In the Dark

by Judith Arnold

  Too bad he worked with her. Too bad he worked for her sister. Another time, another circumstance, and this evening might have ended back at his apartment. He might have figured out a way to seduce her out of that baggy sweater, out of those soft, worn jeans and into his arms. He might have wound up smelling like her perfume, if she was wearing any.

  Julie put up an argument when he reached for the check. He ignored her protests as he handed the waitress his credit card. Once the waitress was gone, Julie slumped in her chair, sulking. “Why won’t you let me pay for my meal?”

  “I brought you here,” he said, wondering whether her annoyance qualified as one of those prickly moods women were so susceptible to. “I’ll pay.”

  “Just so long as we’re both clear this isn’t a date,” she muttered.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He smiled at her stubbornness. “Clear as the air between us.” Which, he had to admit, wasn’t all that clear, given the dim lighting and the fact that they both were nursing secrets. If he was going to do his job, he’d have to uncover her secrets. She’d probably resent him for that, even more than she resented him for paying for dinner.

  Her annoyance had faded by the time they left the restaurant. They huddled together under her umbrella as they walked down the alley to his car, then shared a quiet drive along the wet city streets back to the huge, slightly decaying house where she lived. He walked her up to the brick front porch, and her fingertips brushed lightly over his as he handed her the umbrella. Her fingers were long and slender, as cool and gentle as he’d imagined.

  The security expert in him didn’t approve of the uneven lighting on the front porch. The man in him only saw the shadows playing across her face, and the way her large violet eyes glowed, and the curve of her lips.

  “Do you want to take the umbrella back to the car?” she offered. “You can return it to me tomorrow.”

  “It’s hardly drizzling,” he said, trying not to stare at her mouth. “Be careful, Julie. You get any more scares, no matter how trivial—tell me. Okay?”

  She rolled her eyes, then smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly fine.”

  Perfect, maybe, he thought as he broke from her and strode down the walk to his car. The rain fell cold against his face and neck, but he refused to run or hunch up the collar of his jacket. Perfect, but not perfectly fine.

  He drove back to the hotel, left his car in a lot the hotel maintained a few blocks away and pulled his BlackBerry from the console between the front seats. He turned it on and checked his e-mail.

  There it was, a note from Marcie: “Our mother’s maiden name was Farris. Our grandmothers’ maiden names were McConnell and Pasker. Only family pet was Julie’s dog, Bella. Why do you need to know this?”

  Because it might help me do some breaking and entering, he silently answered Marcie’s question. He tucked the Black-Berry into an inner pocket of his jacket, climbed out of the car and strolled down the street toward the hotel’s service entrance. The rain had thinned into a chilly mist. His brisk pace kept him from getting too wet.

  He entered the hall to the security office. No one expected him to be at the hotel at 10:30 p.m., but if someone spotted him and he hadn’t checked in with the night security staff, there would be questions. Mac had learned long ago that one of the best ways to avoid those kinds of questions was to do whatever you were doing right out in the open.

  Tyrell was seated at the security desk when Mac swung through the door. “Hey, boss. You come to spell me?” Tyrell asked. He was young and had a sly sense of humor.

  “No such luck,” Mac told him. “I’m not really here. Julie Sullivan told me she had some weird static on her computer. She’s worried about a virus or a hacker. I told her I’d check it for her.”

  “You a techie?” Tyrell asked.

  Mac shrugged. “I can fiddle around a little. I’m betting it’s a problem with her power strip. I’ll unplug something, plug it back in, and she’ll think I’m a hero.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a lady like her thinking I was a hero,” Tyrell said appreciatively.

  Mac wouldn’t mind, either. “What kind of night are we having?”

  “A boring one.” Tyrell peered up at the monitor above the desk. “Some dude kicked up a fuss at the front desk on his way out to dinner. A Mr.—” he located a slip of paper on the desk and read from it “—Alvin Grote, Room 307. He said someone swapped pillows on him.”

  “Swapped pillows?”

  Tyrell glanced at the slip of paper. “He said his pillows were much softer when he checked in. Now they’re hard. The desk clerk assured him no one had changed the pillows in the room, but he got himself pretty worked up. So the desk clerk contacted me.”

