Sitting up, Emma switched on the lamp again. Maybe, she thought, I should let myself think about Jason MacKenzie.
Then, half sitting against the headboard, her fingers clutched around the bedclothes, she tried to go to sleep with the lights on.
And thoughts turned to dreams…
Chapter Five
A fire crackled, fragrant with charred pine smoke, casting light and shadow against the ceiling. Undertones from the nearby bay layered a surging bass rhythm beneath the rustle and snap of the flames. A mattress on the floor, layered with soft old flannel sheets caught the light and the warmth and the shadows.
The shadows.
Emma’s heartbeat quickened. A man eased over her. Jason. The heat of his naked chest brushed her bare breasts, tickling and tantalizing. His lips sought the hollow at the base of her throat, nuzzled, drifted lower.
A log broke and the fire surged greedily into it, shooting light across the ceiling to disperse the shadows. But the shadows lunged back.
The shadows.
Emma woke with a start. Darkness enveloped her and for an instant her heart tripped. The shadows surrounded her, murmuring and reaching, stirring the scream that hid in the depths of her fear.
Light flashed, vanquishing the lurking darkness for an instant of time. But, in that instant, reality reached her.
My bed. I’m in my bed.
She turned her head on the pillow. The bedside lamp was off. So was the digital display of her alarm clock. The power was out. The crackling, snapping sound from her dream…light flashed again, outside and thunder rumbled. Rain struck the bedroom window, its patter like the lick of a flame at a log.
Emma pushed herself upright in the bed. A storm. It’s just a storm.
Two storms, she realized a second later. One outside her apartment, the other inside her. Her body was warm and moist from the internal tempest and her pulse throbbed in intimate places. Images from her dream, of the man at the center of it, lingered in her mind, driving that pulse to a more urgent pace.
She resisted. She had somehow repressed the memory of such dreams before and allowing them free thought now could only lead to trouble. But as the outside storm intensified and the shadows appeared to move around her, she found such thoughts as reassuring as they were troubling. Lying down again, she pulled the sheets up over her head and let those thoughts take her back to sleep.
* * * * *
Early morning sunlight streaked through the window behind Jason’s desk as the last of the storm clouds dispersed. The brightness blanketed the old photograph lying on top of the Campanero case folder. Jason figured the picture was about forty years old. The crime scene boys had found it inside a shoebox under the bed in the victim’s bedroom.
In the photo, Amalia Campanero sat on a swing with a young man whose arm draped her shoulders. There was a faint family resemblance between the two, something about the eyes and the set of each chin.
Fiddling with a cracked ballpoint pen, Jason sat back and considered that resemblance. Emma St. Clair had suggested a sibling innocently enough but Jason had a hunch she might be right. In fact, her suggestion touched off a little alarm at the back of his head that shouted, “Pay attention!”
He tapped the pen against his desk and wondered if Emma’s casual suggestion had risen from a similar instinctive alarm. Brian Reiser had once told him that doctors relied on hunches as much as cops did. Emma St. Clair struck him as sharp enough to be in tune with her more instinctive nature. She certainly had the most intelligent eyes he’d ever seen. Intelligent and sexy at the same time, those eyes seemed to peer right inside his brain, find his libido and stroke it until—
Dropping the pen, Jason tried to force the beautiful medical examiner out of his mind. She got in the way there far too often since he’d left her in that restaurant yesterday. A major distraction was what she was.
Grabbing his computer keyboard, he dragged it forward. The gold shield displayed in the center of the blue screen taunted him as he tried to remember what combination of keystrokes would take him to the search option. But memory failed him. He’d told Emma that Charlie wasn’t computer-literate but the truth was, he was the one with the problem. During computer training classes two years earlier, he’d been more interested in the stacked blonde running the sessions than in learning the lessons.
He glanced at the phone. The system administrator, Janice, didn’t usually get into the station until nine o’clock. She was probably still in bed. But did that matter? It had been a while but she’d never minded him waking her before.
Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine Janice lounging in her king-sized bed. Instead, Emma’s face gazed up at him from those ice-blue satin pillows in his mind, her auburn hair spilling in waves around her. The image so startled him that his fingers twitched on the keyboard. The computer bleeped.
“Frick,” Jason muttered and darted a glare at his partner’s empty desk. If Charlie would just get to work and give him a hand then he wouldn’t be thinking about big beds and blondes who turned into redheads in his mind.
Narrowing his eyes, he stared harder at the screen, as if doing so would make the machine tell him the magic keystrokes. Instead, by the time Charlie showed up five minutes later, Jason was about ready to toss the computer out the window.
Leaning over Jason’s shoulder, Charlie squinted at the screen and chuckled. “The great detective.” With one finger he thumped the “Invalid Password” message displayed on the screen. “How long have you been trying?”
“Too long.” Jason’s jaw ached as he spoke through clenched teeth. “If they’d let me use my birth date like I wanted—”
“Birth dates are the first thing hackers try when they break into computer systems. Didn’t you pay attention in the systems security class last year? Oh, I forgot. You were too busy trying to seduce the instructor. I’ll use mine.” Reaching around Jason, Charlie quickly typed several letters. Seconds later a list of inquiry options appeared on the screen.
Backing off, Charlie slid a cinnamon roll into the space between Jason and the keyboard. “Maybe you forgot your password because you’re busy mooning over our pretty medical examiner.”
“I wasn’t mooning over anyone,” Jason lied, avoiding Charlie’s gaze. “Lots of people forget their passwords.”
As Charlie lifted another cinnamon roll out of a paper bag on the desk, Jason could see that his partner didn’t believe him. He knew too, that Charlie worried about him. Jason had tried not to obsess over his recent losses. But it was tough to ignore a Fate that seemed determined to destroy every close relationship in his life. Only his relationship with Charlie and the man’s small family seemed immune. At least so far.
Shaking off that disturbing thought, he grabbed the pastry. “You got something for me besides sugar and cholesterol?”
“I can’t give you a name but I can tell you that your hunch was right. A man killed Ms. Campanero.”
“Fifty-fifty chance of being right on that one.” The cinnamon roll and his own frustration with the computer enticed Jason enough to leave the keyboard alone for a few minutes. “But how do you know for sure?”
Charlie reached inside his suit coat. “After much time and effort, I found a boy in Ms. Campanero’s neighborhood who swears a man was living with her at the time of her death.”
Jason raised an eyebrow. “A good, unmarried Catholic girl like Amalia?”
“The boy thought we might be interested in the man so he drew this.” Charlie dropped a sheet of lined school paper on the desk. Drawn in pencil across the blue lines was a decent sketch of a man. “Take off a few wrinkles, add a little hair and lift the mouth…”
“And he looks like this guy.” Jason placed the drawing beside the shoebox photo. Excitement tickled his gut. “Your witness drew this?”
“He’s in the honors art class at Clear Harbor High School.”
“Convenient. Why does he think this man killed her?”
“The boy was selling raffle tickets around the nei
ghborhood for the art club three days ago. He said Senorita Campanero always supported school projects, so he went by her place and saw this guy through a window. Said he was arguing with her. It got so ugly, the kid ran off.”
“What are the odds that this guy is Amalia’s brother and that he’s in the country illegally?”
Charlie pulled up a chair. “Move over and let’s find out.”
Jason slid aside, letting Charlie take his place at the computer. The older man tapped a few keys and brought up a search screen, then typed in the name “Campanero”. Several seconds passed before search results appeared.
“Look at that one,” Charlie said, pointing to the last of three displayed photographs on the computer screen.
Jason held the boy’s sketch and the old photo near the screen image. His blood coursed a little faster. The similarities were too close to ignore. “I think that’s him.”
Charlie clicked a couple of keys more to bring up detailed information on the last photo.
