Upon a Midnight Clear
Page 2
“Yeah, mine.” Dixon explained the situation. “I figure either the guy got away before I made it over here or he’s still hiding somewhere in the building.”
“We’ll check it out.” Cesar waved to his partner. “Andy, you go around and keep an eye on the fire escape. I’ll do a room-by-room search.” He turned back to Dixon. “You wait here. I might have more questions for you later.” He started for the entrance at a jog, yelling over his shoulder, “And for Pete’s sake, put your gun away. The citizens tend to freak when they see men who look like wild-eyed psychos dripping blood and brandishing firearms.”
“Dripping blood?” Dixon eased the pistol into his waistband and tugged the sweatshirt over it. “Hell, I stopped dripping five minutes ago.” Cesar didn’t respond; he was already inside.
Dixon stared intently at the entrance. He was ninety percent sure the shooter was long gone. Nonetheless, he focused his full attention on the double doors. Just in case.
When someone touched his shoulder from behind, he shied like a nervous horse, then whirled around, the .38 steady in his hand, his trigger finger poised ready to waste the bastard.
“Mr. Yano?”
He relaxed as soon as he saw who it was. “Dammit, don’t creep up on people like that, Ms. Roundtree. You could get yourself hurt.” He tucked the pistol back in his waistband.
“You’re already hurt.” Frowning, she reached up to touch his wounded arm. “You should go to the emergency room.”
“It’s just a scratch, nothing to worry about.” He grinned. “A Band-Aid or two and I’ll be fine.”
Her face remained grave. “That was a bullet, Mr. Yano. I was standing at the window and someone took a shot at me. Now do you believe I’m in danger?”
His grin faded. “Yeah, I do, only you don’t need a private investigator. The police will handle the investigation. I’d only get in their way, and they tend to get a little jacked out of shape when that happens.”
“Please, Mr. Yano.” Her beautiful mix-and-match eyes were full of entreaty.
“I can’t help you. The minute that bullet was fired, this became an active police case.”
She took a step closer and placed one hand on his arm. “The police can’t protect me twenty-four hours a day, but you could.”
And what would her fiancé think of that? he wondered.
“Be my bodyguard, Mr. Yano. I don’t want to die. I’ll pay whatever you ask. Please.”
Forget it, warned his common sense. This lady’s nothing but trouble. She’s a flake. A beautiful flake, but a flake any way you slice it. And what’s worse, she’s engaged. Tell her to buzz off, Dix, old buddy. This case stinks to high heaven.
“All right,” Dixon agreed.
“Who knew the obituary was a fake?” After a tedious trek through the red-tape jungle at police headquarters followed by an equally irksome delay at the emergency room, Dixon had brought Alexandra back to his office, where cardboard and duct tape now blocked the view across the street. He handed her a mug of cocoa.
She took a sip, barely tasting it. Not even chocolate helped when depression was this profound. Who knew the obituary was a fake? What he really wanted was a list of suspects, a list of friends and family. “My mother. And my uncle, of course. My sister.” She paused to take a calming breath. “And Mark.”
“No one else?” The expression in Dixon Yano’s soft brown eyes was even more comforting, more warming than the cup of hot chocolate she gripped between her hands.
She frowned. “Mandy probably told her husband, and Uncle Rex might have mentioned it to Aunt Virginia or my cousin Shelby.”
“Mother, sister, brother-in-law, uncle, aunt, cousin, fiancé.” Dixon counted them on his fingers. “A short list.”
“It could have been an outsider, a stalker who followed me to your office.” But she didn’t really believe it.
“Maybe,” he said. “How about motive? Who has a reason to want you dead?”
“Nobody!” Her protest was vehement.
Dixon raised an eyebrow. “Okay, then. Who benefits if you die? Who inherits?”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” Alex jumped to her feet, sloshing cocoa down the front of her blouse. “Dammit!”
Dixon rescued the half-empty mug from her uncertain grasp and handed her a wad of tissues from the box on his desk.
Blinking back tears, she daubed at the stains. “Dammit,” she said again, her voice shaking. “This blouse is silk.” But Alex knew the cause of her upset wasn’t a blouse.