  “Did you have to calm the guy down?”

  Tyrell’s immediate answer was a snort. Then he elaborated. “He was worked up, but it wasn’t like he was swinging or making threats. He’s from Chicago. Dressed all in black, bald on top and the rest of his hair in a ponytail…. You know the type. He demands the best, even though he hasn’t got a clue what the best is.”

  “But you were able to keep the situation under control?”

  “The desk clerk offered to put him in a different room, but he didn’t want that. So I suggested we have the hotel treat him to a drink at the bar. That satisfied him.” Tyrell shook his head. “Sometimes I think folks just throw a fit because they’re hoping to get something free out of it.”

  Mac had to agree. He was thankful hotel work wasn’t his life’s vocation. He hated giving people undeserved gifts just to shut them up. It seemed like extortion to him.

  He studied the monitor for a minute. “Other than Mr. Grote, have there been any problems?”

  “Nah. The night’s young, though,” Tyrell added hopefully.

  “I like your optimism.” Mac patted him on the shoulder, then left the office and headed toward the stairs. Hearing footsteps down the hall, he turned to see Luc Carter emerge from the housekeeping supply room, shutting the door behind him.

  Luc bounded along the hall until he noticed Mac. Then he slowed to a halt and smiled. “Hi.”

  “Hi, yourself. What are you doing here?”

  Luc glanced over his shoulder, then spun back to Mac. His tie loose and his hands plunged into his trouser pockets, he had the pleasantly rumpled look of someone who’d put in too many hours at work but didn’t really mind. His job as the hotel’s concierge shouldn’t have required a trip to the housekeeping supply room, though. “I’ve, uh, I’ve got a friend who works in there.”

  Oh. Okay. Mac smiled. “You can’t find a better place for your rendezvous than the supply room?”

  “Well, she was closing up for the night, and I came downstairs to help her.”

  “You’re all heart, Luc,” Mac teased him. Luc’s smile transformed from sheepish to wolfish. Mac considered reminding Luc that affairs with coworkers rarely ended happily—a truth he ought to remember the next time he got to pondering Julie Sullivan’s magnificent mouth—but dispensing romantic warnings to colleagues wasn’t his style. Let Luc learn his own lessons.

  “Well…I guess I should be on my way,” Luc said, sparing Mac a parting grin. “Catch you later.”

  “Yeah.” He watched Luc leave the building, then lapsed into thought. Where was the young lady Luc had been fooling around with in the supply room? She must have left ahead of Luc—but the supply room was her bailiwick, not Luc’s. Odd that she’d leave him to lock up the place.

  Frowning, Mac abandoned the stairs for the hall, stealing past the security office and testing the doorknob to the supply room. As he’d expected, it was locked, but he had a master key. He inserted it, twisted and pushed the door open. Reaching around the jamb, he groped for the light switch and turned it on before he entered the room.

  Floor-to-ceiling shelves divided the room into narrow aisles. The shelves were packed with supplies—bed linens, bath towels, boxes of complimentary shampoos, soaps and skin lotions, rows of irons that guests could borrow
, spare coffeepots and packets of ground coffee, glasses capped in pleated paper. No sign of Luc’s sweetheart—not that Mac had expected to find her lurking in the storeroom.

  Where could a young couple fool around in here? he wondered. The room lacked upholstered horizontal surfaces, and the floor was cold, hard linoleum. Of course, a lot could be accomplished standing up, but the aisles were narrow and the shelves were so crowded that a couple getting physical would likely knock things onto the floor.

  The floors were clear and the shelves were neat, though. Maybe Luc and his girlfriend had just stolen a few kisses. Maybe they were saving the main event for another venue.

  Or else…maybe they’d spread some towels on the floor. Mac noticed that the stack of plush white bath towels on one of the shelves looked slightly uneven. Most people wouldn’t have caught that, but Mac had been at this game a long time. He knew how to spot things that weren’t quite right.

  He strode down the aisle to the crooked stack. If Luc had used these towels, they shouldn’t be sitting on a shelf with all the clean ones, awaiting delivery to some unsuspecting guest’s room. He pulled the top towel from the stack and shook it out, searching for signs of dirt.

