Mind Tricks (29 page)

Either way, it didn’t matter. What
mattered was getting out of this alive.

“So you and Ginny started a bit of
business on the side,” Emma prompted him a little desperately. She slid her
eyes toward the phone. Could she grab it and dial 911 before Bill got to her?
Even if all that the operator heard was a struggle, perhaps a police car would
be sent out.

“I cut your phone line,” Bill said
conversationally.

God, she had to watch herself
better. For Bill’s benefit, she shrugged as if she didn’t care, which was
possibly the dumbest reaction ever and one he’d never buy for a second.

And her cell phone…smashed into
bits on Cynthia’s kitchen floor. That couldn’t have been an accident.

She was in serious trouble.

“To continue with my story,” Bill
said, “yes, Ginny and I had begun to do a little business. And she was going to
join me at my company next month. All she had to do was undermine Woodhaven
until then. She herself came up with the idea of spreading rumors about cash
flow problems. She also came up with a smart way to leave Woodhaven without
Jake being suspicious. Can you guess what it was?”

Jake. She wished with every cell in
her body that he was here right now, with his confidence, his humor, his sexy
eyes, his obvious care for her—

“An office romance gone bad,” Emma
said slowly. And that explained the Rohypnol.

Bill touched a finger to the end of
his nose. “Got it in one. She and Jake had had some kind of history, so it
wasn’t too far-fetched that they’d get back together again. Plus, she let slip
that she’d come on to Jake a few weeks after her boyfriend had dumped her last
winter, and Jake had turned her down. She planned to accuse him of sexual
harassment and ruin his name in the boating community. Frankly, I think that
this whole game she was playing with passing me customer info and spreading the
rumors was just a way for her to get even with him.”

It just popped out: “God, what a
bitch.”

“Well, it did get me thinking that
I didn’t want a person who had zero company loyalty and fairly low ethical
standards working for me. I know, it sounds hypocritical, but if I could so
easily buy her, someone else could buy her, too. And after all the trouble I’d
gone to to get them, I wanted my customers to stay right where they were.”

It was like the problem a mistress
had to face when she finally got the old wife out of the picture: How
thoroughly could she trust the fidelity of a husband who’d already cheated on
one wife?

Murdering the husband seemed a
little drastic, though.

“Also,” he added nonchalantly, “she
blackmailed me into giving her a job at Selkie. I wanted her to stay at
Woodhaven and feed me information, but she threatened to tell Jake everything
unless I gave her a spot at my company. I hate being blackmailed.”

Emma shivered. He sounded so
normal, but the words coming out of his mouth were completely insane. “When did
you decide to kill Ginny?”

“Oh, the night that she and Jake
had dinner at the Waterview. She’d called me up, excited because an opportunity
to put her plan into play had simply dropped into her lap. After I hung up the
phone, I realized that an opportunity had been dropped into my lap, too. If I
handled everything right, Ginny would be taken out of the picture, and Jake
would be accused of killing her. Woodhaven would crash quickly instead of
slowly, I’d be able to snap the business up at a huge discount, and no one
would ever know the truth because it would be locked behind Ginny’s lips.” He
pressed a finger to his own lips and smiled. “Just like the truth will be
locked behind yours. And as a bonus, the police will probably assume that Jake
and you, his accomplice in Ginny’s murder, had had a falling out, and he killed
you.”

Enlightenment struck, and her knees
weakened. “Were you the one who told the police that Jake and I knew each other
before Ginny’s death?”

“Sure,” Bill said easily. “His and
your word against mine, and the police think I have little to gain by
misleading them. Sure, everyone knows we’re in competition…but do they think I
would commit murder? Because no one has the same strength of purpose,
imagination, and ability to seize an opportunity that I do, everyone will
ignore the obvious: I benefit from Jake’s jailing and Woodhaven’s slide toward
failure.”

He’d settled quite thoroughly
against the wall. Maybe, just maybe, he’d be too slow to stop her from getting
out the back door.

This would be her one chance. She
had to do it right. Slowing her breathing, she concentrated on imagining the
feel of the metal doorknob twisting beneath her hand and springing the door
open. He’d expect her to go toward Mickey’s house or toward her car at the
front of the house, so she’d go in the other direction, dodging between the
kennels. She knew her way around them, and they would slow him down. Then she’d
make for the woods. If she could get far enough ahead of him, maybe she could
hide there until darkness fell two or three hours from now.

