by Kit Frazier
The balmy wind whirled around me, and with Agent Fiennes beside me, I felt warm and safe. Above, the stars were so bright that I contented myself to settle in and enjoy the ride.
John looked over at me and his smile was brilliant. “And what did you tell Mr. DeLeon?”
“Hm? Oh. Name, rank and serial number.”
He laughed as we pulled into my drive. He got out and opened the passenger door. The evening was warm and night insects chirred in the dark. On the porch, he turned to me and I could practically feel the heat radiating off him.
“I’m pleased I ran into you tonight,” he said, and my heart did a little jazz riff against my ribcage. I was surprised he even remembered me after one meeting, and I said so.
“Cauley, if I lived to be a hundred years old and never saw you again, I would never forget you.”
“Oh,” I said and winced. One of these days, I was going to have to learn to flirt.
Chuckling, he pressed a kiss to my cheek, very close to my lips. “You’re something else, you know that?” he said, and he looked down at me with those very green eyes.
“I have a proposition of my own,” he said, and he slipped a finger beneath the lock of hair that had escaped my chignon and kept falling into my eyes. “I will get the information I need sooner or later, but there is an easier way. We could go see Barnes tomorrow. Together. You are friends with our Mr. Barnes. He would talk more freely if you accompany me.”
I stared up at him. “You’d really share information with me?”
He smiled and ran his thumb over my lower lip.
“I really would,” he said.
I took a deep breath, trying not to shiver at his touch. “Let me think about it,” I said.
We stood there, bathed in moonlight, the cicadas serenading us in the warm velvet night. I looked up at him and got a hot chill, and I knew he was waiting for me to ask him in. I’d have to think about that, too.
In the mean time, I rose to my tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, then turned and unlocked my door.
“Cauley?” he said, and I stopped, just inside the door.
“Yes?”
“You look good in red.”
I closed my eyes, wrapping myself in the pleasure of his words. He sauntered down the steps and I waited, listening as the BMW’s motor turned and revved, then faded into the night.
I floated past the open door and into the foyer on a cloud of pure happiness, lust and something else I wasn’t ready to define. I was perilously close to breaking into song when I flipped on the lights and jarred to a stop.
My little house was a wreck.
Not a clothes-on-the-floor, dishes-in-the-sink wreck. It was a certifiable disaster. Chairs overturned, lamps broken, empty file folders ripped and scattered like big, manila-colored confetti all over the living room.
Somebody tossed my house.
I had the insane impulse to call out, to search my rooms, to touch each one of my things, to inventory them, but as a cop’s daughter, I stifled that urge. Switching the light back off, I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
In the dark entryway, I felt chaos all around me. I wanted to see the damage, but on some level I knew that was the most stupid thing I could do.
My stomach did a queasy slide and I glanced out the living room window into the moonlit darkness. John was gone. Someone had been in my house. I wasn’t sure if Van Gogh was still alive, but I’d just left an up-and-coming mobster with a half-mast hard-on.
And he’d mentioned El Patron. Had I poked a stick in a hornet’s nest?
In the darkness of my house, I was very aware that I was alone. I had no car and no cell phone. Only silence.
Oh dear God. Where was Muse?
I knew I should back out and run next door to Beckett’s, but I couldn’t bear a Godfather-type message with Muse’s fuzzy little tennis ball-shaped head rolling around in my bed.
From somewhere in the dark house, I heard a muffled gackking sound.
As quietly as I could, I felt my way toward the library where the small choking noise grew louder. My heart pounded in my ears as I eased around small patches of starlight shining in through windows. I needed to stay out of the light in case someone was still in my house.
Gack! The noise was coming from the library sofa.
“Muse?” I whispered.
Gac-c-ck! The sound wasn’t coming from the sofa. It was coming from inside the sofa.
“Shit, cat,” I swore as quietly as I could, and I fumbled along the desktop for the letter opener.
