They watched the car approach. As it did, it slowed to a crawl. Dawn couldn’t see much through the tinted windows, but she was pretty sure the head she saw silhouetted there was turned her way. She thought about Sean Googin, the fifteen-year-old boy who’d been murdered here years ago, his body found in the lake at her back, a hundred and fifty yards from shore, weighted down with rocks. It took the cops ten years to catch the guy who did it. It was a famous case in this town, because it had been the first murder in Cazenovia’s two-hundred-year history. Everyone remembered it. They still talked about it.
The car slowed some more. “Shit,” Dawn muttered.
“It’s stopping,” Kayla said.
“Let’s get out of here!” Dawn gripped Kayla’s hand and tugged until she turned and ran with her, back along the path. She heard a sound, like the opening and closing of a car door, and knew Kayla heard it, too, when she ran even faster.
* * *
“So you made it back,” Sean said softly, rising from the sofa in the reception area with a fresh cup of coffee in one hand.
Julie looked at Sean and got the feeling he’d been waiting for her. She felt guilty as hell for what she’d done to him, but she hadn’t had a choice. She had to protect Dawn. “Yeah, I’m back.”
“Feeling better?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You get a chance to view the tape?”
She licked her lips, glancing nervously at the receptionist, Penny, who pretended not to be listening. “Yeah. Uh…about the tape.”
Sean lifted his brows, waited.
She pulled the cassette out of her bag, the tape hanging out of it in an impossible tangle. “My machine kind of ate it.”
He closed his eyes slowly.
“I’m really sorry, Sean. I know this must have been the biggest story of your career, and if I could make it right, I would, but—”
“I don’t give a damn about the tape.” He took it from her, turning as if to toss it into the wastebasket beside the reception desk, but then he stopped himself, shaking his head.
“I really am sorry,” she repeated.
He lifted his eyes to lock them on hers, started to speak, then seemed to think better of it. “Your office is closer. Come on.”
Swallowing hard, wondering what on earth he was going to say to her, she followed. Not that he gave her much choice, with the grip he had on her elbow. He had every right to be angry—furious—with her for what she’d done. She’d expected it, and she would deal with it.
He entered her office first, closing the door after she came in behind him. He didn’t hesitate or offer any preamble. “You’re not sorry at all. You destroyed the tape on purpose, probably hoping it was my only copy. It wasn’t, Jones.”
She stared at him, her eyes growing wider.
“I had a feeling that’s what you would do. I just hoped to God I was wrong. You really let me down, you know.”
“You don’t under—”
“I understand more than you think, because I went home and watched that footage, just like you probably did. And I saw what got you so upset. I saw you. You were there.”
“No!” She turned away so fast she nearly wrenched her neck. “There might have been someone who looked like me. But it wasn’t me. I was never there.”
“Don’t.”
“It wasn’t—”
“Jones.” He moved in front of her, caught her shoulders to prevent her turning away and held her eyes with his. “Don’t. Don’t lie to me, please, not about this. I was there, too, goddammit.”
She had to close her eyes; she couldn’t look at him.
His hands on her shoulders tightened, guiding her to her chair, easing her into it. “Look, I know what you’re thinking. That I’ve finally got the dirt on you that I’ve always wanted. And you’re right, I do. You should have known I would. Jesus, Jones, I’m too good not to find out about something this big.”
“Not so big when compared to the size of your ego,” she said, automatically, though her heart wasn’t in it.
“I’m not going to tell anyone about this.”
She shook her head. “Yes, you will. Maybe not today, but eventually, you will. It’s what you do.”
“Not this time. It’s different this time.”
She opened her eyes, dared to peer up into his. “Why?”
His lips thinned; he seemed to swallow. “Let’s just say—I owe you.” Straightening away from her even as she frowned, he turned his back, pressing a hand to the nape of his neck and rubbing there, as if it ached. “I thought everyone in that compound died. How the hell did you get out alive?”
