The Switch

by Sandra Brown

  But out of all the surprises that had been sprung on her since bidding Jem good night—the sudden appearance of Christopher Hart, his being attacked, his injuries, his asking if she had a gun—the most incredible to her was that he could fall asleep and snore peacefully in the midst of a crisis.

  For ten minutes she didn't move. She sat silently and watched him sleep. Then, as though programmed to wake up after sleeping exactly six hundred seconds, his eyes came open. Seeing her, he smiled and whispered, "Hey." "Hey"

  Extending a hand toward her, he drawled, "What are you doing way over there?"

  "I—" Then, realizing his mistake, she smiled apologetically and reminded him softly, "I'm Melina."

  He dropped his hand and, looking chagrined, shifted his position in the chair. He sat up straighter and pushed his fingers up through his hair. Irritably he said, "I knew that."

  "For a second there, I don't think you did."

  Declining to respond, he asked, "Did I doze off?"

  "No, you went comatose."

  "Sorry."

  "You should try and get about eight more hours of it. Unless you think you have a concussion; then you should stay awake."

  "I told you I don't have a concussion."

  "Okay." After a short silence, she asked, "How'd you know where I live?"

  "Lawson gave me the address. I sent flowers."

  "Oh. I haven't read all the card enclosures yet. Thank you." "You're welcome."

  He stared at the toe of his boot. The hems of his jeans were wet, she noticed, but the boots had kept his legs and feet dry. He seemed unconcerned about the drops of blood that had discolored the leather.

  Finally he looked across at her. "How'd you know?" "What?"

  "About me and Gillian."

  "That you'd slept together?"

  He bobbed his head curtly.

  "She told me. When she got home that night."

  The toe of his boot became his focus again. "I wasn't lying to Lawson when I said I didn't know what time she left. She didn't say goodbye." He shot her a quick glance before resuming the study of his boot. "She sneaked out while I was asleep."

  "She thought it would be better to make a clean break. That it might have been awkward if she'd hung around until morning." He looked at her as though waiting for a more complete explanation. "Some men would rather not go through that morning-after scene. Gillian thought you might prefer waking up alone."

  "She thought wrong."

  "Oh. Well." Several beats separated the words. "She had no way of knowing that. She wasn't that familiar with the protocol for one-night stands." Blue eyes drilled into her. "It's true," she insisted. "In that regard we were different."

  "So she said."

  "She did?"

  "While playing you, she described herself as impulsive. She said Melina Lloyd does whatever feels right at the moment."

  She smiled sadly. "That pretty much describes me, but it wasn't Gillian. She was much more circumspect. You should feel flattered, Chief. She compromised her standards to sleep with you. You must've been very special to her."

  "Then why'd she—" He ended the question abruptly, angrily.

  "I've explained why she left without saying goodbye." "Yeah, yeah," he muttered. "You say she got here between two and three?"

  "She apologized for being so late, but I was waiting up for her."

  "To hear how the evening went?"

  "Yes."

  "Well?" he asked.

  She bristled. "What do you want, a grade? A through F? On a scale of one to ten? Or will a simple pass-fail classification be sufficient? Isn't that a little juvenile?"

  "And twins switching places isn't?" he asked, raising his voice.

  Waving her hands in front of her face, she stood up. "We've gotten off track here." Forgetting to favor her foot, she came down hard on her heel and grimaced.

  "Does your foot hurt?"

  "Why did you come here, Chief? What happened tonight that brought you crashing through my door?"

  "I was at this club on—"

  "Greenville. That much you've told me.""I was on my way to my car when two guys jumped me." "And beat the crap out of you."

  "They were working on it. They were trying to get me into a van and making promises that they were going to kill me. I think they would have made good on that promise if another car hadn't turned into the parking lot. When it did, they got into the van and sped away.

  "The people in the other car realized I was hurt and offered to help, to call 911, the police. I told them it was a family fight and best handled privately. If they could please just get me into a taxi ... You know the rest."

