Keep No Secrets (32 page)

Jack reminds himself that anyone

would do the same before mailing letters of a threatening nature. Why not use a box on the street, though, away from cameras?

"What makes you say that?"

"Nothing I can put my finger on. Body language."

"How do you know this woman mailed the letters? No time stamp is on the postmarks."

"True, but she's the only one who was in the post office on all three dates. And each visit took place at about the same time."

"Which was?"

"Saturday morning, a little after eleven."

Jack knew the dates all fell on a Saturday, but the time is new

information. "Can you describe her? I mean, from what you
did
see of her?"

"Dark hair. Long. Thick."

"Dark, as in brown? Black?"

"From the tapes it looks black. Could be dark brown."

"Could you see the side of her face?"

"No. Her hair was always in the way.

That's what I mean. Like she was

purposely trying not to be seen."

"Curly? Straight?"

"Straight. So straight it was like she'd used an iron, you know?"

The waitress places a plate in front of each man, burgers for Dog and Demetri, a roast beef sandwich for Jack. Jack looks at the sandwich and knows, because of what he's learned so far, he won't be able to eat it.

"What race was she?" he asks when they're alone again.

Demetri shrugs. "She wasn't a sister, if that's what you mean."

"Was she dark, fair?"

Demetri presses his lips together, looks to the ceiling in thought. "Like I said, I couldn't see her face, but her arms were probably what I'd call dark. Darker than the typical white girl."

"Like a tan? Or naturally dark?"

"I don't know. Hard to tell from a tape.

Just dark."

"What was she wearing?"

"Well, in the first one, she had on one of those shirts the girls wear in the summer. You know, like a man's

undershirt, the sleeves up here." He motions at his shoulders. "And jeans."

"You mean, like a tank top?"

"Yeah, that's right."

"What color?"

"White."

Jack sees Jenny on the bed when he woke up, pajamas on her bent legs, white tank bright against her brown skin.

"Boss? You okay?" Dog asks gently, so out of character for him.

"I don't know," Jack says. "Let me ask you one more thing," he says to Demetri,

"and then you can eat in peace."

"Sure."

"You keep saying 'girl.’ Was she really a girl? Or a woman? You know, an adult?

How old would you put her? How tall?"

Demetri's eyebrows rise, and he shrugs again. "Can't say for sure how tall, because the camera angle makes it hard to judge. But she wasn't a child. She was built, at least from the rear. Nice ass, you know? I mean, maybe a bit skinny for my tastes" —he laughs— "but nice and tight, especially in her jeans."

He bites into his burger then. When he moans with pleasure, Jack's not sure if the food or his memory of the mysterious woman's ass is to blame.

By the time he leaves O'Connell's, Jack is convinced Jenny mailed the letters to herself. He questioned Demetri about the other tapes, and except for changes in attire, the description of the woman on each tape remained the same.

He takes a detour on his way back to the courthouse to find a payphone—a difficult task since they've become a scarce commodity. He first calls the motel, but when he asks to be connected to Room Five, the desk clerk tells him the guest checked out. Even though he trusts Jenny less and less, he still feels a pang from her departure.

He then calls her cell phone. It rings four times before he gets a recording telling him "the cellular customer you are trying to reach has chosen not to have voice mail service on this account." He knows he’ll hear that message until he calls from a number she recognizes. He calls her then from his own phone, his desire to talk to her trumping his fear.

"Did you just try to call from a different number?" she asks, not bothering with hello.

"Yeah, we need to talk. Where are you?

The motel says you checked out."

"I did."

"Yeah, and?"

She's quiet for a moment. Then, "I told you I planned to go back."

"You also told me you’d talk to me first."

"I said I’d be here a few more days, and then I’d decide. I never said I’d run it by you."

He can’t remember the specifics of their last conversation, but he left the motel on Christmas assuming that before she left, she’d let him know.

"What do we need to talk about?" she asks.

