“Why not?”
“For one thing, interrogating James won’t be easy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t just waltz up to the front door and ask if he kidnapped Brittany Swinburn. If he did...”
“Go on.”
“Then he’s a dangerous man who should be avoided at all costs. Besides, he won’t admit to taking Brittany. I’ll have to search for her.”
“She’s my child, and I’m going with you. I don’t care how dangerous James is.”
He pivoted her by the shoulders to face him. “The potential for disaster is too great. I’ll take you back to the boat while I snoop around James’s place.”
Carleton James didn’t frighten her. The devil himself wasn’t any scarier than the prospect of someone hurting Brittany. Not even the trial and her almost certain conviction for David’s murder frightened Angel more. She had to find her daughter, assure her safety and locate someone who would love her and care for her when her mother went to jail.
She tipped her chin and locked gazes with Jordan. “If you don’t take me with you, I’ll go alone.”
AFTER LEAVING the real estate office, they sought out the address listed for James Shelton in the local telephone directory and found his dilapidated house at the end of a dead-end road in a deteriorating neighborhood. Knee-high weeds and grass choked the yard, cracks riddled the front walk, and the torn screens of the front porch hung in gray curls.
Bunny Shelton answered their knock, but didn’t open the screen door. “What do you want?”
Jordan assessed the woman with hair the texture of straw, red-rimmed eyes, wrinkled shorts and shirt and teeth and fingers stained with nicotine and wondered what had driven Swinburn to cheat on Angel.
Jordan introduced himself, then Angel, using her real identity.
Definitely not the soft and cuddly creature of her name, Bunny was all sharp angles and barbed tongue. “You got some nerve coming here, Sara Swinburn, after killing the only man I ever loved.”
Angel’s eyes flashed with anger. “I wasn’t aware Mr. Shelton was dead.”
“Jim’s alive and kicking—unfortunately. The good news is the commercial fishing boat he works on has been out for three weeks and won’t be back for three more. I’m talking about Dave, your ex-husband.”
If Jim Shelton had really been at sea for three weeks, that crossed him off their list of suspects, Jordan thought. Besides, from the looks of the Shelton house, the owner couldn’t afford hired killers like Frank and Sidney.
“I’m not here to trade insults.” Angel was making an obvious effort to hide her dislike and be conciliatory. “I’m looking for my daughter. Do you have her?”
Bunny’s hatchet-shaped features contorted in a . scowl. “Dave never let me near his precious daughter. Figured I wasn’t good enough for her.” “Did he say where he’d taken her?” Angel asked.
“Last time I saw Dave was Friday morning. He was on his way to your place to pick up the kid.”
Bunny glared at Angel with hate-filled eyes, and Jordan tensed, ready to spring to Angel’s defense if the woman shoved open the door and attacked.
“And even if I did know,” Bunny continued in a high-pitched voice as annoying as electronic feedback on a sound system, “you’re the last person I’d tell.”
“Maybe you’ll tell the police,” Jordan suggested with the hint of a threat.
“Yeah, if I knew. But I don’t. Now get off my property before I call the cops myself.”
“Just one more question. Do you know a man named Carleton James?”
Fear drained the angry color from Bunny’s thin face. She shook her head.
“Then why does his name frighten you?” Jordan asked.
Bunny licked her thin lips nervously. “Dave told me if I ever so much as mentioned that name, he’d kill me.”
“David actually threatened to kill you?” Angel lifted her feathery eyebrows in surprise.
Clutching her sleeveless blouse at her throat, Bunny nodded. “Yeah, but I didn’t believe him. Dave wasn’t the violent type, you know? But he said if he didn’t kill me, the man you just named would.”
Weighing the secretary’s words and body language, Jordan concluded she must be telling the truth. “Is Carleton James the violent type?”
“I dunno. But he gives me the heebie-jeebies. If a snake could talk, it’d sound just like him.”
“Did James come to the office often?” Jordan said.
