But how had they done it?
And how had they known I would be in the apartment to see the piece, instead of in Greer’s guesthouse, where I’d been staying for days?
A shiver trickled down my spine, then shinnied back up again.
What the hell was going on?
I spent the next forty-five minutes scouring the place for electronic bugs, hidden cameras, anything. There was nothing.
Finally I hunkered down on the couch again, drawing my knees up, wrapping my arms around my legs. And I brooded.
But I think I knew even then that what I’d seen hadn’t come through a wire, or by means of some electronic techno-magic. Oh, no. This was another kind of thing entirely, and there were no Damn Fool’s Guides to explain it.
I was still sitting there, staring, when I heard a knock at the apartment door and knew Tucker had arrived.
I felt both relief—when he was around, I was safe—and sorrow, because I knew even he wouldn’t believe it if I told him I’d seen the prelude to Gillian’s murder on my TV screen.
“Coming,” I called halfheartedly, heading for the door. My legs felt wooden, and I was stiff. Cold. “Tucker?”
“Yo,” he said.
I opened the door.
He was holding a cluster of take-out bags in one hand and a leash in the other. At the end of the leash was a small black-and-white dog with pointy ears, one of which tipped forward at a rakish angle.
“Meet Dave,” Tucker said, apparently referring to the dog.
Dave gave a hopeful little yelp of greeting and looked up at me with one blue eye and one brown one.
I stepped back to admit them both.
Tucker frowned as he handed me the take-out bags and reached back to shut the door. “What’s up?” he said. “You look—if you’ll excuse the expression—like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I had a headache earlier,” I fibbed. “I’m better now.”
I hadn’t had a headache, and I wasn’t “better,” either.
Tucker unclipped the leash, and Dave went sniffing into my living room. “Aren’t you going to ask about the dog?”
“What about the dog?” I asked dutifully.
Dave lifted a leg against a bookshelf and let fly.
“See that,” Tucker said. “He already feels at home.”
I gave him a look, carried the takeout into the kitchen, dumped it on the table and started tearing paper towels off the roll to wipe up the piddle.
“Somebody dumped him at Allison’s front gate,” Tucker went on, watching me closely and somewhat thoughtfully, as if he knew something was up with me but couldn’t quite get hold of what it was. “That’s why she asked me to come by. She checked him over and gave him his shots, but she can’t keep him because she’s shutting down the practice while she and the kids visit her folks.” He spread his hands, as if he’d just brought stone tablets down from Mount Sinai to a waiting world. “You need a dog. Dave needs a home. It’s fate.”
Chapter Ten
RIGHT ABOUT NOW, you’re probably thinking I broke down and told Tucker all about seeing the prologue to Gillian’s murder on my TV screen—and about my visit to Vince Erland at the county jail.
I did neither. I needed to make sense of both experiences within myself before I could share them, and I was a long way from doing that. I’m big on processing, and that’s a private thing.
So we ate Chinese food in my kitchen and drank coffee.
Dave scored some of the chicken, then curled up in the corner of the room, yawned and went to sleep. He had the air of an exhausted traveler, home at last after crossing mountains and valleys and windswept prairies.
All to get to me, the human Mecca.
I looked askance at Tucker, because I couldn’t look askance at the dog, now snoring contentedly, with his bent ear almost touching his nose.
Tucker followed my glance and grinned. “Falling in love?” he asked.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “No,” I said. I’d loved my cat, Chester, and he was gone. I’d loved Russell, the basset hound—ditto. I’d even begun to love Justin’s dog, Pepper, for heaven’s sake, and where was that going to get me?
I flat-out couldn’t afford to love Dave, too.
“Liar,” Tucker said, looking smug.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” I said. “Bringing that dog here, expecting me to take him in.”
“It’s required in my line of work,” Tucker answered. “A lot of nerve, I mean. And you’ve been wanting a dog ever since Russell went into Witness Protection.”
He was right, of course, but I didn’t have to admit it.
My conscience, napping during the Dave exchange, yawned, stretched and shook itself awake. Focused on the gun I’d bought that day.
I’d buried the Glock, still in its case, under the crumpled take-out bags piled on the table, hoping it wouldn’t catch Tucker’s eye before I was ready to break the news that I now owned a lethal weapon. I wasn’t sure how he’d react—he might be relieved, but he was more likely to give me the speech about how easy it would be for an assailant to get hold of the gun and use it against me. The standard discourse on tragic accidents would follow, complete with verifiable statistics.
Tucker, like many cops, believed ordinary citizens were better off without guns. It wasn’t that I disagreed with him—in fact, I was sure he was right—but I wasn’t an ordinary citizen. I was a detective, and a psycho magnet.
I had enemies.
I could feel them, a dark pressure in the atmosphere around me.
It made me shiver, dimmed the light flowing in through the kitchen window.
I looked at Dave again. He’d be a lousy guard dog, small as he was, but he’d make good company, I supposed. I’d just have to be extra careful not to start caring about him too much.
He slept on.
