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“Do you want to take the chance?”
She didn’t. Tara got out of the car when he parked it and slammed the door hard.
He followed her into the garage elevator and they rode it silently to the seventh floor. Tara kept her lips pressed together as she strode down the hall with him at her heels. She unlocked the door and tried to shut it again before he got inside. He blocked it with his foot and pushed into the apartment behind her.
Fox looked around. There was magnificent view of the Schuylkill River from a long line of windows at the back of the living room. The boathouses there were trimmed with lights, looking like something out of a fairy tale. He liked that. Then his gaze came back to his immediate surroundings.
There was glass. There was cold white leather. The carpet was black. The prints on the walls were painfully, jarringly modern. The apartment was as sharp as her tongue and her cunning little mind.
He was damned if she was going to slip through his fingers, Fox thought. Even if she hadn’t actually killed anyone—and that was a big if, with nothing but his gut to hitch it on—something was going on here. She’d been inside that house.
He moved to the sofa and sat. “Where were we?”
“You were just leaving.”
“Let’s go over what I do know first.” He began ticking items off on his fingers as she stood in the center of the room, watching him. “Stephen Carmen is dead. And lo and behold, an hour or so after the dust settles, you come tiptoeing out his back door.”
She said nothing.
“It’ll take the lab a few hours to match your prints, but by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have you on that, too.”
“I told you—”
“Ah. I forgot that part. You and the victim are related. You visited his library regularly. Your prints would logically be…well, everywhere.”
“Yes,” she conceded cautiously.
“Do you think a grand jury will believe you when you tell them that you habitually fondled Carmen’s fireplace poker?”
“Fondled?” She nearly choked. And in spite of every sane thing she knew about brazening out the hard spots in life, Tara’s gaze fell to his hands.
Her mind emptied of every plan of attack she might have had. His hands were a dichotomy, she realized. Though they were a gentleman’s hands with buffed, trimmed nails, they had a girth and a width to them that would be strong and persuasive. She could very easily imagine them…well, fondling.
Why was she thinking this?
“On top of all that,” he continued, “you resisted arrest.” He watched her mouth open in outrage, then snap shut again. He gave her a point for self-control. “And you committed assault upon my person.”
Her eyes narrowed dangerously as though she was contemplating more.
“I think even Cal Mazzeone is going to have his hands full with this one.” Fox sat back against the sofa, pleased with himself.
“Let’s try him.” She went for the sleek, ultramodern phone on a chrome-and-glass table by one wall.
Fox came to his feet. “Put it down.”
“Or what? You’ll shoot me?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Then charge me with something! Either you have cause or you don’t.”
Neither of them was getting an upper hand here, Fox realized. He did not intend to call this night a draw.
The silence between them drew out. Then he shrugged—a lazy gesture that brought to mind humid summer heat, Tara thought. He walked toward her. There was a lazy sense about the way he moved. He did it with more grace than a man should lay claim to. Tara eased back to give him plenty of room.
She let him take the phone from her hand. Even as he punched in a number, he watched her in a way that made her stomach do a slow roll. Like he was the devil himself and she was something he’d wanted for a very long time.
“Don’t worry about the stepsister,” he said suddenly to someone on the other end of the line. “I guess you could say that I have that situation…in hand.” He eyed her once more, another slow cruise of his gaze. “She doesn’t have the ruby. It’s not anywhere on her person. Trust me, I can be sure.”
Tara’s heart chugged. He was talking to whoever it was like they had no idea where the Rose was. Was it possible?
She opened her mouth to tell him that the stone was somewhere on the library floor, in the far corner, near the window. She caught herself just in time as he put the phone down. “Maybe Stephen…dropped it,” she offered. “You know, in the scuffle.”
“Who said there was a scuffle?”
“You did. You were the one who mentioned the fireplace poker. Or did he just stand there and let himself be conked with it?”
She was quick. It went with all her sharp edges, he thought. “Trust me. That rock is nowhere in the house.”
Then he saw her face change. Stark horror, a raw kind of distress, passed over her expression like a cloud over the sun. He felt another visceral tug of something that wanted to soften toward her, but he’d never met a woman who needed pity less or who irritated him more.
He left her and headed for the door. “You won’t want to leave the city for the time being, you hear?” Then he opened the door and stepped into the hall, closing it quietly again behind him.
