“Jane, please...”
He heard her catch her breath. What had he done? Had some emotion carried through his voice, something that he hadn’t wanted her to know?
“Are you all right, Rick?”
No. He wasn’t all right, and he didn’t know how to tell her what was wrong.
“It’s been an awful day, Jane.” The understatement of the year. “Let me take you to dinner and tell you about it.”
Tasha stopped thumbing through the letters. She kept her head down, though, clearly listening.
“I can come over there now,” Jane said.
“No,” he said a little too quickly. “Let’s still do Friday. That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But, Rick, if you need something sooner—”
He let the warmth he was feeling toward his sister seep into his voice. “I know who to call.”
“Please do, Rick. I meant what I said at the wedding. I don’t like how far apart we’ve grown.”
“I don’t either, Janie,” he said softly.
Tasha frowned slightly, as if the endearment bothered her. Or maybe she really was just studying the letter in front of her.
“Look, the next few days are going to be kind of strange. You might want to use my cell to reach me.” He gave Jane the number.
“Rick, are you sure you’re not in trouble?”
He never could put anything past his sister. More than his parents, Jane had been the one who watched over him and in some ways was more of a mother than his own had ever been.
“It’ll be all right, Jane. I promise I’ll tell you everything on Friday.”
But as he hung up, he wondered if he would tell her anything. How would she react, knowing that her brother had a hidden life he had never told her, one that bared family secrets to the whole world? He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.
“Problem?” Tasha’s voice was a shade too casual.
“My sister,” Rick said. “I’d promised to cook her dinner on Friday night.”
“Maybe you can do it at her place.”
“I’m taking her out.”
“And telling her everything.” Tasha curled her legs under her, looking very comfortable. “Do you really mean that?”
“Better to find out from me than the cops, huh?”
“We’re not going to tell anyone.”
“You’re not,” Rick said. “But what about Rassouli? He never promised.”
“He knows I’ll kill him if he makes me break my word.”
“And the tape? What did you do with that?”
She closed the file. “Are you interrogating me, Mr. Chance?”
“Just trying to see how much of my life I’ll be able to preserve when this is all over.”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “And I don’t think it’s up to me or Lou or your family. I think it depends on when we catch your friend.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”
“I don’t know what else to call him,” Tasha said. “You know, you’ve got some real interesting letters in here. I never realized sex offended so many people.”
“It’s just premarital sex that seems to upset them,” he said.
“Really? What about this one here, complaining about the use of a condom?” Then she frowned at it. “Although it doesn’t seem like a crazy letter to me.”
“You mean you’re against condoms?”
She flushed. He liked it when she did that. It made her seem more human somehow. “No. It’s just the writer seems to have a point. You have a Catholic character having sex with his new wife—”
“A lapsed Catholic, having sex with his ex-wife. Apparently that letter-writer doesn’t read very well.” He leaned back in his chair. “Besides, that’s not why the letter’s in there.”
“Why is it then?”
“You haven’t gotten to the abortion stuff, have you?”
She thumbed through the letters, as if just by rifling them she could read them. “Abortion stuff? What do you mean?”
“In my fourth book, Betrayal, one of the characters says she was forced to have an abortion—”
“By her husband. I remember that.” Tasha seemed excited to even be discussing the plot. “But that’s not what the book was about. It was about the way people related to each other and what truth was—”
“I know,” Rick said gently. “But in this culture, some words have become buzz words and abortion is one of them. I got a lot of hate mail on that book from people who obviously never read it. Some pro-life organization singled me out and I got hundreds of letters, almost all the same.”
“If I remember right, the abortion didn’t even happen,” Tasha said.
“That wasn’t the point,” Rick said. “What they seemed to object to the most was a statement my protagonist made when she first believed the abortion story, that sometimes abortion was the only choice.”
“You got hundreds of letters protesting a single sentence?”
He nodded. “One of the joys of being in the public eye. Even if I am wearing metaphorical drag.”
Tasha gave him a gentle smile. “I have a hunch your letter writers wouldn’t approve of that either.”
“A man in drag?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“I suspect you’re right.” He paused. “Do you approve?”
“I looked through your closets searching for the intruder,” Tasha said. “I didn’t see any dresses.”
He said softly, “I wasn’t really asking about a man wearing drag.”
Her gaze met his, and then she looked away so quickly he wasn’t sure what he had seen in her eyes. “I thought things were complicated for you right now.”
She used his words from the restaurant, throwing them back at him.
“They are,” he said quietly. “But you’ve found out about all the complications.”
Her right hand was still rifling the letters, only now it was a nervous gesture. “I thought you were giving me the brush-off.”
“I was.”
She winced.
“Think about it, Tash. I had no idea you were a cop.”
“Would that have made a difference?”
He nodded. “At least I would have known that you could take care of yourself.”
She closed the file. “Don’t make this my fault.”
