Whirlpool

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Abruptly Cruz felt uneasy, out of place, like he was the criminal. The setting was too calm, too serene. The air smelled too clean.

  The cottage felt innocent.

  He’d done more than his share of residential prowling over the years. As a federal agent, he’d crept around suspects’ homes without a flicker of conscience. He seldom gave a thought to the privacy of others.

  But tonight he was an intruder. He knew it as surely as he knew he had only nine fingers.

  He had an impulse to withdraw, to leave Laurel Swann in peace.

  Whatever her secrets are, I doubt that they’re important enough to justify this kind of invasion.

  Surprised by the intensity of his reaction, he struggled with the feeling of being in the wrong. Up until that moment, he would have said he had no such scruples. He’d spent his life in the netherworld, pursuing bank robbers and kidnappers, international terrorists, and drug merchants of all stripes. As a result, he didn’t think much of humanity as a whole.

  The exceptions he’d encountered—Cassandra Redpath and Ranulph Gillespie were among the select handful—had only reinforced Cruz’s certainty that, as a species, Homo sapiens wasn’t any better than it had to be.

  Despite that, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that the little beach house in Cambria was not part of the netherworld. It was clean and neat and open. It smelled of ocean spray. He had no right to be here.

  But he was here just the same.

  Slowly he turned around, giving the garage a final look. The shiny new trash can that stood beside the door drew his eye again. He’d learned a lot in the past by trash-diving. Most crooks were stupid. They thought whatever went into the trash was gone forever. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Cops knew better. Out of sight and into the hands of a patient investigator.

  He walked toward the can. He cursed silently when he confirmed that it was indeed metal and already warped by a careless trash collector. Experience told him that he wouldn’t be able to get the lid off quietly. He reached for the lid anyway.

  Experience was right.

  Grimly he struggled with the ill-fitting lid. It had been jammed on hard, but after a few scrapes and one distinct squeal, the lid came free.

  At least the lady of the house should be a sound sleeper, Cruz told himself. The sleep of the innocent. She’ll never know I was here.

  Setting the lid very gently on the concrete floor of the garage, he looked into the can. He didn’t have to go diving. It was right there on top.

  A wad of pale wrapping paper and a shipping label.

  For the first time in his life, he felt more disappointed than exhilarated to find himself in the danger zone again, where no one could be trusted.

  I’m losing my edge. I really believed this Swann female was clean.

  I should have let Cassandra call in Williams and gone back to chasing that fault line.

  Maybe Laurel Swann has had a birthday since the last trash collection. That would explain it. A perfectly innocent present mailed from anywhere on the face of the earth except Tokyo.

  Yet even as he was trying to explain to himself how his instinct about Laurel’s innocence had been so wrong, he was fishing out his small flashlight to have a closer look.

  The pinhole beam reflected harshly off the plastic sleeve that had been glued to the paper. He moved the light, shining it indirectly on the document inside the sleeve. It was a domestic waybill with Laurel’s address on it and had been transported by an international air freight company.

  He peeled a corner of the plastic off the paper. Beneath the plastic was another waybill, one that was marked FOR INTERNATIONAL SHIPMENTS ONLY.

  Without reading any further, he knew the box originally had been addressed to the Damon Hudson Museum of Art in Los Angeles.

  But he read further anyway, wanting to be absolutely certain that Laurel Swann wasn’t as innocent as her cottage.

  The international waybill was addressed to the Damon Hudson Museum of Art.

  Inside Cruz, disappointment struggled with triumph. Neither won. He simply felt tired.

  Then the familiar metallic click of a pistol being cocked sent adrenaline exploding through his body. He froze, thinking fast, knowing that any movement could bring death.

  The sound had come from behind him.

  Though he couldn’t see the pistol, he sensed the black eye of the muzzle staring at him from the shadows. Silently cursing how badly he’d misread Laurel Swann, he braced himself for the blow of a club or a bullet.

  Nothing happened.

  Relief curled through him. Very slowly, he raised his hands to shoulder height, showing he wasn’t armed.

  No one ordered him to hold still. No one said anything at all. The garage was as silent as death.

  By slow degrees he turned his head until he could see a white figure standing in the darkness of the garage. A woman. Her arms were raised in classic target-shooting posture.

  From the corner of his eye, he could just make out a pinpoint of Day-Glo orange where the muzzle of the gun would be. That dot was known in the trade as a speed sight. This wasn’t a fashionable purse pistol. This was a blow-your-head-off gun.

  And every taut line of the woman’s body told Cruz she knew just how to use it.

  “It’s your move, Laurel Cameron Swann,” he said quietly.

  15

  Cambria

  Monday night

  The sound of her own name shocked Laurel. It had been the last thing she expected to hear from the mouth of the prowler who’d been rummaging in her garage. The voice was a surprise too. Low, almost lazy, calm. Soothing. Reassuring.

  Gentle.

  Suddenly Laurel knew how the wolf had caught Red Riding Hood. It was the dark, irresistible lure of his voice.

  “Are you going to shoot?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said honestly.

