by Lisa Jackson
Had someone been out here last night?
Her skin crawled at the thought of it.
The crepe myrtle seemed undisturbed . . . but the fronds of a fern were twisted, a few flattened, as if stepped on. A cold wash of fear spilled down her spine.
Had there actually been someone standing here in this very spot, peering through the window, watching as she showered?
“No way,” she whispered as St. Ives crept around the corner to move stealthily through the foliage. The cat stopped at her feet and looked up to meow at her. “Hey, buddy.” Bending over, she picked him up, catching him squarely this time. Holding his furry body against her chest, she walked to the front of the house where her small front yard ran into the sidewalk. There was a short wrought-iron fence around the front of her property with an unlocked gate leading to the front door. Anyone could have stepped through or climbed over, but who? And why? What kind of perv?
She didn’t want to think about it, but vowed to keep her blinds closed and windows shut at night. That would pose a problem in the bathroom, where steam built up when she showered. Maybe it was time to fix the exhaust fan that had given up the ghost six months earlier, and install motion detector lights outside the house. Or she could go to a local shelter and rescue a dog, a big dog that would cause any prowler to think twice about trespassing. She was definitely warming to that idea, as long as the dog got along with cats; well, at least with one overweight yellow tabby.
“That’s a must, isn’t it?” she said to St. Ives, as if the tabby could read her mind, or understand her words. “But it could be time to expand the family. What do you think? Hmm?” She buried her nose in his soft fur and he began to purr as she carried him inside and made a mental note to install the lights and fix the fan.
For now, the dog would have to remain on her wish list.
She had work to do today. The first order of business was to do some checking on Jase Bridges, find out a little information on the reporter. Just who was he? Certainly far more than the hell-raiser she remembered from her youth. Letting St. Ives climb onto the bookcase, Brianna located her laptop, dropped onto a corner of the couch, and plugged in. Just as she settled in, her cell phone dinged, letting her know that she’d missed a call. She snatched it and saw that she’d actually missed two: one from Tanisha and another from Milo Tillman. “Not now,” she said aloud. One thing at a time.
Although she told herself that she was checking out Jase Bridges to screen him for Selma, she had to admit that she found him more than a little fascinating. Sure, she’d like his help in finding the missing Denning girls. But there was more to her interest, a spark that had ignited when she was little more than a girl, a spark that, she sensed, could flare if she let it. She toyed with the idea. Her love life had been dismal since Max. What would it hurt?
“Don’t go there,” she warned herself. Getting involved with a man right now was a distraction she didn’t need. More than that. Getting involved with Jase Bridges would be a mistake. A big mistake. At least until Selma’s daughters were located.
But she did need to know more about him, especially if she agreed to work with him. “Forewarned is forearmed,” she reminded herself, remembering one of her mother’s favorite phrases.
He’d worked for several newspapers, including the Savannah Sentinel, before landing at the Observer. Nowhere did it mention that he’d ever been married, which corroborated what he’d told her. Not that it mattered, she told herself. And yet, she couldn’t help feel a small sensation of satisfaction.
“You’re hopeless,” she said aloud, then looked up to find St. Ives sitting on a shelf, flicking his ringed tail and staring at her as if he agreed.
“Son of a bitch!” Jase whispered under his breath as he glowered at the computer screen. His oath seemed to go unnoticed in the newsroom, where a steady hum of typing, conversation, philosophizing, and joking was the norm. Fluorescent lights suspended from the high ceiling of this converted warehouse offered a fake illumination that vied with the natural light pouring through a bank of massive windows facing the street. Centuries-old brick walls contrasted with the rows of sleek monitors and computers that processed the online version of the Observer.
“Trouble?” Meri-Jo Williams asked from her desk barely six feet from his. Meri-Jo, always competitive and all of twenty-three, considered herself a dyed-in-the-wool journalist, fighting sexism to find her niche in the hardscrabble world of news. All bullshit.
“Nothing,” Jase said.
“Didn’t sound like nothing.” Her drawl, accentuated by the arch of a single, perfectly plucked eyebrow, accused him of the lie.
No way was he going to tell her that the document on the computer screen was personal. The last thing he needed was Meri-Jo breathing down his neck.
After being shut down by Bentz at the homicide crime scene, he’d spent a little time talking to the building’s superintendent, extracting the basics for his story, along with some sketchy information on the victim, Teri Gaines. He’d been careful not to cross the line, hadn’t pushed to view the crime scene or anything that would, at this point, piss off anyone in the department. He needed to do this job, of course, but it would be downright stupid to step on any toes in the New Orleans Police Department if he wanted to join their ranks.
“Wait. You’re working on the murder of the prostitute, right?” Meri-Jo was interested because she wanted his job. She knew he was thinking of leaving, and she made zero bones about the fact that she coveted his position as the crime writer. She wanted it now. Or sooner. “Trying to tie this one in with Father John?” She waved a hand, as if shooing away a bothersome fly. “Right? That psycho who dressed himself as a priest and killed hookers.” She gave a fake shudder. “What a douche.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“The truth, Bridges. The only way I ‘put it.’” She hooked her fingers into air quotes and glared at him as if he’d somehow offended her. Meri-Jo prided herself on being a fact-finding, truth-seeking, hungry-but-honest reporter who took her job more than seriously.
