Flowerbed of State (10 page)

I hugged my chest a little tighter and pretended I didn’t notice the threatening scrape of shoes against the pavement. It had grown louder. And closer. Someone was creeping up behind me.

I started to run.

I ran.

And ran.

Suddenly, I was back at the White House. I charged screaming for help down the hallway toward my office in the shadowy basement.

No one came to help me.

The muffled thump of the hard leather soles against the hard floor grew closer. Steady. Unerring. There was no escaping those black-and-white shoes . . . or the man wearing them.

He’d stolen my security pass, my identity, had nearly taken my life.

I wasn’t safe. Nowhere was safe.

Not even the White House.

He grabbed me from behind. His fingers closed around my throat. I struggled helpless against his strong grip.

His fingers tightened.

Tighter. I couldn’t breathe.

With a yelp, I jolted up in the bed. Gasping for air and so tangled in my blankets, I could barely move. My bruised temple throbbed with a devil’s vengeance.

Thump. Thump. Thump
.

What the devil? I shouldn’t still be able to hear the footsteps from my dream. I pinched myself.

“Ouch!”

Thump. Thump. Thump
.

It was coming from downstairs.

I unwound myself from the tangle of warm bedding and padded out into the hallway. My nervous heart crept up to my throat. The thumping sounded louder out here on the upstairs landing. Nearly as loud as the pounding in my chest.

I braced myself with a hand on the stairway newel post’s large ball, timeworn and smooth, and listened.

Why would someone be pounding on the door at this time of night?

“Alyssa?” I called out. “Are you expecting anyone?”

Nothing.

My roommate could sleep through a nuclear war.

I rushed back into the bedroom and pulled on a pink satin robe decorated with delicate floral swirls that matched my pajamas. My hands shook as I tied the sash. My bare feet trembled on each tread of the stairs. The man who’d attacked me had stolen my security pass. He knew who I was. He knew where I lived. Every muscle in my body begged me to go back, go back up to my bedroom and hide under my covers. Which was silly. I needed to calm down. Killers didn’t knock on front doors.

Not even in the middle of the night.

The ornately carved front door loomed in front of me. Geometric patterns of crystal blues and sea foam greens splashed across the hardwood floor from the porch light shining through the door’s art deco stained glass sidelights.

The bright porch light would discourage any would-be killers lurking in the shadows of the street. Even so, by the time I’d reached the bottom of the stairs, my insides quivered like a big old bowl of muscadine jelly despite the deep-breathing exercises and pep talk.

A large shadow moved in front of the sidelight.

Bang! Bang! Bang
!

I yelped.

And then I cursed myself for acting like a frightened mouse.

With a quick pull, I tore aside the heavy drape that covered the window in the top half of the door.

“Lorenzo?”

I quickly unlocked the door and threw it open.

“Lorenzo, what are you doing out there?”

He looked terrible. Worse than terrible. Dark bags sagged underneath his bloodshot eyes. His once freshly pressed suit looked as if it’d spent at least a week crumpled up into a tight ball on a floor somewhere. His tie was gone, his shirt untucked. Mud and grass stained his knees. The pocket of his coat had been ripped.

I knew he was my age, a youthful not-quite-forty. But seeing him slumping against the doorframe with his shoulders hunched against the world, I would have added at least ten years to that number. Under the bright porch light, his sharp Italian features appeared to be even more deeply etched.

I grabbed his arm and pulled him inside, closing and locking the door behind me.

“Lorenzo? Are you okay? What happened to you today? Where did you go?” I demanded.

He shook his head.

“Where did you go?” The sharpness of my voice surprised me. It must have surprised Lorenzo as well. His gaze snapped up from the spots of color from the stained glassed window on my hardwood floors that had captured his attention. His eyes met mine.

“I climbed a tree.”

“A tree? You’re joking.” I shook my head. I could not—and believe me, my imagination lacked for nothing—but I couldn’t picture Lorenzo perched up in a tree. Not under any circumstances. Not ever.

“What kind of tree?”

“A cherry tree near the Tidal Basin. An ‘Okame,’ I believe.”

“That’s illegal, not to mention how damaging climbing can be to those trees. Some of them are nearly a hundred years old.”

Lorenzo shrugged. “I needed to think. It seemed like a good place.”

We stared at each other for several minutes.

“What are you doing here?” I asked finally.

“I had to come.” His eyes grew wide and more than a little wild. He took a step toward me.

I took a step back.

“You’ve got to tell me,” he rasped. He took several more steps toward me.

I retreated until my back hit the foyer wall.

“What—what do I need to tell you?” I asked, desperate to sound calm. But failing miserably. My voice sounded breathless and weak. I hated that. I hated that I’d let myself get so frightened.

This was Lorenzo, for Pete’s sake, soft-spoken, pesticide and fertilizer-misguided Lorenzo. While he often sprayed indiscriminately for insects, beneficial or not, he wouldn’t hurt me, a fellow gardener.

“I’ll help you as long as you tell me what you need.”

“That FBI agent said you were their only witness. You have to tell me. What exactly did you see?”

“What did I see? I—I’m not supposed to—”

“Dammit, Casey!” He slammed his fist against the wall beside my head with enough force the plaster cracked. “I’m not playing around here.”

Good God, he’d lost his mind! I squeezed my eyes shut. Wincing, I turned my head away and braced myself, half expecting him to hit me.

“Look at me!” he shouted.

I looked. He must have seen the fear spiking through my body with such force that I was nearly doubling over from the pain of it. He cursed and stumbled backward as if he’d lost his balance.

