Windy decided to change approaches. “Do you remember a girl named Eve?”
That got Misty’s attention. She smiled, looking almost pretty, and said, “The bitch who lived next door to us?”
Almost pretty. “Yes.”
“I don’t remember her exactly, I was little when she moved, but I remember Harold talking about her. I asked him one time if she was his girlfriend, and he hit me. I think he was totally hot for her. This other time, when I was eight, I went to the mall with some friends and I saw her there, making out with this old guy. And then I looked around and I saw Harold. He was staring at them.” Her eyes glittered with pure malice. “He was sweating like a pig. I swear he almost reached into his pants and jacked off right there. I know he did later at home.”
Windy hoped that image was not going to haunt her dreams that night. She said, “Do you know of anyone else who might know where he is? Maybe any other relatives?”
“No way. My whole family hated him. I was worried he would show up for Mom’s funeral, but he didn’t.”
“What about on his father’s side?”
“Them? Sure, maybe one of them, but I never met any of them. They were freaks too, that’s where he got it from, my mother said. We never saw them.” She looked out at the street, at her watch, the street again. Then frowned, and came back to Windy. “Actually, you know what? I think he had an aunt somewhere in Vegas. Yeah, you know, she sent him presents on his birthday. His father’s sister or whatever. She married some rich guy. She was a bitch.”
“I thought you said you never met them.”
“I didn’t, but one time for his birthday she sent Harold a BB gun and he shot up my father’s car with it. Used to aim it at me too. That was right before he went away.”
“Who? Harold or your father?”
“Both of them. Look, has Harold done something? Because I don’t want my name in the papers connected to him.”
“I doubt it will be.”
“Good. I’m just working here until my career takes off and I can’t afford scandal.” She tossed her hair, a studied gesture, and said, “I’m getting into modeling. Anyway, if you see him, will you tell him one thing for me?”
“Of course.”
“Tell him he owes me $1,860 for our mother’s funeral. I had to borrow the money. There is no reason he shouldn’t have to pay half of that. Right?”
“Sure. You have no idea where he might be?”
“Try looking in the gutter,” Misty said, making a joke. Her eyes scanned traffic again and she perked up, pushing her chest out, saying, “I gotta go.”
“Just one more thing. Do you know his aunt’s name? The one who gave him the BB gun.”
“My mom called her something. Fucking Nadene, that was it. I guess her name was Nadene.” Misty clutched her purse strap under her arm and said, “I don’t like to talk about Harold, so don’t come back here, okay?” then took off.
Windy watched Misty run over to a black Mitsubishi Diamante with chromed-out wheel rims, three fake bullet holes in the front by the driver’s side and a purple neon license plate frame. The windows were down, so she heard the man in the driver’s seat with the braided goatee say, “Where have you been, bitch? I been waiting here for you,” and heard Misty whine, “I’m sorry, baby, I had to talk to that lady over there,” before the car screeched out of the driveway with Misty’s door still open, one platform pump hanging out.
“Fucking Nadene,” Windy repeated to herself. So Nadene Brown was Harry’s aunt.
She was heading back to her car, dialing Dr. Bob to ask her to send over a photo of the impression the clasp had made on Nadene’s neck, when she saw Ash walking toward her.
That could only mean one thing. She closed her phone and ran to him. “What happened to Cate?”
“Nothing. She is fine. I just talked to her bodyguards.”
“What are you doing here?”
“The lab came back with the rings. They were able to lift both engravings.”
“And?”
“And the first one was Kelly O’Connell’s. No question.”
“The other one?” She did not like the look on his face at all. Her heart started to pound.
Ash took a deep breath, then held a photo out to her. “I think it is yours.”
CHAPTER 80
Windy stared at the photograph he was showing her. It was of a ring, cut in half so you could see the writing inside. EMKIII-CAT Toujours amie.
Windy’s throat went completely dry. “How did you know?”
“That’s not important. It is your ring?”
“Yes. But, my God, Ash. How did he get it? I keep it in a box. Hidden in a box. I keep it—oh God. He has been in my house. All the way in.”
Windy felt his hands on her shoulders. “The reason I came out here was because I thought you might want to go home. And you might not want to be alone.”
“I should get back to work. Nadene Brown is Harry’s aunt. Was Harry’s aunt. I should—”
“Windy, I don’t think you understand. Your home is a crime scene now too.”
She looked up at him. “This means I’m next, doesn’t it?”
She left her rental car in the free parking lot at the Stardust and climbed in next to Ash, glad to be with him, glad to be going fast, glad to be doing anything rather than thinking about what she had just seen.
“I’ll double the officers around your house,” Ash said.
Windy nodded. “I think I’ll send Cate and Brandon to visit my parents in Chicago for a few days.”
“Do you want to go with them?”
“Yes,” Windy said. “But I’m not going to.”
Ash looked over at her quickly but did not say anything. They drove in silence for a long stretch and then Windy broke it, asking, “What did you do about Gerald? How did you get off the phone?”
Ash wanted to tell her he was there for her, he would lay down his life to keep her safe. But he knew that wasn’t what she needed to hear. He said, “Nothing. He’s probably still talking on speaker phone.”
