Lead Me On

by Victoria Dahl

  He cocked his head. “Now, that’s something you might be right about. My brother’s not a killer.”

  “Neither is mine! I swear to you, Greg, he didn’t do it. I know that. That latest girl, she was killed the day before she was found, wasn’t she?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Jesse was with me that day. He couldn’t have killed her.”

  Greg sniffed. “You want me to go to my boss and tell him I’ve cleared a murder suspect on the word of his sister? Maybe I’ll also mention that I used to sleep with you.”

  “Regardless, I—”

  “‘Hey, boss,’” he mimicked, “‘my ex-girlfriend is a skank from a family of criminals.’ That’d be a great note in my file when promotion time comes around.”

  “All right,” she snapped. “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, Greg, but this is more serious than your damaged pride. We’re talking about somebody’s life.”

  “We’re talking about a few lives, Jane. Two women are dead, maybe three, and from what I hear there’s plenty of evidence that your brother did it. So get the hell out of here. Now.”

  “He didn’t do it, and I’m providing you with evidence that he didn’t! On Monday evening he was with me. We met with his attorney and then stopped at the grocery store before having dinner with his grandmother. You can check with his attorney. You can check the security cameras at the store. He was with me.”

  “And how late did dinner run? I’ve got a feeling Grandma doesn’t eat at nine o’clock.”

  Jane clenched her teeth together. She didn’t know the exact time of death. Mr. Chase’s contact had revealed only that she’d died about twenty-four hours before she was found.

  When her fingers went numb, she realized that she’d twisted them tightly together. “Can you at least look into it? Please? Look at the evidence with a new eye. Just assume, for a minute, that it wasn’t him.”

  “We treat every case with the same objectivity. Nobody is out to get your brother. If he didn’t do it, he won’t be charged.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t give me that.”

  “Jane,” he snapped, then paused to take a deep breath. “I’m sure his lawyer will be contacted with anything important. I couldn’t show you favoritism even if I cared to. And I don’t.”

  Hoping to see some glimmer of reason in his eyes, Jane stared at him for a long moment. Please help me, she pleaded silently. But Greg’s scowl was back.

  “Who’s that guy, Jane?” He jerked his chin in the direction of the truck. “Are you working your way back to your roots?”

  Jane set her shoulders and calmly turned to leave.

  She should have waited to break it off with him. Why had she been in such a hurry? If she’d held on for one more week…

  But the thought made her shudder, and her instincts had just been confirmed. He’d liked her well enough when she was sleeping with him, but now she was trash. Just trash.

  She slipped into the truck.

  “Jane? You okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Chase pulled away from the curb, but she could feel his attention on her. “That didn’t seem to go well.”

  “He was posturing. Maybe when he gets into the office he’ll take another look at the files.”

  “Mmm.”

  She’d claimed to be okay, but was she? Jane closed her eyes and took an internal inventory. She’d just revealed part of her past to Greg. And she felt…okay. It was the part of her past she would have been forced to reveal if their relationship had continued.

  Yes, he might spread it around, let other people know where she came from, but her family was hardly the worst of it.

  She was okay.

  “So,” Chase said, “is that the kind of guy you usually date?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doctors, lawyers, that sort of thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mmm,” he said again. Jane wondered what that noncommittal hum could mean.

  She hadn’t wanted to bring Chase along, but he’d decided that every solitary woman in Aspen was in danger. He also seemed to have decided that Jane was his solitary woman and he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. In all honesty, she probably could have convinced him to leave her alone. He had no control over her. She could’ve kicked him out.

  But the truth was that she had the perfect excuse to have a few more unwise days with him, so she’d asked him to drive her to Greg’s house.

  “So what about guys like me?” he asked, startling her out of her thoughts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said you’d never done this before. I assume you meant you don’t usually keep a guy like me on the side?”

  “No!”

  Chase nodded, his hand hanging casually over the steering wheel, as if he hadn’t just said something outrageous. “Well, that guy doesn’t look like he’d be able to handle someone like you.”

  “What?” Jane heard her voice echo through the cab of his truck and realized she was shouting. “What do you mean, ‘someone like me’?”

  When Chase turned to her, his face was flushed with anger. “I’m not calling you trash like your classy boyfriend did, if that’s what you mean.”

  All the blood seemed to drain from her head. She felt clammy and cool and confused. “You heard that?”

  “Yes. And I came damn close to getting out and putting my fist in his face, but I figured that wouldn’t help your brother.”

  “No,” she murmured, shame drifting over her like wisps of fog. She’d let Greg call her garbage and trash. She’d stood there and let him say those words, and Chase had heard them. For some reason that was worse than knowing what Greg thought of her.

  Chase cursed under his breath and wrapped both hands tightly around the steering wheel. “When I said he didn’t seem like he could handle a woman like you, I meant that he seemed like a jackass. And a wimp. And a pussy.”

  Her throat got even drier.

  “I meant that he wasn’t good enough for you.”

