“Have you considered diapers?” Liz asked drily as she joined the line.
“Yeah, but I’m too old to be changing ’em and too young to be wearing ’em.” Esther laughed again, nudged her with an elbow, then went to top off coffee cups.
In Dallas, none of Liz’s neighbors knew her well enough to bother with her comings and goings. As for all the places she’d stayed in the past two years, they’d deliberately kept a very low profile. No one had known anything about them, and apparently hadn’t cared. There’d been little curiosity, no neighborly visits, no friendly invitations.
She would appreciate the lack of anonymity in Copper Lake if she didn’t have things to hide.
Finally it was her turn to order. The teenager in front of her took his change and frozen drink and Joe’s gaze met hers and her lungs tightened. Sure, it was lack of oxygen that made her a little giddy, nothing more.
For a moment, he just looked at her, all serious and hard to read. Then he smiled, just a bit, just a quirk of his mouth, and said, “Hey.”
“Hi.” She watched him for a moment before remembering that she was supposed to order something. “I’ll have a-a-” Her gaze swept over the menu board, but the words didn’t make a lot of sense. “Surprise me.”
His smile grew a bit. “Hot or cold?”
“Hot.”
“Have a seat. I’ll bring it out in a minute.”
Her head bobbed several times before her feeble brain got her feet moving. She found a table next to the east-facing window, still lit by a sliver of sun. The seat was warm and felt good against her back.
At the counter, Joe was talking with the next customer in line, his voice a quiet rumble. A man’s voice was a comfortable thing. Her earliest memories were of awakening at night to the soft murmur of her parents talking in their room next to hers. The conversations were mundane-what he had done at work that day, which cases she was hearing, what kind of trouble the boys had gotten into-but the words hadn’t mattered. Just the sound of her father’s voice had made her feel safe and secure enough to sleep again.
Joe’s voice made her feel safe and secure…and a whole lot more.
Forcing her thoughts from that direction, she looked around the room. The music playing in the background was symphonic, lots of strings and horns. She would have preferred something by Metallica or Nickelback, but the other customers didn’t seem to mind. Most of them were plugged into iPods or immersed in conversation. One woman read a book while sipping her coffee. Another typed furiously on her laptop, and the earbud customers were making use of the wireless Internet connection. With the ceiling fans circulating the mixed scents of great brews, it was a lovely way to pass the time.
If she were merely there to pass the time.
Minutes went by before Joe finished with the rest of his customers, then came to the table, carrying a tall glass mug that he set in front of her before sliding into a chair. She didn’t ask what it was, but reached for it, blew a small crater in the whipped cream mounded on top, then took a cautious sip. “Oh, my God, this is wonderful. I love hazelnut.”
He looked the way a good cook did when presenting a meal done to perfection. “ Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee and cream whipped with a little hazelnut infusion.”
“This would be incredible on a cold snowy night.”
“You don’t like cold.”
“No, but this would make it tolerable.” She took another drink. “Busy morning?”
“About typical. It’ll slow down at lunch, then pick up again around two.” He glanced around the room before focusing on her again. “How is your back?”
“Bruised.” She’d managed a look in the bathroom mirror after her shower and seen muddied colors and slight swelling. At least it wasn’t shaped like her pistol. That would have been hard to explain.
“By the time I got home last night, Nat had dried the dogs and they were curled up in my bed. Do you know it’s virtually impossible to dry a dog a hundred percent with a towel? I rolled over around two this morning onto a wet spot roughly the size of the two mutts combined and cold as ice. I had to strip the bed and leave the mattress to air dry and spend the rest of the night on the sofa.”
Ignore that. Change the subject. Take your coffee and run. But the only thing she ignored was the wise voice in her head. “Hey, I offered to show you my bed.”
His voice turned a shade huskier. “If you’d offered again around two, I would have taken you up on it, and we’d still be there. Then Esther would have been on her own this morning, and she’d be serving everyone plain black coffee, no matter what they ordered. She doesn’t think much of froufrou drinks.”
Liz smiled faintly at the old-fashioned phrase in his deep, quiet voice, though she could imagine it quite well in Esther’s gravelly tones.
Suddenly serious, he rested his arms on the table, leaning closer. “Does it matter-Josh and me being twins? Is that why…?”
Liz was slow to understand what he meant, then, as she took a drink of the slowly cooling coffee, it hit her and she almost choked. He thought she’d let him kiss her, that she’d held on so tightly to him, because he looked like his brother? Because she was looking for a substitute for Josh, and who better than his identical twin? “No,” she said bluntly. “If it mattered, it wouldn’t be in a good way.”
He opened his mouth to respond, but before he got the first word out, a man stopped beside their table, waiting for their attention. Like Joe, she glanced his way, automatically cataloging him: male, mid-thirties to early-forties, five foot ten, one-seventy-five, brown hair, brown eyes, forgettable. She had never met him before, but in his line of work-her line-forgettable was a good thing.
His gaze was fixed on Joe, as if she weren’t worthy of attention. “Saldana?”
Joe nodded.
“Which one are you? Josh or Joe?”
