Night Whispers

by Judith McNaught

  Given all that, it was understandable that she was shaken by the discovery that there was one enormous family secret to which she had never been privy.

  Sara sank down at the kitchen table and thought about how often she had sat at kitchen tables with Sloan and Kimberly. Thousands of times.

  Sloan looked over at her friend. “Would you like a sandwich?” she repeated.

  “I realize this is none of my business,” Sara said, feeling a little like an outsider for the first time since she’d met Sloan and Kimberly, “but can you at least tell me why you kept all that about your father a total secret from me?”

  Sloan swung around, startled by Sara’s hurt tone. “But it wasn’t a big secret, not really. When you and I were kids, we talked about our fathers, and I told you about mine. When my mother was eighteen, she won a local beauty contest and the first prize was a trip to Fort Lauderdale and a week in the best hotel. Carter Reynolds was staying at the same hotel. He was seven years older than she, impossibly handsome, and a hundred times more sophisticated. Mom believed it was love at first sight and that they were going to get married and live happily ever after. The truth was, he had no intention of marrying her or even of seeing her again until he found out she was pregnant, and then his disgusted family gave him no choice. For the next couple of years they lived near Coral Gables, scraping by on what he could earn, and Mom had another baby.

  “Mom thought they were blissfully happy until the day his mother arrived at their house in a limousine, offered him a chance to come back into the family fold, and he grabbed it. While my mother was in tears and shock, they persuaded her that it would be selfish of her to try to hold on to a man who wanted his freedom, or to try to keep both his babies away from him. They convinced her to let them take Paris back to San Francisco with them for what Mom thought was a visit. Then they got her to sign a document agreeing to a divorce. She didn’t know that in the small print she had relinquished all her rights to Paris. They left in the limousine, three hours after his mother arrived. End of story.”

  Sara was staring at her, her eyes filled with tears of sympathy and outrage for Kim. “You did tell me that story a long time ago,” she said, “but I was too young to understand the . . . the ruthlessness of what they did and the torment they caused.”

  Sloan took instant advantage of Sara’s own words to press home her point. “And now that you do understand, would you want to admit you’re related to that man or his family? Wouldn’t you want to forget it?”

  “I’d want to kill the bastard,” Sara said, but she laughed.

  “A healthy reaction and honest description of the man,” Sloan said approvingly as she put two tuna salad sandwiches on the table. “Since killing him was not an option to my mother and since I was too young to do it for her,” Sloan finished lightly, “and since talking about him or my sister or anything associated with that day used to make her incredibly sad, I convinced her when I was seven or eight that we should pretend none of them ever existed. After all, we had each other and then we had you. I thought we had a pretty terrific family.”

  “We did. We do,” Sara said with feeling, but she couldn’t smile. “Wasn’t there anything Kim could do to get Paris back?”

  Sloan shook her head. “Mom talked to a local lawyer, and he said it would cost a fortune to hire the kind of high-powered attorneys she’d have needed to fight theirs in court, and even then he didn’t think she’d win. Mom has always tried to convince herself that in living with the Reynolds family Paris has had a wonderful life with advantages and opportunities that Mom never could have given her.”

  Despite her objective tone, Sloan felt swamped by anger. In the past, her strongest emotion had been indignation on her mother’s behalf and contempt for her father. Now, as she recounted the story, she was a grown woman, and what she felt was far more fierce than indignation; it was empathy and compassion so intense that it made her chest ache. For her father—that callous, selfish, cruel destroyer of innocence and dreams—what she felt for him was not merely contempt, it was loathing, and it grew as she considered his presumptuous phone call earlier. After decades of neglect, he actually believed he could make a phone call and his abandoned wife and unseen daughter would leap at the chance for a reunion. She shouldn’t have just coldly dismissed him on the phone; she should have told him she’d prefer spending a week in a snake pit to a week with him anywhere. She should have told him he was a bastard.

