Читать книгу Her Colton P.i. - Amelia Autin - Страница 12

Chapter 5

Chris hung up with Peg, then glanced at Holly. She was kneeling on the floor, an arm around each twin, clutching them tightly. “Sorry,” Chris said, thinking she was trying to keep the boys from hearing his side of the conversation. “I forgot there were little ears around.” The face Holly raised to his was ashen, and guilty. “What?” he asked.

“It’s terrible,” she whispered. “I should be praying for that poor woman. But all I could think about when I heard her name was that I could stop worrying.”

Chris shook his head. “You didn’t really think you were in danger, did you? Yeah, your name begins with H, but hell—” He caught himself up short, remembering too late his vow to watch his language. “Heck,” he amended, “you don’t have long dark hair. Your hair isn’t even really dark—I have the pictures to prove it.”

“I know. I wasn’t really worried, but...fear isn’t always logical. It was just there in the back of my mind, you know? And the newspaper reported that the woman who’s suspected of being the Alphabet Killer—I forget her name—”

“Regina Willard.”

“Right. She once stayed at the Rosewood Rooming House, same as me.”

“I know.” Chris suddenly thought of something. “Before I forget, I wanted to tell you there’s no internet service here at the house yet. And no cable. Water, gas, electricity and phone—yeah. I couldn’t turn the water off—unless I wanted to let the landscaping shrivel up and die. Not to mention Peg needs water when she comes out here to take care of the place. And electricity and phone service are necessary for the alarm system. But no cable or internet landline. I called to get them turned on when we were at Peg’s, but it’ll be a few days.”

“That’s okay,” Holly informed him. “I haven’t watched TV since I left Clear Lake City. And I only browse the internet at the library anyway, so it’s not a hardship to do without. But what about you?”

“I can survive without cable for a few days. And I’ve got mobile internet access for my laptop and smartphone—I need it for my PI business. So, I’m good.”

Ian and Jamie both squirmed to get free at that moment, and Chris said, “Better get them their baths. Go on,” he insisted. “It won’t take me more than a few minutes to clean up in here. Then I have some work to catch up on. I’ll be in the office.”

* * *

A half hour later Holly ruefully fished her dark pixie-cut wig out of the tub in the master bathroom, where Ian had dunked it after he tugged it off her head. She rolled the wig in a towel to dry it as much as she could, then hung it on a hook over the shower. “Laugh,” she told Ian in a mock-threatening tone as she lifted him out of the tub and wrapped his wriggling body in a towel. “You just wait until you grow up. I’m going to take delight in embarrassing you by telling your friends all the things you did to me.

“No, Jamie, we don’t eat soap,” she said, changing subjects, quickly removing the bar of soap from his vicinity. She scooped him out of the tub and wrapped him in a towel, too. She played peekaboo with both boys and their towels for a couple of minutes, then gathered them close as intense motherly love for her babies washed through her. “You’re little monsters—you know that—but I love you madly,” she told them. “And I wouldn’t trade you for anything in the world.”

Clean, Ian and Jamie looked like little angels, their golden curls fluffed into tiny halos. Holly brushed their barely damp hair, ruthlessly suppressing the curls, before using the brush on her own head when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. She wasn’t vain about her appearance—well, not much—but she didn’t want anyone seeing her with her hair a flattened mess. She refused to acknowledge who she meant by “anyone,” but in the back of her mind lurked the memory of her dream that afternoon. The dream, and the kiss. Not to mention her erotic reaction to it.

Holly let the twins run naked into the bedroom, dabbing futilely at the large, damp patch on her pale blue T-shirt where Jamie had—deliberately, she was sure—splashed her with soapy bathwater. Then she followed her sons into the other room.

She dressed them in the pull-ups they still wore at night because they weren’t quite potty trained yet, then in their nightclothes. “Come on,” she told them, taking their hands in hers. “Let’s go say good-night to Mr. Colton. Pretend you’re really as angelic as you look so he won’t mind sharing a house with us.”

* * *

Chris leaned back in his leather desk chair and absently fondled Wally’s head as the dog lay quietly beside him. “Look at this, boy,” he murmured. “You think...?” This was a news article on his laptop’s computer screen—a story about the daring capture of a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. A dangerous man who was an alleged associate of a drug lord who’d been dead for six years—Desmond Carlton. The name Carlton was enough like Colton for the story to have caught Chris’s eye, and he shook his head at a vague memory. Then he picked up his smartphone and hit speed dial.

“Hi, Chris,” Annabel said when she answered. “What’s up?”

“Carlton,” he said abruptly. “Wasn’t that the last name of Josie’s foster parents?”

“Um...I think so. Yes, it was. Why?”

“I was just reading something on Yahoo News about a man who ran with Desmond Carlton six years ago.”

“The guy who was on the Ten Most Wanted list? The one the FBI just captured?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Why is that important? Other than someone else will be promoted to the list tomorrow, now that he’s in prison where he belongs, the creep.”

