She put the album down, finished her beer. “I was hoping there was something here to help us in some way, make me remember something, but I can’t find anything.”
Cullen gestured to the boxes. “What about those?”
“Those are my mother’s hobby photos. I’ve had a good look through them, but I don’t see anything that stands out. Maybe fresh eyes will see something I don’t.”
Closing her eyes, the image of her mother in the yellow dress filled her head, and without warning, tears filled her eyes. Sadness, anger at a life cut short. The repercussions had reverberated down through the years, and would likely continue for a long time. As an empty feeling came crashing down inside her, she started to sob.
Moving closer, Cullen put his hands around her and pulled her toward him. She let herself lean against him this time, not caring. He felt warm and strong and smelled like soap.
A while later, finally able to stop crying, she turned her head, looked at him, let herself examine his face, chin, lips, forehead. Their eyes met.
He brushed her hair behind her ears. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. They both knew this was dangerous territory but neither of them broke eye contact until she reached out and touched a little scar above his lip, just below his moustache. “How did you get this?”
“It’s actually a mild cleft lip.” He took her hand and something in his expression suggested fear. Or maybe she was seeing things. “I want to ask you something.”
She cleared her throat, waited. His smell, fresh and woodsy, was mesmerizing.
“Can I kiss you? Just one kiss?” Husky, his voice had gone all low and husky.
She nodded. “I won’t even call you an asshole.”
He wasn’t in the mood for light remarks. Those blue eyes smoldered. His lips were soft and full, slightly parted, utter temptation. It was torture looking at him and not doing anything.
She put her hands around his neck, pulled him closer, and his mouth on hers was as light as a feather. His lips trailed along hers, reached the corners, went back to the middle, and then his tongue moved along the seam of her lips, slipped inside her mouth, then out.
Warmth flooded her and she shuddered, totally unprepared for her reaction. Until now, they had hardly touched and even now his hands weren’t on her. It was just his tongue, soft, darting in and out. His five o’clock shadow prickled her skin.
He pulled away. Her eyes fluttered open and met his, and then she lowered her eyes. For a moment, he didn’t say or do anything, then dipped his head down so he could see her eyes. “See? I kept my promise, just a kiss.”
She swallowed, looked away.
He said, “We should call it a night. I’ll get the inflatable bed set up.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The next morning, Cullen was lying in bed staring at the ceiling when his phone buzzed on the nightstand beside his bed.
“I know it’s your day off, but I thought you’d want to be kept up to date,” Anna Ackerman said when he answered.
He groaned. “What time is it?” It had taken hours to fall asleep and he’d tossed and turned all night, unable to stop thinking about Nicole.
“Eight thirty. Time to get up and at ’em.”
Another groan. “What’d you want to tell me?”
“First Marshall Corporation belongs to Allan Spidell.”
“First Marshall? What’s that again?”
“The holding company that sold the farm where Lisa Bosko’s body was found.”
He bolted up, swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Shit.”
“I’d say. It might be just the break we need. Want to head over to his place?”
“Definitely. We should ask him about that and why Lisa Bosko quit working for him just before she was killed. I’m thinking maybe they had a falling out. She found out something, and he killed her to keep her quiet.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Am I whispering?” he whispered, slipping into a pair of jeans. He walked down the hallway to the door of Nicole’s bedroom, which was ajar. Peeking in, he saw crumpled sheets but no Nicole. Her suitcase was open on the floor beside the bed.
Looking around downstairs, Nicole was nowhere to be seen. A fissure of unease licked at him. In the kitchen, his keys were on the table by the window.
“You there?” Anna said with a trace of irritation.
“Call you back in a minute.” He hung up before she could respond.
Back upstairs, he looked out the front window. It was narrow, with a pointed arch at the top. Didn’t see her. Ran down the hallway to his bedroom, peered out a side window. Let out a breath. She was in the uncut hayfield, about a half mile off, walking back toward the house.
He called Anna back. “I’ll just grab some coffee and breakfast. I can pick you up in, say, an hour. I’ll call you when I’m leaving.”
Nicole was knee-deep in the grass, and the tops swaying in the wind seemed to wrap around her. In a week or two, the farmer who rented the field would cut the hay. Above her the sky was a cloudless blue. He watched her for a long time, thinking of their kiss, and soon she was close enough to see she was wearing the same navy sweater from last night. The sun caught coppery highlights in her hair. She walked with her hands in her back pockets of her jeans. When she looked up and saw him at the window, she took her hands out and gave a little wave.
A feeling of warmth spread through him. Turning from the window, he put on a white button-down shirt and went downstairs to start breakfast. By the time she came in, he had coffee ready and bacon and eggs on the go. While she poured herself a coffee, he set their breakfasts on the table, retrieved cutlery and salt and pepper. “How’d you sleep?”
“Well, thank you.”
It was doubtful she was telling the truth. She looked tired but better than the day before. Better and then some in a plaid shirt with the top two buttons undone. He speared a piece of bacon, tried not to think about reaching over and slipping his hand in the opening.
