And The Bride Vanishes Read online

  “What are they saying on TV?”

  “The police don’t believe there’s any connection to your death, but they’re not ruling anything out.” She shrugged. “What did you expect? Sooner or later, they’ll reach the obvious conclusion, and then your photo will be on wanted posters all over town.”

  He wished he could have viewed the broadcast. “What did Janet say? Did anyone else see me?”

  “Some neighbor lady weeding her garden, according to the police. She and Janet both reported a dark male figure, that’s all. Nobody got a good look.” Sarah paced across the shabby room. The only shiny thing in it was the notebook computer by the telephone.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve messed things up.” He kept getting the sense there was some other reason she’d called him tonight, something she hadn’t mentioned yet. “Have you discussed it with your editor?”

  She let out a long breath. “No, but something else happened. When I came in from shopping a little while ago, I noticed something odd about my bedroom window. I wouldn’t normally have spotted it, but my headlights hit it at just the right angle.”

  “What do you mean, odd?”

  “There’s a piece missing. A small circle, big enough to put a hand through and unlock the window. It wasn’t like that this morning, I’m almost sure.” When she stopped pacing, he realized Sarah’s hands were trembling. “Someone must have tried to break in here while I was out. It was barely dark.”

  “It’s not the best neighborhood,” he said.

  “My bedroom window is two stories above the pavement,” she said. “To get in, you’d have to use a ladder or climb along the drainpipe from the balcony. Maybe even lower yourself from the roof. And that circle—it took a lot of skill to cut it. Any burglar that sharp would be too smart to hit a crummy place like this, especially at such an early hour.”

  “So why do you think he tried it?”

  “I think he watched until I went out. I think he was planning to slide the window open, come inside and lie in wait.”

  The implication made Wick’s stomach tighten. He’d realized by the time he climbed out of the lake, bruised and half-drowned, that whoever ran him off might well have been a professional hit man. The swipe had been both calculated and perfectly executed.

  Now someone had scaled a two-story wall and cut a precision hole in Sarah’s window. “It sounds like he should have succeeded. What kept him out?”

  “I bolted down the entire frame and put in my own locks,” she said. “He couldn’t unlatch the window, so he’d have had to cut a hole big enough to climb through. That would have taken too long.”

  In the silence that followed, Wick realized that he’d never seen Sarah so frightened before. He’d seen her eager and exhausted, determined and discouraged. But this was something new.

  Not that he’d known her long; they’d met only five months ago, shortly after he and Linda were married.

  He wished now that he’d shared his suspicions about the Lyme Company with Linda, but he’d had no way of foreseeing the startling course his life would take. All he’d known at the time was that there were details that didn’t add up—excessive security, clients with a fetish for privacy and properties bought with funds transferred from offshore banks and other hard-to-trace sources.

  Much as he liked his old roommate Avery, and grateful as he was for the job, it infuriated Wick to think he was being used in an illicit scheme. But he couldn’t go to the authorities without hard evidence, especially not in a small town like Inland.

  Then in walked Sarah, press card in hand and a sheaf of clippings under her arm from a Los Angeles business magazine. She’d been writing a series of articles about unusual family-owned companies and wanted to interview Granville Lyme.

  The office manager rushed her out the door so fast she nearly got whiplash on the way. But Sarah had managed to leave behind several business cards with her pager number.

  When he contacted her, Wick had thought he could simply fill her in on his suspicions and let her handle the rest. Instead, although she’d been enthusiastic, she’d explained that she needed more information.

  She’d asked him to provide data on all émigré clients in the past two years, which wasn’t a great number. The firm specialized in quality, not quantity.

  It had been painfully easy to get the computer codes. They were changed frequently, but Linda, who was authorized to enter data, wrote them down so she wouldn’t forget. She always hid the slip, but Wick knew where she kept it and copied it one day while she was out of the office.

  He hated using his wife, and he hated hiding his actions from her. At the time, he’d told himself he didn’t want to put her in an awkward position. Later, during his weeks of recovery from the accident, he’d realized that a lifetime of depending only on himself had made him unwilling to trust anyone, even her.

  And now? he wondered. The news of her engagement to Avery Lyme had raised a frightening specter, that perhaps his own wife was involved in the company’s schemes. Or, at least, that she knew about and tolerated them.

  What about his murder? Had she known about and tolerated that? He’d been on his way home from delivering the downloaded client files to Sarah when he was forced off the bridge. Had his wife alerted her employer and set him up?

  He didn’t know who had hired his would-be killer. Until he did, he had to keep an open mind to all possibilities.

  But whatever Linda had done and wherever her loyalties lay, she was carrying his child. He had no doubts about the child’s paternity, since they’d been hopeful of a pregnancy and hadn’t taken precautions. He owed that baby his protection, and by extension, he owed it to his wife, as well.

  The only real solution lay in finding out what was going on and who was behind it. That was why Wick had risked leaving Linda to come here tonight.

  “This is getting too dangerous.” Sarah folded her arms and faced him. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to call it quits.”

