“Uh, no. Well, maybe when I was a little girl. I had a pair of ruby-red boots with pointy toes that curled up.” Was she babbling or what?
“Are you over the concussion?”
She chuckled. “Is it that obvious?”
“No.” He gave her a slow smile that started in his hazel eyes. “I like your laugh.”
The way her heart ratcheted up, she didn’t need to do the eye contact thing and dropped her gaze to the five o’clock shadow on his jaw. Warning bells rang in her head. Say something. “You and Scott don’t look like brothers.”
“He’s my stepmom’s son.”
Her social skills really needed fine-tuning. But he made her feel like an awkward teenager. She took a calming breath while Nick took a seat in the wingback chair close to her desk.
“You’re reading Dead Men Don’t Lie?” Surprise laced his Southern drawl.
Taylor fumbled the book as she set it on her desk. “Actually, it belongs to a friend. She’s hoping you’ll autograph it.”
“Be honored to.” He reached for the book. “Her name?”
“Christine.” She waited as he signed his name on the title page. “What was it like, being on A.M. News last week?”
A tinge of red started at his throat and worked up to the tips of his ears.
“I’d rather have a root canal.” He slid the book back on her desk.
“I know . . . I’ve done a few interviews, and there’s nothing quite like those studio lights and someone sticking a microphone in your face and having your mouth get so dry your tongue sticks to the roof.”
“Sounds like the voice of experience.” Nick shook his head. “I hope I don’t have to do another one anytime soon.”
“Don’t blame you there.”
A soft knock interrupted them again. Her office had turned into Grand Central Station. “Come in.”
Her teaching assistant handed Taylor a small package and several envelopes. “This just came for you, and since I was coming to this building, I brought it.”
“Thank you,” Taylor said, dismissing him. She placed the mail to the side and picked up the small box. The postmark on the package caught her eye. Memphis, Tennessee. No return address. Maybe something from some of the family . . . except she wasn’t expecting anything. She glanced from the box to Nick. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead.”
Taylor peeled off the brown wrapping paper, then used a letter opener to slice the tape on the shipping box. Inside she found a black satin case embossed with the Drexler Jewelry Store logo. She frowned, remembering a diamond bracelet she’d admired in Drexler’s window a few weeks ago . . . actually drooled over it, but it’d been way beyond her budget.
She lifted the top, and her hand froze. Shrouded in black velvet, the same bracelet she’d admired glittered at her like a rattler coiled to strike.
A business card fell from the box, and she picked it up.
Death unfolds like a budding flower . . .
Cold chills raced over her body and wrapped around her chest, squeezing her lungs until she couldn’t breathe.
A diamond bracelet like the one the jeweler had shown Nick only an hour ago gleamed hard and cold in the light. He was certain it was the same bracelet charged to Scott’s credit card. Nick’s stomach churned. There had to be a mistake. His brother could not be the one stalking Taylor. Not the little boy he raised after their parents were killed in a car wreck.
Lord, let it be a coincidence. Let the card have a name on it. “Taylor, are you all right? Does it say who it’s from?”
“No! I’m not all right. And no, it doesn’t say who it’s from. I looked at this bracelet weeks ago. The same day I caught your brother following me.”
“I don’t know what to say.” Maybe something like he had evidence his brother had purchased it?
She took out her cell phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling Zeke Thornton. Let’s see what he does with this.”
“Wait.”
Her thumb hovered over the screen. “Why?”
“I need to tell you something first.”
“Does it have anything to do with Scott?”
Nick sighed as he nodded. “It’s one of the reasons I came to Newton. After I talked with you last week, I called the private investigator. A purchase at”—he glanced at the black case—“Drexler Jewelry showed up on a prepaid credit card belonging to my brother.”
Taylor folded her arms across her chest. “So Scott is stalking me. That means he’s the one who attacked me and Sheriff Atkins.”
