Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  Nora gave J.D. a look that had reduced lesser men to squirming pulp. “Yeah, I get enough senseless violence on TV. Let's go, honey.”

  It was nearly one when Mari stepped out of the elevator on the seventh floor of the lodge. She felt beaten, exhausted, hurt. Being hurt was pointless. If she had an ounce of sense, she wouldn't let J. D. Rafferty hurt her. Trouble was, she wasn't sure she had an ounce of sense left. She was running on empty in too many respects.

  “Tomorrow is another day, Marilee,” she muttered, digging her key out of her purse. “Isn't that a pleasant prospect?”

  She flipped the switch for the entry light and got nothing. Swell. Sighing heavily, she toed off her sneakers and left them in the doorway to keep the door open and let a sliver of light into the gloom so she could navigate her way to a lamp.

  She sensed trouble a second before she saw it. The hair on the back of her neck went electric. She turned instinctively toward the bed and started to scream.

  The large, dark shape hurtled into her with all the force of a linebacker, driving her back against a side table, knocking the telephone off onto the floor with a clatter. Her heart racing out of control, Mari grappled with her assailant, struggling to stay on her feet, fighting to draw in a breath. Their arms and legs tangled and they tumbled sideways. She landed on her back, the last of the air from her lungs whooshing out. Colors burst and swirled before her eyes as she wheezed and gasped.

  Fight! Fight!

  Her brain screamed the message. She thought her arms and legs were flailing madly, trying to fend off the attack, but the fall seemed to have severed her mind's connection to sensation. She wondered wildly if she would feel anything while she was being raped and killed.

  Suddenly her lungs reinflated and adrenaline surged through her in a powerful rush. The smell of sweat and fear burned her nostrils. She swatted the attacker with one hand and groped for a weapon with the other, her fingers stumbling over the body of the telephone. Grasping it frantically, she swung it as hard as she could. The bell jingled as the phone smashed against the man's shoulder and he grunted in pain.

  Fight! Fight!

  Her feet working frantically to gain purchase on the carpet, she tried to scoot out from under the attacker as she hit him again and again with the telephone. He blocked the blows with his arms, leaning back, taking his weight off her. Sensing a chance at escape, Mari twisted onto her belly and shoved herself toward the door.

  Stand up! Run!

  The light from the hall beckoned like a beam from heaven and she headed for it, trying to crawl, to run, to escape.

  Run! Run!

  Something large and hard connected violently with the side of her head, and everything went black.

  The intruder ran into the hall and to freedom.

  Mari lay on the carpet, motionless, the telephone a foot out of reach, her mind floating in a void.

  A voice came over the receiver sounding pleasantly concerned. “Front desk. How may we help you?”

  CHAPTER

  15

  DREW WAS despondent over the attack. He paced back and forth along one end of the room in a black Reebok warm-up suit. His shoes were untied. His hair stood up in tufts that he continuously ran his hands back over as if to soothe himself. “This is terrible,” he said for the fourth time. “We've never had anything like this happen.”

  Mari tried not to watch him pace. Moving her eyeballs intensified the pain drumming relentlessly in her head. Sheriff Quinn had been rousted out of his bed for the event—on Drew's insistence. He leaned against the dresser, looking glum, while a deputy poked around the room. Raoul the night manager hovered outside the open door, trying not to appear superfluous.

  “God, I feel so guilty,” Kevin said. He reached for Mari's hand and gave it a squeeze. He sat beside her on the disheveled bed, looking like an ad for Calvin Klein nightwear. A navy blue silk robe was loosely belted at his slim waist, the V opening revealing a smooth, tightly muscled chest. Baggy beach shorts stopped just short of his knees. He was barefoot. “We've been talking about replacing these old locks with card keys for months. Maybe if we'd done it, this wouldn't have happened.”

  “It's not your fault, Kev,” Mari murmured, tightening her fingers around his, offering him more comfort than he was giving her.

  “You didn't get a look at the fella at all?” Quinn said on a yawn.

