Keeping Watch: Heart of the Night\Accidental Bodyguard (27 page)

“Elliot?” she whispered.

Against the ivory of the counterpane the dark head moved once, a negation, but that movement seemed to free Thorne from whatever spell had held them motionless. His body began to lift, and she scrambled off the bed to stand beside it on legs that trembled. Thorne touched a button on the speaker phone, and she finally remembered to take a breath. The cops had arrived quickly enough the night he called them to pick her up. The first night she had come here. So long ago.

Then, suddenly, Thorne’s long fingers were turning the phone. “Son of a bitch,” he said, the words again only a breath, the comment made to himself and not to her. At what was in his voice, her stomach roiled, moving upward toward her throat from the cold, hard knot of fear that had begun to grow within it.

He picked up the receiver then and put it to his ear, but given the silence that surrounded them, she already knew. There was no dial tone. There was no longer any connection between the mansion and the outside world.

“The line’s been cut,” he confirmed, and the coldness in her stomach shifted and reformed, enlarged and blossomed, threatening to engulf her.

He pushed her shirt into her hands, which were trembling so much it was hard to put it on. Before she had the crumpled material completely in place over her body, Thorne had grasped her arm, drawing her away from the bed and toward the shadows of the hallway. She resisted, knowing that the danger they faced was below. Surely they were safer here in the upstairs darkness.

“We can’t go down there,” she protested, still whispering.

“There’s someone inside. We have to get out.”

Thorne pulled her out into the hall, not toward the curving central stairs they had climbed together, but deeper into the dark bowels of the vast house. They hurried, moving almost noiselessly over the carpeted hall, passing closed doors. The farther they got from the streetlights, the darker the interior of the mansion became. She ran into him when he began to slow.

“Stairs,” Thorne warned, the command almost silent. He released her arm, placing her hand on the smooth wood of the stair railing. She heard him move in front of her, and she knew she had no choice but to follow him.

The kitchen was lighter, more open, as it had been the night they had sat at the table and talked. Thorne didn’t give her time to enjoy the openness, a welcome contrast to the claustrophobic narrowness of the walls on either side of the steep stairs they had just descended. He pulled her across the room. Awakened from some puppy dream, startled and confused, Charlie barked once, the sound echoing, too revealing. The shock of the unexpected noise paralyzed her, like a thief discovered in the act. By that time Thorne had the door open. He turned back to grab her hand, drawing her out into the now-safer blackness of the urban night.

He led the way unerringly through the small grounds that surrounded the mansion. Behind them, she could hear the echoing frenzy of Charlie’s barking increase. Then the sounds faded as they rounded the front corner of the house. The gate was open again and beyond it stood her car.

“I have a phone,” she gasped, the words ragged from lack of breath. It was only after she had spoken that she realized how ridiculous that comment was. They didn’t need a phone. In her earlier panic that something might have happened to Thorne, she had not only left the folders in the car but also her keys. All they had to do was to reach the Mazda, get in and drive away.

She led the way to the sidewalk, but it was Thorne who moved automatically to the driver’s side. She stood by the passenger door, breath sobbing, from physical effort now and not desire, waiting for him to release the lock that would let her in. Looking down into the car, she realized with shock that the folders she had piled on the passenger seat were no longer there. But when Thorne’s fist pounded once on the roof of the car, his expletive soft but expressive, she became aware that they had a more immediate problem than the disappearance of those files.

“Locked,” he said.

Suddenly the lights came on in the mansion behind her. She glanced back at the house through the bars of the surrounding fence. The chandelier in the foyer, which she had never seen lighted before, was blazing out into the dark stillness.

“Come on. Across the street,” Thorne ordered.

She turned back in time to see him sprint toward the darkened hulk of the mansion that was being renovated. She followed, rounding the front of the Mazda as the porch light came on behind her.

Thorne seemed to melt into the shadows of the ruined house that loomed out of the darkness before her. She had always thought his vision must be more acute than normal because of the way he lived, and now she realized that their very lives might depend on his ability to negotiate in the blackened interior of the silent, ghostly ruin.

