Up in Flames (32 page)

His gaze darted over Sophie’s Jeep, then jerked back. The hatch was open, with three boxes inside. He recognized the company’s name in black script on the box, and recalled giving her the pool tiles from the Reznick job. She must have come to return them.

Reznick. Exotic insects.

Manny and bug parts.

It was the only connection he had. And it was action; he had to move, to do something.

Ducking into the truck, he slammed the door and sprayed gravel in an arc as he raced down the driveway to the highway.

Manny hadn’t made a move toward her, but she had no doubt he would. She backed away, scanning the room as she did. It was sparse, utilitarian except for the expensive camera equipment, but seemed to be exactly what she’d been told—a low-budget movie studio. “Why do you have access to this place?”

“Because of the bugs, of course. I deliver them.”

“You?”

“It’s one of my jobs.” A shadow of hesitation touched his face. “I thought you knew this.”

“I don’t know anything.”

It had seemed worth trying, but apparently he wasn’t buying it. “Unfortunately, you do. I deliver the live bugs for Artie. Sometimes I bring them over the border, too,” he told her, explaining the process as patiently as he had when he taught her to lay paving stones. “From Mexico. I go anyway, to see my family.”

The lesson done, he took a couple of steps toward her. She took a couple more backward. She bumped into one of the large movie cameras, stumbled, and jumped aside without taking her eyes off Manny.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“Because Mr. Reznick is a suspect now, not Zane. They must find you in a place where he would leave you.”

Where he might leave her body, he meant. But mentioning her death might be impolite. With thoughts of her impending death distracting her, she couldn’t follow his reasoning. “Why didn’t you leave Rena Torres here?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“Come on, Manny. If you’re going to kill me, I have a right to know.”

He took a moment to think it over, then stepped toward her. “No, you don’t.”

She skittered backward, caught her foot, and looked down at a tangle of cables. High-stepping carefully, she kept one eye on the cables and the other on Manny.

He seemed content to work her slowly toward the corner of the studio with the furniture, probably making it easier to trap her. Her only chance would be to disable him long enough to make it to the door, but now he’d be watching for her ineffective kick. There had to be something here she could use as a weapon.

The longer she distracted him, the more time she had to look. “You made Zane look responsible for Rena’s death. I thought you liked Zane.”

“No one was supposed to find Rena’s body.”

“But if they did, Zane would take the fall.”

“Yes. That’s too bad. But it is your fault. You were not supposed to dig. You should have done as you were told, Sophie.”

He stepped through the cables, relentlessly pacing her. She wiggled the rope around her wrists as she shuffled backward, but only succeeded in making her skin raw. If she could pull at the knot with her teeth she might loosen it, but she doubted Manny would stand still while she did that.

“Is that why you killed Rena, Manny? Did she disobey you? Break a rule?”

His frown cut deep furrows in his forehead. “Rena broke many rules. Women like that, they don’t deserve respect.”

“They deserve to die?”

It seemed like a leap of logic to her, but it didn’t bother him. “Yes. It was her choice.”

She bumped into something and glanced around. A bed. She’d backed all the way into the stage set of a bedroom. She took a few rapid steps to the side as Manny paced after her, slowly closing the distance between them. She’d back into a wall soon.

She tried again to tap into his guilt, hoping to distract him. “I hate to tell you, Manny, but Rena didn’t choose to die. You made that choice for her. Except it’s not yours to make, is it?”

He looked mildly annoyed by the accusation, so she pushed harder. “You might not approve of women who sleep around, but it’s not against the law.”

“I did not care about that.”

She skirted a chair, keeping it between them as she tried to puzzle it out. “Then what did she do that was so wrong? Did she come on to you?”

Not even an eye twitch. His intent herding didn’t falter and she risked another look at the bed behind her. Silky ropes with handcuffs dangled from the footboard; did alien monster flicks get kinky?

Her eyes darted back to Manny as a new fear dawned. “What do you plan to do to me?”