She sighed. “I…can’t. I can’t talk to you about this, MacKenzie.” She got up, heading for the door.
But he stopped her, his hands clutching her arms almost too tightly, and the look in his eyes was something she’d never seen there before. He seemed almost desperate.
“You have to talk to me about it, Jones.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to know.”
Two quick taps on the office door preceded its opening. Bryan stuck his head in. “You two are on the air in five, you know. Holler if you need anything.”
The door closed again. Neither of them had blinked; they were still staring at each other. She didn’t like this—this serious, life-and-death kind of tension hanging between the two of them. She wanted the old banter back, the fun of hating his guts. Not this. This was too real.
Finally, she looked away. “We have to go.”
“This isn’t over,” he warned.
“I’m sorry, Sean, but it is.”
He lifted his brows. “I’ll force it if you make me, Jones. You know I can. Don’t make me do that to you. You’ll end up hating me more than you already do.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“You’re a liar, and we both know it.” His grip on her shoulders eased, but he didn’t let go. She felt his hands change, soften, and then begin to tug her closer to him, just a little. His gaze focused on her lips, and something stole her breath.
She wrenched herself away and fled the office so fast she nearly tripped over her own feet on her way out.
* * *
Sean’s stomach was queasy, and he kept having to force his hands steady as he and Jones read the news to the cameras that evening. His attempts at baiting her were lame, her reactions barely there and way below her usual standards. They wouldn’t be winning any public praise for tonight’s broadcast, he thought. The crew loved it, but he knew they could be so much better.
Their hour was nearly up, and they were just coming back from commercial when Allan Westcott rushed in, handed Sean a sheet of news copy and ducked back out of camera range just as the red light came on.
Westcott stood beside camera one, pointed at Sean and gave him a nod.
“This just in,” Sean read. “The Syracuse police are seeking the public’s help in the Harry Blackwood murder investigation. They are looking for a woman in connection with the case. She is described as approximately five-five, slender, with very dark hair.” He was aware of the photo being flashed on the monitor to his left, caught it just from the corner of his eye. Black and white, grainy, unidentifiable, it showed a woman who was all but concealed beneath a trench coat, huge sunglasses, a scarf. The handbag, though, was one he’d seen before.
He had to clear his throat to convince his voice box to keep on working. “The police want to stress that the woman is not a suspect at this time. If anyone saw this woman at the Armory Square Hotel between 11:00 p.m. and midnight Monday night, or can identify her, they are asked to call the SPD Tipline at 800-555-TIPS. Now, here’s TV-Four Meteorologist Danny Kellogg with your final look at the weather.”
“Roll three!”
Danny Kellogg was in the third chair behind the desk, smiling into camera three, which was giving a wide shot that included all three of them. “Hey, that photo could have been anyone, even our own Julie, don’t you think, Sean?” He
was joking, trying to give some life to an otherwise dead broadcast.
Sean glanced at Jones, who looked pale and shaken. He put a teasing expression on his face. “It’s probably the first and only time she can be glad she got stuck with me tagging along on a story, Danny. She was never outta my sight. Which is more than I can say for the sun this week, up until this afternoon. Any more of this fabulous sunshine in the forecast?”
“Roll four!”
The light on camera three went out, and camera four focused solely on Danny, following him as he moved to the weatherboard. “You’re right, Sean, things cleared up nicely for a couple of hours this afternoon, but it looks like the clouds are due to roll back in. Let’s take a look at the radar.”
He went on. Sean glanced at Jones. She was studying him as if she’d never seen him before. They were both still miked. He couldn’t say anything, didn’t know what the hell he would say if he could. He had just become, publicly, her alibi. He’d lied to protect his worst enemy, and he knew damn well why, and he hated it.
He hated it.
* * *
Lieutenant Cassie Jackson sat in a small room with two televisions running. One was tuned to Channel Four’s evening news. She just couldn’t get enough of watching Julie Jones coming undone. Oh, no one else might see it. But Cassie did.
