by Beverly Bird
“If I tell him to.”
“Tell him to.”
“Ask me nicely.”
She started to laugh but the sound caught in her throat. Her gaze fell to his mouth. She had a sudden, heated image of persuading him to see things her way. He was grinning now and she thought of running her tongue over his bottom lip and stealing that smile away until his mouth molded over hers.
The fantasy came out of nowhere. It robbed her air and set her pulse to pounding. What was he doing to her?
Fox watched the change come over her face. She started to smile before something happened to her eyes. They narrowed intently. Her breath quickened then caught. It was almost an…invitation, he thought as his own heart punched and things gathered inside him.
Then she took a quick step back. The moment was broken.
Fox ran a hand over his unshaved jaw. “That’s it then,” he said for lack of any other words. Damn it, he knew an invitation when he saw one.
“What’s it?” Tara felt dazed although nothing had actually happened.
“I’ll get a cop over here, then you can go your way and I’ll go mine.”
Tara braced herself against another quick, shifting sensation of disappointment. “And he’ll bring coffee,” she reminded him.
“Sure.”
“Then your plan has my wholehearted support.”
“Hallelujah. Mark this day on the calendar.”
She lifted a haughty brow at him and spun on her heel. He watched her move away. When she disappeared into the living room, he went quickly to stand in the kitchen door to keep her in sight. She headed down the hall toward her bedroom with an easy sway to her hips and that black hair tumbling down her back.
Fox let out a pent-up breath. What had that been? By any name, he thought, it changed things.
And he liked it.
He left twenty minutes later. Tara was still in the bathroom in her robe, a towel wrapped around her wet hair. She heard him shout from the hallway.
“I’m leaving!”
“Okay!”
She waited a heartbeat. He said nothing more. Sprinting across her bedroom to the door, she paused to listen. She heard the front door open and close.
She left her bedroom and trotted to the living room window, dodging the debris. She looked down in time to see him rip a parking ticket from beneath the windshield wiper of his Mustang. A moment later, he was gone.
Tara went to the telephone, sitting on the floor to use it. She called her office. The phone rang and rang before she realized it was probably no later than seven-thirty. All her clocks were ruined and she couldn’t find her watch so she couldn’t be sure.
She disconnected and called Debbie at home. “Hi. It’s Tara. I’ve been thinking about what you guys said. I do need to take some time off.” She didn’t mention the latest wrinkle, what had happened yesterday.
There was a heartfelt sigh from her secretary. “That’s good. How long do you think you’ll be out?”
Tara looked around at her devastated apartment. “I don’t know.” It would probably take her a day to do what she had to do next, then she would have to tackle this mess. She drummed her fingers on her thigh. Where was that cop with her coffee?
She hung up and went to the door and peered out. Mr. Raincoat had finally arrived. This time he was standing right outside her door like a shaggy sentinel.
“Good morning,” he said pleasantly.
“Same to you. Did you bring coffee?”
He frowned. “Was I supposed to?”
She was never going to speak to Fox Whittington again. Tara closed the door without answering.
She went to her room and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, then she crossed the hall to the extra bedroom she had turned into a home office. It was in rough shape. Her computer monitor had hit the floor with enough force to shatter the glass and spill most of its innards onto the carpet. Her hard drive was beyond resurrection. But her desk was still there and the telephone was in working order. She stepped across the threshold then she stopped dead in her tracks.
“What are you doing here?”
The dog was sitting on her chair, her tongue lolling as though she was grinning.
“He left you here? I don’t want you!”
Belle’s little black eyes narrowed.
“Okay. But…scoot. Shoo!” She waved her hand at the animal. “Go sit somewhere else. I’ve got work to do.”
The dog jumped down from the chair and left the room. She actually stalked, Tara thought, though she knew that was impossible. Tara frowned after her, then she shrugged and sat in the chair the dog had vacated. She pulled the telephone toward her and found the Yellow Pages on the floor beneath one of her upended drawers.
