Hot & Bothered (27 page)

So having a legitimate reason to stay was the good news. The bad news was this case was seriously screwed up. Ford's having had a fortune in bearer bonds was purely overkill. The man'd had enough enemies as it was—throwing in a bundle in bonds that were cashable by anyone who got their hands on them merely made the possibilities too numerous to count.

The only thing he knew for certain about this mess was that he wasn't prepared to leave Tori and his kid alone to deal with it. He might not be worth a damn for their emotional health in the long run, but in the short run he was at least another bulwark to stand between them and whoever had killed Ford.

Victoria hadn't responded to his announcement one way or the other, and he turned to look at her leaning back against the passenger door. She looked shell-shocked and worn to a nub as she stared back at him.

He gripped the steering wheel to keep from reaching for her. “Do I have your permission to search the mansion for the bonds?”

She nodded jerkily.

“Anyone could have taken them,” he admitted. “But there's no sense speculating who until we've done our best to make sure they aren't simply tucked away somewhere in the house. Once we have, I suppose we'll have to take the information to the police.”

“Dear God,” she said, looking even more tired, “you plan to do all that tonight?”

“No,” he said, although in truth that had been his initial impulse. “First thing in the morning.”

As it turned out, he didn't sleep worth a damn. Betting that Victoria hadn't, either, he rousted Jared out of bed at eight the following morning and the two of them were outside her rooms by eight-oh-seven. He knocked on the door to her suite as he finished explaining the situation to the teenager. The door swung open almost instantly, but no one was there. Then he adjusted his sights downward and found Esme beaming up at him.

“Hi! Have you come to play with me, then?”

“No, sweetie,” Victoria's voice said from within the room. A second later she, too, was at the door. “We're going to search for some missing things of your grandfather's. Hello, darling,” she said to Jared, leaning forward to give him a peck on the cheek. “I didn't expect to see you.”

“I thought he should be here,” John said. “Seeing as he's got the most to gain or lose from this latest development if we can give the cops another suspect to investigate.”

“Yes, he does,” she agreed, barely sparing John a glance. “I should have thought of that myself.”

“It sounds like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack to me,” Jared said a bit sullenly. “Still, I suppose I'm game if everyone else is.”

“I'm game!” Esme bounced up and down on her toes. “I want to look, too, Mummy. Can I look for Grandpapa's things, too?”

“Sure. But this is not a game, Es, so I don't want to hear about it if you grow bored.”

“'Kay.”

John dragged his gaze away from Victoria and his daughter. Part of him wanted to claim them, to mark his territory so anyone who might have other ideas—including Tori, herself—could just think again. Another part of
him, however, urged him to get a grip. Allowing himself to feel possessive was just begging for trouble. He knew better than to put himself out there where people were free to examine him and find him wanting.

The way his father always had.

But that kind of thinking was a fast track to nowhere and shoving his personal doubts behind a shield of professionalism, he said briskly, “I did some research on the Net last night. Bearer bonds have no registered owners, so the paying agent—in this case Ansbacher Cayman Limited—won't be able to say who the owner is. They can identify the party who received the last interest payment, but that's not of particular help at this moment, since the bank won't be open again until Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, it occurs to me that three spots in the house are more likely than others to have been used by your father.”

“His offices and the master suite?” Victoria asked.

“Exactly.”

“Then we're already screwed with a full third of our options,” Jared said flatly. “Because DeeDee never moved out of Dad's suite, did she?”

Victoria shook her head, looking as discouraged as her brother.

John, however, merely shrugged. “So we'll ask her permission to search it.”

“And if she says no?” Jared asked doubtfully.

He reined in his impatience at the continuing pessimism. “You and your sister are the legal owners,” he said in a level tone. “As long as you give permission, we don't really need DeeDee's. But before we just write her off, why don't we go see what she has to say in the matter?”

“Don't like DeeDee,” Esme muttered.

A slight smile tugged up one corner of Victoria's mouth and she reached down to lightly grip her daughter's shoulder. She met John's gaze over the little girl's head. “Do you mind if Esme and I start in Father's old office?”

“Not at all.” He turned to Jared. “C'mon, kid. It looks like it's you and me.”

He studied the teen as they strode down the corridor to the master suite. He'd been so busy worrying about controlling his own temper around the boy that it had taken him a while to notice Jared's mood, too, had been steadily deteriorating. “Everything okay with you?” he asked.

