The desire was still there, but she wouldn’t use Nick for angry sex. He deserved better...and so did she.
He stood beside her on the balcony. The branches of a tall conifer nearly brushed the edge of the railing. The view below was landscaping that led to a manicured golf course. She stared down at the shrubs, hoping she hadn’t destroyed her relationship with Nick. She liked him a lot. This was a man she could have a real relationship with.
Quietly, she said, “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need an apology.”
“It’s just that—”
“And I don’t need an explanation,” he said. “All I care about is that you’re safe. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you, not physically or in any other way.”
She forced herself to gaze into his face. In the pale moonlight, his features were shadowed and rugged. She could tell from the way his brow pulled down that he was concerned about her. Who wouldn’t be? She’d been acting like a crazy person. “This isn’t me.”
“Who is it?”
She was usually calm and stable. A midwife, for goodness’ sake. People trusted her to deliver their babies. “Tonight was a distortion, like in a fun-house mirror.”
“It’s okay.” His voice was gentle. “I can live with the crazy streak as long as you’re honest with me.”
“I swear I’ll be honest.”
“And I’m going to trust you, Kelly.”
He smiled, and she felt acceptance. She’d behaved badly, but he wasn’t kicking her to the curb. He was the kind of man who would stand by his friends. Was that what she was to him? A friend? Her relationship with Nick had the potential of being so much more than friendship.
Now wasn’t the time to discuss it. “I think I need some time alone.”
“Not a problem. I’ll take the bedroom at the end of the hall. You take the other.” He raised her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss across her knuckles. “Sleep tight.”
She watched him disappear into the condo. The hand kiss was sweet and gallant, but it told her that he wanted to keep his distance, and she didn’t blame him.
Her gaze lifted, and she looked up at the stars. Tears burned behind her eyelids. With all her heart, she wished that tonight had turned out differently.
Wednesday, 9:45 a.m.
THE NEXT MORNING after a shower, Kelly slipped into her tired khakis and shirt from yesterday and went to the front room of the condo where Nick was sitting at the dining room table.
“Good morning.” He saluted her with his coffee mug. “I brewed a pot, but it’s sludge. I want decent coffee from the diner in the Spencer Building.”
After last night, she wasn’t sure what to say. She’d already apologized, and he’d specifically told her that he didn’t need for her to clarify her behavior, which was good because she wasn’t sure she could tell him exactly what was going on in her head. He’d said that he wanted her to be honest. That, she could do.
She cleared her throat and said, “Going to the Spencer Building is fine with me. My van is there, and I need to pick up some fresh clothes.”
“You carry a wardrobe in your van?”
“While I’ve been living at Serena’s, I’m kind of a gypsy. Most of my stuff in Texas is in storage, but I have a couple of boxes of clothes that I’m dragging around with me.”
“Ready when you are.” He was already striding toward the door. “We get your clothes, then breakfast.”
Before she could indulge in one more second of angst, they were on the move. Action was exactly what she needed. As they ran through simple tasks, her mind cleared and her spirit lifted. First, the van. Then, the diner. By the time she’d eaten her Denver omelet and guzzled her second cup of excellent coffee from the diner, Kelly felt as though she could take on the world.
“You stick with me today,” Nick said. “If anybody starts following us, we’ll take them on.”
“Even if they’re looking for a story about my ex?”
He leaned back in his chair and regarded her steadily. “Is there a story you want to tell them?”
She could have smeared Ted Maxwell’s reputation and revealed him for the truly obnoxious jerk he was, but she preferred not to dredge up the nasty secrets of the past. “There’s nothing I want to talk about.”
“Honestly?”
“I don’t care about my ex-husband’s image. That’s his problem. Honestly, I don’t want to talk to the media because my past is awful, and I don’t want to be hurt anymore.”
“Fair enough.”
His brisk tone indicated that he really didn’t want to talk about this, and neither did she. “What are we going to do today?”
“I want to figure out what Uncle Samuel did with the money. His office is no longer considered a crime scene. That’s where we’ll start.”
“I don’t know how helpful I’ll be.” Tracking down a million dollars was way outside her experience. “I’m not good with money. I can barely balance my checkbook.”
“We’re not going to do accounting. I’ll leave that part to Marian and Rod. We’re going on a quest, and I have a feeling that you’ll be good at it.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got a talent for reading people.” The waitress delivered another coffee for Nick in a to-go cup. “It always helps to have fresh eyes on a problem.”
Like many creative types, he assumed that other people were as bright and clever as he was. She doubted that her fresh-eyed view would provide any new perspective, but she was willing to try. She owed him that much for putting up with her.
On the ninth floor, Nick greeted the receptionist and led Kelly down the hall to his uncle’s office. The atmosphere in Spencer Enterprises had changed slightly. Kelly noticed the employees sitting up straighter and showing more respect when Nick walked by. They had to be concerned about keeping their jobs. Even in a midsize corporation like Spencer Enterprises, the death of one of the principal owners meant reorganization.
