With Every Breath (22 page)

")oe Gallen," Joe said curtly into the phone.

"Let me tell you what," a vaguely familiar voice said without preamble. It took Joe a minute to assimilate that it was Goldwell, the cop he had spoken to in Florida on Saturday night.

"I’m all ears," he answered carefully, neutrally.

"I hate the night shift," the guy went on sarcastically. "Six years away from retirement, my pension so close I can damned near touch it, and a handful of lousy circumstances have landed me here standing guard over the midnight-to-eight. And hell, now it’s past nine o’clock, and I’m still here. Want to know why?"

Joe had a strong feeling that he didn’t. "What happened?"

"I got this morning’s newspaper here in front of me. The classifieds. Third one down under personals. My wife noticed it this morning and dropped it by with my breakfast." The cop began to read aloud. "Exclusive Madeline Brogan photograph. Never published or marketed. ‘The Woman and The Boy.’ Best offer. Call

evenings, 7 p.m." He bit out a phone number. "Now you want to tell me what the hell this is about?"

"I don’t know anything about it."

"Yeah, well, Steve Singleton does."

Joe’s blood got cold and sluggish. "You think so?"

"I called Ma Bell. That number is a phone booth on Candle Island, Maine."

"Give it to me," Joe snapped. Jesus. What the hell is going on here?
He could think just clearly enough to realize that there were only two public phones on the island, one out in front of the post office, and the other stuck to the side of the Sandbar.

"You need to keep an eye on that booth," Goldwell said, as if he was talking to some small-town dunce. Goddamnit, Joe thought, he was.

"No shit," Joe growled.

"You need to see who shows up there at seven o’clock," the cop went on as though he hadn’t heard him. "Then we’ll know who Steve Singleton is, because something’s telling me you don’t have a clue either." "Graycie." Joe winced when he heard himself say it aloud. But he knew it was Graycie. It had to be. The bastard was there, he realized, and trying to keep tabs on how close Fort Lauderdale was to getting him.

Except using a Candle Island phone number tipped Fort Lauderdale off to where he was.

And this ad made no sense at all. What was he doing, trying to sell one of Maddie’s pictures? Money, Joe thought. No doubt he needed money. Joe already knew her prints were expensive. The books had cost him a small fortune.

"Yeah, well, I just got the classified supervisor away from his morning coffee," Goldwell went on. "Steve Singleton ordered that ad. Mailed it in with a money order to pay for it. But I guess you’ve figured that out by

now, huh? And I made some calls around the state. The same thing ran in every major newspaper. Also in the Atlanta, Savannah, and Macon papers. And in Nassau and Paradise Island as well. Same method of payment. You know what I think? I think somebody’s pretty damned busy up there on Candle Island, Maine."

Yeah, Joe said to himself, and it’s not me. He was just running around chasing his own tail.

He hung up angrily, rudely, suddenly, and sat rubbing his temples. The phone rang again. He snatched it up. "Now what?"

"It’s Hector," Sheila said. "I’m putting him through." "Make it good. Hector," Joe warned as soon as he heard the click.

"Something funny just showed up in the sky over The Wick," Hector said eagerly. "East side."

There was a short silence. "The flare. Hector," Joe snapped. "I told you I gave her those goddamned flares! Go to her house! Now! I’ll meet you there."

He disconnected before Hector could answer, and he was behind the wheel of the Pathfinder before his heart could beat a second time. And when it did, it seemed to have a chant.

Too LATE too LATE.

He’d get there too late.

It was too late, he knew then, to tell himself that he could stay away from her. Too late to tell himself that he wanted to stay away from her. At the first beckoning, there he was, running. And he hadn’t actually run in years. Pain scrambled and clawed in his knee in early retribution. He should have stayed with her last night.

It was too late to back off, too late to decide he wasn’t going to change his life. Someone was changing it for him, hurling him at Maddie Brogan with circumstances, making him admit—hell, yes—he cared.

And he knew before he hit The Wick bridge that he cared about both of them. There was a kid at stake, a kid who already had his share of problems. And that really annoyed Joe to no end.

Who? Who was doing this to them, he wondered? The anonymous Steve Singleton?

It made sense that they were all one and the same, the cat-killer and the phone-line-cutter and the Fort Lauderdale PD-inquisitor. It made sense because there hadn’t been this much trouble on Candle in twenty-five years, so logic said it all came from the same source.

Maddie Brogan.

But where did the picture fit in?

Then again, he told himself, it made just as much sense that these pranksters weren’t one and the same. It made just as much sense to assume that Gina had acted out again this morning against Maddie, and that explained the flare. That some nosy busybody like Mildred Diehl had called the Florida cops under an assumed name, that Rick Graycie knew where his ex-wife and his kid were and he wanted them back enough to cut the phone line so that she couldn’t call for help. It made just as much sense to assume that none of these things were related at all.

He topped the bridge and saw Hector’s car in front of him, cruising slowly into the drive. Maddie burst through the front door onto the deck as Joe parked behind the patrol car. Joe leaped out of the Pathfinder, then his heart stopped all over again as he registered the sight of her.

She was all legs.

Bare legs.

She had on some kind of sweatshirt thing, and it fell to a midpoint on her thighs, and he wondered if she had anything on underneath it. His chest tightened. He made his way up the steps far more slowly than he had intended to.

She hurled herself at him.

She was shaking badly and somehow his arms went around her, and the wildflowers came back into his head. Joe closed his eyes and stroked his hands over her back, and he felt nothing that even vaguely approximated bra straps. Her breasts were flattened against his chest, and it was hard as hell to ignore them under the circumstances. For a moment frozen in time, he was absolutely convinced that he could feel her nipples tightening, right through that sweatshirt, right through his own shirt. He realized then that he had forgotten his coat.