“How the hell did you get in there?” I put my shoulder to the sofa and leaned it on its back legs, probing the fabric that lined the bottom until I found a writhing, hissing bulge.
“Hold on, kitty,” I said, and plunged the letter opener against the opposite end of the sofa.
Muse shrieked as the fabric tore. I reached for her and she spun and thrashed like the Tasmanian Devil. A small box tumbled out of the sofa after her. Muse hissed.
“Stop it,” I hissed back. “I’m trying to help you!”
Grabbing the little maniac by the scruff, I tucked her under my arm, scooped up the box and ran like hell next door toward my friend, Beckett, toward a telephone, toward some semblance of safety.
Chapter Ten
“An ear? Somebody left a whacked ear in your living room?”
“Library,” I said, snuggling into a Downy-soft blanket. I sipped a cup of Mexican hot chocolate, letting the warmth of the Kahlua slide down my throat while Beckett and Jenks soothed Muse into a purring stupor. Beckett and Jenks were both impossibly handsome and in their late twenties, and in a committed relationship for the past ten years.
We all sat in Beckett’s living room, staring at the box with the severed ear, which lay in a profusion of Saran Wrap, rubber gloves and Clorox Clean Wipes on the rough-hewn coffee table. We’d called the police and were sitting, staring at the severed ear, waiting for the welcome call of the sirens.
“Why on earth would they stuff poor Muse in the sofa?” Jenks said, staring at the box.
“Probably to make sure she found the ear,” Beckett said.
I shuddered. “I think they’re trying to scare me.”
“Oh, honey. When someone leaves you a little box it ought to have something sparkly,” Jenks said.
“It was a message.” I said, still fighting nausea but feeling a little better as the Kahlua kicked in.
“You need a Xanex?” Jenks said. He took my glass and headed to the kitchen to freshen my drink.
“I need a new life,” I said.
A knock sounded at the door.
Jenks grabbed a frying pan and assumed a kickboxer stance. It might not scare the burglar to death, but he might fall down laughing.
“Who is it?” Beckett called through the door.
“Special Agent Tom Logan, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“I’ll get it!” I yelled, tripping over the blanket as I scrambled toward the door. I swung it open and found Captain America standing on the front porch.
“Ms. MacKinnon?”
I stood, blinking at his large frame silhouetted in the porch light. I hadn’t called the FBI.
The sharp light cast Tom Logan’s angular face in shadow and I wondered if John Wayne had just swaggered in off a movie set. Behind me, I heard Beckett and Jenks go into a simultaneous sigh.
Logan grinned. “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”
“Yes, I…how did you find me here?” I stuttered, looking back at my neighbors.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m FBI.”
“Right,” I said. “I always forget that.”
Logan slipped the severed ear and its box into an evidence bag, logging it as discreetly as he could.
Through small patches of moonlight, he took my hand and led me across Beckett’s manicured lawn and back to my house, where a team of crime scene techs were shooting photos and examining surfaces for stray hairs and latent fingerprints.
“You’ll have to make a list of what’s missing,” Logan said.
“Missing?” I felt sick again.
With Muse still squirming in my arms, I rushed into the library and found my father’s compass, untouched. I clutched it tightly to my chest. Muse calmed, and I exhaled.
Suddenly cold, I watched the controlled chaos of a crime scene investigation. I didn’t know any of the cops roaming around my house, and I watched these strangers wandering through my living room, touching and examining what was left of my belongings.
I settled the compass into an old cigar box and set Muse on the rug. She hit the ground running, no doubt looking for some place to hide. I knew how she felt.
If I were a screamer, this would have been the perfect opportunity. Every stick of furniture in my living room had been smashed or overturned, books and files torn and tossed about the library and living room. My television was still intact, but my DVDs and videotapes were broken and scattered along the Turkish rug. I was going to have to call Aunt Kat and tell her about her Queen Anne chair.