  He couldn’t believe it. “But surely you’ve got enough for a story. After what we’ve dug up the past few months…”

  “Tantalizing hints, but nothing firm,” she said. “Nothing worth getting killed for.”

  “What about your editor? What does he say?”

  “There is no editor.”

  Her words hung in the air like a guillotine blade. Any minute, Wick knew he would feel the deadly cut.

  All the time he’d felt sure he was trusting no one, he had relied on Sarah. She’d come to his rescue when he beeped her from a pay phone after his near death. She’d located the trailer, provided a car and arranged for a cellular phone.

  This was a great story, she’d said when she rented the apartment. Her editor wanted her to stay and pursue it.

  There was no editor. “Who the hell are you?”

  Before his eyes, she seemed to grow thinner and older, although she couldn’t be much past forty. “I’m a private detective,” she said. “My name is Sarah Walters, not Withers.”

  “And what exactly are you doing here?”

  She strolled to the window and stood to one side of it, peering out as if watching for the intruder to return. “Believe me, I didn’t set out to deceive you. A client hired me to get some information on a family member who had recently immigrated and was hiding resources. Some kind of dispute over an inheritance.”

  “What’s the client’s name?”

  “It’s confidential. Let’s just say John Doe.”

  “Sarah! After all that’s happened—”

  “If I thought there was any connection, I’d tell you. But I have good reason to believe it’s purely coincidental. I have to protect my clients or I’ll lose my license. Besides, I’m sure we just stumbled onto something by accident.”

  “Why did you ask for two years’ worth of files on émigré clients? Or was that simply to confuse me?” He didn’t try to keep the bitterness from his tone. He’d nearly gotten killed for a liar who was only trying to make a buck.

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p; “John Doe insisted on it, so I wouldn’t know which case was involved. Some people have a passion for privacy.” In the flat light, the color seemed to have washed from her face. “I’ll admit, I used you. I was planning to hand over the files and take off. Then when someone tried to kill you, I couldn’t.”

  “Don’t tell me. A sudden attack of conscience? Or did you figure you could make money on it somehow?”

  There was suffering in her expression, but he reminded himself that she deserved it. She was the one who’d made a mess of his life.

  “Believe me, I’m losing money on this, not making it, but I couldn’t leave after I’d put both our lives in danger,” Sarah said. “Obviously, someone very sophisticated had gotten wind of what you were up to. I knew we couldn’t rely on the rinky-dink Inland police force to crack this one.”

  “That’s what you said before,” he reminded her. “The fact that you’d induced me to steal on your behalf wouldn’t have had anything to do with it, would it? I’ll bet you could lose your license over this one.”

  She shrugged. “All right, it’s true. Not to mention that we could both go to jail.”

  “John Doe must be paying you well.”

  “At this point, he hasn’t paid me at all because I never turned over those files.”

  “Mind if I ask why not?”

  “Too dangerous,” she said. “We had a rendezvous set up later that night, but I didn’t show. If the killer could find you, he could have found me. Besides, there was obviously something in those files that none of us suspected. I haven’t been able to figure out what it is in four months, but it has to be there. I couldn’t expose my client to that kind of risk.”

  “If there’s no editor and you’re not getting paid, why are you bothering to investigate this?”

  “I figured if we got enough proof of a conspiracy to bring in the federal authorities, you’d be safe and I might be able to negotiate immunity. So I collected you, bleeding and waterlogged, and you know the rest.”

  “What about your John Doe?”

  “He was very secretive, and I didn’t have any way to contact him to explain. With a killer after us, I wasn’t exactly going to advertise my location.”

  “Who’s been paying my expenses?”

  “Me.” She grimaced. “From my paltry savings. You don’t need to say it, I know I owed it to you.”

  If he could believe her, she had made a lot of sacrifices to help him. It formed a neat story, complete with a sympathetic heroine—Sarah.

  But he didn’t trust her, not when he’d been fooled so easily the first time. Everything she had told him, in the beginning, had dovetailed with his own thinking so completely that he hadn’t questioned her story. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “Bull,” he said. “I’m not even sure you know how to tell the truth.”

  She nodded stiffly, as if she’d expected that response. “I know I can’t convince you of anything. But I could have kept on lying to you and simply disappeared after you got hurt. I’m telling you this for a reason, Wick.”

  “Because of the break-in attempt tonight?”

  She nodded. “I’ve got to get out of here. You and Linda reed to vanish, too. After the way she got snatched today, the killer has to suspect you’re still alive. Maybe he was watching her, and followed you. Maybe that’s how he found me.”

  Wick’s temples began throbbing as he tried to absorb what this meant. The killer might have been watching Linda in case Wick or Sarah turned up. He might have followed Wick from Janet’s house and observed him sitting in the parking lot, calling on his cellular phone.

  This evening, someone had tried to break into Sarah’s apartment. There might be some other explanation, but the timing seemed too neat to be a coincidence.

  What if the killer had followed Wick all the way to the trailer this afternoon? What if he knew where Linda was?