“I don’t know,” Chris said slowly. “But as I was reading the story the name Carlton rang a bell. That, and the fact that Desmond Carlton has been dead for six years. Six years, Bella. Think about it.”

“You don’t mean... Josie? It’s got to be a coincidence.”

“I don’t like coincidences. And I don’t trust them. Especially two coincidences together.” He thought a minute. “Do me a favor, will you? Find out what prison this guy is in. I might want to have a little chat with him.”

Annabel’s soft drawl took on a hard edge. “You don’t want to ask Trevor? He’s FBI. He could probably get in to see this perp whether or not he wants visitors.” When Chris didn’t respond, his sister said, “Are you still holding a grudge against Trevor? I thought you agreed it wasn’t fair to him.”

“Trevor’s got enough on his plate right now,” he pointed out, “what with trying to find Regina Willard. Especially now that she just added number eight to her victim list—the pressure to catch her has got to be intense.”

“It’s not just the FBI, you know,” Annabel said drily. “The Granite Gulch Police Department is involved in this case, too.”

Chris winced. His sister didn’t say it, but it had been Annabel’s solid police work that had identified Regina Willard as the Alphabet Killer. The woman hadn’t been caught yet, though not for lack of trying on Annabel’s part.

But the real reason Chris didn’t want to ask for Trevor’s help wasn’t that his older brother was too busy—that had just been an excuse. Chris was still holding a grudge...but he wasn’t going to admit it to Annabel. Okay, it was an old wound from his childhood that he should have gotten over long since—he knew that. The adult in him knew that. And yeah, it wasn’t fair to Trevor—Annabel was right about that. And true, he and Trevor had finally reconnected years back...mostly.

But deep inside him resided that eleven-year-old boy who’d idolized his older brother, who’d felt betrayed when the family was split up and Trevor made no attempt to maintain the connection with him when they all went into foster care. Yeah, they’d seen each other a few times a year at the home of Josie’s foster parents—court-mandated visits—but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Chris had pretended it hadn’t hurt...but it had. Badly. He was still trying to excise the scar tissue that had left on his psyche, but he wasn’t there yet.

Then there was the whole Josie thing. When Trevor turned eighteen, he’d tried to get custody of Josie...or at least that was the story. But how hard had he tried, really? Chris didn’t know, and the uncertainty of that ate at him. Josie would have been only seven back then. She’d turned Chris’s offer down when he turned eighteen, but by that time it was already too late—she’d been ten, and had spent seven years with the Carltons. Maybe it was unreasonable, but Chris laid the blame for losing Josie squarely on Trevor’s shoulders.

“But you’re right,” Annabel said, breaking into his thoughts. “Trevor’s got enough to worry about. I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Thanks, Bella.”

“No problem.” Silence hummed between them, until Annabel said out of the blue, “I can’t stop thinking about the day I saw her.”

“Josie?”

“Mmm-hmm. I can’t swear it was her, but—”

“But that gold charm you found clinches it,” he finished for her.

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Ridge and Lizzie believed it was her when they had their own Josie sightings.”

“I know. At least she’s alive. For the longest time I...” Chris’s throat closed as he thought of how he’d imagined the worst. Young women disappeared all the time. Murdered. Their bodies disposed of in the most callous ways. It had killed him to imagine that was Josie’s fate.

Annabel seemed to understand Chris couldn’t talk about it, and she changed the subject. “Speaking of sightings, Mia told me she spotted you coming out of your apartment this morning carrying a suitcase and your laptop bag. You taking a trip? Something to do with your work?”

Chris hesitated, then remembered his heart-to-heart conversation with Annabel last month and his promise that he would take her seriously as a police officer going forward. She’d earned that right and then some. “No,” he told her. “Remember that missing-person case I mentioned the other day? The one I was taking pro bono?”

“The widow who ran off with her twin sons? The one the in-laws are trying to track down?”

“Yeah, her. Turns out I was way off base.”

His sister snorted. “Told you there was more to the story.”

“Don’t rub it in.” Chris massaged the furrow he could feel forming between his eyebrows. “Anyway, long story short, I found her. But she had a damned good reason for running—her in-laws tried to kill her.”

Annabel gasped. “Are you kidding me?”

“Nope. She’s been living in the Rosewood Rooming House with her boys for the past three months, but she was just about to run again.” He took a deep breath. “So I convinced her it would be safer for the three of them to live in my house for the time being...with me.”

“Your house? You mean the one you built for Laura?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t let her run, Bella. I wasn’t going to tell the in-laws I found her, but I couldn’t let her run. If she did and the in-laws hired someone else...” He knew he didn’t have to draw his twin a picture.

“So you’re living there with her?”

“And her sons,” he was quick to point out. “Just until we can set a trap for her in-laws.”

“We?”

