Moving Target

by Elizabeth Lowell

  He hesitated. The shadows under her eyes left by a nearly sleepless night gave them a haunting darkness. “I want to.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  Serena looked at Erik’s touch resting so carefully on her heritage, her dreams. She closed her eyes and said quickly, “I don’t remember the first time I dreamed about that design. Mother was still alive, I know that much. She smiled when I tried to draw it. I couldn’t write my own name, yet I was trying to create something so intricate that I couldn’t even comprehend it.” Serena shrugged and opened her eyes. Erik was watching her. His eyes were as wild and clear as a falcon’s. “Anyway, I kept trying until I finally got it right.”

  “How long did it take you?”

  “I finished it the night my grandmother was murdered. The dream I had of it that night was unbearably vivid.”

  “You dreamed of her death?” he asked sharply.

  “No. Crazy laughter, the initials winding around each other like vines, a scream of inhuman pain . . .” She rubbed her arms and looked at the glowing, gold-drenched page. “I woke up sweating. I began drawing. I didn’t stop until I had it all.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “I don’t know.” She smiled raggedly. “Too long, according to Mr. Picky. Sometime into the second night, he started dropping choice morsels on the drafting table to lure me away.”

  “No crunchy bits?” Erik asked.

  She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a throttled cry. “No. Just the juicy ones.”

  “Sounds irresistible,” he said ironically.

  “It’s the thought that counts.” Her voice was as dry as his, but her hands kept trying to rub goose bumps from her arms. “Anyway, I finished the drawing.”

  He thought over what she was saying and wondered about what she hadn’t said.

  “The design you dreamed,” he said finally, stroking lightly down the margin of the illuminated page where initials were woven together in staggering complexity and beauty. “It was like this?”

  “No. It was that. Big difference.”

  “It’s not unusual for childhood memories to be very vivid and long-lasting.”

  She nodded, hesitated, then gave a mental shrug. Maybe he would be able to explain what she never had been able to understand. “I couldn’t have seen the page before I dreamed it.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Why?”

  “G’mom never gave the pages to my mother, never visited mother after she ran away, never spoke to her after she changed her name to Charters. And I never saw G’mom until my own mother was dead.”

  “Yet you dreamed this page while you were still living with your mother?”

  Serena gave him a slanting look. “I told you that you wouldn’t believe it.” She shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. “Not surprising. I don’t want to believe it either. It’s . . . eerie.” She blew out a breath. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

  Erik wanted to agree with her. He couldn’t.

  “It might,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It might matter.”

  Her chin tilted up. “Why?”

  “Provenance,” he said succinctly. “It’s part of any appraisal. You’re the only one alive who might have seen these pages in your grandmother’s hands.”

  “Morton Hingham did. Her lawyer.”

  “Are you certain?”

  She hesitated. Her grandmother could have used the safe-deposit box and never told Hingham what was inside. It would have been like her. “No,” she said tightly. “So what?”

  “To determine provenance, I need to trace the owners of these pages as far back as possible.”

  “I told you. They were passed down to the firstborn girl of each generation.”

  “No, you didn’t tell me. But it will make my job easier. Who was your grandmother’s mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try again.”

  “I told you. I don’t know.”

  “All right. Who was your grandfather?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Great-grandmother on your mother’s side?”

  “No.”

  “Great-grandfather?”

  “No.”

  “Aunts, uncles, anything?”

  “No. I’m the last of the female line. Of any line, for all I know.”

  Erik looked at her fiery hair and violet eyes and was certain she had stood in front of him once before like this, saying almost the same thing: I am the last of the Silverfells line.

  The pager against his belt vibrated. He reached for it automatically, glanced in the window, and saw Niall’s number. His very, very private number, the one even Dana hesitated to use.

  “Excuse me,” Erik said, reaching behind his waist. “It’s urgent or he would have waited for me to call in.”

  “He?”

  “S. K. Niall, one of my bosses.”

  Erik activated the scrambler, punched the automatic dial button, and waited.

  Niall hit the answer button like a starving trout after a fly. “You’ve got a bogey.”

  “Down the street?”

  “Name of William Wallace, aka Bad Billy. Former Navy. He was bounced out of Drug Enforcement Administration for ‘excessive force’ about ten years ago. Now he’s a more or less licensed private investigator who is rumored to sell his unlicensed talents to the highest bidder. He started out with simple stuff, beating the crap out of deadbeats and stalkers, that sort of thing. Then he got into high-paying work. No proof, but I’m betting he’s planted more than his share of trees on both sides of the border.”

  “Sounds like a real winner.”

  “Oh, he’s cute all right. He usually works with Ed Heller, who’s no better than he has to be. We’re flying Lapstrake down to Leucadia right now as your backup.”

  “Divert to Palm Springs.”

  “Your place?”

  “Yes. Don’t take on the alarm system. I had some changes made.”

  “Bugger,” Niall muttered. “Last time you nearly fried me.”

