Out Of Nowhere

The grief had ebbed and flowed through him sporadically for ten long years, then it had finally settled into something distant and bearable. Now Fox was determined. It was time to start over. Somewhere in Philadelphia, he thought, there was another gentle, quiet woman meant to be his wife.

“We’ve got to go,” Rafe said. “We’ve caught a stiff up in Chestnut Hill. A nice, fat rich one. There are officers there now, waiting for us. Seems a ruby the size of Mount Rushmore has disappeared as well.”

Translation, Fox thought—his night was over.

He returned to the bar and paid the tab, then he snagged his jacket from the back of his stool. On impulse, he caught the blonde’s hand and kissed it, a gentle touch that was gone before it started. Her eyes widened and she sighed. When he straightened, he saw Rafe roll his eyes.

Five minutes later, they were in Fox’s vintage Mustang, a 1968 Shelby convertible, heading north. Raphael filled him in on what he knew so far.

“We got an anonymous 911 call. A female. The call was traced to the home. She seemed to indicate that Carmen—that’s Stephen Carmen—was killed for a gem he had in his possession, but I haven’t heard the tape yet. Officers arrived and yeah, there was a body in the library but no apparent jewels lying about. The missing stone is a Burmese ruby, uncut, twenty-four carats. It’s called the Blood of the Rose.”

Fox frowned. The name tickled his memory. “I’ve heard of it.”

“If you’ve read the papers lately, you’d have to. Stephen Carmen and his stepsister—name of Tara Cole—have been tying up the probate courts over this baby for something like four years now. The ruby belonged to Cole’s mother, Letitia Cole Carmen, who apparently willed it to her stepson.” He paused for effect. “The court returned a ruling today—Carmen’s will was up to snuff. They gave him the gem.”

“So let’s find the lady and have someone take her down to headquarters.” Fox reached automatically for the radio handset on his dashboard.

“Not likely. I already put the word out for some officers to pay a visit to Ms. Cole. She doesn’t appear to be home.”

They pulled up in front of a house awash with lights. Brilliance glittered from three floors’ worth of windows. The front door was wide open. Fox cut the engine.

“So do you want to take care of the body or do the scene this time?” Rafe asked.

“I’ll handle the scene. You wouldn’t know a gem if you fell over it. You can’t tell rock salt from diamonds.”

Raphael frowned. “I was distracted during that case.”

“Yeah? How’s Kate?” He’d been distracted, Fox remembered, because he’d met his wife on that one.

“Pregnant,” Rafe reminded him.

“Read cranky between the lines.” Fox had four sisters back in Savannah. During his visits home, he’d noticed the trend. “Fear not, pal. It gets worse before it gets better.”

Raphael looked at him sharply. “You’re just busting my chops because I pulled you away from Bambi.”

“Her name was Candy.”

“Whatever. Aren’t you? Busting my chops?”

“Nope.” It was Fox’s turn to grin.

They got out of the car. Fox moved up the sidewalk at a stroll, a few steps behind Rafe’s more rapid pace. An officer stepped into the door as they reached it. Fox read his name tag when he joined them. “Hey, McGee, what’s the story?”

McGee thrust a thumb over his shoulder. “The vic’s in the library. Through those doors there and down a bit to your right.”

Fox stepped into a marble-floored vestibule. There were French doors at the back. Odd architectural touch, he thought. That was a Yankee for you. In his humble opinion, they weren’t long on welcoming hospitality. This effect made it look as though they were trying to keep guests out.

One of the inner doors was ajar as well. Fox turned sideways to pass through it without touching anything and Rafe followed him. They headed down a wide center hall.

Stephen Carmen lay in the middle of his library floor. Fox automatically stooped to take his pulse. In one memorable case, the vic had been only unconscious and he’d learned right then and there to be thorough, not to make any assumptions. When that “murdered” woman had sat up, he’d nearly dropped dead. That had been in his rookie year.

Carmen, however, was definitely deceased. His skin wasn’t quite cold yet but both his lips and his nail beds were going blue. He’d been dead less than three hours.

