If Looks Could Kill (37 page)

Mac gave Dinah a policeman's official nod. Dinah actually preened. In all their association, Chris had never seen the likes.

"Heard a lot about you," Mac offered noncommittally. Chris almost winced.

Dinah flashed a perfect set of teeth. "Well, I sure as hell haven't heard enough about you. Do you play tennis?"

Evidently Mac took that for a rhetorical question. Chris was glad. Although she had to admit she was relating to the tennis analogy. All of a sudden she was feeling like a ball in a hot match.

"I'm sure you had a long trip," Mac said evenly. "Which means you'll feel more like coming in to talk to me tomorrow."

"Talk?" Dinah demanded. "You want to waste time on words?"

Mac's answering smile was as perfectly worn as his uniform shirt. "I know you wouldn't be able to think of anything else until this whole thing with Chris's books is cleared up."

Dinah glanced over at Chris as if Mac weren't even standing there. "Oh, he's good."

"Could I talk to you for a minute, Chris?" Mac asked, still not quite able to take his eyes off the diminutive agent who stood between them.

Chris tried to pull her scattered thoughts together enough to answer.

Dinah never let her. "I'll just put my things away," she suggested, reaching up to pull off the bag that still hung over Chris's arm. "Wherever away is."

Chris gave a vague motion back toward the living room. "There's, uh, something in the fridge. I think. I'll be right back."

The night was cooler than the last time she'd been out sampling it. Chris could use that right now. She stepped outside and leaned against the front wall of the building, hands up to rub at suddenly burning eyes.

"Looks like you're having a busy night," Mac mused, pulling out the ubiquitous cigarettes.

Chris groaned. "You don't know the half of it."

"Want to tell me why you're in your felony two clothes?"

She was still trying to rub away the confusion. "You did see her," she couldn't help saying. "Right?"

"What?"

Chris just shook her head. "Never mind. I'm just a little... overwhelmed."

"I can tell. And I thought my day was full with Garavaglia. What's she doing here?"

Chris dropped her hands and laughed. Not a very sane-sounding laugh, she realized. "Hell if I know. She just showed up on my doorstep like Dorothy back from Oz." That earned another dismal shake of the head. "She
never
comes
here."

"Any ideas?"

"Not one."

Mac spent a few seconds smoking and looking in toward where they could hear Dinah moving around the house.

"Something else," Chris said while she could still pull her thoughts together.

Mac's attention returned.

She took a breath for courage. "It's Victor," she admitted. "He's known about Jacqueline Christ all along. I found out tonight, only... he doesn't know. He's got a goddamn shrine in that house, and I'm all over it."

Mac considered her quietly. "You're surprised?"

Chris turned on him. "Of course, I'm surprised." Her shoulders slumped. "Oh, hell, I guess not. It's just... spooky. Sad."

"Well, hopefully we can keep his secret."

Chris looked over, not sure she was happy with the change in his tone of voice.

"I came over to tell you that we finally tracked down Louise."

Now Chris knew she didn't like it. "She OK?"

Mac blew a cloud of smoke at a hovering swarm of insects. "Depends on your definition of OK. She's safe, she's under observation, and there's some hope she's treatable."

Chris slumped all over again. "Oh, God."

He gave her a considering look. "She'd broken into the old barbershop."

"Next to the How Do?"

"She had a knife. We haven't been able to get anything coherent out of her, but she's been screaming about you for about three solid hours now."

Chris tried to shake her head, as if denial could erase the truth. As if it could ease the splinter of guilt in her chest.

"I think," she said miserably, "I'm just going to stop trying."

Mac took another drag, his gaze still passive. "Your fault again?"

Like books stacked too high, boxes without balance, her stability was getting too precarious. She didn't have anything to say.

"You might like to know that she did have a mental history," Mac said quietly. "Judges are in a perfect position to hush things up. Evidently she's been paying real close attention to Harlan's suggestions that you suffer for your crimes."

Chris battled a flush of fury. "Well, why am I not surprised he had a hand in this?" She took a minute, rubbed a little more at gritty eyes. Tried to piece together what Mac was saying. "So, you're telling me you think you have our killer?"

A car slowed at the stop sign and rolled through, its lights washing across his chest. "Garavaglia couldn't be happier. I'd like to hear more than delusional ramblings. Evidence might be even nicer. We think whoever did Lawson has all those files. So far, we haven't seen squat."

"Could Louise have done it?"

"Sure. Crazy people fool me all the time."

"Can she work a computer?"

That brought his head around again. A moth was beating itself against the screen to get to the light inside.

"What?"

Chris sighed. Struggled for the courage to take the next step and actually show him. Because once she did, she'd have to explain.

She'd have to share what was in that manila envelope.

"Come here." When she opened the screen door, the moth followed them in.

Chris did not normally invite people up her stairs. It was a natural barrier for her. The floor was community territory, where she shared tea with Eloise's poker group and potluck with the Hospital Auxiliary. But the balcony was hers. It was where her alter egos lived, where her secrets were kept. Where she could indulge herself in the illusion of being able to look out over the world unseen and remain safe as she dissected it.

"I was on my way to get you when I ran into Dinah coming the other way," she was saying as she rounded the corner to where her desk waited by the wall of closed blinds. "This showed up when I was booting up the system to find out about Victor."

They came to a halt by the computer. Chris surreptitiously slid the envelope aside. Mac bent to consider the screen.

"What?" he asked.

