Dead Certain (17 page)

“Son of a bitch,” she growled from between clenched teeth, and struggled to the top of the stairs. “Son of a bitch . . .”

She made it to the front door and all but fell down the steps.

“Jesus!” Dana yelled and dashed from the car. “What the hell . . .”

“He was inside . . . in the house . . .” Amanda gasped and slumped to the ground halfway across the lawn. “He was in there the whole time.”

Drawing her gun, Dana dashed into the house. Within minutes, she was running back down the driveway.

“He went out the back door, probably through the field and into the woods.” She reached into the car for her radio. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you? Do you need an ambulance?”

“No. He roughed me up, that’s all. Surprised me, mostly.” She rubbed her throat. “Neck’s going to be sore. Head’s sore. Not as sore as he’s going to be, though.”

“You land a shot?”

“Right to the jaw.” She looked up and smiled. “With any real luck, I might have even broken it.”

“He’ll need it set, if that’s the case.” Dana nodded and turned her attention to the dispatcher as she called for backup.

Within minutes, the street was alive with activity, the woods swarming with officers searching for signs of Amanda’s assailant.

“Tell me again why you went into the house alone?” Sean stood next to the passenger side of the patrol car in which Amanda now sat.

“I went in for a book—”

“And Officer Burke was where?”

“She was on her way back to the car. She was taking my bag. We’d just come out and I’d locked the door and I remembered that I’d left the book—”

“So instead of having Officer Burke accompany you back inside—”

“Stop right there. Dana did nothing wrong. We’d just both come out of the house. There was no one there . . . no one that we’d seen, anyway. He must have been hiding someplace—”

“Well, gosh, who’d have suspected he’d have hidden himself when he heard you two come in? How clever of him.”

She lowered her voice. “Stop it, Sean.”

“He could have killed you, Amanda.” His eyes narrowed, darkened. “Do you understand? This is the man who killed Derek. He killed Marian. He wants to kill you.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t, did he?” She got out of the car, her jaw set squarely, her eyes flashing like lightning. “I fought back this time, Sean. I was ready to fight back. He’s the one who left here hurting, not me. I fought back. . . .”

He watched the fury gather in her face, watched it explode as she shoved him away and walked off down the drive toward the back of her property. He gave her a minute, then followed.

He found her sitting on the bench near the koi pond.

“That’s what this is all about to you, isn’t it?” He sat on the end of the bench. “Fighting back.”

“Everything I’ve done since Archer Lowell has been about fighting back.” She looked him directly in the eyes.

“Didn’t it occur to you that he might have had a knife? Or a gun?” He tried to avoid looking at the reddened area near her temple that had already begun to swell. Since she’d denied being hurt, he chose not to mention it.

“Do you know what it’s like to be a victim, Sean? To be totally helpless, to be at the mercy of someone bigger and stronger and have no way to fight back? To be afraid all the time, and everywhere you go?” She wiped away a few escaping tears, not waiting for a reply. “After the attack last year, I promised myself I would never be anyone’s victim again. Lowell took every bit of security, every small bit of confidence I’d ever had. He made me afraid to be in my own home and afraid to leave it. Afraid to go to work. Afraid to run early in the morning or go to the grocery store alone.”

She drew her knees up to her chest.

“Before all that last year, I was very shy. Timid. Didn’t even have the nerve to open my mouth to bid at auctions for things I wanted for the shop.” She smiled ruefully. “Derek even had to negotiate prices for me. I wasn’t assertive enough to argue with anyone over money.”

She looked up and saw the look of skepticism on Sean’s face.

“Archer Lowell changed all that. That woman—the one he had terrorized—no longer exists.”

Sean leaned forward and with one finger traced the L-shaped scar on her face.

“Yeah, that’s the mark of my liberation,” she laughed darkly. “The doctors suggested that a little plastic surgery would take that right away, but I wouldn’t let them. I think they thought if they removed the physical evidence, I’d be able to put it all behind me.”

