by Jean Barrett
“You can explain what happened, but until then…”
“Yes, we have to go on to Savannah. Unless, Cleveland aside, you’ve experienced something useful.”
There was a hopeful look in those fantastic blue eyes that she trained on him. He knew what she was asking him, and he hated to disappoint her again.
“I wish I could tell you that some new memories have surfaced by now. I’d give anything if they would, but they haven’t, no matter how hard I’ve been reaching for them.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Just what I told you this morning, and those shadows that came out of my session with Atlanta Johnson last night.”
Shane thought about those images as the cab worked its way through the early stages of the evening rush hour traffic on its way to the Cooper River bridges. He wished the meaning of them wasn’t stuck down there in the depths of his mind. Whatever they signified, a military operation gone wrong or something else, he had the persistent, bleak feeling that he’d screwed up somehow. That maybe he was to blame for lost lives.
The possibility haunted him. Made him wonder, when his memory did return, whether he would ever be able to forgive himself. Or if the torment would stay with him for the rest of his life.
There was something else. Another shadow that lurked under his consciousness. It wasn’t exactly a faint image like the others, more of an impression really. But he could feel her buried in his memory.
Her?
All right, it was a woman, and she had once mattered to him. How much and in what connection he didn’t know. Except there was one thing he was clear about. Whenever he thought of her, it was in past terms, which had to mean she was gone from his life. So, whoever she was, or had been, she was no longer a reality.
But the woman sitting beside him in the back seat of the cab was altogether real to him. Shane’s gaze slid in her direction, resting on her in a mixture of desire and tenderness.
Did Eden have any idea how tantalizing she was? Not because she was beautiful; her features lacked the necessary balance for that. But she didn’t need those kind of looks. Not when she had that incredible mouth going for her, the ivory skin framed by her dark, dark hair and those pure blue eyes and thick lashes.
He wasn’t going to start on her figure. He was in enough trouble as it was where she was concerned. Had been all day, his groin tightening whenever she came near him.
No, he decided, she probably didn’t know how desirable she was. In that area, if no other, she lacked confidence in herself. He wanted to show her just how wrong Charles Moses, and any other man who might have hurt her, had been not to hang on to her. Wanted to let her know all about the other qualities she possessed that had nothing to do with sensual pleasure but everything to do with a man valuing a woman for more than just her body.
Only Shane couldn’t tell her these things. He had no right to tell her, not when his life was still a blank, with no identity. But there was something he could share with her, that she deserved to know if he stood any chance at all with her when this was all over. Chance? Yeah, he guessed that was just what he did want.
“I know this sounds like a line a million guys have used before me,” he said, “but about those shadows…”
She looked at him, bemused.
“There’s another one who’s a woman,” he continued, telling her all about it.
“The Beth you referred to under hypnosis?”
“Could be. Whoever she is, I want you to know I don’t belong to her. She isn’t waiting for me. No one is, Eden.”
“How can you be sure of that? You can’t be sure.”
“My gut-level instincts tell me it’s true. And, memory or no memory, I think I must be someone who’s always relied on his instincts.”
She nodded, but Shane had the miserable feeling his certainty had left her unconvinced.
CHARLESTON WAS BATHED in the ruddy glow of a vivid sunset when the taxi reached Bahama Street where they had left the car. Their major concern at this point was not to be delayed by any further encounter with the two gorillas. Though it wasn’t likely, the pair might have managed to leave the Yorktown and return by speedboat in time to intercept them.
But that concern was forgotten when the taxi delivered them to their destination. Or as close as the driver could get to it, which was nearly a half block away from the Toyota.
“Looks like I’ll have to drop you off here, folks. I’m sure not gonna be able to get through that.”
The street in front of Harriet Krause’s building was blocked by several vehicles with flashing lights. A crowd of spectators was gathered there.
Eden prayed that the scene in progress had nothing to do with them. But she had an uneasy feeling, after she paid the driver and joined Shane on the sidewalk, that this event was no coincidence and they were in some way connected with it.
“We’d better see what’s up,” Shane said.
“Do you think we should risk it?”
“We don’t have a choice, Eden. Your car isn’t going anywhere until the street is cleared.”
But Eden wasn’t happy about the situation. She could see as they approached the activity that the flashing lights belonged to an ambulance and three police cruisers. Two uniformed officers were so busy holding the curious back that Eden and Shane were able to melt into the crowd unobserved.
I don’t know why I should be worried, she thought. The police can’t be interested in us, except maybe to question us about what happened aboard the Yorktown. And even if that episode had been reported to them by now, it certainly wouldn’t be a priority.
On the other hand, she and Shane had yet to learn that he wasn’t a wanted man, although at this moment he didn’t seem troubled by that possibility.
“What’s all the excitement?” he asked the man next to him.
“They’re saying a woman was murdered in one of the apartments up there.”
“She was murdered,” the woman beside him insisted. “I know the neighbor who found her and called the cops. There’s a detective questioning Walter right now.”
