Ronnie nearly laughed. The man clearly hadn’t known Crystal if he assumed for even one minute she would’ve taken the time to do anything so responsible. That sort of long-term planning had never been her sister’s strong suit. “I’m afraid not.”
“Then my suggestion is that you go see an attorney when you get back to Seattle and have him or her petition the court on your behalf for custody of your niece. As it stands now, you have no legal status, since Ms. Davis died intestate and left no provision for her daughter’s care. Gaining guardianship would also address the question of child support. Eddie had a legal agreement with your sister to pay a generous monthly stipend for Elizabeth’s support. But he also had the wherewithal to flee to a life of luxury in a country that holds no extradition treaty with the United States, so his assets were frozen when he failed to appear for trial. In order for a portion of those assets to be released for the child’s support, you’ll need to be appointed her legal guardian. It would be a conflict of interest for me to represent you, but I’d be happy to recommend someone in your area. I know several competent Seattle attorneys.”
“I’d truly appreciate that, Mr. Peavy.”
“Please. Call me Neil.”
“Neil, then. Thank you.” Finished with her water, she started to set the cup on the desk, but its shining surface, looking far too capable of being marred by a water ring, made her hesitate. Securing her purse and coat on her lap with her free hand to keep everything from spilling, she set the cup on the floor. When she straightened she saw the lawyer observing her with a look that, for just an instant, made her feel like a classless bimbo.
But she must have imagined the hint of scorn, for he simply gave her a mellow smile and said, “Not a problem. I’ll just write down a couple of names here, along with their respective phone numbers.”
“I probably should’ve done something about this already,” she admitted. “But everything has happened so fast that I’ve simply taken it one day at a time. I can see the wisdom in establishing a legal claim, though, so please don’t undervalue the importance of your advice. You’ve shown me my goal, and given me a starting place to reach it. For that alone, both Lizzy and I thank you.”
“Then you’re both very welcome.” He finished writing down the promised information on the back of a business card and leaned forward to pass it to her.
Veronica set her bag on the desk to keep it from dumping onto the floor and reached for the proffered card. As she leaned forward to accept it, however, her coat started to slip. Her quick attempt to anchor it sent Neal farther across the desk as if to lend her a hand. His elbow caught a corner of the oak photo frame, sending it skittering toward the edge of the desk. Veronica made a grab for it, but all that accomplished was to knock her purse into her lap and her coat to the floor.
She laughed at her own clumsiness as her hand closed over the frame. “Well, that’ll teach me to use more care folding my coat,” she said as she looked down at the photograph in the frame. “The slippery stuff’s supposed to go on the inside.” Then shock froze the laughter in her throat.
Rather than the photo of a loved one she’d expected to see, it was a disturbingly familiar snapshot of a coconut grove and a beautiful coral-pink building of soaring arches and minaret-topped turrets…with a small brown and white dog lifting its leg against one of the trees in the foreground.
Dear God. It was the exact same photo taken during Crystal’s getaway with her “influential” man. Although influential wasn’t quite the word Ronnie would use to describe a lawyer who slept with one party in a custody battle while representing the other.
She took a deep breath and held it. She’d have to be a fool not to connect the dots, but her sudden suspicion that she was alone with her sister’s killer was unbelievably horrendous. She had to keep her cool until she could get to Coop. It was the only thought she could seem to hang on to.
She had to tell Cooper.
It seemed like a millennium since she’d glanced at the photograph, but in reality only seconds had passed. Carefully replacing it on the desk, she shoved down the awful fear and gave Peavy a strained smile. “You know what they say,” she said with the equanimity perfected dodging drunken hands at the Tonk. “You can take the girl out of the small town, but you just can’t take the small town out of the girl.” She shrugged, gathered her coat, and rose to her feet. “I won’t take any more of your time.” She slipped into her coat and made a production of checking the floor for lost articles from her purse. When she felt she could meet the lawyer’s gaze without giving herself away, she straightened and offered her hand. “You’ve been very helpful, and I plan to take your advice.” Just two more minutes and you’re out of here, she told herself as Peavy rounded his desk to accompany her to the door. All you have to do is keep it together for two minutes more.
She managed to do precisely that, chatting lightly as they walked down the hall. When they reached the front door she was sure she was home free. But just as she began to pull it open, Peavy’s hand came over her shoulder and pushed the door closed again. Her heart climbing to her throat, she gave him a coolly questioning look over her shoulder. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “This really is quite unfortunate, but I’m afraid I can’t let you go.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face him, and the easy smile on his face, so at odds with the cold flatness of his eyes, chilled her. “I admire your efforts, and your ability to think on your feet, Ms. Davis, but you don’t have a very good poker face. The photo apparently gave me away—I assume that slut Crystal kept a copy for herself?”
“I don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about,” she said with chilly dignity, “but I do take exception to your language regarding my sister.” She tried to shrug out of his grasp. “Now kindly remove your hands and allow me to leave. Lizzy will be getting home from school soon, and I still have a dozen things—”
The sharp shake he gave her shocked her into silence. “Don’t play the innocent with me, missy. I didn’t get to be smarter than the average bear by being taken for a fool.”
