by ML Gamble
“Rest a bit, love,” he murmured softly, driving with a steadier hand than he had a right to have.
* * *
FREDERICK BROOKER WAS escorted by two uniformed guards into interview room number one. He had several inches of gauze taped to the right side of his face and both his hands were bandaged. He walked slowly to a chair and sat across from the woman already waiting at the table.
“Kind of you to come,” he snapped, his greenish eyes like flint. “I want you to let Erik know I’m okay. You tell him I’m walking around on my own two feet, talking and thinking clearly. You tell him. I don’t want him worrying.”
“It would be a lie if I told him you were thinking clearly,” the woman replied. “We both know that.”
Brooker shook his bandaged right hand in her face. “Don’t start with me. I’m doing what I’ve got to do, like always. You do what I tell you, and nothing will change.” He leaned over close enough to smell her perfume. “But if you don’t do what I tell you, everything will change. I promise you that.”
“Have you ever known me to disobey?”
Brooker smiled, wincing as the raw flesh pulled away from the gauze. “No. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering if you didn’t have something to do with my little accident. I’m sure my dying behind bars would not cause you great sorrow, my love.”
“Are you accusing me of attempted murder, Frederick? Shall I hire Mason Weil for myself?”
“No, of course not. Besides, I’ve already hired someone who can take care of what happened to me inside, as well as carry out my plans outside of these four walls. He’s very expensive.” Brooker reached across to stroke the woman’s designer suit jacket. “But then, I’ve never regretted paying for quality. You know that.”
“You heard that your boat burned yesterday?” the woman asked, hoping to see another trace of pain on Brooker’s face.
“Yes. Regrettable. Erik was very fond of the Geisha Empress. But that had to be,” Brooker whispered. “Seems someone tipped off the FBI about my plans for Mr. Steele. They came to put him in protective custody, but the fool tied them up.” Brooker laughed, a high-pitched sound that did not match his voice at all.
The woman’s left eyelid quivered, but she made no reply.
Brooker stopped laughing, then sighed. “Well, you can go now, dear heart. Take care of my boy. Tell him Daddy will be home very soon.” His eyes traveled the length of the woman’s neck. “I’m very, very anxious to sleep in my own bed again.”
“I’ll tell Erik,” the woman said, standing abruptly. Without another word, she left.
“Back to your cell, Mr. Brooker,” one of the two guards said.
Frederick Brooker stood and walked ahead of them, refusing to acknowledge their temporary existence in his life.
* * *
THE LIGHTS OF AVALON, Catalina Island’s harbor town, snapped on and off like lightning bugs in the cool dusk as Alec and Molly sailed into the bay.
To their right, Catalina’s landmark white marble ballroom dome sparkled, and off to the left, south of the half-mile-long development of the town proper, sat the Enchanted Cottage. A tiny white Victorian tucked into the rocky cliff, the cottage had been built by a captain for his fiancée as a wedding present. The woman had never seen it, however, breaking off the marriage plans when she decided the island was too desolate to live on.
The would-be groom died of a broken heart, according to local legend. Now, bright pots of orange flowers bloomed on the railing, so someone had eventually made it a home, Molly found herself thinking.
“There’s always hope,” Molly murmured.
“What?”
She looked at Alec, surprised that he’d heard her over the noise of the ferry and the waves. Quickly she told him the story of the cottage and the doomed lovers.
“I’d say he was better off dying. A love as strong as that, there’s no getting over.”
“Time heals all wounds, no?”
“Might scab them over a bit, but I doubt they truly heal. Man walks around more dead than alive the rest of his life. No good that, I’d say.”
Unable to think of a reply to such a revealing remark and finding herself wondering if Alec had had such a love in his past, Molly changed the subject. She called his attention to the glass-bottom boats cruising the coast, then explained how she had visited as a child each summer.
“At that time the island was virtually uninhabited, bought outright by William Wrigley of chewing gum fame and then deeded as a wildlife preserve to the state of California. No more than two percent of the land can ever be developed.”
