And The Bride Vanishes Page 3

  “Let me see if I get this straight.” He shoved a shock of light brown hair back from his forehead. “The official story is that I was stealing from my employer?”

  “Possibly selling information about the company’s clients,” Linda filled in. “And maybe embezzling money, too.”

  “Forget the money. There isn’t anything missing unless they faked it,” he said. “Let’s concentrate on the information I’m supposed to be selling Now, what sort of data would be that valuable?”

  “Wick, you know as well as I do that the Lyme Company finds real estate for foreign investors and wealthy 6migr6s,” she said. “Maybe—I don’t know—someone wants to blackmail the company’s clients, or sue them, or sell them something. You tell me.”

  “I just want to make sure I understand the picture Avery’s been painting for you,” he murmured. “Is he suggesting I married you for some reason related to all this?”

  “No.” Avery had never wavered in supporting his old college roommate. But there were those, including Linda’s parents, who’d pointed out that it was Avery who had brought Wick into the business a year ago. When he defended his pal, her parents insisted, the young man was essentially defending his own judgment. “But other people have pointed out that I did have access to the computer security codes,” she said.

  “And I wanted them badly enough to marry you for them?” he probed. “But I never asked you for those codes, did I?”

  “That’s true.” Still, he’d hung around the office plenty of times, waiting to take her home or out to lunch. He could have observed the keypad over her shoulder. “I don’t know who to believe, Wick. Until you told me, I had no idea someone had run you off the bridge.”

  “But you preferred to believe Avery’s account rather than assume I was innocent.” A tremor of anger underlay his tone.

  “I told you, Avery isn’t accusing you of anything!” she retorted.

  “All right.” He raised the flame in the hurricane lamp as the night deepened around them. “I’ll tell you what I know, which isn’t much.”

  “And yet you say it’s enough to nearly get killed for,” she said.

  He set the lamp down. “Apparently.”

  Linda’s hands clenched. Despite her suspicions, she hoped she could accept what he was going to tell her.

  “As you know, I had been working in Los Angeles for a financial consulting firm that hit some hard times,” he said. “I earned my real-estate license and tried to make it as an agent, but with interest rates rising, things were tough. When Avery offered me a position with the Lyme Company, it seemed like a godsend.”

  “He was glad to get you.” Avery’s praise of Wick had been a balm to Linda’s wounds, reassuring her that she hadn’t been a complete fool. “He said you’re one of the smartest men he’s ever met.”

  He seemed to digest that information and then went on. “I like numbers, and I like helping people find the right properties,” Wick said. “Also, the Lyme Company offered a great package. After I finished my trial period, they gave me profit sharing on top of my commissions. I planned to work for them until I retired. Linda, you of all people should understand, I had no reason to sabotage the company. Ripping off quick money isn’t my style.”

  The way he explained things, it was hard to doubt his sincerity. Yet Linda had known the details of his background before and heard them discussed by others. She had learned that one could with equal reason conclude that Wick changed jobs frequently and had never intended to stick around.

  It was time to ask the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “Who did you meet at the bar? Who’s been helping you?”

  “I’m getting to that.” He didn’t seem angered by her inquiry, just cautious. “Linda, didn’t you ever notice anything strange about the Lyme Company?”

  “Strange? In what way?”

  With the same maddening refusal to provide answers, he responded with another question of his own. “Did you like it there?”

  “It’s better than the first place I worked, the Inland City Bank. That was so large and impersonal.” She’d gone to work at the bank straight from college. “I used to envy Janet the friends she made at the police department.”

  “Why didn’t you apply there?” he asked.

  “I did, but there weren’t any openings that I qualified for,” she said. “It was Janet who suggested I try Avery’s company. She’d worked there one summer during college as a gofer, and she found the people really friendly. So I took her advice, and she was right.”

  “You never noticed how many security precautions they take?” he pressed. “How many files are coded, and how few people have access? That there’s a burglaralarm system elaborate enough for Fort Knox, plus a backup system and a security guard at night?”

  “It’s no different from the bank,” she said.

  “A real-estate company isn’t like a bank,” he said. “A bank is entrusted with money and other valuables. A real-estate company simply negotiates property transactions. There’s nothing valuable on the premises, other than things like computer equipment that any business would have.”

  “And financial information about their clients,” she added.

  “These days, anyone can get access to credit data if they try hard enough.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said. “Not if it relates to people overseas.”

  “Their credit information is just as accessible as ours,” he murmured. “Unless they’re doing something underhanded and deliberately hiding their records.”

  Linda couldn’t picture Avery or his father getting mixed up with criminals. “There’s nothing suspicious about Lyme’s clients. You’ve met some of them yourself—that opera singer from Russia, that family with the tailoring business in Hong Kong, even Janet’s great-uncle Yuri, for heaven’s sake. What makes you think there’s anything wrong at the office, other than the fact that they have an elaborate security setup?”

  “About a month after we got married, there was an attempted break-in,” Wick said. “Nothing was taken, but Granville went ballistic. Linda, he’s hiding something.”