“Just friggin' swell.”

O-kay. Precisely the opposite, it appeared. “Your friends giving you a bad time?”

“Some of them,” Jared admitted with a lack of rancor that told John it probably wasn't the problem. “Most of them are cool, though.” His mouth twisted. “Well, maybe not most of them,” he admitted. “Since most seem to have a thing about asking stupid questions like what it's like to be accused of murder. Still, the ones I give a good goddamn about have been pretty cool.”

“Like little Priscilla Jayne.” John smiled at the thought of her. “How are things working out for her back home?”

Jared stiffened. “I wouldn't know. The number she gave me is disconnected.”

Ah-hah. And therein lay the rub, he was guessing. “Mac wasn't real impressed with P.J.'s mom,” he said slowly. “You want me to look into their whereabouts for you?”

For just a second, the teen looked as if he'd like nothing more than to accept the offer. Then a sullen, screw-you expression settled over his features. “No. If she wanted to talk to me, she would've given me a working number in the first place.”

“Could've moved.”

“Yeah. But I haven't, so she also could've called me with the new number. The hell with her.”

He thought the kid was making a mistake but merely nodded. “You're the boss,” he said mildly. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

They arrived at the master suite then and he rapped on the door. Silence greeted his knock and he waited a moment, then knocked harder. When there was still no answer, he gave up all pretense of subtlety and pounded. “DeeDee!”

“Wha?” Her voice sounded sleepy and faraway.

“Open up. We need to talk to you.”

“Come back later,” she said blearily.

“No. Now.”

“Oh, for—” The oath was cut off and dimly, behind the closed door, he distinguished the faint sound of bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor. A second later the door was ripped open and DeeDee stood glaring up at him.

She was the next best thing to naked.

J
OHN GLANCED AT
J
ARED, WHO
was staring without blinking at DeeDee's lush breasts through her diaphanous baby-doll nightie. She obviously subscribed to the Frederick's of Hollywood school of lingerie, which leaned more toward showcasing a woman's assets than hiding them, and the kid's eyeballs were all but bugging out of his head.

His total absorption carved a slight smile into the corners of John's mouth. “You might wanna roll your tongue back into your head before we're called upon to move our feet,” he advised drily. “I'd hate for you to trip and fall on your face. And you,” he added sternly to Ford's widow, “go put on a robe or something. I think you've given Jared here all the education he can stand for one morning.”

“Not true,” Jared disagreed, his gaze eagerly taking in every exposed inch of the blonde's impressive curves. “I can stand a lot more.”

But DeeDee gave John's crotch a quick once-over, shrugged, and turned on her bare heel to pad back to her room.

“Dang,” Jared said wistfully. “She looks as good going as coming.” He watched until his father's fifth wife, in her practically nonexistent top and teensy thong undies, had disappeared through a doorway. Then he turned and jabbed
his elbow into John's side. “Did you see that? She was checking you out to see if she'd given you a boner.” He rocked back on his heels and slid fisted hands into his pants pockets to make his own incipient erection less noticeable. “She didn't even bother to see what she'd done to me.”

“You're seventeen.” John bumped shoulders companionably with Jared, understanding better than most how beneficial good old-fashioned teenage lust could be for what ailed a guy. “Something would have to be seriously skewed if she couldn't give you a hard-on.”

“I suppose. Still, you're a guy and you're not
that
old.”

“Yeah.” He gave the boy a rueful smile. “I hardly creak at all when I move.”

“So how come it didn't work with you?”

“Hell if I know. It's not as if I didn't enjoy the view as much as you. I guess I'm just a few years beyond allowing the sight of a naked woman to drive me into a frenzy of lust.”

“Oh, man, not me,” Jared said and he grinned, looking suddenly more carefree than John had ever seen him. “But feel free to bring on the nudie girls until I get as ho-hum about it as you.”

DeeDee returned a few moments later wrapped in a red satin kimono. John noticed she'd taken the time to brush her hair, as well, and to apply lipstick and mascara. “Now,” she said, looking at them without smiling. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

“Victoria and I learned last night that Ford took his yearly CEO bonus in bearer bonds. They never showed up on the estate's asset list and before we turn the information over to the police, we want to make sure they're not merely filed away somewhere in the house. To that end, we'd like your permission to search your suite.”

