“Maybe that is something,” Liam said. He remembered the shiny smooth line of Kyle Amesbury’s hairless chest. Grabbing his collar, he had touched his nape and back.
Smooth.
He glanced at his watch, then stared at the screen again. The man in the tape maintained the same basic position throughout. No matter how the footage was segregated and enlarged, there was nothing to be seen but the top of a dark-haired head, and a view of the shoulders and back. But Oz was damned right about one thing—the guy hadn’t so much as the stubble of a single hair on his shoulders or back. “Thanks, Oz,” he said.
“I’ll keep playing with it,” Oz assured him. “I’m not sure where I can go with it, but I will keep trying.”
Liam left the studio and drove for Serena’s house, disappointed that he hadn’t found out more, yet hopeful that he might have gained something. The man in the film might have been Jay Braden. Or Kyle Amesbury.
Or Jeff Guelph?
As he headed from the city and back up to the hills, he took a sudden, unplanned turn. Might as well check out one thing right now. He was close enough.
He drove back to Guelph’s house.
Jeff must have heard his car as he pulled into the drive. Before he reached the front door, Jeff had opened it. He stared at Liam quizzically. “Am I about to be arrested—”
“No.”
“Are you coming back in?” Jeff asked.
“No. I want you to take your shirt off for me, please?”
Jeff looked at him with astonishment. He didn’t even ask why. He was wearing a polo shirt, and he pulled it over his head and shoulders.
“Turn around.”
Jeff did so.
The man was a veritable grizzly bear.
“Thanks,” Liam said.
“Don’t mention it,” Jeff murmured. “Are you going to tell me why you just had me do that?”
“Yeah, sometime,” Liam said.
Melinda suddenly called to him from the house. “Jeff? Is anything wrong? Is someone there?”
Liam shook his head. “I’m leaving,” he told Jeff. ‘Tell her that everything is all right. I think that it is. You slept with Jane Dunne, at least once. Where? Not at Kyle Amesbury’s, right?”
“At Amesbury’s?” Jeff said, sounding baffled again. His face reddened. “It was only once,” he said, his voice pained. He took a deep breath. “In her dressing room.”
“Thanks,” Liam said, and headed back to his car.
Serena thought she knew now what it felt like to be a hunted animal.
She leaped back over the privacy fence to the rear with the simple thought that there had definitely been something in front of her. But when her feet hit the ground in the rear, she could see someone on the other side of the pool. Not clearly. The form was close to the foliage, masked by the deep shadows from the illuminated pool.
She headed toward the bushes and the large palm to her right. They would give her a little cover.
The figure by the pool was moving. She needed a running start to scale the wooden fence. Her heart was beating like a wounded hare’s. Her every breath was beginning to sound like the storm of the century. She sprang from the bushes and started running.
“Serena!” she heard her name called as she ran. Was it the voice from the phone? She didn’t know. It was blocked by the wind in her ears, the rustle of foliage. She leaped the fence and started for the road again.
Once again, a shadow loomed before her.
She zigged and zagged, and the shadow before her danced and did the same. She screamed in desperation, trying to make a mad dash for the road.
She flew straight into the shadow …
A deep sense of alarm filled Liam the minute he came around the bend and neared Serena’s house. Light was pouring from the front of the house; the door was gaping open. Cars were drawn up on the yard.
He hit the gas hard, speeding to the embankment in front of her house, then slamming on the brakes. He leaped out of the car just as he heard a scream loud enough to shatter glass.
Serena.
He raced across the yard, bursting through side hedges. There was Serena, and someone else. He moved so fast he practically flew, throwing himself at the form in front of Serena. A huge fellow, a man. He wrestled him to the ground. Serena fell and rolled, shrieking again. “No, no, Liam—!”
The man beneath him was powerful. Liam rolled him over.
Bill Hutchens.
“Jesus Christ, Liam, it’s me!” Bill complained.
Liam rose, staring down at the cop and friend he had just flattened. He stood back, ready to reach for the gun beneath his jacket as he heard a rustling and a thump at the privacy fence. He nearly drew his weapon.
Then Ricardo appeared, coming over the fence and running toward them. Serena was still on the ground, looking dazed. Liam walked to her, grasped her hand, and pulled her to her feet.
“What the hell is going on here?”
“I drove back by to see if you were here yet, and if not, to make sure Serena was okay,” Bill told him disgustedly. “I saw the door wide open, and heard a commotion, and started around the back.”
By then Ricardo, winded and panting, had reached them. He had apparently heard some of what Bill had said.
He put his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. “I got here—saw the door open, saw the light, called Serena’s name, got no answer …” He inhaled deeply. “Heard something in the back, jumped the fence, saw a figure, and came racing after it. The figure disappeared, then came flying over the fence again, and I came at it again, calling out, pretty sure then that it was Serena, and trying to tell her it was me, but … she was already over the fence.”
Serena, next to him, was shaking.
