Guilty as Sin (5 page)

"Yeah. The BCA guys were still going over the house today. We've got Karen under twenty-four-hour surveillance, in case she was involved. I don't think she had a clue what her husband was doing. She's not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, to begin with. Now she's so distraught, she can barely function. I didn't get anywhere with her, but you might have better luck woman-to-woman."

"Let's hope."

She could hear the phone ringing in the outer office, but no calls were being put through to Mitch. Natalie was running interference for him. The last two weeks had been hell on him. As
Deer
Lake
's chief and the only detective on the thirty-man force, he had shouldered the burden of the search for Josh and an investigation that ran virtually around the clock. His professional and personal lives had been under constant scrutiny by the press.

"I spoke with Megan this afternoon," she said as he rose and came around the end of the desk to see her to the door. "She's got a rough road ahead of her."

"Yeah." He tried to put on a game expression, but it hung a little crooked, letting the worry peek through. "But she's a tough cookie. She'll gut it out."

"And you'll be there to help her."

"If I have anything to say about it."

"She's lucky to have you. You're a good guy, Mitch."

"Yeah, that's me. Last of the good guys."

"Don't say that. I'd like to think there's a couple left out there for us single women. It's that hope that keeps us shaving our legs, you know."

The press had either lost her or given up on her for the afternoon. Deadlines beckoned them if Ellen North did not. He had no deadlines except the statute of limitations on his anonymity.

He stood just outside a back door to
Deer
Lake
's
City
Center
, freezing his ass and cursing
Minnesota
's stringent antismoking laws. In the time it took to smoke a cigarette, he had already lost the feeling in his smaller toes.

She came out of the building through a side door, muttering to herself, head bent as she pulled her keys out of her handbag. He tossed his cigarette butt at a snowbank.

"Ms. North? May I have a word?"

Ellen jerked her head up at the sound of the voice—a honey-and-smoke drawl from the
Deep South. Damned reporters. Lurking everywhere but under the bushes—and they would have been there, too, if the bushes hadn't been buried under three feet of snow. This one came toward her with a long, purposeful stride, the collar of his black coat turned up high, hands jammed into his pockets.

"No—that's your word," she snapped. "I said all I have to say at the press conference. If you didn't get your sound bite then, that's too bad."

She kept walking, frowning as he stayed just in front of her, walking backward. "You're lucky I believe in handgun control," she said. "Don't you know any better than to sneak up on a woman in a dark parking lot?"

He grinned at her, a wicked pirate's grin that flashed white in an angular face shadowed by a day's growth of beard. "Don't you know any better than to assume a stranger coming at you in a dark parking lot is a reporter?"

The question cut through Ellen like a knife. What sun there had been earlier in the day was gone, swept away by a bank of clouds and the onset of evening. Though there was a police force inside the building she had just left, there wasn't another soul in the parking lot. She thought of Josh Kirkwood, his parents, everyone in
Deer
Lake
who had made the assumption they were safe here. Even after everything that had happened in the last two weeks, she still felt personally immune. How stupid. How naive.

An image of Megan flashed through her mind. Megan, her face a ^alette of bruises and stitches. Megan hadn't seen her attacker. "We fooled vou all along, he said . . .
 
We, always we . . ."

Even in the faint wash of light from the streetlamps he had to see the color drain from her face. Her gaze darted toward her car, then back to he building, judging distances as her step slowed to a standstill.

"I'm no rapist," he assured her with a certain amount of amusement.

"I'd be a fool to take your word for that, wouldn't I?"

"Yes, ma'am," he conceded with a tip of his head.

"Ma'am," Ellen snarled under her breath, trying to muster up some anger to counteract the sudden burst or fear. She took a slow step back toward the building. "Now I do wish I had a gun."

"If I were after you for nefarious purposes," he said as he advanced on her, "would I be so careless as to approach you here?"

He pulled a gloved hand from his pocket and gestured gracefully to the parking lot, like a magician drawing attention to his stage.

"If I wanted to harm you," he said, stepping closer, "I would be smart enough to follow you home, find a way to slip into your house or garage, catch you where there would be little chance of witnesses or interference." He let those images take firm root in her mind. "That's what I would do if I were the sort of rascal who preys on women." He smiled again. "Which I am not."

"Who are you and what do you want?" Ellen demanded, unnerved by the fact that a part of her brain catalogued his manner as charming. No, not charming. Seductive. Disturbing.

"Jay Butler Brooks. I'm a writer—true crime. I can show you my driver's license if you'd like," he offered, but made no move to reach for it, only took another step toward her, never letting her get enough distance between them to diffuse tfie electric quality of the tension.

"I'd like for you to back off," Ellen said. She started to hold up a hand, a gesture meant to stop him in his tracks—or a foolish invitation for him to grab hold of her arm. Pulling the gesture back, she hefted her briefcase in her right hand, weighing its potential as a weapon or a shield. "If you think I'm getting close enough to you to look at a DMV photo, you must be out of your mind."

"Well, I have been so accused once or twice, but it never did stick. Now my Uncle Hooter, he's a different story. I could tell you some tales about him. Over dinner, perhaps?" "Perhaps not."

