“Where are you right now?”
“The Motel Six off Route 75—”
“And you didn’t call in and give your location and a phone number when you landed last night,” Laronda scolded. “Cell phone satellites were out from five-thirty this morning until about ten minutes ago. We couldn’t reach you, Locke. Max is not happy. I am not happy. No one is happy—”
“I tried, but it was oh-five-hundred when I got here,” Alyssa protested. “Which wasn’t that long ago. I was getting one of those system-wide busy signals, and I figured since I was only going to have about four hours before I got back on the road, I might as well use that time to actually sleep instead of trying to call in.”
“Where’s Lieutenant Starrett?”
“Next door,” Alyssa said. “Probably still sleeping.”
“Get him,” Laronda ordered. “Stay with him. Bring him back to Sarasota.”
“What’s going on?” Alyssa asked. “I just spoke to Jules and he said everyone’s heading down there.”
“Does anyone ever tell me anything?” Laronda complained. “I’m Max’s message service today. Eighteen years and I’m walking voice mail. Let me read you Max’s complete message: ‘Tell her to bring the son of a bitch—’ that would be Lieutenant Starrett ‘—back to Sarasota ASAP. Tell her not to let him out of her sight. Tell her I’ll call her as soon as I’m out of this expletive deleted meeting.’ An expletive deleted meeting with the United States President, I might add. So do what the boss says, Locke, and get yours and the son of a bitch’s butts to Sarasota. Now.”
Mary Lou had just cleaned up Haley and Amanda after their breakfast and set them up with The Little Mermaid video, when she heard the sound of crying.
She followed it to Whitney’s room—with all of its pink and white frothy froufrous that had been hand selected by some famous interior decorator.
The door was ajar, and Mary Lou knocked on it as she pushed it open.
“Go away,” Whitney sobbed. “Just leave me alone!”
And Mary Lou might have—had she not caught a glimpse of the girl’s face.
Someone had given her one hell of a bloody lip.
Someone? Someone named Peter Young, the little prick.
Mary Lou went into Whitney’s bathroom and wet a washcloth with cool water. She carried it back out into the bedroom, where she sat on the edge of that candy-colored bed and rubbed Whitney’s back.
“Come on, honey,” Mary Lou said, with the same gentleness that she used with Haley and Amanda. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Whereupon Whitney launched herself at Mary Lou and hugged her with a ferocity that was not unlike her two-year-old daughter’s.
Mary Lou rocked her and let her cry, murmuring that it would be okay, it was going to be okay—knowing what it was like to be so desperate for affection that any attention from any man was interpreted as potential love. If true love made you blind, then lonely, self-loathing desperation made you blind and deaf and unable to think clearly—so much so that the seemingly appropriate response to a leering look from a stranger was to sleep with the man.
When the girl’s tears finally let up, Mary Lou asked, “You want to tell me what happened?”
“What do you care? You’re just being nice to me so that I won’t tell my father that your name isn’t really Connie Grant.”
Mary Lou had to laugh. “Go on and think that if you want. Besides, I already know what happened. Peter broke up with you, you got in his face about it, and he backhanded you.” She pressed the cold cloth gently against Whitney’s swollen lip.
The girl’s eyes welled with fresh tears as she pushed the cloth away, but this time they were tears of anger. “I caught him with his dick in Sarah Astrid’s mouth.”
And this actually came as a surprise?
Whitney wiped her nose with the back of her hand, wincing as she got a little too close to her cut lip. “He was in his car, and he and Sarah just looked up and laughed when they saw me standing there.”
“Oh, honey …”
“So I called him up later and pretended I wanted to see him and, you know, get it on, like I didn’t care about what he did with Sarah the slut.”
Whitney wasn’t a particularly pretty girl, but she did have a certain something in her eyes that, when lit, gave her charisma. It was on fire now.