  Oh, God. Why did Chase have to be the one to say the right things? Why did he have to be the man who made her feel tight with need? “I called it off with Greg because I wasn’t in love with him. And in the end, I guess I didn’t really like him.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I would have doubted your judgment otherwise, Jane.”

  “I suppose. But he wasn’t that bad before. Maybe he’ll come through. Maybe he’ll give Jessie a fair shake.”

  Chase shrugged. “We’ll see,” he said, but his voice still held the censure of disappointment.

  Jane stared out the window and willed herself not to cry.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “WHY IS THERE A HEAVY bag in your spare bedroom?”

  Jane looked up from the book she was reading to try to take her mind off her worry. The book wasn’t working. Neither was the movie playing on television. “I box for exercise.”

  “Really? Boxing? That’s kind of hot.”

  “You say that about a lot of things.”

  “Seriously, you sweating and half-naked while you beat the shit out of that big red bag? That’s hot.”

  “Why would I be half-naked?”

  “Er…Because you like me?”

  Jane rolled her eyes and punched him in the arm.

  “Ouch. Do that a couple more times and I’ll give you what you want.”

  “Shut up!” Jane laughed, throwing a few light punches at his shoulder.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Do it, baby.”

  “I thought I was supposed to be half-naked,” she teased.

  “Shit, you’re right. Come ’ere.” Chase unzipped the hoodie she was wearing while Jane pretended to slap his hands away. He was just sliding his hands under her shirt when his cell phone rang. His hands didn’t stop sliding.

  “Chase!” she protested as his palms covered her breasts. “Answer the phone.”

  “Later.” His hot mouth su
cked at her throat.

  “It might be important.”

  “This is important.”

  Yes, it was. It really was. Especially when his teeth scraped down to her shoulder. The phone stopped ringing, and Jane sank back into the couch, sighing when Chase followed her down. His body pressed into her….

  And his phone rang again.

  “Shit,” he barked, pushing up to sit on the edge of the couch and grab his phone. “Don’t move.” He flipped open the phone. “This is Chase.” His back straightened, and Jane heard an urgent male voice speaking rapidly on the other end of the line.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, we’ll be right there.”

  Jane jumped off the couch and began pulling on her shoes. “What is it?” she begged when he closed the phone.

  “My dad has something to show us.”

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head. “Something to do with a police report. He said he’d tell us when we got there.”

  Jane grabbed her purse and coat and they were out the door. The fifteen-minute ride seemed to take an hour, but Jane comforted herself with assurances that he must have found something good.

  Jane raced up to the door and knocked, but couldn’t make herself wait for him to answer. Horrified with her own rudeness, she pulled the door open herself. “Mr. Chase?”

  “Hello, Jane! Would you like a beer?”

  “No, thank you. What did you find?”

  “Hey, Billy!” he said when Chase pushed past Jane. “Can I get you a brewski?”

  “No, Dad.” Jane could hear the edge of impatience in Chase’s voice. Or perhaps she was projecting her own vibrating impatience onto him.

  “Mr. Chase,” she pleaded, “did you find something?”

  “Oh, I sure did. I already called Ms. Holloway to tell her. You two want to sit down?”

  Jane launched herself toward a chair and sat down so quickly it skidded across the linoleum. She counted to ten while Chase approached and took the chair next to hers. She made it all the way to twenty while his father puttered around, straightening out files and rearranging papers.

  Finally he sat down and opened one of the files. “As soon as I heard about the last murder victim, I went down there to see if she’d filed a complaint about a stolen purse in the past couple of months.”

  Jane swallowed. Maybe it wasn’t good news after all.

  “I found the report. It’s all a matter of public record. Her purse was stolen from a place called Steel. Jessie mentioned it in one of his interviews.”

  “Oh, no,” Jane whispered.

  “But—and here’s the important part—she said her purse was stolen on May thirteenth.”

  Jane frowned. “The thirteenth?”

  “Jessie was arrested on the seventh. He was in custody on the thirteenth.”

  “It couldn’t have been him.”

  Mr. Chase shook his head. “It couldn’t have been him.”

  Overwhelmed, Jane grabbed Chase’s hand and squeezed it. “This is it, right? This is why they didn’t arrest him again. They don’t have anything.”

  Chase’s dad smiled. “They don’t have anything. Jessie admits he stole Michelle Brown’s purse, but there’s no evidence he was involved in the theft of Kelly Anderson’s backpack, and he couldn’t possibly have committed this last theft.”

  Jane nodded, blinking back tears. “So all we have to worry about are the legitimate charges of theft.”

  “Probably. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Cops don’t like to give up on a hunch. Right now Jessie is their only lead, as far as we know, and they won’t want to let him go. I want to give them something else to think about.”

  “Like what? I don’t understand.”

  “We’re going to go through these files and find something they’ve missed. Even if it’s just an idea. Every single page. You sure you don’t want that beer now?”

  Jane shook her head, and they got to work.

  An hour later they’d made a list of possible connections between the women. Most of them were tenuous, and the police had probably connected most of the dots, but it was better than nothing.

