by Nora Roberts
“Yes, you do. And if you haven’t been home since Wednesday, you still have it.” He glanced down at the bag she continued to hold.
“I don’t generally carry stars in my purse.” She sent him a smile that was shaky around the edges. “But it’s a lovely, almost poetic, thought. Now, I’m very tired—”
“Ms. Fontaine.” His voice was clipped and cool. “This victim is the sixth body I’ve dealt with today that traces back to those three blue diamonds.”
Her hand shot out, gripped his arm. “M.J. and Bailey?”
“Your friends are fine.” He felt her grip go limp. “They’ve had an eventful holiday weekend, all of which could have been avoided if they’d contacted and cooperated with the police. And it’s cooperation I’ll have from you now, one way or the other.”
She tossed her hair back. “Where are they? What did you do, toss them in a cell? My lawyer will have them out and your butt in a sling before you can finish reciting the Miranda.” She started toward the phone, saw it wasn’t on the Queen Anne table.
“No, they’re not in a cell.” It goaded him, the way she snapped into gear, ready to buck the rules. “I imagine they’re planning your funeral right about now.”
“Planning my—” Her fabulous eyes went huge with distress. “Oh, my God, you told them I was dead? They think I’m dead? Where are they? Where’s the damn phone? I have to call them.”
She crouched to push through the rubble, shoving at him when he took her arm again. “They’re not home, either of them.”
“You said they weren’t in jail.”
“And they’re not.” He could see he’d get nothing out of her until she’d satisfied herself. “I’ll take you to them. Then we’re going to sort this out, Ms. Fontaine—I promise you.”
Grace didn’t speak as he drove her toward the tidy suburbs edging D.C. He’d assured her that Bailey and M.J. were fine, and her instincts told her that Lieutenant Seth Buchanan was saying nothing but the truth. Facts were his business, after all, she thought. But she still gripped her hands together until her knuckles ached.
She had to see them, touch them.
Guilt was already weighing on her, guilt that they should be grieving for her, when she’d spent the past few days indulging her need to be alone, to be away. To be somewhere else.
What had happened to them over the long weekend? Had they tried to contact her while she was out of reach? It was painfully obvious that the three blue diamonds Bailey had been assessing for the museum were at the bottom of it all.
As the afterimage of that stark outline on the chestnut floor flashed into her head, Grace shuddered once again.
Melissa. Poor, pathetic Melissa. But she couldn’t think of that now. She couldn’t think of anything but her friends.
“They’re not hurt?” she managed to ask.
“No.” Seth left it at that, drove through the wash of streetlights and headlights. Her scent was sliding silkily through his car, teasing his senses. Deliberately he opened his window and let the light, damp breeze chase it away. “Where have you been the last few days, Ms. Fontaine?”
“Away.” Weary she laid her head back, shut her eyes. “It’s one of my favorite spots.”
She jerked upright again when he turned down a tree-lined street, then swung into the drive of a brick house. She saw a shiny Jaguar, then an impossibly decrepit boat of a car. But no spiffy MG, no practical little compact.
“Their cars aren’t here,” she began, tossing him a look of distrust and accusation.
“But they are.”
She climbed out and, ignoring him, hurried toward the front door. Her knock was brisk, businesslike, but her fist trembled. The door opened, and a man she’d never seen before stared down at her. His cool green eyes flickered with shock, then slowly warmed. His flash of a smile was blinding. Then he reached out, laid a hand gently on her cheek.
“You’re Grace.”
“Yes, I—”
“It’s absolutely wonderful to see you.” He gathered her into his arms, one of which was freshly bandaged, with such easy affection that she didn’t have time to register surprise. “I’m Cade,” he murmured, his gaze meeting Seth’s over Grace’s head. “Cade Parris. Come on in.”
“Bailey. M.J.”
“Just in here. They’ll be fine as soon as they see you.” He took her arm, felt the quick, hard tremors in it. But in the doorway of the living room, she stopped, laid a hand over his arm.
