Always a Thief

by Kay Hooper

  “No, I was just thinking . . . it's a good night for skulking around out there.” He turned, but his face was still in shadow.

  Morgan felt oddly breathless and swore at herself silently for it. She was being ridiculous. And stupid. Let's not forget stupid. “Oh. Is this the kind of night you like? For—skulking, I mean.”

  He didn't answer immediately, and when he did there was a thread of tension in his voice. “It's the kind of night I'm used to. The kind of night I've seen a lot of. When the line between black and white blurs in the darkness.”

  She went slowly toward him, halting no more than an arm's length away. His size always surprised her when she was this close to him, because there was something so lithe and graceful about the way he moved she tended to forget the sheer physical power of broad shoulders and superbly conditioned muscles. She had to tilt her head back to look up at him.

  “Is that all you find nights like this good for? What about when you're inside, like this?”

  He drew a short breath and let it out roughly. “Something blameless, I suppose. Read a good book, watch television. Play cards.”

  “Strip poker?”

  “A game you wouldn't play,” he reminded her.

  “Maybe I've changed my mind.” She heard herself say it and couldn't believe the words were coming out of her mouth. I'm out of my mind. Absolutely, unconditionally out of my mind . . . Quinn reached up with one hand to brush a strand of her long black hair away from her face, his fingers lingering for just a moment to stroke her cheek. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his mouth sensuous, and she could feel a slight tremor in his long fingers as they touched her.

  Then, abruptly, he turned away and crossed the room to the hallway leading to the bedroom. “Good night, Morgana,” he said briskly over his shoulder. Seconds later, the bedroom door closed softly.

  . . . and not much of a vamp, apparently.

  There wasn't much a woman could do when she had been rejected except wrap her pride about herself and try to put the rebuff behind her, so that's what Morgan did. She even managed, after a couple of glasses of wine, to drop off to sleep somewhere around dawn.

  When she woke up Tuesday morning, Quinn was gone.

  It was just after nine when Max met Morgan in the lobby of the museum as she came in.

  “Keane's due here in about an hour to talk to you,” Max said after greeting her. “How's your houseguest?”

  “Gone,” Morgan replied succinctly, proud of her matter-of-fact tone. “He was up and dressed most of yesterday, and gone when I got up this morning.” She paused, then added dryly, “While I was getting ready to leave, a florist delivered a lovely vase of flowers. No card.”

  “Well, at least he said thank you.”

  “He did say it once or twice while he was healing,” she admitted. “But the flowers were a nice touch.”

  Max smiled slightly, but his eyes were grave. “Don't be too hard on yourself for . . . feeling the effects of his charm.”

  “I think I should be appalled,” she muttered.

  “Do you? Morgan, have you realized that, even six months ago, you were so fixated on work and so closed off from other people that you would have seen Quinn as pure evil, a completely negative force?”

  “You're trying to tell me that would have been a bad thing?”

  “Of course it would have. People are far more complex than that; their desires and motives tangled and contradictory. Alex is no more a purely evil man than he is a purely good man—he's just a man. And you've opened up enough, learned to trust your instincts enough, to be able to see that.”

  “And just complicate the hell out of my life. Oh, goodie.”

  “You have to admit you're enjoying this complicated new life a lot more than you were your old one.”

  Morgan did admit that, but silently. What she said was, “He's a thief, Max. Whatever he's doing now with Interpol is because he had to, not because he wanted to.”

  “Granted. But even good men can make bad choices, Morgan. Keep it in mind.”

  “You like him,” she realized, surprised.

  “I like him. I don't harbor any illusions about him, though. He's three parts chameleon, and he'll always find a way to fit himself into whatever role he's playing. So it is a bit difficult to see the man behind the gifted actor.”

  Morgan thought about that for a moment, absently watching visitors wandering through the lobby. “Didn't you just contradict yourself? He can't be a good man who made a bad choice and a chameleon always playing a part and hiding his true self. Can he?”

