“I tripped getting out of the pool,” Kelly said, pulling away from the gentle touch.
“What did you trip on?” Tessa asked angrily. “Someone’s fist?”
Ed put his hand on Tessa’s arm to silence her, then held it out to Kelly. “I’m Ed Flynn. It’s very nice to meet you. I understand California hasn’t been too kind to you.”
Kelly looked down at the weathered hand he offered her, then up into Ed’s warm brown eyes. He looked like such a dad, with an expression of concern and gentleness that made tears well up in her eyes. Instead of latching on to his offered hand like the lifeline it was, Kelly snatched the sunglasses off the table and put them back on her face.
Ed knew she was trying to put distance between them, and he let her. If she felt safer with the Jackie O glasses on, maybe she’d relax enough to tell them what had happened.
“I won’t let anything happen to you now, Kelly. Neither will Tessa. But you have to trust us,” Ed began. “Can you do that?”
Kelly resumed biting on the thumbnail she had been mauling. “I just want to go home,” she said with a break in her voice.
“We’ll take you there. Is home in Colorado?” Ed asked.
Kelly hesitated, then nodded jerkily.
“Then why don’t you have a driver’s license issued from that state?” Ed asked.
“My family didn’t have a car for me to drive,” Kelly mumbled.
Tessa’s eyebrows shot up. She knew that even when an individual didn’t have a driver’s license, it was customary to get a photo identification card from the state. “What about your birth certificate? The state of Colorado doesn’t have a record of anyone named Kelly Martin being born on January 12, 1985.”
Kelly shifted in her seat. “I don’t know. Maybe my mom lost it. Maybe I wasn’t born in a hospital, so they never got a birth certificate.”
Ed caught Tessa’s glance and shook his head slightly. “You’d need one to enroll in school, child.”
Kelly thought for a moment, then said “My mom home-schooled us.”
Ed had to give her credit for quick wits—or for remembering a story she’d rehearsed before. “Tessa told me that you had an envelope with a bunch of cash and credit cards in your purse, but that you hadn’t known the cards were in there. She said you were going to talk to your cousin about it.”
Kelly’s shoulders hunched even more. “I did. He said they belonged to friends that he had dinner with. They all forgot their cards at the restaurant I work at, so I returned them to my cousin when the manager asked me to.”
Same story. Ed sat back and raised an eyebrow at Tessa, silently asking what she wanted to do next.
Kelly saw the exchange, then shot to her feet. “I’m out of here. I don’t need this.”
“Wait—” Tessa began.
“You don’t believe me,” Kelly said accusingly. “After everything I told you. I trusted you.”
Tessa’s heart sank at the hitch in Kelly’s breath, at the beginnings of a sob in her voice. “We do believe you were attacked, Kelly. We just need to understand the rest. But that can wait. Right now my priority is to get you to a safe place.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t go back to your cousin’s house. Why didn’t you tell me what happened when we talked yesterday?”
“I tripped and fell after I talked with you,” Kelly said, refusing to meet Tessa’s eyes even through her sunglasses.
“Yeah, right.” Tessa shook her head. “You’re still not going back there.”
“I have to. I have, um, things there. I can’t just leave. Jerry would worry about me,” Kelly said.
“We’ll call your cousin—”
“No! You can’t talk to him. I have to go now, I don’t want to cause any trouble.” Kelly began to edge away from the table.
Tessa had had it. “Listen to me, young lady. You will not be going back to that house. Clearly there’s not enough supervision for you there.”
“You can’t make me leave,” Kelly insisted. But it was said in a tone of voice that was almost hopeful, as if she wanted the responsibility to be taken off her tiny shoulders.
Tessa jumped into the opening. “Right now, you are the only witness to a crime that’s being investigated. I can have Ed take you into custody for your own protection. So you can tell your cousin you don’t really have any choice.”
Kelly felt her stomach muscles relaxing for the first time in days. “Whatever,” she said, working hard to sound sullen.
Tessa looked at Ed, glad that he hadn’t called her bluff. He stood up. “Kelly, why don’t you order yourself a big breakfast. I need to talk to Tessa alone.” He handed the girl a menu and steered Tessa out of earshot.
She looked back over her shoulder and saw Kelly reading through the menu with what looked to be real enthusiasm.
“That was pretty tricky, lady. She was damned relieved to have you take the decision out of her hands,” Ed said.
“Comes from helping to raise Kevin,” Tessa smiled, referring to her much-younger half brother. “Teenagers act like they want independence and responsibility, but when things get tough they’re happy to find a way out of being in charge of their own lives while still saving face.”
