Twilight (25 page)

Only after he’d driven away did he begin to get that first nagging sense of impending disaster burning a hole in the pit of his stomach. Had he just sent the woman he loved off to get her head blown off?

27

C
arolina Vincenzi lived in ostentatious style. The heavily wooded lots in her exclusive development were an acre or more. With the exception of one or two towering old oak trees, which had the audacity to shed an occasional dead leaf, her grounds had been trimmed and manicured as tidily as any formal garden Dana had ever seen on an English country estate. Even the days-old snow looked clean, as if it had been swept free of soot.

The house, which had been built in no discernible style, had touches of art deco, a little taste of country French, and a hint of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was ugly as sin, too big for the lot and every bit as tasteless as Dana would have anticipated, right down to the gargoyle knockers on the double front doors.

To Dana’s frustration, pounding on that massive front door with that hideous knocker and ringing the bell drew no response. The place was as silent as a tomb—an image she wished hadn’t come to mind.

Foiled in her plan to cross-examine Carolina, she crept behind the bushes to peer in the closest window, a narrow floor-to-ceiling panel of glass beside the door.

The foyer was practically the size of her living room, with an Oriental carpet in bright reds and blacks covering most of the wide plank oak floor. An Oriental vase, probably from some ancient dynasty, sat atop a gleaming mahogany table in the center. Someone had devoted hours of elbow grease to getting that deep shine on the wood.

Dana had seen exclusive hotel lobbies that had been decorated with less attention to effect. In her house that table would have been cluttered with mail and keys. Not here. She doubted there was so much as a speck of dust on it, or even swirling in the air above.

Just as she was debating whether to try some makeshift means of picking the lock, she saw a stealthily creeping shadow toward the back of the foyer. Rick, no doubt. She tapped lightly on the window to try to attract his attention.

Rather than Rick, however, it was another man who slipped into view. Peter Drake. Dana stared at him incredulously.

Fortunately, he either hadn’t heard her tapping or was too absorbed in his own invasion of the place to give it any attention. He edged into a room on the left and disappeared from view.

Dana practically trampled some kind of thorny bush in her haste to get around to the back of the house so she could intercept Rick before he inadvertently joined Drake inside. She rounded the corner in such a rush that she ran smack into the very man she’d hoped to warn.

“What the hell?” Rick muttered, his arms closing around her. “Dana?” He scowled at her “Why aren’t you inside? You’ve had plenty of time.”

“Because no one answered the door,” she said simply.

“Ah, I see. Well, good,” he said, not wasting time on questioning what he obviously viewed as their good fortune. “Then we should have free run of the place.”

When he would have moved toward the door, she held him back. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

She described what she had seen. “I guess he figured whoever had been ringing the bell had left.”

“Or he was trying to get to a window so he could check,” Rick suggested.

Just then they heard an engine starting. Apparently there had been another alternative.

“Or he was trying to get to a door so he could beat a hasty retreat,” she said. She took off for the front, with Rick right beside her. They were just in time to see Drake’s familiar and very expensive sports utility vehicle speed away.

She glanced up into Rick’s puzzled eyes. “Curiouser and curiouser, yes?”

“I’ll say. What do you want to do now? Shall we leave or check out the inside and see if we can figure out what Drake was up to?”

She regarded him with suspicion. “It’s my call?”

“
Querida,
you’re the investigator.”

“Yes,” she said, grateful for the acknowledgment. “Yes, I am.” Excitement shimmered through her. “Let’s do it. Can you get us in? I don’t have my lock picks with me.”

“Perhaps we should just try the door Drake used. I doubt he was locking up on his way out.”

Naturally, though, that would have been too easy. The house was locked up tighter than Fort Knox, complete with an alarm system that warned Rick off.

“It’s too advanced for my skills,” he conceded, after studying the wiring.

“Which raises an interesting point,” Dana said. “How did Peter Drake get past it?”

“Maybe Carolina let him in.”

Dana recalled the weird feeling she’d gotten as she’d approached the house, the image of the place as a tomb. “You don’t suppose...” She let her voice trail off, but Rick caught her meaning.

