Читать книгу Criminal Deception - Marilyn Pappano - Страница 9

Joe’s primary function at any of the various organizational meetings he attended was to provide the coffee. Oh, he knew Ellie Maricci and the others relied on his willingness to volunteer, but when all was said and done, it was the coffee that counted most.

Tonight’s meeting was at River’s Edge, the antebellum beauty catty-cornered from A Cuppa Joe. It was a tourist attraction, a community meeting center and the place for celebrations of every sort. His mother, Dory, had seen a story about it in the Savannah newspaper and commented—while gazing at Joe with utter innocence—what a lovely place it would be for a wedding. The ceremony in the garden, a string quartet on the verandah, a lavish cake in the gazebo and laughter everywhere. The wistfulness in her voice had been deep, tinged with sadness.

Like most mothers, Dory wanted grandbabies to cuddle, preferably after a wedding to remember, but, she was fond of saying, she would take them any way she could get them. A bride who needed a little help planning a wedding would have been a plus in her book. She understood it was the bride’s mother who traditionally got the pleasure, but didn’t she deserve something extra for raising him and Josh?

She’d deserved a lot better than she’d gotten.

All too aware of that, Joe had responded with a joke. How do you get decent blues out of a string quartet?

Predictably, she’d swatted him. You don’t play the blues at a wedding.

Depends on whose wedding, his father, Ruben, had muttered.

Blues would be most appropriate for the poor sucker who made the mistake of walking down the aisle with Josh. Better yet, a funeral dirge.

And it damn well had better not be Liz.

Scowling, Joe carried a wicker basket across the verandah and through the open double doors. Ellie had covered half of the antique cherrywood dining table with desserts from the deli’s kitchen and left the other half for him. He’d already delivered two urns, started the coffee brewing—Guatemalan Antiqua and Ethiopian Yirgacheffe—and from the basket he now unloaded bowls of sugar and sweetener and two small carafes of cream, one plain, one flavored with hazelnut.

“Oh, my gosh, it smells wonderful in here.” Ellie waited for him to turn away from the table, then hugged him. Her body was solid, warm, with a barely noticeable bump from her four-months-along pregnancy. For more than five years, she and Tommy had gotten together, broken up and done it all over again, all because of his desire to get married and have kids and her opposition to both ideas.

Funny how surviving a near-death experience had made her see things in a different light.

It was one thing Joe and Ellie had in common. The near-death experience. Not so much the desire to marry and have kids.

When she stepped back, he gestured toward the table. “Do I need to set out cups and napkins again, or do you have that covered?”

Ellie grinned. “I brought finger food. No need for dishes.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen people take their coffee directly from the urn, on their knees, scalding their tongues. It’s not a pretty—”

The door that led from the dining room directly into the kitchen bumped open an inch or two, and black curls appeared briefly before the door received a harder shove. Liz was smiling, saying something over her shoulder and carrying a silver tray loaded with cups and saucers as she came into the room. Speaking of pretty sights…

Damn. He’d thought since he’d made it the rest of the day without so much as a glimpse of her that he might be safe. He would come to the meeting, it would be late when he got home, he would go straight to bed without even thinking about her…

Yeah, right.

“Hi, Joe.”

He automatically reached for the tray, heavier than it should have been. She flashed him a smile, hotter than it should have been. “Thanks,” she said as she began unloading cups and carefully lining them up near the urns. “I wondered why we were using the good china instead of paper plates and foam cups. Guess I have my answer.”

We. How easily she included herself among his friends, his town. She’d been there less than thirty hours, already had an invitation to work on Ellie’s project and had apparently made herself at home. Though, to be fair, Ellie would accept help from any living, breathing body.

And Liz was definitely living…breathing…and what a body. She wore white capris that left her legs bare from the knee down, a black-and-white dotted shirt that clung to her curves and black-and-white dotted sandals. With heels, of course.

Had he mentioned that he liked sexy shoes?