“Yeah, right,” Matthew Kennedy said as he cruised by with what was probably his second super-sized Diet Coke of the day. “That’s you, Meri, taking journalism to a whole new level.” Pushing sixty, with an I’ve-seen-it-all smile and a nose for self-important BS, Kennedy had been with the newspaper through three or four incarnations and still, he survived. “Thank God you’re keeping us old warhorses on the straight and narrow.”
“Shove it, Kennedy.”
“My pleasure,” he said, and sauntered off.
“God, he’s such an asshole.” She was perturbed, her truth-and-justice feathers seriously ruffled. But before she could launch into a diatribe about “old reporters not giving the new, innovative generation a chance,” her cell phone chimed and she snatched it from her desk, checked the screen, and turned her back to Jase.
Good.
Now he could absorb his discovery in private.
And absorb he did as he flipped from one page on his screen to another. After putting together his story on the homicide of Teri Gaines, he’d searched for information on his own family and dug up documents he had never seen before.
In truth, he’d always believed in “letting sleeping dogs lie” where his own history was concerned, having trusted that his father and grandparents had told him the truth about what had happened in the past. He’d been too young to remember his mother, though once, in the farmhouse attic, he’d come across a family album tucked between old books and bedding. Inside, he’d found a black-and-white photo of a wedding. His father, dressed in a dark, western-cut suit, stood next to a soulful-eyed girl in a white lace dress and veil. Their hands were clasped, rings evident as they stood under a simple altar.
Jase, being a rambunctious boy who accepted what grown-ups told him as fact and later, as a teenager who was always in trouble, had never really had too many questions about his mother or, for that matter, the brother who had died in Texas. He’d been
too caught up in himself. It had seemed odd that Marian Selby Bridges, purportedly heartbroken at the loss of a son, had deserted her husband and two boys, leaving them to fend for themselves. However, his occasional questions about his mother had always evoked anger from his father or anguish from his grandmother. As an adult, he’d sided with his father in the belief that any woman who’d abandoned her kids and never once contacted them didn’t deserve the title of mother, and she certainly didn’t need to be located. He’d made a couple of lame-ass attempts to find her in his late twenties, but when the job had been more involved than he’d wanted, he’d let it go.
Was she alive? Dead? He’d been interested, yes. Hell, any kid would have questions about the woman who had given birth to him. But he hadn’t felt the urge to dig up any of the family dirt. Who knew what he would find? His mother’s rejection only confirmed that he didn’t need a woman who would walk out on him in a heartbeat, a woman who might require the same kind of care and attention that his father was now demanding.
Truth be told, Marian Bridges didn’t deserve to know the kids she’d left.
And then there had come the time when he’d met Arianna Hayward. From that point forward, his life had been turned upside down and inside out. His own secrets had crippled him emotionally, he figured. Deep down he was scared of the truth because he knew how dark, how innocently evil it could be.
No more.
Today, things changed.
With the speed of the Internet, his connections at the newspaper, a few phone calls, and some incredible search engines, he’d dug deeper than before, deeper than he probably should have.
But now, he knew for certain that the old man had lied. About Jase’s life. A web of lies that had grown with the years. Well, hell, what had Jase expected? He hit the Print button on several documents and tried to keep his rage in check.
It was time to call Edward Prescott Bridges on his crap.
Tossing the documents into his briefcase, he headed outside, but as he was walking out the glass doors, he nearly ran into Brianna Hayward heading into the offices of the Observer.
“Hey! I was coming to see you,” she said. In sunglasses, her dark hair caught in a loose bun, she looked a little messy and sexy as hell as she stopped short and he stepped outside.
A woman with pale hair and a pissed expression was walking a dog past the building. Jase had to hop over the beagle’s tether to avoid tripping.
“Hey!” the blonde said irritably as beads of sweat glimmered over her compressed lips. “Watch where you’re going!”
“Sorry.” He backed away just before he became entangled in the leash.
“Jerk! Some people!” She half-trotted briskly ahead, the dog straining and pulling her forward. “Get a life!”
“Still making friends,” Brianna observed drily.
“Always.” He watched the dog tug its owner around a corner at the end of the block, then turned his attention to Brianna. God, she was beautiful. A carbon copy of what Arianna would have looked like, had she survived. His jaw clenched a bit, and he remembered his resolution to stick to business with Brianna.
Too late.
Jase felt drawn to her, wanted to know more about her. Because of Arianna and his guilt? Of course. His emotions played a big part in it, but there was more to his attraction. Something about the way she angled her face up to his, her eyes guarded by the oversized colored glasses, her chin a little point, her lips wide. He was near enough to observe a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Silently he told himself that being this close to her was dangerous.
“I think we need to talk, Bridges,” she said.
More than you know, he thought.
She added, “But probably, considering the heat and lack of privacy, not here in the street.”
