Sarah hadn’t confronted him about the reacquisition, and Jarred had been running late and unable to talk things over with Kelsey. But that was okay. Let her hear the news from others and get some impressions. Though he didn’t truly agree with Detective Newcastle that someone within Bryant Industries was out to get him, he wasn’t fool enough to discount a possible snake in the grass. Someone wanted him out of the way. Permanently. And that someone could well be a Bryant Industries employee.
He was just about to call Kelsey’s cell phone when he heard her pull up outside the construction area that was once his garage. For a moment he let his mind wander to the events of the night before, when he’d pulled her warm, willing body close to his and made love to his wife slowly and with exquisite, almost painful, slowness while December’s Wish rocked ever so gently. God, he was like a schoolboy. But best of all, Kelsey seemed as eager for him as he was for her.
“Hey, there,” he said by way of greeting as she walked inside.
“Hey, yourself.” She glanced around the kitchen. “Something smells good.”
“Mary insisted on coming back today and fixing dinner. I told her we weren’t staying here, but she didn’t care. I think she just wanted to do something.”
Kelsey picked up a fork and tasted the chicken breasts. Glancing up, she looked around the room. “It still feels… invaded somehow.”
“I know.”
Wind had disheveled her hair, turning it into a riot of chestnut waves, which curled up enticingly at the ends. Bright spots of color filled her cheeks and her amber eyes sparkled. He wanted to drag her into his arms and make love to her before doing anything else, but she seemed somewhat distracted.
“I was just going to call to find out what happened to you.”
She nodded. “I stopped by the condo just to check it. I was thinking I should maybe rent it or something.” She brushed back a curtain of shining waves, a frown marring her brow. “There were a ton of phone calls made to my number, but no messages on the answering machine. I checked Caller ID. The calls were from pay phones around Seattle.”
“Like your prank caller?” Jarred didn’t like the sound of that.
“Maybe.”
“Come here.”
She willingly slid into his arms. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Kelsey forcibly shook off her mood. “I like this,” she admitted.
“Mmm. Me, too.” He drank in her scent, recalling the soft white curves of her flesh as she had lain across him in bed.
“What do you think we should do next?” she asked softly.
“Hot sex on the granite island?”
Her shoulders shook with soundless laughter. “Sounds like cold sex to me. Cold, uncomfortable sex.”
“Then how about hot sex in a warm bed on Lake Washington?”
“Before dinner? What would Mary say?”
“She’s not here, and besides, she already thinks I’m completely unsalvageable in that department,” he said, and Kelsey laughed, her spirits lifting.
“Let me put this food together. We can eat right here. And then…?” She left the thought unfinished.
“How about a joint shower?” he suggested. “Or a dip in that god-awful heart-shaped tub together?”
“First things first. Bring down the plates and let’s get this together.”
In a scene of domestic bliss that nearly boggled Kelsey’s mind, Jarred did as he was told, and she put the salads together and pulled the rolls from the oven. Jarred discovered a bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator and uncorked it. Then they sat down together at the kitchen counter. A first, in all their years of marriage.
As the dishes were put away, Kelsey realized she felt slightly drunk, more from this lovely moment than from the effects of the wine. She wiped off the counter as Jarred loaded the dishwasher; then she threw down the sponge and raced for the stairs. “I’ll be waiting for you upstairs!” she sang out.
Jarred chuckled but made no move to race after her since there was no chance in catching her, given his current state. “I’ll be right there!” he yelled back. A shower…or a bath—he didn’t care. Either one sounded fabulous.
Remembering the rather elaborate collection of feminine soaps and shampoos and scented scrubbers and such he’d gathered into a box and shoved high on a shelf in the utility room following Kelsey’s departure three years earlier, he decided now was the perfect time to bring out the flowery arsenal. He smiled, just thinking about the evening ahead.
Two steps into the utility room and the grin vanished from his face. His head swam. An overpowering smell assailed him. He felt ill. Pressing the heel of his palm to his forehead, he leaned heavily against the washer.
