SB stood yammering at us in the anxious tone he reserved for sightings of luggage. I said, “Don’t worry, SB, I’m coming right back,” while Victor knelt and treated him to plenty of farewell scritches.
Outside, it was overcast and chilly, with a brisk breeze: fall struggling to assert itself. I opened the car trunk. Victor tossed in his duffel and slammed the lid. Within moments we were negotiating the back roads of Crystal Harbor, headed for the parkway.
“Sophie called a little while ago,” I said. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’m always ready for Crystal Harbor gossip,” he said. “I’m going to miss it when I’m back in Paris. You’ll have to keep me informed.”
“No problem, I’ll make sure you get daily updates. Well, you know the City Council investigated the police department and ended up firing Paul Cullen and his buddy Chief Larsen. Also Larsen’s mistress, the drunk dispatcher.”
He nodded. “Have they found replacements?”
“Yup. Howie Werker has been promoted to detective.”
“This is excellent news.” Victor grinned. “I like Howie. He deserves this. Do you think he and Bonnie will work well together?”
“Well, that’s the other thing. She’s no longer going to be a detective. They replaced her with someone from outside the department.”
“They fired Bonnie?” He frowned. “Is there something I don’t know about her?”
“They promoted Bonnie.” I stopped at a red light. “She’s Crystal Harbor’s new police chief.”
His eyebrows rose. “This is quite a shakeup. Do you think she’ll be a good chief?”
“I think so. She’s a tough cop, does everything by the books.” Well, almost everything. I hadn’t told anyone, including Victor, about Bonnie’s illicit sharing of Cullen’s notes. I had no intention of doing so. Bonnie might not be my favorite person, but I’d given my word.
Speaking of said notes and the phone tips they contained, I’d been in touch with Meredith Dorn since Chloe’s arrest. She’d gotten the authorities up there in Connecticut to take another look at the facts surrounding her husband Tony’s supposedly accidental death. She was determined to rehabilitate his reputation.
“I hate leaving when it’s all so uncertain,” Victor said. “About Chloe.”
“What’s uncertain?” I said. “She’s going to prison for a very long time.”
“Unless her lawyer is successful.”
“What, the insanity defense?” I asked. “Good luck with that. I don’t know how it is in France, but over here, jurors aren’t so quick to buy ‘not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect.’ Not that it’s never legitimate, but in this case? Just look at the facts. Chloe tried to cover her tracks. She tried to implicate SEAR as soon as she did it, right there at the scene.”
“And she called Pierre’s phone a few minutes later to make herself look innocent, yes?” Victor said.
“Yes! So nobody can claim she didn’t know she’d done a bad, bad thing and tried to get away with it. The prosecutor will use that to show she was sane. Well, sane enough to take responsibility for her actions. We both know the woman’s a half bubble off plumb.”
“There’s no physical evidence that she did it,” Victor said.
“Only because it was obliterated when Tucker showed up a few minutes later,” I said. “He tried to pull out the knife, so that’s whose fingerprints were found on it. And his big size-thirteen sneakers wiped out any shoe prints Chloe might have left.” He still looked worried, so I added, “Don’t forget, she confessed. She told you about how she killed him, and why.”
“I don’t recall any of that.”
“Because she drugged you,” I said. “But I heard it loud and clear, and unless this ends in some kind of plea bargain, I’ll be on the stand helping to convict her.”
Victor sighed. “Her lawyer, he’s good, yes? Experienced. And juries are unpredictable.”
“Okay, it’s not going to happen, Victor. Chloe’s going to find herself in an orange jumpsuit. Which for a redhead…” I shuddered. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. “But if she did get off on insanity, they’d toss her into a secure state psychiatric institution.”
“For how long?”
“Until she’s deemed no longer, you know, dangerous.” I merged onto the parkway.
“She can be very persuasive,” he said. “She had us both fooled.”
No way to deny that. “I thought Tooley was the unstable one. Well, he is. And Lee has her own wackadoodle issues. But Chloe just didn’t emit those vibes—not at first anyway.” Which might explain why I ignored that telltale uh-oh alarm when I found nothing but businesslike emails between Swing and Chloe. Not to mention the absence of evidence that Chloe had spent time at Swing’s home.
“I believed her when she told us they were engaged,” Victor said.
“Well, she did have your great-grandma’s ring,” I reminded him. “Swiped when his back was turned, no doubt. And she believed it, too, that’s the thing. She believed the two of them were deeply in love and getting married. She came off as sincere because she was sincere.”
“But still, she wanted the ‘engagement’ kept secret,” he said.
“Supposedly because the attention would make her uncomfortable, but what I think? I think deep down she knew it was BS and she knew that if people started looking into it, her story would unravel.”
“But she told us.”
“Because she needed to return the ring,” I said. “Her conscience wouldn’t allow her to keep your family heirloom.”