  7

  The fire had been noticed at approximately nine-thirty P.M., according to Mrs. Rivera’s neighbor who saw smoke seeping under a front door and called 911. Within six minutes, the fire department was on the scene, but it was already too late to save the shabby frame house.

  Sloan had been on her way home from work, intending to change clothes and walk across the street to the beach where Pete’s bachelor party was underway, when she heard the radio call and decided to offer whatever help she could. By the time she arrived, the street was already jammed with fire engines, ambulances, and police cruisers, their emergency lights flashing like grim beacons in the night. Sirens were wailing in the distance, and fire hoses were stretched across the street, slithering over the yards like fat white snakes. Police officers were cordoning off the immediate area and trying to keep a growing crowd of curiosity seekers from getting too close.

  Sloan had just finished taking statements from several neighbors when Mrs. Rivera suddenly arrived on the scene. The heavyset, elderly woman plowed past the officers and onlookers like a frantic linebacker heading for a touchdown, tripped over a fire hose, and landed in Sloan’s arms, her momentum nearly knocking them both to the ground. “My house!” she cried, struggling to free her wrist from Sloan’s grasp.

  “You can’t go in there,” Sloan told her. “You’ll get hurt, and you’ll only get in the way of the men trying to save your house.”

  Instead of being calmed or deterred, Mrs. Rivera became hysterical. “My dog—!” she screamed, struggling to free herself. “My Daisy is in there!”

  Sloan wrapped her arm around the woman’s shoulders, trying to detain and console her at the same time. “Is Daisy a little brown-and-white dog?”

  “Yes. Little. Brown and white.”

  “I think I saw her a few minutes ago,” Sloan said. “I think she’s safe. Call her name. We’ll look for her together.”

  “Daisy!” Mrs. Rivera sobbed, turning in a helpless circle. “Daisy! Daisy—where are you?”

  Sloan was scanning the street, looking for likely hiding places where a small, terrified animal might seek shelter, when a little brown-and-white face, covered in soot and grime, suddenly peered out from beneath an unmarked police car. “There she is,” Sloan said.

  “Daisy!” Mrs. Rivera cried, rushing forward and scooping the terrified animal into her arms.

  After that, there was nothing Sloan could do except stand beside the bereft woman and offer the solace of companionship while they watched the ravenous flames devouring the roof, licking at the front porch. “One of your neighbors told me you have a daughter who lives nearby,” Sloan said gently.

  Mrs. Rivera nodded, her gaze riveted on her collapsing house.

  “I’ll radio for a car to pick her up and bring her here to you,” Sloan offered.

  • • •

  By the time Sloan got home, she was already so late for Pete’s party that she couldn’t possibly take time to shower and wash her hair. She parked her car in her driveway, grabbed her purse, and hurried across the street, where she had to turn sideways to sidle between two of the cars parked along the street. As she edged between the cars’ bumpers, she thought she saw someone sitting in the driver’s seat of another car parked far down the row; then the shadowy figure disappeared, as if the person had slouched down in the seat or leaned over out of sight.

  Sloan suppressed the impulse to investigate and walked swiftly across the sidewalk. She was in a hurry. Perhaps the person in the car—if it had been a person—had dropped something on th
e floor and reached down to pick it up. Perhaps he’d decided to take a nap. More likely, what she’d seen had been only a shadow on the windshield cast by palm fronds swaying across a street lamp.

  Even so, she continued to watch the vehicle, a Ford, from the corner of her eye as she headed toward the long row of food stands on the boardwalk. As she started around the north corner of an ice cream stand, she saw the Ford’s interior light go on, and a tall man got out of the car. He started walking slowly toward the beach, moving at an angle that kept him south of the row of food stands and along the edge of the sand dunes.

  Sloan could no longer quell her uneasy suspicions, and she froze, using the side of the building to shield her from his view. North of the snack stands was a three-mile stretch of sandy beach dotted with circular kiosks used by beachgoers for barbecues and sheltered picnicking. That was the stretch of beach suitable for sunbathing, swimming, and parties, and it was there that Pete Bensinger’s party was under way.