Tara stared after him then she ran to throw the locks. She caught herself just in time and peered out through the peephole. He was still standing there, no doubt waiting for the sound of metal rolling. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
He’d quit. He’d given up. He was gone. She couldn’t believe her good fortune! But where was the Rose?
Tara turned slowly and leaned her back against the door. After a moment, she heard him move off outside and her breath rushed out of her. Then her gaze fell on her telephone table and her heart kicked all over again.
She ran to the table. It was glass—there was no way to misplace anything on it or beneath it. She dropped to her knees anyway and ran a frantic hand over the carpet. She gave a cry of outrage.
Her date book was gone.
Chapter 3
The lady was well and truly miffed.
Fox allowed himself to grin as the echo of Tara’s infuriated howl rolled down the hallway on his heels. It gave him his first sense of satisfaction in hours. He stepped into the elevator and took the date book from his pocket. It was going to be interesting reading, he thought, flipping through it. Then his cell phone rang.
“You’ve got it in hand?” Rafe demanded when Fox answered. “What does that mean? Where are you?”
“I’m at 1222 Poplar Drive.” As the elevator began its descent, Fox glanced down to make sure his jacket showed no signs of his earlier scuffle. “Where are you?”
“Headquarters. I—” Rafe broke off. “That’s the stepsister’s address.”
“Yes.” Fox stepped into Tara Cole’s elegant lobby and looked around at the top-notch Persian rugs and the marble reception desk. He knew that if he laid his palm against it, he would feel a chill.
It suited her. She was one cool customer.
“So where was she tonight?” Rafe asked.
“She was in the dead gentleman’s home.”
“What?”
There would be time enough later to explain why he didn’t have Tara Cole in custody at this very moment. In fact, Fox knew that he would have to explain—to Plattsmier if no one else. “I don’t want to pull her in yet.” He stepped outside onto Poplar Drive and crossed the street against traffic. At least one car honked its horn at his leisurely pace. “She didn’t kill him. I’ve got a hunch.”
“A hunch,” Rafe echoed. They generally respected each other’s gut instincts. “So is she involved at all?”
“I think so. I just don’t know how yet.”
Snow banked prettily in the common area across from her building. The public lanterns there made it sparkle. Fox looked around appreciatively as he settled onto a park bench. He gazed up at the seventh floor windows of 1222 and counted to ascertain which belonged to her apartment. He saw her pass in front of her living room windows. It appeared to Fox that she was talking on the phone. That made sense. He’d put money on Cal Mazzeone’s line being busy at the moment.
“Here’s what I’ve decided to do,” he continued finally. “We’ll need four officers here around the clock. One on the seventh floor—that’s where she lives. We’ll want one in the lobby, one here in the park across the street, and the last one over on Girard to keep an eye on the back of her building. The first two guys will be stationary, the other two will be tails, moving with her wherever she goes.”
“That’s a lot of manpower for a woman who didn’t do it.”
“She’s slippery as an eel and she has a tongue like a viper,” Fox explained. “I want to know every move she makes, every sigh she sighs, the caloric value of every bite of food she puts in her mouth, starting now. It’s the only way we’ll learn what she was up to tonight.” In the lighted window seven floors above him, he watched her drag a hand through all that long, wild, dark hair.
He’d always preferred blondes. Adelia had been elfin, pale, petite. Tara Cole couldn’t have been more her opposite. So what was it with this jerking sensation in the area of his chest at the way her hair fell down her back again when she moved her hand and let it go?
Still framed in the window, Tara put the telephone down hard. The room plunged into darkness as she left it. Then the next window lit up. Her bedroom. She came to the glass and lifted her arm, pausing just long enough that Fox wondered if she’d guessed he was out here. Then the blinds came down like a quick, hard slap.
Unfortunately, they did nothing to obliterate the shadowy hint of her movements. Fox thought it was entirely possible that she was peeling out of…whatever that thing was that she had been wearing tonight. His mouth went vaguely dry. His pulse started moving like the hands of an aborigine drummer.
“Huh?” he said into the cell phone.
Rafe had been talking, but now there was a spell of dead silence. “Did you just say huh? You? Mr. Smooth?”
“The connection’s bad.” Fox changed the subject quickly. “I’ll wait in the park across the street until I see surveillance take their places. As soon as she moves I want them to report in to us.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
On the seventh floor, her lights finally, blessedly went out.
