Love with the Proper Stranger (3 page)

Most of the time, she embraced the solitude, often reveling in the noise-dampening sound of the surf and the raucous calls of the seabirds. But today she felt social. Today, she
wanted
the crowds. Today, just on a whim, she wanted to use her camera to take photographs of people.

Today she was meeting her friend, Serena, for lunch at one of those very same four-star restaurants.

But she was more than an hour early, and she took her bike with her onto the sand. She set it gently on its side and spread her beach blanket alongside it. There was a reggae band playing in the tent next to the resort bar even this early in the morning, and the music floated out across the beach.

She sat in the sun, just watching the dynamics of the people around her.

Some sunbathers lay in chaise lounges, their noses buried in books. Others socialized, talking and flirting in large and small groups. Men and women in athletic gear ran up and down the miles of flat, hard sand at the edge of the water. Others walked or strolled. Still others paraded—clearly advertising their trim, tanned bodies, scantily clad in designer bathing suits.

Mariah took out her camera, focusing on a golden retriever running next to a muscular man in neon green running shorts. She loved dogs. In fact, now that she wasn’t shut up in an office each day from dawn till dusk, she was thinking about getting one and—

“Fancy meeting you here this early.”

Mariah looked up but the glare from the bright sun threw the face of the woman standing next to her into shadows. It didn’t matter. The crisp English-accented voice was unmistakable.

“Hey,” Mariah said, smiling as Serena sat down next to her on her blanket.

“I thought you’d sworn off the resort beach,” Serena continued, looking at Mariah over the tops of her expensive sunglasses.

Serena Westford was older than Mariah had originally thought when they’d first met a few weeks ago—she was closer to forty than thirty, anyway. Her smile was young though. It was mercurial and charming, displaying perfect white teeth. Her hair was blond with wisps escaping from underneath the big straw hat she always wore, and her trim body was that of a twenty-four-year-old.

She was as cool and confident as she was beautiful. She was everything Mariah wished she could be. Everything Marie Carver wished she could be, Mariah corrected herself. But Marie Carver had purposely been left behind in Phoenix, Arizona. Mariah Robinson was here in Georgia, and Mariah was happy with her life. She went with the flow, calm and relaxed. No worries. No problems. No stress. No jealousy.

Serena was wearing a black thong bathing suit, covered only by a diaphanous short wrap that fluttered
about her buttocks and thighs in the ocean breeze, leaving only slightly more than nothing to the imagination. Despite the fact that Serena Westford was no longer a schoolgirl, she was one of the minuscule percentage of the population who actually looked
good
in a thong bikini.

Mariah let herself hate her friend—but only for a fraction of a second. So what if Mariah was destined never to wear a similarly styled bathing suit? So what if Mariah was the exact physical opposite of petite, slender, golden Serena? So what if Mariah was just over six feet tall, broad shouldered, large breasted and athletically built? So what if her hair was an unremarkable shade of brown curls, always messy and impossible to control? So what if her eyes were brown? Light brown, not that dark-as-midnight intriguing shade of brown, or cat green like Serena’s.

Mariah was willing to bet that behind Serena Westford’s cool, confident facade, there lurked a woman with a thousand screaming anxieties. She probably worked out two hours each day to maintain her youthful figure. She probably spent an equal amount of time on her hair and makeup. She was probably consumed with worries and stress, poor thing.

“I just came down here to violate the photographic rights of these unsuspecting beachgoers,” Mariah told her friend, unable to hide a smile.

The two women had first met when Mariah took Serena’s picture here on the resort beach. Serena had been less than happy about that and had demanded Mariah hand over the undeveloped film then and there. What could have been an antagonistic and adversarial relationship quickly changed to one of mutual respect
as Serena explained that while in the peace corps, she’d spent a great deal of time with certain tribes in Africa who believed that being photographed was tantamount to having one’s soul kidnapped.

Mariah had surrendered the film, and spent an entire afternoon listening to Serena’s fascinating stories of her travels around the world as a volunteer humanitarian.

