Kylie was having a little trouble believing it herself. Okay, she admitted ashamedly, she could believe Coy Roberts would risk having one of his men shoot at Jake. But at her? What if his aim had been off? Wouldn’t it enrage her father if she’d been shot?
The senator viewed every election as a battle. He had a battle plan, a war chest and a motto. If you’re not for me, then you’re against me. And he showed no mercy to those against him.
Did he consider her one of the enemy now?
“I’m going to take you back to town,” Jake said grimly. “You can clean up and go to work, go shopping or do nothing at all, but you can’t stay here.”
When he tried to grab her hand, she clasped them behind her back and took a few steps away. “The hell I can’t. I’m safe with you—”
“Apparently not,” he said with a snort.
“Then maybe you’re safer with me. You’re not staying here by yourself. You need me here.” And she needed to be there. Needed to see for herself whatever he found. Needed to know he wouldn’t be tempted to sugarcoat the truth for her.
Scowling, Jake loomed over her. “So far, they’ve just been screwing with me. Getting run off the road, getting shot at—they just wanted to scare me off. What if they get serious? What if the next time they’re really trying to stop us?”
She drew a deep breath to level her voice. “Then I’ll need to know so I can do something about it. My father’s not the only one in the family with influence. He’s a Riordan. I’m a Colby. I know senators, representatives, the governor. The daughter of the head of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation is a sorority sister of mine. The attorney general is my grandfather’s godson. I call him Uncle Frank. If they seriously try to stop us, I can get someone to stop them.”
He was wavering—she could see it in his eyes, in the flare of his nostrils, the set of his mouth. He wanted to send her away for her own safety…but he could use her.
Finally he ran his fingers through his hair, then plucked a weed from her hair. “All right.” His tone was grudging, but that was all right. He would get over it.
One of the two keys fit the padlock on the door; the other went to the dead bolt. He unfastened both, hesitated, then turned the knob.
The door opened with a creak on rusty hinges, casting a wedge of light into the foyer. Dust covered the wood floor and floated on the air, drifting along with a strong musty odor. Twenty-two years without disturbance. Even the vandals who would destroy anything had done nothing more than break out the upstairs windows. Even they had realized this was a desolate place better left alone.
Jake entered first, his boots leaving distinct prints in the dust. Kylie was a few steps behind him. Her palms were damp and her chest was tight.
Jillian had spared no expense on the house. The flooring, beneath all its dirt, looked like aged heart of pine. A top-quality Persian runner extended the length of the hall, and there were antiques everywhere.
There was also, just inside the arched doorway into the living room, an ugly dark stain on the floor, soaked into the very fibers of the wood. Blood.
“Jillian died right there,” Jake said numbly. “Stabbed eleven times in the neck, chest and abdomen. The authorities said the number of wounds indicated rage, and the fact that her face was untouched suggested the killer loved her.”
If something that warped could be called love, Kylie thought as she walked past him into the shadowy room. She avoided the bloodstain and glanced at the photos that covered most flat surfaces. Bert and Jillian on tropical beaches, on a sailboat, in snowy mountains. In London, Paris, Rome. A wedding portrait, a first anniversary photo, a pregnant Jillian, a newborn Therese.
In the photographs they looked like the typical happy family…and maybe they had been. Just because Kylie could never be happy with a spouse who was unfaithful didn’t mean Bert hadn’t been. He’d had a beautiful wife and a daughter whom he’d clearly adored. Maybe he’d seen her infidelity as a fair trade-off.
Another arched doorway led into the dining room, where one chair was knocked to the floor and a sterling candlestick lay on its side in the middle of the table, next to a vase of long-dead flowers.
“The theory is that Charley came to the house to persuade Jillian to leave Bert and run off with him.” Jake circled the opposite side of the table, stopping in front of one boarded-up window. “She refused, they argued and he stabbed her. Bert came in, saw what he had done and ran through this room, trying to make it to the back door, where his car was parked just a few yards away. Charley caught him in the kitchen, stabbed him once in the heart, then left.”
Kylie was shaking her head by the time he finished. She stepped around the fallen chair and continued through yet another arch into the kitchen. Another stain marked the floor there, near a marble-topped island beneath a pot rack.
“There are so many holes in that theory.” She opened a door into a butler’s pantry with every small appliance a cook could ever need, then closed it and leaned against it to face Jake. “Charley was charged with second-degree murder in Jillian’s case because he didn’t come here intending to kill her and with first-degree murder for Bert because he killed him while in the commission of a felony.”
Jake nodded. “The weapon was presumably the butcher knife missing from that set.” He gestured to a wood block at the back of one counter that held eight knives in its nine slots.
“So he comes here, they argue, he comes into the kitchen, gets a knife and kills her in the living room. And he does this while Bert is home and liable to walk in any minute.”
Nodding again, Jake wondered if she was as cool as she appeared. Was her skin crawling at all? Did she feel the evil or was the place simply sad to her?
“Then Bert does walk in. He sees what Charley’s done and is horrified. He fears for his life and he tries to flee the house. Alone.”
