Out of Nowhere

by Beverly Bird

  Exasperated, Tara knelt beside him. Then she frowned. The fireplace poker was beside him, hidden on his far side.

  It had blood on it.

  Her body reacted to what she was seeing before her mind even registered it. Her heart began jackhammering. Her gorge rose. She felt suddenly chilled; her skin had gone dewy and damp.

  “No, no, no,” she whispered, not aware she did it aloud. “Stephen?” She touched his wrist. There was no pulse.

  He was dead.

  The realization went through her like a shot of electricity. She couldn’t feel grief, not for him, a man who had perpetrated cruelty after cruelty on her for too many years to count. But shock rolled through her body, somehow cold and hot all at once. And she knew that somehow, even in death, he would still manage to hurt her.

  Call an ambulance, she thought first. But he wasn’t just dead. He’d been killed and she had found him. The press had followed every detail of their court battle. She had told the cab driver—emphatically—not to wait. And she’d given him a huge tip, mostly because she’d been too nervous and too impatient to worry about taking change back.

  Real fear began to beat in her blood. She could make an anonymous call to 911, she realized, but then she should just leave.

  Tara shot to her feet and spun for Stephen’s desk and the phone there. She grabbed it and it dropped from her nerveless fingers. She cried out instinctively at the clatter it made on the desk then she picked it up again and managed to punch in the correct numbers.

  “I—yes,” she babbled to the voice that answered. “There’s a body. Somebody’s dead here. You should—” Tara broke off and pressed a trembling hand to her temple as something else occurred to her. The Rose! Had Stephen been killed for the Rose? “The ruby!”

  She slammed down the phone. Her gaze swung wildly to Stephen’s safe. It was open. She took a quick step that way but then her foot came down on something vaguely round and hard, something that pressed into the rug beneath her weight and made her ankle roll. Tara gasped at the pain and looked down.

  The Rose. On the floor?

  She bent and grabbed it. She had the wild thought that heat pulsed from it, that the ruby somehow knew who she was and that it welcomed her touch. Then she heard a sound. Somewhere…over there, she thought, near the window.

  The killer was still in the room with her.

  Every instinct told her to be still but Tara was trembling hard enough now that her teeth snicked together. Then she heard it again, a warning…vibration. A growl? She moved back to the wall and inched along it cautiously. Then there was a high-pitched yip and Tara jumped inside her skin.

  It was a dog. Apparently, Stephen had acquired a pet.

  “I don’t believe this,” she whispered aloud. And then she saw it. It walked into the milky spill of white from the streetlight outside the window. It was a…

  …a Chihuahua?

  She’d been expecting a watchdog if anything, a Shepherd or Doberman, something he might have used to guard the stone. But this dog was tiny with a long, crooked muzzle and too-big dark eyes. Its ears stood straight out from the sides of its head and they were easily half the size of the rest of it. She could have sworn it was grinning at her.

  She’d called 911. The cops would be here any minute. She had to get out of here.

  Tara bolted from the room. The dog let out a cacophony of barking and chased after her. Tara made it only as far as the door to the hallway before she felt sharp little teeth slide down the back of her right calf. She choked on a scream and braced herself against the doorjamb to shake her leg. The nasty little dog wrapped itself around her calf and held on, bouncing up and down.

  “No!” She swatted at it with the hand that held the Rose. “Stop it! Let go!” Then she let out a low, agonized cry as she lost her grip on the stone.

  It sailed off somewhere into the shadows gathered in the corners of the library near the window. There was a soft thud as it hit the wall. Then, only then, did the dog let go of her leg.

  Tara heard a steady thumping sound. The Chihuahua was wagging its tail! From the front of the house, she heard a sharp male voice.

  “Hello? Police!”

  Tara knew she could talk her way out of this. She could talk her way out of anything. It was her gift. But she knew better than to try when the stakes were this appalling, this high. This, she realized, feeling sick, was one of those situations where the less that was said, the better—at least until she called her lawyer.

  So she ran.

