Bodyguards Boxed Set

by Julianne MacLean

  “What? You can’t just—”

  “Are you going to try to keep me here against my will?” She snatched her coat off the rack and turned toward the door.

  He stood and circled the desk. “Wait a minute. You can’t leave.”

  He closed his hands over her shoulders just as she grabbed the doorknob. She gasped and flinched, then stumbled back into a corner, holding her coat in front of her like a shield. Jamie instantly raised his hands in a placating gesture, noting how her eyes registered a flicker of fear before she managed to compose her features.

  Keegan, you idiot! Something had happened to her, something bad. No woman reacted this way to being touched unless she’d been victimized. Had she been assaulted? Raped? Was that why she was here? Mentally beating himself up for his lack of insight, he backed slowly away from her and opened the door.

  “There,” he said soothingly. “You can leave any time you want. I won’t try to keep you here, and I won’t touch you again. I promise.” Often in an interview or interrogation situation he had to feign sincerity; this time it was all for real. He felt ashamed, incompetent.

  “Would you rather discuss this with a woman detective?” he asked.

  Her eyebrows rose fractionally. “That won’t be necessary.”

  Good. He wanted the opportunity to redeem himself. From the bottom of his heart, his only desire was for her to feel safe with him, to confide what had happened to her, to let him help her. He felt an almost personal interest in coming to her aid—curious, given that he’d just met her.

  Returning to sit behind his desk, he motioned to her chair. “Please stay, then. You can put your sunglasses back on if you want.”

  She looked toward the door for a moment, then reached up and pulled the shades down over her eyes. Keeping the coat bundled in front of her, she sat down.

  Jamie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It would be a miracle if he could reestablish trust with her now, but he had to try. “Can you tell me... what happened?” With his notebook in his lap, he swiveled his chair around so that he’d be looking at the wall, and not directly at her. That should help.

  “All right.” He could hear the hesitation in her voice, and his heart went out to her. He kept his gaze averted. “It was a week ago that I noticed a new cat out back. I have this shed in back of my house, and when the weather started to get cold, I put a heater in there for the stray cats I feed. Anyway, I noticed a new one, a black-and-white shorthair. It looked like a tom, but I couldn’t get close, because every time I approached the shed, all the cats would scatter.”

  Cats? Wondering where all this was leading, Jamie said, “Let’s back up for a second, if you don’t mind. Your house, where is it? Do you live in town?”

  “On the outskirts,” she said. “About a quarter mile from the roadhouse.”

  He glanced at her sharply. “Little Eddie’s? The place that burned down last week?”

  “Yes. My house is number four Crescent Lake Road.”

  He wrote down the address. “Have you lived there long?” he asked, thinking he would have noticed her before this if she had. Mansfield, although ostensibly a city, was really little more than a small town that had grown just a bit too big for its britches. He knew almost all of its residents by sight, if not by name.

  “I moved in on the first of September,” she said. “It was my father’s house. I grew up in it. He died last spring, and left it to me.”

  He snapped his fingers, awareness dawning. “You’re Henry Cook’s daughter!” She nodded. Henry had defended a fair share of the bad guys Jamie had apprehended during his decade on the Mansfield police force, but that wasn’t why Jamie had hated the man. The problem was Cook’s personality. He’d been one of those self-righteous, my-way-is-the-only-way types who’d always kind of made the hair on the back of Jamie’s neck stand up. When he’d died, Jamie hadn’t mourned him.

  But his daughter probably had. “My condolences,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  He consulted his notebook. “So you moved here two months ago. Where’d you live before that?”

  “New York for the past three years.” She hesitated. “Newport, Rhode Island, before that. During most of the year, that is. We traveled a lot, and we had homes elsewhere.”

  We. It hadn’t even occurred to him that she might be married. His gaze automatically sought out her left hand, but her wedding ring, if she wore one, was hidden under the glove. The disappointment he felt stunned him. My God, he’d only met this woman, and here he was, jealous as a schoolboy of some husband from Newport, Rhode Island, with “homes elsewhere.”