Evidently Dixon did too. He folded her gently into his arms and held her until she calmed down.
Warm and comforting eyes. Warm and comforting arms. Alex relaxed. She felt safer in Dixon Yano’s embrace than she’d felt in weeks. Why couldn’t Mark hold her like this?
Mark. Mesmerized by the steady, reassuring beat of Dixon’s heart, she’d forgotten about her fiancé. Reluctantly, Alex pulled herself free. “Sorry.”
A rueful half smile tilted one corner of his mouth. “No problem.”
Her heart skipped a beat at the expression on his face. Behind the kindness, the sympathy, she saw a hint of something else. Approval? Attraction?
She blinked, then deliberately shifted her gaze to the ring on her left hand, a nice, safe inanimate object.
If she were honest, she’d admit she was aware of him too. Dixon Yano’s rugged good looks were very appealing.
Stay focused on the real problem, Alex. Somebody’s trying to kill you. Irritated with herself, she paced the narrow office, pausing next to the makeshift cardboard window-pane. Now that the sun had gone down, the air penetrating the flimsy barrier was cold. She rocked back and forth, hugging herself against the chill while her thoughts ran in pointless circles. “What now?”
“First dinner, I think, and then bed.”
She shot him a wary look, but he wasn’t smirking at her. He wasn’t even looking in her direction. He scowled instead at the scarred surface of his desk.
Another nice, safe inanimate object? she wondered, feeling obscurely cheered.
Alex jumped when he smacked one fist in the palm of the other hand like a baseball player testing his mitt. “Where will you be safest, though? You can’t stay with any of the prime suspects, and you can’t stay alone.”
“My place,” she surprised herself by saying. “I have an apartment over Gemini Gifts. No way in except through the shop.”
“You can’t stay alone,” he repeated.
“I won’t be alone because you’ll be camping out down in the break room ready to protect me from the bad guys.” Alex smiled. “I have a folding cot.”
Dixon was scrunched up on the narrow cot, doing his best to get comfortable on a bed designed to accommodate a child. One support bar burrowed into his back just below the shoulder blades. A second elevated his knees. In between the two, the thin foam mattress dipped like a swaybacked nag.
He shifted, trying to relieve the pins and needles in his shoulders. He’d long since lost any feeling in his feet. They hung off the end of the mattress in the chilly limbo between the cot and the door.
Despite the discomfort, he must have dozed off, though, because it was after two when he shot upright, wide-awake, his heart slamming double time. He recognized the condition as fight-or-flight syndrome. But what had triggered it?
Stifling an idiotic urge to shout Who’s there? Dixon slid quietly out of bed, his right hand reaching automatically for his gun. Barefoot, dressed only in a pair of black sweats, he slipped through the door of the break room. At first glance the shadowy shop, illuminated by a single overhead fixture in the office alcove, appeared empty. Then he saw her, a pale slim figure hovering near the back door. The hairs on his arms stood up. In a long flowing robe, she looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past. “Alexandra?”
“Shh.” She held a finger to her lips. “I heard a noise out back. I think someone may be trying to break in.”
Dixon moved noiselessly to her side. He could see her hands tremb
ling, hear the catch in her voice.
A loud clang shattered the stillness, sending a fresh shot of adrenaline pumping through his bloodstream.
Alexandra jerked violently. “There it is again!”
Dixon motioned for her to move back, then eased the door open a crack, just far enough to accommodate the barrel of his gun and give him a narrow line of vision.
The harsh glare of the security light lit the paved area near the door. The night was cold and empty, the only sound the eerie whistle of the wind as it lashed the naked limbs of the poplars that formed a loose barrier between the parking lot and the railroad tracks.
Gooseflesh puckered the skin of his bare chest and arms, three parts attributable to the cold, one part a purely atavistic response to the unknown. What the hell had made that noise?
As Dixon edged through the door he caught a movement in his peripheral vision and whipped around just in time to see a raggedy, misshapen figure disappearing down the alley.
A bum. Just a bum.
And the sound? He scanned the area thoughtfully, his attention drawn to the Dumpster. He lifted the lid an experimental six inches or so and let it drop. The resulting sound was loud enough to wake the dead from their coffins.
