by Thea Devine
“Dev,” Galligan said warningly.
“Let me ask the questions,” Osias said. “MJ.”
“What?” Her voice was a little sharper than she intended.
“Pretty fast work.” He sounded skeptical.
“We didn’t expect anything to happen; it was just something to do because we felt so confined. Really, that’s all there was to it.”
“How long were you with this Baines guy?”
“Several months.”
“You were his mistress?”
MJ gave him a killing look. “Yes.”
“Who broke it off?”
“Me.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t happy.”
“Why?”
She wanted to strike him; his tone was too kind.
“He was too demanding,” she said finally. “About everything.”
“And you hadn’t seen him at all since your breakup—until that day?”
“No.”
“You don’t know if he spied on you?”
“No.”
“And you had no idea he had any connection to Alaina Bohansson before yesterday?”
“No.”
Osias nodded. “Okay. What else do you need, Nick?”
“Something to make sense,” Nick growled.
“I can do some digging,” Dev said, pulling out his laptop. He tapped away for a moment, then: “Let’s see—Baines runs around in those upper-strata social circles, and he’s known for keeping company with beautiful young women. Usually models. Sometimes daughters of business acquaintances.”
“At last, a reason we need Page Six,” Nick murmured.
Dev ignored him. “He’s married, has a couple of kids, lives in South Salem. Corporate officer in a law firm. Has an apartment in Midtown—no, had an apartment in Midtown. Huh. Wonder what that means. Wonder how he met Alaina Bohansson. I bet someone knows. I’ll go back to the office and do some heavy research.”
Nick said, “Here’s one thing: There’s no one connected with the Bohansson family named Baines.”
Brooke suggested, “What if he has an alias? I mean, Thane had two.”
“Taking another name is not that easy to do,” Osias said, “but it’s possible. He has connections.”
“Still off the record, Dev,” Nick said warningly, as Dev made a note.
“Got it. If he’s operating under another name, I’ll find it.” He gathered up his gear and winked at Delia. “See you. And I’d love to see you again,” he added in a lower tone, just to her.
“He’ll find it,” Nick said as the door closed. “Meanwhile, what do you think?”
“I think you’re wearing us out,” Brooke snapped.
He fixed those steady eyes on her. “Oh, I think you were well-worn already, Ms. Sarrett.”
She made a movement, almost as if he had struck her.
“That was low. Sorry.” But he didn’t look or sound sorry.
Brooke grabbed her coat and stalked out the door. Delia followed, shooting Galligan a furious look over her shoulder.
“Son of a bitch!” Brooke was raging mad, punching the elevator button. “That fucking son of a—”
“Hey hey—”
“That bastard—Shit!”
Delia rubbed her arm, trying to calm her.
“I’m not going back in there,” Brooke fumed as the elevator doors closed behind them.
“Of course not. We’ll just walk for a while.”
“I want to hit something. I want to smack him! I—” She charged ahead of Delia out of the elevator.
Delia grabbed at her arm. “Hey, slow down. Did it ever occur to you that he’s totally thrown by you, in a good way?”
Brooke came to a screeching halt. “What?”
“The way he looks at you—”
“Oh, God, another older guy? Forget it. I’m not doing the mistress thing again.”
“I don’t think he’s a mistress kind of guy,” Delia said gently.
“He’s up to no good, in every way.”
They stepped out into the icy cold air.
“Damn, I didn’t take a hat.”
“C’mon, just walk, you’ll warm up and cool down.”
“What he said was unforgivable.”
“And that’s what I mean,” Delia said. “All those sparks flying around.”
“No, that was hellfire and brimstone.” Brooke walked faster, tucking her arms around her waist. “He’s that kind of guy.”
“He’s the kind that makes you think about home and hearth and family Thanksgiving, and all that good stuff.”
Brooke blew out an impatient breath. “Well, I’m not that kind of girl.” She’d been thinking maybe she was that kind of girl, but never with someone like him. She was sick of him judging her. “Enough. It’s ridiculous.”