The dome of Carmen’s forehead shined in the library lights. He had a receding hairline and pudgy features, with the kind of petulant mouth that always made Fox’s skin crawl a little when he saw it on a man. He dropped the man’s wrist. “Sorry, pal. Rough way to end it even if I wouldn’t have wanted to shake your hand while you were alive.” He straightened away from the corpse, leaving it to Rafe.

Everything in the library was good quality, from the rich indigo of the Persian rug to the teak desk. Fox peered behind the drapes, into the fireplace, around and behind a tiny tea table with two ornate chairs bracketing it. He moved the chairs by nudging the legs with his toe.

Nothing underneath.

Fox went to the open safe and sifted through its contents. He found a wad of legal documents but nothing valuable. He scanned the papers. They chronicled the court battle between Carmen and Tara Cole.

He really wanted to meet this lady.

In the meantime, he studied row upon row of books on shelves that lined two walls. None of them looked as though they’d ever been cracked open. What a waste, Fox thought. Some of them were classics. He took a pair of gloves from the first of the crime scene techs to arrive and he removed the tomes one by one.

Finally, he was satisfied. There was no ruby in this room, especially not a twenty-four-carat-size one.

“I’ll just check out the rest of the house,” Fox said, and Rafe nodded.

It took him nearly an hour to go through the remainder of the place. There was a lot of it but nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. By the time Fox got to the kitchen, he knew nothing else was going to be. This whole scene had clearly gone down in the library.

He reached for the pantry door and peeked inside. Nothing but canned goods and darkness. Then he heard Rafe call to him from down the hall. He closed the door again with a quiet snick and went to rejoin his partner in the library. The body-catchers had arrived from the morgue and Rafe had released Carmen to them. The crime scene techs were leaving fingerprint dust in their wake wherever they passed.

“Okay, here’s my play on it,” Rafe said. “Ms. Cole got word from the court today that she’d lost her fight. She came over here in a nice temper, walloped Carmen with the poker, maybe in a rage, or maybe she planned to.”

Fox frowned. “That’s cold.”

“Yeah, well, either way, she did us the courtesy of calling 911. Then she grabbed the ruby and took off. It fits.”

“Don’t it though,” Fox drawled. Too neatly, to his way of thinking. “Nobody’s found her yet?”

“No. She’s either traveling on foot or by public transportation. She could be anywhere. She doesn’t keep a car—she lives in a high rise on Poplar—so we can’t put anything out on the vehicle.”

Fox nodded. If he hadn’t had a love affair with the ’68 Shelby since he was a boy, he wouldn’t have bothered to own a car in the city, either.

“We’ve got officers at her building waiting for her to come home,” Rafe continued. “If she doesn’t turn up by morning, there’s our cause to put out an APB on her.”

At which point, Fox thought, she could be in Duluth. “Let’s nudge it some,” he suggested. “Give her until midnight to appear, then hit the airwaves with her description.”

“That would be my inclination,” Rafe agreed, but they both knew the score. “Plattsmier will balk. You know how he gets when there’s any money or clout involved and something tells me these folks have some income.” Their captain was more politician than cop, more worried about lawsuits than justice. He’d started his career with enough integrity but the title had done him in.

Plattsmier and Rafe did not get along. Luckily, Fox could charm a snake. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with him myself.”

He left the library again. He went down the hall and finally stepped outside into the backyard. He circled the house once, then twice, without finding anything interesting there, either. Rafe caught up with him in a winter-dead garden in the backyard.

“The techs are on their way out,” Rafe said.

“Go ahead and catch a ride with one of them.”

“You’re going to stay for a while?”

Fox nodded. They had worked together for eight years now. It was Fox’s strong opinion that no case ever got solved by jumping to conclusions. He took things slowly. Rafe, on the other hand, tended to crash right in, angry and righteous in his pursuit of justice. They balanced each other well.

Fox watched his partner leave then he cleared snow from a stone bench. Several aspects of this crime bothered him. He sat down to dwell on them.

Chapter 2

Behind the pantry closet, crunched down into a too-small wedge of space, Tara listened to the new quiet. She didn’t remember this cubbyhole being so cramped. Then again, the last time she’d used it, she’d been maybe eleven years old. Now, even moving her hand to wipe at an errant tear required clever effort.

