by Joanna Wayne
“Yeah, I’m sorry about…” Angel glanced toward Alex as her voice dropped to a low whisper. “Your real husband, you know. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.” So Angel knew that Kelly had yet to tell Alex her father had been murdered. She guessed that meant all of PPS had heard and she couldn’t help but wonder what else they knew about her.
Alex left the window and walked over to stand beside them. She looked up at Angel quizzically, then fit her hand into Kelly’s. “Is she a witch?”
“No, of course not. I’m sorry, Angel. I’m sure Alex didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“It’s okay,” Angel said. “It’s probably just the black dress.”
Black dress, black shoes, black lipstick, black nail polish and more bling jangling from her multiple piercings than a heavy metal band.
Angel dropped her compact and gloss into her top desk drawer. “Lenny’s already been up here looking for you, Jack. He said to send you his way the minute you got here.”
“Thanks. Do you know if Sara’s around? I’d like to see if she can watch Alex for a few minutes.”
“She’s out, but I’ll watch the kid, as long as you don’t take all night. I’m off duty at six, you know, and unlike the rest of you, I’ve got a life.”
“I don’t think Alex would—”
“Want me to paint your nails?” Angel asked before Kelly could finish her protest. “I can paint a scorpion on your thumbnail. They’re really gory. That’s like cool, you know.”
“What’s a scorpion?”
“Kind of like a spider with a long stinger. But I can paint other stuff, too, like bats and such.”
Alex left Kelly’s side and sidled up next to Angel. “I want a spider.”
Kelly quit worrying that Alex wouldn’t take to Angel and started worrying that she would. But she had more pressing issues to consider, and she could sense a steadily growing tenseness in Jack that added to her unease.
Her heels clicked noisily as they hurried down the well-lit hallway and past a number of closed doors. “Are all of those offices?”
“A few are offices. The rest are conference rooms, databases, a lounge, your typical headquarters stuff. We have a kitchen, too, where you can usually rummage around and find a snack if you get hungry while working in the middle of the night. And there’re a couple of camping spaces for emergencies.”
“Is camping space some protection lingo we laymen don’t understand?”
“It’s a room with a bed in it, so you can camp out if you get too tired to drive home, or if you just need to catch a little shut-eye and go right back to work.”
“Where’s your office?”
“I don’t exactly have an office. I’m not senior enough for that. I have a cubicle in the northeast work area, near the tech guys. Makes it easier to run over and interfere with them every time I have a question.”
“They must love that.”
“This is it.” Jack stopped at a closed door and once again peered into a rectangular box, waiting a second until the door slid open. “Extra precaution due to the costly equipment and the nature of the work that goes on in this area,” Jack explained as he ushered her inside.
The walls were lined with cubicles, each about six-by-eight. The ones in her view contained a desk, overhead shelves and state-of-the-art computer monitors. There were at least a half-dozen men in the first row of cubicles, some at their computers, one staring into space and a couple talking on the phone.
Jack spoke to everyone they passed, but didn’t stop or bother introducing her to anyone until they reached the end of the row and a heavily freckled guy with bright red hair that stuck out in all directions like porcupine quills.
“Hold it one sec,” the guy said without looking up. “Need a megaminute to copy and save these files. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Got ’em.” The guy finally lifted his fingers and swiveled his chair around so that he faced them. “I was on a hot streak.”
“Did it concern Nick Warner?” Jack asked.
“You guessed it.”
“This is Nick’s wife.”
The lanky redhead stood and extended a hand. “I’m Lenny. Sorry.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant he was sorry about Nick’s death or sorry she’d been his wife. Or maybe sorry that he was Lenny. But she liked his smile and his freckles and was thankful he didn’t have black gloss on his lips or studs in his nose.
Lenny went back to his keyboard. “I hate to be the harbinger of bad tidings, Mrs. Warner, but in case you don’t already know it, your late husband was up to his neck in debt.”
“You can call me Kelly, and exactly how much debt are we talking about?”
“Looks to be about eight mil.” Lenny hit a few keys and a new screen popped up on his monitor. “Take a look at his credit report.”
She did, and there it was. A long list of names, all of them creditors, and Lenny was still scrolling past more. She didn’t see a total sum on the report, but she could easily see how the figures could add up to eight million dollars.”
“How could that happen?” she asked.
“The more you make, the more they’ll finance for you.” Jack pulled her up a chair so that she could sit and still have a good view of the monitor.
She skimmed the list of creditors. There had to be at least a million dollars in credit card debt alone. Three million still owed on the yacht he’d bought two years ago to salve his wounded spirit after his last movie bombed. The Porsche, Lamborghini, and Mercedes all had huge outstanding balances—and he’d purchased a two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand dollar Aston Martin two months ago that she’d never even seen, much less driven.
She took a closer look at the information. “It looks as if he only pays the minimum on every account and pays that late.”
“There’s more,” Lenny said.
“Surely not more bills.”
“Your house in Beverly Hills is mortgaged to the hilt.”
She muttered a curse under her breath. Nick had never told her any of this, and she was sure Mitchell didn’t know about it, either. He’d have read Nick the riot act long before now. “Who’s responsible for his debts if there’s no money left in his estate?”
