Truth or Dare

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  Zoe contemplated that for a while. “You know, you’re pretty darn good when it comes to this kind of logical thinking.”

  “Thanks. It sure would be a lot more exciting to be psychic, but I’ve learned to muddle through using logic and common sense.”

  “We all have our little gifts.”

  Ethan laughed.

  It was the first time in several days that he had done so. For some reason she found his amusement reassuring.

  23

  That night they went to Last Exit to celebrate Harry’s early return from LA. Arcadia sat close to him, letting her shoulder touch his, stealing a little of his warmth. The slow, soft strains of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” drifted through the lightly crowded nightclub.

  It was well after midnight. The jazz was good. Arcadia had a martini in front of her. Harry was home, safe and sound. This was as near to perfect as her life had been in a long, long time. So why couldn’t she relax?

  “You came back early because of me, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Nah.” Harry munched peanuts from the bowl in front of them. “I told you, the client pulled the plug on the kid’s shopping expedition.”

  “Liar.” She sucked the olive off the little red spear, chewed and swallowed. “You quit the job early on my account. Admit it.”

  Harry took a sip of his beer. “Hey, I was glad when the gig ended. The kid was driving me crazy.”

  “I knew it. You’re home early because of me.”

  “So,” Harry said, lounging against the padded wall of the booth, “you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

  She hesitated. “As far as I can tell, nothing’s wrong. I got a little jumpy for a few days after you left, that’s all.” She took a sip of the martini. “I’m okay now. But . . .”

  “But, what?”

  “But I missed you, Harry.”

  Harry said nothing. He just waited, as patient as the grave.

  She exhaled slowly. “Okay, I’ll tell you what I told Zoe. Shortly after you left there were a couple of occasions when I got a creepy feeling. As if someone was watching me or something.”

  Harry did not move so much as an eyelash. “Yeah?”

  “But the feeling went away after two or three days,” she added quickly.

  “Anything else?”

  She made a triangle around the base of the martini glass with her fingers. “I lost the Elvis pen you gave me. I searched everywhere and couldn’t find it.”

  “No big deal. It’s just a pen.”

  “I liked it. It was my favorite.”

  Harry thought about that for a long time. “Anything else in your office disturbed?”

  Having him put her own secret fears into words chilled her to the bone. “No. Nothing. Believe me, I checked. Given my history, I consider paranoia a healthy state of mind. I went through every drawer. Nothing looked out of order.”

  “A pro wouldn’t have left any tracks in your files,” he mused. “You don’t have the kind of security at the office that we have at home. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone who knew what he was doing to get inside.”

  She frowned. “You really think that an intruder might have broken into my office just to steal an Elvis pen? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “The pen could have been an accident or a mistake.” He moved one hand dismissively. “Hell, it might have nothing to do with anything. The cleaning crew could have broken that damn pen and tossed it into the trash.”

  “True.” She tried a smile. “In which case I’ve got no reason at all to think that anyone was inside my office after hours. Just another example of a vivid imagination run amok, Harry. I’m sure of it now.”

  He did not return her smile. “Earlier this week when you felt that someone was watching you, did you check out the faces of the people around you?”

  “Of course. But I didn’t see anyone who looked even remotely like . . . him.”

  She did not have to explain who she meant. Harry knew she was referring to Grant.

  “See anyone you didn’t know more than once?”

  That question gave her pause. An image of an elderly woman with a shopping bag and a camera flickered through her mind.

  “It was a busy week at Fountain Square. Lots of tourists coming and going. I saw several of them more than once but no one who was suspicious.”

  “Cars?”

  “Who looks at cars?”

  “I do,” Harry said. “Think about it, honey. You got that creepy feeling from something you noticed, even if you don’t remember what it was. That’s how it works.”

  “How what works?”

  “The creeps. You get them because you see something or someone out of the corner of your eye and it looks wrong. Maybe you don’t think about it much, but something inside goes on alert.”

  Harry would know, she assured herself as she settled back against the seat and tried to summon up memories of some of the cars she had noticed in recent days. After a couple of minutes, she gave up in frustration.

  “I just don’t have much of a memory for cars,” she said apologetically.

  “Try people.”

  The image of the woman in the shop window popped into her head again.

  “There was one,” she said slowly. “I saw her two, maybe three times.”

  “Describe her.”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know why she stuck in my mind. She didn’t exactly stand out as a dangerous character. She must have been at least eighty years old. She had a large sun hat and those oversized sunglasses that people wear over their regular glasses. She was just a tourist, Harry.”

  “What else?”

  The man would have made a good interrogator, she thought ruefully. He just kept pushing.

  She took a sip of her martini and tried to still her mind. In the old days she had made her living in the adrenaline-driven financial world. It was a world where millions of dollars were placed at risk every time she made a decision. In that world, she had been very good at seeing patterns and trends. She had trained herself to notice the tiny signals that appeared before a company went into a death spiral. She had learned to watch for disturbances in the flow that warned of trouble brewing among the members of a company’s board of directors. She could spot insider trading before the SEC even woke up in the morning.