“If you say so.” They turned down Broadway, where they could duck into a store or a restaurant if necessary. “God, it’s cold.”
Suddenly it seemed as if there was more of a crowd than usual, and then came a shout—“Hey! It’s the mistresses!” And people started running, swarming around them.
Delia grabbed Brooke’s hand just as someone pushed her, hard, into the oncoming traffic, with Delia falling on top of her.
Brakes slammed, drivers shouted; people pulled them up, brushed them off. “The mistresses, the mistresses.” It went through the crowd like a match set to tinder.
“You okay?” Delia asked.
“Yeah. Somebody pushed me.”
“God. Let’s go.” They broke from the crowd and dashed into the oncoming traffic with four or five people following them.
“Oh, God, we’re going to die,” Brooke panted as she skirted one brake-slamming cab after another.
“Light’s green, lady!”
“The mistresses!” someone shouted.
“Hey, get in,” the cabbie called. “I’ll take you places you’ve never been before.” He pointed to them as they dashed to the opposite side of the street. “It’s the mistresses…”
They wheeled in the opposite direction and ran south this time, then west, where the traffic on Riverside Drive could hold up a driver and buy them some time. East again, toward Broadway—
“We’ll never get back to the hotel,” Brooke panted. “How stupid…”
Delia looked back. “We’re okay. Walk slowly, head down. Maybe we should separate?”
“Hey! Delia!”
She whirled involuntarily. There was a car edging up to them, the man inside motioning to her.
“It’s Dev,” she said.
He squealed to a stop. “Get in. The press is swarming all over the city, looking for you.”
“We know.” They scrambled into his Mini Cooper.
“You know, you’ve got to tell your story sometime,” Dev said, pulling from the curb and nearly sideswiping a cab. “They’re crucifying you everywhere.”
“And we thought he was an ally?” Brooke said mordantly. “Turns out he’s looking out for his own interests, too.”
“And what could we tell you to offset any of that, anyway?” Delia asked, noting almost automatically that he was wearing Versace, a fact that had been lost on her when they were in the hotel suite. What kind of reporter dressed to the nines like that?
“Oh, I don’t know. You were coerced, blackmailed, held as sex slaves against your will.”
Delia rolled her eyes. “No comment.”
Dev shot a bemused look at her. He’d been drawn to her the minute he’d walked into the hotel room. She didn’t look so slick or sleek you could bounce a dime off of her, but she didn’t seem like an innocent, either. He didn’t know what to make of her, and he was usually pretty quick to sum up a person.
Brooke was all edgy and defensive, sharp and intelligent, and much angrier than Delia. But then, Galligan had been pushing her buttons big time. He was acting pretty edgy himself and was much more obnoxious than usual…especially with her.
“I don’t get you three,” he s
aid, maneuvering down Central Park West toward Sixty-fifth Street.
“There’s nothing to get, Dev. The story is what it is.”
“No, you didn’t take the guy for a fortune. You’re not dripping in furs and diamonds, driving in limos all over town.”
“Oh, but we converted it all to cash and it’s in my Swiss bank account,” Brooke put in sarcastically.
“It’s probably all in Egan’s Swiss bank account,” Dev said. “What the hell were you doing out in the open, anyway?”
“No comment,” Brooke said, staring out the window at Central Park.
Which meant Nick had said something that set her off. “Okay. Well, I’m taking you back to my place for the moment. We’ll call Nick and tell him. I can do what I need to do from home.”
“I get it,” Delia said. “He’s kidnapping us to get the exclusive. How do we know this isn’t a ploy?”
“You have to have a friend in the press, Delia, or they’ll bury you alive.”
“We’re as good as dead anyway,” Brooke said.
“We can reverse that. I can help.”
“What a nice guy. Of course, that just might kill the book deal.”
