If Looks Could Kill

by Beverly Barton

  “May we see Jazzy?” Genny asked.

  “Yes, of course,” the doctor replied. “Two at a time and only for a few minutes.”

  “We understand,” Genny said, then looked to Reve. “You and Jacob go in first.”

  “Are you sure?” Reve asked. “After all, you’re her best friend.”

  “And you’re her sister.” Genny reached out and hugged Reve.

  Reve looked to Sally Talbot. The old woman nodded. “Genny’s right. You go in first.”

  “What about Caleb?” Reve asked.

  Dallas glanced in Caleb’s direction. He stood alone at the end of the hall, his back to them, his shoulders hunched. “I’ll go talk to Caleb. He’ll be all right.”

  Jacob took Reve’s hand and together they entered Jazzy’s ICU cubicle. Although still pale, still connected to numerous wires and tubes, Jazzy smiled as her gaze focused on Reve. An odd sensation hit Reve in the pit of her belly. Without make-up, without her green tinted contacts and with the bright red rinse on her hair beginning to fade, Jazzy looked more like Reve than ever. Truly identical twins.

  “Reve.” Jazzy’s voice was very weak and slightly hoarse from lack of use.

  Reve rushed to her sister, grasped her hand and leaned over to kiss her. “It’s about time you woke up. You gave us all a really bad scare.”

  “Sorry.” Jazzy mouthed the word.

  “You’re going to be just fine. Dr. Cornelius said so, and he should know. He’s the best in the business.”

  Jazzy nodded. “You . . . you made sure . . . of that.”

  Reve laughed.

  “You got that damn straight,” Jacob said as he came up behind Reve. “Your sister has made sure you received the best care possible.”

  Jazzy frowned. “Watch her.”

  “Watch who?” Reve asked.

  Jacob put his arm around Reve. “You want me to watch out for Reve? You want me to keep her safe?”

  Jazzy nodded. “Yes. Danger.”

  “Dr. Cornelius told you what happened, why you’re in the hospital,” Reve said.

  Jazzy nodded again. “Attacked. Head.”

  Reve squeezed her sister’s hand. “You rest now. Jacob and I are going to leave so Genny and Dallas and your aunt Sally and Ludie can come in to see you.”

  “Caleb?”

  “He’s still here. He hasn’t left the hospital since you were brought in.”

  “Loves me.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am, he surely does.” In that one split second Reve envied her sister greatly. Not for the first time she wondered what it would feel like to have a man love her the way Caleb loved Jazzy. If only . . . Don’t you dare go there, Reve Sorrell, she warned herself. Just because you shared the most incredible night of sex in your life with Jacob Butler does not mean he loves you. The “L” word was never mentioned. By either of you.

  Griffin Powell arrived in Cherokee Pointe around ten- thirty and met with Reve in Jazzy’s office at Jasmine’s. Jacob had offered to be with her when she met with Griffin, but she’d assured him she could handle things without him. He’d kissed her and left without another word. They hadn’t talked about last night, hadn’t scrutinized their actions or tried to explain to each other that it had just been sex and nothing more. Nor had either of them declared undying love for the other.

  “As of yesterday evening, our investigation into Dinah Collins’s life led us to three men,” Griffin said. “It seems that while she lived on Hyatt Street in Sevierville, Dinah had only three frequent male visitors. One man came to see her every week, occasionally more often. Another man came once a month. And a third visited her several times.”

  “Do you know who those three men were?” Reve asked.

  Griffin nodded. “Maxwell Fennel, a well-known lawyer here in Cherokee Pointe; Dodd Keefer, a highly respected circuit court judge here in Cherokee County; and Farlan MacKinnon, who owns MacKinnon Media and lives here in Cherokee Pointe.”

  Reve’s stomach muscles tightened. A queasy unease churned inside her. “Do you believe that one of those three men is our father?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do we find out which one?”

  When Griffin hesitated, Reve could tell he had more information, but for some reason seemed reluctant to share it with her.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Whatever it is, just tell me. I can handle it.”

  “Last night Farlan MacKinnon telephoned me. It seems that he met you recently and realized how much you re sembled Dinah Collins, a woman who was once his mistress.”