“That’s the really bad news, Kelly. It looks as if your name’s on a lot of the accounts.”
“I never cosigned for anything.”
“Then someone signed for you.”
“How much are we talking about?”
“Approximately half of the total.”
“That’s four million dollars. All I have is some money I saved from when I was acting. It’s not nearly enough to cover that.”
“The estate will have the income from Savage Thunder,” Jack said. “That should cover the debt.”
“Unless it bombs like the last two. Nick’s already received his up-front money. Any additional payments are based on box office receipts.”
“Did he have a life insurance policy?”
“I doubt it, but if he did, you can bet my name won’t be on it.”
She leaned against the cubicle. “Is this why you had me come in? If so, I think your investigation sucks.”
“Look at the figures again,” Jack said. “Those expenditures look outrageous at first glance, but they’re not that out of line with what other people in Nick’s income bracket spend.”
“Then why the debt?” Kelly asked.
“I don’t know,” Jack admitted, “but when we find out, I think we’ll know what got Nick killed and why your name is on someone’s hit list.”
“But I’ve never been involved in Nick’s finances. I used the credit cards he gave me, but I assumed he was paying them off every month. If he was into anything illegal or risky, he never shared that with me, so why would anyone think they had to get rid of me?”
Lenny started typing again. “Let’s go back to the facts. One, an intruder breaks into the house in the wee hours of Friday morning, runs into Kelly but doesn’t try to harm her. Two, less than twelve hours
later, someone aims an assault rifle at her and tries to blow her to kingdom come. If we assume those two incidents are connected, then what happened in between them that changed the scope of the danger?”
“And the obvious answer,” Jack said, “is that her husband was murdered by an unsub.”
Kelly raised a hand as if she were in class. “Talk English, please. What’s an unsub?”
“Unknown subject,” Lenny answered.
“Aren’t both of you overlooking the fact that Detective Carter has arrested a suspect.”
“Bates didn’t do it.” Jack and Lenny made the pronouncement at the exact same time.
“How can you be so sure?” she countered. “The man confessed to the crime.”
“I ran a full background check on David Bates,” Lenny said. “He’s been in and out of so many mental institutions he has his own skeleton key.”
“Now that’s hyperbole,” she said.
“Not by much. Last year the guy managed to get on the speaker system at Coors Field and insisted he’d been sent from Babe Ruth to warn about the evils of performance-enhancing drugs. Two years ago he was arrested at a Broncos game for streaking through the stands during the national anthem. He’s not a killer. He’s just an attention-craving psycho.”
Jack straddled his chair and raked his fingers through his hair. “Back to our issue. Nick was shot, but he didn’t die immediately because for some unknown reason the killer shot him in the stomach instead of the head or heart. That’s not the work of a professional like we were dealing with today on the way to the airport.”
“Maybe Nick saw him and tried to wrestle the gun away from him.”
“So why didn’t the unsub finish him off after he put three bullets in him?”
“It was on the street in the middle of the night. Someone was coming and our unsub had to clear out before he got caught.”
“So had the unsub followed Nick all night waiting for that opportunity?”
“Or had he been partying with Nick and decided to kill him because of something that happened that evening?”
“And how are Friday night’s break-in, Nick’s murder and the sniper fire today related?”
Kelly’s head swam as she tried to keep up with the comments and questions that Lenny and Jack shot off like a pack of firecrackers on one short fuse.
Lenny took his fingers from the keyboard, leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “The killer didn’t finish the job, so Nick ended up at the hospital instead of the morgue. Maybe he thinks Nick came to long enough to tell Kelly who shot him.”
“Which she would have immediately told the police,” Jack said.
Lenny turned to Kelly. “Did Nick say anything at all while you were with him at the hospital?”
She tried to think, but her memories of last night were foggy. She’d still been in shock at that point. “He groaned a few times. He tried to say something about a list. And he started to spell something, the way he used to do when he didn’t want Alex to know what he was saying. He may have thought she was with me.”
“What were the letters?” Lenny asked.
“T-L-N. T-M-L.” She shook her head. “I can’t remember.”
“TCM,” Jack said.
“T-C-M,” Lenny repeated the letters as he typed them. “I don’t think there’s a word in the English language that starts with tcm.”
“Could be an acronym,” Kelly said, but Lenny was already ahead of her. He’d pulled up the TCM listings from whatever search engine he was using.
“Technical Counsel of Macken Industries. Turner Classic Movies. Turnbow Construction Movers. TCM Driving Academy. The list goes on and on.”
Kelly glanced at her watch. “I should go relieve Angel of Alex or at least check on her.”
“Let me do it,” Jack volunteered. “You stay here and give Lenny any additional information he needs to keep his search progressing.”
“I don’t know what else I can tell him. He seems to know more about Nick than I do.”
“Where did Nick grow up?” Lenny asked.
“Don’t tell me we have to go back that far. We’ll be here all night.”
“You’ll be out of here in forty-five minutes, an hour, tops. Town and state.”
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She had her doubts any of this would lead to Nick’s killer or her sharpshooter, but she didn’t have any better ideas. “He grew up in Joliet, Illinois, but I think he was actually born in Wisconsin.”