“Jesus—book deal? I was hoping—”
“That you could ghost it?” Brooke asked abrasively.
“You know what? Talk to Galligan. He’ll tell you I’m not half bad.”
Delia made a disgusted sound. “The wolf has been disguised as a lamb and is finally showing what big teeth he has.”
“Delia—”
“Just let it go. Call Galligan. We need to know this little pickup is legit.”
Dev lived on the top floor of a Federal town house in the east twenties. It had two bedrooms carved out of the middle of the floor-through; the kitchen, bath, and dining area, with fireplace, overlooked the garden in the rear; and the living room, with fireplace, faced the street. One corner held Dev’s home office and a small conference area with a round table and four chairs. He barely had room for a couch and his obligatory big-screen TV.
But the apartment was scrupulously neat and meticulously furnished without screaming designer names.
They called Galligan and told him about the pushing incident. While they waited for him to arrive, Dev pounded his sources and Delia made coffee. Delia liked the apartment; felt comfortable rummaging in his narrow galley kitchen while Brooke sat at the oak dining table and stared out over the trees.
“Look,” Delia said, “we really don’t know if someone pushed you. The crowd was surging to get close to us, so—”
“I felt two hands just below my shoulders, and they pressed very hard against my back.”
“Okay. But why?”
“I don’t know. General mistress hatred?”
“Hey, come in here.” Dev had turned on the TV and there they were, running from the crowd not an hour ago as the anchor intoned, “The mystery of the missing mistresses…seen running from the crowd on upper Broadway. They subsequently disappeared and no one has been able to find them…”
“I could get a million dollars for the secret of your location right now,” Dev said in a melodramatic voice.
Delia looked appalled.
“Only kidding,” he said as the buzzer sounded. “That’s Galligan.”
As Delia admitted him, Dev called out, “Seen the news?”
“Yes. And you’ve been salivating, haven’t you?”
“Not at all. Delia promised me dibs on the book.”
“Dev!”
“Where’s MJ?” Brooke asked.
“Osias took her to his office for the time being. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to separate you three, anyway.” He turned to Dev. “Let’s sit down. Okay, first things first—Brooke?”
“There’s nothing much more to tell. We were walking down Broadway, and someone recognized us and the crowd started coming at us, and someone in that chaos pushed me hard into the oncoming traffic.”
He stared at her for a moment, his expression inscrutable. “Dev?”
“Lots of goodies. Bet you know all this stuff already.”
“Maybe not. What have you got?”
“Not only did Baines give up that much-desired Midtown apartment, he took a leave of absence from his job.”
Nick nodded.
“But he didn’t rent MJ’s old apartment—someone named Ian Baen did.” Dev looked at them. Nick clearly knew; Delia and Brooke were dumbstruck.
“And here’s the fun part,” Dev continued. “My sources tell me that Ian Baen and Alaina Bohansson have been dating quite seriously.” He went on, “Baines is said to be very obsessive, and by MJ’s account, very controlling.”
Nick jumped in. “So it’s conceivable that he killed Bohansson because MJ had left him to start an affair with him. But you can’t just walk up to a larger-than-life guy like Bohansson and stick a knife into him. You have to plan these things. You take a leave of absence. You remove yourself from your former life. You take an alias. You rent your former lover’s apartment, a step that keeps the goal in mind every minute of the day. You somehow worm your way into the family.”
“And since he’s a serial adulterer, why not seduce the guy’s daughter?” Dev put in.
“Or,” Nick said, “the coup de foudre. You go to work for the family, where you can easily become acquainted with and then seduce the daughter. It’s the European royal scenario: the princess and the chauffeur thing.”
“And here comes the big finish. The Bohanssons hired a new chef six or seven months ago,” Dev said. “His name is Ian Baen.”
“Tall guy, very fit, very good-looking and smooth. Any of you know him?” Nick asked.
Delia answered, “No. MJ kept him all to herself.”
“And so he’d want to hurt Brooke because…?”
