For Your Eyes Only

by Rebecca York

  In his car, he sat with his eyes closed and head thrown back against the headrest. Immediately, he was ambushed by a picture of Jenny’s face floating behind his closed lids—the way she’d looked, panicked and upset, when they’d carried him out on a stretcher last night. He’d been too angry with himself to say anything when she frantically called his name.

  Lord, he hated the mess he’d made of things. Ten hours after he’d met her, he was caressing her breasts and kissing her like a starving man invited to a feast. Only he hadn’t exactly had an invitation. Never mind that he’d gotten hit on the head and lost all his normal inhibitions. He gave a little snort. Yeah, so what? He’d still known what he was doing. Taking advantage of the situation. Even now when he thought about it, he felt a mixture of chagrin and arousal that was as maddening as it was disconcerting.

  When he’d gotten out of the hospital, he’d thought about calling her to tell her he was all okay. She had the right to expect it. But he’d been ashamed to face her.

  Not only because he’d practically made love to her, but because there was no excuse for screwing up and letting the bastard conk him over the head. Probably it was the guy who’d murdered Blaisdell. He could have killed Jenny, too, he thought with a shudder. Except that Pete had told him she’d fought him off with a screwdriver, for God’s sake. He should be grateful the guy had run away, but he couldn’t stop thinking that Jenny had done a hell of a lot better job of protecting herself than he had. And he was the one who had put her in danger in the first place.

  For all those reasons, it would be better for both of them if he stayed away from her. Still, it was impossible to get her out of his mind as he started the car and drove back to headquarters.

  HE STOOD LOOKING at his closet, thumbing through his considerable wardrobe deciding what to wear. Not the fancy outfits he liked when he went out to his favorite bars, or the meter-reader’s uniform that had come in so handy the other night. Something more subdued for his computerbulletin-board and chat-room activities. Maybe a khaki shirt and pants for his new persona. A few days ago he’d been Oliver from Love Story but now he’d selected a new character to play—Lieutenant Frederick Henry, from Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. An American volunteer in the World War I Italian army, Henry gets shot in the leg and meets an accommodating English nurse in the hospital. He knocks her up, and they run off together to the Swiss Alps or somewhere like that and have a glorious winter together, until she goes into labor. She dies having the baby; the kid dies, too, and poor Frederick Henry is left with nothing. Perfect.

  Humming to himself, he slipped on the khaki shirt and admired his image in the mirror. He was a good-looking guy—tall and muscular, and he could get the better of any woman. Wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze the life out of her—if that was his pleasure. He wasn’t a sniveling little kid anymore, at the mercy of a woman who hated his guts for something he hadn’t even done.

  He whispered his real name: “Arnold Heizer.” It was on his birth certificate. Yet he’d been forced to play a role all his life—even when he’d been a baby in diapers back in Oklahoma City. Now he was his own man, and he could pick any role, any name he wanted.

  As he buttoned the khaki shirt, he felt a jolt of anticipation. Of course, it wasn’t necessary to dress up tonight. His new lady friend wouldn’t care what he looked like until they actually met. But wearing the right outfit helped him to get into the part he’d chosen—and find the right woman. She had to be worried about her appeal, naive, ready to take a chance on a stranger. But most of all, she had to have a secret that was poisoning her soul. Like the big secret Meema and Mom had made him keep.

  Only now that he was his own man, he’d figured out a way to ease the pain of his childhood and make himself whole again. He’d been lucky with Marianne. That secondstory man he’d met at work had told him about her and her computer. And he’d nosed around the Internet services and found her on World Connect. It had been easy to break into the system and make some modifications that let him identify users by their names and addresses. So he was going to stick with it for a while, find himself a good woman, and settle down to a relationship. It wouldn’t last more than a few weeks. He couldn’t sustain it for longer than that. The pressure to complete the act built up too fast Which was getting to be a problem, because he couldn’t date too many women in Baltimore or the police would catch on and he’d have to leave the great job he had here and look for work in another part of the country.

  But meanwhile, he was all set to go hunting in his favorite cyber-preserve.

  EARLY THURSDAY evening Jenny pulled her chair in front of her home computer screen and with a few deft commands booted the software she’d ordered from the 800 telephone number a couple of days ago.

  It was from World Connect, the on-line service Marianne had been using. For a nominal installation fee of twenty dollars, payable by credit card over the telephone, the company had been glad to download a version of their software for the visually impaired directly into her computer via modem.

  She assured herself she was just curious about the venues where members could meet. Maybe if she explored a little bit, she could find out where Marianne had been hanging out.

  Brisco would tell her to leave the investigation to the homicide division, but Brisco hadn’t bothered to get in touch with her over the past few days. And Brisco wasn’t feeling guilty that he’d steered Jenny’s friend into an activity that had gotten her killed. Brisco probably didn’t feel guilty about anything.

  Banishing him from her mind, she accessed the list of chat rooms and bulletin boards. There were hundreds. Systematically, she thought about her friend’s interests. Marianne had loved to read and she was interested in genealogy. And low-fat recipes, because she was always worried about her weight.

