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“This one’s obviously the key to your own apartment,” he said. “That’s why it wouldn’t fit.”
Behind him, he heard her taking a deep breath.
His sisters always had problems with keys. Privately he was convinced it was built in with the XX chromosome, although the one time he’d run that theory by his older sister, Carmela, she’d hit him over the head with her physics textbook.
He straightened up in abrupt annoyance. “The stupid thing’s not working. Which apartment does your super live in?”
Jenna took her keys back and pressed a button on the intercom board. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I didn’t have a problem this morning. I forgot my bus pass, and I had to let myself back in to get it.”
She gave the buzzer another halfhearted little tap and turned back to him without waiting for a response. “He’s not home. Let me try the keys again. Men always have trouble with keys.”
“Trust me—they don’t work.” Biting off the words with unnecessary emphasis, Matt jammed his thumb on the buzzer and kept it there. Whatever information she had for the Bureau, he thought wearily, it had better be good. By the time they got into her apartment and she spilled her big secret it would be midnight, at the rate this meeting was going.
He felt a twinge of guilt. It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t shown up on time, he told himself. And if his evening wasn’t turning out exactly the way he’d planned, hers had been a disaster. She’d been mugged, for God’s sake. She’d been left penniless by some creep who’d knocked her down and taken her purse, and she was right—the money was going to be the least of her problems. Replacing credit cards and identification would be a major headache.
No wonder her serenity was beginning to crack a little.
“What do you want, mister?” The man who opened the door was about fifty. He was shorter than Matt’s own six-two by about a foot, but he had the bad-tempered pugnaciousness of a bantam rooster. Under the dirty white T-shirt he was wearing strained the hard potbelly of a serious drinker, and his tattooed biceps, stringy as they were, looked as if they’d served him well in decades of barroom brawls.
He didn’t even glance at Jenna, but instead kept his glare pinned on Matt. “If you’re a goddamn salesman for something, buddy, you’ve got about five seconds to get your butt off—”
“Mr. West, my key’s not working.” Jenna didn’t seem intimidated by his stream of invective. “When I moved in last week you said you’d get a spare set cut for me. Can I use them tonight and have some copies made tomorrow?”
He swung round to her, the scowl on his face deepening. “And who are you, lady? What is this, some kind of freakin’ scam?”
Matt had been watching the super, ready to step in if the man’s hostility crossed the line into action, but this newest tactic caught him by surprise. Flashing a quick look at Jenna’s dumbfounded expression, he realized that she was as taken aback as he was. Her polite smile had faded into confusion, and her cornflower-blue eyes widened.
“I’m Jenna, Mr. West—Jenna Moon, from 2B. Remember, you helped me move in my futon and I dropped it on your foot? And last night I gave you an aloe plant and told you how it could heal burns and cuts?” She gave an uncertain little laugh. “You were going to fix my faucet this weekend.”
“You’re crazy, sweetcheeks.” West looked from her to Matt and grunted. “Get your flaky girlfriend out of here before I call the cops.”
He started to close the foyer door, but Matt had had enough. Swiftly he stepped forward and shoved his shoulder and right arm through the narrowing space between the door and its frame, his ID and badge already open and dangling from his fingers.
“I am the cops,” he said in a flat voice. “And the lady’s a tenant of yours. How about you start showing some cooperation here, buddy?”
He could have sworn he saw a flash of something like fear behind West’s hard stare, but that was a common reaction. Men like him always had something to hide, Matt thought with disgust. Usually their dirty little secrets had nothing to do with the case on hand, but as soon as they realized they were dealing with the authorities they started lying automatically, unwilling to give a straight answer to any question.
West was probably just a mean drunk who’d drawn a temporary blank on his newest tenant. But Jenna—what had she said her last name was?—Jenna Moon didn’t need any more problems tonight. She was doing that deep-breathing thing again, he noted resignedly.
“Just let her into her apartment. I’ll even sign for the key if you want some kind of official receipt.” He forced a civility into his voice that he didn’t feel, at the same time exerting enough pressure on the half-open door to make the surly superintendent step back. Giving Jenna a slight nod, he kept his body between her and West as she nervously slipped past him to the short flight of stairs leading to the second floor.