  It was her talent for catching the small anomalies in the constantly shifting streams of data that had given her advance warning of Grant’s intentions. Maybe she should apply those old skills now.

  “I saw her at least twice, both times as a reflection in a store window. I remember thinking that the camera was very fancy, not one of those disposable gadgets. And she carried the same shopping bag both times, a blue-and-white one from a dress shop in Fountain Square.”

  Harry was silent for a while. “Okay.”

  She raised her brows. “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, now we go talk to Truax.”

  “It’s one-thirty A.M. He and Zoe will be sound asleep.”

  “Not our fault those two keep weird hours.”

  Ethan managed to fall into a restless sleep but he dreamed the Nightwinds dream.

  He walked through the vast house, opening each door he came to, searching every room. But Zoe was not in any of them. She had to be there. The possibility that he might not find her made despair claw at his insides.

  He called out to her, wanting to explain, to plead, to make her understand. But the words echoed forever in the endless corridors of pink-tinged night.

  At last he came to the small, private theater, the room where the old murder had occurred, the one place in the house that seemed to disturb her.

  He opened the doors slowly, bracing himself for what awaited him in the darkness.

  Zoe stood in the shadows near the small marble bar. Simon Wendover reclined in one of the plush velvet seats facing the screen. He looked at Ethan over his shoulder and grinned.

  “You’re dead,” Ethan said.

  Wendo
ver laughed. “That’s your problem, not mine. We both know you’re going to see me in your dreams now and again for the rest of your life.”

  Ethan turned away from him and looked at Zoe. “Come with me.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “She’s going to leave you just like all the others did,” Wendover said cheerfully. “That’s how it works where you’re concerned. Been that way all your life. You rescue them and then they wave goodbye.”

  Ethan kept his gaze on Zoe. “You’re different.”

  “Am I?” she said.

  Wendover chuckled. “How could she love a man with your track record? You’re a loser, Truax. You couldn’t save your brother. You couldn’t hold any of your three marriages together. You couldn’t hang on to the corporation you built from scratch. You spent months investigating me but in the end you couldn’t even put together a case that held up in court.”

  Ethan knew he had to get Zoe out of the room where Wendover sat gloating. He tried to walk through the doorway of the theater but something stopped him. It was as though he confronted an invisible wall.

  Zoe watched him with her mysterious eyes. “I’m sorry, Ethan. You can’t come in here. There’s a psychic barrier. You can’t get past it because you don’t believe in the woo-woo thing.”

  Wendover’s laugh echoed in the shadows.

  “Ethan. Ethan, wake up.”

  Her voice. So close. So near.

  He opened his eyes. Zoe leaned over him. Anxiety radiated from her in waves.

  “It’s okay.” She gripped his shoulder. “It’s all right. Just a bad dream.”

  “You can say that again.” He scrubbed his face with one hand and made himself breathe slowly. When he was fairly certain that he had himself under control, he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  She knelt behind him and massaged his shoulders. “I sure hope you’re not catching the nightmare habit from me. Do you suppose bad dreams are contagious?”

  “I doubt it.” Her hands felt good on his shoulders. He wanted nothing more than to relax under the soothing pressure of her fingers and palms, but the tension hummed through him like electricity.

  “Do you want to tell me about your dream?” Zoe asked quietly.

  He thought he heard Wendover’s laughter somewhere in the distance.

  “It was complicated,” he said carefully.

  Her hands stilled on his shoulders. He sensed her withdrawing. For a couple of seconds he thought she was going to stop the comforting massage.

  “I do complicated, remember?” she said. Her hands moved on him once more.

  A shudder of relief went through him.

  “Ethan?”

  “We were both at Nightwinds but the house seemed way too large,” he said tonelessly. “There was an endless series of rooms.”

  “It was probably the thought of redecorating all those rooms that gave you the nightmare.”

  “Probably.” He knew that she was trying to lighten the atmosphere but it wasn’t working. He was too cold and too drained. He should stop now, he told himself. There was no point telling her the rest. But it was as if some powerful magnet dragged the words out of him. “You were there somewhere but I couldn’t find you.”

  “Ah, yes, the elusive designer who never returns the client’s phone calls,” she murmured.

  “I eventually tracked you down in the theater.” He hesitated and then raised one shoulder in a shrug. “That’s when you woke me up.”

  “You were thrashing around. I got the impression that you were trying to claw your way through something.”

  He froze. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No. You just woke me up.” She continued to work his shoulders. “Are you sure there wasn’t something else about the dream that bothered you?”

  Somewhere in the shadows, Wendover chuckled.

  The phone rang. Zoe’s hands stilled once more on Ethan’s shoulders. He glanced at the clock. It was one thirty-five in the morning. Phone calls at that hour rarely brought good news.

  “I’ll get it.” He picked up the phone. “Truax.”

  “This is Stagg,” Harry said. “We have a problem. We’re standing outside the front door of the lobby of Casa de Oro. You want to buzz us in?”

