Intimate Betrayal (16 page)

What was she up to? Didn’t she know that there were police cars parked at the other end?

Annie hurried to the west entrance and followed Paolina inside. There was a pile of bricks by the opening to the area, and,
in the dark, she stumbled on them.

“Damn,” she whispered. She felt in her purse for the pencil flashlight she always carried with her. She switched it on, noting
from its dim light that it would soon need new batteries.

She felt a shiver of pure fear. As she had told Matt the other evening at his house, she had a lifelong fear of being shut
up in dark places. She assumed that it had something to do with one of her experiences in those awful foster homes as a child,
although she must have repressed the exact memory.

It wasn’t exactly claustrophobia, since she could ride in subways and elevators and fly in planes without feeling as if she
had to tear at the walls. But if she was in an elevator and it stopped and the lights went out… she was sure that she would
rapidly devolve into a candidate for the psychiatric ward.

“Take it easy, Annie,” she muttered. “There’s nothing small and confining about this place.”

She directed her light toward the extreme west end of the nave. For the moment, she didn’t see Paolina. Nor were there any
lights in the front of the church near the altar. Maybe the police investigators had finished up their task and left.

Most of the inside walls of the building were lined with scaffolding, used by the men who were working on the walls, the electric
connections, the masonry, and the windows. But Annie squinted down at the scaffolding that had failed. From a distance it
looked much the same as usual, which surprised her. There wasn’t enough light in the cathedral for her to see the part of
the structure that had fallen.

Poor Giuseppe! She imagined how it must have been to fall for endless seconds through the dark, knowing that when the falling
stopped, so would your life. Falling through darkness. It was like a terrible dream.

She forced her mind away from that. Dammit, where was Paolina?

A bright movement at the corner of her eye alerted her. Paolina was in one of the side aisles, gliding silently toward the
east end of the cathedral. With her long blond hair and her dark flowing dress she looked more like an apparition than a teenage
girl.

Annie hurried after her. She was about six feet behind her when Paolina turned, her face white and scared.

“Shh, it’s all right, nobody’s going to hurt you,” Annie said. “What are you doing here?”

The girl shook her head wordlessly.

“If you’d like to pray, I’m sure Barbara Rae will pray with you, but this is a construction site, and it’s not safe. You can’t
be in here, Paolina. Especially now. The police are here.”

Paolina gasped and looked around wildly.

“Paolina, do you know what happened to Vico’s uncle?”

The girl looked at her, and Annie wondered, for an instant, what was wrong with her. Was she on drugs? She seemed vague and
confused, as if she was high on something. Dear heaven! She was pregnant. She damn well ought to know better!

But Paolina’s eyes cleared as she looked at Annie. “Yes, I know. He’s dead.”

“And Vico? If you know where he is, please tell him to come forward. The police are searching for him.”

“They’ve been searching for two weeks,” Paolina said disdainfully. “They won’t find him.”

“Yes, they will. The stakes have gone way up. Before, he was just another punk who sells drugs. Now he’s a suspect in his
uncle’s murder.”

Paolina’s eyes widened. “He’s a suspect?”

“Exactly that. Vico and his uncle had some problems. The cops are afraid that—”

“No!” the girl cried. “Vico did not do it! The scaffolding broke apart and Giuseppe fell! Vico would never hurt anyone, especially
his uncle.” Her tone was passionate and insistent. “I know they argued sometimes, but Vico loved him!”

A flashlight snapped on in the apse of the cathedral and they heard a man’s voice call out to another. The anguish in the
teenager’s eyes changed to panic. She pushed past Annie and fled along the north wall of the cathedral.

Annie rushed after her, retracing her steps toward the door they had both used to enter the construction site.

“Hey, where d’you think you’re going?” a man exclaimed as Annie careened into him in the darkness. He grabbed her arm and
pulled her to a stop. As she whirled to face him, he quickly let her go. “Annie?” he said.

It was Jack Fletcher.

“Please, let me pass. There was a girl in here—she said something important.”

“I didn’t see a girl,” Fletcher said. “I’ve seen a lot of cops hanging around, but no one else.”

“Jack, I was just talking to her, dammit. She slipped past me and got away.”

