Dirty Secrets

by Karen Rose

  Tanya made a distressed sound. “That’s not Darrell’s notebook.”

  Harris raised a brow. “I know. But why did you say so?”

  Tanya bit her lip. “Darrell was halfway through his book. That one only has a few pages. And the handwriting’s sloppy. Darrell was never sloppy.”

  Harris looked at Christopher. “Our lab checked this book out. It’s Roberts’s handwriting, but it’s shaky. And all the pages were written at the same time, even though they’re dated days apart.”

  Christopher slowly examined both books. “And there are gaps in the dates themselves from book to book,” he said heavily. He hadn’t really believed Darrell had been murdered until this moment. “Whoever killed him, took his latest notebook with him, because it wasn’t here when I found him. Why? These are just soil samples.” His throat thickened as the enormity of the situation struck him hard. “It’s just dirt.”

  “Somebody didn’t want him testing their dirt, Professor,” Ian said quietly.

  “This isn’t possible,” Nate protested weakly. “It’s . . . too fantastic.”

  Christopher could not tear his eyes away from the fake notebook. It was Darrell’s handwriting, but Tanya was quite right. It was sloppy and that was something Darrell had never been. “Whatever was in that book is gone.”

  “No, it’s not,” Tanya whispered and all eyes were suddenly on her pale face.

  “What do you mean, Miss Meyer?” Harris asked sharply.

  She licked her lips nervously. “After Darrell lost all his samples in the break-in last month, he got hypercompulsive about losing his data. He started scanning his notebook pages every night before he went home.” She looked over to the computer in the corner. “The files are on the hard drive.”

  Christopher shook his head. “I don’t understand, Tanya. If he was so worried, why didn’t he say anything?”

  Tanya sighed. “He thought it was too fantastic himself and he didn’t want you to think he was losing it. He said he knew he had to be wrong.” Her lips trembled and she pursed them hard. “He said it was just dirt.”

  There was silence until Harris cleared his throat. “I’ll need access to the files that he scanned from his missing book,” Harris said and Christopher nodded, numbly.

  “Right away.”

  “I appreciate it.” Harris backed out the door, taking off his goggles. “And if you’re planning to work after hours, make sure you’re not alone.” He gave each of them a hard look before walking away.

  Christopher waited until he heard the outer door slam. “Make sure you burn a copy of those files for me as well,” he said tersely. “I’ll be in my office.”

  * * *

  Cincinnati, Sunday, February 28, 1:00 p.m.

  Emma put down the last page from Christopher’s envelope and carefully smoothed the worn page with a trembling hand. The envelope had been filled with letters. The yearbook letter and dozens of others. Some were love letters, but most were ordinary “here’s what happened to me today” kind of letters. All ended “All my love, Christopher.” All were letters he’d never sent, dating from their freshman year of high school until his sophomore year of college when they stopped. Abruptly.

  That would have been the year he met and married Mona.

  Dear Lord, she thought. All those years. He was in love with me all that time.

  But on top of the stack had been a letter he’d penned last night after dropping her off at the hotel. She read it again, her cheeks on fire. It was by turns sweet . . . and hot. Filled with longing, both emotional and most definitely physical, Christopher Walker had taken the term “chemistry” to a whole new level. She’d come home to cool down, but that didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon.

  She gathered the papers into a neat stack and carried them to her bedroom, loathe to leave the letters out where just anyone could see them. Specifically, where Kate’s prying eyes might spy them. Even though Kate knew the basic events of the weekend, the words in these letters were Christopher’s mind and heart and needed to be protected. On an impulse she slid them in the middle of a stack of printed pages that was the beginning of her next manuscript, the follow-up to Bite-Sized that her publisher had been asking for. That she’d had trouble writing.