  "Could you describe the men?"

  "They were wearing ski masks."

  "Masks? Good Lord. Did you see the car tag number on the van?"

  He shook his head. "Too dark. Didn't even get the state. The van was a blur of some dark color. I couldn't tell."

  "They didn't try to take anything?" she asked, glancing down at his aviator's wristwatch.

  "These weren't thieves, Melina. They said right up front that they were going to kill me, and when they said it, I believed it. They weren't messing around. I'm no coward ..." Remembering that she'd called him just that, he added dryly, "Your opinion to the contrary. But in any case, these guys made a believer out of me. They would have done what they said."

  Chief wasn't the kind of man who would exaggerate a fist-fight. He didn't need dramatic effect to get attention. He attracted attention when he was standing still doing nothing. He didn't need to invent tales of fire-breathing dragons to look like Prince Charming.

  "Why do you think they singled you out?"

  "I wasn't singled out of a crowd, Melina," he said with diminishing patience. "They were lying in wait for me. Me, not just anybody."

  "They called you by name?"

  "Aren't you listening?"

  "Okay, okay. They knew you. That makes this very serious. Why didn't you notify the police immediately?"

  He gnawed on the corner of his lip for a moment, then continued speaking with soft urgency. "Think about it. Three days ago Gillian was murdered in her bed. She was targeted. The words painted on her walls were crude references to me and the fact that we had slept together. It pissed off somebody."

  "Dale Gordon."

  He made a scoffing sound. "It wasn't any fucking ghost that jumped me tonight. You might believe in coincidence, but I don't. At the very least, I'm skeptical of it. I believe in cause and effect. A bell rings, you look for a cause, a reason for its ringing. It's been drilled into me through my training to watch for warning signs and to heed them immediately.

  "Granted, sometimes you can read the signals wrong. Sometimes it can be a false alarm. But you've got to check it out. Warning signals are built in for a purpose, and that purpose is to alert you of danger. I consider one murder, one suicide, and one attempted murder to be warning signs that something is terribly wrong with this picture."

  "You think Gillian's murder and this attack on you tonight are connected?"

  "Yeah. Furthermore, so do you." He looked at her hard, his eyes reflecting the light from the open bathroom door like blue-tinted mirrors. "Unless I miss my guess about you entirely, you thought Lawson's summation of things was a trifle too pat. You're not in complete agreement that it went down the way he says it did. You are not convinced that Dale Gordon acted alone. Are you?"

  They stared at one another through the still semidarkness. Her chest was so tight she found it difficult to breathe. Finally she said, "Would you like some tea?"

  CHAPTER 19

  "Tea?"

  "Sometimes I drink it to relax," Melina explained. "Ever tried bourbon?"

  "With a pain pill?"

  "Even better."

  "I'll see what I've got." She left the room. While she was out, Chief took in his surroundings. The room was comfortably furnished. Feminine, but not fussy. Neat, but not compulsively so. On the nightstand was a framed snapshot of the twins. He pu
lled himself out of the chair and picked up the photograph, looking from one smiling face to the other.

  "Can you tell which is which?" Melina had carried in two highball glasses.

  "No. Thanks."

  She hesitated before passing one of the drinks to him. "No

  thanks?"

  He reached for the drink. "No, I can't tell you apart. And thanks for the drink."

  "You're welcome."

  "You took my suggestion, I see."

  "The drinks took less time to fix than tea." She nodded down at the picture. "I'm the one on the right."

  He looked at the snapshot again, shook his head, and muttered, "Damn." Returning the frame to the nightstand, he resumed his place in the chair. Melina sat on the bed and propped her back against the headboard, but she continued to gaze at the framed photograph. "I haven't mourned her yet."

  "You haven't had time."

  "I suppose."

  "It'll hit you all at once. Unexpectedly. Like a ton of bricks falling on top of you. You'll realize she's truly gone. That's when you'll grieve."