  Churches, schools, doctors, friends. If those details had been collected, they hadn’t been included with the evidence provided to Jessie’s lawyer. But despite all their hypothesizing, it was clear that the women were linked by the thefts.

  “All the reports were taken by different officers, but that’s not to say another officer couldn’t have taken an interest in each woman as she came in.”

  Jane couldn’t quite believe what Chase’s dad was saying. He’d been a policeman himself. “You really think an officer could be involved?”

  “I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed out of hand. Now then, her purse has been stolen, she’s filed the report—now what does she do?”

  “Cancels her credit cards,” Jane suggested.

  Mr. Chase wrote that down. “And maybe her cell phone account?”

  Chase flipped open a file. “The first two had the same brand of phone.”

  His father raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it’s someone working at the local cell phone store.” His hand flew over the notebook. “I noticed all the women reported that their keys were in their purses. They must have had their locks changed, too.”

  Jane added, “And they would’ve needed a new driver’s license first thing.”

  She felt Chase’s elbow touch her. “Don’t go down to the DMV anytime soon. There could be some psychopath there taking license pictures.”

  By the time they left, Jane was nearly giddy with hope. Mr. Chase would give all these ideas to Ms. Holloway, and Ms. Holloway would make clear to the police that they’d better start following up on these other leads before the press got the idea that they weren’t doing their jobs.

  Pretty soon Jessie would be cleared, and Jane’s life would get back to normal. Only, she was beginning to suspect she no longer knew what normal looked like.

  ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Jane was sitting at her desk in Jennings Architecture, looking around with a sense of wonder. She’d been back at work for three days. The mess of indecipherable notes that Mr. Jennings had piled on her desk had been weeded down to two remaining scribbles.

  These were the kinds of mysteries she enjoyed. What had Mr. Jennings meant when he’d written “8 south boy here”? He had no recollection of such a thing, so it was up to Jane to puzzle it out. The second note was less cryptic—“Thursday 9:00”—but equally mysterious. Still, that puzzle would likely solve itself on Thursday at nine o’clock, so Jane was less intrigued.

  But her sense of amazement had nothing to do with her personal little Da Vinci Code and more to do with the utter calm around her. Jessie’s lawyer had played her cards with great success. It had helped that the lead detective on the case was losing faith in the Jessie-as-serial-killer scenario. A preliminary report from the medical examiner placed the girl’s death at a time when Jessie’s alibi was strongest.

  The detective hadn’t appreciated the lawyer’s suggestions of how to conduct the investigation, but Mr. Chase had dropped the same thoughts into the ear of his contact at the sheriff’s office. Hopefully someone would pick up on a hotter trail than Jessie MacKenzie. But regardless of whether or not they found the real killer, the D.A. in charge of Jessie’s case had made overtures of a deal. They were no longer awaiting additional charges. The case was moving forward.

  “Thank God,” Jane murmured just as Outlook notified her that Mr. Jennings’s phone call with a reclaimed-wood dealer was coming up in five minutes. She hit the intercom button. “Mr. Jennings?”

  Silence.

  She tried again. “Mr. Jennings?”

  Experience had taught her that she might startle her boss from his work with that second inquiry, but once he ignored that, it was hopeless. Jane got up and walked to his office. His door was partially open, and she could see him hunched over his drafting table, glaring at a quiver of straight lines that meant
nothing to her.

  “Mr. Jennings.” She tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Hmm?” he grumbled, not looking up from the sharp edge he’d started to draw.

  “You have a call coming up in three minutes with Hatlock Wood. Shall I go ahead and place the call?”

  He finally looked at her, eyes cloudy with distance. “What?”

  “Hatlock Wood, Mr. Jennings. Are you ready for the call?”

  “Oh.” He cast a mournful glance at the sketches before rolling his shoulders. “Sure.”

  “Still no idea about the ‘south boy’ note?”

  “The what?”

  “I thought so. I’ll have Hatlock on the line momentarily, sir. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  He said yes, and she was so thankful to be busy again that she grinned while rushing around to get coffee and place the call. She had her own meetings this afternoon. One with their accountant and another with a school representative interested in placing an architectural intern with Mr. Jennings. Adding a young kid to the office would upset Jane’s perfect balancing act, but Mr. Jennings seemed enthusiastic. She needed to be sure they got a quality candidate and a school willing to work carefully with the office. Then there was Lori’s bon voyage party to nudge along…

  A landscape architect came through the front door to drop off a series of sketches he’d done for one of Mr. Jennings’s clients, and Jane noted that his eyes looked right through her. Despite the way she’d been living for the past two weeks, her disguise hadn’t been compromised. This man didn’t see her as anything other than an office fixture. The scarlet letter on her head was still invisible. He hadn’t heard any rumors, didn’t notice any difference in her body. She was still invisible Jane. And that was the biggest relief of all.

  She’d had a wake-up call, at least. Her family was still her family, no matter how sharply she’d tried to separate herself. She wasn’t foolish or naive. She didn’t plan to throw a party to introduce all her colleagues to her leather-clad kin, but she realized she needed to find a better balance. A less fragmented way of living her life while still working toward the white picket fence.