Keepsake (36 page)

She gave him a mischievous smile. “I’m ready. Your place or mine?”

“This is for you,” said Rob.

They had settled on her place, and he had insisted on stopping at a small grocery store on the way home and picking up a couple
of steaks and the makings of a salad. “You always cook for me,” he said. “Tonight I want to do something for you.”

He had made her a lovely meal, and now, as they sat over coffee, he handed her a flat square box. “Open it. Sorry it’s not
wrapped.”

“Gee, it’s not my birthday or anything.”

“I want you to have it.”

In the box, nestled on cotton, was a necklace made of beaten silver. It was solid, like a choker, and set into the handcrafted
silver were several black and white stones.

She looked up at him, smiling with surprise and pleasure. “Rob, it’s beautiful. I don’t know what to say.” It must have been
fairly expensive, she was thinking.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s gorgeous!” She fingered the silver, admiring the crafting. This relationship was still in its beginning stages, and
she wasn’t entirely certain how to interpret such a gift.

“May I?” He took it from her. “Lift your hair.”

She gathered her thick hair in one hand and pulled it up out of the way while he fastened the silver necklace around her neck.
When he secured it in the back, it was snug, but comfortable.

“I was a little worried it might not fit,” he said. “It looked so small…”

“I have a little neck,” she said, smiling. “It fits fine.”

He touched the silver in front, just above her pulse point, and gave her a wicked grin. “It looks a bit like a slave collar.”

“Ah hah! So that’s your motive!”

He raised his eyebrows. “Someday,” he said.

“Threats, threats!”

He took her head between his palms and pulled her close. “Kiss me,” he ordered.

She obeyed.

But later that night it was Rob, not April, who had an anxiety attack. He was lying with her in his arms, half asleep, dreaming
or fantasizing—he wasn’t sure which. He saw her melting in his arms. Shrinking, turning transparent, slipping away from him.
He jerked up, his heart hammering, uncertain for a moment whether he was holding April’s loving body, or Jessie’s corpse.

What if he lost her? He’d been making one mistake after another. She had almost died.

It took him a long time to fall back to sleep again.

In the morning, he told her. “Listen, April,” he said slowly. “I think maybe it’s time for me to back off this case a bit.”

“What d’you mean, back off?”

“I think somebody else should be guarding you. I’m thinking of Jonas, actually. He’s younger than I am, probably stronger
and certainly quicker. Plus he’ll have the objectivity that I lack.”

“I don’t get it, Rob. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I don’t think we should see each other for a while.”

She touched his face uncertainly. “Why not?”

“Because you’re not safe with me.” He shook his head, once again seeing fragments of the dream. “I can’t keep you safe.”

“Of course I’m safe with you!”

“Look, it’s not up for discussion. Rina died in my care. You almost died last week because I wasn’t alert enough to the possibilities.
Obviously I’m losing it, and I’m not going to take any more chances with your life. You need protection and I’m going to see
that you get it.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Look, I don’t interfere in your business and I don’t want you interfering in mine. Nobody who’s emotionally involved with
a client has any business to be protecting their life. I’m too vulnerable. Too liable to make mistakes. It can’t continue.”

She sat up in bed. She was still wearing his lovely necklace—it had remained on her throat ever since he had given it to her
and placed it there. “This is an excuse, isn’t it?”

“What do you—”

“You’re feeling vulnerable because you’re feeling something that you don’t want to feel. It’s the old approach-avoid thing.
The man begins to feel close… he expresses affection, he makes gestures, the woman responds, and suddenly it’s too much for
him. He’s allowed himself to get too emotionally involved. So he backs off to a safer distance. Is that what’s happening here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with how well you can protect me. I think what it’s really about is how well you can
protect yourself.”

He regarded her steadily. “You may be right. But the fact remains that for whatever reason, I don’t feel that I can do a good
job. We have to find this killer and stop
him. We have to unravel the heart of the mystery of who hired him in the first place. Worse, we have to contend with the possibility
that there has been some sort of professional parting of the ways here—that it has become personal. That the killer may now
be working for himself.”

“You mean he’ll come after me even if nobody orders him to do it?”

“I’m afraid of that, yes. Why does someone become a professional killer? The money’s good, but it’s a high-risk vocation.
He’s violating the most ancient laws of how one human being behaves toward another. It takes some sort of pathology to do
it, and this guy has apparently gone over the edge. The rose was a warning sign. Cold professional killers don’t send roses
to their victims.”

“We don’t know for certain that the killer sent that rose.”

He looked startled for a moment. “I think we can assume it.”

“Are you saying that even if we find out who hired him and throw him—or her—into prison, I still won’t be safe?”

“Yes. You’re at risk, and so, I suspect, is Kate, who also saw his face. Our job is tougher now. On the other hand, we have
a few more clues. We’ll get him, eventually. But it’s going to require a complete commitment of time and energy, and I think,
frankly, that I’m better used as an investigator than as a bodyguard. Jonas has done more bodyguarding recently than I have,
anyway. I trust him completely, and so can you.”

“I don’t like this, Rob. It doesn’t feel right to me.”

“Trust me, April. Please.”

“I trust you,” she said. But deep in her heart she wondered if it was true. Did she really trust anybody? Had she ever, since
Rina had left?

When the door to her office opened unexpectedly and a man walked in, April’s heart turned over.

She must be more nervous than she’d realized.

“You okay?” said Christian de Sevigny. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Didn’t you hear me knock?”

“Uh, no,” she said. She’d been daydreaming. But he must have knocked pretty damn softly. “Usually my secretary buzzes me and
warns me when someone’s about to come in. A nice perk—having a secretary.” She managed a smile. “That’s a first for me, I’ll
admit. I did my own clerical work in the bookstore.”

