by Rebecca York
"Thanks," he said, his tone sardonic.
Instead of spouting more information, she asked one of the questions that had been deviling her since the night before. "Do you have that scratch you put on your arm?"
"Yeah. I'd show you, but taking off my jacket and rolling up my shirtsleeve out here is only going to raise more eyebrows."
"I'll take your word for it."
Neither one of them spoke for several seconds.
"What are you thinking now?" she asked.
"I'm trained in investigative techniques. I'm trying to apply my police detective skills. Unfortunately, this is like a case where you find a dead body. But nobody saw anything. There's no physical evidence. There's nobody with an obvious motive. So I'm still trying to figure out—why us?"
She shrugged. "I don't know." Deliberately looking him in the eye, she said, "Contrary to what you may think, a wild, irresponsible sexual escapade with a guy I barely know isn't my normal behavior."
She was pleased to see him struggling to bite back a grin. "An interesting way to put it," he said, keeping his voice neutral. Then, "Not my style, either."
She kept her eyes on his. "After I woke up from the dream, I waited for you to call me. Why didn't you phone me last night? Or this morning?"
"I wanted to get some distance."
"I don't think either one of us is going to have much success with that."
"Oh, yeah? What do you know that I don't?" he asked, the challenge obvious in his voice.
"The same thing you know! Stop looking for hidden meanings in everything I say. Are you still accusing me of being a witch?"
"If you're not a witch, then we're back to the other theory—that it's some outside influence."
"You prefer witchcraft?"
"Christ, what a choice!"
In the dream she'd told him she was scared. Pride kept her from saying it again, but she wrapped her arms around her shoulders, rocking slightly as she fought to hold herself together. There was nothing she could say about their shared experiences that would make either one of them feel better. But she did have something to offer him. "Well, I do have some information to give you."
She watched him stiffen. "Like what?"
She dragged in a breath. "Like somebody tried to hurt me this morning."
She had the satisfaction of seeing his face whiten. Maybe—No, she wouldn't let herself hope for any genuine concern on his part. He wanted to take her to bed. But the impulse wasn't his choice. This morning he was just a cop doing his job.
"What happened?" he asked.
She kept her voice steady. "When I came out to get the paper, I tripped over a piece of plastic fishing line strung across the door frame."
"Were you hurt?"
"I scraped my hands—that's all."
"Let's see." He reached for her hands, turned them over, cradling them in his large palms as he looked at the scrape marks. Gently, he ran his thumb over the one where her hand had hit with less force. It was just a light touch. Still, she felt it all the way to her toes.
For long moments, neither one of them moved, until he must have realized that he was holding on to her. He was simply examining the scrapes. But after the wild, erotic kisses they'd exchanged, just his touch had the power to make heat pool in her center.
Perhaps his reaction was as strong, because she heard his breath quicken.
He cleared his throat, turned her hands loose. "Where's the fishing line?"
She snapped herself out of her trance. "An Officer Lorton took it away. It was across the bottom of the front door frame."
"You made a report?"
She raised her chin. "I wanted it on the record."
He strode around the house, bent down to look at the scene of the crime.
"The line was strung between the hinge and that nail," she said, pointing.
"Do you have any idea who did it?"
"Not at all. After the dream—I thought I heard someone outside. Then I saw a cat, and I figured that was what I'd heard. I guess I was wrong."
"Fingerprints?"
"Lorton didn't find any."
"Who wants to hurt you?"
"I don't know! It could be someone who wants to hurt Heather. The front door leads to her apartment, too."
Mentioning Heather made her remember what she'd originally intended to tell him, before events had gotten away from her. "There's something else. Yesterday, I went back to Heather's apartment and did some more looking around. I found something…"
"What?" he demanded.
"I'm not sure. I'm thinking the best thing is to show it to you."
"Is this a ploy to get me inside?"
"You certainly are a trusting bastard."
He heaved a sigh. "Sorry. As I said last night, I'm on edge. Let's go in."
TWO streets away, Simon sat in his car, grinning like Ronald McDonald—only he had a gray wig instead of a bright red one.
With a sharp laugh, he bounced his palms against the steering wheel, pleased with the way things had worked out this morning.
"Hey, lady, you too busy to help me out?" he said, repeating his opening line with an exaggeration of his old man voice.
He'd been going to scoop up Reynolds—until he'd seen that nosy neighbor watching him.
So he'd sped up and turned the corner, thinking he'd try again in a few minutes. Then he'd come down the street the second time and hit the jackpot.
Confrontation wasn't his style. He had always been cautious—stealthy. But when he'd seen the guy get out of his car, he'd known that the last time he'd seen the man, he'd been dressed like a Roman general.
Jesus! He could hardly believe it. The guy who had been with Reynolds in that vision. The vision that had broken his concentration.
Goose bumps had risen on his arms, and he'd known he had to get the hell out of there.
Then reason prevailed. He was in disguise. They had no way of knowing who he was, either dressed like this or dressed like Simon Gwynn, for that matter, and if he played his cards right, he'd come out on top of the situation.
