“I want to know why she’s been poking around where she doesn’t belong.”
“Don’t you worry, boss. I can make her talk.”
Since Ricky continued to comment on how attractive the vet was, it was clear what methods he’d call upon when he finally confronted the woman. Benedict didn’t care what method he used, as long as he didn’t raise an unnecessary stink. “Be discreet if you can,” Benedict said with great patience. “I don’t care how you get the information I want, but remember, there’s no need to draw attention to ourselves.”
He didn’t care about Ricky, but if the man led authorities here…well, that was another matter.
“Maybe Janet can whip up a batch of her special drug and we can have a go at the Eldanis woman that way,” Ricky suggested.
“I don’t think that’s wise, not until we’ve established without question why Eldanis is nosing around. If there’s a simple explanation for the Internet search, we’ll walk away as quietly as possible.” He looked the younger man in the eye. “Are you capable of walking away without creating a scene, Driggs?”
“Just a suggestion,” Ricky said, not at all pleased with the prospect of walking away quietly. “It might be a nice little experiment, and I wouldn’t mind having a woman around who’d do anything I asked in order to get her next dose.” Again, he winked.
The man was a cretin.
“I’ll think about it,” Benedict replied, his tone indicating that the meeting was over.
When Ricky had finally gone, Benedict closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the fresh air. In an odd sort of way he had liked it here all those years ago. He had enjoyed being close to the ocean, but not too close. If the wind was just right you could smell the sea. He’d liked the thick stands of trees and the solitude and the people. Some of them, anyway.
It did no good to look back. Perhaps if he hadn’t indulged in a small social life while he’d lived in Wyatt all those years ago, he might not have to worry that if he went to town someone might recognize his face. He hadn’t changed all that much, he thought with a squaring of his shoulders. He kept himself fit, and he still had all his hair, even if it had turned silver a few years back. While he had a few distinguished lines on his face, and his goatee was as silver as the hair on his head, he was still an attractive man.
If he could be absolutely positive that no one in town would recognize him, he’d pay the vet a visit on his own. But it was best to remain here, a few miles away from town. Just in case.
Benedict walked into the trailer and closed the door firmly behind him. The lock was a sturdy one; he couldn’t afford to have a less-than-state-of-the-art security system on this vehicle. From this vantage point, the interior of the RV looked perfectly ordinary. There was a small kitchen, a seating area and table, a bed and a bathroom.
Beyond the door at the rear of the RV, the vehicle was unique.
He opened that door and found Janet hard at work in her mobile lab, her head bent over her task. She was so intently focused on her work she did not even know he had arrived.
When Janet took off her glasses and let her hair down, she wasn’t a bad-looking woman. She didn’t often take off her glasses or do anything with her dark hair, which was showing a few strands of gray these days. She wouldn’t worry about the gray, like so many women her age would. Dr. Janet Sheridan’s mind was most definitely occupied with more important matters.
“How’s it coming?” he asked.
Her head snapped up. With her hair in that little bun and her glasses slipping down her nose, she looked a little bit older than forty-nine. Not that he cared.
“What?” she asked, her voice thick as if she were in a daze.
“How’s it coming?” he asked again.
She frowned. “Slowly.”
“We can’t have our subjects dying on us before we’re finished with them, Janet. Fix it.”
“They don’t die all the time,” she argued. “And I am trying to fix it. I’ve tweaked the formula here and there. In a couple of days I’ll be ready to test it again.”
He could not afford to risk the lives of those he was searching for. Not yet, at least. Not until he had the answers he sought. “Guinea pig or genuine target?” he asked.
“Guinea pig,” she answered.
“How about Ricky?” The Englishman had been getting on Benedict’s nerves of late, thinking himself more important than he would ever be. Ricky Driggs was, and always would be, a lackey. Worse, he was getting sloppy, and Benedict could not abide carelessness in his employees.
Janet nodded absently and then returned to her work. Benedict remained in the doorway, watching.
It was possible that he had found the perfect woman in Dr. Janet Sheridan. She was quite eager in bed, and she didn’t ask for much in the way of attention outside their encounters in the bedroom. Nine years younger than he, she was his lover and his most trusted employee. They had sex; they did not make love. And like so many other gullible women might’ve done, she never fooled herself into thinking otherwise.
Janet was surprisingly fit, lifting weights in her spare time and eating healthily. Perhaps she wasn’t pretty in a conventional sense, but she had a body many younger women would kill for.
Beyond the bedroom she was an absolutely brilliant scientist. Janet Sheridan never let scruples get in the way of her ambition.
Benedict told her, “I’ll get a strand of Ricky’s hair next time I see him, so you can extract his DNA for the formation of the drug.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she said in an offhand manner. “I have a sample of his DNA stored here in the lab.”
Benedict smiled. “You do?”
“I thought it wise, in case such a circumstance should arise.”
He wouldn’t be sorry to see Ricky on the wrong end of Janet’s needle. The sometimes-useful hoodlum would either end up addicted to a powerful drug designed specifically for him, or dead.