  Every time she sat down to write she’d felt like a cheat, a fraud. She’d been sure she’d be found out, exposed, the psychologist telling everyone how to deal with their grief when she’d been running from her own. Now she sat down in front of her computer, new ideas filling her mind. And she began to write the story of the old woman she’d met on the plane all those years ago. The woman who was afraid to go home because her husband’s shoes were in the foyer. The paragraphs flowed and the old woman’s story became her own. A story she was now unafraid to write.

  So deep was she into her work that she didn’t notice the sunlight growing dim or the shadows growing longer as the sun went down. She didn’t hear the creak of her kitchen door opening, nor the footsteps on the stairs. A split second of warning was all she had before a big gloved hand covered her mouth and yanked her to her feet.

  She struggled, her feet blindly kicking behind her. No. She bit the hand that covered her mouth and drew a breath to scream when with a grunt the hand let go. But her scream was cut off, a rag shoved in her throat, so deep she gagged.

  He’ll rape me, she thought, her lungs unable to get enough air. God, please. No. I just started over. Please . . . She was pushed to her bed, the man’s knee shoved into her kidney as he held her down. Tears stung her eyes. Pain and fear warred as her mind tried to stay calm. He yanked at her hands, tying them behind her back. Then he tied her feet and wrapped another rag around her eyes.

  The pressure lifted from her back and she gritted her teeth, preparing herself . . .

  The bed creaked as he got to his feet.

  But he didn’t touch her. Emma fought to breathe evenly through her nose as she listened. He was unzipping her overnight bag, dumping it on the floor. Ripping drawers from her bureau. She heard more sounds from over by her desk, the scrape of plastic, the dull clang of metal. A muttered curse.

  Then he left her room. She heard him downstairs, moving all the boxes she and Kate had packed. She heard tape ripping from cardboard, again and again.

  I have to get help, she thought. He could come back when he finished doing . . . whatever it was he was doing. There was a phone on her nightstand. I can do this, she thought. I’ve answered that phone in the dark a hundred times. She inched toward the top corner of her bed, like a caterpillar, swung her legs over the side of the bed and struggled to sit up, as soundlessly as possible. The nightstand was against her knee. She leaned over, knocked the receiver off the phone with her chin. Nearly fainted with relief when she heard the dial tone. Nearly fainted from terror when she realized that he might hear it, too. He was still downstairs. In the kitchen now. She could hear the occasional clatter of dishes or silverware as he continued his search.

  For what? Right now, that didn’t matter. What only mattered was calling for help. She bent her face close to the buttons and carefully she ran the tip of her nose over each one, grateful Will had insisted on a no-nonsense office-style phone. She pictured the position of the numbers nine and one.

  911. She pushed the buttons with her nose, cursing the shrill tones that seemed to echo off the walls. She could clearly hear the calm voice of the operator asking her to state the nature of her emergency. Her grunts were muffled, but the operator understood. Help was on the way.

  Downstairs, his movements went quiet, then she heard a click as he picked up the extension in the kitchen. She winced at the crack when he threw the phone to the marble countertop in her kitchen. Held her breath as the back door creaked open.

  And closed. She let the breath out, let the tears come. He was gone.

  * * *

  St. Pete, Sunday, February 28, 7:00 p.m.

/>   “Daddy! I’m home!” Megan’s voice jerked Christopher’s attention from the book in which he’d spent the better part of the afternoon, totally engrossed. Megan had spent the night at a friend’s pajama party. She’d been concerned about going to a party so soon after Darrell’s funeral, but he’d urged her to go. To have fun. Life went on after all. She poked her head through the door of his study. “What are you reading?”

  Christopher flashed the book her direction. “It’s a book the campus counselor suggested we read. It’s about how to deal with the death of someone close to you.”

  He’d picked it up in his office after Harris left. Brought it home, needing the connection to Emma after coming to grips with the stark truth that Darrell had been murdered after all. He’d thought he’d skim it. But one page had turned into fifty, then a hundred. She wrote like she talked, wry and funny and so damn sincere. It was almost like she was talking, just to him. He could see why her book had been such a success.