Shouting threats and waving a mop, Alexandra rushed out the back door of the shop. She stopped abruptly, her fierce expression melting into confusion as she realized no enemy lurked within striking distance. Slowly she lowered her weapon. “What made that horrible racket?”
“Dumpster cover.” Dixon demonstrated. “A bum was going through your trash.”
“Myron?”
Dixon shrugged. “We didn’t introduce ourselves.”
“Myron’s homeless. He’s been hanging around for the past few months. I slip him food sometimes.” She looked puzzled. “But I’ve never known him to prowl this late.”
“Maybe he couldn’t sleep.” An affliction to which Dixon could relate.
TWO
“A wake would have been more appropriate,” Alex complained, viewing her fellow party goers with a jaundiced eye. Not one of her mother’s guests had mentioned either her obituary or its subsequent retraction in today’s paper. She felt like the invisible woman.
“But you’re not really dead,” Regina pointed out with irrefutable logic. “And that’s just as well; black is a wretched color on me.” Her mother pressed a glass of punch into her hands. “Lighten up, sweetie. It’s Christmas.”
Alex started to take a sip, remembering in time Dixon’s admonition that she avoid eating or drinking anything at the party. She frowned across the room. “Mother, that isn’t Congressman Flanagan, is it?”
When Regina whipped around to look, Alex tipped the contents of her glass into a potted poinsettia.
“No, it’s not. I was mistaken.”
Spots of color highlighted her mother’s cheekbones. “You must have been. I’d sooner invite the devil himself than that … that … Democrat!” She scanned the room, her fingers worrying at the fringe on her vest. “Who’s the thug near the buffet table? I don’t remember inviting him. Could he be one of Flanagan’s flunkies?”
Alex waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “No, that’s Rocky, my bodyguard.”
Regina frowned. “I thought you hired Dixon Yano.”
“I did. But he had a court appearance this afternoon. Another case.” She shrugged. “He knew he’d be late, so he enlisted Rocky to run interference until he gets here.”
Her mother eyed Alex’s alleged bodyguard dubiously. “Are you sure he’s trustworthy? The man looks like a gangster.”
“And drives like a maniac. We slewed sideways three times coming up your hill.”
“You need studs,” Regina said.
“Talking about me behind my back, Reggie?” Mark pulled Alex into a casual embrace and flashed her mother his hundred-megawatt grin.
Regina spared him a thin smile.
Alex prudently hid her own amusement. Her mother hated being called Reggie. Actually, she wasn’t all that fond of Mark, no matter what he called her.
“We were talking about snow tires,” Regina explained. “Alex’s driver had trouble getting up the hill this evening.”
Her mother’s new log home sat on a hill overlooking Brunswick. The steep, winding drive was the price she paid for a spectacular view.
Regina turned to Alex. “Speaking of studs, shouldn’t Dixon be here soon? You’ve met Dixon, haven’t you, Mark?”
“Dixon who?”
Alex started to explain, but her mother cut her off. “You know, Dixon Yano.”
“No, I don’t know. Who’s Dixon Yano?” Mark glanced from mother to daughter. “Any relation to old Hiroshi Yano, who owns most of Arrowhead Heights?”
Alex shook her head. “I have no idea who his relatives are. He’s dark-complected, but he doesn’t look Japanese.”
“Dixon Yano is a private detective,” Regina told Mark.
“Private investigator,” Alex corrected.
Mark frowned. “What do you need with a PI, honey?”
Alex pulled her hair behind her ear. “Look at the side of my face, Mark. Someone took a shot at me yesterday.”
Mark brushed her right cheek. “These look like cuts, not bullet wounds.”
Did he sound disappointed? Alex studied his face for a moment, then gave herself an angry little mental shake. She didn’t seriously suspect Mark, did she?
“Bullet wounds? What’s this? I thought you said you weren’t hurt!” Regina’s voice rose shrilly. Several of her guests turned to stare.
Alex shook her head. “I wasn’t. A few scratches. With my hair down, they don’t even show. I caught a little flying glass. Dixon’s the one who was shot.”