“Do you know who she was?”

“Yes, of course. Her name is Paolina. She’s Vico’s girlfriend. She says he didn’t do it.”

“Well, of course that’s what she says.”

“I know, I know, but it was more than just a lover’s denial, Jack.” What was it Paolina had said?
“Vico did not do it! The scaffolding broke apart and Giuseppe fell!”
It sounded
as if Paolina had actually seen it happen. As if she had been right here in the cathedral at the time. “I think, from what
she said, that she may have been a witness to Giuseppe’s death. Perhaps she and Vico were both witnesses.”

“Yeah, like she witnessed
him
doing it,” Fletcher said.

Annie shook her head. Of course he wouldn’t believe her. Neither, she was sure, would anybody else.

But Paolina had sounded so sincere and so passionate.

“What was she doing in here anyway?” Fletcher asked.

“I don’t know.” She looked at him. “What are
you
doing here? Isn’t the site still off limits to all of us?”

“To hell with that,” Fletcher said. “It’s my construction site, and I damn well want to know exactly what happened here last
night.”

“Yes, well, so do I.”

“We’re well away from the crime-scene tape,” he added. “It’s not like we’re tromping through the evidence.”

Somebody shouted at them, and flashlights were beamed their way. “Even so, I think we’re about to be nailed in our own building,”
Annie said with a sigh.

“You’ll have to tell the cops about the girl,” Fletcher said.

“Mmm.” Annie was already wishing that she hadn’t told Fletcher.

Had
Paolina been here last night?

Had she witnessed Giuseppe’s death?

After the police grilled them and finally let them go, Fletcher walked Annie back outside to her car. She was clearly preoccupied,
and she didn’t seem to notice how close beside her he was walking, or even that he took her arm once to
help her around a pothole in the razed lot they all used as a parking area.

“It’s late,” he said in as gentlemanly a manner as he could muster. “Would you like me to follow you home, make sure you get
there okay?”

She blinked at him, obviously puzzled by the question. “Thanks, but that’s not necessary.”

“I guess you’re pretty brave, huh?” he said.

“What do you mean, brave? Why am I brave?”

“Well, here you are at a construction site in the middle of the night… just after someone’s been murdered. That takes guts,
I think.”

“Does it? You’re here,” she pointed out.

“Hey, I’m a guy.”

She gave him a freezing look. “I guess that explains it.”

Stupid idiot!
he raged at himself.

She frowned but said nothing more about it. A second or two later, she started up her car. “See you tomorrow, Fletcher,” she
said, and pulled away.

Fuck.
Fletcher got into his car. He thought about following Annie home anyhow but decided not to risk it. One mistake per night
was enough.

He wondered about the girl in the cathedral. Paolina. Vico’s girlfriend. He’d seen her hanging out at the site when the kid
was on the job. Blond girl—a real looker, all right.

Annie had not mentioned her to the police. Why had the girl been hanging around the cathedral? And what was Annie trying to
hide? Could she be trying to protect Vico?

God, he’d love to get something on Annie. He needed some way to get her under his thumb.

Fletcher picked up the cellular phone in his car. He was
proud of that phone. Made him feel like a big shot to be talking on the phone while waiting for a red light to change.

He dialed Sam Brody’s private number. It was late, but what the hell. There’d been a murder on the site, for chrissake. Anyhow,
Brody liked him to check in on a regular basis. Sometimes he felt like he was working more for Brody than for McEnerney Construction.
Especially since McEnerney was such a prick.

“Mr. Brody, you know that kid—Giuseppe Brindesi’s nephew? The one the cops are after?”

“What about him, Jack?”

“He had this girlfriend. Blond chick. Very good-looking. When the kid was there she used to hang around sometimes, encouraging
him. You remember her?”

“Sorry. I don’t know anything about her. Why?”

“I was wondering if you had any idea how to find her. An address? A phone?”

“First I’ve heard of her, Jack.”

“Well, she was lurking in the cathedral tonight. Annie seems to think the girl might know where Vico is. She could even be
some kind of witness. Annie thinks she and her boyfriend may have been around when Giuseppe got frosted.”

There was silence on Brody’s end for a couple of moments. Then: “Annie?”

