Flash (35 page)

An odd, rasping sound caught Jasper's attention. He aimed the flashlight at Dixon.

Haggard was still on his knees. His face was wet with tears.

“I did it all for her,” Dixon whispered. “I did it for Eleanor. The country needs her.”

That night they burned the contents of Melwood Gill's hot box in Jasper's big river-stone fireplace. The flames devoured decades of facts and rumors and grainy photographs shot through long camera lenses. They consumed yellowed, hand-typed pages from a private investigation agency that had gone out of business twenty years earlier. They ate new reports produced by the computer printers of a modern, more sophisticated agency.

The police had taken the Lancaster file into evidence, but not before Jasper and Olivia had scanned the contents.

Rollie's private investigator had tracked down an
unnamed retired police detective who had been involved with the Richard Lancaster murder investigation.

The former detective had retired to a beachfront house in Mexico. He had confided to the investigator that he had been convinced from the beginning that Richard Lancaster was not the victim of an unknown burglar who was never caught.

Lancaster had known his killer, the retired detective claimed. He also said that he would have bet his pension that the murderer was Dixon Haggard. But there had never been any proof to take to a prosecutor. The case had gone into a cold file.

Dixon took full responsibility for the murder. He was apparently proud of the fact that he had acted alone. Eleanor Lancaster had no inkling of the truth.

“I talked to Todd this afternoon.” Olivia fed another sheet to the flames. “He said he feels an obligation to stay on with the Lancaster campaign for a while. He's going to do whatever he can in the way of damage control. But he told me privately that he's not sure that Eleanor's candidacy can survive the scandal.”

“No big surprise there.” Jasper picked up his glass of scotch. “The police said that Haggard confessed to the crime. He also made it clear that he acted on his own initiative. He's obsessed with Eleanor Lancaster.”

“She's innocent, but she'll be tainted no matter how much spin control her people do. It's going to be hard to explain why she inadvertently hired a campaign manager who committed murder to help her launch her political career. Doesn't exactly demonstrate astute judgment.”

Jasper's mouth curved faintly as he tossed another sheet into the fire. “The public doesn't expect a lot of sound judgment from politicians, but it may feel that Lancaster pushed the envelope of stupidity in this instance.”

“You're sure Dixon won't tell the police that some of the files were removed?” she asked again.

“He didn't see us take the one box downstairs to the car. Besides, all he could think about was that he had screwed up. He was oblivious to what was going on around him.”

Olivia knew that Dixon Haggard had slipped into a world of his own, one in which he was Eleanor Lancaster's failed knight in shining armor. He was still weeping when the police took him into custody.

Silas had recovered consciousness shortly after Olivia and Jasper had arrived downstairs, but he had remained stretched out on the floor of his office, dazed, until the aid car got there.

Olivia raised her brows. “I trust you really have learned your lesson from all of this. An obsession with filing is not a healthy thing.”

Jasper grinned briefly. “I knew you wouldn't be able to resist rubbing it in. Don't worry. Like I said, I've already made plans to clean out some of my old records.”

“I should hope so.” She contemplated the flames. “I suppose we'll never know for certain how Melwood Gill discovered Uncle Rollie's secret files.”

“The information about the storage locker at Pri-Con Self-Storage was probably in Rollie's home office files. You would have come across it when you cleaned
them out, if Gill hadn't gotten there first and set the fire to cover his tracks.”

Olivia nodded and tossed another page to the ravenous flames. “We'll never be able to prove it, but that's the only scenario that makes sense. No wonder Rollie told me that if anything ever happened to him I was to destroy all of his personal files. He knew there was some potentially lethal stuff in them.”

“Rollie trusted you.” Jasper met her eyes. “He must have known that you'd figure out what to do when you came across the Lancaster information.”

“I wonder why he didn't tell Todd the whole story before he left on that safari trip?”

“Not enough hard data to make accusations,” Jasper said. “And none of it implicated Eleanor Lancaster, herself, just her campaign manager. But it was enough to make Rollie uneasy about Todd's involvement with the campaign. He tried to warn him.”

Olivia nodded. “Uncle Rollie may not have been unduly concerned at that point. As far as he knew, Todd was only serving as a temporary consultant to the campaign. He hadn't realized that the relationship between Eleanor and Todd was getting personal and serious.”

“He would have been a lot more worried if he had known that your brother was getting sucked deeper into Lancaster's intimate circle. After all, the closer he got to Eleanor, the more a nutcase like Haggard was likely to resent him.”

Olivia shivered. “At some point Dixon's twisted brain might have concluded that Todd was a rival and a threat. I think he was already heading in that direction.”

“Yes.”

“My God. Dixon might have eventually worked himself up to the notion that Todd had to be removed the same way Eleanor's husband had been removed. He might have murdered my brother.”

“It's over now,” Jasper said quietly.

There was a short silence broken only by the crackle of the flames.

“Yes,” Olivia whispered. “It's over.”

“Jasper.
” Olivia came out of the nightmare with his name on her lips. Her pulse pounded. She gasped for breath.