In Samuel’s office, Nick sat behind the desk and pulled open the top left drawer. After emptying the back portion of the drawer of files, he reached underneath and did some kind of manipulation. The bottom of the drawer popped up.
Delighted, Kelly said, “A false bottom.”
“Uncle Samuel stored his cigars in here where Julia wouldn’t find them.” He removed the fake panel and looked inside. “Nothing here. The forensics team from the police must have figured this out.”
She leaned against the edge of the desk. “Did your uncle have a lot of these hidey-holes?”
“He liked to create illusions. Once, he told me that if he hadn’t been an architect, he would have been a magician.” He walked around to the front of the desk and waved an invisible wand. “Hocus-pocus, and a million dollars disappears.”
“Do you think he hid the cashier’s check?”
“That’s too eccentric, even for Samuel. I’m looking for something that might indicate what he was doing with the money.”
“Like a treasure map?”
“God, I hope not.” He leaned down to inspect the molding on the front of the desk. “Somebody already opened this one, too. See how the pattern doesn’t line up exactly?”
She imagined that the forensics investigating team had a ball going through this office with all the interesting little twists and turns. Samuel’s cleverness extended beyond the desk. A shoe-polishing machine popped out from underneath the credenza. The wall clock twittered like a mocking bird. And a panel slid aside in the back of his closet providing a hiding place large enough for someone to hide.
The closet space worried her. “If your uncle was killed, the murderer could have been hiding in here.”
“That was one of the first things I thought of. When you were trying to revive him, I looked in here. The police dusted it for fingerprints. They found only Samuel’s and mine.”
“Why would he make a hiding place?”
“To get out of work.” He flicked a switch and turned on a light inside the hiding space
. “He used to make Julia nuts by going into his office, and then not being there when she needed him.”
His uncle was beginning to sound more like a brat than a creative genius. As far as Kelly was concerned, there was a fine line between charming childlike behavior and irresponsible childishness. Samuel Spencer must have irritated a lot of people. “Any other tricks?”
“This one concerns me.” He went to the window with the great view of the foothills and glided his hand under the lower sill until he found what he was looking for. “I pull the lever here, and watch.”
A slot at the side of the window flipped open. The window, which hadn’t appeared to be on a track, slid into it, and fresh air swept into the office.
The locked room where his uncle allegedly committed suicide hadn’t been inaccessible. The open window gave an escape route for the killer.
Chapter Eleven
Wednesday, 11:15 a.m.
Yesterday, Nick had shown the window trick to the police, who duly investigated and concluded that the killer hadn’t lowered him or herself from the roof.
“That’s not the only issue,” he explained to Kelly. “The window only opens and closes from this side. If a killer used the window as an exit, it would have been open when we came through the door.”
She poked her head through the window and looked down, as she’d said she wasn’t afraid of heights. Then she started feeling around the edges of the window. “Maybe there’s some kind of trigger on the outside.”
It didn’t make sense. Why would his uncle install an outdoor opener? In case a hawk wanted to swoop in for a visit? It made no sense at all, and yet...
When she pulled back inside and looked back at him, her cheeks were flushed. “I love that your uncle had a way of opening the window. One of the things I hate about offices is how you can never get fresh air.”
“When this building was constructed thirty years ago, all the windows opened and closed.”
“The Colorado version of air-conditioning,” she said.
The climate on the front range of the Rockies was such that the temperature dropped low enough during the night to cool everything down and make air-conditioning unnecessary. At least, it used to be that way. Global warming made a difference, as did improved technology. All new construction had air-conditioning.
“The heating and cooling systems in these buildings have been updated several times. We use a lot of solar power.” He remembered a discussion he’d had with Samuel about wind turbines. “My uncle was talking about tearing down the Spencer Building and starting over, creating a model for natural energy use and conservation.”
“Is that a project he might borrow a million dollars to get started?”
“He might.” It would be exactly like his uncle to launch into a wild-eyed project that he knew Marian and Rod and even Jared wouldn’t approve of. “I was right about you bringing a new perspective. Good call, Kelly.”
She did a fist pump to celebrate her insight. “Yay, me.”
“If that was his plan, he must have been putting together blueprints.”
“On the computer?”
“My uncle never got into computer technology.”
“Really? He loved all these mechanical gizmos, but he didn’t use computer science—the most fantastic gizmo of all.”
“Here’s how Samuel explained it to me—a magician never reveals his tricks.”
She cocked her head to one side. “I don’t understand.”
“He liked being a genius who could dazzle his clients. It made him happy to come up with creative solutions that no one had ever considered. Computers tend to level the playing field. Anybody can sound smart if they have a free pass to the information highway. With the new architecture and blueprint software, it’s a lot easier to design a building.”
Nick suspected that Samuel also disdained computers because he liked to keep his secrets. If the money he’d borrowed from Radcliff had been a computer transfer, Nick could have found it in seconds. If Samuel had kept his project notes on the computer, they’d be easier to access.
“I wish I’d known him,” Kelly said.
