Blind Dates Can Be Murder (50 page)

He shrugged.

“It wasn’t a problem.”

He was tall and skinny, and when he gave her a wry smile as she stood, she almost recoiled from the yellowed and missing teeth. Lettie had described Chuck as “dangerously handsome,” but this guy was awkward and unattractive.

“Got it?” he asked.

She handed him the suitcase. Without even looking inside, he gave her the address book.

“You’ll find what you need to know in there,” he said. “Nice doing business with you.”

He walked away, in the same direction he had come from. Jo watched him go, frozen in her place, thinking that without the stocking over his face, he really looked nothing like what she had expected. He bent down to avoid a low-hanging branch, and she made a slight gasp as she realized what she should have known as soon as he stood right in front of her, not to mention when he spoke. That wasn’t him.

The man from last night hadn’t been that tall!

“It’s not him, it’s not him!” she whispered urgently, but it was too late.

On the other side of the bushes, she could hear yelling, the squeal of what sounded like several sirens, and the screech of brakes.

They were tipping their hand and busting the wrong man. Quickly, she flipped through the address book, desperate for some clue as to where he had planted the bomb. They might have nabbed the wrong guy, but at least they could save the person whose life or home was in danger.

Chuck sped from the park, back toward Jo’s house. As he went, he dialed the number for Jo Tulip’s cell phone, glad to hear her answer after only two rings.

“You think that was clever?” he asked when she answered. “You think I didn’t know you had called the police?”

“Where is it?” she demanded. “Where did you plant the bomb?”

Obviously, she had gone through her little address book and not found any indication of what he had done.

“Oh, I don’t know. Why don’t we find out? Listen carefully.”

He hung up the phone as he turned on to her street. When he reached her house, he went past the driveway and proceeded another hundred feet. Then he held up his hand and pressed the detonator.

Jo Tulip’s house exploded.

Chuck tossed the detonator onto the floor and rammed his foot down on the accelerator, making it around the block and down the road before the neighbors even had the chance to run out to their front yards to see what was going on.

She wanted to play games, did she? Well, he had a game for her. It was called Countdown to the Money.

Jo stood there beside the mausoleum, cell phone in one hand and address book in the other. Somewhere not too far away had been a big boom. It had sounded like a distant cannon shot, and then it was done.

Her heart in her throat, Jo ran across the grass and cut through the bushes, the same way the man had gone. On the other side, half of the bomb squad was there, along with a number of cops and cop cars. The man with the rotten teeth had been arrested, and they were just pushing him into the backseat of a police car.

“I didn’t do anything!” he kept saying. “Some guy paid me to come here and make the exchange!”

Jo spotted the bomb unit director and she ran to him.

“Did you hear that?” Jo demanded. “A bomb! It went off! Over that way!”

She pointed toward a plume of dark smoke rising toward the sky.

“The man called me, just now,” she added. “Said he knew I had brought in the cops, and then he blew up the bomb.”

The director called out to a few of his men and they all jumped into their van and took off to find the source of the smoke. Jo ran back and got her own car. She was afraid that the smoke was coming from Danny’s house, but as she drove closer, she realized that it was her own home, completely engulfed in flames.

Her beautiful house. All of her things. Her refuge. Her
home
.

In shock, Jo was silent as she pulled to a stop along the side of the street behind the van. Slowly, she climbed out, but as she did, the cell phone rang again.

“You think that was the only bomb I’ve planted today?” the man asked when she answered. “Guess again. Only, the next one isn’t in an empty house. This place has people in it.”

“No. Stop. Please. What do you want?”

“I want the money.”

“I don’t have it. I pretended I did to buy some time. But I’ve never had it. I was only bluffing.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“I read all of the names in your address book,” he said. “Trust me, I know who you’ve been working with.”

The sound of a siren grew louder, and suddenly a big red fire truck was turning onto her street. Jo stepped onto the grass and watched as the massive vehicle pulled to a stop in front of her house. When the siren ceased and firefighters began climbing out, she spoke again.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Who I’ve been working with?”

“This is getting old,” he replied. “To get the stains out of the money. I’m not stupid.”

“Well, then I guess I am,” she said, “because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Finally, Jo caught the eye of the bomb squad chief. She waved him over and then held a finger to her lips to keep him from speaking.