He was waiting for her beside the opening where the front door had once been. His damaged hand closed around her wrist, and despite the fact that she had known instinctively that he wouldn’t leave her behind, she jumped with the shock of that unexpected contact.

“Upstairs,” he breathed, his mouth pressed against her ear.

From the street came the sound of footsteps, unmistakable in the surrounding night. Thorne drew her into the foyer. She wondered briefly about the safety of climbing the stairs that loomed before them, about the safety of walking on the upper floors, but she had seen the workmen there. And would she and Thorne be safer to stay below? To wait for whoever was following them, for whoever was working, fairly successfully now, to keep the sound of his pursuit hidden?

Her tennis shoes made no noise on the wooden risers, and surprisingly, for such a big man, Thorne moved almost as silently, guiding her again with unhesitating certitude into the darkness at the top. She could barely see, following him blindly, forced to trust his superior night vision.

She thought once that she heard someone moving behind them, but the fire-damaged beams of the structure might have produced that sensation. Just as they might be revealing their progress, she acknowledged ruefully. Thorne guided her around workmen’s paraphernalia, leading her ever toward the back of the house.

They climbed another set of dark, narrow stairs, up to the third floor now. The hallway they ran down was becoming brighter, and when she looked up, she realized why. The door it led toward had, like most of the outer doors, been removed, and the passage ended in a view of the night sky beyond the sagging banister of what must have been the back stairs of the mansion.

As she watched, a figure moved up those stairs into the dim illumination provided by the backdrop of moon-touched sky—a man, silhouetted suddenly within the framework of the missing door.

A flash of light exploded out of that darkness. She flinched before its brightness even as she realized the powerful beam wasn’t directed at her. Its intensity had pinned the man moving ahead of her down the hall. Thorne’s hand raised in automatic response, trying to protect himself from the glare.

“Kate?”

She identified the speaker immediately, although she could see nothing beyond the glare of the flashlight.
Kahler,
she realized.
My God, it was Kahler.
And the police? Even as she thought it, she realized there had been no sirens, no arriving patrol cars. Only Kahler.

“Are you all right?” Kahler asked, shifting the light slightly to include her figure within its illumination. “He hasn’t hurt you, has he?”

“I’m all right,” she said automatically. Why would he think Thorne would hurt her?

“You don’t have to be afraid, Kate. Everything’s under control,” Kahler went on, his voice reassuring.

“What the hell’s going on?” Barrington’s voice, as coldly furious as the night she had first walked into his house. “What were you doing in my house?”

I picked up a few tricks of the trade,
Kahler had said the day she had found him inside her apartment, and she realized Thorne was right. It had to have been Kahler who had entered while they were upstairs. There was no one else. At Barrington’s question, the flashlight had been refocused, its powerful light again directed at Thorne’s face.

“It’s over,” Kahler said, his voice as cold as Barrington’s. “Finally, you’re going to pay for what you did.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Thorne said. He had lowered his head, his hand still shielding his eyes. “Get that damned light out of my face,” he ordered.

“You couldn’t leave Kate alone. Maybe because of your hatred of the media, but whatever you intended tonight is not going to happen. You’re not going to hurt her.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Kate came here because—” Thorne’s voice stopped suddenly, whatever he intended to say deliberately cut off, and she wondered why. Because he had realized that Kahler was jealous? That telling him why she had come tonight would only make him more angry?

“Because you tricked her into trusting you,” Kahler said. “Because she believed what everyone else believed about you. Because she doesn’t know what you really are.”

“And you do?” Barrington asked. His tone had changed, anger overlain by a rigid control and by an emotion she couldn’t read.

“I know
exactly
what you are. A murderer. A fine, highly respected, sanctimonious murderer.”

“Kahler,” Kate said, a protest. She could sense the unraveling fury in his voice, and thankfully, with her interruption, the beam of light came back to her.