Benedict had a feeling Ricky was going to end up dead, one way or another. Janet would end up dead herself one of these days. She knew too much, and that made her a potential threat.
For all he knew, she had a sample of his DNA stored in this lab of hers.
But Janet was safe for now. He needed her. He needed her genius and her cold detachment and her willingness to do anything to succeed.
Chapter 11
After working and living at Sheryl’s house for the past few days, Hawk found the hotel room seemed too small. Even Baby was unhappy with the new arrangements. She missed her new friends; she missed Sheryl. Baby curled up on the bed and moped as if Hawk had taken away her favorite toy.
“We’ll be home before you know it,” he said as he squinted to read a scribbled notation in the margins of some woman’s medical files.
Baby whined, but just a little.
The Wyatt Hotel had large guest rooms, compared to more modern hotels. Of course everything in the room—the bed, the television, the table and chairs, and the love seat—were all antiques. They weren’t show-off antiques, they were just old. The love seat, which was covered in a pattern of faded roses, had a musty smell that kept Hawk in one of the ladder-back chairs by the small walnut table. His eyes were often drawn to the window, which looked down on a quiet, narrow side street. Darkness had fallen a while back.
This had surely been the longest day of his life.
When the walls started to close in on Hawk, he left his work and Baby behind and headed for the restaurant downstairs.
The hotel was an old, five-story brick building a block from the town square. It had once been a fine hotel, though why anyone would build a fine hotel in Wyatt was beyond Hawk. In any case, it hadn’t come anywhere close to fine in many years. Like his room, the hallway showed the place’s age. The carpet was faded; the tables sporting silk flowers were dented and scuffed.
Like everything else in this place, the elevator was old and creaky. Hawk took the stairs from his third-floor room and came out of the stairwell into the lobby,
just a few steps away from the hotel restaurant.
Bethany, or so her name tag implied, gave him a grin as he approached. The restaurant was small, and she served as both hostess and one of two waitresses. She’d been working last Tuesday, when Hawk had brought Sheryl here for supper, but she hadn’t smiled quite so widely then.
“Hi, there,” she said, that bright smile staying in place. “Table for one?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll put you over here in my station,” Bethany said, casting a glance back as she led the way with a swing of her hips. “I’ll take good care of you tonight. Promise.”
Hawk might not socialize much, and he might not be able to read people the way he did animals, but he was smart enough to know when a woman was flirting with him.
He sat in the booth where Bethany deposited the menu.
“What can I get you to drink?”
“Beer.”
“Sure thing. You look at the menu and I’ll be right back.” Bethany scampered off in a hurry, but she did cast him another of those come-hither grins, and there was a suggestive wiggle in her hips.
If everything he’d said to Sheryl this afternoon was true, then he could prove it here and now. Bethany was willing, she was pretty. While she didn’t have Sheryl’s compact, strong body, she had curves in all the right places and she wasn’t at all hard to look at.
If he said the word she’d be in his room in a flash.
But he didn’t want Bethany. He couldn’t imagine inviting her back to his room.
“Here you go.” She placed a cold bottle of beer before him. “Have you decided?”
He hadn’t even opened the menu. “Cheeseburger and fries. Make that two cheeseburgers.” Maybe a burger would make Baby feel better.
Bethany wrote his order down slowly, her hip cocked. Her eyes flickered to him too often, and she licked her lips more than once.
“The burgers here are pretty big. Sure you can handle two?”
“One of them’s not for me.”
She licked her lips again, and this time she left the tip of her tongue waiting there at a corner of her mouth just a little bit too long before she said, “Hey, where’s that woman you were with the other day? The vet.”
“Home, I guess.”
“I thought maybe you two were…” She waggled the fingers of one hand suggestively.
“No.”
Bethany nodded and breathed deeply, all but thrusting her breasts in his direction. “She’s kinda the brainy type, and you don’t look to me like the kinda man who goes for that sort, you know? Brainy types just aren’t a whole lot of fun. I know, because I dated a smart guy once, and he just wanted to talk all the time.” She rolled her eyes. “Can you imagine? I can definitely see where hanging out with a brainy woman might get on a real man’s nerves after a while.”
“Actually,” Hawk said tersely, “it’s the talkative type that gets on my nerves.”
Bethany wasn’t completely stupid. Her grin finally faded.
“Make my order to go. I’ll take it up to my room.”
“Whatever,” Bethany said as she slapped his check on the table and walked away. There was less swing in her hips this time.
It was official. Sheryl Eldanis had ruined him. In the past, Bethany would have been exactly his type. Not too bright, willing to get busy for the night without demands for tomorrow. All she wanted was someone to make her feel good for a while, and he could do that. There wouldn’t be any talk about the past or the future. Once they got past a certain point, there wouldn’t be any talk at all. Hawk had known his share of women like that. The world was full of Bethanys.
Not too many Sheryls around, though. Not that it mattered.
He could leave town tonight, taking the last of the files with him. It’s not like he was going to sleep. He had what he’d come here for—the fertility clinic files and a name for his birth mother—and he wasn’t going to find anything else.