Jason read the data. “Jaime Campanero. Citizen of Mexico. Hmm. Looks like Señor Campanero makes frequent uninvited trips into our country. Deported three times in the past seven years, arrested once for running drugs. The only witness against him was found in a Houston alley with half his face blown away. The drug charge was dropped and he was sent back to Mexico again.”
“I’ll order the ballistics report on that murder and compare it to what our people got on Amalia Campanero.” Charlie clapped Jason on the back. “A good morning’s work, my friend.”
Yeah, any time they got a break made it a good morning.
Grinning, Jason gestured with his cinnamon roll. “What? You couldn’t afford an espresso to go with this?”
* * * * *
Emma leaned her cheek against the knuckles of one hand and tried to concentrate on the report on her desk. A stack of folders stood at her elbow. Others waited in a basket on the credenza behind her. She had mountains of work to do but her thoughts kept returning to what had happened in the autopsy suite on Wednesday.
“Just your imagination,” she muttered for the hundredth time and then lowered her damp hand to her lap. She’d seen her physician that morning and he’d assured her that her head injury had not been severe enough to cause hallucinations after nine weeks of recovery. She was stressed, he’d determined and had prescribed a mild anti-anxiety pill to get her through this tough time of returning to work. Emma hadn’t mentioned her ridiculous notion about ghosts.
She hadn’t allowed herself to think about Jason MacKenzie anymore, either. Not that certain thoughts didn’t try to intrude. But when she was awake, she was more in control than when she was caught in the twilight edge of sleep. That time when golden eyes and hard, masculine hands could soothe away nightmares.
Taking a careful breath, she tried again to concentrate on the report. The subject, a sixteen-year-old girl, had died of a heroin overdose two weeks earlier. Judging from the attached crime scene photograph—the position of the body on a rumpled bed, drug paraphernalia neatly arranged on the nightstand—it had been a self-administered overdose. Tracks on the girl’s arms were numerous, running from her wrists to her armpits, indicating prolonged and regular drug abuse. Her problem couldn’t have been more apparent if she’d stood on a street corner and announced it to the world.
Or stood in an autopsy suite and told one Associate Chief Medical Examiner.
Turning the photo over, Emma sat back and closed her eyes. She had not autopsied this body, had never seen the girl before opening the folder. She would not allow herself to imagine that the girl’s spirit could appear before her. The souls of the dead did not hang around after their bodies expired. They did not appear to the living. They went on to…to…
Emma wasn’t sure where they went. Heaven. Hell. Some kind of metaphysical limbo reached via a warm golden tunnel. Or maybe the dying just dreamed themselves into oblivion.
It didn’t matter. She had imagined Amalia Campanero’s spirit because she was stressed. She should accept that fact, move forward with her work and be grateful that she had no post mortems scheduled for the rest of the day.
She’d hoped that sitting on the sidelines for a couple of days, doing paperwork, would help her forget what had happened on Wednesday. But the image of Amalia Campanero continued to taunt her.
A chill shuddered through her. Opening her eyes, she sat forward. “Get a grip,” she muttered and reached for the next page of the report.
A shadow fell over her desk. “Talking to yourself?”
Emma looked up with a start. “Alan!”
Her ex-husband smiled at her from the other side of her desk. “Hello, Emma.”
Rising, she clutched her hands over her stomach and tried to calm her racing heart. She hadn’t seen Alan in months and certainly hadn’t expected to experience this rush of emotion at seeing him again. But she was fragile now, a victim of her own imagination and he’d always had the power to quicken her pulse with his shimmering blue eyes and lean runner’s body. The fact that she was already halfway to Nervous, USA only strengthened his effect today.
“I had business in town,” he said. “I wanted to know how you were so I thought I’d see if you’re free for dinner.”
She forced her fingers to untwine, then reached out to close the folder that lay open on her desk. Temptation teased her but she resisted. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” He stepped closer to the desk, bringing a scent of spicy cologne with him. A lock of his blond hair fell forward over his forehead. “Two old friends? What’s wrong with that?”
