"So, why did you date him?" Damn, he didn't want to ask that question, but it came out in full force, as if it had a will of its own.
Helen looked away, blinking, with her mouth a thin, contrite line. "He was nice to me. Mostly, I spent my weekends with my mother. I was lonely, she was lonely…" She trailed off. Then she added, "It was nothing serious. He even said there wouldn't be any commitment until I was ready. He was good at guessing how I felt. What I wanted to hear, too."
Oh, yeah, that fit Cooms very well. "And you never suspected Cooms of anything illegal?"
"No!" Her eyebrows shot up. She seemed to want to say more, and when he waited patiently, she continued, "Well, only once. He mentioned he was paying off some politicians and some…well, he was drunk at the time, so I didn't say anything about it later. I figured it was either he was boasting or that maybe all businessmen get kickbacks." She threw up her hands. "We hear about it on the news all the time!"
Bingo. Nick leaned forward, but stopped when her eyes widened and her mouth softened. He ached to ask her more about Cooms, about the corruption. Instead, stupidly, he knew, he asked, "Any other boyfriends?"
"The only other man I see regularly is my landlord." She shook her head. "He keeps an eye on me. Like he's doing me a favor. He's harmless."
"Have you been back to your apartment?"
"Not since…" She shuddered. "Not for over a week." She looked up at him, and he knew she was gauging his reaction to her words. "Do you think someone has been through my place, too?"
Meeting those dark blue eyes directly, he wished he could pigeonhole her personality as easily as he had others like Cooms. He couldn't, though, and that fact irritated the hell out of him.
Her mother's home had been broken into and she was upset, but now, as she faced the possibility that her own place had suffered the same fate, she remained controlled, but wary. Of him? He didn't like the suspicion he saw in her eyes as she looked at him. But what could he expect?
"It's hard to say why someone broke in here." He scanned the room again. "It wasn't for the electronics. They're still here. But if it had anything to do with Cooms, it's logical to assume they'd also go through your apartment to find whatever they're looking for."
Fear flickered past her expression, the first time since he'd mentioned her apartment. "But what are they after? Do you know?"
He hated himself and all the training drilled into him for so long. It was all he could do to resist telling her the truth. She was better off thinking he was involved with Cooms. It kept her wary of him. It kept him from accidentally jeopardizing the lives of all the undercover operatives involved.
Did that also mean he didn't believe her innocence?
Helen took a step forward. He'd already decided to stamp her with the timid stamp, but he'd seen her when she felt her mother was being threatened. She had turned combative damn quick. Now, she wore a similar, albeit milder look. "Whatever they're after, I don't have it." Her words were thick with warning.
If he could go to her apartment by himself, he would, but not knowing what to look for would make it futile. He hated to do this. "Get your coat. We'll go check out your apartment."
He watched her disappear into the kitchen. Along with the noise of her coat scraping a kitchen chair along the floor, he heard a distinct chink of a ceramic lid being lifted and dropped into place again.
* * *
Helen followed Nick to his SUV, far slower than she should have. He'd asked her why she didn't live with her mother. A valid question, though the answer still hurt. How could she tell him she'd felt so lost after her father's death, she'd foolishly become involved with a man who'd stolen from her? Scott Jackson had drained her bank account and her overdraft protection. In order to stop the blasted bank from pressuring her own mother, she'd had to move out and pay it all back in high interest installments. When Jamie had entered her life, she'd been more than wary, but he'd been good at saying what she'd wanted to hear. No commitments. Let's just keep each other company for a while.
She climbed into the SUV. Not since her father died had she struggled so much with uncertainty. No. She had to be strong. She could be strong. Even while Nick had somehow insinuated himself in to her life.
She couldn't let him get any closer. He'd been paid off by Jamie. She knew that. Jamie had let slip that dangerous tidbit on more than one occasion.
And Momma was missing. Her heart seemed to squeeze shut when she considered her mother's safety. Where could she be? Could she trust Nick to help her? Like she'd trusted Scott, then Jamie?