“Leaving his three-year-old daughter upstairs. No way. She was everything to him. He would have died to protect her.” Just as Charley would have died to protect him. “What if the murder had nothing to do with Jillian? They came up with a theory and manipulated the facts to fit it. But instead of Bert dying because he saw Jillian killed, what if it was the other way around? If Bert was the target and Jillian was the witness?”
“If someone killed him, she walked in, screamed, ran—maybe trying to get upstairs to Therese—and he caught her and killed her.” She shrugged. “It makes more sense than Bert intending to abandon Therese with a murderer in the house.”
Jake massaged his temple with one hand. “Even so, the rest of their theory holds up—gets even stronger, in fact. They’d say Charley killed Bert to get him out of the way, thinking that would leave him a clear field with Jillian. But she still rejected him, even after he killed for her, so she had to die, too.”
Kylie heaved a sigh, then pushed away from the door. “This isn’t helping us with what we came here for. I’m going to start in Jillian’s bedroom. See if she kept any mementos of an affair with Charley or anyone else.”
His first impulse was to go with her, but he restrained it. He was doing okay. He could handle searching the downstairs rooms by himself.
There was a built-in desk near the pantry, clearly Jillian’s domain. A fabric-covered bulletin board held recipes, a phone number or two and a few photographs of Therese, and the drawers were filled with pens, paper clips and other supplies. Cookbooks lined the shelves above. He flipped through each one, looking for a note tucked inside, but found only loose recipes.
Down the hall on the left was Bert’s study, a large room with dark paneling and burgundy drapes. The bits of light leaking in around the boarded windows were barely sufficient to illuminate his way across the room. A porcelain coffee cup sat on the desk, dried residue darkening the inside, and a checkbook, a stack of bills and a pen rested on a leather pad. Bert had been in the middle of paying bills when he’d died. What a way to spend his final minutes—tedium, then terror.
Jake searched the desk an
d the credenza, then opened the top drawer in the file cabinet. Every folder was neatly labeled, but the lighting was too bad to make out the faded type. In the pantry he located a box of trash bags, emptied the contents of the file cabinet into one, then left it near the front door.
There was a library, a sunroom, a utility room and four closets on the first floor. None of them held anything of interest. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and followed the faint sounds Kylie was making to the master suite. It was brighter up there, with no boards over the windows, no glass in the frames. On the downside, instead of a thick layer of dust, everything in the room was crusted with dirt. Leaves littered the carpet and the bed, and water damage showed near each window.
Kylie had gathered a small pile of items on the bed—a jewelry box, some framed photos, a red leather address book. He flipped through the book before dropping it back and turning to look for her. “Find anything?”
Her voice came from the closet. “Birth control pills in Jillian’s bathroom and condoms in the back of her nightstand drawer.”
“To protect from pregnancy with her husband and disease with her lovers?” He moved to stand in the closet door. It was bigger than his bedroom back home and was filled to overflowing: rod after rod of clothing, shelves of shoes and purses, a built-in dresser housing drawers filled with scarves, stockings and lingerie—the sexy, wispy pieces he would expect of the photographed woman in the bikini.
“That would be my guess. Jeez, her friends weren’t exaggerating when they said she spent a lot of money. She must have been a favorite customer at every high-end shop within driving distance.” Kylie was on her knees, pulling out drawers, feeling beneath them, looking behind them. When she finished with the last, he offered his hand and helped her to her feet. She took a step away, stubbing her toe against the dresser, knocking a strip of wood at the bottom loose. She looked at it, looked at him, then knelt again.
The molding fitted easily back into place when she pushed on it and came away easily when she pulled. She removed it completely and held it up to the light coming in the door so he could see there were no nails, no glue. The piece on the end nearest him didn’t so much as wiggle when he nudged it; neither did the one at her end.
Bending low, she looked into the space underneath the bottom drawer, then gingerly reached in. When she pulled out a folder and offered it to him, his stomach knotted.
The folder contained bank statements, filed with the most recent on top, for a savings account in the name of Jillian Franklin and showing a mailing address of a post office box in the nearby town of Bristow. The final statement was for the month before her death, and the amount was well over three hundred thousand dollars.
“Wow,” Kylie murmured. “What was she doing? Prostituting herself? Robbing banks? Stealing Bert blind?”
Jake scanned the activity for the final month—four deposits, no withdrawals. It was the same for the previous month—same dates, same amounts—and the month before that and the month…” Or maybe blackmailing someone. Considering the different dates and amounts, maybe four someones.”
She had reached out to steady his hand so she could see, too, but suddenly her own hand trembled too badly. He knew she was wondering if her father was one of those four—knew she was afraid he was.
Jake wished he could make all this easier for her, but he also knew what it was like to be disillusioned by a parent. Angela had let him down—and Charley—more times than he could count. There wasn’t anything he could do to make it less awful for Kylie besides be there for her when she wanted to talk, when she needed to vent.
Abruptly she turned away, moving to the corner of the closet where two dozen or more jackets and coats hung. “There’s a door at the end of the hall that leads to the attic,” she said, her tone brittle. “Why don’t you check up there while I finish here?” She began patting down each coat, checking the pockets and the lining for anything out of the ordinary.
