Carrying His Secret Read online

  “You think someone wants to kill me?”

  “I sure as hell don’t want you moving around like some kind of a walking target just to find out if I’m right or not.”

  “I can’t go into hiding if that’s what you’re talking about.” The very thought was claustrophobic to her, making it suddenly hard to breathe. She needed to be out in the open, to be accessible at any time.

  He wasn’t about to let her talk her way out of this. Her life could very well depend on it. “Yes, you can, and you will.”

  She tried to make him understand why that was impossible. “Your father’s gone. There’s all sorts of work to get done in his absence,” she insisted.

  Whit looked at her pointedly. He’d had no idea she could be this stubborn. “To my recollection, corpses don’t get very much accomplished.”

  Elizabeth stared at him, stunned. “You really believe that?”

  He wasn’t sure what she was asking. “What? That corpses don’t get very much accomplished? Absolutely,” he guaranteed.

  “No,” she said impatiently, waving away his response, “that someone’s out to kill me.”

  The short answer was yes. He gave her the benefit of the long one instead. “I know that I don’t want to be standing around twiddling my thumbs with you exposed just to find out if I’m right. My father’s killer is still roaming around out there and if nothing else, we need to take preventative measures.”

  “That doesn’t mean going into hiding,” Elizabeth protested. She was beginning to get the sinking feeling that nothing she said here mattered. He was going to force her to do what he felt was best. But she felt she at least had to go on the record as being against this forced retreat to who knew where.

  “I’m afraid that this time that’s exactly what it means. And yes, you’re very important to AdAir Corp, but as I’ve already stated, you’ll do absolutely no one any good if you’re dead.”

  “But—”

  She could argue until every last one of the proverbial cows came home, but he wasn’t about to let her win this one. “Don’t argue with me, Elizabeth. If it helps you to go along with this, just think of it as making my father happy. He wouldn’t have wanted anything to happen to you, especially not on account of him.”

  She didn’t like it. Didn’t like contemplating being inactive when working was what was helping her cope with everything at the moment. It was her way of holding herself together during this unspeakable tragedy.

  But she supposed that Whit was right. She wasn’t going to do anyone, or AdAir Corp, any good if she was dead.

  “Remember,” Whit cautioned her, “he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.”

  “Like Robin Hood?” she questioned, vaguely remembering that the line was applicable to the mythical outlaw who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor—and drove Prince John absolutely crazy.

  “Whatever works for you,” Whit said with a dry laugh. The next moment, he was calling 9-1-1 on his cell phone, reporting the crime and then asking to be transferred to Detective Kramer in Homicide.

  Detective Kramer had struck him as being rather lax about the whole investigation, but he knew it would be difficult to get another detective assigned to the case without lodging a major complaint. He wasn’t ready to step on any toes just yet.

  “Hello, Detective?” Whit said when he heard the phone being picked up after several moments of dead air had gone by. “This is Whit Adair—”

  He heard the man on the other end sigh before he began speaking. “Sorry to tell you that there’s nothing new in the investigation of your father’s murder, Mr. Adair—”

  “I might have something for you along those lines,” Whit said, cutting the man short.

  “What kind of something?” the detective asked warily.

  “My father’s executive assistant just found all four of her tires slashed in the parking lot of a law firm’s building.”

  Whit could almost envision the detective coming alive.

  “Give me your location,” the man instructed. “I’ll be right there.”

  * * *

  Kramer’s version of right there turned out to be showing up some forty minutes later. Elizabeth had just about given up and was contemplating calling a tow truck to take her car to the local tire store she dealt with when the detective finally arrived.

  Getting out of his rather well-maintained vehicle, he muttered an apology. “Sorry. Traffic.”

  Whit looked at him, puzzled by the excuse. “I thought traffic didn’t apply to the police department. Isn’t that why you have sirens, to clear away the impeding vehicles?”

  It was obvious that after almost two decades with the department, Kramer didn’t like to be questioned. “Sirens don’t do any good if there isn’t a path, or some kind of a hole to drive through. It was completely bottled up.” His tone said that was the end of the discussion on the subject. “So what do we have here?” he asked, looking at Elizabeth’s car.

  “I think it’s pretty self-evident, don’t you?” Whit asked.

  Kramer frowned. Whether it was in response to Whit’s question or because he was contemplating the vehicle was unclear.

  “And you think this is somehow connected to your father’s murder?” Kramer questioned.

  Whit answered the question with a question of his own. “Don’t you? After all, she was his assistant and she was the one who found my father’s body,” Whit pointed out.

  Kramer inclined his head as if agreeing with him and yet not agreeing at the same time. It was obvious that he was reluctant to expand the investigation.

  “Sometimes a rotten prank is just a rotten prank,” he said.

  “So you don’t think someone’s deliberately sending me a warning of some sort?” Elizabeth asked. All things considered, she would rather go along with the detective’s theory than with Whit’s. It was less unnerving that way. Even so, she had a feeling that Whit was the one who was right.

