Thread of Fear (19 page)

Fiona jolted awake at the noise. Another call…

Something moved beside her, and she jumped, startled to realize she wasn’t alone.

She was in Jack’s bed. She was in Graingerville. And the shrilling telephone would not be for her.

Jack snatched the receiver off the nightstand. “Bowman.”

He listened a moment and then got out of bed to scoop his jeans off the floor. He fumbled in the dark with the denim.

“Shit. Yeah, it’s here.” He sighed. “Ringer’s off. I was in a
press conference. Why? What’s up?” And after a brief pause, “When?”

Fiona watched his naked silhouette in the near darkness. At some point, Jack had turned out the lamp. At some point, he’d shucked his jeans and climbed under the covers with her. They’d fallen asleep, and now it was—she glanced at his alarm clock—11:14. And judging from Jack’s rigid posture and terse words, he wouldn’t be coming back to bed any time soon.

He ended the call and pulled on his jeans, and Fiona knew what he would say even before he said it.

“I’ve got to go in.”

She’d spoken the same words on more than one occasion over the years, usually to a boyfriend who didn’t understand the round-the-clock demands of her job. She guessed Jack hated pouters as much as she did, so she didn’t say anything, but she did give in to the self-conscious urge to tuck the sheet up under her arms.

He jammed his feet into boots, not even bothering with socks.

Worry gripped her. “Is it Marissa?”

“No.” He pulled his shirt on, buttoned up quickly. “That was Carlos. He needs my help with something.”

This was just the scene she’d wanted to avoid in a motel room. Silly her, for thinking it wouldn’t have played out the same way at his house. Cops could never stay, not for very long anyway. And they never told you where they were going.

She knew, because it was the same for her. Why burden the normal people in your life with an unpleasantness they could neither fathom nor understand?

He paused in the doorway. “Will you be here when I get back?”

No kiss good-bye.

“That’s a good assumption. I don’t have a car.” She heard the bite in her voice and wished she hadn’t let it come through.

“Oh. Right.”

“Just bring my purse and my art case in, would you? They’re on the floor of your truck, and my cell phone’s in one of them.”

He stood still for a second, and she wished she could read his face in the dimness. Was he replaying the frantic moments that had made her forget her stuff in his pickup? Or maybe he was feeling guilty for leaving her alone like this.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” And with a quick rap on the door frame, he was gone.

Lucy was waiting outside for him when he arrived. She wore a barn jacket over blue satin pajamas. Her gaze raked over him, and her lips pressed into a thin line.

“Sorry to drag you out of
bed
.”

“What are you doing out here?” he demanded, mounting the porch steps. “Where’re your brothers?”

“Everyone’s got the night shift except Dolores.” She held the door open. “And he’s not there anymore. I’ve been watching.”

“You couldn’t watch from behind a locked door? What the hell—” Jack halted when he saw Sebastian curled up on the living room sofa with his teddy bear.

“Hi, Jack.”

“Hi, sport.”

“Sebastian couldn’t sleep,” Lucy said pointedly. She locked the door, and then crossed the living room. “Come back here and I’ll show you that thing I was talking about.”

She led him to her workroom at the back of the house, where she typically slept on the pull-out couch. She didn’t turn on any lights, but simply crossed to the wall of windows stretching across the back of the room.

“He was over there.” She gazed out the window, nodded. “Under the oak tree.”

Jack looked out the window. “Are you sure it was a person? Maybe it was a cow got loose from the Nelson place. Or a deer.”

She turned to face him. “Do cows smoke cigarettes?”

Jack shifted his gaze back outside.

“I got up to get a drink of water. Sebastian found me in the kitchen. He said he couldn’t sleep. He said the shadow man was there again.”

“The shadow man.”

“He said he watches the house sometimes. Always at night, from under that tree. And yes, tonight’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

Jack tried not to show a reaction, but an old, long-buried fury was pushing its way to the surface.

“Stay here,” he said.

He unlocked the back door and shoved it open. He didn’t see anyone outside, but he slipped the gun from his waistband just in case. The familiar weight and shape of it in his hand helped him think like a cop instead of a protective boyfriend.

The night was dark and cold, the moon a thin slice of
silver up high in the sky. It was a good night for stalking someone, a good night to move around undetected.

Jack tromped across the grass and ducked between two lengths of barbed wire, taking care not to snag his jacket. This was Nelson land, and the farmer kept a couple dozen head of cattle in an adjacent pasture. Jack stopped beneath the oak and pulled a small Mag-Lite from his pocket. He scanned the ground around the tree, pausing the beam on something small and white. A cigarette butt. Flattened with something—probably a shoe—against the root of the tree. Jack crouched down.

