Soft Focus

  “Is this conversation going anywhere? If not, I’ve got plans for the evening.”

  “Yeah, I know, you’re going to attend an auction.”

  “As a matter of fact, I thought I’d take in a film instead.”

  Elizabeth stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve decided not to bid on Soft Focus.” Hayden threw himself down into one of the chairs and looked at Jack with hooded eyes. “It’s all yours, brother. Good luck. Not that you should have too much trouble getting it. With Holland and me both out of the running, I doubt you’ll face any competition.”

  Jack closed the door very deliberately. “What made you decide to take yourself out of the bidding?”

  Elizabeth smiled slowly. “You called Larry, didn’t you? Got the other side of the story.”

  Hayden gave a massively indifferent shrug. “Odds are, the specimen won’t work, anyway. Might as well save my money.”

  Jack glanced at Elizabeth and then turned to Hayden. “What is this?”

  “Hayden is telling you, in his own fashion, that he’s changed his mind. He’s not going to go after Soft Focus in order to get a little revenge.”

  Jack looked at Hayden as if he were some odd, new carbon life-form that had just stepped off a spaceship.

  Hayden gave another elaborate shrug. “Like I said, Soft Focus probably isn’t worth what it would cost me to keep it out of your hands. And it’s not like I can use the damn thing myself. Hell, I’m still not real clear on what it’s supposed to be able to do. Page, or whoever called me, never went into technical details.”

  Elizabeth gave him an approving smile. “It’s all right, Hayden. You don’t have to play Mr. Tough Guy. We all know you’re doing this because you’ve come to realize that taking your revenge against Jack won’t change the past. He’s not to blame for what happened between your parents. You know he’s innocent.”

  Hayden grunted. “There’s nothing innocent about Jack. But you’re right. Screwing with his business reputation won’t change anything. I’m going home in the morning. I’ve wasted enough time here in Mirror Springs.”

  Jack eyed him thoughtfully. “I think someone is going to be very disappointed if you don’t show up at the auction tonight.”

  “Tyler Page?” Hayden gave a short, humorless laugh. “My advice is, don’t give him a dime for Soft Focus. Beat it out of the creep. He stole it from you in the first place, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t think Tyler Page is the one who will be waiting for you out on Loop Road,” Jack said. He took his cell phone out of his pocket.

  Elizabeth glanced at him. “What are you doing?”

  “I think it’s time we called in the cops.”

  THE ISOLATED CABIN off Loop Road was a single-room, one-story log structure. It had the neglected look of a house that has been abandoned for years. In the headlights, Jack could see that the railing on the steps that led to the front door had been broken long ago. Weeds grew wildly in a yard.

  A stone fireplace formed one wall, but there was no sign of a fire or any other kind of warmth or light visible through the single front window.

  “This is the old Kramer place,” Chief Gresham said as he got out of his patrol car. “No one’s used it in years.” He flicked on his flashlight and gave Jack and Hayden a sour look. “I don’t see anyone around. Are you sure about this?”

  “No,” Jack admitted. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and looked at the unlit house. “But I couldn’t think of any other explanation that fit the facts.”

  “You should have contacted the authorities right at the start of this thing,” Gresham muttered. He started toward the front steps. “Damn corporate suits. Always think you can handle things better than the cops.”

  Jack looked at Hayden and Elizabeth as they got out of the car beside him. Elizabeth shrugged. Hayden raised his brows but said nothing.

  They trekked behind Gresham to the front door. The police chief was a small, wiry man with an aura of competence and command. He might be a small-town cop, Jack thought, but he knew his business.

  Gresham had not been thrilled when he had been summoned from home to listen to Jack’s version of recent events. But he had not wasted any time taking charge of the situation, either.

  Gresham knocked on the front door of the cottage with the butt of the flashlight.

  There was no response.

  Jack stood with Hayden and Elizabeth. They watched Gresham knock a second time.

  “I still think you figured this wrong,” Hayden said quietly.

  “I hope I did,” Jack said.

  Gresham gave up knocking and went to the grimy window. He aimed the flashlight into the darkened interior.

  “Well, hell,” Gresham said softly. “I did not need this.”

  He went back to the door and turned the knob. The door swung inward. The beam of Gresham’s flashlight sliced into the small, dark room.

  The light glanced across an outflung hand that lay, palm up, on the floor. Then it skimmed over blond hair that had been stained red with blood. The smell of death was heavy in the air. The woman’s forehead had been partially destroyed by the bullet, but there was no doubt about her identity.

  Elizabeth gave a muffled cry, put her hand to her mouth, and turned quickly away from the gory scene. Jack put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Oh, Christ.” Hayden sounded as if he was about to be ill. “It’s Gillian. You were right, Jack.”

  “Not exactly.” Jack tried to breathe through his mouth as he stared at the body on the floor. “She wasn’t supposed to be dead.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  A LONG TIME LATER, HAYDEN SLOUCHED INTO the booth at the back of the Mirror Springs Resort bar and wrapped his hands around a glass of scotch. “Page probably made that call. He intended for me to be found standing over the body when you arrived, Jack. It would have been perfect. Angry husband kills wife because she’s giving him trouble over divorce settlement. He’d have been in the clear.”

