Truth or Dare (17 page)

22

A
short time later she climbed out of the passenger seat of the SUV. Ethan came around the front of the vehicle to join her. Together they walked across the newly paved parking lot toward the front entrance of the restored hacienda-style house. There were only a half dozen vehicles in the parking lot because the house was not yet open to the public.

“Bonnie said the Historical Society spared no expense on the hacienda and it looks like she was right.” Zoe gestured with one hand. “It's stunning, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Ethan said. “And it's not even pink.”

“No, it certainly isn't,” she said softly. “It's beautiful.”

There was no doubt that the hacienda Kirwan had built was worth the cost of the loving restoration it had received. It was an elegant, graceful structure painted in a rich, warm shade of
golden brown. A long shaded and colonnaded patio ran the entire length of the front of the structure and had probably once functioned as an extension of the living room on warm evenings. The wall was studded with intricately worked iron sconces.

“You know,” Zoe said, “the paint on the outside of this place is close to the color I'm trying to convince you to go with for the exterior of Nightwinds. You said you've been having a problem visualizing how the house would look if it were any other color than pink.” She swept out a hand. “This should give you a good idea. What do you think?”

Ethan removed his dark glasses with slow deliberation. He contemplated the hacienda for a long moment. “Not bad.”

She folded her arms and looked long and hard at the walls of the big house. “It's better than not bad. Admit it.”

Ethan said nothing for a long moment. She was aware that he was studying her now, not the house.

“Okay,” he said finally.

Startled by the abrupt capitulation, she dropped her arms and spun around to face him. “Are you sure? I see Nightwinds a couple of shades more toward ocher.”

He shrugged. “I can't do ‘a couple of shades more toward ocher' in my head. But if you like it, let's go with it. Hell, anything is better than peppermint pink.”

She smiled tremulously. “Thank you, Ethan. It will work, I promise.”

His mouth curved slightly. “Sooner or later, you gotta have a little faith in your decorator, I always say.”

“Actually, I'm quite positive that is the very first time that
you ever said it in your entire life, but that's okay, I'll take it.” She took a step forward and went up on her toes.

She'd intended to brush her mouth lightly across his, but before she could step back, he wrapped his hand around the nape of her neck and pinned her against his chest.

“You didn't tell me there would be a reward for going along with the decorator's choice,” he said.

He kissed her slowly and deliberately.

When he was finished she discovered that her knees were a little wobbly.

“Let's get one thing clear,” she said breathlessly. “I am not bribing you with sex.”

“It's okay. Sex works. I see entire new areas of compromise opening up before us.”

“Hmm.”

He laced her fingers through his own and they walked toward the wide, arched doorway.

She hesitated, as she always did at the entrance to a new building. Ethan did not comment, nor did he use his grip on her hand to urge her into the shadowy interior. Instead, he waited patiently.

Having been taken off guard twice in recent days, she opened her senses with more caution than usual. But she encountered nothing more than the low-level psychic hum that was typical of older buildings. Layers of human emotions had built up over the years, but it was just the normal stuff, she thought, easy to tune out.

She stepped through the doorway with Ethan, ignoring the gentle, faded psychic energies in the atmosphere the same way she routinely ignored the background noise of a busy city street.

Inside the hacienda, tall, well-proportioned windows illuminated high, dark-beamed ceilings. The paintings and artifacts of the Kirwan Collection were artfully arranged in what had obviously been originally designed as the main reception room.

At one end of the long salon, Paloma Santana stood talking to two men who were dressed in work clothes and tool belts.

The mayor glanced toward the entrance and inclined her head in greeting. She said something else to the workmen and then walked down the length of the room toward Zoe and Ethan. The heels of her designer-label sandals rang on the floor tiles.

“Ethan, I'm so glad you could come take a look at the house.”

“It's not often that I actually get to visit the scene of the crime in one of these old cases. I'd like you to meet my wife, Zoe.”

The possessiveness in his voice was unmistakable. Zoe felt her cheeks warm.

“It's an honor, Mayor Santana,” she said, politely extending her hand.

“Call me Paloma. I understand you're an interior designer, Zoe. What do you think of the restoration job?”

“It's wonderful,” Zoe said with real feeling. “It's going to be a terrific addition to the community and also a fine tourist attraction.”

“I agree. We're all quite pleased with it.” Paloma looked at Ethan. “I assume you're here to see Kirwan's study?”

“If that's possible,” Ethan said.

“Of course. Follow me.”

Paloma led the way through the long reception area, past the restored dining room and kitchen and into a long, book-lined
room. A massive stone fireplace covered most of the wall at the far end.

