Echoes (11 page)

“This book is from 1982. That's my father, there,” John said, pointing to a photograph, “with Pierre Mauroy, prime minister of France at the time. We didn't get many American politicians, but we had more than a few European ones.” He skipped a few pages. “This is the kind of thing you're probably looking for, though. This was one of the bigger parties I remember ever seeing at the hotel, and it was my first summer on the island. Greek oil tycoon weds American pop star; they took over the hotel. Actually, they took over the whole island, as I recall.”

They looked through the pictures, Callie laughing aloud a couple of times over the fashions in evidence, but if she recognized any of the families involved in the murders, she gave no sign. They made it through the 1982 and 1983 albums, but when John reached for the 1984 one, Callie excused herself to use the bathroom. John rose, too, to show her the way, and to refill their wineglasses, and Mac wondered whether he could take the chance to slip out of the house, but decided it was too risky. Lewis had brought Callie; he'd have to take her back to her hotel, leaving the house unguarded, which would be far safer. Unless, of course, she decided to spend the night.

***

In the tiny half bathroom off the kitchen, Callie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She'd laughed off Mac's assertion that John Lewis was interested in her sexually, but the past several hours had, infuriatingly, proved the man correct. There was no mistaking the signs. And although she was undeniably flattered, given the kind of women John had been photographed with over the years, she was also a bit creeped out. After all, people kept telling her how much she looked like his sister.

Or, according to him, not his sister. If he'd never grown up thinking of Nicole as a blood relation, maybe the attraction wasn't so out of bounds. But although he was handsome, urbane, and obviously intelligent, Callie felt not in the least drawn to him. And she had a sneaky feeling that the real problem for John was that he didn't show well compared to Mac Brody. Not the direction she particularly wanted her mind traveling, but she was too honest not to acknowledge the situation for what it was.

Should she cut the visit short? There had been nothing of importance in the albums they'd seen so far. Would staying to flip through more give John the wrong idea about her desires? But the longer she kept John occupied, the better chance Mac had of finding something in the Paradis files, if anything existed to be found. In the end, she resolved to compromise by suggesting skipping forward to the one from 1987, when her parents had visited the island.

When she returned to the office, John was reshelving the albums they'd looked through. As he reached for 1984, she stopped him.

“I'm getting tired. I thought we could just stick to the one that would show my parents, if they ever stayed at the hotel.”

“Of course. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be silly. I'm just fried—too much travel and excitement in the past couple of weeks. And good food, wine, the ocean . . . It's all catching up with me.”

“Completely understandable. Let's just have a look at 1987, then.” He led her back to the sofa and opened the last book. The first few pages were taken up with photographs of a New Year's Eve party held at the Paradis.

“Ava looks great. Nicole was born in September, you said? She must have worked out like a fiend to get back in shape for this party.”

“That was Ava,” John conceded. “All about appearances. The first construction my father did on the hotel when he got it was to put in the gym and spa building. He claimed he did it to attract athletes who needed to work out while on vacation, and it certainly served that purpose, but even though I was just a teenager, I knew he was building it for Ava.”

John pointed out a woman holding an infant. The child held a tiny silver rattle up as if in victory. “There's Nicole. Life of the party and only three months old.”

“She was born in France, right? How long did it take your parents to reconcile?”

“Oh, that happened as soon as she was born. Their separation kept Ava out of the public eye during her pregnancy, kept gossip to a minimum, but Ava came back to the island pretty much the minute Nicole was old enough to travel. A child, illegitimate or not, is far less provocative meat for the gossips than pregnancy.”

“Your father must have loved Ava very much to take Nicole for his own.”

“He probably did. But it's equally true that he had no patience with failure, and since my mother left him in the rudest way possible, he probably wasn't going to give up on his second marriage so easily. He wouldn't like the picture it painted of him.”

“Your parents were divorced?” She'd assumed, when he said he'd lived with his aunt, that his mother had died.

“No. My mother committed suicide.”

“Oh, no! I'm so sorry.”

He shrugged off her condolences. “I was nine when she did it, and had lived with her mood swings and alcoholism for years; it made me sad, but it was also a relief. My aunt had a kid almost exactly my age, and she raised us together until my father sent for me.”

He turned one of the pages in the photo album, dismissing the subject. “There's one of the tennis stars I told you about who stayed here that year.”

“I can see how she might have made an impression!”

They flipped through the book, but Callie saw none of the families whose pictures she'd studied in the papers Mac had printed out. None of the Steeles, Masterses, Corys, or Pearsons had been guests at the Paradis, if the albums were anything to go by.

John drove Callie back to her hotel. She wanted him to leave her at the lobby, but he insisted on walking her across the little footbridge and all the way to her room. The security guard at the bridge noted her room number as he had earlier but once again did not ask for any kind of verification. At the door, John pressed a kiss to Callie's cheek and promised to call the next day once he'd been through the Paradis files to see whether her parents or the Steeles had been registered at the resort.

Callie bolted the door behind her, took a bottle of water out of the refrigerator, and stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the marina. Although exhausted, she was too keyed up to sleep. She hoped John didn't take it into his head to go check the files at the Paradis right away or that, if he did, Mac had had time to go through them and get out.

Boats bobbed in the bay, their lights reflecting off the black mirror of the water. Her father had loved the water and had always been happiest when his assignments took him to places near the ocean. They'd actually lived on a boat during his tenure in Greece, cruising from island to island on weekends he didn't have to work. Throughout her childhood, he'd maintained a house and a small fishing boat on Montauk Point, out at the end of Long Island. They'd gone on many a deep-sea fishing expedition together.