  Megan flopped into the chair next to his desk. “It must be good. You never even heard me come in.”

  He turned the book, looked at Emma’s face smiling up at him from the back cover. If he’d looked at the book the day the counselor had given it to him he could have found her himself. But she’d found him just two days later. It was fate, plain and simple.

  “It’s very good,” he said quietly. “Better than I thought it could ever be.” He considered telling his daughter about Emma then, but she started bubbling about the time she’d had with her friends at the party, the movie they’d seen, the pizza they’d made from scratch. She’d been so sweet since Darrell’s death, trying to cheer him up.

  “From scratch?” he said, smiling. “You never make anything from scratch for us.”

  “At a party it’s fun. Every night . . .” She grimaced. “Too much trouble.” Then she bit her lip. “But I could if you wanted me to.”

  “Delivery from the place on the corner is fine with me, Punkin,” he said, lapsing into the pet name he’d had for her when she was small. “In fact, let’s do that tonight.”

  She grinned her relief. “How about I order us a pizza with everything?” Without waiting for his reply, she bounced to her feet and bounded from the room.

  “Bye,” he said to the place where she’d been standing moments before. Oh, to be a teenager again, he thought. But he couldn’t think about being a teenager without thinking of Emma. About how perfect she’d felt in his arms. Her wild cries of pleasure when he’d fondled and suckled her breasts, and that had been with her dress in the way. He could only imagine what she’d be like when he finally got her naked. In his bed. Panting and begging. Her legs wrapped around his hips. His name on her lips.

  He’d imagined it all night long. He was imagining it right now. Damn, he was hard as a rock from all the imagining. It was all he’d been able to do not to buy himself a plane ticket to Cincinnati. To give her the time and space she’d asked for.

  She hadn’t called him yet. He wondered if she’d read his letters. Especially the one he’d written last night. There would be no doubt in her mind what he wanted from her once she’d read that last letter. He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He missed her already. Missed the way she smiled, the way her brown eyes could hold so many different emotions. The way he felt . . . complete and at peace.

  He needed her right now, as his thoughts seesawed to Darrell and the detective’s visit that afternoon. His friend had been murdered. Over dirt.

  It was still too impossible to be true. But it was. They’d gone over his old notebooks, looking for something suspicious. But all they found was a list of more than fifty samples Darrell had been preparing to run. The fifty samples came from at least two dozen different places. They’d seen no pattern. No smoking gun, as it were. The only thing they could do was re-create Darrell’s tests, to find out what it was that someone didn’t want him to learn.

  The phone rang and out of habit he let Megan pick it up. It was always one of her friends anyway. Until he saw the 513 area code on the caller ID. Cincinnati. Emma. “Hello?” he and Megan both said together. “I’ve got it, Megan. You can hang up.” He waited until he heard the click before uttering a smooth, “Are you ready to come back?”

  “Chr-Christopher?” Her voice was shaking and instantly he was sober. And afraid.

  “Emma? What’s wrong?” He listened as she stuttered the details, his blood running cold. His fist clenched around the phone. “Are you hurt?”

  “No.” He heard her shudder. “Not like you think. He didn’t touch me. Not like that.”

  Staggering relief stole his breath. “Then he just robbed you.”

  “No,” she murmured. “No, he didn’t do that either.”

  “Then what did he do, Emma?”

  “He . . . he was looking for something.”

  Christopher’s cold blood turned to ice. “What?”

  “He was looking for something.” He heard her swallow. “He ripped my hard drive out of my computer. He went through all my papers, all the boxes I’d packed of Will’s things. He threw Will’s things all over the house.” She choked back a sob. “Now I have to pack them away all over again.”

  The bastard had gone through her papers. Emma’s papers. Darrell’s notebooks. It seemed too fantastic, but so had the idea of Darrell being murdered. He closed his eyes and took a hard hold on his churning gut. “Emma, honey, where are you now?”

