She relaxed. “That is pretty shady, isn’t it?”
“Almost impossible.” Kennedy put down the containers and started opening them. “What did you get?”
“I don’t know what you like, so I got a little of everything. I figured there would be too much, but you could have it for lunch tomorrow.”
“I like it all, and this ocean air gives me an appetite. When I got tired of looking at the computer, I took a run on the beach.”
Immediately her brain stripped him down to his shorts and sent him sprinting across the sand, the waves crashing behind him, seagulls sailing overhead, as the sun set and cast a golden glow over his rippling chest. If her business didn’t pan out, she could have a career creating commercials for orange juice or insurance or dog food. Or female erectile dysfunction … too bad that didn’t exist.
She cleared her throat. “Did you get a lot accomplished?”
“Accomplished? No.” He got out plates and silverware, and loaded them and the food boxes on a tray. In one day, he’d certainly made himself at home.
He said, “I brought up Michael’s photograph and then compared every James/Jim/Jimmy in my corporation. I started about a year ago, the time of the kidnapping, and worked backward. I included men who have moved on.” Kennedy headed for the living room.
She trailed behind. Again.
“Did you know that during the years my company has been in operation, there have been fifty-two men who have some variation of James in their names? And two women.” He put the tray on the coffee table and turned to Summer. “Should I run the women?”
“You mean you think Michael Gracie could be a transsexual?” Remembering him and his almost visible sexual aura, she laughed. “No. He is most definitely a man, born with package in place.”
Kennedy scrutinized her as if seeing something he did not like.
In the brief time she’d known him, he’d done that too often. She met his gaze, and smiled tightly. “He’s unself-consciously male, and attractive.”
“Got it. Not gay, not a transsexual.” Kennedy waved her into the armchair and seated himself on the closest corner of the couch. “When I expand the search to include men I’ve ever worked with in any corporation who have the names of James, it gets exponentially larger and more difficult.”
She browsed through the containers, found the pork fried rice and the black pepper beef, and filled her plate. “Sounds boring.”
“It is like strolling through a garden of businessmen in white shirts and dark suits, and looking to see which one is different. The conclusion—none of them are. It’s made me rethink my business attire.”
She laughed out loud.
He looked surprised, then pleased. Apparently he didn’t make people laugh often. “After I got done with that, I set up a facial recognition program to compare the faces. It’s running now, and should pick up our man.”
“Should?”
“If Jimmy has had enough plastic surgery, it’s possible that the parameters for the facial recognition software need to be tightened.” Kennedy didn’t pay attention to what was in the containers, he just loaded up and used his chopsticks to attack the food. “This is good,” he said in surprise.
“Try the mu shu shrimp,” she advised. “But only if you like garlic.”
He looked right at her. “Do you?”
“Love it.”
“Then I’ll eat it.”
He was telling her … they were on a date. Emotions. Relationships. She wasn’t ready for all that. “So—why don’t you make the parameters tighter anyway?”
“The search takes longer, and to my mind, it seems unlikely that any man—any person—would go to such extremes.”
“Not to fool you, but maybe for other reasons.” She remembered Michael Gracie so clearly, his form, his grace, his mobile features, his eyes glowing with an inner light. When she first caught a glimpse of him, she thought he looked like a god. Then she saw him shoot Dash, and realized he was more like Lucifer, the dark angel. She feared him for his power, his intelligence. She sank back in her chair, and flinched at the bruising in her ribs. “I think he’s as smart as you are.”
“It’s possible. Looking at the complete and brilliant cover-up of his past, I would say even probable.” Kennedy put down his plate. Lifting Summer’s feet from the ottoman, he sat and placed them in his lap. He started a slow massage, thumbs in her arches, then running to her heels and toes, each spot receiving its own massage.
The sensation was so intimate, the silence so intense, she wanted to object. Then, as she relaxed into the massage … she didn’t want to object.
His voice was hushed and gentle. “You’re moving with caution, and your car is crunched. Tell me what happened today.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Kennedy had let Summer think that she could pick her time to tell him about the tree and the car and her injuries and who and why and what were they going to do. He’d eaten with her, talked to her, listened to her, soothed her into a state of relaxation, and then dropped the bomb right in her lap.
She wanted to squirm in her chair. But squirming would hurt too much. “Someone felled a tree … on me.”
Kennedy’s expression did not change. “On purpose?”
“The guy leaped out of his excavator and started running, and to the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t stopped yet.” To say it out loud made it so real. “The only explanation is that Michael Gracie has found me.”
“Have you been to the doctor?”
“She suggested ice and heat, pain relievers, and a massage.” It seemed unwise to mention that Dr. Watchman was a veterinarian. “But aspirin is all I’ll take. He will not come at me when I’m drugged and helpless. And I won’t go in for a massage.” Except for the one you’re doing on my feet … don’t stop.
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to lay facedown on a table, naked and vulnerable.”
“No. I wouldn’t like you to do that, either.” He stood up and went into the kitchen.
She dug the paper with her photo out of her bag.
