by Alice Sharpe
Tess stopped struggling. She concentrated on listening, but it was hard with blood pounding in her ears.
“Mind your own business. Go back to your own life while you still have one to go back to, understand?”
She nodded again.
His grip dug into her arm as he leaned even closer. “Where is it?” he said.
“I don’t know what—”
He yanked upward on her arm as the gun ground into her cheekbone. Pain shot through her shoulder, blinding her for a moment with its sheer intensity. Tears burned her eyes. “Don’t try that with me, Katie.”
Tess jerked. Katie!
“Of course I know your name,” the man spat. “You think your daddy didn’t talk about you? He never mentioned how pretty you are, though.”
Tess swallowed the knot in her throat.
“I want his share of the fire money,” her attacker said. “Fifty thousand. It’s not here, so where did you stash it?”
Fire money? There had to be a mistake, an explanation.
“Get this straight,” he said, yanking on her arm yet again, pinning her tighter against the wall by leaning his weight into her back. She could barely breathe. The gun rested on her shoulder. “That money is mine now. I did the work, I took the risks, you have no rights to it. I’ll do whatever I need to do to get it. Do you understand?”
“I need time,” she croaked, her mind racing.
“Time?”
“I need a few days,” she said, putting everything on the line. “I gave it to someone to keep. I won’t tell you who. Kill me right now and I won’t tell you who.”
Another yank on the arm with a hurried, “Don’t tempt me.” He apparently thought it over before adding, “You’ve got till four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Four o’clock. One second more, and you’ll wish I’d taken you up on your offer. You understand?”
Her cheek on fire, she nodded again.
“I know your cell phone number,” he said as once again the gun nuzzle jabbed her throat. “I’ll call you tomorrow at four with a drop spot. Try any tricks, I’ll go straight for the widow lady. Or maybe you’d rather I plug that new boyfriend of yours or the nice old guy down the hall? And his dog. Either way, after I kill one of them or all of them, I’ll come looking for you.”
“I understand.”
“And keep your nose out of other people’s business or I may just blow it clean off you face.”
He pulled her with him as he stepped away from the wall, pushed open the bathroom door and shoved her inside. Tess sprawled on the linoleum floor. For one instant she got a look at the man’s face, features distorted under the nylon stocking, squashed and anonymous. He slammed the door. It was silent for a second, then she heard footsteps. She sprang to her feet and locked the door before flinging herself back against the wall and holding her breath.
RYAN FED HIS CAT before changing out of his damp clothes, then spent a few minutes checking his e-mail. After that he wandered around his apartment, restless and irritated. There’d been a message on his machine when he got home telling him his buddy had fixed Katie’s lock so he knew Tess was safe, but the tension eating away at him wouldn’t subside.
Tess had called him jealous, and, Lord help him, he thought she might be right. One look at Nelson Lingford groping her had driven every professional bone from his body.
Still, would it have killed her to thank him for rescuing her instead of getting all hot under the collar? The woman wasn’t a real undercover cop, she was a veterinarian! Her play acting had gone to her head. And now she claimed she had actually accepted a job at the Lingford house.
Well, she couldn’t go. He’d seen Lingford’s face behind Tess. He’d seen the conniving glint in the man’s eyes. And if he thought an enemy of his had sent her, who knew what he had planned.
But she would go and he knew it and if he didn’t give her some space, she’d shut him out and do it alone.
Clive jumped up on top of the bookcase, knocking over a few dust catchers. Ryan absently picked a wooden carving off the floor and set a photograph straight.
“You’re losing your touch,” he told the cat who sat in a smug, neat bundle. “Maybe you should lay off the cat food.”
The photograph caught Ryan’s attention, and he picked it up again. Peter stood by his first new car, a red two-door, used and dented, a high school graduation gift from their distant grandparents who’d been blissfully unaware when he sold it the next day for easy cash. His brother looked proud and happy, a young man on the brink of a bright and promising future. In truth, he’d been anything but happy and less than a week away from dying.
Ryan put the photo down and met his cat’s unblinking gaze.
He dug Tess’s phone out of his pocket and suddenly the image of her scrolling through the photo gallery popped into his head. He pushed a few buttons on the phone, working his way through a dozen menus until he found the right one. He left his apartment as his printer ground out the first photo.
FIRST HE DROVE by Desota’s business, an electrical contracting place he’d driven by a hundred times. He hadn’t paid it much attention lately and was surprised to see a closed sign on the door in the middle of the day. Calling dispatch, he got a home address for Desota and drove on over.
Desota lived in a nice little community east of town. His house was two stories, relatively new, one of those places that occupy most of the lot to cut down on yard work. A broken tricycle and a coiled hose lay in the driveway. A notice of repossession had been taped to the front door.
Desota wasn’t living in the house anymore. He’d lost his business, and from what Tess said, his family had deserted him. Donovan had questioned Desota about the fire—it was in the reports Ryan had read before taking a leave of absence. Desota had come into a hunk of change near the time of the fire, but it had been traced back to a savings and loan outfit. In the end, the loan hadn’t been enough to bail him out.
Vince Desota was beginning to sound like a man with little else to lose.
