Sundays Are for Murder Page 11

Because she wasn’t completely ready to be alone with her thoughts, she had come here, to Ben, instead of going home. Ben was the only one she trusted.

  Trust. Now there was an expendable word.

  Her entire picture of Cris had been thrown out of focus. Apparently her sister wasn’t the person she’d thought she was. She’d always credited Cris with such high standards. And now…

  She didn’t know what was worse, that Cris had had an affair with a married man, or that she’d kept that affair a secret from her. On top of everything else, Charley felt betrayed. It shook up everything she thought she’d believed. Every time she thought she had a bead on who and what she was, someone came along to shake up the picture. She wouldn’t feel so confused if it hadn’t been for Brannigan.

  It was easy to blame the man for everything, but she was an FBI agent. She had to look at the truth first, her own feelings about the matter second.

  Not always the easiest thing.

  Unchanneled energy pulsed through Charley as she continued to pace. Turning sharply, she narrowly avoided colliding with the end of the bookcase that housed Ben’s late wife’s Hummel collection.

  She slanted a glance toward Ben to see if he noticed. He had. Being Ben, he hadn’t said anything. Her father would have been reading her the riot act before she was within a foot of the bookcase, telling her to be more careful.

  She needed to get a hold of herself.

  The interview with her sister’s friend, a former boyfriend named Michael Matthews, who was now teaching part-time at the university while going for his Ph.D., had been far from satisfying. Because it had been convincing. She came away from the interview believing that her sister had had the affair. That Cris was still in the affair the night she was killed.

  It wasn’t the most pleasant pill to swallow.

  Charley was grateful that she and Brannigan had come in separate cars, and that she could be alone with her thoughts on the way back to the Federal Building. The way she felt, she couldn’t have been held responsible for what she might have said to Brannigan. Silence was a great deal preferable.

  For the most part, she maintained it for the rest of the day, going over the other details in Cris’s folder, then comparing them to the details in the two folders she’d selected. One of the two women was having an affair with a married man. Just the way they believed that Stacy Pembroke was having one with her employer. The coincidence was too much to ignore.

  Above everything else, Charley considered herself a good FBI agent. But she was having a hell of a time dealing with this curve she’d been thrown.

  She wished she’d never laid eyes on Brannigan. Turning, she looked at Ben, who had calmly taken his seat at the small table for two in his kitchen.

  “Brannigan is cocky, arrogant, pushy. He doesn’t listen—”

  “Sounds very, very familiar,” Ben said, his round face consumed by an amused, knowing smile. He lifted his mug and took a sip.

  Charley blew out a breath. She wasn’t in the mood to be teased. Not even by Ben. “Stop kidding.”

  His eyes crinkled as he watched her wear a path in his rug. “I’m not.”

  “I listened to you,” she pointed out. Working with him, once she hit a rhythm, she’d absorbed everything the man had to teach her.

  Ben knew that he remembered things a little differently than she did. “Only when I made you.” He nodded at the steaming mug of tea he’d poured for her. “Sit down and have your tea before it gets cold.”

  “Tea,” she repeated with a sneer. “You’re a grown man, Ben. You shouldn’t be making tea. You need a hobby,” she told him. But she did as he instructed. She sat down and drew the mug closer to her, wrapping her hands around it.

  Ben’s brown eyes looked straight into her soul. Because she cared for him, Charley didn’t flinch. Instead, she waited for him to say something.

  “I don’t think you’re angry at Brannigan,” he said.

  Charley snorted, looking away. She brought the mug to her lips. Instead of drinking, she let the steam hit her, wishing it could do something about the clouds she felt inside. “And here I thought you were a perceptive man.”

  “I am,” he told her simply. Twenty-eight years on the job had given him some insight. Working with Charley had provided the rest. “You’re angry with Cris.”