She forgot about the dog for three solid hours until she heard a horrible clanging sound in her kitchen. It was followed by a great deal of barking and growling.
Fox was haunted by her scent through most of the morning. He told himself he was just trying to figure it out. It wasn’t perfume, not exactly; it was nothing that strong. Maybe it was her shampoo. He’d noticed it most distinctly when she’d moved close to him in the kitchen this morning, but he remembered it from when he had tackled her in Carmen’s winter-dead garden as well. It was almost spicy, but more floral than that. There was a heat to it that teased his senses. And it was elusive. Sometimes he caught it and sometimes he didn’t.
Like the woman herself, he thought. Sometimes he was on top of things with her. Most times he wasn’t.
He swallowed a mouthful of hot coffee at his desk in the R-H unit then he winced. He’d forgotten to send some to her with Phil Currey.
Picking up his phone, he tapped in the extension for the dispatcher on duty. Sherrie Collins was an overweight blonde whose hair had been bleached one time too many. But she had a heart of gold.
“Hi, gorgeous,” she greeted him in a robust voice.
“Do me a favor? Raise Currey and get him to run over to a croissant shop on Twenty-ninth. He’s at Tara Cole’s apartment. Ask him to grab some coffee for her.”
“Lucky lady,” Sherrie sighed.
“I’m not sure she thinks so.” Fox looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock. Currey would be due for lunch soon. He could kill two birds with one stone. “Send Migliaccio over to replace him for an hour.”
“I’ll take care of it. Just plain coffee. No cappuccino? A latte, maybe?”
He’d thought about it. “Better make it one of each.” Unless he missed his guess, she’d be more than a little irritated with him by now.
He hung up as Rafe rolled in and glanced pointedly at his watch again.
“Hey, you’re Mr. Font-Of-Information-About-Pregnancies,” Rafe complained. “Take a shot at why I overslept.”
“Kate was up and down sixteen times during the night.”
“Not counting the time you woke her. She says she can’t get comfortable.”
“This is nature’s way of sharing the burden,” Fox explained. “If she can’t sleep, you don’t get to, either. Lucky for you I’m so understanding.” Fox pulled the Carmen paperwork from his file drawer and dropped it on his desk. “Given that you’re still probably more well-rested than I am, you can be in charge of thinking today.”
Rafe got his own cup of coffee from an ancient machine against one wall. He took the chair at the desk opposite Fox’s. “What’s come in?”
“Nothing.” And that ticked him off. “All the reports on the Carmen scene are in now. There were no unmatchable prints in his home except those on the telephone and we know those are Tara’s.”
“Tara’s? We’ve gone to a first name basis?” Rafe grinned. “By the way, where’s the dog?”
“I left her with our witness.”
“Ah. That could be trouble.”
Fox concurred with him on that one. He’d been expecting a phone call about it all morning. The fact that he hadn’t bore out his guess that she probably wasn’t speaking to him because of the coffee. “
Can we get back to business? We got virtually nothing from the scene last night except that slew of identicals and, of course, they match the ones on Carmen’s phone. They’re hers.”
“What about hairs, fibers?”
“Nothing human jumps out at either scene, but a few thousand dog hairs were lifted from Carmen’s trousers.”
Rafe laughed. “So you believe Tara now.”
“I always believed her.” Fox frowned at the sudden anger in his own voice. Rarely did he and his partner snarl at each other but he felt as though Rafe had just stepped on tender ground. “My point being that Carmen had to have rolled when he hit the floor. The hairs would have been on the carpet, right?”
“Unless he was cuddling the dog.”
“Against his legs?”
Rafe nodded, giving him the point.
“That’s the only way to account for the fact that they were both on the front of his pants and the back,” Fox continued. “So the blow to his head killed him and whoever did it packed a punch, enough to turn him right over when he hit the floor. Carmen wasn’t a small man so that, too, more or less rules out a woman. No one was seen entering or leaving the estate that night. No one heard sounds of an altercation.”