  The husky uncertainty of her voice made the hair stir at the base of Cruz’s skull.

  “But when you decide, I’ll be the first to know, right?” he asked sardonically.

  She fought a frightening impulse to laugh. Velvet voice and a sense of humor too. Red Riding Hood went up against a stacked deck. At least I’ve got a gun. Poor old Red only had a basket of cookies.

  Laurel backed through the small door into the house, keeping the intruder’s spine in the center of her field of fire.

  “Walk backward through the door,” she said, “and keep your hands up.”

  When he obeyed, the relief she felt was so great that for a moment the gun wavered.

  But only for a moment. The sight of the prowler backing toward her definitely wasn’t reassuring. Her first impression was of size and overwhelming darkness. Dark hair, dark sweater, dark jacket, dark jeans, dark shoes. Dark everything.

  The second impression was of catlike coordination. Not a domesticated cat. A wild one. The kind that should be kept behind one-inch steel bars.

  My God, she thought in dismay. He’s as big as Dad. No, he’s bigger. And quicker.

  Then the man turned his head slightly. The pale flash of his eyes was as unnerving as his size. He watched her with an intensity that was chilling.

  He’s waiting for me to make a mistake. Just like Dad told me would happen if I ever held a gun on a professional.

  She took a hidden, steadying breath as Jamie Swann’s lessons came rushing back to her. She’d agreed to let her father teach her how to shoot only if he also taught her how to avoid shooting. He’d done just that. It showed in everything she did now.

  She kept her distance from the man she held at gunpoint. She never took her eyes off him. She kept the muzzle trained on the middle of his back as they made their way into the house.

  “Go to your left, to the windows,” she said. “No! Don’t turn around!”

  The man did as he was ordered.

  While she groped for the wall switch on the stairway that led to the upper floor, Laurel kept the man silhouetted against the moonlight comin
g through the windows.

  Electric light flooded the room.

  Seeing better didn’t help. It simply proved that her first impression had underestimated the man. He was strong, from his wide shoulders to his muscular thighs. Being indoors in the light only emphasized his graceful, coiled way of moving.

  She’d never been so clearly aware of the unfair difference between male and female physical strength.

  Now he was looking around her workroom, taking in the details like a computer scanner. Then he made a half turn and looked at her.

  Shimmering, ice-blue, clear, riveting in their intensity, his eyes held her as surely as her gun held him. Then he looked away from her eyes to her body.

  His expression changed subtly, unmistakably.

  Too late Laurel remembered that she was wearing nothing but the thin silk nightshirt she’d grabbed when she heard a noise in the garage. Static electricity made the cloth stick to her body, particularly to her breasts and hips. The prowler was noting every place the silk clung. Especially at the top of her thighs.

  “Maybe you should get down on your face,” she said, irritated by his frank scrutiny.

  He lifted his glance, trying hard not to smile. “It’s not necessary,” he said gently.

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  He looked at the muzzle of the gun. “That’s a big pistol. Are you sure you know how to handle it?”

  “The safety is off, the hammer is cocked, and there’s a round in the chamber,” she said in a clipped voice. “All I have to do is remember how to pull the trigger.”

  “Not how,” he corrected. “When and if.”

  She fought a smile. Her father had told her the same thing, in the same way, emphasis and all.

  “Your job is easier,” she retorted. “All you have to remember is that you don’t want to give me a reason to shoot.”

  “I can handle that.”

  She didn’t doubt it.

  As the probability of having to pull the trigger became less with every passing instant, she found herself noticing the weight of the pistol more. As her father had pointed out more than once, most women didn’t have the shoulder muscle to hold a weight at arm’s length for long. Laurel was no exception.

  On the other hand, the prowler looked like he could hold a rifle at arm’s length in each hand and not notice. And he was slowly turning toward her, half facing her now.

  “That’s far enough,” she said.

  He’s damned good-looking, she thought distantly, if you don’t mind eyes that make ice look warm.

  But the man kept turning very, very slowly, watching the tension of Laurel’s trigger finger. When she began gathering slack, he stopped moving. By then, he was three-quarters facing her.

  Suddenly she was sure she knew him. Yet she knew she didn’t. She wouldn’t forget meeting a man like him.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Cruz Rowan.”

  The name, like the three-quarters profile, was oddly familiar.

  “What are you doing in my garage?”

  “I’m on an Easter egg hunt.”

  Adrenaline pumped through Laurel’s already overloaded system. For the space of a breath all she could think was how incredibly good it would be to have Cruz Rowan on her side.

  But he wasn’t on her side and wishing was dangerous.

  An approving smile curved the tight line of Cruz’s mouth, softening the hard planes of his face.

  She realized that he was appraising the clinging silk of her nightshirt again. She dropped the gun muzzle until it was aimed somewhere just below the buckle of his belt.

  “Easy, Laurel,” he said. “I don’t want to get shot. You don’t want to shoot me.”

  “Don’t bet anything important on it.”

  “You’re an amateur,” he said gently. “If you were going to shoot me, you’d have done it by now. If you were going to call the cops, you’d have done that too.”