  Well, that was a no-brainer, she thought. “Of course I’m angry with Cris. She’s dead and I can’t yell at her.” She struggled to keep her voice down, not wanting to take her feelings out on the person she considered her best friend. She hadn’t had one since Cris died. “I can’t ask her why she never told me about DeLuca.” She felt like hell inside. And it was going to take time to make peace with this. A long time.

  “This was a whole part of her life, Ben. According to her old boyfriend, Cris and the horny professor were an item for six months. Six months,” she repeated with emphasis, shaking her head at her own blindness. “And I never even had a clue. How dense is that?”

  “Not dense at all if she was hiding it,” Ben contradicted. “Wives hide it from their husbands, husbands hide it from their wives. Why not one sister from another? You didn’t expect her to do something like that, especially after your father stepped out on your mother, so why would you be looking for any signs that she was having an affair?”

  “Not looking,” Charley conceded. “But this was right under my nose. And it was my sister. My sister, Ben. Not some stranger. My twin sister. Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I sense it?” She paused to collect herself. To make him understand her frustration. “The night she was killed, just before the M.E. estimated that Cris died, I felt this sudden wave of unbelievable fear. I was sitting in the science library, reading some mind-numbing textbook. There were maybe five, six people around in the whole place. And all of a sudden, for no reason whatsoever, I was scared. Right down to the bone. More scared than I’d ever been in my entire life. And I knew it had to be Cris. That there was something wrong. I sensed it.”

  As she spoke, she could almost see the events transpiring before her. Her throat tightened as she recited them.

  “I ran two red lights driving back to the off-campus apartment we shared. I remember thinking there should have been a cop around. I knew I needed a cop. That Cris needed a cop. When I got to the apartment, it was too late. She’d been strangled.”

  Charley blinked back tears. Without a word, Ben took a napkin from the pile in the middle of the table and pushed it toward her. She took it. Instead of drying her eyes, she shredded it as she spoke.

  “My point is, if I could feel her fear so vividly that night, why couldn’t I feel her love before? If she was in love with DeLuca, why couldn’t I have felt something that tipped me off?” Finished, she pressed her lips together, the same question still haunting her. “Why couldn’t she have trusted me?”

  Ben gave her the same answer that Nick had. “Because she loved you and sometimes we hide things from the people we love.”

  Charley sighed, drawing together the strips of napkin she’d created and pushing them into a pile. She supposed what Ben said was as good an explanation as any.

  The upshot was that she couldn’t waste any more time feeling sorry for herself. Feeling hurt. It wouldn’t help solve the case.

  But what Nick had stumbled across might. At least, it would help. “The cocky bastard found a clue.”

  Ben nodded. “Sounds like he’s not quite as much a waste of space as you indicate.”

  “No,” she agreed reluctantly, “he’s not.”

  Ben rose. “In the mood for some pot roast? I made way too much and I’m going to have to throw it out if you don’t have any.”

  She was on her feet, ready to help. Wanting to lose herself in some mindless chore, if only for a little while. “Sounds good. Can I have some for Dakota?”

  “Would I forget my favorite canine?” Ben chuckled as he walked toward the Crock-Pot on the counter.

  IF LOOKS COULD KILL, Nick figured he would have been dead twice over
by now. She hadn’t said anything, but the daggers Charley Dow had shot in his direction after they’d finished talking to Michael Matthews, and later at the office when they hooked up again, would have left at least several mortal wounds on his person had they been real.

  His mouth twisted in a half smile. Lucky for him that her weapon had remained holstered throughout the day.

  Must be rough, thinking you knew someone, then finding out that they had a big secret they’d been keeping from you.

  He still hadn’t gotten a handle on his partner. She struck him as more than competent, and he found her more than mildly attractive, but he still wasn’t sure if they could mesh well. She’d hit the nail on the head the first day, although he’d told her otherwise. But if he’d had a choice, he would have preferred having a man as a partner. He’s never worked with a woman before. Romanced them, yes, enjoyed their company, yes, but he’d never thought of them in terms of life and death.