They’d talked about Mariah’s work for Foundations for Families, too. Serena had mentioned she’d seen Mariah getting dropped off by the Triple F van in the evenings. And they’d talked about the grassroots organization that used volunteers to help build affordable homes for hardworking, low-income families. Mariah spent three or four days each week with a hammer in her hand, and she loved both the work and the sense of purpose it gave her.

“Hey, I got a package notice from the post office,” Mariah told her friend. “I think it’s my darkroom supplies. Any chance I can talk you into picking it up for me?”

“If you had a car, you could pick it up yourself.”

“If I had a car, I would use it once a month, when a heavy package needed to be picked up at the post office.”

“If you had a car, you wouldn’t have to wait for that awful van to take you over to the mainland four times a week,” Serena pointed out.

Mariah smiled. “I like taking the van.”

Serena looked at her closely. “The driver
is
a real hunk.”

“The driver is happily married to one of the Triple F site supervisors.”

“Too bad.”

Serena’s sigh of regret was so heartfelt, Mariah had to laugh. “You know, Serena, not everyone in the world is husband hunting. I’m actually very happy all by myself.”

Serena smiled. “Husband hunting,” she repeated. “The biggest of the big game.” She laughed. “I like that image. I wonder what gauge bullet I’d need to bring one down…”

Mariah gathered up her things. “Let’s go have lunch.”

* * *

S
HE WOULD KNOW HIM WHEN
she saw him, but she simply hadn’t seen him yet. He would have money. Lots of money. Enough so that when she asked for the funds for the down payment on a house, he wouldn’t hesitate to give it directly to her. Enough so that he would open a checking account in her name—an account she would immediately start draining. She would transfer the money to dummy accounts out of state.

She had the system set up so that anyone following the paper trail would be stopped cold, left high and dry.

She’d sit on the cash for a week or two, then make the deposits into her Swiss bank accounts.

Three million dollars. She had three million dollars American already in her Swiss accounts.

Three million dollars, and nine locks of hair.

Yes, she’d know him when she saw him.

* * *

“G
ARDEN
I
SLE
, G
EORGIA
,” the agent named Taylor said as he looked around the table from Daniel Tonaka to Pat Blake, the head of the FBI unit, and finally to John Miller. “It’s her. The Black Widow killer. It’s got to be.”

He slid several enlarged black-and-white photos
across the conference table, one toward Blake and the other toward Miller and Daniel. Miller sat forward slightly in his chair, picking it up and angling it away from the reflections of the overhead lights. He couldn’t seem to hold it steady—his hands were shaking—and he quickly put it down on the table.

“She’s going by the name Serena Westford,” the young agent was saying. “She came out of nowhere. Her story is that she spent the past seven years in Europe—in Paris—but no one seems to know her over there. If she
was
living there, she wasn’t paying taxes, that’s for sure.”

The photograph showed a woman moving rapidly, purposefully across a parking lot. She was wearing a hat and sunglasses, and her face was blurred.

Miller looked up. “What’s your name again?”

The young man held his gaze only briefly. “Taylor. Steven Taylor.”

“Couldn’t you get a better picture than this, Taylor?”

“No, sir,” he said. “We’re lucky we even got this one. It was taken with a telephoto lens from the window of the resort. It’s the best of about twenty that I managed to get at that time. Any other time I tried to take her picture, she somehow seemed to know there was a camera around and she covered herself almost completely. I have about five hundred perfect pictures where her face is nearly entirely obscured by enormous sunglasses or her hat. I have five hundred other perfect shots of the back of her head.”

“Yet you’re certain this woman is our Black Widow.” Miller didn’t hide his skepticism.

Daniel shifted in his seat. “I believe it’s her, John. Hear him out.”

Miller was usually unerringly accurate when it came to reading people. He knew for a fact that Patrick Blake disliked him despite his record of arrests. And he knew quite clearly that Steven Taylor was afraid of him. Oh, he was polite and respectful, but something about his stance told Miller clear as day that Taylor was going to request a transfer off this case now that he knew Miller was aboard.

Daniel Tonaka, on the other hand, had never been easy to read. He was unflappable, with a quirky sense of humor that surfaced at the most unexpected moments. As far as Miller could tell, Daniel treated every person with whom he came into contact with the same amount of courtesy and kindness. He treated everyone from a bag lady to the governor’s wife with respect, always giving them his full attention.