“I refuse to believe that. The bracelet was a phone order. Anyone could’ve placed it.” Nick leaned forward. “You don’t know that Scott—”
“Stop!” Taylor held up her hands. “I’m telling you, he’s stalking me. Even though Conway is now a satellite of a much larger institution, it’s still a small university. I have, on average, eighteen students in each of my classes, most of them from the Newton and Seattle area. I’m not that well-known, yet Scott found his way here from Memphis, twenty-five hundred miles away. Which just happens to be close to where I grew up. Logan Point, Mississippi. Did you know that?”
“You grew up just outside of Memphis? No, I didn’t know. How could I?”
“Same way your brother knew. Hello . . . internet.”
“You’re saying my brother found you on the internet and came here to stalk you?”
“Why else would he pick this university to attend? And this poem.” She held up the card. “It sounds like your brother to me.”
Taylor crossed her arms and gave him a look that dared Nick to contradict her. Nick stared at the bracelet again. It was the only piece of evidence linking Scott to Taylor—everything else was circumstantial. Unless he revealed he’d written the poem. Given Taylor’s present state of mind, if she had that information, there would be no changing her opinion. She might even think Nick was in on it, and the last thing he needed was for her to decide he was working with his brother on this. “Everything you say may be right, but you don’t know my brother.”
“Oh!” She raised her hands as if in surrender. “I give up.”
He stood and paced in front of her and then stopped and leaned his hands on her desk. “I can’t believe Scott is the only long distance student you have in this university. Have you checked?”
“Sheriff Atkins did.” She tapped a pen on the desk. “We have less than a hundred from outside the northwest region.”
“So he’s not the only one.”
“He fits the circumstances.”
Nick chewed his bottom lip. “If, and I’m only saying if, Scott left the candy and flowers for you . . . you’re a beautiful woman. Have you considered he might have a crush on his professor?”
“Right. I led him on.” She glared at him. “Now I understand why you’re a bestselling writer. You can fabricate a story out of thin air. But that doesn’t explain the photographs.”
She rolled her chair to a file cabinet behind her desk, plucked out a folder, and thrust it toward him. “Take a look at these pictures. They arrived in the mail in a large envelope, no return address but postmarked in Newton.”
Nick opened the folder and flipped through photos of Taylor jogging, getting her mail, sitting in an auditorium. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble. “How do you know Scott took these?”
“Most of them”—she pointed at the photos—“are all the places I saw Scott, and when I confronted him, he turned white, almost fainted. He was guilty, all right. And he dropped my class right after that.”
Nick’s cell phone rang, and he unhooked it from his belt. The private investigator. “I need to take this.”
He turned and kept his voice low. “Hello?”
“Nick, Carl Webster. My secretary said you called, but first, let me tell you what I’ve discovered. I finally received feedback from some of the other banking institutions. Scott had more than one card. He purchased a one-way ticket from Seattle to Memphis usin
g a debit card.”
“When?”
“Ten days after he bought the bracelet. The eighteenth.”
The day after the attack. Nick gripped the phone. Doubt mushroomed, eating away at his belief in Scott’s innocence. Could his brother be dangerous? If he was, Nick had to stop Scott before he hurt someone else.
There has to be another explanation. The small whisper echoed in his heart.
Either way, he had to find his brother. And Taylor had resources he didn’t. If they could work together . . .
Taylor’s hands shook as she used a tissue to slide the jewelry box and packaging into a large envelope. She couldn’t live with these threats hanging over her. She had to find Scott and put an end to them.
Nick hooked his phone on his belt. “That was the investigator. Scott’s in Memphis. Been there about two weeks.”
Taylor caught her breath. If she’d had any doubt about Scott’s guilt, that information erased it. “That’s where the package came from. Memphis.”
Nick stepped back. “What?”
She shoved the address where he could see it.
“No . . .”
His ragged voice touched a chord in Taylor. She hated this for him, but she didn’t understand why the investigator hadn’t found this information already. “If the PI can find out about the credit cards now, why not earlier?”