  “I didn’t say that,” Kramer qualified.

  She wanted to nail the man down. Waffling might work for the detective, but it certainly did nothing for her peace of mind.

  “Then you do think someone’s trying to tell me something, warn me about something?”

  Kramer took out a small, weather-beaten notebook and made a couple of notes to himself. He used a pencil, preferring the old ways to the way the wet-behind-the-ears detectives did things these days.

  “It’s very possible,” he replied, obviously preoccupied.

  “Tell me, Detective, do you ever get splinters, sitting on the fence like that?” Whit asked him.

  Because Adair came from money, losing his temper with the younger man was not an option. So Kramer replied evenly, “Just trying to stay open-minded. I’ll give CSI a call to get them down here and then I’ll take down your statement,” the detective informed the couple, summarizing standard procedure.

  With that, he turned away from them as he made his call.

  “After this is over,” Whit said to her, keeping his voice low, “and he goes back to the precinct, you’re coming with me.”

  “To the office?” Elizabeth asked, assuming that he was talking about where he was heading next. They could still get in a number of solid hours’ worth of work.

  “No,” he told her, “to the ranch.”

  She didn’t understand. Why was he suggesting that? “What’s at the ranch?” she asked.

  Had he forgotten to get something from there? She knew he spent his weekends there for the most part and that because of everything that was going on lately, his life had been thrown off balance. But even if he was going to the ranch, there was no reason to take her with him. Oh, she could think of one reason, but he had made it perfectly clear by ignoring the whole incident that there was nothing between them on that scor
e. Hence taking her to the ranch made no sense to her.

  “Safety,” Whit answered.

  It still wasn’t making sense to her, although the uneasy feeling she’d experienced earlier was back. “I don’t—”

  Glancing to see if the detective was still busy—he was—Whit spelled it out for her. “Look, you can’t go home because my father’s killer probably knows exactly where you live and if it’s all the same to you, I don’t want to give him a second crack at doing you some kind of harm. The next time around,” he told her bluntly, “it might not just be tires that are slashed.”

  She wanted to tell him he was wrong, that he was letting his imagination run away with him—but in all honesty, she couldn’t. Because the opposite might very well be true.

  “I think you might be right about the killer knowing where I live,” she admitted.

  Immediately alert, Whit pressed her for an explanation. “Why would you think that? What haven’t you told me?”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to ask when he had become her keeper, but that was antagonistic and she didn’t want to engage him in a clash of wills, certainly not while she was carrying his baby.

  So she told him, “I thought I was imagining it, but last night, when I came home to the town house, I could have sworn that some of my things had been moved around, like someone had gone through them and then tried their very best to put everything back exactly where they’d been— except that in a couple of places, they didn’t succeed.”

  Whit felt a surge of anger, but he managed to bank it down again. Losing his temper wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

  “Why didn’t you call me about it?”

  “Because you were already dealing with enough things and besides, I thought that maybe I was just being overly tired and imagining things. Especially since I didn’t find anything missing— except for a lipstick case. But again, I just might have misplaced it. Besides, what kind of homicidal maniac steals a woman’s lipstick case? That doesn’t even make a good souvenir.”

  “I don’t know,” Whit answered, frustrated and exasperated with both himself and what was going on. He didn’t like not being in control of things. “Maybe this guy didn’t read the homicidal maniac’s handbook on proper procedure and doesn’t know what makes a good souvenir and what doesn’t.”

  The next moment, Kramer was terminating his call and turning his attention back to them.

  “All right, let’s get that statement, shall we?” he said.

  “Sure.” It couldn’t be soon enough for her. Half the day was gone and she hadn’t accomplished most of the things she had put down on her list. She was going to have to work twice as hard to catch up, Elizabeth thought as she and Whit followed the detective to a less well-traveled area.

  Any place, she thought, was preferable to going down to the precinct again.

  Chapter 8

  In comparison to the kind of intense questioning she had been subjected to when she had discovered Reginald Adair’s body, the statement Elizabeth wound up giving to the detective this time around turned out to be extremely brief. Kramer seemed to only want the sketchiest of details.

  Whit’s statement required even less time to take down.

  “I think I have everything I need right now,” Kramer told the pair, closing the notebook he’d been writing in. He tucked it back into the inside pocket of his worn navy blue jacket. “Your contact numbers in case I have other questions are still the same, right?” he asked, looking from Whit to Elizabeth for some sort of cursory confirmation.

  “Considering it’s only been a little more than a week, yes, the contact numbers are still the same,” Whit said, answering for both of them as he leaned against his car. He noted the look of discomfort on Elizabeth’s face. His guess was that she didn’t really care for Kramer and she just wanted to have this be over with. He certainly couldn’t blame her.

  “Very good, then,” Kramer said, nodding more to himself than to either one of the people he had just questioned. And then he added a rather lofty “I’ll be in touch.”

