by Meryl Sawyer
The glaring headlights blinded her, but she could tell the car wasn’t moving. With each gasping breath, energy drained from her body. Already she’d lost the feeling in her fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself to have the strength to hang on. She knew what would happen if she fell to the ground.
“What’s going on?” shouted a male voice from a short distance.
“Help!” shrieked Whitney. “Help me!”
The car careened sideways and tore off across the greenbelt with a roar and a plume of exhaust. In the darkness its taillights appeared to be two evil eyes, reminding her of the malevolent eye in Vladimir’s painting. The eyes glowed in the dark and vanished in less than a few seconds.
She released the bars and crashed backward.
ADAM SAW THE FLASH-FLASH-FLASH of the blue-white police car strobe lights as soon as he rounded the corner near the condominiums. He’d just walked in the door and read Whitney’s note when the telephone rang. An older-sounding man told him there had been an accident, but Whitney wasn’t seriously injured. The moment he learned this Adam had forgotten how furious he was with her for leaving the house.
He left his car at the first open spot he found, then stormed up to the cluster of people standing near two police cruisers and a paramedic van. Whitney was sitting on the curb, clutching a dachshund to her stomach as if holding herself together with the dog. An EMT was tending to a cut on her leg that didn’t appear to be serious.
Adam elbowed aside a policeman he didn’t recognize. “What happened?”
Whitney looked up at him, her expression blank, as if he were a total stranger. She finally opened her mouth to respond but no words came out. She averted her eyes. He dropped down onto the curb beside her and gently eased his arm around her shoulders.
“Are you all right?”
She slowly nodded and met his eyes. When he’d left Whitney, she’d been vibrant, happy—now she couldn’t utter a coherent sentence.
An older man with a Golden retriever on a leash told Adam, “Someone was trying to scare her. They chased her with a car. A prank.”
Adam’s blood boiled. He wasn’t buying this explanation. He asked the policeman, “What makes you think it was a prank?”
“We’ve had other incidents where cars have driven over our greenbelt,” the older man responded before the cop could. “Ruins the grass. When the pool’s finished, we’re relandscaping and putting in big boulders to keep cars from driving on the grass.”
“This is our second call to this location,” confirmed the uniformed policeman, who was taking notes for a report.
“Did they chase anyone else?” he asked.
“No, but they might not have had the opportunity.” The policeman flipped his notebook shut. “The other incident occurred just before dawn.”
“That time rap music from their car’s radio awakened one of the owners who lives close by,” added the elderly man. “They called the police.”
The EMT stood up. “I don’t think you’re going to need stitches,” he told Whitney. “It’s just a bad scrape. You’ll probably have a doozy of a bruise, though.”
“Th-thanks, th-thanks…so…” Whitney’s voice quivered, then trailed off.
The EMT backed away and joined his partner. The policeman said to Adam, “She’s badly shaken. You’d better get her home.”
“Hot milk or tea might help,” advised the man with the retriever. “Or bourbon.”
“I wish I could say we’re going to catch this jerk,” the policeman told Whitney, “but I doubt it. Without a description of the car or…anything.”
“I’m telling you, it was too dark for anyone to see a blasted thing.” The old man pointed to the dark area behind them. “I’ve still got twenty-twenty and I couldn’t tell you what kind of car it was. I heard screeching tires, then screaming. I came running. I’m not as fast as I used to be. All I saw was the outline of a car.”
“He couldn’t even tell us the color, except that it wasn’t a light color,” added the police officer. “Neither could she.”
Adam bent close to Whitney. “Did you see anything? Was it big like an SUV or was it small?”
Her glassy eyes were wide, the pupils dilated. She hadn’t been crying, but shock and a desperate need to control her emotions showed on her face. “I—It all happened so fast. M-my impression is mid-size. I don’t think it was an SUV but I’m honestly not sure.”
IT HAD SEEMED LIKE THE RIGHT idea at the time. The paramedics didn’t think she needed to go to the emergency room. He’d been anxious to get her out of there, get her home. Now, Whitney was sitting on the edge of his bed, and he wasn’t so sure.
She’d insisted on bringing the dachshund with her, almost as if she was afraid to let the little dog go. She hadn’t said a word on the short drive home. When he’d directed her upstairs, she obeyed in a robotlike way.
Shock.
Adam had seen it often enough in Iraq. He’d dealt with it himself after the suicide bomber killed his friends and almost took his life as well. There wasn’t much he could do for her. Time and sleep helped. He’d learned that much from his own experience.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. “Is something wrong with your shoulder? You seem to be favoring it.”
She put down the dachshund and scooted between the sheets. Da Vinci and Jasper were already curled up on top of the bed and Grey joined them. Lexi was on the floor looking anxiously up at Whitney, mirroring what Adam was feeling.
Whitney leaned against the pillows he’d arranged for her while she’d been in the bathroom changing into his T-shirt. “I’m fine. My shoulder’s a little sore because Grey was hanging from me.”
“Do you feel up to telling me about it?” He didn’t have any more information than what he’d learned at the scene.
