Grave Danger

by Rachel Grant

  Mark turned her to face him. “I want to believe you, Libby. But I can’t let our relationship get in the way of the investigation.”

  She yanked out of his grasp. Another hard-earned lesson from childhood came back to her. She would never again beg a man to stay. She would never be like her mother and beg a man to love her. She was done begging him to believe her. She glared at him. “If you want to believe me, Mark, then just do it—you don’t get to kiss me like you did a moment ago then hide behind your damn badge.”

  “I’m not hiding. Damn it, Libby! I’m not even supposed to be talking to you without your lawyer present.”

  “No problem. I’ll leave.”

  “Wait. Did you sleep with Aaron?”

  His words stunned her to the core. Never in a million years had she seen that question coming. She narrowed her gaze. “Who wants to know? The cop or the lover?”

  “Aaron called me on Monday. He described your scar.”

  Her mouth dropped open. Monday. Again. Before she’d been arrested. “You sonofabitch!” She stepped closer and tapped his chest. “You believed Aaron. Over me. You don’t even know him. But you know me.”

  His arms encircled her, trapping her again. “You lied to me.”

  “No, Mark. I didn’t.”

  “Then how does he know about your scar? Make me understand.”

  The fight left her even though the ache hadn’t. Her gaze held his. She loved him. Not even the pain of his distrust could destroy her feelings—no matter how much she wished otherwise. Yet he demanded she explain herself, her past, something she should be allowed to keep locked away in her own box of painful memories.

  “I didn’t lie to you. I didn’t have sex with Aaron.” Her voice shook. She cleared her throat. “If you really want to know the story, you have to let me walk away from here after I tell you. You have to leave me alone. Forever.” She refused to be like her mother. She would rather be alone than spend her life pining for a man incapable of loving her back.

  “I’ll let you walk away, but I don’t agree to the last part.”

  “You won’t have a choice.” She breathed deeply. “Aaron and I were on our third date. I wanted to like him, but somehow, didn’t. I have good instincts, but I didn’t trust them. Aaron was in my house, in my bedroom.” She paused. “My mistake, I know.” A shudder ran through her. She lived with this memory and the aftermath on a daily basis.

  “We kissed. I was trying to convince myself he was okay. Things went further than I wanted. He removed my clothing until I wore only my bra and underwear. I was stupid, passive, trying to figure out how I was going to stop him, because I wasn’t interested—I certainly wasn’t aroused. He asked about the scar. It was fresh then—I’d gotten the stitches only a month before.

  “He reached for my underwear and a wave of revulsion I couldn’t control came over me. My skin started to crawl. I couldn’t have sex with him. I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t kiss him, and I certainly couldn’t let him do any of those things to me. I just…shut down. I said no.

  “He called me a cock tease and said I owed him. I told him to get out.” She closed her eyes. “He lunged at me, but I shoved him away, so he slammed me into the wall. That dazed me. I had a goose egg on the back of my head that lasted several days.” Of their own accord, her fingers gingerly probed the back of her head, even though the lump was long gone.

  “He twisted my arm behind my back and shoved me face first into the wall then ripped at my underwear and said crap about how he knew from the first moment we’d met that I’d like it rough. He tried to kiss me, even then. I jabbed him in the eye with my free hand. He let go of me, and I ran out of the room. He tackled me from behind and slammed me onto the floor.

  “I was pinned in the hallway. He slapped me across the face then wrapped a hand around my throat while his other hand worked to unhook his belt.” She opened her eyes again and met Mark’s shocked gaze. “I couldn’t breathe. He lifted his weight off me to loosen his tight belt, giving me enough leverage to knee him in the balls. I was able to shove him off and run.

  “In the kitchen, I grabbed a knife and told him to get the hell out, that I’d cut him open if he took one step closer. He laughed and said, ‘Have fun trying to blame this on me,’ then waltzed to the door like nothing happened. He had the gall to say he’d call me as he walked out.”

