by Beverly Bird
“Here’s what I’ve decided to do,” he continued finally. “We’ll need four officers here around the clock. One on the seventh floor—that’s where she lives. We’ll want one in the lobby, one here in the park across the street, and the last one over on Girard to keep an eye on the back of her building. The first two guys will be stationary, the other two will be tails, moving with her wherever she goes.”
“That’s a lot of manpower for a woman who didn’t do it.”
“She’s slippery as an eel and she has a tongue like a viper,” Fox explained. “I want to know every move she makes, every sigh she sighs, the caloric value of every bite of food she puts in her mouth, starting now. It’s the only way we’ll learn what she was up to tonight.” In the lighted window seven floors above him, he watched her drag a hand through all that long, wild, dark hair.
He’d always preferred blondes. Adelia had been elfin, pale, petite. Tara Cole couldn’t have been more her opposite. So what was it with this jerking sensation in the area of his chest at the way her hair fell down her back again when she moved her hand and let it go?
Still framed in the window, Tara put the telephone down hard. The room plunged into darkness as she left it. Then the next window lit up. Her bedroom. She came to the glass and lifted her arm, pausing just long enough that Fox wondered if she’d guessed he was out here. Then the blinds came down like a quick, hard slap.
Unfortunately, they did nothing to obliterate the shadowy hint of her movements. Fox thought it was entirely possible that she was peeling out of…whatever that thing was that she had been wearing tonight. His mouth went vaguely dry. His pulse started moving like the hands of an aborigine drummer.
“Huh?” he said into the cell phone.
Rafe had been talking, but now there was a spell of dead silence. “Did you just say huh? You? Mr. Smooth?”
“The connection’s bad.” Fox changed the subject quickly. “I’ll wait in the park across the street until I see surveillance take their places. As soon as she moves I want them to report in to us.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
On the seventh floor, her lights finally, blessedly went out.
“This one is going to be a challenge. The resort is twenty-three miles from Maine’s premiere coastal tourist area. Our job is to find out if those tourists can be persuaded to spend their vacation away from the beach.” Tara looked around at the people who had gathered at her conference room table for a meeting with her marketing firm. And though she’d managed to concentrate on the matter at hand so far, suddenly her train of thought derailed.
The Rose was in Stephen’s library—somewhere. If Whittington didn’t have it, then the cops had just missed it. But how was she supposed to get that…that detective with the blue eyes and the devil’s own grin to look for it against the far wall? How to do that without admitting that it had flown there when she’d knocked away the dog?
Come to think of it, Whittington hadn’t once mentioned the dog, she realized. Why not? For some reason, that disturbed her. A new band of tension tightened across Tara’s forehead and she rubbed at it.
She’d handled him perfectly Monday night. Perfectly. Sure, he’d swiped her date book, but he wasn’t going to find anything earth-shaking in it. In the end, he’d left her alone with that vague warning not to leave town. Which, of course, she was going to do first thing Monday morning. She had to fly to Maine on this project. She’d worked far too hard establishing the reputation of her marketing firm to let some guy with an initial-type name undermine it now.
Besides, she thought, he really had no right to hold her here. Cal Mazzeone had pointed out that Whittington couldn’t possibly have anything significant to tie her to the crime because she’d slept in her own bed these last two nights and Cal wasn’t scrambling for her expeditious arraignment. It was Wednesday and Whittington had made no further move, so Tara had to believe that Cal was right.
All that was well and good, but where was the Rose?
“Huh?” she said suddenly, realizing that her assistant in charge of research had said something to her. The people at the table exchanged frowns.
“Did you just say huh?” Eric, the assistant, asked.
“Of course not.”
Kim Koby, who ran the graphics department, cleared her throat. “Speaking as your friend and not your employee, maybe you should take a few days off.”
“Why would I want to do that?” They all knew how she’d felt about Stephen. None of them would expect her to grieve to the point of being unable to work.
“At least stay out tomorrow,” Debbie, her secretary said. “For the funeral.”
“The funeral will only take two hours in the afternoon.” She would go, Tara thought, for her stepfather’s sake, out of respect for Scott Carmen’s memory. And because she was the only family member left standing. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t—cry for him and she wouldn’t pretend.
They all knew that. An unsettled sensation began to shift in Tara’s stomach.
Debbie rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Laying low for a while might keep our competitors’ tongues from wagging,” she said. “We’ve had a cop watching our building entrance for two days now. If you’re home, maybe he’ll stand there.”
Tara frowned at her. It took two or three heartbeats for her words to sink in.
She ran into the hall and jogged back to her own office. She looked down out of her fourth floor window. There was no cop down there, but there was a guy in khakis loitering next to the mailbox. Tara waited three minutes, four, then five. The man didn’t leave.
She went slowly back to the conference room.
“How do you know he’s a cop?” she asked Debbie. Maybe he was a reporter lying in wait for her. The phones had been ringing off the hook with interview requests, all of which Cal had advised her to decline. The less she said at the moment, the better.