He gave her a crestfallen look that was ruined by the sense that he was more amused than affronted. "After I waited for you out here in the cold?"

"After you stalked me and skulked around in the shadows?" she corrected him, moving another step backward. "After you've done your best to frighten me?"

"I frighten you, Ms. North? You don't strike me as the sort of woman who would be easily frightened. That's certainly not the impression you gave at the press conference."

"I thought you said you aren't a reporter."

"No one at the courthouse ever asked," he confessed. "They assumed the same way you assumed. Forgive my pointing it out at this particular moment, but assumptions can be very dangerous things. Your boss needs to have a word with someone about security. This is a highly volatile case you've got here. Anything might happen. The possibilities are virtually endless. I'd be happy to discuss them with you. Over drinks," he suggested. "You look like you could do with one."

"If you want to see me, call my office."

"Oh, I want to see you, Ms. North," he murmured, his voice an almost tangible caress. "I'm not big on appointments, though. Preparation time eliminates spontaneity."

"That's the whole point."

"I prefer to catch people ... off balance," he admitted. "They repeal more of their true selves."

"I have no intention of revealing anything to you." She stopped her ¦etreat as a group of people emerged from the main doors of
City
Center
. 'I should have you arrested."

He arched a brow. "On what charge, Ms. North? Attempting to hold conversation? Surely y'all are not so inhospitable as your weather here in
Minnesota
, are you?"

She gave him no answer. The voices of the people who had come out f the building rose and fell, only the odd word breaking clear as they lade their way down the sidewalk. She turned and fell into step with the thers as they passed.

Jay watched her walk away, head up, chin out, once again projecting 1 image of cool control. She didn't like being caught off guard. He ould have bet money she was a list maker, a rule follower, the kind of woman who dotted all her i's and crossed all her t's, then double-checked em for good measure. She liked boundaries. She liked control. She had no intention of revealing anything to him.

"But you already have, Ms. Ellen North," he said, hunching up his shoulders as the wind bit a little harder and spit a sweep of fine white snow across the parking lot. "You already have."

CHAPTER
 
3

The Fontaine Hotel sat kitty-corner from the
City
Center
, on the opposite side of the park that made up the old-fashioned town square. In ordinary times Ellen would have enjoyed a brisk walk around the park ending in the warmth of the Fontaine's beautiful restored Victorian lobby. But these were not ordinary times. She parked her car in the lot beside the hotel and sat with the heater and fan running full blast, as if the trembling in her arms and legs had anything to do with the cold.

She liked to think of herself as strong, smart, savvy, able to handle herself in any situation. In a matter of moments, in the course of a few sentences, a lone man had managed to summarily unnerve her. Without ever laying a hand on her, without ever making a verbal threat, he had shown her just how vulnerable she really was.

Jay Butler Brooks. She had seen his face on the cover of People as she'd stood in the checkout line at the supermarket. She had seen his name on book covers, remembered glancing through an article about him in a recent issue of Newsweek.

He was one of the current pack of lawyers-turned-authors. But instead of making his fame with courtroom fiction, Brooks had chosen to capitalize on actual crime. His books sold millions, and
Hollywood snapped them up like Godiva chocolates.

The story had left a bad taste in Ellen's mouth. She looked at the business of turning true crimes into entertainment as twisted and sleazy, vulgar voyeurism that only helped blur the lines between reality and fantasy, and further inured Americans to violence. But money talked, and it talked big. Jay Butler Brooks was worth more than most third-world countries.

"I prefer to catch people . . . off balance . . ."

The remembered timbre of his voice rippled through her. Dark, warm, husky. Seductive. The word whispered through her mind against her will, against logic. He had said nothing seductive. Tiiere had been nothing sexual about the encounter. Still, the word hung in her mind like a shadow. Seductive. Dangerous.

"If I wanted to harm you, I would be smart enough to follow you home. . . ."

Reporters came out of the mahogany woodwork the instant she set foot in the Fontaine's elegant lobby. Ellen shouldered her way past them without comment and breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of a uniformed police officer guarding the doors to the elevator. He nodded to her as she stepped into the car and halted those who would have followed her, demanding that they produce room keys. As a number of them scrambled to reach into their pockets, the doors closed.

Wright's wife had been given a room on the second floor to discourage any notions of flinging herself out a window. The woman who answered the door to room 214 was not Karen Wright. Teresa McGuire's pixie face peeked out from behind the safety chain, eyes narrowed with suspicion, mouth tightened into a knot. The victim-witness coordinator for
Park
County
, she had drawn baby-sitting detail because there were no women on either the
Deer
Lake
or
Park
County
forces.

"Ellen! Thank God," she whispered, closing the door enough to slide the chain free. "I thought you were Paige Price. Would you believe yesterday she actually thought she could talk her way past me just because she ance interviewed a friend of mine for a story on victims' rights? That bitch. I wouldn't watch channel seven if you held a gun to my head."

"I hear she's been reassigned to cover that sewage-plant disaster in
Minot,
North Dakota
," Ellen said softly, setting her briefcase on a side able. "She blew it big time getting into bed with the sheriff for her inside nformation."