She was pretty sure she’d been looking for a woman for this Blackwood killing from the moment she’d gone over the evidence from the scene and spotted that tube of mascara. When she’d heard about Jones’s little purse-dumping incident in the room, she’d become suspicious. The witness placing Jones’s silver Mercedes in the parking garage an hour earlier than she would admit added weight to the theory, and the anonymous note on her car tipped the scales even more, even though the search of the house had turned up nothing. Then there were the massive withdrawals from Jones’s retirement accounts over the past six months. More than two hundred grand. She hadn’t matched it up yet with deposits into any of Blackwood’s accounts, but she was working on that.
She’d gone over the damned surveillance camera footage from the hotel elevators for hours, countless hours, and the only suspicious female she’d found on those tapes was the one in the silk scarf and raincoat, who kept her face averted from the camera like a goddamn pro.
Her height and build fit Jones, though. So did that single lock of dark hair that had escaped the scarf. She’d ridden from the parking garage to the 12th floor at 11:22 p.m.
The mascara tube was still being analyzed. So far they’d only lifted one partial print from it, and it was smudged to hell and gone. They were still working on trying to extract some DNA from the brush. A couple of eyelashes had been retrieved, but it would be a few days before she knew if a sample had been extracted.
Meanwhile, she had the kid as her mom’s alibi to contend with. It didn’t surprise her that the girl would lie to protect her mother. She couldn’t even hate the kid for it. But it was really throwing a monkey wrench into her own investigation. A jury would want to believe a girl like Dawn Jones.
The second television screen was running the Armory Square Hotel’s elevator surveillance tapes. She’d been praying for another shot of the mystery woman, maybe as she left the building, but so far she hadn’t found it.
Then, suddenly, she saw something on the tape that grabbed her interest. She quickly reached for the control button, stopped and rewound the tape, and let it play again. The person in the elevator was not the mysterious woman with the obvious disguise. It was Sean MacKenzie, arriving on the scene.
“Hey, that photo could have been anyone, even our own Julie, don’t you think, Sean?”
The tinny voice of Channel Four’s meteorologist drew Cassie’s gaze to the first television set, the one airing the evening news. She paused the surveillance tape with one remote, turned up the volume of the news show with another. Just in time to hear Sean MacKenzie say, “It’s probably the first and only time she can be glad she got stuck with me tagging along on a story, Danny. She was never outta my sight.”
Cassie Jackson glanced back at the first TV, frozen on an unfocused image of Sean MacKenzie standing in the hotel elevator—alone. Smiling slowly, she pointed her forefinger at the television screen and cocked her thumb. “Gotcha.”
* * *
Dawn and Kayla emerged from the brushy path into Dawn’s backyard, breathless and frightened. They had opted not to try to run back toward the school. It was further away, and they would have had to go over open road to get there. Dawn’s house had been closer, and the shortcut along the lake let them keep under cover as they ran. Dawn fumbled in her jeans pocket for her new set of house keys, found them and then paused to look around. “I don’t see anyone. Do you?”
“No.” Kayla shot a look behind them. “Let’s just get inside, okay?”
Nodding, Dawn jogged across the lawn, unlocked the back door and opened it. The two girls crowded into the house, clutching each other. Kayla closed the door and locked it, while Dawn released her grip on her friend’s arm to run through to the living room and check the lock on the front door. Then she peered out the window.
Her heart almost jumped out of her chest when she saw the car parked on the side of the road, across from the house next door.
“Kayla!”
Kayla came running, then followed Dawn’s gaze. “Oh, God. It’s the same car. Isn’t it?”
Dawn nodded.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know.” Dawn spun to look at the clock. “Mom will be home soon.”
“Dawnie, can you see anyone in that car?”
“No. The glass is too dark.”