Drugs.
Something…Something. What? His head hurt. Throbbed. What was this?
The hospital. He’d woken up in the hospital and thought about drugs. Chance’s drugs. That terrible, pungent odor.
Cat urine.
No, crystal meth.
And memory flooded back so quickly and completely it left him dizzy and weak.
Where in the world was Jarred?
Soaped and drenched with water, Kelsey stood in the shower, wishing now that she’d waited for him before she’d stripped off all her clothes and jumped in. Maybe he couldn’t climb the stairs. No, he’d been helping her around the kitchen as if he were nearly as good as new; so that wasn’t it.
What had happened to him?
After turning off the taps, she unsnapped the glass door and listened. No sound. The fogged mirrors and steamfilled room attested to the length of her shower. She’d been waiting a good ten minutes.
Wrapping a towel around her torso, she stepped outside the bathroom and into the bedroom suite, then padded across to the hallway door. It was ajar, so she stuck her damp head out and listened again. Nothing.
“Jarred?” she called, fear clutching at her heart. Then, at the top of the stairs, she call his name again.
She scurried downstairs, her bare feet leaving damp marks on the floor as she returned to the kitchen. Jarred was nowhere to be seen.
A nightmare vision of someone grabbing him, dragging him away, and beating or stabbing him to death filled her mind. Choking with fear, she ran through the solarium toward the boarded-up garage.
And ran right into him.
“Jarred!” she declared in a voice shaking with relief. “Oh, my God. What happened to you? I thought all kinds of terrible things when you didn’t answer me. Are you okay?” she asked, realizing his face had lost color.
“It was crystal meth,” he said in a slightly dazed tone. “Chance and his friend were making it. It smelled just like that.” He pointed through the door of the utility room to the litter box.
“Crystal meth?” She didn’t understand.
He pressed a hand to his forehead. “I saw Chance outside MacNaughton’s one day,” he said carefully, as if the thoughts were being pulled from his brain and he didn’t trust them. “He was on the street, and I just walked out to talk to him, but he left. I followed in the Porsche. Not exactly a stealth vehicle, but Chance didn’t pay attention. He drove to this house outside Silverlake. His place. And I walked in after him and there it was.”
“What?”
“They were making it. God-awful smell. Like…cat urine. I smelled it and it just hit me.”
Jarred closed his eyes and shuddered.
…could be temporary? Couldn’t it? Well, couldn’t it?
…opened his eyes twice and spoke. Didn’t know a damn thing. Doctor says it happens sometimes after severe trauma…
…has to remember…has to recover…Oh, God, what if he doesn’t?
Forget it. We could never be that lucky…
“Jarred?” Kelsey asked, panic creeping into her voice.
Whose voices were they?
“Chance was in my office,” he said, his voice sounding dim and far away.
“When?”
“That day… before the accident…”
His dream burst onto the sc
reen of his mind. Chance Rowden standing in his office. His hands shaking. His lips cracked, red, almost bleeding. White faced, hollow eyed, scared. “You’ve got big problems of your own, but they’re not Kelsey. Never Kelsey. But you can smell the problems, can’t you? You can smell them. And they’re right here. Right here!”
“Jarred…”
He felt Kelsey’s arms encircle him. He hugged her close but he didn’t want to open his eyes. He didn’t want to wake up and lose this moment, this memory.
“It’s eating away at everything you have. Eroding like acid… Look around you… She’s doing it…. “
A door opening. Chance breaking down. A feeling of intense disgust and anger at this pathetic man whom his wife loved. Chance pushing through the door.
“Wait!”
The airport. The engines’ roar. Tension in his chest. Worry. Empty thoughts of the future. “Gotta clear my head. Gotta get things right with Kelsey
Chance running across the tarmac. Waving at him. Cutting the engines. Lowering the door. Letting him inside.
“You’re scaring me,” Kelsey whispered.
