Dirty Secrets (7 page)

Downstairs, his movements went quiet, then she heard a click as he picked up the extension in the kitchen. She winced at the crack when he threw the phone to the marble countertop in her kitchen. Held her breath as the back door creaked open.

And closed. She let the breath out, let the tears come. He was gone.

* * *

St. Pete, Sunday, February 28, 7:00 p.m.

“Daddy! I’m home!” Megan’s voice jerked Christopher’s attention from the book in which he’d spent the better part of the afternoon, totally engrossed. Megan had spent the night at a friend’s pajama party. She’d been concerned about going to a party so soon after Darrell’s funeral, but he’d urged her to go. To have fun. Life went on after all. She poked her head through the door of his study. “What are you reading?”

Christopher flashed the book her direction. “It’s a book the campus counselor suggested we read. It’s about how to deal with the death of someone close to you.”

He’d picked it up in his office after Harris left. Brought it home, needing the connection to Emma after coming to grips with the stark truth that Darrell had been murdered after all. He’d thought he’d skim it. But one page had turned into fifty, then a hundred. She wrote like she talked, wry and funny and so damn sincere. It was almost like she was talking, just to him. He could see why her book had been such a success.

Megan flopped into the chair next to his desk. “It must be good. You never even heard me come in.”

He turned the book, looked at Emma’s face smiling up at him from the back cover. If he’d looked at the book the day the counselor had given it to him he could have found her himself. But she’d found him just two days later. It was fate, plain and simple.

“It’s very good,” he said quietly. “Better than I thought it could ever be.” He considered telling his daughter about Emma then, but she started bubbling about the time she’d had with her friends at the party, the movie they’d seen, the pizza they’d made from scratch. She’d been so sweet since Darrell’s death, trying to cheer him up.

“From scratch?” he said, smiling. “You never make anything from scratch for us.”

“At a party it’s fun. Every night . . .” She grimaced. “Too much trouble.” Then she bit her lip. “But I could if you wanted me to.”

“Delivery from the place on the corner is fine with me, Punkin,” he said, lapsing into the pet name he’d had for her when she was small. “In fact, let’s do that tonight.”

She grinned her relief. “How about I order us a pizza with everything?” Without waiting for his reply, she bounced to her feet and bounded from the room.

“Bye,” he said to the place where she’d been standing moments before.
Oh, to be a teenager again,
he thought. But he couldn’t think about being a teenager without thinking of Emma. About how perfect she’d felt in his arms. Her wild cries of pleasure when he’d fondled and suckled her breasts, and that had been with her dress in the way. He could only imagine what she’d be like when he finally got her naked. In his bed. Panting and begging. Her legs wrapped around his hips. His name on her lips.

He’d imagined it all night long. He was imagining it right now. Damn, he was hard as a rock from all the imagining. It was all he’d been able to do not to buy himself a plane ticket to Cincinnati. To give her the time and space she’d asked for.

She hadn’t called him yet. He wondered if she’d read his letters. Especially the one he’d written last night. There would be no doubt in her mind what he wanted from her once she’d read that last letter. He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He missed her already. Missed the way she smiled, the way her brown eyes could hold so many different emotions. The way he felt . . . complete and at peace.

He needed her right now, as his thoughts seesawed to Darrell and the detective’s visit that afternoon. His friend had been murdered. Over dirt.

It was still too impossible to be true. But it was. They’d gone over his old notebooks, looking for something suspicious. But all they found was a list of more than fifty samples Darrell had been preparing to run. The fifty samples came from at least two dozen different places. They’d seen no pattern. No smoking gun, as it were. The only thing they could do was re-create Darrell’s tests, to find out what it was that someone didn’t want him to learn.

The phone rang and out of habit he let Megan pick it up. It was always one of her friends anyway. Until he saw the 513 area code on the caller ID. Cincinnati.
Emma
. “Hello?” he and Megan both said together. “I’ve got it, Megan. You can hang up.” He waited until he heard the click before uttering a smooth, “Are you ready to come back?”

“Chr-Christopher?” Her voice was shaking and instantly he was sober. And afraid.

