Just Another Pretty Face (HT 459) (22 page)

He tossed the package onto the passenger seat of the silver Jaguar as he got into the car, his mind on the appropriateness of diamonds versus colored stones as he exited the studio lot. The drive to the jewelry store, located in the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, was a short one. In less than forty-five minutes, he was seated in a private room, trying to decide between a flawless eleven-carat diamond solitaire and a five-carat square-cut peridot set in platinum and surrounded by smaller diamonds.

"The solitaire is classic," pointed out the jeweler, eager for the higher price it would bring.

"But the peridot matches her eyes," countered Pierce. Besides, he had a sneaking suspicion that his intended bride would find an eleven-carat diamond a bit ostentatious. He left with the diamond-studded peridot in a little velvet box, nestled into the breast pocket of his raw silk Armani jacket.

He sat in the Jaguar for a moment after he left the store, admiring the engagement ring and trying to decide just when he would make his proposal. If he had his way, he wouldn't wait another day to get the ring on her finger. But Nikki had scruples about such things. If she wouldn't sleep with him while she was his bodyguard, it was probably a sure bet that she wouldn't agree to marry him while in that capacity, either. And he couldn't fire her, he thought, grinning, or she'd sue him.

Maybe, if he agreed to a whole platoon of bodyguards, he could convince her to resign.

Or, maybe, the fan would strike again in the next couple of days and it would all be over.

One could only hope.

He snapped the velvet box closed and put it back in his inside pocket, then reached out to turn the key in the ignition. The package on the seat caught his eye. He picked it up. It was small and rectangular, about the size of a child's shoe box. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and packaging tape, and the address label was neatly typed rather than being written in the flowing script he had half expected. It made a muffled thumping noise when he shook it.

He took the key out of the ignition, used the end of it to tear through the tape, and slipped it back into place. Grasping the body of the box in one hand, he lifted the lid with the other.

A charred Barbie doll lay nestled in the satin-lined box as if it were in a coffin. It was naked and its long black hair had been hacked off so that it was sticking up in tiny spikes all over the doll's head. The smell of burnt plastic was almost overpowered by the musky smell of the perfume it had been doused with. Horrified, Pierce stared down at the grisly doll for a long moment. There was something there... something he should be seeing... something beyond what he was seeing.

And then, suddenly, he knew.

He threw the box onto the seat with a strangled oath of rage and fear and reached for the ignition. The car roared to life. Pierce slammed it into gear and screamed out of the parking lot as if Satan himself were after him.

* * *

NIKKI OPENED the kitchen door with her key, already annoyed that there had been no plain black pickup truck from Bender Security in the driveway. Her annoyance increased when she realized there was no one in the kitchen, either. Someone was always supposed to be monitoring the monitor.

"Hello?" she called, the heels of her cowboy boots thudding against the tiles of the kitchen. The sound changed, becoming sharper and then muffled and sharper again, as she strode across the plush bur-gundy-and-gold Brussels carpet that adorned the center of the hardwood floor in the massive dining room. "Hello? Mrs. Gilmore?" Her voice echoed hollowly back at her as she crossed the marble foyer and headed down the hall to the garden room. "Anybody? Is anyone ho—oh, hi, Kathy," she said, smiling. "Where is everyone?"

"I haven't seen Mrs. Gilmore since this morning," Kathy said. "I guess she must still be out doing the grocery shopping. Lisbeth was by the pool, studying, the last time I saw her."

"Oh?" Nikki said, trying to sound casual. She'd promised Pierce that she wouldn't reveal her suspicions to anyone outside of him and Bill Bender. "How long has she been here?"

"I'm not sure. I wasn't the one who let her in."

"Oh, well." Nikki shrugged. "I guess it's not that important. I'll ask Mrs. Gilmore later." She moved toward the windows overlooking the pool area as she spoke, unable to resist the urge to check on the girl. "I was expecting a couple of guys from Bender Security to be here by now," she said over her shoulder. "They were supposed to start work on the motion detectors in Pierce's room."

"Somebody named Dean called just a few minutes ago. He said there was a problem at another site and they'd be about an hour and a half late."

