Authors: Kat Martin
Deep Blue
Conn eased back to look at her. “You’re a real handful of trouble, you know that?” And then he kissed her, very tenderly, very thoroughly. Hope didn’t mean to kiss him back quite so passionately. She knew what would happen if she did. But her mouth parted and his tongue slid in and her own tongue slid over his. Conn groaned.
“We can’t do this,” she whispered, drawing away. “We might reopen your wounds.”
“There’s a risk in everything.” Conn kissed her again and her body began to melt at the same time her brain screamed a warning. There was a chance she’d been responsible for getting him shot in the first place. She wasn’t about to be the one to hurt him again.
ZEBRA BOOKSTo treasure hunters everywhere, men like Mel Fisher and his crew, who, after long years of searching, finally found the treasure-laden galleon
Atocha,
giving us a glimpse of the past we would never otherwise see.
For my husband, who helped me so much on this book. My hero always.
“Oh, my God! Look at this place!” Standing in the hall outside the door of her Manhattan apartment, Hope Sinclair stared in horror at the wreckage that had once been her home.
The door stood open and two uniform policemen prowled the destruction, which pretty much included everything in the room. In the cozy living area, her overstuffed pale-green sofa and chair were turned upside down, the pillows violently ripped open, the stuffing spewed onto the floor. The coffee table had been upended, breaking the beveled glass top into a dozen pieces. Her leafy green philodendron lay on its side, dirt all over the deep beige carpet.
Hope’s disbelieving gaze swung to the mahogany bookshelves she had saved up to buy and only just purchased, the items there raked onto the floor. She had sublet the apartment from her sister almost two years ago, when Charity had set off for a summer adventure that turned into marriage and a permanent move to Seattle. It had only been in the past several months that Hope had begun to make the place her own.
She moved toward the pile of novels and reference books that had once sat on the bookshelves and now lay in a heap on the carpet, along with her prized collection of jazz CDs. Some of the plastic cases were broken, but fortunately it looked as though most of the disks had survived.
The small dining area looked as if a Scud missile had landed, the table and chairs upended, one of the wooden legs hanging loose.
Both policemen started in her direction when they spotted her standing just inside the doorway in her navy wool coat and cashmere scarf, a concession to the icy January weather. Hope moved farther into the room and closed the broken door.
“Are you Charity Sinclair?” The cop was young and blond and she could tell he felt sorry for her.
“Um…no, I’m not. I’m Hope Sinclair. Charity is my sister. I took over her lease when she left the city.”
“I see.” He scribbled something in his notebook as the second officer walked up, older, with thinning black hair going gray and a slight paunch around his middle.
“Your next-door neighbor heard the commotion and called 911,” the second policeman said. “Whoever did this was gone by the time we got here.” The tag on his chest read “Buckley.” “Looks like they broke the lock on your door. Which wasn’t too hard. You haven’t got much of a lock.”
“You’ll need to take a look around,” the blond cop said. “See if you can figure out what’s missing.”
Hope swallowed. “Yes…yes, of course.” Her initial shock was wearing off, replaced by a growing anger. Who the hell would do something like this? She didn’t own anything of any real value.
Which the intruders must have discovered, since they seemed to have gone through every inch of the apartment. In the bedroom, her feather pillows had been slashed open, and all of the clothes in her drawers had been pulled out. In the bathroom, the shower curtain had been ripped down and her toiletries shoved off the counter onto the floor. The medicine cabinet stood open, everything scooped out into the sink.
Ignoring the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, Hope made a fairly thorough search of the rooms, but couldn’t find a single item missing. Which, she suddenly realized, might be bad news instead of good.
“Do you have any enemies, Ms. Sinclair?” the blond patrolman asked, sending a chill down her spine. “Anyone who might do something like this?”
“No one I can think of. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do this kind of damage.”
“The world is full of nuts,” Officer Buckley said. “There’s no telling why some people do the things they do.”
She surveyed the mess, thinking of all the hours it was going to take to put the place back in order and how much it would cost to replace the things that were broken. The chill returned as she remembered the feather pillows in her bedroom, violently ripped apart.
Her gaze shifted to the older cop. “You don’t think I might be in any sort of danger? Is there a chance whoever did this might come back?”