  Out in the foyer, at the very front of the house, she heard the steady tap of heels. Tara sprinted fast and silently through the shadows gathered in the hallway. She hit the swinging door to the kitchen just as she heard the officer call out again. She was running out of time. She’d never get out of here free and clear. She would have to hide.

  The pantry! Tara dove for the white-painted door just beside the stove. Behind it was a trapdoor and a small space that one of her nannies had once shown her. As a child, it had been her special hideout from Stephen. If he had never discovered it in all the years since then, if he hadn’t boarded it up…

  Tara dropped to her knees and crawled beneath the lowest shelf. She pushed hard against the rear wall with a trembling hand.

  It creaked and opened.

  The bartender had just brought a second round of drinks when Fox spotted Raphael Montiel over the blonde’s right shoulder. He put his drink down without tasting it.

  If Rafe had come looking for him here, then it was purely bad news. They were partners with the Philadelphia Police Department’s elite Robbery-Homicide unit. They never worked at night—unless someone had the audacity to get killed or to steal something noteworthy after regular business hours. Fox pushed back from the bar and waved Rafe down. They met halfway to the door.

  “How’s it going?” Raphael asked dryly as his gaze fell on the blonde.

  “She has potential.”

  “Don’t look now, but I think your Georgia’s showing again.”

  “Leave my Georgia alone.”

  Fox was transplanted from Savannah. Northern women tended to have an aggressive edge that he had never quite gotten used to…with the single exception of Adelia. She’d been sweet and soft, demure and fragile. Too fragile. He’d lost her to leukemia six weeks before they were to be married.

  The grief had ebbed and flowed through him sporadically for ten long years, then it had finally settled into something distant and bearable. Now Fox was determined. It was time to start over. Somewhere in Philadelphia, he thought, there was another gentle, quiet woman meant to be his wife.

  “We’ve got to go,” Rafe said. “We’ve caught a stiff up in Chestnut Hill. A nice, fat rich one. There are officers there now, waiting for us. Seems a ruby the size of Mount Rushmore has disappeared as well.”

  Translation, Fox thought—his night was over.

  He returned to the bar and paid the tab, then he snagged his jacket from the back of his stool. On impulse, he caught the blonde’s hand and kissed it, a gentle touch that was gone before it started. Her eyes widened and she sighed. When he straightened, he saw Rafe roll his eyes.

  Five minutes later, they were in Fox’s vintage Mustang, a 1968 Shelby convertible, heading north. Raphael filled him in on what he knew so far.

  “We got an anonymous 911 call. A female. The call was traced to the home. She seemed to indicate that Carmen—that’s Stephen Carmen—was killed for a gem he had in his possession, but I haven’t heard the tape yet. Officers arrived and yeah, there was a body in the library but no apparent jewels lying about. The missing stone is a Burmese ruby, uncut, twenty-four carats. It’s called the Blood of the Rose.”

  Fox frowned. The name tickled his memory. “I’ve heard of it.”

  “If you’ve read the papers lately, you’d have to. Stephen Carmen and his stepsister—name of Tara Cole—have been tying up the probate courts over this baby for something like four years now. The ruby belonged to Cole’s mother, Letitia
Cole Carmen, who apparently willed it to her stepson.” He paused for effect. “The court returned a ruling today—Carmen’s will was up to snuff. They gave him the gem.”

  “So let’s find the lady and have someone take her down to headquarters.” Fox reached automatically for the radio handset on his dashboard.

  “Not likely. I already put the word out for some officers to pay a visit to Ms. Cole. She doesn’t appear to be home.”

  They pulled up in front of a house awash with lights. Brilliance glittered from three floors’ worth of windows. The front door was wide open. Fox cut the engine.

  “So do you want to take care of the body or do the scene this time?” Rafe asked.

  “I’ll handle the scene. You wouldn’t know a gem if you fell over it. You can’t tell rock salt from diamonds.”

  Raphael frowned. “I was distracted during that case.”

  “Yeah? How’s Kate?” He’d been distracted, Fox remembered, because he’d met his wife on that one.