Ed smiled briefly, then grew serious as he thought of what he had to do next.
“Kelly’s lying, you know. She’s got a pretty, well-rehearsed story, but you could grind it up and use it as fertilizer,” he said.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I do agree there’s something, er, fishy-smelling about her story,” Tessa responded. “Still, someone could be intimidating her, and that’s why she’s afraid to tell us the truth. We need to get her into a safe environment, then she’ll begin to trust us.”
“You can’t build a legal case on a foundation of lies.”
“She’s not lying about being raped,” Tessa insisted.
Ed looked over her head at Kelly, who was watching people pass by the front windows—as if she were looking for someone and afraid to see him at the same time. “Something happened to her, there’s no question. And I don’t like the bruises on her face. Slipped on the pool deck, my ass.”
“So you agree that she needs our support right now, not a bunch of questions that imply we don’t believe her?” Tessa asked.
“You have to stop making excuses for the child, Tessie. Try to understand what she’s lying about and why she’s doing it, and I bet you’ll uncover the truth about what happened to her.”
“I know. I was thinking that we could have her take a polygraph test. That way we’ll know what to focus on and be able to weed out the unimportant stuff. And you’ll know for a fact that she’s nothing more than a scared teenager who needs our help.”
“Hell, I can see that right now. But I worry about how to figure out the rest of it,” Ed said.
“I know. But can we do it my way?” Tessa reached out and laid her hand on Ed’s forearm. “Please. It’s important to me that we do this right—and slowly. I think it’s even more important to Kelly.”
Ed looked down into hopeful blue-gray eyes and felt it happening—felt himself being sucked in against his better judgment.
What the hell.
At least he’d be there to watch over Tessa if things started spinning out of control. He wouldn’t let her throw away her career on this case.
“I’ll call and set up a polygraph for this afternoon, off the record. Then we should talk to Sledge Aiken,” he said, checking his watch.
“I’d love to,” Tessa replied. “He’s been traveling with his team for off-season appearances, according to his agent.”
“Ah, but I checked the official web page of the Waves before leaving this morning. The team returned to LA last night.”
“So while you are monitoring the polygraph with Kelly, I’ll find a place for her to stay. Then we can go see Aiken,” Tessa said.
“Where are you going to put her?” Ed asked.
“Well, she can’t stay with m
e. I don’t want any accusations of conflict of interest or malicious prosecution. I think I’ll talk to TSS—Three Sisters Shelter. They take in battered women and children, and they have a residency program for at-risk patients who have graduated from their drug rehabilitation programs. The security there is decent, and they have good supervision. Kelly might even meet some girls her age.”
“Okay. But first, we’d better get that girl some breakfast before she starts eating the place mats,” Ed said as he steered Tessa back to the table. “Poor kid probably hasn’t eaten in days.”
About the Author
Elizabeth Lowell has over thirty million books in print, including the Rareties Unlimited ROMANCE-SUSPENSE series (each featuring a different set of characters): Moving Target, Running Scared, Die in Plain Sight and The Color of Death. Her other novels published by PerfectBound e-books are: CONTEMPORARY ROMANCES: This Time Love; Desert Rain; To the Ends of the Earth; Remember Summer; Where the Heart Is; Forget Me Not; Lover in the Rough; A Woman without Lies; Beautiful Dreamer; Eden Burning. The DONOVAN novels — Amber Beach, Jade Island, Pearl Cove, and Midnight in Ruby Bayou— were instant New York Times bestsellers. Elizabeth Lowell’s HISTORICAL ROMANCES of the American West are Only His; Only Mine; Only You; Only Love. Please visit www.elizabethlowell.com.
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By Elizabeth Lowell
Amber Beach
Jade Island
Pearl Cove
Midnight in Ruby Bayou
Moving Target
Running Scared
Die in Plain Sight
The Color of Death
Credits
Jacket design by Richard Aquan
Jacket photograph © by Jack Hollingsworth/CORBIS
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE COLOR OF DEATH. Copyright © 2004 by Two of a Kind, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
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Excerpt from No Escape by Heather Lowell Copyright © 2004 by Two of a Kind, Inc.
Mobipocket Reader May 2004 eISBN 0-06-077148-8
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eBook Info
Title:The Color of Death
Creator:Elizabeth Lowell
Date:2004
Type:novel
Format:text/html
Identifier:eISBN 0-06-077148-8
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Rights:Copyright © 2004 by Two of a Kind, Inc.
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