Jan Coffey Suspense Box Set: Three Complete Novel Box Set: Trust Me Once, Twice Burned, Fourth Victim

by Jan Coffey

  “I don’t think I can go to sleep.”

  “Try.” He helped her to her feet. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  The look of gratitude in her gaze touched Owen inside. She glanced down at the sofa and at the pillow on one end. She peeled the blanket from her shoulders and handed to him. “You are a very decent man, Owen Dean. I don’t think I could ever repay what—”

  “You don’t have to.” His fingers brushed a new tear off her cheek and she blushed.

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever been so emotional.” Sarah turned to go, and Owen watched every step she took. At the doorway to the bedroom, he asked the question that had been burning in his mind.

  “Would you have married him if he’d asked you again?”

  She turned around slowly. Her eyes were polished jade in the light from the kitchen.

  “No. I could never have married Hal. I had learned to respect him. I was sorry for all that he’d suffered. But I could never have married him.” She leaned against the doorjamb. “I’m the product of a loveless marriage myself. I’d never make the mistake of marrying a man I couldn’t love.”

  Chapter 14

  The briefing room outside the Public Information office was crawling with reporters. Cameras flashed intermittently in the direction of a small group of officials facing the crowd. At the portable podium, the district attorney kept his jury face on as he answered the flood of questions regarding the murder. Ike Bosler knew the importance of looking dignified, open, and in control for the pictures that went into the papers. And this was especially important with the governor’s mansion up for grabs in a couple of years.

  “Do you believe there is any connection between Sarah Rand’s murder and this one, Mr. Bosler?”

  “Too early to tell.”

  “Have there been any arrests at all?” another reporter called out.

  “The Newport Police have a number of leads that they are following up on. The investigation is still in its earliest stages.”

  “There was a stabbing outside the Civic Center in Providence last month. Could this be the work of a serial murderer?”

  “There is no connection between the two incidents.”

  “Will you be releasing a composite sketch of a suspect?”

  Bosler shot the police chief and Dan Archer a quick look. The captain had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket and was wiping the sweat from his forehead. Chief Calvin nodded sharply.

  “We should have one by this afternoon,” The district attorney responded confidently.

  “Should the tourists be warned of danger lurking in these streets?”

  Ike Bosler paused, looking pensive for a long moment. He knew from experience that this was the look that said judicious, circumspect, analytical, commanding. The camera shutters whirred.

  “I can say, without hesitation, that the Newport Police Department is doing an excellent job of keeping this city safe for both residents and visitors. The crime statistics speak for themselves. Breaking and entering, robbery, larceny, aggravated assault—the crime rate in Newport has been cut in half since Chief Calvin and I sat down to map out an anticrime strategy at the beginning of his tenure here.” The D.A. took hold of the podium with both hands and leaned forward for effect. “Newport has averaged less than one homicide per year for the past five years. In every case, there has been a timely arrest when the facts warranted it, and a successful prosecution. I believe our tourists are in good hands, and it is safe to say that this department, under the guidance of Chief Calvin, is well equipped to serve and protect all of our citizens. The streets of Newport are safer than any city of comparable size in America. We could only wish that Providence were doing so well.”

  Bosler listened to the knowing laugh of the reporters. Everyone in the room knew that the police commissioner in Providence had been making some noises about a run for governor. Might as well nip that in the bud, he thought.

  “Mr. Bosler—”

  “That’s all we have for now, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Despite the shouts and questions by the reporters, the D.A.’s departure from the press conference was closely followed by that of the chief of police and Captain Archer.

  In the corridor leading to the chief’s office, Bosler turned on the two policemen.

  “I want you two to listen, and listen good. I don’t care if Santa Claus stuck that knife into Van Horn. I want a good sketch this afternoon and a suspect we can feed to the press by tomorrow.” The D.A.’s face was fierce and menacing. “I want a clean, open-and-shut case, David. And I’m telling you, Archer, if you fuck up, you’ll be doing beach patrol on Block Island. Do you understand me?”

  ~~~~

  “I saw him, Jake.” Frankie looked around the crowded diner and lowered his voice into the phone. “I saw him do it.”

  “Did he see you?”

  Frankie took the cigarette out of his mouth. “I was standing right there. He practically ran me down. Of course he saw me.”

  “All of a sudden, I’m worried about you.”

  “You wha—I get it. You’re saying this shit ‘cuz there’s a fucking guard standing next to you with his ear up your ass. Yeah…yeah…your mother is doing much better.”

  “Serious. We’re family. If we don’t take care of each other, who will?”

  “Cut the shit.” Frankie took another cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “I also saw the bitch again. She is alive, all right. Right there on the street when Van Horn got dusted. Jake, just whose fucking body did you drag out of that place, anyway? I’m thinking maybe you forgot to tell me something.”

  “Think of it this way, we just followed our directions. If the damn doctor wanted us to do something more specific, he should’ve said so.”

  “You’re speaking in code, goddammit.” He frowned into the face of a purple-haired kid who walked up and stood a step away, waiting to use the phone. Frankie held the phone away from his mouth. “Hey, do you fucking mind?

  The kid made a noise with his mouth and backed up a step.

  “Look, Jake, I have to go. But something I forgot to tell you.” He lowered his voice and turned his back on the kid. “You won’t believe who I saw the bitch get in the car with…after the thing.”

  “Who?”

  “Our new, resident movie star. And they seemed to be pretty cozy together, too. Now try to figure that one.”

  “Watch out for Ma for me, will you?”

  “Yadda. Yadda. Sure. But Jake, Ma says go fuck yourself…and that guard, too.” He could hear Jake chuckle once as he hung up the phone.

  Frankie poked a fat finger into the boy’s chest. “And fuck you, too.”