  “That’s not proof. That’s hardly even grounds for suspicion.” Then she said, “I don’t remember hearing about it. Did he call the police?”

  “No,” Wick said. “But whoever tripped the alarm got past the security guard and the first security system undetected. That took a real pro. Why would somebody like that want to break into the Lyme Company, and why wouldn’t Granville report it?”

  The shrill of the cellular phone sent her heart slamming into her throat before she realized what it was. With an apologetic grimace, Wick plucked the device from his pocket and answered it.

  His responses were cryptic. “Yes,” then “Fine,” then “Twenty minutes.” He pressed a button and folded the phone away. “I have to go out.”

  “Where?” she said. “Who was that?”

  “I can’t tell you yet.” He studied her assessingly. “Can I trust you to stay here?”

  Outside the windows, she knew, lay only the wildness of the canyon. “It’s not as if I could call a cab.”

  He pulled a light jacket from a cabinet and shrugged into it. “I’ll have to trust you, and you’ll have to trust me. I’ll be back in an hour or so. Don’t open the door for anyone. There are a lot of strange characters around here.”

  As he strode from the trailer, Linda suppressed an urge to call him back. She felt stranded out here, and Wick, for all his possible duplicity, was at least a familiar face. Besides, even if he was lying, she didn’t believe he would harm her or their child.

  But then, she’d read about hostages who began empathizing with their captors, and stayed in danger when they could have escaped. She would have to be an idiot to sit here relying on his honesty when he hadn’t so much as told her who he was going to meet. And maybe she shouldn’t believe he wouldn’t hurt her. He might be planning ways to get rid of her.

  As she listened to his car mutter away, Linda realized she
had to do everything possible to safeguard her child, no matter what it cost. Right now, that meant getting out of here while she had the chance.

  Chapter Three

  Linda’s nerves tensed as she opened the trailer door. She half expected an alarm to sound, or for Wick to leap from a hiding place.

  She heard only the chirping of crickets and felt only the coolness of the desert air. The night would soon turn chilly, and she supposed she should find a jacket, but she couldn’t bring herself to retreat even for a moment. Besides, since she’d been pregnant, her heightened metabolism generated so much heat that she hardly ever felt cold.

  Descending two steps to the ground, Linda paused to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkness. As they did, she noticed that the stars shimmered much more clearly than in town. She also saw that the canyon was not going to be an easy place to escape.

  In front of her, a cliff rose in a series of steep ascents broken by only a few irregular outcroppings. When she walked around the trailer, she noted that the other canyon rim was less precipitous but strewn with boulders.

  In the dark, wearing high-heeled shoes, she risked serious injury by taking any route other than the unpaved road that meandered along the canyon floor. Beyond the trailer, it appeared to fade to a trace, while ahead it grew wider.

  She would have to go that way and hope she didn’t run into Wick on his return. It would help if she had some idea how far they had come from town, but Linda had been unconscious on the trip.

  It still seemed incredible that he was alive, almost more than she could absorb. The sorrow that had twined through her thoughts, shading a thousand memories with its dark tendrils, loosed its grip reluctantly. Even now, she found herself mourning him, and then remembering with a jolt that he hadn’t died.

  Part of her wanted to embrace him and forgive him and accept his explanations. But what if he was lying?

  She couldn’t take that risk, Linda decided. She would have to persuade Wick later, if he turned out to be innocent, that she had done what she thought best for the baby.

  In one day, she had been snatched from a placid existence into a world of shifting loyalties. Tonight, with the canyon walls looming and her nerves on edge, every possibility seemed fraught with danger.

  With a sigh, she willed herself into motion. The ground felt rough beneath her thin shoes, and she had to slow down despite her impatience. Gradually she settled into a rhythm.

  As she walked, Linda reassessed their conversation. Wick said he found the Lyme Company’s preoccupation with security suspicious, but it had never bothered her. And Granville might not have reported an attempted break-in to the police simply because he didn’t believe they were likely to take much action.

  Besides, why should those occurrences have led Wick to steal computer data? And who was this mysterious person who had been helping him, and whom he was meeting now?

  She wondered if this friend was the same person Wick had stolen the computer data for. And what was the connection to whoever had forced Wick’s car off the bridge?

  What could this person want? For heaven’s sake, the Lyme Company was a real-estate investment firm. It didn’t have access to hidden wealth or government secrets or anything else that would justify such skullduggery.

  Linda’s feet were starting to hurt from the unsuitable shoes, and her abdomen throbbed from the weight of the baby. After a while, she cupped the bulge with her hands to relieve the strain.

  In books and movies, people made heroic treks, fighting through miles of Arctic tundra or jungle growth while barely breaking a sweat. Linda doubted she’d gone a quarter of a mile, and she was already dreaming of a week’s recuperation in a hammock.

  A sudden howl, primitive in its ferocity, made her skin prickle. Although she registered that it was only a coyote, the sound echoed eerily off the canyon walls, reverberating until it was impossible to detect its origin.

  Another cry joined the first, and then a whole pack gave voice. Would coyotes attack a person? It seemed unlikely, given the cautious way they lurked around town, but she didn’t know how the creatures behaved in the wild.

