Dying to Have Her (28 page)

Liam caught him by the collar of his designer shirt, coming nose to nose with him. “I catch you threatening a hair on her head, and you’re a dead man.” Amesbury went pale. Liam turned and started down the walkway. Amesbury slammed the front door. Liam paused for a moment. The front draperies were open.

Kyle Amesbury flipped a minute phone from the pocket of his perfectly pressed trousers and spoke angrily into it. He looked up the stairs. Someone had called him. He started up the steps.

Liam returned to his car, headed for his next stop. Amesbury had dark hair. Thick, wavy, dark hair.

“
In your house, close, in your house with you, coming closer …
” the husky, rasping voice continued in Serena’s ear.

Serena didn’t think; she bolted.

She raced to the door, throwing it open. It occurred to her, even in her panic, that by running out without keying her pad, she would set off the alarm.

She burst out of the house and across the yard, heading for the street. But as she did so, a huge shadow swayed before her from the front. In the darkness of the night, she could make out nothing at all about the form; all she saw was a shape.

Dark and menacing. She was blocked from reaching the street.

Now the door to the house stood open. Someone waited within.

Someone … something … waited outside as well.

She flew around the side of the house, not looking for the gate, but reaching for the top of the privacy fence and leaping over it into the backyard. She heard her heart racing, and the sound was so loud it drowned out all others. She didn’t know if she was being pursued or not. In the backyard, she raced for the huge old oak, stretching to the darkness of the sky. She reached the tree, slipped around it, leaned against it, and breathed shallowly, so as not to make a sound. She waited. How much time had passed? Seconds … minutes?

The alarm had not gone off.

She hugged the oak, trying to remember that she could hide in its dark shadow. She needed to still the racing of her heart, be silent, and listen, not give away her position with the ragged storm of her breathing.

Time passed …

She turned, staring around the yard. There was the pool, the swaying palms around it. The barbecue, the lounge chairs. The foliage that made the yard so beautiful …

And so dangerous now.

Then, at the corner of the house, by the bushes at the wall, she saw movement

Was it just the breeze? Branches everywhere were dipping and swaying.

A twig snapped.

She nearly screamed aloud. Then she saw a squirrel racing pell-mell from the oak. She had scared the creature as much as it had scared her. The sound of her heart was growing louder once again.

The backyard held nothing, she thought.

Nothing but shadows …

Trying to breathe very deeply and slowly, she realized that dashing into the backyard was the worst mistake she could have made. Here she was trapped. A killer could do anything, protected by the wooden privacy fence. She needed to make her way back to the front, somehow, keeping to the shadows herself.

She stared at the next large tree, to the right of the pool.

She began thinking about all she had learned from movies.

Scream.

The killer calls the house and unnerves the victim. The victim searches for the killer, the source of danger, and runs right into …

Death.

Fool!
she chastised herself.

The phone call had come. She had panicked and fled. Her house had been sealed. Now the door lay wide open. And she was in the darkness and shadows, and every tree was moving and whispering in the darkness, seeming to chant her name.

She waited, tense as a bowstring.

At last she made a move.

She sprinted to the next tree, sliding against the bark. She watched and waited again. Now her backyard seemed silent.

Then …

A thump. Not a rustle. A
thump!

Somewhere on the other side of the yard.

She was just fifty feet from the wooden wall to the front of the yard. She held her breath, realized she was doing so, expelled it, and breathed deeply.

She broke from the tree, rushing for the fence. She jumped over it. Even as she did so, she heard rustling again, running, someone coming after her. In the seconds it took her to skim the wall, she was thinking.
Don’t return to the house. Run like hell. Get to a neighbor’s house, beat on the door, scream loud enough to wake the dead.

She slipped over the side of the fence, hit the earth with her knees bent, ready to run again. She started tearing across the lawn.

Her heart slammed hard against her chest. Headlights beamed on the street A car was coming. All she had to do was reach the road, scream, shriek, stop the driver …

A shadow stepped out from one of the huge hibiscus bushes that flanked the walkway, directly in her path.