Inside, Bailey and M.J. stood, facing away, hands linked. Their voices were low, with tears wrenching through them. A man stood a short distance away, his hands thrust in his pockets and a look of helplessness on his bruised and battered face. When he saw her, his eyes, the gray of storm clouds, narrowed, flashed. Then smiled.
Grace took one shuddering breath, exhaled it slowly. “Well,” she said in a clear, steady voice, “it’s gratifying to know someone would weep copiously over me.”
Both women whirled. For a moment, all three stared, three pair of eyes brimming over. To Seth’s mind, they all moved as once, as a unit, so that their leaping rush across the room to each other held an uncanny and undeniably feminine grace. Then they were fused together, voices and tears mixing.
A triangle, he thought, frowning. With three points that made a whole. Like the golden triangle that held three priceless and powerful stones.
“I think they could use a little time,” Cade said quietly, and gestured to the other man. “Lieutenant?” He motioned down the hall, lifting his brows when Seth hesitated. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere just now.”
With a barely perceptible shrug, Seth stepped back. He could give them twenty minutes. “I need your phone.”
“There’s one in the kitchen. Want a beer, Jack?”
The third man grinned. “You’re playing my song.”
“Amnesia,” Grace said a little time later. She and Bailey were huddled together on the sofa, with M.J. sitting on the floor at their feet. “Everything just blanked?”
“Everything.” Bailey kept her hold on Grace’s hand tight, afraid to break the link. “I woke up in this horrible little hotel room with no memory, over a million in cash, and the diamond. I picked Cade’s name out of the phone book. Parris.” She smiled a little. “Funny, isn’t it?”
“I’m going to get you to France yet,” Grace promised.
“He helped me through everything.” The warmth in her tone had Grace sharing a quick look with M.J. This was something to be discussed in detail later. “I started to remember, piece by piece. You and M.J., just flashes. I could see your faces, even hear your voices, but nothing fit. He’s the one who narrowed it down to Salvini’s, and when he took me there… He broke in.”
“Shortly before we did,” M.J. added. “Jack could tell the rear locks had been picked.”
“We got inside,” Bailey continued, and her tear-ravaged eyes went glassy. “And I remembered, I remembered it all then, how Thomas and Timothy were planning to steal the stones, copy them. How I’d shipped one off to each of you to keep it from happening. Stupid, so stupid.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Grace slid an arm around Bailey’s shoulders. “It makes perfect sense to me. You didn’t have time for anything else.”
“I should have called the police, but I was so sure I could turn things around. I was going into Thomas’s office to have a showdown, tell them it was over. And I saw…” She trembled again. “The fight. Horrible. The lightning flashing through the windows, their faces. Then Timothy grabbed the letter opener, the knife. The power went out, but the lightning kept flashing, and I could see what he was doing…to Thomas. All the blood.”
“Don’t,” M.J. murmured, rubbing a comforting hand on Bailey’s knee. “Don’t go back there.”
“No.” Bailey shook her head. “I have to. He saw me, Grace. He would have killed me. He came after me. I had grabbed the bag with their deposit money, and I ran through the dark. And I hid down under the stairs. In this little cave under the stai
rs. But I could see him hunting for me, blood all over his hands. I still don’t remember how I got out, got to that room.”
Grace couldn’t bear to imagine it—her quiet, serious-minded friend, pursued by a murderer. “The important thing is that you did get away, and you’re safe.” Grace looked down at M.J. “We all are.” She tried a bolstering grin. “And how did you spend your holiday?”
“On the run with a bounty hunter, handcuffed to a bed in a cheap motel, being shot at by a couple of creeps—with a little detour up to your place in the mountains.”
Bounty hunter, Grace thought, trying to keep pace. The man named Jack, she supposed, with the bronze-tipped ponytail and the stormy gray eyes. And the killer grin. Handcuffs, cheap motels, and shootings. Pressing fingertips to her eyes, she latched on to the least disturbing detail.
“You were at my place? When?”
“It’s a long story.” M.J. gave a quick version of a handful of days from her first encounter with Jack, when he’d tried to take her in, believing her to be a bail jumper, to the two of them escaping that setup and working their way back to the core of the puzzle.