She gaped at him. “You didn’t.”
“It was the easiest thing to do. When I saw—I had to get out of there fast.”
“He could take away your job, Ash.”
“You know, at this point, that doesn’t really bother me.”
“Why do you do this job, put yourself in danger, if you don’t need the money?”
The question caught Ash unprepared. He shrugged. “Being rich was never something that mattered to me. It happened by accident, I developed something that a lot of people were willing to pay for. Basically what I realized is that having money is nice, but it doesn’t give you a reason to get up every day.” Being more honest than he’d intended.
They had turned off the Strip and were rolling to a stoplight on Sands Boulevard when a group of motorcycles, four Harley Davidsons, one with a side car, roared up next to them. Ash looked over and was surprised to see Windy smile.
“Do you like motorcycles?”
“Yes.” She looked far away. “My husband, Evan, Cate’s dad, used to ride one. A Ducati F1-750. When we met.”
They settled back into silence, until she looked over at him and gave him a half smile. “It’s okay. You can ask whatever you want.”
“Where did you meet?”
She went back to looking out the window. “Paris. We were both doing our junior year abroad.”
“And then you stayed in touch when you got back to the States?”
“Sort of. I wrote to him. For four months I wrote to him and he never wrote back.”
Ash frowned. “Why didn’t you call?”
Windy turned away from the window to face him. “Nice girls don’t call boys. My mother could tell you that. Besides, he’d said he wasn’t sure of his phone number.” She shook her head at herself, for being so stupid then, for talking about it now. She hadn’t told anyone about this in ages, not since Evan died. But she kept going, saying, “I thought I had been an idi
ot, you know, falling in love with this guy. And then one day, I was home at my parents’ house for spring break my senior year, and all of a sudden there’s this terrible noise outside. It was Evan, roaring down the street on a custom soft-tail Harley Davidson.”
She shook her head again. “My mother started crossing herself and found religion again as he pulled into the driveway. Parked his hog right next to her Buick. I thought she was going to faint when I answered the door.”
“What happened?”
“He just stood there, covered in leather, dusty. He’d been riding for two days. He said, ‘I’m not that good at letters. I can’t ever get them to say what I want. So I thought I would just drop in.’ ”
“Drop in? He was coming from—”
“Connecticut.”
“And you were in Chicago.”
Windy smiled and nodded.
“What happened then?” Ash asked.
“I invited him in. My mother, falling back on etiquette, offered him something to drink. She went off to the kitchen—I have always suspected, to take the first shot of hard alcohol of her life, although she denies it—and he sat down next to me on the couch.” She stopped talking, seemed to curl in on herself.
After a little while Ash said, “And?”
She swallowed. “He leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Windy, will you marry me?’ ”
“That’s how he proposed?”
She nodded.
“And you accepted.”
“Of course not. I mean, I was going to, but not right away. Good girls do not immediately accept proposals, particularly not from men who talked them out of their virginity in a French garret and then didn’t respond to their letters for months. I said I’d think about it.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said, ‘Can I use the bathroom? I’ve been riding nonstop for the past thirty-six hours.’ ”
Ash stared at her. “You’re kidding.”
She shook her head.
And they both cracked up. “I think I would have liked Evan,” he said. “Not the part about making you wait four months, but the other part.”
“I think you would have too,” she said. Got very quiet.
Ash glanced at her. “Is it harder when people say that? When you talk about it?”
“No. Actually, it’s nice. It’s really nice. I haven’t told anyone about that in a long time. A lot of people get uncomfortable talking about it.” She looked out the window, slightly fogged, and drew a circle on it with her finger. “Tomorrow is Evan’s birthday. He would have been thirty-five.”
And all of a sudden she started to cry. Ash veered over to the curb, stopped the car, and put his arms around her, holding her tight as she sobbed into his sweater, clinging to him. He did it just as a friend. But it felt like something worth dying for.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her faced pressed against his chest, not moving away. “I think everything is getting to me. I’m becoming a mess.”
“Shh,” he told her. “No apologies.” His hand stroked her back, her hair, making her know it was okay.
A few minutes later she sat up and turned from him. “That is so embarrassing.” She was fishing around her bag for a Kleenex, not looking at him.
“Not as embarrassing as finding a wad of these in my car,” he said, handing her a stack of Krispy Kreme napkins.
She sniffled into one of them and dried her cheeks. “Thank you, Ash.”
“You’re welcome, Windy.” Now their eyes met and wouldn’t let go. Time stood still. She moved toward him and gently kissed him on the lips.
She pulled away first. Ash could not move. It was a stunning kiss. And it had lasted maybe two seconds.
She rested her hand on his cheek, staring at him. He opened his mouth to say something but she shook her head.
“Not today. Not yet. Okay?”
“Okay.”
It felt like everything important got said anyway.
CHAPTER 81
Ash watched until Windy was in her house, counted the officers he’d stationed around the perimeter, then realized he’d lost track and counted them again. For the first time since becoming a cop he had to work to stay focused on a case, his mind wanting to replay what had just happened, and what it meant. When he and Windy got together, he wanted her to have no regrets and he was willing to wait as long as it took for her to get there. He was in this for the long haul.