  He noticed how her gaze followed his to her left hand. “I’m divorced,” she said.

  He brightened. “Ah.” For God’s sake, Keegan. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.”

  He stifled a smile and said, “Go on about the cat, if you would.”

  She fiddled with the strap of her shoulder bag. “After a while I noticed that he seemed to have a slight limp. Finally, yesterday, I managed to catch him. I brought him into the examining room—I practice out of my house—and discovered that all four paws and part of his right rear leg were burned. I dressed the burns and started him on antibiotics.”

  Jamie stopped writing and turned to look at her. “Burns.” She nodded. “Are you sure? I mean, they were old wounds by that point—”

  “Phoenix showed up a week ago, right after the road-house burned down.”

  “You call him Phoenix?”

  She nodded. “Because he rose from the ashes. His fur was singed. He even smelled vaguely of kerosene. He was there at Little Eddie’s when it burned, I’m sure of it.”

  “So this is what you came here to tell me about?” She nodded. So. She hadn’t been assaulted, after all. Not recently, that is; from her skittishness about being touched, he’d bet there’d been some kind of victimization in her past. A lamentable situation—and all too common—but one which had nothing to do with the arson case. And that’s what all his faculties had to be concentrated on right now.

  She took a deep breath. “But there’s more.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’d prefer... I’d prefer if you didn’t write down the rest of this.” To his surprise, she lifted her hand and slipped off her sunglasses, then looked him in the eye, imploringly. God, she was gorgeous. “Please,” she continued. “It was hard enough for me to come here. I kept thinking someone would recognize me, and find out...”

  “Find out what?”

  A pained look settled over her beautiful features. “I don’t want to be the town freak, that’s all. I just want to tell you what I know and then walk out of here and be left alone. That’s all I want—just to be left alone—but I’m afraid if people find out what I’m going to tell you...”

  “Dr. Cook. India.” He adopted an expression of frank sincerity. If it was part of his detective’s bag of tricks and not quite the genuine article... well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d had to play a part to gain a subject’s trust. He just wished he didn’t have to employ such artifice with this particular subject.

  He stole a glance at the voice-activated tape recorder lying on the middle of his desk and saw the little red Record light go on as he said, “If you don’t want me to take notes, I won’t take notes.” He deliberately closed up his notebook and returned it to his inside pocket. “Why don’t you tell me what you came here to tell me? It’s only the two of us.”

  She looked him right in the eye and actually bit her lip. He noticed her fingers twisted together in her lap and felt unnervingly like the big bad wolf. “Please promise me you won’t think I’m crazy.”

  He smiled indulgently. “I won’t think you’re crazy.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “I... sense things. I get... readings, if you will, off of people and animals, even inanimate objects. Psychic readings.”

  He just stared at her, his expression carefully neutral, although he felt as if he’d
been kicked in the stomach. Psychic, for God’s sake. She was telling him she read minds. Crazy? He wished he thought she was crazy.

  Crazy, he could handle. Crazy, he could understand, work with, even sympathize with. But psychic? She had to be kidding.

  She was, in a way, he supposed. Wasn’t lying a kind of bastard cousin to kidding?

  Why her? Why India Cook, of all people, with her ethereal eyes and her air of mystery and fragility? He’d found her deliciously intriguing. He thought back to Bridey and remembered the way she would reinvent herself for her more important scams, adopting a new persona carefully designed to push that particular sucker’s buttons. Of course he’d found India Cook intriguing. He’d been meant to. She knew exactly what she was doing, this one, and she did it very, very well.

  He rose, went to the door, and said coolly, “Thank you for your time, Dr. Cook. If we need to speak to you again, we’ll get in touch.”

  Her eyebrows drew together just a bit, before she set her jaw and eyed him coldly. She put her sunglasses back on, but made no move to rise. “I don’t like being dismissed, Lieutenant.”