His tone was bitter. “No, it would only allow her to murder my brother, a man who’d shown her nothing but kindness.”
I thought of something Chloe had said when we’d discussed Victor’s lovestruck stalkers. Someone that obsessed, you don’t know what she’s capable of. She could have been describing herself.
We lapsed into silence while I drove at a sedate speed in the right lane. I was in no rush to see Victor step out of my car and out of my life.
At last I said, “So get this. Chloe told me she had no family. I believed it at the time. I mean, why not? Turns out, according to the cops, she has tons of family. Parents, four siblings, zillions of nieces and nephews and what-all. Two of her grandparents are still around, for heaven’s sake. Most of them live in the Boston area.”
“Why did she lie about that?”
“She was estranged from them,” I said. “Seems she’s been troubled for a long time and refused to get help. They’ve had no contact with her for years. Oh! You know I told you that Chloe had a picture of her and Swing at her place? The two of them looking all, you know, lovey-dovey?” When he nodded, I said, “Lee Romano, of all people, cleared that one up. She was at the charity event where that picture was taken. It was just Swing and his agent posing for a snapshot together—nothing romantic about it.” Except in the agent’s warped mind.
“What do you think of Lee’s new venture?” Victor wore a crooked smile.
“I think she’s finally found her calling. And if she gives Miranda Daniels a run for her money, I’m all for it.”
Lee’s combative performance on Ramrod News had snagged the attention of another network. They admired how she’d handled herself and floated the idea of her hosting a competing “news” show in the same time slot. Essentially they offered Lee a platform to take down any individual or organization she thought needed it. How could she resist? The result was The Romano Files, which had debuted three days earlier.
“She really did a job on Romulus Tooley and his pals.” Victor, now grinning, shook his head at Lee’s audacity. The Society for Endangered Animal Rights and its hapless spokesman had been the focus of her first show. She’d taken them apart with surgical precision, refusing to mince words, shedding light on little-known facts and assorted atrocities that the legitimate news outlets had been afraid to touch. No one else was willing to risk being sued or, worse, targeted for violence by terrorists posing as do-good animal-r
ights activists.
Lee Romano’s attitude? Bring it. She refused to knuckle under to people she described as cowardly thugs hiding behind pandas. The public uproar engendered by that episode had been instant and vocal, forcing the FBI to redouble their efforts to identify the worst ecoterrorists and bring them to justice.
“Well,” I said, “Leonora Romano was determined to become a household name, and damn if she hasn’t accomplished that.”
“Except she wanted to be known as the finest chef,” Victor said, “and this she has not accomplished.”
“It’s just a matter of time. I heard a rumor—”
“No! A rumor?” Victor teased. “In Crystal Harbor?”
I smirked. “Yeah, go figure. It’s my understanding that Lee negotiated something else with the network in addition to The Romano Files. She kind of shoved it down their throats.”
“Ah, this sounds like the Lee I know,” he said.
“She’s going to be doing these specials where she goes into a restaurant, rips into their signature dishes—you know, saying how disgusting they are, how no one there knows how to cook—and then teaches them how to do it right. Kind of like those shows where the mean chef helps turn around a failing restaurant. Only this isn’t about saving a business, it’s about the food itself.”
“I don’t know, it’s a stretch,” Victor said. “Lee being mean? Do you think she can pull it off?”
I pretended to mull that over. “Nah… it’s just so out of character.”
Despite my best efforts to drag out the trip, I couldn’t simply drive past the parkway exit to JFK International Airport. The airport was huge, but unless I deliberately took wrong turns on the looping roads, we’d reach Terminal One in under five minutes. I steered onto the exit ramp.
“Well…” I glanced at Victor’s handsome profile. “Next time you’re in New York, you know you have a place to stay. Which should be pretty soon, right? I mean, you’ve listed Swing’s house with an agent. The restaurant too. You’ll have to come back for the closings.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “My lawyer says I can do it remotely by granting him power of attorney.”
“Oh. Um, well, your firm might want you back in New York at some point.”
“Actually, my firm has an apartment near the SoHo office for the use of out-of-town staff.”
“Oh.” Then… “Wait a minute. All that time you were making that long, miserable commute from my place, you could have been staying, what, a couple of blocks from your office?”
“That’s right.”
I rolled that around my cranium. “Well, I suppose it would have been difficult for you to, you know, settle Swing’s affairs from the city.”
“Not that difficult. That’s not why I accepted your hospitality these past few weeks.”
He left it at that. I glanced over and found him gazing steadily at me, his expression one of unguarded longing. I nearly crashed into a light pole.
Victor pointed to the right. “Go in there. We have time.” Obediently I turned and found myself in the cell phone lot. A handful of cars were parked near the entrance of the large lot. I drove to a relatively secluded spot and killed the engine.