Stop staring.
He said, “I have to go out for a while, a couple of hours.” He didn’t want to tell her where until he had more information, not wanting her to think about Allan Spidell. “Will you be okay here?”
“I’ll be fine. I took a peek at your bookcase. I might just find something to read.”
“Help yourself to anything. There’s not much food in the fridge, but enough to throw together a sandwich, in case you get hungry. The mobile’s on the counter, if you want to reach me. I put my number in it.”
Half an hour later, he picked up Anna downtown and headed for the Spidell ranch.
Anna had brought a file with an interview with Spidell from when Lisa Bosko had disappeared. She said, “He didn’t have much to say. He gave Bosko the job as a sort of favor. They were old high school friends and she’d come to him eighteen months earlier, wanting to earn some extra cash. He said she was very good at it. He had no idea why she left, but she gave two weeks’ notice.”
He said, “She wouldn’t just quit her job and give no explanation.”
“I agree, but it might not have anything to do with this. And back then the cops had no reason to suspect Spidell, or anyone else, for that matter.”
Just before Taunton Lake, driving past a new subdivision, he spotted the Spidell ranch on a hill ahead. “Did you find anything out about what his money troubles are all about?”
She nodded. “There’s a dispute with one of his business partners, a Lewis Mandrake. It’s hard to pin it down, but it seems things went sour in the last year or so. The partner says Spidell owes him a lot of money, somewhere between three and four million dollars. Spidell may have been siphoning off money into his horse farm. Mandrake is suing him.”
Cullen whistled as the car pulled up in front of the house. “That’s a lot of money.”
As he got out of the car, the front door opened and a woman burst out, followed by Spidell’s son. Cullen couldn’t remember his
name.
The woman was yelling and flapping her hands about. She tripped on the last step, caught herself.
He said, “What’s going on?”
“What?” This came from the son. “We called you. We called the police.”
In the distance, the noise of sirens came across the fields and up the hill. “What happened?”
The son said, “It’s my father. He’s killed himself. He hung himself in the barn.”
* * *
After Cullen left, Nicky read a magazine for a while, then found a pair of scissors in the kitchen and used them to slice the packing tape on the last unopened box of photographs, one that she’d picked up from her father’s place. Opening the box, the smell of dust and mold hit her. Sneezing, she pulled out a couple of dozen photos bound together with a thin blue elastic. She sneezed again as she set them down on the table.
The box must have been stored in the basement for a long time. Removing the elastic, she riffled through the photos. This time, sneezed three times in quick succession. She spread the photos on the table so they could air out, then went into the kitchen to make a sandwich for lunch.
Cullen called as she was cleaning up, but didn’t say where he was or what he was doing, although he warned her he might not be back for a couple of hours.
Back in the living room, she peered down at some of the photos. One set was of a group of teenagers outside in someone’s backyard. Her mother was there, aged about eighteen, fresh faced and beautiful, her long brown hair hanging down her back. She seemed to be staring at something, but it was impossible to say what it was. If Nicky was correct, and her mother had been eighteen, it meant she’d had fewer than a dozen years to live. She put the picture down, a dark hollowness in her stomach widening.
From the other pictures, Nicky could see four girls and three boys had been together that day and they’d passed the camera around so no one was left out. It took a moment to recognize her uncle, Steve Bosko, then a grinning Allan Spidell, who was much slimmer and had a full head of hair. She didn’t recognize any of the girls, aside from her mother, or the third boy, who was shorter than the other boys, with a hawkish nose and frizzy blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She would have to ask her uncle.
After a while, sneezing again, she put the pictures aside and went for a walk. When she came back, at just past three p.m., Cullen was standing on the back step.
He looked gorgeous, rocking a serious five o’clock shadow, and his body all muscle and brawn in a white shirt and jeans.
Her chest felt like it was swelling. When he didn’t return her smile her smile, she said, “What’s wrong?”
“Come inside.”
“Tell me.” Her pulse quickening, she reached out, grabbed his arm. A chill spread over her skin. “You’ve arrested Allen Spidell, haven’t you?”
He took her hand, and when he looked down his eyes were troubled. “No, we haven’t. Allan Spidell’s dead. His body was found in his barn this morning.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Shrinking back, Nicole gave a little cry before clamping her hands over her mouth.
Cullen cursed himself under his breath for not breaking the news more softly. She’d gone pale again, giving her face a bleached-out look.
A gust of wind blew her hair across her face. It was cold and he reached out for her. “Come inside. I’ll tell you.”
In the kitchen, he waited until she was seated at the table before speaking. “Jason Spidell found his father’s body in the horse barn this morning. His father wasn’t answering his cell, so he went out to look for him.”
“And?”
“He said he found him hanging from a beam in the horse barn.”
She kept her eyes on his. “Suicide?”
“Can’t say for sure until the investigation is complete but it looks like it.”
Hanging her head, she rubbed her face. After a minute, she looked up. “I suppose I should go see Jason.”