He came back with a Costco-sized bottle of pain reliever and an ice bag wrapped in a towel. “Where do you need the ice?”
“My ribs.” She took it from him and started to slip it under her shirt.
But he seated himself on the ottoman, unbuttoned her shirt and examined the purpling bruises. He set his jaw, but placed the ice bag gently on the worst of the marks, handed her two aspirin and a bottle of water, and asked, “What do you have there?”
She gave him the paper. “I found this in the cab of the excavator.”
“He tried to clumsily kill you.” Kennedy’s face looked as it did in his off-putting online photos: distant, unemotional, analytical.
At this moment, having that formidable logic working for her was a comfort. But at the same time, it was hard to reconcile the passionate lover with the rational brainiac. “All this time, I have feared a sniper’s bullet.” She took the aspirin. “I’ve thought that every moment on earth could be my last. Why … why this? Why the hit-and-run?”
“The hit-and-run?”
What was she thinking, to mention Mrs. Dvorkin’s accident? “I suspect he hired someone to run over me last week, someone who looked like me. But Michael Gracie is an efficient killer. So what is he thinking?”
“Without knowing who he really is, I can’t successfully speculate on his motivations.” She could see Kennedy’s mind at work, assessing, organizing, deciding. “Give me the rest of the information. How did you end up seeing Gracie murder someone?”
Her head hurt, and she rubbed her temples with her fingers. “In the Sawtooths, winter was setting in, and breaking into houses wasn’t cutting it. But I lucked out. I showed up at a party, and I got a job. I worked for Georg’s, the catering firm in Sun Valley.”
“Doing what?”
“Waitstaff. Kitchen staff. He paid me, too. Cash. But you know what? When you’re living in a tent in the mountains, there?
??s nowhere to spend the money. What he gave me that I needed was the leftovers. If not for Georg, I wouldn’t be alive.” She laughed a little. “He thought I was an abused wife. He was going to drive me down to the women’s shelter, and I was going to go. I thought I could move from that position to somehow contact you and get back to reality. Man, did that plan fall apart.”
“You met Michael Gracie.”
“Right. I worked a party at his house. And I saw Dash. He was palling around with Mr. Gracie, and I thought … I thought Dash was going to kill him.”
“And you cared?”
She had cared. She had thought she saw something great and noble in Michael Gracie. In a few brief moments of conversation, she had been captivated by his charisma. When she thought of him, she was afraid, but also … something stirred in her, some emotion that buzzed with delight at the memory of his face and his voice. She looked down and moved the ice bag to a different bruise. “I didn’t want to see him dead.”
“Why would you care so much about a stranger?”
Nothing on earth could make her tell this cool-eyed man about her hallucination of her father, his prophecy that she would die if she didn’t seize her opportunity and his urging her to do so. She could only imagine what Kennedy would say about that. Anyway, that wasn’t the only reason she had found herself in that wine cellar. “Don’t we all have some kind of obligation to do what we can to save a life, even a stranger’s life?”
“You believed you were saving Michael Gracie.” Kennedy picked up her hand and held it before her eyes, so she was forced to look at her mutilated finger.
“I was an idiot. He shot Dash in the head. I saw it. I was trapped. I had to cut off my finger to escape.” There. She had said it.
He hesitated as if he really would like to spend the evening harping on her imprudence. “Give me the details.”
She told Kennedy everything she could remember from the moment she had followed Dash and Michael Gracie down to the wine cellar to stowing away in the body locker in the airplane. “He knew what he was doing. He has a system set in place to dispose of the bodies. Yet he has a spotless record. He’s after you. He’s after your family.” She grasped Kennedy’s fingertips. “Get him, or we will all die.”
Kennedy turned his downturned hand and held her palm to palm. “Please go to California.”
“It’s too late for that.” She leaned back wearily. “He’s found me, and the only way I’m going to get away is to take him out. You have to figure out who he is, what he does, and how to pin these crimes on him.”
“I have the resources to protect you in California.”
She shook her head. “If I believed that, I would go. But I don’t, and if he’s going to kill me, I want it to be here. Virtue Falls took me in.”
“You’ll endanger your friends.”
“He won’t make another mistake. Any other murder attempts will be more precise.” It was up to her now to inspect every event and every occasion and weigh the percentages that Michael Gracie had engineered a trap … and a killing.
Standing, Kennedy paced across to the desk and his computer.
She watched him, then closed her eyes. Her head hurt. Her body hurt. She was tired: tired of being afraid, tired of hiding, but mostly just tired. She wanted to go to bed and sleep, and wake up to sunshine and singing birds and a world that looked like a Disney movie.
She must have drifted off, because she started when Kennedy sat down on the ottoman again. She opened her eyes and looked at him. He wasn’t as noble as a Disney prince, but right now, he looked pretty good. She smiled.
He didn’t. “I just now looked up your caterer. I thought he might be a source of information.”
“You don’t want to involve him. He could get hurt.”
“He disappeared about two weeks ago.”
She started feeling sick.
