Acquainted With the Night (20 page)

Tony turned pleading eyes to Alex. She said to him, “Turn around.”

She cuffed him behind his back, loosening the cuffs a little to keep them from digging into his wrists. When she was finished, the woman pulled on the handcuffs to test them, then pushed Tony down onto the carpet, first onto his knees, then onto his stomach.

“If you move,” she said to him, “I’ll shoot you dead. Believe me, I will. I don’t need you anymore.”

Tony made an awful noise, half groan, half choking.

The woman said to Alex, “Sit down. Put your hands on the arms of the chair and leave them there.”

Alex did as instructed, and the woman moved around to sit in Tony’s desk chair. The woman wiped Tony’s revolver clean and left it on his desktop, holding Alex’s much larger Glock semiautomatic on Alex and Tony as she sat behind his desk.

“Now,” the woman said in a friendly voice, “that’s better. We can have a little chat.”

From behind her, Tony moaned, “Sue, baby, why are you doing this?”

“I told you to shut up!” the woman said, suddenly furious. “I’ve had to put up with getting fucked by you for months. We’re done now, so shut up!”

“Sue—” he whined again.

Alex interrupted. “It’s not Sue, is it?” she said calmly. “You’ve changed in the last decade, and your hair is a different color, but I do recognize you. You used Sue Davis as an alias but I know your name. It’s Laurel Halliday, right?”

Her mercurial mood changed again and she smiled. “Yes,” she said, almost friendly. “I’m not surprised Belle showed you pictures of us. You saw how happy we were together.”

The general rule in crisis situations, Alex knew, was not to engage in dialogue with people who were mentally ill or had personality disorders. It gave them a sense of power and control, and that was the last thing Alex needed the woman to have, not with Alex’s own gun pointed at her.

But sooner or later, something would happen. A cleaner would knock on the door, or a late-working staff member might stop by. At worst, Chris Andersen knew where she was and would eventually come looking for her. All Alex had to do was keep them all here alive and unhurt long enough for something good to happen. That meant that she had to talk, and let Laurel talk as well.

She tried to breathe away the knot in her stomach. Then, testing the limits of what Laurel would tolerate, she sat back a little and deliberately crossed her legs, leaving her hands motionless. Laurel’s eyes narrowed but she didn’t move the gun.

“You were smart about it,” Alex said, trying to sound as relaxed as if she were safely in one of her own interrogation rooms. “Getting the two young men to do your dirty work for you was a very good idea.”

“You think so?” Laurel sneered a little, and Alex wondered how a woman so pretty could make her face look so ugly. “They certainly botched the job badly enough.”

“That depends on what you were trying to accomplish,” Alex continued. “If you were trying to scare CJ, you certainly accomplished that.”

“Don’t call her that!” Laurel spat at her. “Her
name
is Belle. You don’t even know her name, do you? What the hell she saw in you, I’ll never know. What are you? You’re not beautiful, you’re not rich, you’re a civil servant, for the love of God. Obviously you were just someone to fuck her while she was waiting for me to come back to her.”

Grandiose expectations, exaggerated self-importance, thinks the world revolves around her.
Narcissism?
Alex knew she was guessing at a diagnosis without enough professional expertise.

“But she uses CJ in Colorado,” Alex said. “And that’s where you made a mistake. The envelope you sent her said ‘Lieutenant C. St. Clair’ on it. Anyone who’d met her here would have used both of her initials. Christabelle Johnson, old family names. Belle is from Christabelle, that’s why you used just her first initial.”

Apparently, making a mistake didn’t fit into Laurel’s world view, so she ignored Alex’s remark and said smugly, “She certainly jumped when I told her too, didn’t she? She was always so compliant.” She smirked at Alex and said, “You should have seen her when she was nineteen. My God, she was gorgeous and so very innocent. She was a virgin when I first took her, did you know that? Sweet as strawberry pie. I believe she thought I’d invented sex.” Laurel gave a pleasant laugh. “She would do anything I asked her, anything I could think of to do to her. She could not get enough of me.”

Alex felt her fingers tighten on the chair, forcibly reminding herself that Laurel was trying to provoke her.
Stay calm. Breathe.
“You haven’t been together in almost twelve years,” Alex said, to see what that would get to her.