“It reminds me of home,” Alec replied. “A thousand times more space than men. Good proportion for thinking.”
“Do you miss Australia?”
“Nah, not usually.” He stood close to her and brushed a lock of hair away from her mouth. “Especially not today, at this moment. Although if we’re trying to hide from someone, Alice Springs would have a lot more options than this place.”
They both stared at the dock, which was looming closer. The trip to San Pedro, during which she was embarrassed to have fallen asleep, took two hours. The cruise took the same, though they had not been able to board until 2:30 p.m. It was still full daylight but clouding up over the Pacific.
“We’ll pretty much have the town to ourselves by the time we get dinner tonight,” Molly told Alec. “The day-trippers leave at 6:00 p.m. It might be safest to head to Brooker’s lodge then.”
“I think you’re right,” he replied. “I’ll check into a motel somewhere, though, and we’ll lie low until dark. Follow a bit behind me until I get a key. Our pictures are probably all over the news by now. It’s very dangerous to be seen together.”
Alec was wearing a cowboy hat, which covered his blond hair, and black sunglasses to hide his eyes. Molly had purchased a beige-and-green scarf to cover her mane and wore a bulky sweatshirt she’d stuffed into one of their bags. The bag also held the two guns, which she was petrified would set off some kind of alarm when they’d boarded the ferry, but no check of luggage had been made.
During the voyage, they sat apart, meeting up only now as the passengers were disembarking. Alec took her arm and guided her through the light crowd.
“I’m going to try to make a few calls tomorrow and find out what’s going on,” she whispered.
“To whom?”
“The phone companies have as much information on people as credit-reporting agencies, in some cases. I’m going to do a little research on Mr. Brooker. I’ve got a secretary who’s as good as gold, Alec. I think she’ll help us. Don’t worry. I won’t do anything to get us caught.”
“I trust you, love. I told you that. Don’t lose me.” With a squeeze of her hand, Alec left her side and headed down the ferry plank to land.
Molly followed, not too closely, and made a mental note to try to get into the telephone company business office on Catalina and check out the records for Brooker’s lodge. If memory served her, it was a three-person office, and if she went when they were busy, she’d probably get away with just flashing her ID, giving a phony name before they looked too closely at it and smiling a lot.
The actual plant facilities housing the network wiring and switching equipment were well guarded, but the business offices were notorious for having stringent rules about signing in and out that were seldom enforced.
Their records could possibly tell her about Brooker’s other business holdings and real estate, two things that she felt she should look into. On the cruise over, Molly had devoured a stack of newspapers and a three-month-old Newsweek she had pinched from the cruise line’s waiting area. The magazine contained a lengthy article on Frederick Brooker and Paul Buntz.
After reading it, she was convinced that Buntz must have been blackmailing Brooker over information about a string of robberies that had taken place at several of Brooker’s clients’ homes in the months before Buntz was killed.
It might even be that Buntz had fenced some of t
he stolen merchandise, as the Newsweek article had speculated, since he had once been arrested as a fence with organized-crime connections.
Molly was anxious to do a little sleuthing on her own in this matter, as well as to discuss what she had read with Alec.
One thing she found interesting was that Buntz and Brooker were both born in Kensington, Ohio. Buntz was the same age as Brooker, so there was a good possibility they had known each other growing up.
To Molly’s way of thinking, it was a lead that might prove significant in tying Brooker more tightly to all that had happened so far. If someone could find the link between Paul Buntz and Frederick Brooker, maybe they could discover what the ex-sportscaster had been blackmailing Brooker over. The more Molly thought about it, the more she was convinced that the answer to that mystery would probably answer the question of whom Alec was programmed to kill.
Sleuthing single-handedly was a risky plan, but it was all Molly could think of at the moment. And a good Pacific Communications manager always worked with what she had, she told herself with a wry grin, which immediately turned to a grimace when she remembered Rafe Amundson.