  ~~~~

  Archer sipped his coffee as he watched the technician click in a new chin on the composite ‘sketch’ being constructed on the computer screen. The restaurant hostess, their most reliable eyewitness so far, pursed her lips and then nodded.

  “That’s more like her. Her hair was shorter, I think. At least, what I could see under the baseball hat.” She glanced up at Archer. “I’m not going to try and tell you your business.”

  “We appreciate that, miss.” The captain took another sip of his coffee as the technician smirked at the screen.

  “But I want to make it really clear. She wasn’t the one with the knife. She wasn’t the one who stabbed him.”

  “We understand that. But you said she was near enough to have seen the killer, and she left the scene immediately. She could be very useful to the investigation.”

  “So she could be another…what do you call it? Another eyewitness.”

  “That’s right.” Archer nodded. “How about hair color?”

  “I’m not sure,” she replied. “She was wearing that hat. Her hair was light, I think. Maybe even blonde. I couldn’t see much of it. Light colored eyes. I didn’t really look. Maybe blue or something. The eyebrows didn’t arch as much as you’ve got there. Yeah, that’s better.”

  “You said she was really you
ng. Maybe fifteen or sixteen.” Archer asked a moment later. “What makes you so sure of that?”

  The woman shrugged. “She wasn’t carrying anything. No wallet or pocket book. She had to borrow a pen from me to jot down something on a piece of paper.”

  “Did you see what it was that she wrote down?”

  The hostess shook her head. “Maybe some phone number or something? Every store in town is hiring these days. We can’t keep any kitchen help ourselves. Maybe she saw a help-wanted number. Actually, she looked like someone who would be looking for their first job. She never really looked straight at you.”

  “Aha.”

  “How does this look?”

  “Smaller nose. No.” She shook her head at the technician. “Yeah. She had a pretty nose. Straight. And a small chin. Delicate.”

  “You said she disappeared after the incident.” Archer prompted again.

  “I’d say a long neck, thin from what I could see, anyway.” She looked from the monitor back to Archer. “Somebody might have picked her up. There were a lot of cars on Bellevue. But there was too much going on for me to be sure.”

  The captain pushed his reading glasses onto his nose and flipped open his notebook.

  “Normal lips. No, that’s too puffy. Yeah, that’s about right with the mouth. She wasn’t wearing any make-up or lipstick. She had a way of bending her head, the tip of the hat covered most of the face. No earrings.”

  “No earrings. Why do you believe someone picked her up?”

  “I said might have,” she corrected him. “I saw a car door open in front of the restaurant, and someone got in. It might have been her, but I can’t say for sure.”

  “Which direction was the car headed?”

  “North? I’m not good at directions.” She shrugged. “Whatever direction takes you toward Memorial Boulevard. The car turned toward First Beach.”

  “Can you give us a description of the car?”

  “Hmm. Black? Blue? Gray? Well it was a dark SUV.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Archer prompted. “Perhaps a license plate number?”

  “Sorry, Captain Archer. There was too much going on for me to focus on those kind of details.”

  Dan Archer waited until the computer-generated sketch was finished and then took it back to his office. Bob McHugh was standing at his desk within a minute.

  “What do you think?”

  Archer leafed through a thick file on his desk and pulled out Sarah Rand’s driver’s license photograph. Putting the sketch next to it, he covered the hat with a piece of paper. “She was there.”

  McHugh moved the two pictures around a bit and ran a hand up and down his bristly chin. “You want to run it through the computer to make sure?”

  “No. I’m sure.”

  For the first time in all the years Archer had known the burly detective, McHugh actually looked nervous. With good reason.