“That she’s inside,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s only one way to find out. I don’t have a problem setting off the alarm to find out if you don’t. We can always say Carolina expected us and that we saw someone sneaking around on the property and decided we’d better investigate.”

“Think that’ll fly with Detective O’Flannery?”

Rick shrugged. “I suppose it depends on whether or not we find Carolina dead.”

Dana shuddered. She’d really stumbled upon all the dead acquaintances she wanted to when she’d discovered Mrs. Fallon’s body. “Maybe we should look in the garage first, see if her car’s here.”

Rick grinned. “Turning cautious,
querida?
”

She scowled at him. “You should be pleased.”

“I am,” he assured her, leading the way to the double garage on the far side of the house.

To Dana’s regret, the builder had inconveniently neglected to put any window into the garage. Dana stared at the impenetrable-looking doors while Rick searched for some indication of whether the alarm system extended to this part of the structure.

“Is it wired?” she asked.

“There’s no evidence of it, but anything is possible.”

The lack of conviction in his voice set off her own mental alarms. That prickling on the back of her neck had once been very familiar. It had alerted her to impending disaster.

“What now?” she asked.

“Now we see if lifting weights has paid off for me,” Rick said, grabbing the handle and trying to heft one of the doors up. Apparently locked, it stayed firmly in place. In fact, it didn’t so much as creak on its hinges.

“Very solid,” he muttered, then brightened. “But no shrieking alarms have gone off because I tried to lift it. I would have expected a very sensitive motion detector.”

“A very good sign,” she agreed. “Then we move on to plan two.” She dug around in the bottom of her purse for a paper clip. She waved it under his nose and knelt down to fiddle with the lock.

“You expect to break in with a paper clip?”

“No, I
hope
to break in with a paper clip,” she said, trying to delicately nudge the lock’s tumblers. Her fingers weren’t nearly as deft as they’d once been, but the skill hadn’t entirely abandoned her. She felt the precise instant when everything clicked into place. The handle turned easily and the door began to glide up smoothly. Adrenaline pumped furiously through her veins. Damn, but it felt good to be back in action. Her confidence soared.

“That’s far enough,” Rick said, bending down to peek through the opening. “No need to have the neighbors wondering why the garage door’s sitting open.”

“What neighbors? The nearest one is half a block away, behind a quarter acre of trees.”

“You’re assuming he never leaves the house to walk the dog I hear barking.”

Dana frowned. “Okay, your powers of observation are very good.”

“Better than yours, perhaps?”

“Don’t rub it in. It might make me start to wonder how you honed them.”

He chuckled. “Yes, we definitely would not want that.”

“So, is there a car inside or not?”

“Two of them. A Mercedes and a very expensive sports car, a Lamborghini, perhaps, though I have never seen one up close.”

“That’s Carolina’s,” Dana confirmed. “Which means she could be inside.”

“Or in Florida with her children,” Rick reminded her. “She would not leave a car like this in the lot at O’Hare. She would take a limo to the airport, yes?”

The reminder that at this very moment Carolina might be near Dana’s children frightened her even more deeply than the possibility had earlier. Finding Peter Drake sneaking around inside the house had only confirmed that something very strange was going on and that Carolina was involved in it.

“Are you ready to check inside?” Rick asked. “If the garage alarm was off, then my guess would be that the whole system is down.”

“No,” Dana said at once, oblivious of the golden opportunity they had to sneak in undetected. “I want to check on my kids. I have to warn my parents to be alert, in case Carolina shows up there.”

“Not even a quick peek?” Rick asked. “You could use the phone inside and charge it to your calling card so there would be no record of it on their bill.”

Tempted, Dana stared at him, intrigued with the devious workings of his mind. There had been a time when she would have hired an intrepid, quick-thinking man like that on the spot to work for her. Now she couldn’t help worrying just a little about all that she didn’t know about the darker side of Rick’s past. Was he merely indulging her in this quest to keep her from once more focusing on him as a suspect? At the moment, there was enough to intrigue her right here. She would worry about Rick’s motives later.

“Okay, you win.” She wiggled the paper clip in front of his nose. “Your turn,” she suggested when they reached the front door.

To her chagrin, he was even more adept than she had been with the garage door. They were inside that pretentious foyer practically before she could blink.

