Читать книгу Woman Most Wanted - Harper Allen - Страница 14

She’d known it was going to be bad. What she hadn’t been able to imagine was just how bad it could be.

Numb with disbelief, Jenna shivered involuntarily. Despite the steamy heat in the coffee shop, she felt as if a cold wind was cutting through her, numbing her to her very bones.

“They had to have made some mistake in identification.” Even to herself, her protest sounded foolishly stubborn, as if she was insisting that the world was flat. “How do they know for sure it was Carling’s body?”

Matt rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand, not meeting her pleading glance. Under the harsh fluorescent lights the lines of weariness around his mouth were thrown into stark relief, and his eyes, when he opened them, were unreadable. He sighed like a man trying to hide his frustration.

“Forensics didn’t make a mistake, Jenna. That’s why they haven’t released the news of his death to the media yet—because they wanted to make damn sure their suspicions were right.”

“But even experts can—”

He cut in on her abruptly, as if he couldn’t allow her to keep hoping any longer. His voice was low and emphatic.

“It’s very important that you understand this. Rupert Carling is dead. He’s been dead for over forty-eight hours—ever since someone turned his Mercedes into a ball of fire with a car bomb the night before last.” His words were vehemently distinct and his gaze held hers with what seemed like desperation. “The man was a financial titan, so when word of his death gets out later tonight, Wall Street’s going to tremble, Jenna—and with that much at stake, nobody could afford to make any creative guesses on what was left of his body. They located a Dr. Borg, Carling’s dentist, and had him working alongside the forensics team to make absolutely certain that the dental records matched up with—” He saw the convulsive swallow that she tried to hide, and changed what he’d been about to say. “With what was found at the crime scene,” he ended quietly.

“So I didn’t see him today at Parks, Parks.” Her voice was barely audible.

“There’s no way you could have.”

“And if I didn’t see Rupert Carling, then there’s no reason for anyone to try to make me look crazy,” she went on. It was as easy as connecting the dots, she thought. One fact led to another, and although she knew she wouldn’t like where this was leading, she had no choice but to follow the logic. “And if no one’s trying to make me look crazy, the only explanation for what’s been happening to me is that I really am crazy. Even Zappa was only part of my fantasy.”

Her face was pale and the strands of hair feathering onto her forehead seemed to have lost their vibrancy and fire. Her eyes were dull. “Paranoid delusions. When I started using phrases like ‘vast conspiracy,’ it should have tipped me off right then. But of course, refusing to believe that they’re delusions is part of the problem, isn’t it?”

“You saw somebody in that corridor at work. It just wasn’t who you thought it was,” Matt said uncomfortably. The coffee shop was nearly empty now, but he lowered his voice. “There’s got to be some other explanation for what happened tonight besides immediately jumping to the conclusion that you’re suffering from paranoia.”

“Another explanation for anyone else, maybe. Not for me!”

The unequivocal reply escaped from her like a cry of pain and her eyes squeezed shut, as if she couldn’t bear to face his carefully phrased questions. Alarmed by her reaction, Matt reached across the table for her hand, but she drew away from his touch. A shudder ran through her and for a moment he tensed, ready to catch her if she fainted; but even as he watched, he saw her quell the trembling with a visible effort.

A few hours ago she’d made him think of caramel sauce and whipped cream, he thought slowly—lush and desirable and frivolously disconcerting. Who would have guessed that that almost confectionery-like exterior hid a will as tough and unyielding as stainless steel? Whatever other problems Jenna Moon had, the woman had an inner strength that was imposing a rigid control on her.

When she spoke again, her words were delivered in a flat, dead whisper that sounded as if it was being wrenched out of her. “Let me tell you about my father. Then you’ll understand.”

She folded her hands carefully in her lap, pressed her lips together tightly for a moment, and then continued, the normally husky edge to her voice harsh with pain. “Franklin Moon was a student radical in the ’60s—passionately committed to making the world a better place through peaceful protests and demonstrations. He was typical of the best of that era, and he should have become one of the most influential people of his generation. But no one’s ever heard of my father—and no one ever will now.”

A car sped by on the rain-slick pavement outside, throwing up a sheet of muddy water against the coffee shop, and she flinched as it slapped loudly against the window beside them. Her shoulders hunched forward. “Sometime during his last year at Berkeley, Franklin Moon became convinced that ‘they’ were out to get him—a sinister enemy or enemies who would stop at nothing to destroy him. He left without completing his degree. My mother, Sara, was his girlfriend back then. She loved him enough to throw away her life and her future—she cut all ties with her family and disappeared with him. They lived like nomads, never staying in one place for more than a few months, sometimes packing up their Volkswagen van and moving on after only a day or two. Franklin would have seen or heard something that convinced him that ‘they’ were on his trail again.”

