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And why was she thinking about that when the Rose was missing, when Whittington felt strongly enough about her involvement in Stephen’s death to have put a cop on her? She was losing her mind. Maybe the horrors of the last few days were getting to her, even more than she realized.
Tara pressed a fist against her mouth while panic tried to fold her knees, both for what he was doing and for the effect he was having on her. Then she went back to her desk and forced herself to concentrate on the Maine proposal.
Fox sat at his desk in the Robbery-Homicide den on the eleventh floor of headquarters. The cop standing in front of him spoke earnestly.
“I talked to her doorman. He was pretty emphatic about her schedule,” Vince Migliaccio reported. “She always walks to and from her office, except on Wednesdays.”
“This is Wednesday,” Fox responded.
“Yeah. So she’ll be cabbing it tonight. It’s her dry-cleaning day. He says she always takes her clothes with her and comes home in a taxi. Maybe the cleaners is too far away for her to walk.”
“You’re sure about this?”
Migliaccio flushed and Fox felt sorry for him, but his caution was not misplaced. Migliaccio had had an outstanding opportunity to move up in the ranks last summer when he’d been assigned to back up Fox while Rafe had been out on suspension. He’d blown that job. Now—at least for the time being—he was back on patrol.
Fox knew that Rafe had hand-picked Migliaccio for this assignment to give the kid another chance. Fox thought that was a good idea but he sincerely hoped the young man had learned to keep a wall up between himself and the females involved in a crime.
Like he was doing? A sudden image of yards of black hair hit Fox’s mind hard. He saw it spilling over his hands the way it had when he’d struggled with Tara Cole in Carmen’s garden. He saw her tight, agile body encased in that black second skin.
“Huh?” he said to Migliaccio.
The officer looked at him strangely. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right.” Fox deliberately cleared his mind.
“She usually orders lunch in. That’s what the guy at the deli around the corner says.”
“What’s the name of the place?”
“It’s called Ernie and Vin’s and it’s on the corner of Brown and Twenty-fourth.”
Fox filed that away for future use. “Okay, good. Presuming she doesn’t leave the office earlier, I’ll take the watch over from Currey at five o’clock.” Phil Currey was the guy currently standing in front of her office building.
“Sure. I’ll tell him.” Migliaccio left.
Fox opened the lady’s date book again. Tara Cole was dining with a friend named Charlie at the Four Seasons tonight. She would be attending a black-tie event at a local gallery tomorrow night at nine. Fox decided he was looking forward to that one. He enjoyed art.
At twenty minutes past six, Tara stood up from her desk. Her nerves had been coiled like a child’s slinky toy all day, ever since she’d found out about the cop. She pressed the heel of one hand into each eye, then she turned to the window again and peered down.
The khaki guy was gone. She blinked to be sure but when she opened her eyes again, there was no one down there. Tara spun back to her desk. She slammed her palm down on the mouse, frantically trying to turn her computer off, then she spun for the closet in one corner of her office. She shrugged into her coat while groping for her bag of dry cleaning stashed on the floor.
“Eric!” she shouted. When she stepped out into the hall, her assistant popped his head out of his own office. “Lock up for me! I’ve got to go now, right now!”
“Well…sure.”
Tara ran down the hall and leaned hard on the elevator button. “Come on, come on, come on.” She wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Whittington wouldn’t send someone else to watch her. This would be the changing of the guard, that was all. She was pretty sure he had more than one officer spying on her. She’d noticed someone suspicious in the deli earlier.
Whittington’s cop brigade would catch up with her again at home, but that wasn’t the point. Eluding him for a while was merely payback for what he had done with her date book Monday night.
She had to let him know that he didn’t hold all the cards.
There was an available cab idling right at the curb when she reached the sidewalk downstairs. Tara switched her dry-cleaning bag to her left hand and reached for the door handle with her right.
“Allow me,” said a voice she recognized.
Tara shrieked. She jerked around blindly and her hands came up as though to ward off a blow. The laundry bag dropped at her feet. “You!”
“Northern women have such a hard time accepting hospitality.” Fox stepped around her and opened the cab door himself. “Ladies first.”
“No!”
“I won’t think less of you if you have a gracious moment.”