Fletcher pulled it in a couple of notches. “The Jefferson babe.”

“I’d hate to see her reaction if she heard you calling her a ‘babe,’ Jack. Women are very sensitive to that sort of thing
nowadays.”

“Sorry,” Fletcher mumbled, clenching his fists.

“As I said, this is the first I’ve heard of Vico’s girlfriend.”

“I’d like to find her. Ask her a few questions.”

“So will a lot of people, especially if she or the boy was a witness. Still, isn’t that the sort of thing we should leave
to the police, Jack? They’ll find Vico and the girl, if necessary, much more easily than you or I will. At least, that’s what
we pay our taxes for.”

“I suppose,” Fletcher said.

They said goodbye and hung up. But the more Fletcher thought about it, the more he believed that the blond girl was the key.
The key to Annie. If he could find her and find out what she knew, he could take it to Annie. She’d be grateful, he knew.
Very grateful.

He drove home, fantasizing all the way. What he wanted, he decided, was a combination of grateful and scared. Grateful so
she’d have to come to him. Scared once she was in his hands.

Annie was brave, and it was starting to get on his nerves. He wanted her nervous. Tense, fretful, a little upset. Briefly,
when the cops had confronted them, she’d looked as if she hadn’t known quite what to expect or exactly how to handle herself.
She’d been wary, perhaps a little frightened, and Fletcher had loved it.

That was the way he wanted her to look just before he fucked her. Vulnerable. Scared.

That was the hard part, for him. If they were willing, they usually weren’t scared. Made him want the ones who
weren’t
willing, but that raised a whole other set of problems. He’d learned the hard way that unwilling women could be real nasty
about things afterward.

No, the women he got were usually the sluts who couldn’t wait to get on with it, and most of them were just too damn
aggressive in bed. And the demands they made—Christ, what a pain in the ass! Not only would they expect to be given an orgasm—or
several orgasms in the case of some of these broads—but they’d dictate how to do it and when to do it and where to touch,
precisely, and how long and how hard.

Then there were the ones who didn’t make any demands but expected you to read their minds. They were a bit better, but not
much. If you didn’t figure out what they wanted and how they wanted it, they didn’t scream at you and flounce into their clothes
and out of your house—no, they sulked. Or, worse, they cried. He hated that. Crying women reminded him of his bitch of a mother,
who’d been a whiner and a crier all her life. She was gone now, and good riddance. He’d always wanted a soft, warm, loving
mom, but instead he’d had a harpy who’d terrorized and beaten him bloody when he was a child, then whined and cried because
he didn’t come round to see her as an adult.

Annie, though—Annie would be different from all the other women. She was a lady, with all the class his loudmouthed mother
could never in a million years have possessed. He’d never heard Annie mouth off at anyone—she was too elegant, too smooth.
He just couldn’t see her picking up his finger and depositing it on the precise spot on her clit. She had better manners than
that. She would wait for him to make the move, and if it wasn’t exactly what she wanted, she’d be far too polite to say so.

No, Annie would behave. Annie would do as she was told.

And if she didn’t… Well, there was a remedy for that as well. His mind slipped into a fantasy of Annie, naked, spreadeagled
and bound to the frame of his king-size bed, her beautiful
long limbs straining and her body arching as she struggled to get free. That was how he
really
wanted to fuck her.

And before he fucked her, he wanted to watch her expression. He wanted to see her fear. She’d look vulnerable then, by God.
She’d look nervous and worried and sexy as hell.

Fletcher recalled with great pleasure the last time he had tied a woman up. Actually, she’d suggested it. Said she was into
it. Said it excited her and to do it, do it please.

He’d never tied a woman up before then, although he’d certainly fantasized about it often enough. Having a taut female body
arching helplessly beneath him while he fucked her was one of the sexiest things he could imagine.

And it had been wild. He’d gone with his instincts and blindfolded her as well. She hadn’t expected that, and he’d seen the
wariness come over her face as he was tying the scarf over her eyes. Before that she’d looked almost too eager, but with the
blindfold he got her back under his control. She didn’t know what he was going to do. She wasn’t absolutely sure she could
trust him not to hurt her. What a turn-on!