To Trust a Stranger

by Karen Robards

  The third upside was that Roger Basta had been captured alive. He wasn’t talking, but it was early days yet. When he saw the kind of charges he was facing, it was likely that he would sing like a bird.

  Even though he now knew for certain that his brother was dead, Mac still wanted to find Daniel. Basta was the key to that. Basta knew where Daniel was. Refusing to dwell on the ache that always accompanied thoughts of his brother, Mac looked over at Julie and tightened his grip on her hand. There were lots of things he wanted to say to her, needed to say to her, but, conscious of the paramedic on his other side monitoring his vital signs on various beeping machines, he refrained.

  What he said instead was, “That was good thinking, by the way, telling Basta that you knew where the tape he was looking for was hidden. Otherwise, I think he would have shot us right there on the spot. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

  Julie met his gaze. Her big brown eyes were tired and heavy-lidded and bloodshot, but they were still incomparably beautiful. She was incomparably beautiful.

  “I do know where the tape’s hidden. At least, I think I know. As soon as I knew it was a tape, I realized where it must be. When my father came to see me that last time, he gave me a teddy bear. It was the only present he ever gave me, and I’ve kept it all these years. He said it was for my birthday, and I should take real good care of it. He said he’d be back in a couple of weeks to make sure I was taking care of it. Of course, he never came back: he died before he could. But even at the time, I thought it was weird: he never visited us, but here he was, showing up on our doorstep and bringing a teddy bear as a birthday present to a grown girl. It’s a soft, squishy teddy bear with a fat stomach. When I first got it, I used it as a pillow sometimes. I quit because there was something hard under all those layers of fluff. Hard and rectangular and about the size of a cassette tape, now that I think about it. At the time, I just thought it was part of the bear’s innards. I’ll bet anything the tape’s in that teddy bear.”

  “Where’s the teddy bear now?” Mac couldn’t believe his ears. The key to this entire mess—and Julie had had it all along without knowing it? He stared at her incredulously.

  “On the table beside my bed. I kept it all these years, but I never told anyone where I got it.” Julie grimaced, making a face that was sad and rueful and a tad funny at the same time. “See, it was Becky’s birthday, not mine. I was so jealous that he remembered her and not me that I never even told her about the bear. I just kept it for myself.”

  The look on her face smote him to the heart.

  “Hey.” Mac brought her hand to his mouth, paramedic or no paramedic, and kissed her palm. Then, because she still looked unhappy, he decided to hell with manly pride, and went for it. “Julie. I love you.”

  She smiled at him, a slow-dawning smile that was like the sun coming out. “I love you, too.”

  Ignoring the stone-faced paramedic, Mac kissed each of the slender, rose-tipped fingers he held. Then curiosity overcame him, and he looked up.

  “Didn’t you ever tell Sid about the bear?” If she had, Sid would have immediately suspected what was in it and taken the thing apart.

  She shook her head, and a sudden spark of amusement twinkled in her eyes. “He was so nasty about my family all the time. I couldn’t tell him that my father couldn’t even tell me apart from Becky.”

  Mac laughed. All the time, Julie had held the key to the puzzle, and Sid had never been able to worm it out of her because he was such a prick. Was that poetic justice, or what?

  “We’ve got to tell Greg.” As the thought hit him, Mac tried to sit up and found himself held back by the straps around his chest.

  “I already did.” Julie’s hand on his chest and the paramedic’s sharp admonition caused him to sink back. “He’s sending somebody to get the bear. He said even if the tape’s in there, he’ll see I get it back once the tape’s removed, good as new. I guess I’ll have to tell Becky about it now.”

  “You’re something, you know that?” Mac said to her tenderly.

  She smiled at him, and suddenly he was flying higher than even the pain medication had taken him. He was high as a kite—on Julie.

  Then they were at the hospital, and he was taken from the ambulance and wheeled into the emergency room, and there was no more opportunity to talk.