Kayla’s voice came out softer and tight. “What if he’s not out there? What if he’s already in the house?”
Dawn went cold at those words. It felt as if her blood turned into ice. She grabbed the phone, hit the speed dial, then put her free arm around Kayla and backed into a corner, eyes on the front door and the stairway, ears straining to catch any sound.
“Who are you calling?” Kayla whispered.
“Mr. White, next door.”
A solid knock sounded on the front door. Both girls jumped. “He’s not answering,” Dawn said.
“Hang up and dial 9-1-1.”
CHAPTER TEN
The knocking came again. “Dawnie? You home?”
Dawn’s muscles all seemed to go limp. “Mr. White?” She hurried to the door, peeking through the window, then rapidly unlocking and opening it. “Come on in.” She looked past him as she ushered him inside, up the road and down it. The black car was gone.
“I made your favorite,” Mr. White was saying as Dawn closed and locked the door, mouthing “He’s gone” to Kayla. “Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies! Thought you might enjoy some. Hello, Kayla.”
“Hi, Mr. White. It’s really good to see you.” She moved forward as he peeled the plastic wrap from the plate of cookies, helping herself to one and taking the phone from Dawn. “I’d better call my mom. She’ll be at school looking for us by now.”
“Right.” Dawn hadn’t thought about the lie they’d told ever since the car had stopped by the lake. That little problem had been frightened right out of her head.
The old neighbor carried the cookies into the kitchen, setting them on the table, looking around the place. “You girls home alone?”
“Mom should be here any time now.” Dawn said, taking a cookie from the plate. “You want some coffee or anything?”
“Oh, no. That caffeine…” He shook his head side to side. “Milk, now, that would be a different matter.”
Dawn got three glasses, filled them all with ice-cold milk and took a seat at the table, waving Mr. White to take one, too. He did, methodically dipping a cookie into his glass of milk, then biting off the moistened bit.
Kayla joined them in the kitchen, sipping her milk, as well.
“I noticed a strange car outside earlier,” Mr. White said. “Just sort of sitting there, across from my place. You see it?�
�� He dipped again, bit again.
Dawn and Kayla exchanged glances. “Yeah, we did. It made us nervous. In fact, I was just calling you when you knocked on the door.”
He lifted his brows, then smiled. “Well, that makes me feel pretty good, Dawnie. I hope you never hesitate to call if you feel scared over here alone.”
“I think you scared him away. The car was gone when I opened the door to let you in.”
Rodney nodded. “Yeah, I saw that. He pulled away when I got halfway here. Probably took one look at me and ran.” He grinned when he said it and made a fist as if to flex his bicep. He was wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt with a windbreaker over it. But Dawnie didn’t need to see his arm to know there wasn’t much muscle there. Her mother often joked that a strong wind would blow Mr. White away if he wasn’t careful, despite the fact that he apparently existed on his own homemade cookies, brownies and fudge.
“Probably best to tell your mom about it, Dawnie. She’d want to know.”
Dawn looked at him. “She told you to keep an eye on me, didn’t she?”
“I’ve always got my eye on you, missy. But, yes, your mother has seemed a little bit more nervous than usual, these past couple of days.” He tipped his head sideways. “You wouldn’t know why that is, would you?”
“No idea.” Dawn heard a car pulling in. “That’s probably her now, though.”
Mr. White finished his cookie, drained his milk. “Well, I only came to deliver the cookies and put the fear of the aged into that lurker outside. You two be careful, now.”
“We will. Thank you, Mr. White.”
“Yeah, thanks a bunch for coming over.”
“Anytime.” He headed for the front door and let himself out.
Kayla and Dawn followed him to the living room, and watched him go. He met Dawn’s mom halfway across the driveway.
“I’m gonna have to tell her we walked home,” Dawn said. “Even though that was exactly what she told me not to do. What did you tell your mom?”
“I told her the review class let out early and that we were so glad the sun finally came out that we decided to walk.”
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