She reached down to the end of the bed and stroked Grey. “You know what’s amazing about dogs?” She didn’t wait for him to respond. “They forgive you for anything.”
Her answer seemed a little spacey and he wondered if she’d hit her head during the so-called prank.
“Even the most abused dog will lick his owner’s hand—first chance the dog gets. You’d think they would bite or run away. They don’t. Dogs are so forgiving.” She petted Grey’s head and the little dog nosed her with his snout. “I nearly killed this dog. He doesn’t even know me, but the second we hit the ground, Grey licked my face to see if I was okay.”
Hit the ground? Where had she been? Adam sat down on the bed beside her. He did his best to keep anger and fear out of his voice. “Tell me what happened.”
He listened carefully as she described the car that appeared suddenly from out of nowhere. He envisioned it deliberately changing course and wheeling to the right and charging directly at her. Imagining her on the fence, the dachshund hanging from her arm, made him smile despite the situation.
“Good thinking,” he told her. “Fast thinking. You might have been killed otherwise.”
“If that’s what was happening.” She edged backward until she was propped up against the pillows again. “Mr. Fisher—he’s the older man with the Golden—thought it was a prank. He may have been right.”
“Why do you say that? It sounds intentional to me. If not, it was dangerous as hell.”
“When I looked back, the car had stopped several feet behind me. It didn’t ram the fence even though it could easily have crushed the back of my legs.”
Adam had to admit that did seem a little odd. “Maybe he didn’t want to damage his car.”
“And maybe I overreacted. Even if it had been a prank, it was dangerous. I could have been accidentally killed. The driver needs to be found and stopped before someone gets hurt.”
Adam wasn’t sure what to think. His training as a detective warned him that two near misses on the same person’s life wasn’t just a random coincidence. “Maybe someone mistook you for Miranda,” he said, thinking out loud.
“I doubt that. There’s been enough pu
blicity about the firebombing for anyone to realize Miranda isn’t around.”
“Criminals often seem clever, but most of them are stupid. I remember a case we had in Robbery—Homicide. There had been a series of bank robberies. The banks started booby-trapping money with vials of indelible ink that exploded when thieves removed the paper banding a stack of bills.
“We were pissed because the media found out about the trick and publicized it. Everyone and his mother knew about it. A few days later, another bank was robbed. We caught the guy because he was covered with ink. He hadn’t seen the news reports.”
“You think someone believes I’m Miranda?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“It’s possible, I guess. Mr. Fisher mistook me for Miranda at first.”
Adam mulled over the facts for a few minutes but couldn’t come up with a better explanation. Mistaken identity, or just a prank? “Listen, I’m going to hop in the shower. Why don’t you get some sleep? We’ll see what the police come up with tomorrow. They’ll make plaster casts of the tire tracks in the lawn. That should tell us what type of car it was. With luck, that will help.”
He leaned over and gently kissed her lips. He wanted to pull her into his arms and squeeze her tight—to reassure himself that she was all right. But she’d been through so much that he didn’t want to risk hurting her.
She pulled the sheet up to her chin, and he turned out the light. He stood in the shower and let the water stream over his body. He felt helpless, the way he’d felt when he’d arrived at his uncle’s villa in Siros. He hated not being in control, not being able to help Whitney.
As soon as Quinten Foley’s men searched the house tomorrow, he was going to Cancún with Whitney. If Miranda wasn’t working in a shop at Corona del Mar, he believed they would find her in Cancún. She had the answer to this—
“Holy shit!” he said out loud. He leaped out of the shower, wound the towel around his waist, left the bathroom and raced through the dark bedroom. He was down the hall and in his uncle’s office before he saw Lexi had followed him.
“Go guard Whitney,” he said, then realized Whitney was with the dog.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, her eyes wide.
Adam grabbed the picture of his uncle fishing off the wall. “It just hit me. Something’s written on my uncle’s baseball cap.” He flung open the middle drawer of the desk and found the magnifying glass.
“You think…?”
He examined the script on the cap. “I’ll be damned. Corona del Mar.” He gazed at her, thinking out loud. “How much do you want to bet Uncle Calvin took Miranda to Cancún last December?”
“But her passport—”
“Would have been examined by customs officials but not necessarily stamped. Airports for private planes operate differently.”
“Do you think they were, you know, involved?”
He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Good thing I’m not on the force anymore. They’d bust me down to writing traffic tickets. I should have considered the romance angle before now.”
‘I didn’t think of it, either. The age difference—”
“What? Twenty years—give or take. My uncle was a good-looking guy with a lot of money. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman ignored a few years when a guy was rich.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
RYAN SHAVED AND inspected his reflection in the mirror. Where in hell was Ashley? It had been almost dawn when he’d come home. He’d expected her to be asleep but it was evident that she hadn’t even touched the bed. He’d lain awake—thinking, wondering.
He was willing to admit that he had been harder on Ashley than necessary. Poor baby couldn’t help it if she had a heart of gold. She hadn’t wanted Whitney to suffer. Ashley had no idea how much trouble Whitney was causing him.
“Wait!” he exclaimed to his reflection. “That’s it.”