Christian glanced at the paper-thin gold watch that graced his angular wrist. “It’s twelve-thirty. She’s probably gone to
lunch.”

April nodded. Where was Carla? she wondered.

Christian, after all, was one of the suspects.

Right on cue, Carla’s head popped in the door, checking. April nodded to her. For now, it was okay.

“How’s Kate?” she asked.

“She’s much better. Pretty much back to her normal self, in fact.” He shook his head. “Now that it’s over, she seems to be
taking inordinate pride in the fact that she got shot and lived to tell about it. She’s on the phone constantly with her friends,
telling them all the gory details.”

“But it’s not over,” April said.

“No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

Almost a week had passed and nothing much had happened, except that Isobelle and Charlie suddenly seemed to be at each other’s
throats. The rumor was that the romance had ended, but neither had confirmed it, and April didn’t feel close enough to either
of them to ask.

As for her own romance, that seemed to have fizzled also. Blackthorn had indeed backed off. Jonas guarded her now at night,
and Carla during the day. She had hardly seen Rob at all.

She was trying not to focus on how much she missed him. If she thought about it too much, she felt those old feelings rising
in her—that sense of being abandoned. She told herself over and over that this was a silly, irrational reaction. That Rob
was a professional, and this was how he felt he had to do his job. That he’d given her the necklace—and that it must mean
something. That men always bounced back and forth in this manner, and that if she just waited it out, he would return, and
move closer to her than before.

Anyhow, she reminded herself, she had more serious problems to worry about.

“Listen, there’s something I want to speak to you about,” Christian said. “It’s about the investigation.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“Actually, it’s about Robert Blackthorn.” His glacial
blue eyes were looking straight into hers. “After he came to my home and started making a lot of wild accusations, my father
and I did some checking into his background. We found something. It might not seem like much, but, well, it’s strange. I thought
you should know about it, since he and his people are watching out for you.”

“What are you getting at?”

“It’s easier, actually, to show you.” He handed her an unsealed envelope. It contained an enclosure that looked like a Xerox
of a newspaper article.

“I don’t know how well you know Blackthorn,” Christian said as she removed the article and unfolded it. His tone seemed to
indicate that he
did
know how well she knew him. “But this seems to me to be a fairly important piece of information. After all, as we’ve agreed,
there are many reasons to want someone dead. Revenge is one of the oldest motives.”

The enclosure was a clipping from a local newspaper in the small town on Long Island where Blackthorn had lived with his wife
until her death. It was a letter to the editor, apparently in response to an article on alternative healing. Its tone was
scathing, and it read, in part:

“To promote hope and optimism in seriously ill patients is fine as long as these so-called ‘alternative healers’ don’t interfere
with traditional therapies that actually have some chance of working.

“But to brainwash cancer patients with stories about the horrors of chemotherapy and radiation therapy in order to lure them
away from the medical establishment and thereby get their business and collect their money is unconscionable.

“Someone very dear to me is dead because she paid far greater attention to the comforting
—
but medically useless—banalities of the ‘self-help’ organization Power Perspectives.
If she had spent less time trying to ‘find her own power,’ and more subjecting herself to the proven powers of modern medicine,
she might still be alive today.

“Power Perspectives, and organizations like it that make phenomenal amounts of money offering useless panaceas for all of
life’s pains, are collectively responsible for killing thousands of credulous clients every year.

“They must be stopped, by any means possible.”

The letter to the editor was signed “Robert Blackthorn.”

April shook her head and read it again. The clipping was dated a little more than a year and a half ago, which must have been
shortly after his wife had died.

She looked up at Christian. She could feel her heart racing. “What are you trying to suggest with this?”

“Merely that if I were you, I’d want to know as much as possible about the man to whom I was entrusting my life.”

After Christian left, April sat still and silent at her desk. She was alarmed at how quickly her imagination spun out a wild
tale of suspicion and treachery. Halfheartedly, she told herself that she’d spent too many years working in a shop that specialized
in murder mysteries.

Her imaginings went like this: Blackthorn was secretly an enemy of Rina’s. He had pretended to be her friend, got himself
hired to guard her, and then himself engaged the killer of the Anaheim convention center. He had allowed him into the seminar
room and, knowing full well the identity of the real shooter, he had tackled April and thereby created the diversion that
had assured the assassin’s escape.

His reasons for all this? Revenge. He blamed Rina de
Sevigny—and Power Perspectives—for his beloved wife’s death.

“They must be stopped, by any means possible.”

He had believed that Rina’s death would cripple the organization. Mission accomplished.

But then April had come along. And although she didn’t share her mother’s fervor for these methods, she was a good manager,
both of people and of finances, and so far she’d done a creditable job of keeping the company together. Power Perspectives
was still in business, and seizing your own power was still all the rage, despite its founder’s death.

So he’d decided to kill her as well.

After all, she was a danger to him. She’d persisted in digging into the mystery of her mother’s death. She’d even suggested
that an examination of Rina’s relationships with her clients held the key, and one of Rina’s clients had been Jessie Blackthorn.

Stop it, April.

She hugged herself, trying to interrupt the wild spiraling of her thoughts. Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t suspect everybody
you come in contact with!

No, she told herself, if she was going to suspect anyone in this, let it be Christian. He’d probably shown this material to
her purely to sow more confusion, wreak more havoc, and direct suspicion away from himself.

She took a deep breath. The thing to do, of course, was turn the material directly over to Rob, and let him handle it.

Irresistibly, her eyes were drawn back to the words he had written to the small-town newspaper. “Someone very dear to me is
dead… collectively responsible for killing thousands of credulous clients every year… any means possible… they must be stopped.”

In a state of grief, a man might be capable of making some pretty wild accusations.

But these sentiments were very strongly expressed.