“Same thing for Tara’s building yesterday,” Raphael supplied.
“The homes in Carmen’s neighborhood are separated by small countries and the walls in Tara’s building are probably soundproof.”
“Still. Does this strike you as being especially clean?” Rafe asked.
“It does.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Premeditation.”
“Someone cleaned up after themselves real well. At least, neither of these things seem to be sudden acts of rage.”
Fox shook his head. “So all we’ve got to go on is our common sense. I don’t see us getting a lot of physical evidence if we don’t have it by now.”
“Which brings us back to the same point,” Rafe said, rising for more coffee. “Who has the rock?”
“Who has the rock?” Fox repeated.
“Therein lies our answer.”
“Yes,” Fox agreed. And something was starting to tell him that it was going to be a humdinger.
The clanging sound scared Tara, coming as suddenly as it did. But she was in deep concentration and it took her a moment to identify where it was coming from and to catch her equilibrium. She paused to rub her eyes. She’d made twenty-three telephone calls and she’d learned exactly nothing. She felt worn out by frustration and disappointment and she had a headache besides.
Then her heart hurtled as the sounds got even louder. What in the world? She spun for her office door and ran up the hallway. She skidded to a stop when she reached the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” she shouted. “Stop that right now!”
Belle paused obligingly to train her beady black gaze on Tara but she kept her jaws clamped around her fur coat. The metal door to the trash chute was open. Half of the coat was in there. Belle seemed seriously determined to annihilate the other half.
Tara advanced on her. “Give me that.” She reached for the coat and the dog snapped at her hand. “I don’t believe this! Give me my coat!”
Belle growled. Tara went for the broom.
She wielded it, swinging it back and forth until the dog let the coat go and raced out of the kitchen. “It’s faux!” Tara shouted. “What kind of doggy instincts do you have anyway, you stupid mutt? You can’t even tell the difference between real fox and a synthetic!”
The dog barked back at her angrily from the other room.
“That does it.”
Tara forgot about her coat. She found the dog near the sofa and swiped her up in one hand. Then she held her up so that she faced her nose to nose. “You are one really lousy houseguest!”
Growl.
“You made me lose the Rose!”
Snarl.
“And it’s because of you that I’m stuck with Fox Whittington in my face every day and most nights!”
The dog barked.
Tara tucked her under her arm. “Just so we understand each other. Those are all the reasons I’m kicking you out.” She wrenched open the door and stalked out into the hall. The little dog struggled and kept trying to nip her. Mr. Raincoat was gone. Maybe he’d felt sorry for her and had gone for that coffee after all.
The elevator came and she stepped in. There was a tall man inside and she thought briefly that he was dressed oddly. He reminded her of a mortician with his long black trenchcoat, black trousers and a black fedora. Tara nodded him a greeting then she hit the lobby button, still trying to contain the dog.
The elevator doors slid shut and the arm that clamped suddenly around her throat was like a vise. Tara tried to scream and found that she couldn’t. Terror scattered her heartbeat and made the edges of her vision go black. She dropped the dog to reach up and claw at the man’s arm.
She was strangling. Then she felt the cold kiss of steel at her throat. The man in the strange clothing put his face close to her ear.
“Where is it?” he hissed. “What have you done with the Rose?”
Chapter 9
Hell broke loose in the form of a five-pound Chihuahua.
The frantic barks of the dog punctuated the man’s harsh, grunting breath. The dog had him by the ankle and his arm moved, relaxing a bit as he looked down in disbelief. Tara dragged in air and screamed.
Her shriek bounced off the walls and ceiling as she twisted in the man’s hold. She couldn’t feel the knife anymore. Where was it? She didn’t dare fight him without knowing that. A hot stream of helplessness poured into her blood.
“Where is it?” he asked again. He had a deep and raspy voice as though he had gargled with sand. His mouth was still close to her ear and his breath warm and fetid.
“I don’t know,” she croaked.