Stephen was dead. No, she couldn’t mourn him, but everything inside her still shook with the horror of it.

Tara listened to the silence as she tried to steady herself, then she wriggled into the pantry again. The cops were finally gone. She was sure of that. She squeezed beneath the shelf once more and pushed the door open gently, just a crack.

The kitchen was dark as pitch. The house stayed quiet. Tara crawled out and stood. She thought she heard her bones crack. She went back to the hall, keeping close to the wall.

There might still be gaping neighbors out front, she thought. And somewhere, presumably, there was that damned dog, unless the cops had taken it away. If they hadn’t, it might still be near the library and she didn’t care to encounter it again. Carefully, quietly, Tara headed for the back door.

She eased it open and turned sideways to pass through the crack. Then she pulled it gently shut again and felt everything wash out of her until her bones felt like they would bend.

The Rose was gone. She hadn’t gone back to the library to look for it, didn’t have to. She’d heard the commotion of all the cops there. Someone would have picked it up from the floor.

Maybe, eventually, she could buy it back from Stephen’s estate. But for now she didn’t even know for sure where it was. Tara leaned her forehead against the door and fought the urge to cry.

Sometimes, Fox thought, taking things slowly really paid dividends. He sat up suddenly and straight to watch her.

The woman was a shadow moving within a shadow. Everything about her was darkness, from the midnight hair that spilled down her back to the leggings and jacket she wore. She used both hands to pull on the knob and shut the door silently. Then she rested her forehead against the wood. The gesture was so edged with defeat that Fox felt an instinctive stir of sympathy.

He frowned as he let his gaze move up over her bulky socks and running shoes. Yards of legs topped them. This, he thought, was a long, tall drink of water. He felt a certain quickening deep inside himself that was pure appreciation and had very little to do with watching this case unfold before his eyes.

His instincts told him that the woman hadn’t seen him yet. After a moment, he knew he was right. She finally left the door and moved quietly to the corner of the property. Fox stood from the bench and followed her. He didn’t make a sound until he was a foot behind her.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

Tara spun, her heart exploding. She was running before she even finished her turn.

Fox reached up instinctively to catch her and she ran straight into his arms. They stumbled backward together and went down in the snow.

Fox moved fast. He could move quickly when he had to. He caught both her wrists with one hand just as she would have sprung to her feet again. He kept with her until he was on top of her, pinning her to the cold, wet ground.

“Now then,” he drawled. “What’s all this about?”

The woman drew in her breath to scream.

Fox clapped a hand over her mouth. “Stop fighting me. I’m a—” He never finished. Her teeth sank down into the soft pad of skin between his thumb and his forefinger. She’d bitten him! And while his mind grappled with that, she managed to twist out from beneath him.

Under other circumstances, Fox would have admired her agility. As it was, she flew toward the rear of the property and he was damned if he was going to be bested by her no matter how striking her perfect face had seemed in that moment he’d gotten a good look at her. Besides, he had a strong hunch that this was the elusive Tara Cole.

He grabbed for her and his hand came back holding air. She was halfway over a stone wall at the back of the property when he lunged again and caught her hips. He tugged backward and they sprawled again into the snow.

“I’m a police officer!” he shouted.

She was breathing hard, but then she went utterly still. “No, you’re not.”

Fox actually felt his blood pressure rise. “Yes. I am.”

“You said excuse me, when you came up behind me. You said excuse me, ma’am. What kind of cop says excuse me? A real cop would have said something like, hold it right there, you’re under arrest!”

“You’re not under arrest.” He fought a little for his own breath after their struggle. “Yet.”

“Show me your badge.”

He started to do it. But if he let her go long enough to reach for it, she’d be over the wall in a heartbeat and they both knew it. “Nice try. Where’s the ruby?”

“What ruby?”

“The one you lifted from Carmen’s safe after you killed him.”

“I don’t have a ruby. Where do you think I’d hide a ruby?”

Fox angled his head to look down at her. Where indeed? Whatever she was wearing under her jacket wasn’t just leggings as he’d first thought. It was one piece. It clung to every inch of her from neck to ankles. The fabric was like a breath against her skin, no more substantial than that. It was outrageously provocative.