  The realization that he’d left his wife alone there alarmed Wick with alarm. “You should have told me this on the phone,” he snarled. “You shouldn’t have made me leave her.”

  Sarah’s face reflected dismay. “I wasn’t thinking. I wanted to tell you the truth in person. I’m sorry.”

  He refrained from snapping at her again. The important thing was to reach Linda. “Goodbye, Sarah,” he said, and stalked out the door.

  CLEARING THE CLOSET, she threw her possessions into a suitcase. As a former policewoman, Sarah had considered herself fully capable of running the detective agency she and a colleague had opened, and of handling any situation that might come up.

  But there was something insidious about this entire investigation. It kept leading her into blind alleys, and she had the sense someone was keeping one step ahead of her the entire time.

  In two hours, she could be home in Los Angeles. But during the past four months, Sarah had turned her agency over to her partner and deliberately gone underground. This was no time to surface, not with a possible professional killer on her tail.

  The safest course would be to drive east across the desert. In Las Vegas, she could contact the FBL Or maybe she’d take another identity, permanently. After all, she had no family and no savings. Why not start over?

  She didn’t want to let panic rule her thinking. She would make that decision later, when she no longer felt as if an assassin were breathing down her neck.

  Through a side window, Sarah checked the parking lot. The men who lived downstairs were getting out of their truck, toting a case of beer. There was safety in numbers, she thought as she hurried to close the notebook computer and collect the printed-out data. Time to make her escape while there were people around.

  Still, she paused to peer out the front window, checking the scene across the street. A contract killer might use a high-powered rifle, but she didn’t see where anyone could hide. There was only a scrubby vacant lot and, next to it, an aging gas station staffed by the same taciturn attendant she’d noticed the day she arrived.

  Sarah opened the door, already planning the circuitous route she would take out of town. It should make it easy to notice whether anyone might be following.

  She registered the fact that the lightbulb outside her door had been removed. It must have happened in the last few minutes. She’d seen its glare when Wick left.

  What should have followed was a quick step backward, a slam of the door and a call to the police. What actually happened was that a wire clamped around Sarah’s neck from one side.

  The pain against her windpipe was unbearable. The inability to suck air into her lungs was like a scene from a nightmare.

  Frantically, she tried to dig her fingers under the garrote as she was shoved inside, but it was yanked too tightly. Everything had happened so quickly and silently that the men in the parking lot hadn’t even glanced up.

  She had to breathe. She had to get relief.

  Sarah twisted just enough to catch a glimpse of a face she recognized. She tried to speak, to beg for her life, but she couldn’t. Her throat and chest were bursting.

  She was grateful for death, when it came.

  Chapter Four

  Wick drove too fast, jouncing over the rutted path until the car groaned in protest. He didn’t care. He had to make sure Linda was safe.

  At the same time that he willed the car to go faster, he couldn’t stop replaying Sarah’s confession. How could he have fallen for her deception?

  He’d been excited to hook up with the press, in the naive belief that wrongs could be righted with a stroke of the pen or, these days, the computer. Sarah had played him like a synthesizer.

  Yet she’d seemed as intent as he was on uncovering the murderer, and the truth about the Lyme Company. Still, the most they’d been able to turn up was sketchy evidence that money was being transferred to the firm from suspicious sources. Also, a few of the firm’s clients had apparently changed their identities, which suggested shady backgrounds.

  They had fled their countries for many reasons, some personal, some politica
l, some economic. It was possible that one or more of them might be involved in smuggling, money laundering or embezzlement—reason enough to kill anyone who threatened to expose them.

  There was no way Wick could narrow the scope any further, especially since Sarah was dropping the case. Or was she tricking him even now?

  What if she was lying about the break-in attempt? Persuading him to take Linda and flee might be an easy way to get rid of him with no mess and no arguments.

  Slowing the car, Wick cursed himself for a fool. He should have inspected the window. But that wouldn’t prove anything, because Sarah might have cut it herself.

  Trying to sort out matters felt like boxing with shadows. Wick was a businessman, not a secret agent.

  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like the best course to turn himself in to the police tomorrow. Then Linda could go home, and he could start putting together whatever was left of his life.

  As he passed the makeshift camp, the drifters sat hunched in the darkness, their cigarette tips glowing like fireflies. They scarcely glanced at the car rumbling by.

  Parking near his trailer, he scanned the area for a second vehicle. He didn’t see one, but a motorcycle could easily be hidden in the uneven terrain.

  Taking a flashlight from the glove compartment, Wick checked the ground around the trailer. There were footprints, all right, high-heel marks. They appeared to lead away and then return. They looked about Linda’s size.

  It seemed unlikely that she had chosen to go for a walk, under the circumstances. More likely, she’d considered leaving and then returned when she discovered how difficult escape was.

  He couldn’t blame her. What right did he have to insist that she enter his netherworld, when he couldn’t even convince himself of his own purpose any longer?

  Still alert to any sign of an intruder, Wick unlocked the trailer and slipped inside. The interior lay in deep gloom.

  He noted with relief the sound of Linda’s regular breathing. Still on edge, he went to check on his wife.