Daniel had spoken up to say he had a hunch or a feeling about a suspect or a case only a handful of times, and all of those times he’d been right on target. But this time he’d used even stronger language. He
believed
Serena Westford was the Black Widow.

Miller looked expectantly at Steven Taylor, waiting for him to continue.

Taylor cleared his throat. “I, um, used the computer to search out the most likely locations the Widow would choose for her next target,” the young man told him. “She prefers small towns with only one or two resorts nearby. I programmed the computer to ignore everything within two hundred miles of the places she either met or lived with her previous victims, and narrowed the list down to a hundred and twenty-three possibilities. From there, I accessed resort records and used a phone investigation to query the resort staff, searching
for female guests under five feet two inches, traveling alone, staying for extended lengths of time.

“Frankly, there was a great deal of luck involved in finding Serena Westford. She’d arrived at the Garden Isle resort only two days prior to our call. When it became clear she was traveling under an alias, I went to Georgia myself to try to further identify the suspect.” He shook his head ruefully. “But as you can see, in all of the pictures we have of the Black Widow, her face is covered.”

“But her legs aren’t,” Daniel pointed out. “Steve got plenty of pictures of Serena Westford’s legs.”

“Her legs are visible in some of the other photos we found in the victims’ houses,” Taylor said. “We have no pictures of the Black Widow’s face, but we have plenty of photos of her legs.” He looked at Daniel and grinned. “Tonaka had the idea to take those pictures and
these
pictures and run a computer comparison. According to the computer, there’s a ninety-eight percent chance that the Black Widow’s legs and Serena Westford’s legs are one and the same.”

Miller glanced at Daniel. Damn, the kid was good at finding creative alternatives. “A computer match of legs won’t hold up in a court of law as proof of identity,” he commented.

“No kidding,” Taylor said, quickly adding, “Sir. But it’s enough to convince
me
that there should be a further investigation.”

Miller passed the photograph to Captain Blake, and again his hands shook. The older man glanced at him, eyebrows slightly raised.

Miller turned back to Taylor. “Tell me more,” he commanded.

“When Serena first arrived, she had traces of bruising beneath her eyes,” Taylor continued. “I’d dare to speculate that that was from recent plastic surgery—probably a nose job to alter her appearance.”

“We’ve been talking about the possibility of flying husband number seven’s former housekeeper to Garden Isle,” Pat Blake interrupted, “but if the Widow
has
had extensive plastic surgery, there’s no way she could make a one hundred percent positive ID. I want no room for reasonable doubt. This one isn’t going to walk away.”

Miller nodded. What they needed was to catch the killer in the act.

“She’s recently rented a beach house on Garden Isle,” Taylor continued. “That’s a clear indication that she’s intending to stay, although at this point, I don’t believe she’s targeted her next victim. I’ve compiled a list of all of the people—both men and women—whom our suspect has had contact with over the past several weeks. Out of forty-seven people, twenty-eight have since left the island. They were there only on vacation, and they’ve gone home. Out of the other nineteen, one in particular stands out.”

Taylor took a series of photos from his file, spreading them out on the table.

“Her name is Mariah Robinson,” he said. “Or so she says. According to our files, no such person exists. We’ve identified her as Marie Carver, former CEO of Carver Software out of Phoenix, Arizona.”

Miller leaned forward to look at the photographs. One was of a tall young woman with shoulder-length dark hair, wearing a bathing-suit top and shorts, seated on a beach blanket. Another bikini-clad woman was sitting next to her, her face obscured by a huge straw hat.

The woman in the hat had to be Serena Westford. Her barely there bikini was designed to make blood pressures rise, yet it was the woman sitting next to her that drew Miller’s eyes.

“Marie Carver—or Mariah Robinson as she calls herself—lives alone in a rented house on the island,” Taylor continued. “She spends most of her time on a private beach taking nature photographs. She has a darkroom in her cottage. Every few days, she goes off island—I don’t know where. I haven’t had the opportunity yet to follow her. She and Serena seem pretty tight.”