She couldn’t completely disguise the rawness in her voice, and this time when Matt reached forward he was too fast for her. His hand, strong and warm, encircled her wrist. “You don’t have to go on.”

For a moment she hesitated. Her fingers curled reflexively, resting on the pulse point at the base of his palm as if she needed to reassure herself that he was real. Then she firmly disengaged herself from his clasp.

“For a long time I thought everybody lived that way—starting a new school just as soon as you made a friend at your old one, never owning anything that couldn’t fit in a suitcase, waking up sometimes and forgetting exactly where you were. And then when I was seven, my mother died suddenly and the bottom fell out of my world. A few days later Franklin started loading up the van again and I began screaming and hitting at him, telling him that this time I wasn’t going with him, asking him how he could just leave the place where she was buried when he knew that he’d never come back.”

Her eyes filled with tears. She made no attempt to wipe them away and they fell unheeded from her bowed head to her lap. She continued as if it was vitally important to relate every last painful detail.

“That’s when he told me. He pulled me into his lap and stroked my hair while I cried myself into exhaustion, and he explained that there were people looking for him—people who would never stop looking for him…people who wanted to kill him. The next morning I got in the van and we drove away from the town where my mother had died.”

“How the hell could he have put a child through that?” Matt exploded angrily. “No roots, no stability—what was he thinking?”

“He was trying to protect me,” Jenna interjected. “He really believed that he was in danger, and that whoever was tracking him wouldn’t hesitate to kill his daughter too. In every other aspect Franklin is—” She stopped and her lashes dipped briefly as she closed her eyes and sighed. She corrected herself softly. “Was the gentlest, kindest man I’ll ever know. Most people never guessed there was anything the matter with him, and he tried his best to make my childhood as full of love as possible. That’s one of the reasons we lived on the communes—he hoped that being part of caring communities like that would make up for me not having any family but him.”

She fell silent, and beside her Matt stared unseeingly through the plate-glass window into the wet night. When he spoke, his words were hesitant. “Was there ever anything that made you think he wasn’t fantasizing this mysterious enemy? Anything, however far-fetched, that might have indicated that there really was someone trying to find him and kill him?”

“Forget it, Matt.” She smiled tightly and shook her head, just barely holding on to her composure. “After a lifetime of living with Franklin Moon, maybe I sometimes persuaded myself that I’d seen the same car following us in two different states, or that the casual curiosity of a complete stranger was reason for alarm. But there was never any solid proof. How could there have been? It was all in his mind—all part of the same outlandish delusion.”

His gaze searched her face intently. “And you’re afraid that whatever compulsion drove Franklin to think he had to run for his life has been passed on to you.” It wasn’t a question. One look at her haunted eyes was answer enough.

The smart money at the Agency was on Agent D’Angelo becoming the next area director. The man was tough, pragmatic, and nothing ever threw him. That was the image he seemed to have acquired, Matt thought wryly. But all bets would have been off if any of his co-workers had been around to see the indecision on his features as he searched for something—anything—to soothe away the fear that had taken control of the woman across from him. Dammit, he was supposed to be good at handling people, he told himself in sudden anger. Why was he just sitting here, letting the silence between them lengthen?

He said the first thing that came into his mind, and as soon as he had, he wished he could recall his words. “Even one shred of proof that you’d ever lived there would have given me grounds to investigate further, Jenna. The Carling thing could have been a simple case of misidentification. But coupled with what happened at the apartment and the fact that none of the other tenants in the building would cooperate when I tried to question them before we left—” He broke off, cursing himself for his clumsiness. Jenna had been pale before but now the only color in her face was her eyes, bluer and wider than ever.

“Coupled with the apartment that I insisted was mine, the apartment that obviously belonged to someone else—the apartment where no one knew me—there really isn’t any doubt, is there?” She met his gaze and held it almost challengingly. “Crazy Jenna Moon who sees auras, dead tycoons walking around in exterminator coveralls and whose whole existence is turning out to be a fantasy. And what’s really scary is that I almost had you believing it all, didn’t I?”

“For God’s sake, I’m not the bad guy here.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, acutely aware that Marg the waitress was looking narrowly over in his direction. “I know what you must be going through. I just wish there was some way we could back up part of your story, but there isn’t.”

