by Lee, Rachel
Gil supposed it was just a teenage act of disobedience, but after what had happened last time with Jamie, he didn’t trust that little prick any farther than he could throw him. Maybe not even that far. Jamie would do something to Trina to teach her a lesson for running away from him with another guy. He knew it in his bones. And apparently, so did Rina. Otherwise, she never would have called him.
There was no answer at Jamie’s house, so he decided to check the beaches first.
But he did know the make, model, and license number of Jamie’s car. Reaching for his phone, he called in the cavalry.
It was his only advantage as a cop. Otherwise, he was just any jerk who made the same stupid mistakes. Really stupid mistakes. After five years of avoiding women because he didn’t want to be betrayed again, he’d gone and gotten involved with a suspect.
Shit, it was going to be a long day.
Tebbins picked up his phone yet again, and this time called Anna. Her answer was subdued.
“Hello?” she said, her voice heavy with reluctance.
“This is Tebbins,” he told her. “I need your help.”
She seemed to perk up a little at that. “What can I do?”
“I’ve got a bunch of videotapes to review, and I want you to help me identify people. Can you lend me a few hours?”
“Sure, I’d be glad to.”
“Thanks. I’ll send an officer for you. He’ll bring you to my house.” He’d done that for a specific reason. Bringing her in to the station might tense her up, make her overly cautious. His home would be a much less threatening atmosphere, one that wouldn’t make her too wary. “Say, forty-five minutes?”
“I’ll be ready.”
Things were getting too dangerous, the watcher thought as he followed Tebbins from the station to his home. Too dangerous. He never should have taken the dagger.
But even as he thought that, he understood he’d had no choice. He needed the dagger to perform the sacrifice, and he needed to return it to its rightful place so the curse would end. He knew that.
But events had mushroomed. The police had figured it out before he could make his offering. He’d made a serious misstep by putting the fake dagger in Anna’s bed. He’d been so consumed by his need to let her know she was being haunted by the curse that he’d been a fool.
He hadn’t thought the police would watch her house after she found the dagger. He’d assumed they would come, check things out, and leave. Instead he’d had to drug a cop so he could approach the house to kill Anna, and had been nearly caught by Garcia. It was enough to make him think events might be conspiring against him.
But that couldn’t be, he reminded himself. He had the jaguar god on his side. No, it was just a greater test. He was having to prove himself, was all.
Now they were getting too close. He had to stall them. He’d heard Tebbins say on the phone that he was going to review the tapes, and he had to prevent that. Because all the while he’d been telling himself they wouldn’t find him because he’d changed the recordings for the lobby and exhibit cameras covering the time from 12:30 A.M. to 8:30 A.M., he hadn’t been able to switch any of the tapes of the lobby from the night before or the morning after.
He’d been able to duplicate tapes of night shifts from the preceding week without any trouble. The problem was, there was no way he could duplicate the lobby tapes from the night of the party. Nor had he been able to change the morning tapes because the robbery had been discovered and the tapes locked down before he could have done so.
He should have picked a different night to rob the place, he realized. Then he could have used duplicate tapes that showed him leaving the night before, which would at least have covered his ass somewhat, even though he couldn’t switch to a tape showing him arriving the next morning.
If someone noticed that…
He swore under his breath. Hubris. He’d wanted the splash of committing an impossible crime directly after the party. He’d told himself all those people would be potential suspects, concealing him even better.
But he’d left a great big hole in his own alibi. And if Tebbins noticed…
He had to get Tebbins out of the picture, at least long enough to give him the opportunity to sacrifice Anna, and maybe Nancy.
He had no choice. But he hated having to drag others in. He didn’t even want to kill Anna and her sister, but it was the only way he could save his own neck from the curse. Unfortunately, that was now true of Tebbins as well.
The curse had reached out, snaring others. Others whose only sin was to be remotely involved. Just like his own mother and father.
He steeled himself by remembering that he would be saving lives in the long run if he succeeded, the lives of others who would fall under the curse for preventing the dagger’s return to the tomb. Hadn’t the last week shown it was still reaching out, snaring others in its maw?
But he had to move swiftly.
Tebbins felt pretty good by the time he arrived home. The case was about to break big-time. He had enough now to knuckle Anna under with some questioning, although at the moment he preferred to wait a little while. She didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere, and he didn’t have a whole lot to go on, at least until the toxicology was back on the coffee she’d given the cop. No, he needed a whole lot more.
And he hoped he might get some of it today.
But first he had to make this look like a social setting. He dug a box of scones out of his pantry and arranged them on a doily-covered plate. He put them on the tea cart next to the elaborate porcelain tea service he’d bought a few years before. The small blue roses had appealed to him.
Boiling the water and heating the milk would have to wait until Anna arrived.
He surveyed his preparations with approval, then checked to make sure his entertainment system was set to run videotapes. All ready.
Humming “Rule Brittania,” he went to slip on his smoking jacket.