  Trying to dismiss her anxiety, Linda plowed onward, scarcely seeming to move relative to her surroundings. Finally, she came around a boulder and spotted a light flickering ahead.

  Relief flooded her. There were other people in this wilderness, and that meant telephones and vehicles and rescue.

  Still, she approached warily. It was possible that Wick’s secret contact lived close by. What an idiot she would look, crying for help to the very people who had conspired to kidnap her.

  As she drew closer, still hidden by darkness, Linda made out a battered pickup with a cabover shell. Judging by the flatness of the tires, the vehicle was being used as a residence rather than a means of transportation.

  Nearby stood a tent of the army-surplus type. Two parked motorcycles testified to their owners’ means of transportation.

  The light came from a fire snapping inside what at first appeared to be a cylindrical barbecue. As she eyed it, Linda realized it was a trash can.

  Wavering light revealed two men roasting skewered wieners over the blaze. She could make out only their hunched outlines and the fact that a beard covered most of one man’s face. The other had his back to her.

  There was not likely to be a phone in either the tent or the cabover, she realized. Also, neither man’s appearance inspired confidence. For all she knew, they might be crooks, or mentally unbalanced.

  Only in the most extreme danger would she turn to this pair for help. Instead of providing refuge, they posed yet another obstacle to her escape.

  She couldn’t pass them without being seen. Besides, from the soreness spreading through her feet, legs and abdomen, Linda knew she couldn’t walk much farther anyway.

  Retreating behind the boulder, she contemplated for the first time what would happen if and when she turned up at home. There would be no way to pretend she didn’t know the location from which she had escaped.

  She would have to lead the police back here. Even if Wick fled in the meantime, there might be enough evidence for them to pick up his trail.

  Fingerprints, she thought. Wick’s would be in the state computer system, since he had a real-estate license. If the police found any in the trailer and identified him as the abductor, they would know he was alive.

  That could alert his would-be killer and put Wick in mortal danger. Of course, it was possible he’d lied about being run off the bridge. Maybe there was no killer. But if there were…

  That raised another possibility that Linda didn’t want to contemplate, because the ramifications were too terrifying. But as she wavered there, uncertain how to proceed, she forced herself to face it.

  If someone had tried to kill Wick, and came to believe that she might be privy to his secrets, wouldn’t that person want to kill her too?

  Whether he meant to or not, when Wick snatched her from in front of Janet’s house, he had drawn her into his own danger. The risk of leaving might be greater than the risk of staying.

  A ways off, the men began to sing in an off-key whine that set the coyotes howling again. A night breeze carried the tart, alien scents of desert plants and raised gooseflesh along her arms.

  There was something raw out here. The only safety lay in the trailer.

  Much as she resented the way Wick had forced her into this situation, Linda knew she would have to rely on him until she puzzled matters out for herself. Wincing, she trudged back the way she’d come.

  AS HE PARKED the battered car in front of Sarah Withers’s apartment building, Wick wondered at what point he’d stopped feeling like a civilized member of society and begun acting like a savage.

  Kidnapping Linda today had put both her and him in danger. He hadn’t even discussed his plans with Sarah. It had simply been unthinkable to let the wedding take place.

  Would he have behaved differently if he’d known Linda was pregnant? He would never have chosen to put th
e baby in peril, and yet the image of his wife married to Avery filled him with rage.

  Since the night when a car slammed into his with expert precision, launching him into the lake before he could even react, Wick had known the usual rules didn’t apply. From then on he’d been inventing his own as he went. But now there was much more at stake, so much that he wondered if he shouldn’t take his chances by going public.

  He peered in both directions before exiting the car. The two-story apartment complex, which rented units by the week or month, was fronted by cracked and mounded asphalt. The only landscaping consisted of squat palm trees with peeling bark.

  These past months, he’d spent a lot of time here, mostly using Sarah’s computer. The place hadn’t improved any with familiarity.

  By the dim light of a streetlamp, he could see the two men who lived downstairs getting into their truck a few slots away. With a roar, the vehicle shot backward, then screeched out of the lot.

  When nothing else moved, Wick slid from the driver’s seat and mounted the outside staircase that led to the second-floor balcony. He was spared the need to knock when Sarah cracked the door at his approach. She must have been watching.

  Her narrow face was tense as she slipped the bolt into place behind him. Normally she didn’t bother to lock up when Wick was on the premises.

  Tall, with gray-streaked brown hair pulled into a loose ponytail, Sarah usually radiated confidence. Tonight she had a jittery air.

  “Look, I’m sorry about the kidnapping.” He knew she must have seen it on the news by now. “It was a crazy idea.”

  “I can’t believe you did it.” Sarah sounded more weary than angry.

  “I know I wasn’t thinking straight. Then I got worried when Linda didn’t wake up right away, so I swung by here and called you from the car. Your line was busy, and there were too many people around to risk getting out, so I went on to the trailer.”

  “I must have been logged on.” Her computer modem was attached to the unit’s only phone line. “Wick, this has to be one of the most harebrained stunts in the history of the planet.”