Grave Danger (33 page)

“Five thousand. I pulled it from the business account. We can get a cash advance from one of the credit cards if we need to cover it.”

“Dating cops is seriously bad for my finances.”

She smiled, relieved Libby could still make a joke. She was a strong woman; she’d get through this. “Did you talk to Mark?”

“Yes. He thinks I faked everything. I can’t believe the man I spent the weekend with ordered my arrest without even talking to me first.” She swirled the wine in her glass. Simone watched as she held her drink up to the light. The deep burgundy color gave a warm glow. “He tried and convicted me in his own mind.” She looked Simone in the eye. “You know, he never even asked if I did it.” She set the glass down and swiped at more tears. “Part of me wants to hit him, just to make him hurt as much as I do.”

“I’m pretty sure he already does.”

“You didn’t see him—”

“I didn’t need to. If he’s been convinced you’re guilty, he’s as much a victim as you are.”

That silenced Libby for a few minutes. Finally she said, “Last night I was this close”—she held up her hand, holding her thumb and forefinger millimeters apart—“to blurting out that I love him. That seems ridiculous now. We’ve known each other for a little more than a week. What was I thinking?”

“Maybe that you love him. Do you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.” She twirled the wine glass again, more interested in the light and color than in drinking it. “All I know is, I didn’t hold anything back. I lived in the moment without reservation. You would have been proud of me. I put all my old fears aside, all my stupid abandonment issues. I was totally open. I gave everything away.” Her voice cracked. “Then he heard the rumor Amy Seaver started and believed that over me.”

“How could a dumb rumor be this damaging? One look at the scope and budget would exonerate you.”

“Not completely. We haven’t finished negotiating the scoping changes with Jack, but that’s not really the issue. They have evidence against me. To start with, my fingerprints were on the Molotov cocktail bottle and on the sticky side of the tape that was used to bind me.”

“What?”

“I think the goal of the attack was to frame me.”

“It worked.”

Libby nodded. “They’ve also got a witness who says they saw me bring the gas cans home and put them on my back porch. It must be the old guy next door. He spends his days alternating between his back balcony and front porch. I wave every time I see him. He has yet to wave back.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Who knows? Jason said he would have the witness investigated.”

“Thank God Jason wasn’t in Seattle today.” Thank God he’d been willing to help Libby. Lord knew that if Simone had been the one arrested, he’d have let her rot in jail.

“Yeah. Convenient that we found his mother’s dead body, so he had reason to stay in Coho this week,” Libby said with rampant sarcasm.

“Don’t bitch at me. I’m on your side,” Simone said mildly.

Libby slouched against the wall. “I’m sorry. I want to fight with someone, I guess. I feel bad for Jason. I’m piling my crap on top of his already huge load. He tried to kiss me after our lunch meeting today.”

So he really did want Libby. Disappointment jabbed her. “What did you do?”

“I turned him down. Then an hour later I had to ask him to be my defense lawyer. The whole situation is so damn humiliating.” She gazed at the ceiling. “I don’t know what to do.”

Simone grabbed her hand and squeezed. “Life happens one day at a time. All you have to face is today. Truthfully, tomorrow will be worse—that reporter came by the site this afternoon, so you can expect at least one headline tomorrow—but we’ll deal with it. We can fight this. You haven’t done anything wrong and their motive is pure bullshit. So tomorrow, you hold your head up high and let them say what they want. The truth is on your side.”

“But what if the truth isn’t enough? My God, I just spent the weekend with Mark screwing his brains out, and even he doesn’t believe me. Your opinion of my sexual talents aside, one would presume he’d be a sympathetic audience.” She slipped her hand from Simone’s and cradled her head. “He was my rescuer that night. If this goes to trial, the jury would see the chief of police—who found me bound and covered in gasoline, and who also happens to be my lover—testify for the prosecution that I faked the whole damn thing.” She shook her head. “No one is going to believe me.”

“Libby, there’s no motive.”

“They can claim I’m trying to frame Brady to get the Anti-Harassment Order reinstated. I’m actually shocked that’s not the motive they’re going with.”

“You can’t frame someone who lives so far away. You’d have to track his every movement and only stage incidents when he was without an alibi for several hours. It would be ridiculous to attempt such a thing.”

“They seem to think I’m pretty stupid.”

“And Mark knows you’re not. They have no motive.”

“What if they don’t need one? What if they just claim I’m crazy? What if they say I’ve got some sort of weird variant of Munchausen’s Syndrome, but instead of faking illness, I fake being a crime victim? No one believed me about Brady before, so I’ve got a history they can use against me. With everything that’s been going on,
I’m
starting to wonder if I’m crazy!”

“But you’re not. You’ve been set up. Now we’ve just got to figure out why.”

That silenced her. Finally she shook her head. “I haven’t a clue.”

“What about Brady?” Simone said.

“I don’t think he could pull off something this sophisticated. The only thing I can think of is that this relates to the Cultural Center.”

“Someone wants to stop the project?”

Libby shrugged.

“Aren’t there better contractors to go after? The architect and engineering firm is making ten times what we are.”

“Yeah, but we’re here now. The architects and engineers have been here and gone, and it’ll be months before they’re back. I’m the best target if someone is crazy mad about the Center.”