* * *
Anna felt uneasy. She told herself she was being ridiculous, that she was riding in a police car to visit a police officer, but she felt uneasy anyway. Going to Tebbins’s house rather than the station bothered her, but she hadn’t been able to figure out a good reason to call him back and refuse.
Instead, she sat in the car and remembered how Tebbins had been on the scene almost the instant she found the dagger on her desk. She didn’t have any trouble imagining that a detective might be involved in the robbery.
He would certainly have the knowledge and resources. And, if he wanted, access to a great deal of information about the security. Better still, he’d be all but invisible to everyone, including the investigators.
But he can’t do anything today, she reminded herself. The cop who was driving her would be there. She was safe. She was just being paranoid.
But her discomfort continued to grow. She wished Nancy were with her, but Nancy had called to say she was going to stop off for a beer with Boomer and Turk before coming home. A fugitive smile curved her mouth as she considered the shock those two guys were going to get if they made a pass at Nance.
But amusement didn’t lift her spirits for long. Her anxiety still grew, a feeling of impending doom, as if she were hurtling into the darkness.
Looking at the cop beside her, she knew she was trapped. She just hoped she was with the good guys.
The watcher was hiding behind a vine trellis in a neighbor’s yard, keeping an eye on Tebbins’s house. He stood near a fire-ant mound and the nasty bugs were getting up inside his pant legs, stinging like mad. He needed to move, but he didn’t dare. Not yet. Tebbins was still moving around too much, visible as he passed by windows.
Then the cop car drew up out front. An officer climbed out and came around to the passenger side, opening the door.
Anna! At once a sense of exhilaration and a sense of despair filled him. Two of his targets together. But that other cop… that other cop would be a problem.
Straining, he listened as the front door opened. He he
ard Tebbins tell the cop to go get himself some lunch.
The watcher felt blessed. The jaguar god had stood by him. Staring after the departing police cruiser, he felt the gun in his pocket and the dagger in the small black bag he carried. He had his weapons. Now he had to find his opportunity.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Anna’s heart sank as Tebbins told the officer to go get himself some supper. He seemed to sense her dismay, although he probably didn’t guess the reason for it.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said. “No one else knows where you are. He can’t find you.”
But the identity of he was the big question, Anna thought miserably as she allowed herself to be ushered into the living room and seated on a sofa. Tebbins excused himself to make the tea after ascertaining that she did indeed enjoy Earl Grey.
At least he hadn’t lied about the videotapes; the cartridges waited on the small table next to the entertainment center, a big bundle of them. So maybe he hadn’t lied about anything else.
A short while later, Tebbins returned with the tea cart. The elegance of the service surprised Anna, then she wondered why. Everything about Tebbins was unusual.
“I scalded the pot,” he assured her, “and warmed the milk.”
“Wonderful.” Even though she drank her tea straight and didn’t do anything fancy in the making of it, she appreciated the finer points, having heard about them.
“No reason not to do it right.” To her relief he took the armchair beside the couch and reached for a delicate cup and saucer. “How do you like yours?”
“Plain please.”
“Tsk,” he said, a teasing twinkle in his eye. “A barbarian.”
She managed to smile back at him. “I suppose so.”
“I hope you like scones.” He offered her the plate and waited while she selected one.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever had them.” And this was too absurd, she found herself thinking. Just too absurd. She felt as if she’d stepped backward a century in time.
When she was served, he moved the cart aside and went to the stack of tapes. “I’m trying to decide which ones are the most important to look at.”
“What are you looking for?”
He faced her, sticking one hand in his trouser pocket and twisting his moustache with the other. “One of the people I’m interested in is a part-time employee and volunteer. The thing is, I don’t know his name. There are quite a few, aren’t there?”
“We do hire a lot of students,” Anna agreed. “But Ivar would be better able to tell you how many. I know there have been quite a few, but they come and go.”
“How about those who have pretty much been there since you started to implement the exhibit? Maybe even as far back as the point in time where you had to tell the directors about your father.”
Anna felt another shiver of apprehension, though she wasn’t sure why. Mention of her father’s death always disturbed her, but it didn’t make her feel this way, as if unseen eyes were boring into her. “Let me think.”
But thinking was hard. It was as if her mind didn’t want to settle on the subject, but instead hopscotch between all her fears and worries. “Maybe… a dozen,” she said finally. “Maybe a few more. I’m not exactly sure. I don’t work with them all, and we have so many volunteers also that it’s hard to keep track. Really, Tebbins, Ivar could help you more with this.”
“Well, I’m primarily interested in whether you’d recognize faces.”
She nodded slowly. “I might recognize most of them.”
“What I’m especially interested in is whether you noticed someone who came into the museum during the evening of the party but didn’t leave. Someone who might well have been there in the morning but isn’t seen arriving.”
“Oh!” She felt relieved. “I think I can do that. I thought you wanted a whole bunch of names or something.”
“As you said, I can get that from Ivar. In fact, I think I may already have it. But right now I’m interested in someone who can identify faces.”
“I should be able to do that.”
“Excellent.” She watched him put in the tape and tried to relax, suspecting that this was going to be a long and boring process. But the feeling of something bad about to happen just grew thicker, as if it were filling the room.