“Shh. Wait.”
Engines loud. Flying low. Distracted by something. Something with the plane. Chance babbling. “She wants what’s hers. She thinks you owe her.”
“Kelsey?”
“She thinks you all owe her. “
Something wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Jarred inhaled sharply, his heart in overdrive, sweat breaking out on his skin. Slowly he opened his eyes. Kelsey’s were huge, scared.
“He tried to warn me about someone,” Jarred said in a voice he didn’t recognize as his own. “He tried to warn me about a woman.”
Chapter Twelve
“A woman,” Detective Newcastle repeated, gazing at Jarred across the length of the mahogany office desk.
A woman, Jarred repeated silently. Since his memory had seen fit to return in a blast yesterday he’d run the jumble of words and images in his head over and over again. He still didn’t have the entire mosaic; but there were a helluva lot more tiles now. “That’s what Chance said. I can remember that day in my office now as clearly as if it happened ten minutes ago.” Jarred shifted in his chair, uncomfortable and somehow anxious. Instead of liberating him, this memory dragged him down in a way he didn’t fully understand.
He’d explained very little to Kelsey last night. As soon as the memory took hold, he didn’t want to talk about it. Why, he couldn’t say, but though she’d pressed him, he’d said he wanted to think about it some more before they discussed it. His reticence had made for an oddly strained night together on the boat—not that he could blame her— and not a lot had been said this morning either. But he had needed time to think. He still needed time to think. Calling Newcastle had gone against his gut feeling, but with a plane crash and car explosion behind him, he couldn’t play the lone soldier and expect to live for long.
“Chance Rowden came to your office to warn you about a woman,” Newcastle repeated. There was a whiff of disbelief to his tone.
“The day after I followed him to his house and walked in on him and his friend cooking up something. I’d been at MacNaughton’s and I saw him outside, through the window. I just…followed him.” Jarred grimaced. How could he explain that that particular night? He’d seen Kelsey’s lover and he’d acted on instinct, pure and simple. It hadn’t been smart. It hadn’t even made sense. But he remembered the feeling of wanting to chase Chance down and throttle him or learn the truth or something maybe even worse. “I wanted to confront him,” he said now, “but when I got to the house they were making something. Smelled god-awful.”
Newcastle smoothed his palms down his pant legs. “Like cat urine?” Jarred didn’t move a muscle, but his surprise must have showed on his face because Newcastle shrugged. “That’s how crystal meth’s described more often than not.”
Jarred nodded.
“I told you we checked out Rowden’s place after the plane accident,” Newcastle said. “There were signs of all kinds of stuff. Those boys were into it pretty seriously. You don’t have any idea who the friend was?” he asked without much hope.
“Connor,” Jarred said.
Newcastle blinked, pulled out his pen and paper, and asked, “Who?”
“Chance’s parents said his cousin Connor lived with him off and on.”
Newcastle scribbled away. “Would you recognize him again?”
Jarred considered. Scruffy. Dirty. Nervous and fidgety. “Yes.”
“But no woman was there?”
Jarred shook his head. It had been a squalid, smelly room with an aura of desperation and Jarred had been less than kind. “This is where the money goes?” he’d demanded of Chance, for he’d known then where Kelsey’s … generous withdrawals had been delivered. And he’d hated Chance for it. And himself for caring.
But Chance had desperately grabbed him by the arm, steering him outside. “No, no, no! You’ve got it all wrong. You don’t know.”
Jarred’s head had been swimming, the pungent odor filling his senses, making him ill, stoking his fury. All he could think about was that Kelsey loved this wreck of a human being. Loved him enough to give him money—loads of money! His money. This drug abuser. While he, Jarred Bryant, had been used. Used for years by a woman who couldn’t return his love. And he’d wanted to kill Chance Rowden right there and then, but the man was such a sorry excuse for a human being that Jarred had only felt disgust with a bit of reluctant pity mixed in.
