eyes widened. “But that means the fraud would have to be rock-solid. If it ever came out that I hadn’t had you in custody, the creep would know it was a trick.”

  “Yeah.” Baran folded his arms, his expression grim. “You’d have to keep the secret until you died.”

  “Shit. It’s not that easy, Arvid. Even at this hour, there are people at the department and people at the jail. They’d know you were never there. And I’d lose my badge.”

  There was a desperate, thrumming silence while they tried to figure out a solution to that problem.

  “What if you were questioning him somewhere else?” Jane asked suddenly. “It doesn’t have to be that you actually arrested him, just that you could attest that he was in a given location at a given time. Maybe you could say he attacked you here.”

  “But that wouldn’t get you alone,” Baran pointed out. “I’d never have let you out of my sight.”

  “Druas doesn’t know that. Look, Tom could say I was horrified that you’d actually attacked him, so I ran off. You held him for a while, but then he escaped and you ran. It would create a window of time when I’d be left unprotected.”

  Baran shook his head. “Druas wouldn’t fall for that.”

  “If it’s in the paperwork and Tom swears it happened that way, why wouldn’t he?”

  “Neither of us would be that stupid.”

  “People are uncharacteristically stupid all the time,” Jane said. “Besides, Druas believes he’s smarter than the rest of the universe. He wants to believe we’re that dumb.”

  Tom sat forward and braced his hands on his knees. “You have no way of knowing whether this guy is going to take the bait. You’re asking me to put my career on the line on the off chance this is going to work. If it doesn’t, I’m fucked.”

  “If it does, no other women will get killed,” Baran told him. “Including Jane.”

  He sighed. “Shit, when you put it that way ... But what if he does take the bait and you can’t beat him?”

  Baran’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not going to be a problem. One way or another, Druas is dead.”

  Tom and sat back in his chair. “I’d object to that just on general principles, but practically speaking, I can’t offer an alternative. Even if I arrested the bastard, I doubt a prison would hold him, not given the abilities you describe.”

  “And you’d lose a lot of cops during his escape.”

  “You sure I can’t help take the fucker down?”

  Baran shook his head. ‘Too risky. If he got his hands on you, you wouldn’t have a prayer. I’m going to have my hands full keeping Jane alive as it is. I don’t need to worry about triggering a temporal paradox by losing you.”

  “So how do you know telling me all this won’t cause one of those paradoxes all by itself?”

  “It won’t,” Baran said.

  He lifted a brow. “You sound pretty damn certain.”

  “He is.” Freika said from the floor of the deck. “We’re all still alive, aren’t we?”

  Tom stared at the wolf. “You mean... Never mind.” He sighed and looked over at Baran again. “So, have you got a gun? I figure if I’m committing career suicide, I might as well do it right.”

  “I’ve got one at home,” Jane told him.

  Baran shook his head. “Wouldn’t do much good anyway.” He told Tom about Druas’s armor and reinforced bones.

  “Huh.” The detective contemplated the problem. “How about a knife?”

  “That’d work.” He shrugged. “I could always slit the bastard’s throat. Better than being unarmed.” He grimaced. “Actually, I should have picked one up earlier.”

  “I’ve got a bowie knife with a sheathe I use for deer hunting, if you want to use it.”

  “Are you sure, Tom?” Jane asked. “If Baran uses that knife to kill Druas ...”

  The detective waved a dismissive hand. “That asshole needs to go down. Whatever I can do to help, I’m going to do. Give me a minute.” He got up to open the glass door and slip inside.

  Baran took a deep breath and looked at Jane. “Well, you were right.”

  Jane shrugged. “Tom cares more about protecting people than career building.” She looked at him steadily. “He’ll keep the secret until he dies, Baran.”

  “Yeah.” For a moment they fell silent. Baran stared off across the yard at the moon riding just over the trees. “This plan is risky as hell,” he said, his voice low. “I don’t like it.” She shook her head. “You know I’m the only one who can pull it off.”

  “Maybe, but it’s so damn risky....” He straightened from his pose leaning against the deck railing and walked over to her. His expression going even grimmer, he slipped the suit-nullifying ring off his finger. Then to her surprise, he knelt on the deck beside her and took her hand. Solemnly he slipped the ring on her finger. Its alien metal automatically shrank to fit. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  Staring into the fierce vow in his eyes, Jane curled her fingers around his. “Yeah,” she said softly. “I know.”

  Jane’s heart thudded so hard it seemed to choke her, and her mouth was utterly dry. She fought to concentrate on the road and ignore the clawing terror she felt.

  She was aware of Baran’s eyes on her in the darkness as he crouched in the floorboard of the car, his big body coiled uncomfortably. Freika was stretched out across the bench seat in the front, his furry head almost in her lap. They were both sensor shielded—using their computers
to generate a nulling field to keep Druas from picking up their life signs. But the field didn’t work on visible light, so they had to stay out of sight.

  For the purposes of the trap, they needed to make it look as if she was driving home alone in Tom’s “stolen” patrol car.

  The detective had decided to let them borrow the car, since that was the only way they could be sure of smuggling Baran and the wolf in past Druas. Unfortunately, since his report would claim Jane had taken it without his permission, there was a distinct possibility she could face charges for it later. She’d decided she’d worry about that problem if she managed to live through the next hour.

  And she wasn’t making any bets on that.

  As they’d made their way toward Tom’s house earlier that night, they’d decided Jane had the best chance of getting close enough to Druas long enough to use the ring. If she could distract him while she touched him with it, he might not realize what was happening until it was too late. As soon as the ring disabled the suit, Baran and Freika would attack.

  Of course, the really tricky part of the whole plan was the period while the two were hiding just out of Druas’s sight. Even though they’d be watching, if he went after her before she managed to disable the suit, she could get hurt before they could come to the rescue.

  Fortunately—though that might not be the right word— Druas’s M.O. was to strangle his victims before he used the knife, which should give Baran and Freika enough time to interfere. Unfortunately, as strong as Druas was, Jane could still end up dying slowly with a crushed larynx.

  The whole plan was risky as hell. Baran hated it; it went deeply against his grain to take a risk of that magnitude with Jane’s life. Unfortunately, every other option they came up with carried a virtual certainty that Druas would simply Jump to freedom and return to attack Jane later. And there was no telling how many women he’d kill in the meantime.

  All of which had made perfect logical sense when she’d argued for the plan during that hike through the woods. But now, in the car on the way to face a monster, it seemed a hell of a lot less convincing.

  He’ll kill you, Jane, her father’s ghost whispered, sibilant in the darkness. You’re not smart enough to fool him. He’ll see through the act and slit your throat on the spot.