“You still haven’t told me why we’re here,” Jack said quietly as they stepped out of the car.
“I can’t tell you anything yet; I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for,” she said, repeating the refrain she had been giving Jack ever since they had left Manhattan.
“I think you do know,” Jack said, his voice low and intense in the darkness. “And I think you’re not telling me because you’re not sure how I’d react.”
“I’m not telling you because I don’t know the specifics. Something just started to tug at me back in Lenny’s apartment. When I see it I’ll know.”
Jack snorted. “You make fun of me for paying attention to vibes but you expect to ‘just know’ when you see whatever it is?”
Cassandra crossed her arms over her chest as they walked along the sidewalk, backtracking the path they had taken past Laura’s house.
“It was something he said; made me think back to something I’d seen before,” Cassandra admitted. “I can’t for the life of me think what it was. I just hope it’s still in there.”
Cassandra wasn’t sure whether she was right about her half-remembered clue, and her concern that she might have it wrong had led her to keep Jack in the dark about the errand she was bringing him on. She didn’t want to get his hopes up by telling him about the theory that had slowly started to coalesce in her brain.
After a few minutes, they approached the house once more. Cassandra looked around, suddenly apprehensive that the neighbors might be on the lookout for people interested in investigating the house unofficially, and uninvited.
Up close, the house looked even more sinister; the security lamps bleached out the paint on the exterior walls, and the garden had gone to seed, weeds springing up amidst volunteer starts from the planned plantings.
They came to the door and Jack tried the knob. Cassandra was unsurprised to find that it was locked.
“It’s one of the cheap ones,” Jack told her after a moment’s inspection. “Whoever was here last, they didn’t think to do the deadbolt, either.”
He began kicking at the door around the knob and Cassandra cringed. He’s more frustrated than he let on, she thought, peering over at the houses that surrounded Laura Granger’s residence.
“There are still people living all around,” she told him in a hiss.
Cassandra could understand Jack’s irritation: they had spent all day tracking down two of the people on his list, as yet to no avail—and there was no guarantee that their luck would hold out much longer. At any time, they could have been pulled over again, and the next cop to talk to Cassandra about her busted taillight might not have been as interested in her cleavage. Even if she found what she was looking for at Laura’s place, and made it out without any of the neighbors raising the alarm, they could still get busted driving to wherever it was they needed to go next.
“One…more…kick…”
The door swung forward, the sound of groaning wood and creaking hinges cutting through the night. Cassandra looked around quickly, but no lights flicked on in the neighboring houses and it seemed that for the moment at least, they were still safe. By the time she had assessed that they had somehow managed not to alert anyone to their presence, Jack had already entered the house. Cassandra hurried to follow him, pushing the door closed behind her.
Jack looked around for a long moment, and Cassandra saw a slight shudder work its way through the man’s body. She took a deep breath to push down the sense of revulsion and fear that rose up inside of her and looked around. The forensics team had given the house a thorough combing over, that much was clear. She heard a crash and started.
Turning around, her gaze fell on Jack. He was throwing around the few items left in the living room, pulling up the couch cushions and letting them thump to the floor.
“Keep it down!” Cassandra hissed.
Jack turned and looked at her, irritation and confusion forming lines across his face.
“It’s the middle of the night in the suburbs,” Cassandra reminded him. “We just broke into a pretty damned famous ‘murder house’. Do you want the neighbors to call the cops?”
Jack scowled. “So tell me what we’re looking for then,” he said, setting the cushions down on the couch.
Cassandra licked her lips, peering around the room.
“We’re looking for something small,” she said, consulting the impulse she’d felt at Lenny’s apartment hours before. “Something the cops would have ignored, or just decided was insignificant.”
“You can’t give me anything more to go on than that?” Jack gave her an exasperated look.
“I told you before,” Cassandra said, defensive. “I’ll know it when I see it. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but there was something.” She rolled her head around on her neck, fighting the tension she felt at the base of her skull. “But if we end up with the cops coming here, we’re going to have no chance of finding it,” she told him firmly.
“Fine,” Jack said, looking faintly sulky. “Take a look around, then.”
As she wandered around the living room, Cassandra tried to remember how it had looked when she had first gone through the house as part of her investigation; there were so many things missing that she couldn’t quite begin to place the significance of the things that remained.
She moved into the bedroom, careful not to touch anything. Of course, months after the trial of Jack Hardy, it wasn’t likely that she could disrupt the forensics team; they had come and gone already, clearing out everything they thought could have been remotely relevant to the case at hand. The bed had been stripped, but the mattress remained. Cassandra looked around, wishing she had an inventory at her disposal as she had done when she’d been here before. She couldn’t remember everything that the police and scientists had taken, much less compare it to what had remained behind.
She sighed, her gaze scanning the ransacked room. There was something deeply unpleasant about being inside a bedroom that had become the scene of a murder. She frowned, trying to decide whether she could still smell something of a scent of death in the room.
