A taint in the blood (40 page)

"So what?" she told her reflection.

Jim, at first wary and then baffled, thought the best option available to him in this situation was to remain silent. Nobody ever got into trouble by keeping their mouth shut.

"Okay," Kate said, turning from the mirror and removing the jacket to hang it in the closet. He watched her every move with close attention, his gaze lingering on the lace cups of her bra, cut almost down to her nipples.

She walked over to the bed and turned on the lamp, back to the door to turn off the overhead. Half in shadow, she slipped out of the silk slacks, leaving her dressed in the bra and a pair of matching panties. He swallowed hard. Now he understood why they called them briefs.

"Erland and Alice had no kids," Kate said, wandering back over to the dresser. She raised her arms to run both hands through her hair. The line of her back arched and he could see in the mirror that her breasts were threatening to spill out of the bra.

She met his eyes in the mirror. Did she know what she was doing to him? Her voice was so cool, so controlled, so matter-of-fact. "Victoria, Erland's sister, married Eugene, had three kids— William and Charlotte dead, Oliver still living. Victoria divorced Eugene—according to Max, at least in part due to family disapproval over their lily white daughter marrying an Aleut. Victoria then went to work in the family business, helping keep the books. Prior to that, though, she'd had a very public falling-out with them over their plans to lay off union workers and replace them with contract hires. In the meantime, her husband, Eugene, gets himself elected to head the employees' union. This must have been pretty annoying to a man like Jasper Bannister, not to mention his son and heir."

She walked over and got the straight-backed chair out of the corner and carried it back to the dresser. She straddled it and rested her arms along the back and her chin on her arms. His eyes dropped to the graceful line of her leg, knees bent, toes pointed. She rolled her head one way and then another, and met Jim's eyes again in the mirror, an obvious invitation in her own. He walked over to put his hands on her shoulders again, this time with no fabric, no beads between his skin and hers.

"Is that enough, in and of itself, to cause Erland, a highly respected and greatly feared member of the community, to gallop out to the valley and torch his sister's house?" Kate closed her eyes and tipped her head back. "Maybe my neck a little. Yeah, right there."

Her body seemed to hum with pleasure beneath his hands.

"I could understand that," Kate said, "if the attempt hadn't been so clumsy. One thing you can be sure of, Erland would hire good help. If Erland had meant to burn down Victoria's house as a warning to her, he would have hired someone smart enough to check that the house was empty. Arson is one thing. Murder is quite another."

He held her neck firmly but gently and began working at her spine with the other.

She let her head fall forward again and moaned a little. The sound went straight to his cock, which he had thought couldn't get any harder. "Not to mention which," she said, gasping a little, "Victoria and Eugene's actions on behalf of the union were fruitless. PME did in fact lay off all its union employees and replace them with contract hires, and now it's one of the top twenty business concerns in the state. It's hard to quarrel with that kind of success, and certainly Victoria's daughter, Charlotte, and her son Oliver both have had some kind of financial stake in the success of the family firm. And so does Victoria. Now that she's out."

He had to clear his throat to speak. "You're thinking he didn't do it, then?"

"I don't know," she said. "He knows who did, though. Hey."

He was having difficulty focusing on her words. It was a minute before he said, "What?"

"I wonder who Charlotte's heir was?"

Her skin had been steadily warming beneath her hands. He'd been angry at her for meeting Erland, for deliberately putting herself in harm's way. Now all his anger seemed to have vanished, to be replaced by a need so great it threatened to drown him.

"I said I wonder who Charlotte's heir was? Emily, do you think?"

He dragged himself back from the precipice with difficulty. "Yeah. Probably. Why not? They were as good as married."

"It would explain why she won't talk to me. Erland could have threatened to contest Charlotte's will in court."

"Could have." He couldn't stop himself, his hands slipped down over her shoulders and cupped her breasts.

She leaned back against him and he looked up to see them in the mirror, her seated in front of him, straddling the chair, his hands slipping into the cups of her bra, that tiny little pair of panties barely containing the mound between her legs.

He picked her up and carried her to the bed.

19

She woke up thirsty in the middle of the night and slid from the bed. Jim rolled to one side but didn't wake up. She pulled on his T-shirt and padded downstairs to get herself a glass of water.

In the cold dark before dawn, she knew Erland Bannister was never going to bite. All he had to do was wait for her to leave. She was beaten, and she hated it. She couldn't remember the last time it had happened. "Some days you get the bear," she said out loud, "and some days the bear gets you."

It was the thought of Charlotte Muravieff that bothered her most. Charlotte, that middle-aged Alaskan icon with the alternative, pampered, extremely well-funded lifestyle. Charlotte, not Victoria, very possibly the victim of a thirty-year miscarriage of justice, Charlotte, not Eugene Muravieff, whom Kate had very probably gotten killed just by looking for him, Charlotte, not William, a seventeen-year-old boy barely on the cusp of manhood, who never had a chance at life. Kate thought of the first time she had seen Charlotte, so desperate, so determined. She thought of her at Erland's party, when Kate had scored off the phoniest person in a room full of phonies, and Charlotte had looked so pleased and grateful.

