“My firm provides business-related background-check services. Not the personal kind.”
“No offense, but from what I can tell, your company could use whatever work it can get. Why don’t you want this kind of business?”
“We all know what happens to messengers. Sooner or later they bring news that the client doesn’t want to hear. The outcome is never good for the messenger.”
He closed the car door, turned, and walked toward a silver-gray SUV parked a couple of slots away. He did not look back.
She fired up the ignition and drove out of the parking lot, heading for the corporate headquarters of Sanctuary Creek Inns. She had things to attend to at the office before she went home to pack for the trip to Cooper Island.
She glanced once in the rearview mirror. There was no sign of the silver-gray SUV.
So much for thinking of Jack Rayner as her personal hired gun.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jack splashed some whiskey into a glass and went to stand at the window of his condo. From where he stood he had a sweeping view of the valley and the town of Sanctuary Creek. The lights of houses and condominiums and resorts scattered on the hillsides overlooking the community glittered like fool’s gold beneath the desert moon.
On the far side of the valley he could see the glow of the gated community in which Madeline’s condo was located. She would be packing for the trip north tonight. Tomorrow she would be on her way to an island that she and her grandmother had left eighteen years ago. As far as he had been able to determine, neither of them had ever returned, nor had they shown any desire to go back to Cooper Island.
Yet Edith Chase had never sold the Aurora Point Hotel.
Edith had been a savvy businesswoman. Why had she hung on to a property that was evidently rotting into the ground?
He wished he’d had more time to get to know his first major client. He’d certainly been impressed with Edith. He had also been very grateful to her. She had taken a chance on him and he had been determined to prove that his firm, tiny though it was, could handle security for her hotel chain. But now Edith was gone and he was left to deal with Madeline Chase.
He told himself that he had done his job today. He had given his client the data she needed to make an informed decision. He recalled Madeline’s fierce expression when she had emerged from the encounter with Fleming. She had been every inch the warrior queen. Her coffee-brown hair had been knotted in a severe twist at the back of her head. The style emphasized her amber eyes and her striking, sharply etched features. In that moment she had been radiating so much energy he was surprised that there were no lightning bolts in the atmosphere around her.
She had been coldly furious—not with Fleming; with herself. He understood. He’d been there.
He swallowed some of the whiskey. It wasn’t her fault that she had been deceived for a time by the bastard. She was a very smart woman, but guys like Fleming were very, very good with camouflage. It was their greatest talent and they honed it because it was pretty much the only thing that kept them alive. If the true nature of a narcissistic manipulator ever surfaced, the logical response from decent people would be to slay the beast.
There was nothing in Fleming’s background to suggest that he fell into the category of violent sociopath, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t done a lot of damage in his time. He had taken advantage of Madeline’s grief to move in on her while her natural defenses were down. But in the end her personal firewall had held. She had summoned the messenger and asked for a background check. The messenger had delivered the bad news.
The warrior queen had been singed but not badly burned.
She was right about one thing—background checks on her dates were routine for her. He’d found records of investigations going all the way back to her high school prom.
He drank a little more whiskey and turned his attention to the Cooper Island property. It was reasonable that in the wake of Edith Chase’s death, the eccentric caretaker would want to discuss the future of the old hotel and his own job. It was even possible that he might have insisted that the conversation take place in person.
But there seemed to be a lot of fog around the Aurora Point property. Edith Chase had never wanted to answer any questions about it. Now her granddaughter was proving to be just as secretive.
There was very little information about the old hotel online. It had been a struggling property when Edith had purchased it, and it had continued to struggle even as Edith tried to transform it into a Northwest vacation retreat. At some point Madeline’s parents had been killed in a car accident, and Edith had taken her five-year-old granddaughter into her home.
According to the records, the Aurora Point Hotel had eventually begun to turn a profit. But eighteen years ago, for no obvious reason, Edith had closed the hotel and left a caretaker to look after the grounds. Then she and Madeline had moved to Sanctuary Creek and apparently never looked back.
But now, after all these years, Madeline felt compelled to make the long trip to the San Juan Islands to discuss the future of the property—not with a real estate agent or a developer but with the caretaker.
He let the questions simmer while he finished the whiskey. When the glass was empty he went into the kitchen and turned on the oven.
He opened the refrigerator and considered his options. He liked cooking. It relaxed him. But cooking for one was not particularly inspiring. Sharing a meal with another human being on a nightly basis was one of the things he missed most whenever he was between relationships. Okay, he missed the sex, too.
Unfortunately, ever since the disaster in California, he tended to spend a lot of time between relationships—and the few he did manage to fire up never lasted long.
He took out the block of feta cheese, a few green onions, and some green olives and closed the refrigerator door. There was a can of diced tomatoes in the cupboard. He sautéed the onions in a pot and added the tomatoes and some white wine. A little salt and cumin finished it off.