“Look, mister.” West dropped his voice and darted a look at her, now climbing the stairs. “I’m being straight with you—that little sweetheart don’t live in 2B or any other freakin’ apartment here. If I have to, I’ll prove it to you.”
His attitude had changed from abrasiveness to an unpleasant kind of man-to-man confidentiality. For a second, Matt wondered if there was any way the man was telling the truth. His earlier impression of Jenna resurfaced.
West had called her flaky. During her brief phone call to the Bureau, he’d figured himself that she’d sounded like a kook—secretive, refusing to give him any hint of what her vital information was and hanging up after that unconventional description of the dress she was wearing. Her reaction to losing her life savings hadn’t been normal, and even her appearance was a little offbeat. He frowned. On the other hand, this lowlife superintendent was just the type to run some kind of scam himself, and, with her obvious openness and artlessness, he would have pegged his new tenant as an easy mark. The last thing he would have expected was for her to show up with an FBI agent in tow.
“There’s someone in my apartment!” Jenna’s voice was outraged, and glancing up to the first-floor landing he saw her bent over and peering at the crack under the door. “There’s a light on. I didn’t leave any lights on when I left this morning!”
“Okay, that’s it.” Matt jerked his head grimly at the man in front of him. “You’re going to let the lady into her apartment, and if we find anything missing you better be ready with some real fast explaining. What is this, some sweet little deal you’ve got going with a few light-fingered friends?”
West gave a short bark of humorless laughter, shedding the false bonhomie he’d displayed a few seconds ago as if it had never been. He rubbed his unshaven jaw thoughtfully, a thin smile on his lips. “You’re as crazy as she is. But I don’t want no trouble with the feds.” He shrugged and started for the stairs, reaching around the back of his belt for the collection of keys that hung on a steel ring there. “Come on, let’s see how Miss Looney Tunes explains this.”
They were close enough now to Jenna that she overheard this last remark, and the expression in those wide, guileless eyes made Matt think of a deer, shot without warning. She’d obviously trusted this jerk. He felt a sudden spurt of irritation at her naiveté. Where the hell had she been all her life, that she seemed so ill equipped to deal with the real world? She had to be twenty-three or twenty-four—not a susceptible teenager anymore. It was as if she’d been living in some peaceful utopia up until now, where everyone could be taken at their face value, and the sordid side of life—money, violence, dishonesty—never intruded.
“Use your damn key, West,” he snapped. The man had raised a meaty fist and was knocking on the door. “Let’s get this over with.”
Even as he finished speaking, he heard footsteps coming from inside the apartment and all his senses went on full alert. Jenna had heard them, too, and she turned to him, shocked.
“What’s going on, Matt? Does he have the right to let someone in when I’m not at home?”
“Move away from the door, Jenna.” He ignored her question and gave the command in a low, urgent voice. Standing to one side of the door himself, he reached inside his jacket for the shoulder-holstered Sig Sauer he wore during working hours and narrowed his eyes at West, who hadn’t moved.
“If your pals are armed, you stand a good chance of being the first casualty. And if you’re not the first, you can bet I’ll make damn sure you’re the second.” He gripped the gun in both hands, the barrel pointing at the floor. His words were barely above a whisper, but the threat was unmistakable. “Tell them to open the door slowly, and no sudden moves.”
The man’s shrug of reply was almost insolently unconcerned. One side of his mouth hitched up in a mocking half smile. “This is a real career-breaking move you’re making here, D’Angelo. Maybe you should go home tonight and start packing for Anchorage. The Bureau’s probably going to send you as far out of town as they can after this foul-up.” He tapped with almost ludicrous courtesy on the door as the footsteps shuffled to a halt. “Mrs. Janeway? It’s Pete West. Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Matt’s finger was tight on the trigger, and for one fleeting second he could see himself—Matt D’Angelo, who never rushed into things without carefully considering every angle, standing armed and ready to kick down a door if necessary, all on the word of a woman he’d met only minutes ago. What’s wrong with this picture, D’Angelo? he thought in momentary confusion. This isn’t you, man—step back and think this out, for God’s sake!