He stuck his jaw out. “He’s not a cop, and this isn’t a movie where the detective gets online and sends out a few queries or bribes someone for the information.”
“Well . . . you could’ve gotten a court order.”
Nick folded his arms across his chest. “What crime has Scott committed? Judges don’t issue subpoenas without probable cause, and your own Deputy Thornton said my brother isn’t even on his radar.”
She cringed under the withering glance he shot at her. She hated to admit Nick was right, that PIs didn’t have access to the same information law enforcement did. “Did your investigator say where in Memphis? It’s a big city.”
“No. Only that a plane ticket to Memphis showed up on a debit card.” Nick shook his head. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I know my brother. Scott didn’t do this. He was the kid who always took up against bullies and brought home stray cats. I’m going to find him and show you. Work with me. Help me to prove his innocence.”
She steeled herself against the grief in his voice. Grief so palpable it breathed. But Nick Sinclair needed to face reality.
“Your brother is in Memphis. I get jewelry and another threat postmarked from there. You don’t know what he’s like now. Wake up, Nick. Scott is involved somehow.”
“No,” he said, determination settling into his voice. “There has to be someone else. Someone with a reason to threaten you. Scott doesn’t have one.”
Taylor gave Nick her best “I can’t believe you” look. “Are you always this stubborn?”
He folded his arms across his chest. “That goes two ways.”
“Just know this—I’ll be looking for him too.” She shot him a warning glance. “Don’t get in my way.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed, then he gave her a curt nod and without another word turned and walked out the door, his back ramrod straight.
Taylor bit her lip. She wished . . . what did she wish? She couldn’t change the evidence, and the evidence pointed to Scott’s involvement. But, her profiler instincts told her a good man just walked out the door.
And he was going to get hurt.
Her cell rang, and Taylor glanced at the ID. Livy. She punched the green button and answered the Memphis detective’s call. “What’s going on?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who yelled ‘ma chére.’”
“That was last week,” Taylor said.
“I know. Your email got buried in an avalanche of spam, and I just read it. So what’s going on?”
Taylor’s glance slid to Dean Hart’s dinner invitation on the corner of her desk, then back to the envelope containing the bracelet that she needed to get to Zeke. “If I come home this week, can you get me cleared to search for my dad’s old case files?”
“You bet! When are you coming?”
“Tomorrow, if I can get a flight out.” Her mouth curled in a wry grin. At least she wouldn’t have to make small talk with her ex-fiancé.
Taylor opened her internet browser and typed in flights to Memphis, Tennessee. “But I would like you to do a couple of things before I get there. First, I’m trying to locate a Scott Sinclair . . .”
5
A sour odor fanned in Scott Sinclair’s direction from the man who handed him a Movies 2 Go membership card. Scott managed to keep his lip from curling up. In the week and a half he’d worked at the video store, he’d come to know this one as a regular. A heroin junkie if he’d ever seen one—red-rimmed eyes, sallow skin, and wearing a dirty white long-sleeved shirt on a hot muggy night like tonight. And like always, he needed a bath.
Scott hated dealing with these people and would quit this job tonight if his trustee had come through with an advance on his monthly allowance. “Work will do you good.” Ethan Trask’s words rang in his ears.
One more day until the first and money would hit his bank account, but until then Scott only had the small amount of cash his boss paid him every night to live on. If his girlfriend hadn’t let him crash at her apartment, he’d be on the streets.
As soon as he got his money, it’d be adios . . . to this job, maybe even to Memphis. In the meantime, he’d at least been able to walk to the video store from the apartment.
Scott handed the card back to the customer and glanced at the movie title. Babes Gone Wild. Heroin wasn’t the only thing this guy was addicted to.
The man’s nicotine-stained fingers shook as he took the card, his gaze fixed on the video case. He pocketed the card, then rubbed the scraggly gray bristles covering his hollow cheeks.