Victor took my hand. Staring at it, he stroked the palm and entwined his fingers with mine. Finally he looked at me. “I wanted to be close to you.”
I swallowed hard. I felt lightheaded.
“I still do,” he continued. “I believe we have something special, Jane. I think you feel it too, yes?”
I took a deep breath, trying to corral my thoughts. I wouldn’t lie. “Yes,” I said, “but I don’t know what it means, whether it’s just… I don’t know, a fleeting infatuation or…” I offered a helpless shrug.
His smile was gentle and understanding and ruthlessly sexy. “We don’t have to label it.”
“You know, we just went through a lot together.” I was trying to be reasonable, not the easiest thing with Victor caressing my fingers. “I mean, this was an intense few weeks, what with your brother’s murder and… the rest of it. That sort of thing creates a, um, an artificial closeness, you know? Like soldiers during battle.”
“You think I’m saying these things because you saved my life.” He shook his head. “Not so. I’ve felt this way for some time.”
I emitted a ragged sigh and ordered myself to shut up. You’d think I had a steady stream of sexy Frenchman declaring their feelings for me, from the way I appeared so willing to blow this one off. Which I wasn’t, not really. It was nerves, plus, if I was being honest with myself, a failure to know my own heart. I’d been without a significant other for so long, I wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed. Or whether I even wanted to proceed.
I considered my words carefully. “This is why you were acting strange.”
“Strange?”
I thought of that day at Swing’s house when I helped Victor go through his brother’s things. He’d spoken of leaving within a couple of days, bolting before his scheduled interview with Cullen—an interview that had never materialized since Chloe had been arrested the very next day. “You just seemed kind of, I don’t know, subdued,” I said. “Every time you talked about going back to Paris.”
“I didn’t want to leave you,” he said. “It was eating me up.”
Not guilt over Swing’s death, as I’d feared at the time, but grief over our impending separation.
“What?” He turned my face toward his and brushed his thumb across the smile I was trying to suppress. “What does this mean?”
“Nothing. I’m an idiot. A clueless, self-defeating idiot.”
“Well, I would like this clueless, self-defeating idiot to move to Paris with me.”
I gaped at him, openmouthed.
“We don’t have to completely understand what’s happening between us, not yet,” he said. “We just need to give it space to happen. And we can’t do that when we’re thousands of miles apart with an ocean between us.”
“But… Paris?” Living in the City of Light. With Victor. I imagined strolling along the Champs-Élysées on his arm, Sexy Beast strutting along at our side, wearing a proudly raised tail and a snazzy little French beret.
I shook my head in an attempt to replace the seductive image with cold, immutable logic. “I can’t move out of the house. Not while Sexy Beast is alive.”
“Ah, yes.” His tone was arid. “The house your dog owns.”
“I’m his guardian and he has to remain in that house. It’s the way Irene McAuliffe structured her will— Oh, you know all this.” I’d explained the bizarre legal device to him. He was a smart man, I knew he got it.
“I like Sexy Beast. I’m hoping he lives a long, happy life.” He tipped his head consideringly. “Maybe not too long.”
I grinned, knowing he didn’t mean it. Of course, there were no legal impediments to Victor uprooting his life in Paris, moving in with me, and working out of the SoHo office on a permanent basis. I wasn’t even close to making such an offer, however, and I knew he didn’t expect it.
And, too, I couldn’t ignore the elephant in the backseat. Well, two elephants, though I doubted either my ex or the padre would appreciate the analogy. My feelings about them were too confused. I would need to unpack a lot of emotional baggage before I could even consider anything serious with my charming Frenchman.
“You know,” I said, “there’s nothing in Irene’s will against Parisian vacations.”
“Long Parisian vacations.” He shifted closer and caressed the tender spot behind my ear, making me shiver. “With side trips to my bed-and-breakfast in Uzès.” The way he said this left little doubt he was talking about one room, not two.
“Okay,” I breathed. And then I stopped breathing because he was leaning closer, and his mouth was touching my mouth, and his hand was slipping around my neck and the kiss was turning so… oh! And if you ask was it a French kiss, I will slap you because it was so much sweeter and hotter and head-swimmingly perfect than I’d imagined his kiss would be. An
d I’d done a lot of imagining over the past month.
When it was over we sat with our foreheads touching, catching our breath, and somehow my arms had ended up around his neck, and his hands had ended up… well, wherever the heck they wanted to be, which was just fine with me. And that darn center console was playing chaperone, reminding us where we were and that Victor had a flight to catch.
“You said ‘okay.’” He settled back in his seat, those silver-gray eyes crinkling at the corners. “That’s a verbal agreement, Jane. Legally binding in the state of New York.”
“Oh. Well.” I turned the key in the engine, chewing back a grin. “If it’s legally binding, then I guess I have no choice.”
###
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Perforating Pierre (Jane Delaney Mysteries Book 3) Page 24
