Sandra Brown - Ricochet

“What happened?” she asked. He gave her a few seconds to massage circulation back into her wrists before reaching for her hands again. “Oh, please don’t,” she begged as he replaced the cuffs. “Why?”

“My peace of mind.”

“You still don’t trust me?”

He opened his closet and pulled out a duffel bag, tossed it on the bed, and unzipped it. “Did you bring anything here with you except the rain slicker?”

“No. Did you see Cato?”

“Yeah, I saw him.”

“Where?”

“At the morgue.”

“And he identified my body?”

“She was wearing your wristwatch.”

“ Napoli made me take it off and give it to him.”

“It wasn’t in the car when we found him.”

“Then Savich must have taken it.”

“Must have.” There was much to learn, but not before they were safely away from here. “Where have you been staying all this time?” he asked as he rifled bureau drawers and began throwing items of clothing into the duffel bag.

“In a house on Hilton Head. I paid a year’s rent on it six months ago, but I hadn’t used it until this past week.”

“How’d you get to the island?”

“A while back I bought a used car and kept it parked in a paid lot, so I could leave in a hurry if I needed to. That night I walked to it from the bridge.”

He stopped what he was doing and looked at her. “And then drove back across?” One route to the island meant crossing the Talmadge Bridge.

“No, I took the interstate.”

“Going back to the bridge would have been audacious, even for you,” he said bitterly. He resumed packing. “How did you manage to come by a house, car, et cetera when your husband had Napoli following you?”

“I guess I wasn’t under constant surveillance.”

Or Napoli had deliberately withheld some information to use to bait the judge later, up the ante, make more profit. “Where’s the car now?”

“Same place. This evening, as soon as I heard on the news that the search had been called off, I drove from Hilton Head. I left the car in the paid lot and walked from there to here.”

“A rental house and a car purchase. That’s a paper trail a mile wide. A blind man could follow it.”

“Then how come nobody discovered it while I was missing?”

“Good point,” he said wryly. “But I don’t want to take any chances. You’ve got to stay invisible.”

“For how long?”

“Until I figure out what to do.”

“About me?”

“About everything. Your husband produced a body so we would stop looking for you and close the case. I need to find out why.”

“Please don’t refer to him as my husband.”

“You’re married to him.”

“I despise him.”

He held her gaze for several beats, then went into the bathroom and raided the medicine cabinet of toiletries. “How were all those transactions handled? The house, the car.”

“Under assumed names. I bought the car in South Carolina from an individual. It’s registered there. Cato doesn’t know any of this. I’m sure.”

“Well, I’m not,” he said, dumping the double handful of bathroom items into the duffel on top of the clothing. “I don’t like it.”

He checked his closet for anything he might have missed and might need, then took a pistol from the top shelf. Along with a box of bullets, he added it to the duffel bag and zipped it up.

Then he looked around the room, wondering if this was the last time he would ever see it. But he had no time for entertaining sentimental thoughts. He picked up Elise’s slicker and draped it over her cuffed hands.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet. But I can’t keep you here. You’re good to me only as long as you stay dead. Take off your shoes.” She toed off the sneakers without question. He put them in the pockets of the slicker, then hastily wiped up her wet footprints with a bathroom towel. “If anyone comes looking for you, I don’t want them to see your footprints.”

“Who would come looking?”

“You friend Savich, maybe.”

“Savich is not my friend. He for sure wouldn’t be if he knew I’d seen him kill Napoli.”

Leaving that alone for the moment, Duncan hefted the strap of the duffel bag onto his shoulder and took Elise’s hands, pulling her along behind him as he went down the stairs. “I parked my car out back in the alley.” He led her through the dark house to the rear door in the kitchen.

He pulled it open cautiously and scanned the enclosed garden. Like the rest of the city, his walled backyard was saturated from the recent rains. Tops of plants were bent low from the weight of the water. He detected nothing out of the ordinary and no movement other than raindrops splashing into puddles.

He took her shoes from the coat pockets and placed them on the floor then guided her bare feet into them. “Okay, let’s go.” But when he tried to pull her through the door, she resisted. He turned back. “What?”

“Do you finally believe me?”

He stared into her shadowed face for several moments, then said, “Do you have a birthmark partially covered by your pubic hair?”

She gave him a pointed look.

He said, “It was dark. I could have missed it.”

“I don’t have a birthmark.”

“Then I’m close to believing you.”

As he got into his car and started the motor, he thought to check the fuel gauge. More than half full. Good. He was reluctant to make another stop before getting the hell out of Dodge.

But there was one thing he must do. He plucked his cell phone off his belt and called DeeDee. She answered immediately. Without even an opening hello, she said, “How was it at the morgue?”

“Cold.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Judge Laird was still there.”

Because he was lead detective on the case, Gerard had asked him to take that duty while DeeDee was sent to the pier where the body had been discovered to interview the men who’d discovered it. He summarized his brief conversation with the ME and with Laird, aware that Elise was also listening from the passenger seat of his car. He concluded with, “The judge is very torn up.”

“Well, that’s that, I guess,” DeeDee said with her typical practicality. “As you said earlier today, it would be over when her body was found.”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

She hesitated, then asked, “How are you?”

“Fine. But I wondered if you could cover for me if I take a couple days off?”

DeeDee expressed concern for his mental and emotional state and told him she didn’t think it was a good time for him to be alone. She suggested he see a counselor and discuss his conflicts regarding the late Mrs. Laird.

He couldn’t talk openly about it, not with Elise sitting on the other side of the console, but he told his concerned partner that a few days away from the office were exactly what he needed.

“I just need some downtime, DeeDee. I want to hang out, get my head straight, then I’ll be right as rain and raring to get back to work. I’ll call you in a day or two.” He said good-bye before she could ask where he was going for this self-prescribed downtime.

“I wonder who she was,” Elise said as he ended the call. “The woman in the morgue wearing my wristwatch. Who was she?”

Duncan had a good guess, but he kept it to himself. There was much he needed to learn before he could trust Elise entirely. “She was a blonde. Approximately your size. And Judge Laird was awfully convincing as the grieving husband. If I hadn’t seen you in the flesh, I would have believed he was weeping over the mutilated corpse of his beloved wife.”

As they approached the Talmadge Bridge, they both tensed and stayed that way until they had crossed it. South Carolina ’s state highway 17 was a dark, narrow, and dangerous road notorious for fatality collisions, but Elise visibly relaxed once Savannah was behind them. She tucked her feet beneath her hips and turned in her seat toward him. He noticed her shiver.