First You Run (12 page)

“Why?”

“Because I have it on very good authority that someone knows we’re looking for Eileen Stafford’s daughter, and she could be in real danger because of it.”

Fletch stifled a dark curse. The last freaking thing he needed was another woman in trouble. “Then maybe you ought to get on that job, mate.” He wrapped the towel around his waist. “So it can happen faster.”

“I would, but I can’t leave Charleston. I have more work to do here. Plus, I could be followed. No one knows you’re on this job, so I need you to get to the next adoptee on the list.”

“I don’t know how quickly—”

“Fletch. I know you like that woman. I’m sure she’s hot and fun, and you’re having a great time on your little road trip down the coast, but this is more important.”

It was not fun. It was not a little road trip. And Jack was beginning to piss him off. In the next room, he heard sheets rustle, then a soft sigh.

But Jack was right about one thing: he
did
like this woman. She
was
hot and fun. And in trouble. Still, staying with her had nothing to do with the job he’d set out to accomplish.

“All right, mate. I’ll call you later.” He clicked off, stepped into the clean underwear he’d left on the counter, and dried his wet hair with a shake that would make a dog proud.

When he opened his eyes, Miranda was standing at the door. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide.

“He’s not dead. I just saw Wild Eyes on TV. He walked right behind the camera.”

Fletch folded her in his arms and pulled her hard against his chest. Damn Jack Culver and his search and his anonymous women in trouble. This one was real and scared, and also in trouble.

“It’s okay, Miranda,” he cooed into her ear, stroking her hair. “Don’t let him scare you. That’s what they’re trying to do, these crazies. Don’t let them.”

She pulled away, her eyes full of determination and fear, the mix pulling at something deep inside him. He leaned his forehead against hers. “I won’t leave you until you’re safe, Miranda.”

He felt her whole body relax into his arms, telling him she trusted him completely. And nothing—no mate, no timeline, no boss—would make him betray that trust.

“T
ELL ME ABOUT
your girlfriend.” Miranda tried to make the request sound casual, considering they were pulling out of the hotel where they’d spent the night together. Although he’d slept on a sofa and she had taken the bed.

He snaked through the Century City traffic, glancing in the rearview mirror and maneuvering the big SUV with ease. “I don’t have a steady woman in my life. I intentionally misled you, Miranda. I’m not involved with anyone but work.”

“So you were referring to Lucy, your boss?”

“No, just work in general.”

“What kind of—you just missed the entrance to the freeway.”

“We’re not taking the freeway.”

“To San Diego? But surface streets will take all day. I thought you wanted to get there early to check security at the museuem.”

“I have a quick stop to make,” he said as his phone beeped softly. He glanced at the ID, then answered. “G’day, Mr. Cordell. Thanks for calling back.”

She studied him as he described Wild Eyes’ birdlike face, narrow lips, and platinum-blond hair and explained what they’d seen the night before.

A few days ago she’d been anticipating the solo trip, excited about seeing the country and having the time to think away from the pressures of the university. She wasn’t that happy teaching, and she’d hoped to use the trip to think about how, or if, she should change her life.

Well, she’d certainly done that.

“Is there a database of student ID pictures?” Fletch asked Miranda.

“Yes, try the registrar’s office. If they won’t give it to you—”

“We know how to get it. I just needed to verify that it exists.” He listened for a moment, then gave another detailed overview of what had happened at the Page Nine, the incident with the bird, and why they wanted to find Wild Eyes.

“Let me ask her,” he said after a minute. “Miranda, who else in that audience did you know who might be able to make a positive ID on your behalf? Was there a friend or colleague astute enough to give a detailed description for a sketch artist?”

“Adam DeWitt,” she said. “Another associate professor. He might help.” Unless he still harbored a grudge because she wouldn’t introduce him to her publisher. “I don’t know if he’ll be in his office this week, but I have his address.”

She reached for her bag, but Adrien stopped her. “We can get it.”

Of course they could.

“Right, mate,” he said into the phone. “Excellent. I owe you one.” After he signed off, he turned to Miranda. “All righty, then. We’ve got a good man up in San Francisco, Wade Cordell, who’ll do some snooping for us on Wild Eyes. Now, tell me why you think this Adam might not help you. Have some issues with him, then?”

Absolutely nothing got by Adrien Fletcher. She’d have to remember that. “We’re competing for the same job. All faculty members in a department are, to some extent. He’s a bit higher on the totem pole than I am, but with the book, I’ve surpassed him.”

“Could he want to see you fail?”

She snorted softly. “Everybody wants to see everybody else fail. Welcome to ivory tower politics in academia.”

“Bad enough for him to bomb a building?”