“Yep. Madison.”
“If you already know all of this, what’s the point of the questions?”
“Ever look for a needle in a haystack?”
“No.”
“Me, either,” Lenny admitted, “but I figure if there’s one there and you poke your hand between enough blades of hay, you’ll eventually find it. I’m poking now, looking for discrepancies as well as facts. If I feed Jack enough info, he’ll figure it all out. You’ll think he’s getting nowhere. Then all of a sudden, pow! He’ll have all the answers. He’s the master. Now, names of ten of Nick’s best friends.”
Kelly was certain this was going to be one of the longest hours of her life.
Saturday, 9:30 p.m.
Single S Ranch
JACK THREW ANOTHER LOG on the fire and propped his foot on the hearth near where Kelly’s fancy boots sat drying next to his. The ranch house had an entirely different feel with her in it. The faint fragrance of her perfume penetrated every room. The radio was tuned to an easy listening station that played the kind of ballads that struck right at the heart.
Worst of all, he could hear the water running in the bathroom and the thought of her standing naked under the shower, her body sleek with soap, had him so worked up he couldn’t think straight.
He should have been over her years ago. There wasn’t that much to get over, just two eighteen-year-olds giving in to raging hormones. But then she’d been the only good thing in his life of horrors.
Jack dropped to the couch and let his mind go somewhere he’d left behind years ago. The loud arguments. Coming home to find his mother passed out from tranquilizer overdoses.
And finally, the rainy night Jack’s father drove his big rig off an overpass. The highway patrolman who’d investigated the accident said it was caused by the weather. Jack figured his dad just couldn’t take it anymore.
He and his mother had moved to the Lake Tahoe area and into her parents’ small lake house. His grandparents were no better at dealing with their daughter’s addiction and unstable personality than her husband had been, and they didn’t like having her or Jack around to complicate their quiet life.
Jack had begged his older sister to let him live with her in Chicago. She refused, so he spent his senior year skipping classes, roaring around the area on his Harley and getting into fights with the local jocks.
By May, he was just hanging on until the day he left for boot camp. At least that had been the situation until he’d run into some of his classmates at the lake. Kelly O’Conner, the minister’s daughter, more out of than in her sky-blue bikini, had started flirting with him. And that’s when his real trouble had begun.
Jack stirred the fire again, then sank to the sofa just as Kelly joined him in the den. She’d made a turban for her wet hair from one of his green towels, and she’d slipped into a pink robe that looked as if it might melt if touched.
“Nice,” she said. “I love a fire when it’s snowing. It’s one of the things I miss living in Beverly Hills.” She pulled off the turban and tossed her head so that her wet hair swung freely in front of the fire screen.
“I tried to call Mitchell and ask what he knew about Nick’s debts,” she said. “He didn’t answer his cell phone or the one in his hotel room. I left him a message.” She straightened and let her hair fall down around her shoulders. “Do you have any wine? I think a small glass might help me sleep.”
It would take a lot more than that for him. “I’m not much of a connoisseur, but there are a
couple of bottles in the cupboard. Only red, I think, probably a cabernet.”
“Cab would be nice. Will you have some with me?”
“Sure. Never make a lady drink alone. That’s the rule, isn’t it?”
“As I remember it, you were never one to follow rules.”
At least she remembered something about him. He went to the kitchen, uncorked the wine and grabbed his finest crystal water glasses from the discount store in town. He worried that she’d hate the wine. It would be a lot less expensive than what she was used to.
So get off it, Jack Sanders. She’s used to marriage to a gay guy. Surely you can top that.
When he returned to the den, Kelly had settled on the sofa and curled her legs beneath her robe. She looked like a cup of sherbet, light and frothy and delicious. He swallowed a string of curses, aimed at himself for thinking like some lovesick geek who’d never been alone with a woman. Even as an ignorant teenager, he’d handled things better than this.
He set the glasses on the table and poured. “I brought the bottle in here with me. You may need a refill after the last two days.”
“I may, but I really don’t want to talk about Nick, or the black-car shooter or my recently inherited debt. I’m overwhelmed and not even sure I’ve actually accepted yet that Nick’s dead. Maybe that’s why I can’t get up the courage to talk to Alex about it.”
“We can just drink and not talk at all.”
“No, I want to talk, just not about unpleasant things. I know I have to deal with all of this, but I just can’t face any more tonight.”
“You start,” he said. “I’ll jump in.”
She sipped her wine and stared into the fire, staying quiet so long he thought she’d changed her mind about conversation. He’d gotten his hopes up too soon.
“How did you come to settle in Denver?”
He stretched his legs in front of him and propped his feet on the coffee table so that he didn’t have to face her and have his mind drift to places it shouldn’t go.
“I’d decided to leave the army and was going bonkers recuperating and trying to decide what to do next with my life. Out of the blue I got a call from Cameron Morgan. He and I had met while he was with the Army Rangers, but he’d already left the military and signed on with PPS. To make a long story a little less long, he asked me to come up and look over PPS operations. I did. They offered me a job, and the rest is history.”
