Sandra Brown - Ricochet

“Sorry. You’ll just have to put up with the stink.”

“You don’t smell bad, but doesn’t the drying sweat itch?”

Reflexively he scratched the center of his chest. The hair there had become matted and salty. “I can stand it.”

“I’ll be glad to wait for-”

“Why does your husband want you dead?” he asked, speaking over her. “And why is it a big secret you can only tell me?”

She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and said, “I came to you with this, sought you out personally, because I sensed you would be more-”

“Gullible?”

“Receptive. Certainly more so than Detective Bowen.”

“Because I’m a man and she’s a woman?”

“Your partner comes across as hostile. For whatever reason, our chemistry isn’t very good.”

“By contrast, you think our chemistry is?”

She lowered her gaze. “I felt…I thought…” When she raised her head and looked at him, her eyes were imploring. “Will you at least listen with an open mind?”

He folded his arms over his chest, fully realizing that it was a subconscious, self-protective gesture. When she looked at him like that, her eyes seemed to touch him, and his physical reactions were as though she actually had.

“Okay, I’m listening. Why does your husband want you dead?”

She took a moment, as though collecting her thoughts. “You and Detective Bowen picked up on the alarm not being set.”

“Because you and the judge had sex.”

“Yes. After, I tried to get up and set the alarm. But Cato wouldn’t let me leave the bed. He pulled me back down and…”

“I get the picture. He was horny.”

She didn’t like that remark. Her expression changed, but she didn’t address his vulgarity. “Cato didn’t want the alarm to be set that night. He wanted Trotter to get into the house. After I was dead, he could truthfully say that it was part of my routine to set the alarm and that he had prevented me from doing so. He would say that he would never forgive himself, that if only he had allowed me to leave the bed, the tragedy would have been prevented. He would assume responsibility for my murder and, by doing so, win everyone’s pity. It’s a brilliant strategy. Don’t you see?”

“Yeah, I see. But when you were in the kitchen and heard the noise, why didn’t you call 911, get help immediately?”

“I didn’t know how much time I had.” She answered quickly, as though she’d known he would ask that and needed to have a response ready. “My instinct was to protect myself. So I took the pistol from the drawer in the foyer table.”

Duncan tugged on his lower lip as though thinking it through. “You wanted the pistol in case Trotter attacked before you could make the 911 call.”

“I suppose that’s what I was thinking. I’m not sure I was thinking at all. I merely reacted. I was afraid.”

She dropped down onto the piano bench and covered her face with her hands, massaging her forehead with the pads of her fingers. This position left the nape of her neck exposed and Duncan ’s gaze found it, just as it had the night of the awards dinner. He blinked away the vision of kissing her there.

“You were afraid,” he said, “but you found the courage to go into the study.”

“I don’t know where I got the courage. I think maybe I hoped I was wrong. I hoped that what I’d heard was a tree branch knocking against the eaves, or a raccoon on the roof, something. But I knew that wasn’t it. I knew that someone was in there, waiting for me.

“I’d been expecting it for several months. Not a burglary, specifically. But something. This was the moment I’d been dreading.” She pressed her fist against the center of her chest, right above her heart, pulling the fabric of her T-shirt tight across her breasts. “I knew, Detective. I knew.” Whispering that, she raised her head and looked up at him. “Gary Ray Trotter wasn’t a thief I caught in the act. He was there to kill me.”

Duncan pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes as though concentrating hard, trying to work out the details in his mind. Actually, he had to do something to keep from drowning in those damn eyes of hers or becoming fixated on her breasts. He wanted to haul her up against him, kiss her, and see if her mouth delivered as promised. Instead, he pinched the skin between his eye sockets until it hurt like hell. It helped him to refocus. Some.

“Gary Ray Trotter hardly fits the profile of a hired assassin. Mrs. Laird.” He tacked on the name to reestablish in his mind who she was.

“I can’t account for that.”

“Try.”

“I can’t,” she said, her voice cracking.

He crouched down in front of her, and caught himself about to place his hands on her knees. They were face-to-face now, inches apart. From this close, he should be able to detect any artifice. Should be able to.

“Judge Cato Laird wants you dead.”

“Yes.”

“He’s a rich and powerful man.”

“That doesn’t exclude him from wanting to have me killed.”

“But he hires a bargain-basement assassin to do it?” He shook his head with skepticism.

“I know it sounds implausible, but I swear to you it’s true.”

He searched her eyes for signs of drug-induced paranoia or hallucination. None there.

Her husband doted on her, so it was unlikely that she was trying to spice up her mundane existence by creating some excitement.

Schizophrenia? Possibly. Compulsive liar? Maybe.

There was also a chance she was telling the truth, but the odds of that were so slim as to be negligible. Knowing Cato Laird, knowing Gary Ray Trotter, it just didn’t gel.

What Duncan suspected, what he believed with every instinct that had made him a good detective, was that she was trying to cover her own sweet ass, and that, because of what he’d said to her the night of the awards dinner, she was trying to use him to do it.

Why her sweet ass needed covering, he didn’t know yet. But, based on what he and DeeDee had discovered last night at Meyer Napoli’s office, he would soon find out. In the meantime, it pissed him off that she thought he’d be that easily manipulated, and he wanted to tell her so.

For the moment, however, he would continue to play along. “Implausible is precisely the word I would use, Mrs. Laird. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of the judge contracting with someone as inept as Trotter.”

“All I know is this. If I hadn’t fired the pistol when I did-and I did not fire first, no matter how many theories to the contrary you parade out-I would be dead. Cato would have told this story about a burglar caught in the act, and who wouldn’t believe him?”

She stood up so suddenly she almost knocked Duncan over. “He’s a superior court judge. He’s from a wealthy, influential family. It would never occur to anyone that he would hire someone to kill his wife.”

“It certainly would never occur to me.”

His inflection brought her around slowly to face him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, he would have to be crazy, wouldn’t he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on,” he said, his voice as taunting as his smile. “What man in his right mind would want to get rid of a wife like you?”

She regarded him closely for several long moments, then said softly, with defeat, “You don’t believe me.”

His smile vanished and his tone turned harsh. “Not a goddamn word.”

“Why?” Her voice had gone thin. If he didn’t know better, he would swear she was genuinely perplexed.

To keep himself from falling for it, he gave a sardonic snuffle. “The judge has got himself a live-in topless waitress.”

She took a deep breath, the defeat settling on her even more heavily. “Oh.”