Good idea.
“Your office?” she suggested.
Bad idea. The conference room was currently occupied, and his desk wasn’t exactly private. He cringed inside, thinking about Meri-Jo being so close, always with half an ear cocked in his direction, sometimes doing her own research on stories assigned to him, trying to one-up him. She was such a pain.
Brianna started for the door, but he grabbed the crook of her arm. “Not here.”
“No?”
“Too noisy, too much going on.” He offered a wry smile. “The Observer, it’s a happenin’ spot.”
“If you say so.”
For the moment, his fury at his father had abated, and his intention to drive home like a madman to righteously confront the old man seemed less important. It could wait. And maybe that was a good thing. Jase needed to cool off before he tore into Edward. Realizing he was still holding on to her elbow, he let go. “There’s a coffee shop across the street, at the corner. They make a mean cappuccino.”
“And that will be more private?” A skeptical eyebrow lifted over the rim of her sunglasses and her pink lips twitched a little.
“They’ve got a shady spot outside, an inner courtyard. No one will bother us.”
“Okay.”
“And if I remember correctly, I owe you a drink,” he said.
“That’s not how I remember it.”
He ignored her remark and said, “Play your cards right, I might even spring for a beignet.”
Now both eyebrows had lifted and her lips, a glossy pink, curved into a smile. “Big spender.”
“That’s me.” Her grin widened and he felt an unlikely pull on his heart.
“Fair enough, Bridges. You’re on!” With that she turned away and started toward the shop. Sunlight burnished her hair to a coppery sheen and the hem of her skirt swung above her knees as she walked. In two quick strides he fell into step with her and told himself he was being a fool and that his brother had been right. He should avoid her.
Too late. She glanced up, gave him an amused smile, and he was sunk. Aside from his attraction to her, he was intrigued about her change of heart. What had happened to make her trust him? As they stepped into the shop, he figured he was about to find out.
They ordered at a long counter that ran along one wall. Behind them, all the tables were taken by patrons sipping iced tea or coffee while plugged into the establishment’s free Wi-Fi. The buzz of conversation and coffee-making filled the space with a constant din. Jase took care of the bill, as promised. Once they’d picked up their drinks and food, he guided her through an open doorway to a veranda that looked as if it had once been an alley. Surrounded on two sides by the craggy brick exterior of century-old buildings, the narrow street had been gated with wrought iron on either end to form a courtyard. Potted palms and an indigo awning helped shade and cool the area.
The courtyard was quiet and peaceful as the few customers seated at the outdoor tables were huddled close together and lost in their own conversations. Jase nodded toward a small table with two chairs pushed into a corner, the most privacy the space provided.
“Better,” Brianna said, scraping back a chair. “Out here I can actually hear myself think.”
“Careful, that could be dangerous.”
“You don’t know how right you are about that.” Her smile faltered a bit. Once seated, she shoved her sunglasses onto the top of her head so that she could look him in the eye. “So the reason I came looking for you,” she said, and once again he was taken aback at how direct she was, “is that I want to take you up on your offer. Of help in finding Zoe and Chloe Denning.”
“And the 21 Killer?”
“God, I hope I’m wrong about that son of a bitch.” She stuffed a straw into her glass. “I mean, I don’t believe Donovan is 21, no way. But I hope to high heaven that the 21 Killer is not in New Orleans and that . . . I hope he didn’t target Zoe and Chloe.” Sadness darkened her eyes, and she bit her lip for a second before her shoulders straightened. “So,” she said, obviously turning her thoughts from the fate of the missing twins. “Here’s the deal: You help me find Zoe and Chloe, and I’ll give you an exclusive to my side of the story. But there’s a
catch.”
“There always is.” Leaning back in his chair, sipping his black coffee, Jase watched the play of emotions that crossed her even features.
“We have to run everything by Selma, their mother. And if . . . I mean, when the girls are located, you’ll need to get their approval, too. My deal is only good for what I’m doing now.”
“In exchange for my help?” he clarified.
“Right, with all your resources.” She drank some of her iced tea, then unwrapped her beignet. “You have access through the paper to all sorts of news information that I don’t.”
“Just about everyone who has the Internet does.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. But you guys—” As she licked powdered sugar from her fingers, he tried not to stare. “You get it first. You know, lightning quick.” She snapped her fingers to make a point. “And that’s just to begin with.” Another swallow of tea. “I’m willing to bet you have sources in the police department. And I’m not talking about the usual statements and reports generated by the department. My guess is you have someone inside.”
“A leak?”
“Call it what you will.” A lift of her shoulders. More tea.
“I’m trying to land a job there,” he reminded her.
“Regardless. And you’re not employed by the City of New Orleans yet. In fact, you’re still on the payroll of the Observer, still trying to ferret out the news and get it printed, including the story on the Denning twins and 21.
“I did some research on you, Bridges. You’re pretty good at what you do. You dig deep. Aren’t afraid of stepping on toes. You go after the truth, guns blazing. So, yeah, I decided I want you on my side.”
“Is it a side? Aren’t you working with the police?”