“Help yourself to the coffee.” He smiled and gestured to the full pot of coffee that sat in the coffeemaker on the countertop. “The eggs will be ready in a jiffy.”
“No eggs for me,” Libby protested as she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the glass-topped kitchen table. “I’m not much of a breakfast eater,” she explained, noting how at home he looked in the kitchen. Obviously, he was a man accustomed to taking care of his own needs.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?” His voice held a light, teasing note.
“Yes, for years my father made me eat breakfast. Then, when I got married, my husband insisted I cook his breakfast every morning. Now that I’m on my own, I don’t even look at food before noon.”
“Personally, I can skip any other meal of the day, but I have to have my breakfast.” He grinned, turning back to the stove.
Libby sipped her coffee and watched as he expertly cracked several eggs into an awaiting skillet on the stove. “Perhaps after you’ve eaten you wouldn’t mind dropping me off at the pawnshop?” she asked.
“Bad idea,” he replied, transferring the eggs to a plate and moving the skillet off the burner. He joined her at the table. “Are you sure you don’t want something?” he asked.
“No, really, coffee is just fine.” Libby looked distastefully at the plate of heaping food before him.
He shrugged as if to indicate it was her loss, then dug in, eating with a gusto Libby found almost nauseating so early in the morning. “I don’t want you anywhere near that shop until we find out what’s going on,” he explained between bites.
She thought about it, then slowly nodded her agreement. “Okay, then take me back to my apartment.”
“An equally dangerous move.” He lay down his fork and looked at her, his dark eyes grave and sober. “Libby, you’d be an absolute fool to dismiss lightly all that has happened to you. Those men were quite serious last night, and I can almost guarantee they will be just as serious this morning.”
“So, what do you suggest? I can’t stay here forever. I do have a life to get back to.” She couldn’t keep an edge of impatience out of her voice.
“Let me make some contacts. I’ve still got some good friends on the police force. Let me talk to them and see if they can give me some insight on all this.”
“How are they going to know any more than we do?” she scoffed irritably. “They were the ones that told me the pawnshop was broken into by kids. And last night they said they thought maybe the apartment mess was the work of a gang. I’ll tell you, it was no kid who crawled into my bedroom window last night.” She shivered suddenly, remembering the feel of the man’s hand against her mouth, the smell of his body, oppressive and rancid.
“Give me today.” Tony reached across the table and captured one of her hands in his. Libby immediately felt a stir of warmth, an electric current connecting his hand to the pit of her stomach. She nodded, realizing she would agree to anything with his hand holding hers. She snatched her hand away and grabbed her coffee cup.
“Okay, I’ll give you today, but if we don’t come up with any answers, then I’m going home.”
Tony nodded and looked at his watch. “I’ve got a buddy who comes on duty at seven in the morning. I think I’ll head on to the station and see if I can catch him.”
“What can I do to help solve this mystery?” she asked, focusing on what was important, refusing to stop and analyze why the touch of his hand had affected her in a most pleasant fashion.
Tony stood up, a frown creasing his forehead. “I’m not sure, but because the pawnshop was the first place searched, I would say the answer to this puzzle somehow lies there.” Libby nodded her agreement, realizing that at least that much made sense. “While I’m gone, I want you to make a list of everyone who came into the shop on the day before the break-in. Write down names and what items were pawned.”
This time it was Libby’s turn to frown. “That’s quite a tall order. This is the busiest time of the year for the business. Besides, there are lots of customers who I’ve never seen before and probably won’t see again. I certainly won’t be able to remember their names.”
“Just do the best you can.” He looked at his watch once again. “I’ve got to get out of here if I want to meet Cliff down at the station.” With a quick smile, he was gone, leaving Libby with the impression that he had somehow taken some of the color out of the kitchen when he left.
She poured herself another cup of coffee and sat back down at the table, staring absently out the window that looked out into his large backyard.
Thank God Tony seemed to be a stand-up kind of a guy. Circumstances make strange bedfellows, she thought, then shook her head. The last thing she wanted was a bedfellow of any kind. Still, she couldn’t deny the fact that she was attracted to Tony—attracted in a way that had her thinking of sultry nights, satin sheets and dangerous passion. It was crazy how those charcoal-flaming eyes of his made her remember the joy of making love, the fact that it had been a very long time since she’d indulged in that particular pleasure.
“Hormones,” she said aloud, draining her coffee cup and taking it to the sink. What she was suffering was nothing more than the resurgence of hormones too long denied.
She was pulled from her thoughts by the plaintive meows of Twilight, who sat at her feet and looked up at her expectantly. Knowing the cat was demanding breakfast, she quickly placed a dish with the leftover bacon and eggs down on the floor.
Seeing that Twilight was content, she found a piece of paper and a pen, then sat back down at the table, realizing it was time to get to work on the business at hand. She needed to think of names and items pawned on the day before the break-in. She knew the quicker they solved her little mystery, the quicker she could get back to the sanity of her own life.
* * *
“Tony, I’d really like to help you, but I’m on my way out. We’ve got a stiff downtown in an alley.”