She turned and ran again, into the darkness of the rear of the yard.

Shadows in front, shadows to the rear. She had trapped herself.

She inched into the darkness, hit brick with her back.

Trapped!

Idiot!

The night was alive with rustling, sounds … whispers.

And shadows that moved.

The room was dark except for the glow of light that streamed from the computer screen. Liam stood behind Oz Davis, the wiz kid of his senior year in high school, a man who had gone on to become a technical master of film and video in every variety, and computers. He’d taken me tape, honed in, enlarged, and defined the picture to every length possible by science.

But staring at the man with Jane Dunne—honed, defined, and enlarged as he might be—Liam was still frustrated.

“It was almost as if this man knew there were cameras in the room,” Oz said with disgust, shaking his head. He pointed to the screen. “I’ve gone through the entire tape, over and over. I’ve digitized and asked the computer for help. But you can never get a clear picture of even an angle of the face; the best you’ll get is here—if you can recognize a man by his shoulders. Maybe I can give you something—the guy doesn’t have a wisp of hair on his shoulders or back. That suggests an actor, body-builder—or just a guy who’s had a great laser removal done because he was embarrassed by the hair on his back.”

“Maybe that is something,” Liam said. He remembered the shiny smooth line of Kyle Amesbury’s hairless chest. Grabbing his collar, he had touched his nape and back.

Smooth.

He glanced at his watch, then stared at the screen again. The man in the tape maintained the same basic position throughout. No matter how the footage was segregated and enlarged, there was nothing to be seen but the top of a dark-haired head, and a view of the shoulders and back. But Oz was damned right about one thing—the guy hadn’t so much as the stubble of a single hair on his shoulders or back. “Thanks, Oz,” he said.

“I’ll keep playing with it,” Oz assured him. “I’m not sure where I can go with it, but I will keep trying.”

Liam left the studio and drove for Serena’s house, disappointed that he hadn’t found out more, yet hopeful that he might have gained something. The man in the film might have been Jay Braden. Or Kyle Amesbury.

Or Jeff Guelph?

As he headed from the city and back up to the hills, he took a sudden, unplanned turn. Might as well check out one thing right now. He was close enough.

He drove back to Guelph’s house.

Jeff must have heard his car as he pulled into the drive. Before he reached the front door, Jeff had opened it. He stared at Liam quizzically. “Am I about to be arrested—”

“No.”

“Are you coming back in?” Jeff asked.

“No. I want you to take your shirt off for me, please?”

Jeff looked at him with astonishment. He didn’t even ask why. He was wearing a polo shirt, and he pulled it over his head and shoulders.

“Turn around.”

Jeff did so.

The man was a veritable grizzly bear.

“Thanks,” Liam said.

“Don’t mention it,” Jeff murmured. “Are you going to tell me why you just had me do that?”

“Yeah, sometime,” Liam said.

Melinda suddenly called to him from the house. “Jeff? Is anything wrong? Is someone there?”

Liam shook his head. “I’m leaving,” he told Jeff. ‘Tell her that everything is all right. I think that it is. You slept with Jane Dunne, at least once. Where? Not at Kyle Amesbury’s, right?”

“At Amesbury’s?” Jeff said, sounding baffled again. His face reddened. “It was only once,” he said, his voice pained. He took a deep breath. “In her dressing room.”

“Thanks,” Liam said, and headed back to his car.

Serena thought she knew now what it felt like to be a hunted animal.

She leaped back over the privacy fence to the rear with the simple thought that there had definitely been something in front of her. But when her feet hit the ground in the rear, she could see someone on the other side of the pool. Not clearly. The form was close to the foliage, masked by the deep shadows from the illuminated pool.

She headed toward the bushes and the large palm to her right. They would give her a little cover.

The figure by the pool was moving. She needed a running start to scale the wooden fence. Her heart was beating like a wounded hare’s. Her every breath was beginning to sound like the storm of the century. She sprang from the bushes and started running.

“Serena!” she heard her name called as she ran. Was it the voice from the phone? She didn’t know. It was blocked by the wind in her ears, the rustle of foliage. She leaped the fence and started for the road again.