“We know someone’s pulling the strings,” M.J. concluded. “But we haven’t gotten very far on figuring that out yet. The bail bondsman-cum-black-mailer who gave Jack the fake paperwork on me is dead, the two guys who came after us are dead, the Salvinis are dead.”
“And Melissa,” Grace murmured.
“It was Melissa?” Bailey turned to Grace. “In your house?”
“It must have been. When I got home, the cop was there. The place was torn up, and they’d assumed it was me.” It took a moment, a carefully indrawn breath, a steady exhale, before she could finish. “She’d fallen off the balcony—or been pushed. I was miles away when it happened.”
“Where did you go?” M.J. asked her. “When Jack and I got to your country place, it was locked up tight. I thought…I was sure you’d just been there. I could smell you.”
“I left late yesterday morning. Got an itch to be near the water, so I drove down the Eastern Shore, found a little B-and-B. I did some antiquing, rubbed elbows with tourists, watched a fireworks display. I didn’t leave until late today. I nearly stayed over another night. But I called both of you from the B-and-B and got your machines. I started feeling uncomfortable about being out of contact, so I headed home.”
She shut her eyes a moment. “Bailey, I hadn’t been really thinking. Just before I left for the country, we lost one of the children.”
“Oh, Grace, I’m sorry.”
“It happens all the time. They’re born with AIDS or a crack addiction or a hole in the heart. Some of them die. But I can’t get used to it, and it was on my mind. So I wasn’t really thinking. When I started back, I started to think. And I started to worry. Then the cop was there in my house. He asked about the stone. I didn’t know what you wanted me to tell him.”
“We’ve told the police everything now.” Bailey sighed. “Neither Cade nor Jack seem to like this Buchanan very much, but they respect his abilities. The two stones are safe now, as we are.”
“I’m sorry for what you went through, both of you. I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” M.J. declared. “We were scattered all over—one stone apiece. Maybe we were meant to be.”
“Now we’re together.” Grace took each of their hands in hers. “What happens next?”
“Ladies.” Seth stepped into the room, skimmed his cool gaze over them, then focused on Grace. “Ms. Fontaine. The diamond?”
She rose, picked up the purse she’d tossed carelessly on the end of the couch. Opening it, she took out a velvet pouch, slid the stone out into her palm. “Magnificent, isn’t it?” she murmured, studying the flash of bold blue light. “Diamonds are supposed to be cold to the touch, aren’t they, Bailey? Yet this has…heat.” She lifted her eyes to Seth’s as she crossed to him. “Still, how many lives is it worth?”
She held her open palm out. When his fingers closed around the stone, she felt the jolt—his fingers on her skin, the shimmering blue diamond between their hands.
Something clicked, almost audibly.
She wondered if he’d felt it, heard it. Why else did those enigmatic eyes narrow, or his hand linger? The breath caught in her throat.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” she managed, then felt the odd wave of emotion and recognition ebb when he took the stone from her hand.
He didn’t care for the shock that had run up his arm, and he spoke bitingly. “I imagine this one’s out of even your price range, Ms. Fontaine.”
She merely smiled. No, she told herself, he couldn’t have felt anything—and neither had she. Just imagination and stress. “I prefer to decorate my body in something less…obvious.”
Bailey rose. “The Stars are my responsibility, unless and until the Smithsonian indicates otherwise.” She looked over at Cade, who remained in the doorway. “We’ll put them in the safe. All of them. And I’ll speak with Dr. Linstrum in the morning.”
Seth turned the stone over in his hand. He imagined he could confiscate it, and its mates. They were, after all, evidence in several homicides. But he didn’t relish driving back to the station with a large fortune in his car.
Parris was an irritant, he reflected. But he was an honest one. And, technically, the stones were in Bailey James’s keeping until the Smithsonian relieved her of them. He wondered just what the powers at the museum would have to say about the recent travels of the Three Stars.
But that wasn’t his problem.
