“You have witnesses that can vouch for you?”
He hung the jacket over an easel. “Quite a few. All very credible.” Slowly, he unfastened the buttons on the cuff of his left sleeve. “I was at a hospital on Wilshire Boulevard. As a patient. My partner left me on June second, which is the day I did this.” Adam pushed back his shirtsleeve and rotated his forearm, displaying a thin pink scar that ran two inches above his wrist. “Pathetic, huh? I wasn’t really trying to kill myself, just get the attention of the man who I thought was the love of my life. Didn’t work. He never showed up, called, or sent a get well card.”
The scar wasn’t red or angry, but she could see it was still raw. Evie had never experienced that kind of pain, probably because she’d given her heart to her career. She shifted her gaze to Wainwright’s face, etched with pain. Her heart went out to the man, who clearly could not have been driving his car. Jack was right on this account. “I’ll need to know who had access to your car and keys that weekend.”
“Just Mr. Elliott.”
“Jack Elliott?”
“After I attempted my pathetic little cry for attention, which took place here in my office, I got wise and called nine-one-one. An ambulance took me to the hospital where I was under suicide watch for forty-eight hours. I was worried about my car sitting on the street in this neighborhood, so I called Mr. Elliott and told him about my monumental screw-up. He had my car moved to the Elliott Tower parking garage, which has better security.”
Evie could see Jack taking control and taking care of everything. She pictured Claire’s scars and heard Brady’s words: Jack Elliott’s my savior. A man who pulled people out of dark places because he’d been there himself. A man who refused to let go.
Adam tugged his sleeve over the scar and tried to smooth the lines on his face. “Do you still need me to go down to the police station?”
“No.” Because if Adam Wainwright wasn’t driving his car that weekend, he wasn’t Carter Vandemere.
* * *
9:49 p.m.
“My job would be so much easier if you’d just admit you’re the bomber.” Evie slipped her arms around Jack, who stood in front of the glass wall of his office on the thirty-sixth floor of the Elliott Tower.
He cupped his hands around hers. “I wish it were that easy.”
Right now nothing was easy. After leaving the VIP gathering at the Abby Foundation, Jack brought Evie back to his office, where he checked his calendar and verified that he had one of the garage parking attendants pick up Adam’s car and leave it in the parking garage. The keys had been dropped off and kept in Claire’s desk.
“This is the second time a security breach has been connected to Claire,” Evie pointed out. The first being that her security card had been the only one to access Jack’s office in the days before the paper heart bomb exploded.
Jack turned around and faced her. “Claire is not the bomber.”
“No, she’s not, but it’s possible the bomber is using her to get access to you.”
He was a dark silhouette against the L.A. skyline. She couldn’t make out his face, but she felt the anger rolling along his body, tightening and tensing his muscles.
“He’s not going to win,” Jack said. Confidence was so damned sexy on this man.
“I know.” She slid her hands along his chest.
His hands pressed against hers. “He is not going to hurt the people I care about.” Jack’s heart thundered against her palm in a message stronger than words. He cared. About his staff. About her.
His head dipped, a slow, calculated movement, giving her a chance to back away from the deal.
A laugh bubbled up her throat, and she threw her arms around his neck, capturing his lips with hers. His hands slipped around her back, and he drew her against the solid wall of his chest, a groan—one she felt more than heard—ripping low in his gut, across his chest, and against her lips. She welcomed it with a soft groan of her own. His hands slicked across the buttery folds of the dress he’d chosen for her, slipping it from her shoulders and past her hips, where it fell to the floor like a brilliant spill of paint.
His fingers fanned through her hair, lifting it, then splaying it across her shoulders and chest. He stepped back as if to admire his handiwork. “Beautiful,” he said around a smile.
With less gentleness, he tore off his jacket, shirt, and tie. In the moonlight his skin was molten gold. She ran first her eyes, then her fingertips along the dips and mounds of his chest, smiling as his skin rippled and gleamed with heat.
Her fingers froze just above the skin peeking out above his right hip. She stepped back and blinked. “You have a tattoo.”
He pulled her to him, his lips sliding along her neck. “Yes.”
“When did you get it?”
“Discuss later,” he said against the hollow of her throat.
She pushed him away. “Discuss now.”
His breath came out in ragged puffs. “This is another power struggle, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
Jack eased back but kept his hands around her hips. “I got it in New York.”
She unlatched his belt and tugged down the waistband of his trousers, exposing an elongated four-pointed star. “What is it?”
“A compass. To remind me that I am the master of my fate and captain of my soul.”
She traced the tip of the star. “I’ve heard that before.”
“From the poem ‘Invictus.’ My brooding seventeen-year-old self loved it.”
She ran her index finger along his waistband. “And you chose to tuck it away and not share your message with the world.”
“It was a message for one.” His entire body stilled for a handful of endless seconds before he unfastened the button of his dress pants, the fabric falling and exposing the full tattoo with a curving letter N and arrow. A compass from a man who knew exactly what he wanted in this life and how to get it. And he’d chosen to show it to her.
She threw herself into his arms, his hands exploring every heated inch of her, pausing only when he found the piece of raised skin on her thigh. “And you have a scar,” he said. “Recent.”