Hostility radiated from Joe even as he shifted to lean back in the chair, looking every bit as casual and relaxed as Liz knew he wasn’t. “Joe. Who are you?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have ID to prove that?”
“Yeah. Scars from two bullet holes. Want to see?”
The marshal’s gaze flickered down to the general area of the scars. Liz hadn’t seen the wounds; they’d been covered with dressings and tape during her one hospital visit. That had been enough to give her a bad dream or two.
“I’d settle for a driver’s license.”
Joe made a pretense of checking his pockets. “Damn, I must have left it at home again.”
“That’s convenient. Driving without a license is illegal.”
“Don’t need one for a bike. Who are you?”
“Paul Ashe.” In a practiced move, Ashe produced his credentials case from an inside coat pocket. “Deputy U.S. Marshal. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Everyone wants to ask a few questions. Let me save you the trouble. No, I haven’t seen my brother, I haven’t heard from him and I don’t know where he is. Would you like a cup of coffee before you go back to Atlanta or wherever the hell you came from?”
Ashe’s smile was benign. “I don’t drink coffee. It makes me edgy.”
Joe’s smile matched, but with a sharp bite of anger. “I don’t need coffee to make me edgy.”
Sitting quietly, sipping her drink, Liz hoped she looked as if she wished she weren’t there-and, in some ways, she did. But what she was really wishing was that none of this was necessary. Why couldn’t Josh behave like an adult once in his lousy life instead of putting his family through this-questioned like suspects and kept under surveillance. Even if they weren’t aware of it.
“When was the last time you talked to Josh?” Ashe asked.
“About two minutes before some guy walked up to me with a gun and pulled the trigger.” Joe crossed his arms over his chest. “Last time I’m saying it-I haven’t seen him. I haven’t talked to him. I don’t know where he is.”
Liz’s fingers tightened around the mug handle. I haven’t talked to him. A
moment earlier, he’d said he hadn’t heard from him. Hearing from someone didn’t necessarily involve talking. An e-mail, a text message, a letter, a message passed through a friend, a posting on a Web site-there were a lot of ways to communicate without actually talking, and some of them were virtually impossible for anyone else to discover.
Careless phrasing on Joe’s part? Or a subconscious slip?
She set the mug on the table, and the sturdy base clunked, drawing Ashe’s gaze to her for the first time. He feigned surprise well. “You’re Elizabeth Dalton. Last time anyone saw you, you were helping Josh get out of town. Now you show up here with his brother, and we’re supposed to believe he’s not here, too?”
“I’m also looking for him,” she said stiffly. “I haven’t seen him in a couple months. I woke up one morning, and he was gone, along with everything we had worth taking.”
Skepticism colored Ashe’s expression and his voice. “Yeah, right. He just ran out on you.”
She met his gaze then. “That’s what Josh does. He runs out on people.”
“Or maybe he goes someplace, pretends to be his brother, settles in, then sends for his girlfriend. They say the best place to hide is in plain sight. The Mulroneys know now that Josh has a twin. Next time-and there’s always a next time-they’ll want to be real sure they’ve got the right brother.”
Heat rose in Joe, spreading through his veins with each increasing beat of his heart, tightening his jaw until his teeth ached. Shoving one hand into his hip pocket, he pulled out the battered leather wallet his grandmother had given him when he turned sixteen, jerked out his driver’s license and slapped it on the table.
“You said you left your license at home,” Ashe said accusingly.
“Yeah, well, arrest me for lying.”
The marshal picked up the license, studying it longer than necessary, obviously still not convinced. Why should he be? When they’d still lived at home, Josh had “borrowed” Joe’s license on more than one occasion, and no one had ever known. After all, his face matched the picture.
“What do you want? Fingerprints?” Joe reclaimed the license and put it away.
“You’re identical twins.”
“That means identical DNA. Not fingerprints.”
Ashe stared at him a moment before turning his attention to Liz. “So what happened between you two? Did he find someone else? Did you nag at him too much? What made him leave?”
As Joe had thought the night before, Liz definitely wasn’t comfortable around cops, but only someone who’d spent too much time watching her would see it. She straightened her shoulders under Ashe’s gaze, lifted her chin and evenly replied, “The why is none of your business, Mr. Ashe. He left. That’s all you need to know.”
“Had he been in touch with anyone from home? His family? Old friends? Maybe-” he shrugged “-the Mulroneys? Maybe they offered him big bucks to disappear. Ol’ Josh always liked money, didn’t he?”
You can never have too much money or too many women, Josh had boasted. Joe had known how he’d gotten the women-that had never been a problem for either of them-but he’d never wanted to know where Josh’s money came from. He’d alluded to investments, but there was a world of difference between his brother’s idea of investments and his own.
When Liz didn’t respond, Ashe turned back to Joe. “How much do you think they’d have to give him to overlook the fact they almost killed you? How much is your life worth to your brother?”
Not a whole hell of a lot. That knowledge hurt somewhere deep inside, but Joe stubbornly ignored it.
New customers came in, but he made no effort to leave the table. Despite his joke about Esther, she was perfectly capable of running things behind the counter without his help.