“That’s only the scar that shows on the outside,” he said softly.

“Right, Chief. Though I must say, I’ve done a damned good job of healing the inner ones all by myself.” Her chin thrust forward just slightly. “I’ve driven away my demons and I’m a stronger person for it. I can take care of myself for the first time in my life. I wasn’t afraid in there, Sean. I wasn’t scared.”

“You should have been.”

She shook her head. “I knew I could take him. I knew he wouldn’t expect me to fight back. Especially not with the level of expertise that I did.”

“Black belt?” he asked.

“You betcha.”

“How’d you manage to do that in sixteen months?”

“Well, I was hardly starting from scratch. I’d taken tae kwon do in high school and in college. Evan insisted on it. But after Archer, I started back to class three, sometimes four nights every week. It didn’t take long to get back in the swing of things.” She made a meek attempt at smiling. “No pun intended.”

He sat beside her quietly for a long moment, as if trying to decide what to do next. He took both her hands in his and just held them. After a minute or two, Amanda rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. He put one arm around her and drew her against his chest.

“I was lying,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Before. When I said I wasn’t afraid. That was a lie.” She opened her eyes and stared up at the sky. “I was afraid.”

“Well, it’s only normal to—”

“Not of him. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to fight. That I’d panic and not fight back. And if I couldn’t fight, it would mean that everything I thought I’d learned about myself, everything I thought I’d become, was a myth. That after all I’d done and all that I’d been through, I’d find out that deep inside, I was still that meek, helpless woman Archer Lowell had preyed on. And that the past sixteen months of my life hadn’t meant a damned thing.”

Sean tried hard to think of something to say that would make her understand that it was neither her strength nor her weakness that determined whether her life had meaning. But while he was searching for the words, she looked up at him and said, “But I did all right, didn’t I? I fought back. I beat this bastard, ran him off. This time, I won.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, one hand stroking her arm in reassurance. “You won this round.”

They sat close together on the bench for another ten minutes or so, until the last of his officers came back through the field shaking their heads.

“Nothing, Chief,” Dana told him. “Ground’s too hard and there’s too much underbrush to get a trail through the woods. It’s like he disappeared into thin air.”

“He couldn’t have gone too far, if he was hurt as badly as Amanda thinks he was.”

“I only landed one kick to his jaw,” she noted. “He must have been stunned, and he probably hurts like hell. But he’d have had no trouble getting through those woods by the time your other officers arrived.”

“Kicked him in the face, did you?” Dana asked.

“With every ounce of strength I had.” She smiled. “Kicked like a mule . . .”

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

Bitch kicked like a fucking mule.

Vince lay back against the pillow, the plastic bag filled with ice numbing the left side of his face. There’d be no partying down at Dolores’s apartment tonight, that’s for sure. He’d have to leave a message on her answering machine—as soon as he could work his jaw to talk, that is. Didn’t want her wondering where he was, coming to his room to look for him. Or worse, thinking he was dumping her, after last night. Damn, but that Dolores was one hot little tamale. Turned him inside out and all but ripped him to shreds. But that was fine. He liked it like that.

That little bauble he’d given her had been worth its weight in gold—he’d been right about that. It had turned her on like a Bunsen burner.

And here was a little bonus he hadn’t counted on. Any time he wanted to see it, it would be there, hanging around her neck. And every time he looked at it, he’d be reminded of Marian and how she had tried to scream. He’d found the experience of killing her unexpectedly sweet in retrospect, had found it thrilling to think back on how he’d plunged the knife in and out. In and out. In and out. Just like he’d plunged himself into Dolores over and over the night before. It had been the absolute best sex he’d ever had, hands down.

Well, it was just like he’d figured. Dolores was one of those women who just crumbled when she thought a straight-up guy like him was into her for the long haul. And he would be, relatively speaking. He liked this little town, liked the way things were going for him here. He could see himself hanging around for a bit. And he would, since he did not intend to do anything stupid that would attract attention. Nope, as far as everyone around here was concerned, Vinnie Daniels was a stand-up guy. Salt of the earth, and all that.

