“Piper, where are you?”
It wasn’t Abe but an annoyed Richard Starkweather, her coworker. And he was using Abe’s cell phone. “Hi, Richard. Is Abe all right?”
“Where are you? I stopped by your apartment to check on you last night and you didn’t answer. So far, I’ve left three messages on your cell.” There was concern in his voice, but beneath it, she heard a trace of annoyance.
“I’ve been … busy.”
“Very busy,” Duncan murmured in a voice only she could hear. She made the mistake of meeting Duncan’s eyes and the glint of laughter had her choking back on a laugh.
“Where are you?” Richard asked again.
“Where’s Abe and why are you using his cell phone?” she countered.
“Abe asked me to call. We need your help on the Bronwell case. You have to make yourself available. We need to know where you are.”
Piper kept her tone patient. “Richard, you were in the meeting I had with Abe yesterday afternoon. I’m taking a few days off at Abe’s request. As far as the Bronwell case goes, I turned over all my files to you. It’s all there. Why aren’t you using your own phone?”
“Because you haven’t returned any of my calls. Obviously, you were avoiding me. If I have questions, I need to get a hold of you.”
She bit down hard on annoyance. “You’ve got hold of me now. What do you want?”
“How long will you be out of town?”
“Until the publicity fades and Abe thinks I can return.” But in her head she said, Until I can take over second chair again. Then you won’t have to ask me any questions.
“Sorry, I’m losing the connection,” she said aloud. Then she broke the connection and took a long drink of her water.
“You don’t like Richard,” Duncan said.
She paced away, and then whirled to come back to him. “Actually, I think it’s the other way around. In Richard Starkweather’s view, I have two strikes against me. He was Abe’s right-hand man until I was hired, and then I refused to go out with him. Several times.”
“What was the I’m-so-concerned-about-you act he put on in your apartment yesterday?”
“That was about impressing Abe.”
“Some men don’t take either rejection or competition well. Does he dislike you enough to stage that scene yesterday morning and send the flowers?” Piper stared at him. “Good heavens, no. Why would he?”
“To get you out of the way so that he could take over second chair at the Bronwell trial. My boss, Adrienne, suspects that someone in Abe’s office may have leaked the fact that you wrote the brief—to either the Macks family or to one of the other victim’s families. No one in my office was aware of your involvement. I didn’t even know you worked for Abe.”
“I can’t believe that Richard would do something like that,” she said.
“Abe’s a suspect, too. It’s very convenient that the media is focused on you now and not him. He can go forward with the Bronwell trial with a cleaner slate, so to speak.”
“That’s ridiculous. Abe would never do anything like that.”
“Maybe not. But until we figure out who staged that scene in your apartment and is sending you flowers, my boss would like to keep your location a secret, even from your coworkers.”
“How? This is my home. Even Richard could guess that I might come here.”
“Yeah.” Duncan smiled slowly. “I’ve given that some thought. I didn’t mention it to Adrienne, but it might work to our advantage if our RPK imitator does follow us up here. In D.C., it’s fairly easy to remain anonymous. Up here, strangers are remarked upon. Earlier today, I spoke with Sheriff Skinner in Glen Loch and filled him in on the situation. He’s putting the word out through Edie at her diner. He claims she’s his best investigator.”
Piper didn’t like the fact that their conversation had started the nerves dancing in her stomach again. “I want this all to be over.” She shifted her gaze down to the lake and let the view diffuse some of her anger. “But I’m not going to run any farther than this.”
Duncan got that. He’d seen that quality in her when she’d been eight and he’d come upon her clinging to the cliff face for dear life. His heart had nearly stopped. But she’d held on until he’d been able to reach her, and she hadn’t panicked. Then she’d followed his directions like a trooper as they’d climbed down together.
He placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. “You’ll be fine here. Thanks to whoever it was paying nocturnal visits to the castle library, the security is currently CIA approved, and Vi says that Daryl Garnett will be here for the weekend because of that photo shoot. As head of the CIA’s domestic operations, he’s the best when it comes to white knights. But so are you.”
She frowned at him. “What are you talking about?”
“That time you had to play damsel in distress in the cave all afternoon? You did that to protect Nell. And you told a bald-faced lie when you claimed that you’d always dreamed of being rescued.”
“Maybe.”
“Whoever this guy is who’s sending you flowers, he picked the wrong person to mess with. But I suggested we come out here to get your mind off everything else for a while. And I have an idea of just how we can do that.”
She stared at him. “You want to have sex here?”
With a grin he glanced around. They were on the steepest part of the cliff and while there was no one in plain sight, anyone with a good pair of binoculars or a camera with a telephoto lens could see them. “Tempting, but that’s not what I had in mind.”
Instead, he swung the backpack off his shoulder and sat down. “I thought we might share some lunch before we climb down to explore those caves.”
“You want to climb down to the caves.” She walked over to him and took one of the sandwiches he held out. “Why?”
He sat down on the grass near the cliff edge and gestured for her to join him as he pulled out his own sandwich. “I want to check something out.” He explained his theory about it being Eleanor who’d hidden her dowry.
She took the time to chew and swallow the first bite of her sandwich while she mulled it over. “You’re profiling her.”
“I suppose I am in a way. I’m looking at what we know and trying to theorize what might have happened.”
“Okay, I see your point. Eleanor wore the sapphire in her wedding portrait, and there’s no record, either visual or written, of their existence after she died. So it’s logical to think she’d be the one who hid them. It also stands to reason that if she split the earrings and hid just one of them in the stone arch, she hid the two other pieces of her dowry elsewhere. Otherwise, why split them up in the first place?”
“Exactly. And if she hid one of them outside the castle, it seems logical that she’d hide the other pieces somewhere else, also.”
“Very logical,” Piper said around a second bite of sandwich. “That’s why we’re here. You figure Angus would have known about the caves. This was land he chose. It stands to reason he would have explored all of it. Heck, it didn’t take you and your brothers more than a week to find them. So Eleanor would have known about the caves also. You showed them to Adair and Nell and me the same day you discovered them.”
“Right.”
“But if any part of the Stuart Sapphires is in the caves, surely one of you would have found it.”
“We scoured both of those