“I was thinking Sam, you and me. Unless you don’t want to.” He knew when he said it what Annabel’s answer would be. Set a trap for would-be murderers? If they pulled it off, it would be another professional coup for his sister.

“Count me in.”

Annabel’s enthusiastic response made Chris smile to himself. “I haven’t asked Sam,” he told her, “so don’t say anything to him yet, okay? This all just happened this morning.”

“No problem. Just let me know when and where. So, what’s her name?”

“Holly. Holly McCay. And her boys are Ian and Jamie.”

“Cute names. What’s she like?”

Chris smiled again. Knowing his sister, he’d known the question—or one very similar—was coming. “You’d like her. She’s very down-to-earth. Very unassuming. And a good mother. You’re not going to believe this, but Holly and Peg are friends,” he said, knowing the message that would convey. “Other than Peg and me, you’re the only one who knows where Holly is right now, and until we can prove anything against her in-laws, that’s the way I want to keep it.”

“Works for me. When do I get to meet her?”

Children’s voices from the hallway outside his office alerted Chris that Holly and her boys were approaching, so he cut off his conversation with Annabel. “I’ll let you know,” he told her quickly and disconnected. He swung his chair around and stood up, but Wally was faster. The dog bounded across the room toward the hallway, tongue lolling out, tail wagging.

“Holly, I—” Chris began but stopped as if he’d been poleaxed when a blonde woman appeared in the doorway with Ian and Jamie. Long blond hair that owed nothing to artifice. Long blond hair that shimmered under the lights with a hundred different layered shades of gold. Long blond hair parted slightly off center, paired—unusually—with pale brown eyes. The eyes he’d seen before, but not with the blond hair. Holy crap, he thought as desire unexpectedly slashed through him, but all he said was, “What happened to the dark-haired wig?”

Holly laughed ruefully. “Ian thought it was funny to pull it off and dunk it in the tub.”

He didn’t mean to say it, but the words just popped out. “Your pictures don’t do you justice.”

She laughed again, but this time a slight tinge of color stained her cheeks. “Thank you... I think.” She stood there for a minute staring at Chris as if caught in the same trance as he was, and her not-quite-steady breathing drew attention to her breasts rising and falling beneath her damp T-shirt. But when the twins tugged free of her hold to play with Wally, the spell—or whatever it was—was broken. “We came to tell you good-night,” she explained, the color in her cheeks deepening.

“Oh. Right,” Chris said, forcing his eyes away from Holly and down to the toddlers and the dog. Their well-scrubbed cherubic faces were misleading, he knew—if they were like most boys, Holly’s twins were no angels. But they were all boy, just as Wally was all dog. Boys and dogs went together like...well...like boys and dogs. And Chris had a sudden memory of his younger brothers Ridge and Ethan—four and two to Chris’s six—and his dog back then, Bouncer, a golden retriever, just like Wally. It was a memory from his early years that didn’t stab at his heart for once, a memory that made him smile for a change. He glanced at the clock on the wall and said, “Kind of early for bedtime, isn’t it?”

“I start early,” Holly explained. “I read them stories, then they get lullabies, and...” She smiled. “All of that can take an hour or more before they finally settle down and go to sleep.”

He didn’t know what made him make the offer, but he said, “How about I read them their bedtime stories?” When Holly looked doubtful, he added, “I’m a pretty good bedtime-story reader. Peg’s daughter, Susan, would vouch for me if she was here.”

Holly chuckled. “Okay,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t mind a few minutes to myself for a change. Let me get the books. We have a ton of library books—I was going to return them on my way out of town today,” she rushed to explain, as if she didn’t want him to think of her as a library thief. “And we have some books I bought for the boys. I let them pick the books they want me to read.”

She was back in no time, carrying a stack of books that Chris quickly relieved her of. “Their favorites are on top,” Holly told him. “But I usually just spread the books out and they choose based on the cover.”

“Fly,” Jamie said. “Want fly.”

“A Fly Went By?” Chris asked him, juggling the stack until he found the Mike McClintock title three books down from the top. He handed it to Jamie, who hugged it.

“You remember that book?” Holly asked, surprised.

“Hell—heck, yeah,” he amended. “That was one of Josie’s favorites. I read it to her so many times I think I have it memorized.”

“Me, too.” Holly smiled at Chris, a somehow intimate smile, and something he hadn’t felt in forever tugged at his heart. Holly’s smile made him realize there was more to life than merely putting one foot in front of the other. More to life than the work he’d thrown himself into with even more dedication after Laura’s death. Except for his relationship with Peg, Joe and their kids, except for his relationship with his sister and brothers, his life revolved around his work. Work that gave meaning to a life that held little else.

But Holly’s smile reminded him he was a man, first and foremost. A man who hadn’t made love to a woman in close to two years, who hadn’t even given it serious thought in all that time.

He was thinking of it now, though. He was definitely thinking of it now. In spades.