“But you aren’t even at the site every day. I’m running the excavation. Why not go after me, or the dig directly?”

“They must think that if I go down, so will the rest of you. It’s more subtle to go after me. If they directly sabotaged the dig, then the police would track them down. This way the police come down on me and only me. The question is, are they going to ruin the contractor Jack hires to replace me?”

“There won’t be another. Jack won’t fire you. You’re innocent.”

“Simone, I could go to jail.”

“With one lying eyewitness and no motive? Jason’s a better lawyer than that.”

“Lord, I hope so.”

“He is. Your case is going to be tossed out so fast, and then Jason’ll hit ’em with a wrongful arrest suit. Your chief’ll be lucky to keep his badge after the lawsuit Coho will have to settle. He was involved with you and he used his position against you. He’ll pay with his career.”

“But he loves his job,” Libby said softly.

There was no doubt in Simone’s mind; in spite of everything, Libby loved Mark with every fragile piece of her shattered heart.

M
ARK IMMERSED HIMSELF
in the Caruthers investigation, staying at the station late into the night. He didn’t want to think about what happened earlier in the day. He used every ounce of his will to focus on the evidence collected two decades ago. For brief periods, none lasting longer than a few minutes, his efforts were effective. He would have searched through Angela’s boxes, but he couldn’t look at them without thinking of Libby.

He reread the transcript of an interview with Jack conducted in early 1980. Did Jason know, then or now, that Angela had an affair with her grad school officemate? Jack had lied repeatedly before admitting the truth—that he’d known about the affair for months before her disappearance. Did Jason also know that at the time of his mother’s disappearance Jack had been sleeping with a woman who worked for him? Would Jason be so eager to defend his father if he were aware of these details?

At one in the morning, the pages blurred before his eyes, and Mark accepted the inevitable. He needed to sleep. He left the station and headed home.

He braced himself before entering his bedroom for the first time since that morning. There he faced tangled sheets, the blankets half on the bed, half on the floor, and a pillow lodged between the bed and the headboard. In his mind, he saw Libby on the bed, tousled. Beautiful.

He lifted a pillow from the floor, held it for a moment, and then ripped off the pillowcase. He turned to the bed and yanked off the sheets. Downstairs, he tossed the bedding into the fireplace, went out back, and found an old can of lighter fluid. By the time he went to sleep in the guest bedroom, the sheets had been reduced to cinders.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
S
EVEN

L
IBBY CRIED HERSELF TO SLEEP
—something she hadn’t done since she was a child and her father had once again left her brother, sister, and her alone with their increasingly cold mother. Now she’d been abandoned by another man, and for the first time she understood her mother and the bitterness she directed at her children because the real cause of her hurt was out of reach. She understood, but she didn’t want to be like her. She didn’t want to embrace the bitterness and block her ability to love even those who were closest to her.

She wanted to rise above the pain and the petty desire for revenge, but she remained human, and black anger surfaced every time she thought about the humiliation of being arrested in front of her employees, or considered Amy Seaver’s calculating lies.

And she didn’t know what to think of Mark.

Simone was right: Mark was a victim, too. He’d been manipulated. Whoever had framed her had toyed with Mark’s sense of justice—and as a cop, she knew his sense of justice ran deeper than most.

Still, he’d made a choice when he found her guilty without even talking to her. He’d said repeatedly that he had to explore every option, couldn’t rule anyone out as a suspect, yet she had a feeling he’d followed the evidence to her and…stopped.

She had a new day in front of her, and no idea how to face it. Simone left early for the site. Life—and the project—had to go on.

She deactivated the alarm long enough to grab the morning paper from the front porch and retreated back into the house. The
Seattle Times
had nothing about her above the fold. A ship was being deployed to the Persian Gulf. The shellfish harvest would be down this year. Below the fold was a different story. A small blurb—“Archaeologist Digs Attention. Allegedly Fakes Attack After Finding Bones of Missing Woman”—was followed by instructions to read the full story on page A-8.

She groaned and threw the paper aside, not ready to read the article.

The phone rang. Caller ID said
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
. She unplugged the landline and turned on her cell phone. Anyone who really needed to reach her had the number.

She leaned on the small table and stared at the heavy, black, rotary-dial phone, a relic from the days when this was Angela Caruthers’ house. She and Jack had a home in Seattle, but her dissertation topic meant spending several days at a time in Coho, and Libby had learned she’d claimed the Shelby house as her own. The house had remained in Jack and Jason’s control after her disappearance. Libby was the first tenant since the early 1970s.

Angela had used this phone, this table. She’d sat in the bay window. For all Libby knew, Angela had argued with Jack in the kitchen much as Libby had with Mark. Libby couldn’t do anything about her disastrous situation, but she could bury herself in someone else’s problems. She made a pot of coffee and then headed upstairs with a full mug in hand. Angela’s papers waited.

She took notes as she read, detailing Angela’s areas of interest and jotting down avenues for further research. Angela’s ethnographic study had been broad, but she’d focused in on a few key areas: the effect mill development had on tribal customs and practices, Millie Thorpe Montgomery’s relationship with the tribe, and the change in mill/tribal relations after Lyle took over.