“I think you already know, Sophie.” He paused to drag a chair across the only exit path from the cluttered corner. “I am sorry you have to die. You were nice.”

“I fucking baked you cookies!”

“Thank you, they were delicious.” He paused to untie a length of cord, wrapped each end in his fist, then tested it with a quick pull.

Her insides felt jittery. “Is that what you did to Rena, Manny? You found her here when you delivered the bugs, and you decided if she put out for other men, she could do it for you, too?” He didn’t blink as he moved closer. She backed into a table, penned in by a densely packed rack of clothing. “What’s the matter, did she turn you down?”

She thought it would be a jab at his ego, but he smiled. “Rena offered herself. It was just a job to her.” He raised the cord as he moved in.

A job. She felt a little slow that she hadn’t realized she was on a porn set. That explained the bedroom furniture. But it didn’t explain Rena’s excessive devotion to her craft, handing out free samples as if she had to keep in practice.

Unless it wasn’t the sex she was practicing.

“She filmed you, didn’t she?”

He stopped, frowning at the memory she’d jogged. “She did not tell me. But I saw the lights on afterward, blinking like little red eyes. Recording. I knew what she did.” His voice shook with anger, the first sign that he might be losing some of his carefully held control.

“Sex should be private,” she said, guessing his thoughts.

“She
laughed
about it. She said millions of people would see me on the Internet.”

He was close. His narrowed gaze flicked to the bed, just for a second. It was the only opening she’d get. Lacing her fingers as tightly as she could, she swung at the side of his head.

Her swing wasn’t as powerful as she’d hoped, and the blow glanced off his jaw. But it was enough to make him stagger into the bed, which was all she needed. Diving between a nurse’s uniform and a cheerleading outfit, she fought her way through the clothes rack. She’d barely cleared it when Manny grabbed her from behind.

She pulled free, but stumbled into a shelving unit. Trapped again, with Manny past the edge of patience. Reaching blindly for something to throw, her hands encountered a heavy piece of glass on the shelf. She pulled, tipping it to the floor in a loud shatter of glass and dirt.

Not exactly dirt. Substrate; the habitat material for the beetles. Several more aquariums lined the shelves.

The broken habitat littered the floor between her and Manny, causing him to pause. She didn’t; grabbing another aquarium, she pulled it to the floor. Then another, and another, moving down the length of the shelf. One crash after another scattering glass, sand, and dirt. Not a barrier, although it seemed to be strangely effective.

Manny stood frozen, staring at the floor. Sophie looked, too. Over a scattering of mulch and broken glass, a hoard of hairy black spiders fled the destruction of their homes. Tarantulas.

They would head for the closest cover, she knew. Manny may not have known that. He stared in wide-eyed fear, before taking a few awkward steps backward, as if he’d forgotten how to make his legs move.

She had no pity. “They’re poisonous!” she screamed. Poor acting, but possibly up to standards for this studio. “Save yourself! Run!”

It was as bad as any line from Reznick’s campy alien movies, but it worked. He ran.

She wanted to leave, too, but there was only one way out, and Manny had taken it. If she ran into him again, she had to be ready. Sitting down in the scattered dirt and dead leaves from the aquariums, she set her teeth to the rope binding her wrists, and began tugging at the knot.

Zane stopped behind Manny’s van and jumped from his truck. He was halfway to the building when the side door burst open and Manny barreled out, eyes bulging with terror and mouth open in a silent scream.

Dipping his shoulder, he hit him in the stomach, knocking him to the ground in perfect NFL style. Manny struggled to breathe as Zane rose to his knees, grabbed him by the shoulders, and shook him. “Where is she?”

Manny sucked in a harsh breath, and managed a pitiful whimper.

He slapped Manny’s face, not because it would help, but because beating him harder would mean he couldn’t talk. “Where is she, damn it!”

Manny pressed a hand to his stomach and drew a tortured breath.
“Tarantula,”
he gasped.