  “And I don’t like being conned, Doctor.”

  Her perfect lips opened and then shut. “I can’t believe you’re being such a Philistine about this.”

  “And I can’t believe you’ve taken up such a big chunk of my valuable time—and yours—with this.”

  She crossed her arms and stared him down, a stubborn tilt to her head. “I do have psychic powers, Lieutenant. I’ve had them for three years. Also as a child for a while—”

  “Dr. Cook, you picked the wrong detective to come to with this tale.”

  “You’re the detective in charge of the arson case. I read it in the Mansfield Courier.”

  “And I’m the detective who will never, while there’s a sun in the sky and fish in the sea, ever believe a word of all this.”

  “Why not?” she challenged.

  Careful. “I have my reasons.” He gestured toward the door. “Now, if you’ll please—”

  “Fine. I don’t need this.” She rose and crossed to the open doorway, then stopped abruptly and stood with her back to him. After a moment, she shook her head almost imperceptibly. “I can’t do this. I can’t just walk out without telling you what I know. If he sets another fire, and I could have done something to stop it...” She turned, took her seat again, and lifted her chin. “Five minutes. Just hear what I have to say, then I’ll leave. Believe me, I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  He sighed heavily, then sat down behind his desk and waved a hand toward her as if to say, Go ahead.

  She licked her lips, normally an indication of nervousness. Was she worried that she hadn’t rehearsed her part well enough? Or maybe she just figured the sight of her pointed little tongue flicking out to moisten those china doll lips might get under his skin, just a little, might make him start thinking with his hormones instead of his head. Well, it wouldn’t work. True, she was an attractive woman. Were it not for this little revelation about her “powers,” he could see indulging in a passing fantasy about that nice wet mouth of hers... he might wonder if her lips were as soft as they looked, her tongue as clever. He might imagine kissing her, imagine how she tasted, imagine her tasting him and wanting more. She might unbutton his shirt and taste his throat, his chest, his belly, then reach for his belt...

  “Are you listening, Lieutenant?” she asked.

  He shifted in his chair, staggered by the speed with which he’d become so incredibly hard. Zero to sixty in three seconds. “Yes. Of course. You were saying...”

  “That I experience two kinds of extrasensory perception. The first happens when I touch a living thing, a person or animal. I can sense their thoughts, even pick up visual images of the things they see or have seen. That’s telepathy. The second is when I get a reading off of an inanimate object. Those readings are much less refined, just leftover energy from whoever touched the object before me. That’s—”

  “Psychometry,” Jamie supplied.

  A heartbeat’s pause. “Yes. You know about psychic phenomena?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said sarcastically, arousal waning swiftly. “I know all about it.”

  She studied him for a second and then went on. “When I first touched Phoenix, to capture him, I got an instant image of flames leaping up all around him. I felt his terror, his helplessness. Later, as I was cleaning and dressing his burns, I saw a man’s face—young, with dark hair. And there was some kind of basement or workroom in an old brick building, with strange wrought iron railings on the stairs—but that’s not what was on fire. I don’t think the fire had happened yet.”

  A gust of laughter escaped him. “You got all that from a cat?”

  She squared her shoulders. “They were unusually powerful readings, very detailed. Intense emotions create the strongest energy. And I was especially susceptible to Phoenix’s terror. I’m... a little phobic about fire. More than a little. When I was five, I was trapped in a burning barn. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since. It’s probably my strongest fear, and it’s exactly what Phoenix experienced at the roadhouse.”

  Jamie stood up. “Thank you again. Dr. Cook, for coming in to make this report.”

  “I’d recognize him again,” she said. “The young man with dark hair. I’d know that face anywhere. Shouldn’t I look at mug books or something?”

  Maybe she can bring the cat in, and have him look, too. “No, I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” He stood by the door. “As I said before, if we need you, we’ll call.”