  “Can't he?” Without waiting for her to respond to that, Max added, “I have a meeting with Ken and the board, but Storm, Wolfe, and Jared are waiting for you in your office. You should all get up to speed on the latest . . . developments.”

  “Gotcha.” Morgan made her way across the lobby and into the administrative area of the museum. She found her relatively small office occupied by two large men and one very small blonde and had to squeeze past Wolfe to get to the chair behind her desk.

  “Hi, all.”

  “We were just discussing your houseguest,” Storm offered in her customary drawl. She was in one of the visitor's chairs and Jared was in the other, with Wolfe wedged between the desk and a filing cabinet.

  “Yeah? What about him?”

  “Well, for one thing, what was he doing to end up getting shot? I mean, the collection isn't in place here yet. The trap isn't set.”

  Morgan found it perfectly reasonable that Storm knew about Quinn and the trap being set; aside from being Wolfe's fiancée, she was also their computer expert and had written the security program that would protect the Bannister collection. She had to know.

  “I didn't ask, and he didn't offer any explanations.” Morgan looked at Jared, brows lifting. “Shouldn't you know? And should Interpol be such a . . . visible presence in the museum?”

  “I'm not known as an agent on this side of the Atlantic; as far as onlookers are concerned, I'm an independent security consultant called in to work with Wolfe.”

  Morgan found that a bit ironic but repeated her other question. “Shouldn't you know why Quinn was shot?”

  The Interpol agent answered readily. “Quinn's convinced that Nightshade is already in the city. That he might even live here. So he's been . . . looking around.”

  “Breaking into private homes?”

  Wincing slightly, Jared said, “I told him not to tell me about it if he did. He claims he's mostly kept an eye on the nightly activities in the city, just to identify the players more than anything else. But, since we're convinced Nightshade is a collector, searching for a secret cache in a private home is probably not a bad idea.”

  “Was that what he was doing Thursday night?”

  “No, he says he was near this museum—and spotted someone apparently casing the building, for at least the third night in a row. On both previous nights, this person slipped away from him in the fog, so Quinn was, naturally, determined not to lose him. What he wanted was to follow him or her back to, presumably, a house, apartment, or hotel. Unfortunately, somewhere near the waterfront, his quarry doubled back and caught him. Shot him with a silenced automatic.”

  Morgan blocked from her mind the memory of that terrifying night and Quinn bleeding in her living room to say calmly, “Max said the bullet went in at an angle, otherwise it probably would have killed Quinn. But he heals fast.”

  “Already up and gone, is he?” Jared said.

  “This morning.” Morgan offered nothing more.

  It was Storm who asked, “Couldn't that bullet be used as evidence? I mean—”

  Jared said, “I know what you mean. Yeah, if we ever do get our hands on this guy, if he has a gun, and if a ballistics expert can match it to the bullet the doctor dug out of Quinn's shoulder, we could at least hang an attempted-murder charge on him. We're waiting for a ballistics report now. What I'm interested to see is whether that bullet matches the ones taken from four of Nightshade's previous v
ictims.”

  Wolfe spoke up for the first time to say, “If it does, you'll know that Nightshade is in the city and that Quinn came very close to him that night.”

  “Too close,” Morgan said.

  “Too close in more ways than one,” Jared said. “If it was Nightshade, it's at least possible that he now knows someone has been shadowing him, following him across rooftops. And the police don't usually work that way.”

  “But another thief might.” Morgan didn't like the hollow sound of her own voice.

  “Another thief might,” Jared agreed. “So Nightshade has to be wondering who's following him. And why.”

  “Then there's this new wrinkle,” Storm said. “A murdered woman possibly connected to the museum. Inspector Tyler and his people are being awfully cagey about the connection, but just from their manner I'd say they're pretty damned sure there is one.”