Once again, a shadow loomed before her.

She zigged and zagged, and the shadow before her danced and did the same. She screamed in desperation, trying to make a mad dash for the road.

She flew straight into the shadow …

A deep sense of alarm filled Liam the minute he came around the bend and neared Serena’s house. Light was pouring from the front of the house; the door was gaping open. Cars were drawn up on the yard.

He hit the gas hard, speeding to the embankment in front of her house, then slamming on the brakes. He leaped out of the car just as he heard a scream loud enough to shatter glass.

Serena.

He raced across the yard, bursting through side hedges. There was Serena, and someone else. He moved so fast he practically flew, throwing himself at the form in front of Serena. A huge fellow, a man. He wrestled him to the ground. Serena fell and rolled, shrieking again. “No, no, Liam—!”

The man beneath him was powerful. Liam rolled him over.

Bill Hutchens.

“Jesus Christ, Liam, it’s me!” Bill complained.

Liam rose, staring down at the cop and friend he had just flattened. He stood back, ready to reach for the gun beneath his jacket as he heard a rustling and a thump at the privacy fence. He nearly drew his weapon.

Then Ricardo appeared, coming over the fence and running toward them. Serena was still on the ground, looking dazed. Liam walked to her, grasped her hand, and pulled her to her feet.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“I drove back by to see if you were here yet, and if not, to make sure Serena was okay,” Bill told him disgustedly. “I saw the door wide open, and heard a commotion, and started around the back.”

By then Ricardo, winded and panting, had reached them. He had apparently heard some of what Bill had said.

He put his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. “I got here—saw the door open, saw the light, called Serena’s name, got no answer …” He inhaled deeply. “Heard something in the back, jumped the fence, saw a figure, and came racing after it. The figure disappeared, then came flying over the fence again, and I came at it again, calling out, pretty sure then that it was Serena, and trying to tell her it was me, but … she was already over the fence.”

Serena, next to him, was shaking.

Liam stared at her. “What were you doing out of the house? What happened? What started this?”

“I got a call. A bunch of calls. Then someone reciting the valentine I had been sent … and saying that they were in the house.”

“So you ran out?” He stared at her incredulously.

Hostility touched her eyes. “The caller said that he or she was
in the house
.”

“Has anyone searched the house?”

“I searched the house the minute I brought her home,” Bill told him indignantly, straightening his shirt and trying to dust the grass from it. “It was clean. I’d bet my life on it.”

Liam realized that they were all staring at Serena. So far Bill and Ricardo had refrained from calling the stupidity of her act to her attention. He was too shaken to be so tolerant.

“You’re an idiot!” he blurted out harshly. “You knew that the house was clean—”

“I was frightened!”

“Great, so run out into the arms of death!” He turned his back on her, afraid that she would see how badly he was shaking. “Has anyone searched the house again yet?”

“Liam, we must have both gotten here right before you drove up,” Bill said. “We haven’t searched anything.” He shook his head. Then he remembered that he was in charge; Liam was hired help. “We’ll take the house. Ricardo, search the yard.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

Liam stared at Serena, who was panting, hair wild, eyes wild—and still narrowed with fury at him. He gritted his teeth. He needed to shut up. He wanted to shake her. She had been tricked, surely, and she had fallen as easily as a ripe apple from a tree.

He walked ahead. Bill Hutchens put an arm around Serena, coming toward the house with her.

“You all right?”

“Yes, thank you, I’m fine.”

His reproach was gentle. “Serena, you know I checked out your house.”

“Bill, I heard the voice, and I panicked.”

“Maybe this is good. Maybe we can trace the call. We’ll hear the voice. We can have it analyzed. Of course, maybe it was just a trickster—”

“A trickster who knew about that valentine’s message, and quoted it word for word?” she said.

“We’ll search the house; then we’ll hear the message.”

Liam reached the house ahead of them. Maybe that was why he’d finally left the police force. Public relations. Once upon a time, he’d been good with victims of crime. Tonight … he was seriously on edge himself, angry, afraid.