“Houston. Falling glass.” She pointed to the tiny white scar dissecting her eyebrow. “Same place I got this.”
He kissed her from the tiny scar through her eyebrow to the one on her thigh and every place in between, and she melted into him, wondering how she could ever have thought him cold.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Wednesday, November 4
6:12 a.m.
Evie stood at the kitchen counter, a knife in her hand and a frown on her face.
“Personally, I thought sex was pretty damned incredible last night,” Jack said. After making love in his office he brought her to his penthouse and made love to her again in his bed, and if he had his way, he was very much looking forward to repeating the act in his kitchen.
He crossed the room and nuzzled the side of her neck. She tasted sweet and salty. He slipped his hands under the black shirt she’d thrown on and ran his palms up the silky curves along her waist and chest.
“It was.” Evie pushed him away and aimed the knife at his chest. “Where’s your juicer?”
“My what?”
“Citrus juicer.” She stabbed the knife at the counter, and for the first time he noticed a small mountain of sliced oranges on the counter. “I was craving fresh-squeezed orange juice this morning, so I went to the store and bought oranges, but now I need a juicer.”
Jack ran his hand along the stubble of his chin. “I don’t have one.”
“You own twenty acres of citrus—”
“—but don’t own a juicer. I know, Evie, I’m in serious need of help.”
She tossed the knife in the sink and wound her arms around his neck, the sweet, sunny smell of oranges engulfing him. His hands cupped the soft swells of her hips.
“It’s a good thing you have me.” She landed one more kiss on his lips, then patted his butt. “Back in a
flash.”
The tails of his shirt flying out from the faded curve of her blue jeans, she darted out of the kitchen, and with her went his breath. While a bomber was rocking all of Los Angeles, one tiny bomb investigator was rocking his world. He stared at his hands, empty but for the lingering heat of her skin. She’d slipped away from him so fast, so easily. Because she had juice to make. Work to do. Serial bombers to stop. His fingers curled into his palms. And in the staccato tick of a clock or the single beat of a heart, she could be gone.
He flattened his palms on the cold granite of the kitchen counter. There was nothing he could do to stop her. As she reminded him yesterday in her blistering speech, he wasn’t Parker Lord. He wasn’t the president of the United States. He was a crucial part of her current investigation and her chauffeur. When the case was over, she’d move on to the next pile of smoldering wreckage. Away from him.
The front door swung open and seconds later, Evie charged into the kitchen with a small, round electronic appliance. “Voilà!”
And he was also the guy whose compass shook every time she walked into a room. Pushing himself up off the counter, he crossed his arms over his chest. “Where did you get that?”
“Mrs. Simmons two floors below. She told you to keep it. She has two others.”
“You know Mrs. Simmons?”
“I do now. Nice woman.” She nudged him aside and plugged in the juicer. “She invited us to a potluck at her place a week from Saturday.”
But would Evie be around a week from Saturday? Would she have already slipped out of his life? “A potluck with my neighbors?”
“I told her we’d be there.” She grabbed two orange halves. “With cake.”
Jack couldn’t help it. He forgot about next week and people who slipped out of his hands and laughed, because now was a good time to laugh.
As she squeezed the oranges, he scrambled eggs and made toast. They ate breakfast, neither reaching for their phones or computers, because when that happened, the magic of fresh-squeezed orange juice would end.
Evie set down her empty glass. “I have work to do.”
“Me too.”
“Ready to play chauffeur?”
“I’m going to check in with Agent MacGregor on his search for Abby.” Last he heard from Agent MacGregor, no one had seen or heard from Abby after she disappeared from The Colony. But she was alive. He refused to let that bit of hope slip from his hands. “Then I need to take the helicopter out to Ojai.” The horse wasn’t just part of a collection. It was a living, breathing thing, and according to his new stable manager, the living wasn’t easy for the blind racehorse.
“Problems with Sugar Run?”
“Manny texted this morning. Sugar Run isn’t adapting well to the new environment.”
“Good. You go take care of your dream.” She leaned over the table and gave him a sweet, orangey kiss.
* * *
8:09 a.m.
“How old is he?” Evie asked the woman standing at the bottom of the playground slide. At the top of a jungle gym stood a little boy with stick-straight blond hair and a dirty face. He was banging a stick on the plastic roof of the slide, the metal rail, and the nine plastic tic-tac-toe squares.
The woman smiled. “Two and a half. Not quite a terror, but close.”
Evie took out her shield and showed it to the woman. “Keep your eye on him, okay?”
The woman wrapped her arms around her chest even though the sunshine flooded the little park off Grand this morning. “I heard the police on the news say the Angel Bomber’s next victim might be a blond-haired child.”
“We’re doing our best to make sure there are no more victims.” Evie smiled at the kid banging away like a drummer in a rock band. “But in the meantime, keep him close.”
Carter Vandemere was scheduled to strike in two days, and if he hadn’t done so already, he was probably on the hunt for a brown-haired woman and a blond infant.