“She always knew I’d come back for her,” Laurel said with casual assurance. “I had a few other women to get out of my system first, but she has always belonged to me. You think she’s yours, but she never was. Belle has
always
belonged to me.”

Alex studied Laurel, trying not to look at or think too much about the gun pointed at her. She truly was a lovely woman, blond hair with honey highlights, an almost delicate face, beautiful skin. But her eyes glittered with—what was it? Jealousy? Greed? Lust? Hatred? All of them, perhaps.

“Why?” Alex asked her. “Why, after all this time?”

Laurel showed her even white teeth in a grimace of frustration. “She disappeared on me. She was so upset about losing me after I broke things off with her that she just left Georgia and went away.”

Interesting revisionist history there, Alex thought.

“I couldn’t find her,” Laurel continued, “not until I acquired quite a lot of money. Then it was just a matter of hiring someone to track her down.”

Alex said, carefully, “It’s really your brother’s money, isn’t it?”

The flash of anger was back. “It’s
my
money now, you know. God knows I earned it. I did the research for him, did you know that? I practically wrote the damn book for him, but who gets the big contract? Jackson was never going to take advantage of what money could buy a person. And did he put my name on the book? He did not. So I made sure the money ended up where it belonged.”

Alex felt her hands tighten on the chair again. “He committed suicide.”

Laurel laughed. “Oh, I assure you he did no such thing. But my experience with police officers is that they’re just pretty damned stupid.”

Ignoring the jibe, Alex said flatly, “Are you saying you killed him?”

She shrugged casually. “Ungrateful bastard. He deserved it. And he was in my way, after all.”

“Just like those two boys you shot last July,” Alex ventured carefully. Now that she had Laurel in a confessional mood, she wanted to get as much as she could. Thankfully, Tony would be able to confirm these revelations.

“They were incompetent idiots.” She spat out the words. “They deserved what they got. They never had any idea I would just shoot them, the morons. I paid them good money to get you out of my way, and they murdered some poor idiot instead and you come out without a scratch.” She snorted. “Can you believe they were apparently so high on something that afternoon that they forgot that I told them that ‘Alex’ was a woman? Fucking idiots. They shot the only man there and thought they were following instructions. It was actually a pleasure blowing what little brains they had out of their heads.”

Anger pounded through Alex’s head, but she forced it down again. “You must have had a lot of influence on Tony to get access to his files, and then convince him to give them deferred prosecutions.”

There was a strangled moan from the floor behind her.

Laurel laughed again, unpleasantly. “All he did there was to give me access to his staff. He didn’t even know about my two new employees. I just had to use my—influence, let us say, on one of his assistant district attorneys. It was ridiculously easy.”

“Influence,” Alex said, still drawing her out.
Why hadn’t Chris called?
“Did you bribe the guy, threaten him with Tony’s displeasure, or make promises?”

“None of those. Haven’t you figured out yet that all men think with their dicks? I just let him fuck me a couple of times.”

Tony groaned, “Sue, for God’s sake!”

Laurel jumped up from behind the desk and lifted the gun his direction. “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m going to shoot your miserable excuse for a cock off. If I can find it. Now shut up!”

Alex looked at Laurel’s gun hand, her finger tight against the trigger. She drew a deep breath.

At the movement, Laurel swiveled the gun back to her. “Don’t you start thinking I won’t kill him,” she threatened Alex. “I don’t need him anymore, so I would just love to shut him up on a permanent basis. And I’ll be sure to use your gun to do it.”

Alex said slowly, “It must have been tough on you, being a lesbian, sleeping with all these men to get what you want.”

Laurel, somewhat mollified, sat down again, still keeping the gun trained on Alex. “What it was mostly was goddamned boring. I just don’t get the attraction, you know? It’s always about their dicks. Get it hard, slam it in, or suck it off. And they always think because they’re getting off, that you are too. God, they’re idiots. I actually feel sorry for straight women. Now, fucking with a woman, on the other hand…”

Laurel raked her eyes up and down Alex’s body, and Alex suppressed a shudder. “Sorry we don’t have time, or I’d be happy to demonstrate just why women are so very much better.”