  To the immediate south of the snack stands, where the stranger was heading, there was nothing except sand dunes covered in thick vegetation, dunes that offered little on a dark night except privacy for trysting couples and for people who were hoping to engage in other, less innocent endeavors.

  Sloan knew she’d been jumpy and off-balance ever since her father’s phone call that afternoon, but there was something about the male who got out of that car that made her feel distinctly, and professionally, uneasy. For one thing, he seemed vaguely familiar; for another, he wasn’t dressed for a late-night stroll on the beach, and most important of all, there was something stealthy in his actions, both when he was in the car and now that he was out of it. There’d been muggings at the dunes, drug exchanges, and even a murder several years ago.

  Sloan edged her way back to the corner of the ice cream stand, then began retracing her steps, staying close to the rear of the food stands so that she would emerge on the south end of the row of buildings. From there, she would be able to either watch him or follow him.

  Silently cursing the sand that filled his shoes, the man waited beside the dunes, expecting his prey to appear on the beach, beyond the snack stands. She’d been so unsuspecting, so easy to follow, and so predictable, that when she didn’t appear where he expected to see her, it didn’t occur to him to be alarmed. She’d been in a hurry, and since she hadn’t appeared on the beach, he assumed she’d forgotten something at home and returned to get it.

  Rather than going after her and getting more sand in his shoes, he backed up a few steps and crouched down in the cleft of two dunes. Concealed by sand and vegetation, he reached for a roll of mints in his pocket and waited for her to reappear in his line of sight.

  Removing the silver wrapper from the candy, he leaned forward, watching for a glimpse of her as she recrossed the street toward her house. The moon was behind a cloud, but the streetlamp was near enough to the snack bar to enable him to see her as she suddenly emerged from behind the south end of the buildings and disappeared almost immediately in the overgrown dunes.

  Her unexpected maneuver tantalized him, it added a little flavor and excitement to what had been, until now, a thoroughly boring but necessary four days. She was up to something. Something private.

  He stood up cautiously, craning his neck, his senses alert to any sound, any shadow, but she seemed to have vanished. Swearing under his breath, he turned and started to climb up the hill behind him. From higher ground he’d be able to spot her.

  “Hold it right there —”

  Her voice startled him so completely that he lost his grip on the tall stalks of sea grass and slid to the ground. Off-balance and unable to regain his footing in the soft sand, he twisted around, stumbled, and lunged forward at her. He tripped over something, felt a blow on the back of his neck, and landed facedown in the sand.

  Blinking grit out of his eyes, he turned his face toward her. She was standing just beyond his reach with her feet planted slightly apart, her arms outstretched, a nine millimeter Glock clamped between her hands.

  “Put your hands behind your back where I can see them,” she ordered.

  For the moment, he was willing to go along with her. She’d obviously realized he was armed when his jacket fell open, but now she was going to try to disarm him, and he had no intention of letting her do it. He smiled slowly, deliberately, as he put his hands behind him. “That’s a big gun for a little girl like you.”

  “Clasp your hands together and roll over onto your back.”

  His smile widened knowingly. “Why? No handcuffs?”

  Sloan did not have handcuffs; she did not even have a shoelace to bind his wrists. What she did have was an armed man on a populated beach who was cool enough—or weird enough—to goad and smile at her, a potential psychopath who was not exhibiting any normal reaction to his predicament. “Do as I said,” Sloan warned, lifting her weapon a little higher for emphasis. “Roll over onto your back, on top of your hands.”

  Another bizarre smile drifted across his face as he considered her instructions. “Not a good plan. When you reach for my weapon, all I have to do is lift up a little, grab your wrist, and shoot you with your own weapon. Have you ever seen how much damage a nine millimeter does to a body?”