Liam stared at her. “What were you doing out of the house? What happened? What started this?”
“I got a call. A bunch of calls. Then someone reciting the valentine I had been sent … and saying that they were in the house.”
“So you ran out?” He stared at her incredulously.
Hostility touched her eyes. “The caller said that he or she was in the house.”
“Has anyone searched the house?”
“I searched the house the minute I brought her home,” Bill told him indignantly, straightening his shirt and trying to dust the grass from it. “It was clean. I’d bet my life on it.”
Liam realized that they were all staring at Serena. So far Bill and Ricardo had refrained from calling the stupidity of her act to her attention. He was too shaken to be so tolerant.
“You’re an idiot!” he blurted out harshly. “You knew that the house was clean—”
“I was frightened!”
“Great, so run out into the arms of death!” He turned his back on her, afraid that she would see how badly he was shaking. “Has anyone searched the house again yet?”
“Liam, we must have both gotten here right before you drove up,” Bill said. “We haven’t searched anything.” He shook his head. Then he remembered that he was in charge; Liam was hired help. “We’ll take the house. Ricardo, search the yard.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
Liam stared at Serena, who was panting, hair wild, eyes wild—and still narrowed with fury at him. He gritted his teeth. He needed to shut up. He wanted to shake her. She had been tricked, surely, and she had fallen as easily as a ripe apple from a tree.
He walked ahead. Bill Hutchens put an arm around Serena, coming toward the house with her.
“You all right?”
“Yes, thank you, I’m fine.”
His reproach was gentle. “Serena, you know I checked out your house.”
“Bill, I heard the voice, and I panicked.”
“Maybe this is good. Maybe we can trace the call. We’ll hear the voice. We can have it analyzed. Of course, maybe it was just a trickster—”
“A trickster who knew about that valentine’s message, and quoted it word for word?” she said.
“We’ll search the hous
e; then we’ll hear the message.”
Liam reached the house ahead of them. Maybe that was why he’d finally left the police force. Public relations. Once upon a time, he’d been good with victims of crime. Tonight … he was seriously on edge himself, angry, afraid.
He started with Serena’s bedroom, searching everywhere, under the bed, through the closet, the bath, behind the curtain. Her bedroom took up most of the right side of the house; opposite it, across the hall, was a library. No bath, no closet, nowhere for anyone to hide. It was empty.
Back in the living room, it was easy to see as well that no one could hide there. He went to the back family area where the plate-glass windows and sliding doors led to the pool area.
Bill appeared from the other side of the house, where he had searched the two guest rooms. Staring at Liam, he shook his head.
Serena was standing in the entry.
“Let’s hear this message,” Liam said.
She walked to the answering machine and hit the Play button. A mechanical voice came on. “One new message.”
The voice that came on was Melinda Guelph’s. “Serena, Serena, pick up. It’s me, your sister. I know you’re there, screening your calls.” There was a silence. “All right, fine. Don’t speak to me.”
There was a click.
The mechanical voice came on again.
“End of final message.”
She stared at the machine incredulously. “I swear to you that there were messages. The caller phoned a few times, breathed without speaking, and hung up. And the voice came on, repeating the valentine and saying that the killer was in the house!”
Ricardo appeared at the still open front door, winded. He shook his head. “Nothing in the yard.”
“I’m telling you—” Serena began.
“Can these messages be canceled from somewhere else?” Bill asked gently.
“Sure. You can erase the whole thing if you call in from anywhere else with the code.”
“Well, then, we’ll trace the calls to your house,” he told her. “We’ll get in some fingerprint people and make sure that no one did slip in here. And we’ll pull phone records. We’ll get on it right away.”
“Do you need Serena?” Liam asked.
“Sure. She’s going to have to file a complaint, make a statement—”
“All right. Let’s get to it all fast. I’m going to take her out of here tonight.”
Serena stared at him. “You think that I’m going crazy, imagining things that didn’t happen.”
“I never said that,” Liam told her curtly.
“No, you’re saying that no one was ever really inside my house, but I should leave it?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “Bill, can you get started as quickly as possible?”
“Sure.”
It was two hours before the paperwork had been filled out.
He chafed with impatience the entire time, even though he knew the procedure, knew the kind of time that it took.
The fingerprint experts arrived to check the phone, the doors, and other areas of the house. They would be there for some time. Liam doubted that they would find anything because he didn’t think that anyone had been in the house. The call had been made either to scare Serena or to lure her outside.
There was no sign of forced entry, of course. Serena had left the door wide open. There was no sign of anything. Just Serena’s statement about what had occurred.
The tape was pulled from her machine to be analyzed. Perhaps something could still be drawn from it by the experts. Her incoming calls would be traced.
When she had signed the last sheet of paper, Liam told Serena, “Go get your things.”
“There can’t be anyone here now. The place is crawling with cops,” she told him stiffly.
“We’re getting out of here tonight,” he told her.