Debbie gnawed on her lip. “I don’t. But he’s armed.”
Tara felt her pulse speed off. “Armed?”
“I saw a gun in one of those under-the-arm holsters when his coat flapped open.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” she demanded.
“I figured you were under enough strain.”
Tara fisted her hands to keep them from shaking.
Four years ago when her mother had died, she had been left with two things precious enough to keep her going. She’d had the Rose, a piece of her mother, a piece of her own past, a promise for the future. And she’d had this firm. She’d built it painstakingly. It was her baby, born of her expertise and her guts and her talent. In large measure, her employees were her family.
Stephen had swiped the Rose but she’d still had Concepts. Now, at one of the shakiest times of her life, her own staff was shielding her, closing her out.
“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself,” she said quietly, then she waved a hand. “We’re done here. I’m going back to my office.”
Suck it up, she ordered herself, heading down the hall again. Get a grip. Damn it, she could deal with this on her own. She knew her way through the dark.
In her office, she inched up to the window again. She kept her eyes closed, then, with her palms pressed against the cool glass, she deliberately opened them again. And she looked down.
The khaki guy was still there.
At least it wasn’t Whittington, she thought helplessly. This guy wore a plain white button-down shirt under the ill-fitting raincoat that Debbie had mentioned. Absurdly, Tara found herself remembering how Whittington had been dressed Monday night, in that soft-as-butter leather jacket. She knew its texture because she’d had fistfuls of it when he’d first taken her down. The man definitely had a sense of style.
And why was she thinking about that when the Rose was missing, when Whittington felt strongly enough about her involvement in Stephen’s death to have put a cop on her? She was losing her mind. Maybe the horrors of the last few days were getting to her, even more than she realized
.
Tara pressed a fist against her mouth while panic tried to fold her knees, both for what he was doing and for the effect he was having on her. Then she went back to her desk and forced herself to concentrate on the Maine proposal.
Fox sat at his desk in the Robbery-Homicide den on the eleventh floor of headquarters. The cop standing in front of him spoke earnestly.
“I talked to her doorman. He was pretty emphatic about her schedule,” Vince Migliaccio reported. “She always walks to and from her office, except on Wednesdays.”
“This is Wednesday,” Fox responded.
“Yeah. So she’ll be cabbing it tonight. It’s her dry-cleaning day. He says she always takes her clothes with her and comes home in a taxi. Maybe the cleaners is too far away for her to walk.”
“You’re sure about this?”
Migliaccio flushed and Fox felt sorry for him, but his caution was not misplaced. Migliaccio had had an outstanding opportunity to move up in the ranks last summer when he’d been assigned to back up Fox while Rafe had been out on suspension. He’d blown that job. Now—at least for the time being—he was back on patrol.
Fox knew that Rafe had hand-picked Migliaccio for this assignment to give the kid another chance. Fox thought that was a good idea but he sincerely hoped the young man had learned to keep a wall up between himself and the females involved in a crime.
Like he was doing? A sudden image of yards of black hair hit Fox’s mind hard. He saw it spilling over his hands the way it had when he’d struggled with Tara Cole in Carmen’s garden. He saw her tight, agile body encased in that black second skin.
“Huh?” he said to Migliaccio.
The officer looked at him strangely. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right.” Fox deliberately cleared his mind.
“She usually orders lunch in. That’s what the guy at the deli around the corner says.”
“What’s the name of the place?”
“It’s called Ernie and Vin’s and it’s on the corner of Brown and Twenty-fourth.”
Fox filed that away for future use. “Okay, good. Presuming she doesn’t leave the office earlier, I’ll take the watch over from Currey at five o’clock.” Phil Currey was the guy currently standing in front of her office building.
“Sure. I’ll tell him.” Migliaccio left.
Fox opened the lady’s date book again. Tara Cole was dining with a friend named Charlie at the Four Seasons tonight. She would be attending a black-tie event at a local gallery tomorrow night at nine. Fox decided he was looking forward to that one. He enjoyed art.
At twenty minutes past six, Tara stood up from her desk. Her nerves had been coiled like a child’s slinky toy all day, ever since she’d found out about the cop. She pressed the heel of one hand into each eye, then she turned to the window again and peered down.
The khaki guy was gone. She blinked to be sure but when she opened her eyes again, there was no one down there. Tara spun back to her desk. She slammed her palm down on the mouse, frantically trying to turn her computer off, then she spun for the closet in one corner of her office. She shrugged into her coat while groping for her bag of dry cleaning stashed on the floor.
“Eric!” she shouted. When she stepped out into the hall, her assistant popped his head out of his own office. “Lock up for me! I’ve got to go now, right now!”
“Well…sure.”
Tara ran down the hall and leaned hard on the elevator button. “Come on, come on, come on.” She wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Whittington wouldn’t send someone else to watch her. This would be the changing of the guard, that was all. She was pretty sure he had more than one officer spying on her. She’d noticed someone suspicious in the deli earlier.