  “I’ll kill him.” Mark pulled her closer and stroked her hair.

  Warmth invaded her. He didn’t blame her. He didn’t say she’d asked for it by letting Aaron into her bedroom in the first place.

  “Why didn’t you report the assault?”

  “I was nearly naked with him in my own home. I let things go too far. Be honest. How well would the system have treated my assault case in those circumstances? Keep in mind the accused was a cop.”

  “It would have been difficult. But you had bruises to back up your claim.”

  “I told the crew I had the flu and stayed home for a week.”

  “No one saw your bruises.”

  “No one.” She touched her neck, remembering the pain of Aaron’s fingers. She’d told Mark more than she’d ever told anyone. “I didn’t want to fight a public battle. The guy was my client’s brother. I had a crew to pay, a project to run. I wanted to forget what happened and move on.”

  “And after you healed and no longer had physical evidence, Brady started stalking you.”

  “Yes. I had a lunch meeting with my client. Aaron showed up and acted as though nothing happened. I was in a fix. I hadn’t reported the assault. I certainly couldn’t accuse him of attempted rape in front of my client. I was forced to pretend everything was fine. Then the stalking started.”

  She leaned back and studied him. She’d learned to read him and knew he believed her. Her heart broke that he was willing to listen now. Her voice hardened. “Don’t think for a minute that every time Jason called a business meeting a date I didn’t want to run away screaming. You want to know why I didn’t shove Jason away when he kissed me? Look at what happened when I shoved Aaron away, and ask yourself, do you really think I could have handled my client’s son any other way? I had to be pragmatic.”

  His arms tensed. “I’ve been a complete ass.”

  “True. Now we made a deal. I told you about Aaron. You have to let me go.”

  His hands dropped from her waist and she was free. Before he could change his mind, she bolted and ran all the way home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  MARK WATCHED LIBBY LEAVE, stunned to the core. Why hadn’t he guessed Aaron had beaten her? All the signs were there. He remembered her reaction to hearing the sound of someone being choked in the blackberries. No wonder she’d been terrified. No wonder she’d been convinced Aaron was stalking her again.

  He leaned against the tree. He was the fool Jason had called him and worse. If she hadn’t stopped him, he would have made love to her right there up against the historic oak planted by James Thorpe in honor of the birth of his first child in 1855. He grimaced, remembering he’d learned that fun fact from Libby when they drove around Coho last Thursday.

  She had him in knots. He wanted to go after her. He wanted to beat Brady to a bloody pulp for assaulting her. He wanted to undo the hurt he’d caused her and beg her forgiveness.

  But he could do none of those things.

  He went home and managed a few hours of fitful sleep, but by six a.m., he was wide awake and thinking about Libby’s answer when he asked who she suspected was after her: “Listen to Angela’s tapes. Figure it out for yourself.”

  As soon as he arrived at the station, he put Sara back on the task of going through Angela’s research notes, starting with the cassettes. Nothing of interest had turned up in the initial inspection done by other officers over the weekend. Mark himself had only done a cursory examination. If Sara failed to find anything of interest, he would take a turn. For now, he had a huge backlog of paperwork to complete. Unfortunately, said paperwork was what threatened to put his
exhausted body into a state of slumber he hadn’t been able to achieve the night before.

  After an hour at his desk, the page before him blurred, and he stood to refill his coffee mug.

  “Chief, this just arrived for you.” His receptionist crossed his office and handed him a spiral-bound notebook. “It’s from Jason Caruthers.”

  Mark quickly read Jason’s cover letter and found he was suddenly wide awake. Thirty minutes later, he put down the notebook and paced his office. Angela’s journal was important. He just had to figure out which details were relevant to her death.

  Sara knocked on his office door. She held a cassette in her hand. “Chief, I think I’ve found what we’re looking for.”