Too late, she realized that she hadn't called Aunt June. As soon as they got to her place she would. At least she could put one person at ease, even though partially, using what Aunt June might consider a lie.
Helen directed Nick to her place, in as few words as possible. Talking took too much emotion. Too much effort.
They reached the large Victorian house within a few minutes. No sooner had she climbed out, than her landlord, Chester Ellis, zipped out of his ground-floor apartment. Helen rented the second-floor apartment from him, while the attic, now a studio apartment, was rented to a quiet university student.
"Helen!" Chester called out, jogging up to them. Chester wore his usual padded plaid shirt, his thin chest barely making a dent against the suspenders that held up his work pants.
"Hello, Chester."
Chester threw a suspicious glance at Nick as he rounded the front of the truck. "I'm so glad you're safe. You know, I called the police because you hadn't been back for a week."
Helen smiled thinly. Chester meant well and she suspected he was halfway in love with her, despite there being at least a twenty year age difference. He always kept a look out for her, though, and she appreciated that.
"I was away unexpectedly. I—I'm not staying, but I've just…come to…"
"To pick up some things," Nick finished for her.
Chester backed up, hurt lingering on his narrow face. But Helen knew from past experience that Chester wasn't going to let her get away that quickly. "I had to let the police into your apartment, Helen. I was worried and I knew you…" His voice trailed away as he shrugged.
She turned at the porch steps and looked at him. "Knew I'd what?"
"Um, that you'd have a picture of yourself in there, so I—the police—found a picture of you on top of your fridge. I let them have it. That way the police could keep an eye out for you." His face reddened.
Helen caught Nick's skeptical glare and offered a stronger smile at Chester. "It's okay. You did the right thing."
Striding past the older man, Nick steered her up to the door. "Do you have your key?"
"Here!" Chester interjected, pulling on a tractable wire case on his empty belt loop. Keys jangled in his hand as he scrambled to find the right one.
"Thank you," Nick said, putting himself between Helen and her landlord. "We'll let ourselves out."
Up in her apartment, she shut the door behind Nick and surveyed her tiny living room.
"Is that guy always like that?" Nick asked.
She nodded. "He's single and I think he's a bit lonely."
Nick said nothing, but it wasn't hard for her to sense his disapproval. Too bad. She wasn't looking for Nick's opinion.
"Let's check out each room, shall we?" he said.
They moved from room to room. Everything seemed to be in place, nothing obviously missing, except the photograph. But it could take hours, maybe even days, to find if something had been taken. Nick stayed at her heels, his body heat bombarding her in every tiny room of her apartment. She stayed only a minute in her bedroom.
Back in the living room, she sank down on the couch.
Nick remained standing. "This Chester, what does he do for a living?"
Helen leaned back and shut her eyes. "Nothing. He's retired and rents these apartments to augment his pension. He's harmless, Nick."
She heard him grunt, but couldn't care less if he agreed or not. All she wanted to do was close
out the nightmare this past week had been. Her apartment was fine, safer than her mother's house, more comfortable than the shelter.
She opened her eyes. "I'm not going back to the shelter, Nick."
He was standing near the TV, peering out one of the long, old-fashioned windows to the driveway below. "Yes, you are."
She moved in front of the TV. "Nothing has been touched here. Chester's always home and I have a good lock on the door. Look, Jamie is dead. He was why I ran away in the first place. You should be focusing on finding my mother. There must be something you can do. And I should stay here in case she calls."
Nick let out an impatient noise. "We can report it, but the police will ask you to wait. Unless she needs care or medicine."
"No. She's healthy." She swallowed. "Maybe she'll call."
"Neither of us believe she's out shopping. Helen, Cooms was murdered and Clive Darlington, who is out there somewhere, is wanted for assaulting you. He would know where you live because that sort of information is readily available. Plus he worked for Cooms." He peered into her face. "You don't believe you're safe here any more than I do."