While the tomato mixture was heating, he arranged several chunks of the feta cheese in the bottom of a baking dish and sprinkled the olives across the cheese. He poured the tomato sauce over the cheese and olives and stuck the dish into the oven.
He spent the next twenty minutes at his computer, reviewing reports from his small—two-person—staff. Then he went back into the kitchen and took a couple of eggs out of the refrigerator. He cracked them, one by one, into the bubbling casserole. He covered the dish with aluminum foil and stuck it back in the oven for another eight minutes.
When the eggs were set, he removed the dish from the oven and put it on the counter to cool. He poured himself a glass of red wine and thought about what he had said to Madeline that afternoon.
He had meant it when he told her that he didn’t want the job of messenger again—not when it came to running background checks on her dates. She could get someone else to do that work.
The problem with doing those checks was that it presented him with a serious conflict of interest—because he was seriously interested in Madeline Chase.
He drank some wine and carried the tomato and feta cheese dish to the kitchen table. He turned on the television news for company and thought about Madeline while he ate his solitary dinner.
He needed to give her time to recover not only from her grandmother’s death but also from the Fleming situation. Madeline had a long history of being very cautious about relationships, but she would be even more careful now. It would not be a good strategy to rush her.
He wondered who Madeline would hire to look into his past if he did manage to convince her to take a chance on him. He wasn’t concerned about what an investigator would find. One of the useful things about being in the security business was that you knew how to bury your own secrets.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tom Lomax was dying. Blood and other matter draining from the terrible
head wound soaked the threadbare carpet. His thin, wiry body was crumpled at the foot of the grand staircase that once upon a time had graced the lobby of Aurora Point Hotel.
He looked up at Madeline with faded blue eyes glazed with shock and blood loss.
“Maddie? Is that you?”
“It’s me, Tom. You’ve had a bad fall. Lie still.”
“I failed, Maddie. I’m sorry. Edith trusted me to protect you. I failed.”
“It’s all right, Tom.” Madeline held her wadded-up scarf against the horrible gash on Tom’s head. “I’m calling nine-one-one. Help will be here soon.”
“Too late.” Tom struggled to reach out to her with a clawlike hand that had been weathered and scarred from decades of hard physical labor. “Too late.”
The 911 operator was asking for information.
“. . . the nature of your emergency?”
“I’m at the Aurora Point Hotel,” Madeline said, automatically sliding into her executive take-charge tone. “It’s Tom Lomax, the caretaker. He’s had a bad fall. He needs an ambulance immediately.”
“I’ve got a vehicle on the way,” the operator said. “Is he bleeding?”
“Yes.”
“Try to stop the bleeding by applying pressure.”
Madeline looked at the blood-soaked scarf she was using to try to stanch the flood pouring from the wound.
“What do you think I’m doing?” she said. “Get someone here. Now.”
She tossed the phone down on the floor so that she could apply more pressure to Tom’s injury. But she could feel his life force seeping away. His eyes were almost blank.
“The briefcase,” he whispered.
Another shock wave crashed through her.
“Tom, what about the briefcase?”
“I failed.” Tom closed his eyes. “Sunrise. You always liked my sunrises.”
“Tom, please, tell me about the briefcase.”
But Tom was beyond speech now. He took one more raspy breath and then everything about him stopped. The utter stillness of death settled on him.
Madeline realized that the blood was no longer pouring from the wound. She touched bloody fingertips to Tom’s throat. There was no pulse.
A terrible silence flooded the lost-in-time lobby of the abandoned hotel. She knew that Tom was gone, but she had read that the first responder was supposed to apply chest compressions until the medics arrived. She positioned her hands over his heart.
Somewhere in the echoing gloom a floorboard creaked. She froze, her gaze fixed on the broken length of balcony railing that lay on the threadbare carpet beside the body. For the first time she noticed the blood and bits of hair clinging to it.
There were probably several scenarios that could explain the blood and hair on the broken railing, but the one that made the most sense was that it had been used to murder Tom.
The floorboards moaned again. As with the blood and hair on the strip of balcony railing, there were a lot of possible explanations for the creaking sounds overhead. But one of them was that Tom had, indeed, been murdered and the killer was still on the scene.
She listened intently, hoping to hear sirens, but the wind was picking up now, cloaking sounds in the distance.
The floorboards overhead groaned again. This time she was almost certain she heard a footstep. Her intuition was screaming at her now.
Instinctively she turned off the phone so that it would not give away her location if the operator called back. She scrambled to her feet.
Somewhere on the floor above, rusty door hinges squeaked. One of the doors that allowed access to the upstairs veranda had just opened.
She looked down at Tom one last time and knew in her heart that there was nothing more she could do for him.
“I’m sorry, Tom,” she whispered.
Her car was parked in the wide, circular driveway in front. She slung the strap of her heavy tote over one shoulder and sprinted toward the lobby doors.