“What?”
“The fact that you blew me off. It’s not my fault for failing to tell you what I do.”
“No,” he said, “it’s not.”
“You wouldn’t have seen me anyway because of your secret identity.”
“I dated while I was writing. It was the Creep, Tash. I don’t know what he’d do to a woman I was dating. I was afraid he’d see her as some sort of rival for Jessamyn.”
“Then why did you flirt with me?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I thought he was gone.”
“You said he followed you.”
“The first basket appeared Friday night after the rehearsal dinner.”
“But you flirted on Saturday.”
He nodded. How to explain this? “Then I came home to change, and remembered how he’d terrified Rita.”
Not to mention how that had unnerved Rick.
“I got to thinking about it on the drive to the restaurant and thought maybe I should wait before dating anyone.”
Tasha took a deep breath, as if she were trying to grab ahold of herself. She set the files on the couch beside her.
“Tash?”
“How come,” she snapped, “when a man has a secret identity in the movies, he’s Superman or Batman or something really cool?”
Rick grinned. “I didn’t say Jessamyn Chance was my only secret identity.”
Tasha glared at him. “How many other pseudonyms do you have?”
“None,” he said, “but I’m a writer. I can put one together fairly quickly. What do you want—someone who is upright and righteous like Clark Kent or dark and brooding like Bruce W
ayne?”
“This doesn’t look like Wayne mansion,” Tasha said.
“Well, I’m not as rich as Bruce,” Rick said. “But I can take your family on.”
She turned toward him so fast, he thought for a moment she was going to lose her balance. She looked shocked.
He raised his eyebrows at her. “I may not use Jessamyn’s name in my everyday life, but I do get to keep the money.”
“My god,” Tasha said. “I never realized—”
“Is that important to you? That I have money?” Rick felt a little chill run through him. He hadn’t expected golddigging from Tasha. But then what did he know about her? Only what she had told him. And her job showed that she didn’t have money after all.
“It’s just so unusual,” she said.
That wasn’t the answer he’d expected.
She picked at imaginary lint on her pants. “You know about my family. Most of the men who know, know I’ll come into money someday. And that interests them.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“It’s usually pretty clear,” she said.
“I think you probably didn’t give them enough credit, Tash. You’re a beautiful woman.”
She kept her head down. “You said that before. At the reception.”
“I meant it.”
“Then you let me embarrass myself at the restaurant.”
“It wasn’t my smoothest moment, I’ll admit. I was hoping that we could exchange numbers or something, so that once I got rid of the Creep, I could call you.”
“You really thought you were going to get rid of him?”
Rick was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just knew I couldn’t put you in jeopardy. It wouldn’t have been fair.”
His cheeks flushed a little when he realized that he’d let her search his house for him, with the idea that the Creep was inside. But it was her job, and she was trained for it. The idea of the delicate Tasha was so far from his mind as to seem almost preposterous now.
“You are rather hopelessly macho, aren’t you?” Tasha asked.
“If I were that, I would have come down here with you to search for the Creep, no matter what you said.”
“Lou and I wouldn’t have let you.”
“You and Lou couldn’t have stopped me.” He spoke quietly. “But once I found out what your job was, Tash, I trusted you. I figured I would only get in your way.”
“You would have.” She sighed. “Things are complicated for me, now, Rick.”
His computer clicked as it went into sleep mode. He hadn’t touched it for a while.
“I’m working on a case involving you. Even if I wanted to, I can’t—”
“It’s all right,” he said a bit too quickly. “I know that. I was just clearing the air.”
But he wasn’t sure that was what he had been doing. He had been apologizing, hoping that perhaps they could return to that easy flirtatiousness they’d had at the wedding.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right,” he repeated.
“I just wanted you to know it’s not—this.” She glanced around the office. She had come all the way back to his initial question. “I find it kind of intriguing that you write as Jessamyn Chance. It makes me see the books in a whole new light.”
“Re-evaluating them to see if the man got things right?” he couldn’t keep the bitterness from his tone.
She didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, I know you got them right. Maybe I’m the one who’s sexist. I couldn’t believe that a man was sensitive enough to have some of the attitudes in those books.”
He was silent. In some ways, that had been the source of his fear of discovery—that his writing, his pen name, and his choice of material took something from his masculinity.
“Shows what I know, huh?” Tasha said.
“No,” Rick said, “it’s a pretty common attitude. It’s one of the reasons that Jessamyn’s still secret.”
“What’s the other reason?”
Rick paused. He’d mentioned it in passing in the police station, but he doubted Tasha had heard him—or at least had figured out what it meant in context.
“I’m a very private person, Tash,” he said. “I liked having a part of myself that people saw but didn’t understand.”
“Liked?”
He shrugged. “I figure it’ll get out now.”
“Because of me.”
“Because of everything.” He touched the phone. “I’m going to have to talk to Jane sometime. She’ll tell the rest of the family, and that’ll be that.”
