JANE'S WARLORD

by user

  “Taking a break from harassing hotel clerks, Jane?” he asked pleasantly, plopping down on the cement bench across from her and Baran.

  Hell, Jane thought. Busted. Maybe literally, judging from the look on Tom’s face. She shrugged and pasted a bright smile on her own. “Just working on a story.”

  “Yeah, and I know exactly what story you’re working on,” he said, his eyes hard. “Stay out of my case, Nancy Drew.” Tom flicked a gaze at Baran. “By the way, exactly when did the Hardy Boy here come to town? He wasn’t with you Friday night at the murder scene. In fact, you didn’t even mention you’d hired him.”

  “The subject didn’t come up,” Jane drawled. Oh, God, Tom was suspicious of Baran. She thought fast. “He flew in early this morning.”

  “Yeah?” His eyes flicked to the bigger man’s face. “You already found a place to stay?” His smile held a distinct edge. “You’re not registered at any of the motels.”

  Baran leaned an elbow on the table and lifted a dark brow. “Actually, I’m staying with my good friend Jane.”

  “Uh-huh.” The look he gave Jane was so coolly disapproving, she felt her cheeks heat. “Your daddy wouldn’t much like that.”

  “Daddy didn’t like a lot of things,” Jane snapped back. “But since I’m twenty-nine years old, he-wouldn’t have had much say even if—“ She clamped her teeth shut over he wasn’t a dead wife-beater.

  “Guess not.” She was surprised at how much the disappointment in Reynolds’s eyes stung. He flicked his attention back to Baran. “How you feeling after your little run-in with that lightning bolt?”

  “It wasn’t a lightning bolt. And I’m fine.”

  “Even the hands? Gashed ‘em up pretty well, looked like. Get ‘em tended?”

  Baran shrugged and displayed a broad palm. He’d pulled off Jane’s makeshift bandages after the trip to the second hotel. Now the wound showed as nothing more than a healing red line. “They looked worse than they were.”

  Tom frowned at his palm in astonishment. “Damn, I could have sworn—“

  “How about the woman in the car wreck?” Jane interrupted, pulling out her notebook more as a means of distracting the detective than anything else. “How’s she doing?”

  The detective’s expression turned grim. “She didn’t make it.”

  Baran stiffened. Jane glanced over at him. His face was blank, but she could sense his helpless anger at the news. He’d tried so desperately to save her....

  “That’s too bad,” she said softly. Straightening her shoulders, she assumed an expression of cool professional interest. “What can you tell me about the crash?”

  Tom lifted a sandy brow at her. “I just directed traffic, Jane. You need to talk to the Highway Patrol to get the details. You know that.”

  Of course she did, but she also wanted to keep him from grilling Baran. “Oh, yeah. So what about the murder? Can you tell me anything about it?”

  Tom hesitated, then sighed. “Let me go get my paperwork out of the car.” He got up and headed back toward his Crown Vic.

  As he walked away, Jane looked at Baran, taking in his stony expression. “You tried,” she said softly.

  He shrugged, but something in the movement communicated pain. “Evidently I wasn’t supposed to succeed.”

  Thirty minutes later Jane tucked her notebook back in her purse as Tom drove away. He’d given her the formal details of the case, including the victim’s identification. She’d have to get the details of the cause of death from the Tayanita county coroner, but she already knew what he’d say: Jennifer Moore had been strangled, then methodically butchered.

  She sighed and looked over at Baran, who’d listened patiently during her conversation with, Reynolds. “So where do we go from—“

  “... Alpha six, caller reports stabbing at 534 Cherokee Lane,” the scanner interrupted.

  All three of them froze, looking at the rectangular device as the tension rose, almost vibrating in the air between them. “Is that,..” Baran began.

  “... white male victim, blond hair, blue eyes. Caller said she stabbed him in the buttocks when she caught him with another woman.”

  Relieved, Jane grinned at the Warlord. “Ten will get you twenty the butt in question was bare and between the other woman’s thighs at the time of the stabbing.”