"I have a lead on the letters, remember? I don’t want to talk on the phone, though."
I want to see the look on
your face when I spring the news
.

"We don’t have much of a choice."

"I would love to see where you’ve been living," he says quickly, calling her bluff.

"I can head up to Chicago today."

She laughs—to make him think she

takes it as a joke, he guesses—but he hears nervousness in her voice. Despite the restrictions of his bail, he’s tempted to attempt a brief trip up and back to see what has her spooked about the

suggestion. A flight is out of the question, but he might be able to manage a drive without anyone knowing.

"I don’t think the court or your bail bondsman would appreciate you leaving,"

she says, reading his mind.

"I wasn’t aware we now have patrols at our state borders."

"You’d risk that? You’d really risk getting caught and having your bail revoked?"

Would he? He thinks again of Claire’s words:
She’s like a drug to you
. And like a drug, the hard-earned knowledge of how much harm she can do is weak armor against her pull.

"So what’s your lead?" she says, apparently deciding the answer is no.

He considers his strategy. He didn’t anticipate the problem of being in two different places. Should he toss her a few bones to see how she reacts or keep what he knows close so he doesn’t spook her?

He chooses the latter. "Not on a cell phone, Jen. No way."

"How about if I call you at a landline, from a pay phone?"

He doesn’t trust that the government phones at the DA's office aren’t bugged, and given Harley’s efforts to go after Jack’s law license, he’s not really sure his home phone isn't either.

"Let me think about where that could be." He also needs more time to decide how much he’ll tell her. Maybe, even, he'll convince Demetri to let him see the tapes for himself, possibly rendering all of this moot. "I’ll get back to you, but do a favor for me, next time I call?"

"What’s that?"

"Answer."

Jack sits in his car and thinks about their conversation. He didn't imagine her nervousness, yet if she had something to hide, why ask him to help in the first place?

Once again, he calls Dog.

"Miss me already?" Dog asks without greeting.

"You know it." It gets a laugh from Dog. "I have a question for you."

"Shoot."

"What do you know about how cell phones works?"

"Depends. What do you need to know?"

"Let's say I don't want to go through the legal hoops required to ask the phone company to locate a cell phone. Is there still a way, if I place a call from my phone, to find out the general location of the other party to the call?"

"Sure, roughly."

"Like maybe which state they’re in?"

"Oh, yeah, no problem. It would depend on the phone’s capabilities. But if all you want is the state, or even the city, you only need to know where the call was routed."

"Go on."

"You know, like which towers were used? Just call your phone company and they'll tell you which towers the call routed through."

When Jack doesn’t say anything, Dog mutters and continues slowly, as if talking to a child. "Okay, for example, a few months back my cell bill showed a roaming charge for calls from Texas. I ain’t ever been to Texas, so how could I have made a call from there, you know?

When I called the phone company, they checked and saw that none of my calls were routed through Texas. Mistake in the billing. Got it?"

"Got it." In fact, Jack got it even before Dog launched into his example. He was already thinking several steps ahead of Dog. If Jack's hunch is right, finding out whether Jenny lied to him will be easier than he thought.

Ten minutes later, after speaking to an AT&T representative, he learns that his last call to Jenny was routed through a tower in Clayton. It never left the state.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ON THE WAY into Clayton, Jack calls Mark. When he gets voicemail, he leaves a short message: "We need to talk. I’m coming over." Unless his brother is traveling for work, he should be home.

Jack rings the doorbell, following it with a hard knock. When no one answers, he flips through his keychain until he finds the key.

He unlocks the door, cracks it open, and calls out. Mark doesn't respond, but Jack hears water running through pipes.

At first he thinks the sound comes from an appliance—the clothes washer or the dishwasher—but as he moves into the house, closing the door behind him, he realizes it's the shower. His watch reads almost three fifteen. An odd time for a shower, unless Mark has a date later.

