Sweet Dreams Boxed Set (155 page)

“He didn’t have a choice. He needed a car.”

“But you didn’t know him, did you? You must have been scared to death.”

“It was fairly obvious from the start that Jason wasn’t a dangerous man.”

“They said they found evidence in your apartment that he had tied you to the bed.”

“He never hurt me.”

Sophie rested a hand on her chest. “I would have been scared to death. A strange man demanding I give up my car, then tying me to the bed.”

Angela had nothing to say to that.

Sophie lifted a brow. “Have you two formed a relationship?”

Angela’s eye widened. “Why do I get the feeling I’m being interrogated?”

“I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s none of my business.”

“What are you two discussing?”

They both looked in the direction of the bedroom. Jason, wearing boxers and nothing else, made his way toward them, his gait slow and steady. His side was covered in bandages.

Angela helped him to the living room. “You shouldn’t be out of bed. You need to rest.”

“I heard voices.” Once he was settled on the couch, he took a good long look at Sophie. “It’s been a long time.”

“It’s good to see you, Jason.”

“Is Colin coming?”

“He couldn’t get away. They’re still watching the house.”

“I see.”

“Colin said you needed clothes, so I stopped at the store and bought you some pants and a couple of shirts. I hope it all fits.” She gestured toward the bag on the floor.

“Sorry about your mom.” Jason tried to get comfortable but wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Not until Angela disappeared and then returned with an armful of pillows and a blanket. “As you can see,” Jason said, “I’m being well taken care of.”

Angela blushed as she worked the pillows around him just so. Once she was finished, she straightened and then plunked her hands on her hips. “How’s that?”

“Perfect. Thank you.”

“I’m going to give you two some time to catch up,” Angela said. “I’ll be in the kitchen heating up some soup. You’re probably hungry.”

“Starved.”

***

As soon as Angela disappeared, Sophie took a seat on the edge of the couch.

“You shaved your head.”

He rubbed the palm of his hand over it. “Still not used to it.”

She smiled. “Even without hair, you look handsome.”

Before he could respond, she added, “I’m sorry I haven’t been to prison to see you in a while. Life tends to get in the way. Before you know it, days become months, and months become years.”

He gritted his teeth.

“You’re angry, aren’t you?”

He met her gaze. “You could say that. I’m rotting in prison and suddenly you drop off the face of the earth without a word, without a goodbye, and you think ‘you’re sorry’ covers it?”

Her spine stiffened.

“How long have you and Colin been seeing one another?”

Surprise lit up her face. “What?”

“When I was talking to Colin on the phone, I heard your voice in the background.”

Both of her hands were in her lap now. She looked suddenly anxious, making him wonder if she could be the one who’d murdered Colin and framed him. She had a key to his house, easy access to his kitchen knives. She’d been frustrated with Dirk back then, seemed reluctant to leave him. But kill him?

A tear slid down the side of her face. “After you were convicted, I was alone. My boyfriend had killed a man and yet I had nobody to confide in or to talk to.” Her hand shot up to her mouth. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“You believe I killed Dirk?”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh, come on, Sophie. You just said as much. Quit lying to me. You can’t even look me in the eye.”

“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “After you were locked up, there were so many stories being told about you that painted a different picture of the man I knew. It got to the point that I didn’t know what to believe any longer.”

A ripple of fresh pain swept through him. It was one thing to think she might not believe in him, but something else altogether to hear her say the words. “You didn’t answer my question. How long have you been seeing Colin?”

“Does it really matter?”

“It does to me.”

She remained silent.

“The two of you have been together since the moment they took me away,” he stated aloud, as if he could see things clearly for the first time.

She didn’t have the courage to look him in the eye, but she nodded.

“In those first few years, you and Colin came to see me fairly often, and yet neither of you had the decency to tell me the truth. Why did you do it, Sophie?”

“Because I’m weak. I couldn’t stand to be alone. I needed him.”