  24

  Ethan sat on the sofa and watched Zoe serve the tea she had made for the four of them. She had clipped her hair into a loose knot and put on a pair of black slippers that looked like the kind of shoes ballet dancers wore. Her midnight-blue dressing gown was tied snugly around her waist.

  He had pulled on a pair of trousers and a tee shirt. Because he could see that his new habit of shaving before bed was starting to worry Zoe, he hadn’t bothered to do so that night. The result was that he knew he probably looked more than a little rough around the edges.

  Arcadia and Harry, however, were both creatures of the night. They managed to appear oddly stylish at one-thirty in the morning. Arcadia was her customary ice-queen self in a narrow column of a dress that was the color of a pale desert dawn. Harry was surprisingly natty in a short-sleeved sport shirt decorated with surfboards and palm trees.

  “Let me get this straight.” Ethan sat forward on the sofa, elbows resting on his thighs, fingers loosely linked between his spread knees. “You noticed the same senior citizen in a hat and sunglasses twice over the course of two days and you lost the pen that Harry gave you? That’s it?”

  “Doesn’t sound like much to get freaked out about, does it?” Arcadia said apologetically. “Sorry about this. It was Harry’s idea to come here tonight.”

  “And a very good idea it was,” Zoe said forcefully. “When you add this bit with the little old lady to that edgy feeling you mentioned to me earlier this week, it raises some questions.”

  Ethan frowned. “No one told me anything about Arcadia feeling edgy this past week.”

  “I thought maybe I was just a bit jumpy because Harry was gone and . . .” Arcadia’s platinum-tipped fingernails glinted when she picked up her cup. “Well, the feeling went away so I didn’t want to mention it.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the camera that bothers me the most,” Zoe said. “From your description, it was not only expensive, it sounds like something a professional photographer would use. Not the kind of equipment an elderly tourist would favor.”

  “The lost pen may or may not mean anything,” Harry said. “But if someone is watching Arcadia, it would be logical to assume that he searched her office. Maybe he used the pen to pry open a drawer or poke around inside a file cabinet and it snapped. He figured it would be better to get rid of the pieces rather than leave them behind.”

  “It was an inexpensive pen,” Zoe added. “He would have assumed that no one would even notice it was missing.”

  Ethan looked at Arcadia. “Notice anything else missing or rearranged in your office? Anything seem different in there?”

  Beside him, Zoe abruptly stiffened. She offered no comment, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that the teacup wobbled ever so slightly in her fingers. What the hell was that all about?

  “No,” Arcadia said in response to his question. “And I checked, believe me.”

  Ethan switched his attention to Harry. “What about the condo?”

  “Everything is fine there,” Harry assured him. “I’d know if someone had got past the new system.”

  “All right.” Ethan picked up the notebook and pen that he had placed on the coffee table. “Here’s what we’ve got. Someone may be watching Arcadia. If that is true, there may be a connection to Grant Loring.”

  “Who is supposed to be dead, but I don’t believe that for a moment,” Arcadia said evenly. “He is definitely my worst-case scenario. But it’s also possible that the Feds have tracked me down.”

  Harry looked at her. “How badly do the Feds want you?”

  Arcadia exhaled slowly. “I honestly didn’t think that I was that important to them. But I suppose they might have convinced themselves that if
Grant is still alive I might be able to lead them to him.”

  “Except that you can’t,” Zoe said. “You don’t have any idea where he is. Besides, that scenario implies that they no longer believe that you’re dead.”

  Arcadia shrugged and said nothing.

  “Okay, let’s stop there for a minute.” Ethan made a note. “Best case is that it’s the Feds. Problem is, it doesn’t feel like a Fed kind of operation.”

  Harry raised his brows. “The senior citizen with the camera?”

  “Yeah. Not Fed style. When it comes to equipment, they’re a lot more high-tech. Also, they’re big on putting wires on people and sending them into situations to record conversations.” He glanced at Arcadia. “I assume no one has tried to get you to open up about your past lately?”

  “No.” She frowned. “You’re right. Probably not the Feds. That leaves Grant or one of his former associates.”

  “Lucky for you, you’ve got a real good friend who is also an ace bodyguard,” Ethan said. “And you’ve got another friend who is a hotshot PI. Harry and I will split up the job. He’ll keep an eye on you while I start asking some questions. We’ll need Singleton’s assistance for the on-line work.”

  Zoe looked at him. “Do you think Harry should take Arcadia out of town while you conduct your investigation?”

  “It’s an option,” he said neutrally.

  “No.” Arcadia was suddenly, fiercely, resolute. “If Grant has found me under this new identity, he can find me anywhere. Disappearing again for a while will only delay matters. I’d rather deal with him now and finish it.”

  Harry nodded in agreement. “Something to be said for staying here in Whispering Springs. It’s a relatively small community and it’s our turf, not Loring’s. We know a lot more about it than he does.”

  “Also, things have changed considerably in the past few weeks,” Arcadia pointed out. “You’ve got some connections with the local police now, Ethan. You know people around town and at Radnor.”

  “None of those contacts will do you much good if he tries to take you out with a bullet,” Ethan said flatly. “Harry’s good, but no one is perfect.”