Whittington’s cop brigade would catch up with her again at home, but that wasn’t the point. Eluding him for a while was merely payback for what he had done with her date book Monday night.
She had to let him know that he didn’t hold all the cards.
There was an available cab idling right at the curb when she reached the sidewalk downstairs. Tara switched her dry-cleaning bag to her left hand and reached for the door handle with her right.
“Allow me,” said a voice she recognized.
Tara shrieked. She jerked around blindly and her hands came up as though to ward off a blow. The laundry bag dropped at her feet. “You!”
“Northern women have such a hard time accepting hospitality.” Fox stepped around her and opened the cab door himself. “Ladies first.”
“No!”
“I won’t think less of you if you have a gracious moment.”
She felt helpless temper fill her head. Tara looked down while she tried to get her breath and her equilibrium back, while she got it under control. He wore really fine alligatorskin boots, she noticed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d met a man who wore alligator boots. Why did he always have to look so damned good?
“Isn’t that an endangered species or something?” she muttered.
Amazingly, he followed her train of thought and looked down as well. “I’ve never met an alligator who didn’t deserve to be worn. Which may be more than I can say for that fur coat you’re wearing.”
Tara’s head snapped up and her gaze narrowed on him. “It’s faux.”
He grinned. “If that’s what gets your conscience through the night.” Then he ran a finger along her sleeve as though to be sure.
Tara felt the jolt of his touch clear through her coat. His eyes caught hers and held on in something that felt like a challenge…and she didn’t think it had much to do with her fake fur. Her breath caught all over again. He really was the devil incarnate, but for a crazy moment she found herself tempted to lose her soul to him.
The thought nearly stole her voice. “Go away,” she said hoarsely. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Fine. You take this cab and I’ll take the next one. But, ma’am, we surely do need to talk.”
“Why? I told you everything I could possibly tell you Monday night.”
“You told me nothing Monday night.”
“Because there’s nothing to tell!”
“Well, see, I’ve had awhile to think about that now and I’ve decided you’re wrong.” He paused. “You were in Carmen’s home. Can we at least agree on that much?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that—”
“You can’t take the Fifth yet!”
“Why not?” she demanded. “You’re the law, I’m a citizen—”
“You’re a suspect!”
Her air punched right out of her, but she rallied. “That being the case, I refuse to answer—”
“Shut up!”
“You’re very rude.”
His blood pressure spiked. But what she had said was amazingly close to the truth, at least when he was in her company. “I’ve never had anyone try to trot the Fifth out at my most innocent question!”
“There’s nothing innocent about you, nothing at all.”
It was out before she knew she was going to say it. Tara turned away quickly before he could see the heat stain her face. He wouldn’t miss her blush, of that she was sure.
He caught her elbow and her pulse beat harder. “Talk to me,” he said, “if only to save your own pretty hide.”
She fell back on everything she knew about holding her own. She gave him a provocative smile as she looked back at him. “You like my hide?” Then the cabbie blared his horn and she jumped.
Fox bent to peer into the car. “Sit tight, pal.” He finally let go of her when he straightened. “Get in.”
“Give me my book back first.”
“I haven’t finished reading it. I’m finding it very entertaining.”
“Then you need a life, Blue Eyes.”
Fox opened his mouth to answer and found that he simply couldn’t. Anything that passed his lips right now would be angry, frustrated, and yes, rude. He thought of the life he might have been having rig
ht now if this woman hadn’t decided to secrete herself in her stepbrother’s home for some reason known only to her. He thought of the inviting blonde he’d left behind at Remmick’s on Monday to investigate this mess.
Tara moved quickly, sliding into the rear seat of the cab while he seemed preoccupied. She pulled the door shut fast and leaned forward in the seat. “Go!” she shouted at the driver.
“I been trying to,” the man complained.
Tara shot a glance backward as the car vaulted into traffic. Detective Whittington with the initialed name looked quite irate.
Tara laughed aloud, then the sound tried to strangle her. Her dry-cleaning bag was still sitting on the pavement next to Whittington’s slick, handsome boots. She watched him pick up the bag and get into the cab behind her.
Something told her she hadn’t seen the last of him.
Fox decided to keep the laundry, at least for the time being. He took it back to his own apartment, not far from hers on the north side of Girard College. He used his cell phone in the cab and touched base with both Rafe and Migliaccio. He sent Migliaccio to stand in front of Tara’s high-rise. As for his partner, the man was fretting over the virtues of pistachio ice cream and pregnant women.
“Don’t give it to her,” Fox advised.
“Don’t? I’d want to make sure where that meat cleaver of hers is first before I break the news.” Rafe’s wife, Kate, was a chef.
“Trust me on this one,” Fox said. “What goes down green comes up green.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ah, man.”
“Have a good night.”
“You’ve got everything under control? You don’t need me right now?”
Fox guessed by his partner’s tone that only a portion of his mind was on the case—and it was a small, tidy portion at that. “I’ve put snipers on top of every building near hers. If she moves, she’s gone.”