Swallowing a new surge of emotion at the memory of this morning’s tragedy, Molly managed to keep Alec in sight, though she had to wipe tears away several times.
Fifteen minutes after they walked off the ferry, Alec and Molly were locked into room 19 of the Devil Fish Motel. Alec used everything but fifty dollars of the money he had taken from the “visitors” to buy ferry tickets, lunch and rent for the night. The motel was the island’s most secluded, and emptiest. Only two other guests were registered, Alec had heard from the manager. The motel was located high on a side street at the farthest settled point of the city of Avalon. Most visitors liked a more central location, the manager had explained.
Molly thought what he really meant was that they liked more civilized surroundings. After she had looked around, she wasn’t too pleased with their accommodations. The room’s good features were a double bed with an ominous, canyon-size cleft running down the middle, a television with three fuzzy channels and a bathroom whose grout had come over with the first settlers. The bad included a damp, cold draft under an ill-fitting door, no soap or tissues and two towels the size of sandwich Swiss—and nearly as holey.
“I’m sorry about the kip, Molly,” Alec apologized as soon as she’d walked across the threshold. “We don’t have enough cash for two rooms.” He deposited what little money he had left on the small night table. “Your name is Margaret Day, by the way. I’m Robert.”
“Where did you come up with those?”
“Bob Dylan’s a favorite of mine. Peggy Day is one of his best.” Alec shrugged, looked out the door in both directions, then shut and locked it.
Molly liked that song and found herself wondering if the lyrics she remembered from that folksy ballad, which revealed that Bob wanted to spend the night with Peggy Day, was pertinent.
Unwilling to ask Alec, Molly sat on the bed and nearly tilted over on the worn-out mattress. She kicked off her pink tennis shoes, which were smudged from the soot under the ferry seats, and pulled the scarf from her head. She shook her hair free and collapsed on the bed’s lumpy surface.
“Money’s a real problem, Alec. We’ve got to call Alicia, if you think we can still trust her and see if she can meet us somewhere soon.”
“I know. But we can’t call from the room. Your phone cards are surely being traced by now, and I don’t have one.”
“Wait a minute,” Molly cried out. She rolled off the bed and grabbed one of the canvas satchels, emptying its contents onto the graying, threadbare carpet. Rafe’s call-out book of emergency numbers was there. Bound in leather, its front flap held various items Rafe had never got around to putting anywhere else.
One of the items was his calling card. Another was a hundred-dollar bill. With a sigh, she tossed the two items onto the bed. “There’s a little more money. And a way to try to reach Dr. Chen. That’s Rafe’s phone card from work. His PIN is 1551. That’s the last four numbers of his Pacific Communications employee number. The crew always kidded him because everyone else’s numbers ended in three thousand and something. He was there a long time.”
It must have been something in her voice that made Alec kneel down beside her and take her in his arms. “I’m so, so sorry, Molly. What happened wasn’t your fault, though I know that doesn’t help anything.”
Molly fully lost her composure then. Her crying turned to sobbing, which turned into a hiccuping torrent and finally into exhaustion. Alec held her through the entire gamut, rubbing her back, smoothing her hair.
“It’s so damned unfair,” she finally said. “He never hurt anyone...”
“I know, Molly.” Alec hugged her and stood, massaging the kinks out of his neck gently. “None of this is fair. Not the deaths of innocent people, not the hole this has made in your life, or mine.”
She realized then that she knew almost nothing about him. “What do you do in Melbourne, Alec Steele?”
He grinned and sat down again, relaxing against the bed with his arms around her. “I own a charter boat, do day sailing, touring the coast a bit. I made a bit of money racing the past few years but gave it up after your Yankee, Dennis Connor, lost the America’s Cup. Good bloke, that Connor. Never gives up.” His voice grew huskier. “You can’t give up, either, Molly girl. We’ll get through this. Get some help. See some daylight. You can count on it.”
At that second, she realized she would believe whatever he said to her. Her body was warm next to his and vulnerable in a thousand different ways. Without realizing what she was doing, Molly leaned into him.