“You have no idea what I’m going through.” The brief flash of emotion that she’d displayed had subsided, to be replaced once more with a hopeless acceptance of the situation.

The cornflower-blue of her eyes was blinded with a sheen of tears. Even stainless steel snapped under enough pressure, Matt thought worriedly. And although he still thought it was more likely that whatever mental aberration she was suffering from was temporary, she seemed to believe that her condition was permanent—a legacy from a father who’d lived his whole life running from a fantasy enemy. She needed professional help, he thought reluctantly.

A psychiatrist, D’Angelo, he told himself roughly. Face it—it’s possible she needs a shrink. This gorgeous, sexy, warm woman who didn’t look as if there was anything the matter with her at all was going to have to be checked into a hospital. And he had the sinking feeling that she wasn’t going to go along with that plan willingly. He’d been wrong, Matt thought with a twinge of self-condemnation. He was going to have to be the bad guy here.

“We’ve got to find you a place to stay for tonight.” He attempted a reassuring smile, feeling like a Judas. His voice sounded a shade too hearty even to his own ears. “There’s a hotel downtown that the Agency uses sometimes. We’ll put you up there for the night, okay?”

For a moment she didn’t answer him. She stared at him assessingly, the unshed tears glittering at the edge of her lashes, and Matt had the feeling that she knew exactly what he was planning. If she ran, he’d have to go after her. It wasn’t something he wanted to do, but she couldn’t wander around the streets in her condition. Then, with a sense of deep relief, he saw her nod in agreement. Jenna Moon trusted him—which made it a whole lot easier to lie to her. He felt like a heel.

“I guess that’s the best solution. I’ll start looking for another place tomorrow, but if you’re sure it’s okay for me to stay at the hotel tonight, that would solve one problem at least.” She managed a smile. “I owe you, Matt. Just give me a couple of minutes and then we can leave. I’d feel better if I splashed some cold water on my face.”

She got up from the table with that long-legged grace that had caught his eye the first time he’d seen her—had it only been a few hours ago? A gallant spirit, Matt reflected somberly as he watched her approach the waitress standing by the counter. Marg gestured toward the back of the coffee shop. If what Jenna feared was true, she’d need all the courage she had to battle the demons that had beset Franklin Moon throughout his life, and that at his death had seemingly transferred themselves to his daughter. She was going to hate him for deceiving her, but with time maybe she’d realize that he hadn’t really had a choice. The hospital was the only place for her right now. He was doing the right thing, he told himself weakly.

So how come words like betrayal and abandonment kept running through his mind?

Probably because she’d come to him in good faith, asking for his help. She certainly hadn’t expected that he’d end up taking her freedom away, no matter how much he felt his actions were justified. He rubbed the side of his jaw tiredly, hardly noticing the pinprick of stubble against his hand, and as he did he caught the sidelong glance the waitress threw him. Their eyes met, and she switched her attention quickly to her order pad, but not before he saw the guilty flush of color on her cheeks.

For crying out loud, D’Angelo—she’s taken off on you. And that pottery-making waitress helped her escape!

He pushed his chair back swiftly and crossed the distance between them in three strides. Flustered, Marg looked up with an expression of innocence that wouldn’t have fooled a Cub Scout—which was no guarantee that it couldn’t fool him, Matt thought disgustedly. He’d screwed up royally.

“She left by the back exit, didn’t she? Where is it?”

“It’s past the kitchen, mister.” Marg snapped her order book closed defiantly and crammed it into her apron pocket. The only other customer left in the place, a bleary-eyed old man in a security-guard uniform, looked up with interest as the waitress’s voice took on a sharp edge. “And she’s had a good five minutes’ start on you, so you might as well just kiss her goodbye. She’s gone. What the heck did you say to her, anyway?”

Matt didn’t answer. He pushed past her and down the short hall at the back of the room. A slightly overweight boy in a white apron over a stained T-shirt was filling jelly doughnuts with an enormous pastry bag. His boredom was replaced by dull interest as first Matt, then Marg, then the geriatric security guard went by at a fast trot, and he stared hopefully at the hallway as if he was expecting more to the parade. The doughnut he’d forgotten he was filling exploded, sending raspberry jelly and powdered sugar all over the counter.

“You a fed?” The security guard pushed importantly past Marg and wheezed out his question at Matt, watching with avid interest as he unlocked the heavy metal door at the end of the hall with some difficulty. “I switched my hearing aid up full blast when you were on the phone and I heard you talking about that big shot that’s gone missing. That redhead with the great gams was a witness—and you let her get away.”