“You would have liked each other.”
“Why is that?”
“You both look sweet and innocent, but you’re complicated.”
With the breeze through the window tossing her sunlit brown hair and a wide grin on her face, Kelly didn’t appear to have a care in the world. He never would have suspected her dark side.
Last night, he’d seen into the depths of her tortured soul. She’d been hurt, and she was enraged. When she came at him, she’d been more than hot. She’d been a beast, literally tearing off his clothes. Driven by fury and passion, she’d demanded hard, rough sex. And he had been ready, so damned ready, to give it to her.
The fuse had been lit, and he knew there would be fireworks. But he’d also known that he wanted more than a down and dirty one-night stand. If he’d taken advantage of her rage at her ex-husband and indulged in angry sex, there wouldn’t be a future for them. At least, that was what he’d told himself last night when he was lying alone in his bed, cursing himself for kissing her hand instead of grabbing her tight and making love to her on the balcony.
“Blueprints,” she said, “aren’t there like a million blueprints in the file room outside of the vault where you keep the gold?”
His brain was still fully engaged with the memory of her tongue plunging into his mouth and her fingernails clawing his back. “Blueprints?”
“For the new, improved building,” she said. “Didn’t you say he would have needed to draw up blueprints?”
The thought of tediously digging through the documents outside the vault gave him a headache. He reached down and manipulated the lever that closed the window. “There’s something else I want to do first.”
He escorted her to the elevator and they went down to the sixth floor where the sporting-goods distributor was located. This office was Nick’s favorite place in the building. Nobody wore suits in these sixth- and seventh-floor offices. The employees were outdoorsy people—skiers, hikers and mountain bikers—who actually used the equipment they sold and distributed.
With the help of the receptionist, they located Tony Bracco, the chief executive, in a display area that was as big as a gymnasium. Tony was a short, lean man with a skier’s tan and shaggy brown hair. In his hand, he held a crossbow.
“Hey, Nick. Sorry to hear about Uncle Sam. If there’s anything I can do to help, say the word.”
“How about letting me try that crossbow.”
“It’s a beauty.”
After he introduced himself to Kelly and told her to say hi to Serena and her husband, Tony showed off the features of the crossbow, a serious weapon meant for hunting big game. “A well-aimed arrow could bring down a moose.”
Nick handled the crossbow with respect, appreciating the design, the heft and the balance. He didn’t do much hunting, but when he did, he used a bow. It only seemed fair to give the prey a chance. “This baby looks more lethal than a rifle.”
“You bet it is. So I guess you’re not going to like it. This bow takes the challenge out of hunting.”
Nick nodded to the target on the far wall. “Can I try it?”
“Knock yourself out.”
He loaded the arrow, sited and fired. His arrow landed with a satisfying thump only one ring away from the bull’s-eye. “Maybe I won’t hunt with it, but this is fun.”
Tony nudged Kelly’s arm. “You want to try?”
“I’m not a shooter,” she said. “I like rock climbing.”
He gestured for them to come to a different area of the showroom. These offices weren’t warehouses for the equipment, but they had samples of everything but guns, which were far more regulated. The latest equipment appeared first in these offices, and the sales force processed orders for shipping.
The area dedicated to mountain climbing had ropes, pitons, hinges, shoes, helmets and other goodies to make the climb safer an
d more efficient. Kelly picked her way through the equipment with the kind of enthusiasm that comes from awareness. She knew rock climbing.
“Do you mind if I borrow some of this stuff?” Nick asked.
“Help yourself. Going on a little outing?”
“You might say that.”
With an armload of ropes, belaying equipment and grappling hooks, Nick led her back to the elevator and pressed the button for the tenth floor.
“We’re going up?” She eyed him curiously. “Why?”
“Testing your theory,” he said. “I want to make sure there was no way to open and close the window in Samuel’s office from the outside.”
On the tenth floor, he stepped into the concrete stairwell and used a piton to keep it from closing all the way. If the door locked behind them, they’d have to go all the way down to the ground floor to gain access to the building. At the door leading to the roof, it was once again necessary to prop it open and keep it from locking automatically behind them. In his office, he had keys to every door and office in the building, but there was no need to use them right now.
The view from the rooftop was panoramic, reminding him why he liked high mountains. The crisp air refreshed him, made him feel truly alive. He longed to be back home in Breckenridge, where corporate hassles were at a minimum. The small town of Valiant wasn’t the place he wanted to live, not anymore. He’d rather break off his own little piece of Spencer Enterprises and leave the rest of it to his brother.
Kelly strolled across the rooftop, weaving her way between air vents and solar panels. He appreciated her long legs and athletic stride as she made her way to the side of the building facing the foothills. She leaned over the waist-high parapet.
“Your uncle’s office is on this side,” she said. “Is it this end or the other?”
“Right here.” He dropped the equipment and studied the surroundings. “See if you notice signs that anyone else has been up here.”
“Like footprints?”
“And scratches on the concrete where a hook could have been attached.”
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