There were marks on the walls indicating some of the things that forensics technicians had taken pictures of, notations that would have appeared in the crime scene photos. Fingerprint dust covered everything in the bedroom in a way it hadn’t in the living room, and Cassandra kept her hands carefully to herself as she made her way around the room, lost in thought. What was it that she’d almost called to mind? What was the detail that had slipped her conscious notice but nonetheless lodged itself in the back of her mind to plague her when she needed it most?
Cassandra gave up on the bedroom and walked back out into the living room. Even so long after the fact, knowing that it was the scene where Laura Granger had died gave Cassandra the creeps.
“It’s got to be here somewhere,” she said, more to herself than to Jack, and more because she hoped that it was true, rather than because she expected it to be.
Jack was still looking around, here and there, and Cassandra watched as emotions flickered across his face: anger, sadness, resentment. If she found the house unbearably creepy, it obviously had a lot more complicated associations for the man she had entered it with.
They went through into the kitchen, and Cassandra began to carefully inspect the room. She noticed that a knife had been taken out of the block and tried to remember if the coroner’s report or any of the subsequent notes had mentioned stab wounds.
“If I’d known I was going to be kidnapped and taken on a wild goose chase to find Laura Granger’s real killer, I would have had the presence of mind to bring my case notes with me,” Cassandra said dryly.
Jack didn’t seem to appreciate the joke. “If I see something that might be what you’re looking for, I’ll point it out to you,” he said, turning his back and inspecting the cabinets carefully, holding a layer of paper towel between his hand and the surfaces.
Cassandra bent to look into the half-open silverware drawer.
Something about the weak gleam of the light on the stainless steel tableware tugged at her mind, the same way Lenny’s mention of jewelry had. She contemplated the problem until the sharp, high-pitched wail of a distant siren cut through her thoughts.
“Shit,” Jack said behind her.
Cassandra turned to look at him, pushing the silverware drawer shut once more.
“They’re coming towards the house.”
Cassandra listened closely, and hearing two sirens she did the mental math: two sirens meant two cars, and two cars meant four police.
“Maybe they’re passing through,” Cassandra said hopefully. “Maybe someone up the street got broken into.”
“Let’s not take that chance,” Jack suggested.
He grabbed for her hand and pulled her in his wake, moving confidently to the sliding glass door that opened out into the home’s back yard. He pushed up the lock and hurried through, dragging Cassandra over the threshold and steadying her when she stumbled, unprepared for the door’s track.
Jack slid the door shut behind them, almost slamming it in his hurry.
“With any luck they’ll just think it’s teenagers, getting their thrills visiting a crime scene,” he told her lowly, propelling her into the inky darkness of the back yard.
Cassandra felt the grass brushing against her legs, some of the sharper-leaved weeds poking through the fabric of her pants. She looked around, her eyes slowly adjusting to the lack of light. The back yard seemed just as overgrown as the front had been. Jack came up next to her and as one they plunged through the almost knee-high grass towards a thick clump of shrubbery.
They reached the dubious cover at almost the same moment, and sank down into the leafy branches, the smell of rotting vegetation filling their noses. Cassandra saw flashlight beams inside of the house. She took a deep breath as her heart hammered away in her chest, willing her body to calm itself down. She felt the sweat gathering at the small of her back, dampness dripping down between her breasts. Crouching low in the bushes, she pressed her lips together to force herself to breathe more quietly through her nose.
“Don’t move,” Jack murmured, his voice much steadier than Cassandra felt.
One of the cops stepped out onto the patio, directing the flashlight beam slowly over the back yard.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” he called over his shoulder. “Probably those damn kids again.”
Cassandra heard a muffled radio message from inside; something to the effect of making sure the premises were clear and then moving on.
“Right. Nothing moving out here. Whoever it was, they made tracks.”
The beam of the flashlight trailed slowly from one corner of the yard to the other, and Cassandra felt a flurry of panic as she momentarily lost her center of balance, her feet tingling from the position she had taken.
She wished uselessly that they could have had time to get to her car. As the police search of the house continued, she struggled to stay motionless in her hiding spot, inches away from the convicted murderer of the woman whose house they had broken into. It was impossible to know how long they were hiding there for, but Cassandra guessed that maybe half an hour passed. There was a crackling, electronic sound, and then the officer who’d come out onto the patio spoke into his radio, responding to something that distance garbled and muffled, keeping Cassandra from hearing what was said.
“Yeah. Yeah. So far it looks like they left. We’ll have to contact whoever’s responsible for the estate and tell them about the door.”
The flashlight beam disappeared and Cassandra saw him heading into the house once more, rejoining his colleagues. Cassandra’s relief at not being caught dissolved as she remembered his earlier comment about ‘those damn kids.’ If a bunch of teenagers had been consistently raiding the house since the forensics team had left it, there was no chance that she’d find what she’d come to see.
All at once, her knees gave out, her ankles turning slightly as Cassandra swayed and then fell forward. Something hard and sharp dug into her left knee and Cassandra yelped in surprise and pain, flailing uselessly at the bushes to try and keep herself from falling flat on the ground.