Ignoring the excited old man’s running commentary, Matt slid the lock back on the door.

Behind the coffee shop was an alleyway that seemed to run parallel with the street in front of the building, but it was hard to see more than a few feet. The rain was a silvery curtain blocking out everything but the basic shapes of the buildings backing onto the alley.

“Calm down, Jimmy,” Marg snorted. “It’s just a lovers’ argument.”

“It wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel.” Even though he was standing in the doorway, already the front of Matt’s suit jacket was beaded with moisture. The rain-haloed glow of a street-light shone fuzzily on the three of them as they huddled there. “And she wasn’t a witness, old-timer. She was just a lady with a problem.”

“It looked to me like the only problem she had was you,” Marg said with a scowl. “One minute the two of you are practically melting the frosting off my Boston cream doughnuts, and two seconds later she looked like she’d just lost the only friend she ever had. She was a basket case when she ran out of here—no sane girl would take off into this downpour.”

“Yeah, well…” Matt turned his suit collar up and looked out into the night. It wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, he thought, and somewhere out there Jenna was getting soaked to the skin. “The question of her sanity was what I was worried about. I was about to take her to a hospital.”

“The redhead was crazy? She looked all there to me.” The guard pushed his cap to the back of his head and whistled in disbelief. “Didn’t seem like there was anything wrong with her, if you catch my drift.”

“There wasn’t anything wrong with her.” Marg’s fists went pugnaciously to her hips and her voice rose in scorn. “You’re the one who’s crazy if you were planning on having her locked up in a padded room somewhere. You were sitting right across from her, mister—didn’t you take a good look at her? She was upset, sure. I guess to you she looked a little offbeat, what with her clothes and all. But that sweet girl was as sane as you and me, and if you’d even thought twice about it instead of jumping to conclusions, you’d have realized that.”

“Hold on, Marg,” the old man said uncomfortably. “He’s a federal agent. He must know what he’s doing.”

“He works for the Establishment, Jimmy.” Anger sparked in her eyes, making her look suddenly younger. “He’s the Man—what does he care about ordinary people like you and me and that beautiful, gentle girl, people who think peace and love and doing your own thing are more important than wearing a suit and tie and toeing the corporate line? He probably thinks we all should be carted off to a padded room!”

Jimmy tugged nervously at his jacket, partially hiding the holstered gun and the handcuffs that hung from his belt. Matt didn’t blame him. He felt as though he’d been dropped into the middle of an early Peter Fonda film. Jenna Moon might be Miss Looney Tunes, as the apartment superintendent had so sensitively phrased it, or she might be the saint that this fiery holdout from the ’60s, with her faded apron and work-roughened hands seemed to think she was, but one thing was definite. She certainly had an effect on anyone she came in contact with—and if proof was needed, all he had to do was examine his own emotions.

He felt a sudden affinity for Marg. She’d only known Jenna for a few minutes, but in that short time the course of her life had taken a drastic turn. She’d been given back her hopes and dreams, all because Jenna had taken the time to care about her. Of course she was going to defend her and blame him for the situation she thought he’d created.

“Okay, I was a jerk,” he said. “I lied to her and she knew I was lying and she ran. But I feel the same way about her as you do, Marg, and whether you agree or not, I feel I’ve got a responsibility to find her and get her some help. Did she say anything about where she was heading?”

“No.” The waitress surveyed him stonily for a second, and then sighed. “Sorry for the outburst. I guess I was having a flashback or something.” She glanced over at the kitchen and shrugged. “You could ask Tom if he saw which way she went—he probably had to open the door for her.”

Jimmy, now that the crisis was over, had regained his swagger. “Nice kid, but no rocket scientist, if you catch my drift,” he confided to Matt. He raised his voice. “Tom, get your butt out here! Man’s got a question for you!”

“He’s a little slow, but he’s not deaf.” Marg shot the security guard a black look. As the younger man lumbered out of the kitchen toward them, she fixed a smile on her face. “Tom, you know the red-haired lady who went out of here a little while ago?”

“The pretty one? Sure.” Tom nodded judiciously. “I had to open the door for her. She couldn’t do it all by herself, so she asked me. Her hair smelled good.”

Marg reached out and touched the boy on the arm. “It’s pretty important, Tom. Did she go to where the alley comes out on the street, or did she turn right and head for the back of those apartments?”

With a start, Matt realized that the apartment building she was talking about was the one where he and Jenna had had that ill-fated encounter with West and Mrs. Janeway earlier—the building where she’d insisted she’d lived. It made sense that she’d head back to what she imagined was familiar territory, and he grabbed Tom’s arm, his voice urgent. “Did she go toward the apartments? Is that the way she went?”