Then he stopped trying to reason, and let instinct take over completely as he saw the door swing slowly open.
“FBI—freeze!” Out of the corner of his eye he could see Jenna edging nervously but resolutely up to the other side of the door, the dented can held high above her head like a weapon, and he felt his heart skip a couple of beats. “Step out into the hall with your hands up!”
For a second there was no reply, but then a voice answered him in a hesitant quaver. “I can’t, young man. If I let go of my walker, I’ll fall. If you’ll give me a minute, though, I think I can spread ’em, as you policemen say.”
Even as Matt pivoted swiftly from the side of the door frame to confront the intruder, his brain was scrambling into overdrive, desperately trying to pull in every scrap of information it was receiving and process it into something that made some kind of sense.
Except when he realized that he was holding a gun on a little old lady in an aluminum walker, a little old lady with white hair, orthopedic shoes, and bifocals that glinted in front of curious faded blue eyes, he suddenly got the feeling that there was going to be no way this was ever going to make sense.
God, D’Angelo, you could have blown away Grandma Walton, he thought with numb horror. Well, it hadn’t been that close a call. But he’d be willing to bet that West, standing behind him, would embellish the encounter to the first reporter he could get on the phone.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Jenna asked the woman.
For a second he’d forgotten about Jenna, but that had been another mistake, he thought, his heart sinking. Hair flying around her shoulders in a burnished copper cloud, breasts heaving in indignation under the thin Indian cotton of her dress, and shaking the can of cat food at Mrs. Jane-way, she looked like an angel, all right. Only this time she looked like an avenging angel, ready to drive the old lady out of the Garden of Eden.
Or at least out of the apartment that Jenna obviously still felt she had a claim on. A sudden thought struck Matt, and he turned with renewed hope to the superintendent behind him, ignoring West’s triumphant grin. “What are you trying to pull? It’s the wrong damn apartment!”
“What do you mean, the wrong apartment?” Jenna whirled on him angrily. “I know where I live, Matt! This woman might look like a sweet little old lady to you, but she’s got no right to be here! Look, I’ll show you!”
Before he could stop her, she’d sidestepped past the aluminum walker with a dancer’s agility, but even as he edged cautiously past the old lady with a muttered apology and reached out to grab Jenna’s arm, she froze.
“What have you done to my apartment?”
Her gaze swung wildly around the comfortably cozy living room as if she was looking upon some terrible desecration. With a trembling finger, she pointed at a row of potted African violets on the radiator by the window.
“They—they’re artificial! Where’s my fern and my spider plant?” She gestured at the colonial-style recliner sitting in front of a small television set. On a low table beside the chair was a half-knitted child’s garment, in an insipid color combination of peach-pink and cream. Her voice rose. “And what’s all this? This isn’t my furniture! I had my rattan set here, and I don’t even own a television! What’s going on?”
It was time to step in, he told himself. She’d made some kind of colossal mistake, and she just wasn’t admitting it to herself. Again, the first impression he’d had of her flashed through his mind, but he shoved it aside. She’d only lived here a week, and tonight she’d gone through a traumatic experience. She wasn’t necessarily crazy—maybe she’d hit her head when she’d fallen and received some kind of mild concussion. That had to be it, he thought compassionately. She was suffering from some kind of short-term memory loss.
It was a convenient theory, but it was full of holes, and he knew it. She’d given him this address over the phone this afternoon—before she’d been accosted by the mugger.
If there had been a mugger.
“You don’t believe me.” She was staring at him, her face pale, her white-knuckled grip still hanging on for dear life to the cat-food can, and Matt found it impossible to say anything. The smart way out would be to lie, to play along with her until he could get her out of here quietly, but suddenly he knew he couldn’t do it. As the silence between them lengthened, she seemed to be searching his expression intently.