  “My mother was Farlan MacKinnon’s mistress?”

  “Yes, and he claims that he is the father of her twin daughters.”

  For a moment, Reve couldn’t breathe; then she sucked in huge gulps of air.

  “Are you all right?” Griffin asked.

  “I’m fine.” She wasn’t, but she would be. “Did Mr. MacKinnon offer any explanation about what happened to my mother and how Jazzy and I wound up abandoned and left for dead when we were infants?”

  “No, but he does want to meet you. He told me that he wants to explain things to you himself.”

  “How the hell can he explain?”

  “I don’t know, but if you’re willing to meet with him, all I have to do is telephone him right now and my guess is that he’ll come straight here.”

  Did she want to do this now? Was she strong enough to face this man who claimed to be her father—Jazzy’s father— and listen to his explanations?

  “Call him. Tell him I’ll see him. Today.”

  “The only way this might work is if we tell no one,” Dallas said. “Not Genny or Reve. And certainly not Caleb.”

  “I suppose all that matters is that Jazzy has agreed,” Jacob said, “but God help me, I don’t feel right about this. It’s almost as if we’re taking advantage of Jazzy, considering her condition. And when Caleb finds out, he’s liable to kill us both.”

  “He’ll be pissed as hell, but if we capture Jazzy’s attacker, he might let us live.”

  “Logic says our plan will work, that it’s the best way to trap a killer, but because I love Jazzy, I’m concerned that something could go wrong and she’ll get hurt.”

  “We’re going to keep close watch over her, twenty-four/ seven,” Dallas said. “My guess is that once the word is out that Jazzy has regained consciousness and it’s only a matter of time before she names her attacker, we’ll see some action. Possibly tonight.”

  “Not if this guy’s smart. He won’t fall into our trap. We could be putting Jazzy’s life in danger for no good reason.”

  “He’s a copycat would-be killer, not an original thinker. My experience tells me that he’ll panic when he thinks Jazzy is on the verge of identifying him. He’ll take some big risks to try to shut her up.”

  “Once we put the word out about Jazzy, Caleb’s going to start questioning how it happened, how word leaked out. He’s a former cop,” Jacob reminded Dallas. “It won’t take him long to figure out what we’re doing, and when he does figure it out—”

  “If we’re lucky, Jazzy’s attacker will act before Caleb finds out what we’ve done. The main thing is not to forget that unless we want to fake Jazzy’s death, which would be a pretty drastic measure, once word leaks out that she’s no longer in a coma—and word will leak out whether we do it or not—her attacker will try again. It’s much safer for Jazzy if we make sure he comes to us when we’re expecting him.”

  “I say we both stay at the hospital tonight and not leave this to anyone else.”

  “And if he doesn’t strike tonight, you and I can take shifts until he shows.”

  “How do we explain this to Genny and Reve? And Caleb’s sure to wonder what’s up.”

  “We can be honest, up to a point,” Dallas said. “We’ll tell them that we’re beefing up security because we’re afraid word might leak out that Jazzy’s conscious. Nobody will have to know that we’re putting the word out ourselves and embellishing the truth a bit.”

>   “Heaven help us if anything goes wrong,” Jacob said. “Or if Genny senses what we’re up to.”

  Reve wasn’t sure how she’d feel when she saw Farlan MacKinnon again. She only vaguely remembered him from the night at the ER, the night when his son Brian had rescued Jazzy! Try as she might, all she could recall was that he was a big, tall man with thinning white hair and brown eyes. An old man. Was he seventy? Probably.

  Dinah Collins had been twenty when she gave birth to twins. If Farlan MacKinnon was now seventy or seventy- five, then he’d have been forty or forty-five when . . .

  You don’t know that he’s your father, she reminded herself. Just because he says he is doesn’t make it so. But what would he have to gain by making such a monumental confession?

  When Reve heard a firm knock on the closed office door, she tensed. “Yes?”

  “Reve, it’s Griffin Powell. I have Mr. MacKinnon with me. May we come in?”

  “Yes, come in. Please.” Reve stood, steeling her nerves to face whatever might happen.