Detective Newcastle dragged Jarred back to the present. “So you followed Rowden and then confronted him.”
Jarred nodded grimly. “He said I didn’t know anything. He told me to leave. To get out and forget it all. His teeth chattered.”
“What happened then?”
“I left.” Went home and drank about half a bottle of single-malt scotch.
He’d been depressed, sick with misery, facing the end of his marriage.
“And then?”
“I went to work the next day and Chance showed up here. Stood by the door and warned me about my business. He said I had big problems. I didn’t even know it, but I had big, big problems and that she wanted what was owed her.
Newcastle shifted his weight. “No idea who he meant?”
“None.”
There was a pause while the detective flipped through his Utile notebook. Jarred watched him, aware that Newcastle wasn’t really looking at anything he had written down. Eventually Newcastle glanced up and met Jarred’s eye. “Mr. Bryant, if something happens to you, who benefits?”
Jarred’s skin prickled. “Directly?” When Newcastle nodded, he said succinctly, “My wife.”
“At the risk of pointing out the obvious, could the woman Chance Rowden was talking about have been your wife?”
“No.”
“They did know each other.”
“No,” Jarred said again in a warning voice. “Chance said specifically that it wasn’t Kelsey. Never Kelsey.”
“You trust your wife •that much?”
Jarred’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”
“You trust your memory that much?”
Jarred’s eyes narrowed at the needling detective. This was really getting under his skin. Kelsey was his Achilles’ heel. He knew it, and Newcastle knew it. “Yes. Chance showed up here and he was a wreck. If I had to guess on it, I’d say he wanted to cover his ass. I’d walked in on his drug dealings and he and his friend were spooked. So he came here to reason with me. He wanted to shift focus away from his dirty little secret. Everyone always acted like he was this ‘dabbler,’ this social drug user, but he was addicted, plain and simple.”
“Meth users are paranoiacs. They think everyone’s after them. He probably thought you would blow his cover. Tell his friends. Your wife, for example. And then his family.”
“Everyone knew already. They just didn’t talk about it.”
“He might have thought he had them all fooled,” Newcastle argued. “Peo
ple have killed over less. Especially under the influence of drugs.”
“But it was Chance who died,” Jarred argued, completely aware that the detective had a point, but not liking it at all.
“You were the one supposed to be on that plane, not Rowden.”
Silence fell again.
Newcastle breathed heavily. “I want to find this Connor and talk to him. There are others involved.”
Jarred nodded. His Porsche was the result of those “others.”
“Do you recall anything else?”
He’d called Kelsey into his office and tried to tell her about Chance, but she wouldn’t listen. “It’s not like I was asked here,” she’d spat at him. “I was ordered! So don’t go telling me that I need to change my attitude, because I’m not the one who treats people as if they’re pawns!”
“Mr. Bryant?”
He wasn’t about to explain about that fight with his wife, but the memory lingered inside his mind. With an effort, he said, “I remember Chance getting on the plane. I was leaving and he caught up with me. He wanted to talk. I allowed him on board and then things went wrong. That part’s still fuzzy.”
“Why did you let him on the plane?”
Because I wanted to know the truth about the money.
Once more Jarred hesitated in telling Newcastle all. The man already thought Kelsey was culpable. There was no way Jarred was going to throw suspicion on her. And there was no way he was going to admit that he’d feared she’d subsidized Chance’s habit and that he’d believed her love for Rowden was deep enough, compelling enough, to allow her to turn a blind eye to his escalating drug dependency.
And that it damned near killed him inside.
“I thought Rowden could tell me something more,” Jarred said after a long moment, and the detective let his evasion go by.
“We’re fairly certain the bomb left in your Porsche was put there by a local group of drug traffickers. A warning. It may have been that they didn’t like what you saw at Rowden’s, and when the plane accident failed to kill you, they wanted to let you know they hadn’t forgotten.”
“I thought you said the accident and explosion were the work of two separate factions.”
Not Without You Page 21