“Emma? What’s wrong?” He listened as she stuttered the details, his blood running cold. His fist clenched around the phone. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” He heard her shudder. “Not like you think. He didn’t touch me. Not like that.”

Staggering relief stole his breath. “Then he just robbed you.”

“No,” she murmured. “No, he didn’t do that either.”

“Then what did he do, Emma?”

“He . . . he was looking for something.”

Christopher’s cold blood turned to ice. “
What?
”

“He was looking for something.” He heard her swallow. “He ripped my hard drive out of my computer. He went through all my papers, all the boxes I’d packed of Will’s things. He threw Will’s things all over the house.” She choked back a sob. “Now I have to pack them away all over again.”

The bastard had gone through her papers. Emma’s papers. Darrell’s notebooks. It seemed too fantastic, but so had the idea of Darrell being murdered. He closed his eyes and took a hard hold on his churning gut. “Emma, honey, where are you now?”

“With my friend K-Kate. She came and got me after the police came and untied me.” She was shivering, her teeth chattering. In shock.

The thought of her tied and gagged . . . and afraid . . . It made him want to find the bastard who’d terrorized her and rip him from limb to limb. “I’m coming.”

“Christopher, no. I just needed to hear your voice. I really am fine.”

“No, you’re not. Emma, I just lost a graduate student because he was working on something somebody didn’t want him to know. Now you’re attacked in your own home.” He gritted his teeth, feeling so helpless. “Don’t you think that’s coincidental?”

“Oh, God. Christopher, I never . . .” Her breath was labored. “But you’re right. It is too coincidental to be ignored.”

“Put your friend on the phone. Please.” Trapping the phone between his shoulder and ear, he put both hands on his keyboard and pulled up a travel Web site. By the time her friend Kate said hello, he’d booked one flight up and two flights back.

“This is Kate. Christopher?”

“Yes. Tell me the truth. Is she all right?”

“She’s shaken up and bruised, but other than that she’s not hurt. The guy tore up her house. He was looking for something, the cops were sure of it. Why would somebody think Emma had anything of yours in her possession?” Kate’s voice was slightly accusing but mostly terrified, and Christopher couldn’t blame her a bit for either.

“I gave her an envelope this morning at the airport. If someone was watching me . . . Dammit. Listen, I’ve got a ticket on the seven a.m. flight tomorrow morning. I’ve got two seats on the eleven a.m. flight back here. I’m going to bring her here, where I can keep her safe. Can you make sure she has a packed bag?”

“I will. I’ll bring her to meet you at the airport. Thank you, Christopher. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Christopher hung up the phone and sat still. He was trembling. Shaking. She’d been in danger. His woman had been in danger and he’d been too far away to help. His hands were barely steady enough to dial, but he punched in Harris’s number with single-minded intent. “It’s Christopher Walker from the University.” Haltingly, Christopher told Harris what had happened. “I could be making a major deal out of something unrelated, but I’m not willing to take a chance with her life.”

Harris was quiet for a moment. “I don’t think you’re overreacting, Professor.”

“I’m going to Cincinnati tomorrow to get her and bring her back here. I just thought you should know I’m leaving town, but I won’t be gone more than a day.”

“For what it’s worth, I never thought you had a hand in Roberts’s murder. Is your lady friend all right?”

“Yes, thanks to her own ingenuity.”

“She sounds like a plucky lady. Who knew you two were going to meet last night?”

“Only the detective she’d hired and I don’t think he would have done this.”

“No, that doesn’t make sense. Nobody else?”

“I didn’t even tell my daughter. But . . .” He rubbed his forehead wearily. “But the private detective did talk to a number of people about me. He called my daughter and my grad students and my boss’s secretary. And during the funeral on Wednesday, all of them told me he’d called them. Anyone could have heard.”

“I think you’ve got someone watching you, Professor. You need to be careful. Who will watch your daughter while you’re away tomorrow?”

Christopher’s heart just stopped. Simply . . . stopped. “Oh, my God. Megan. I . . .” He got hold of himself. “She’ll be in school tomorrow. I can have my friend drop her off and pick her up from school.” Jerry would help. No question.

Papers rustled in the background. “She’s at St. Pete Middle, right?”

“Yes. She’s in the eighth grade.”