  Taking the plunge, Jenny navigated to the cooking section and found a sizable group of people interested in diet recipes. When she started to enter their chat room, she quickly discovered she’d have to give her name and ID to participate.

  No way. Not yet, she thought with a little shiver. She already felt like a kid who’d snuck into the adult section of the library. She wasn’t ready to let anyone know she was there.

  Investigating further, she found that on the bulletin boards she could remain anonymous as long as she only read messages and didn’t reply. So she began paging through the posts, looking for names. It took only a few minutes to find a message from Marianne asking about good-tasting low-fat salad dressings. Several people had answered, including three men. It all sounded so friendly and normal, Jenny thought, as she deftly used her braille slate and stylus to take down their names and ID numbers. When she finished, she ran her hand over the raised dots that symbolized the letters. She could give the names to Brisco as possible suspects. But then what? Probably they were simply overweight junk-food addicts who would be horrified to find out that Marianne had been killed.

  For several minutes she sat there, figuratively staring into space. She should probably give this up, she thought. But she was too wired to quit.

  Switching to the literature-discussion group, she paged through the recent posts. The comments of a man named Oliver caught her attention. He was arguing rather eloquently that contemporary writers took themselves much too seriously—for the kind of product they turned out. Marianne had backed him up. From their comments it seemed they knew each other pretty well. Jenny jotted down his name and ID number.

  The next day Oliver had changed the subject and launched into a discourse about literary characters with secrets. Then he made a generalization from literature to life. Secrets were poison to the soul, and you ought to get them out in the open before they ate away at you, he said.

  Jenny wanted to challenge that observation. Everybody had things they felt compelled to hide. Why should you feel obligated to discuss your innermost thoughts? But she reminded herself that jumping in without knowing more about these people was risky.

  She was about to switch to an
other topic when the doorbell rang, and she jumped in her seat.

  “Jenny? Are you home?” a voice called from the front porch.

  A little frisson went through her as she realized who it was.

  Chapter Seven

  “Ben Brisco.”

  The way she said his name was like a warm flush of pleasure. She must be glad to see him, he decided as he stood on the porch in the twilight. The light came on, and he strained to see her through the translucent curtain in the door panel. He could make out her long hair and the suggestion of her features. What he wanted to see was her expression. Did it confirm the lilt in her voice? Or was he making that up? he wondered, pressing his sweaty palm against his thigh.

  His heartbeat accelerated as the lock turned and the door swung open. He’d given himself a lecture on why it would be smart to stay away from her. But here he was with a bona fide excuse to be on her front porch—and his stomach tied in knots.

  Taking a step forward, he drank in the details of her. The light was still too dim to make out her expression, but he could see she was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt with a Far Side cartoon. It showed two Japanesestyle monsters demolishing New York City. One was saying to the other, “Hey, Konga, fancy meeting you around here.” Konga’s head stuck out slightly where the fabric covered her right breast, and he felt a jolt of awareness as he remembered cupping that soft, warm weight in his hand. Thank the Lord she couldn’t see his hot face, he thought.

  “Brisco?”

  “I like your shirt,” he managed.

  “Thanks,” she murmured. “A friend picked it out.”

  “Can I come in?” he asked. “Or are you upset that you haven’t heard from me?” He hadn’t intended to say that The words had simply zinged from his mind to his lips the way so many things did when he was with her.

  “Yes,” she replied softly as she stepped aside to let him in. He assumed she was answering yes to both, but he wasn’t going to make things worse by asking.

  Closing and locking the door gave him something to do. Then he had to turn and face her.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  He watched her swallow.

  “I was worried about you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Another line he hadn’t exactly planned. But as he said it, it sounded right. “I’ve been pretty busy. One of the guys on our squad is sick, so the rest of us have been putting in overtime on a drive-by drugdealer shooting.”

  “Aren’t you working on Marianne’s case?”

  “I am. But there are over three hundred murders a year in the city and only fifteen homicide detectives.” At her nod, he continued, “Look, could we sit down? I’ve brought your friend’s answering machine.”

  Her hands fluttered in front of her. “Oh.”

  “I don’t want to put you out.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Meaningless dialogue, he thought. They were avoiding the key issues. But that was probably for the best.

  She turned quickly and led the way to the living room. After switching on a couple of lamps for him, she sat in an overstuffed chair next to the couch. He stopped in the doorway and looked around. He’d pictured her house without any particular visual interest, but she’d fooled him again. The living room was decorated with flair, in warm cinnamon and peach with gray-blue accents. The cinnamon color of the walls picked up one of the colors in the slipcover of the couch. The furnishings were traditional, comfortable. But a number of accent pieces like the Mexican bird on the mantel appeared to have been selected for their whimsy. The whole effect brought a little smile to his lips. He’d wanted to place Jenny in her environment, now he could do it whenever he liked.

  “I’m plugging in the answering machine over by the window,” he told her. “The cord’s a bit of a hazard.”