Last night he had told Ashley they were on the verge of bankruptcy. Ashley must think she’d caused their troubles. She loved him so much that she might be trying to singlehandedly solve their problems. She might have gone to borrow money from someone she knew.
In the middle of the night?
Ryan splashed on the aftershave lotion Ashley had given him. “She’s mad at me,” he again said out loud. “She spent the night with a friend.”
That made sense. He probably deserved it, but she had no idea what pressure he was under. Thanks to Whitney.
Ryan walked into his closet to get dressed. He halted and spun around. How long was Ashley planning to stay with her girlfriend? He went into her closet, but he couldn’t tell what she’d taken. She had too damn many clothes.
Brooding, he wandered back into the bathroom and checked the vanity area where Ashley kept her cosmetics. “Oh, shit!” What did women do with all this crap? He couldn’t tell if she’d removed a thing.
It didn’t matter, he decided. He had to get dressed. A hell of a day was ahead of him. Tonight, Ashley would be here waiting for him. He wouldn’t make it easy, but he would forgive her.
He loved Ashley so much that it hurt sometimes. It pained him not to be able to give her everything she wanted or be the successful doctor she believed him to be when they’d met. He needed her love in a way that he’d never needed anything else.
ADAM LOOKED OUT THE AIRPLANE window at the aquamarine water. It was so clear he could see the reefs below the surface. The ocean off California and the west coast of Mexico was deep blue. Here on Mexico’s eastern shore the sea was the blue-green of the nearby Caribbean. Judging from the beaches below, Cancún enjoyed the same white sugar sand, too.
He glanced to his right and saw Whitney was still asleep. No wonder. They’d talked until almost dawn, then she’d been forced to get up and walk her clients’ dogs, arrange care for her own dogs and buy some things for this trip. He’d arranged to have a security guard from HiTech go with her—just in case.
The timing couldn’t have been better. While she was out, Quinten Foley’s team had thoroughly searched the house.
Nothing.
They’d gone through every book, checked every CD and DVD, examined each photograph for hidden text, knocked on paneling to see if there was a secret hiding place and they’d used some special machine to inspect the stonework for loose places where the disc might have been hidden.
Nothing.
If Calvin Hunter had hidden the disc at the house, the experts hadn’t had any better luck than Adam. When they’d finished with the building—interior and exterior—they’d gone over Uncle Calvin’s Lexus sedan.
Nothing.
While all this had been going on, another team had searched the charred, water-soaked contents of the garage where Miranda had stored her things.
Nothing.
Adam would have bet that they were coming up empty because the disc wasn’t here. He was positive Miranda had it. Now that he thought about the situation, it made perfect sense. She’d faked the robbery and made off with the computer and the disc or discs.
The information on the disc was worth a lot of money. Not for the first time, he wondered if Miranda had killed his uncle. If they’d been involved, his uncle might have confided in her. She would have had access to the house, his car, his computer.
Beside him, Whitney stretched and yawned. “Are we almost there?”
“Yes. You can see the beaches below.” He moved back so she could look out the window.
“Wow! Such white sand. It’s nothing like Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta. Their beaches just have regular sand like California.”
He nodded his agreement, thinking how special Whitney was. He needed to clear up this mess before something happened to her. He’d tried to piece the puzzle together but hadn’t been able to make things fit. Miranda was the key.
Last night, after they’d discovered his uncle had also been to Corona del Mar, Adam went round and round in his head trying to decide how much to tell Whitney. He would have told her ever
ything except she was still shell-shocked by the incident with the car.
In the end, he’d elected not to complicate matters by explaining his uncle’s involvement with Quinten Foley in some clandestine government deal. What did he know for certain anyway? Not a damn thing, really.
He thought back to the last time he’d seen Calvin Hunter. His uncle had been worried, certain someone was going to kill him. He’d refused to reveal any details, but Adam felt his death had to be linked to the missing disc.
What other explanation could there be?
The plane had been slowly descending for some time. Now it dipped lower on final approach. The endless blue of the sea stretched out to the horizon.
“What’s our first move?” Whitney asked.
He wanted to lure her to some cabana where sea breezes would cool their naked bodies while they made love. Business first, he reminded himself. There would be plenty of time for them later.
“Have a margarita and take a swim.”
“Seriously,” she replied with a laugh.
“Check into our hotel. Change clothes, then drive out to Corona del Mar for a drink. The cocktail hour should bring out residents who may have met your cousin.”
“You think Miranda is out there?”
They’d discussed this last night, but Whitney had been a little groggy. “Hard to say. If she’s not there, someone may recognize her picture. Cancún isn’t that big. The thing to do is check Corona del Mar. Then we’ll show the photos you had made around at supermercados and other places people who stay here long-term would shop. If she’s living here, she’s shopping somewhere. She can’t be eating out all the time.”
IT WAS NEARLY TEN WHEN Ryan checked the clock mounted on the wall beside the pool. The device gave the temperature and the time. He didn’t need to check the temperature. He could tell it was still in the mid-seventies even though it was dark and the temperature had dropped the way it usually did on summer evenings.