Two or three hours. It would feel
like forever. She gave herself a mental shake. First, she had to get out of the
house and away.

She twisted her head suddenly to
look toward the front of the house. Bill frowned and followed her gaze, his
focus finally leaving her.

Her sneakers’ soles bit into the
floor, and she leaped for the back door, hand outstretched for the knob.

Moving faster than she’d ever
expected, Bill shoved away from the wall and knocked her forearm down with a
bladelike hand. Still in motion, he drove into her. She crashed against the
door, and the air in her lungs crumpled. Bill clamped a large hand around her
neck.

God, he was going to choke her, and
she had no air to begin with. She bucked and tried to go for his eyes, but he
forced his full length against her, trapping one of her arms between them and
grabbing the other wrist. Her vision filled with sparkly spots.

Knee him! Desperately she tried to
jerk her knee up, but he was too close.

Rapid-fire barking detonated in the
kitchen, exploding against the walls and then echoing again weirdly in her head
before fading away into quieter and quieter barks.

She was losing consciousness…

“Fuck!” Bill’s hand on her throat
loosened enough for oxygen to squeak past, and her vision and hearing sharpened
like a film loop coming back into focus. Brutus hung on to Bill’s calf,
growling hoarsely around the mouthful of blue jean-covered flesh. Bill kicked
out, but Brutus was a big dog and hardly moved. “Fuck,” Bill said again. A note
of fear had crept into his voice. He released Emma completely to deal with his
new attacker.

One, two, three breaths, and her
knees began to work again. She had to force aside Brutus’s clamoring, angry
thoughts burning through her head in order to concentrate. She groped for the
doorknob jammed into her spine. Now was her chance, while Brutus had Bill
pinned in place.

Bill stuck his hand in his suit
coat pocket, pulled out a handgun, and shot Brutus.

• •

Jake’s heart froze even as he
continued to run through the woods.

Emma’s house. The shot had come
from Emma’s house. He refused to consider what that might mean. If he thought
about it, his heart would quit beating, his legs would stop moving, and he’d
crumple to the forest floor.

Jesus, Emma. Be all right.

The trees thinned, the tangerine
light from the slowly setting sun became brighter, and he burst out onto Emma’s
lawn.

There: movement at her kitchen
door. He could see her hair and her back through the glass, and as he watched,
she stepped sideways and out of view.

She wasn’t dead. He wasn’t too
late.

Think, damn it.
Think.
Someone must be in there with
her—Emma had said earlier she didn’t have a gun, so the shot hadn’t come from
her. Jake needed to get her out safe, and bursting into the kitchen probably
wasn’t a good way to do it, despite every cell in his body shrieking at him to
just run in there and save her.

Slowing to a jog as he came out
from the long shadows of the trees, he unclipped his cell phone from his belt
and dialed. “911. What’s your emergency?” a reassuringly calm voice asked.

“I just heard gunshots from Emma
Draper’s house, on Wingate Road in Baymill. I think she’s being attacked.”

“Do you know the house number on
Wingate Road?”

Couldn’t they look it up
themselves? “No. But it’s one house south of 472 Wingate”—Mickey’s house.

“But you don’t know the actual
address?”

He wanted to reach through the
telephone connection and wring the operator’s neck for going through all this
bullshit. “Just get the police here
now
.
I—”

A heavy weight smashed into him,
slamming him face-first to the ground so fast he didn’t have time to break his
fall with anything but his chin. The hot taste of blood swamped his mouth. He’d
bitten either his lip or his tongue—not sure which, since his whole damn face
hurt.

“You have the right to remain
silent,” Cooperman’s voice gasped near his ear. “Anything you say—” Cool metal
snapped over Jake’s left wrist.

Desperation ripped through him. He
blindly swung his right fist backward and connected with something hard,
hopefully the detective’s skull. Cooperman let out a grunt and the pressure
eased off Jake for half a second.