She shrugged and stepped back from the doorway where they'd been politely waiting permission to enter. “Knock yourselves out,” she invited. As if realizing how indifferent that sounded, she pasted on a sorrowful expression. “I haven't been able to bring myself to go though the dear man's effects, so everything is just as he left it. You can start in here, if you like, while I go get dressed.”

Jared didn't look nearly as admiring as he watched her leave the room this time. “I don't get her at all,” he said. “She's like Split-Personality Girl. One minute she acts as though my dad was the big love of her life and the next as if she could care less that he's dead.”

“Yeah, she's a tough one to get a fix on, all right. I haven't been able to figure out what her story is, either. Maybe she's one of those people who just plain needs to be in the spotlight.” Dismissing her, he thrust a forefinger at the small desk in the corner of the room. “How 'bout you start with that? I'll take the books off the shelves and go through those.”

“Sure.” But for a moment Jared merely stood in the same spot and stared at him. “What does a bearer bond look like, anyhow?”

“Excellent question.” He pulled a sheet of paper from his hip pocket and snapped it open before passing it to the teen. “Here. This is one of the bond copies your dad's AA gave us last night.”

“Fricking hell.” Jared blew out a breath. “That needle in the haystack I mentioned earlier would probably be easier to locate. This is going to be a major pain in the butt.”

He nevertheless buckled down to looking and John was impressed with both the kid's work ethic and his willingness to continue the thankless job when an hour and a half later they'd finished searching the sitting room and
were ready to move on to the bedroom. DeeDee had long ago left for the country club, leaving them free to divide the new space and Jared started inspecting his section without complaint.

Together they were lifting the king-size mattress to check between it and its matching box springs when the outer door in the other room suddenly banged open.
“John!”

Victoria's voice was laced with such panic that man and boy exchanged one rapid-fire look and dropped the mattress. Before John could even round the end of the bed, the bedroom door slammed open and bounced off the inner wall as Victoria barreled into the room. Halting abruptly, she stared at him, wild-eyed.

“Oh, God, John, oh,
God.
” Her moss-green eyes filled with tears. “Esme's gone!”

 

S
ICK WITH FEAR
, V
ICTORIA
could only stand rooted in the middle of the floor, breathing in ragged, panicked gulps, as she watched Rocket vault the corner of the bed, then eat up the distance between them with long strides.

Pulling up short in front of her, he reached out to grip her shoulders. “What do you mean gone?”

“As in
not where she ought to be!
” Her voice rose perilously close to hysteria. “As in
can't be found!
”

“Okay, shhh. I'm sorry, that was a stupid question. Take a deep breath, darlin'. Now let it out nice and slow—
that's
my girl. Now.” His voice went from warm and crooning to authoritative and cool. “When did you see her last?”

The change made her blink back her tears, swallow her terror and concentrate. “Around nine-twenty,” she said. “As I suspected, she grew bored with the search for Father's bonds, so I took her to Helen.”

“And Helen discovered she wasn't where she was supposed to be when?”

“I don't know, maybe twenty minutes ago.” She shook her head. “At least that's when she came to me. But of course she searched on her own for a while first.”

“Had they done anything out of the ordinary before Esme went missing?”

“No. Helen said they played dolls for a while and that Es talked to Rebecca on the phone. Then she told Helen she was coming back to help me again.”

“And she just let her go?” John demanded incredulously. His mouth twisting, however, he promptly shook his head. “Of course she did—Esme was in the house and going to join her mother.” He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “Tell me every place you've looked for her already.”

“Everywhere we could
think
to look within the house, including the kitchen and Cook's and Mary's rooms. We even searched the basement, despite the fact that Esme hates it and would never voluntarily go down there. I've looked up in my workshop and all the places on the estate where I've allowed her to play since the reporters started hanging around the front gate.”

“How about the front part of the grounds?”

“No. There was no point since I've told her repeatedly not to—” She cut herself off. “Oh, God. How stupid can I be? Of course that's going to make it more attractive to her.” Abandoning the discussion, she wrenched free and sprinted for the door.

He passed her before she'd even reached the top of the stairs. By the time she hit the foyer at the bottom, he was already out the door and headed down the main drive. The distance between them widened even farther as he sud
denly left the road and disappeared into the live oaks and pine trees dotting the grounds.

