Cara Summers - No Holds Barred

He gave himself another thirty to examine the scene in his mind and thirty after that to make adjustments. Then he backed up to the door, took his cell phone out of his pocket and took a video, first panning the scene, then zooming in on the sheet and the petals.

It took him another minute to prop the ladder-backed chair against the door. Halfway down the stairs, he glanced at his watch. Seven or eight minutes from start to finish. Ten if the guy let nerves slow him down. But nothing else in the apartment had been disturbed. Whoever it was had come for one purpose only. To set up the scene, record it and get it on TV.

Mission accomplished.

Then he remembered the bag or whatever the guy must have used to carry in his props. If it had been a shopping bag, it hadn’t been in the apartment. And it wasn’t needed anymore.

On a hunch, he stopped by the Dumpster at the end of the alley. Duncan held his breath, ignoring the mix of odors he released as he lifted the lid. A Macy’s bag lay right on the top, and inside he found a sales slip and the plastic covering for a single sheet.

Bingo.

He had his phone out, intending to pass the information along to Mike Nelson, when a long dark sedan pulled up to the mouth of the alley and his boss stepped out.

Adrienne Monticello was a tall, slender blonde with long curly hair. Today, she wore it pulled back into a ponytail. She had the same camera-ready good looks as her brother and she knew how to dress to enhance them. Her jacket and slacks were purple, her shoes designer. Gold winked at her ears and on her wrist. Although he knew she was in her mid-fifties, she could pass for a decade younger.

She whipped her oversize sunglasses off as she approached, and her expression was worried. “You aren’t answering your phone.”

“I don’t like to be interrupted when I walk through a crime scene.” And that’s how she’d figured out where to track him down. The fact that she’d left the office to do so didn’t bode well.

“Abe called me. He says you don’t believe that Lightman was involved in this.”

“He wasn’t.”

She studied him for a moment, and then nodded. “He’s worried about Ms. MacPherson. He’s been watching the TV coverage at his office, and they’ve located a photo of her from law school. They’re running it along with the little petal scene.”

“And Abe noticed that she’s the Rose Petal Killer’s type. Slender, long brown hair,” Duncan added. Serial killers often had a type. Some even went for females who were left-handed or played a certain sport in high school. There’d been one who’d even chosen his victims because of the number and sequence of vowels in their first and last names.

“It isn’t just Abe who’s noticed it. The press is announcing it to the world about every fifteen minutes or so.”

Not good , Duncan thought. That put an even bigger target on Piper’s back. One that might tickle the fancy of Patrick Lightman. “Where is she right now?”

“In Abe’s offices. He wants protection for her.”

What he wanted, Duncan suspected, was for his big sister to help him out of the mess he’d created when he’d ignored her advice and taken the Lightman case.

“I thought you might have some ideas,” she said. “Piper MacPherson is your stepsister, right?”

“Yes,” Duncan said. “My mother married her father seven years ago, but we’ve never shared a home.” And his feelings for her were definitely not brotherly. “You’re having Lightman watched. Does he have an alibi?”

She nodded. “They didn’t see him leave his apartment.”

“I’m betting there’s someone else who has a beef with Piper.” He told her about the Macy’s bag and the rest of what he was thinking. “It could be Sid Macks, Suzanne’s brother.” The young man had appeared on all the talk shows he could get himself booked on to protest the release of Lightman and the miscarriage of justice.

“Yeah. He confronted Abe a couple of times outside his office, but he never made any personal threats. He didn’t seem the violent type.”

“Maybe he or someone else is doing this to get Lightman’s attention focused on Piper, hoping he’ll do the dirty work.”

“Shit. You’re making me remember why I hired you. You can really get into the twisted way someone like Lightman would think.” She glanced up at the apartment building. “Maybe it’s a onetime thing. And maybe you’re being paranoid about Lightman. He should be grateful that she helped get him off of death row.”

“Hard to bank on that with a crazy psychopath.”

“Hannibal Lecter had a soft spot in his heart for Clarice.”

“Lecter was a fictional character. Lightman’s not. But I may have a plan to keep her out of harm’s way for a while.” Duncan supposed it had been forming in his mind from the moment she’d walked into her apartment that morning.

“Then it was worth tracking you down in an alley,” Adrienne said.

“The problem will be selling it to her.”

Adrienne smiled at him. “I can’t imagine the day when you won’t be able to sell something to a woman.”

AT A FEW MINUTES PAST SIX THAT evening, Piper started down the back stairwell in the building where Abe Monticello rented office space. She was wearing dark glasses, and she’d tucked her hair into an old golf cap her boss had dug out of one of his desk drawers.

A disguise.

Abe and Richard were, at this very moment, exiting through the front of the building, thus distracting the few die-hard reporters who had hung out all day hoping to interview her about the Rose Petal Killer’s visit to her apartment.

No use telling the media that it hadn’t been the real RPK who’d broken into her home and strewn those flower petals around. Some official spokesperson from the D.C. police department had already tried to clarify what had happened. And although the clips had aired all day on the twenty-four-hour cable news stations, first impressions were lasting. And whoever had taken that original video clip and released it to the press had created a dilly of a first impression.

Within hours some enterprising reporter had located her graduation photo from Georgetown Law and she’d become the celebrity of the moment, the latest face that could be blamed for letting Patrick Lightman out of jail.

Duncan had said that she had a target on her back. And by the end of the day, she’d felt it grow brighter and heavier by the moment. It hadn’t helped one bit that every time she thought about the target, she thought about him and what she’d imagined doing to him and with him on that sheet in her apartment.

Seeing him again had blown open a floodgate of feelings that she’d successfully buried for years. The intense attraction she’d felt for him at their parents’ wedding should have been history.

Piper started down the last flight of stairs. All day she’d tried to convince herself that what she’d felt when she’d seen him that morning had been a fluke. A onetime phenomenon that had been caused by the adrenaline rush of coming home to that terrible scene in her apartment.

But try as she might, she couldn’t seem to get Duncan Sutherland completely out of her mind. Even as a child, she’d liked him the best of the triplets. He’d helped her out of an embarrassing situation once. She could still remember it as if it were yesterday. They’d been playing pirates, and Nell had drawn the short straw, which meant that she had to play the captured princess and sit in those dumb caves in the cliff face for hours on end until someone rescued her. Boring. But even though Reid had offered his help, Nell had looked frightened at the prospect of climbing up the cliff face to get to the cave. So Piper had volunteered to take her place.