  “Well—” Jack began, looking thoughtful.

  “Damn,” Hayden interrupted fervently. “If you hadn’t come to my room tonight and made me listen to your screwy theory, I’d have been trying to talk my way out of a murder rap tonight.”

  Jack shook his head. “You had already changed your mind about attending the auction, remember?”

  Hayden grimaced. “Yeah, but that was a real last-minute thing. Who could have known?”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Either way, I don’t think Tyler Page set it up to make you look guilty. If he really did kill her, as Gresham and everyone else seems to think, he did it in a fit of passion. Probably because he found out that Gillian never intended to run off with him after she conducted her auction.”

  Jack looked at her. “You’re a real die-hard romantic, aren’t you?”

  “I keep telling you that Page is a man of passion, not a cold-blooded strategist,” she said.

  “Whatever he is, he’s probably a long way from Mirror Springs by now. But, unlike Holland, who got away, I have a hunch the authorities will find Page fast. He doesn’t have the skills and the know-how that it takes to hide from the police for long.”

  Hayden turned to Jack. “How did you figure out that Gillian was the one who had orchestrated the theft and set up the auction?”

  “It was Elizabeth who insisted all along that there was a woman in this somewhere,” Jack said.

  “I thought at first that it was Vicky Bellamy.” Elizabeth sipped her mineral water. “But I changed my mind. I had pretty much abandoned the whole femme fatale concept when Jack came up with his own variation on it tonight.”

  Jack looked at Hayden. “Tyler Page is not the organized type. But whoever had planned the theft and made Page disappear here in Mirror Springs was good at organizational details. For a while I thought Dawson Holland might have been more than just another bidder.”

  “You thought he had
used Vicky to seduce Page and convince him to steal the specimen? Set up the auction?” Hayden asked.

  Jack nodded. “Like I told Gresham, Holland had had plenty of contact with Page over the past few months. And according to Larry, he had motive. But it didn’t quite fit. Holland was too savvy and too well connected to want to waste time trying to sell Soft Focus here in the States. I figured if he actually had it in his possession, he’d take off for Europe, where the sky would be the limit at an auction.”

  “And then Vicky more or less confirmed that she thought Holland was here in Mirror Springs for business reasons,” Elizabeth said. “She told me that she thought he was planning to get hold of something of a high-tech nature that he could turn over to a consortium of foreign investors.”

  “Which meant that he was just another bidder,” Jack said. “That didn’t leave a lot of candidates for the job of organizing Tyler Page and setting up an auction. Tonight when you called me to tell me that you had been given directions for the auction and that it was going to take place during the premiere of Fast Company, I started thinking. Finally.”

  “About Gillian?” Hayden asked.

  Jack nodded. “She fit Elizabeth’s theories as well as mine. A femme fatale who, through her father, was connected to the high-tech scene. She was smart enough to have picked up the rumors of Soft Focus and understand the potential. She would have known how to go about getting a spy into Excalibur—”

  “Ryan Kendle?” Hayden asked. “I heard you tell Gresham about him.”

  “Kendle probably identified Page as the one person who could most easily steal the crystal. Gillian researched Page, discovered his weakness for filmmaking, and went after him.”

  “But why did she fixate on stealing Soft Focus?” Hayden asked. “Taking it hurt you, not me.”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” Elizabeth said quietly.

  “Get what?”

  “No one will ever be able to prove it now,” Jack said. “But Elizabeth and I think that the reason you got the call first tonight was because Gillian intended to kill you.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Comprehension lit Hayden’s eyes.

  “Jack would have been called later,” Elizabeth said. “Because she planned for him to be the one the cops found standing over the body with the smoking gun.”

  Hayden stared at her. “I knew she hated me because I wanted out of the marriage and Daddy was not happy about that.”

  “And she hated me because I had also refused to be the son-in-law Daddy wanted,” Jack said.

  Hayden rubbed his temples. “So she planned to kill me and let you take the rap.”

  “Can’t you see the headlines? ‘Long-Standing Feud Between Two Brothers Ends in Murder.’ ” Elizabeth snapped her fingers. “Just like that, she gets revenge on both of you. One is dead and one goes to jail for murder.”

  Hayden gave a visible shudder and took another swallow of scotch. “I realized shortly after I married her that she had some serious problems. It got a little scary, to tell you the truth. But even after I filed for divorce I didn’t realize that she was capable of murder.”

  “A real femme fatale,” Elizabeth said. “The genuine article.”

  Hayden winced. “I hate to admit it, but you did try to warn me about her, Jack.”

  Jack said nothing.

  “Gillian used Tyler Page,” Elizabeth said softly. “Treated him like a pawn, as if he had no strong passions or emotions.”

  “And in the end, he killed her,” Hayden said.

  ELIZABETH GLANCED BACK over her shoulder as she went through the front door of the house. “Did you realize that Gillian was crazy?”

  “No.” Jack walked across the room and switched on the gas fire. “I just knew that there was a screw loose somewhere and that it had to do with Daddy Ringstead.”