“Kylie—”
“I’d really like to get all this stuff and get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
He considered pushing it but agreed with her. He would feel more comfortable delving into the details of the Franklins’ lives back in his motel room. “All right. If you need anything…”
She smiled tightly but didn’t stop her search.
The stairs to the attic were narrow and steep, and the space itself was narrow and gloomy. It held a few pieces of furniture covered with canvas cloths and a dozen boxes of Christmas decorations. Therese’s cradle and crib were in one corner, next to a stroller, a walker and a wind-up swing. Maybe she would want those things one day. He would like to have something from his childhood to pass on to his children, but they’d moved too often to lug along anything that wasn’t essential, and Angela hadn’t been sentimental about baby things.
He’d bet Kylie’s baby things were on the mansion’s third floor. Her family kept everything for posterity, she’d said. That would be just as good.
He grimaced. He’d known the woman for less than seventy-two hours and he was thinking about having kids with her? Damn, he was an idiot…but it felt as if they’d been together forever. There was just something about her—some connection. And she felt it, too. She never would have spent last night with him if she didn’t. Sex with someone she’d just met was as much out of character for her as it was for him.
The only records stored in the attic were clearly marked and all premarriage. Jake peeled the brittle tape from a few boxes and looked inside, but they were exactly what the labels said, and none of them looked as if they’d been tampered with since they were first stored.
Dusty, hungry and wanting to wash the smell of the house from his skin, he returned to the second floor, glanced inside two guest rooms, then stopped at the nursery. It had been painted in pastels, lavishly decorated and filled with everything the pampered daughter of a wealthy couple could desire. The covers on the bed were rumpled, and a pink teddy bear lay facedown on the floor beside it, fallen there, no doubt, when Therese had gone looking for her parents.
Therese. In a bloody nightgown, sitting beside her mother’s body.
He shuddered, backed out of the room and called Kylie’s name.
She came out of the master bedroom with her finds in a wicker wastebasket. She looked dusty, too, and as if a shower would hold great appeal. Maybe they could wash each other’s backs.
They left the house, locking it up securely, carrying their cache to the car. As she waited for him to stow the trash bag in the trunk, she gazed across the yard to the garage. “Should we check that out?”
He glanced that way, too, and said shortly, “No. We’ve been here long enough for one day.”
She looked as relieved by his answer as he felt.
Once back in town, he drove straight to the motel, then faced her. “Want to come in?”
She gestured toward herself. “I need to clean up.”
“Yeah, me, too. So…you want to come in?”
Her smile was sweeter for its rarity. “I don’t think so. Why don’t you come over to my place when you’re done? We’ll be more comfortable going through this stuff.”
“Will the senator be there?”
“Probably not. He doesn’t spend much of his days at the house when he’s in town. But even if he is…I own the place. What can he say?”
Jake was pretty sure she’d never had to use that small fact against her father in all the years since her mother had died. He was sorry she’d even thought of it now. “All right. I’ll bring lunch with me.”
She nodded, and they each got out of the car. Swinging his backpack over his shoulder, he started toward the steps, but she stopped him.
“You’d better keep this with you.”
He turned back to find she’d opened the trunk and was lifting the basket out. “I trust you with it.” He didn’t believe she would destroy or conceal evidence from him.
“Thanks.” She smiled briefly before turning grim again.
“But the senator has keys to my car and my house, so I’d feel more comfortable if you kept it.”
How hard had that been? he wondered as he returned to heave the trash bag from the trunk. He took the basket, too, brushing fingers with her in the process. “I’ll see you in a while.”
With a resigned nod, she slid behind the wheel, then drove off.
Chapter 9
For the second time in six hours, Kylie showered, applied makeup and dithered over what to wear. Earlier she’d chosen the slim denim skirt because it made her legs look good. Now she chose jeans because they hid the scratches and bruises she’d gotten when they’d been ambushed.
Despite her words, she’d worried on the way home about inviting Jake over when the senator was back in town. Seeing that the Jag was gone had eased the knot in her stomach, but she still felt a certain discomfort about it. Don’t poke the bear, the saying went, and virtually parading Jake Norris at the Colby home was sure to poke the senator.
But it was her home. If the senator didn’t like it, he could move out.
Jake arrived before she’d had the chance to put on her shoes. She padded barefoot through the house, undid the locks and opened the door. In faded jeans and a red T-shirt, he looked incredible. And he held a brown paper bag that smelled incredible.
“If you’ll take this…” He gave her the bag, then returned to his truck to get his backpack and the Franklins’ belongings.
Since it was a pretty day, she laid out the food—barbecue from a joint on the north edge of town—on the patio table, along with a beer for him and pop for her. While they ate, they talked about the little things that would hold no real interest to anyone but them. He liked NASCAR and had been known to pass entire days fishing. She didn’t like sports, though she occasionally played tennis. He skied, but she had a problem with altitudes in excess of eight thousand feet. He liked rock music, country and classical, and she would rather plug her ears than listen to one note of Bach.
More Than a Hero Page 15