“That doesn’t make any sense—”
“I don’t want an argument. I want to get you out of here.”
“Liam—”
“You do what I say, or I walk,” he told her.
“What?” she said incredulously. She tried to smooth back a lock of tousled hair, raising her chin.
“I believe that you were hired to follow me.”
“You do what I say, or I walk,” he repeated.
He could hear her teeth grinding. All right, so he probably hadn’t handled the situation really well.
“Walk. You’re good at that, aren’t you?” she snapped.
They were in the hallway, away from the others. “Don’t be a little fool,” he told her. “We’re talking about your life here. I’m doing my damned best to preserve it.”
“Liam—”
“Do you really want to be alone? Or take a chance with some other hired asshole who doesn’t know squat?”
She could be regal when she wanted. She drew herself up to a great height. “I’ll get some things together,” she said smoothly. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll know once we’re there.”
“But I need to go to work tomorrow—”
“You’ll go to work.”
“I don’t understand why you can’t tell me.”
“I don’t want anyone to know. Anyone.”
“I’m going to have to call my sister back. I don’t want her to think that I’m ignoring her—”
“We’ll call your sister. We won’t tell her where you are. Get your stuff.”
Ten minutes later they were in his car, driving.
“We’re going to your place?”
He nodded. “Any objections?”
“No … I guess not.”
She remained silent as they drove. He tried to keep his mouth shut. He couldn’t.
“Serena, dammit, that was an incredibly stupid thing to do.”
“You’ve told me that.”
“There might have been someone out there, waiting.”
“There might have been someone in the house.”
“Bill checked out the house.”
“He might have missed a closet—”
“He wouldn’t have.”
“All right, fine. Will you quit telling me how stupid I was if I admit it?”
“There could have been someone in the yard. The call could have been a ruse, just to get you outside.”
“I know.”
“You went tearing out into the darkness—”
“I know, dammit. I was scared!”
He fell silent. Again, he tried to stay that way.
“If you’re locked in again somewhere, you have to stay locked in, do you hear me?”
“Yes. I can’t possibly miss hearing you!” she retorted angrily. Then she added, “I don’t think a bodyguard is hired to scream at the body he’s supposed to be guarding.
“Like I said, hired help can quit.”
“I don’t want you to quit. I do want you to stop behaving like a dictator. I’ll try never to be so stupid again in the future, but then, I’m an actress, and I know your opinion of that.”
“I don’t have a bad opinion of actors and actresses,” he said. “Just the way they run their lives at times. As if the real world is never as important as what’s written in the press, or shown on tape and celluloid.” He cut himself off; he had yelled a lot and had behaved badly. He was angry. Still tense, still wound up.
And still afraid.
They reached his house. His front yard was totally illuminated. No one could hide near the front door, or on the tiled entry porch.
He exited the car, coming around for her. She was already out of the vehicle. “May I take your bag, Miss McCormack?” he asked politely.
“I have it, thank you. We actresses are capable of carrying our own bags. And guess what? I’ve even made coffee over an open fire. I simply don’t like sleeping with bugs and dirt. Okay?”
She preceded him to the house, then realized that he had the key. He opened the door, ushered her in, and keyed his alarm.
She stood in the living room for a
moment.
He wondered if she was thinking about the last time she’d been here. He was thinking about that day himself.
He’d left …
He’d been far too involved with her. In love. Hell, he’d found himself stopping at jewelry store windows, staring at the diamonds, wondering if he could afford a stone that would be right for her, wondering if she would even consider marriage, and if they could make it, him a cop, her appearing frequently on magazine covers, in the news, here and there, with this guy, that guy, …
Jealous?
Yeah, he supposed.
“Well, where do you want me?” she said at last.
“Take my room. I’ll stay out here.”
She walked away. He heard the door close.
The night was cool, and he decided to build a fire. Just when he really got the blaze going, Serena reappeared. She had showered; her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, her hair was brushed out, long, glistening, the red highlights enhanced by the glow of the fire.
“May I use your phone? I want to call my sister.”
She expected his answer to be yes, and so she started for the phone by the sofa. “Wait,” he told her. “Use my cellular.”
The tight white line of her mouth informed him of what she thought about his doubts regarding her sister and brother-in-law.
She accepted the phone from him, her fingers brushing his. She was wearing that robe with the deep V again. He wondered if she had anything on beneath it.
She started dialing. “Don’t tell anyone where you are. Anyone.”
She didn’t reply. She finished dialing and listened. He could hear her sister’s answering machine picking up.
“Melinda, it’s me. I really wasn’t there. I—I’m not at home. I’ll try to get you again in the morning. I’m going in to work, early.”
She hung up and handed the phone back to him. “Thanks,” she said, and turned around and started back for the bedroom.
“Hey,” he said, calling after her.
“What?” she turned back.
“Can I get you anything? Of course, you know where everything is. If you want anything …”