“Lock it up,” he said, passing the stone off to Cade. “And I’ll be talking with Dr. Linstrum in the morning, as well, Ms. James.”
Cade took one quick, threatening step forward. “Look, Buchanan—”
“No.” Quietly, Bailey stepped between them, a cool breeze between two building storms. “Lieutenant Buchanan’s right, Cade. It’s his business now.”
“That doesn’t stop it from being mine.” He gave Seth one last, warning look. “Watch your step,” he said, then walked away with the stone.
“Thank you for bringing Grace by so quickly, Lieutenant.”
Seth looked down at the extended, and obviously dismissing, hand Bailey offered him. Here’s your hat, he thought, what’s your hurry. “I’m sorry you were disturbed, Ms. James.” His gaze flicked over to M.J. “Ms. O’Leary. You’ll keep available.”
“We’re not going anywhere.” M.J.’s chin angled, a cocky gesture as Jack crossed to her. “Drive carefully, Lieutenant.”
He acknowledged the second dismissal with a slight nod. “Ms. Fontaine? I’ll drive you back.”
“She’s not leaving.” M.J. jumped in front of Grace like a tiger defending her cub. “She’s not going back to that house tonight. She’s staying here, with us.”
“You may not care to go back home, Ms. Fontaine,” Seth said coolly. “You may find it more comfortable to answer questions in my office.”
“You can’t be serious—”
He cut Bailey’s protest off with a look. “I have a body in the morgue. I take it very seriously.”
“You’re a class act, Buchanan,” Jack drawled, but the sound was low and threatening. “Why don’t you and I go in the other room and…talk about our options?”
“It’s all right.” Grace stepped forward, working up a believable smile. “It’s Jack, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.” He took his attention from Buchanan long enough to smile at her. “Jack Dakota. Pleased to meet you…Miss April.”
“Oh, my misspent youth survives.” With a little laugh, she kissed his bruised cheek. “I appreciate the offer to beat up the lieutenant for me, Jack, but you look like you’ve already gone several rounds.”
Grinning now, he stroked a thumb over his bruised jaw. “I’ve got a few more rounds in me.”
“I don’t doubt it. But, sad to say, the cop’s right.” She pushed her hair to her back and turned that smile, several degrees cooler now,
on Seth. “Tactless, but right. He needs some answers. I need to go back.”
“You’re not going back to your house alone,” Bailey insisted. “Not tonight, Grace.”
“I’ll be fine. But if it’s all right with your Cade, I’ll deal with this, pick up a few things and come back.” She glanced over at Cade as he came back into the room. “Got a spare bed, darling?”
“You bet. Why don’t I go with you, help you pick up your things and bring you back?”
“You stay here with Bailey.” She kissed him, as well—a casual and already affectionate brush of lips. “I’m sure Lieutenant Buchanan and I will manage.” She picked up her purse, turned and embraced both M.J. and Bailey again. “Don’t worry about me. After all, I’m in the arms of the law.”
She eased back, shot Seth one of those full candlepower smiles. “Isn’t that right, Lieutenant?”
“In a manner of speaking.” He stepped back and waited for her to walk to the door ahead of him.
She waited until they were in his car and pulling out of the drive. “I need to see the body.” She didn’t look at him, but lifted a hand to the four people crowded at the front door, watching them drive away. “You need— She’ll have to be identified, won’t she?”
It surprised him that she’d take the duty on. “Yes.”
“Then let’s get it over with. After—afterwards, I’ll answer your questions. I’d prefer we handle that in your office,” she added, using that smile again. “My house isn’t ready for company.”
“Fine.”
She’d known it would be hard. She’d known it would be horrible. Grace had prepared herself for it—or she’d thought she had. Nothing, she realized as she stared down at what remained of the woman in the morgue, could have prepared her.
It was hardly surprising that they’d mistaken Melissa for her. The face Melissa had been so proud of was utterly ruined. Death had been cruel here, and, through her involvement with the hospital, Grace had reason to know it often was.
“It’s Melissa.” Her voice echoed flatly in the chilly white room. “My cousin, Melissa Fontaine.”