“So, what else is new?” Tony asked wryly, grinning at the short, wiry man he considered his best friend.
Cliff didn’t return his smile. “What’s new is that this particular stiff is not the run-of-the-mill wino or junkie the downtown district normally turns up. Seems this guy was some sort of respected scientist until he wandered into the alley behind Bateman’s Shoe Repair and caught a bullet through his head.”
Tony’s blood suddenly raced through his veins. Bateman’s Shoe Repair was right next door to Libby’s pawnshop. Coincidence? His nose told him there were just too many damned coincidences in all of this mess. “Cliff, let me ride with you. This might tie into something I’ve been working on.”
Cliff frowned for a moment. “I don’t know…we’ve got heavy brass leaning on our butt on this one.”
“Come on, man,” Tony said urgently. “I’ve got a gorgeous blonde waiting for some answers, and my nose tells me this might be the place to start looking for some of those answers.”
“A gorgeous blonde, huh?” Cliff grinned in disbelief. He relented. “Okay, but make sure you stay out of the way.”
As they drove to the scene of the murder, Cliff filled Tony in on the details that were known so far. “The body was discovered about an hour ago by the garbagemen who service the area. They moved the Dumpster and the body was behind it. They immediately called the police.”
Tony looked out the passenger window of the patrol car and frowned as Cliff brought the car to a halt. He felt a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach as he saw the Dumpster, between the back door of Libby’s place and the shoe repair store next door. Surely there was no connection…surely the unusual things happening to Libby and the death of this scientist were totally unrelated.
He tugged at his mustache thoughtfully, smelling something dirty, something discernible only to his nose. Most people relied on their gut reaction. Tony relied on his nose. When he’d been a cop and a case went awry, he could always smell it happening. And in this particul
ar case, he definitely smelled something ugly. Now, if he could just figure out what exactly it was that stank.
* * *
Libby grimaced and scratched out a name she had just written on the sheet of paper before her. The job of trying to remember everyone who had come into the shop on a particular day was more difficult than she’d thought it would be. Without her ledger, she was lost.
She looked down at the sheet of paper with a sigh of dissatisfaction. She knew the list was incomplete, but it was difficult to try to reconstruct an entire day of business from memory alone.
She placed her chin in her hands, struggling with not only the elusive names of customers, but the millions of unanswered questions that whirled around and around in her head. She looked up, startled as Tony burst through the doorway. “That was quick,” she exclaimed, noting by the kitchen clock that he had been gone less than an hour.
“Cliff was tied up with a murder case. Seems some sort of genius Defense Department scientist managed to get himself killed.”
“Here in Kansas City?” she asked in surprise, getting up to pour him a cup of coffee as he sat down at the table. “What would a Defense Department scientist be doing here in Kansas City?”
“It seems this guy was something of an enigma. He worked for the Defense Department in a lab in Washington, D.C, for almost twenty years. Then, two years ago, he quit the department and left D.C., retiring to a private lab in the Ozarks. Word has it that he was still doing projects for the government.” He nodded his thanks as she set the coffee cup before him, then rejoined him at the table. “From what Cliff was able to discover, he left the Ozarks area in a private plane on Tuesday, and arrived in Kansas City around nine o’clock, at which time he left the plane, instructing the pilot to be ready to take off again within an hour. He never made it back to the plane.” He leaned forward and Libby suddenly noticed the tenseness of his body. “His body was found behind the Dumpster between your pawnshop and Bateman’s Shoe Repair.”
Libby felt a cold finger of fear reach inside and caress the inside of her stomach. “You…you don’t think this has anything to do with me?” She paused a moment as he merely looked at her. “What…what was his name?”
“Jasper Higgens.”
“Oh my God,” she gasped.
“What?” Tony demanded.
“He was in my shop. Look, I have his name on my list.” She shoved the list of names at him, pointing to the scientist’s. “It was the first time he’d been in the shop, but I remembered his name because it was unusual, he was unusual.” She gasped as another thought struck her. “He was in my shop around nine-thirty. My God, Tony, he must have been killed immediately after leaving the pawnshop.” She stared at Tony in horror.
Tony stumbled to his feet and took her by the shoulders. “Think, Libby. This is very important. What did he bring into the shop? What did he pawn?”
“A necklace,” she answered without hesitation. “It was a gold necklace.”
“Where is it?”
“I…I don’t know…at home,” she answered in confusion, trying to remember where the necklace was at that precise moment. “No, wait, it’s here.” She jumped up out of her chair and ran up the stairs and into the bedroom where she had slept the night before. She dug into her suitcase and pulled out her bathrobe, reaching into the pocket and breathing a sigh of relief as she felt the heavy gold of the necklace.
“Did you find it?”
She turned to see Tony standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She held the piece out to him wordlessly.
Tony took the necklace and scrutinized it closely. “I’ll admit, it’s an attractive piece of jewelry. But surely it’s not worth a man’s life.” He bent his head down closer to the necklace, his fingers moving over the thick centerpiece. “This looks like a locket. Does it open?”
Libby shrugged. “I don’t really know. I didn’t try to open it.” She watched impatiently as he worked with the center in an effort to get it to open.