So he saw through her thinly veiled need to keep her distance. She shoved her glance from his sturdy, long-legged frame down to her TV stand.
Her tapes were mixed up, not in the neat line they usually were in.
"Did you hear me, Helen?"
She dropped to her knees in front of the stand.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"My tapes. Someone has been through them."
Nick bent down. "Chester?"
"No." She glanced up at him and acquiesced. "At least I can't see any reason for it. I know what you're thinking. Yes, he's been in here before. I even caught him once when I came home early. He said he was checking out the radiators. But he's never shown any interest in my tapes." She reached out to touch them.
Nick caught her arm. "Don't. I'll ask the Major Crimes Unit to check them for fingerprints."
Helen pulled her arm away. The mere touch of his hand did things to her system. Her tired, bone-weary system.
Oh, no. She didn't want to feel that way again. Not the way she'd felt when she lay on his couch, while he covered her body with kisses and made her a slave to her half-starved emotions. She couldn't allow herself to be moved by a man who could be involved with whatever illegal activities Jamie pursued.
Or with her mother's disappearance.
She bit back a groan of fatigue as she stood.
"What's on these tapes?"
"My life. Before my father died, he had all our old eight-millimeter film put on video. My mother gave them to me after she bought her new house." She tried to rub away the ache growing in her forehead. "No one would be interested in my home movies."
"Your landlord might be, if you're the star."
Helen turned away. "I never encouraged his crush, all right? He's been in my apartment before because he's my landlord. If he wanted to rummage through my tapes, he could have done so anytime in the last few years. Why now?"
"When he reported you missing, he let the officers in here to borrow a photograph of you. How would he know where one was?"
Helen pulled a slight face, wondering if Nick would think she was taking offense to his suggestion that Chester was a suspect. Or a lover. He thought that of Jamie, too. She shuddered. "One of Jamie's friends had snapped that picture. Jamie took the film. But he gave me the photo later on. I had no desire to frame it, so it ended up on my fridge. When it fell off once, I threw it up on top. Chester must have seen it at some time."
"And Cooms? Had he been here often?" Nick asked.
She turned to him, frowning. Was he holding his breath, waiting for her answer? Surely neither of them wanted her to elaborate on whether or not Cooms had been in her bedroom? Didn't he believe her when she said their dates were only casual? No way was she going to get involved again. He should trust her on that one. She said, "That's none of your business, Nick."
He blinked twice, and she grimaced. All right, maybe it was a legitimate question. "Actually, there was one evening that he showed up here with Chinese takeout and suggested we watch some of those tapes. I know. It seemed odd that he should be interested, but hey, it was only home videos, and I figured he'd get bored long before I would. So we started at tape number one. Me eating ice cream at six months old." She shook her head. "I fell asleep. It was hardly riveting stuff. I think Jamie got as far as the third tape before he nodded off."
Nick walked over to her phone and called the police station, reminding her to call Aunt June.
"They're sending someone over right now. Quiet night, I guess," he said, after hanging up.
Fifteen minutes later, the officer she'd given her statement to, a corporal named Mark Rowlands, showed up with another officer. Nick went downstairs to let them in, while she stood at the top, watching Chester peer curiously around the corner. Nick led the way up. "Long day for you," he commented to Mark.
Mark agreed. "And it's going to get longer. I've been assigned to help Saint John with the investigation. We're going to put in a lot of overtime on this case. I'll be lucky if I get home at all this week." He said hello to Helen when he reached the top of the stairs. "Ms. Eastman, is there anything else you feel has been touched?"
She shook her head and moved to one side, while the men stooped down in front of the TV.
Later, as Mark and the other officer were finishing up, Nick asked, "What did you find?"
"A couple of sets of prints on a few tapes." Mark straightened. "The TV stand is clean and so are the doors. Ms. Eastman, I'll need you to give me a set of fingerprints for comparison."
She sat down at the coffee table and offered her hand, her gaze darting from the officer holding her hand to Mark and finally to Nick. "My mother is missing, too," she blurted out.