“Listen,” she said into the phone. “Why don’t you tell me where you’ve put the next bomb so that no one will get hurt.”

“Bring me the money—the real money this time—and I will.”

“I can’t bring you money that I don’t have,” she said, her mind racing. “But there is something I can bring.”

“Oh, yeah? What?”

“I can bring you your wife.”

28

D
anny had had enough. He flew across town in his car, breaking every speed limit to get to Jo. He’d been listening to all of the tactical communications along with Jo’s wire, and the pain and fear in her voice as she got those phone calls was palpable.

He screeched to a stop on her street, shocked to see that the fire had nearly consumed her house, though it looked as though the office had been spared for now. He rolled down the window to speak to a group of women he recognized as neighbors standing and watching nearby.

“Why aren’t they putting it out?”

“They said something about a bomb,” a woman told him. “It’s not safe for the firefighters to get too close.”

Sure enough, it seemed as if they were being forced to keep their distance, spraying the hoses as best they could toward the flames while standing in the road. They had obviously wet down the yard and the neighboring houses; now it seemed that all that remained was for the fire to burn itself out while they contained it. Then perhaps the bomb squad would move in and see what form the explosives had taken.

Danny scanned the crowd, a surge of relief bringing tears to his eyes when he finally spotted Jo. She was standing between several officials, but when she saw Danny getting out of his car and struggling to get on his crutches, she broke away and came toward him, her cell phone in her hand.

He saw her coming, so he gave up on the crutches and balanced himself against the car. She fell against him and he wrapped his arms tightly around her. They simply stood there for a long moment, holding each other close.

“I cannot ever lose you,” he whispered.

“You never will,” she replied.

Then her cell phone rang.

Jo answered the call, pulling away from Danny as she did so.

“Hello?” she said, her voice shaky at best.

“Did you work it out?” Chuck asked.

“I think so,” she replied. “They’re talking with the chief now. Lettie should be released momentarily.”

“I want you to meet up with her at the police station and wait there for my call. I’ll get back to you in exactly ten minutes.”

“Where’s the bomb, Chuck?”

“Somewhere populated,” he replied.

Then he hung up.

Jo stifled a scream of frustration. Did this sick man enjoy playing cat and mouse with her?

What a stupid question. Obviously he did or he wouldn’t keep calling. In the meantime, the cops were working to evacuate everyone on Jo’s list, the firemen were working to put out the fire, and the bomb squad was suiting up for whatever might come next. Apparently, the fellow with the bad teeth was claiming that Chuck had been asking around for the sophisticated plastic explosive Semtex, but word on the street was that all he’d been able to acquire was detonation cord. From where Jo was standing, she didn’t think it mattered all that much what sort of bomb he had used; her house was burning down regardless.

Danny insisted on driving Jo to the police station. While she worked out the final details with the squad director, he turned the car around in a neighboring driveway so that he was ready to go when she was.

“I’m so sorry about your house,” Danny said as she climbed into his car.

“I know,” she replied. “Maybe I’m too much in shock to think about it right now. My focus has to be on stopping this man.”

Danny started off, reached the end of her street, and turned.

“This stupid address book,” Jo said, holding it in her hand and trying not to scream. “Power is everything, you know. By taking my information, he took control over me.”

“You’re worried about the next target.”

“More than that. When he called earlier, he said that he knows the person I’ve been working with to get the stains out of the money. Evidently, he thinks I’m up to something with someone who is listed in here.”

“Who’s in there?”

“Friends. Relatives. People who gave me their address and phone number for one reason or another.”

She flipped through the pages, realizing as she did so that there were several entries in there that hadn’t been in her Rolodex, several people who hadn’t yet been called and told to evacuate because she hadn’t thought to include them in her list for the police.

Quickly, Jo dialed the chief and explained that there were four more names of new acquaintances that they needed to contact: Brock Dentyne, Ming Lee, Peter Trumble, and Tasha Green at Dates&Mates. Any one of them could be on Chuck’s to-be-bombed list.

Jo gave the chief phone numbers for Tasha, Ming, Peter, and Brock. When she hung up, she told Danny about running into Brock over on the campus and his surprising connection with Dr. Langley.