  Baran’s lips twitched as he relaxed, sitting back on the cement bench. “In any case, I doubt Druas was involved.”

  “Not unless he was the victim, anyway.” She snorted. “Now, there’s a mental image to cherish.”

  “We’re not that lucky.”

  “Not judging by recent events, no.” Jane sobered. “So, as I was saying before our butt-stabbing friend interrupted—where do we go from here?”

  Baran shook his head, beads tapping his cheek. “I have no idea. Unless you want to drive around Tayanita County while I scan every house.”

  “God, please no,” Freika said from underneath the table. “I don’t think I could take being cooped up in that truck with both your libidos that long. I’m traumatized enough as it is.”

  Jane picked up a cold french fry and threw it at him. He snapped it out of the air. As he swallowed, she looked over at Baran. “Much as I hate to admit it, I don’t care for that idea, either.”

  He shrugged and drummed his fingers on the cement table. “It does sound like a waste of time.”

  “Besides,” she added, picking the scanner up and tucking it back into her purse, “I’ve got a newspaper to put out tomorrow, and right now I don’t have a damn thing to put in it. Well, nothing anybody would believe anyway, assuming I could even print it....”

  “Which you can’t,” Frieka said, popping over the lip of the table to lick up a couple of surviving fries with his long pink tongue. “You know, these are good.”

  Jane aimed a swat at his pointed ears. He dodged, giving her a dirty look. “As I was saying,” she continued to Baran, “I need to do a couple more interviews.”

  He lifted a questioning brow. “With whom?”

  She grimaced. “Jennifer Moore’s family.”

  Which, she knew, wasn’t going to be any fun at all.

  Cars were lined up on both sides of the street in front of the neat brick colonial that belonged to Jennifer’s sister, Rebecca Rogers.

  Jane pulled the SUV into an empty spot and got out as she draped the chain of her press card around her neck. Opening the rear door, she reached for the huge peace lily that occupied the seat next to Freika. She’d had to pick it up at the grocery store, since all the florists were closed on Sunday.

  Reporters didn’t usually give flowers to survivors, but Jane had gotten into the habit years ago. It was a multipurpose gesture, showing she both sympathized and regretted intruding. Families seemed to get the message; she got cussed out a lot less now, and people were more inclined to talk to her.

  “You’re going to have to stay in the car,” she told the wolf when he started to jump out past her.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “Let me out to terrorize the neighbors.”

  Jane snorted. “This is South Carolina, furball—even the little old ladies are armed. Somebody’d shoot you.” Turning, she found Baran eyeing the line of cars with a frown.

  “I don’t understand why this is necessary,” he said. “They can’t tell us anything about Druas.”

  “No, but they can tell me something about Jennifer Moore,” she said, fluffing the plant’s emerald leaves. “And like it or not, talking to the families of victims is part of my job.”

  Jane hadn’t even bothered to ask Tom where to find Jennifer’s family—she’d known he wouldn’t tell her. But when she’d driven by the Trib office, she’d discovered that, as she’d hoped, the funeral home had already faxed in the obituary. As was customary, the obit had listed where Jennifer’s family could be reached.

  The plant in her arms and Baran at her heels, Jane started toward the brick two-story. Her stomach twisted with that ugly, sick feeling she alwa
ys got when she had to conduct this kind of interview. She knew families of murder victims often seethed with impotent rage—a rage for which reporters made the perfect guilt-free target.

  Unfortunately, without a human glimpse of the victim’s personality, it was too easy for readers to view this kind of story as more titillating than tragic. So Jane gritted her teeth and sought to ignore the knots assembling themselves in her stomach.

  Then Baran took her elbow as she started across the neatly trimmed lawn. There was something so comforting about his solid male presence, she felt the knots ease.

  This was, she thought, so much easier with a partner.

  A number of people were sitting out on the house’s screened-in front porch. One of the traditions of Southern grief was that friends and family always gathered as soon as they heard the news of a death, to sympathize, cry, and bring food. The crowd usually ended up spilling out on the porch; Jane had lost count of the number of interviews she’d done standing on the front stoop.