That’s what his mother used to say when she described someone she really admired. “He’s the salt of the earth, Vince,” she’d say, and nod her head, her mouth set in an approving line. It was her highest compliment.

Wonder what little words or phrases she was using to describe him these days, he thought idly. It sure as hell wasn’t salt of the earth, or anything even near as nice.

The last time he’d seen her, she’d cursed him, then cursed herself for having given birth to him. That had been a little hard to take, having his own mother damn him to the fires of hell and mean it.

Yeah, okay, so he fucked up. He probably should have dealt with Diane some other way. He was ready to admit that now. Killing her and the boys had not been the best way to resolve the custody dispute. But she had just made him so goddamned mad with her bitching at him in court, right there in front of everyone, talking about how he lost his temper with her and the boys, about how he’d slapped her around now and then. Okay, so maybe sometimes it had been more than a few slaps. Didn’t a man have the right to keep his woman in her place, remind her who she had to thank for the roof over her head and the clothes on her back? Not that he’d have allowed her to work. Uh-uh. Not his wife.

And then that damned advocate, that Douglas woman—the one appointed by the court to review everything and make recommendations about the boys—got involved. Stuck her two cents in. Next thing he knew, that bitch of a judge was yapping at him and telling him he couldn’t so much as set foot in that house he’d worked and sweated his balls off to buy.

Yeah, right. Like that was gonna happen.

Well, she got hers, hadn’t she? The judge? His buddy Curt Channing had seen to that. Curt had screwed up where the advocate had been concerned, but hey, he’d gone two for three, hadn’t he? Besides, Vince was almost finished with his three. Then he’d take care of Mara Douglas on his own. Gotta be careful there, though. That one would be too easy to trace back to him. Everyone knew he hated her guts and would blow her away as soon as look at her.

She had been something to look at, though.

Well, he’d think of something where she was concerned. He’d heard she’d taken up with some slick FBI agent, though. And now that Vince thought about it, wasn’t her sister some FBI type, too?

Better let that one go for a while. He’d have to wait. He could wait. He had all the time in the world now.

Besides, hadn’t he read something in the prison library that someone had said something like revenge was a dish best served cold? Vince took that to mean that he’d be better off just letting it go for a while, letting things cool down, and then, someday, some long time from now, he could do her and no one would suspect him. That’s what he thought it meant, anyway. It sounded like good advice to him.

He painfully turned his head to look at his watch. It was almost seven. Dolores was going to be getting home anytime now. Last night she’d said her last client today would be a cut and color at six and she probably wouldn’t get home until seven-thirty or so, and it would be closer to eight by the time she got to the Dew. He was going to have to tell her he’d been called out of town for a few days. On business.

Yeah, business. The business of putting my jaw back into alignment.

Who’d have thought that little slip of a thing could pack such a punch? He sure hadn’t. Damn, she was fast. And tough.

Yeah, well, she won that round, but next time—and there would be a next time—he’d be ready for her. She’d just caught him off guard, that was all.

In spite of the pain and the humiliation of having had her get the best of him, he almost smiled.

Derek England had been all too easy. One quick pop and he was history. One down, two to go.

Marian had been more lively, true, and much more rewarding, all things considered. But there’d been no real sense of sport to it. The old
veni, vidi, vici
thing. But Amanda, well, she was something else altogether.

And then there was the little matter of knowing that her big brother, that hotshot detective, would never know she’d gone down at the hands of Vincent Giordano.

Hot damn. This was going to be so sweet. The fact that he and Detective Crosby had a history, well, that made it sweeter still.

Two down, one to go.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

“See anything on the menu that appeals to you?” Sean sat across the booth from Amanda in Broeder’s one true diner and pretended to be considering the day’s specials.

“I’m not really all that hungry.”