Zane didn’t see any, and didn’t care, but the braided cord Manny inexplicably clutched in his hand looked useful. Snatching it, he pulled Manny’s hands behind his back and tied them together, looping the cord through the man’s belt for good measure. He rolled Manny to his side and tried it one more time. “Where’s Sophie? In English.”

Manny’s terrified gaze swung toward the studio, then back at Zane. “Poison,” he whispered.

Zane’s insides twisted, picturing Sophie writhing in pain from something he didn’t know how to fix. “What kind of poison?” He pulled Manny to a sitting position, but it was apparent the man couldn’t speak. Letting him drop, he took off for the studio.

“Sophie!” he yelled, barreling through the door and down a wide hallway where a door stood open. “Sophie!” He paused to scan what looked like a soundstage, and spotted her across the room, sitting in a scattering of dirt and broken glass, her head bent but moving. “Oh, God,” he groaned, both grateful and worried as he dashed across the room.

She raised her head and sighed with relief. “Zane! Thank God. Did you see Manny?”

“I got him.” He dropped to his knees, cupping her face and checking her eyes for . . . he didn’t know what he was looking for. “Did he give you some sort of poison, Sophie? How do you feel?”

“I’m okay.” She lifted her hands with a pleading look. “Could you get this for me?”

He glanced down, then transferred his grip to her hands. The sisal rope had worn raw lines in the soft skin of her wrists. “Son of a bitch,” he growled, and began working at the knot. She held still, the worried creases in her forehead already fading when he darted another glance at her. “You’re sure you’re okay? He said something about poison.”

“He meant the spiders.”

His fingers stopped as he shot a look around the dirt-strewn floor. “Poisonous spiders?”

She jiggled her hands, reminding him to keep going. “They’re not poisonous, I just told him that. They’re tarantulas.”

He stopped again, staring at her. “How many tarantulas?”

“Lots, but they’re harmless.” She jiggled her hands again. “Please. The rope.”

He finished quickly, then examined each wrist as she shook feeling back into the other. The red lines in her skin made him yearn to go outside and take a few more shots at Manny.

“Thank you,” she sighed. With a grateful smile, she threw her arms around his neck.

He forgot about hitting Manny. He sat on the dirt, pulled Sophie onto his lap, and took her face in his hands as he kissed her, first gentle, grateful kisses, then a long deep kiss that might never end.

Manny was probably wiggling his way toward the trees, but Zane could hear the first wailing police car bumping its way downhill toward the studio, no doubt wreaking hell with his new sod. They could handle Manny. He had the most important person right here in his arms, and he wasn’t letting go of her again.

21

Z
ane sat in
his truck, reading the latest issue of the Barringer’s Pass newspaper-slash-rumor mill, the
Echo
. They were calling Sophie the Spider Woman, wringing every bit of drama possible from the deluge of tarantulas she’d loosed on Manny. Most of them had been babies from a breeding aquarium, a fact the
Echo
chose to leave out when they mentioned the “dozens of poisonous spiders” she’d released.

At least they’d stuck to the facts with his interview. The reporter had been ecstatic when Zane had called to offer a first-person account of foiling his brother’s schemes, then revealing Rena’s killer and simultaneously clearing his own name. It was such a delicious combination of scandal and high drama that the paper had shown unprecedented restraint, adding only a few lurid adjectives. It had been difficult for him to tell the story, drawing unwanted public attention to himself. But Sophie and her family had done so much to defend his name that he couldn’t sit back and let them do it all. He’d had to speak up for himself. It turned out that promoting himself hadn’t been as uncomfortable as he’d feared, not after the rejection and hatred he’d experienced by avoiding the public eye for most of his life.

A tap on the window pulled him out of the article. He set the paper aside and opened his door, stepping out to face the man he’d been waiting for.

He was exactly what Zane had expected, a dignified graying executive, polite but no-nonsense. “Sorry, but you’ll have to move, buddy. You’re in my spot.”

“I know.” The labeled parking spaces for executives in Pace Laboratory’s parking lot had made identifying Ron Cezerki easy. “I’ll be glad to get out of your way, Mr. Cezerki. But I wanted to talk with you about something we have in common. Two things actually.”