Then Chris looked. Reality slid a little farther off-center. "Oh, shit, no," she moaned, leaning forward, punching keys, calling up screen after screen. All of them innocuous, all of them exactly what had always been on her screen. The message had disappeared like the phantom out in her yard.

"Dinah!" she yelled, leaning over the balcony. "Did you touch my computer?"

"And chip a nail?" the response floated up from the closed bathroom door.

"I didn't see her go up the stairs," Mac offered behind her.

Chris was sweating. She couldn't believe it. She knew she'd seen it. She'd been awake. Wide awake. You just don't imagine things like that.

But she wasn't sure anymore.

"What did you want to show me?" Mac asked.

She couldn't quite face him. "It was there," she insisted out loud. "I know it was there." Even she could hear the rising desperation in her voice.

Mac took a cautious step closer. "What was there, Chris?"

She did look up at him, then. Begged him to believe her, even when she didn't know whether to believe herself anymore.

"A message. A warning. It showed up on the screen just as the machine was booting up."

"What did it say?"

'"You know me,'" she said, knowing the message even before this. Having written the words herself so long ago. Of all she'd written, the thing she'd remembered best. '"And you can't escape me.'" She actually took hold of his arm, her grip taut, her voice shaking. "Tell me there was somebody in that shop last night, Mac. Please."

She was scaring him, now, too. Chris could see it in the quick uncertainty in his eyes. "I don't know, Chris. Do you think there was?"

She nodded. "I think I've been followed. That somebody's been in here. That they've been stalking me."

"Why didn't you say something?"

"I did!" she almost yelled. "Once when I thought I was followed. And when we came back here that time. Nobody listened. Last night."

"But there's more."

She tried her best to pull coherent thoughts together. To string together suspicion without betraying motivation. Without tipping off Dinah who had just stepped out of the bathroom.

Chris had wanted to wait until she could handle it on her own terms. Until she could face it alone. Now she wasn't going to be alone. She wasn't going to have the time to sort things out and shore up her strength.

"Yes," she admitted. "Yes, I think there's more."

Mac disengaged her fingers from his arm and took both hands in his. Like a parent comforting a child. Chris wasn't sure whether to feel fury or relief.

"OK," he said. "Let me get some information on it, and I'll check in with the other men. They haven't reported chasing anybody off but Victor, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. In the meantime, I brought a radio for you to keep here. That way if there are any problems, we can get ahold of each other until I can get the phone company to get a line in."

"I don't want a phone."

"You don't have a choice. Now, if it turns out that Louise is our villain, everything's fine. But I'm not in the mood to take chances."

Stable ground. Support. At least he was paying attention. At least he didn't think she was nuts. He wouldn't until she told him the rest.

"Chris?"

Startled, she looked up at him. "What?"

He gave her his best policeman smile. "If there's somebody out there, we'll get them. OK?"

"OK." What, she thought, if there's somebody in here?

"Chris?" Dinah called up to them. "What the hell's going on?"

Mac turned to consider the agent a moment. Then he returned his attention to Chris, still holding her hands. "Come on out and get the radio with me OK?"

She just nodded. "I'll explain over hot chocolate, Dinah," she answered without looking away from the sanity in Mac's eyes.

"Hot chocolate?" the agent retorted scathingly."Gosh, Auntie Em. When do we get to count the chickens?"

Mac didn't say another word until he got Chris out by the trunk of his cruiser. "One more thing," he said quietly as he reached in for the portable walkie-talkie he'd brought. "I'm not real happy about you being here alone with her."

Chris noticed that Mac actually had a fishing rod in the trunk. She wondered when he'd gotten the time to use it since this morning. "I'll be fine."

He straightened, packing every inch of official intent in his posture. "She is still," he reminded her, "a suspect. A prime suspect who pops up on your doorstep just about the time you're being followed."

Chris did her best to grin at him. "You're not spending the night," she retorted definitely.

"Not till this is over, anyway."

Chris suspected that he hadn't meant to say that. She certainly hadn't expected to hear it. The damn thing was, he meant it. Three weeks ago, it would have made her smile. Now, it just settled in right on top of all that tilting weight. She wanted him to hold her again, and he couldn't. And she couldn't let him.

"Keep your blinds opened," he commanded, his face mottling just a little in the dark. Absurdly, Chris was enchanted by his embarrassment. "That way we can keep an eye on you. Make sure you're safe with her."

"How do you know," she countered, "that she's safe with me?"

Mac just grinned. "You'd never stand a chance against those nails. Now, get some sleep. I'll see you tomorrow."

* * *

"Of course you want to go."

Chris couldn't believe it. Eighteen hours almost without stop. The two of them sat in the living room over Sarah Lee banana cake and coffee arguing about bringing Jacqueline Christ out of the closet and where to spend the subsequent money.

"I told you," Chris retorted yet again. "Just because Pyrite found out about Jacqueline doesn't mean I want the rest of the world to. I have absolutely no desire to see Paris, no matter who's paying for it."

She'd found out, finally, why Dinah had come. Not directly, of course. Dinah would rather have had her scarlet nails ripped off one by one than admit it. Still, woven into the subtext, into the funny little silences when Chris had looked up to see the uncertainty in her agent's eyes, she'd found out. Dinah was worried about her.

Dinah would never think of expressing said concern—although she'd sent the biggest order of flowers Eloise could phone out, without gladioli, to Trey—but she did, in her own way, care very much.

So she was here. In Pyrite. Driving Chris crazy.

Well, at least there hadn't been any voices last night. No visitations, no new surprises. Whatever was going on had given wide berth to Dinah. Chris was glad to see that even delusions had sense.