  38

  THREE WEEKS LATER, Mac was once again standing on the cliff overlooking Lake Moultrie. It was a hot day, with a sky so blue it would put sapphires to shame and bright sunshine pouring down: A happy kind of day, a day for hot dogs and kites and walks on the beach. For Mac, though, it was bittersweet. A crane was lifting a rusted-out Chevy Cougar from the water. He knew that car. Daniel had bought it two months before he disappeared.

  Mac’s heart ached almost unbearably as he watched it rise dripping into the cerulean sky.

  Basta had told them where to look. Basta, who, as it turned out, had another identity entirely: In his everyday life he was a high-level operative for the DEA. He’d worked for the agency for over thirty years, and was as dirty as they came. At first it had been garden-variety graft: He’d dealt drugs, taken bribes, fixed cases. By his own account, when he’d started busting dealers who worked for John Carlson, he’d gone over to the dark side for good. When Carlson had found out who he was and what he was up to, he had used that knowledge to get Basta under his thumb. In the end, John Carlson had owned Roger Basta. Among other things, Carlson made use of Basta’s training and talents by employing him as his own private hit man, calling on his services whenever somebody got in the organization’s way.

  It both surprised Mac and made him proud to learn that Daniel had been a DEA agent, too. According to Basta, Daniel had been recruited right out of the military, where he’d been, like Mac, a Navy SEAL. As an old friend of Sid’s, Daniel had long suspected that the Carlsons were involved in the drug trade. As a gung-ho young agent, he had gone to his boss with his suspicions. His boss had been Basta. Basta had had no choice but to let Daniel investigate; if he hadn’t, he had feared that Daniel would become suspicious of him. From the moment he had started his undercover investigation of the Carlsons, Daniel had been marked for death.

  Then Kelly Carlson had accidentally taped Basta, Sid, and John Carlson talking about a hit Basta had just made at their instigation. Listening to it and realizing what she was hearing, Kelly had grown frightened. She had run to Daniel, whom she had dated before she had married Sid, and told him about the tape. Daniel had told Basta. Basta, all ears, had instructed him to get the tape. Daniel had obediently gotten the tape from Kelly, and been on his way to give it to Basta when Kelly had called him, frantic. Something in the way Sid was acting toward her made her think he knew about the tape. So Daniel had hidden the tape and gone back for Kelly.

  Daniel and Kelly had been killed that night.

  Basta added that Mike Williams, who had also worked for the Carlsons as a gopher and nominal employee of Rand Corporation, had been instructed to follow Daniel wherever he went. Williams saw where Daniel hid the tape, retrieved it, and listened to it. Like Kelly, he got scared at what he was hearing. He knew he’d be killed if anyone found out that he knew what he knew. He ran—and took the tape with him.

  But then he’d apparently gotten greedy. He had made the mistake of coming back five years later, trying to blackmail the Carlsons about the contents of the tape. For safekeeping he’d hidden it in a teddy bear, and given it to Julie. When they’d caught up with him and tried to beat the whereabouts of the tape out of him, he’d been vague, but he had told them just enough to make them suspect Julie knew where it was before he died prematurely during a further interrogation. Basta had made the death look like an accidental drowning. It had been anything but.

  Then Sid had entered Julie’s life in pursuit of the tape, and the rest was history.

  The feds now had the tape, and it was as explosive as its billing. The hit had been on Henry Jacobs, a longtime federal judge. It was one of the most highly investigated cr
imes of the last two decades. It had never been solved—until the tape turned up. The recording clearly proved that Basta had done the hit, John Carlson had paid him to do it, and Sid had known everything.

  When the police opened the trunk of the Cougar and found Daniel and Kelly, the story was finally ended. For Mac at least.

  As the remains were lifted out and put into body bags, Mac realized that there were tears running down his cheeks, and he turned away. He leaned heavily on the crutches he was forced to use until his leg mended, and closed his eyes.

  Ah, Daniel, he thought. I loved you, bro.

  Seeing his distress, Julie stepped in front of him, slipped her arms around his waist, then rose up on tiptoe to kiss him. Her mouth was soft and sweet, like the rest of her, and he returned her kiss hungrily. He was surprised to find himself wanting her, even at a time like this when there were reminders of tragic death all around. It was, he supposed, an affirmation of life.