He folded his menu and put it aside. “I realize that you’ve had a really, really bad day.” The glint in his eyes told her he knew he was understating the situation. “But you ate hardly anything at breakfast, too.”

“It was the bacon. Not a good idea. Bacon is not a good choice on an unsettled stomach.” She continued to scan the menu.

“What did you have for lunch?”

“A salad.”

“Yummy,” he mumbled.

“You ready to order, Chief? You see our specials?” The cute little waitress whose name tag identified her as Linda set two fat glasses of ice water on the table. Under normal circumstances, she would have been flirting like crazy with Sean, but today she busied herself with inspecting Amanda from the corner of one eye.

“Yes, but I’ll have the meat loaf.” He handed her his menu.

“Mashed or baked?”

“Gotta have the mashed with meat loaf.” He winked at her and she giggled.

“Miss?”

“Does the salmon special come with a sauce?” Amanda asked.

“Ah, it comes with lemon.” The waitress screwed up her face as if it were an unnatural thing to ask. “What kind of sauce were you looking for?”

“Something herby.”

“I can ask the cook,” she offered but made no move toward the kitchen.

The look on Sean’s face was pure amusement.

“What?” Amanda frowned.

“This is a diner,” he stage-whispered. “Not a French restaurant.”

“What would you suggest, then?”

“The meat loaf.”

“Not a big favorite of mine.”

“That’s because you probably haven’t had diner meat loaf.”

“Fine.” She looked up at the waitress. “I’ll have what he’s having. And an iced tea.”

“Iced tea sounds good. Make it two, Linda.”

“I’ll be back in a flash.”

“Can it be possible that you’ve never eaten at the Broeder Diner before?” Sean said.

“Guilty.”

“How could you have lived here for so long and not have eaten here?”

“I don’t know. I just never did.”

“Just take a look around. We’re talking classic American diner here,” he told her. “White walls. Black-and-white checkered tile floor. Red leather benches for the booths. American as apple pie.”

“Well, that’s not a favorite of mine, either.”

“Let me guess. Chocolate mousse.” He smiled up at Linda as she returned with two tall glasses of iced tea, lemon wedges riding on the rims.

“Yum. Although I do prefer a good pear tart. But nothing gets me going quite like bananas Foster.”

“Whatever,” he muttered, shaking his head, and she laughed for the first time that day.

“That’s better,” he said softly, wanting to reach across the table to her, but knowing that sort of intimate gesture would generate a little too much fodder for the small-town gossip mill. “How long do you suppose it’s been since you laughed?”

“There hasn’t been much to laugh about lately.” She rested both arms on the table in front of her and looked solemn.

He started to say something, but her attention was drawn to the front of the diner. The door being directly in her line of vision, she could not avoid seeing every patron who came in or went out.

The redheaded woman walked slowly down the aisle as if counting heads or looking for someone. Amanda had a feeling she knew who that someone was.

“Sean?” The woman stopped next to their table.

“Ramona.” He looked up and appeared to be trying to smile.

“Did you get my message?” The woman’s voice was very soft and very sweet and almost apologetic. “I called you. . . .”

“I’ve been a little busy.” He looked pained. “We’ve had a few homicides here in Broeder. You might have read about them in the paper.”

“I don’t usually read the papers.” She shook her head. “Too much bad news, you know?”

“Well, bad news is my business, Ramona.”

She nodded and turned to Amanda as if seeing her for the first time.

“Are you Sean’s girlfriend?” the woman asked.

“Ahhhh . . .” Amanda stuttered, taken aback by the question.

“This is Amanda. She’s a friend.” Sean’s face was unreadable.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Ramona said to Amanda.

“It’s nice to meet you, too, Ramona.”

The waitress arrived with their meals. “Sorry, I forgot about your salads,” she said as she put their plates down. “You eating, hon?” she asked Ramona.

“Oh. No. I . . . I’m not staying.” She gave Sean a weak smile. “Will you call me? Please?”