  Mark, Luke, and Sara gathered in the investigation room. Sara put the tape in the cassette deck and they all listened to Angela’s interview with Frances Warren, in which Frances described a will Millie Montgomery supposedly made just hours before she died.

  “Why wasn’t this brought to my attention on Monday?” Mark asked.

  Luke answered. “I didn’t listen to the tape. I spent hours listening to some of the other tapes then found the transcripts and realized I could have saved time. I planned to match each tape with a transcript, then listen to the ones that hadn’t been transcribed.”

  “But you didn’t do that.”

  “No.”

  Instead, he’d spent his weekend hours investigating Libby. Mark swallowed his anger and addressed the issue at hand. “Next time I give you an investigative task, I expect you to follow it. All the tapes need to be listened to, whether they were transcribed or not.”

  Luke looked down. “Yes, sir.”

  Mark flipped through the notebook Angela had used as a journal. After listening to the tape, he understood Angela’s obsessive search for proof Lyle had killed his wife. “Angela believed Frances Warren’s story about the will.”

  “So?” Luke said. “What does Millie have to do with Angela’s murder?”

  Jason was right. Luke was too green to have been trusted with investigating Libby’s assault. Mark’s fault again. “Frances said she believed Angela could find the will. I think Angela was looking for it.”

  “Why do you think that?” Sara asked. At least she was asking the right questions. Plus, she’d immediately recognized this interview was important, proving she had good instincts.

  He held up the notebook. “I just read her journal. She never mentions the will explicitly. But it’s there. She was looking for something to prove Lyle killed Millie. At one point, she worries that if Jack finds out what she’s doing, he’ll be upset that she’s trying to give Jason’s inheritance away. She was looking for Millie’s will.

  “Luke, I want you to go to the library and get copies of all newspaper articles about the crash that killed Millie. Contact the sheriff’s office and request the investigation file from their archives.”

  He nodded but said, “What’s the point? We’re investigating Angela’s death, not Millie’s.”

  Luke had no idea his job was hanging by a thread. “It’s likely Angela was killed because she was looking for the will. Losing TL&L is a pretty strong motive to kill someone. Especially if she found it.”

  Mark remembered an important point from his argument with Libby a week ago, when she justified going through Angela’s boxes. She had wondered why the Kalahwamish would grant Angela—Lyle Montgomery’s granddaughter—access to study them. Now he understood. Frances Warren set Angela on a path to find the will and then aided her research as much as possible.

  Cold dread ran through him. Rosalie Warren had done essentially the same thing for Libby when she told her to follow Angela’s research. Could one of the Montgomerys be Libby’s stalker? Were they trying to get her thrown off the project before she followed Angela’s research all the way to the will?

  “This opens up the suspect list considerably,” he resumed. “We need to look at the activities of the Montgomerys—all of them—during the time Angela disappeared. Did they provide statements to the police in 1979, detailing their whereabouts?”

  “They weren’t considered suspects at the time, sir,” Sara said. “I’ll check the file and keep my fingers crossed.” She reached for the older investigation files.

  Out in the hallway there was a commotion. The dispatcher called out, “Where is the chief?”

  Mark jogged to the end of the corridor to the dispatcher’s desk. “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve got a homicide at 24 Bay View Way.”

  His chest froze. Libby lived at 22 Bay View Way.

  “The victim?” he asked.

  “Eli Banks. He was stabbed. His housekeeper just found him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  SOMEONE POUNDED ON THE DOOR of the Shelby house, startling Libby from a deep, dreamless sleep. A moment later, her cell phone began to ring and vibrate on the nightstand. Caller ID said Simone.

  “What?” she growled into the phone.

  “Thank God you’re okay! Open the front door! We need to talk! I have coffee. Have you heard about your neighbor?”

  Groggy, Libby couldn’t respond to the rapid-fire sentences. She shook her head to clear it. “I’ll be right down. Keep your panties on.” Her clothes were in a pile next to the bed. She pulled on a pair of yoga pants and headed downstairs. After shutting off the alarm, she opened the door.