Nikki looked at her watch. "Damn, that's going to throw a monkey wrench into things, especially if Pierce gets finished earlier than he thought." She frowned thoughtfully, still staring out the window. "I don't see Lisbeth," she said. "Are you sure she's out there?"

Kathy came up to the window beside her. "She was sitting there at the first umbrella table," she said, pointing. There was a stack of books and papers there, but no Lisbeth. "Maybe she went into the cabana. The door's open."

"Maybe," Nikki said, uneasy without knowing why. Pierce was out of harm's way for the moment, safely ensconced in his sister's office. "I think I'll go check on her."

"I'll be in my office if you need me," Kathy said.

Nikki nodded absently and pushed open the glass door. Stepping outside, she started to pass by the umbrella table, then stopped, her eye caught by a flash of pastel blue. There was an entire pad of lined blue note-paper lying next to the stack of textbooks, exactly like that which had been used to write the threatening letters to Pierce. Either Lisbeth was completely innocent, Nikki thought, or her obsession was making her careless.

The deranged mind of a stalker was apt to work that way, becoming more and more convinced that the fantasy it had created was true, until it was so real to the person who created it that she forgot it
was
just a fantasy. And that's when she became the most dangerous. Because she believed the world she had fabricated in her head was the real one.

What was Lisbeth doing in the cabana?

Nikki felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Something was wrong, she was sure of it. Something was terribly wrong. She slid her right hand under her jacket, feeling for the butt of her gun, and crept toward the open door, wishing she was wearing tennis shoes instead of the cowboy boots that practically announced her approach. Wishing for backup, too, while she was at it.

She should have insisted on armed guards and dogs for the daylight hours, too, she thought, at least until the alarms had been installed. She should have insisted that all nonessential personnel be barred from the estate for the duration. And then,
Thank God, Pierce is safely out of the way,
she thought. She couldn't have kept him safe if he was there with her. He'd have insisted on being macho and male, bum leg and all.

She reached the door without, apparently, alerting anyone inside. Flattening her back against the outside wall of the cabana, just to the side of the door frame, she drew the Baretta out of the holster. Taking a deep breath, she grasped it in both hands in front of her and whirled in front of the door.

Nothing moved.

She waited a minute and then stepped inside.

Still nothing.

She made a slow half circle, the gun held out in front of her. "Lisbeth?" she called, her gaze checking every corner. The cabana was one big room, with a gym on one side and a casual conversation area on the other. The bathroom and shower area were behind the only other door in the room. It was closed. "Lisbeth?"

Silence.

Nikki lowered her gun and approached the bathroom door. Standing to one side of it, she rapped sharply. "Lisbeth? Are you in there?"

If she was, Nikki thought, she wasn't answering. If she wasn't, then where the hell was she? Nikki reached out and turned the door handle. It opened easily. She pushed it with the muzzle of her gun and, very carefully, peeked around the edge of the door frame.

Lisbeth was lying on the tile floor on her side, apparently unconscious.

"Lisbeth!" Nikki knelt down, the fingers of her free hand automatically searching through the tumbled hair on the girl's neck to feel for a pulse. She found it, finally, beating very faintly, under Lisbeth's fragile jaw.

Nikki shoved her gun into her holster and used both hands to turn the girl over. Her arm flopped across her body as Nikki rolled her onto her back, leaving a trail of blood across the front of her pale yellow blouse. "Good God, what have you done to yourself, Lisbeth?" Nikki breathed, horrified at the sight that greeted her eyes.

The girl had cut both her wrists. And some time ago, too, Nikki thought, because the blood oozing from the lesser cut on her right wrist had already started to coagulate. She hadn't cut it deep enough to sever the vein. The one on her left wrist was more serious. It was still bleeding heavily. Nikki reached up and yanked the towels off the rack next to the shower, using them to wrap Lisbeth's wrists. She fashioned a makeshift bandage for the left one first, making a pad to press against the cut before winding a smaller one around it to hold it in place.