  “With my friend K-Kate. She came and got me after the police came and untied me.” She was shivering, her teeth chattering. In shock.

  The thought of her tied and gagged . . . and afraid . . . It made him want to find the bastard who’d terrorized her and rip him from limb to limb. “I’m coming.”

  “Christopher, no. I just needed to hear your voice. I really am fine.”

  “No, you’re not. Emma, I just lost a graduate student because he was working on something somebody didn’t want him to know. Now you’re attacked in your own home.” He gritted his teeth, feeling so helpless. “Don’t you think that’s coincidental?”

  “Oh, God. Christopher, I never . . .” Her breath was labored. “But you’re right. It is too coincidental to be ignored.”

  “Put your friend on the phone. Please.” Trapping the phone between his shoulder and ear, he put both hands on his keyboard and pulled up a travel Web site. By the time her friend Kate said hello, he’d booked one flight up and two flights back.

  “This is Kate. Christopher?”

  “Yes. Tell me the truth. Is she all right?”

  “She’s shaken up and bruised, but other than that she’s not hurt. The guy tore up her house. He was looking for something, the cops were sure of it. Why would somebody think Emma had anything of yours in her possession?” Kate’s voice was slightly accusing but mostly terrified, and Christopher couldn’t blame her a bit for either.

  “I gave her an envelope this morning at the airport. If someone was watching me . . . Dammit. Listen, I’ve got a ticket on the seven a.m. flight tomorrow morning. I’ve got two seats on the eleven a.m. flight back here. I’m going to bring her here, where I can keep her safe. Can you make sure she has a packed bag?”

  “I will. I’ll bring her to meet you at the airport. Thank you, Christopher. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Christopher hung up the phone and sat still. He was trembling. Shaking. She’d been in danger. His woman had been in danger and he’d been too far away to help. His hands were barely steady enough to dial, but he punched in Harris’s number with single-minded intent. “It’s Christopher Walker from the University.” Haltingly, Christopher told Harris what had happened. “I could be making a major deal out of something unrelated, but I’m not willing to take a chance with her life.”

  Harris was quiet for a moment. “I don’t think you’re overreacting, Professor.”

  “I’m going to Cincinnati tomorrow to get h
er and bring her back here. I just thought you should know I’m leaving town, but I won’t be gone more than a day.”

  “For what it’s worth, I never thought you had a hand in Roberts’s murder. Is your lady friend all right?”

  “Yes, thanks to her own ingenuity.”

  “She sounds like a plucky lady. Who knew you two were going to meet last night?”

  “Only the detective she’d hired and I don’t think he would have done this.”

  “No, that doesn’t make sense. Nobody else?”

  “I didn’t even tell my daughter. But . . .” He rubbed his forehead wearily. “But the private detective did talk to a number of people about me. He called my daughter and my grad students and my boss’s secretary. And during the funeral on Wednesday, all of them told me he’d called them. Anyone could have heard.”

  “I think you’ve got someone watching you, Professor. You need to be careful. Who will watch your daughter while you’re away tomorrow?”

  Christopher’s heart just stopped. Simply . . . stopped. “Oh, my God. Megan. I . . .” He got hold of himself. “She’ll be in school tomorrow. I can have my friend drop her off and pick her up from school.” Jerry would help. No question.

  Papers rustled in the background. “She’s at St. Pete Middle, right?”

  “Yes. She’s in the eighth grade.”

  “We have a resource officer there at the school. She’ll be safe there. I’ll tell him to keep an eye on her.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem. Call me if you find anything more in those notebooks.”

  It all came down to what Darrell had been working on. Somebody thought he knew something, that he’d passed information to Emma. “I will.”

  “You will what, Daddy?”

  Christopher turned to find Megan staring at him from the study door. His hand bobbled the receiver as he hung it up. “How long have you been standing there?”