Ellie began stacking the saucers around the dessert plates as she primly said, “I admire Joe’s commitment to the environment and avoiding unnecessary waste.”

“Of course you do, because it means when we do this type of thing, I do the dishes.”

Liz wasn’t fooled. “I saw the state-of-the-art dishwashers in there.”

He shrugged.

“But tell me, doesn’t it take a lot of energy to run the dishwasher, heat the water, dry the dishes—heavens, to manufacture and ship the dishwasher in the first place? How do you know it’s not more environmentally friendly to just use throwaways and be done with it? Not foam, of course. It’s practically indestructible. But paper decomposes.”

Before he could respond, Ellie raised both hands. “Please, no environmental discussions. Tonight’s for my cause.”

Still holding Liz’s gaze, Joe directed his words to Ellie. “I heard you’d decided to use environmentally friendly disposable diapers for the kiddo. And that your remodel includes solar panels and a geothermal heat pump system.”

“That’s our contractor’s idea. Nothing to do with you,” she replied with a wink for Liz’s benefit. She knew Tommy and Russ had discussed it with him before making their choices. “So…I didn’t realize you two had met.”

“I didn’t realize you two had met,” he said.

Liz’s movements were fluid as she took a cup from the table, placed it under the spout of the Antiqua urn and filled it. “A good cup of coffee is the first thing I look for in a new town,” she said breezily.

“I’d’ve thought it would be a familiar face,” Joe said without a hint of breeze.

Ellie’s gaze shifted from one to the other, then she began easing away. “I’m gonna see if everyone’s here. When you hear me talking loudly in the parlor, that’s your cue to come on in. I’d hate for you to miss out on anything.”

Liz stirred sugar into her coffee, then held the spoon to drip. “I think that means she doesn’t want to miss out on anything.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I met Ellie at the deli this morning. Cute names in this town. Ellie’s Deli. A Cuppa Joe.”

“Not my doing,” he reminded her.

She nodded, then sucked the spoon into her mouth. The action was simple, unaffected, and damn near cut his knees out from under him. “Mmm. You know, there really is a difference between instant coffee and this stuff.”

“Yeah.” Was his voice really that hoarse? “Lucky for me, everyone else in the world was quicker than you to figure that out, or I’d be out of business.”

She took a sip and made another, softer mmm sound. “I don’t have time to make real coffee every day.”

“You can’t spare a few minutes? Keeping up with Josh—or tracking him down—must be a full-time job.”

A blink, one blink of those java-dark eyes, was her only response to the mention of his brother, and he tried to read a lot into it. Did she love him? Did she miss him? Did she hate him, need him, want to punish him?

Did she see him every time she looked at Joe?

Being an identical twin had its pluses and minuses. Being hot for a woman who didn’t even have to close her eyes to imagine she was with his brother was right up at the top of the minus column, along with being mistaken for him by a hitman.

Thinking about being hot for his brother’s maybe-ex was the perfect time for an interruption, provided by A. J. Decker. “Come on, Saldana. You’ve got all the coffee a man could need all day long. Do you mind sharing a little of it tonight?”

Joe forced his gaze from Liz. “I don’t know. I’m so used to getting paid for it that it’s kind of hard to give it away free.”

Decker reached into his pocket and pulled out a wrinkled five. “Now will you move?”

Liz set her cup aside and picked up a clean one. “Keep your money, Lieutenant. This one’s on me.” Her slender, elegant fingers gestured toward the engraved plates that hung from each urn. “What’s your pleasure?”

Pleasure? On her? Sweet hell, Joe had to get away. Fast. Saying, “Excuse me,” and sounding more than a little strangled, he escaped the dining room for the broad hallway that divided the house front to back. The air was cooler there, easier to force into his choked lungs, kinder to his hot skin.