It seemed about all Kate was going to be able to do for Charlotte.

She heard a noise in the backyard and went to look out the window. The boys' tent was silent and dark. She opened the door just to be sure, and had just enough time to see two dark figures coalesce out of the gloom before something dropped over her head and everything went black.

"Hey!" she yelled stupidly, and a sledgehammer hit her face and everything went blacker.

Three different cannonballs hit Jim at once and he came awake thrashing and yelling. He slid off the bed in an ignominious heap just about the time someone switched on the overhead light. He blinked up at it. "Kate? What the hell is going on?"

He was engulfed by a seething swarm of what looked like ten kids and sounded like twenty dogs, all yelling and barking.

"What the hell?" he said in frustration. He was rewarded by another burst of sound, and he put back his head and bellowed,
"Quiet!"

Silence fell. The melee resolved itself into two frightened boys and one angry dog, who snarled at him in a way that reminded him of the time Kate had been—

"Kate?" he said. "Kate!" He got to his feet, scooping up his jeans as he ran. She wasn't in the bathroom, in the kitchen, watching a movie. "Kate!" he bellowed, even though he knew it was useless. He turned to head back upstairs and had to stop before he ran over the boys and the dog, who had followed on his heels and were now staring up at him with equal anxiety over their faces, furred and furless.

Jim felt his heart stop. Yes, he did, and it did, it simply stopped in his chest for one interminable moment. His mouth opened and closed again. With a thump that deafened him, his heart resumed beating, fast and high up in his throat. His voice, when it managed to get out around his heart, was a low croak. "Where is she?"

Mouths opened and closed, including Mutt's. He couldn't hear anything. "What?" he said. "What?"

Sound returned without warning and he winced away from it.
"They took her!"

One of the boys—Kevin? Jordan? Jim couldn't remember. God help him, he couldn't remember. What kind of cop was he? This boy took Jim's arm and led him to the living room and more or less shoved him down on the couch. He put his hand on the back of Jim's head, preparatory to pushing Jim's head between his knees, when Jim raised a hand to stop him. "It's okay, kid," he told him. "I'm okay. Thanks. You did good."

"What?" the
kid mouthed. Jim still couldn't hear him, but that was because the other boy was back up to one thousand decibels. He flapped his hand and it ceased. Mutt nosed beneath his arm, emitting a continual anxious whine, and that scared Jim more than any other single thing in the last five minutes. If Mutt had even a smidgeon of a clue as to where Kate was, she'd have been on her trail and long gone. Instead, Mutt crowded next to him, restless, even whimpering. He couldn't remember ever hearing Mutt whimper.

"Who took her?" he said, enunciating even these few words with extreme care, because his tongue felt inexplicably too large for his mouth.

The older kid spoke. "Two men. They had something thrown over her, a blanket or a coat or something, and they hit her and then they threw her in the back of a van."

"A van?"

The kid nodded.

"What color?"

The kid hesitated, and Jim's heart sank. "It was dark," the kid said.

"Of course it was dark; it's four in the fucking morning," Jim said, and caught himself when he saw the kids' expressions.

The older kid swallowed and said, "No, I meant the van was dark, dark blue, maybe, maybe even black."

Jim's heart lifted again. "Did you—is there a chance—can you remember one or two or any of the numbers on the license plate?"

The kid reeled off the number like an off-duty cop. Jim stared at him, mouth slightly open. "What?" he said.

The kid did it again. "They'd daubed mud on the plate, but the streetlight hit it just right when they turned, and I—"

Jim lunged out of his chair and grabbed the kid up by his shoulders, the boy's feet dangling two feet from the floor, and almost kissed him. The kid was afraid he was going to, but Jim set him down on the floor and thumped him on the shoulder hard enough to knock him forward a step. "Good job, kid," he said fervently, "I mean
really
good job."

He was halfway out the door before he thought about the boys, and he paused just long enough to bellow over his shoulder, "Don't move from this spot, do you hear? And don't open the door to anyone except me! And call your damn parents, damn it!"

Later, he wouldn't remember very much about the drive uptown, but the expression on the face of the willowy blonde who was sharing Brendan's bed that night would stay with him for a while. Mutt didn't help, prowling next to him, ears lying back, fangs slightly bared, and an expression in her great yellow eyes that was not at all human.

Brendan took one look at Jim's face and said, "What?"

His response was not adequate to the occasion, evidently, because Mutt leapt up on his table and barked once right in his face.

"Holy Mary Mother of God," Brendan said. The blonde screamed and slammed the bedroom door.

"They took Kate," Jim said tightly.

"Who took her?" Brendan said, but he knew as well as Jim did.

"I've a got tag number," Jim said, and reeled it off.

A laptop sat on a crowded desk, and Brendan booted it up. "It'll be stolen," Brendan said over his shoulder.

Jim paced up and down in an agony of suspense. Mutt stood stiff-legged in the doorway, glowering and occasionally growling, although apparently just on general principles. Brendan cast an unfriendly eye in Jim's direction. "And where the hell were you when she got took?"

"Asleep," Jim said.

Brendan looked at him.

"Just find the fucking van!"