She almost laughed. “To be honest, he doesn’t have what it takes to orchestrate something like that, although he’d probably like to think he does.” She paused as he pulled into the right lane and put his signal on at Westwood Boulevard. “Are you going back to Westwood?”

“I hope we’re not too late.”

“For what?”

“Trash pickup.”

A few minutes later, he was at the curb in front of the café where Wild Eyes had sat the night before. It was far enough from the bombed bookstore that the police hadn’t cordoned off the place and early enough that few patrons were around. Media trucks filled the streets closer to the bookstore, but this area was relatively quiet.

“Wait here,” he said, climbing out and heading toward the tables.

He went directly to the trash can that Wild Eyes had used for a basketball hoop the night before. Without even glancing around, he lifted the metal rim and set it on the ground, leaning over and peering in. Wouldn’t the restaurant have emptied that last night?

He reached in, rooted around, looked up to her, and grinned. A second later, he pulled something out, replaced the lid, and strolled back to the curb.

In the car, he held a ball of paper gingerly by two fingers. “We can run a DNA test on this.”

“I can’t believe you found that.” She shook her head, impressed. “Will you take it to the police?”

“I’ll turn it over to Lucy’s lab and see what we get.”

“Can we open it? I’d like to see what he wrote all over it.”

“Touch as little surface as possible.”

He held one side, and with the very edges of her fingers, she drew the other side of the paper out, slowly opening to reveal the second page of the fourth chapter, a brief biography of Pakal, who ruled the Maya for sixty-eight years and had a profound influence on the Long Count calendar.

All over the words, sharp blank ink had slashed a glyph.

“What’s that?” Adrien asked, pointing toward the concentric circles above an oval with four “fingers” with a single thorn drawn into the palm.

“It’s a symbol. It’s actually quite accurate Maya writing.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s the glyph for bloodletting. For asking the gods for a favor.” Miranda swallowed as she slowly lowered the bottom half of the page. They’d be doodles to anyone else, swirls of shapes, dots, and roughly drawn pictures. But Miranda could read the Maya alphabet as well as she could read her own name.

Which was exactly what he’d written.

Under that, six numbers with decimal points. She pointed to those numbers and whispered, “That’s yesterday’s date. He planned to sacrifice me last night.”

The editorial intern at the
Charleston Post and Courier
turned out to be quite a bit prettier and a little bit younger than Jack had figured when he started working her as a phone source. She’d taken his calls, answered his questions, and, as he’d hoped, arranged for him to get into the newspaper’s library on a Monday, when it was closed to the public. She was a college student, majoring in journalism, but she’d told him during their first conversation that her backup career was as a PI.

He hated to tell her he wouldn’t be hiring any interns soon, especially when she walked to the guard’s station to greet him. She was all legs and hair and one seriously sweet smile in a too-short skirt and a breast man’s paradise of a sweater.

“Mr. Culver?” She thrust out her hand and showed off her daddy’s investment in orthodontics. “I’m Toni Hastings.”

The newsroom was damn near deserted this early on a Monday morning, and Jack’s presence barely merited a glance from the few reporters who sipped coffee, skimmed e-mail, and got settled for their week of work. Guiding him around the cubicle walls, Toni sparkled, flipped her hair, and gave him an animated tour all the way to the double glass doors of a darkened library, where she ended the trip.

“Like I said, there’s no librarian here on Mondays,” she apologized. “But I can help you out if you know exactly what you’re looking for.”

He did. Wanda Sloane’s murder and the subsequent trial of Eileen Stafford hadn’t been huge news, but surely there was some coverage in the local paper. Experience told him that police departments and courthouses might have the facts on a case like this, but the newspaper would have the slant.

“The photo files and physical clips are in there,” she said, pointing to the electric rotating file. “The rest is every article and editorial ever written before we went to computers. Everything’s on microfiche or in hard copy, but you might have to do some rooting around to find what you want.”

He nodded, throwing his backpack onto a chair. “Rooting is my specialty.”

“I’m extension six four five. You can use that phone.”

“Thanks. I’ll call you if I need help.”

Three hours later, he stretched with a groan, then pushed a thirty-year-old editorial column aside.

The morning had produced nothing he didn’t already know.

He’d read the court files, of course, and expected them to be bland and relatively useless. But the paper was worse. It was as if every word that had been written on this trial was whitewashed. Granted, this wasn’t the trial of the century and didn’t merit a lot of ink at a time when the city of Charleston was on the verge of bankruptcy.

But still, didn’t some nosy reporter
somewhere
question the flimsy motive that Eileen felt threatened by a new gal who might take her job as a floating legal secretary at the courthouse? Didn’t anyone question a prosecutor who relied on sloppy, compromised evidence, an eyewitness with proven night blindness, or the fact that the police had stored the clothing Eileen allegedly wore in the same bag as the victim’s bloody dress, then claimed the barely there nitrite residue was proof she’d fired the gun?

