Delores Fossen - Questioning the Heiress

Wise move. From her vantage point, she could see a lot through that beveled glass, including an intruder if he was about to come after her.

She reached over, eased open the door, and Egan slipped inside through the kitchen. The floor was gray slate. Potentially noisy. So he lightened his steps.

There were yards of slick black granite countertops, stainless appliances that reflected like mirrors, and in the open front cabinets, precise rows of crystal glasses, all shimmering and cool. He lifted an eyebrow at the halfempty bag of Oreo cookies on the kitchen island.

The A/C spilled over him, chilling the rain that snaked down his face and back. “Has the intruder come out of your bedroom or moved past you to get to another part of the house?” he asked.

“No one’s come out of that room,” she insisted.

So Egan turned his ear in that direction and listened.

Well, that’s what he tried to do, anyway, but he couldn’t hear much, other than Caroline Stallings’s frantic breathing and her silk clothes rustling against her skin. She was obviously trembling from head to toe.

“When I came home from work, I noticed my security system wasn’t working. Then I heard someone moving around in my bedroom,” she muttered. “I dialed 9-1-1, they dispatched my call to you, and something or someone cut the line.”

Yes. The line had indeed gone dead. Egan had hoped it was because of the rain, but his gut told him otherwise. It wasn’t difficult to cut a phone line or disarm a security system, and perps usually did that when they wanted to sever their victim’s means of communication. Murder or something equally nasty usually followed. Hopefully, he’d prevented the “equally nasty” part from happening.

“And I found this thing in my car,” she added a moment later.

The vague thing got his attention. That wasn’t good, either. Egan didn’t want his attention on anything other than the intruder.

He glanced over his shoulder at Ms. Stallings and scowled at her so she’d hush. The scowl was still on his face when he heard the sound. Not breathing or rustlings on silk. It came from the direction of her bedroom, and it sounded as if someone had opened a door.

“What’s the status of SAPD?” Egan whispered into the communicator.

“Not here yet,” was the guard’s response.

Egan silently cursed. It was decision time. He could stand there and continue to protect Ms. Stallings, or he could do something to catch a possible killer.

It didn’t take him but a second to decide.

“Follow me,” he instructed Caroline. “Stay low and don’t make a sound.”

She nodded and kept a firm grip on the butcher knife.

“And don’t accidentally stab me with that thing,” he snarled.

She tossed him a scowl of her own.

Egan took his first steps toward the bedroom, moving from the slate floor of the kitchen to some kind of exotic hardwood in the dining room and the foyer. He stopped. Listened. But he didn’t hear any indication that the intruder was coming their way. So he took another step. Then, another. Caroline Stallings followed right behind him.

From the massive foyer, it was well over twenty feet to her bedroom. The door was open, and he paused in the entryway to get a look around. It, too, was massive. At least four hundred square feet. He wasn’t surprised by all the space.

There were more dark hardwood floors and an equally dark four-poster bed frame, but nearly everything else was virginal white. The walls, the rugs, the high-end dresser and chest that were glossy white wood. It smelled like linen, starch and the rain.

No visible intruder.

However, there was movement.

Egan spun in that direction, re-aiming his weapon, but he realized the movement had come from the gauzy white curtains that were stirring in the breeze. He quickly spotted the breeze’s source. Another set of French doors.

And these were wide open.

The doors shifted a little with each new brush of wind. That was obviously the sound he’d heard when he’d thought the intruder was escaping.

Mentally cursing again, Egan stepped just inside the room so he could get a better look at the floor. It didn’t take any Ranger training or skill to see the wet footprints on the hardwood. The prints didn’t just lead into the room. There were also some going out.

Hell. The intruder had likely left before Egan had even arrived.

“The cops are here,” the guard informed Egan through the communicator.

Maybe it wasn’t too late. “Have them check the grounds, but it looks as if our guy got away.”

“He got away?” Caroline repeated with more than a bit of anger in her voice.

She went forward until she was right at his back and came up on her tiptoes so she could peer over his shoulder. She touched him in the process. Specifically, her silkcovered right breast swished against his back. That didn’t stop her from looking and obviously seeing those tracks.

“He’s gone,” she mumbled, moving back slightly. She cursed, too, and it wasn’t exactly mild. But it was justified. Judging from what the Rangers had learned about the murders, Caroline Stallings just might be on the killer’s list.

The problem was—who was the killer?

And why exactly would he want Caroline dead?

So far, all the victims had been connected to a fatal hit-and-run that’d happened nine months earlier on the night of a high-society Christmas party at Cantara Hills. The now-dead Vincent Montoya was responsible for that incident, in which a young woman had died. In fact, everyone directly connected to the hit-and-run was dead.

Except for Caroline.

She’d been driving the vintage sports car that Vincent Montoya had slammed into.

Caroline had been injured, too, and supposedly lost her memory of not only the accident but that entire fateful night. The so-called amnesia bothered the hell out of Egan. Was she faking it to save one of her rich friends who might have caused the hit-and-run? Or was she covering for herself because she’d been negligent in some way? Egan didn’t know which, but he was almost positive she was covering something.

Almost.

“The police will come inside any minute,” Egan told her. He moved her back into the doorway so that she’d be away from the windows. “Then, I can question you and have them check for trace and prints. We might be able to get something off those shoe impressions and the doorknobs.”

He didn’t want to get too engrossed in processing the crime scene just in case the cops flushed out the intruder and the SOB came running back into the house. That’s the reason Egan kept his service pistol aimed and ready.

“You’re sure you had your security system turned on?” he asked her.

“Of course. Since the murders, I always make sure it’s set. But as I said, it wasn’t working when I came home.” She looked around. “At least nothing appears to have been ransacked. And besides, there wasn’t much to steal since I don’t keep money or expensive jewelry in the house.”

“This person might not have been after stuff,” Egan grumbled.

She touched the highly polished dresser, which was dotted with perfectly aligned silver-framed photos of what appeared to be family members. “Do you think the intruder could have been the person who murdered Vincent Montoya?”

“It’s possible.” More than possible. Likely. Especially since the ritzy neighborhood of Cantara Hills had been virtually crime-free prior to the hit-and-run. But afterward…Well, that was a whole different story.

“Why isn’t Lt. McQuade here?” she asked a moment later. “I figured he’d be the one to come.”

Brody McQuade, the Ranger lieutenant in charge of the Cantara Hills murders. “He’s in California trying to track down a person of interest.”