So he'd eased the car forward. The government plate had instantly registered. The guy could have been a county building inspector, of course. Or from the tax department. But Simon had studied cops—and this guy looked like one.
Two seconds of conversation had confirmed that hypothesis. And the stupid bastard had given up his name—just like that. Of course, he probably didn't have a choice. He was a public servant; he couldn't hide his identity.
He was still grinning over the turn of events when the full implications of this couple struck him, and his features turned sharp. They had been in the vision. They had destroyed his concentration.
Which must mean the demon was the one who had brought them together—forged the bond of sexual energy that had destroyed his ceremony.
Once the idea took hold, it began to resonate. Of course the demon was using them! What else could explain last night?
A low sound rose in his throat. They both had to be eliminated—and quickly.
But his original plan to simply kidnap Reynolds was too dangerous. Now that he knew someone would be looking for her—her lover boy police detective. And the cop would be a dangerous opponent.
What he had to do was get rid of Jack Thornton. Which meant making some other quick arrangements.
He started the car again, in a hurry now. As he drove, his mind was busy, already making plans for the ceremony he would perform.
JACK let Kathryn walk past him, then followed her up the stairs to her apartment. Again, he stood aside as she opened the door. He felt the stiffness of his body. The determination that he wasn't going to reach for her again.
Inside, he folded his arms in what he knew must look like an uptight gesture as he stood in the middle of the living room, waiting to find out if she really had something to show him or if she was making an excuse to get him in here.
She opened a desk drawer, took out a letter-size envelope, and held it out to hi
m. He saw she had clamped her bottom lip between her teeth—the way she'd done in the dream, he suddenly remembered. He didn't want to think about the dream. Or anything strange. He wanted to focus on a real case he might have a chance of solving.
He dragged his gaze away from her and lifted the flap on the envelope, pulling out a piece of paper impregnated with colored dots, each one stamped with a picture of a cartoon character in the middle.
"Jesus!"
His exclamation had her gaze drilling into his.
"What?"
"Were you using this stuff with her?"
She looked confused. "What stuff? What is it?"
"You're saying you don't know?"
Her face turned stormy. "Jesus! is right. Every time you have a chance to think the worst of me, you do it. Whatever that paper is, I don't have a clue about it."
"Acid," he said, hearing the anger in his own voice.
"Acid?"
Either she was naive as hell or she was a wonderful actress. "LSD," he clarified. "Did you and she trip together? And now you're feeling guilty about it?"
"Of course not! I didn't even know what it was." Her posture changed as she took in the implications. "You're saying Heather took LSD? People still use that stuff?"
"It's certainly not as big as it was in the sixties. But people fool around with it. Didn't they teach you about it in health class? Didn't people in college do it?"
She sighed. "I guess I was in the wrong crowd in college. And as for health class…" She shrugged. "Maybe I was absent when they covered it."
"The cat ate my homework," he muttered.
"What?"
"Forget it."
He saw that Kathryn had picked up the magic wand and was flipping it back and forth in her hand. His gaze was drawn to the damn thing. For several moments, he watched the blue liquid and the suspended sparkly stuff swirl back and forth.
The wand was just a toy. A novelty. It couldn't really have any magic powers, could it?
He strove to wipe that dumb notion from his mind as he slipped the envelope into an evidence bag. Too bad that his prints and Kathryn's were on the paper. He hoped they hadn't obscured some that might be more pertinent. Like maybe those of the boyfriend, Gary Swinton. Was that what the guy had been hiding? That he and Heather had been doing illegal drugs together? Or was there something more?
"Okay, if you aren't worried about my connecting you with Heather's drug use—what are you worried about?"
He saw her face pale. "What, exactly, do you mean?"
"Since the first time I came here, you've acted like you had something to hide. What is it?"
He watched her face harden, watched her struggle to relax. Long moments passed when he thought she wasn't going to answer the question.
Finally she gave a small shrug. "Family tradition, I guess. My mom had some bad experiences with the police."
"Like what?"
"I told you she found that porn stuff that belonged to my dad. After that, they had some pretty violent rights. Mom called the police a time or two before she threw Dad out. Let's just say the cops weren't very helpful," she said, speaking quickly, as though she were trying to get it over with. "Mom was left with a basic… dislike for the boys in blue, which she passed on to me. Which made it hard for me to make a report on Heather in the first place. But I did it. And I've continued to cooperate with you." By the time she was finished, she was standing with her hands on her hips and her jaw thrust forward.
She'd made him understand her basic attitude better. "I'm sorry about your mother," he said.
"It was a long time ago."
"But it still influences your thinking."
"Yes."
More gently than he'd spoken before, he said, "Thanks for the information. On Heather."
She nodded.
He half-turned toward the door.
"You're leaving?"
"Yeah."
"Jack—" She took a step toward him, reached out a hand. All it took was that simple gesture for a jolt of sexual need to zing through him.
He stiffened, anticipating her touch, fighting the unwanted reaction. "What?" he asked, his voice and his posture rigid again.
She dropped her hand. "We have to talk about us."