“No,” Jason said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

She looked at him, confusion lining her face.

“Why did you kill Dirk?” he prodded.

Her eyes brightened with indignation. “I did no such thing. What’s wrong with you?”

He wagged a finger at her. “Ah, why didn’t I see it all before?” He struggled to sit up taller. “For years you had your little finger wrapped around all three of us, didn’t you?”

She continued to stare at him as if he were the crazy one.

“It was Colin,” he said. “You had Colin do the dirty work and then the two of you set me up. The two of you must have gotten in a few good laughs at my expense.”

She jumped to her feet, every muscle tense as she shuffled through her purse and pulled out a wad of cash. “I’m not going to listen to any more of your crazy talk. I came here because I wanted to help. Colin said you needed a change of clothes and I thought you might need some cash.” She tossed the bills on the coffee table. “Three hundred dollars. Any more than that would have raised a red flag.”

“I don’t need or want your money.”

She ignored him and headed for the entryway. “Use the house as long as you need it.”

“Yeah, sure. The police should be here any minute, isn’t that right?”

She turned about, her face lined with anger. “I told the neighbors that my cousin was using the house for a while.” She lifted her chin. “Colin adores you. He thinks of you as a brother.  He wanted to tell you the truth right from the beginning, hated the lies, but—”

“You can both go to hell.”

A few seconds after the door slammed shut, he heard it open again. Angela had stepped outside to talk to Sophie. He could hear voices, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. A moment later, Angela was by his side, asking him what had happened to make Sophie rush off like that.

He did his best to rein in his bitterness. “Turns out that the moment I was thrown into prison, she moved in with Colin. Although she hasn’t been to visit me in a long while, I can’t say the same for Colin. And yet he never thought to mention they were living together.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“I understand.”

And he knew she did.

After a quick trip to the kitchen, Angela returned with a cloth napkin, a spoon, and a bowl of tomato soup. While he ate, she sat on the chair across from him, the computer in her lap.

“What were you talking to Sophie about?” he asked.

“I wanted to know if she remembered the names of any of the women Dirk was seeing when she was with him.”

“And?”

“She gave me two names, along with the cities where they used to live.”

“Eight years later and she still remembers their names and the city where they lived?”

Angela met his gaze. “You don’t know women at all, do you?”

Silence.

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

He thought about it for a moment before he said, “No. I’m not in love Sophie. I’m in love with a distant memory, a past life I no longer have.”

“So, now that you’ve seen her and talked to her, what do you think? Is she a suspect?”

“The cops haven’t knocked on the door yet. It would have been real easy for her to give them a call and let them know where I was.”

“Unless she didn’t want Colin to know what she was up to.”

He set the bowl on a side table. “True. The people closest to me will all have to remain suspects until I’m one hundred percent sure they’re not.”

She nodded. “What about the guy who attacked you? There were two men. I did manage to jot down a license plate number, but it doesn’t do us much good unless you have a friend in the police force.”

“Hang on to it, will you?”

She nodded again. “Why would someone be trying to kill you? Do you think that lawyer of yours could have had something to do with the attack?”

“No. Mike and Stephanie both seemed genuinely scared. I’ve definitely worried someone, though. It’s no longer good enough that I’m thrown back in prison. This time, they want me dead.”

“But why?”

“That’s the million dollar question.”

“I think it’s time to concentrate on the women who probably knew Dirk best.” She went back to working on her computer, clicking away at the keyboard.

“What are their names?”

“Pam Cooper and Karen Hickman.”

He watched her as she concentrated on the task at hand. Angela Chack was beautiful, inside and out, he thought.

She looked up and caught him staring. “What?”

“I was just thinking about how special you are...and beautiful.”

“Stop,” she said with a smile.

“Everyday that goes by, my opinion of Rob gets lower and lower. He had no idea what he had, and now he’s going to spend the rest of his life regretting letting you go.”

“That’s sweet of you to say.”