  He sounded crazy enough to kill anyone on the beach who got in his way, and the last thing Sloan intended to do was give him that chance by trying to disarm him herself. Tense but steady, she leveled her weapon on a spot between his eyes. “Don’t make me use this,” she warned.

  His eyes narrowed as he registered the subtle change in her aim; then he slowly rolled onto his back on top of his hands. “I’m carrying twenty-five thousand dollars in cash,” he said, changing tactics. “You take it and I walk away. No one gets hurt; no one finds out.”

  Sloan ignored him. Stepping back, she aimed the Glock high and out over the water and fired off three rounds in rapid succession; then she pointed the gun at him again. The shots echoed in the darkness like small cannons fired in a canyon, and somewhere down the beach someone shouted in alarm.

  “Why in hell did you do that?” he demanded.

  “I’ve just sent for reinforcements,” she replied. “They’re right down the beach. They’ll be here in a minute.”

  His entire demeanor altered before her eyes. “In that case, introductions are in order,” he snapped, turning brisk and businesslike. “I’m Special Agent Paul Richardson, FBI, and you’re about to blow my cover wide open, Detective Reynolds.”

  Other than the fact that he knew her name and his personality had just undergone a radical change, Sloan had no reason to believe he was anything other than what he’d seemed to be moments before. And yet . . . “Let’s see some identification.”

  “It’s in my jacket pocket.”

  “Sit up slowly,” she ordered, following his movements with her gun. “Take it out with your left hand and toss it over here.”

  A flat leather case landed in the sand beside her foot. Keeping her weapon trained on him, she bent down and picked it up, flipping it open. It bore his picture on one side and his credentials on the other.

  “Satisfied?” he asked, already rolling to his feet.

  Sloan wasn’t satisfied; she was furious. She let her arm drop to her side, and her body began to tremble in delayed reaction to the extremely tense situation he’d inflicted on her. “Was that your idea of fun, or do you have some other excuse for scaring the living hell out of me?” she demanded.

  He shrugged as he brushed sand off the legs of his pants. “I had an opportunity to find out how you react under stress, and I decided to take advantage of it.”

  As Sloan watched him, she suddenly realized why he’d seemed familiar, and she also realized he wasn’t telling her the entire truth. “You were at the park yesterday, and in the parking lot at city hall earlier today. You’ve been watching me for days.”

  Instead of replying, he zipped his cotton jacket up enough to conceal the brown leather holster at his arm; then he finally gave h
er his full attention. “You’re right. I have been watching you for days.”

  “But why? Why is the FBI interested in what I do?” “We’re not interested in you. We’re interested in Carter Reynolds.”

  “You’re what?” she said blankly.

  “We’re interested in your father.”

  Sloan stared at him, speechless and disoriented. Her father had long ago ceased to exist for her. Carter Reynolds was simply a name that belonged to a famous stranger, a name that no one ever mentioned to her. And yet, in the last twelve hours, that man, that name, seemed to be rising up out of the ashes of her past and sticking to her like soot. “I don’t know what you think he’s done, but whatever it is, I’m not involved. I haven’t had anything to do with him in my entire life.”

  “We know all that.” He glanced toward the shoreline where three men were running in their direction, one of them with a flashlight, its beam bouncing and fanning the sand like a lighthouse beacon gone haywire. “It looks like your reinforcements are on the way,” Richardson observed, taking her by the elbow and propelling her forward. “Let’s go meet them.”

  Sloan moved automatically, but her legs felt like wood and her brain like sawdust. “Be casual,” the agent instructed. “Introduce me. If anyone asks, we met in Fort Lauderdale two months ago when you were attending the police seminar, and you invited me to Bell Harbor for the holiday weekend. Now, smile and wave at them.”

  Sloan nodded and obeyed, but she couldn’t think of anything except that the FBI was investigating Carter Reynolds . . . and they’d been tailing her . . . and a few moments ago, this particular FBI agent had tried to see if she’d take a bribe!