  “We are going to release this to the press, though, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, we are—but only with the description given by our eyewitness.” Archer handed the sketch over. “This should give them something to chase their tails after. Don’t forget the age. Fifteen or sixteen.”

  ~~~~

  Scott Rosen’s pen never lifted off his legal pad while Judge Arnold and Evan Steele argued possible motives for Hal’s stabbing.

  “Judge, the whole thing might come down to Hal simply being in a wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The judge snorted his disagreement, looked around the small meeting room reserved for inmates and their legal counsel, and then turned his frown on the other man.

  “Do you seriously think someone else was supposed to be gutted by that knife?” He turned to Scott next. “Have they done an autopsy yet?”

  The lawyer fixed his gaze on his client. “They were supposed to do it this morning. We don’t have any preliminary results, yet.”

  “I talked to the emergency room doctor who saw to Hal,” Steele cut in. “His educated guess was that because of the severe cuts and obvious damage to the major organs, the weapon could not have been something as simple as a switchblade. This was done professionally. My own guess would be that the weapon was a double-edged knife, very common in contract murders.”

  Judge Arnold looked troubled when he turned again to his attorney.

  “Don’t tell me that they are going to try to pin this thing on me, too.”

  “You are the only one with an obvious motive, your honor,” Scott answered.

  “But the judge had no means…no method.” Steele argued.

  “You said yourself that this could be a contract murder, Evan,” Scott replied. “Your honor, you have been critical of your stepson for as long as you were married to his mother. It is documented that you have been jealous of Sarah’s attentions toward him in recent months. It’d be easy to argue that the same person that you allegedly hired to kill and dispose of Sarah Rand was hired for this hit, as well. Even more damning is that Hal’s death eliminates the D.A.’s strongest witness against you. With Hal out of the picture, you could very well win your freedom and reap great financial rewards in the bargain. With Hal dead, you stand to gain virtually all of Avery’s fortune.”

  “Whose fucking side are you on, anyway?”

  Scott Rosen laid his pen down on his pad and calmly met judge’s angry glare. “You should be thankful, your honor, that I’m on yours.”

  ~~~~

  Her best thinking was always done in the shower.

  Sarah savored the piercing sting of the hot water on her scalp and face, and cleared her mind before trying to piece together the part of herself that had come undone these past forty-eight hours. Two people whom she cared for were dead. By staying with Owen, she was exposing him to the same danger.

  It had to stop. She had to turn herself in and face the consequences before this man, too, was hurt. Somehow, somewhere in the madness of the past two days, Owen Dean had emerged from the long-buried images of a youthful daydream, only to become a living, breathing human being. What was even wilder, he was a man who matched every expectation she held for a real friend…and more. But then again, Sarah thought, ‘friend’ could be a pretty loose term. The rest of what was going on between them, she didn’t even want to think about. She turned off the water and reached for a towel.

  He was on the phone when Sarah stepped out of the bedroom a little later. She felt that same strange prickly warmth spread through her when he looked up, his face brightening as he acknowledged her. He must have showered and shaved while she was still asleep. A cup of coffee sat before him on the desk. He motioned toward the kitchen, and she saw the glass of juice and the cereal bowl he’d left out for her.

  Sarah glanced at the drawn shades and the sliding glass door that had been left partially open, giving her glimpse of sunlight and brick and of green grass that she knew led all the way to the seawall. For a moment she had to fight the urge to step out onto the terrace and breathe in the fresh sea air. With a sigh, she instead went to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee, wondering when she would ever have even that small freedom again. She brought the pot in and was refilling Owen’s cup as his phone conversation ended.

  “Good morning.” His greeting was gentle. “You look better this morning.”

  She had never realized how dark a shade of blue his eyes were until now. “Thanks for last night. I was a mess.”

  He stood up, and she felt dwarfed by his size, by the air of confidence and potency that he exuded. These were two attitudes she needed to regain. She wondered where she’d lost them. Good lord, she was a wreck, anyway she looked at it.

  “You have to have something more to eat than that.” He motioned toward the cup of coffee in her hand. “Can I make you some real breakfast?”

  “No, thanks. The cereal will be great.”

  “The phone call was from my production company office in New York,” he said while she filled the bowl. “Captain Archer has been busy.”

  “Wha
t do you mean?”

  “He’d called them yesterday, making an ‘unofficial’ inquiry about me.”

  She sat down on the edge of the chair. “But there is no connection between you and me as far as he could see. Am I missing something?”

  “There was my call to the police two nights ago. And then, that same night, you called me from the Van Horn mansion. They must have traced the call.”

  “Brilliant.” Sarah’s hand trembled, and she wrapped it around the cup. “I should never have called you from there.” She shook her head to clear it. “I did some serious thinking in the shower. I think it’s time I turned myself in. I’m putting you at far too great a risk.”

  “Do you have another copy of that list? The items in Avery’s safe-deposit box?”

  She was startled by the way he’d changed the subject. “No. I mean not with me. As far as going to the police—”

  “Where could we get a copy? Is it on one of your computers at work? Could you somehow download it?”

  She watched him pour the milk on her cereal.

  “Why are you doing this?” Sarah asked softly.

  “Most people like milk on their cereal.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. Why don’t you put me out?”

  Owen sat across from her, his expression thoughtful.

  “I don’t know,” he said after a lengthy pause. “I guess I figure, like it or not, I’m already involved. And it’ll make everything look a hell of a lot better if we turn ourselves in to the officials with some reasonable amount of evidence in hand, instead of saying, ‘Sorry, we were just trying to play cops and robbers, but we didn’t do too well.’”

  “What do you think is a reasonable amount of evidence?”

  “You are the lawyer. You tell me.”

  His comment bolstered the flicker of confidence she still had left somewhere in her battered psyche.