  “Joella still laughs about her handiwork. Next time, call ahead.”

  “No worries, boyo. When will you be there?”

  “We’ll leave in a few minutes.”

  Serena’s left eyebrow went up. Erik had been looking right at her when he said “we.”

  “Stay there,” Niall said. “Lapstrake can rent a car and follow you back.”

  “No. That would tip off the hound.”

  “What are you planning to do in Palm Springs?”

  “Sketch bighorns.”

  It didn’t take Niall long to understand. “Ahhh. All those lovely cliffs. A man could break his neck.”

  “Unless he was feeling friendly and conversational. Then all he would have to worry about is blisters from hiking in city shoes.”

  “All right,” Niall said after a moment. “But I want the pager switched to GPS. If anything goes sideways, we’ll find you from the coordinates.”

  “Global Positioning System, just like a crashed plane,” Erik said dryly. “You really think he’s that eager?”

  “I don’t know what to think until I know who hired him and why.”

  “Assuming he was hired,” Erik said. “Big assumption.”

  Niall grunted. “Get going. Factoid and his minions are still investigating. If he turns up anything worse, I’ll see you in Palm Springs myself.”

  “Right.” Erik punched the END button and put the unit back on his belt.

  “Sounds like you have a problem,” Serena said.

  “Not me. We.”

  “I don’t see any problem.”

  “That’s because you haven’t noticed the clown down the street.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The guy who’s sitting in a car admiring the back of his eyelids while he waits for you to put these pages within his reach.”

  Serena’s mouth firmed. “I have a bad feeling you aren’t joking.�
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  “I have a bad feeling you’re right.”

  “I’ll rent a new safe-deposit box.”

  “It would be awful crowded—you, me, my inspection gear, and the pages.”

  She almost smiled. “I get the point.” Then she cursed under her breath. She really didn’t want to turn loose those pages, but . . . “Okay, you can take them with you.”

  “With us.”

  “I have a weaving to finish up.”

  “You can’t finish it if you’re dead.”

  Serena’s eyes stared at him in rich shades of twilight. “What are you saying?”

  “You believe your grandmother was murdered, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Again she hesitated. Again she saw no real option except to trust the familiar stranger known as Erik North. She opened the drawer of her design table, flipped through a folder containing her grandmother’s few papers, and held out the note Lisbeth had written before she died.

  Then Serena watched the change come over Erik as he read. He looked up from the paper and pinned her with bleak bird-of-prey eyes. He was furious and didn’t care who knew it.

  “Shit, lady. You really believe in living dangerously. You should have told me about this first thing.”

  “What I believe in is handling problems myself.”

  “So did your grandmother,” he shot back, “and look where it got her. Burned alive.”

  Chapter 31

  Still seething over Serena’s lack of trust, Erik organized her departure with a few curt orders. Her grandmother had been looking for the missing pages when she was killed. Serena was looking for the missing pages and was now being followed.

  It was the kind of simple addition that made his gut clench.

  He didn’t try to hide that he was loading the big leather portfolio into his own car. In fact, he did everything except light flares to catch the tail’s attention.

  Not that Erik expected the tail to take his word for it. If he was a pro, he would wait for a while to be sure the house was empty; then he would go through it like a stiff wind, searching for the pages. Or the tail could decide to follow Serena. Then he would simply start driving as soon as they did.

  Erik was betting that the man would stay in Leucadia long enough to ransack the house. Probably he had a backup on the job or he had put trackers on their cars so he could catch up later.

  It was what Erik had done in the past when he was trailing one of his sister’s boyfriends, the one who had stolen the best of Erik’s illuminated pages and gone to ground with them. The batteries on the little radio trackers had lasted for several days.

  Erik had lasted as long as it took to get the job done.

  Making sure the tail had a chance to see every motion, Erik put Serena’s small overnight bag in the back of his SUV. Even with the backseats folded flat, there was very little room left for the bag. “Little Betty” was already installed in the vehicle, along with enough yarn to put a fringe around Africa. Then there was Mr. Picky’s car carrier to add to the pile. Or underneath the pile, to be precise. Serena said the cat preferred not to watch the world whizzing by. It made him crazy. Then it made him sick.

  “I knew it would all fit,” Serena said, glancing into the interior.

  “You sure you don’t want Big Betty?” he asked sardonically.

  “I’m sure I do. I’m also sure I won’t get her.”

  She climbed in the passenger side, closed the door, and fastened her seat belt as though she always took off for unknown amounts of time with equally unknown men.

  Hell, Erik thought irritably. Maybe she did.

  He started to say something surly on the subject. Then he noticed the fine trembling of her fingers as she smoothed back the golden-red fire of her hair. No matter how cool she looked on the outside, on the inside she was flat scared.

  It should have made him feel better. It didn’t. Having raised his younger sisters, he knew too much about intelligent, independent, just-plain-stubborn women who wanted to do it all themselves. Serena was frightened now, but it would pass. When it did, he would have his hands full.

