by BROWN SANDRA
“There’s nothing for breakfast. Sorry.”
“Coffee’s fine.” But it wasn’t. Her first sip caused her to grimace.
“Gall’s recipe,” he explained. “It would knock a mule on its ass.”
“Milk?”
“I checked. It’s curdled.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, bravely taking another sip. “This morning I could use the jolt.”
“Sleep okay?”
“Like a log. You?”
“I did all right. I stayed awake for a while wishing you’d try to cop that feel.” Then, “Ah, the blush is back. I was getting worried for a while there. Last night you went pale at the thought of sleeping with a killer.”
“Dent.”
“Did you wake up convinced I’m innocent?”
“Not guilty. But far from innocent.”
“There’s a difference?”
“In my mind. How’s your back?”
“I think the cut closed up overnight. There’s no fresh blood on the bandage.”
He still looked like the survivor of a long battle. The cuts on his face had begun to scab, but they were puffy and surrounded by dark bruises.
Motioning at the telephone directory, which, judging from the looks of it, was several generations old, she asked who he was looking up.
Sidestepping the question, he stretched out his long legs beneath the table. “Go with me for a minute here.”
“All right. I’m listening.”
“Assume that all this—the rat delivery through last night’s parking lot adventure—is reprisal.”
“For the book?”
“For that and/or the incident that inspired it. In your kitchen yesterday, one of us remarked that it would be a short list of people who would harbor that kind of grudge and go to those lengths to settle it.”
“You said that, or near enough. You asked me who I thought the mystery guest was.”
“Okay, let’s name the possibilities.” He raised his finger as though to count them off. “Me.”
“You didn’t fake the knifing.”
“So I’m eliminated? Thanks,” he said drily. A second finger joined the first. “Your parents.”
“We can strike them, too. Cancer is a solid alibi.”
He held up a third finger. “Steven. He has some serious issues and grievances.”
“But it wasn’t he who jumped you last night. Besides, he wouldn’t harm me, no matter how angry he is over the book.”
“I guess,” he said, but dubiously. “Those are the principals. If it’s not one of us, it’s gotta be someone more removed.”
“Tangential.”
“Back to the big words. But, yeah.”
“Dale Moody?”
“Possibly. But what’s his beef? Besides coming across as not too bright or competent in your book.”
“Daddy said he looked like a troubled man during the trial. He should have been pleased with the conviction. What was the problem?”
Of course Dent didn’t have the answer, but thoughtfully he added, “Moody’s a big guy, or was, like the lummox who jumped me. Let’s put a check mark next to his name. Who else?”
“What about Rupe Collier?”
“Definitely wasn’t him at the IHOP.”
“No. So who does that leave?”
“Strickland.”
She reacted with a start.
“Not Allen,” he said. “But maybe his brother. Roy.”
“Ray,” she corrected.
He motioned at the directory. “That’s who I was looking up.”
“What made you think of him?”
“Process of elimination. Of this group of people involved, even tangentially—did I say it right?—he and Allen were by far the most redneck.” He looked down at the cut across his knuckles. “He’d be royally pissed by how his big brother was portrayed in your book.”
“It was a fair portrayal.”
“Of a killer. But what if he wasn’t? An excellent reason for a vendetta is your brother getting sent to prison for a crime that he didn’t commit.”
“And then dying there.”
“Allen didn’t die, Bellamy. He was murdered.”
She flinched at the word, and it reverberated there between them for several ponderous moments. Less than two years into his twenty-year sentence for manslaughter, Allen Strickland had been fatally stabbed in the Huntsville prison yard by a fellow inmate.
After a prolonged silence, Dent pulled in his legs and leaned upon the table. “We’ve talked about every aspect of this business, but you’ve never mentioned Strickland’s ultimate fate. Why’s that?”
“Habit, I suppose,” she said quietly.
“Habit?”
“I remember the day we found out he’d been killed. I was a freshman in high school. Rupe Collier called my parents just as I was about to leave for class.”
“How did they react to the news?”
“They didn’t receive it cheerfully, which would have been distasteful and insensitive. But they weren’t so hypocritical that they expressed deep sorrow, either. Daddy just looked . . . very somber. I remember him saying, ‘That’s an end to it, then.’
“And the way he said it was like . . . like a mandate that it never be spoken of. Then he got up and left the room. Olivia followed him. To my knowledge, no one in our household ever mentioned Allen Strickland’s death again.”
Steven hadn’t referred to it yesterday. Nor had her father, who had referenced Strickland’s imprisonment but not how he’d died. Perhaps the question posed by Van Durbin in his column yesterday had made them all too uneasy to talk over the possibility that not only had he been unjustly incarcerated, but that he’d also died needlessly.
“I ran across Ray Strickland’s name when I was researching the book,” she said to Dent. “He was quoted in numerous newspaper write-ups of the trial, always professing his brother’s innocence. But if he was the man at IHOP, I wouldn’t have recognized him. The man I remember from the photographs had bushy hair and a mustache that grew down over his jaw.”