Ryan drove to Tess’s place next. All his rehearsed apologies for acting like a jerk were forgotten when he found signs that Katie’s apartment had been broken into again. Pulling his gun, he nudged the door open.
It had obviously been searched, though not as thoroughly as before. More alarming were Tess’s crutches on the floor along with her coat, sweater, purse and its contents. Other than a little dried mud on the carpet, there was no sign of another person. He opened the coat closet, peered inside and left the door ajar.
The bedroom was next and he opened that door with caution, dreading what he would find. She’d obviously been attacked at the door, dragged into the bedroom, God knows what happened next. She was just inside, dead or hurt and he was too late…
His gaze went immediately to the bloody smear on the bedroom wall, then to the closed bathroom door.
His heart leaped. “Tess?” he yelled, knocking on the door with the butt of the gun while pulling on the knob. He was about ready to kick the door in when it flew open.
She stood as still as death, scarlet scrapes vivid against white skin, a fist of knuckles crammed against her teeth as though to keep herself from screaming. Her dress was torn, her bandages trailed down her cheek.
“What happened?” he said, stepping toward her, expecting her, needing her, to fly into his arms for comfort. Something in her expression nailed his shoes to the floor and he stayed where he was.
“Tess?”
She lowered her hand deliberately. “I…I had a…visitor,” she mumbled, her voice raw. He felt a chill in his heart as she added, “A man.”
“Honey—”
“A big man…with a stocking over his face,” she added. “I don’t know who…I couldn’t tell who…I thought he had come back…I thought you were him.”
“Did he hurt you? Are you hurt?”
She was so quiet it scared him, though intellectually he knew victims of violent crimes sometimes reacted in this detached way as though trying to control emotions too frag
ile to face.
Reholstering his gun, his calm voice at odds with the molten lava churning in his gut, he said, “What did he want?”
“He roughed me up, that’s all,” she said, darting a glance at her feet and the door, anywhere but at him.
He scanned her with a critical eye. Bruises on her neck, abrasions across her right cheek and forehead, the bridge of her nose swollen. She rolled her left shoulder.
“What do you mean he roughed you up?”
“Against the wall,” she answered, her voice cracking as she continued. “He ran a big silver gun up and down my face. He told me to mind my own business. He twisted my arm, pushed me against the wall. I need…I want to take a shower. Will you stay here until I’m done?”
He stared at her hard. Rape victims often wanted hot, scalding showers to wash away the feel and scent of an attacker.
“Did he—”
“No,” she said. “Ryan, you’ll stay, won’t you?”
“Of course I’ll stay.” He ached to hug her.
She nodded gravely as she whispered, “Thank you.”
TESS DROPPED THE SOAP so many times she finally left it at her feet, atop the drain, turning her face into the spray and closing her eyes.
She wanted to go home.
She wasn’t a spy. She wasn’t brave like Katie. She wanted to be a million miles away when the call from that man came.
But Katie wasn’t a million miles away. Sooner or later she’d wake up and have to face this unless Tess managed to face it for her.
The question remained: how much to tell Ryan. She didn’t know how to assimilate what she’d heard today. She would need to run it by him, but she was loath to mention the money and yet how could she not when that thug had sworn to come after her again? Where was she supposed to come up with fifty thousand dollars? And if she didn’t, what would he do to her or Madeline Lingford or the man with the dog…even the dog…in retaliation?
Or Ryan…
Had her father taken fifty thousand dollars to purposely try to kill a woman?
Wasn’t that a lot of money for just starting a fire?
She needed time to think. If she told Ryan about the money, he’d leap to the obvious conclusion that her father had burned down that house with the intent to kill. It would be like handing him her father. She couldn’t imagine Katie would want that.
Oh, Katie, wake up, wake up.
There had to be another explanation. Until she figured it out, she wouldn’t tell Ryan about the money.
The key was stamped 119. She needed to find out what that key opened. How hard could that be? She’d visit a locksmith, start there. She had Katie’s car, and if she relented a little on the pretense of having a broken leg, she could drive herself around. All she needed to do was ditch Ryan.
Since her duffel bag was still at the hospital in Katie’s room, Tess dressed in more of her sister’s clothes, this time jeans and a woolly white sweater. Her straight red hair jolted her every time she glanced in the mirror, and now the clothes looked strange, too, the jeans a style she wouldn’t have chosen, lower cut, tighter, the sweater sliding off one shoulder. Katie’s taste or Katie’s disguise?
Whichever, the different look only emphasized Tess’s increasing disassociation from her own life. She longed to speak to her mother, wherever she was. Barring her mother, a friend would do, but she hadn’t recovered Katie’s cell phone from Ryan and the thought of leaving the apartment to hunt for a pay phone made her shiver.
He was out there.
Besides, how could she explain what was happening to her? Her friends were normal people, people she worked with, had dinner with, went to movies with, laughed and plotted and shopped with. They had no more experience with violence than she did.
When she returned to the living room, she found Ryan had straightened the place up again. He turned from where he stood at the sink and stared at her. No longer wet and bedraggled looking, he appeared trim and vigorous in tight blue jeans and a body-hugging navy T-shirt with a small police logo on the chest and long sleeves pushed up to his elbows. The muscles in his upper arms mesmerized her for a second. All that power, right there. What would he do if she ran to him? Would he hold her? Kiss her?