  Griffin Powell came into the office first, then Farlan MacKinnon, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Griffin, the two men approximately the same height. About six-four. She studied the man who claimed to be her father. He was a rather good-looking old man, his shoulders wide, his back straight. He was staring at her as if he was seeing a ghost.

  “You look so much like your mother,” Farlan said. “Except you’re tall. Like me.”

  His words hit her like a sledgehammer. “I don’t know what you expect me to say. I don’t know how to respond.”

  “It’s all right. I understand. This has been quite a shock for you.” He looked at her through a mist of tears overlaying his dark, whiskey-brown eyes. Eyes the exact color of hers and Jazzy’s.

  Reve clasped the back of the chair with white-knuckled fierceness. “Won’t y’all sit down?” Ever mindful of her manners, Reve acted purely on a lifetime of training.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. MacKinnon?” Griffin suggested.

  After Farlan MacKinnon sat in one of the empty office chairs, Griffin took the other one. Reve sat down behind Jazzy’s desk.

  “How is Jazzy?” Mr. MacKinnon asked.

  “She’s still alive.” Do you care? Reve wanted to scream. Do you really care whether either of us is all right? If you’d cared about us thirty years ago, you would have protected us.

  “You’re angry,” he said, and when she opened her mouth to reply, a biting comment on the tip of her tongue, he held up a restraining hand. “You have every right to be. I failed you and your sister. I failed your mother.”

  “Why should I believe that you’re my father?” Reve asked, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  “I’m willing to undergo a DNA test.”

  “I see.”

  “You have Dinah’s beautiful features,” Farlan MacKinnon said. “I assume you and Jazzy look just alike. I—I’ve never seen her, you know, except at a distance. I never paid much attention to her, never dreamed she was my daughter.”

  “I’ve seen Dinah Collins’s picture,” Reve said. “I know that Jazzy and I look a lot like her.”

  “You do, except she was a little thing, about five-three and very delicate. You got your height and size from me.”

  “Tell me about her. Tell me about the two of you.” Do I really want to hear this, even if every word is the truth?

  “I’m going to be as truthful as I know how to be.” He paused as if it hurt him to say more. “Some of the things I’m going to tell you about your mother will bother you, but you must remember that she had a kind and loving heart. She was not a bad person.”

  Reve tensed. Was she prepared to hear awful things about her birth mother? “Go on.”

  “I met Dinah when she was seventeen, almost eighteen. She was a prostitute in Knoxville.”

  Reve gasped. Emotion flooded her senses. It was all she could do to keep herself from bursting into tears. Her mother had been a prostitute? How was that possible?

  “I didn’t find out about her background, about her life before she wound up in Knoxville, until much later. When I took her away from Knoxville, away from the terrible life she’d been living and—”

  “And made a teenage girl your mistress,” Reve finished for him.

  He hung his head in shame, as well he should have. When he lifted his head, his gaze met hers and locked. “I take full blame for everything that happened. But there’s something you should know. I loved Dinah. And she loved me.”

  Oh, God, why had he told her that? Didn’t he realize that whether it was true or not, she would want to believe it?

  “Dinah had run away from home when she was thirteen. Her mother was an alcoholic, and her father deserted them when Dinah was just a toddler. She lived with her aunt and uncle on and off from the time she was seven. Her mother’s sister and her husband.

  “The uncle began sexually abusing Dinah when she was ten.” Farlan became very quiet. A lone tear trickled down his left cheek. “When she was thirteen, she found out she was pregnant and when she told her aunt, the woman blamed her.”

  “Oh, God.” Reve jumped up and flew across the room, flung open the door and rushed down the hall to the bathroom.

  She had just barely made it inside one of the stalls when she retched and threw up. She wiped her mouth with toilet tissue, then took several deep breaths before going to one of the sinks and washing out her mouth. After dampening her face with a moist paper towel, she washed and dried her hands, then squared her shoulders and went back to Jazzy’s office. Both Griffin and Farlan were standing.

  “Are you all right?” Farlan asked. “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t apologize for telling me the truth. If you can’t do anything else for me, you can be honest with me.” When Jazzy sat back behind the desk, she looked right at Farlan. “What happened to her and to her baby?”