“You call. I’ll look around,” Rick said. “Make sure you don’t leave any fingerprints on the phone.”

She tolerated the warning because it made sense. “Be careful,” she whispered. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“It is good to know you don’t need a mansion to be happy,” he said in an enigmatic way that raised goose bumps and some fascinating speculation.

“Not this mansion, anyway.” She left the room before he could respond to that. She headed straight in the direction she had seen Peter Drake taking. Maybe he had only been looking for a nearby exit, or maybe he’d been doing a quick scan for something important.

The room she entered was very masculine and, indeed, it did have its own exit. Perhaps so Carolina’s husband could slip in and out at night? she wondered. It was an intriguing possibility.

She knew next to nothing about Tony Vincenzi, except that he’d made his money with a string of upscale pizza places. He rarely attended church with his wife, except on special occasions, such as Christmas Eve services. In fact, Dana realized, she had heard once that he and their sons attended the nearby Catholic church, which would explain why Bobby hadn’t known the boy who had taunted him down in Florida...if that’s who it was.

Although she was itching to poke through the desk, she took a handkerchief out of her purse, picked up the phone and dialed her parents’ number, using her calling card to do it, just as Rick had suggested.

Her father answered on the first ring. It was an old habit, indicative of his impatience. He was usually curt to the point of rudeness on the phone, except with her. His greeting now was as abrupt as always.

“Hey, Dad, it’s me.”

“Dana, baby, how are you?” he asked, his tone softening.

“I’m fine. Are the boys there with you?”

“They went shopping with your mother. Why? You sound worried.”

“It’s nothing specific, just a mother’s intuition, I suppose.”

“A mother’s or a private investigator’s?”

“A little of both,” she admitted. “Did Mom ever find out the name of the kid who’d been tormenting Bobby at school?”

“Bobby wouldn’t say. She hasn’t pursued it with the teacher, as far as I know. Is it important?”

“It could be. I just heard that a couple of kids from the area are down there.”

“So you think they picked up that garbage about Ken from home?”

“Exactly.”

“But who would say something like that, unless they knew about the drugs being planted?” He hesitated. “My God, you think that that kid could know the person who planted the drugs, don’t you?”

She wasn’t surprised by how quickly he’d grasped the problem. “It’s possible. Please, Dad, don’t alarm them, but keep a close eye on the kids, okay? This whole thing really has me spooked.”

“What do the police say?”

“They’re doing the best they can,” she said, feeling more generosity toward them than she had felt when she’d rushed home to pick up their slack. “They agree with me that it looks as if Ken was framed by somebody hoping to destroy his reputation after his death, probably so the police would dismiss his murder as a drug deal gone sour or something.”

“Honey, you do what you have to do. I know you’re torn about leaving the kids down here with us, but they’re fine. They’re adjusting to school. Even Bobby’s getting along okay now. Ken was the best son-in-law a man could ask for. You clear his name, okay?”

“I’m trying.”

“Just don’t put yourself in danger. The boys need you safe and sound. We all do.”

Dana thought of the man in the house with her and wondered if the warning hadn’t come too late. She trusted that Rick wouldn’t harm her, at least not physically. But in making him her ally, she had placed her heart at serious risk.

How would her father feel about this man who was so very different from Ken? she wondered. Would he welcome him, as he had the quieter, gentler man she’d married? Or would his old instincts about troublemakers kick in? Would he view Rick as an ex–street kid who’d flouted the law for too many years? Fortunately, the need to answer that was a long way down the road.

“I love you, Dad.”

“Love you, too, baby. Take care of yourself. I’ll see to it that no harm comes to your sons.”

“I know you will,” she said. After she’d hung up, she prayed that he could do as he’d promised. Was he any more of a match for a murderer than Ken had been?

Yes, she concluded. Because unlike her husband, who had trusted everyone, her father had no illusions about human nature. He’d been a prosecutor for too many years, seen too many supposedly reformed criminals released back onto the streets to commit more atrocities. He was the one who’d fueled her desire to become an investigator in the first place. On occasion, she had even been fortunate enough to work for him before his retirement. He’d had a cop’s instincts and a passion for seeing justice done.