"There is no us!" he said as firmly as he could, willing it to be true. He had children who needed him. He had cases he was working on. He had no time for some kind of crazy sexual compulsion. Before she could engage him in a conversation, he pulled the door open and escaped.
Somewhere in his mind, he knew he was deep in denial. But he couldn't cope with her, couldn't cope with his need. Couldn't cope with what he saw as failure. He was a disciplined man. Yet discipline broke down every time he was with this woman. Rather than take what he wanted—what she was silently offering—he fled.
It wasn't until he was in the car that he remembered somebody had tried to injure her this morning. And, as a cop, he had a responsibility to do something about it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
« ^ »
AS SOON AS he got back to work, Jack checked with Lorton and found out the officer could add nothing to what Kathryn had already told him. Next he looked at reports from the neighborhood, trying to determine whether the fishing line stretched across Kathryn's doorway was an isolated incident.
He found that over the past few days, there had been several break-ins within a five-block radius. Nothing too big. Someone had jimmied a sliding glass door, gone in, and boosted a television set and stereo equipment. A lawn mower had disappeared from a nearby garage. The older daughter in a Moslem family had been harassed. Kids had stolen several cars. But none of the crimes seemed to have any connection to a fishing line stretched across a door frame.
He had to go on the assumption that someone had specifically wanted to hurt Kathryn—or DeYoung.
He wanted to see Gary Swinton's expression when he asked him about the line. And he was about to leave for Circuit City when Captain Granger asked for an update on the missing person cases.
Not now, he thought with exasperation. What he said was, "I'd be happy to update you."
Glad that he could give a coherent account of the investigations, he spent an hour going over what he knew about each of the three cases that Granger had asked him to try and tie together—feeling uncomfortable at the way the captain was looking at him. He kept waiting for Granger to reveal what was on his mind, but his boss remained silent. So Jack plowed ahead with the facts he'd uncovered when he hadn't been tied in knots by Kathryn Reynolds.
There was still no word on the missing child, Kip Bradley, or his father, Henry Bradley. But Jack had discovered some deep-seated hostility between Bradley and his ex-wife. She said he had taken off for Montana, where he had relatives who were willing to hide him. Jack had contacted the relatives, who claimed not to have seen him. He'd also contacted the Montana State Police, who had gone out to the ranch and failed to find Bradley.
The young mental patient, Stewart Talber, was another matter. Now in his early twenties, Talber had been in and out of mental hospitals and various outpatient programs since he'd been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic at the age of fifteen. Most recently, he'd been living in his mother's house out in the county. The mother had died two months ago, and his relatives were worried about him. But when they'd come out to the house with two county mental health workers, Talber had disappeared. Jack had talked to some of his relatives and determined that Talber had a history of disappearing—so there was no proof that anything sinister had happened to him. Jack had intended to check out homeless shelters in D.C. and Baltimore, but he hadn't gotten to it yet.
The case of the young woman, Brenda Quinlin, did bear some similarities to Heather DeYoung. She was single and lived alone. She'd failed to come in to work after a week's vacation. But there still wasn't enough information to link the two cases—except that the two victims were young women who had disappeared when they weren't necessarily expected home. Which could imply that they might
have been stalked.
"So that's all you've got?" Granger asked when he finished. "Nothing that would show a connection?"
"I've just started."
"You usually work faster than this."
Jack shrugged. Granger was right, but he couldn't dredge up any excuse that he liked the sound of. "I was just going to interview DeYoung's boyfriend again."
"Okay. Go on."
Jack grabbed some peanut butter crackers from the machine, then drove to Circuit City.
Walking into the small appliance department, he looked around for Swinton. He wasn't there, and Jack's next stop was the manager's office.
"Where can I find Gary Swinton?" he asked.
The secretary stopped chewing her gum and rolled her eyes. "Gary? He was here this morning. Then he said he was sick, and left. He's been out a lot lately. Mr. Victor is probably going to fire him. Only I don't think he really cares. He's been acting like he's got more important things to do."
"Uh-huh. How long ago did he leave?"
"A couple of hours."
"Thanks," he answered. His next stop would be the D.C. apartment where Swinton lived.
He checked the address that Kathryn had given him—it was in the Adams Morgan area, which spread out from the intersection of Eighteenth Street and Columbia Road.
Once it had been a white-bread, upscale D.C. neighborhood. Now it was one of those melting pots where African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and whites lived together in tolerable proximity. A colorful mix of ethnic restaurants and shops, secondhand stores, older apartment buildings, and row houses lined the main arteries.
Swinton's address turned out to be a small redbrick apartment house off Columbia Road. Jack found a place to park down the block, then walked up the cracked sidewalk to the building. It wasn't exactly a slum. But some of the hall tiles needed replacing, and the wall could use a new coat of paint.
Swinton lived in 3B. Since there was no elevator, Jack walked up two flights. When he got no answer, he walked down to the basement, where the super lived.
Inside the man's apartment, he could hear a television blaring. His first knock yielded no results. He attacked the door with a noisy fusillade—finally attracting the attention of a wizened old man who opened the door a crack, blocking access with a safety chain.