“There’s always a chance,” Buckley said. “You’re gonna need to replace your door locks. I’d suggest you get something a little less flimsy. And keep that window by the fire escape securely locked down.”
“Yes, I certainly will.”
They gathered a little more information: where she worked, where she had been at the time of the break-in, whether she was routinely away at this time of day. Then the blond cop handed her a card with the precinct number printed in the corner.
“If you think of anything that might be of help,” he said, “you can reach one of us at this number.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you, officers.” She closed the broken door behind them just as her cell phone started to ring. Hope hurried over and grabbed up her big leather purse. Tossing up the flap, she frantically dug out her cell and flipped open the earpiece.
“Hello?”
“Hope, this is Artie. One of the guys heard the 911 call come over the police scanner and recognized your address. You okay?”
“I wasn’t here when whoever did it broke in. But God, they trashed my apartment.”
“What’d they take?”
“Nothing. That’s the weird part.”
A long silence fell on the opposite end of the line. “We need to talk, Sinclair.”
“I have to buy some new locks and have them put on. I’ve got to get this place in livable condition again.”
“I said
we need to talk.
That means now. Get in here, Sinclair, on the double.”
His tone left no room for argument. She had only been working for the small Manhattan paper,
Midday News,
for the last couple of months and she needed the job. “I’ll be right down, sir.”
The line clicked off without a good-bye, and Hope took a last look at the destruction all around her. With a sigh, she walked over to the telephone book lying in a heap next to her desk. She rummaged through the Yellow Pages and found a locksmith, got back on the phone and dialed him. She gave him her address, along with instructions to replace the broken locks with new ones, the heavy-duty kind, paid him with a credit card, then went to see the superintendent.
Charlie, one of the more dependable supers she’d had, agreed to watch the place while she was at work. He said he would get the new keys from the locksmith and told her not to worry—he would “deal with the perps if they have the nerve to come back.”
Since Charlie was well over sixty and hardly in prime condition, she prayed the man or men would not return.
With a thank-you to Charlie, she went back to her apartment, pulled on her heavy wool coat, and wrapped the cashmere scarf around her neck. Slinging her purse over her shoulder, she took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out into an icy wind. Slushy snow crunched beneath her boots as she hailed a cab and gratefully climbed in out of the chill.
As she leaned back against the cracked leather seat, she thought of her apartment, and a fresh shot of anger swept through her, mingled with a trace of fear. Who would do something so heinous? Why her place and not someone else’s? What were they after?
The questions plagued her as the cab wove through the traffic on Lexington, all the way down to the offices of
Midday News
on Twenty-second Street, not far from the Flatiron Building.
Her editor, an overweight, balding man in his fifties named Artie Green, spotted her the minute she pushed open the door leading into the main office behind the reception area and motioned her toward his office. Once there, he held open the half-glass door while she walked in, then closed it firmly behind her.
In the cluttered newsroom outside, reporters sat at their computers surrounded by messy stacks of paper next to half-full mugs of cold coffee. At least the overflowing ashtrays were gone—thanks to a new city ordinance that banned smoking, the one bad habit she hadn’t acquired over the years.
“Sit down, Sinclair.” He was wearing his usual dark slacks and rumpled shirt with a tie that was way too narrow to be stylish.
Beneath her coat, which she hung on a hook beside the door, Hope wore slacks, too, dark brown with a light beige sweater. She sat down in one of the metal, vinyl-covered chairs on the opposite side of Artie’s desk.
“Sorry about your place. That’s got to be a real bummer.”
Hope held back a sigh. “That’s putting it mildly.”
“The cops got any idea who might have done it?”
“Like I said earlier, nothing was taken, so they really don’t have a clue.”
“I hate to say this, but you pissed off a lot of people with that article you wrote on old man Newton and Hartley House. Maybe someone was sending you a message.”
Goose bumps ran over her skin. She had thought of that herself. Over the last few days, she had gotten several nasty calls at the office, but nothing she considered a serious threat.
“All I did was give the tenants’ side of the story. They don’t think the building should be condemned. Those old people love that place. They’ve been living there for years. It’s their home and they don’t want to leave.” Hartley House was a retirement home on the south end of Manhattan. There were thirty-five units, each occupied by a tenant over sixty-five, most of them older than that.
“The building inspector says the place isn’t safe,” Artie said. “A lot of the people in the neighborhood agree. They think the building’s an eyesore. They want to see something new go up, something more classy that will add to the value of the area.”