Though she had begun the kiss, he immediately took control. His mouth was harder than she had imagined, and gentler. And hotter, as it moved against her lips, dueled with her tongue and devoured her conscious awareness. He squeezed her to him, and they tumbled onto the floor. His hands traveled the length of her, caressing her and hugging her to him. Now, for the first time, she understood the meaning of the word “bliss.”
When he broke away from her, his breathing was ragged, his eyes bright and his voice silky and soft. “I’ve wanted to do that ever since I thought you were going to shoot me.”
“When did you think I was going to shoot you? Last night, you mean?”
“No. Months ago, when I opened the door at Brooker’s office and you were standing there, wild-eyed and grabbing for something in your purse as if it was the only protection between you and the hounds of hell.”
Molly laughed low in her throat and shifted her hips closer to him. The movement put a much more serious look on Alec’s face, and a much more reckless thought into hers. “I thought about you, too, that night. It was Valentine’s Day. I was hoping I would see you again. And then—”
He raised two fingers to her lips and shushed her. “Don’t, Molly girl. Don’t go back. Stay here with me a bit more.”
Alec kissed her again then, and she told him with her body that he could—should—make love to her, that she wanted him. He moved his hand under the sweatshirt, under her bra, stroking her breast, her stomach, coming back around to rub her nipples until she thought she would cry out.
But instead, he cried out. Forgetting his injury, Molly had dug her nails into his neck, accidentally touching his wound.
“Oh, no, I’m so sorry, Alec. Alec, are you okay?”
He waved her away and unsteadily moved up on his knees, grabbing his head with one hand and squeezing it. “It’s okay, love. Really. Ah-g-g-gh.”
She sat next to him now, rubbing his back, saying repeatedly she was sorry. Finally he grinned and patted her leg. “Hey, it’s okay, honest. I think we pinched one of those bloody needles down, though. It hurts like hell. Can’t you try to get it out now, love?”
She pulled back the adhesive tape and stared at the two tiny black needles. One spot seemed to be infected, which really scared her. What if she hit a nerve, or worse, and really incapacitated him?
&nb
sp; “No, Alec, I can’t. But let’s try to reach your friend now. Really. Use Rafe’s card to call Dr. Chen. That thing could be infected. Besides, she’s bound to be worried about failing to connect with you earlier on the boat.”
“I will, soon. Just let me sit here with you for a while. Tell me about what you were reading on the ferry over.”
Molly related the facts about the Brooker case, as well as the information she’d gleaned about Paul Buntz growing up in Brooker’s hometown, and of his connection to stolen goods.
“The magazine article noted that twenty-five of Brooker’s company’s clients in the Del Mar, Coronado area were robbed in one three-week period. It had to be an inside job according to the police, but they could never prove it by getting a lead from the burglars, so they concentrated on the items stolen, particularly the jewelry. Some of it was located in New York and traced back to Paul Buntz. Do you think that could be the thing he was blackmailing Brooker over?”
Alec’s eyes seemed cloudy and he shook his head. “Could be, love. I didn’t know Brooker long, but I’ll tell you one thing. You wouldn’t want to cross the man. Even before he shot that man in cold blood, I sensed he wouldn’t let anyone get the best of him without paying the price.”
“Did you cross him?”
“Not in business. But it’s my word that could send him to death row. It’s not likely that Brooker would take that lying down. Personalities like his never accept responsibility for their own fate.”
“Well, that’s enough of this for now,” Molly said, noting that Alec’s body language was becoming more and more distressed. “Please call Alicia now, before you fall asleep. Then we’ll eat.”
Reluctantly Alec agreed. She left him sitting on the bed, the phone cradled in his lap. Molly went into the bathroom and ran the water, not liking the way Alec’s voice changed every time he said Alicia’s name and not liking herself much at all for experiencing what felt a lot like jealousy. When Molly heard his voice rise and some teasing chatter begin, she slammed the door shut.