With slow deliberation the pudgy teenager looked down at Matt’s hand. Then, as if he’d come to a momentous decision, he shook his head and pursed his lips. “Not toward the apartments, mister. She ran toward the street and a bus was coming and it stopped for her. She got on it and then she told the driver she wanted to go downtown, and he said okay. Then the bus drove away with her on it.” His voice rose. “But she didn’t go toward the apartments. She never even looked that way! She went toward the street, okay?”

He was lying as best as he knew how, Matt thought with rueful admiration. Jenna had done it again—passed a few moments with a stranger and gained another friend for life.

“He couldn’t have heard a conversation on the bus at this distance,” Jimmy said in a low tone. “Not with this downpour making such a racket. The kid’s lying—she musta headed for the back of those apartments like you figured.”

“She got on the bus and it drove away with her,” Tom said. He folded his arms across his chest, adding a new smear of raspberry jelly to the stains already on his apron. There was a smudge of powdered sugar on his cheek. “She didn’t go anywhere near those apartments, mister.”

“Poor kid, he’s trying to protect her,” Marg murmured to Matt. She patted Tom’s arm. “Thanks, Tom. You’d make a pretty good detective.”

“Okay, Marg. I’m going to start making more lemon doughnuts now.” Pointedly ignoring Matt, he turned away from the open door.

If anything, the rain was heavier now. Down the cracked pavement of the alleyway small streams ran and merged together, sweeping bits of paper and cigarette butts and other flotsam along with them. Jenna was out there, Matt thought. He’d been responsible for making her run. Anything could happen to her, and it would be his fault.

“Thanks, Marg. Jimmy, forget anything you thought you heard me talking about on the phone.” Hunching his shoulders, he sprinted out into the downpour, heading toward the apartment building.

THE KID HAD suckered him in. For the third time in as many minutes, Matt wiped the rain from his eyes in frustration and wondered briefly if it was too late to switch careers. A few feet beyond him was the dead end to the alleyway, beside him was an industrial garbage bin with the refuse from the apartment building spilling out of it, and behind him was the building itself—the building where this doomed nightmare of an evening had begun. Jenna hadn’t come this way at all. He’d been finessed by a donut-making teenager who, if he definitely wasn’t a rocket scientist, as Jimmy the security guard had said, certainly had managed to pull a fast one on one Matt D’Angelo, future area director of the Agency.

Jenna could be anywhere by now. He’d lost her.

He was halfway back down the alley when he heard the sound—an unearthly scream that floated eerily through the night. The hair on the back of his neck lifted in an atavistic reaction and he whirled around, his hand going automatically to his gun before he checked himself.

It had sounded like a baby’s cry—but not like any human baby he’d ever known. A chill that had nothing to do with the rain spread through him. From out of his childhood came, full-blown and as spine-tingling as when he’d first heard it, the memory of a story his great-grandmother had told him and his sister Carmela; the story of the goblin’s child who sobbed and wailed in the forests of her native Calabria to draw soft-hearted maidens to their deaths.

The cry came again, an unearthly, soulless entreaty that turned his blood to ice.

Matt blinked the rain from his eyes, and his mouth thinned to an angry line. He didn’t believe in ghosts or fairy tales or fantasy. He believed in hard facts. He started running, heading blindly toward where the sound had last come from and he felt his foot connect with something.

With a raucous clatter, the lid of a trash can fell to the pavement and rolled a few feet before its noisy progress ended. The next minute he saw a small figure leap from the edge of a nearby garbage bin and felt a searing pain rip its way across his left bicep. Immediately the cold clamminess of his shirt was overlaid with the warmth of blood.

His blood. Dammit, he was bleeding. And he was holding a damn cat!

For the second time that evening he found himself gazing into impossibly blue eyes, but this pair was cross-eyed. They glared myopically out of the triangular, brown-masked face peering from his arms, and even as Matt met that disconcerting gaze, the cat opened its mouth and let out a sobbing wail that gurgled off into an irregular purr.

He’d insisted on proof. He’d refused to believe anything she’d told him, he’d let her run out into the night believing she was what that lying bastard West had called her—Miss Looney Tunes—and now she was on the run, alone and frightened, just because he had to have everything by the book. How could he have been so damn stupid?

The cat in his arms yowled miserably and lashed a rain-drenched tail—which was covered, Matt saw, with a streak of sky-blue paint.