“Sure.” He nodded.

“Bye.” She turned sad eyes to Amanda, then walked away.

The waitress returned with their salads. “Sorry. Things just got hectic all of a sudden in the kitchen.” She looked over the table. “I forget anything else? More iced tea, Chief? Miss?”

They both shook their heads.

“Holler if you need me.”

They ate in silence for several minutes.

“How’s your meat loaf?” he asked.

“Fine.”

More silence.

Finally, Amanda couldn’t stand it any longer. “She seemed so
sad.
Ramona.”

When Sean did not respond, she said, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry.”

Sean continued to chew.

“It’s not what you think,” he said after a time.

“I wasn’t thinking anything.”

“Yes, you were. You’re thinking she’s an old girlfriend”—he put his fork down—“and that I just rudely blew her off.”

“None of my business.”

The fingers of his right hand began to tap on the tabletop, and his eyes narrowed, as if he were in the midst of an inner debate.

“I hardly know her,” he finally said.

“Sean, you don’t need to feel that you—”

“She thinks she’s my sister,” he pretty much blurted out.

Amanda’s jaw dropped noticeably. “She thinks she’s . . .” Amanda repeated slowly, as if not quite understanding.

“She thinks she’s my sister.” He said it again, more deliberately.

“Why does she think that?”

“Because Greer told her she was.”

“You’ll forgive me if I appear to be having a little problem following all this.”

“How do you think
I
feel?”

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, Greer told Ramona that she is your sister.” Amanda paused. “Half sister or whole sister?”

“Greer thinks maybe half, but no one’s really sure. That part’s apparently still up in the air.”

“How did she find you?”

“Greer found her.”

“How?”

“Same way she found me.”

“Well, that turned out fine. I don’t understand what the problem is.”

“The problem is that Greer wants to embrace Ramona like—” He stopped in midsentence.

“Like a long lost sister?” She finished it for him.

“You’ve seen how Greer is. She is just too trusting. Too open. Before you know it, she’ll have Ramona under her wing like the mother hen she is.”

“And that would be wrong because . . . ?”

“What if it turns out not to be true? Greer’s heart is going to be broken.”

“I would think that for Greer to have contacted her, she’d have researched this pretty carefully,” Amanda said gently.

“I have no reason to believe that my mother ever had any children other than Greer and me. And she didn’t want either of us. Dumped us both on her mother and never looked back. Why would she have gone and had another child?”

“You were very young then. You wouldn’t have known whether your mother had had another child. And what if it’s the truth? What if Ramona really is your sister?”

“She’s not.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because.” His jaw set squarely and he made a point to look away.

“Because you don’t want her to be?”

“Bring you folks anything else? Coffee? Dessert?” The waitress paused in flight past the table.

“Amanda?”

She shook her head.

“Just the check, please, Linda.”

Linda stopped long enough to total up the check and drop it onto the end of the table. “Thanks, Chief. See you tomorrow.”

“You eat here every day?” Amanda asked on their way out, more to break the uncomfortable silence than because she was deeply interested.

“Pretty much.”

A serious rattle of thunder greeted them as they started down the steps from the door to the parking lot. A crackle of lightning burst close by. They both looked skyward and mentally calculated the arrival time of the impending storm.

“Look, I guess I was out of line,” she said when they’d gotten into the Jeep. “I said more than I should have. I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“My fault for bringing it up.”

He started the Jeep and headed off in the opposite direction from Greer’s.

“I need to stop at my place for just a minute. I need to pick up a few things,” he said.

“Okay.”

They drove in silence for several blocks before making a right turn onto a narrow side street where the houses were small and for the most part nondescript. Sean pulled into a gravel driveway and turned off the engine.

“Since I’m not comfortable leaving you out here alone, I guess you’re going to have to come on in.”

“Okay.” She unlocked her door and jumped out onto the stones and followed him to the front door. A soft rain had just begun to fall, and the sky continued to darken. Large fat clouds gathered overhead at a steady clip.