Logan sniffed the air. “Smells like burning rubber,” he said and I winced.
“That was from before.”
“Cooking accident?”
“Something like that,” I said, staring into my kitchen where big, jagged pieces of my blue Spanish glasses and Aunt Kat’s china lay shattered on the hardwood floor. A few hours ago, my friends and I had been here, laughing, accidentally torching my Tupperware in the oven, watching movies and scarfing down quesadillas and ham sandwiches.
“You’ve been through the house?” I asked Logan, trying to keep my voice even.
“Yeah,” he said. “Whoever did this knew what they were after. The rest is for show. What was on your computer?”
I stared at him. “My computer?”
Without another word, I raced into my den, dodging broken furniture along the way. Standing in the doorway of my little home office, my heart slammed into my throat.
My hard drive was gone. The surface of my desk glittered with shattered glass from my monitor. It looked like somebody kicked it. The paper files in my desk had been ransacked. All of my computer disks were missing. The medical book where I’d tucked Scooter’s file was gone.
Screw it. I went ahead and screamed. “My computer!”
Logan appeared beside me. “Was it insured?”
“That’s not the point,” I said, feeling like I’d lost everything. “I kept everything I ever wrote on that hard drive. Even my disks are gone!”
I dropped back against the wall with a hard thump and slid down until I landed on my butt. I was so upset I couldn’t even cry.
“Was any of it worth stealing?”
“No,” I said truthfully. My ransacked house had to be tied with Barnes somehow, but the joke was on the thief. My predilection for procrastination left the burglar with a half-finished outline on my suppositions about Scooter and a half-finished freelance article about liposuction.
I looked around at the carnage and said, “They weren’t just searching, where they? This was personal.”
Logan rubbed the back of his neck. “Looks like.”
Looking up into Logan’s dark eyes, I swallowed hard. “Do I even want to go into my bedroom?”
“Probably not,” he said, but I pushed myself to my feet. Pressing past him, I swung open my bedroom door.
The breath caught in my throat. My dresser drawers were dumped on the floor, except for my lingerie drawer, which was overturned on the bed. Shredded remnants of my most personal garments were strewn about my bed, colorful slashes of fabric against my crisp, white sheets.
Someone had taken a knife to my panties.
Hands shaking, I picked up a soft scrap of ruined silk and I couldn’t control the full-body shudder. All the crotches had been ripped out.
A fresh wave of nausea sent me running for the bathroom.
I didn’t throw up, but it felt like I was going to. I heard running water at the vanity. Logan appeared in the doorway and pressed a cool, wet washcloth into my hand.
“You okay?”
“No.” I wiped my face with the cool cloth and blew out a breath.
He nodded. “You know what’s going on here?”
I shook my head. “I thought I had an idea but now I’m not so sure.”
An hour later, the police were gone. Logan brewed us two cups of tea and helped me right the furniture that wasn’t broken. I was going to have to call Aunt Kat and tell her half the furniture she’d entrusted to me had been reduced to a big pile of splinters.
Logan and I piled the broken furniture in the library near the ripped up sofa. I’d figure out what to do with all the pieces later.
In the living room, Logan hooked the cables back into my television while I stacked a few undamaged DVDs and old videos back into the cabinet. Aunt Kat’s sofa was overturned, and one of the claw-and-ball feet was missing.
“I cannot believe I got robbed,” I said.
“Technically you were burgled,” Logan said.
I turned to look at him. Odd, how someone could be handsome and rock solid and funny, all at the same time.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, trying to make my voice sound light. “Robbery they’d have to confront me with a threat or place me in fear of imminent bodily injury or death, blah, blah, blah. Criminology 101.”
“And I’m guessing it didn’t hurt that your dad was on the job.”
I shrugged. From the living room, I looked at the jagged remains of my blue Spanish glasses on my kitchen floor. “But breaking into my house feels like I’ve been threatened.”