“How is he?” Regina still sounded upset.
“Sore, but not incapacitated. The bullet just grazed his arm.”
“There you go.” Mark snapped his fingers. “He was probably the target all along. PIs are always ruffling people’s feathers. You’re getting paranoid, honey.” He gave Alex’s shoulders a squeeze.
“Paranoid?” Regina’s lip curled. “What about the threatening letter? The mugging in the mall? The exploding reindeer?”
Mark’s smile held a hint of condescension. “A series of coincidences, Reggie.”
“If I stuck a ‘series of coincidences’ like that in a mystery novel, my editor would throw a tantrum.” Regina’s eyes snapped with annoyance.
Alex racked her brain for a way to defuse the situation. Much more of Mark’s interpretation and her mother was the one who’d throw a tantrum. She scanned the big, two-story living room, looking for a diversion.
Like a couple of impatient vultures, her brother-in-law, Tom, and her sister, Mandy, were circling Sadie Silverberg, Regina’s agent.
Tom Sutton was an excellent proctologist and a wretched wannabe writer. He’d recently finished a manuscript he called Complications, a combination medical thriller/horror novel in which his hero accidentally received a transfusion of vampire blood during a routine hemorrhoid operation. He’d already been turned down by eleven agents. Apparently he was going for an even dozen.
“Emergency at two o’clock.” Alex indicated the impending calamity with a jerk of her head.
“Oh, Lordy.” Regina set off on an interception course.
“What’s the deal?” Mark asked.
Alex sighed. Tom was a nice guy … if only he would limit his writing to prescriptions. “Tom wrote a …” She let her explanation trail off when she realized Mark wasn’t listening. His attention was riveted on something across the room. She followed his gaze to the group near the fireplace. Nothing exciting there. “Mark?” She tapped his arm. “Do you want to try the buffet?” As soon as she said it, she remembered Dixon’s warning. Okay, fine. She wouldn’t eat anything. She’d just shove the food back and forth across her plate.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Did you eat before you came? Is that why you were late?”
“No, something came u
p. Business. At the office.” He sounded distracted.
Admit it, Alex. He sounds like he’s lying.
“There’s Eileen.” He gave Alex’s shoulders another squeeze before releasing her. “I’d better go make nice.”
Eileen Loomis, part of the group near the fireplace, was the wife of the senior partner of Mark’s law firm.
“Want some company?” Alexandra’s offer was halfhearted. She’d never cared for either Loomis or his wife.
“No thanks, honey.” Mark grinned. “You might cramp my style. I plan to lay it on thick. There’s a partnership coming up, you know.”
Alex watched in irritation as he sauntered over to greet Eileen, the expression on his handsome face so charming, it ought to come with a warning label. He whispered something in the older woman’s ear and she slapped playfully at his arm.
Alex clenched her hands into fists. Why did Mark think he had to play office politics? He was a good lawyer. Wasn’t ability alone enough to secure a partnership?
Turning away in disgust, Alex surveyed the enormous living area. Regina Roundtree’s tree-trimming party was an annual event, a clever way to get her tree decorated and pay off her social obligations all in one fell swoop. One group of guests was putting the finishing touches on the tree while another had gathered around the piano, where Sadie Silverberg was pounding out “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” with all the verve of a born-again Christian. Alex opted to join the singers.
Dixon leaned against the doorbell. Even through the door he heard the chimes ring out, sandwiched in between one “comfort and joy” and another. But as the seconds passed and no one let him in, he began to suspect he was the only one who had heard the chimes. He pressed the doorbell a second time, propping himself wearily against the door frame as he waited. His injured arm throbbed in time with the piano.
“Hey, there! Do I know you?”
Dixon twisted his head around to see a perky little redhead wearing a faux-fur coat and industrial-strength makeup.
She drew back crimson lips in a smile as predatory as any crocodile’s. “We haven’t met, have we? I’d have remembered.” As she stepped forward to extend her hand her earrings, garish baubles shaped like miniature Christmas ornaments, caught the light. “I’m Shelby Winters, Regina’s niece.” She squeezed his hand.