“It's all right.” Jasper's warm arms closed tightly around her. “Only a dream.”

“No.” She refused to be comforted. She pried herself out of his arms and sat up, clutching the sheet to her breasts. She stared down at his shadowed face. “No, it wasn't a dream. It really happened. You almost got killed in that locker.”

She trembled as fragments of the nightmare wafted through her mind. She relived the ominous rattle and clatter of padlocks as Dixon made his way through the aisles. Closer and closer until she had realized too late that his search would bring him first to Jasper's hiding place.

Jasper had
known
that would happen when he left her in Rollie's locker.

“Don't ever do that again,” she whispered.

“Don't ever do what again?”

“Don't ever leave me behind while you go off to deal with things the way you did today. We're supposed to be partners, remember?”

His eyes were enigmatic pools of night. “I made an executive decision. I thought it would be easier to handle Haggard alone.”

“You should have discussed it with me first.”

His mouth quirked, but he said nothing.

Olivia flushed. She was grateful for the shadows that enveloped the bed. “Okay, okay, forget the preplanning discussion idea. Obviously there wasn't time. But promise me you won't do anything like that ever again.”

“I promise you that I have absolutely no intention of repeating today's exercise. In fact, I may never even rent a self-storage locker again.”

She sensed the amusement he was trying to suppress and groaned. “I suppose neither of us could have predicted what would happen when we went to find those files this morning.”

“You're wrong.” The humor vanished from Jasper's voice as if it had never existed. It left behind a grim edge. “I should have considered the possibility that whoever else was after those files would follow us.”

“Stop it.” She put her fingers over his mouth to silence him. “It was eight o'clock in the morning in a commercial establishment. We should have been perfectly safe.”

He caught hold of her wrist and dragged her fingers away from his lips. “A commercial establishment in which there had already been another dangerous incident between you and Gill. I was an idiot to take you back to that place.”

“There was no one else who could have gone with you. This affair has involved only the two of us right from the start.”

“I could have gone alone. I should have gone alone.”

She smiled. “What are we going to do, spend the rest of the night telling each other that we should have done things differently? Even a couple of brilliant executives like us can mess up once in a while. The bottom line is that we both got out of it in one piece.”

Jasper curled a strand of her hair around his fingers. “About this affair.”

She stilled. Even without her glasses she could see the intensity of the look in his eyes. She knew that he was no longer talking about blackmail.

“What about it?”

“You keep saying we're partners.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I do say that a lot.”

“When it comes to Glow, I'm the senior partner.”

“Jasper, this is not a good time to discuss your fifty-one percent.”

“I need to know how you really feel about the fact that I control the company.”

She smiled. “You want the truth? I feel relieved to know that it's in good hands and that I can concentrate on Light Fantastic. I've dreaded the day when I would have to be responsible for Glow. But Uncle Rollie kept reminding me that there wasn't anyone else in the family who could handle it.”

“You trust me to run Glow?”

She touched the severe line of his jaw. “I trust you with my life.”

He smiled slowly. Then he turned his head just far enough so that he could kiss her fingers. “About the other aspects of this partnership …”

“What about them?”

“I'm aware that any kind of personal arrangement based on mutual business interests makes you uneasy. But I would like to take this opportunity to point out that we've got a few other things going for us, too.”

Everything in her went on hold, poised on some invisible ledge, straining to hear his next words.

“Do we?” she prompted gently.

His eyes narrowed. “You want me to list them?”

“Just a couple will do.”

He frowned. “All right, let's start with the fact that we've been through a traumatic, dangerous experience together.”

“A relationship based on that kind of thing is no more secure than one based on business interests. Once the artificially enhanced emotional edge wears off…”

He pushed her back down onto the pillows and rose on one elbow to lean over her. “We were both willing to break into a house, steal some papers, and lie by omission to the cops in order to protect some people who are important to us. I'd say that gives us a hell of a lot in common.”

She curved her hands around his sleek shoulders and looked up into his shadowed face.

“In the event the question ever arises, let's set the record straight here,” she said. “Melwood was run down and killed by a car. He had no next of kin in Seattle. Acting in our capacity as his concerned employers, we entered his house with a key that he had provided to the company for emergency purposes.”

“Oh, yeah, right. I keep forgetting.”

“Regarding today's activities,” she continued briskly, “we did our civic duty. We gave the police everything they needed to arrest Dixon Haggard. The stuff we didn't tell them about had nothing to do with either Melwood's death or Richard Lancaster's murder.”

Jasper grinned. “I love it when you talk like a bigtime corporate CEO.”

She clung to the word
love
and let the rest of it go. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she pulled him down so that she could kiss him.

She wondered why he had brought up the subject of their relationship in such a roundabout way. She wanted to ask him what his point was, but something told her he'd have to come to it in his own time. If ever.

Jasper was as skittish around the subject of marriage as she was.

Now, what had put marriage into her head?

“I forgot one other thing on my list of stuff we have in common besides our business interests,” Jasper muttered against her mouth.

“What's that?”

He curved his hand around her hip. “The sex is great.”

“There is that.”