Jake rolled, kicking and punching,
until he got clear of the detective and then staggered to his feet, the damn
handcuff still dangling off his wrist. The whole yard spun and dipped
sickeningly around him like he was on an unbalanced schoolyard merry-go-round,
and then straightened out. Jake spit a mouthful of blood onto the grass.

Cooperman squinted up at him. “You
have to be the dumbest asshole I’ve tried to cuff all year. Resisting arrest,
assaulting an officer…and now you just stand there?”

Jake ignored him. Where the hell
were the rest of the police? Two squad cars had pulled up to Mickey’s house,
and the 911 dispatcher should have sent at least one of them over, right? They
should be here by now.

Limping, he began heading for
Emma’s back door.

He was going to have to do this on
his own.

• •

Brutus’s agony tore through Emma’s
skull, and she doubled over, arms wrapped around her middle. Bill said
something, but it was mere noise.

He gripped her bare biceps and
pulled her upright. His human frustration swirled in her head with Brutus’s
animal pain. “I said, let’s go.”

As he tugged her toward the front
door, Emma’s eyes could only track Brutus writhing on the floor, smearing blood
on the tiles beneath him as his unceasing, rhythmic whine filled both her head
and the kitchen. Bill shoved the kitchen table aside and led her into the
dining room.

Bill stopped suddenly. Fear spiked
through his frustration. “Cops!”

Emma blinked and lifted her head to
stare out the window. A squad car rolled toward then, bouncing as it hit divots
in the gravel at a speed higher than most people took the driveway. As the car
stopped, it yelped out a short
whoop-whoop
.

The quick siren blast cleared
Brutus’s thoughts from her head. Either that, or Brutus— She refused to think
any further.

Bill reversed direction, dragging
her back into the kitchen. “Open the door,” he commanded.

She didn’t move. “What, are you
going to pull me into the woods and shoot me? The cops will be sure to get you
then. Just let me go now, and I’ll tell them you shot Brutus in self-defense.”
She looked him in the eye. Poker-face time. “Twenty thousand dollars, and I
forget we had this conversation.”

Bill hesitated, weighing his
options and her offer. For a moment she knew she had him…

Then he snorted. “No way. I’m
surprised I even got you to agree to let Cynthia go. This…I wouldn’t trust you
with this. Open the door.”

Moving slowly, she reached for the
knob as her mind raced. She still had other options. Once outside, if she could
break free—

No. He had the gun. If she ran,
he’d just shoot her down, then maybe shoot her in the head to make sure she was
dead, and vanish into the woods. He could always double back to his car later.

“Your car,” she said suddenly. “The
police must’ve seen your car.”

He chuckled. “Honey, I parked
elsewhere and hoofed it over here.” In his head she saw where he’d parked: an
unused, overgrown road a half mile down the street. “But it sure is nice of you
to be looking out for me.
Open the damn
door.
”

She twisted the knob and pushed the
back door open.

Jake, only twenty feet away, a long
grass skid mark on his white shirt and blood trickling from his mouth, halted
and stared. “Bill?”

“Surprise,” Bill said genially.
Something hot and hard jammed into Emma’s temple, and she flinched. “Easy,
honey,” Bill cooed. “No sudden moves. We’re all going to go back behind the
kennels. Right, Jake?”

Jake nodded. “Sure. Just be careful
with that, huh?” He looked like he’d been run over by a tractor, but only
concern for her radiated from him.

Emma’s heart flailed in her chest
as Bill’s thoughts again began to seep into her. This wasn’t fair. “Bill killed
Ginny,” Emma told Jake.

Bill kicked Emma’s heels to get her
moving again, and she shuffled toward the kennels. Her eyes started to blur and
burn. “He killed Brutus, too.”

And he was going to kill them as
well. Bill was imagining the executions even now, his bloodlust surging through
the mental filter Emma tried to hold fast.

“This actually will work out well
for me,” Bill said. “A murder-suicide, nice and clean. I’d tried to get you out
of the way earlier, Jake, by setting your condo on fire. The stupid police
hadn’t arrested you yet, and I heard through the grapevine that customers were
starting to lose their jitteriness about working with Woodhaven. As it turns
out, it would’ve been a mistake to kill you then, because I still had to deal
with little Miss Mind-Reader here.”