Familiar voices came from the parlor across the hall. Ellie and Tommy. The Calloway boys: Russ, Robbie and half-brother Mitch, and their wives, Jamie, Anamaria and Jessica. Sophy from the quilt shop and Officer Pete Petrovski, Joe’s neighbor. KiKi Isaacs, the first female detective in Copper Lake history. Dharma, the temperamental chef at the deli, and Cate Calloway, ER doctor and former cousin by marriage to the Calloway boys. Marnie, the lost-in-another-world crime scene tech who oversaw the CLPD lab. Her people skills mostly applied to the recently dead, but Joe liked her anyway.

He liked all these people. He liked their parents and their kids and their dogs, and they liked him back, even if they didn’t know much about him. The only person in town who did know much about him was approaching from behind, talking freely with Decker.

“…don’t know how long I’ll be here. I’ve just reached one of those points, you know, where anywhere you’re not has got to be better than where you are. If I like it, if I don’t…” She finished with a little shimmy of movement that started with the wild curls gathered on top of her head and ended with the slight sway of the ruffles stretched across the base of her toes.

And Decker didn’t even seem affected. His fingers didn’t tighten on the cup he held in his left hand. The saucer in his right didn’t tremble. He didn’t look as if all the air had been sucked out of his lungs with that one little wiggle. He just nodded, said something about Dallas making Copper Lake look damn good, shoved a bite of minicheesecake in his mouth and went off to take a seat next to Cate.

Huh.

As Ellie moved to stand in front of the fireplace, Joe chose the broad sill of a window to lean against. The windows were open, and scents drifted in, along with the hum of insects and the infrequent traffic on the street. He rested his hands on the aged wood, settling in to relax and listen.

Ellie had already explained the gist of her plan to him: She wanted to found a school for young women on the streets who’d fallen through the system’s cracks. Whether a girl ran away or was tossed out by her parents, there was precious little help available and virtually none after they turned eighteen. Society got to wash their hands of them once the girls reached the age of majority, leaving them on the streets with one job skill—prostitution—and little more than dreams of having a normal life.

Joe was all in favor of normal lives.

The location was the simplest of the problems. The Calloways’ mother, Sara, owned an abandoned elementary school, and she was ready to donate it. But there were still the legal issues, the zoning, the licensing, the funding, the staff. But if anyone could handle it, he had faith these people could.

“It all sounds very daunting,” Liz remarked two hours later when she delivered a tray of dirty dishes to the kitchen.

Joe glanced up from the sink where he was washing saucers. “Maybe to mere mortals.”

“And these people aren’t?”

“Oh, they’re mortal enough. They’re just…passionate.”

Instead of murmuring some response, then leaving for more dishes, she picked up a dish cloth from the neat stack on the counter and began drying a fragile cup. “You included?”

“Only about my coffee.”

“And your family.”

He lifted one shoulder in agreement. “You know, passion can be positive or negative.”

“Oh, I’m sure you use your power for good. Getting on board with this bunch. All the recycling stuff. Coaching Little League. Sponsoring needy families at Christmas. Taking in strays.” She searched the cabinets until she found the remaining coffee cups, placed that one inside, then came back for another. “I’ve been talking to people about you.”

He gave her a flat look. “They know what I want them to know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No one knows what happened in Chicago or about Josh.”

“Oops. I told Natalia that Josh and I used to date.”

He washed a few more dishes before brushing it off. “Natalia doesn’t make small talk.”

“I noticed. Talking with her is like pulling teeth. I had breakfast next to her. I helped her walk those dogs back to your house. I even cleaned up the fuzzy one’s accidents on the way, and she still didn’t say three dozen words to me.” She watched, wondering if he would defend Natalia, certain he wouldn’t betray any of her confidences.

He didn’t surprise her. “You’re lucky it was the fuzzy one. His really are accidents. The brown one, though…she does everything on purpose.”

“She’s just a puppy,” Liz said with a laugh.

“She’s a half-starved, abandoned puppy who thinks she rules the world, particularly any corner of it that I try to claim for my own. She’s clearly familiar with the phrase ‘alpha,’ but she doesn’t seem to know that it’s usually followed by ‘male.’ She tries to mount the male, she stands me down and she’s not afraid to draw blood if you cross her.”