  A pale, subdued young woman came to push the screen door open and take the peace lily from her arms. “Thank you for coming,” she said in a soft upper-class drawl, probably assuming Jane and Baran were friends of the family.

  Jane lifted her laminated press badge and met the woman’s eyes. “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief. Jane Colby with The Tayanita Tribune. We were wondering if you had a photo you wanted to run of Mrs. Moore in the paper tomorrow.” Usually the funeral home took care of that detail, but then again, thev might not.

  The brunette’s expression cooled. “I’ll check,” she said, and turned around to step back into the house.

  Jane, with Baran behind her, instantly found herself the focus of five pairs of hostile eyes. “I want to tell you how sorry I am for your loss,” she said, letting the sympathy she felt show in her own gaze. “This is—“ she couldn’t think of a word that did it justice and settled on “—horrible.”

  A tall, thin girl spoke up from the wooden porch swing. “Did the police tell you anything? Do they know...”

  Somebody hushed the teenager, but Jane answered her question anyway. “At this point, they’re still investigating, trying to find witnesses.”

  “It wasn’t Barry,” a haggard, potbellied man said. Grief and anger seethed in his voice. “People are going to think it was Barry, but he was at work. Second shift at the Triad plant. This is killing him. And the kids .., Her little kids ...”

  She had two, according to the obit. They were six and four; Tom had said they’d been spending the night with their grandmother when it happened. Jane winced at the thought of what Druas might have done to them had they been home.

  “It’s good you’re all here. They’re going to need all the support they can get.” Taking a deep breath, Jane added, “I wondered if anyone has anything they’d like to say about Jennifer, about the kind of person she was. As a tribute to her.” She took her notebook out of her purse by way of making clear anything they said would be for the paper.

  A silence fell while the little group digested the question. They’d either throw her out now or talk to her.

  “She loved her kids and she loved her husband,” somebody said.

  In the next fifteen minutes a picture emerged of a bright, pretty young woman who did pastel sketches of her friends’ children and homeschooled her own. She’d taught Sunday school and told corny jokes and had evidently never met a single human being she didn’t try to make friends with.

  Her husband thought she’d hung the moon. He was somewhere inside, sitting in dazed shock. Yesterday had been their tenth wedding anniversary; they’d planned a romantic dinner that evening. Instead one of the neighbors had called him at the textile plant where he worked third shift to tell him his house was surrounded by police. He’d raced home in a panic only to find his wife dead and himself a suspect.

  While Jane was gently extracting her quotes, the woman emerged from the house with Jennifer’s photo and handed it to her. “I couldn’t find one of her by herself,” she said. “All I had was the group shot they took at Christmas.”

  “That’s okay,” Jane said. “We can crop it.” She looked down and felt her heart clutch.

  Jennifer and her husband sat side by side in the professional studio shot, two cherubic blondes standing in front of them. The two little girls had their mother’s warm, broad smile and their father’s hazel eyes.

  Druas had destroyed that idyllic picture, butchered that pretty woman simply because he could. But Jennifer wasn’t his only victim. He’d shattered the lives of her children and her husband, too. Her little ones would grow up with the scars of trauma and loss, and her husband would feel the ache until the day he died. To make matters worse, there would always be whispers, questions, rumors that he’d murdered the woman he’d loved.

  “Pretty family,” Jane said to Baran, a knot hi her throat.

  “Yes,” he said, looking down at the photo from over her shoulder.

  She looked up at him. He wore the carefully blank expression she’d come to realize meant he’d locked down his emotions. Somewhere behind those dark glasses, she knew, hell was banked in his eyes.

  Without another word the warlord pivoted and walked out the screen door. It banged shut behind him.

  Jane stared at his retreating back, then shot a wide-eyed look at the bewildered group on the porch. “Thank you for your time.”

  Tucking the photo hi her purse, she hurried out after him.

  “He’s stolen so much from them,” Baran said as they got back in the truck.