She blinked. “The average what?”
Ignoring her question, he said dreamily, “I love that picture. It gives me a tingle every time I look at it, remembering what I got away with.” Then he gave her that awful charming smile again. “Let’s you and I take a little ride.”
“Let’s not.” Getting in a car with this man sounded like a dangerous plan. Veronica intended to stay right where she was until his office staff returned from lunch. Which, God willing, would be any minute now.
“Are you laboring under the delusion I’m asking you?” he inquired gently. Releasing her, he stepped back. “This is not a request. Get your keys, because we are going for a ride.”
She grabbed for the door handle and jerked it open. But as she drew breath to scream, she was yanked back and spun around so fast her head swam. Neil’s hands clamped around her throat, cutting off her breath.
“You Davis women have a real knack for making me angry,” he said with that appalling pleasantness, then eased up on the pressure constricting her wind-pipe. But his hands remained in place around her neck, his thumbs an implicit threat as they pressed lightly against the hollow of her throat. “You keep pushing me,” he said mildly, “and I’ll squeeze the life out of you where you stand.”
Her heart felt as if it were trying to pound its way out of her chest, but she met his gaze as coolly as she could. “And how will you explain my corpse littering your lobby?”
“No explanation will be necessary.” The chilling affability never left his face as he looked her in the eye. “I’ll dump your cold, stiff remains in my closet until I can do something a little more permanent about them after the office closes for the night.”
That chilled her right to the bone, but damned if she’d let him see. She raised her chin. “You’d never get away with it. People know about my appointm
ent with you.”
“‘People’ being Coop Blackstock, I presume?” He laughed in her face. “Big deal. The man’s an itinerant bartender, for God’s sake. Let him ask any question he wants. I’ll simply act properly puzzled.” He gave her a look of baffled concern that appeared all too genuine to her horrified eyes and said with warm sincerity, “Ms. Davis is missing, you say? I don’t understand this—I just saw her this afternoon, and she was fine when she left my office.”
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered. “Why did you kill my sister?”
“Because she was a greedy little bitch who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. We had a mutually satisfying relationship—and since I knew to the penny what Chapman was worth—I even helped her squeeze a few extra dollars out of the man to support her little glitter habit. It should have been enough for her. But she always wanted more, and when Eddie got fed up with paying her extortion and instructed me to file for custody of the child, everything spiraled out of control.”
“So you killed her?”
“I didn’t set out to, no. But Crystal never knew when to call it a day. She kept demanding I get Eddie off her back, and it wasn’t for any sentimental attachment to her little girl, I can tell you. She was afraid if she lost custody, she’d also lose the cash cow Chapman had been up until then.”
Veronica cringed, fearing he was right.
“She refused to listen when I explained I couldn’t simply command Eddie’s compliance,” Neil continued. “She became more and more insistent that I do something, which was annoying enough. But then she went too far.” He looked at Veronica, and for the first time his fraudulent geniality was nowhere in evidence. “She threatened to expose our affair if I didn’t do something.”
Oh, Crystal, Veronica thought in despair. Why did you never think things through?
Then the awful smile was back. “Killing her probably wasn’t what she had in mind,” he said in an amused voice. “But that’s what little girls get when they push their luck. I have a position to maintain in this town. There was certainly no way I was about to allow some Baker Street trollop to ruin me.”
Low social status made one a perfectly acceptable candidate for murder? Veronica hit her flash point. She gave Neil a hard shove that caught him off guard and sent him staggering back. Once again she tore open the door, then kicked back at the man reaching for her, and plunged for freedom.
She made it through the doorway before her hair was gripped from behind, jerking her to a halt. The gleamingly sharp-edged blade of a Swiss army knife twitched into view and waved menacingly back and forth before her eyes.
“Don’t be fooled by its length,” Neil murmured in her ear. “Because it will do the job quite handily if you give me any more grief.” The blade disappeared, but a second later she felt its tip scratch against the nape of her neck as Neil pulled the law office door closed behind them. “Make one peep and I’ll show you exactly how much damage a blade this size can do.”
“Figures you’d be one of those guys who insist it’s not the size that counts, but what you can do with it,” she muttered as he directed her to her car. “It’s always the ones who don’t have the size.”
The tip of the blade pressed a little harder against her nape. “You Davis girls just don’t know when to zip your pretty little lips, do you? Keep it up, and I’ll be forced to zip them for you. Permanently.”
Like you don’t plan to do that anyway. Veronica had no illusions on that score; she knew too much now.
But damned if she’d go without a fight.
He stopped at the passenger side of her car. “Un-lock it and climb in slowly,” he ordered.
Not having any choice, she fumbled her keys out of her purse and did as she was told. She contemplated diving for the driver’s door, figuring that while her lower body might be in danger of getting slashed, the small blade wouldn’t do anywhere near the damage it was capable of inflicting on her vulnerable neck.
But Peavy gripped her arm and climbed in right alongside her, not giving her even an inch to maneuver. He closed the door behind him, and gave her that damn smile again.