“Wow, and you’ve only had her twenty-four hours. This should be fun.”

With a scowl, he settled another stack of plates into the soapy water.

Liz became aware of the murmuring voices outside the kitchen growing more distant. “Sounds as if everyone’s leaving.”

“You thought I was kidding when I said I do dishes?”

“I thought surely someone would help.”

“Someone is helping.” He gestured to her with a sudsy hand. “Believe me, they pay attention. If you hadn’t stayed, Sophy would have, or Ellie or Jamie. The moment they see a willing victim walk through the door, though, they’re outta here.”

A willing victim—that was her. And Josh. But not Joe. He hadn’t asked for any part of the events that had turned his life upside down. Did he regret it? The shooting, of course. But moving to Copper Lake, starting his own business, making new friends?

“Do you regret it?” For an instant she was surprised that she’d asked the question aloud, but because she couldn’t take back the words, she pushed on. “Moving. Starting over. Moving here.”

He washed the last dish, then started on the glass urns. “It wasn’t in my life plan.”

“But sometimes good comes out of bad. You seem happier here than you were in Chicago.”

“You should have seen me before yesterday,” he said drily. “I was damn near ecstatic.”

She made a face at his back, then turned her attention to the kitchen. It was lovely, looking every one of its two-hundred-plus years but with all the modern conveniences, including the two dishwashers she’d mentioned earlier. She wasn’t surprised Joe had chosen not to use them. The dishes weren’t heavily soiled and could be done just as quickly by hand. Even she probably would have gone that route.

After the paper plates and cups had been prohibited.

“So what’s kept you busy the last two years? Besides Josh, of course. You never seemed to have time for work in Chicago.”

Meaning he’d never seen her unless she was plastered hip-to-thigh to Josh. Except that one night. That was the closest she’d ever come to disaster, and that included waking up to find Josh handcuffing her to the bed and spending two years on the fugitive squad.

“I’ve done a lot of things. I usually work for a while, save some money, then take a break.”

“What kind of things?”

“Wait tables. Tend bar. Clerical stuff.” Josh had thought it funny to tell a few of his buddies that she worked out of their apartment as a phone-sex operator. Joe wouldn’t be nearly as amused by that as those guys had been. Talk dirty to me had become their standard greeting to her.

“Most people who work those kinds of jobs have to keep working. They don’t get the luxury of months off here or there.”

She hadn’t had an entire month off since college, and even then she’d worked part-time jobs. But she smiled sunnily and said, “Most people have obligations.”

“And all you want to do is find Josh.”

Ignoring his comment, she put away the last half dozen cups, laid the damp towels across a rod to dry and leaned against the countertop to watch him rinse the first urn. It was tall, the glass tempered, distorted to give the appearance of age. He didn’t take particular care with it but handled it competently, the way he’d handled the more delicate cups and plates. She knew without asking that he’d never broken a piece of the everyday china, never let a soapy urn slip from his hands, never lost his cool, calm confidence.

Except maybe a little, on an emotional level. When it came to Josh. And her.

If he were anyone else, she would like that she could throw him off his emotional balance.

If she were anyone else, she would take a chance at letting him unbalance her.

He finished the last of the cleanup in silence, then scooped up the urns, one in each arm. “Can you flip the light switch?”

Accommodatingly she followed him through the house, turning off the switches he indicated, picking up the wicker basket from the dining table, securing the double doors behind them.

It was nearly ten o’clock. The buzz of streetlamps was louder than the tree frogs’ song, but only by a notch or so. The scents of the river two blocks away mingled with the closer fragrance of flowers, and music drifted from somewhere nearby, something low and mournful.

Liz took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. “You made a good choice.” Sensing rather than seeing Joe’s curious look, she went on. “Coming to Copper Lake. Do you ever remember a night this calm in Chicago?”