Zoe hesitated once again at the arched entrance to the study, bracing herself for whatever awaited her inside. She experienced a profound relief when nothing out of the ordinary brushed across her psychic senses. She did not need any more traumatic encounters that day.

“One of our goals was to re-create Kirwan's library,” Paloma said, moving into the study. “Fortunately, there was a complete catalog of the original collection. We were able to duplicate it almost entirely.”

Zoe watched Ethan walk into the study. She could feel the predatory curiosity of the born hunter awaken in him.

He prowled the room, examining the bookshelves, the large desk and the massive stone fireplace. Eventually he came to a halt in the middle of the room and looked at her.

Belatedly she realized that he was waiting to see if she would enter. She probed once more and stepped into the room. Traces of old, low-level emotions whispered around her but nothing strong, violent or worrisome.

“How is your investigation going?” Paloma asked Ethan.

“At this stage I'm still gathering information,” Ethan said easily. “I went through several newspaper accounts of Kirwan's death. Singleton Cobb helped me locate some letters that were written by Kirwan's biographer, his agent, Exford, and a few of his friends. From all accounts Kirwan was a difficult, temperamental man.”

Paloma nodded seriously. “My grandmother confirmed that.

But she always said that she knew how to deal with him. What about Exford? Were you able to locate him?”

“Dead in a car crash a few years after Kirwan died. He had a serious drinking problem.”

“I don't suppose you found any indication that he was the one who took Kirwan's last manuscript?”

“I'm still pursuing that line of inquiry,” Ethan said.

His professional aplomb made Zoe struggle to conceal a grin.

Outside in the parking lot, she got into the passenger's seat and buckled her belt. “ ‘Pursuing that line of inquiry'?”

“That's what you say to the client when you're not sure what the hell is going on. I'll bet you decorators have a few similar client-handling phrases.”

“I've always been partial to ‘I thought you understood that special orders from Italy required up to four months' additional delivery time,' myself.”

“Remind me not to special-order any furniture from Italy.” He twisted the key in the ignition. “Well? Feel anything in that room?”

She glanced at him, startled that he would ask the question. “Hey, you don't believe that I'm psychic, remember?”

“I have great respect for your intuition, you know that.” He put the SUV in gear and drove toward the exit. “What did it tell you?”

“Nothing useful,” she admitted. “But I've explained to you that I only pick up on very strong, dark emotions, remember? Rage, fear, panic, lust.”

“All the fun stuff.”

“Yeah. In any event, I've been thinking about it and it occurs
to me that I'm not sure I'd pick up anything at all in a case of death by poison.”

“Why not?”

She groped to explain something she did not entirely comprehend herself. “There might not be any violent energy released in that sort of situation. Kirwan might never have realized that he had been poisoned. Perhaps he simply felt ill, passed out and died very quietly. Unless the killer stood over him, gloating and generating a lot of intense emotion, I've got a hunch that there would be very few vibes left behind for me to feel years later.”

“In other words, you can't tell me diddly-squat.”

“Look on the positive side, you're getting the advantage of my psychic consulting services for free.”

“Yeah, well, you get what you pay for, I guess.”

“Okay, Mr. Hotshot PI, what do you think happened in that room?”

“Well, to begin with, I'm pretty sure that Maria did not steal the manuscript.”

That caught her attention. “You didn't say that to the mayor.”

“Because I can't prove anything one way or the other yet.”

“What made you decide the housekeeper didn't take the book?”

“If she killed him and stole the manuscript, it would have turned up sooner or later. It was too valuable to stay hidden all these years.”

“Unless she burned it that night.”

He shook his head. “Why would she do that? She had worked for Kirwan for years. Long enough to know that the manuscript
was worth a good deal of money. She probably overheard the argument between Kirwan and his agent and knew that there was at least one potential buyer.”

“The publisher?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about the agent? Think Exford killed Kirwan and stole the manuscript that night?”

“No. Same reason I don't think Maria took it. The agent had financial problems. If he took the manuscript, he would have sold it or seen to it that it got published.”

Zoe contemplated that for a while. “You know, you're pretty darn good when it comes to this kind of logical thinking.”

“Thanks. It sure would be a lot more exciting to be psychic, but I've learned to muddle through using logic and common sense.”

“We all have our little gifts.”

Ethan laughed.

It was the first time in several days that he had done so. For some reason she found his amusement reassuring.

23

T
hat night they went to Last Exit to celebrate Harry's early return from LA. Arcadia sat close to him, letting her shoulder touch his, stealing a little of his warmth. The slow, soft strains of Billy Strayhorn's “Lush Life” drifted through the lightly crowded nightclub.