  “Pregnant,” Rafe reminded him.

  “Read cranky between the lines.” Fox had four sisters back in Savannah. During his visits home, he’d noticed the trend. “Fear not, pal. It gets worse before it gets better.”

  Raphael looked at him sharply. “You’re just busting my chops because I pulled you away from Bambi.”

  “Her name was Candy.”

  “Whatever. Aren’t you? Busting my chops?”

  “Nope.” It was Fox’s turn to grin.

  They got out of the car. Fox moved up the sidewalk at a stroll, a few steps behind Rafe’s more rapid pace. An officer stepped into the door as they reached it. Fox read his name tag when he joined them. “Hey, McGee, what’s the story?”

  McGee thrust a thumb over his shoulder. “The vic’s in the library. Through those doors there and down a bit to your right.”

  Fox stepped into a marble-floored vestibule. There were French doors at the back. Odd architectural touch, he thought. That was a Yankee for you. In his humble opinion, they weren’t long on welcoming hospitality. This effect made it look as though they were trying to keep guests out.

  One of the inner doors was ajar as well. Fox turned sideways to pass through it without touching anything and Rafe followed him. They headed down a wide center hall.

  Stephen Carmen lay in the middle of his library floor. Fox automatically stooped to take his pulse. In one memorable case, the vic had been only unconscious and he’d learned right then and there to be thorough, not to make any assumptions. When that “murdered” woman had sat up, he’d nearly dropped dead. That had been in his rookie year.

  Carmen, however, was definitely deceased. His skin wasn’t quite cold yet but both his lips and his nail beds were going blue. He’d been dead less than three hours.

  The dome of Carmen’s forehead shined in the library lights. He had a receding hairline and pudgy features, with the kind of petulant mouth that always made Fox’s skin crawl a little when he saw it on a man. He dropped the man’s wrist. “Sorry, pal. Rough way to end it even if I wouldn’t have wanted to shake your hand while you were alive.” He straightened away from the corpse, leaving it to Rafe.

  Everything in the library was good quality, from the rich indigo of the Persian rug to the teak desk. Fox peered behind the drapes, into the fireplace, around and behind a tiny tea table with two ornate chairs bracketing it. He moved the chairs by nudging the legs with his toe.

  Nothing underneath.

  Fox went to the open safe and sifted through its contents. He found a wad of legal documents but nothing valuable. He scanned the papers. They chronicled the court battle between Carmen and Tara Cole.

  He really wanted to meet this lady.

  In the meantime, he studied row upon row of books on shelves that lined two walls. None of them looked as though they’d ever been cracked open. What a waste, Fox thought. Some of them were classics. He took a pair of gloves from the first of the crime scene techs to arrive and he removed the tomes one by one.

  Finally, he was satisfied. There was no ruby in this room, especially not a twenty-four-carat-size one.

  “I’ll just check out the rest of the house,” Fox said, and Rafe nodded.

  It took him nearly an hour to go through the remainder of the place. There was a lot of it but nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. By the time Fox got to the kitchen, he knew nothing else was going to be. This whole scene had clearly gone down in the library.

  He reached for the pantry door and peeked inside. Nothing but canned goods and darkness. Then he heard Rafe call to him from down the hall. He closed the door again with a quiet snick and went to rejoin his partner in the library. The body-catchers had arrived from the morgue and Rafe had released Carmen to them. The crime scene techs were leaving fingerprint dust in their wake wherever they passed.

  “Okay, here’s my play on it,” Rafe said. “Ms. Cole got word from the court today that she’d lost her fight. She came over here in a nice temper, walloped Carmen with the poker, maybe in a rage, or maybe she planned to.”

  Fox frowned. “That’s cold.”

  “Yeah, well, either way, she did us the courtesy of calling 911. Then she grabbed the ruby and took off. It fits.”

  “Don’t it though,” Fox drawled. Too neatly, to his way of thinking. “Nobody’s found her yet?”