  A few seconds passed, and then she stood up, reached into her bag, withdrew a business card, and handed it to him, careful not to touch him. “Not that I think you’ll use it. Goodbye, Lieutenant.”

  After she left, Jamie picked up the little recorder, rewound the tape, and punched the Play button. He heard his own voice: Good. Great. A pause. Look, I need to tape this... He fast-forwarded. That’s all I want... Her voice. Just to be left alone... but I’m afraid if people find out what I’m going to tell you...

  She had that right.

  * * *

  “INDIA COOK! IS that you?”

  Pausing with her hand on the front door, India turned to see Sam Garrett striding toward her through the sea of activity that was the Mansfield police station. She should have known he’d recognize her if he saw her, despite the shades. During her high school years, his daughter, Miranda, had been India’s best friend. They’d been inseparable, and India had practically lived at the Garrett household. Yet she’d seen the captain only twice since leaving for college fifteen years ago—at her lavish Newport wedding, and then at her father’s funeral here in Mansfield last May. On neither occasion had they had the chance to talk.

  “Captain Garrett, how are you?”

  He extended his hand, but she pretended to busy herself with taking off her sunglasses and fumbling in her shoulder bag to find their case.

  “It’s ‘Sam’” he corrected genially. “And I’m just great. I’m retiring in five months, three weeks and four days.”

  She smiled. “Are you finally going to write that book? What is it—?”

  “Zen and the Art of Bass Fishing? Absolutely! What about you? Still filthy stinking rich?”

  “Uh... actually, it was Perry who was filthy stinking rich. Thanks to his clever little prenuptial agreement, he’s just as rich as ever, and I’m clipping coupons. Nothing left but my dignity.”

  He looked somewhat abashed. “Sorry, kid. Miranda didn’t say anything.”

  “I guess she doesn’t know. I haven’t seen her since the wedding.” She took a deep breath. “Perry and I didn’t even make it to our first anniversary, Sam. I left him three years ago. I’ve been in New York since then, working at an animal hospital.”

  “So are you back in town to settle up the estate?”

  “Actually, I... I kind of live here now. I moved into Dad’s house a couple of months ago. Turned the front parlor and study into a waiting roo
m and examining room and set up a practice.”

  He frowned. “And you didn’t look me up?”

  She shrugged self-consciously. “I keep a low profile, Sam.”

  Sam nodded slowly. “Fair enough. So. What brings you to my humble place of business this morning?”

  India hesitated, wondering how much to tell him. She remembered what a great father she’d always thought he was, the perfect person to raise a teenager—firm, but fair, with a healthy appreciation for adolescent eccentricities. He’d always understood when they got weird on him.

  Drawing a steadying lungful of air, she filled in some of the blanks from the past four years... the lightning, the strange powers that changed her life... and finally Phoenix and the shadowy face she saw when she touched him.

  Sam just stared at her, and for a few uneasy moments she feared that he might show her to the door, as had the skeptical Lieutenant Keegan. But then he grinned and said, “Tell you what. Just for the hell of it, why don’t we go on over and sit you down with some mug shots? How would that be?”

  She blinked. “Really?”

  An idle shrug. “What have we got to lose? Long as you got the time—” he motioned her to follow him “—and you don’t mind...”

  “Mind? That’s why I came here.”

  A minute later he had her sitting at a big table outside his office, poring over mug books. No snide laughter, no funny looks, just “See if you can find a face that looks like the one you saw.”

  Good old Sam Garrett, she thought as she settled in and began flipping pages. If only her own father had been half as understanding, half as capable of accepting her for who she was, idiosyncrasies and all.

  She conjured up in her mind the face she sought in the mug shots—young, good-looking in a street-punk kind of way, black hair, and dark, intense eyes. There were hundreds of pictures in the mug books, and she scrutinized every one that might remotely have been a match, but after a while she began to think it was a waste of time. The faces began to blur together, to take on the same distinctive features, to look like...

  Lieutenant Keegan.