The cigarette butt bothered him beyond the fact that it corroborated Lucy’s story. Why leave it? Why go to the trouble to watch someone, or stalk someone, under cover of darkness, and then risk the glow and smell of a cigarette? And why leave the butt behind?

Why kill a young girl, then dump her body near a well-traveled highway? Why kidnap the daughter of a prominent politician? If the mission was to rape and kill, or simply to kill to cover up a rape, why leave a trail for the cops?

Unless part of the mission was to screw with the cops. Or with the public at large. Or maybe a certain segment of the public that would feel intimidated by the selection of these particular victims.

The Arrellandos fell into that segment. And maybe tonight’s visit was just one more way to terrorize.

Jack took a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket and snapped them on. The HPD had taught him always to come prepared, and the habit hadn’t faded in Graingerville. Jack carefully picked up the cigarette and dropped it into
one of the small brown bags he kept folded in his pocket. It was a cold night, meaning a higher likelihood the subject would have been wearing gloves, and also a lower likelihood he would have had sweat and oil on his hands that would leave behind a good print. But he would have left saliva, and now that the FBI was involved, Jack might actually find a way to get the shit analyzed in a lab in the next year or so.

Jack tucked the bag into his pocket, and then resumed his flashlight sweep for any further clues. He spent ten more minutes walking a grid pattern and was about to call it quits when the back door squeaked open. Lucy came down the steps and walked toward him, arms wrapped around herself to ward off the frigid wind that whipped across the pasture.

“Find anything?”

“Maybe. You should go back inside.”

She shrugged. “We both know he’s not here anymore.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Yes, we do.”

“When does your family get home?”

“Morning.” She cocked her head to the side. “Go home, Jack. You don’t really want to be here.”

He switched off his flashlight and shoved it in his pocket.

“You just fucked her, didn’t you?”

He sighed. “Lucy—”

“I can tell. I remember that look.” She turned and trudged back toward the house. When she reached the door, she glanced back over her shoulder. “It’s okay, Jack. Next time I’ll call the sheriff.”

I
t always amazed Nathan how stupid the bad guys could be. He stared down at the report on his desk, shaking his head at the utter idiocy of it. Tonight’s perpetrator, a seventeen-year-old gangbanger, had decided to knock off a sandwich shop on the east side of town. Kid thinks he has a clever plan: he plunks a twenty down on the counter, asks for change, and when the cashier—a young Vietnamese woman—opens the drawer, he sticks a gun in her face and tells her to hand over all the cash. She complies. He leaves the store feeling like hot shit, probably ready to go celebrate with his buddies, but a black-and-white pulls up just as he’s rushing through the door with a semiautomatic pistol in his hand. The kid panics, squeezes off a round that totally misses the cops, but hits the middle-aged computer programmer who’s sitting at a stoplight less than a block away.

And the irony of it all? The kid left his original twenty on the counter and made off with a grand total of eighteen dollars and eighty-seven cents. It would have been funny if it weren’t so fucking tragic.

The computer guy expired an hour later from a gunshot wound to the chest.

Nathan rubbed his eyes. Some days he hated this job.

“You
are
here.”

Nathan glanced up to see a guy from the burglary squad standing beside his desk.

“Everyone’s looking for you.”

“Yeah, why’s that?” He could already feel the acid pooling in his stomach.

“Got a chick down in reception. She’s raising all kinds of hell, says she wants to talk to someone in charge. Says her sister works homicide for us.”

Nathan frowned. “There aren’t any women in homicide.”

“I know.” He smiled. “But you may want to go talk to this girl. She’s got a trash mouth and a body like you wouldn’t believe.”

“What’s she in for?”

“No idea.”

“So why do I want to talk to her?”

The guy shrugged. “She says she knows you. Oh, and her name’s Corey. Or Courtney. Yeah, that’s it. Courtney Glass.”

Jack’s house was old and drafty, full of creaks and moans that made it impossible to sleep. Fiona pulled the blankets up around her neck and berated herself for the string of poor decisions that had gotten her to this point.

She’d slept with Jack. Finally. And while part of her reveled in it, another part of her was already making the case for Never Doing It Again. He hadn’t kissed her good-bye, and she hated that it mattered to her. She hated that she actually
liked
this man and had thought his feelings for her went beyond the I-need-to-get-laid variety.

A car motored down the highway, and Fiona tensed, hoping it was him. But it passed by without slowing.

She sighed. She despised this. The little woman waiting at home for her man. The tip of her nose felt cold, and she wanted Jack’s warm, muscled body to spoon with her again. She wanted the weight of his arm slung over her waist as she slept.

This was a disaster. She should never have given in to lust.