“See, his parents were going out of town, so we made plans for me to come over—this was last night. So I bought, like, twenty-five bags of ice and got there before he got home. I climbed in through the kitchen window and I put the ice in his bathtub and filled it up the rest of the way with cold water. And then I lit all these candles in the bathroom and turned off the lights, like we were going to have some kind of big romantic moment, like something out of a movie, you know? And when he got home and saw that, he took off his clothes so fast, he didn’t even notice the ice in the bathtub, so I pushed him in and pulled out one of Daddy’s guns—”
“Whitney!”
She wiped her nose again. “It wasn’t loaded,” she said scornfully. “I’m not stupid. Of course, Peter the shithead didn’t know that. So I held it on him and made him sit there in that ice water for about five minutes, till his lips started to turn blue. Then I made him get out and stand there, and I took some digital pictures of him with his little, teeny shriveled dick. And I put them on the Internet.”
Mary Lou couldn’t help it. She started to laugh. “Oh, my Lord, girl!”
Whitney was laughing, too, but it faded quickly. “But then this morning, he told me if I hadn’t of done that, he was going to ask me to marry him, but now he wasn’t going to. And then he backhanded me.”
The tears were back in her eyes, and Mary Lou gave her a gentle shake. “What are you doing crying over a boy who can’t keep his johnson out of Sarah Whatsis’s ugly mouth? You think he was serious about marrying you—for any reason other than he wanted to get his hands on your father’s money? Here’s a hot tip, hon. If a man loves you, truly loves you, he’s not going to be fooling around with anyone else. And he’s sure as hell not going to backhand you and make you bleed. Not ever.”
Whitney moved slightly away from her, taking the washcloth and pressing it to her lip, pulling it back to look at the blood. But then she made a face. “Yeah, what do you know about true love, Connie-Wendy-whatever? Your loving husband wants to kill you.”
Sam may not have been loving, but he certainly hadn’t wanted to see her dead. Mary Lou got a twinge of remorse every time Whitney referred to her fictional murderous spouse. And over the past day or so, the girl had managed to bring the subject up an awful lot.
“Actually,” Mary Lou said, “toward the end of my marriage, I did meet a man who loved me the way true love should be. With grace and kindness and sweet devotion.”
“You cheated on your husband?” Whitney asked incredulously. “No wonder he wants to kill you.”
“I didn’t cheat,” Mary Lou said, then corrected herself. “Ihbraham didn’t allow me to cheat. I would have if he’d have let me. I was that desperate.”
Whitney nodded. For once she had no smartass response.
“I didn’t realize I loved him at first,” Mary Lou told the girl. “He was a gardener and, Lord, he wasn’t even white.…”
“Oh, my God!”
“Yeah. And my husband was this officer in the … the—” Air Force, she was going to lie, but really, what did it matter? “The Navy.” She went with the truth. It was easier to remember. “That seemed so much, I don’t know, flashier, I guess. More important. I mean, who wants to say, ‘My husband is a gardener’? But you know what? It really, honestly, doesn’t matter. What you really want to be able to say is ‘My husband loves me, and I love him, too.’ That’s what matters.” Unfortunately, it was a lesson she herself had learned too late.
“So where is he?” Whitney asked. “If he loves you so much? What’s his name—Abraham?”
“EE-braham Rahman, spelled with an I,” Mary Lou said. “He was from Saud
i Arabia.”
“He’s, like, an Arab?” Whitney’s mouth dropped open. “Weren’t you afraid he was a terrorist?”
“No,” Mary Lou said.
Whitney could smell a lie a mile away. Took a liar to know another liar. The girl just lifted an eyebrow and waited.
“Yeah, okay,” Mary Lou admitted. “So there was this bad … thing that happened, and I thought he was involved, and I left town with … with Chris because I was all freaked out, and I thought not only was he a terrorist, but that he was a dead terrorist.” It had broken her heart.
“Wait a minute,” Whitney said. “You thought what?”
