Brown and de Luca Collection, Volume 1

by Maggie Shayne

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Do you think he knows about my sister’s place?”

  “If he’s been watching you, yeah. He might.”

  I think all the blood rushed from my brain to my feet at that point. He was still talking, something about his family having a lake house in the Adirondacks, but I wasn’t hearing him anymore. I was looking for my purse. Still up in the bedroom. I sprinted there and back again in about three and a half seconds, fumbling for the car keys as I ran into the kitchen, passing him on the way. I was kind of surprised that my backdraft didn’t spin him in a full circle as I ran by.

  “Hey, hey, hold on a sec.” He grabbed my shoulder, and I turned and looked at him but my mind wasn’t on him at all. It was on Sandra, and the twins, and Jim. Shit, what would father of the year Jim do in the face of a serial killer? Probably try to reason with the guy, talk him down. You couldn’t talk down a psychopath.

  “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to make my sister get the hell out of town until this is over.”

  “Can’t you just call?”

  “I’ll call on the way. You can write me a ticket after.”

  “I really don’t think he’ll go after her so long as you’re not there.”

  “Don’t even pretend you know that, Mason. My family is in danger.” I glanced back toward the stairway I’d just descended. “And maybe so is yours, since you’re the lead detective and it wouldn’t be hard to find out your address.”

  In seconds I was out the door and diving behind the wheel of the twins’ car. Five miles later I realized that I’d forgotten Myrt.

  I clapped a hand to my forehead. How could I?

  My phone rang, and I grabbed it fast without even looking at the caller ID. “What?”

  “It’s me,” Mason said.

  It’s me. So our nonrelationship has reached the “It’s me” stage, has it? “I forgot my dog. I’m a horrible human being.”

  “That’s why I’m calling, to let you know she’s fine.”

  “Fine my ass.” I hit the speaker button and dropped the phone on my lap to avoid a ticket. “She’s blind, she’s in a strange place, and she’s on the second floor.”

  “She got up and apparently followed her nose into the boys’ room, where she whined until Josh woke up and brought her downstairs. He took her outside for a walk, and right now he’s sharing his pancakes with her.”

  I exhaled, and some of the tension eased from my spine, which had been so tight I’d thought it was about to snap. “I’ll deal with my sister and the kids, and then I’ll be back for her.”

  “Deal with your sister and the kids,” he said. “Then go home and pack a bag for you and one for Myrtle. Your house has been cleared, and given the footprints in the woods from that guy lurking there last night, so have you.”

  “Did they find the hammer?”

  He paused a beat before replying. “No. I think he took it with him.”

  “God, Mason. Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just do what you need to do and pack, okay?”

  I blinked, harkening back to our earlier conversation. “Is this about your lake house in the mountains?”

  “Yes. We’ll head up there this afternoon. We can work the case from there. Okay?”

  I wanted to say no. But how the hell was I supposed to say no when I was also wondering if it would be safe for me to return to my own home—my fucking haven—for long enough to pack?

  So instead of arguing with him, I said, “Okay.”

  “Okay? Why was that so easy?”

  “Because I’m wondering if this bastard is going to be lurking in my bushes with that fucking hammer when I get home.”

  “I’ll be there waiting when you get there. I’ve just gotta run the boys home first and pack some stuff.”

  “Do you think they’re safe, Mason?” The killer was their father, after all.

  He paused for a long moment. “If this is what you think it is, someone continuing Eric’s crimes because they inherited his illness through his organs, I don’t see how they could be targets. My brother would never have harmed his sons. But I’m going to try to find a way to get Marie to let them take a few days off school and come with us, just in case. Why don’t we meet at your place at noon?”

  I nodded at the phone and felt my throat going tight, and there was a burning behind my eyes.

  “Okay?” he asked when I didn’t answer.

  I cleared my throat, but my voice still came out tight. “You’re really a decent guy, aren’t you, Mason?”

  “I try to be.”

  “It’s weird. I mean, that your brother turned out…the way he did.”

  “Keeps me awake nights. We were both raised in the same home, by the same parents. He was adopted, but still…”

  “I didn’t know that.” I was starting to like this guy. You know, as a person, not just as a sex object.

  “Noon at my place, then,” I said. “Take good care of my dog, okay?”

  “You’re not really the tough, thick-skinned chick you pretend to be, are you?”

  “If I wasn’t, I’d never have made it this far in life. Trust me on that.” I hit the end call button and headed straight to Sandra’s, but I was on the phone the entire twenty-minute drive with my favorite travel agent.

  * * *

  “The Bahamas?” Sandra blinked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  “Yep. One weeks, all-inclusive, at a really high-end resort. It’ll be amazing. The chance of a lifetime.”

  “And you say you won this?”

  “Yep. Sweepstakes I forgot even entering. I guess my luck is changing, right? But it’s a trip for four, and I don’t want to leave Myrtle, and I’m way behind on the current book, so I thought of you. Misty and Christy will go insane.”

  “Yeah, I imagine they will.”

  Sandra pushed herself back from her desk. She’d been hard at work when I’d burst in to interrupt her and offered her a dream vacation wrapped up in a package of lies.