Wouldn’t that be using him? Wouldn’t that be unfair to him? And wouldn’t that be giving in to the vulnerability that currently rocked her soul?
“You look better,” he said, drying his hands on a striped dish towel. He leaned back against the counter, his arms folded across his chest, his gaze intense. At last he said, “Tess, I’m sorry. I should never have allowed you to come back here alone. I let my emotions—”
“Let’s talk about what happened today,” she said, cutting him off.
He reached out a hand, but she pretended she didn’t see it and turned away. By omission, she was about to lie to him, and she hated herself for it.
Bypassing the love seat and the big recliner, she settled on a small chair. Ryan sat on the love seat by himself, leaning forward the way he did when listening, resting his forearms on his thighs, pinning her with his gaze. He looked as he had when she’d first met him: competent and strong. And she liked the fact that she could see a little of his gun. She almost wished the thug would come back. If Ryan shot him dead, the threat would be over.
Good heavens, what was happening to her?
“Tess?”
“He was in the apartment when I got here,” she said.
“Hiding I assume.”
“I was…preoccupied.”
“You were mad at me.”
“I should have realized something was wrong when I saw the busted lock. I mean, I was holding the new key your friend had made, so I knew he’d been here, and yet I didn’t walk away. Why didn’t I have the good sense to walk away?”
“Because you’re new to this,” he said softly. “Because you take things at face value.”
She ignored the undercurrent of meaning in his remark and continued. “He just came from out of nowhere. He grabbed me and took me into the bedroom. I thought he was going to—”
She stopped abruptly and swallowed. Her throat hurt. “He slammed me against the wall. He told me to mind my own business. He called me Katie.”
Ryan jumped to his feet. “Katie! He called you Katie?” Pacing, he added, “If Nelson Lingford sent this thug, then your cover at that house is blown. You can’t go back there. Wait, maybe the creep’s lying to you. Maybe he found Katie’s belongings in her closet.”
“No, I checked, the stash is still there, all tucked away. He knew my name before he came here.”
“Not your name, your sister’s name.”
“Sometimes it gets confusing. Sometimes I forget where she ends and I start.”
His voice earnest, he said, “I know you’re scared, but before we call the police in, you have to tell me everything that happened to you today.”
“I’m trying to tell you,” she said, tears burning behind her nose. “But you have to stop throwing out edicts. And don’t forget this, Ryan—the police washed their hands of this matter. I don’t want them involved, that’s what you’re here for. I’m just trying to find out who framed my father. I need you to help me, not bully me.”
He ran a hand though his hair and stared at her. She saw his gaze dart to the bruises on her throat.
“We have to call the police,” he said.
“You’re the police.”
“You know what I mean. Katie’s accident could have been just that, an accident. The first ransacking of her apartment could have been the work of opportunistic thieves. This attack on you is different. There’s no subtle way to interpret it.”
“No. They’ll use this to further condemn my father.”
“Why would they do that?”
She’d said too much! As far as Ryan knew, the intruder had only warned her to stop snooping. He didn’t know about the demand for money. Clasping her hands together, she said, “No police. We agreed. What happened today just shows that I’m getti
ng close to someone.”
Ryan closed his eyes for a second. She couldn’t begin to guess what he was thinking. “Let’s go to my apartment,” he said at last, his eyes open again but troubled like a stormy winter sea.
“I want to stay here,” she said at great cost. The thought of sleeping in this apartment after the terror of the afternoon sickened her. But she wouldn’t leave.
Ryan nodded, accepting her decision though she could tell he hated it.
“And you won’t call the police. There’s nothing I can tell them about that man. He wore gloves and a mask.”
“No police, not yet,” he agreed ominously.
Tess got to her feet. “I want to see Katie.”
“Are you sure you’re up to—”
“I need to see her,” Tess said, tears filling her eyes. “I need to see her breathe in and out. I need to make sure she’s okay, that no one got to her….”
Ryan reached for her hand. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Seven
They stopped at the Lum Yuen restaurant for egg flower soup before they hit the hospital. Not that Tess made much headway on hers. Ryan couldn’t help but notice the way she glanced at the door every time it opened and her startled response when a waiter dropped an empty tray. She was a bundle of raw nerves, looking over her shoulder, biting her lip, having a hard time making conversation.
He should have taken her out for dessert, not soup.
Ryan paid the bill, and they drove to the hospital where they found Katie in the same condition as the day before. While Tess went out in the hall to talk to the doctor, Ryan stared down at Katie. Her bruises had faded a little, and the scrapes were mending. In some ways she now looked better than Tess.
The sisters’ resemblance to one another was unmistakable and yet he saw differences between them, as well. Tess had rounder cheeks, longer lashes, fuller lips. But Ryan also acknowledged a new swelling of concern for Katie that went beyond his guilt for her current predicament. He was beginning to feel true compassion for her losses, and respect for her decision to search for the answers she needed. Answers that apparently had landed her here in this bed.