Leaving the sliding glass doors open to the night, Callie went back inside. She would close them before she went to bed, more to keep out mosquitoes than because she worried about anyone breaking into her third-floor suite, but the sounds and scents of the tropical evening drifting across the bay were soothing.

The bathroom—done up in shades of seashell pink, both marble and synthetic composites—verged on tacky, but the tub was huge and the water pressure strong. Callie twisted her hair up in a clip, turned the water almost all the way to hot, and stepped under the spray to work out some of the knots in her back and neck. She stood beneath the water until the whole bathroom had filled with steam, then wrapped herself in the robe the hotel had provided and opened the door.

If not for the smell, she might have fallen into the trap. But the door opened inward, and she took a deep breath to clear the steam from her lungs, so she noticed the chemical odor before stepping into the bedroom. Without taking her eyes off the doorway, she backed up and snatched her sharply pointed tweezers from the sink, then waited for whoever had invaded her room to realize he'd lost the element of surprise and attack.

It didn't take long.

He came at her fast. She had an impression of wiry grace, smooth strength, dark skin and muscle, before all her concentration was taken up by self-defense. She slashed out with the tweezers, felt the drag, and heard him grunt as they connected, slicing into his skin. His leg caught hers, sending her to the ground, and she rolled, taking him down with her. For a moment, she had the upper hand, and felt a tiny surge of triumph, but he squirmed free and got an arm around her neck. She tried to knock him back with her head, but he was ready for her.

Callie gasped for breath as black spots obscured her vision. On the edge of passing out, she heard a tremendous crash. Her captor cursed and released her, but it was too late; the world faded into darkness.

She woke to the sound of Mac's voice as he spoke urgently into his cell phone. He had pulled the blackout curtains, but the dim light of his phone's display illuminated her room at the Princess. She was lying on top of the bed, still dressed in the robe she'd put on after her shower. Her body ached and her throat throbbed.

“Check there first. Call when you get here and we'll come aboard.” He switched on the bedside lamp, then snapped the phone shut and settled next to her.

“How do you feel?”

“Like shit.” Callie tried to smile and was horrified to feel tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. She sat up quickly, brushing them away, and drew her knees beneath her chin. “What happened?”

“You had a visitor.”

“I got that much. I also got that he didn't want to kill me, just knock me out. I smelled something.”

“Chloroform. He probably hoped to carry you off somewhere so his boss could find out what you know and who you've told. He didn't count on you fighting back. And he didn't count on me. Unfortunately, by the time I got in, he was out the window and on the ground.”

“Who were you talking to on the phone?”

“Travis Moreland. He's the Army buddy I told you about, the one who charters out fishing boats. He's coming to pick us up. It's fairly evident that you're no longer safe here.”

“I guess it's a good thing I didn't unpack.”

“In this case, yes. But under normal circumstances, it's better if you do.”

“What do you mean?”

He rubbed his forehead. “If the guy had succeeded tonight, he could just have picked up your suitcase, grabbed whatever you left in the bathroom, and he'd be done. In a matter of seconds, there'd be nothing for the police to go on, no way for them to track you. When you get to a hotel, if you spread your possessions out, you make it harder for criminals to eliminate their tracks.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

He grimaced. “Most people don't. Luckily, they don't have to. But when a guy goes to the police saying his wife disappeared on a business trip, and her hotel room is empty of personal belongings, it's damned hard to determine whether she left of her own accord or not. If she unpacks, there's a chance whoever abducts her will leave something behind—shoes in the closet, a watch in the safe, an address book in the desk drawer—that will lend credence to her husband's claims.”

“From now on, I'll unpack.” She scooted to the edge of the bed, then stood. “Let me get dressed, and I'll be ready to go. I gather your friend is picking us up by boat?”

“Yeah. He'll call when he's found a spot to pull up in the marina. We're safer on the water at the moment, though we should probably report tonight's incident.” He rubbed the scar on his face with one finger in a thoughtful gesture, and Callie realized that at some point it had become invisible to her, just part of the man. “The question is, do we really want to involve the Dutch police? The gendarmes are already in because of Nikki, and the feds want to chat because of the murders in the US, so I'd like to avoid muddying the waters even further if at all possible. I had to break your door to get in, but no doubt we can come to terms with the hotel so that they don't report it.” He glared at her. “You didn't bolt it.”

“I most certainly did!”

“Ah, then your little friend must have unlocked it after he let himself in via the balcony. That's what I would have done. He probably intended to take you out that way—he couldn't very well carry you down the rope he hooked to the balcony—and had an accomplice waiting to help. We got lucky; the door would have been a lot more trouble for me if the bolt had been on.”

Glancing at him as she headed into the bathroom to change, Callie doubted the security lock would have caused Mac much difficulty. The man's muscles had muscles, for which she was immensely grateful at the moment.

“I'll have Marlon phone the hotel in the morning,” she called through the door. “This is his time-share week, and he's good at getting what he wants. He's a lawyer. He can explain that he won't mention his friend being attacked on their property if they won't file a police report. I somehow doubt the resort is anxious for the bad publicity an incident like this could generate.”

Callie stripped off the robe and examined herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Her neck was a bit red, but there was surprisingly little bruising. Her hip, where she'd landed when her assailant had tripped her, was another matter. Already darkening, it promised to become a Technicolor extravaganza, and when she pulled her jeans on she could feel the whole area beginning to swell. But at least the drops of blood spattered on the floor weren't hers.

She pulled on a bra and a clean T-shirt, brushed her hair, then rejoined Mac in the bedroom.

“You know, I stabbed the guy with a pair of tweezers, and looking at the amount of blood in there, I must have gotten him better than I realized. Maybe we should go to the police—if they put out a bulletin, maybe someone would remember seeing an injured guy in the area.”