Cezerki raised an eyebrow, not shutting him out yet. That part was coming soon. “What’s that?”

“We’ve both had our lives irreparably damaged by Emmett Thorson.”

Hardness settled over Ron Cezerki’s features like a curtain falling. “Emmett Thorson is not someone I care to think about, or to discuss with strangers.” He jerked his chin up in a challenging gesture. “Who are you?”

He took a deep breath. “I’m Zane Thorson, Mr. Cezerski. I’m not apologizing for that, but I’m hoping you won’t have me hauled off by security before I can tell you about the other thing we have in common.” He looked him straight in the eye, not aggressive but not backing down, either.

Cezerki took his measure, grinding his jaw over his decision. “What’s the other thing?” he asked.

“We both admire Sophie Larkin for her intelligence and her integrity. I also happen to be in love with her, so I have even more reason to know how special she is.”

It was enough to make Cezerki pause, but not enough to improve his disposition. “Zane. I remember you from the trial.” His flat stare narrowed to a sharp point. “You said Emmett was innocent of raping my daughter.”

“No, I answered what I was asked. I said I’d never seen my fifteen-year-old brother act violently toward a woman—that was the best his lawyer could get out of me, and he knew it. If I’d been allowed to speculate, I would have said Emmett was not only capable of rape, he might kill, too. If you want to despise me for being related to him, well, you won’t be the only one. Just don’t think I defended anything he did.”

Bringing up the subject had cracked Cezerki’s control, and he sucked in several deep breaths, apparently forcing himself to stay calm. “What does this have to do with Sophie Larkin?”

“Emmett? Nothing. That has to do with you and me. Sophie had nothing to do with it.”

“So what’s your point? If you’re trying to clean up your image, you picked a bad time, and a poor way to make a good impression.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t care what you think of me, Mr. Cezerki. It’s what you think of Sophie that matters to me. Like I said, she’s a special person. I’ve learned a lot from her lately about standing up for yourself and your beliefs, no matter what others say. She does that. I imagine you’d understand, the way you stood up for your daughter, even after the legal system let you down.”

Cezerki cocked his head slightly in a speculative glance, and Zane was sure the man knew where this was going. He didn’t keep him waiting. “Is it true you wouldn’t offer Sophie a job because of her connection to me?”

“I don’t know how you’d know about it, but yes, it’s true.”

“Then I want to say that you’re doing her a disservice, because she doesn’t deserve to be punished for being loyal to a friend and to her own convictions. You’re also doing yourself a disservice, because she’s the best there is.”

Cezerki gave him a long look. “You forgot to mention that her convictions about your innocence appear to have been right.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t want to lay it on too thick, but damn right they were.”

Cezerki hummed thoughtfully to himself. Zane waited. Finally, he asked, “You have someplace you have to be, Thorson?”

“No, sir.”

“Get in your truck and follow me. There’s a coffee shop a mile up the road.” Cezerki strode back to the car he’d left idling behind Zane’s pickup, slid inside, and headed out of the parking lot. Zane scrambled to start his truck and follow.

Sophie parked next to Zane’s white pickup, the only other vehicle at Natural Designs. The police had finally released his pickup yesterday, along with the dump truck she could see through the open doors of the large equipment barn. Zane was there, too, wiping his hands on a rag as he walked out to meet her.

He smiled, his eyes conveying the spark of desire that always seemed to leap between them, and she steeled herself against responding to it. Not yet. And not unless he had a good explanation for what he’d done.

“Hi,” he said, leaning in to kiss her.

She kissed him back, because she wasn’t ready to deny herself
every
satisfaction until she decided whether she was seriously angry with him or just mildly pissed off. “Hi.”

“I thought you were going to see someone about a job.” He reached out, casually brushing a strand of hair off her cheek. Damn it, she liked it when he did that.