“We have a resource officer there at the school. She’ll be safe there. I’ll tell him to keep an eye on her.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem. Call me if you find anything more in those notebooks.”

It all came down to what Darrell had been working on. Somebody thought he knew something, that he’d passed information to Emma. “I will.”

“You will what, Daddy?”

Christopher turned to find Megan staring at him from the study door. His hand bobbled the receiver as he hung it up. “How long have you been standing there?”

Megan was frowning. “Long enough to know you’re going away tomorrow and bringing somebody back. What’s going on here, Daddy? And who is she?”

“She’s an old friend, Megan. It was why that private detective was calling me. He was trying to pass on a message from her. I met her for dinner last night. She went home and someone broke into her house. She’s shaken and scared.”

Megan’s face went carefully blank. “Why can’t she be shaken and scared in her own house? Why does she need to come here?”

Christopher flinched at the utter lack of compassion in his daughter’s tone. “Megan.”

Megan turned on her heel. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I’ll call Debbie and ask if I can spend the night with her. That way you won’t have to worry about me at all tomorrow. For now, I have homework to do.”

Christopher scrambled to his feet. “Megan, wait. We need to talk.”

“No, we don’t. Call me when the pizza gets here.”

He flinched again at the sound of her bedroom door slamming and slumped into his chair. “Hell.” She’d been so sweet this last week. He swore he’d never understand the mercurial mood changes of adolescent girls.

His daughter wasn’t a baby anymore.
But she’s still
my
baby.
His gut clenched at Harris’s warning. Someone had been watching him. That same someone might be watching Megan as well, and while the police meant well, they wouldn’t be able to watch her constantly.

Christopher picked up the phone and dialed Jerry. “Hey, buddy, I need your help.”

He could hear a television being turned down in the background. “Name it.”

He told Jerry about Emma, about Darrell, about Harris’s concerns for Megan. “I’m going to Cincinnati tomorrow. Can you make sure Megan gets to school and then to her friend’s house after school?”

“My God, Chris.” Jerry’s voice shook a little. “This is insane.”

“I know. I can’t believe any of this is happening, but it is. Can you watch Megan?”

“You know I will. Do you need me to come over?”

“No. She’s going to her friend’s house tonight. Just make sure she gets in the school building tomorrow morning. She’ll be safe there. They have resource officers patrolling the halls.” He’d hated the thought that his daughter’s school needed officers, but at this moment he was damn glad they were there. “I’ll call you when I get back.”

* * *

St. Pete, Sunday, February 28, 8:30 p.m.

The phone rang. He closed his eyes, the ceramic tile cold against his cheek. The pain still too intense to move. The ringing ceased, only to start all over again. Groaning, he grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter and pulled himself to his knees. He picked up the phone, a spear of white hot pain shooting up his arm and down his back. “Yeah.”

“You were wrong,” Andrews said. “He didn’t give the Townsend woman anything.”

He’d figured that out himself. Having one of Andrews’s Neanderthals attack him in his own kitchen was a major clue. He had at least three broken ribs and cuts and bruises all over his chest, back, and abdomen, none of which would show when he put on his shirt tomorrow. Which, he supposed, had been the point. “I’m sorry.”

“Lie to me again and you’ll be dead.”

He hurt too much to be afraid or to argue, but he hadn’t lied. He’d followed Walker to the airport that morning, watched him slip a thick envelope into the hands of the same woman he’d had dinner with the night before. She’d zipped the envelope securely into her overnight bag and he couldn’t get it without her raising a public fuss. So he’d managed to get in line behind her while she waited to go through airport security. She was so intent on sniffing her flowers that she didn’t even notice that he was looking over her shoulder at the ID she held with her boarding pass. Her driver’s license said she was Emma Townsend of Cincinnati, Ohio. Then he’d mumbled something about forgetting something to the person behind him, got out of line and called Andrews.

He let Andrews know Walker had passed information to this woman, that she was romantically involved with him, clearly evident from their good-bye kiss. Andrews had cursed him for not getting the envelope, muttering that he’d have someone else get it.
They moved more quickly than I expected.
“Is she?” he asked. “Dead, that is?”