“A razor would have taken care of both in five minutes.”
“Did you find a telephone listing for him?”
“No. But I don’t believe we’ll have to search for him. He’ll find us.”
That was an unnerving thought. “Maybe we should get the police involved, after all. We could report last night’s assault on you, give them his name, and—”
“And if Ray Strickland, brother of the late Allen, turns out to be a law-abiding, tax-paying, churchgoing man living in the suburbs with a wife and adoring children, you’ll have made another enemy. It would make news, and Van Durbin, assuming he survived his night in lockup, would—”
She waved her hands to cut him off. “I see where you’re going.” As she organized her thoughts, she pulled her lower lip through her teeth. “We don’t know that Strickland is our pickup driver, but it feels right.”
“It does to me, too. Low Pressure ends with Allen receiving his sentence. You didn’t cover his death in prison. Ray might’ve seen that as a slight. He might consider it unfair. In his mind, you exploited his personal tragedy, but you didn’t tell the whole story.”
She placed her elbows on the table and held her head. “Lord. I would happily apologize.”
“I don’t think that’s gonna do it for the guy I met last night.” He exhaled heavily. “On the other hand, I could be way off track. The hell of it is, we don’t know who we’re dealing with.”
She dropped her hands back onto the table. “There’s still Moody.”
He thumbed the curled pages of the phone book. “I also tried to look him up.”
“Good luck with that.”
“When you were trying to locate him before, did you contact the Austin PD?”
“I started there. I was told that he’d retired, but that’s all I learned. Human Resources claimed not to have an address for him, no contact information whatsoever.”
“He must
draw a pension.”
“It’s automatically deposited into a checking account. The bank is headquartered in North Carolina, and they hung up on me when I asked for privileged information about their customer. I ran a Google search and tried to obtain his social security number, but gave up when I came under suspicion of identity theft.”
“Family?”
“An ex-wife who said she didn’t know where he was, but that she hoped he was in a cemetery.”
“He may be. Did you check death records?”
“Along with tax rolls, voters registration, the DMV.” She shook her head. “Believe me, I looked. And not just in Texas.”
“He was a cop. He would know how to disappear.”
“He’s not the only thing that went missing,” she said, her tone gaining Dent’s full attention. “With the bribe of a few beers, I talked a detective into letting me review the Susan Lyston case file. I could have saved my bar bill. He reported back that the file was missing.”
“Did you believe him? Maybe he was holding out for a sweeter bribe. I would have.”
She responded to his insinuating smile with an eye roll. “He seemed genuinely perplexed, upset, and embarrassed by his and the police department’s failure to produce the file. I think he genuinely wanted to help.”
“Or he genuinely wanted to get laid and then get an acknowledgment in your book.”
“Not every man thinks like you.”
“Sure they do.” It was a rote response because he appeared to be already concentrating on something else. He was gazing into space and tapping his thumbnail against his front teeth. “I have an idea of who may know where Moody is.”
He stood up and took the telephone book with him. Pointing to her half-empty mug of coffee, he said, “Bring that with you. You can finish it on the way.”
“I can’t go anywhere without first stopping by my house. I’m a mess.”
He looked her over. “Right. Okay. Good, in fact. I’d like to leave my Vette in your garage.”
“Why?”
“It’s too easy for that knife-wielding son of a bitch to spot.”
He pulled into the driveway behind her car. “I’ll switch cars while you’re making the overhaul.”
“I look that bad?”
“Allow yourself at least fifteen minutes.” He was ragging on her, but his rascally smile suddenly reversed itself. “What’s that?”
Propped against her front door was a large manila envelope.
“When I spoke with the house painter yesterday, I asked him to leave an estimate in the mailbox, but I guess the envelope was too large.”
However, when she picked it up and read the bold label stuck to the front of it, her stomach sank. “Van Durbin.”
She worked open the sealing adhesive and removed several eight-by-ten photographs. All of them were of her and Dent. Sorting through them quickly, she said, “These were taken—”
“Yesterday. At the Austin airport.”
Clearly recognizable in the background was the ticketing area where they had stopped at an automated kiosk to pick up their boarding passes for the flight to Atlanta. There was another photograph of them hurrying toward the security check line and one of them in line waiting their turn.
The fourth picture, obviously taken from a distance with a telephoto lens, had been snapped after they’d cleared security and were rushing toward the gate. Their backs were to the camera.
And Dent’s hand was planted solidly on the small of her back.
She went through the photos a second time, now noting that in each shot he was touching her. She didn’t remember there being that much physical contact between them, but the evidence was there.
The most startling picture had been taken while they were waiting in the security check line. He was pulling a small piece of leaf—a holdover from their trip to the neighborhood park—from her hair. It had seemed like nothing at the time. The gesture had lasted no more than a second or two, but the camera had caught them with their faces close, his fingers in her hair. They were smiling into each other’s eyes in a way that was indicative of much more than his teasing remark about being unable to take her anywhere without dusting her off first.