Except it had been the best sex of her—amazingly sheltered, she now realized—life. So she didn’t totally regret it. But she regretted where she was right now, alone in his house, shivering beneath sheets and blankets that smelled deliciously like Jack Bowman, and Jack Bowman was off fighting bad guys with Carlos.

Her purse vibrated on the nightstand, and Fiona squeezed her eyes shut. Not again. Jack had left her stuff on his kitchen table, and when Fiona had gone to retrieve her phone, she’d seen that it was set to vibrate from the press conference, and that APD had called twice since ten o’clock. She just wasn’t up for it tonight. She had no transportation and no desire to hear about a case she couldn’t get to all the way in Austin.

But what if it was Jack?

She took the purse from the nightstand and checked her phone. APD, just as she’d suspected. She waited to see whether they’d leave a message.

The screen door gave a high rasp, then thudded quietly against the doorjamb. He was back,
finally
.

But what about his truck?

An icy bolt of fear shot through her as she realized she hadn’t heard it. Every cell in her body froze, and she strained for sound.

Nothing.

Had she imagined the screen door? No way. She wanted to call Jack’s name…but what if it wasn’t him? What if it was a burglar who thought no one was here? Or an intruder who knew someone
was
here, alone and naked in this house?

She sprang out of the bed. She grabbed her purse and shoved her phone into it, beside the Ruger. Where were her clothes? She spotted something dark draped over a chair and snatched it up. Clutching everything to her chest, she tiptoed to the closet. The door stood ajar, and she squeezed inside.

The closet was crowded. She backed against some clothes and heard hangers scrape against the rack. She tried to stay still.

Who was here?

The house was silent, except for the pounding of her heart.

Had she
imagined
the sound? Was she
that
off kilter? She remembered her unfounded panic over that man in the convenience store. She took a deep breath and tried to think rationally. Everything was still. The closet smelled of fabric softener, and leather, and fresh dirt. She felt the toes of Jack’s sneakers under her feet.

Creak.

Her pulse leaped. This was not her imagination. Someone was in the house with her, and she hadn’t heard Jack’s truck. She wrestled into the sweatshirt she’d grabbed off the chair and slid the Ruger from her purse.

Don’t panic. Don’t freak out.
It could be Jack. Maybe someone had dropped him off down the road, and he was
being quiet because he didn’t want to wake her. Maybe it was Jack’s neighbor or a friend. Or a niece or nephew sneaking around his house in the middle of the night. None of those explanations made sense, but—

Creak.

Oh, God. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was like parchment. Her lungs burned, and her heart pounded. She held the Ruger, pointed down, hoping like hell she wouldn’t make a terrible mistake.

And then
squeak, slap
—the door slammed shut.

Her breath whooshed out. She stepped out of the closet, scurried to the window, and parted the blinds. The high-wattage security lights illuminated nothing but an empty field. She dashed across the room and tried another window. Emptiness.

In the far distance, she heard an engine growl to life. She ran from the bedroom to the opposite side of the house where the windows faced the highway, but she couldn’t
see
anything. There were no headlights on the road. Her heart thudded wildly as the noise faded into nothing.

It was well after midnight before Nathan finally called it a day. It has been a hellacious tour, capped off with an hour-long stint downstairs as he called in a truckload of favors to have Fiona’s sister cut loose from a vandalism rap. The task had been made easier by the fact that John D. Whosit, whose car she trashed, didn’t want to press charges and wanted the incident kept quiet. What
hadn’t
helped matters was Fiona’s sister being drunk as a skunk and shouting obscenities at the guards while Nathan sweet-talked the jail supervisor.

Shit, what a night.

Nathan swung out of the parking lot and thought about home. He needed a pizza, and a Scotch, and some mindless television. He pulled up to a light and tried to remember the contents of his freezer.

The woman standing on the corner caught his attention. Courtney Glass. She was tall and slender, and wearing way too few clothes for the weather and the neighborhood. She sidled up to Sugar, the 250-pound hooker who frequented this corner, and struck up a conversation. Sugar reached between her humongous breasts and pulled out a lighter.

“Fuck,” he muttered, and leaned over to roll down the passenger’s-side window.

Courtney gave Sugar a cigarette, and the two lit up together like old pals.

“Hey,” Nathan yelled, and Courtney turned around. “What do you think you’re doing?”

She sashayed over on her mile-high heels. She looked steadier on her feet than she had an hour ago, but that wasn’t saying much. She leaned a forearm on the window of his car, and Nathan tried not to stare down her shirt. She was Fiona’s kid sister, for Christ’s sake.

“What are you doing, Courtney?”

She sucked on her cigarette, blew out the smoke. “Waiting for the bus.”

“You can’t stand out here. It isn’t safe.”

“I’m four blocks from a police station.”