  She started to shake her head but caught herself. “It was dark. I hit the first switch when I came in, but the light bulb was burned out. At least, that's what I assumed. Then everything happened too fast. He had on dark clothes and a ski mask. That's all I can say for certain.”

  “Was he tall, short, big, small?”

  “Taller than me. Stronger than me.” At the moment she figured anyone not on a life support system was probably stronger than she was. Nausea swirled through her head and stomach. Her skull felt like a cracked egg. She gingerly touched the sore spot just behind her right temple. Her fingers came away sticky with congealing blood.

  Kevin turned a little gray at the sight. “I'll go get you an ice bag,” he offered, and left the room, nearly bowling Raoul over on his way out.

  “Can you tell if anything was taken?” Quinn asked, rubbing the bridge of his crooked nose. He looked as if he had been sleeping in his uniform shirt. His hair was a field of wheat stubble that had been ravaged by cyclone winds.

  Mari's first instinctive fear had been for her guitar, but it sat unharmed in a corner. The rest of the room was strewn with clothes and upended furniture. She didn't have anything worth taking. No expensive jewelry, no stashes of cash or traveler's checks. The thief had struck out picking her room—if it had been a thief at all.

  Her head boomed and echoed with the possibilities.

  “Nothing was taken as far as I could tell,” she said. She looked sideways at the big sheriff, wondering if he would be receptive to hearing her theories concerning Lucy. Not, she decided. Dan Quinn struck her as a simple man. Steak and potatoes. The missionary position. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

  He glanced at Drew. “Anybody else report hearing anything, seeing anything unusual?”

  “Not at all. It was a normal night until this.” Drew dropped down on one knee in front of Mari and gazed up at her, tortured with guilt. “I'm so very sorry, luv.”

  “It wasn't your fault.”

  “I'll have Raoul move your things to a suite while we're gone to the emergency room.” At the door, the night manager brightened like a terrier at the prospect of importance. Drew's expression toughened as Mari opened her mouth to protest. “You're having that bump checked, and that's the end of it. I'll drive you myself.”

  “We'll dust the room for prints,” Quinn said, fighting another yawn. “And we'll question the rest of the guests on this floor in the morning. See if they might have noticed anything. I've got the deputies on patrol looking out for anyone suspicious. Reckon he's either long gone or gone to ground by now, but we'll keep our eyes peeled.”

  He looked as if he needed his peeled with a paring knife. The man was ready to fall asleep on his feet. Mari bit back her own questions. They could wait until morning, at least until the sheriff had gotten some sleep.

  As promised, Drew delivered her to the New Eden Community Hospital himself. Kevin, admittedly woozy at the prospect of needles and blood, stayed behind to supervise while the deputy dusted the room for fingerprints and Raoul began the moving process. They took Drew's black Porsche to the small hospital. Mari leaned back in the reclining leather seat and tried to concentrate on something other than the need to throw up.

  “It's such a shock,” Drew said. “One simply doesn't expect crime in a place like New Eden. That's part of the lure, isn't it? Clean air, idyllic setting, utopian values.”

  He was talking to himself. Trying to reason away the shock. Mari listened, understanding perfectly. Paradise wasn't supposed to have a dark side. She felt as if that were the only side she was seeing—the parallel universe, where everything wa
s cast in sinister shadows. Like cutting open a perfect apple and finding it full of rot and worms.

  Her stomach rolled at the analogy.

  “Drew,” she said weakly as sweat misted across her skin. “Do you have any idea what Lucy might have been into?”

  “Into?” He wheeled the Porsche under the portico at the emergency room entrance. The white glow of fluorescent lighting spilled out of the hospital doors like artificial moonlight. “How do you mean?” he asked carefully.

  “You said she liked to be in the thick of things, stirring up trouble. What if she poked at the wrong hornet's nest? Did you ever think about that?”

  He frowned, looking handsome and rumpled, his lean cheeks shadowed with stubble, his brows slashing down above his green eyes. “I think you took a nasty smack on the noggin. We ought to concentrate on that for the moment. Don't let's worry about Lucy. There's nothing we can do to help her now.”