  What he saw were tiny glitters imbedded in the plush nap. Squinting, he angled the towel toward the overhead fluorescent light. Each glitter belonged to a splinter of broken glass.

  Something must have shattered in here, and Luc and his girlfriend had used the towel to clean it up. And then they’d put the towel back onto the shelf, where it could have been picked up and sent off to a guest’s bathroom. The unsuspecting guest would have stepped out of the tub and dried himself off, and wound up with glass splinters in his back.

  “Son of a bitch,” Mac muttered.

  He pulled the next towel out and studied it in the bluish light. More splinters of glass. He unfolded a third towel, a fourth, a fifth. All of the towels in the stack were flecked with tiny shards of glass.

  “Son of a freaking bitch.” Why would Luc have done something so careless, so downright stupid?

  Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe the girl had, or someone else on the housekeeping staff. The housekeepers were the lowest paid employees at the hotel. Someone pissed off at the boss or simply at the world might have left the booby-trapped towels on the shelf.

  Didn’t the hotel ship the bulk of its linens out to a professional laundry? Maybe someone at the laundry was responsible for this.

  He cursed one final time, then turned and left the supply room, locking up behind him. He’d have to contact Nadine LeClaire, the head of housekeeping. She’d be gone for the night, but this was worth phoning her at home about. Charlotte would have to hear about it, too, but he could write her a report in the morning.

  He returned to the security office, swung inside and reached for the phone. “What’s up?” Tyrell asked, shifting his gaze from the monitor and frowning at Mac.

  “Glass,” he muttered as he punched in Nadine’s phone number. The home telephone numbers of all the senior staff were posted on the wall next to the desk. Fortunately, the hour wasn’t so late, and he didn’t awaken her. As soon as she answered, he told her about the towels.

  She was appropriately outraged. “Broken glass in the guest towels? Who would’ve done that?”

  Mac pictured Luc Carter, then shook his head. Too many other possibilities existed for Mac to name a suspect. “I don’t know, Nadine. But I think you’d better send that batch of towels back to the laundry service. We don’t want to risk having a guest get hurt.”

  “I’ll come down and oversee the job,” she said. “God almighty. Thanks for discovering this mess.”

  “Just doing my job,” Mac insisted before hanging up.

  Tyrell looked worried. “I missed something?”

  “You couldn’t have missed it. We have no camera in the supply room—and those towels could have been put there hours ago. When Nadine gets here, give her whatever help she needs. I’ll get a report to Charlotte tomorrow.” With that he left the office, determined to accomplish what he’d come to the hotel to do.

  He took the back stairs two at a time. On the second floor he moved swiftly and quietly down the hall to Julie’s office. The master key worked on her door as effectively as it had on the supply room door.

  Not bothering to turn on the light, he crossed directly to her desk and hit her computer switch. While the machine warmed up, he pulled his BlackBerry from the jacket pocket where he’d stashed it. Her sister’s e-mail glowed on the tiny screen. Farris, McConnell, Pasker…and the family dog, Bella.

  Julie had told him she was a dog person. Now he’d find out just how much of a dog lover she was. Lots of folks used the maiden names of relatives as passwords, but some used the names of their pets. Mac had a feeling Julie was one of the pet people.

  As soon as the computer was online, he clicked her e-mail icon. The cursor flashed at the “password” box and he typed in B-E-L-L-A.

  “Yeah,” he whispered as her e-mail inbox filled the screen. A dozen unopened e-mails awaited her, and he skimmed the return addresses. They featured recognizable names or companies. He hoped that meant she wouldn’t have any ugly surprises awaiting her tomorrow.

  Issuing a silent prayer that she hadn’t deleted the e-mail that had upset her, he scrolled down to her already opened e-mails. One return address stood out: “4Julie.” He clicked it.

  The e-mail showed a musical notation of some sort—a staff with a wriggly line sloping up it, and underneath it the message: “The song is over.”

  What the hell did that mean? Obviously, Julie had some idea. This had to be the message that had shaken her to her bones.

