Snow banked prettily in the common area across from her building. The public lanterns there made it sparkle. Fox looked around appreciatively as he settled onto a park bench. He gazed up at the seventh floor windows of 1222 and counted to ascertain which belonged to her apartment. He saw her pass in front of her living room windows. It appeared to Fox that she was talking on the phone. That made sense. He’d put money on Cal Mazzeone’s line being busy at the moment.
“Here’s what I’ve decided to do,” he continued finally. “We’ll need four officers here around the clock. One on the seventh floor—that’s where she lives. We’ll want one in the lobby, one here in the park across the street, and the last one over on Girard to keep an eye on the back of her building. The first two guys will be stationary, the other two will be tails, moving with her wherever she goes.”
“That’s a lot of manpower for a woman who didn’t do it.”
“She’s slippery as an eel and she has a tongue like a viper,” Fox explained. “I want to know every move she makes, every sigh she sighs, the caloric value of every bite of food she puts in her mouth, starting now. It’s the only way we’ll learn what she was up to tonight.” In the lighted window seven floors above him, he watched her drag a hand through all that long, wild, dark hair.
He’d always preferred blondes. Adelia had been elfin, pale, petite. Tara Cole couldn’t have been more her opposite. So what was it with this jerking sensation in the area of his chest at the way her hair fell down her back again when she moved her hand and let it go?
Still framed in the window, Tara put the telephone down hard. The room plunged into darkness as she left it. Then the next window lit up. Her bedroom. She came to the glass and lifted her arm, pausing just long enough that Fox wondered if she’d guessed he was out here. Then the blinds came down like a quick, hard slap.
Unfortunately, they did nothing to obliterate the shadowy hint of her movements. Fox thought it was entirely possible that she was peeling out of…whatever that thing was that she had been wearing tonight. His mouth went vaguely dry. His pulse started moving like the hands of an aborigine drummer.
“Huh?” he said into the cell phone.
Rafe had been talking, but now there was a spell of dead silence. “Did you just say huh? You? Mr. Smooth?”
“The connection’s bad.” Fox changed the subject quickly. “I’ll wait in the park across the street until I see surveillance take their places. As soon as she moves I want them to report in to us.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
On the seventh floor, her lights finally, blessedly went out.
“This one is going to be a challenge. The resort is twenty-three miles from Maine’s premiere coastal tourist area. Our job is to find out if those tourists can be persuaded to spend their vacation away from the beach.” Tara looked around at the people who had gathered at her conference room table for a meeting with her marketing firm. And though she’d managed to concentrate on the matter at hand so far, suddenly her train of thought derailed.
The Rose was in Stephen’s library—somewhere. If Whittington didn’t have it, then the cops had just missed it. But how was she supposed to get that…that detective with the blue eyes and the devil’s own grin to look for it against the far wall? How to do that without admitting that it had flown there when she’d knocked away the dog?
Come to think of it, Whittington hadn’t once mentioned the dog, she realized. Why not? For some reason, that disturbed her. A new band of tension tightened across Tara’s forehead and she rubbed at it.
She’d handled him perfectly Monday night. Perfectly. Sure, he’d swiped her date book, but he wasn’t going to find anything earth-shaking in it. In the end, he’d left her alone with that vague warning not to leave town. Which, of course, she was going to do first thing Monday morning. She had to fly to Maine on this project. She’d worked far too hard establishing the reputation of her marketing firm to let some guy with an initial-type name undermine it now.
Besides, she thought, he really had no right to hold her here. Cal Mazzeone had pointed out that Whittington couldn’t possibly have anything significant to tie her to the crime because she’d slept in her own bed these last two nights and Cal wasn’t scrambling for her expeditious arraignment. It was Wednesday and Whittington had made no further move, so Tara had to believe that Cal was right.
All that was well and good, but where was the Rose?
“Huh?” she said suddenly, realizing that her assistant in charge of research had said something to her. The people at the table exchanged frowns.
“Did you just say huh?” Eric, the assistant, asked.
“Of course not.”
Kim Koby, who ran the graphics department, cleared her throat. “Speaking as your friend and not your employee, maybe you should take a few days off.”
“Why would I want to do that?” They all knew how she’d felt about Stephen. None of them would expect her to grieve to the point of being unable to work.
“At least stay out tomorrow,” Debbie, her secretary said. “For the funeral.”
“The funeral will only take two hours in the afternoon.” She would go, Tara thought, for her stepfather’s sake, out of respect for Scott Carmen’s memory. And because she was the only family member left standing. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t—cry for him and she wouldn’t pretend.
They all knew that. An unsettled sensation began to shift in Tara’s stomach.
Debbie rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Laying low for a while might keep our competitors’ tongues from wagging,” she said. “We’ve had a cop watching our building entrance for two days now. If you’re home, maybe he’ll stand there.”
Tara frowned at her. It took two or three heartbeats for her words to sink in.
She ran into the hall and jogged back to her own office. She looked down out of her fourth floor window. There was no cop down there, but there was a guy in khakis loitering next to the mailbox. Tara waited three minutes, four, then five. The man didn’t leave.
She went slowly back to the conference room.
“How do you know he’s a cop?” she asked Debbie. Maybe he was a reporter lying in wait for her. The phones had been ringing off the hook with interview requests, all of which Cal had advised her to decline. The less she said at the moment, the better.
Debbie gnawed on her lip. “I don’t. But he’s armed.”
Tara felt her pulse speed off. “Armed?”
“I saw a gun in one of those under-the-arm holsters when his coat flapped open.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” she demanded.
“I figured you were under enough strain.”
Tara fisted her hands to keep them from shaking.
Four years ago when her mother had died, she had been left with two things precious enough to keep her going. She’d had the Rose, a piece of her mother, a piece of her own past, a promise for the future. And she’d had this firm. She’d built it painstakingly. It was her baby, born of her expertise and her guts and her talent. In large measure, her employees were her family.
Stephen had swiped the Rose but she’d still had Concepts. Now, at one of the shakiest times of her life, her own staff was shielding her, closing her out.
“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself,” she said quietly, then she waved a hand. “We’re done here. I’m going back to my office.”
Suck it up, she ordered herself, heading down the hall again. Get a grip. Damn it, she could deal with this on her own. She knew her way through the dark.
In