Over the Line (15 page)

"From Tupelo?" She fought a heightening sense of alarm that tried to grab her by the throat when he nodded.

"They found a car. Sunk in the Tombigbee just outside of town." He wiped a hand over his jaw. "An old Pontiac— probably stolen. They're still running the plates. Anyway, seems a fisherman hooked a propeller on the roof, got stuck, and when he went into the river to cut himself loose, there was this car."

Okay. So this wasn't real news, she told herself, working hard to dodge an escalating sense of doom, despite the fierce scowl on his face. "I imagine there are all sorts of junk cars stuck on that riverbed."

"I imagine so," he agreed, his eyes hard. "Only this one wasn't junk. Hadn't been submerged long enough to get rusty."

Janey felt her blood run cold as she waited, knowing that what came next would land as heavily as a hammer.

"They found a piece of cloth stuck in a headlight. They've been able to match it to the dress your mother was wearing the night she was run down."

Cold changed to hot like a switch had been flipped. From her ears to her fingertips, she suddenly felt hot.

"And they've found a witness."

She touched her fingertips to the cross. It was warm from lying against her chest. "Someone saw what happened that night?"

"Some guy in a parked car outside the bar was playing patty-cake with a woman who wasn't his wife. He was reluctant to come forward until now, but apparently his conscience finally got the best of him."

Like anxiety was getting the best of her. Her heart kicked out several fast, hard beats. "So ... so he saw the accident?"

He gave her another long, searching look, like he was hesitant to tell her the rest of the news.

She braced herself, a sixth sense making her just as hesitant to hear it.

"It was dark and he couldn't see the person driving, but the witness stated that whoever was behind the wheel had to have seen your mother, that they had plenty of time to break or swerve to miss her. Instead, the driver of the car accelerated and deliberately headed straight toward her when she crossed the street."

Janey's mouth was so dry and her heart was suddenly beating so fast she could hardly get the words out. "Some ... someone intentionally k-... killed her?"

He shoved his hands into his back hip pockets, nodded. "It's pretty much looking that way, yeah."

She dragged a hand through her hair, aware on some peripheral level that it was shaking. That
she
was shaking. "Why? Why would someone want to kill my mother?"

The look on his face had her pushing herself back against the sofa—like someone riding in the passenger seat of a car going too fast, and instinct made them press their feet against the floorboard as if they could put on the brakes and stop a wreck from happening.

But nothing was going to stop this.

"There's something else. I didn't tell you this before," he said slowly. "Grimm left a message with his 'gifts' today."

She closed her eyes. "Something tells me you don't want to share it any more than I want to hear it."

He puffed out his cheeks, clearly reluctant, confirming her suspicion.

"Let's have it," she said, bracing herself.

She watched his face, waited in horrified silence until he reluctantly told her what Grimm had written.

"'We're both orphans now.'"

... and the silence became a white-hot roar of noise.

She took it like a soldier. It was the biggest compliment Jase could give anyone. Yeah. Janey Perkins knew how to take a punch. All the while looking like a small, fragile doll.

Jase walked over to the fully stocked bar, grabbed a Coke and a bottle of water. He twisted the top off the water and handed it to her.

She accepted the bottle without a word, sat quietly for a moment, then rose and walked over to the window, absently touching her fingers to the cross she'd put on again after her shower and had pretty much always worn since she'd found it at her mother's.

And she said nothing.

It didn't seem to matter that prior to starting this assignment Jase had crammed in several hours of online research on "Sweet Baby Jane the Rock Star" in her spike heels and black leather and badass pout. Each time he saw her like this—her face scrubbed clean and her hair pulled back in a thick, shiny tail like a thirteen-year-old would wear—all he could think of was innocence. It was not the image she portrayed to the general public.

Living the life she lived, exposed to some of the fastest crowds, the highest thrills, how could she possibly be innocent? And what that had to do with the price of an RPG in Iraq he didn't know.

In the meantime, she had to be quaking inside over this latest bit of news. But she'd sucked it up. Just like she'd sucked it up during her mother's funeral. And when her mother's house had been broken into. Taken it in stoic silence. And Jase's admiration factor kicked up another notch.

It had to be hard enough to think your mother was the victim of a hit-and-run accident. But to find out she was intentionally run down. Murdered. All of this on the heels of a burglary and a convicted stalker's impromptu "visit" to her hotel room.

Jase could think of any number of things he'd like to do to the pervert if he ever got his hands on Grimm. Things he'd learned from the Taliban in Afghanistan and from the fedayeen in Iraq, where barbarism was king and human life held no more value than the price of a spent rifle shell. Sometimes, when he was aching cold on a godforsaken mountainside north of Karbala or rotting in a hellish hot sand bunker outside of Tikrit, the only thing that had separated him from the bad guys was a very loose grip on sanity.

Seeing what Grimm was doing to Janey—well, Jase felt a little too close to a savage side of himself that he'd discovered over there and wasn't very proud to know existed.