  “She ran away and wound up in Knoxville, on the streets, a thirteen-year-old kid who was four months pregnant.” Farlan rubbed his big, age-spotted hands up and down his thighs. “She got hooked up with a rough bunch, and within a week she was turning tricks. She told me she hated it, hated all those men touching her. And I hated it for her.”

  “What happened to her baby?”

  “The baby died. She was born prematurely. Dinah was only about six months along. After that, she grew up fast and learned to take care of herself. When I met her, she was a sassy, street-smart hooker. She’d closed off her feelings completely. Until we fell in love. Neither of us meant for it to happen. And I know it surprised her that she could actually love somebody, least of all a man old enough to be her father.”

  Reve glanced at Griffin. “You said that two other men continued to see Dinah after she moved to Sevierville, right?”

  “That’s correct,” Griffin replied.

  “Maxwell Fennel was my cousin and fresh out of law school,” Farlan explained. “I hired him to take charge of Dinah’s finances, to see to it that she had anything she wanted. That’s why Max visited her on a monthly basis.”

  “And the other man was Judge Dodd Keefer,” Reve said.

  “Dodd is my brother-in-law. I met Dinah through him. He’d been one of Dinah’s regular customers, and he fell in love with her. But he wanted to end things because the guilt nearly destroyed him. Dodd is an honorable man and he truly loved his wife. He confessed his sins to his wife and she forgave him, but for quite some time after he was no longer Dinah’s lover, he visited her. He couldn’t quite let go. Not until he learned she was pregnant with my baby.”

  “I take it that you were married and had no intention of divorcing your wife,” Reve said. “Why didn’t you just arrange for Dinah to have an abortion?”

  “Neither of us wanted that. She wanted to have my child— my children. And I asked my wife for a divorce.”

  “You did?” Reve couldn’t believe what he’d told her.

  “Yes, I did. But my wife, who was and still is mentally unbalanced, r
efused to give me a divorce. She even tried to kill herself, and when she survived the attempt, she swore she’d try again if I left her. We had a twelve-year-old son. How could I have taken the chance that his mother would kill herself?”

  “So you made a choice between your wife and son and your mistress and twin daughters?” The rage boiling inside her surprised Reve. She’d wanted to know the truth, but now she hated the truth. She hated this man’s wife and son. And she hated him.

  “Dinah understood,” Farlan said. “She’s actually the one who made what she believed was the right decision for us. She made plans to move to Atlanta and take our babies with her. And I arranged through Maxwell to care of her and our children financially.”

  “How noble of you!”

  “I don’t blame you for being angry. I don’t blame you for hating me.”

  “Obviously Dinah didn’t take her twins and move to Atlanta,” Reve said. “Do you want to tell me what went wrong? What happened? How did Jazzy wind up being stuck in a tree stump and left for dead? How did I wind up being thrown in a Dumpster, like a piece of trash?”

  Farlan shook his head. “I don’t know. I swear, I don’t know.” Tears welled up in his eyes. “All these years, I believed the three of you were safe and happy and—”

  “But not once”—Reve spoke through clenched teeth— “not once in thirty years did you ever make sure, did you? You just sent us packing and forgot about us.”

  “No!” Farlan jumped to his feet. “Not one day of my life has passed that I didn’t think about Dinah, about our two little girls and wonder—”

  Reve looked at her father—and she knew in her heart that this man was her father, just as she’d known Jazzy was her sister—and almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  “Do you know of anyone who might have hated my mother enough to harm her?” Reve asked. “Who would have wanted to see Jazzy and me dead?”

  Farlan’s face went chalk white. “Oh, God. No. No.” “Who?” Reve demanded, but Farlan simply sat back down, buried his face in his hands and wept.

  Chapter 28

  He watched from across the street when Farlan MacKinnon left Jasmine’s with Griffin Powell. Reve Sorrell stood in the doorway of the restaurant and shook hands with the private investigator, then turned to Farlan. They just looked at each other and he could tell, even from this distance, that the old man wanted to put his arms around his daughter and hug her. But he didn’t. He couldn’t see Reve’s face so he couldn’t be sure about her feelings. He’d hoped she would hate Farlan and tell him to go to hell. Apparently that hadn’t happened. But she wasn’t exactly kissing her daddy goodbye, so maybe all wasn’t lost.