  And partners had your life in their hands.

  He didn’t like being responsible for a woman. Even as he thought it, he knew she would have gone upside his head for that one, informing him tersely that she could take care of herself and that the only one he was responsible for was himself. Still, he had trouble thinking of Charley Dow as strictly an FBI agent.

  She had too many curves for him to be impartial.

  He was home. The trip from the Bureau to his apartment complex was a blur.

  After parking his vehicle in his carport space, Nick got out and crossed to his apartment door. As he approached it, he looked around cautiously. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. There was no sign of the man he was fairly certain had left the slaughtered rabbit on his doorstep. Sean Dixon.

  He’d already called a friend back in D.C. and had him check out Dixon’s whereabouts. Just as he’d suspected, the man had pulled up stakes. No one knew where. Linda’s brother hadn’t left a forwarding address with the post office when he’d moved. But tracking Dixon’s credit card activity had told him that the man had purchased a ticket to John Wayne Airport. One way. That was less than five miles away from where he was.

  Since purchasing the plane ticket, no activity on his credit card had been reported. That wasn’t necessarily a good sign. As he remembered it, Dixon had once been sent up on two counts of identity theft. Which meant that the man knew how to avail himself of someone else’s ID. And someone else’s credit cards.

  Which in turn meant that he was going to have to remain alert.

  Nick shook his head. Problems did pile up, didn’t they? He had a partner who kept him on his toes and busted parts of his anatomy he would have preferred leaving untouched, and a psycho with a criminal record possibly stalking him. And that didn’t even begin to cover the case he was supposed to be working on.

  “Ain’t life grand?” he said aloud as he put his key into the lock.

  Inside his apartment, the phone was ringing. The smile faded from his lips.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  NICK PUSHED his door closed behind him, listening for the click that told him the lock was in place. He strode over to the telephone and jerked up the receiver.

  “Hello?” Anticipating who was on the other end made his tone less than friendly.

  “You’re going to be sorry.”

  He was right. It was Sean. Nick could feel the anger soaring through his veins, throbbing at his temples.

  “Listen, you low-life scum—”

  There was a click on the other end of the line. Nick found himself addressing no one.

  Just like all the other times.

  Since the rabbit had turned up on his doorstep, he’d received at least two calls a day, each ending in a hang-up. Some hang-ups were immediate, some came after several seconds of silence. Still others came after a couple of words had been growled in his ear, as if some circus lion or tiger had been gifted with the power of speech. Or jackal, he thought.

  But the guttural cadence didn’t disguise the caller’s identity. Nick knew in his gut that it was Linda’s brother, Sean, bent on harassing him. Bent on playing mind games in some pathetic attempt to torture him.

  Nick’s first thought was to get his phone number changed. But he’d only had this one for a month. And he was unlisted. If Sean could get this number, he could get any other number the phone company would issue just as easily.

  The surprising thing was that, so far, no nuisance calls had come in on his cell phone. He supposed he should count his blessings. It was only a matter of time before Sean latched on to that number as well and continued with his program of harassment.

  With any luck, Nick promised himself, he’d be able to deal with the bastard before that happened. As far as the word “deal” went, that was open to interpretation. Regular channels weren’t going to work. Court injunctions issued to keep Linda’s brother a prescribed number of feet away wouldn’t mean anything to Dixon. No, the only way to get Dixon to back off was to put the fear of God—or him—into the man.

  Still, Nick couldn’t help hoping that it wouldn’t come to a showdown. He had no desire for a confrontation with Dixon, he just wanted the man to go away. Far away.

  Just like he wished that the residue guilt over Linda’s suicide would go away. It wasn’t his fault that she had taken her life, everyone had said so. In his own mind, he knew that. And yet, he couldn’t help blaming himself. He should have never allowed the woman to get close enough to begin fabricating her delusions.