  “I’m so sorry, Mac,” she said softly, pulling her mouth from his at last, her eyes clouded with tears for him. He realized that he’d seen tears in her eyes too much lately: at Sid’s funeral, at John Carlson’s, at Carlene Squabb’s. He never wanted to see tears in her eyes again, he thought, unless they were tears of joy. He made a silent vow to do his best to make sure he wouldn’t.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve known inside for a long time that Daniel was dead. Finding him was the last thing I could do for him. I owed him that: He was my brother.”

  “I wish I could have known him.”

  Mac managed a smile. It felt slightly crooked, but it would serve. There was no sense in dwelling on the past. The living had to move on.

  “He would have liked you. Hot chicks were his hobby.”

  That surprised a laugh out of Julie, and hearing her laugh eased some of the pain that all his sensible cliches could not quite pry out of his heart. He looked down at her, and realized that at least some good had come out of the tragedy: he’d found Julie, the love of his life. His gaze took in the glossy black hair curling softly around her shoulders, the beautiful face, the breathtaking body. She was dressed in a short, sleeveless dress in pale yellow, and looked as delicate and lovely as a sunbeam come to earth. Beneath the dress, her long tan legs were bare.

  He loved the fact that her legs were bare.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  They’d been living together in Mac’s house, because Julie couldn’t bear to so much as enter hers, and had put it up for sale. As soon as they walked through the door, Josephine greeted them with an excited yap and a wagging tail. Mac looked apprehensively around, but he couldn’t see anything right off the bat that had been chewed to splinters. During a hospital visit in which Mac had made aggrieved mention of some of Josephine’s less attractive traits, his grandma had looked guilty, confessed that she had totally forgotten about that, and stunned him by informing him that the dear little dog was driven into a frenzy by the sound of a ringing phone. When she had first become aware of this tendency in her beautiful Josephine she’d whisked her off to a doggy psychiatrist, who had come to the sad conclusion that, due to some unknowable trauma in Josephine’s past, the dog saw the ringing phone as a threat and responded by attacking. His grandma had solved the problem by investing in a phone that, instead of ringing, played chimes.

  Upon being released from the hospital, Mac had promptly done the same. He privately thought that such a simple solution was too good to be true, but Josephine, to his knowledge anyway, hadn’t chewed anything since.

  Relaxing as no immediate evidence of doggy mayhem met his gaze, he tossed Josephine one of the treats he’d brought in with him from the car, leaned his crutches against a wall, balanced himself carefully on his good leg, forgot about the dog, and pulled Julie into his arms.

  She smiled up into his face, and lifted her lips for his kiss.

  Instead he simply looked down at her. If he could only have one gift from fate for the entire rest of his life, this was the one he wanted: Julie.

  “I love you,” he said. “Marry me.”

  Her eyes widened on his face. For a moment, a heart-stopping moment, he looked down into the big brown eyes that he knew would own him for the rest of his life no matter what she said, and waited for her answer.

  She frowned, and looked thoughtful. “Is Josephine part of the deal? Bad habits, rhinestone collar and all?”

  He smiled. “Absolutely.”

  “Then, yes. Yes, I will marry you.”

  Mac bent his head and kissed her. Then the earth spun on its axis, and the dust motes danced and sang, and the air around them was turned to steam heat by the blaze of their passion. He made love to her with a fierce intensity that expressed without words the way she made him feel. And when she was reduced to quivering, mindless jelly in his arms, he made love to her all over again.

  POCKET BOOKS

  PROUDLY PRESENTS

  WHISPERS AT MIDNIGHT

  Karen Robards

  Now available in hardcover from

  Pocket Books

  Turn the page for a preview of

  WHISPERS AT MIDNIGHT. . . .