“Dammit.” He tunneled his fingers through his short dark brown hair. “I’m sorry, Casey. I don’t mean to scare you.” His head dropped to his chest. “You don’t understand.”

I had to lean forward to hear what he whispered next.

“The woman you found, Pauline. She was my lover.”

W
ELL, shut my mouth
, that explained why Lorenzo had run off in such a state this morning. I dragged us both into the kitchen, scooped my favorite shade-grown Costa Rican ground coffee beans into Alyssa’s French press, and started to heat a kettle of water while Lorenzo paced.

“She drove me crazy, Casey. When I was with her, I felt on top of the world one moment and as if I was losing my mind the next.” He stopped at the refrigerator and, making himself right at home, opened the door and peered inside. Finding nothing of interest in there, he turned around and shuffled back toward the pantry.

“Are you looking for something?” I asked him.

“No.” He seemed nervous, like he didn’t know what to do with himself. “It’s just that . . . I don’t know. My world revolved around Pauline. She was everything to me. We’d been dating for nearly a year. I was going to ask her to marry me. What am I going to do now?”

“Why don’t you sit down, Lorenzo?” His pacing was starting to make me dizzy. I breathed in the coffee’s rich scents. It was like inhaling a thick dose of caffeine. “Tell me about Pauline.”

“She was vibrant, a shooting star.”

I poured the heated water into the French press. Then after swallowing a couple of pain tablets with a glass of tap water, I joined Lorenzo at the small maple kitchen table. He’d folded his arms over his rumpled shirt and had tilted his head back slightly. His eyes were closed.

Had he fallen asleep? I glanced at the clock on the stove. It was half past three in the morning. He must have been exhausted. I knew I still needed several hours of sleep before I could reasonably expect my mind to start functioning on all cylinders.

So I didn’t try to think. I simply sat at the table with Lorenzo sharing his grief.

Five minutes passed. And then ten.

My muddy backpack was still on the kitchen table where I’d carelessly dropped it. The mud had dried and crumbled into a small mound.

Hadn’t Alyssa recently complained about the amount of dirt I brought into the house?
Soil, not dirt
, I’d tried to explain to her. But she refused to acknowledge the difference.

I cleaned up the mess and then reached into the backpack. The mystery novel I’d been carrying around hadn’t fared well from having spent the day in a soggy bag. Its pages were water stained, its cover slightly warped. But the promise of a mystery to be solved on its pages and justice demanding to be served called to me.

I hated feeling timid in my own skin. Heroines like Miss Marple knew how to keep a calm head on their shoulders despite their constant encounters with danger. And here I was shivering in my satin robe after a coworker—a man I wanted to consider my friend—unexpectedly showed up in the middle of night in search of comfort. And answers.

What would Miss Marple have done?

She’d do what any good friend would do. She would help him, of course.

I quietly stood and retrieved two coffee mugs from the cabinet.

“Did you see him?” Lorenzo asked. His eyes were still closed and his head tilted back as if in slumber.

“Yeah.” I filled the pair of mugs with the fresh coffee. “I saw him, but I don’t know what I can tell you that would be helpful. I didn’t get a good look at him.” I placed a mug on the table in front of him and then fetched a carton of milk from the refrigerator. “The FBI, D.C. Police, Secret Service, and everyone else with a badge in the D.C. area are all using the information I gave them. Believe me, they want to find this guy as badly as you do.”

“I understand that. But still—”

“Do you take sugar?” I asked.

He waved the sugar bowl away. After pouring a healthy serving of milk into his coffee, he took a sip.

“But you saw him, Casey? You saw the monster who killed Pauline?”

If only I could remember his face. Did I even see his face?

“I don’t know what or how much I saw,” I admitted. “It’s all hazy.”

I looked away. I couldn’t bear to watch his hopeful expression dissolve into disappointment. I’d already seen that happen with the Secret Service agents and then the FBI and the police. “Maybe when my head heals, I’ll be able to remember more.”

Lorenzo shifted uneasily. His shoe bumped my foot.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

I moved my foot and instinctively glanced under the table to make sure my legs weren’t intruding on his space.

“I can’t wait, Casey. You need to remember it now. Think. Any bit of information might be helpful,” he insisted. “I need to know what you know. You might have seen something that would identify him.”

Like his shoes.

His black-and-white lightning bolt shoes.

Why would Lorenzo be wearing the killer’s shoes?

He wouldn’t. Not unless the killer and Lorenzo were one and the—

In a panic I jumped up and grabbed the first thing that came to mind. A knife.

A satisfyingly large butcher’s knife. I liked the weight of it in my hand.

“What are you doing?” Lorenzo asked as I whirled toward him, the knife pointed menacingly toward his chest.

“Um . . . um . . .” What did I think I was going to do with the knife? This was Lorenzo, for heaven’s sake. “Oh, you know me. When I get nervous, I garden.”

“With a butcher’s knife?”

Right. That didn’t make sense.

Desperate, I grabbed the closest thing at hand, a pineapple Alyssa had purchased a few days earlier and had left sitting out next to the bread box. The knife’s sharp blade made a satisfying
thunk
as it cut through the top of the pineapple, freeing its bright green top. I raised the stalk of spiky leaves in the air as if it were a trophy. Bits of bright yellow pineapple flesh clung to it.

“I’m going to grow this pineapple top.”

His brows crinkled. “Right now? In the kitchen?”

“Yes. Why not? They make great houseplants, you know.”