Only in Philadelphia, he thought. Then he caught her scent. Something spicy. Something hot, seductive, teasing. For the space of a moment, Fox found himself reasonably glad that the North had won the war.

“You have the right to remain silent,” he said. “Anything—”

“Oh, swallow it. What are you arresting me for?”

“Assault on a police officer! Grand theft! Murder one!”

“We still haven’t even determined that you’re a cop!”

His grip on her tightened in frustration and she gave a small cry of discomfort. In that moment, Fox realized the full effect she was having on him. She might as well have taken his manners in her teeth instead of his skin. She was crazy.

Fox came to his feet. He pulled her with him. “You have the right—”

“I didn’t know you were a cop when I bit you,” she interrupted. “You never identified yourself. As for the other—”

He was going to get this out if it killed him. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything—”

“I want a lawyer.”

Fox stopped cold.

The headache she’d given him was starting to pump heat behind his eyes. He was ready to drag her back to his car and take her in for questioning but he was thinking with his temper, not his good sense. Hadn’t the woman been haggling with Carmen over twenty-four walloping carats’ worth of Burmese ruby? She’d start hollering for an attorney the minute she crossed the threshold of headquarters, and the money he presumed she had would buy a lot of legal punch.

Fox made a decision. He decided to follow his gut.

In a relaxed atmosphere, with her guard down, he just might get something worth knowing out of her before she hid behind counsel. Something deeper than the obvious was going on here. He kept seeing the way she’d leaned her head against the door when she had closed it. She’d seemed beaten. Overwhelmed.

Not murderous.

If it turned out he was wrong, there was nothing saying he couldn’t bring her in later. Fox tugged on her arm. “Let’s go.”

Fear finally ripped past Tara’s bravado and took off with her pulse, unbridled. “You’re arresting me?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Tell you what. We’ll trade answers. Ladies always go first. What were you doing in Stephen Carmen’s home?”

“Who said I was?”

“I saw you leave with my own eyes!”

“Well, I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.”

“You can’t pull the Fifth! This isn’t court!”

“That’s just a technicality.” She waved a hand dismissively and hoped he didn’t notice how badly it shook.

He wasn’t actually committing himself to arresting her on the spot, she realized. Maybe she could get out of this. She knew how to be brazen, how to baffle her opponent with the outrageous. It had almost always worked with Stephen. Remembering his body on the library floor, Tara’s heart spasmed. She put the image from her mind.

“Let’s get back to basics,” she said. “You never showed me your badge. I want to know who I’m dealing with here.”

This time he did it. They stopped beside the house and he reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a little leather case. He flipped it open but he moved his body as he did, edging in on her space, trapping her against the wall.

Tara couldn’t quite get her breath. Her head filled with his scent, something sharp yet smooth. It stroked her nerve endings and made things gather alertly all through her body. She fought the urge to squirm and concentrated on the badge he held in front of her nose.

Robbery-Homicide. That was the first thing she saw. He was one of those people who used initials—that was the second. His name was C. Fox Whittington. Tara took another quick, shallow breath. “What’s the C for?”

“What difference does it make?” He nearly snarled it.

“I’m curious. I like to be on a first name basis with anyone who arrests me.”

“Maybe you ought to put your mind to the trouble you’re in instead.”

Oh, she was in so very much trouble! Tara looked at his eyes in the thin moonlight. They were sharp, watchful eyes, totally at odds with that Southern drawl he had. Her teeth started chattering with a chill she wasn’t aware of feeling.

“M-my lawyer is Calvin Mazzeone. Take me to a telephone and I’ll c-call him.” Mentioning an attorney had stalled him once.

“Shut up and let me think about this.” Suddenly, she was shaking like a leaf, Fox realized. The hint of vulnerability—a shadow of how she had looked coming out of the house—touched him all over again. “We’re going to your house,” he decided. “We’ll talk there.”

“Isn’t that a little unconventional?”

“You want conventional? I’ve got cuffs in my car.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you to the trouble.”