"What happened?" he asked hoarsely. He realized that Hector was still at the patrol car, watching these proceedings with great interest, and he fought back a curse. Because this scene was going to be all over the island before noon.

"F-Flowers," Maddie said, still shuddering.

"Flowers," he repeated blankly.

"B-black, with w-worms, and I locked the door, but they were on the t-t-table."

He set her away from him very carefully. He regretted doing it as much as he needed to.

"Where?" he asked evenly. "Where are they? Show them to me."

"I c-can’t. I threw them."

"Where?" he asked again.

"Off the back deck."

"Okay," he rasped. His throat felt inordinately dry. He went inside, crossed through the kitchen, and flung open the back door. He went out onto the rear deck, then he came in again.

"Maddie."

She was standing in the kitchen, hugging herself. "What?"

"Get dressed, for Christ’s sake. Just... get dressed."

Chapter 18

Most of the worms had crawled off into the dunes. Joe came back into the kitchen with the flowers, the flowerpot in one hand, those that had fallen out gripped in his other. Maddie was dressed—more or less—and making coffee.

She’d pulled on a pair of black leggings underneath the sweatshirt thing. All they did was cover her skin. They clung, outlining every curve of calf, thigh, knee. Her feet were bare. She’d scrubbed her face. The hair at her temples was damp. He didn’t think she’d put on any makeup, but her color was high without it. He didn’t know the status of the bra situation, either, and he didn’t want to look to try to figure it out.

"Who could have done it?" she repeated, and he realized she had been talking to him. He looked up into her clear blue-green eyes, feeling dazed.

"The question of the week," he muttered. Then something else hit him. "Having second thoughts about it being your ex?"

Maddie shook her head. "No, not really. It’s just a matter of having more than one enemy now."

And she didn’t know the half of it yet. He thought of Steve Singleton again. "Yeah, I guess you do."

He carried the flowers into the dining room. He spilled everything onto the table and studied the mess morosely. Maddie followed him with the coffee.

"Gina?" he asked rhetorically. "Or Rick?" He might as well tell her about Singleton, he realized. He was a long way from solving that particular mystery. He was a long way from solving anything.

He had never felt so bumbling, so ineffectual, so unqualified for a job in his entire life.

"Know anybody by the name of Steve Singleton?" he asked. He rubbed at a headache growing behind his eyes. She sat down and looked at him blankly. "Should I?" "It would help a whole goddamn lot." But he hadn’t expected she would. "He’s using a Candle Island phone number to try to sell one of your pictures. And he called the Fort Lauderdale PD to try to find out what they have on Graycie."

Maddie blanched. "It’s him. It’s Rick."

"Yeah. It occurred to me."

The last of her color drained. "He gave a Candle Island number? Sweet God." She jumped to her feet, then she sat jerkily again. "He is here."

Her terror hurt him. He fought a significant war with himself to remain dispassionate. To act like a cop.

"But why the hell would he try to sell one of your pictures to people in Florida?" he demanded. And Macon and Savannah and Nassau, he added silently.

"Which one? Which picture was it?"

He sorted through his memory, jammed then with too many obscure, seemingly unrelated details. "The Woman and The Boy."

"Huh?"

"The Woman and The Boy," he repeated.

"I don’t name my pictures."

Something almost cold went down his spine. "Well, somebody did."

She shook her head frantically. "And I’ve never done one with two people in it! Never. It detracts from the impact," she finished inanely.

He stared at her, then closed his eyes briefly against his headache. "Goddamnit," he said, without much bite. "It’s us," she breathed.

He opened one eye to look at her. "What’s us?"

"Me and Josh. The woman and the boy—that’s us." His blood seemed to go still. "What are you saying?" "I don’t know!" she wailed. "But what else could he be talking about but Josh and me?"

What indeed? "All right, calm down."

"Calm—"

He cut her off by holding his palm up. He thought she was dangerously close to becoming hysterical. "From the beginning. Let’s start at the beginning."

She nodded, her head moving like a puppet being jerked around by a bad marionette.

"What happened this morning?" he went on. "In order."

She took a deliberate breath. "I got up, and the flowers were on the coffee table in the living room." She felt herself growing calmer, and was suddenly embarrassed at having fallen apart. The business with the picture was a lot more threatening than a bunch of stupid flowers. And she had certainly never dreamed that the flare would bring two cops, burning rubber.

"The door was open a crack," she continued, "but I locked it last night."

"You’re sure?"

She stiffened. "Very."

"You were tired, stressed—"

"I locked the damned door!"

She was still on edge, he thought. And why not? "Okay, okay."

"I checked it three times. I was afraid, being alone." "Well, you won’t be anymore." The words got out before he could wrestle himself over them.

Maddie let her breath out and felt herself trembling again, with relief this time. "Thank you," she breathed.

Don’t thank me yet. He wanted to snap at her and tell her that he didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to be anywhere near her in the long dark of the night . . . and God help him, he still wanted to get under that sweatshirt.

"Get dressed," he said again. "I’m going to look at the door and try to figure out how they got in."

"I am dressed," she said slowly. Why is he so fixated on that?

"I mean to drive down to the big island. I need to get to a phone. Where’s Josh?"

"Hiding," she whispered, her voice cracking.

"What?"

Maddie explained. "He’s in my room. I’ll get him ready to go, too. Just give me ten minutes."

She disappeared down the hallway.

He watched her go, golden hair swinging against her shoulders, long, slender legs striding purposefully, and he looked for some line or strap against her back that might indicate a bra.

Oh, God help me.