  With that, the detective made his way over to the forensic team. The two people who had answered the call were busy taping off this latest crime scene.

  “I won’t hold my breath,” Whit said quietly, sharing his remark with Elizabeth.

  Seeing that the detective was now engaged in what appeared to be a terse conversation with one of the crime scene investigators, Whit straightened up and looked at Elizabeth. It was time to leave.

  “All right, do you want to swing by your place?” Whit asked her. When she looked at him, a puzzled expression slipping over her features, he said, “To pick up some of your things. I’m not sure how long a stay this is going to have to be.”

  Ideally, it would only be until his father’s killer was caught, but seeing the lax way the investigation was being conducted, he wasn’t holding out much hope that the situation was going to be resolved soon.

  “What things, what stay?” Elizabeth asked, confused. And then the conversation she’d had with Whit before the detective had arrived replayed itself in her head. “You mean you were actually serious about having me stay at the ranch?” She’d assumed that he’d been just talking, throwing the possibility out there so she could roll it over in her mind. What she had decided on was continuing on a path of business as usual instead.

  Obviously Whit had other ideas.

  “Of course I was serious,” he told her. Why would he ask her to stay at his ranch if he wasn’t? He didn’t understand her reasoning. “I mean, we could stay at my place right here in the city, but it’s only got one bedroom, which is a slight drawback,” he told her.

  The idea of sharing that small of a space with her brought with it a number of problems, not the least of which was that although he’d berated himself for having taken advantage of her and the situation that night in Nevada, he was still very attracted to her.

  “And more importantly,” he went on, “whoever did that to your car—” he gestured at the vehicle, now being guided onto a flatbed tow truck so it could be brought down to the CSI lab for thorough testing “—knows where I live. It’s not exactly a state secret,” he reminded her.

  “Neither is the location of your family’s ranch,” Elizabeth pointed out.

  “True,” he agreed, “but the difference is that there are a lot more people on the ranch. That translates to there being a lot more people besides just me to keep you safe.”

  She was, by nature, a private person. This had all the earmarks of living in a goldfish bowl, something she did not aspire to.

  “I don’t think I’m really in any danger,” Elizabeth protested rather strongly.

  She’d had time to think about it and the more she did, the more convinced she was that no one was out to kill her. This was just some kind of perverse warning, although she really didn’t have a clue as to what she was being warned about.

  Whit was far from convinced. “Well, I don’t want to take the chance that you’re wrong. Look at it this way. If you’re right, you spend some time at a place that a lot of people would kill to be invited to. If I’m right, we’re foiling someone’s plan to murder you. Not being murdered is always a good thing,” he told her wryly. “Try to think of it as a vacation,” he urged, then asked her, “When’s the last time you had a real vacation?”

  Elizabeth frowned. Whit knew the answer to that as well as she did, she thought, since they frequently interacted with one another at AdAir Corp, not to mention that they went on business trips together. As a matter of fact, not a week went by when they weren’t sitting next to one another at some meeting or other. In the five years that she’d worked at AdAir, there hadn’t been a single week that had gone by without his having to work with her. She’d never been absent, to his recollection.

  “I can’t remember,” Elizabeth
was finally forced to admit.

  “Exactly my point,” he told her. “That means you’re way overdue for one.” Holding the passenger side door open for her, he gestured for her to get in. Elizabeth stubbornly stood her ground. “Don’t make me have to put you into the car,” he said.

  Part of her wanted to see if he actually would, but the other part of her knew that he wasn’t bluffing and she did want to maintain her dignity in this. With a displeased sigh, she got into the passenger side and buckled up. Only then did Whit round his hood and get in on the driver’s side.

  Buckling up, he lost no time in starting up his sports car. A second later, he took off.

  “I take it that your car really does do zero to sixty in ten seconds,” she commented.

  The second she’d heard the engine all but growling as he gave it gas, she’d grabbed her armrests and held on to them as if they were actual lifelines intended to keep her anchored to earth instead of spinning out into the stratosphere.

  She felt as if her stomach had been left behind at the starting line and was now struggling to bring about a reunion. Ordinarily, she would have enjoyed this display of engine power, but not in her present condition.

  A few minutes later, Elizabeth realized that Whit was decreasing the car’s all but teeth-rattling speed. “Oh, don’t do it on my account. I’m kind of curious to find out if my skin is going to fall off after you reach a certain speed.”

  Whit spared her a smile, but kept the speed at a constant rate now. “Hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Something to look forward to later on,” she countered.

  He made no comment. Instead, he asked her for her exact address.

  Giving it to him, Elizabeth sat back in her seat. Since she had no choice in the matter—and part of her had to admit that she did rather like the idea that Whit was being protective of her—she went into her efficiency mode, mentally going over everything that she was going to need to keep herself productively busy during this sudden so-called vacation she was being forced to take.