“I thought he broke the law,” Mary Lou simplified. Yeah, simplified was an understatement. What she’d thought was that Ihbraham had been part of a plot to assassinate the U.S. President. She’d thought he’d used her to smuggle guns onto the Coronado Navy base in the trunk of her car. She’d actually seen one of those guns, touched it even. She’d first thought it was Sam’s and had been royally pissed that her Navy SEAL husband had left it in the trunk of her car, where she might’ve gotten into trouble for carrying it around.
But it turned out that Ihbraham had nothing to do with the terrorist plot. He hadn’t put that gun there, either. He was just a gardener. Just an American who happened to be born in Saudi Arabia.
Who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Someone else had used her to smuggle those guns onto the Navy base. Someone who had traced her to Sarasota all these months later and killed Janine. Someone who was surely still searching for Mary Lou.
“There was an … incident some months ago,” Mary Lou told Whitney now, trying to explain why she’d thought Ihbraham was dead. “Terrorists started shooting into a crowd, and yeah, they were definitely al-Qaeda—and they definitely looked it. Some of the folks in that crowd started beating the hell out of anyone who looked like they came from the Middle East. Ihbraham was there and he was attacked.”
“You can’t blame people for trying to protect themselves!”
“No,” Mary Lou agreed. “You can’t. But there’s a huge difference between knocking a guy to the ground and searching him for a weapon or restraining him until the police can come—and kicking a hole in his skull.”
Whitney winced. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. After it was over, he was taken to the hospital, unconscious. No one expected him to survive.
“I filed for divorce from my husband and left town.” She continued with her story, because for the first time ever, Whitney was really, really paying attention. “After I’d gotten to know Ihbraham, it seemed kind of obvious that my husband didn’t love me. Not even a little. And I … I’d finally found out what real love felt like. There was no point in sticking around in a marriage that had nothing to do with anything real.”
She’d also feared arrest. Sooner or later someone would find out that she’d smuggled those guns onto the base. It had been inadvertent on her part, sure, but her past experiences with the police didn’t give her much faith in their ability to see subtle differences in the facts.
“I spent five months thinking Ihbraham was probably dead, and then my sister got sick of me crying myself to sleep every night, and called his business number.” It was the same day they’d moved out of the house they’d shared with Janine’s ex-husband Clyde.
Jan had been feeling extremely proactive in affairs of the heart, so she’d called the phone number on the landscaping business card that Ihbraham had given Mary Lou a lifetime ago.
Being Janine, she’d been direct and to the point. She was Mary Lou Starrett’s sister and she wanted to know if an Ihbraham Rahman who’d used to work from this phone number was still alive.
“I was at work when she called him,” Mary Lou told Whitney. “But when I got home she told me that Ihbraham was alive.” Her voice still shook when she said the words.
At the time, Mary Lou had handed Haley to her sister, locked herself in the bathroom, and cried and cried. Ihbraham was alive!
“She actually spoke to him,” she continued. “He’d been in the hospital for three months, but he was almost completely recovered now and even working again. No, he was not a terrorist. He and his brothers had been questioned by the authorities, but they weren’t involved in the shootings. My sister also told me that after Ihbraham left the hospital he spent some time searching for me. But since I was keeping myself pretty well hidden … He asked my sister to tell me that he hoped I would give him a call. But, Lord, as much as I loved him—because I loved him—I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” Then Whitney answered her own incredulous outburst. “Because your husband would kill him, too.”
Mary Lou nodded even though it wasn’t Sam who would kill Ihbraham. Sam would probably welcome Ihbraham with a handshake or even a hug. Take my ex-wife, please.…
No, it was the terrorists—the real terrorists—whom Mary Lou was scared to death of.
One of them was a man, a very American-looking man with blond hair and blue eyes, who Mary Lou had only known as Bob Schwegel—obviously that had to be an assumed name. She’d met him in the library, of all places. He’d told her he was an insurance salesman, he’d flirted with her, and they’d become friends.
Sort of.
He’d certainly had access to her car during the time she’d found that weapon in her trunk.
And, months later, she’d seen him leaving her house in Sarasota with another man.