“Buddy Newton thinks it’s just a scheme to force him to sell.” Buddy was the owner of the building, one of the occupants himself.
“Newton’s an old fool, just like the rest of ’em. The place needs to come down. He might as well get as much money as he can and get on with his life—whatever’s left of it.”
“Even if the neighbors believe that, surely no one was mad enough about the article to break in and vandalize my apartment.”
Artie just shrugged. “It’s a hot issue and tempers are running high. Which is why I’m pulling you off the story.”
Hope shot out of her chair. “What are you talking about?”
“You heard me. The publisher’s taken an editorial position in support of the condemnation.” Meaning the advertisers were screaming and the paper was caving to their demands. “We’re winding this one up,” Artie said. “If something interesting develops, Randy Hicks will handle it.”
“Randy Hicks! You’ve got to be kidding. That guy hasn’t had a fresh idea in years.”
“In this case, we don’t need fresh ideas. Fortunately for you, an assignment’s come up that’s a whole lot better.”
She eyed him warily. “I’d rather keep working on Hartley House.” In the weeks since she’d been on the story, she had grown fond of a number of the tenants. Old Mrs. Eisenhoff was Aunt Bea come to life, right out of Andy Griffith’s
Mayberry,
and one of the sweetest old ladies Hope had ever met. Mr. Nivers, on the third floor, always had a joke for her, and Mrs. Finnegan, completely alone in the world, would be utterly bereft without her slightly whacky friends and weekly bridge games.
None of them wanted to lose their homes.
And she thought that maybe Buddy Newton might be right.
“Yeah, well, you’re off, kid. That’s just the way it is. Like I said, you’re gonna be doin’ somethin’ better. You’re gonna be writing a series for
Adventure
magazine.”
“That’s crazy—I don’t work for
Adventure
magazine.”
“Doesn’t matter. The magazine’s owned by McLaughlin Media Corp, same as
Midday News.
You work for them, you go where they need you. Besides, you were requested to do the piece.”
Hope was having trouble digesting all this information at once. She knew the newspaper was owned by a huge corporation that owned a string of magazines and newspapers across the country.
Midday News
was one of the smallest in the group.
“So who requested me for the story?”
“Actually, it’s scheduled to be a series. And the guy’s name is Brad Talbot—you know, the ‘Doormat King’? You interviewed him for some kind of freelance article a couple of years ago. At least that’s what he said.”
She had written the piece, “Movers and Shakers,” for
Young Executive
magazine. Talbot, a multimillionaire New Yorker, was the grandson of the man who invented rubber doormats back in the thirties. His father had expanded the company holdings and made profits into the ionosphere; then he died and left the entire family fortune to his son.
“So what does Brad Talbot have to do with
Adventure
magazine?”
“Talbot’s one of the partners in a treasure-hunting venture. He’s the moneyman in the deal. There are three other guys involved—an archeologist named Archibald Marlin, a guy named Eddie Markham, and the operations man, Conner Reese. You’re going to the Caribbean, Sinclair. No more shitty snow and freezing wind, just warm, tropical sun and sandy beaches. A place called Pleasure Island.”
“Pleasure Island. Sounds like someplace in Disney World—or a porno flick.”
“Hey, what have you got to complain about? The magazine wants at least three articles. They’ll probably take weeks to write, and while you’re gone, all your expenses are paid. You’re goin’ on a dream vacation, kid.”
“I don’t want a dream vacation. I want to continue working the story I’m on. What if I refuse the assignment?”
Artie frowned. “Then you’ll be looking for a job.”
Hope opened her mouth, then clamped it tightly closed. She needed this job. Magazine articles were more fun to write, but they didn’t come with a regular paycheck. And she did have some expertise.
Several years back, she had done some freelance articles for
Travel and Life
magazine; one of them, “Sexiest Places to Dive,” dealt with islands in the Caribbean, mostly the accommodations, but during the time she spent there, she
had
learned to dive. She was still a novice, but she enjoyed the sport, and she had fallen in love with the islands. If she weren’t so caught up in Buddy Newton’s problems, an assignment like this would be the nearest thing to heaven.
Hope looped a hunk of thick red hair over her ear, not quite used to wearing it longer than the jaw-brushing length it was before.