  “I’m keeping my options open. Besides, you look…familiar.”

  Cruz knew there was only one reason he would seem familiar to Laurel Swann. Same old bullshit. Again.

  She watched a look that was both shuttered and weary come to his face. Then his expression became neutral, a mask that gave away nothing of what lay beneath.

  For a moment she had an utterly irrational impulse to apologize to him and then to soothe away the brackets around his mouth with gentle touches.

  You’re losing it, she warned herself. Why didn’t Dad warn me that the first man I held a gun on would also be the first man who looked interesting enough to take risks for?

  Grimly she gathered her scattering thoughts.

  “Take three steps to your left,” she said with a totally false calm. “Turn all the way toward me.”

  As Cruz stepped fully into the light from the stairwell, he turned to face Laurel.

  Silently she studied him. She told herself she was only trying to identify him. She certainly wasn’t memorizing him, wasn’t noting the lines of past pain and present tension, wasn’t looking at the clean curve of his lips and wondering how they would feel on her body, wasn’t wondering if there were names for all the colors of blue crystal she could see in his eyes.

  “Well?” he said neutrally.

  “You’re handsome enough, but you already know that. You’re strong and physically confident, and you know that too. Have we met somewhere before?”

  He smiled ironically. “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”

  “To hell with lines. Have we met?”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be?” she demanded.

  “You have the most remarkable eyes of any woman I’ve ever seen. The rest of you is damned memorable, too. Especially in that scrap of silk.”

  Well, she told herself, I asked for it. And Cruz is the man who can deliver.

  Tantalizing thought.

  “All right,” she said through her teeth. “We haven’t met. Then why are you so familiar to me?”

  “You tell me.”

  Deliberately Laurel studied the rest of him. Her glance went slowly from his black hair to his wide shoulders, narrow hips, and muscular legs. When she reached his black athletic shoes, she looked him over again. If the scrutiny made him uneasy, it didn’t show.

  For the first time she looked at his hands. They were beautifully made, with long, slender fingers—except for the index finger of his left hand, which was little more than a stub.

  Cruz saw where Laurel was looking. He fought the impulse to ball his left hand into a fist.

  Then her golden eyes widened in shock and he knew she’d remembered why he seemed familiar. He’d seen that sudden change come over other people when they recalled his face from the television screen or the front pages of the newspaper.

  Notoriety like that was hard to live with. It had driven a wedge between Cruz and his friends, between Cruz and what little family he had left in the world, and between Cruz and himself.

  But to see the shock and surprise and loathing spread across the face of the most interesting woman he’d ever met was infuriating.

  Yeah, Cassandra, he thought bitterly. Time for me to get past it, huh? What about the rest of the world? When will they get past it?

  He waited for Laurel to speak. When she didn’t, he did. “I take it you read the newspapers.”

  The sound of his voice made her flinch. Gone was the dark velvet and gentle reassurance. Cold, brittle, sarcastic, his tone could have frozen sunlight.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen that look before.”

  The combination of bitterness and acceptance in his voice reminded Laurel of her mother every time Jamie Swann had left his family to chase an adrenaline-filled dream.

  Whatever else this man has been and done, Laurel thought, something hurt him all the way to his soul. Like my mother. But unlike my mother, he’s still alive. Still hurting.


  The sound of the safety snapping on shocked Cruz even more than hearing the safety come off in the garage had. In raw disbelief he watched the gun muzzle point away from him to the floor. Slowly he lowered his hands to his sides.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You discover that I’m the cold-blooded bastard who murdered two teenagers in front of God and a photojournalist, and you put your pistol on safe!”

  She looked at the gun as if surprised to see it pointing at the floor. “It was a long time ago. And they weren’t teenagers.”

  “It was five years. And one of them was nineteen.”

  Frowning, Laurel tried to understand why she’d instinctively decided that Cruz wouldn’t harm her. All she could remember of the incident in front of the South African consulate in Los Angeles was that two young black men had been killed by a white FBI agent.

  Then the city had gone up in flames. Rioting, looting, shooting, and editorials about how society once again had failed its black citizens.

  But all she recalled clearly was the photo, which had become the symbol of all that was wrong in the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the chaotic instant after the two men were shot, a news photographer had snapped a chilling portrait of the FBI marksman who had fired the fatal bullets. Most people had looked at the photo and seen a killer who was intent, cold, brutal.

  Inhuman.

  The photo had won a Pulitzer Prize. It was reprinted time and time again. Politicians and journalists, demagogues and social critics, each found his or her own meaning in the portrait of the federal shooter. In his black Kevlar vest and with a black watch cap covering his hair, Cruz Rowan had been the image of a mindless, brutal automaton, a government executioner with a sniper rifle and two more notches on his gun butt.

  Three congressional investigations had done little to alter the image, despite the fact that no grounds for any charges against Cruz had ever been discovered.

  When Laurel looked at the sniper’s face five years later in the shadows of her own workroom, Cruz still seemed dark and cold. But not inhuman. He was a hard man, probably a dangerous man, but far from brutish.

  “There’s more to you than met the camera’s eye,” she said simply.