Still, he wasn’t concentrating as much as he should have been because he was halfway to the office before it all came together. It was the memory of a tan Lexus like the one registered to Nadene Brown parked a few blocks from Windy’s that did it, made him see how they could find Harry. He dialed as he shifted into high gear, glad the afternoon traffic was light, and when he got Jonah on the phone said, “I want a list of all the property Nadene Brown owned.”
Jonah handed it to him when he arrived. “Her lawyer’s office faxed it over. Didn’t even ask for a warrant.”
“Must be our lucky day.”
The list was extensive and impressive. Nadene Brown had invested well in real estate and owned several corners of the city that now had supermarkets and drug stores on them, as well as four houses and two apartment buildings.
“I want plainclothes officers to check out all of these for any kind of suspicious activity,” Ash said. “Every building, every apartment, but low profile. If Harry is hiding in any of them, I don’t want to alert him.”
“What about that one?” Jonah asked, pointing to the address on the bottom of the list.
“I’ll look at that one myself.”
Windy had tried to sound calm with her mother, explaining that she just thought it would be good for Cate to see her grandparents for a few days, not wanting to give any hint of what was really going on, but at the end she’d lost it and had to beg.
“Please, Mom. I don’t have time to answer questions. I’ll explain it all next week. I’ll come myself. Oh, and please don’t call Bill.”
Bill would be there the next day. She had already put off what she needed to say to him for too long. The least she could do was say it in person.
She put on a good face and told Cate about the exciting trip she was about to go on, giving in to everything her daughter wanted to take, rain boots and swimming goggles and her Soccer Barbie, working hard not to grab Cate and hug her every two minutes. She knew this was the right decision, to make Cate go and stay herself, but the thought of being separated from her made her ache. She was relieved to see that at least it did not seem to bother Cate, who spent the entire ride to the airport telling Brandon about all the great things they could do at her grandparents’ house, “especially without Mom there to get in the way.”
At the security checkpoint she discovered that Ash had called ahead, getting them whisked through. She stayed with Brandon and Cate until they boarded the eight-fifteen P.M. flight to Chicago, waving good-bye long after either of them could have seen her. Then she stood in the empty departure lounge, wondering where to go. Feeling alone and depressed. And scared.
She was making her way back to the parking garage to drive Brandon’s blue VW bug home when her phone rang. Like an idiot, she felt her heart skip when she saw Ash’s name on the caller ID, then skip again when he said, “I think we’ve found where Harry is staying. A year ago Nadene Brown bought a house on Cottonwood Drive. Twenty-two-oh-six—the one next door to the O’Connell house.”
“Didn’t some security patrol person say the place was empty?”
“Yes,” Ash said. “And I’m beginning to think that person was Harry himself. I’m meeting the Metro SWAT team over there now.”
CHAPTER 82
It was after nine o’clock when Windy got to the SWAT staging area, in the middle of the block just east of Harry’s house. Ash was standing at the front of the police squadron, talking to the SWAT commander, both men looking military and alert and worried.
“We’re pretty sure he’s inside and we didn’t wan
t to give ourselves away,” Ash explained as she joined them.
“How do you know it’s the right house?”
“We can’t be positive, but there’s a Camaro IROC parked in the driveway and the neighbor across the street said there’s been ‘unusual activity’ over there.”
Unusual activity. That sounded bad to Windy. “What do we do now?” she asked, looking between the men.
“We wait until my operatives are organized and in position,” the SWAT commander told her. “If he comes out during that time of his own free will, we grab him. If not, we make him come out unwillingly.”
Two hours later they were ready to move on the house.
“We’ve got men in position around the house in case he tries to run for it,” the SWAT commander reported. “Heat scans are picking up someone in the kitchen.” He looked at Ash. “How do you want to play it? Call first or surprise him?”
“I don’t know what we’re dealing with.” Ash turned to Windy. “Do you think he’s suicidal?”
“I don’t know. But I’d like to try talking to him. See if I can get him to surrender.”
Ash shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
“He has been targeting me,” Windy said. “I would stand the best chance of getting him out.”
“Or getting killed,” Ash said.
Windy ignored him and turned to the SWAT commander. “Can your men cover me if I go in closer?”
“No,” Ash said to both of them. “Under no—”
The SWAT commander’s walkie talkie started hissing. “Subject on the move. Subject approaching window.”
From beyond the perimeter, they heard the scraping of a window being raised, then a voice.
“What is happening?” Windy asked.
The voice on the walkie talkie said, “Subject is asking for Chicago Thomas. I repeat—”
“Copy that,” the SWAT commander said. He looked at Ash and Windy. “You heard. He’s asking for you.”
Windy started down the street toward the house. Ash went after her.
“You can’t go,” he said. “This could be a trap.”
“Or it could be our best chance to get him out.” Windy ducked under a wood barrier, slid between two policemen and went to stand on the sidewalk opposite the house. The street was eerily deserted, the streetlights turned off. The only light came from the half moon.
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 36