“This one is going to be a challenge. The resort is twenty-three miles from Maine’s premiere coastal tourist area. Our job is to find out if those tourists can be persuaded to spend their vacation away from the beach.” Tara looked around at the people who had gathered at her conference room table for a meeting with her marketing firm. And though she’d managed to concentrate on the matter at hand so far, suddenly her train of thought derailed.
The Rose was in Stephen’s library—somewhere. If Whittington didn’t have it, then the cops had just missed it. But how was she supposed to get that…that detective with the blue eyes and the devil’s own grin to look for it against the far wall? How to do that without admitting that it had flown there when she’d knocked away the dog?
Come to think of it, Whittington hadn’t once mentioned the dog, she realized. Why not? For some reason, that disturbed her. A new band of tension tightened across Tara’s forehead and she rubbed at it.
She’d handled him perfectly Monday night. Perfectly. Sure, he’d swiped her date book, but he wasn’t going to find anything earth-shaking in it. In the end, he’d left her alone with that vague warning not to leave town. Which, of course, she was going to do first thing Monday morning. She had to fly to Maine on this project. She’d worked far too hard establishing the reputation of her marketing firm to let some guy with an initial-type name undermine it now.
Besides, she thought, he really had no right to hold her here. Cal Mazzeone had pointed out that Whittington couldn’t possibly have anything significant to tie her to the crime because she’d slept in her own bed these last two nights and Cal wasn’t scrambling for her expeditious arraignment. It was Wednesday and Whittington had made no further move, so Tara had to believe that Cal was right.
All that was well and good, but where was the Rose?
“Huh?” she said suddenly, realizing that her assistant in charge of research had said something to her. The people at the table exchanged frowns.
“Did you just say huh?” Eric, the assistant, asked.
“Of course not.”
Kim Koby, who ran the graphics department, cleared her throat. “Speaking as your friend and not your employee, maybe you should take a few days off.”
“Why would I want to do that?” They all knew how she’d felt about Stephen. None of them would expect her to grieve to the point of being unable to work.
“At least stay out tomorrow,” Debbie, her secretary said. “For the funeral.”
“The funeral will only take two hours in the afternoon.” She would go, Tara thought, for her stepfather’s sake, out of respect for Scott Carmen’s memory. And because she was the only family member left standing. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t—cry for him and she wouldn’t pretend.
They all knew that. An unsettled sensation began to shift in Tara’s stomach.
Debbie rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Laying low for a while might keep our competitors’ tongues from wagging,” she said. “We’ve had a cop watching our building entrance for two days now. If you’re home, maybe he’ll stand there.”
Tara frowned at her. It took two or three heartbeats for her words to sink in.
She ran into the hall and jogged back to her own office. She looked down out of her fourth floor window. There was no cop down there, but there was a guy in khakis loitering next to the mailbox. Tara waited three minutes, four, then five. The man didn’t leave.
She went slowly back to the conference room.
“How do you know he’s a cop?” she asked Debbie. Maybe he was a reporter lying in wait for her. The phones had been ringing off the hook with interview requests, all of which Cal had advised her to decline. The less she said at the moment, the better.
Debbie gnawed on her lip. “I don’t. But he’s armed.”
Tara felt her pulse speed off. “Armed?”
“I saw a gun in one of those under-the-arm holsters when his coat flapped open.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” she demanded.
“I figured you were under enough strain.”
Tara fisted her hands to keep them from shaking.
Four years ago when her mother had died, she had been left with two things precious enough to keep her going. She’d had the Rose, a piece of her mother, a piece of her own past, a promise for the future. And she’d had this firm. She’d built it painstakingly. It was her baby, born of her expertise and her guts and her talent. In large measure, her employees were her family.
Stephen had swiped the Rose but she’d still had Concepts. Now, at one of the shakiest times of her life, her own staff was shielding her, closing her out.
“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself,” she said quietly, then she waved a hand. “We’re done here. I’m going back to my office.”
Suck it up, she ordered herself, heading down the hall again. Get a grip. Damn it, she could deal with this on her own. She knew her way through the dark.
In her office, she inched up to the window again. She kept her eyes closed, then, with her palms pressed against the cool glass, she deliberately opened them again. And she looked down.
The khaki guy was still there.
At least it wasn’t Whittington, she thought helplessly. This guy wore a plain white button-down shirt under the ill-fitting raincoat that Debbie had mentioned. Absurdly, Tara found herself remembering how Whittington had been dressed Monday night, in that soft-as-butter leather jacket. She knew its texture because she’d had fistfuls of it when he’d first taken her down. The man definitely had a sense of style.