The next instant, a hand clamped over her mouth and Cassandra stiffened in panic until she realized that it was Jack, that he was muffling any other sounds she might make, his confident grip steadying her. She could still feel something digging into her skin, and as she heard the faint sound of the police officers leaving the property, Cassandra shifted her weight onto her right knee, lifting her other leg and reaching underneath it to grope in the darkness and dirt for the source of the pain.
Cassandra’s breath hitched in her chest as she lifted the object out of the dirt and held it up, carefully, in the lingering light of the patio security lamp. As she examined it—the ostentatious diamond that winked in the darkness, and the heavy engraving she could feel under her fingers—Cassandra felt a spurt of triumph. She knew the ring well; she had seen it dozens of times. She had noticed its absence but had assumed that the wearer had separated from his wife. A new picture began to form in her mind, and Cassandra smiled to herself bitterly.
When Max Adelman had patted her on the shoulder that day in the courtroom three months earlier, breaking with his usual icy formality, Cassandra had instinctively looked at his other hand. That’s when she had noticed that he was missing his ring. She hadn’t thought anything much of it at the time, but now the question loomed large in her mind: what was Max’s ring doing in Laura Granger’s garden?
Chapter Nineteen
“We can go now,” Jack said. “They’re gone.”
Cassandra looked at the ring for a moment longer, trying to work its sudden appearance into the larger puzzle she’d been assembling in her brain.
“What have you got there?” he asked.
Cassandra gave herself a shake, slowly standing up and slipping the ring into her pocket.
“I’m not one hundred percent sure,” she admitted. “But I think that was what I was looking for when we came to Laura’s house. I think we’re done here.”
“Let’s get back to the car,” Jack said, getting to his feet.
Cassandra nodded. As she followed him out of the back yard, keeping to the deep shadows created by the trees and bushes, she considered the bizarre clue hidden in the dirt. She had never at any point thought there might be a connection between Max and Laura—but if he hadn’t known her, why would his ring be in her back yard?
They came out into the front yard and Jack hurried onto the sidewalk, avoiding the security lights on the street. Cassandra followed him around the corner, jogging to keep up with his fast pace.
Well, she thought with a wry grin to herself, I do know one person who should have a very good idea of what Max Adelman’s wedding ring would be doing in Laura’s back yard. And this time, I know where to find him.
When they finally reached her car, Cassandra’s whole body tingled with the possibilities of what she might have learned in their few moments of hiding.
Jack looked around quickly, making sure that they were alone.
“What’s going on? What was with that ring you picked up?”
Cassandra took a deep breath and slid the jewelry out of her pocket, examining it in the feeble light of the parking lot lamps.
“It’s Max—well, it’s Max’s ring,” she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “I don’t know what it was doing at Laura’s, but I think it means he had to have been involved.”
As she gazed at the ring, a scenario started to form in her mind. Cassandra thought about Max’s overly-familiar shoulder pat in the courthouse, the way he’d encouraged her all along in pursuing Laura Granger’s murder investigation, the way he’d subtly pushed her to new discoveries.
“He didn’t separate from his wife—he lost his ring. He murdered her…or at least, he had something to do with getting rid of her.”
Cassandra looked up into Jack’s face, holding up the ring for him to look at it again.
“It has to be Max’s. I’ve seen his ring enough times; this gaudy thing wouldn’t be caught dead on anyone else’s finger. But it’s not enough.”
Jack stared at the ring in confusion for a moment, then looked at Cassandra, the expression on his face unreadable, but unmistakably intense; it reminded her of the way he’d looked at her in the courtroom, the day he’d been convicted of Laura’s murder.
“How did you…?”
He shook his head in disbelief, his lips curving up in a slow smile. Before Cassandra could begin to answer, Jack wrapped his arms around her waist tightly, lifting her up against his body.
“You gorgeous, brilliant woman,” he murmured, bringing his lips down onto hers.
Cassandra stiffened against him as Jack deepened the kiss, his hands tightening on her body. A moment later she felt her body relaxing, the surprising warmth that radiated from Jack seeming to sink into her through her clothes, drenching her skin.
Jack’s tongue probed her mouth, tasting, testing, and Cassandra tilted her head up towards him, trying for a greater advantage. She draped her arms around his shoulders, barely able to bring her hands together against his back.
He spun her around, pinning her to the car, reminding Cassandra of the moment, hours earlier, when she’d gone into her kitchen only to find herself immobilized, a hand over her mouth, pinned against the wall. She moaned softly against Jack’s lips as desire flooded through her body, every little lustful half-thought she had entertained over the course of their time together flitting through her mind, heating her up from the inside out.
She felt the hard ridge of Jack’s cock digging into her hip, rubbing against her. Jack broke away from her lips, panting slightly; Cassandra’s heart pounded in her chest, rabbit-fast. She could taste Jack on her lips, feel the tension in his body pressed to hers.
Steal The CEO's Daughter - A Carny Bad Boy Romance Page 22