“It’s the truth. After what I put you through, here you are doing everything you can to help me. If none of this had ever happened to me, I think someway, somehow, we would have bumped into one another. We have a connection.” He let out a breath. “You do something to me, Angela. You make me feel things I’ve never felt before. I’m falling for you.”

She scrunched her nose. “That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve said since we met.”

“It’s the truth. I realize our time together has been beyond unconventional—”

“You think?”

He shrugged.

She pointed a finger at him. “
You
, Jason Caldwell, have been locked up for too many years. I think you’ve tasted freedom and you like it…so much so that everything around you, including me, seems refreshing and attractive.” She sighed and went back to her research.

After a moment, she looked up at him again, his feelings for her all but forgotten. “I’ve got an idea,” she said.

He waited for her to continue.

“I’m going to take the car in the morning and pay Pam Cooper and Karen Hickman a visit. I’ll pretend I’m a reporter doing a story about you.”

“Eight years after the fact?”

“Since you’re in the news right now, they won’t think it’s unusual.”

“What if they recognize your face?”

“I bought some hair dye when we were in Utah, but didn’t have time to use it. I’ll darken my hair tonight, cut it, put on some lipstick and a pair of sunglasses, and no one will be the wiser.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“We have two people who talked to someone with a voice synthesizer, which could be anyone. We need a name. If I set off early in the morning, I should be able to talk to both women and return here by five.”

“I’ll go with you. They could be dangerous.”

“You need another day of rest. I’ll be fine.”

The three hundred dollars Sophie had left on the table caught his eye, and got him thinking. “Most of the guys I met in prison murdered for one reason only,” he said under his breath.

She looked over her computer at him. “And that would be?”

“Money.” Gingerly, he moved his feet off the couch and to the floor. “Maybe Dirk not only
wanted
to sell the business, he
needed
to sell the business.”

“You think he might have owed someone a large sum of money?”

“You asked me a while ago who wanted to sell the business in the first place. I’ve thought about it some more and it came to me while I was sleeping earlier. It was Dirk. He was the one who brought the deal to the table. Why was Dirk suddenly interested in selling the business? At the time, I knew he needed money to take care of his son, but mostly I thought the idea to sell came out of left field. Now I can’t help but wonder if he owed someone a lot of money.”

“If that were true, selling the company would be a logical thing for him to want to do. So who do you think he could possibly owe that kind of money to?”

“Dirk wasn’t just a player,” Jason told her, “he was a partier. He made a lot of bad decisions. He liked to gamble, and lost a lot of money over the years.”

They were both quiet for a moment

“Now more than ever, I need to get hold of my computer.”

“The computer from your office, right?”

“I only had one computer, a laptop, that I kept at work.”

“Don’t you think it would have been tossed by now?”

“Not necessarily. Colin said that the company that bought Viro Pro kept all the computers. Many times companies keep back-up computers in case a file is corrupt. And most companies don’t make wiping a hard drive clean a priority. It’s time-consuming and costly.” Jason rubbed the tension out of the back of his neck. “It took a few years for Colin to sell the business, so maybe D.M.S. still uses it or never got around to getting rid of it.”

Angela finished typing when she found the info she was looking for. “Viro Pro was sold in early 2011. So now what?”

“I need to find out if D.M.S. Protection, the company that bought us out, is still around.”

It only took her a moment to find what they were looking for. “D.M.S. Protection is still in business. They’re doing well, in fact. Dale Burnside is in charge of finance.”

He headed for the phone in the kitchen, ignoring the pain as he went. “Do you see a number?”

“Got it.”

Chapter Thirteen

Ever since leaving Jason alone at the house that morning, Angela had been uneasy. What if Dirk had been involved with the mob? If so, those same people could be responsible for yesterday’s attack. At this point, she would rather see federal agents find him than heavies with guns. If she weren’t five minutes away from Karen Hickman’s house, she would have turned around and headed back. But she was too close now.