It was impossible to think she could talk to every parent with a young blond-haired child, but any she saw as she was cruising downtown had been getting a personal warning from her. She’d already stopped by neighborhood day care centers and school bus stops where mothers with infants waited for their older schoolchildren. She’d been to fast-food restaurants with play gyms and jogging tracks where parents ran with baby joggers.
Save the baby!
* * *
8:25 a.m.
Smokey Joe waved off the steamy cinnamon roll. “Thanks, Katy-lady, but I’m not hungry.”
“We need to talk,” Kate said. She’d surprised the snot out of him when she showed up last night. Said she missed his cranky old butt, and he missed her, but he had work to do.
“Need to git back on the phone calls.” Smokey Joe ran his hands along his desk until he found his headset. They had two days before Evie’s bomber would strike again, and calls were pouring in to the Angel Bomber hotline. L.A. coppers were taking the calls, which were being taped, and one by one he was going through ’em, listening for anything that might prove useful. Evie said bombers usually kept their distance. They didn’t like to get too close, but it was possible the bomber would insert himself in some way into the investigation. Right now Smokey was interested in a pair of calls that sounded like they came from the same man using different names. “We’ll talk on my lunch break, okay?”
“Not okay.” Kate sat in the chair next to his, the sigh from the chair cushion just as loud as the one that came from her mouth. This morning she sounded tired and a little peaked. Probably her new job. She was heading up some public relations stuff for a real nice nonprofit group in Reno. He was so damned proud of her, getting back into the world of the living.
Smokey slipped the headset around his neck. “Then talk fast because this crazy fella is about to strike again. A woman and a baby. What kind of screwball kills little babies with bombs?”
She let out another long breath. “I talked to Fran yesterday.”
He fingered the headset cord. “Fran? Who the hell is Fran? Does she know something about the bomber?”
“Fran Watland, your cousin, the one who lives in Key West.”
“Franny? Why, I ain’t seen her for fifty years. We used to go blackberry picking together on the Rim. How is the old girl?”
“Great. She said she’d love to see you.”
“Did you give her my address? She can visit me on my mountain as soon as I help Evie get this Angel Bomber business taken care of. So you’ll need to excuse me, Katy-lady; Evie needs me.”
He settled the headphones over his ears and pushed Play.
Someone clicked Stop.
“Why the he-ell did you do that?”
Kate took the headphones from his head. “You’re not going back to your mountain.”
“What?”
“Over the past six months you’ve run off every aide your caseworker has arranged to live with you. You have refused my repeated offers to move in with Hayden and me. So Fran said you’re welcome to move in with her and her daughter.”
Smokey chuckled.
“I’m not joking, Smokey.”
“Me neither, so you can tell Franny and everyone else I ain’t leaving my mountain.”
There was a long pause. Smokey counted the ticks on the clock somewhere near the door. He counted to a hundred before she said, “At this point, what I say doesn’t matter.”
“What are you talking about, Katy-lady?”
“After you drove your car off the mountain, your caseworker set off to track down your closest living relative and found Franny. She explained to Franny that you’re a danger to yourself and others. Franny agreed.” Kate’s voice cracked. “Franny also agreed to serve as your legal guardian if you are unable to make sound choices. If you choose not to go live with your cousin, Franny will seek a court order giving her conservatorship. Don’t you see, Smokey? I’m no longer in the picture.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Wednesday, November 4
3:51 p.
m.
Evie poked her head into her office. Hayden was staring at a computer, and Smokey Joe was staring at the wall.
“Meeting starts in two minutes,” she said. Neither Hayden nor Smokey Joe moved. She banged on the door frame. “Wakey-wakey. Ricci called an all-hands meeting and needs status reports.”
Hayden pulled on his jacket and headed out the door. Smokey didn’t so much as move an eyelash.
“Come on, Smokey. Ricci will have donut holes.”
“Not going.” The old man knotted his arms across his chest.
Evie fell in step with Hayden. “Someone wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?”
Hayden nodded. “I’ll fill you in later.”
On the conference room walls, most of the beautiful women wore smiling faces. The same could not be said for the group gathered around the conference table. They had two days to catch a bomber out to kill two people, including an infant. Every hair on Evie’s body stood on end.
Ricci sat at the head of the table. “Just got the fingerprint report from latent. One set of fingerprints in Vandemere’s studio matched Lisa Franco’s. Blood type found on the futon was also a match.”
Knox’s hands fisted. He’d been working the homicide case and just got the evidence he needed. He knew his killer; now they just needed to find him.
“Cho, anything new with stuff found in Vandemere’s workshop?” Ricci asked.
“I followed up with the art store in Whittier. No one remembers the purchase or a customer who looks like the man in our sketch. I’ve also been visiting home improvement and hardware stores that sell the items we found, and again, no hits. And no hits so far on the coffee cup we found.”
“Anything on the hotline, Hayden?”
“More than five hundred calls came in after the sketch aired. So far nothing solid.”
“What about Abby Elliott?” Ricci’s questions came at a rapid-fire pace.
“I tracked her to The Colony where she had an unwanted admirer named Dougie,” Jon MacGregor said. “I haven’t been able to find a trace of her or her art beyond that. Right now I’m looking into cold cases from fifteen years ago and checking into unidentified bodies of young women.”
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