  “This is too much. We can’t accept it.”

  “Call it an early Christmas present.”

  “It’s only October.”

  “Then call it an early Halloween present. Call it birthday presents for all of you for the next three years. Call it whatever you want. But you’ll lose it if you can’t leave tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” She shook her head. “The girls have school, soccer, I have deals pending, Jim has—”

  “None of that is as important as the trip of a lifetime, Sandra. You can make this work. Come on, start delegating your important stuff and delaying the rest. Wrap up what you can, have Jim talk to his boss. You can do this. I guarantee you the girls would rather spend a week at Flip-Flops All-Inclusive Beach Resort than play soccer. And they both get straight A’s, so a few days off school won’t kill them.”

  Sandra lowered her eyes. “This week’s a bye. They’d only miss one game.”

  “So?”

  “So what’s really going on here, Rachel?”

  I hated when she got that look. The one that said she could see right through me. It was way worse than our mom’s had been, that penetrating gaze of hers.

  I licked my lips, lowered my head. “Okay, you want the truth, I’m gonna give it to you. I don’t have time to dick around here. The guy who killed our brother is still out there. He’s obviously trying to get to me, and since I’m going out of town to a safe haven with Mason for a few days myself, I’m afraid you and Jim and the girls might be in danger. He might try to get to me by harming you or the girls.”

  She went completely white and dropped back into her desk chair as if her knees had turned into oatmeal. I wished I hadn’t said it, but it was done and I couldn’t take it back.

  “The girls!” Her head came up, eyes wide. �
�The girls are at school.”

  “There. That fear right there, that’s how I’m feeling. That’s why I want you out of here, out of his reach, until Mason and I can find him.”

  She already had the phone in her hand, dialing I don’t know who. The school office or, more likely, one of the girls’ ever-present cell phones. She paused while it was ringing—I could hear it. “Mason and you?”

  I got up, not ready to pick up on that topic of conversation. “Be ready. Your flight leaves at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow. Your itinerary and links to check in for the flights are in your email. I have to go.”

  “Rachel—” She stopped there as one of the girls finally answered.

  “I’ve got to go,” I repeated. “Get your family out of here, sis. I’ll talk to you later.”

  She nodded at me, and I was outta there.

  * * *

  She hadn’t been arrested. The rat’s plan hadn’t worked. But that was only because he hadn’t known about her relationship with the cop who’d now cast himself in the role of her protector. And now he was taking her with him on a road trip. He was watching, through high-powered binoculars from a little boat out on the reservoir when the detective met her at her house, put her suitcases into his car and took her away. It didn’t take him long to figure out where. He knew everything Eric Conroy Brown had known, after all. Ironic, that this would come to a head there, of all places. It was perfect, really. Lucky. He started scratching at the brain of his host, urging him toward what needed to be done.

  The host didn’t put up much of a fight.

  To stop the itch and cure the ache, put one more body in the lake.

  CHAPTER 18

  Even without my eyesight, I would have known the place was beautiful. First off, there was the smell, pine and wood and earth, with hints of musty scented fungus wafting in and out again like ghosts underneath the rest. The air was clean, not that it wasn’t clean where I lived, but it was somehow even cleaner here. All those pine needles, bazillions of them, filtering every single breath, I figured.

  We were in the sturdy Jeep Mason had rented for the trip. He’d left his beloved boat of a Monte Carlo behind. Thank you, rutted back roads. And my T-Bird was not meant for this kind of travel. She was unharmed after her recent violation at the hands of the BPD forensics team. Nothing incriminating had been found, and she was safe and sound in my locked garage. I hoped.

  “Are you sure Marie and the boys will be okay?” I asked, still bugged that the kids hadn’t come with us.

  “I put Rosie on them. He’ll keep ’em safe until they can join us tomorrow. Marie wants to come along, but she insisted she needed a day to work out the logistics. My mother heard about it and insisted on coming up with them, and claimed she needed a day to pack. I asked Dennison—I don’t think you’ve met him—to keep an eye on her.”

  “I guess we can’t ask for more than that.”

  “He has no reason to go after them,” he reminded me.

  “I know.”

  I missed my car. I missed being the one behind the wheel. I’d been relegated to the passenger seat on every trip for twenty years, and I really disliked being back there again.

  Myrtle didn’t mind at all. She wore her tinted goggles, smiled with her bottom teeth and relished every second of the trip, even though she was in the backseat for the first time in her life. Well, her life with me, anyhow.

  “I’ve got to ask,” Mason said as we meandered along narrow, twisting dirt roads with nothing but trees on either side and majestic, snowy mountains in the distance. “What’s up with Myrt’s goggles?”

  “Probably me projecting my issues on the poor dog.” He frowned at me, so I elaborated. “When I was blind, I never believed that my eyes weren’t doing acrobatics without my consent, even though everyone told me they were fine. I just couldn’t be around anyone without my shades on. Just in case.”

  He tilted his rearview mirror to look at Myrtle. “So you think she’s worried about her looks?”