The vast, ornate room was drenched in age and gloom. The dusty chandeliers were suspended from the high ceiling like so many dark, frozen waterfalls. The electricity had been cut off eighteen years earlier. When her grandmother had closed the old hotel she had left all the furnishings behind.
Edith had claimed that the heavy, oversized chairs and end tables, the graceful, claw-footed sofas, and the velvet draperies had been custom designed to suit the Victorian-style architecture and would look out of place anywhere else. But Madeline knew that was not the real reason why they hadn’t taken any of the furniture with them. The real reason was that neither of them wanted any reminders of the Aurora Point Hotel.
In its heyday at the dawn of the twentieth century, the hotel had been a glamorous destination, attracting the wealthy travelers and vacationers of the era. Her grandmother had tried to revive the ambience and atmosphere of that earlier time, but in the end it had proven too expensive. In the wake of the violent night eighteen years ago, there had been no way to get rid of the property. Selling the Aurora Point Hotel was never an option after that night. There were too many secrets buried on the grounds.
Madeline was halfway across the cavernous space when she saw the shadows shift beneath the rotting velvet curtains that covered one of the bay windows. It could have been a trick of the light caused by the oncoming storm, but she was not about to take a chance. The shadow had looked too much like a partial silhouette of a figure moving very rapidly toward the front doors. It was possible that she had seen the shadow of the killer. The bastard had used the veranda stairs at the back of the building to get down to the ground and was now moving toward the front lobby entrance to intercept her.
In another moment whoever was out there would come through the lobby doors. She had to assume the worst-case scenario—Tom’s killer was hunting her.
Madeline retrieved her keys from her shoulder bag and dropped the tote on the floor. She could hear the muffled thud of running footsteps on the lower veranda now.
She bolted behind the broad staircase and went down a narrow service hall. She had grown up in the Aurora Point. She knew every inch of the place. In the many decades of its existence it had been remodeled and repaired countless times. The gracious, oversized proportions of the public rooms concealed a warren of smaller spaces that made up the back-of-the-house. There was a large kitchen, a commercial-sized pantry, storage rooms, and the laundry.
There were also the back stairs that the staff had used to service the guest rooms.
She summoned up a mental diagram of the layout of the sprawling hotel grounds. It was clear that there was no way to get to her car without being seen by whoever was on the veranda.
She heard the lobby door open just as she emerged from the small, dark hallway into the pantry. The silence that followed iced her nerves. Most people who happened to walk in on a dead body would have made some noise. At the very least they would be calling 911.
So much for the fleeting hope that the intruder might be an innocent transient or a high school kid who had stumbled onto the murder scene and was as scared as she was.
She heard more footsteps—long, deliberate strides. Someone was searching the first floor, looking for her. It would be only a matter of time before she was discovered. If the person stalking her was armed, she would not stand a chance of making it to her car.
She tried to think through a workable strategy. On the positive side, help was on the way. She needed the equivalent of a safe room until the authorities arrived.
She went to the doorway of the pantry and looked out into the big kitchen. The old appliances loomed like dinosaurs in the shadows. Beyond lay the service stairs that led to the guest rooms on the upper floors.
She rushed across the kitchen, not even trying to conceal her movements. Her shoes rang on the old tile floor. She knew her pursuer must have heard her.
Muffled footste
ps suddenly pounded across the lobby, heading for the kitchen.
Madeline opened the door of the service staircase and raced up to the next floor, praying that none of the steps gave way beneath her weight.
She reached the first landing, turned, and went down the hall. Most of the room doors were closed. She chose one at the far end of the corridor, opened it, and rushed inside.
Whirling, she slammed the door shut and slid the ancient bolt home. A determined man could kick the door down, but it would take some work.
She could hear the intruder coming up the service stairs. But her pursuer would have to check the rooms one by one to find her.
Heart pounding, her breath tight in her chest, she looked down and was vaguely surprised to see that she was still clutching her phone. She stared at it, oddly numb. Very carefully she switched it on and tapped in the emergency number again. She set the phone on the top of a dusty dresser.
“Don’t hang up again,” the operator said earnestly. “The ambulance and police should be there any minute. Are you all right?”
“No,” Madeline said.
She went to the nearest piece of stout furniture, a heavy armchair, and started to drag it across the room.
“Are you in danger?” the operator demanded.
“Yes,” Madeline said. “I’m upstairs in one of the bedrooms. Someone is coming down the hall. He’ll be here any second. I’ve locked the door but I don’t know how long that will stop him.”
“Push something in front of the door.”
“Great idea,” Madeline gasped. She shoved harder on the heavy chair. “Why didn’t I think of it?”
The big chair seemed to weigh a ton, but it was moving now. She managed to maneuver it in front of the door.
She heard the footsteps stop outside her room. She grabbed her phone and headed toward the French doors that opened onto the veranda.
The storm struck just as she stepped outside. Wind-driven rain lashed at her. But she could hear the sirens in the distance.