John slowed down as he hit the trees. He sucked in and expelled slow, careful breaths to regulate his pounding heart. God, he could barely hear above the sound of his own harsh breathing and to his surprise he realized he was almost as panicked as Tori.

Allowing emotions free rein served only to screw up the efficiency of an op—he knew that better than most. So to discover himself doing exactly that was not merely a shock, it was an unacceptable departure from his usual cool-headed effectiveness.

Identifying the problem and doing something about it were two separate issues, however. No way in hell was this a standard op. It concerned his kid, she was just a little peanut of a girl, and she was missing.

All the same he forced himself to stand still, quiet his breathing and open his ears. Behaving like a raw recruit would benefit no one.

The minute he settled down he heard what he should have heard earlier. A man's voice mumbled in the distance, near the wall that provided the estate's privacy. Quietly, John headed in that direction, but it wasn't until he'd gone about a hundred feet that the words turned from an indistinguishable drone into distinct words.

“Hey, there, little girl,” he heard an artificially jovial voice murmur. “Look over here. Your name's Esme, right? You sure are pretty, Esme. Can you smile for the camera? C'mon, girlie, look this way.”

Anger percolating in his veins, John moved silently toward the cajoling voice. The trees had thickened here but he followed the sound to a place where they formed a clearing. And there, in the dappled sunlight on the estate
side of the wall, squatted a middle-aged man wearing a good white shirt and a bad comb-over. He was aiming a high-end digital camera at Esme, who stood stock-still in front of him, clearly too scared to move, while he alternately flattered and tried to wheedle her into looking his way as he snapped off frame after frame.

John's first inclination was to rip the man's head from his body in the most painful manner devisable. He took a step forward to do exactly that before it occurred to him that Esme was already terrified. He drew a calming breath, because the last thing she needed was to witness an act of violence carried out by a man she trusted. He became aware of Victoria and Jared calling her name as they crashed through the grounds behind him, but so far neither his daughter nor the reporter appeared to notice. Hearing the two grow closer, however, solidified his own decision between going in like Rambo to snatch Es from the jaws of danger, or adapting a more covert approach.

There was really no choice. The “jaws” weren't all that dangerous and rushing in might send Esme into a panic. Hunkering down, he duck-walked from tree trunk to tree trunk until he was as close to her as he could get. “Es,” he called out softly.

Her head came up and she swung in his direction, her big, dark eyes searching wildly through the shadows beneath the trees.

Still in a crouch, he eased a leg's-reach away from the trunk so she could see him and held out an inviting arm. “Come to Daddy, darlin'.”

“Wuffs!”
she shrieked and hurtled her sturdy little body across the distance separating them. She threw herself into his arms just as Victoria and Jared burst into the clearing. John surged to his feet with her clinging to
his neck and everyone spotted everyone else at once. Victoria and Jared called out Esme's name, Esme yelled, “Mummy!” and stretched her arms out yearningly toward her mother and the reporter bit off a succinct swear word and began to sidle away.

“Oh, no, you don't,” John said grimly. He thrust Esme into Tori's reaching arms and ordered Jared to get them out of there. The teen's instant compliance freed him to take off after the rapidly departing photographer.

He caught up with him just as the other man was about to clamber over the stone wall. Reaching out, he seized him by the back of his shirt and yanked him down. The reporter's camera swung in a wild arc as he tumbled to the ground and, bending down, John grasped it by its long lens. He ripped it off over the man's head, not particularly worried when the strap momentarily caught around the photographer's neck before it wrenched free.

The man rolled over and began scrambling away on his hands and knees. Slinging the camera around his own neck, John reached back down to grasp the reporter by the back of his shirt and the waistband of his pants. The guy screamed like a girl, but John ignored the shrill racket as he lifted him and turned toward the wall.

The noise attracted the attention of the other reporters and they stampeded down from the gate to see what was happening. The first of them arrived just as John was hoisting the reporter chest-high. He braced himself and flung the man over the wall.

They scattered to get out of the way and as their comrade landed with a thud at their feet he raked them all with a contemptuous gaze. “The next bloodsucker to climb this wall will get a helluva lot worse than your friend there,” he said, yanking the camera off over his
head. Holding it by its woven strap, he swung it with all his strength at the stone wall and was filled with grim satisfaction when it smashed into several pieces.