“I’m sure we can come up with another explanation for Jane.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s tell her I have a pathological hatred of delivery men and instead of arresting me, you’ve put me in an outpatient treatment.”
Tasha laughed. “Or we can tell her that you have a neighbor who is so nosy that whenever you need your privacy, you go to a hotel.”
And then Tasha’s face changed.
“What is it?” Rick asked.
“Mrs. McGuilicuty,” Tasha said. “The way she spies on your place, she has to have seen your—Creep—at one point or another.”
“You’re right,” Rick said, “but I can’t approach her about it, not after this afternoon.”
“No, but I can,” Tasha said. “If she has seen him, she might be able to provide a sketch.”
“She won’t have to if he comes back tonight, right?”
“It’s always nice to have backup,” Tasha said.
“You don’t believe he’ll be back, do you?”
Tasha gripped the file tightly. “This one’s smart, Rick. Think about it. How did he find you in the first place?”
Rick started. He hadn’t considered about that. And neither had the Chicago police.
“He hasn’t figured out who you really are, but he knew where Jessamyn lived. And then there was his ability to track you down after you moved, and to follow you here. Most people couldn’t have done that no matter how dedicated they were. That’s why we tell people to find somewhere else to live, and not to use a forwarding address.”
“You don’t think he’ll be back?”
“He’s smart enough to be unpredictable, Rick.” Tasha set the file aside. “He got you out of the house long enough to attempt a ‘rescue’ of Jessamyn. I think, from the look of that door, he went away to get better tools. He was planning to come back. Whether he will or not is hard to predict.”
“But if he does, you’ll have him.”
“If he does, I hope we’ll have him.” She kept those lovely green eyes on his. “But, like I told you before, we don’t have enough manpower to stake someone outside. We could miss him. And if we do, we’ll use your neighbor’s prying eyes to help us.”
Rick did not feel reassured. He sighed. Apparently that was all he ever wanted. Reassurance that this Creep would go away.
“You might want to try some of the other neighbors too,” he said. “Who knows what they’ve seen.”
Tasha smiled. “Already thought of that.”
Rick’s computer beeped. The large file dump he’d just done onto CD was complete. He hit the space bar, and used the mouse to drag the CD icon into the trash. With a whirl, the disk spit out of the extra drive. He shoved the CD into the laptop and started the download.
“This must be very hard on you,” Tasha said.
For some reason, the comment irritated him. “Well, considering that I can barely work, I can’t have a girlfriend, and now I can’t stay in my own house, yeah, it’s hard on me.”
Tasha picked up both files. “Can I keep these?”
“For now, yeah,” Rick said. “it’s not like I’m going to reread them every day.”
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “I do understand how your frustration bubbled over at that deliveryman.”
“You didn’t this morning.”
“This morning, I had no idea what was really going on. And you did break
the law, Rick.”
“Maybe that was the Creep’s intent,” Rick said. “Get me out of the picture any way he could. He was probably happy when you hauled me away.”
“He probably was,” Tasha said quietly.
“And he’ll be even happier when I leave tonight.”
“As long as you do it with fanfare.”
Rick didn’t want to do it with fanfare. He didn’t want to do it at all. But he’d been fighting the Creep on his own for too long and it hadn’t been working. He’d try it Tasha’s way for a while.
“Hey!” Rassouli yelled from upstairs. “Anyone down there? I got the team here.”
“We’re here,” Tasha said.
Rick cringed. The forensics team. Time to turn his place into piles of dust and fibers. The laptop binged as it finished the download
“Well,” Tasha said, “now we get to find out if our smart perp made his first major mistake.”
“He probably didn’t,” Rick said.
Tasha smiled and stood. “Even the best of them forget something.”
Rick stood too, packing up the laptop as he did so. His last hour in his most private place, a place that would never seem private again.
Chalk this up to another frustration caused by the Creep.
Rick almost welcomed the hotel room. At least there he had no expectations of being completely alone.
***
Through the passenger window of his car, Beebe watched as a police van pulled in front of the house. Four people got out, wearing uniforms with some writing on the back, writing he couldn’t quite make out.
But it didn’t matter. They were looking for something, and it had nothing to do with Chance’s arrest that morning. Obviously Chance had realized he had been in the house. But how was Chance keeping them from Jessamyn? They couldn’t know about her imprisonment, could they?
Beebe wiped his right hand on his pants leg, then repeated with his left, so that he never lost his grip on the binoculars. Maybe he’d done something, left some kind of trace other than the door. Maybe Chance knew he wouldn’t have to show them the door at all. Maybe Chance was smarter than he gave him credit for.
Beebe let the binoculars drop for a moment, and leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He’d been underestimating Chance all along. He’d seen him as interference only, something to be gotten rid of. He hadn’t seen how very dangerous Chance was.
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