Tony made a choking sound, and this time Laurel laughed at him. “Getting off on that one, aren’t you, dickhead? Well, think about this one for a minute. She and I have both fucked you, and we both prefer women. Figure it out.”

Alex wanted Laurel’s focus away from Tony. She knew that Laurel really believed him to be expendable, and he was in more danger at this moment than she was herself.

“So if things are working out so well for you,” Alex said conversationally, “what are you doing now?”

Laurel gave a little sigh of frustration. “One way or another, you selfish bitch, you have been a real pain in the ass. First you wouldn’t just die like a good little girl so I could show up and reassure Belle that she hadn’t lost anything worth having, and now you’re sending one of your minions out to check up on me. That won’t do at all.”

Chris’s visit to her condo yesterday, Alex thought. Laurel found out about it and realized we were closing in. As if on cue, she felt the cell phone vibrate in her pocket. She ignored it.

“I see,” Alex said. “So you’re going to kill us, Tony and me, is that it? Or is this going to look like some murder/suicide set-up?”

Chris will know better
.
Once she identifies Sue Davis as Laurel, she’ll know who the perp is. Of course, that won’t do me much good.
She had a flash of sorrow at the thought of CJ coming back for her funeral.
Can’t let that happen.

“I’m not ready to kill you. Not quite yet,” Laurel said.

Then Alex finally understood. She slowly uncrossed her leg, then crossed the other one instead. “I know what you want,” she told Laurel.

The glittering eyes narrowed dangerously. “I’m sure you do. She belongs to me, and I’m going to have her back. Now, where in the hell is she?”

“What’s the matter?” Alex said. “Did you lose track of her again? That was careless of you.”

The gun edged closer. “Don’t fuck with me. You like to go running, right? You would be amazed about how much information I know about you from lover boy over there. How far do you think you’ll be able to run if I put a couple of bullets in your knees? Where did she go?”

Alex’s stomach tightened in fear, but she said mildly, “It was your idea to send her away.”

“Fuck you!” Laurel exploded. “She was supposed to
leave
you
, not fucking
disappear!
”

Alex said, “You’ve been looking for her, I imagine.”

“You were supposed to lead me to her. Why the hell do you think I’ve been hanging around here for months, screwing lawyer dick over there, waiting for you to slip up? I’m tired of waiting, you stupid cunt. How much do you think Belle would like you if I just cut up your face?” She fingered Tony’s letter opener with her free hand. “I might actually enjoy that.”

“You don’t know her very well,” Alex replied as calmly as she could, “if you think that would make any difference to her.”

Laurel surged over the desktop toward her, spittle gathering in the corner of her mouth. “Don’t
you
tell me I don’t know her!” she was yelling. “
Nobody
knows her except me, understand? No one! She belongs to me, and you’re going to tell me where she is!”

“No,” Alex said, her voice still cool. “I’m not.”

“The hell you’re not!” she screamed. “You want me to shove this gun between your legs and pull the trigger? Tell me!”

She pushed the gun almost into Alex’s face.
No more time
, Alex thought. No time to wait for Chris, or anything else.

She looked at her own gun, inches away from her nose. Laurel should have stayed with Tony’s revolver, she thought.

Alex pushed the gun barrel away and dove for the floor, pulling her backup weapon from her ankle holster as she rolled. Laurel frantically pulled the trigger of the Glock, but nothing happened. Apparently Laurel had never used a semiautomatic with a safety before.

The safety was still on.

Alex rolled onto her back, bringing her gun hand up as she watched Laurel fumbling with the safety catch. “Put the gun down!” Alex yelled at her.

Laurel’s thumb found the safety and pushed it off. She aimed the gun at Alex.

Alex fired first.

Behind her, Tony screamed into the carpet.

Alex watched Laurel stagger back toward the desk chair, gripping her right arm. The Glock dropped with a heavy thud onto the desk. Laurel tried to use her right hand to find the gun again, but her muscles didn’t seem to be working. Alex got to her feet and snatched both guns from the desktop, getting them out of Laurel’s reach.

Laurel was screaming, incoherent bellows of pain mixed with obscenities. Alex scooped up Tony’s phone, keeping her gun on Laurel, and punched in nine-one-one.