Tucker and I finished our meal in silence, and when he would have cleaned up the bags and cartons, thus uncovering the Glock, I suggested sex instead.
We retired to the bedroom, got naked and spent the next couple of hours alternately rattling the walls and lying stuporous in each other’s arms.
I was just mellow enough to tell Tucker about the Glock and my assessment of Vince Erland and my appointment at the target range the next morning, not to mention the blackmailer’s call I’d inadvertently taken at Greer’s, when the phone on my bedside table broke the blissful, honey-warm silence with a shrill bling.
I scrambled over Tucker’s bare torso to grab it.
He looked at me curiously, and one side of his mouth kicked up in a little grin.
“Hello?” I said.
“What are you doing at the apartment?” Jolie demanded. “The locks have been changed at Greer’s, and nobody answers the door.”
Tucker set me astraddle his hips. Eased inside me, the stroke long and slow and deep.
I fought to keep my voice normal. “C-Carmen’s with her.”
Tucker watched my face as he began to move beneath me, his hands cupping my backside, guiding me along the length of him in a maddening rhythm. My nipples hardened, and he raised his head far enough to take one into his mouth.
I gasped, my control shattered. Jolie was ranting, but I couldn’t make sense of the words, and I didn’t dare answer. So I thumbed the end button and tossed the receiver aside, groaning hoarsely as the first of several sharp orgasms slashed through me.
The phone immediately rang again.
I ignored it.
Tucker took me over the edge, and soon followed.
“That was a dirty trick,” I told him some fifteen minutes later when I’d recovered my power of speech. “Jolie’s probably on her way over here right now, thinking something awful’s happened to me.”
Tucker eased out of my
arms, sat up, grabbed his jeans off the floor and pulled them on. “Hey,” he said. “You were naked and lying across my chest. What was I supposed to do?”
Male logic.
A car door slammed hard in the parking lot below the apartment.
Footsteps pounded on the outside stairs.
Dave, who hadn’t made a sound while Tucker and I were raising the roof off the bedroom, started up with a yappy bark, his toenails tapping on the bare floor as he headed from the kitchen toward the front.
A fist thundered against the door.
“She’s here,” Tucker said, grinning as he tugged a T-shirt on over his head.
I got out of bed, too, and had all my clothes on while Tucker was still pulling on his boots.
Blushing, I dashed for the door, practically tripping over Dave in the process, and wrenched it open.
Jolie stood on the mat, glaring at me. Her gaze rose, and I knew Tucker must be standing right behind me. In the next instant she was back to drilling a stare into my face.
“We’re in the middle of a family crisis and you were having sex?”
“We weren’t...” I protested weakly, stepping back, as an afterthought, to admit her.
“Hi, Jolie,” Tucker said, with a grin hiding in his voice. “Come on in. There might be some kung pao left.”
Jolie softened a little in spite of herself. Tucker had that effect on people of the female persuasion. She grumbled a “hello” and looked down at Dave, who was peering around my right knee and no longer barking.
Tucker receded.
Jolie bent to pat Dave on the head.
“Is Greer all right?” I asked.
“What do you care?” Jolie retorted, straightening and pinning me with another scorching look. “I called all over looking for you. I couldn’t get you on your cell phone, or at the guesthouse. Who’d have thought you’d be here, where you were almost murdered, bouncing on a mattress with the boyfriend?”
“Can we get past that?” I asked, getting annoyed. “Carmen was at Greer’s when I left. I asked her to have the locks changed, and she must have gotten right on it.”
Jolie followed me into the living room, Dave keeping pace. He was an odd, wiry little dog, with a spring in his walk that made his bent ear jiggle.
“Sit down,” I said to Jolie, gesturing toward the couch.
My sister seemed calmer, now that I’d told her I’d ordered the lock change at Greer’s myself. I’d probably put such a scare into Carmen, telling her about the threat against her boss’s life, that she was afraid to open the door.
“Did you see Carmen’s car?” I asked. “When you were at Greer’s, I mean?”
“No,” Jolie said, “but her husband usually drops her off in the morning and picks her up at night.”
“You tried calling the main house?”
Jolie skewered me with another glance. “Of course I did.”
“Greer wasn’t feeling well when I left. She’s probably ignoring the phone and the doorbell.”
“I still don’t like it,” Jolie said.
“We’ll go over there in a few minutes,” I assured her. “And break in if we have to.”
Tucker was in the kitchen, and I heard the take-out bags rustling.
Then a clipped, quietly thunderous “Mojo.”
I stiffened and rolled my eyes toward the ceiling. He’d found the Glock.
Jolie took a seat, but perched on the very edge of the sofa cushions, fairly bristling with restrained energy. Raised a curious look to my face.
Tucker appeared in the doorway, holding the pistol. He did not look like the same man I’d been in bed with only a few minutes before. “Were you planning to tell me about this?” he asked evenly, his expression stony, his jaw hard.
Jolie gave a low whistle of admiration, probably for the gun, but possibly for the way Tucker looked holding it.
“Yes,” I said.
“When?”