  The thought of having his hands full of Serena Charters sent heat stabbing through his body in time to his quickened heartbeat. The longer he was close to her, the more he wanted to know her. Deeply. Biblically. Repeatedly. He could handle the hormone storm, but the flashes of medieval dream-memory were keeping him off-balance, wary, sniffing the wind like a staghound testing for danger.

  He had always believed in a casual way that there were more things on earth than Western rationalism could explain. It only made sense; no single culture could have all the answers for all the ages.

  In the same casual way he had always believed that inexplicable things happened to other people, not to him. He was a former college baseball pitcher, a medieval scholar, an illuminator, a hiker, a rock climber, and ninety-five percent a perfectly normal guy.

  But having other people’s memories wasn’t normal, he admitted, climbing into his car and slamming the door. That last five percent could be a real bitch.

  “I told you those were lemons, not oranges, on the tree in the backyard,” Serena said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You. Sucking on a lemon.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You look it.”

  He gave her two rows of teeth in a carnivorous smile. “Better?”

  “Go back to lemons.”

  When the engine started up, Mr. Picky began an unhappy yowling.

  “It’s all right, baby,” she said soothingly.

  She wiggled until she could put her hand between the two seats and poke a finger into his cage. Feline cries of distress turned into purrs.

  Erik looked over his shoulder briefly, then looked again, harder. The big cat was sucking on her finger like a kitten. He had a dreamy expression of cat ecstasy on his broad face.

  “Some pacifier,” Erik said as he wheeled into the street.

  “Beats listening to him once he gets wound up. He’ll fall asleep soon and I’ll get my finger back. Is that the car?”

  “Beige Nissan?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the one. Don’t stare at him.”

  “I was just trying to catch the license plate.”

  “I already have it.”

  The Nissan waited perhaps thirty seconds before it did a U-turn and followed.

  Silently Erik cursed.

  “He’s following us,” she said.

  “I saw.”

  The Nissan stayed with them until they got on the northbound ramp to I-5. Then their tail turned away.

  “Why did he turn around?” she asked.

  “Maybe he needs gas.”

  But Erik doubted it. The tail probably had just wanted to be sure they didn’t drop the portfolio off anywhere before they got on the freeway. Now he would go back and search.

  Erik hit the accelerator. The vehicle surged forward like a predator after prey. He reached seventy-five miles per hour very quickly. He had bought the Mercedes not only for its agility off-road but for its speed on southern California’s freeways.

  Serena waited for Erik to keep talking.

  He didn’t.

  “What are you going to do with the license number?” she asked finally.

  “I already did it.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you could piss off Pollyanna?”

  “My sisters. Frequently. What do you think your grandmother meant about forgery?”

  Serena’s spine stiffened. He wouldn’t answer her questions but had the brass to demand her answers. So she gave him the first one that popped onto her tongue. “Go to hell.”

  “I don’t think that’s what your grandmother meant.”

  “She would have if she’d met you.”

  Erik took a better grip on the steering wheel and his temper. “This isn’t a game.”

  “So you say. But it sure has rules.”

 
; “What rules?”

  “You ask. I answer. I ask. You don’t answer.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. Shit.”

  He glanced aside at her. She didn’t notice. She was watching the side mirror.

  “Did he follow us?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  She let out a relieved breath. “If he’s not on the freeway now, we’ve lost him.” She caught Erik’s thin smile from the corner of her eye. “Not that easy?”

  “He saw me load the pages.”

  “That could have been a ruse.”

  His smile widened without becoming a bit warmer. Her grandmother might have screwed up at the end, but she raised a very bottom-line kind of grandkid. “Yeah, it could have. He’s probably searching your house right now just to make sure.”

  “What? Call the police!”

  “And tell them what? We’re on I-5 headed north and we think someone is burgling your house?”

  “Yes!”

  “Even if the cops believed us, he’ll be gone by the time they get there. The guy isn’t new to the game.”

  “How do you know? Did you recognize him?”

  “I sent his plate number to someone I know. A lot of information came back.”

  “Did he murder my grandmother?” Serena asked starkly.

  “That wasn’t part of the info.”

  “What was?”

  He started to evade the question. Then he thought better of it. Knowing about Bad Billy might make her more cooperative.

  “William Wallace, aka Bad Billy, is a PI up front, but out the back door he’s muscle for hire.”

  “A bodyguard?”

  Erik thought of Niall, who had spent some time being a bullet catcher all over the world. “Bad Billy isn’t the legitimate kind of bodyguard. He’s a cold piece of business. Depending on the price, he’ll break your arm or your neck. A real junkyard dog.”

  “And you think he’s after the pages?”

  “You have a better reason to explain why he’s following you?”

  “How did he find out about the pages? I didn’t tell anyone but you and the House of Warrick.”

  “Don’t look at me. If I wanted your arm or your neck, I’d have it.”

  Serena didn’t argue that. She couldn’t. It was the only reason she was with him right now. She could trust him not to kill her.