“Never. He used to call once a month, until lately.”
“And lately?”
“He telephoned two, sometimes three times a day for the last few weeks.”
“That’s all you know about James?”
“That’s it. Never laid eyes on him.”
As if suddenly realizing she’d said too much, Bunny balled her hands on her hips and glared at them through the torn screen of the door. “Are you leaving now, or do I have to call the cops?”
JORDAN AND ANGEL RETURNED to the boat to wait until nightfall. He attempted once again to discourage her from accompanying him to visit Carleton James—but without success. When the sun set, they changed into dark clothing before heading for the exclusive country-club enclave on the other side of town from David Swinburn’s waterfront home.
A pale, crescent moon hung in the starless sky and a westerly breeze carried the salty essence of the sea as Jordan eased back on the Harley’s throttle and leaned into the turn onto the boulevard where James lived. Angel’s arms tightened around his waist as she shifted balance with him. The pressure of her embrace and the delectable warmth of her body against his back brought both a surge of pleasure and renewed apprehension for her safety.
Scanning the exclusive neighborhood, he memorized the terrain and noted possible avenues of escape. Dense oaks lined the street and absorbed most of the light, providing plenty of places to hide.
A few houses from James’s address, Jordan parked in the circular drive of a residence with heavily shuttered windows, whose owners had apparently returned north for the season, and gave Angel a hand to dismount.
“We’ll walk from here,” he said.
Her earlier threat to come alone if he didn’t bring her with him had left him with only two choices, both potentially deadly, and he’d chosen the latter as the lesser danger. With her, he could at least keep an eye on her. Since the night they met, he had rebelled against taking responsibility for her, especially when her reliance on him for protection had reactivated the nightmares that led to his excessive drinking a year ago.
Now an unrelenting thirst for the numbing balm of alcohol consumed him, brought on by his growing fear for Angel’s safety. He’d lost what little objectivity toward her he’d had in the beginning, and that loss hurt his chances of protecting her.
She was no longer simply a stranger in need of assistance. He was falling in love with her. Her extraordinary good looks had captured him from the start, but he’d soon learned her beauty was more than skin-deep. Her remarkable courage, her fierce love for her child, her composure under the disturbing circumstances of her amnesia and her unique, gentle charm had cast a spell he couldn’t shake. Nor could he throw off his fear that, if a crunch came, he’d let her down.
He defied his body’s demand for a drink to ease his anxiety. He had to remain sober for total vigilance and concentration, and he’d need every skill he’d learned as an officer to assure that no harm came to her. Doubt born of experience twisted in his gut. With Jenny, every resource he’d possessed hadn’t been enough.
With a superhuman effort, he tamped down his self-doubts and dashed across the street with Angel into the shadows of the eight-foot brick wall that surrounded James’s estate. Avoiding the streetlights by skirting the wall, they worked their way toward the main entrance with its locked wrought-iron gates.
He gazed through the opening across the circular drive that swept the front of the antebellum-style house. A light shone behind drawn draperies of a downstairs room a
nd another gleamed upstairs at the front corner of the house, but he couldn’t tell if anyone was inside.
“Should you ring the bell?” Angel pointed to a recessed panel in the wall beside the gate.
“I want to look around before James knows we’re here. If he has Brittany, I don’t want to give him time to hide her.”
Angel tilted her head and surveyed the barricade. “If we climb the gate, someone will see us, and if we go over the wall, the pyracantha thorns will slash us to ribbons. What do we do now?”
“Check for a rear entrance.”
In the darkness of the towering wall, they crept around a corner and down the next block until they came to a break in the brick expanse, spanned by another wrought-iron gate.
A hundred feet inside the compound, a multicar garage attached to the rear of the main house was barely visible in the faint moonlight.
“Can we risk climbing this gate?” Angel asked softly.
He shook his head and pointed to a speaker box and the touch pad of a security system. “Not without setting off an alarm.”