“You think I’m crazy.” Her voice was a thready, incredulous whisper. She stared numbly at the fussy flower-sprigged wallpaper, the embroidered pictures of pastoral scenes on the walls and the stack of Agatha Christie mysteries piled on an ornately ugly coffee table in front of the plaid sofa. “You’ve got to believe me, Matt! When I left here this morning that ceiling was painted sky-blue with white clouds I’d sponged on this weekend. The walls were a lighter blue. I was making canvas cushions for my furniture, I had photographs of my parents on the wall, and my plants were growing on the windowsill. Somebody’s made it all different! You have to believe me!”
Her last few words were an urgent entreaty, and though he tried to soften his response, he knew it was the last thing she wanted to hear. “That doesn’t make any sense, Jenna.” He kept his voice quiet, hoping to soothe the raw anguish in her eyes. “What reason would anyone have for doing that?”
Instead of answering him, she held his gaze unwaveringly for a moment as if giving him one last chance to change his mind. Then whatever hope she still had ebbed visibly out of her and she turned slowly away. Walking to a half-open door, she flicked on a light switch. Matt remained where he was, his hands clenched at his sides, watching her as she looked in, switched off the light and turned back to him, her voice toneless. “Everything’s changed. My futon’s gone, the quilt my mother made for me when I was a little girl—it’s all disappeared. And you don’t believe me, do you?”
“Would anybody like a nice cup of tea?” Mrs. Janeway had hobbled back into the room. At the doorway, West surveyed the scene with a tight grin and Matt suddenly felt a violent urge to knock the smile from his face. But Jenna didn’t even spare the man a second glance. Her attention was directed at the old lady, and her head was tipped to one side, quizzically.
“It’s all an act, isn’t it?” She gave Mrs. Janeway a coldly appraising look, and the older woman halted in her slow progress across the room, her faded eyes sharpening as she met Jenna’s glance. “You must be useful for something like this—who’s going to suspect a sweet little old lady of being a crook?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, dear.” Mrs. Janeway smiled sympathetically. “Mr. West says you had some idea that this might have been your apartment once, but that’s just not possible. I’ve been here for over fifteen years now, and as you can see, I have all my little treasures and comforts around me. This has been my home since my husband passed away, God rest his soul.”
The old voice held a wistful tremor, but instead of rousing Jenna to pity, what little composure she had left finally cracked. “You’re lying! This is my home! You’ve stolen the first home I ever really had, you—you criminal!” She shook the can of cat food at West, standing in the doorway. “And you’re in on this with her! You rented me this apartment a week ago, and you know it!”
Suddenly her gaze went blank and she stared frantically around. “Where’s Zappa?” Her voice rose. “What did you do with him?”
“What’s she talking about?” the old lady said in a loudly whispered aside to Matt, as if Jenna was incapable of understanding her. “Who’s this Zeppo person she’s looking for now?”
The wrinkled face held an expression of saccharine pity, but behind the bifocals her eyes twinkled with avid interest, and suddenly Matt realized that he didn’t like Mrs. Janeway either. But whether he liked the woman or not, they’d intruded on her long enough. He turned to Jenna.
“We have to go. I know you’re upset right now, but—”
“Zappa! Not Zeppo—Zappa! My cat! Or do you think this is a delusion, too?” Now the tears that she’d been holding back spilled over, and those thick dark lashes were spiky and wet as she held out the dented can as if it was some kind of clinching proof. “He’s Siamese; he’s a little chunky around the middle, and his tail’s covered with sky-blue paint from when I was sponging the ceiling.” Her voice shook. “And you’ve made him disappear, too!”
From the doorway West’s glance caught Matt’s and he winked. “Like I told you,” he said in a stage whisper. “Miss Looney Tunes.”
Matt’s heart sank.
Chapter Two
“He called me crazy. Miss Looney Tunes.” Jenna sat across from Matt in the nearby coffee shop where he’d hustled her after the fiasco at her apartment. Her gaze looked as if it could start a flash fire on the cracked Formica of the tabletop between them. “And you’re thinking the same thing.”