  He should have known right from the start that there was something wrong with Linda. Red flags should have immediately shot up like the hands of third-graders eager to answer an easy question. He’d gone out with a hell of a lot of women and not one of them had been a nester like Linda Dixon. Linda had moved in, figuratively, after the very first date. Cooking for him, rearranging things in his apartment. Talking about the future. A future she saw involving them both.

  She’d tried to move in literally, as well, but there he’d held his ground. He’d done it to protect her. In hindsight, it wound up protecting him. But that hadn’t been his initial intent. He hadn’t wanted them living together because of the nature of his work at the Bureau. It was classified as top secret. Public knowledge of the program he was involved in could have very possibly put her life in jeopardy.

  He was now paying the price for having been flattered by her attention. In the beginning, a part of him had entertained the idea of settling down and starting a family. He’d wanted to have what his parents had. He still did.

  Granted, to the casual observer, the Colonel was a stern man. But Retired Colonel Harlan Brannigan was a fair man and he loved his wife. Had loved her since the very first moment he’d laid eyes on her. Their union was strong, with a great deal of mutual affection. Nick supposed that his envy of that had blinded him to the telltale signs Linda exhibited, until it was too late to do anything about it.

  When they were together, three months at most, he tried to attribute Linda’s mercurial behavior to the shift in her hormones. Pregnant women were not often known to be the stablest people on the face of the earth, especially in their first trimester. As he recalled, his sister Ashley had been a raving loon for a couple of weeks when she was first pregnant. Mercifully for her husband and the rest of the world, Ashley got it under control relatively quickly.

  That was what had ultimately tipped him off about Linda. Linda couldn’t get her moods under control, running the full gamut from laughter to tears. A great many tears. She’d used those like an arsenal. She pressed, pushed, threatened and obsessed. Always obsessed about what she wanted out of life. At thirty, she was older than him and saw life drying up and blowing away right before her eyes. She acted as if Nick was her last chance.

  All she wanted to do was get married.

  And all he had wanted to do, Nick thought wearily now, was put it all behind him. He’d fully intended to live up to his financial obligations to the baby. He had wanted joint custody, as well, but he’d inherently known that applying f
or it would be a large mistake. A gut instinct told him that the baby would wind up a pawn for Linda to use against him. It was better if she was granted custody and he had visitation rights.

  When he told her as much at the uncomfortably romantic dinner she’d arranged for the two of them, she became hysterical. She wound up throwing the meal she’d labored over, nearly hitting him in the eye. As it was, she managed to bruise his chin while screaming obscenities at him, accusing him of all sorts of things. She’d reviled him with a list of women he was to have cheated on her with, women he didn’t even know.

  The police had come, called in by a neighbor. It took them exactly thirty seconds to assess the situation. The fact that she came at him with a tenderizing hammer didn’t help her cause. But he refused to press charges and the police “escorted” her back to her home. With a policeman on each side, she’d left screaming how he’d used her, how he was going to pay for what he’d done.

  A week later, she was dead by her own hand. The note she left behind blamed him for everything.

  As did her brother.

  He sighed as he glanced out the window. The streetlamp right before his door illuminated the immediate area. No one was around. But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be. Tonight. Tomorrow night. Soon.

  There was no use trying to ignore his situation. He was going to have to find Dixon and have it out with him before things got completely out of hand. He didn’t want to find any more dead animals on his doorstep.

  He needed a beer.

  Nick made his way to the kitchen. His living arrangement hadn’t really improved any. The boxes were still mostly packed and in the way. Maybe on the weekend, he told himself, circumventing a large box that probably contained his winter clothes. He could start unpacking on the weekend.

  He’d almost reached the refrigerator when the phone rang again.

  Damn it, what did it take to make the Neanderthal stop?

  Furious now, Nick doubled back, knocking over a tower comprised of three medium-size boxes. The top two went flying and he kicked the bottom box as he leaned over for the phone.