“But Brittany might be in there.” She considered the bristling, thorn-laden vines covering the walls on both sides of the gate. It would take more than stickers to keep her from her daughter. “We’ll have to go over the wall.”
Abruptly, a loud electronic hum, followed by a metallic rattle, broke the stillness. Jordan yanked Angel facedown beneath a cluster of lady palms beside the gate. In the compound, a slit of light appeared at the foundation of the garage and widened into a bright rectangle as an automatic door lifted. A well-tuned engine purred to life, headlights flashed, and a car pulled out of the garage and headed down the broad drive toward the gate.
Flattened against the ground with his arm around Angel, Jordan watched the car’s approach. The electronic lock of the gate clicked, the wrought-iron barricades swung inward, and a sedate black limo passed through, onto the street. The limo’s tinted windows hid the occupants.
When the car had rounded the corner, Jordan leapt to his feet and tugged Angel with him. “Follow me. Hurry!”
The gates had almost closed. Jordan pushed Angel through the narrowing opening, then plunged through himself. A few seconds later and the gates would have crushed him. He veered off the driveway and joined Angel among the low, spreading branches of a Norfolk Island pine.
“Look!” She grabbed his sleeve and pointed toward the lowering garage door that was quickly obscuring their view of the well-lighted garage.
“Is someone in there?” All he’d seen before the automatic door dropped completely was an empty space next to a compact red sedan.
“I saw...I remember...” Her hand trembled on his arm.
“What is it?”
“That car...” Her voice quaked as violently as the rest of her.
“The limo?”
“No, the one in the garage, the red Nissan.”
The description sounded familiar, but before he could identify it, she spoke again.
“That’s my car.”
Chapter Eight
“Your car?” Jordan said. “Are you sure?”
“I remember driving it,” Angel whispered, “and the plate on the front bumper has my initials, SWS. No wonder the police couldn’t find it if it’s been locked in James’s garage all this time.”
“How’d it get there, and why?”
Her breath hissed between her teeth, and her grip on his arm tightened. “You don’t suppose I...?”
“You what?”
“What if I know Carleton James? What if I went to him after—” She broke off abruptly, as if afraid to voice the words.
“After David died?”
She nodded and spoke in a soft, pained voice. “Maybe I left my car here.”
Angel in cahoots with Carleton James? The troublesome thought gnawed at Jordan.
So far, his investigation had raised more questions than answers. He struggled against his growing affection for Angel to keep his mind open to all possibilities, including her guilt, and peered into the inky blackness, alert for watchdogs or security guards.
Until now, James had been merely a potential suspect, but Angel’s car in his garage turned tonight’s sortie into a whole new ball game. James had something to hide, and people with dangerous secrets often went to extreme lengths, such as hiring killers to make certain those secrets stayed hidden.
Angel fidgeted beside him, “Aren’t we going to check the house to see if Brittany’s there?”
He scooted deeper into the branches and tugged her with him. “For now, we wait.”
“Wait?” Impatience rang in her whisper. “For what? The limo to come back? Let’s go in while it’s gone.”
“We won’t wait long. Trust me.” Jordan almost choked on his words. How could he expect her to trust him when he didn’t trust himself?
He checked his watch, then continued his observation of the dark grounds. He had estimated the estate’s perimeter and how long the slowest circuit by a patrolling guard, either human or canine, might take. When that much time had passed, he and Angel would approach the house, but not before. With luck, the limo wouldn’t return in the meantime.
He folded his arms around Angel, drew her against him and waited. Her silky hair tickled his nose, and the subtle fragrance matched the scent of honeysuckle on the night breeze. Her soft curves molded against him, and longing spiked in his groin.
Focus, Trouble. Stay alert.
He clamped his teeth on the soft tissue of his cheek and welcomed the pain that squelched his desire and cleared his head. Yielding to the temptation in his arms could get them both killed. The minutes dragged by until a final check of his watch told him it was time to move.