  “I’ll stay away from that side of the room,” she answered stiffly. Apparently she’d thought better of the spontaneously friendly greeting. Maybe because she was remembering the way he’d practically made love to her on the floor of her friend’s bedroom. That should make her nervous, all right.

  Neither one of them had said a word about that. He wasn’t capable of mentioning it, so he continued setting up the machine on the end table, then looked across at Jenny. She was sitting as if the chair back were full of cactus thorns, and he knew it wouldn’t work to keep avoiding the subject of the other night. He had to say something. At least about the attack. “When we went to work on the computer, I was supposed to be protecting you,” he said abruptly. “And I screwed up. I feel pretty bad about that.”

  “You didn’t know someone was in the house.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. This wasn’t going the way he expected. “You suspected he was there. I should have paid attention to what you were saying.”

  She didn’t reply, and he didn’t like the silence. Imagining what she was thinking, he plowed ahead before she could get the drop on him. “A good cop doesn’t make assumptions that could get an innocent bystander killed.”

  “You feel guilty?”

  He sidestepped the direct question and gave her more of his personal philosophy. “A good cop doesn’t get hit over the head by a guy hiding in the dark.”

  “We were there for over an hour. He had a long time to prepare for the attack.”

  “You fought him off with a screwdriver!” he practically shouted, finally getting the worst part out in the open.

  “You wish I hadn’t?”

  “I wish—” He caught the intensity on her face, and a caldron of seething emotions bubbled up inside him. He reached toward her, then let his hand drop back. He missed her only by inches because she was leaning forward, an urgent expression on her face.

  “So after the attack, when you kissed me, did you know it was me? Or did you think it was the woman named Brenna?” she asked in a strangled voice.

  He swore. “I mentioned Brenna?”

  “Yes.”

  “I…don’t remember that.”

  “Was it me you were kissing?” she insisted.

  “Yes,” he answered tightly. He owed her that much honesty.

  A sigh dragged out of her. Her features relaxed and her face registered relief, and a kind of peace.

  He wanted to leap off the couch and take her in his arms and hang on to her—body and soul. Yet he’d spent days telling himself that making any kind of declaration was the wrong thing to do. So he fell back on the arguments that he’d been using on himself. “It shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t appropriate. I was out of line.”

  She sat very still, her hands folded in her lap. “You had a head injury. You weren’t responsible.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed quickly.

  “So you don’t have to blame yourself. And we don’t have to worry about it anymore,” she said softly.

  In the middle of letting out a sigh, his feeling of relief evaporated. She was setting his mind to rest, giving him an easy out. Which must mean she was as anxious as he was to get past the kiss and down to business. Or was she sparing her own feelings?

  “I presume you’ve brought something important on Marianne’s answering machine,” she said a bit too brightly as she settled into her chair.

  He tried to judge whether she really felt more comfortable after their little discussion or whether she was simply a good actress. “There’s part of a message where someone phoned Ms. Blaisdell but didn’t say anything. I think it was the guy she was supposed to meet the evening she was murdered. My guess is she hadn’t arrived yet, and he was calling her to see if she’d changed her mind. When she wasn’t home, he decided to hang up and wait a little longer.”

  “So how can I help?”

  “I’m hoping this call was made from the same place where she called you. If so, you may be able to give me some clues to the location. There’s music playing in the background, but it’s too faint for me to nail it down.”

  She answered with a nod.

&n
bsp; The message started with the familiar sound of an open phone line. Jenny listened intently, her head tipped to one side, her eyes closed. A babble of voices filled in the background along with what must have been a band playing. But it was too faint for him to make out much beyond the observation that the rhythm was lively.

  “Yes,” she gasped. “That’s the same music.”

  “How can you be sure?” he asked, struggling not to pin too much on her response.

  “Well, the band is unusual. Rhythm and blues edged with a country twang. Marianne said she was at a bar in Fell’s Point.”

  He’d have to take her word for it.

  “I’m almost positive that was the group playing in the background when Marianne called me! She said the place was a bar in Fells Point.”

  He started to get excited, then tempered the enthusiasm. “Of course, there’s a time problem I didn’t think about,” he mused. “Why didn’t he know she was already there?”

  “It’s possible he didn’t recognize her.” Jenny paused for a moment. “She didn’t want people to know she was losing her vision, so she worked hard to look…normal. If he was trying to spot a blind woman, he could have missed her.”

  “That’s a workable hypothesis,” he allowed.

  “So now if we take a tour of the local bars, we can find the place. Somebody must have seen them together.”

  “What do you mean—we?” he demanded.

  She appeared to give him a look so penetrating that he had to lower his gaze. “You said you couldn’t distinguish the music.”

  “I could have the tape enhanced,” he argued. “A lab can filter out everything but the band.”

  But she must have picked up on the uncertainty in his tone. She was too damn perceptive for her own good. “How long will that take?”

  “The way things are now with our budget cuts, at least a week.”