“I don’t have time to play games with you!”
Her mind spun frantically. “It’s in my jewelry box.” Then she realized that he already knew it wasn’t. He’d trashed her apartment yesterday looking for it.
The knife came back, nicking her neck just beneath her ear. Tara closed her eyes, waiting for it to gouge deeper. Her legs were folding. Then she heard him swear.
Her eyes flew open again. Belle was jumping at the elevator buttons as though her hind legs were made of springs. And then…the car stopped. The dog had stopped the car between floors.
She thought she was going to die. For a moment, Tara lost all sensation in her limbs. Then the doors slid open to a burgundy-carpeted corridor.
The man let her go abruptly. When his arm vanished from her throat, the sudden onslaught of air to Tara’s lungs left her weak. She coughed, her eyes tearing. The man was a blur as he darted through the open door.
The dog ran after him, yipping madly, then she dashed back into the car just before the doors floated closed again. She stood at Tara’s feet and stared at her.
“I’m fine,” she rasped. Then she coughed again and sat down hard on the car floor. The dog cocked her head and whined.
“Okay,” Tara wheezed. “You’re right. Actually, I’ve had better days.”
Fox picked up his ringing telephone. “Detective Whittington.”
“There’s trouble there! Someone accosted her in the elevator!” Sherrie’s voice was a shout this time.
Fear pooled in Fox’s gut like cold jelly. He knew—somehow he knew—that the dispatcher was talking about Tara. “Send four units.”
He shot his chair back from his desk so hard and suddenly it careened off the far wall and fell over. He had his gun out of his drawer and into his shoulder holster before he took a step.
“What the hell?” Rafe said, startled.
“He got her. There. In the building.”
They ran from the unit together. Each of his pounding footsteps drove recriminations into Fox’s brain like nails. Should have stayed with her. Should have remembered the coffee hours ago. Should have…mig
ht have…didn’t.
“Who was with her?” Rafe demanded.
“Migliaccio.” Fox let out an uncharacteristic stream of expletives. But it could be Currey’s fault, he thought. It could even be his own.
They ran across the street to the parking lot and dove into Fox’s car. He slapped the blinking light onto his dashboard with one hand while he shifted gears with the other. In minutes, they were hurtling around Logan Circle.
Even so, two of the four units beat them there. The cars were stopped nose to nose in front of 1222 Poplar again, jamming the street. This time Fox didn’t even try to park. He skidded the Mustang to a stop near the cruisers then he was out of the car and running. For once in their partnership, Rafe was well behind him.
Fox saw her as soon as he raced into the lobby. A cop was standing protectively beside her at the opened elevator door. Tara was inside, sitting on the floor with Belle on her lap. Fox jogged to her. His every instinct was to hold her. He balled his hands into fists instead, but he wasn’t sure it mattered. He’d already crossed a line anyway.
“Ah, darlin’, I’m sorry. So sorry.” He hunkered down beside her.
She turned glassy, shocked eyes his way and his heart rolled over. Yes, he was emotionally involved here. And he’d gone and done it over the absolutely wrong woman.
As though to prove it, Tara spoke. “You ought to be sorry. You never sent me that coffee.”
A bark of nervous laughter tried to scrape out of Fox’s throat. She was okay. He was afraid to consider what he might have done if she hadn’t been.
“When the elevator opened, she was sitting here on the floor,” the cop explained. “She asked the doorman to call you.”
Fox’s heart shifted a little as he considered the significance of that, that she’d reached out for him. Then he stood and gave her a hand up. “Tell me everything so I know what to do with all these cops.”
Tara took a breath and plunged in. “He was in the elevator when I got on. He had a knife. We struggled then Belle jumped up against the floor buttons. The car stopped on four and he ran out. He wasn’t overpowering me as quickly or quietly as he probably thought he would so I think he cut his losses. He’s dressed all in black—coat, gloves, shoes, hat. He was about your height but chunkier. I couldn’t see his hair.”