  Elizabeth hung her coat in the closet. “How did you end your relationship with her?”

  “I thought I’d handled it fairly well. Made it clear that I could never fill her father’s shoes at Ring, Inc. Pointed out that I was just a small-time consultant who would never amount to much, et cetera, et cetera. I thought she came to the conclusion that she could do much better than me. And as it happened, Hayden started sniffing around at about that time. He reinforced the idea that I had limited ambitions and prospects.”

  “She concluded that he would make a better husband to take home to Daddy, is that it?”

  “That’s it.” Jack sank into a chair in front of the hearth and stretched out his legs. “When I realized that Hayden was actually serious about marrying her I told him he might want to think about it some more. But that only pushed him faster toward the altar.”

  “Human nature. Weird.”

  “Yeah. Just look at you and me. Talk about a weird relationship.”

  Elizabeth sat down across from him. “But never dull.”

  “No.” He smiled faintly. “Never dull.”

  Silence fell. Elizabeth listened to the flames crackling on the hearth for a while. Then she reached up to remove the clip in her hair.

  “We both need sleep,” she said. “We should go to bed.”

  Jack watched her hair tumble around her shoulders. “I know.”

  Elizabeth turned to watch the flames leap. “It’s over, isn’t it?”

  “It’s in the hands of the cops now.” Jack scrubbed his face with one hand. “Gresham was right. Should have called in the authorities back at the beginning.”

  “Think they’ll catch up with Page before the Veltran presentation?”

  “Maybe.” He hesitated. “But even if they do find him, it won’t do Excalibur any good. The crystal will probably get taken into custody as evidence. Could be months before we get it back. By then, the company will be in bankruptcy.”

  She hesitated. Then she decided to take the plunge. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “Your future.”

  He smiled faintly. “I won’t starve, you know.”

  “I know. You can take care of yourself.” She looked at him. “But would you consider a position in management with the Aurora Fund?”

  “You’re offering me a job?”

  “Well, yes. I guess so.”

  “Working for you?” he said very carefully.

  “Why not? You’d fit in very well.”

  “The Aurora Fund is a two-person operation. You and your assistant, Louise. Just how would I fit in?”

  “You have experience in analyzing small start-up and troubled companies,” she said quickly. “You would be terrific at assessing candidates for funding. Or we could even add on a whole new department. In addition to funding new ventures, we could offer start-up and management consulting expertise to our clients.”

  “Me taking orders from you,” he said thoughtfully. “An interesting concept.”

  She began to grow irritated. “What’s the matter? Don’t you think you can deal with taking orders from me?”

  “Hmm.”

  Pride twisted inside her. “If you aren’t interested, just say so.”

  He propped his elbows on the arms of the chair and steepled his fingers. “What I’m interested in is something a little more permanent.”

  She glared at him. “The Aurora Fund is very permanent. It’s much stronger now than it was when I took charge. Regardless of what happens with Soft Focus, it will turn a profit this quarter.”

  “Lucky you,” he said.

  “Jack—”

  He met her eyes. “I wasn’t talking about a permanent job. I was talking about marriage.”

  She stopped breathing for a few seconds. “Marriage?”

  “I’m a lot more interested in marrying you than I am in working for you.”

  She swallowed. Then she swallowed again. “I thought we decided that we needed time,” she finally managed to get out in a strangled voice. “We agreed that we wouldn’t rush things.”

  “That was your idea, not mine. I’ve known what I’ve wanted for si
x months.”

  She gazed into his gleaming eyes. “You have?”

  He shoved himself up out of the chair, walked to the sofa, and scooped her up in his arms. “Yes.”

  “But—”

  “Tell you what,” he said as he started for the stairs with her in his arms. “When you work up enough guts to take a chance on marrying me, I’ll let you know whether or not I’m willing to risk working for you.”

  “That’s a ludicrous bargain, and you know it.” She clutched at his shoulders. “For heaven’s sake, put me down. You’ve been through a ton of stress tonight. You must be exhausted. You’re in no shape to carry me up a flight of steps.”

  “Watch me.”

  “This is no time to show me how macho you are.”

  “It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.” He reached the landing and turned right into his sleeping loft. “We were both headed for bed anyway.”

  “You’re not going to solve anything with sex, you know.”

  “Maybe not, but you have to admit that it does help keep us both entertained while we wait to see what you decide.”

  “I’m trying to have a serious discussion here.”

  “Sex is more fun.”

  He walked to the bed and opened his arms. Elizabeth tumbled down onto the quilt. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, looked up, and saw that he already had his shirt off.

  “Are you serious about marriage?” she whispered.

  “Uh-huh.” He unfastened his belt buckle.

  She watched with growing fascination as he finished undressing. His erection was full and hard and heavy. She felt the familiar excitement uncoil within her when he put one knee on the bed.

  He came down on top of her, caging her within his arms.

  “But I’m also very, very serious about sex,” he said.

  “I can see that,” she whispered. She put her arms around him and pulled him down on top of her, relieved to be able to escape into the passion that flared so easily between them.

  But she knew, even as he eased himself between her thighs and crushed her into the bedding, that it was only a temporary reprieve.