She never should have let him persuade her to walk away from West and that deceitful old woman who called herself Mrs. Janeway, she thought in angry self-recrimination. She should have refused to leave, at least until she’d found out what they’d done with Zappa. Except that in the middle of her near-hysterical outburst she’d caught a glimpse of the expression, quickly veiled, on Matt’s face and for a moment she’d felt as if she’d actually taken a physical blow.
His expression had frightened her. Suddenly she’d realized that she’d lost her only ally, and that the man she’d thought was on her side wasn’t even able to meet her eyes.
He wasn’t meeting them now.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said a shade too heartily. There was a container of paper-wrapped toothpicks on the table, and he’d already mangled two of them. Now he stripped the wrapping off a third and snapped it in half. “It’s obvious that you’re a little confused, but that could be the result of a lot of things—stress, for example. It could be an aftereffect of the mugging.” The third toothpick lay in pieces by his coffee cup as he fell silent.
Right from the start he hadn’t known what to make of her, she thought despondently. She’d seen him glancing dubiously at her ankle bracelet and tie-dyed dress, and even on the phone this afternoon she had the sinking feeling she’d come off as a flake. When she’d met him, she’d realized that Agent D’Angelo was just as alien to her as she appeared to him.
It was no wonder he’d felt uneasy with her. It had been almost inevitable that he’d jumped to the conclusion that she was suffering from some kind of delusion.
The phrase “just the facts, ma’am,” could have been coined for him. He was the perfect FBI agent, from his unobtrusive but well-cut suit right down to his gleaming shoes. Maybe he was just a little too good-looking to pass unnoticed in a crowd, but even there he’d done his best to conform. Not a strand of that thick black hair was out of place, and that sensuously full lower lip that seemed so at variance with the rest of the hard angles of his face was usually thinned in a tightly controlled line. It must have taken him years to submerge his own personality so completely, Jenna mused. Now he probably didn’t even have to think about it.
But he’d slipped up once, and for a startling moment she’d seen past the conservative facade to the original Matt D’Angelo. The man she’d glimpsed had looked at her with a sudden flare of heat in those cool golden-brown eyes, and for a heartbeat his gaze had lingered searingly on her, as if he couldn’t stop himself. Then he’d pulled back with a visible effort, and she’d almost been able to see him convincing himself that what he’d experienced hadn’t been real.
Just like he was trying to persuade her now.
“Refill?” The waitress, a tired-looking woman in her late forties with a name tag that said Marg pinned to her uniform, was standing beside them with a full coffeepot in her hand and a mechanical smile on her face, but as she looked at Jenna her expression changed to one of interest.
“Beautiful dress, honey.” Almost reverently she reached out and her fingertips brushed the thin multihued cotton. “I used to know a girl in the ’60s who designed and dyed her own—Tamara, her name was. She used to give them away.”
“Tamara Seagull?” Jenna looked up eagerly. “She still does—this is one of hers. She lives on a commune in Vermont and barters them for produce and firewood. I traded a couple of bushels of tomatoes and a wheelbarrow-full of zucchini for this.” She laughed for the first time that evening, feeling suddenly as if she’d run into a friend.
Matt was looking at them as if he didn’t know what they were talking about. She ignored him.
“When I knew Tamara we were both still in our teens,” Marg the waitress said reminiscently. She set the coffeepot down on the table, forgotten, and her expression was faraway, as if her dingy surroundings had faded into the background. She smiled dreamily, and it was possible to see that she’d once been vibrantly pretty. “Everything seemed so simple then—she’d make her dresses, and I was going to set up a pottery studio. But then I met Dwayne and fell madly in love, and the next thing I knew, I was married and expecting a baby. Dwayne took a job for a few months at a factory, but he hated it, and two weeks after Debbie was born he took off. I never heard from him again.” She stared unseeingly through the steam-fogged window of the coffee shop to the darkness outside, and then blinked. Slowly she picked up the pot and one of the thick, chipped mugs. “I’ll never forget that summer. I still have one of the plates I made back then. But you wouldn’t even have been born in the ’60s—how do you know Tamara?”