  Jane thought of the photo, of Jennifer Moore’s shattered family. All her life, she’d lived with the gnawing suspicion her father had killed her mother. Yet she’d never been sure. Maybe that’s why she’d been so driven to become a reporter—so that others would never have to wonder what lay behind a shield of lies.

  For the first time, she wondered if the truth was such a blessing. Jennifer’s little girls would never even have the dim, faint hope their mother might be alive. They’d know exactly how she died; every detail of her murder would be laid out in newspaper and television stories. Hell, if the Tayanita killings did gain the notoriety of the Ripper murders, they’d find themselves sought out for anniversary interviews from now on. Endlessly tormented.

  They didn’t deserve that.

  Yet not knowing ...

  Had William Colby killed her mother? If he had, how? Did he use that .38 that even now waited back home in Jane’s attic, or had he simply used his fists on her one last time? Had she suffered?

  Or was Jeanine Colby alive and well somewhere, daughter and abusive husband forgotten?

  Damn, Jane would like to believe that. Unfortunately, everyone who’d ever known her mother had mentioned how difficult to believe they found it that Jeannine would simply abandon Jane.

  Was it better not to know? Who was luckier—Jane or Jennifer’s little girls?

  She...

  The cell phone rang in its pocket in her purse.

  One hand on the wheel, Jane reached into her purse with the other and fished the phone out. “Jane Colby,” she said, as she always did when she was working.

  “She’s got the most lovely legs,” a male voice said. “Not as long as yours, of course, but not bad.”

  Jane frowned, distracted and puzzled. “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Tell me—have you been enjoying your handsome visitor from the future? Or should I say— has he been enjoying you?”

  A wave of ice seemed to roll up the back of her neck. “Druas.”

  “Very good.”

  Baran reached for the cell. “Give me that.”

  “Do it and I’ll kill her now,” Druas snapped. “I want to talk to you, Jane.”

  She licked her lips. Shit. She had to stall him. Waving Baran off, she demanded, “Where are you?”

  “Ohh, some Tayanita landmark. Laughing children, dancing water—and a pretty girl, running as if her life doesn’t depe
nd on it. But it does.”

  Laughing children? Oh, hell. Jane fought panic as she tried to figure out what he was referring to. “Leave her alone, Druas.”

  “I can’t do that, Jane. Wouldn’t want to cause a paradox, now would we?” His laugh was low and taunting. “When you think about it, I’m not committing murder, I’m saving the universe.”

  “Oh, yeah, you’re a big hero,” Jane growled, fighting to think where he could be. Dancing water, laughing children...

  Her eyes widened. There Were bronze statues of laughing children around a fountain in Cherokee Park—along with jogging trails.

  The son of a bitch was about to murder a jogger.

  Jane stomped on the gas and shot toward town. Luckily the park was close by. If they could just make it in time ... “Why are you doing this, Druas?” she demanded, hoping to stall him long enough for them to arrive. “You’re a mercenary, a warrior. Those women can’t be a challenge for you.”

  “No, but your handsome fuck buddy is. Now, there’s a killer. You do know his body count is higher than mine?”

  Baran had whipped off his sunglasses to stare at her, listening hard with his Warlord hearing. His eyes shone as red as a couple of coals. Jane ignored him. “I’m a lot more interested in you at the moment.”

  “You should be. I’m going to kill you, Jane.”

  She almost lost control of the SUV. “No. You’re not. Baran—“

  “... Is going to be too late, just like he was too late to save that bitch in the car this afternoon. My face is going to be the last thing you ever see. And my dick is going to be the last thing you ever feel—after my knife, of course.”

  “You’re the one who’s going to die, Druas,” Baran snarled, lifting his voice so the phone would pick it up.

  “If I do, it won’t be in time to save you, bitch. You’re going to squeal for me, just like all the others. Just like Baran squealed for my comrades back on Vardon. He was such a pretty boy. I’ll bet he hasn’t told you about that.”

  “Yes, he did.” Her skin felt curiously numb, cold. She fought to concentrate on her driving, on getting them there in time. “He told me all about what you sick Xeran bastards did.”