But he wanted one last look at the house where his mother had died. No, where she’d been murdered. Not tonight, in the dark, but tomorrow, by the light of day. When that was done, he’d be gone.
She could go out for the evening, showing Hawk and herself that she didn’t care that he’d dumped her. She was too old to get her feelings hurt because a guy she had always known was going to leave had actually left. There was no dance tonight, but the festivities were not yet over. What was scheduled for tonight? A speech by the mayor. An announcement of who won the pie and the pickle contests.
Nah, she’d rather stay home with her kiddies and her misery.
Sheryl made dinner, ate too quickly, cleaned up the kitchen and did some laundry. She even placed the cozy over her toaster, even though she didn’t much like it. It was much too froufrou for her. She didn’t do froufrou, and Hawk should’ve known that.
At least the color was right.
Laverne was restless tonight. So were the other animals. Instead of settling in as they usually did, all three of the cats and both dogs paced restlessly. Bruce cussed up a blue streak, and then settled into an unusual silence that seemed very much like a pout. They missed Baby. They missed Hawk.
So did she.
Sheryl changed into her flannel sleep pants and a cotton T-shirt that had shrunk in the dryer, and soon found herself in the spare bedroom. There should be something here to help Hawk with his search. Something that wouldn’t hurt him so much.
He hadn’t found anything in these nasty old boxes other than that one photograph. Odds were she wouldn’t, either.
But she looked anyway. She leafed through discarded files looking for the name Deanna Payne. She wished so deeply for something, anything, that would heal Hawk’s pain a little. It was a frustrating search; she found nothing at all.
Sheryl finally had to give up on her search of the documents. No wonder Hawk was so frustrated! Searching through the stupid files was like swimming through molasses. She wasn’t getting anywhere.
It was past her normal bedtime, but Sheryl knew she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep if she went to bed now. So she sat down in front of her computer, signed on and went to her favorite search engine. She hesitated a moment, then typed in Deanna Payne.
He hadn’t given the old farmhouse a thorough search this afternoon. It was damned hard to follow someone on a deserted road and not get caught, and when the two he’d been tailing had left the house, Anthony had been more interested in following them than poking around an obviously deserted old house.
Anthony stepped through the broken front door of the house in question, the flashlight in his hand casting a bright light across the room. Obviously, the place had been deserted for a long time.
Goose bumps rose up on his arms as he stepped deeper into the house. His stomach knotted, and he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as though this was the first place he’d sneaked into in the dead of night. He took a few more stealthy steps, and the boards beneath his feet creaked. Rodents scurried. No one had lived here for a very long time.
There was something familiar about this place, but it was as if everything had shrunk. The walls were too close, the ceiling hung too low. The few pieces of furniture that had been left behind were too small.
His stomach lurched inexplicably as he passed a less than structurally sound flight of stairs and entered the hallway off the main room. The walls threatened to close in on him, but he continued to move forward. Why? What drew him in this direction, and why did the hallway feel so damned tight and narrow?
He stopped in the doorway to what had once been a bedroom, and his heart crept into his throat. Images he didn’t want or need flashed into his mind, almost making him step back away from the small room. The past didn’t creep up on Anthony; it bombarded him with a thousand images at once, making him dizzy and sick to his stomach.
The bedroom had been much nicer then. It had been a pretty place, and the bed had been soft, a place to cuddle with his sisters and his mother when the storms came or early in the morning when it was sti
ll dark outside. He had loved that bed….
His head snapped around and he saw it. Door standing open, insides dark as an airless cavern.
A closet. The closet. They’d hidden there. They’d cowered and cried…
He turned and fled the room, but it was too late. He remembered. He remembered everything. She’d told them to hide in the closet, and they had. But they could hear the screams, and those screams had made Anthony creep out of the closet toward the living room. Watched his father wrap his hands around his mother’s throat. The bastard had killed her. He’d choked her until she didn’t have any breath left. He’d taken her from them.
Anthony stopped in the main room. He was back in the present, but the past remained with him. His mother had tried to make this room pretty and warm and safe, like the bed where she had cuddled her children and laughed.
She had died here.
His father had killed her.
Everything that had been happening to his family suddenly began to make sense, in a clear and sickening way. His father was the man who had become a danger to them all.
Anthony ran again, this time escaping into the night.
“You’re sure there was nothing in the building?” Benedict snapped.
“Positive.” Ricky smoothed back an imaginary stray strand of his short blond hair. “I tore the dishy veterinarian’s clinic apart, boss. I even took a sledgehammer to the walls to make sure there was nothing hidden thereabouts.”
So much for keeping a low profile.
Ricky was obviously annoyed at being summoned so early on a Sunday morning. As far as Benedict was concerned, that was yet another sign that Driggs’s usefulness was coming to an end. His employees came when he called, without question, even if the sun had not yet risen. If they felt annoyance, they did not dare to show it.
“And the woman?” he asked. “You spoke to her?”
A Touch of the Beast Page 14