The photos implied an intimacy between them that now made her feel hot, self-conscious, and glad that her back was to him. She cleared her throat. “Van Durbin must have left them here yesterday before tracking us to your apartment last night.”
“Busy guy.” He sounded distracted, and she wondered if he, too, was surprised to find himself caught in such telling tableaus.
“Why did he bother to hand-deliver them?” she asked.
“To let us know that we can run but we can’t hide. I hope the bastard had a rough night in jail.” She sensed his leaning in to get a closer look at the photographs from over her shoulder. Speaking in a low voice, he said, “You know, to look at these, you’d think—”
“Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly. “That’s Jerry.”
“Huh?”
“Jerry.” She pointed out a face in the airport crowd in the background. The man was looking at her and Dent, not at the camera, but it had a clear angle on his face.
“Who the hell is Jerry?”
She laughed. “He’s . . . he’s nobody. An ardent fan.” Shaking her head with dismay, she said, “What a bizarre coincidence.”
Tucking the photos under her arm, she unlocked her front door and the two of them went inside. “Let me go first.” Dent moved her aside as he reached beneath his loose shirttail and produced a pistol.
Bellamy gasped. “Where did that come from?”
“Pepe’s Pawn Shop, I think it was called. It’s a tamale stand now.”
“Dent! I want nothing to do with guns.”
“Gun. Only one. And you never have to touch it.”
“What are you doing with it?”
“Discouraging anything our tattooed friend has in mind for us. Now stay put till I check things out.”
After a swift walk-through he returned and reported that the house was as they’d left it the day before. She was relieved to see that he’d tucked the pistol away.
“I checked the mailbox and found this.” She held up the letter envelope with the painter’s estimate inside. “Seems fair. And I like the idea of his being the locksmith’s brother-in-law. Saves me from having to give a house key to someone else.”
She reached for her cell phone, but Dent said, “Call him later. I want to hear about Jerry, your ardent fan.”
“He calls himself my number-one fan.” She picked out the photograph with him in it. “The focus is soft, but I’m almost certain that’s him.”
Dent studied the man in the picture.
His deep frown caused Bellamy to ask, “What?”
“I don’t know. Something. Tell me about him.”
“There’s not much to tell. I don’t know him, not even his last name. He came to one of my first book signings and thereafter kept popping up at personal appearances and lectures in New York, always bringing several copies of the book for me to autograph.”
“New York? So what was he doing at the Austin airport yesterday?”
“I have no idea.”
“You told me that your sense of being watched started when you got to Austin. Ever get that feeling in New York?”
“Sometimes. But I thought it was claustrophobia, being surrounded by a crowd.”
“You’re always surrounded by a crowd in New York.”
“Yes, but—”
“This was different? And it started when you began publicizing your book?”
She nodded. “The first time it happened, I was signing copies at a mystery bookstore. I thought the spooky atmosphere, all the people waiting in line, caused me to get flustered and panicky. I felt . . . airless.”
“Was Jerry there?”
“I think so.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“The day—” She stopped suddenly.
He cupped
his ear with his hand. “The day . . . what?”
“I left the city.”
“Same day the rat was delivered. Where’d you see Jerry that day?”
“Outside the network studio. But I’m positive that one has nothing to do with the other.”
“Well, I’m not. Positive, that is. Maybe Jerry’s stalking you.”
“With evil intent? Absolutely not. He’s harmless.”
Dent raised an eyebrow as though questioning that assertion.
“I swear to you, Dent, he’s about as sinister as a glass of milk. Bookish. Mild-mannered. Ordinary looking. He blends into the woodwork.”
“I’m scared already. Just the type you gotta watch out for. A creep.”
She looked at him with asperity. “You’ve never seen him. How do you know?”
“How do you know he isn’t? How do you know he hasn’t got the bodies of authors past buried in his basement?”
“Please.”
“Okay, then explain why he followed you to Texas.”
“Who said he followed me? I’m sure yesterday was a coincidence.”
“He’s your number-one fan. He sees you coincidentally in an airport like fifteen, twenty states away from where you’re both supposed to be, and he doesn’t come rushing over to speak to you, make his presence known? He doesn’t say, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe this! My favorite author out here on the frontier!’”
“Put that way . . .”
“Right.” He took the photograph from her and carried it over to the window, where the light was better. He studied it for several long moments, then his chin went up suddenly and he looked over at her.
“Yesterday. In the park. Two lovers lying on a blanket, getting it on. A pair of grandparents playing ball with their grandson. A group of cheerleaders practicing. And a late arrival. An ordinary-looking guy. Kept his back to us while he appeared to be talking into his cell phone.” He tapped the photograph. “It was your Jerry.”
Rupe had been in the dental chair until midnight last night. He’d called his dentist even before driving himself to the hospital following his violent encounter with Dale Moody.
Fortunately he and the dentist played golf together, so Rupe had his cell-phone number. “No, it can’t wait till regular business hours tomorrow,” he’d said when the dentist balked. “It’s an emergency. I’ll be there by eight.”