  Nice butt was Carly Linton’s first thought, as the muscular, tight and jeans-clad butt in question thrust itself into her line of vision. Not that she was into noticing men’s butts. Not anymore. Since her divorce she’d felt more like kicking them than drooling over them, nice or not. The state of the butt was merely a fleeting observation, made in passing, as the beam of her flashlight locked onto a man on all fours backing out of the crawl space beneath the front porch of her grandmother’s house. Correction, her house now. Her grandmother had been dead for more than three years, and the turreted Victorian mansion, which Carly had inherited, had been empty since Miss Virgie Smith, who’d been renting the place, had moved into an assisted-living home in Atlanta two months before. By all rights, on this dark and stormy June night, it should have been empty still. As in, no one living there, no one home, no one crawling out from beneath the dilapidated porch. How typical of the way her luck was running lately.

  Freezing in her tracks, her flashlight still trained on the baffling butt, Carly considered her options.

  “Christ almighty, is that a burglar?” Sandra whispered, stopping dead beside her. Five foot ten in her bare feet, admitting to 250 pounds, black and proud, Sandra possessed a truly formidable physical presence that should have provided some comfort under the circumstances. Unfortunately, Carly was all too well aware that beneath her good friend’s intimidating exterior lurked the soul of a Martha Stewart. And not a kick-ass Martha Stewart either. A soft and cuddly Martha Stewart. A Martha Stewart whose fight or flight instinct was set on flight.

  “We don’t have burglars in Benton,” Carly whispered back, nearly dropping the flashlight as she fumbled desperately to turn it off before the beam could give their presence away. Scant seconds after she succeeded, the man’s shoulders emerged from the blackness underneath the porch, followed in due and predictable course by his head.

  “Then who is he?” Sandra sounded unconvinced. The cardboard moving box full of pots and pans that she’d been carrying now rested at her feet. Carly had been so focused on the man that she hadn’t even realized Sandra had set her precious cooking utensils down in the wet grass. Her own less docile cargo squirmed indignantly in her arms. Hugo hated to be carried; he considered it beneath his dignity. Carly tightened her hold on the huge Himalayan cat and prayed he wouldn’t let out an untimely yowl.

  “A plumber? The Orkin man? How the heck should I know?”

  The night was steamy and airless in the aftermath of the fierce summer storm that had just passed. A wet earthy smell that Carly always associated with rainy nights in Georgia hung in the air. Still-dripping leaves and eaves combined with the piccolo piping of a host of unseen tree frogs to cover their whispered conversation. From behind shifting clouds a pale sickle moon appeared, providing just enough light to enable Carly to see the tall form of the burglar come lithely
to his feet.

  In one hand, its ominous shape unmistakable despite the darkness, he held an evil-looking black pistol.

  “That’s it. I’m calling 911.” Sandra rooted in the bright plastic tote bag that served as her purse and came up with her cell phone, which she flipped open.

  “We don’t have 911 service in Benton.”

  “Shee-it.” Sandra stopped punching numbers, closed the phone and rolled her eyes at Carly. “You got anything in Benton besides spooky old houses and scary men with guns?”

  “We have a McDonald’s. And a Pizza Hut.” Both were recent arrivals of which her small hometown’s Chamber of Commerce was justly proud.

  “Oh, that’s great. How about I just go ahead and call one of them?” Sandra shook her head in disgust. “I don’t want to eat, fool. I want to be saved from the man with the gun. What about a fire department? They save cats in trees.”

  “In Benton if we need help we call the state police. Or the sheriff.”

  “Number?” Sandra flipped open her phone again.

  “No clue.”

  They were backing away as they spoke. Carly moved carefully, mindful of lurking tree roots, her sneakers sliding a little on the slippery ground, her eyes never leaving the burglar. Clearly unaware of their presence, he stood with his back to them, seeming to focus on the huge dark shape that was the barn, which was just visible behind the house. The yard was as neglected as the rest of the property, the grass and bushes overgrown, the leaves unraked from the previous fall, which made the footing even trickier, especially since they were moving downhill. Situated at the western edge of town on top of a wooded knoll some distance from its nearest neighbor, the Beadle Mansion, as the house was known thanks to its original owner, did not even possess its own driveway. Their vehicle, a bright orange U-Haul, which they had driven straight through from Chicago, was parked beside the narrow blacktop road that curled around the base of the hill. Reaching it without alerting the man to their presence should be doable. Getting inside and driving away without being spotted was a whole other basket of bread rolls.