  He started to turn for the door, but Mari caught his arm. Just that much movement unbalanced her enough to send dinner sluicing up the back of her throat. Her brain felt disconnected from her body, as if her psyche were trying to escape.

  “Drew?” she asked, wanting desperately to slide into unconsciousness again. “Do you think Lucy could have been blackmailing someone?”

  “I think you're on the verge of delirium,” he said brusquely. “Let's get you inside.”

  She spent what was left of the night in the hospital. Dr. Larimer—who also had to be called in from the comfort of his bed—checked her eyes and reflexes, put three stitches in the cut on her head, and pronounced her fit.

  “Fit for what?” Drew demanded, incensed at the man's lack of concern.

  The doctor, a squat man with unflattering horn-rimmed glasses and a retreating dark hairline, gave Drew an impatient look. “For whatever. It's just a mild concussion.”

  Nothing he didn't see every day in the course of treating ranch hands and rodeo cowboys. This was tough country full of hardy folk. The look he leveled at Drew clearly set him outside that realm.

  “We'll keep you overnight for observation,” Larimer pronounced to Mari, obviously sensing the potential for trouble from these outsiders.

  Mari sent Drew back to the Moose. All she wanted was a bed and a handful of painkillers, something to shut out the pounding and the suspicions for a few hours. What she got was a room across the hall from a crying baby. She lay in bed, the smell of bleach from the pillowcase burning her nose, thoughts of Lucy chasing each other through her head, the sound of crying rubbing her nerve endings raw.

  She longed for comfort and thought of J.D. Had it been only hours earlier that she had lain in bed with him, listening to the rain? The memory was real enough for her to recall the warmth of his body, the strength of his arm around her, the pleasant scent of man and love-making. And yet it seemed surreal enough to make her wonder if she hadn't imagined the whole encounter. She didn't fall in lust with alpha males. She hadn't come to Montana looking to bed a cowboy.

  Even so, she closed her eyes and pretended he was there now, that she was tucked back to front against his big, muscular body. She pretended they belonged together, she pretended that he cared. The alternative was to feel alone. And on a night when thoughts of Lucy haunted her, thoughts of a death in the wilderness and a life with no one to love, alone was the last thing she wanted to feel.

  Quinn looked better with a shave and a fresh shirt. His mood hadn't improved with the light of a new day, however. He sat behind his desk, longing to sink his teeth into the fudge-caramel brownies his wife had sent to work with him for his coffee break, but he had the sinking feeling his coffee break wasn't going to happen any time soon.

  Marilee Jennings sat across from him, pale, dark-eyed with an ugly bruise on her cheek and an earnest expression that boded ill. It was almost enough to distract him from the fact that she was wearing another of her incongruous outfits—a filmy flowered skirt, paddock boots, a man-size denim jacket over a Save-the-Planet T-shirt.

  Quinn didn't like to think of anyone getting attacked in his territory. He especially didn't like to think of any outsider getting attacked. They tended to squeal like stuck pigs at the least provocation—not that getting clubbed wasn't just cause for outrage—and they tended to drag lawyers around with them like Dobermans on leashes. A simple case could suddenly be blown into the crime of the century with packs of roving media people sniffing around town for dirt and the lawyers preaching on the street corners like demented evangelists. The prospects set his stomach to churning. He frowned at the pyramid of brownies and the coffee growing cold in his Super Dad mug.

  Life here had been a whole hell of a lot simpler B.C.—before celebrities.

  “How are you doing this morning, Miz Jennings?” he asked politely. Leaning his elbows on the desktop, he discreetly pushed the plate of brownies out of his range of vision.

  She gave him a crooked smile that held more humor than he would have expected. “I have a new sympathy for soccer balls—which is exactly what my head feels like. I'm told I'll be fine in a day or two.”

  “You didn't really need to come in this morning, ma'am. It could have waited.”

  “I take it there's no sign of the man who attacked me?”

  He shook his head, waiting for the diatribe on the incompetency of small-town police to begin. Marilee Jennings just looked sad, a little haunted maybe.

  “I wouldn't worry about him bothering you again,” he said. “He's likely moved on to another town. Thieves tend to get skittish when they've come close to being caught.”