Mark's head snapped over to Nick. For a few seconds, no one said anything. Some other expression, she couldn't fathom it, flickered over Nick's brooding look. Distrust, maybe? Did he expect her to also blurt out the truth about him?
Mark turned back to her. "How long has your mother been missing?"
"Since nearly noon today. She left my aunt June's to pack a few things at her home. I don't think she ever made it there."
"Do you think she went shopping instead?"
Helen raised her eyebrows. "Would your mother, if she had everything at her home?"
"Did she have her car? Do you know her license plate number?"
She threw Nick a look and bit her lip. Nick said, "I sent her to her sister's house in a taxi. There wasn't a car in her own driveway when I arrived."
Mark looked confused. Nick's glare darkened. "Remember you gave me Connie Eastman's address? I went to see if she knew where Helen was. Then I came back to get Helen an hour ago."
"Why?" Mark asked.
Helen stole a glance at Nick, wondering if his earlier visit to her mother had caused the intrusive feeling she'd noticed when she searched the house.
Mark folded his arms, matching Nick's glare. "Why don't you just start again at the beginning?"
The room chilled several degrees. Nick's lips thinned. To Helen, it sounded as though Mark was trying to trip Nick up. Were they on to him?
"I went there this afternoon," she explained to Mark, surprised by her desire to defend Nick. "I called Aunt June and she told me Momma left just before noon to go home. Yes, she has a car. And I know the license plate number." She told him.
Mark scribbled it down. "We'll see what we can do. Usually we have to wait forty-eight hours, though."
So long? Momma could be anywhere, out there…in any kind of danger.
After her prints were recorded, as the other officer handed her an alcohol wipe to clean her fingertips, Mark said, "You may want to look at each of these tapes again, in case some have been tampered with."
"What do you mean, tampered with?"
Nick and Mark exchanged quick, obvious looks. They both knew what it could mean, but they weren't goi
ng to share that information with her.
"Do you think that someone might have taped over them?" Nick asked, as if pretending the quick exchange never happened. "Or switched labels?" He was rubbing his arms. Was he cold? Even at this distance, she could see goose bumps.
"Just a long shot. They could have been looking for something completely different." Mark shrugged before smiling at Helen. "I saw the titles. Can't be that bad to check them over again."
"Ugh. Speak for yourself." She pulled a face. "My life on eighteen tapes. Do you know how boring they'll be?"
The other officer's head flicked up from the fingerprint case. Mark frowned. "Eighteen? There are only seventeen tapes."
Helen leaned away from the men. "There must be some mistake. I've got eighteen tapes. One for each year of my childhood. No more, no less."
Nick bent down and quickly counted the tapes. He turned to Helen. "There are only seventeen." He peered down at the tapes again to read the titles. "One for each year? There's no thirteenth year."
She stood. "Are you sure?" She came close and studied the titles. Her thirteenth one was gone. "Why would someone want a tape of me when I was thirteen?"
"What's on it?"
She crossed her arms to warm herself. Someone took a tape of her at her most awkward stage? That was worse than stealing baby pictures. "Just my family." She thought a moment. "We went to Wonderland in Ontario that year. And some Christmas and birthday parties. Nothing more, really." She looked at Nick, wondering if he believed her, his expression was so unreadable.
"Well," Mark said, shutting his notebook. "That's all we can do for tonight. Look around, you may have misplaced the tape. If you think of anything that might help us, let us know."
Helen hesitated, but then nodded briefly, not knowing what to do anymore. Mark didn't believe her. He figured she was wasting their time, and as the latest girlfriend of a murdered crook, she was automatically under suspicion.
She listened as Nick saw them to the door. Didn't they know that Nick was the crook?
Icy nausea washed over her. What a fool she'd been. She should have told them about seeing Nick that afternoon at Jamie's office. She should have blurted it right out like she'd done with her mother's disappearance. Mark and his partner were the ones with the guns, not Nick. They would have protected her.
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