Scott stepped back to take a quick breath and glanced toward the glass door, where a notice warned that customers had to be twenty-one to rent certain videos. Yeah, right. A purple Movies 2 Go sign flickered in the dark parking lot like a lightning bug on steroids.
Scott turned his attention back to the customer. “That’ll be five dollars. It’s a twenty-four-hour rental. Keep it longer and it’ll be an extra five.”
“I got a name. You been here awhile. You ought to know my name.”
“Excuse me?” Was this joker for real?
“I said, I got a name. It’s Ross. Albert Duncan Ross.”
“All right, Mr. Ross. I need five dollars or I’m putting the movie back. Got it, Mr. Albert Duncan Ross?”
Ross handed him a crumpled five dollar bill. Scott stuffed it in the cash register and pushed the video across the counter. Then he turned away and wiped his hand on his cargo pants, his fingers brushing the pocket that held a pint of whiskey.
Ross grabbed Scott’s arm, spinning him around. “Don’t treat me like I’m trash.”
Scott drew his fist back. “Don’t you put your hands on me.”
“I saw how you looked at me. Like I’m something you wipe your feet on.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Scott spotted other customers watching, excitement lighting their dull eyes. He dropped his clenched fist and shoved past the man. “Next time you come, see the manager.”
Leaving the cash register unattended, he hurried to the rear of the store, passing the store manager on his way. “I’m taking a break, Johnson.”
Scott stumbled out the back door into the thick night air. Water dripped from the eave. Vaguely, he remembered thunder earlier in the night. He leaned against the brick wall, the damp odor of wet asphalt clearing the stench of Ross from his nostrils. If only his head would clear. Instead, his thoughts tumbled together, racing from one thing to another.
Dana. His girlfriend said not to come back to the apartment drunk. He fingered the bottle in his pocket. Maybe the friend he’d met in Newton would let him crash at his place. Nah, Scott hadn’t seen him since he got
the job at Movies 2 Go. His friend had never told him where he lived . . . or where he worked. He was always just there when Scott needed him.
He fumbled for the pint of whiskey in his front pocket and squinted at it. Half gone. He didn’t remember drinking it. Just like he didn’t remember overdrawing his checking account. Bank had cut him off. Maybe he did need to quit drinking, like Dana kept harping on.
He and Dana went way back, before he left for Newton. In fact, she’d encouraged him to go. Get your head screwed on straight, she’d said. And at first it’d been so good. Ethan had gotten him admitted to Conway, and he was staying sober and making good grades. He really liked Dr. Martin. Liked just being near her.
But then Newton went all wrong.
Flashing lights. Newton. Dr. Martin.
What happened that night?
He uncapped the bottle and drank straight from it, pushing the question from his mind. Gotta think about something else. Like getting a lawyer, breaking the trust. Bet old Ethan wouldn’t like that. He acted like the money belonged to him. Scott wanted to see his face when he told him he was getting rid of him.
Tomorrow. Scott would tell him tomorrow.
He knit his brows together, trying to puzzle out the hazy memory that surfaced. Something about Ethan. Yeah, he’d tried to punch the trustee out when he wouldn’t give him any money. Maybe he wouldn’t go see him.
Scott took another swig from the bottle. Next month he’d be twenty. One more year and he wouldn’t have to ask anybody for anything. The money would be his to spend any way he wanted. All five million.
“You don’t need more money, Scott. Or alcohol. You need Jesus.” He stuck his fingers in his ears. He didn’t want to hear Angie’s voice tonight.
“Jesus doesn’t want me,” he mumbled, draining the bottle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and waited for the numbing relief. Maybe after tonight he wouldn’t drink anymore. Angie had always wanted him to quit.
“I’m sorry, Angie.” Scott’s voice echoed down the alley. He should have been there. He would have protected her, not like Nick. Why hadn’t Nick kept his wife safe?
Shadows of the Past (Logan Point Book #1): A Novel Page 5