  “If he was just a thief.”

  Quinn tipped his head. “What do you mean?”

  Mari took a deep breath, tightening her fingers into a knot in her lap. “I'm not sure he was there to rob me. I think he may have been looking for something in particular.”

  “Such as?”

  “I'm not sure.” He looked impatient and she rushed on before her courage could run out. “You know Lucy MacAdam's house was broken into a few days after her death—”

  “Vandals,” he said, moving his huge shoulders. “Sure I know about it. J. D. Rafferty called me out to have a look.”

  “But what if it wasn't vandals? Miller Daggrepont's office was broken into not long after. Daggrepont was Lucy's attorney. Don't you find that strange?”

  “Not especially.” He cut a glance at his brownies, unconsciously flicked his tongue across his lower lip, and looked back at Mari. He seemed to get larger and more intimidating the thinner his patience became. “It's not unusual for a ranch house to get broken into when kids think there's no one around to care or to catch them. I'm not saying it's a common thing, but it happens. As for Daggrepont's office, it's just across the alley from the Hell and Gone. Gets broken into a couple times a year. I keep telling Miller to put a better lock on the door, but I guess he'd rather collect the insurance on that junk he claims is antique.”

  “But now my hotel room has been broken into,” Mari pointed out, struggling to hold on to her own small scrap of patience. She was exhausted and her head was pounding. She wanted to take a couple of the painkillers Dr. Larimer had prescribed, climb into bed, and sleep for a week, but she had thought—hoped—she could arouse Quinn's cop instincts first. If he saw anything in her suspicions, he might assign someone to check out the coincidences, and he might approach the case of her attack from a different angle.

  He wasn't looking aroused.

  “Doesn't that seem a little too coincidental?” she pressed on. “I was a friend of Lucy's. She left all her stuff to me. What if she left me something someone wanted badly enough to commit a crime to get?”

  “Did she?”

  She closed her eyes against the frustration and the pain. He probably already thought she was a lunatic. Another “I don't know” would seal her fate with him. “She left a letter for me in the event of her death—which in itself was strange. In the letter she mentioned a book—Martindale-Hubbell, it's a directory of attorneys. There's a se
t in her study, but one is missing.”

  “If it's missing and you think it's what the thief was after, then why would he break into Miller's office or into your room? He could have gotten it out of Miz MacAdam's study when he broke in there.”

  “Lucy might have hidden it. He might have thought she gave it to Daggrepont for safekeeping or that I had somehow managed to get ahold of it.”

  “And why would she hide a directory of attorneys?”

  “Maybe there's something in it.”

  “Such as?”

  I don't know. Three words guaranteed to jerk a cop's chain. They were linear thinkers, cops. They liked evidence and logic and simple explanations. She could give Quinn none of those things. All she had was a matrix of ugly possibilities and hunches with Lucy at the center. If she told him she saw Judge MacDonald Townsend snorting cocaine at a party, he would likely ask her what she was on at the time.

  Townsend was above reproach. She probably wouldn't have believed it herself if she hadn't seen it with her own two eyes, and if she hadn't known about the judge and Lucy. Nor was Quinn liable to see anything strange about Ben Lucas representing Sheffield in the matter of Lucy's death. Lucas was a prominent attorney with a license to practice in Montana. He ran in the same circles as Sheffield. So what if he had known Lucy back in Sacramento?

  “I don't mean to sound like a crackpot. But there are just some things about Lucy's death that have bothered me from the first. Now this happens.”

  “It was an open and shut case, Miz Jennings,” Quinn said tightly. “We got the man responsible.”

  “Sheffield claimed he never saw Lucy.”

  “I imagine he was lying about that. He shot a woman by mistake. When he realized what he'd done, he panicked.”

  “Or someone else might have shot her.”

  The sheriff blew out a gust of air. His brows plowed a deep V above the bridge of his crooked nose. The scar on his cheek was a vivid slash of red. “I suppose you have some idea who? I suppose you figure it was this mystery man who wants this mystery book you don't really know anything about.”