“I did,” she said, hurrying to make her point before he touched her again, because it had the annoying affect of making her mind go all fuzzy and happy. “I talked with Ron Cezerki at Pace Labs.”

“That’s the place in Juniper where you wanted to work, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Funny you would know that.”

“You must have mentioned it.”

“Or maybe Ron did when you talked to him the other day.”

His cocky, off-center grin was probably the same one he would have used as a kid, getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. If they’d had a cookie jar. “That could be it,” he said. Not the least bit embarrassed.

He didn’t even apologize. It helped her forget his sexy smile and remember the fury that had spoiled her triumphant moment. She pinned him with a narrowed glare. “Zane, I don’t need you lobbying for me. I don’t
want
it. I’ll get a job on my own merits, and not because you guilted someone into it, or twisted their arm. And furthermore, I resent that you think I
need
your help. I earned two masters degrees and a Ph.D. without your help, and I can find a job without it, too.”

“Good, because I’m not offering help.” He probably meant to look disinterested, but curiosity danced in his eyes. “Did he offer you a job?”

“Yes. And I’m not taking it, because
I
didn’t get it.
You
did. Thanks a lot for ruining that perfect opportunity.”

He made a sound that sounded suspiciously like a muffled laugh. “What do you think I did, use the Thorson name to scare him into hiring you?”

“Something like that.” It didn’t sound like Zane, but she clung stubbornly to the facts. “I happen to know he hates you.”

“He hated Emmett, Sophie. So did I. I thought Cezerki and I should talk about that because it was interfering with
your
life, and that’s not right. I know how much you hate social injustice. It seems I’ve learned something about standing up against it.”

She’d worked up a nice, hot temper, and couldn’t believe how easily he’d pulled her indignant anger right out from under her. “You’re using my own argument against me?”

He smiled. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

She bit her cheek, going over his explanation, reluctant to back down so easily. “You really didn’t try to convince Ron to hire me?”

“Your qualifications may have come up. But all I wanted to convince him to do was look at you without looking at me. Sophie, I don’t know enough about what you do to convince someone to hire you. You did that all on your own when you interned there, and when you came back with the right qualifications.”

She stared at him for several seconds, unable to come up with something to refute his sensible answer, or to explain his unexpected intervention on her behalf. The Zane she’d known a few weeks ago wouldn’t have done that. “I don’t believe it,” she muttered, shaking her head in wonder. “We’ve turned you into a social activist. My mother’s going to be thrilled.”

He chuckled. “So are you going to take the job?”

She looked around his empty yard and parking lot. “You just want to get me off the payroll.”

“Are you kidding? I’m desperate for help. Alan Bernstein just signed a contract for $90,000 worth of landscaping, and you’re the only employee I have at the moment. Plus, now you have experience.”

Her own employment situation was forgotten in an instant. “You got the contract!” She grinned her delight. “That’s great!” Throwing her arms around his neck, she gave him a congratulatory kiss. Then a few more, just for fun. “Can I see the plans?”

“Sure, they’re in the office.” He threw an arm around her shoulders as they started across the deserted parking lot. In another week the place would probably be humming with activity as he got a new crew started on the Bernstein job.

“So what gave me away? Did Cezerki tell you I went to see him?”

That was another issue, and she gave him a warning look. “He told me to say hello to my fiancé.”

He smiled. “Ah. I see.”

“Well, I don’t. You didn’t have to make up something like that to prove your concern about me.”

“I didn’t make it up. Are you going to tell me you don’t think we’ll get married?”

She stopped dead. That was
not
the answer she’d expected. “I . . .” She cleared her throat and tried again. “I don’t recall talking about it.”

“I don’t recall telling you I loved you before you informed me that I did. Some things are just obvious.”

Marriage was obvious? She let the thought roll around in her head, waiting for the disbelief. Nothing.

Maybe he was right.

She squinted one eye, wondering what other surprises lay ahead. “Did I say anything else you intend to use against me?”

He smiled. “Can’t think of anything right now. But stick around, I’m sure I will.”