“Hundreds of them. It’s just a town, too.”

“A great big, sprawling, noisy, crowded town.”

“Too big for the Kansas farm girl?”

She responded with an exaggerated frown before following him around the corner of the verandah, then down brick steps to the path. There she moved to walk beside him, through the gate and onto the sidewalk. “I’m not a farm girl.”

Stopping beside her car, he shifted the urns, then extended his hand for the basket. She considered not giving it to him and instead heading across the street to the coffee shop, prolonging this moment with him. A short walk in the cool humid night, a few moments more of comfortable conversation, another few deep breaths that smelled of jasmine and coffee and faded cotton…

She gave him the basket. “I’ll see you later.”

His fingers brushed hers. “You’ll be hard to avoid.”

She shoved her hands into her pockets. “You know how to get rid of me for good.” Tell me where Josh is.

There at the side of the street, his arms loaded, still looking like a surfer boy but a tired one, he said flatly, “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

His voice lacked the insistence she was accustomed to from deceitful family members. He didn’t shift his weight or avoid her gaze or do anything to suggest dishonesty. That didn’t mean he was telling the truth, though. It just meant he was better at lying than most people she dealt with. He was smart enough to avoid the usual subconscious behaviors of an untruthful person.

“Like I said, I’ll see you.” She clicked the remote to unlock the car door, then slid behind the wheel. He didn’t wait until she was safely on her way, but turned and strode across two intersections to the dimly lit coffee shop on the corner.

Within three minutes, she was home. In six, she was stretched out on the sofa, her cell phone propped to her ear. The only light burning in the house was above the kitchen sink; it cast just enough illumination to deepen the living room shadows. The curtains were drawn back, giving her a good view of all three houses across the way.

Pete Petrovski was home, and so was Natalia, babysitting Joe’s puppies. Their barks drifted through the open window, along with a cooling breeze. But the lavender cottage remained dark. Liz wondered if Joe was still at the shop, or if he’d taken advantage of the lovely night to take a ride around town, or if he’d somehow managed to sneak in through the back so he wouldn’t risk seeing her. Not an easy feat considering none of the houses had back doors.

“Hey, I know you’ve had a tough day playing the grasping ex-girlfriend, but surely it wasn’t so exhausting that you can’t take part in a conversation for five minutes.” Mika Tupolev’s voice was chiding, but her expression, Liz knew from experience, wouldn’t match. Mika didn’t frown or scowl or sneer or smirk, or smile much, for that matter. Like the icy Russian mountains her family had once called home, she was all cool all the time. The boss should have sent her to Copper Lake instead of Liz. Joe wouldn’t have been able to melt the first layer of permafrost that encased her if he tried.

Hell, Liz was hot-flashing just from seeing him. Just from thinking of him. And he wasn’t trying to get a reaction from her.

“I’m listening, Mika.”

“You’re not supposed to be listening. You’re supposed to be answering my question. Do you believe Joe Saldana when he says he doesn’t know where his brother is?”

She wanted to think that he was well and truly done with Josh for at least the next fifteen years to life. After all, Josh was as big on screwing up as Joe was on responsibility.

On the other hand, they were identical twins. They’d shared their mother’s womb, had the same face, the same eyes, the same DNA. Was breaking that bond permanently even possible?

“I don’t know,” she said. “He sounds sincere.”

Mika voiced what Liz was thinking. “Don’t all good liars?”

They did. As far as anyone knew, Joe was an honest law-abiding man, but most honest law-abiding people would lie for the right reason. Look at her. Lying was a big part of her job, and she sounded damn sincere when she did it. And Joe had spent half a lifetime with a brother who lied as easily as he breathed.

“My instincts say he or his parents are our best shot,” she said. “It’s always been Josh’s pattern. When he screws up badly enough, he turns to his family for help.”

“We’re keeping tabs on the elder Saldanas as well. If Josh contacts them or shows up there, we’ll know.”