It was well after midnight. The jazz was good. Arcadia had a martini in front of her. Harry was home, safe and sound. This was as near to perfect as her life had been in a long, long time. So why couldn't she relax?

“You came back early because of me, didn't you?” she said.

“Nah.” Harry munched peanuts from the bowl in front of them. “I told you, the client pulled the plug on the kid's shopping expedition.”

“Liar.” She sucked the olive off the little red spear, chewed and swallowed. “You quit the job early on my account. Admit it.”

Harry took a sip of his beer. “Hey, I was glad when the gig ended. The kid was driving me crazy.”

“I knew it. You're home early because of me.”

“So,” Harry said, lounging against the padded wall of the booth, “you going to tell me what's wrong?”

She hesitated. “As far as I can tell, nothing's wrong. I got a little jumpy for a few days after you left, that's all.” She took a sip of the martini. “I'm okay now. But . . .”

“But, what?”

“But I missed you, Harry.”

Harry said nothing. He just waited, as patient as the grave.

She exhaled slowly. “Okay, I'll tell you what I told Zoe. Shortly after you left there were a couple of occasions when I got a creepy feeling. As if someone was watching me or something.”

Harry did not move so much as an eyelash. “Yeah?”

“But the feeling went away after two or three days,” she added quickly.

“Anything else?”

She made a triangle around the base of the martini glass with her fingers. “I lost the Elvis pen you gave me. I searched everywhere and couldn't find it.”

“No big deal. It's just a pen.”

“I liked it. It was my favorite.”

Harry thought about that for a long time. “Anything else in your office disturbed?”

Having him put her own secret fears into words chilled her to
the bone. “No. Nothing. Believe me, I checked. Given my history, I consider paranoia a healthy state of mind. I went through every drawer. Nothing looked out of order.”

“A pro wouldn't have left any tracks in your files,” he mused. “You don't have the kind of security at the office that we have at home. It wouldn't have been difficult for someone who knew what he was doing to get inside.”

She frowned. “You really think that an intruder might have broken into my office just to steal an Elvis pen? It doesn't make any sense.”

“The pen could have been an accident or a mistake.” He moved one hand dismissively. “Hell, it might have nothing to do with anything. The cleaning crew could have broken that damn pen and tossed it into the trash.”

“True.” She tried a smile. “In which case I've got no reason at all to think that anyone was inside my office after hours. Just another example of a vivid imagination run amok, Harry. I'm sure of it now.”

He did not return her smile. “Earlier this week when you felt that someone was watching you, did you check out the faces of the people around you?”

“Of course. But I didn't see anyone who looked even remotely like . . . him.”

She did not have to explain who she meant. Harry knew she was referring to Grant.

“See anyone you didn't know more than once?”

That question gave her pause. An image of an elderly woman with a shopping bag and a camera flickered through her mind.

“It was a busy week at Fountain Square. Lots of tourists coming and going. I saw several of them more than once but no one who was suspicious.”

“Cars?”

“Who looks at cars?”

“I do,” Harry said. “Think about it, honey. You got that creepy feeling from something you noticed, even if you don't remember what it was. That's how it works.”

“How what works?”

“The creeps. You get them because you see something or someone out of the corner of your eye and it looks wrong. Maybe you don't think about it much, but something inside goes on alert.”

Harry would know, she assured herself as she settled back against the seat and tried to summon up memories of some of the cars she had noticed in recent days. After a couple of minutes, she gave up in frustration.

“I just don't have much of a memory for cars,” she said apologetically.

“Try people.”

The image of the woman in the shop window popped into her head again.

“There was one,” she said slowly. “I saw her two, maybe three times.”

“Describe her.”

“That's just it. I don't know why she stuck in my mind. She didn't exactly stand out as a dangerous character. She must have been at least eighty years old. She had a large sun hat and those oversized sunglasses that people wear over their regular glasses. She was just a tourist, Harry.”

“What else?”

The man would have made a good interrogator, she thought ruefully. He just kept pushing.

She took a sip of her martini and tried to still her mind. In the old days she had made her living in the adrenaline-driven financial world. It was a world where millions of dollars were placed at risk every time she made a decision. In that world, she had been very good at seeing patterns and trends. She had trained herself to notice the tiny signals that appeared before a company went into a death spiral. She had learned to watch for disturbances in the flow that warned of trouble brewing among the members of a company's board of directors. She could spot insider trading before the SEC even woke up in the morning.

It was her talent for catching the small anomalies in the constantly shifting streams of data that had given her advance warning of Grant's intentions. Maybe she should apply those old skills now.