“They might have offered him money to disappear,” Ashe said quietly. “But odds are, they’d rather kill him than pay up. If you know anything, if it’s not too late…”
The words were directed to Liz, but hit Joe. That magazine on the shelf at home…Presuming the information was even still good, what would happen if he just turned it over to Marshal Ashe? If they found Josh, they couldn’t force him to testify. Sure, they could drag his ass into court, but if he didn’t want to cooperate, he wouldn’t. Maybe the promise of immunity, if they hadn’t already offered it, or the threat of withdrawal, if they had, would open his mouth, but Joe wouldn’t bet on it.
No, Josh wouldn’t voluntarily testify against the Mulroneys. Whether he had to get by on what he’d taken from Liz or was expecting a nice payoff from the Mulroneys, he’d left San Francisco with every intention of staying away from Chicago.
What if it was already too late? What if Josh was dead, had been dead for the last couple of months? Would Joe know? Twins were supposed to share some sort of intuition, some mental or emotional or genetic connection that couldn’t be severed by time or distance. But beyond sharing the same face and DNA, he and Josh had never been particularly close. The odds of his knowing when Josh was in trouble were pretty slim, particularly when he’d been in some sort of trouble his whole damn life.
“If I knew where he was,” Liz said, “I wouldn’t be here with his brother, would I?”
Ashe looked at Liz a long time, and so did Joe. Her comment hurt a little deep inside, too, but if she realized it, it didn’t show. Her forehead was wrinkled in a frown, her mouth set in a thin line.
Finally, Ashe tossed two business cards on the table. “Think about it. Decide if you want to save Josh’s neck-if he’s alive to save-and give me a call.”
Joe pocketed the card without looking at it. “Why weren’t you watching him all this time he’s been gone?”
“We were. In St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Albuquerque, Reno, San Francisco. He managed to give us the slip.” Ashe looked chagrined as he said the last words. “We’re going to find him again.”
“Good luck with that.”
As Ashe walked away, Liz picked up the card and tapped it on the table, her movements edgy.
“Did you know they were watching you?”
She shook her head.
“That’s freaky, even if you don’t have anything to hide, to think that someone is out there, tracking your every move.” The tap-tap came faster until he pulled the card from her grip. “Hey, you want some lunch? There’s a place down the street with the best steaks in town.”
“What about Esther? Shouldn’t she be off by now?”
“She offered to stay through lunch the minute she saw you waiting to cross the street.” He stood, took her mug to the counter and spoke to Esther, then returned as Liz slowly pushed out of her seat. She appeared a bit shaken. By being on the wrong side of an interrogation? It was no fun no matter how innocent you were. Or by the possibility that Josh might be dead, that she might never reclaim whatever he took?
Or by the chance that she might never see him again?
They left the shop and walked half a block before she spoke. “I don’t think Josh got paid off. I don’t think he had contact with anyone in Chicago. I would have known.”
His chuckle was dry and bitter. “Honey, he could be whispering sweet nothings in your ear and stealing a necklace from around your neck, and you’d never notice it slipping away. Besides, he could have gotten in touch with them after he left.”
“I guess.” A few more steps, then, “Do you think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.” He felt her gaze on him and shrugged without meeting it. “Look, Josh and I have never been best buds and never will be. But I’ve never wished him dead. Well, not since we were kids.” Although some part of him wished Josh had never existed or, at least, had never known Liz. Then Joe wouldn’t feel guilty for wanting her. He wouldn’t keep remembering that she’d been Josh’s first. He wouldn’t wonder whether she preferred Josh to him.
Although if Josh had never been born, the odds that Joe and Liz ever would have met were slim, unless he believed in fate, and he wasn’t sure he did.
A Cut Above was locat
ed in the middle of the block, in an old brick building that still resembled the butcher shop it had once been. That was just in the front, though, where glass cases were filled with choice cuts of meat for home cooking. Swinging doors led to the restaurant, with hardwood floors, exposed brick walls and lights everywhere to make up for the lack of windows.
The hostess, one of Joe’s regulars, greeted him with a smile that doubled in size when she saw Liz, and she led them to a table far from the other diners. “We’ll give you a little privacy,” she said with a pat on his hand, then another for Liz before leaving them alone.
“We’re in clear view of everyone else,” Liz pointed out as she took a seat. “How private is that?”
“At least they can’t eavesdrop.”
“Would they?”
“In a heartbeat.”
“Esther’s keeping tabs on us,” she admitted.
“And she’s not the only one. You stick around much longer, who knows what they’ll think?”
Smiling uneasily, she opened the menu. He didn’t bother with his; he always got the same thing for lunch there.
When she laid down the menu again, the waitress came back. He ordered a rib eye, rare, with all the trimmings; Liz asked for a steak sandwich and sweet potato chips. Alone again, he couldn’t think of anything to say, and it seemed Liz couldn’t either. She sat there, idly toying with the silverware in front of her.
Correction: He could think of something to say. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to say it or hear her response now. But even unpleasant conversation would be better than this awkwardness between them.
“So…”
She looked up.
“If you knew where Josh was, you wouldn’t be wasting time here with me.”
Her cheeks turned pink, but her gaze didn’t waver. “I didn’t say I was wasting time.”
Criminal Deception Page 12