  “So we have to assume the same thing,” Wolfe said. “First the Ace employee being blackmailed and then murdered and now this.” He was gazing steadily at Jared. “There's two lives that might have been saved if nobody had planned to display the Bannister collection.”

  Jared didn't flinch away from that hard stare. “And God knows how many Nightshade will kill if we don't stop him here and now. Just for the record, I'm betting the police will rule out Nightshade in the Jane Doe murder.”

  “Why?” Morgan asked.

  “Because in virtually every case, Nightshade has left his victims where they fell, and they've tended to fall at the scene of one of his robberies. This woman was found near nothing of value to a thief, and no break-in or theft was reported. Plus, according to my sources she was stabbed; Nightshade always uses a gun. And as far as we know, he's always taken credit for his crimes. That dead-rose calling card.”

  “Which means,” Storm said, “we could have yet another player in the game. And this one has his own set of rules. Very nasty rules.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  “Any luck?” Keane asked Gillian as they met up near the museum's lobby.

  “Not so you'd notice.” She sighed, pushing an errant strand of brown hair back off her face. “I just talked to the last of the cleaning crew, and none of them recognizes our Jane Doe.”

  “And I just talked to the last guard on the list. Same deal. Doesn't know her, never noticed her here.”

  “It's Wednesday,” Gillian pointed out. “We've talked to every soul who's worked for or in the museum during the last six months. Nada. Unless our next step is to start tracking and questioning visitors, I'd say we've hit a dead end.”

  He scowled. “No luck searching the basement?”

  “Have you been in the basement?” she asked politely. “Our people can't effectively search down there. A trained archaeologist or historian might spot something out of place—given a few years and a little luck. Seriously, it's like the bargain basement from hell.”

  “But they looked around down there?”

  “Oh, yeah. Checked windows and doors, peered around with flashlights, scared themselves silly turning corners to find Bronze Age warriors staring back at them. One of our rookies nearly shot a marble Greek woman holding an urn.”

  “Shit.”

  “Uh-huh. Getting the creeps aside, it's sort of hard to search a place like that, especially when you don't know what you're looking for. And after Pete was lost for nearly half an hour, somebody suggested we leave trails of bread crumbs.”

  “So we have no connection between Jane Doe and this museum except for the scrap of paper deliberately left on the body.”

  “Looks that way.”

  Keane scowled again. “I don't like being pointed in a specific direction. I like it even less when it begins to look like somebody might be leading me around by the nose.”

  “And in the opposite direction from where you really should be looking?”

  “Exactly.”

  Gillian eyed him, then smiled wryly. “So we keep poking around in the museum, huh?”

  “What other choice do we have? Goddammit.”

  It was the following Friday evening when Morgan came out of her kitchen to find a visitor had arrived. Via the window.

  Oddly enough, she wasn't at all surprised to see him standing there, much as he had the night he'd been wounded. Except that he wasn't wounded now, or masked. And his lean, handsome face was, she thought, uncharacteristically strained.

  “Good evening,” she said politely. “I really do have to do something about that lock, don't I?”

  “It might be a good idea.”

  “On the other hand, I could just hang garlic in the window.”

  “That only works on vampires, I hear.”

  “Let's see . . . Vampires appear only at night, they move so fast you'd think they could fly, they're creatures of legend and myth, they can cling to the side of a building like a bat . . . I'm sure I can think of something that doesn't apply to you, but so far—”

  “They sleep in coffins and drink the blood of the living.”

  Morgan raised her eyebrows silently.

  “Oh, come on,” he said.

  Noting that he at least wasn't standing so stiffly now, Morgan shrugged and said, “Okay, points for that. But I may hang a cross in the window anyway, just—you should pardon the expression—for the hell of it.”

  He waited until she crossed the room to stand before him, and when he spoke it was quickly. “I never really thanked you for taking care of me, Morgana.”

  “You thanked me. And you sent flowers. Points for that, too, by the way. Is that why you're here, to thank me more?”

  “I thought I would.”

