Kill the Competition (42 page)

Suddenly he looked contrite. "I shouldn't have said that. I came over to apologize."

She swallowed. "For what?"

"For looking in your window the other day—that was wrong, and I'm sorry I scared you."

He seemed sincere, and honestly, too simpleminded to pull off what she'd been thinking. "Okay," she said.

"And I want you to know that I won't bother you anymore. But if you need anything, just holler."

His words were so heartfelt that she couldn't help but feel a rush of sympathy for the man. "Thank you, Perry. And you
can
do something for me."

If he had been a puppy, his tail would have wagged. "What?"

She handed him the glass cleaner and the paper towels. "Clean your handprints off my window."

His face fell, but he took the supplies and trudged to the window. She loaded the box, then went inside to retrieve another one. When she returned, Perry was scratching his head. An itchy man. "I don't mind cleaning your window," he said, "but these ain't my handprints."

She frowned and walked over. He held his hand next to the prominent print on the glass. Indeed, his hand was three-quarters the size.

Had Wade left it when he'd worked on the alarm? The police, when they'd searched her townhouse? A reporter? She swallowed hard. Julian? Had he come over to spy on her? She had a slightly different view of his large hands now than when he had applied them to her in the sauna.

"You can wipe them off," she murmured. "There have been so many reporters around." Of course, now that she thought about it, if a serial murderer was on the loose, having reporters around at all hours was darn good security.

"Gotcha a security system, I see," he said, pointing to the imposing sticker Wade had affixed to the window and the front door. Similar stickers were on the windows in the back, too.

It was, she'd learned, a secret of the security business—big honking stickers to warn would-be intruders that if they breached the house, a siren would sound on the roof and a dragnet would fall over the perimeter.

"Just a precaution," she said.

"You need a big-ass dog, like a Rottweiler. 'Course it'd eat your kitty."

She frowned, then pursed her mouth that the thought actually bothered her. Was it possible she was becoming attached to the hellcat?

Perry finished and loped back to his own yard, presumably before she asked him to do some other kind of women's work.

The Goodwill drop-off was a tad painful, and rather anticlimactic. While a man wrote a receipt for her items, she watched the box containing her wedding gown being handed down an assembly line of people who were moving donations from the delivery area to be sorted. Near the end of the line, someone dumped the box onto a table and quickly sifted through the items. The gown and veil were separated and handed to a woman who added them to a clothing rack on wheels. The heavily laden rack was then pushed from the loading area through an open doorway and disappeared. A lump rose in her throat over the realization that the dress had once symbolized so much.

"Ma'am?"

Belinda blinked and looked at the man who was holding her receipt for taxes. She thanked him and stepped aside to make way for the people in line behind her who were all shedding pieces of their former lives.

On the way home she blinked back a few achy tears, then stopped to rent two movies and buy a couple of rolls of aluminum foil to cat-proof her couch—she was tired of having her one good piece of furniture covered with old quilts.

At home she checked her phone messages, hoping for word from Hank Baxter on the missing contracts, or an invitation from Libby or Rosemary or Carole that signaled a truce, or a call from Wade Alexander about a break in the case, or a call from Vince about why she hadn't answered his card, or a call from her mother about the cleanest rest areas in Colorado. But the only call was from the car rental place hoping she was enjoying her "zippy" ride. If she was interested in keeping it, they could arrange for financing, even if her credit was "murky."

Even the lady reporter had stopped calling.

The best part of being arrogantly independent, she decided, was having the entire evening to do whatever she wanted to do.

So she ordered a pizza with extra mushrooms (Vince hated mushrooms) and watched a double feature of independent films she'd missed. She gave Downey a reprieve and allowed the cat to join her on the quilt-covered couch. All in all, not a bad evening, and she even allowed herself to think that someday her life would return to some version of normal. She was innocent, and the police would catch the bad guy. That's the way it was in the movies, and in life.

Probably.

The mushrooms gave her dreadful nightmares about Vince, and Sunday morning she opened the door to find the street in front of her townhouse chock full of reporters. She managed to wrap the raggedy peach robe around herself and snatch the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from her doorstep before darting back inside to find the Archer Furniture Company Serial Murders story on page three. By Joann Cameron. Which explained the new round of reporters.

Thank God the piece was short. The Cameron woman had quoted a lot of unnamed sources, but she'd managed to work in the fact that Julian Hardeman, local traffic celebrity, had been linked romantically to both of the victims and to the Hennessey woman in whose trunk the body had been found. Also, Julian had apparently ditched a scheduled polygraph exam and skipped town. His picture was printed next to the article, plus Jeanie's, Margo's, and—

She yanked the paper closer.
How
had they gotten her Ohio driver's license photo? The only good thing about the dreadful picture of her in the Mickey Mouse sweatshirt was that she was practically unrecognizable.

But Julian. She covered her mouth with her hand, trying to digest the idea of him committing such an appalling crime. It seemed inconceivable.

Her judgment in men was now officially abysmal.

The doorbell rang incessantly, but she didn't answer it. Instead, she carried her laptop to the kitchen table and booted up, looking for a few hours of diversion. She checked e-mail, frowning at all the junk and porn spam. No personal messages, which wasn't a surprise. She hadn't exactly stayed in touch with anyone in Cincy, and anyone who might have been inclined to contact her was probably still too stumped over the reneged wedding to know what to say. And the way she'd left town, everyone most likely thought she wanted to put everything about that part of her life behind her.