“In Ketchum, Idaho, a dog found a human thigh bone and brought it home. Yesterday, they found what was left of the remains, not much, apparently, but his hands were the hands of a chef.”
She remembered. “Georg was missing a fingertip.”
“Law enforcement is testing the DNA, but his assistant in the business has IDed the body as Georg.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
To her horror, Summer burst into tears.
Kennedy leaped into action—picked her up, put her in his lap, and sat down in the chair. He handed her his clean white handkerchief, which he just happened to have in his jeans pocket—who even carried a handkerchief anymore?—hugged her, and rubbed her back.
She tried to speak, to tell him that she never did this. But every time she opened her mouth, she sobbed so loudly she was embarrassed. Finally, she crunched herself into a little ball, grabbed his shirt in her fists, and bawled like a newborn calf. Her grief about Georg, her fear, her sense that she was trapped in a never-ending nightmare … it all came pouring out in unrestrained emotion that, despite her attempts at control, lasted far too long. And worse, oh, God, the very worst thing was—she had to blow her nose. On his handkerchief. Loudly.
He simply hugged her.
When she gradually hiccupped to a stop, she didn’t dare lift her head. Because like Kateri, she was vain enough not to want to display herself when her face was as red and swollen as a birthday balloon.
“I’m sorry.” She spoke into his shirt.
“Don’t cry much?” he deduced.
“No.” She sniffled.
“You needed to.”
Okay, that was unfair. He was caring and civil about her snotting all over his shoulder? If he kept up the cherishing, he’d make her fall in love with him.
Red and swollen or no red and swollen, the thought brought her head up. She stared at him in shock.
He stared back. “What?”
“I should leave.”
“No, you shouldn’t. You should stay here and sleep with me.”
“I can’t have sex.”
He smiled, his mouth half-quirking as if he was amused. About no sex. “Despite the rumors of my prowess, I can abstain. But don’t tell anybody. I’ve worked hard to establish those rumors.”
He had a sense of humor. About no sex. Who was this guy? “Okay,” she said faintly.
He helped her to her feet. “I made the bed in the master bedroom. There’s a gas fireplace in there. I thought we would light it.” He put his arm around her and helped her walk. “I’m from California, you know. We grab any chance to light a fireplace.”
He made the bed. He wanted to light the fireplace. Next he would say he liked to cuddle. “Have you been reading one of those books on the right thing to say to a woman?”
He drew himself up, magnificently insulted. “Me?”
“Right. Sorry.” She smiled as she limped into the bedroom.
* * *
Dr. Watchman was right.
The next morning, Summer woke to the smell of coffee and the knowledge that when she tried to get out of bed, it was going to suck.
It did. Every joint in her body ached. She hobbled into the shower and let hot water pound on her back and shoulders. It helped. Some. Her ribs were marvelous shades of purple. Any eggplant would be proud to be her. Yet … she’d enjoyed a good night’s sleep. She’d had to wake up every time she turned over, but Kennedy was there, helping her, holding her. Even better, he always had an erection, which reassured her that he deeply felt the no-sex deprivation. She needed that reassurance even more than she needed breakfast and aspirin.
She pulled on her workout clothes and padded barefoot out into the living room, to find Kennedy staring evilly at his monitor.
He barely glanced at her. “I’ve run through my whole life, every Jimmy I’ve ever met. No matches. I’m going to have to tighten the parameters.”
“How long will that take?”
“Two days, give or take. Once I’ve set up the program, I’ll know for sure.”
“I’m sorry.” She headed into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee.
“Do you want me to freshen your cup?”
No answer.
She walked out with the coffeepot in her hand. “Kennedy?”
He didn’t notice her. “I’ve got two ways to go at this, and neither is working. I’m looking for a Jimmy I know. And I’m researching Michael Gracie. I’m good at finding the loose thread in a cover story, and then it can be unraveled. But with Gracie, I cannot locate where the truth begins and the lie ends.”
She went back into the kitchen, set the pot on the burner, and returned. “Did you find his family?”
“He claims to have been orphaned as a child and raised in Chicago by wealthy, elderly, now-deceased relatives who shielded him from the public eye. It’s easy to fake a cultured background when there’s no one to contradict you.”
Impulsively, she said, “You never bothered to create a cultured background for yourself.”
Kennedy’s mouth curled unpleasantly. “No. I come from a family of thieves and scam artists.”
She knew that. His unregistered birth, his felon parents, his childhood edged with crime, were no secret. She had discovered the details in a few brief moments on the Internet. But a single glance at his face, frozen with distaste, showed her the truth. He hated his past.
She pulled up a chair facing him, and sat. “So it’s possible for you to erase all trace of your past, but you never did it?”
“It’s not possible to erase all trace. Somewhere someone will know something. Somewhere there’s a photo or a newspaper clipping or a speeding ticket. I will discover the facts about Michael Gracie. As for me—when the truth is unexpectedly revealed, it can cause great trouble. My past is there for all to see. No one tries to blackmail me.” In a rare display of disquiet, he ran his hands up and down the arm of the chair. “Except for my own mother, of course, who does on occasion try.”