She felt helpless temper fill her head. Tara looked down while she tried to get her breath and her equilibrium back, while she got it under control. He wore really fine alligatorskin boots, she noticed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d met a man who wore alligator boots. Why did he always have to look so damned good?
“Isn’t that an endangered species or something?” she muttered.
Amazingly, he followed her train of thought and looked down as well. “I’ve never met an alligator who didn’t deserve to be worn. Which may be more than I can say for that fur coat you’re wearing.”
Tara’s head snapped up and her gaze narrowed on him. “It’s faux.”
He grinned. “If that’s what gets your conscience through the night.” Then he ran a finger along her sleeve as though to be sure.
Tara felt the jolt of his touch clear through her coat. His eyes caught hers and held on in something that felt like a challenge…and she didn’t think it had much to do with her fake fur. Her breath caught all over again. He really was the devil incarnate, but for a crazy moment she found herself tempted to lose her soul to him.
The thought nearly stole her voice. “Go away,” she said hoarsely. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Fine. You take this cab and I’ll take the next one. But, ma’am, we surely do need to talk.”
“Why? I told you everything I could possibly tell you Monday night.”
“You told me nothing Monday night.”
“Because there’s nothing to tell!”
“Well, see, I’ve had awhile to think about that now and I’ve decided you’re wrong.” He paused. “You were in Carmen’s home. Can we at least agree on that much?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that—”
“You can’t take the Fifth yet!”
“Why not?” she demanded. “You’re the law, I’m a citizen—”
“You’re a suspect!”
Her air punched right out of her, but she rallied. “That being the case, I refuse to answer—”
“Shut up!”
“You’re very rude.”
His blood pressure spiked. But what she had said was amazingly close to the truth, at least when he was in her company. “I’ve never had anyone try to trot the Fifth out at my most innocent question!”
“There’s nothing innocent about you, nothing at all.”
It was out before she knew she was going to say it. Tara turned away quickly before he could see the heat stain her face. He wouldn’t miss her blush, of that she was sure.
He caught her elbow and her pulse beat harder. “Talk to me,” he said, “if only to save your own pretty hide.”
She fell back on everything she knew about holding her own. She gave him a provocative smile as she looked back at him. “You like my hide?” Then the cabbie blared his horn and she jumped.
Fox bent to peer into the car. “Sit tight, pal.” He finally let go of her when he straightened. “Get in.”
“Give me my book back first.”
“I haven’t finished reading it. I’m finding it very entertaining.”
“Then you need a life, Blue Eyes.”
Fox opened his mouth to answer and found that he simply couldn’t. Anything that passed his lips right now would be angry, frustrated, and yes, rude. He thought of the life he might have been having right now if this woman hadn’t decided to secrete herself in her stepbrother’s home for some reason known only to her. He thought of the inviting blonde he’d left behind at Remmick’s on Monday to investigate this mess.
Tara moved quickly, sliding into the rear seat of the cab while he seemed preoccupied. She pulled the door shut fast and leaned forward in the seat. “Go!” she shouted at the driver.
“I been trying to,” the man complained.
Tara shot a glance backward as the car vaulted into traffic. Detective Whittington with the initialed name looked quite irate.
Tara laughed aloud, then the sound tried to strangle her. Her dry-cleaning bag was still sitting on the pavement next to Whittington’s slick, handsome boots. She watched him pick up the bag and get into the cab behind her.
Something told her she hadn’t seen the last of him.
Fox decided to keep the laundry, at least for the time being. He took it back to his own apartment, not far from hers on the north side of Girard College. He used his cell phone in the cab and touched base with both Rafe and Migliaccio. He sent Migliaccio to stand in front of Tara’s high-rise. As for his partner, the man was fretting over the virtues of pistachio ice cream and pregnant women.
“Don’t give it to her,” Fox advised.
“Don’t? I’d want to make sure where that meat cleaver of hers is first before I break the news.” Rafe’s wife, Kate, was a chef.
“Trust me on this one,” Fox said. “What goes down green comes up green.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ah, man.”
“Have a good night.”
“You’ve got everything under control? You don’t need me right now?”
Fox guessed by his partner’s tone that only a portion of his mind was on the case—and it was a small, tidy portion at that. “I’ve put snipers on top of every building near hers. If she moves, she’s gone.”
“Good. That’s great.”