Her relationships there had been tenuous, but were they completely disposable?

She pushed the troubling question from her mind and decided to surf a few sites she'd always wanted to check out but had never gotten around to. Since Downey hadn't yet run away, she really should research how to care properly for the poor rejected puss.

There was a
lot
of cat stuff on the Net. Too much, in fact, to read even if one had nine lives. Instead, Belinda browsed and still learned oodles. Like that she probably shouldn't have fed Downey the pizza with extra mushrooms, and she might need to check far corners for cat upchuck.

She made a very passable dinner out of Triscuit crackers, salsa, and cheddar cheese for herself, then a la one of the cat discussion boards, beat up a raw egg as a treat for Downey. At some advanced hour, she tired of shopping sites, news sites, and computer games, and searched for mentions of Archer Furniture Company. The search engine returned little beyond product information, but there was a mention of a couple of industry awards, one for a just-in-time inventory system, and one for a specialized shipping container... both developed by James Newberry, CFO. Belinda pursed her mouth. Not too shabby. At some point, the man must have been good at his job.

At the sound of fabric tearing and a subsequent stream of noise that could only be described as cat cursing, Belinda jumped to her feet, rushed to the living room, and flipped on the light. Downey had either pulled down the sheet covering the bay window, or had just happened to be lying beneath it when it fell. Regardless, she was trying her darnedest and loudest to free herself from its folds.

Belinda saved her, and the cat streaked upstairs, no doubt to find solace under the bed. Belinda signed off the Internet, then rummaged in the kitchen junk drawer for safety pins to rehang the sheet over the window until she could afford to have blinds installed, or maybe someday before her mother visited, hang real live curtains.

It seemed she had managed to waste the entire day. It was dark outside, save for the dusk to dawn light. As she climbed onto a chair to pin up the sheet, it occurred to her that she was visible to anyone who cared to look toward the window—if a reporter lingered, they'd be able to get a photo for a mediocre headline: "Murder Suspect Can't Afford Window Treatments."

She stretched high to rehang the sheet but stopped cold when she noticed the set of large handprints and smudges on the outside of the window. Her heart skipped and took its sweet time finding a rhythm again. Had the same person left the prints? Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow move in her yard. A reporter, or worse? Belinda grabbed the empty curtain rod to keep from falling off the chair and almost tore the entire contraption off the wall. When she realized the shadow was only a bush moving, she finished pinning the sheet and climbed down, shaking.

The tears came then, the ones she'd been holding at bay all day, all week. Great heaving, hiccupping sobs that tore the air out of her lungs but couldn't alleviate the primal fear that had taken root in her stomach. Worse than the fear of someone coming to get her was the fear that her lifelong philosophy of strength and independence had backfired. The joke was on her, to be in a situation that had spun out of her control, and forced to face it alone. The worst of it... she was even
more
afraid of changing, of letting down her defenses. She had let Vince in as much as she'd dared, and look what he'd done to her.

She wasn't sure she could take that kind of emotional hit again.

The phone rang, and she waited for it to roll over to the machine.

"Belinda, it's Wade. If you're there, pick up."

She picked up. "I'm here."

"Are you okay? You sound funny."

"I'm fine." She sniffed.

"Good." He cleared his throat. "I need to talk to you about the case."

The case. Of course. "I'm listening."

He expelled a noisy sigh. "I guess you saw the piece in the paper today?"

"Yes. Reporters have been here all day."

"That's because things are starting to heat up. The D.A. is being pressured by the mayor to make an arrest. Having a serial killer on the loose isn't good for convention business."

She swallowed. "And?"

"And... they're considering charging you and your three friends with conspiracy to commit murder in the hope of forcing someone to confess."

Her mouth moved, but no sound came out for a few seconds. "But we didn't do it," she finally sputtered.

"You
didn't do it, but are you sure they didn't?"

Her mind spun as she tried to sort the varied images of the women with whom she'd been sharing a commute. "I can't imagine it. Kill each other, maybe, but kill Margo... it would've had to have been an accident."

"If it was an accident, and the person comes forward now, the D.A. would probably cut them a deal, perhaps take murder one off the table."

She shivered. "You don't think my friends did it, do you?"

"I'm following other avenues. But you should talk to them."

"Everyone argued on the way home Friday, and we disbanded the carpool. They're not talking to each other, or to me."

"Then where have you been sleeping?"

"Um, see, here's the thing—"

"You've been sleeping at your place?"

"Yes."

His sigh vibrated with frustration. "I haven't been worried about you because you were supposed to be with one of your girlfriends."

He was worried about her? "I told you, the girls and I argued."

His silence crackled over the line. "You're taking a chance with your safety because you're
pouting?"

"I—" She frowned. "I'm not pouting, but I can't hide out indefinitely. You installed an alarm, and reporters are here all the time. And don't forget my ferocious biting cat."

"Belinda, this isn't funny."

She sighed. "I know."

"You need to talk to your friends, let them know what's on the line."

"I'll try." She hung up slowly, knowing she'd have to think of some way to get them all talking again, for their sakes and for hers. Considering the fact that she was the least photogenic person on the planet, she couldn't imagine how bad her mug shot might be.

Chapter 29