“Buckle up,” he advised. “We wouldn’t want you getting hurt.”
25
“I’M PROBABLY MAKING A BIG DEAL OUT OF NOTHING,” Coop said as he gunned the car up Commercial Street toward the city center.
“But you don’t think so, do you?” asked Eddie at his side.
“No.” He glanced over at his brother. “Ronnie never hesitates to tell me I’m full of shit when she thinks I am. It ties my gut up in knots just to think what she might say if she tumbles to the truth about Peavy.”
“The chances of that happening are pretty slim, don’t you think?”
“All but nonexistent.” But his nerves kept sparking a warning to get there now, all the same.
Suddenly he was jolted out of his preoccupation. “Jesus!” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s broad-freakin’-daylight—if anyone sees you, they’ll haul your ass off to jail so fast we won’t see you for dust. And that’s only if the cops don’t shoot first and ask questions second.”
“I don’t think we have to worry too much about the cops,” Eddie said wryly. “Fossil’s police department is hardly what anyone would classify as SWAT central. But if we do get stopped, we’ll tell them the truth: that I was on my way to the station to turn myself in.”
Coop stared at him for a second. “Are you serious?”
“Yes. I shouldn’t have run in the first place—it was a chickenshit, knee-jerk reaction. And despite all those nights I spent rabidly planning different ways for taking Lizzy on the lam, I know it’s out of the question. So it’s time I faced the music. Once we’ve made sure Veronica is okay, we’ll go to the station and see if we can’t straighten out this mess.”
“You really aren’t the kid whose image I’ve been packing around in my mind all these years, are you?” Coop asked slowly. It shouldn’t have come as any big revelation, since on an intellectual level he’d realized for a long time now that his half-brother had grown up.
Emotionally, though, and despite his brother’s earlier willingness to take responsibility for his actions, a revelation was exactly what it felt like.
“I’m sure it comes as a shock, considering my recent behavior,” Eddie replied wryly. “But the truth is, I quit being a kid the day mine was born.”
Coop was suffused with a sudden sense of all the years that had been lost. “I haven’t been much of a brother to you,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry.”
“What?” Eddie turned to stare at him. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“I haven’t been there for you—haven’t been around nearly enough. Not when I should have been.”
“Hey.” Eddie shrugged. “We’ve covered this ground. Besides, we’ve seen each other.”
“Yeah, when you made the effort during your business trips to my side of the country.” He thought about it a moment. “It’s kind of ironic, really. Here I’ve been locked into thinking of you as this perpetual kid…when the truth is I’m the one who needs to grow up and get on with it. I’ve spent too damn many years letting Mom’s opinion of me dictate my actions, and it’s kept me from coming back to see you—if that meant having to return to this part of the world. Never mind the way my feelings for her years after her death, for crissake, have kept me from…” Ruthlessly, he chopped off that conversational tack. Thinking of the way he’d screwed up with Veronica as well wasn’t something he could afford to contemplate right now. Not and hang on to the last vestige of focus he had left.
So he concentrated on the things he could control. “I’ll tell you something that being in Fossil has taught me, though. It’s my loss that I missed out on so much of your life.” Pulling up to a red light, he looked over and met Eddie’s gaze. “But I give you my word that those days are over. From now on, I plan to be around a lot more for you and Lizzy.” Then he grinned. “Whom, incidentally, I’ve enjoyed the hell
outta getting to know. She is one sugarcoated little heartbreaker.”
Eddie’s face creased in a tender smile. “Yeah, she’s a peach, isn’t she? And I’ll tell you something, James. Maybe my taking a powder wasn’t a totally bad thing, if it got you out here where you could get to know my baby. Not to mention that if you hadn’t come to Fossil, no one ever would’ve tumbled to Neil being the one responsible for Crystal’s death. So let’s go collect Veronica. Then we can concentrate on—”
“Holy shit!” Coop craned around to stare as a familiar blue Volvo passed him, going in the opposite direction. “Hey! That was her!”
“Who?” Eddie twisted around to look also.
“Ronnie.” An icy fist of apprehension clenched his gut as he looked for a place to hang a U. “She’s not alone,” he said grimly. “I couldn’t see exactly who was with her through those tinted windows, but I can tell you this much. There’s a man in her car.”
Never let them transport you. The words kept repeating in Veronica’s head until she felt ready to scream. What on earth had she been thinking? Aren’t you the woman who said, “Well, duh,” when the experts on that Oprah episode about learning how to defend yourself said never let your assailant transport you?
No one had mentioned, though, how good sense and rational thought flew out the window when one was terrified. Too late, she realized she should have taken her chances back there in the parking lot. How likely was it that Peavy would’ve killed her right outside his own law offices?
Not very, genius. Stupid appeared to be the word all right. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
“Did you say something?” Peavy’s voice was patently amused.
Eat shit and die, you rat-faced bugger. Conscious of the knife point that rested against the side of her neck, she pressed her lips together and kept the suggestion to herself.
Head Over Heels Page 27