While he waits, he circles through the family room around to the kitchen, casually taking in the scant evidence of his brother's life. With no children to mess it up, the house is immaculate. Mark dated an interior designer back when he bought the house, and the décor is all hers. The black granite kitchen counters are empty save a cell phone, coffee maker and toaster. The door of the large stainless steel refrigerator is a blank slate. No magnetic letters for impromptu poems or messages, no school pictures, no

basketball schedules. A bowl with a colorful mixture of Granny Smith and Red Delicious apples rests on the middle island. The apples look so perfect that Jack touches them to see if they're real; he's surprised to find that they are.

He swings back into the family room, where the furnishings are European modern, all clean lines with a Danish influence. He notices that even the newspapers and magazines, still unread from the looks of it, are stacked in a neat pile on the coffee table. He settles onto the stiff leather sofa with a GQ magazine he finds on the top of the pile. Quickly bored, he tosses it back onto the table and pulls out his phone to listen to voicemail.

He's on the fourth message when he hears the shower shut off. He saves the message and moves on to the next one, from Claire, tersely reminding him she’ll be home late. He doesn’t remember why, but from her tone he knows she already told him and therefore assumes he'll know what she’s talking about.

He's about to press the "call back"

button and confess to his faulty memory when the cell phone on the kitchen counter plays a tinny version of Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends." He finds this odd, too; Mark has always been more a fan of jazz. He debates whether to answer it, but before he finishes the thought he hears the bathroom door swing open, so hard it slams into the doorstop. In the moment before the bather appears around the hall corner, he knows it isn't Mark who will emerge. The footsteps are too light. And even though logically it could be any woman—Mark's house is like a hotel in that department—Jack is certain it's not.

He knows who it will be and he can't escape fast enough.

He sits frozen as Jenny, wet hair clinging to scalp and shoulders, towel hastily twisted across the chest, comes into his line of sight.

But she doesn't even see him as she darts to the kitchen to reach the phone before Billie Joe Armstrong stops singing.

It's evident she hasn't yet used the towel for anything but a wrap. Her skin glistens and water trails behind her, leaving dark, wet footprints in the thick beige carpet.

On the way, she hastily readjusts the towel. With arms stretched wide, she holds the towel out straight and layers first one end and then the other over the front of her body. She seals it by tucking the second layer into the first. The whole motion takes less than five seconds, but it exposes her breasts and stomach to Jack, and like a tiny drop of viper's venom, the glimpse paralyzes him.

She gets to the phone on the third go-around of the song. "Hey." Her tone when she answers is casual, intimate.

Even as he fights his body's instinctive response to what he just saw, he listens carefully. "No, I'm at his brother's house," she says, and now Jack’s curiosity is piqued almost as much as his libido.

He rises from the sofa and make his way quietly to a spot just behind the open doorway to the kitchen. He stands with his head against the wall, his ears tuned to every breath she takes.

"He doesn't know. I'm sure of it."
Is she
talking about him? Mark? And what doesn't

'he' know?
"He doesn't, Brian. I can read him. And she's not stupid."
Who is 'she'?

He steals a glance around the wall.

Strategically, it does him no harm. She's turned away from him. "I don't know,"

she says.

But emotionally, the sight of her leaning on the island cripples him further.

She's bent over, her elbows on the granite, her left hand holding the phone and her right hand mindlessly playing with one green apple. The angle causes the towel to hike farther up the back of her leg. A millimeter more and the soft flesh of her bottom will be exposed. One foot is propped up on the footrest; her calf muscle is flexed.

"I told you, I don't know. I've only talked to her on the phone. I'll find out for sure once I meet with her."

Who is she talking about?

"Yeah. Today."

He twists back to his spot against the wall and tries to steady his breathing. If he's going to confront her, he needs to be calm.

"I just think it's better this way. The letters were the only reason she put up with him seeing me, but—"

Claire. She's talking about Claire.

Calming down is no longer an option.

"Yeah, exactly. I'll call you as soon as I have something to tell you. I promise."

Her voice softened with the last two words, but with the next ones, it quavers.