“Ah-ha,” he said triumphantly as the locket sprang open. Then he frowned. “It’s empty.” He closed the locket once again.
“What on earth could this necklace have to do with any of this mess?” she asked softly, her utter confusion evident in her voice.
“I’m not sure, but at this point I don’t think we can discount the importance of it. There have been too many coincidences. A man comes into your pawnshop and leaves a necklace. He’s murdered and later that night your shop is ransacked and your apartment is broken into.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “I just can’t help but think that somehow everything ties in with the necklace…but why?” His brow wrinkled in perplexity. “Put this on. Until we know more, this necklace is the only thing we have to go on. At least with it around your neck, we’ll know where it is.”
She nodded and turned around, allowing him to fasten the necklace at the nape of her neck. It snuggled against her skin, the feel of it giving her no pleasure at all. Before when she had worn the piece she had enjoyed the feel of the warm gold nestled against her skin. This time was different because she now knew there was a possibility that the necklace had been the cause of a man’s death. That knowledge made it feel cold and alien against her flesh. She turned back to face Tony.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his finger reaching up and lightly touching her cheek.
She nodded and forced a small smile to her lips. “Just a little overwhelmed by all this.”
“Come on, let’s go back downstairs. I’m going to try to call Cliff and see if there’s any more information.” He placed an arm around her shoulders as together they went back down to the kitchen.
As Tony dialed the phone, Libby sank back down at the table. Before, her situation had seemed desperate—now it had taken on a new dimension. She reached up and touched the necklace around her throat. What secret could it possess that was so valuable it might have cost a man his life?
She turned her attention to Tony, who listened intently to somebody on the other end of the phone line. His sharply etched features were tense and his eyes were onyx orbs radiating intelligence. He looked like a man capable of handling danger. She certainly hoped so, for as she sat there watching while he scribbled something down on a notepad, she realized how very dependent she was on him at the moment.
“Whew.” He expelled a low breath as he hung up the phone.
“What? What were you able to find out?” she asked anxiously.
“I just spoke to Cliff. The case of Jasper Higgens has been taken away from the police department and handed to another agency…one working on the assumption that national security may have been compromised.”
Libby stared at him in amazement. “National security?” She emitted a squeak of unbelieving laughter. “What on earth could a necklace have to do with national security?”
“I don’t know.”
Libby released another burst of nervous laughter. “Two days ago I was simply an average pawnbroker, and now you’re telling me it’s possible that somehow I’m in the middle of some national security crisis.” She breathed a shuddery sigh. “Couldn’t we just give the necklace to somebody, you know, the FBI or the CIA?”
“I suppose we could,” he said thoughtfully. “However, I’m extremely reluctant, especially when I don’t know what’s going on. I think we’d be better off finding out exactly why this necklace is so important before we just blindly hand it over to anyone.”
“But how do we go about doing that?”
He shrugged and smiled. “We go to the Ozarks,” he said succinctly.
“We go to the Ozarks….” she repeated blankly. “And what do we do once we get there?”
“We go to Jasper Higgens’s lab, we talk to his associates. Surely he wasn’t working completely alone. Then we find out exactly what he was working on…and maybe that will give us some answers to this whole puzzle.”
“You’re crazy,” she exclaimed. “I say we just give the necklace to one of the people in the agency that’s wo
rking on the case.”
“Fine. We’ll just hand it over to somebody on the task force, but you choose who we give it to. And let me warn you, you’d better make sure he’s a patriotic, duty-bound guy who can’t be swayed to the wrong side of the tracks by a flash of cash. You’d better make sure he can’t be bought at any price and has no family who can be threatened, because if this necklace holds a secret that threatens the security of the United States, by handing it to the wrong person, you sell us all up the river.” His voice rang with passion, and his dark eyes blazed with the full depth of his emotions.
“Out of all the ex-cops in the world, I’ve got to get stuck with a flag-waving, national anthem-singing patriot with altruistic motives, placing the burden of our country’s freedom square on my shoulders.” She glared at him, irritated that he had managed to present to her an argument she couldn’t fight.
“Look, Libby, I’m not suggesting we handle all this alone from the beginning to the end. All I’m suggesting is that we learn more about everything before we make any final decisions about who to give the necklace to.” He tapped the end of his nose. “Some cops rely on their gut reaction. I always relied on my nose, and it’s telling me to take all this very slow.”
She stared at him for a long moment, noting the energy that radiated through him, the glint of anticipation that lit his eyes. He wants to do this, she thought in amazement.
She relented. “Okay, we go to the Ozarks and see what we can find out, but only on one condition.”
“What?”
“If things get really dangerous and I feel like we’re in over our heads, you’ll call somebody in to help us.”
“It’s a deal.” He smiled at her, the smile that always made her heart jump erratically in her chest. She suddenly found herself wondering if she wasn’t already in over her head.
He got up and shut off the coffeemaker and looked at his watch. “It’s almost nine o’clock now. If we get on the road right away we should get to the lab sometime this afternoon.”
One of the Good Guys Page 6