“My father and I lived on the Sunflower Commune for a while about three years ago,” Jenna said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Matt frown uncomprehendingly. He probably thought the lifestyle she’d lived up until recently had died out with sit-ins and peace medallions, she thought impatiently. “It’s a well-respected artists’ colony now, with a self-supporting organic farm attached—their stone-ground bread is famous all over the state. They didn’t have a resident potter when I was there, though,” she added. Beside her, Marg bit her lip thoughtfully.
“It’d take a while before I could turn out anything good again,” she said slowly. “But I’m a hard worker, and a bakery can always use an extra pair of hands. Since Debbie got married and moved away, there’s been nothing to keep me here.”
She poured Matt another cup of coffee almost briskly, and her smile at Jenna as she left their table was nothing like the mechanical one she’d worn earlier. As soon as she was out of earshot, Matt spoke.
“How’d you do that?” His voice was almost accusatory. He looked baffled. “I’ve seen agents with years of experience who can’t draw that much out of someone in hours of interrogation, but she spilled her most secret hopes to you after two seconds. Where’d you learn that?”
Jenna shook her head, momentarily taken aback. “I didn’t learn that. It’s not a technique, Matt—I just thought she looked kind of lonely. And when she noticed my dress, she reminded me of the people I grew up with.”
“Ex-hippies.” He couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his voice. “You really were brought up on communes? I didn’t know they still existed.”
“It’s not that unusual,” she said with a spurt of defensiveness. “A lot of people still choose to opt out of mainstream society and live an alternative lifestyle closer to nature. It’s not as if we painted our bodies blue and sat around contemplating blades of grass all day.”
“Well, it explains the ankle bracelet, anyway,” he muttered, and at that her temper flared.
“And it explains what happened back at my apartment, right? I’m just an off-the-wall flake that lives in a fantasy world half the time, is that it?” She took a deep breath. “I know it must have seemed weird, Matt, but you’ve got to believe me—somebody went into my home today and completely changed everything!”
Put like that, it did sound outrageous, she thought in sudden uncertainty. Why would anyone in the world want to discredit her? What threat was she to anybody?
All of a sudden the answer was right in front of her. Her breath caught painfully in her throat as she considered her theory, examining it for flaws and finding none. Of course, she thought with growing certainty—that had to be it! And once she explained everything to Matt, he’d have to believe her, because with this missing piece in place, the whole thing made sinister sense. Jenna looked around the coffee shop, leaned across the table and lowered her voice to an urgent whisper.
“It’s a vast conspiracy aimed at making me look crazy,” she said in a rush of excitement. “That’s why it’s working so well—because it was planned that way! They wanted you to discount everything I said, so they created the whole setup—changed the locks so my keys wouldn’t work, re-painted and papered my apartment and got rid of all my furniture, and installed that terrible old woman in there with her phony walker. I was watching her, Matt.” She gave an unladylike little snort of derision. “She wasn’t even putting her weight on that thing! Heck, she probably teaches swing dancing when she’s not busy with her criminal career—” She stopped in mid-sentence, taking in the expression in the dark gold eyes across from her.
It was pity. But that was only because he still didn’t know the reason she’d called him today in the first place, Jenna thought, exasperated at herself. She did sound like a kook, spilling it out like that. She took a deep, calming breath to center her thoughts, but Matt’s voice broke into them.
“A vast conspiracy.” His tone was placatingly noncommittal, as if he was taking care not to set her off on another tirade. “Sure, Jenna, that’s probably what’s going on. But right now let’s try and find you a place to stay for the night—since Mrs. Janeway and her cohorts have stolen your apartment.”
He paused, and invested his next words with a casual carelessness, shredding another toothpick to sawdust as he spoke. “And it might be a good idea to take you to the hospital and have that graze on your arm attended to in case it gets infected. In fact, we should do that first. My car’s still outside the apartment, so we’ll walk back. I’ll drive you over to Mass. General straight away.”
He couldn’t have telegraphed his meaning more clearly if he’d been wearing a white coat and chasing after her with a net, she thought in annoyance. She discarded her plan of leading up to the subject logically and dispassionately.
“I saw Rupert Carling today, Matt. That’s what this is all about.”