  “No. She’s either traveling on foot or by public transportation. She could be anywhere. She doesn’t keep a car—she lives in a high rise on Poplar—so we can’t put anything out on the vehicle.”

  Fox nodded. If he hadn’t had a love affair with the ’68 Shelby since he was a boy, he wouldn’t have bothered to own a car in the city, either.

  “We’ve got officers at her building waiting for her to come home,” Rafe continued. “If she doesn’t turn up by morning, there’s our cause to put out an APB on her.”

  At which point, Fox thought, she could be in Duluth. “Let’s nudge it some,” he suggested. “Give her until midnight to appear, then hit the airwaves with her description.”

  “That would be my inclination,” Rafe agreed, but they both knew the score. “Plattsmier will balk. You know how he gets when there’s any money or clout involved and something tells me these folks have some income.” Their captain was more politician than cop, more worried about lawsuits than justice. He’d started his career with enough integrity but the title had done him in.

  Plattsmier and Rafe did not get along. Luckily, Fox could charm a snake. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with him myself.”

  He left the library again. He went down the hall and finally stepped outside into the backyard. He circled the house once, then twice, without finding anything interesting there, either. Rafe caught up with him in a winter-dead garden in the backyard.

  “The techs are on their way out,” Rafe said.

  “Go ahead and catch a ride with one of them.”

  “You’re going to stay for a while?”

  Fox nodded. They had worked together for eight years now. It was Fox’s strong opinion that no case ever got solved by jumping to conclusions. He took things slowly. Rafe, on the other hand, tended to crash right in, angry and righteous in his pursuit of justice. They balanced each other well.

  Fox watched his partner leave then he cleared snow from a stone bench. Several aspects of this crime bothered him. He sat down to dwell on them.

  Chapter 2

  Behind the pantry closet, crunched down into a too-small wedge of space, Tara listened to the new quiet. She didn’t remember this cubbyhole being so cramped. Then again, the last time she’d used it, she’d been maybe eleven years old. Now, even moving her hand to wipe at an errant tear required clever effort.

  Stephen was dead. No, she couldn’t mourn him, but everything inside her still shook with the horror of it.

  Tara listened to the silence as she tried to steady herself, then she wriggled into the pantry again. The cops were finally gone. She was sure of that. She squeezed beneath the shelf once more and pu
shed the door open gently, just a crack.

  The kitchen was dark as pitch. The house stayed quiet. Tara crawled out and stood. She thought she heard her bones crack. She went back to the hall, keeping close to the wall.

  There might still be gaping neighbors out front, she thought. And somewhere, presumably, there was that damned dog, unless the cops had taken it away. If they hadn’t, it might still be near the library and she didn’t care to encounter it again. Carefully, quietly, Tara headed for the back door.

  She eased it open and turned sideways to pass through the crack. Then she pulled it gently shut again and felt everything wash out of her until her bones felt like they would bend.

  The Rose was gone. She hadn’t gone back to the library to look for it, didn’t have to. She’d heard the commotion of all the cops there. Someone would have picked it up from the floor.

  Maybe, eventually, she could buy it back from Stephen’s estate. But for now she didn’t even know for sure where it was. Tara leaned her forehead against the door and fought the urge to cry.

  Sometimes, Fox thought, taking things slowly really paid dividends. He sat up suddenly and straight to watch her.

  The woman was a shadow moving within a shadow. Everything about her was darkness, from the midnight hair that spilled down her back to the leggings and jacket she wore. She used both hands to pull on the knob and shut the door silently. Then she rested her forehead against the wood. The gesture was so edged with defeat that Fox felt an instinctive stir of sympathy.

  He frowned as he let his gaze move up over her bulky socks and running shoes. Yards of legs topped them. This, he thought, was a long, tall drink of water. He felt a certain quickening deep inside himself that was pure appreciation and had very little to do with watching this case unfold before his eyes.

  His instincts told him that the woman hadn’t seen him yet. After a moment, he knew he was right. She finally left the door and moved quietly to the corner of the property. Fox stood from the bench and followed her. He didn’t make a sound until he was a foot behind her.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.”