  "Speaking with the voice of experience, Chief? Have you lost someone close to you?"

  "My mother. Seven years ago. It was tough."

  "When our parents died, one soon after the other, Gillian and I relied heavily on each other to get through."

  "So it was just you two? No other brothers or sisters?"

  "Just us. Now just me." She ran her finger thoughtfully around the rim of the drinking glass. When she looked up at him, she asked, "What about your father?"

  "Still alive." That was all he had to say on that subject, and she must have intuited it because she didn't pursue it. After a lengthy silence that closed the subject of loss, he remarked, "This is a strange situation, Melina."

  "How so? I agree with you, but specifically why do you think it's strange?"

  "Customarily, when I'm fortunate enough to be sharing a bedroom with a beautiful woman, sipping a drink, we're not talking about death and dying and unsolved mysteries."

  She smiled, but there was no humor in it. "Nothing's normal for me, either. My sister's murder changed everything."

  "Then you'll empathize with my saying that since I met Gillian, since the two of you switched places, my life's gone to shit."

  She came off the bed like a shot, with a flash of bare leg that eliminated his need to speculate further if she was wearing anything beneath her robe. None too gently she set her drink on the nightstand and confronted him angrily. "You know what just occurred to me? None of this would have happened if not for you."

  "You're right." His calm statement took her aback. She had

  expected an argument. When none was forthcoming, she was left with nothing to say. "Temper tantrum over? Ready to listen?"

  Huffily she resumed her place on the bed, folding her arms across her chest. He asked politely if he could pour her another drink. She shook her head. "Okay, then," he began, "let's lay it all out, and look at it, and see if we can make sense of it. Agreed?"

  "Why are you doing this?" she asked. "You made it clear that day at police headquarters that you resented being involved, that you were an innocent bystander, and that the sooner you could walk away from it, the better."

  "Initially I did think that way. I didn't want to be dragged into a mess that wasn't even of my making. And you're right, it was selfish of me to feel that way. I feel differently now."

  "Why the sudden change of heart? The threat on your life? A prick of conscience?"

  "A prick with a conscience," he said, grinning at her. She didn't return the smile. "Okay, give me a hard time about it, Melina. I deserve it for acting like an asshole."

  "You're stalling."

  He hesitated, then said quietly, "My reason for being here isn't something I wish to share."

  "Does it have to do with Gillian?"

  "In part. In major part." He didn't expound, but thankfully she accepted the abbreviated version.

  "What else?"

  "I think that whoever killed Gillian also tried to kill me tonight." He had her attention now. She was listening. The currents of hostility coming from her weren't as strong as be‑

  fore. "At least I was made to believe that I was about to be killed. It might have only been a scare tactic."

  "So you admit that you're scared."

  "Mostly I'm pissed. Maybe it's just my Injun blood coming to a boil, but nobody jumps me in the dark, tries to kidnap me, and tells me I'm about to die without getting a good fight out of me."

  She thought about it for a few moments, then raised her hands in a helpless gesture. "But Gillian's murderer is dead, Chief."

  "You're satisfied that Dale Gordon was acting alone?" "It's reasonable."

  "Then why were you at his apartment last evening?" Her lips parted in wordless surprise.

  "I drove past his place myself," he confessed. "It still had crime scene tape around it, but I went over there hoping I'd come away convinced that this sick dick was solely responsible for killing Gillian.

  "I saw you sitting in your car, staring at that creepy place so hard you didn't even notice when I drove past. Seeing you there supported my feeling that Lawson missed something. There's more to this than that one pathetic wacko."

  "I went over there hoping for the same thing," she confessed. "Enlightenment. A sense of closure. Something."

  "And came away... ?"

  "Feeling as you do, Chief. There's got to be more to it. I don't think this sad individual acted on his own. If anything, he was manipulated into doing what he did."