“I know,” Logan said, sounding genuinely sympathetic. He took the video of Key Largo I was holding.
I cringed. “That’s a copy.”
Logan raised a brow.
“You know,” I said. “The warning at the beginning of movies…FBI Warning: Federal law provides civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution or exhibition of copyrighted motion pictures, video tapes or video disks…”
“You going to sell it?”
“I can’t sell it, it’s broken.”
He smiled. “You have way too much time on your hands, kid.” He nodded at my broken disks. “Noir, huh? These belong to your dad?”
I looked up at him, reassessing.
“Yeah,” I said, watching Logan peruse my movies. “But I like everything old, furniture, books…”
“Typewriter,” he said, nodding toward the library. “You planning on writing a book?”
He reached beneath the entertainment center and retrieved the sofa’s missing clawfoot.
“Someday,” I said, genuinely surprised. “I’ve been thinking about writing a book about my dad. He was a real hot shot a detective with APD. But,” I sighed. “Aunt Kat is the real writer in the family.”
“The Pride and the Passion,” Logan said and I laughed out loud.
“You read romance?”
“I do my homework,” he said.
I was about to say, I’m your homework? when he said, “Speaking of old, what’s with the Wurlitzer?” He was looking at the colorful old jukebox near the entrance to the library. Muse perched on the multicolored plastic arch of the jukebox, scowling around at the mess.
I smiled. “The cat’s got a thing for Aretha.”
I turned the movie over in my hands. “What about you? What do you do when you’re not out chasing bad guys? Wait, let me guess. Westerns. You’ve got that John Wayne swagger.”
He didn’t say anything, but he seemed amused.
Sighing, I looked around at the broken antiques. “I guess I like old things because life seemed a lot simpler.”
“Back when women weren’t allowed to vote and there were separate drinking fountains marked colored?”
“Ouch.”
“Life is always simpler when it’s black and white, kid,” he said in a pretty good Bogart impression. “In the movies, life sticks to the plot and has a point.”
He screwed the clawfoot back on the sofa and flipped it upright, and I wished everything could be fixed so easily.
“Yeah, well, it’s nice to believe in fairy tales,” I said. “The good girl gets the guy, and then, boom. Fireworks.”
“To Catch a Thief,” Logan said, and I smiled that he got the Cary Grant, Grace Kelly-fireworks reference.
“Ah.” He grinned back at me. “A cynic underneath it all. You don’t believe in fate?”
“I don’t believe in fireworks.”
“Too bad,” he said, and I turned to look at him, feeling an odd little jolt.
Tom Logan was a pretty cool guy, for a Fed. My gaze flicked down to his naked ring finger and I started to ask him why he wasn’t married, but the moment had passed. It didn’t matter. I was nothing but homework to Logan.
As we straightened out the worst of the mess, I told Logan about Van Gogh, about Diego and rehashing my last conversation with Scott Barnes, since that was what seemed to trigger the rest of it.
He listened, nodding, periodically stopping to jot notes in his notebook.
“Your friend DeLeon said Barnes has something that doesn’t belong to him,” Logan said. “You don’t know what it is?”
“Diego DeLeon is not my friend, but yes, that’s what he said.”
“And he mentioned El Patron without you prompting?”
“I didn’t know there was anything to prompt.”
Logan nodded. “Any ideas on who belongs on the other end of that ear?”
My stomach lurched and I felt lightheaded again. “I don’t know, but I think they’re trying to scare me.” I sighed. “It’s working.”
Turning to the newly righted end table, I picked up the cup of tea Logan had made and took a sip. It was warm and bitter and felt like heaven as it slid down my throat. “Do you know what it is that Scooter Barnes is supposed to have?”
Logan smiled enigmatically. “I’m more interested in your thoughts, since our band of thugs broke into your house and didn’t take anything valuable.”
I shrugged. “I think they did take something valuable, but I don’t know how much good it’ll do them.”