  “You're welcome.”

  “You went out on a limb for me. I know that.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “I'm serious, Morgana. You could have called the police. Should have. And I'm . . . grateful that you didn't do that.”

  It was a bit amusing to watch the usually unflappable Quinn grope for words, but Morgan didn't allow herself to smile. “Noted. I appreciate your gratitude.”

  Quinn eyed her with faint exasperation. “You don't make it easy for me,” he told her.

  She did smile then. “Oh, I see—you want me to make it easy for you. Why should I?”

  He cleared his throat. “Do both of us know what we're talking about?”

  “Yes. We're talking about the fact that I more or less offered myself to you Monday night—and you bolted so fast you practically left your boots behind.”

  A little smile curved his mouth. “The image that conjures, Morgana, is hardly flattering. To either of us.”

  “I agree. Is that why you really came back here? Because you had second thoughts?”

  Quinn hesitated, then shook his head. “No, you were obviously not in your right mind at the time.”

  “I wasn't?” She put her hands on her hips and stared up at him. “Are you trying to save me from myself, Alex?”

  “Something like that,” he murmured.

  “Then why did you come back here?”

  “To thank you, that's all. I just . . . didn't like leaving that way. Without a word.”

  “I didn't care for it much myself. Especially the walking-away-when-I-offered-you-my-bodypart. That's sort of hard on a woman's ego.”

  “You only said maybe you'd changed your mind about strip poker.”

  “We both know exactly what I meant.”

  He cleared his throat again. “If it helps, I really—really—wanted to stay.”

  “Then why didn't you?”

  “It would be a mistake, Morgana. Never doubt that.”

  “Because you're Quinn?” They hadn't talked about this when he'd been recovering here, and she had a peculiar idea that was really why he'd come back—because he wanted her to fully understand who and what he was.

  “Isn't that reason enough? Name any major city in the Western world, and the cops there want me behind bars at the very least. And there are a couple of places in the Far East as we
ll. That won't change, no matter how this turns out. I'm too effective to go public, and Interpol knows it. They've got me by the—short hairs.” He laughed, honest amusement in the sound. “I can't complain. I had a hell of a dance, and now I have to pay the band.”

  “Extend the metaphor.” She smiled faintly. “The music hasn't stopped, the tune's just changed. You enjoy the dance, Alex. And Interpol knows that. So they changed the music for you.”

  “And made sure I'd dance for them?” He laughed again. “Probably.” His voice and face became abruptly expressionless. “The point is that . . . I'm never going to be respectable, Morgana. I don't want to be. You're right; I enjoy this dance. I don't feel a bit of regret about my past.”

  “But they caught you,” she murmured.

  He nodded. “They caught me. They could have locked me up; instead, they gave me a choice. And I chose. I'll keep my bargain with them. I'll dance to their tune. As you said—only the music's changed; the dance is just as much fun.”

  “You won't be able to steal for yourself anymore,” she noted, watching him with an expression of mild interest.

  He shrugged carelessly. “The proceeds of my past will see me through even a long future in style, sweet.”

  In a thoughtful tone, she said, “I would have expected them to demand you return those proceeds.”

  “They tried.” He smiled sardonically. “I told them I'd forget how to dance.”

  “You are a complete villain, aren't you?”

  Quinn eyed her a bit warily. “I don't know why on earth it's so,” he commented, “but I have the most insane urge to insist that I am, in fact, just that.”

  “And selfish and egotistical and reckless. Without morals, scruples, compassion, or shame. Lawless, heartless, wicked, and rebellious. How am I doing?”

  “Just fine,” he answered with a suggestion of gritted teeth.

  She nodded seriously. “Let's see . . . you're a thief of world renown, there's no doubt of that. You've quite cheerfully broken a number of the laws of God and man. Without, according to you, one iota of remorse. And you're on the right side of the law now only because it was infinitely preferable to spending the remainder of your life in a prison cell.”