“What are you doing here, Kate?” he asked. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“What message?” she asked.

“About the lab results. The results on the physical evidence from Garrison’s office and from the sheets I took off your bed. The hair and fiber samples.”

He said it as if it should mean something to her, but it didn’t. In all that had happened, she had even forgotten about the sheets he had taken from her apartment that night. The realization that he seemed to be implicating Thorne Barrington in that break-in and in Lew’s murder began to filter into her head.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“They’re consistent. I told you. On the message. I couldn’t figure out why you’d come here tonight…” He paused, and then the voice she had always thought so pleasant continued. “They match the DNA.”

“What DNA? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Barrington’s. From the bombing. They match Barrington’s DNA.”

“That’s a lie,” Thorne said softly, almost as if he were speaking only to her. “There was no DNA profile done. There was no reason for that to be done.”

“Are you saying that Thorne put the confetti in my bed?” she asked. Her lips felt numb, unwilling to form the question.

“
And
killed Garrison,” Kahler agreed. “There’s enough physical evidence to tie him to both. I told you all this. You didn’t get my message?”

“No,” she said. The cold knot was back. Was it possible that what Kahler was saying was true? She had gone straight into the bathroom when she’d gotten home today, too eager to get out of her clothes, too eager to return to Thorne, and then Lew’s package arrived. She had never bothered to check her messages.

“If you really believe what you’re saying,” Barrington said, his voice still controlled, still enforcing a calmness she knew he couldn’t feel, “then I would like to call my attorney.”

“You can call from the precinct,” Kahler said dismissingly. “Kate, come down the hall toward me. Don’t try to touch her, Barrington. I’m not likely to miss at this range.”

“He said there was no DNA profile done,” Kate said. “There was no reason for one.”

“We were suspicious from the start,” Kahler said. “Despite the old man’s explanation about destroying the wrappings from the package, none of the rest of it made any sense. It always seemed strange that the judge would be opening his mail in the basement, but given Barrington’s reputation—”

“That’s a lie, Kate,” Barrington said, speaking over the detective’s explanation, his voice still low, directed only to her. “That’s not how it happened. You know that.”

But she didn’t. She couldn’t remember anything in the files about the location of the explosion, perhaps because of the press blackout Barrington himself had imposed or because the police had tried to protect his privacy.

Again Kahler’s voice came from the darkness behind the light, almost an echo of her thoughts. “We were suspicious, just not enough. We were too willing to believe what he said because of who and what he was supposed to be.”

She wished she could see Kahler’s face. He had told her none of this before, despite the times they’d talked about the case, about Barrington. Something here didn’t ring true.

“Are you telling me that the police have suspected all along that the first bomb
didn’t
originate outside Barrington’s house?”

Kahler
had
suggested that, but only recently.
Maybe he had an accident. Did you ever think about that?
And she hadn’t. She had been so certain that Kahler’s warning had been born of his jealousy. Certain because she had already been caught up in her own fantasy about Barrington? A fantasy that had become so real that it had interfered with her judgment?

Standing in the darkness of the narrow hallway, she was no longer sure of anything. Her instincts about Thorne Barrington had been completely free of threat. She had trusted him, and now…now she didn’t know who to trust.

“You’re alone?” she asked. That wasn’t right. No cop went into an unknown situation without backup. Kahler was too good a cop not to follow the rules.

“My backup hasn’t arrived,” he said.

“Then you
have
called someone? They’re on the way?”

“Of course.”

But with the word “call” she remembered that the phone lines from the house had been cut. The police didn’t cut lines. Kahler shouldn’t have done that, even if he were acting alone, even if he’d been worried about her safety. And why would he take the folders from her car? Unless…

Oh, dear God,
she thought, the realization producing a roller coaster of sensation in her stomach. Because there was, of course, a folder in that stack about Byron Kahler, one of the hunters, his name neatly labeled in Lew’s script. A folder she had never read, had never seen before. But maybe Lew had.
Oh, dear God,
she thought,
Lew had.