"Hold on, Lisbeth," she said to the unconscious girl as she wrapped a towel around the other wrist. "Just hold on." She jumped up from the floor and ran for the panic button. She hit it with the flat of her hand, made sure it started flashing red, and ran to the door of the cabana. "Kathy," she screamed. "Kathy!"

The secretary stepped out of her office.

"Lisbeth's tried to commit suicide," Nikki said. "I've hit the panic button. Open the front gates so they can get in without any delay," she ordered, disappearing inside the cabana.

She ran back to the bathroom to kneel beside Lisbeth, lifting the girl's head to place a folded towel under it, applying pressure to the seeping wound in her left wrist. "Just hold on a little longer, Lisbeth," she whispered, her fingers against the faint pulse in the girl's neck. "Help is on the way."

She'd wanted to find Pierce's fan and put a stop to her threats but not this way. Not at the cost of a young girl's life. She should have paid more attention to Lisbeth's file; she should have had someone follow up on it, ferret out the circumstances of her previous attempt to take her own life; she should have overridden Pierce's objections and confronted Lisbeth directly. Maybe, then, this wouldn't have happened.

"The gates are open," Kathy said from behind her. "Is she going to be all right?"

"I don't know," Nikki said without looking up. "I hope so."

And then she felt a blinding flash of pain on the back of her head and everything went black.

* * *

P
IERCE RAMMED
the Jaguar through the gates before they were completely open, scraping deep gashes down either side of his sister's car. He didn't even notice. He slammed to a stop behind the limousine in the driveway and jumped out of the car, leaving the door open and the engine running as he staggered up the wide stone steps to the front door.

It was locked.

"Damn it!" he roared, and pounded on the doorbell. "Damn these blasted locks to hell."

Too impatient to wait for someone to let him in, too terrified to wait, he headed around to the back of the house at a painful lope.

He knew who Kathy Frye was now. More importantly, he knew who she used to be. Kay Fielding. He should have recognized the name when Nikki read it to him out of the file, but he hadn't. He'd been so appalled at learning about his secretary's other career as Cherie Bombe that he hadn't paid enough attention to her more recent past.

He'd worked with Kay Fielding.

It had been over fifteen years ago and he'd forgotten about it until that moment in the Jaguar in front of the jewelry store when he'd smelled that perfume again. And finally remembered.

Kay Fielding had had a very small part in
Beyond the Pale,
a movie he'd done when he was barely twenty-one. Her scene had taken one, maybe two days to shoot, if that, and had ended up as thirty seconds on the screen. He'd played a callow, homesick young sailor on leave and she had played the part of the first prostitute he ever visited. It hadn't even been a love scene, just a tawdry depiction of the morning after when, out of guilt, embarrassment and a desperate need to get away from a desperate woman, the young sailor had professed his love.

And she had worn that perfume.

The same perfume she still wore today.

The same perfume that had scented the letters and the charred Barbie doll.

Why in
hell
hadn't he noticed it before, he raged inwardly as he rounded the hedge that shielded the tennis courts from the house. He made a too-sharp turn and slipped on the grass, going down as his bum leg gave out beneath him. He was scrambling to his feet, sweating and swearing, when he saw it. Smoke and flames rising from the cabana.

She'd started another fire.

"Nikki!"
he roared, and went racing the rest of the way across the yard, tottering crazily, almost falling again with every step as his weight came down on his injured leg. The walking cast hadn't been meant for this kind of treatment.

Kathy came running to meet him. To stop him. "It's too late," she said frantically, grabbing his arm as he was about to enter the burning building. "It's too late. They're gone."

Pierce shook her off. "Let go of me, damn it!" he said, pushing her so hard that she fell to the ground.

Kathy wrapped her arms around his legs. "No, you can't. It's too late."

Ignoring the pain of his injured leg, hardly even feeling it, Pierce reached down, grabbed her by her upper arms with enough force to cause bruises, and peeled her away from him. "If it's really too late, I'll kill you with my bare hands," he swore, and threw her aside like a sack of potatoes.

He didn't pause to see where or how she landed but rushed inside the burning cabana. The smoke wasn't as thick and black this time—there was no smoldering carpet to create that kind of smoke—but there were flames, ravenous flames, licking up the walls.