Something burned in Cullen’s chest. He didn’t think she had any feelings for Spidell, but what if he had some residual pull he could use? He’d seen the way the guy had looked at Nicole at the memorial service.
Ashamed for even thinking of that, he got up and walked to the window. To the south, a small mountain peak rose above the fields, just visible in the fading light.
She said, “Do you think this has anything to do with my mother’s death? Like maybe he killed my mom and felt so guilty about it he couldn’t take it anymore?”
He turned to face her. “I don’t know.”
“It kind of makes sense.” Hope crept into her voice as she warmed to the theme. “It was okay while everybody thought she’d disappeared, but now we know it was murder—and I started questioning him about his relationship with her—it was too much to handle.”
Although loath to dash her hopes, he didn’t want her to have a false sense of security just because Allan Spidell was dead. “It’s a possibility, but I think if he’d lived with killing her for so long, I’m not sure her body being discovered would put him over the edge.”
“Did he leave a note?” She put her tightly clenched hands on the table.
He shook his head to indicate no. “He was having money problems. He was being sued and maybe the pressure of it got to be too much. His wife said he’d been despondent. She wanted him to go see a doctor but he refused.”
“It just seems like too much of a coincidence.”
“I agree.”
They discussed it some more, but too many unanswered questions made it difficult to say anything with certainty.
After a while, he went outside and started up the barbecue and they had burgers and a salad. Later, they grabbed sweaters and he built a fire in a pit in the backyard he’d made of river rock.
She sat in a folding chair nursing a beer, not saying much. After a while, she said, “We may never find out who killed my mother or why.” She met his eyes. “I’m not blaming you. I realize you’re trying your best. But I don’t know how I’ll be able to cope with not knowing.”
He said, “I haven’t given up.”
She didn’t seem to have heard him. “The more I think about, the more I realize Allan Spidell didn’t kill her. He didn’t have a motive. He seemed to like her.” She poked at the fire with a long stick. “In some ways he seemed protective of her, almost like a big brother.”
“Even brothers and sisters can have complicated relationships. If you dig under the surface, all sorts of nuances show up.”
She nodded. “Don’t I know it? Except in my family, it’s important to show to the outside world everything is perfect. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors, isn’t it?”
Fully dark now, stars filled the sky. The back porch light cast a dim glow across the yard. Wood in the fire, some of it still a bit green, hissed and popped, but it gave off a lot of heat. Cullen took off his sweater, draped it over the arm of the chair. The crickets that had chirped up a raucous storm a few weeks ago were dormant now.
He said, “Still, I bet you’d do anything for your sister, wouldn’t you?”
She spoke without hesitation. “Of course. Ask me ten years ago and you might have gotten a different answer, and she still drives me crazy sometimes, but I do love her and I’d do anything for her.”
He threw another log onto the bonfire and took a long swig of beer. “My brother and I have a pretty uncomplicated relationship.”
Nicole stood up suddenly, threw the stick she’d been holding on the ground.
Startled, he said, “What?”
She was already half way to the house. “I have to look at the pictures again,” she yelled over her shoulder.
He caught up with her in the living room, where she knelt on the floor and opened a box. She looked through a few pictures, then set it aside. Picking up a photo album, she flipped through it. She must have found what she was looking for, because she sat back, her bum on her heels, and started looking at them more closely.
He said, “You want to
tell me what’s going on?”
After examining it, she stood up and handed it to him. “What do you see?”
The light from the lamp in the corner wasn’t bright, so he walked into the kitchen, flipped on the overhead light, and studied the picture. Following him, she stood to the side, waiting.
He said, “I see your mother, Allan Spidell, another girl, and your father. It looks like they’re at a high school party.”
She snatched the picture away, took another look.
He said, “Am I missing something?”
“That’s not my father.”
“It sure looks like your father.”
“It’s my uncle.”
He frowned. “And?”
“We were talking a minute ago about relationships between sisters and brothers. How you’d do anything for them. My dad and my uncle are really close. They even look the same. That’s what made me think of it.”
“Made you think of what?”
“What if my uncle found out my mother was having an affair?”
He shook his head slowly. Talk about coming out of left field. “Do you have any evidence he knew? I mean, it’s a bit of a leap.”
“Maybe my dad confided in him. Let’s just do a what-if. What do you think my uncle, who is close to my father and vice versa, would do if he found out my mother was having an affair?”
She was way off base here. “Kill her?” He shook his head, then suddenly remembered the alibi. “Wait a second. Your uncle had an alibi. He was in Connecticut with his wife.”
She gave him a long look. “Alibis can be faked. What if he was motivated? Maybe if he was mad enough.” Her pitch rose an octave. “He might not seem like the violent type, but in the right circumstances, who knows?”
“But are these the right circumstances? Your father said he forgave your mother. Do you honestly think he’d be helping your father by killing his wife, the woman he loved?”
Extreme Pursuit (Chasing Justice #2) Page 13