  "You think somebody knew about his obsession with Gillian and used it to get him to kill her?"

  "Something like that." In frustration she thumped the mattress with her fists. "But who? Why? Gillian had no enemies."

  He finished the last of his drink. Neither it nor the pain pill had made a dent in the dull throbbing on the side of his face.

  He could feel his eye swelling despite the ice pack he'd been holding to it. Since it wasn't helping, he set it aside.

  "There are these men, Native Americans, who came to see me." He told her about his two meetings with Dexter Longtree and George Abbott. Melina listened without comment.

  "Abbot's a yes-man, but Longtree is a chief and looks it. He holds a seat on an intertribal council, apparently wields a lot of influence, and has a lot of money. They hoped to persuade me to join a group they're forming." He described Native American Advocacy and its goals. "They want me to serve as their official spokesperson."

  "That sounds great."

  "Like hell."

  "It doesn't?"

  "I've never been involved in Indian affairs. And I'd never be anybody's talking head, a puppet."

  "You think that's what they had in mind?"

  Her dubiety annoyed him. "I... Yes! They tried to strong-arm me into making a commitment right then and there. I told them to fuck off. Words to that effect. Then Longtree calls within minutes after I'd been questioned by Lawson and makes an obscure reference to `unhappy circumstances' and `trouble with the police,' which he thought might have caused me to change my mind."

  He had to tell her no more than that for her to catch his drift. Her brow was furrowed with concentration, her lips slightly pursed. "You think the men who attacked you could have been sent by Longtree."

  "It crossed my mind."

  "Were they Indian?"

  "Couldn't tell. Masks, remember."

  "But that wouldn't make sense, Chief. They don't want you dead. They want you for their advocate."

  "As I said, maybe they were sending me a strong message."

  Watching her closely he added, "Because I didn't heed the first one."

  "First one?" She searched his eyes, then exclaimed softly, "Gillian's murder?"

  He moved to the bed and sat down in front of her. "Could they have used her?"

  "You mean arranged for her to sleep with you?" "Something like that."

  She laughed shortly. "Have you lost your mind? Fi
rst of all, she never would have agreed to be a whore for anybody." "I'm not suggesting—"

  "And secondly, it wasn't her idea to switch places that night. It was mine. I explained this to Lawson, but you weren't in on that conversation. I was the one who suggested that Gillian meet you. She scotched the idea. Initially. But I called her later and twisted her arm."

  "Why did she ultimately give in?"

  "I suppose she wanted to meet you. Or…"

  "What?"

  "Nothing." She averted her eyes. "I don't know why she changed her mind."

  "Bullshit," he said angrily. "You two kept no secrets from each other. You've said so repeatedly."

  "We didn't betray each other's confidences, either." "It doesn't matter now. She's dead."

  Her temper flared. "I don't need you to remind me of that, thank you very much. In fact, I want you to go. Now."

  He hated to see the tears forming in her eyes, but he was pressing her as much for her protection as his own. Through no fault of their own, they had become embroiled in something mysterious and potentially dangerous. He had to know what it was. He had to make it go away, even if it meant temporarily hurting this woman who had already been so badly hurt by her sister's death.

  He took her by the shoulders. "Melina, could Longtree or someone have possibly gotten to Gillian between lunch and when she changed her mind about escorting me?"

  "Gotten to her?"

  "Maybe they threatened her."

  "She would have told me. She would have called the police."

  "Enticed her with money?"

  "You're becoming increasingly insulting."

  Chief persisted. "Could they have appealed to her social conscience, persuaded her that she would be doing a minority people a service?"

  "No. Gillian had pet charities. She supported numerous causes. But she showed no partiality to Native Americans."

  "Not until she fucked me."

  "You bastard." She tried to wrestle free, but he didn't release her.

  "Melina, why did Gillian change her mind?"

  "I don't know!"

  "You do," he insisted. "Why did she go with me that night?"