It was as if…no one
cared
. Even the courtroom had looked oddly empty in newspaper photos. But someone had to care. Someone had to support Eileen.

He returned to the rotating file on the opposite wall, spinning through the contraption for more photos. Most of these were stored from the photographer’s files, developed pictures that had never run in the paper. The captions were sporadic, faded, jotted in incomprehensible notes, and many of the pictures were out of focus or unidentifiable.

By now, though, he could easily identify Eileen, a sweet-faced brunette with curly hair and sharp eyes back then. The woman who showed up in court in a crisp herringbone suit and high heels bore no resemblance to the one who slept in a pale blue hospital gown at Camp Camille.

He flipped through the black-and-white snapshots. There were several of the state-appointed defense attorney, Ronald Wright, now dead. One of the stern-faced judge, now retired and living in Arizona. There was his good friend Willie Gilbert, looking self-important, and another of Eileen talking to a pretty young blond woman.

That woman, Jack noticed, sat behind Eileen on several occasions and was caught on film closing her eyes and covering her mouth as the guilty verdict was announced. A friend? A relative? He set aside every picture that had a caption and began slowly going through them. The newspaper photographer had been sloppy about getting names, though that was part of the job.

Jack went back to the first day of the trial. There she was again, just behind and to the right of Eileen’s attorney, with an infant in her arms.

Jesus, could that be Eileen’s baby? Jack peered at the picture, then flipped it over and let out a little grunt of success: “E.S., R.W., R.A., LTR.”

Eileen Stafford, Ronald Wright, and…somebody…left to right.

R.A.

He sifted through the pile again, turning over every picture this time. And then he found it. No baby in this one, but the blonde was there. And a name. Rebecca Aubry.

He could hear Eileen’s voice.
There were no last names at Sapphire Trail
. But there was someone named Rebecca.

He picked up the phone and dialed Toni’s extension. She’d be able to get him into the
Post and Courier
database to find Rebecca Aubry’s address. And it might cost him lunch, but he’d bet he could get her to let him take the picture out of the building for a few days.

Rebecca Aubry might give him some answers, but he might need something to convince her.

“You didn’t mention the museum was located in the most famous building in San Diego.” From across the expanse of Balboa Park, Adrien paused to study the vista of the Museum of Man bathed in Southern California sunshine and crowded even on a Monday afternoon.

Miranda had seen the California Tower several times, but the awe-inspiring white limestone tower stretching up into a cloudless blue sky and the glistening geometric patterns of the painted dome next to it never failed to impress her.

Adrien took her hand as they crossed a garden and headed for the gabled front entrance. “It reminds me of a church.”

“It’s supposed to,” she told him. “The façade is based on some of the most famous churches in Mexico and Spain.”

As they rounded a large planter and climbed a half-dozen stairs, Adrien gestured toward a small poster at the door.

“There you are, luv. The event is on.”

“So it is,” she said, glancing at her image and the cover of her book on the small marquee. “Let’s find Suzette, the coordinator, and get the lay of the land.”

Just inside the entrance, Miranda approached a woman at a long welcome desk, getting a warm smile and outstretched handshake as soon as she said her name.

“Dr. Lang, we’re so excited to have you here. We’re expecting quite a crowd tonight.”

“That’s wonderful, thank you.” Maybe the sabotage was over. Maybe Wild Eyes had made his point last night. “Is Suzette Kraemer here?”

“Let me call her.” She phoned an extension, waited, tried another, then hung up. “Both her lines are busy, but go right ahead into the rotunda.” She pointed to the left, into the museum. “That’s where you’ll be speaking tonight. You can see the stelae and the zoomorphs. Whenever you’re ready, go outside to the next building, where our admin offices are. Suzette’s over there.”

Miranda thanked her and turned to Adrien, who had introduced himself to a young man dressed in black and wearing a security badge. She waited at the entrance to the rotunda, studying the wall-sized murals of a classic Mesoamerican Maya landscape that flanked each side.

“Looks a bit like your friend’s house.” Adrien came up behind her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“Sort of. That’s Quiriguá, in Guatemala—quite a beautiful ruin. Come on, I’m anxious to see the setup.”

The room opened up into a spacious, sun-dappled area under a fifty-foot-high white dome. Along the back wall, the words “Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth” set an atmospheric tone of the ancients. While the architecture was impressive, the real focal points of the room were three towering stone stelae and two boulderlike zoomorphs.

Adrien craned his neck to the top of the tallest monument, giving a low whistle as he reached the top. “Is this the real deal?”