“Get in the car.”

She laughed then, a low throaty sound.

“I mean it.”

She stood up and crossed her arms. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

“Like hell. It’s thirty degrees out. You don’t even have a coat.”

She tossed a look over her shoulder at the bus stop where Sugar stood, advertising her wares. “Neither does she. She’s doing all right.”

“Courtney.” His patience was slipping. “I’m trying to be nice here. For Fiona’s sake. But I’m not going to tell you again.” He leaned over and pushed open the door.

Courtney tossed her cigarette away, finally, and slid her tight little butt into the passenger’s seat. She yanked the door shut, then leaned out the window. “Hey, Sug! You need a ride somewhere?”

Sugar flashed a smile and waved them off.

“This isn’t a taxi service,” he said, pulling away from the corner.

Courtney rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a dickhead. She’s nice.”

“What, you two are friends now?”

She shrugged. “I met her in the holding cell. She’s got three kids at home with her sick mother. Give her a break.”

Nathan shook his head. He’d jumped through hoops of fire to get this girl released tonight, and by way of thanks she calls him a penis.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Lamar and Ninth.”

“You live with Fiona?” This was news. Nathan hadn’t even known Fiona had a sister before tonight, much less one who lived with her.

“It’s only temporary.”

Nathan hung a right and headed toward Fiona’s loft in the trendy part of downtown.

Courtney ran a hand over the dashboard of his restored ’66 Mustang and whistled her appreciation.

“You sure you’re a cop?”

“Fifteen years.”

She slid her hand over the upholstery, gave a little bounce. “This is
sweet
. My dad drove a piece-of-shit Pontiac.”

“Your dad was a cop?”

Courtney fiddled with the radio. “San Antonio PD. Fiona never told you?”

Nathan knew Fiona had spent the early part of her childhood in Texas, but he’d had no idea her father had been on the job. It was an odd thing for her to have left out. Cops were a fraternity of sorts.

“She never mentioned it.”

Courtney rolled her eyes. “Typical. She doesn’t talk much about it. He was killed in the line of duty.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks, but I barely knew him. My mom pulled up stakes and moved to California after it happened.”

Nathan eyed Courtney as she scrolled through radio stations. She was a beautiful woman. Barely. She was twenty-six years old. Too young, he thought, to be dousing herself with all that makeup and hairspray. She’d look better with some decent clothes and less of that crap on her face. And tonight’s detour into Inebriation Land hadn’t helped. Both her knees were skinned, and her silky turquoise shirt was torn at the elbow.

He turned down the radio. “So what happened with the Carrera? You got something against imports?”

Nathan had figured out the situation on his own, but he
wanted to hear what she would say. To his surprise, she suddenly looked contrite.

“I don’t know what I was thinking.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I just—” She gazed out the window, and he hoped she wasn’t going to turn on the waterworks. “I don’t know. I was just mad. I hate being lied to.”

Nathan shot her a sidelong glance. “You really didn’t know he was married?”

She snorted. “I didn’t even know his real name until today. He fed me this big story, and I bought the whole thing.” She turned to look at him, and he noticed the mascara smears under her eyes. “Thanks for bailing me out.”

“I didn’t really bail you out. I got the charges to go away before you got too deep in the system. There’s a difference.”

Fiona’s building came into view, and Nathan double-parked near the entrance. He went around to open Courtney’s door. The Mustang was pretty low to the ground, and women had trouble getting out of it, especially in heels. He took her hand, getting an eyeful of her killer legs as she emerged. He looked away.

Fiona’s neighborhood was quiet tonight. The street was empty except for a yuppie-looking guy out walking his Labrador.

Nathan accompanied Courtney to the door. “So Fiona’s gone, I take it? She didn’t answer her phone.”

Courtney stopped. She folded her arms under her breasts and eyed him hotly. “I’m not going to screw you.”

“Come again?”

“I appreciate the help tonight, but I’m not going to sleep with you.”

Nathan stood there, stunned. “I never thought you would.”

She tipped her head to the side, as if trying to gauge his honesty. Jesus Christ, she was serious.

“Well…good night.” He took a step back from her and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Stay out of trouble. Leave the painting to your sister.”

He turned and walked back to the Mustang, where he could wait for her to get in safely without making her uncomfortable.

“Nathan?”

He turned around. “Yeah?”

“Sorry I called you a dickhead.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

She smiled timidly. It didn’t fit with the clothes or the attitude, but there it was. “Thanks for helping me,” she said.

“Sure thing, kid. Hey, you know the difference between a porcupine and a Porsche?”

She gave him a wary look. “What?”

“A porcupine has pricks on the outside.”

It took a second to register, and then she grinned and pulled open the door.