“I saw her at least twice, both times as a reflection in a store window. I remember thinking that the camera was very fancy, not one of those disposable gadgets. And she carried the same shopping bag both times, a blue-and-white one from a dress shop in Fountain Square.”

Harry was silent for a while. “Okay.”

She raised her brows. “Okay, what?”

“Okay, now we go talk to Truax.”

“It's one-thirty
A
.
M
. He and Zoe will be sound asleep.”

“Not our fault those two keep weird hours.”

 

Ethan managed to fall into a restless sleep but he dreamed the Nightwinds dream.

 

He walked through the vast house, opening each door he came to, searching every room. But Zoe was not in any of them. She had to be there. The possibility that he might not find her made despair claw at his insides.

He called out to her, wanting to explain, to plead, to make her understand. But the words echoed forever in the endless corridors of pink-tinged night.

At last he came to the small, private theater, the room where the old murder had occurred, the one place in the house that seemed to disturb her.

He opened the doors slowly, bracing himself for what awaited him in the darkness.

Zoe stood in the shadows near the small marble bar. Simon Wendover reclined in one of the plush velvet seats facing the screen. He looked at Ethan over his shoulder and grinned.

“You're dead,” Ethan said.

Wendover laughed. “That's your problem, not mine. We both know you're going to see me in your dreams now and again for the rest of your life.”

Ethan turned away from him and looked at Zoe. “Come with me.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“She's going to leave you just like all the others did,” Wendover said cheerfully. “That's how it works where you're concerned. Been that way all your life. You rescue them and then they wave goodbye.”

Ethan kept his gaze on Zoe. “You're different.”

“Am I?” she said.

Wendover chuckled. “How could she love a man with your track record? You're a loser, Truax. You couldn't save your brother. You couldn't hold any
of your three marriages together. You couldn't hang on to the corporation you built from scratch. You spent months investigating me but in the end you couldn't even put together a case that held up in court.”

Ethan knew he had to get Zoe out of the room where Wendover sat gloating. He tried to walk through the doorway of the theater but something stopped him. It was as though he confronted an invisible wall.

Zoe watched him with her mysterious eyes. “I'm sorry, Ethan. You can't come in here. There's a psychic barrier. You can't get past it because you don't believe in the woo-woo thing.”

Wendover's laugh echoed in the shadows.

 

“Ethan.
Ethan,
wake up.”

Her voice. So close. So near.

He opened his eyes. Zoe leaned over him. Anxiety radiated from her in waves.

“It's okay.” She gripped his shoulder. “It's all right. Just a bad dream.”

“You can say that again.” He scrubbed his face with one hand and made himself breathe slowly. When he was fairly certain that he had himself under control, he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

She knelt behind him and massaged his shoulders. “I sure hope you're not catching the nightmare habit from me. Do you suppose bad dreams are contagious?”

“I doubt it.” Her hands felt good on his shoulders. He wanted nothing more than to relax under the soothing pressure of her fingers and palms, but the tension hummed through him like electricity.

“Do you want to tell me about your dream?” Zoe asked quietly.

He thought he heard Wendover's laughter somewhere in the distance.

“It was complicated,” he said carefully.

Her hands stilled on his shoulders. He sensed her withdrawing. For a couple of seconds he thought she was going to stop the comforting massage.

“I do complicated, remember?” she said. Her hands moved on him once more.

A shudder of relief went through him.

“Ethan?”

“We were both at Nightwinds but the house seemed way too large,” he said tonelessly. “There was an endless series of rooms.”

“It was probably the thought of redecorating all those rooms that gave you the nightmare.”

“Probably.” He knew that she was trying to lighten the atmosphere but it wasn't working. He was too cold and too drained. He should stop now, he told himself. There was no point telling her the rest. But it was as if some powerful magnet dragged the words out of him. “You were there somewhere but I couldn't find you.”

“Ah, yes, the elusive designer who never returns the client's phone calls,” she murmured.

“I eventually tracked you down in the theater.” He hesitated and then raised one shoulder in a shrug. “That's when you woke me up.”

“You were thrashing around. I got the impression that you were trying to claw your way through something.”

He froze. “Did I hurt you?”

“No. You just woke me up.” She continued to work his shoulders. “Are you sure there wasn't something else about the dream that bothered you?”

Somewhere in the shadows, Wendover chuckled.

The phone rang. Zoe's hands stilled once more on Ethan's shoulders. He glanced at the clock. It was one thirty-five in the morning. Phone calls at that hour rarely brought good news.

“I'll get it.” He picked up the phone. “Truax.”

“This is Stagg,” Harry said. “We have a problem. We're standing outside the front door of the lobby of Casa de Oro. You want to buzz us in?”