The house was small and brick with white shutters and no front porch. Three concrete steps led directly to the front door. There was no name on the black metal mailbox affixed to the front of the house, no shrubs or flowers, nothing to lend even a trace of warmth to the property. Scruffy grass ran right up to the foundation, and all of the wood trim—windows, shutters, door—looked like their next paint job was already several years overdue.

Sean unlocked the door and swung it open, stepped aside to let Amanda enter the narrow foyer.

“I’ll just be a minute.” He moved past her to turn on a lamp in the living room.

“I guess I’ll just wait here. . . .” she said, even though he’d already left the room on his way to the stairwell.

She looked around the living room, marveling at the sparseness of the furnishings.

Sparse? She almost laughed out loud. This was beyond sparse. The living room held one dark brown leather chair and an ottoman, both of indeterminable age, and a table painted white upon which sat the lamp he’d turned on. There were stacks of books on the floor on either side of the chair, hardbacks and paperbacks in small haphazard towers, one of which had slumped over to spread out under the table. There was nothing else in the room. No television. No pictures on the wall. Nothing. The walls were all stark white.

She stepped forward through what she assumed was intended to have been the dining room. What might have served as a dining table under other circumstances held an open laptop and piles of paper, files with their contents partly exposed, and stacks of newspaper articles. The lone wooden chair sat pushed up to the table.

Into the kitchen, where counters stood empty and the sink held nothing but a coffee mug. The one surprise was the color on the walls.

“Admiring the decor?” he asked dryly from the doorway.

“Sorry. I was just wandering. Sorry.”

“Now you and Greer will have something else to talk about.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She frowned.

“She’s always on my back about not having any furniture. She says I live like a hermit.”

“Well, you have to admit that you have a lot of empty space just waiting to be filled here.” She chose her words carefully, and it made him laugh.

“I’ll have to remember that next time Greer starts in on me. She thinks it’s cold as a tomb. I’ll just tell her it’s empty space waiting to be filled.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what she thinks I ought to do. I’m just renting here.”

“Lots of people rent, but they still find ways to make the place their home.”

When he didn’t respond, she said, “I like the dark red walls in the kitchen.”

“Greer did it. Said the place needed some color.”

Actually, what Greer had said was that the dark red suited his moody personality, but he felt no need to go into that.

She followed him into the dining room. “You know what they say, there’s no place like home.”

“Well, maybe that’s it then.” He turned off the lights, giving her no choice but to head for the front door. “I’ve never really had one.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, well.” He turned on the outside light, avoiding her eyes.

“Sean, I—”

“It’s okay, Amanda.” He locked the door. “Let’s just forget about it, okay?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to his back as she trudged across the uneven lawn to the Jeep, dodging the rain that had begun to fall in earnest. “I’m so sorry. . . .”

After a few long minutes of the windshield wipers’ monotonous
swish slap, swish slap, swish slap,
Sean turned on the radio. Ten nonstop minutes of classic rock followed but neither sang along. It was a less than comfortable silence and lasted until Sean pulled into his sister’s driveway and peered up toward the garage.

“Looks like Greer’s not back yet.” He frowned and sat tapping the wheel, as if debating with himself. Finally, he said, “Oh, hell. What’s the difference? I’ll move her car in the morning.”

“Move her car?” Amanda looked behind them toward the end of the drive.

“Yeah, when I leave in the morning.” He got out of the Jeep and opened the back door, took out his duffel bag.

“You’re staying here?” She got out, too, and immediately hunched against the rain.

“Yeah. Come on, it’s really starting to come down now.” He ran ahead to the back of the house and paused at the edge of the walk, then opened the door to the screened porch for her, let her proceed in first.

She brushed against him and made the mistake of looking up into his eyes. As if having a mind of their own, his hands reached for her shoulders and turned her around so that she was in his arms. She smelled of lemons and late summer rain. He kissed her, because he couldn’t not.