They slipped from beneath the branches and raced up the dark driveway toward the garage. Jordan checked the doors. All locked. At the sudden crash of shattering glass, he froze, and Angel halted beside him.
“Dammit, Sidney, you broke it.” The angry shout carried across the lawn from the house. “Give me that beer. I’ll drink it from the can.”
Pressing a finger to his lips to signal silence, Jordan moved toward the house’s rear entrance. Angel followed at his heels to a back porch, apparently off the kitchen, where windows were raised to the mild night air.
Hiding with Angel behind a large camellia bush just ten feet from an open window, Jordan could see Frank, sitting at the kitchen table, while Sidney rummaged through a commercial-size refrigerator and emerged with his arms full.
“I don’t care if I break every glass in his house,” Sidney said. “Mr. James goes prancing off to a charity event, as usual, dressed to the nines, and tells us to get back to work.”
“He’s the boss,” Frank reminded him.
“Well, boss or not, a man’s got to eat.”
“Then eat, for Pete’s sake, and let’s get out of here. We have our orders.”
Sidney deposited his armload onto the table and picked up a table knife. “So what’s new? We’ve had those stinkin’ orders for days.”
“If we find her daughter, Sara Swinburn will have to come to us.” Frank took a drink from a can of beer. “And once she does, James will threaten to kill the kid if Mrs. Swinburn doesn’t tell him what he needs to know.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sidney grumbled, slathering bread with brown mustard and piling on cold cuts. “I know the drill.”
“Naturally, James will kill them both after he’s forced the truth from her.”
“It ain’t James who offs ’em.”
Frank exhaled a dramatic sigh. “That’s what he pays us for. Killing is a skill. Not like cutting grass or cleaning a pool. Any moron can do that.”
“I ain’t never killed a kid, and I don’t like thinking about it. It’s enough to spoil my appetite.”
Swallowing his revulsion, Jordan cast a quick glance at Angel but couldn’t read her expression in the darkness. He returned his attention to the argument in the kitchen.
Frank reached across the table an
d filched a cold cut from the platter. “James will spoil more than your appetite if we don’t find that kid.”
“Where we gonna look?” Sidney mumbled around a mouthful of sandwich. “We came up empty at her apartment, Swinburn’s computer files told us zip and Trouble’s boat has disappeared. How do we know he ain’t got her and the kid with him?”
“We’ll check with our man at the police department. He’s always come through for us before.”
Jordan bit back a curse. Someone in the department was slipping James information, the leak Jordan had suspected when Spacek showed up so conveniently at Angel’s hearing.
Frank finished his beer, wiped his mouth with a napkin and shoved away from the table. “Get rid of this mess or Mrs. Gibbons will complain when she comes in tomorrow. I’d rather face James’s wrath than hers.”
Frank left the kitchen through a swinging door, and Sidney flipped a finger at his partner’s retreating back before stuffing the rest of the sandwich in his mouth. Jordan waited while he cleaned up the kitchen before leaving the room, licking mustard from his stubby fingers.
As soon as the kitchen lights clicked off, Jordan and Angel sprinted toward the rear gate.
“Into the trees,” he told her softly.
Minutes later, another garage door rose, and a dark green Buick, with Frank at the wheel and Sidney in the passenger seat, rolled down the drive. The gates parted, and once the car had exited, Jordan and Angel skimmed through the opening onto the street before the iron barricades clanged shut behind them.
“Thank God, James doesn’t have Brittany,” Angel said as they hurried toward the house where they’d left the Harley, “but I don’t know where else to look.”
He grasped her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “We haven’t searched your ex-husband’s place yet. He could have left clues to where he took Brittany.”
She halted so quickly she almost threw him off balance. “The police are combing the house. If they find something, James’s spy will tell him where she is.”
Jordan stared into the brown depths of her eyes, glowing almost golden beneath the streetlights. “You remembered your car tonight. Do you remember anything else?”
A Woman of Mystery Page 11