She shifted uneasily on the couch and fought an urge to look over her shoulder. Tebbins turned on his system and pushed in the videotape. Snow filled the screen.
“This is supposedly a lobby tape from the evening before,” he said. “Remember, I just want you to get an idea of which employees and volunteers were present. Or if someone was there who shouldn’t be.”
“Right.”
“This tape starts at four-thirty that afternoon,” Tebbins said. He returned to his chair.
It was as boring as Anna had anticipated. They watched the snapshot motion of people moving around the lobby, caterers beginning to set up for the evening. “It’s not what I expected,” she remarked. “These are just photos.”
“Right,” Tebbins agreed. “To save tape. The computer stores the image about once per second.”
Which saved time in the review, Anna realized. After merely twenty minutes, they were watching the caterers whiz around like stars in an early Hollywood film, with jerky movements. That was one relief. At least each tape wasn’t going to require an eight-hour review.
That was when they heard the thud from the back of the house.
Tebbins was out of his seat in an instant. A second later he had a gun in his hand. “Stay here,” he told Anna.
Stay here? Icy trickles of terror began to run down her spine.
Jeff Ingles drove away from Tebbins’s house toward a small restaurant a few blocks away, thinking about a burger or maybe a steak sandwich. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning, and his shift had just begun. Damn his kid anyway for showing up at the breakfast table at ten-thirty with his tongue and nipples pierced. That had thrown Roxie, Jeff’s wife, into a tizzy that hadn’t quit.
Jeff didn’t like the piercings. Hell, no. He saw enough of that crap on kids he had to arrest. But he’d long since figured that his own son, Vic, was a few bricks shy of a load anyway. And he’d long since figured out that Vic reacted to authority the way most cats reacted to having their fur rubbed the wrong way. Roxie hadn’t come that far. She was still trying to control the kid’s every action, and expecting Jeff to play the heavy because he was a cop and wore a gun.
Like Jeff would ever pull his gun on his own kid.
Anyway, the day had gone downhill from there. Roxie wanted to ground Vic until he took the rings out of his nipples and tongue. Which was pretty much impossible. Jeff was well aware that short of turning his house into a prison camp and not even letting Vic out to go to school, they couldn’t do that successfully. And he wasn’t sure it would make things better anyway. But hell, Roxie was even demanding that Jeff put Vic into the sheriff’s boot camp—as if the kid had done something criminal.
Not that Jeff didn’t care. But his son was a stupid teenager who was going to do stupid teenage things, and getting those piercings, revolting as they were, was a far cry from the things Jeff worried about, like the kid staying out until two in the morning. Which Vic didn’t do.
It would have been nice if Vic had wanted to be a football player, but the kid wanted to be a rock star. Jeff figured it was enough to keep him away from drugs and get him to graduate from high school. So far, both of those plans were on course. The rest of it was just rebellion.
Anyway, the upshot was, getting out of his house late in the afternoon to go to work had come as a reprieve. The problems on the street were easier to deal with than Roxie on a tear. He felt a twinge of sympathy for his son.
He was also suffering some serious hunger pangs, now that he was far enough away from the uproar to feel them. So it was great that Tebbins had told him to go eat.
Except that by the time he was a couple of blocks away, that began to bother Jeff. The wo
man, Anna Lundgren, was apparently the target of a stalker, which was why Jeff had been asked to escort her. So why had Tebbins told him to leave?
Damn detectives. They forgot that they grew soft sitting at their desks, that their reflexes and street smarts started to fade. They weren’t on the firing line every day anymore. Which was okay, as long as they didn’t start thinking they were as good as they used to be.
And bringing that woman to Tebbins’s home… that bothered Jeff, too. It was irregular.
He thought about it for a few more minutes, but then he was at the restaurant, and that steak sandwich sounded too good to pass up. And Tebbins hadn’t given him a specific time to return, so maybe he could actually savor his meal.
Finding Jamie and Trina proved surprisingly easy. Well, not surprisingly, Gil amended, not when he considered the resources he’d called into play. It apparently hadn’t occurred to the stupid little prick that Trina’s dad had enough friends in local police departments to get help from all the law-enforcement agencies on the beaches, and from the sheriff’s department as well. It was unofficial, of course, but it didn’t take them an hour to find Jamie’s car parked in the public access lot in St. Pete Beach, near the Don Cesar Hotel.
Especially since the little turd had already managed to get himself a parking ticket by not pumping quarters into the meter when it had expired.
Gil made record time getting there from Madeira Beach. He’d started at the north end of the barrier islands, at Clearwater Beach, figuring since he was already near there on his way back from Tampa that it was the logical place to start. He made pretty good time heading south on Gulf Boulevard and giving thanks that tourist season had pretty much wound down.
He found his daughter and her boyfriend in the company of two St. Pete Beach officers that he knew fairly well. Jamie looked sullen and resentful, but much to his amazement, Trina didn’t. She started toward him, but one of the cops stopped her.