  “Not really. But I do think her eyes are sensitive to the sun. Mine were. She squints really badly when the light hits them.”

  “Ahhh. And the scarf?”

  “Well, it matches the goggles. Which match the T-Bird. A girl’s gotta have a little style, you know.”

  He smiled, drove for a minute, then said, “You didn’t need to worry about it. Your eyes, I mean.”

  “That’s right, you saw me without my sunglasses, since you personally knocked them off of me. With a car.”

  “Am I ever going to live that down?”

  “Not in this lifetime. So my eyes weren’t doing anything weird that day?”

  “Nope. They were perfectly gorgeous eyes.”

  “Were?”

  He shrugged. “Still are. Though a little more haunted now.”

  “Yeah, that part’s your brother’s fault.”

  He nodded, sighed, then said, “I’m honestly sorry about that, Rachel. Giving you his corneas, giving anyone his organs now that I…know.”

  “Why did you?” I asked.

  He took his time about answering, really seemed to be searching for the right words. “I think I did it to assuage my own guilt. For covering up his crimes. I suppose I thought helping other people would…not make up for it, but maybe balance the scales a little bit.”

  I nodded slowly. “I guess I can see that. I appreciate the honesty.”

  “Thanks.” Then he turned his attention to something up ahead. “We’re almost there. Right around this next big bend in the road, you’ll be able to see it.”

  And I did. It was a gorgeous chalet-style house, with a steep roof and scalloped shingles, all oak brown with darker wood trim. It looked like a gingerbread house, only bigger.

  “It’s stunning. This is yours?”

  “My parents own it. Just my mother now. She always said she’d leave it to Eric and me in her will.”

  “Just you now?”

  “Unless Marie wants Eric’s half. If she does, I won’t argue against it.”

  He steered the Jeep over the rutted, curving driveway right up to the front of the house. There was a garage dead ahead, below ground on two sides, and beside it a steep incline up to the main level of the house, with beautiful stone steps curving right up to the front door.

  He stopped the car, and I got out eagerly and quickly let Myrt out so she could check the place over, as well. I took off her goggles and scarf, then stood close so she wouldn’t be nervous as she sniffed the air and then the ground. Then she peed.

  “It’s a nice place, huh, Myrt? Frankly, I don’t know if we’re ever going to want to leave.” There were birds singing, way more than I was used to hearing. Just a raucous pile of them. It was like the inner city of nature up here. Myrt sniffed and moved carefully forward, and I stayed close, talking to her as we made our way to the steps and up to the door.

  Mason was already unloading our bags. I’d brought three. One for my laptop and the work in progress, a follow-up to my holiday title, which had been so sadly neglected lately that I might have to ask for an extension on my deadline. One for my clothing and toiletries, and one for Myrtle’s things. Her bed, leash, dog food, treats, toys, dishes and baby wipes. Don’t ask.

  He’d brought just one backpack, and somehow he managed to carry all our gear at once up the stone stairway to the front door, which was made from several wide knotty pine planks with a full-length oval glass mosaic of a heavily antlered buck posing in front of a sunset. Stunning.

  He paused. “Um, yeah, keys.”

  “I’ll get them. Where are they?”

  “In my jeans pocket.”

  “Right. Sure they are.”

  “I’m not kidding. Front, right.”

  I shrugged. “Well, hell, I’m not shy.” I dipped into his front pocket
and got the keys, tickling his thigh with my fingers on the way out.

  He jumped.

  “Serves you right,” I told him, and then I unlocked the door and pushed it open while he stood aside to let Myrt and me pass.

  “Wow.” The place was huge, with an open floor plan, cathedral ceilings, windows everywhere, although I couldn’t see much through them at this point, because darkness was falling fast as the sun fell behind the mountains. We’d packed my stuff, stopped for a late lunch and driven the four hours up here, with one extended bathroom, snack and gasoline break, so the sun had been well on its way down when we arrived. Some of the tall trees stood in silhouette against the deep purple sky, and I could see a vast and slightly darker expanse with no trees or hills at all. The lake, I presumed.

  A huge fireplace, giant multitiered chandelier made of fake—I hoped—antlers, big brown teddy bear furniture that would hug you when you sat in it. What more could a person want in a lakeside mountain retreat?

  Once the door closed behind us, Myrt’s confidence rose a little and she wandered a few feet farther from my side to explore a bit on her own.

  “There are four bedrooms, two upstairs in the loft and two down below, right underneath our feet. One bathroom on each floor. Mom keeps the place pretty well stocked. Perishables are in the freezer.”

  “This place is fantastic.” I crossed to the rear of the giant living room and saw there was a huge deck off the back of the house. Because the house had been built into the mountainside, the living room was ground level in the front and second story in the rear. There were French doors, and in spite of myself, I opened them and stepped out onto the deck. I still had my coat on. No hat though. The breeze was chilly on my ears, but I could hear the water lapping softly against the dock down there below, and I could taste it in the air, too.

  I turned, my back to the railing, when I heard Mason’s footsteps as he came out to join me.

  “This is my favorite place in the world,” he said. “There’s nowhere else this peaceful.”