I blushed. The correct answer was “After we had sex,” but I couldn’t say that in front of Jolie, even though she was obviously up to speed on that subject. “Tonight,” I said, still sounding meeker than I would have liked.
“Where did you get it?”
“Good question,” Jolie put in.
“At a souvenir shop,” I answered. Dave leaned heavily against my leg, and I was grateful for his support—if that was what it was.
“A souvenir shop,” Tucker marveled. “Not from the back of a car behind some liquor store? Or maybe at a yard sale?”
“There is,” I said loftily, “no reason to be sarcastic. And I start shooting lessons tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. The guy at the target range ran a background check and everything.”
A muscle in Tucker’s cheek bunched. “What’s the name of this ‘souvenir shop’?” he inquired mildly. Before I could answer, he was at my desk, copying the serial number off the Glock onto a scrap of lined yellow legal paper.
I was reminded of the pirate phone, which was still in the pocket of my pantsuit jacket, along with the offshore bank routing numbers, the pill I’d taken from Greer’s prescription bottle and the digits I’d scribbled down off the battery of the throwaway. At the time, I hadn’t planned on taking the phone itself—there was always a chance the blackmailers would call again, and Greer had to be the one to answer. Distracted by my conversation with Carmen, I’d forgotten, and automatically dropped it into my pocket.
I gave Tucker the shop name. Glanced at Jolie. “There’s more,” I said, addressing both of them.
They looked at me balefully.
“Great,” Tucker said, drawing out the word.
I took charge. After all, it was my apartment.
“Sit down, Tucker,” I said.
He complied, but he was in no particular hurry to do it.
I went into the bathroom, snatched my jacket off the top of the hamper, where I’d tossed it before my shower, and returned to center stage. Also known as the living room.
“I was doing some—sleuthing—at Greer’s this morning,” I said, “and one of her desk drawers rang. I opened it, and found this inside.” I flourished the throwaway. Jolie swiped it right out of my hand and studied the device.
“So?” she asked.
“So I answered, that’s what, and the person on the other end was surprised to get me instead of Greer. Whoever it was asked me to pass a message on to her—that she’s a dead woman. And they referred to her as ‘Molly.’”
Jolie gaped at me.
Tucker got up from my desk chair, strode across the room and grabbed the cell phone, frowning. “There are messages on this thing,” he said.
The pit of my stomach opened like a trapdoor.
The blackmailers must have called while I was showering, or eating Chinese takeout with Tucker, or—well, you get the picture. When Tucker and I made love, we also made noise. A lot of it.
A bomb could have gone off at the bottom of the outside stairs and we might not have heard it. Forget the muffled ring of a cell phone in another room.
Tucker keyed in a sequence on the keypad. “PIN number,” he said.
Jolie gave it.
It’s that easy to guess a PIN number, if you know a person very well at all. They use their birthday, the last four digits of their Social Security number, even their street address.
Tucker followed through, and patched right into Greer’s voice mail.
Listened, his face darkening.
“Damn,” he said when he’d finished.
Jolie held out one hand for the phone, and he gave it to her. She replayed the messages, and her beautiful coffee-dark skin took on an ashen hue as she listened.
“More death threats?” I asked Tucker.
“Yes,” he said. “Straight out of Qu
entin Tarantino’s worst nightmares.”
I closed my eyes, swayed slightly.
Jolie caught hold of my hand and pulled me down to sit beside her on the couch. She looked sick, and considering that she was a crime-scene technician by profession, and before that she’d worked in a sophisticated forensics lab, weighing vital organs and picking bone fragments out of brains, her reactions gave me pause.
Numbly she handed me the phone.
Tucker shook his head. “Don’t,” he rasped.
I had to listen. If I was going to help Greer, or even try to protect her, I needed to know everything there was to know about the situation.
I sat through it, shivering.
And then I ran into the bathroom and sat on the edge of my tub, in case the gagging escalated to something a lot messier.
When I had the reflex under control, I splashed my face with cold water, straightened my shoulders and returned to the living room.
Tucker was on his cell phone, talking in terse undertones.
“Who’s he calling?” I asked Jolie, who was pacing, jingling her car keys in one hand. I was still a little rattled, or I might have worked it out on my own.
“The Feds,” she said impatiently. “Greer’s over there alone, Moje.”
My heart lurched.
Tucker ended the first call and made a second, to 911.
I couldn’t bear to think about what we might find when we got to Greer’s, so I went with the next-worst worst case scenario. I pictured government agents swarming over the main house, simultaneously invading peaceful Shiloh, Montana, and I was alarmed. While I knew the FBI might protect Greer—since the advent of terrorism, they’d been hard up for manpower—I was still scared to death. The blackmailers weren’t just blackmailers anymore—they were ruthless extortionists. And they might get to my sister before the good guys did. Considering the things they had planned for her, I couldn’t let that happen.
Except, they might already have gotten to her.
I snatched the Glock off the coffee table, where Tucker had laid it down, and he immediately took it from me, slipped it into the waistband of his jeans. He was still on the line with the emergency dispatcher as he, Jolie, Dave and I all rushed down the outside stairs.
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