  “You look like hell.” Simone breezed by and walked straight to the dining room. She pulled up the blinds. The window faced the house next door—Eli Banks’ home.

  “I love you, too,” Libby said. “Why aren’t you at the site?”

  “Everything’s fine at the site. I’m here because your neighbor was found murdered this morning. The police are there now.”

  Fear cleared the bleariness from Libby’s mind. Eli Banks. Murdered. She stepped up to the window and looked across the small side yard that ran between the two houses. Sara Eversall crossed Eli’s dining room. The officer caught Libby’s gaze, made a beeline for the window, and with a tight smile closed the blinds.

  With nothing to see next door, Libby faced Simone. “How did you hear about Eli Banks?”

  Simone handed Libby one of the two lattes she held. “Mark called the site. It was an off-the-record sort of call. I gather he believes you now.”

  “Doesn’t make any difference. He’s a cop first. Lover last. Jerk in between.”

  Simone ignored her. “He said he wanted me to check on you. He’d tried to call you, but you didn’t answer—he figured you saw his name on caller ID and were ignoring him, but he wants to know if you’re okay.” She took a large gulp of her latte before she continued. “Basically, I told him to check on you himself if he was that concerned.”

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “He said he couldn’t, that your next-door neighbor had been stabbed to death and he was needed at the scene. He told me to page him, adding 10-34 to my phone number if you didn’t respond, and 10-99 if you were okay. I paged him while waiting for you to unlock the door.”

  “10-99?”

  “Police code for duty completed, everything’s fine—or secure, or something—that’s what he told me, anyway.”

  “And 10-34?”

  “Trouble, help needed. I think.” Simone gazed out the window. “I’m sure someone will be coming over to question you. Being next door, and all.”

  “You mean being their prime suspect, and all.”

  Simone did a double take. “What?”

  “That neighbor is the guy who said I planted the gas cans. With him dead, they have no witness. No witness, no case. They could say I had a strong motive.”

  “To turn a weak attempted arson charge into Murder One? I don’t think so.”

  Simone had a point. Libby paced the room. It did sound ridiculous. But the Montgomerys had framed her once. If they killed their accomplice, they would certainly want to pin that on her as well. How could they frame her this time?

  The answer came to her in a rush. She suc
ked in a breath. “My hairbrush has been missing since the night I was attacked.”

  “So?” Simone said, clearly confused.

  “I’ve looked for it everywhere. What if my attacker took it so he’d have strands of my hair to leave on Eli Banks’ body?”

  “Whoa. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I was framed once. They could be doing it again. He was stabbed?”

  “That’s what Mark said.”

  Libby entered the kitchen and stared at the knife block. One slot was empty. Cold dread ran through her. “One of the knives is missing.” She found it difficult to breathe and tried to remember when she’d last used the knife. But she’d barely entered the kitchen this week. She’d chosen to skip meals rather than spend time in this room that still—in her mind—smelled of gasoline and pain.

  “Libby, tell me what’s happening.”

  A cold calm descended on her. She wasn’t a clueless victim anymore. She knew what was going on and could use what she knew to clear herself. “C’mon upstairs. I’ll tell you while I shower and get dressed. I want to be ready when the police get here.”

  Simone leaned against the sink while Libby showered, all the while relaying the details of her investigation into Angela’s research, her suspicions about why she was harassed, and why she was attacked.

  “So who do you think is behind this? Surely not Jason?”

  Libby added conditioner to her hair and massaged her scalp. “I’m not ready to trust him. I’m not ready to trust anyone who stands to lose twenty-five million dollars if that will is found.”

  “He was nine. He couldn’t have killed his mother.”

  “I know that. But he has a lot to lose now. He could be involved. I want to trust him, but I can’t.”

  Simone was quiet.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that he’s worked awfully hard to clear you when he has a lot of other stuff on his plate. I’m thinking your suspicions are pretty shitty.”