Fox sighed. Life was different, he thought, when you had a woman.
He disconnected and glanced at the bag on the seat beside him, and the aborigine started drumming behind his eyes again. Correction, he thought. Life was different when you had the right woman. Some could purely drive you to a coronary.
The cab let him out in front of his condominium. The Shelby convertible was in his driveway. He ran a loving hand over her curves and angles as he passed it. He didn’t always take her out. Parking was hell in the city and she was the kind of animal who was built for speed rather than a slow prowl. Sort of like a certain brunette who was the key to this crime.
Damn it, he preferred blondes.
Fox went inside and dropped the dry-cleaning bag on his kitchen table. He grabbed a Guinness from the refrigerator. After a fortifying swallow, he pulled back a corner of the bag and peered inside. Peach-colored satin. With lace. He hooked a finger in and brought out a slim strap that was attached to a camisole.
The lady dry-cleaned her lingerie.
Fox dropped the strap and crumpled the top of the bag together tightly and fast. He swallowed deeply from his beer again. She wasn’t his type. She was dark and sultry, polished as glass and too quick on her feet. She had more sharp points than a porcupine. She wouldn’t know good manners if one jumped up and bit her on the nose, no matter that she had grown up in the lap of luxury. Some people like that thought it gave them the right to set their own rules.
At the bottom of it all, there was still another irrefutable fact, the biggest reason she shouldn’t appeal to him: she was the key to this crime. But all the same…he couldn’t get her off his mind.
Fox went to the telephone and made another call. He decided to take over tonight’s surveillance as well. Five minutes later, he showered then he spent an inordinate amount of time dressing so he could go loiter around the Four Seasons. At seven-thirty exactly, he fired up the Mustang, and headed back toward center city.
He was whistling Dixie.
Chapter 4
Tara didn’t go to the Four Seasons. She didn’t go to the art gallery on Thursday night. And by the wee hours of Friday morning, Fox’s mood had soured considerably.
He sat on the park bench across from her high-rise, reasonably sure that his eyebrows were rimed with frost. He’d been living in Philadelphia for nearly eighteen years now but he had never come to appreciate its Decembers. He did not know where the elusive Ms. Cole was at the moment, but he had a hunch that she was blissfully warm.
It had been pushing eleven o’clock before he’d started to realize that he’d somehow been duped. The fresh young artist the gallery had been celebrating had proven to be talented. By eleven, most of the kid’s work had sold—even Fox had snapped up an edgy, sharp-toned cityscape for one of his sisters who enjoyed that sort of thing. Tara hadn’t bought anything because she’d never arrived. He’d finally checked with the gallery owner. She’d RSVP’d that she would attend and hadn’t called back to change her mind.
Last night, at least, she’d phoned the restaurant to break her reservation. He’d only wasted fifteen minutes or so at the Four Seasons.
Fox called Rafe at midnight. He roused his partner from a sound sleep to have him contact the point men they had on the high-rise on Poplar Drive. Neither of them had actually seen her exit the place and Migliaccio was swearing she couldn’t have, but then, Migliaccio had said that about another woman once before.
Fox finally left the gallery at one o’clock. He took a cab to 1222 Poplar and relieved Migliaccio. Then he took up his seat on the bench and he waited.
Her apartment remained dark. The temperature plummeted. And at two-twenty, something itchy started up at the back of Fox’s brain.
He unclenched one frozen hand to take his cell phone out again, then he realized that he didn’t know her phone number. He called information instead. The number was unlisted. Of course it was. And Fox was too cold and too tired to use his authority to chip through the barrier.
With methodical deliberation, he put his cell phone back in his pocket and started across the street. Adrenaline and temper began to thaw him out a little. He flashed his badge at the security guard and went to the elevator while the guy’s worried eyes followed him. He hit the seventh-floor button hard, rode up, and went to her door. Then he knocked, just to be sure.
Where had she gone instead of the gallery? And damn it, it was practically three o’clock in the morning on a weeknight! He told himself he shouldn’t be surprised. Her date book was littered with engagement after engagement, night after night, week after week. And she dry-cleaned her lingerie. Who, pray tell, was she doing that for? He knocked again.
She was a social animal. She was at a club somewhere, dancing until dawn. He knocked harder.
Tara opened the door.