“So, maybe it was an accident or suicide,” the man suggested.
“Oh, please. Lying facedown with the back of her skull split open? I don’t think so.”
“Who was she?” Eden asked, fearing what was already obvious.
“I don’t remember Walt saying, but she worked for one of them sperm banks. It’ll be on the six o’clock news.”
Anxious to prevent the possibility of their own names being included in that broadcast, Eden laid her hand on Shane’s arm and drew him out of the crowd and over to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.
“Harriet Krause,” she murmured, hearing the shock in her voice as she faced him. She had a genuine reason now to be worried. “If we were seen entering or leaving her apartment, the police will be looking for us.”
“There isn’t anything we can tell them about her death.”
“Except that we might have been the last people to see her alive.”
“No, that would have been her killer.”
“Or killers. Those two brutes who were after us…”
“They couldn’t have murdered her, Eden. They’d just pulled up when they spotted us, and after that they were busy chasing us.”
“But if they beat us back here…”
Shane shook his head. “Not enough time.”
“You’re right. Even if they had somehow managed to get back here ahead of us, all this couldn’t have happened before we turned up again. Harriet’s death, the neighbor finding her, the police arriving on the scene. That has to mean she was killed shortly after we left her apartment, while the four of us were playing cat and mouse. But who—”
Eden’s speculation was interrupted by a swell of fresh excitement across the street. The two officers parted the crowd to allow for the passage of a gurney. Glimpsing the black body bag it bore as it was loaded into one of the emergency vehicles, Eden knew this was Harriet Krause on her
way to a forensic facility. It was not a pleasant sight.
Members of the crime investigation team followed the gurney out of the building and began to make their way to their cars. Eden tensed at the sight of them.
“Relax,” Shane said. “No one is looking this way. We’re just another pair of gapers.”
But Eden wasn’t satisfied until they shrank back into the concealing shadows at the mouth of an alley just behind them. That’s when she noticed something neither one of them had observed until now.
“Shane, it’s missing! The Mercedes was parked just about out there in front of where we’re standing now, and it’s gone! Those two had to have gotten back here ahead of us and driven off before the street was blocked.”
“There’s another possibility you’re not considering. A far more likely one.”
Eden stared at him. And then she, too, understood it. “There could have been someone else with them. Someone we didn’t see because he stayed behind in the car. And whoever it was might have gone up afterward into Harriet’s apartment and—”
She didn’t finish. Their attention was drawn again to the street where a path was being cleared for the departure of the emergency vehicles. Two men—probably the detectives on the case—emerged from the building, spoke to one of the uniformed officers, then drove off in their own car. The crowd was beginning to break up, drift away.
“Your ex-boyfriend, Charles Moses,” Shane said to her softly. “Could he be capable of murder?”
Eden shook her head. “I don’t know. There was a lot about Charlie that in the end I realized I didn’t know. Do you think he was the third occupant in the Mercedes?”
“Maybe. We know he met with Harriet Krause, and if Bruno and Boris were working with him… Yeah, he might have paid Harriet another visit today, one that ended with her death.”
“And then afterward fled in the Mercedes.” Eden gazed at the building across the street, its upper windows reflecting the last flaming light of sunset, and felt the sudden lure of her P.I. instincts tugging at her strongly. “I’d give anything to have a look inside Harriet Krause’s apartment. And that’s an urge that doesn’t make sense, because what could I possibly expect to find that the police haven’t already turned up?”
Shane didn’t answer her. He looked out at the street. There were only a few bystanders now. A single police cruiser parked at the curb was all that was left of the crime investigation team. Its lone officer remained on watch out in front of the apartment house.
“My car isn’t hemmed in anymore,” Eden said. “There’s no reason for us not to leave.”
“Did you notice?” Shane said. “There were no women on that team. They were all men.”
She had learned that Shane sometimes had an oblique way of approaching his subjects. She assumed this was one of those occasions. “What are you saying?”
“That a woman has the ability to observe useful things about another woman, or in this case her possessions, that a man can easily overlook.”
“You’re not proposing—”
“Sure I am.”
“And just how do you expect us to get past that cop over there and inside an apartment whose door is sure to be locked and sealed with the kind of bright yellow tape that gets you in trouble if you fool with it?”
“Maybe that door isn’t the only way in. Let’s drive around the block and see what the back has to offer.”
“Shane, this isn’t smart.”
“You’re a private investigator, aren’t you?”
It was a challenge Eden’s family pride couldn’t ignore, though she questioned her sanity when she found herself fifteen minutes later clambering around an ancient fire escape. And hoping neither one of them lost their footing on the iron rungs in the rapidly fading light. Not that the deepening twilight didn’t have the advantage of concealing them in the shadows, should any of the neighbors happen to look out their windows.
“See,” Shane whispered, indicating the door at the top of the fire escape. “There is another entrance.”