She was right back on her game, he thought, his temper spiking again. Fox finished steering her around the house, maneuvering her toward the Shelby. He unlocked the passenger door and nudged her inside. “Here’s the way I see it. You must have left prints all over that house.”

“Stephen’s my stepbrother. I visit him all the time.”

He closed the door and went around to the other side of the car. “Stephen’s dead.” He slipped behind the wheel.

“He is?”

“Please try to control yourself. I can’t deal with all this grief while I’m driving.”

“Are you always this sarcastic?”

“No. You bring out the worst in me.” Somewhere in Savannah, Fox heard his whole family tree rolling over in their graves at his behavior.

“Then just drop me here at the curb,” she said. “I’ll find my own way home.”

Fox took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at her. “You came out of his house, damn it.” His gaze snapped forward again. “What’s your address, Ms. Cole?”

Of course, he’d guess who she was. Tara felt herself beginning to rattle apart again. “1222 Poplar Drive.”

“For real?”

“Why would I lie?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you just killed your brother?”

“Stepbrother.” She hissed it, the first real emotion he’d heard in her tone so far.

“So why did you kill him?”

“I refuse to answer—”

“Where’s the ruby?”

“I don’t have it.”

“Where’d you put it?”

“The—” Tara snapped her mouth shut again. He was hurling questions at her too quickly. She’d almost answered him and mentioned the dog.

She still didn’t know what that animal had been doing there in the first place and admitting that she knew it was there was as good as admitting that she’d been snooping around Stephen’s library tonight. It was probably not the best place to concede that she’d been until she managed to talk to her lawyer, Tara thought. Besides, he had the Rose, this…this cop with his gentle Southern drawl. His questions to the contrary were purely a smoke screen, intended to throw her off. The cops had to have found it. The ruby had landed right there on the library floor.

Whittington drove into the underground garage of her building. He showed his badge to the security guard and cruised on, looking for a place to park.

“Just pull over and let me out.” Tara crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re not staying.”

“Put coffee on. This could be a long one.”

“I don’t have to let you in.”

“Then I’d have something solid to charge you with. Obstruction of justice should keep you in a cell overnight.”

“That’s ridiculous. Cal could have me out on my own recognizance.”

“Do you want to take the chance?”

She didn’t. Tara got out of the car when he parked it and slammed the door hard.

He followed her into the garage elevator and they rode it silently to the seventh floor. Tara kept her lips pressed together as she strode down the hall with him at her heels. She unlocked the door and tried to shut it again before he got inside. He blocked it with his foot and pushed into the apartment behind her.

Fox looked around. There was magnificent view of the Schuylkill River from a long line of windows at the back of the living room. The boathouses there were trimmed with lights, looking like something out of a fairy tale. He liked that. Then his gaze came back to his immediate surroundings.

There was glass. There was cold white leather. The carpet was black. The prints on the walls were painfully, jarringly modern. The apartment was as sharp as her tongue and her cunning little mind.

He was damned if she was going to slip through his fingers, Fox thought. Even if she hadn’t actually killed anyone—and that was a big if, with nothing but his gut to hitch it on—something was going on here. She’d been inside that house.

He moved to the sofa and sat. “Where were we?”

“You were just leaving.”

“Let’s go over what I do know first.” He began ticking items off on his fingers as she stood in the center of the room, watching him. “Stephen Carmen is dead. And lo and behold, an hour or so after the dust settles, you come tiptoeing out his back door.”

She said nothing.

“It’ll take the lab a few hours to match your prints, but by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have you on that, too.”

“I told you—”

“Ah. I forgot that part. You and the victim are related. You visited his library regularly. Your prints would logically be…well, everywhere.”

“Yes,” she conceded cautiously.

“Do you think a grand jury will believe you when you tell them that you habitually fondled Carmen’s fireplace poker?”

“Fondled?” She nearly choked. And in spite of every sane thing she knew about brazening out the hard spots in life, Tara’s gaze fell to his hands.

Her mind emptied of every plan of attack she might have had. His hands were a dichotomy, she realized. Though they were a gentleman’s hands with buffed, trimmed nails, they had a girth and a width to them that would be strong and persuasive. She could very easily imagine them…well, fondling.