“We’re divorced, Alan, because you cheated on me.” Picking up the folder, she held it in front of her thrumming heart like a shield. She tried to remember how easily he had manipulated her emotions before. “I’d say there was everything wrong with us having dinner together. And how did you get up here anyway?”
He lifted a visitor’s card key. “Your receptionist gave this to me when I told her I was your husband.”
Emma frowned. “Ex-husband. I’ll make a note to let the receptionist know that additional piece of information.”
Alan perched on a corner of her desk, his eyes glimmering beneath pale lashes. He was apparently unaffected by the curtness of her tone. “I haven’t seen you in months. Since that day before the judge.”
“You’ve called me almost every night.”
“I’ve spoken to your machine almost every night. I’ve spoken to your parents. I haven’t spoken to you.” He leaned one hand on the center of her desk, staking a claim on her territory, bringing himself close enough that she caught another whiff of his cologne. “I’ve been worried about you, Emma.”
She put down the folder, picked up a pen and twirled it through her fingers, determined not to back away. His nearness made her nervous but only because she remembered how he had made her doubt herself with his lies. At least, that was what she wanted to believe.
Those charming blue eyes dipped, focusing on her lips. “Can’t we at least talk, babe?”
Her abdominal muscles tightened and her ribs began to ache with the effort of holding her ground. “I don’t see that we have anything to talk about. And I wish you’d get off my desk.”
He ignored her wish. “Can’t you forgive me for a little mistake?”
She shot to her feet. “A mistake? You cheated on me several times—”
“Only twice.”
“And then lied even after I caught you in the act.” Emma took a deep breath. She would not be drawn into an argument over how many affairs he’d had.
“I lied because I love you, Emma and because I hated to see you hurting.” He tilted his head as he looked up at her, his expression a combination of boyish hope and a cad’s confidence. “Honey, you wanted to believe me. You wanted to believe in our marriage.”
The truth in his words had her face heating. “I wanted to believe in myself too and you took that away from me.”
“I don’t blame you for
still being angry.” Moving back at last, he clasped his hands behind his back. But the gleam in his eyes belied his almost penitent stance. “I was a rat and I don’t deserve you. But I do worry about you, especially since your accident.”
Holding the pen against her aching ribs, she glared at him. “I’m fine. And I’m very busy, so if you don’t mind…”
Alan leaned forward again, resting both palms flat on the top of her desk. “I still love you, Emma.”
It hurt but she maintained eye contact with him. “You should have thought of that before you cheated on me.”
The smile in his eyes melted into something softer as he focused on her lips. “I wish you would believe that I’ve changed my ways. Oh, baby, I want to kiss you.”
Feeling the weight of his gaze upon her lips again, Emma remembered their last kiss—remembered how she could smell the woman he’d made out with less than twenty minutes earlier—and her spine went rigid. “Go away, Alan.”
He blinked as if he didn’t understand. “But you love me too.”
“Your infidelity killed my love.”
Shadows flashed through his eyes and he slammed one fist against the desk. “It takes two to ruin a marriage, Emma!”
Emma’s entire body trembled but not with old passion or guilt or any sense of loss. This was fury. “Go away now, Alan, or I will call Security.”
Hands raised, he backed away from the desk, his manner suddenly contrite again, his face relaxing into a pleasant expression that didn’t fool her for a second. “I’m going. We’ll talk again later.”
She reached for her telephone. “Alan—”
“I’ll call you.”
As she started to call building security, Alan slipped out the door. Still shaking, Emma hung up the phone and fumbled her way back into her chair. Lowering her face into her hands, she gave in to tears for the first time since her accident.
* * * * *
“Do you see him?” Charlie murmured over the radio.
“Not yet,” Jason whispered back. He crouched between two trash dumpsters in the shadow of an old warehouse on Dowling Street. Clouds deepened the night, weighing down the summer air. Scents of old oil, grease and rust hung in the humidity and the only sound came from the waves lapping in the bay.
Final Words Page 6