“Not just Brooke, both of us. We both convinced MJ to ditch him.”
“You think it’s that simple? I think there’s more to the story. So here’s what we’re doing: Dev is going to guard Delia like the bulldog he is, and Brooke is coming with me.”
Brooke prickled up instantly. “The hell I am. I’m going back to my place.”
Nick shook his head. “The reporters are still camped out there. Nope, you’re coming with me. And whatever I don’t know yet, you’re going to tell me—tonight.”
Chapter Twenty
“If you browbeat me, I’m not going anywhere with you,” Brooke said defiantly, but Nick just elbowed her out of Dev’s apartment.
“Relax. I can be as metrosexual as the next guy.”
Brooke made a disbelieving sound. “You think?”
They came out the door onto the highly desirable tree-lined street.
“Well, Miss Mistress, we’ve still got a few missing pieces of the puzzle.” He opened the passenger-side door of his car for her.
Uh-oh. She’d be getting into tight quarters with him. Too close to him and his acid comments. And with Delia’s observations overlaying her own fraught feelings about him, things were going from difficult to worse in a New York minute. “No browbeating,” she warned.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot that part.” He climbed in and turned the key.
“You don’t forget much,” she muttered.
“No, I don’t—like the business about an intermediary that you skated around.” He roared out into the street and turned north on Third Avenue while her body froze with apprehension. “I think we have to stroll down that avenue, Brooke.”
“I’d like not to turn onto that avenue altogether.”
“Lots of dark alleys, huh? Just the kind I like.”
“I’m not going there. Dark alleys are scary. You’re scary. You scare the hell out of me.”
“Yeah, me too,” he muttered.
“And you have enough on Baines to arrest him for something.”
“Oh, sure. Big, angry man plotting to get revenge on the skinny girlfriend who dumped him. I love it. Except for one thing. It took two to kill Bohansson. Someone held Bohansson down, someone else snuffed hi
m out,” Nick said brutally. “So who else was angry enough to kill him?”
“One name leaps to mind,” she murmured. “Alaina.”
“What about his wife, or Egan?”
“What about them? And where are you taking me, anyway?” she demanded as she noticed he was heading north up the West Side Highway.
“My house.”
She quelled the funny feeling in her gut. “That’s pretty ex-officio, Galligan.”
“Well, if someone kills you, it’ll be pretty officio—and obviously Egan’s gunning for you. You three can’t fight his money and his reach or his people. So it’s better to have the three of you separated. The Thane Bohansson effect, we’ll call it.”
She felt like the interior of the car was heating up like a sauna, she was steaming up like a sauna, and that the last place she was safe on any level was with Nick Galligan.
He turned off the interstate at Pelham and drove through a residential section near the Metro North tracks before he turned into the driveway of a small Cape Cod house.
A tiny house with barely any lawn or driveway, the tiniest vestibule that put you into the living room with one step, three steps to your left was a dining room, and beyond the living room to the left was a short hallway. Brooke asked to use the facilities and found the bathroom down the hall, along with two small bedrooms—one an office, the other slightly larger: his bedroom, furnished with an antique four-poster bed, a dresser with a small TV, and a night table. A wing chair in the corner with a floor lamp, and a table piled with books and magazines beside it. An Oriental rug on the floor.
She heard him moving around in the kitchen, and she returned into the living room. Here was a cushy modern sofa, more floor lamps, softly lit now, and another Oriental rug. There were antique accessories—a blanket chest as the coffee table, a massive old coffee grinder converted to a lamp, sitting beside a club chair and ottoman in the far corner, an old painting over the fireplace. There was also an upholstered rocker between the front windows, and shelves filled top to bottom with music and a mini CD player on the wall beside the door. A steel-stringed guitar rested on the ottoman; there was a wall of books opposite the door, and no TV. The surroundings fit him and she didn’t feel uncomfortable, but she didn’t want to analyze why.