  He pulled out his flash stick, plugged it into her computer and downloaded her entire e-mail folder. He had no interest in all those e-mails from vendors and banks and the hotel’s reservations department, but only by collecting all the data would he have half a prayer of tracking down the sender of the musical e-mail. Not a full prayer, but half was better than nothing.

  Once the download was complete, he removed the flash stick and shut off her computer.

  The song is over, he thought. What song? Whose song? Over in what way?

  He left Julie’s office, locked up and took the back stairs down to the security office again. “Did Nadine get here yet?” he asked Tyrell.

  “No.”

  “Phone me if she needs to talk to me. I’ll keep my cell turned on.”

  “Okay. Broken glass in the towels?” Tyrell snorted in disbelief. “Pretty crazy.”

  “It’s a crazy world,” Mac agreed as he pivoted and stalked out of the office.

  A crazy world, indeed, he thought as he exited the building into the damp, raw night. Someone sabotaging the guest towels with glass, and someone sabotaging Julie Sullivan’s equilibrium with a cryptic e-mail. A crazy world full of crazy people—no wonder the services of Crescent City Security were in high demand.

  He patted the pocket that held his flash stick. He’d gotten lucky at guessing how Julie would choose a password for her e-mail software. If his luck held, he’d be able to track down who’d sent her the e-mail that had freaked her out.

  Even with luck, however, he had a long night ahead of him.

  SHE’D MADE GLENN SUFFER, so she should suffer, too. Fair was fair.

  Not that what she’d done to Glenn was fair.

  Tracking her down had been easy enough. Anyone could be Googled these days. The name Julie Sullivan had summoned thousands of hits, but patience paid off. You had to be patient to survive an eight-year sentence, being cut off from the world, your job, your lover. That same patience made it possible to click Web site after Web site until the right one appeared.

  The New Orleans Times-Picayune had provided the goods: a photograph of some antiques on display in a hotel lobby, with a few of the hotel’s executives standing around. One was identified as Julie Sullivan, and the photo offered proof. All these years later, Julie was still tall and poised and gorgeous. And she was in New Orl
eans, working at the Hotel Marchand. A phone call to the hotel’s switchboard was all it took to get Julie’s e-mail address.

  Bingo. Or as they said in New Orleans, voilà.

  Thank God for computer cafés and libraries—the twenty-first century’s version of pay phones. Send a nasty e-mail from a public computer and no one could ever trace it back to you.

  Not that the e-mails needed to be openly hostile. That would be too obvious. Julie was the kind of woman who’d get huffy and indignant if you confronted her directly. Better to undermine her subtly. Give her a quiet scare. Soften her up bit by bit, so when the time came, her stiff resolve and her smug self-righteousness would be worn down and she wouldn’t have the will to fight back.

  She’d deprived Glenn of his business, his freedom and his ability to love. Let her suffer and squirm for a while. Make her miserable.

  She’d be put out of her misery soon enough.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MAC HAD BEEN in her office. Julie noticed his scent, faint though it was, as soon as she entered the room the next morning.

  Nothing appeared to have been moved or even touched. Her desk looked exactly the way she’d left it last night. Her chair was pushed in, her computer turned off, her file cabinets closed. Her pen angled out of its brass stand and her day calendar still showed yesterday’s date. She tore off the page and gazed around the room. Mac had left no evidence behind, other than his woodsy, sexy scent.

  What had he been doing in here? When had he done it? Why was he watching her?

  She had to admit his scrutiny bothered her less now than it had before she’d spent an evening in his company, stuffing her face with delicious food at that unpretentious back-alley eatery. If he unnerved her now, it wasn’t because she felt he was spying on her. It was because he was so damn…male.

  Maybe she’d eaten all that food last night to sublimate another hunger. She hadn’t been with a man since she and Steven broke up a year ago—and Mac wasn’t just some guy. He had those dark eyes and that chiseled chin, as Charlotte had pointed out yesterday, and he had a heart-melting smile, a wicked laugh, height to match Julie’s and a soft, seductively drawling voice that could make the word darlin’ sound X-rated. He was smart and confident, just this side of arrogant.