He didn't want to think about any of it now. Yet the memory of one night in Ramadi surfaced without warning. The night patrol. The crack of a door against a mud hut wall. The burst of firepower.

He swallowed, unable to erase the grisly image of the severed head. The lifeless eyes of what had once been an Italian journalist, the violated body on the other side of the room.

"Would he have done that?"

Her tentative question brought his head up and his attention back to the here and now.

"Grimm," she clarified, turning away from the window to look at him with eyes that looked a lot hunted and a little wild. "Would he have gone that far? Did he ... do you think he killed my mother? In some ... some sick attempt to ... be closer to me?"

"We don't know that Grimm had anything to do with your mother's death."

She looked up at him and his heart damn near broke for her. "We're both orphans now?
We're both orphans now?"
Her voice rose on a note of hysteria.

She checked herself. Gathered her composure. "My God. He practically confessed."

"Whoa, wait," Jase cautioned, battling the urge to go to her and offer that shoulder again. "You're making a huge leap of logic here. He could have read it in the papers, heard about it on the news."

And yet. Jase had been thinking the same thing—not that he wasn't covering all of his bases. He'd called No back in West Palm after he'd showered. Asked him to run background checks on everyone from Max Cogan, to Derek McCoy, to Christine Ramsey. Neal Sanders and the rest of the band and backup singers weren't off the hook, either. No was running checks on them, too. Any one of them had access to Janey's suite. Of course, the hearts were 100 percent Grimm's MO, but even so, Jase wanted them checked out.

All he could do on those counts was wait. Right now, however, he had to stop Janey from taking the direction in which she was going. He saw in her eyes what she was doing to herself. Heaping on the self-blame with a shovel the size of a tank.

"Edwin Grimm's obsession is not your fault."

"Isn't it?" She shouldered past him. But she had no place to go. She stopped in the middle of the suite, spun back around, knotted her fists in her hair, and appealed to him with guilt-filled eyes.

"Every time I take the stage, isn't that what I'm asking? For people to be so obsessed with my music and my image that they become my fans? My
fanatics?
Fanatics who might resort to murder to get my attention?"

"Don't do that," he said so harshly that she flinched. "Don't get caught up in the blame game. Even if—and that's a big if—Grimm is responsible, your mother's death is not your fault."

He wasn't sure why he felt the need to set her straight. Maybe it was the haunted look in her eyes. Maybe it was because he'd been where she was now—questioning his motives, questioning his calls. Men were dead because of him. In the name of freedom. In the name of good. Sometimes even in the name of God. But the end result was the same. Men were dead.

"You can't hold yourself accountable for the actions of creeps like Edwin Grimm. You've got millions of fans who do exactly what fans do. They buy your music. They come to your concerts. They don't blur the line. The Grimms of the world are born waiting for a chance to dive off the deep end. They don't need to be coaxed or coerced. They've spent their lives looking for a reason. You just happened to be the one to provide his. And let me repeat—there is nothing but conjecture to tie him to your mother's death."

She wasn't buying it. He understood.

Dead was dead.

"Janey." He forgot about his determination to call her Miss Perkins as once again he found himself resisting the urge to reach for her and hold her together until she sorted this out. "It's not your fault," he insisted.

She blinked back tears, shook her head. He saw the transition on her face, recognized the exact moment when she decided she needed to move on. Still heaping on the guilt, no doubt, but dealing with it.

"The police have to be looking at him as a suspect, though, right?"

Despite the way Janey was beating herself up over the possibility, Jase hoped Alice Perkins's death could be pinned on Edwin Grimm. The sonofabitch would never see the light of day again. If they got real lucky, the death penalty would come into play.

But Jase knew better than to assume. "Yeah. I'm certain they are. Right now, he's probably on the suspect list, but the witness's report has just taken the investigation to a new level. We're no longer looking at negligent or vehicular homicide. We're looking at murder. And we need to give the police time to retool their investigation."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime, I think you should consider canceling the rest of your tour dates."

She didn't even think about it. "I'll tell you the same thing I told Max. It's not going to happen. Besides tonight's final booking here in Atlantic City, there's only the Garden and the Boston gig before we take a two-week hiatus anyway."

He'd figured that would be her response. Just like he'd figured that without Max to support his argument, he didn't have a Humvee's chance against an IED of making her see reason.

And that brought up another question.

Where the hell was Max? And why hadn't he answered his cell?

Chapter 9

Despite the cool, dark interior of the heavily air-conditioned bar, Max Cogan felt a trickle of sweat slide down his back beneath his shirt. His brow was damp. His hands were shaking.

And the damnable tightness in his chest just wouldn't leave him the hell alone.

He fished a pack of antacids out of his slacks pocket, popped a couple in his mouth. Elbows on the bar, he huddled back over his gin and tonic and lit a cigarette. Gin always tasted good on a hot day. Nothing tasted good now.