“And lots of that yellow police tape stretched across it,” she whispered back as they reached the landing. “Though I don’t know why the tape was necessary. The last time I saw a door this solid it was on a vault. Shane, we can’t possibly force our way in here.”
“Yeah, but look at the window over there. I think I can reach it.”
Eden eyed the window several feet away off the side of the landing. It had frosted glass, which probably meant it was a bathroom window.
“It’s probably locked.”
“Probably, but maybe I can pry it open.” He fished in his pocket, producing the screwdriver he had taken from the glove compartment in Eden’s car.
“Careful,” she whispered, watching him as he stretched out over the railing.
“Let’s see just how locked it is,” he said, one hand around the screwdriver, the other tugging on the sash. To Eden’s amazement, the window lifted without an argument. “What do you know. It wasn’t locked. Here.”
He passed the screwdriver to her, leaned out even more precariously over the railing, clamped his hands securely over the window frame and swung himself into space. For a breathless moment he hung there, and then with the strength of a gymnast, he lifted himself through the opening.
Whatever he was, or had been, Eden thought with a mixture of relief and admiration, it must have required rigorous conditioning.
Shane stuck his head out. “There’s a good reason why the window wasn’t locked. The catch is broken. Hold on while I come around to the door.”
Eden waited on the landing, looking nervously into the gathering darkness and hoping that she wouldn’t hear some voice down below raised in a sudden challenge. But the only sound that reached her ears seconds later was the snapping of a lock on the other side of the door.
“We’re in,” Shane whispered as he drew the door back. “Careful not to disturb the tape.”
Eden found that she had to get down and crawl through the opening to avoid the crime scene tape. When she got to her feet again, Shane had the door closed. She had armed herself with a flashlight from the car, but she had no more need for it than Shane had for the screwdriver.
There was enough light from the living room down the hall to tell her she was standing in a small kitchen. That there was light at all in the apartment surprised her.
“You didn’t go and turn on a lamp, did you?”
“There was one already on in the living room and another one in the bedroom. Don’t worry, there’s no one else in the place. I had a fast look to be sure.”
“The police must have left them on.”
Shane nodded. “Probably as a precaution. Now that it’s fully dark, that cop out front would be able to tell if anyone got in and was moving around up here. We’ll be all right as long as we stay away from the windows. Where do you want to start?”
Eden was the trained investigator. She ought to have been able to answer that question. The trouble was, she had absolutely no idea what they should be looking for. That made their intended search, even in an apartment this small, a monumental undertaking.
“Let’s try the bedroom first. If we can find anything that connects Harriet to Charlie or those two thugs…” She left the rest unsaid because she wasn’t sure what it could prove if they did discover evidence of a connection.
Talking in low tones, and only when it was necessary, they searched the bedroom, Eden taking the closet and Shane the desk. When she found nothing of interest in the closet, she began on the drawers of a bureau, hoping all the while that the police had already checked the apartment for fingerprints. Otherwise, without gloves, she and Shane would be leaving evidence of their search.
This is a waste of time, she thought. If there was any worthwhile clue in the place, the police would have turned it up and carried it away. What was I thinking to suggest it?
“Anything?” Shane asked her.
“Nothing. What about you? Tell me you found a bankb
ook with large deposits that has got to mean Harriet was receiving payoffs.”
“All I found were the receipts from the bills she paid. There wasn’t so much as a letter in the desk.”
“If there had been any letters or a bankbook, the police would have claimed them. Shane, this is useless. We should be on our way to Savannah.”
“Let’s not give up yet. You had a P.I.’s itch to investigate the place, and I’m all for trusting that. Let’s see if the living room has anything to offer.”
Leaving the bedroom and its contents as they’d found them, they moved down the hall to the living room. Eden tried not to think about Harriet Krause lying on its floor with her skull split open.
“You want to take the bookshelves there while I have a go at the cupboard?” Shane suggested.
A moment later, crouched in front of the cupboard, one hand on a lower door he had opened, Shane paused and looked over his shoulder at her. “What is it?” he asked, suddenly aware that she hadn’t moved, that she continued to stand in the doorway between the hall and the living room.
“Can’t you smell it?” Eden whispered. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it. She had been conscious of the scent almost from the second they had arrived at the entrance to the living room.
Careful to get nowhere near the windows, Shane got to his feet and came over to stand beside her. She watched him as he sniffed the air.
“Yeah, now I smell it. There’s a fragrance in the room. So what?”
“Shane, don’t you remember? Harriet wouldn’t let us in the apartment until she made certain neither one of us was wearing cologne or perfume. She was intolerant of them.”
“Okay, so this fragrance wasn’t hers. But the police were in here. Either one of them, or maybe the neighbor who found her, had to be wearing cologne or aftershave.”
Eden shook her head emphatically. “All men, and this isn’t a man’s fragrance. It’s a woman’s perfume. An expensive one from the smell of it, maybe French. And I’ll tell you something else. Whoever she was, she had to have been in this room for more than just a few minutes. Her scent wouldn’t be lingering otherwise.”