Her heart had gone into terrified palpitations at the sight of him, and she’d kept on driving, ducking down so that he wouldn’t see her, grateful as hell that she and Janine had switched cars several months earlier.
Janine’s car—the old light blue and maroon wreck that Mary Lou used to drive—had been in the driveway when she drove past. She’d been scared to death for her sister’s safety, but with Haley strapped into her car seat in the back, there was no way Mary Lou was going to stop.
Besides, it was possible the two men had rung the bell and simply asked Janine if Mary Lou was at home.
Wasn’t it?
In hindsight, Mary Lou knew that couldn’t have been the way it had gone down. Bob wanted Mary Lou dead—she had no doubt of that. And there was no way Bob would’ve gone to the door, talked to Janine, and walked away. Because Mary Lou might’ve called before she came home, and Janine might’ve said, “Some guy came looking for you, girl. Blond, killer cheekbones, movie star face …? If you’ve been telling this man no, quick, call him back so I can say yes.”
At which point, Mary Lou would know that Bob had tracked her—somehow—to Sarasota, and would’ve been heading north on the interstate to Jacksonville and beyond, faster than she could say presidential assassination attempt.
On that awful day, Mary Lou had waited until dark, until Haley was fast asleep in the car. She’d parked on the next side street down from Camilia and had crept up to the house from the back, moving as silently as she could. All the windows were dark, even though Janine’s car was still in the drive. The kitchen door was locked, so she’d opened it with her key and …
Found Janine, dead on the floor.
Lord God help them all.
As much as she ached to be with Ihbraham, she was not going to call him. He was one of the three people in this world who Mary Lou loved, one of the three who loved her, too.
Janine was already dead because of her. Haley was in danger just by being her child. There was no way Mary Lou was going to put Ihbraham at risk, too.
No freaking way.
She couldn’t stop herself. She had been strong for so long, but now as she sat on Whitney’s bed, in that horrible pink and white bedroom, she started to cry.
And this time it was Whitney—little messed-up demon child Whitney—who put her arms around her and murmured that it was going to be okay, that she wouldn’t tell her father anything, that Mary Lou’s secret was safe.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
“I’ve been ordered to head bac
k to Sarasota immediately,” Alyssa said when Sam picked up the hotel phone. No Good morning. No Did you sleep well? No Sorry to wake you, but … “And to bring you with me.”
Sam stretched experimentally. Yep. Every inch of him felt exactly as if he’d spent way too many hours cramped in a car made for people half his size, then fought off a couple of canine attackers without properly stretching out first, then slept in a bed with a gully in the middle of it for far too short a time.
He should have slept on the floor. He would have been more comfortable.
“I’m not going anywhere until I talk to the guy at the car dealer,” he told her, his voice gravelly with sleep.
“Yeah, I know,” Alyssa said. “That’s why you have exactly five minutes to shower and get your ass out to the parking lot. You might want to say a quick prayer that the place opens at nine and that our man works Tuesday mornings. Max’s orders didn’t include side trips, but I figure the way you drive, we can make it up on the road.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“That wasn’t necessarily a compliment.”
“No,” Sam said. “I meant thank you for—”
“You now have four minutes and forty-eight seconds,” Alyssa cut him off, and cut the connection, too. Sam hauled ass for the shower.
Alyssa glanced up as Sam got into her car still damp, with his hair wet and slicked back from his face. Thank goodness he still had the full beard. One of these days he was going to shave it off and then he’d look less like a mountain man and more like Sam.
Sam, the irresistible …
“Whoa,” he said. “You showered and got coffee and doughnuts, too?”
“I didn’t shower,” Alyssa informed him. “I figured we needed directions to Harrison Motors more than we needed me to smell sweet.” She put the car into drive. “Don’t touch that coffee until you open that map and verify that the intersection of Routes 20 and 24 really is south of here.”
Sam wrestled with the road map. “It is.” He looked up at the motel’s proximity to the highway in front of them and said, “Take a left out of the lot.” He glanced over at her. “I happen to think you smell very sweet. I’ve always thought you—”
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