O'Halloran's Lady Page 13

  Memory flickered, a series of freeze frames that made him go still inside.

  Natalie sitting at her computer most nights when he had gotten in late. The argument when he had discovered that she was chatting with an online friend. A male friend.

  Jenna frowned. “What is it?”

  “I’ve seen that email address before, or something very like it. There’s one change, an extra letter tagged on the end.”

  Maybe it was sheer chance, coincidence, and this was a completely different person, but he didn’t think so. When he’d worked cases at Auckland Central and made a breakthrough he had felt the same sharp kick of instinct, the same inner certainty.

  His decision at the cemetery to refocus his own personal investigation on Natalie’s and Jenna’s lives was confirmed. For six years, he had centered his hunt for the person who had killed his family on a criminal ring he had been investigating at the time. His spectacular lack of success was now explained. He had assumed that his house being torched was a crime of vengeance, directed at him.

  Normally he worked only on facts. But in the aftermath of funerals and the slow, painful recovery from his injuries, he had made the fundamental mistake of making an assumption.

  Now, finally, that assumption, which had stonewalled his investigation, had been cleared away. Marc hadn’t been the target of the perpetrator. The murderer’s focus had been Natalie.

  “You’ve found something.”

  The flat certainty in Jenna’s voice brought Marc’s head up. He controlled his impatient need to start work on a list of men in both Jenna’s and Natalie’s pasts. If Hansen managed to match the fingerprints, that would be a step that was no longer required.

  “That the criminals I thought were responsible for Natalie’s and Jared’s deaths, weren’t.”

  The room seemed to fill with silence, punctuated by the slow tick of an antique clock.

  “I’ll make coffee.”

  Too tense to sit, Marc levered himself up from the couch and restlessly paced the length of the sitting room, his mind switching to the avalanche of new information that had, within the space of a few hours, changed everything.

  He found himself staring at a small trio of family snapshots on an elegant corner table—one of the silver frames held a studio photograph of Natalie with their small son.

  His chest tightened. He hadn’t murdered them, but for years guilt had eaten at him. He had assumed they had died because of his work as a police detective.

  The need to absolve himself, if only partially, had driven him to continue to search for evidence. He had hunted a phantom, one who had constantly slipped from his grasp.

  The perp had been content to taunt Marc from a distance. But, finally, he had made a mistake. Probably because Jenna was a woman and lived alone, he had fallen into the trap of underestimating her.

  The fact that he had turned up in person was a major breakthrough.

  Marc now had motivation, an email, a photograph, video footage and, most importantly, with the cellophane on the rose, and the clipboard and pen he had found at the base of Jenna’s fence, fingerprints.

  Despite all of the fancy evidence-collection techniques that were so popular on TV shows, fingerprints remained the number-one method of obtaining a conviction. There was just no way of getting around the fact that fingerprints placed the perp at the scene of the crime.

  Although none of the evidence was conclusive unless they got a match on the prints, and that might not happen. But at least he finally had enough information to put together a profile and prove that a murder had occurred.

  Marc’s jaw tightened. For the first time, he could see the man he’d been searching for.

  By running a list of the men both Natalie and Jenna knew, by virtue of cross matching, he could isolate a list of suspects.

  Then there was the aspect of Jenna’s book. Something Jenna had included in her latest story had pushed a button, strongly enough that the perp had tried to intimidate her into removing the book from the market.

  A sense of icy satisfaction filled Marc. He would go back through the book with a fine-tooth comb. Somewhere, there was information vital enough that the perp had seen the possibility of exposure and had moved to nullify the risk.

  Jenna strolled back into the room and set a tray down on the coffee table. Marc set the photograph down and walked toward Jenna. As he did so, he became sharply aware that in the space of the few minutes it had taken her to make coffee, something had changed.

  The glow of awareness was gone from her expression, turned off as efficiently as turning off a tap.

  * * *

  Jenna handed him one of the mugs, but instead of sitting next to him on the sofa, she retreated to an armchair, further emphasising the distance between them.

  Frowning, Marc drank a mouthful of the coffee. “Natalie used to chat to some guy online. I’m pretty sure it’s the same guy who emailed you.”

  Grimly, he noted that Jenna didn’t look as surprised as she should have. “You knew she was talking to someone. That Natalie was involved with some guy online.”

  Shock jerked Jenna’s head up. “I didn’t know about the online part. All I knew was that she had met someone. She didn’t say how.”

  “If Natalie was involved with someone then you need to tell me all the details. Forget that she and I were married.”

  The calm flatness of O’Halloran’s tone was faintly chilling.

  Keeping Nat’s little secret had been a habit, made easy by her death. The way Jenna had seen it, you shouldn’t have to tell on people after they had died, but she couldn’t afford to hold back now. If Nat’s illicit boyfriend and Jenna’s stalker were one and the same, then that was a bona fide link.

  “Natalie phoned me the day before she died to tell me she was considering leaving you to be with her new boyfriend. I didn’t quite believe her.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t believe she would—”

  O’Halloran picked up the copy of the email. “I need to know his name.”

  The remoteness of his gaze made the breath catch in the back of her throat. “She never gave me a name, but I didn’t know he was an online friend. All I knew was that he had been sending her gifts and that Nat was...excited. She died the next day.”

  Jenna’s stomach tightened. She literally felt sick at the implications. Now that it seemed clear that the house fire hadn’t been set by the serial arsonist, the meeting with Natalie’s online friend had taken on a new, potentially ominous cast. That didn’t mean he was implicated in the murder, but he could be.

  It was a connection she should have made and hadn’t. The dangers of meeting someone off the internet swirled around in her head. She knew better than most how many crazies there were out there.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it. I knew about the online friend, and I didn’t connect him.”

  The flat acceptance in his voice stopped her in her tracks. She knew that Natalie hadn’t been entirely happy in the marriage, but she had assumed that was because she had suffered from postnatal depression after having the baby.

  She had never considered that O’Halloran might not have been happy. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just talk. In any event there was no point mentioning it, because nothing happened—she didn’t go with him.”

  And Jenna hadn’t wanted to destroy his memories of Nat. After all, she hadn’t done anything wrong. After she had died, the last thing she had wanted to do was despoil her cousin’s memory.

  O’Halloran was silent for a beat. “There was if he had anything to do with the gas explosion.”

  A chill went through Jenna at the soft, flat comment. On the heels of that another thought made her go still inside. “I used a couple of the things that happened to Natalie in Deadly Valentine, the secret admirer and the use of arson. If he’s the same man, tha
t would explain why he’s so angry.”

  Because she had inadvertently revealed his crime, even if only in a fictionalised form.

  Pushing to his feet, O’Halloran slid his phone out of his pocket. “Which will be why he wants your phone and computer, and anything else that might connect him to Natalie’s death.”

  He short-dialled Farrell. When he got her voice mail, he left a message and hung up.

  A heavy roll of thunder indicated that the storm had moved overhead. As Jenna pulled a curtain aside to stare outside, Marc gave in to impulse and walked over to her. He shouldn’t touch her, but he found himself wanting to pull her close and soothe away the tension that was visible in the line of her back, the set of her jaw.

  Her inability to meet his gaze brought his head up, sharpened all of his senses. In that moment, the small body language cues he had noted ever since the encounter at the gravesite—her pale face and abrupt change of mood when he had focused on Natalie—added up to a conclusion he should have arrived at earlier. Somehow, despite the passage of years and the fact that she had been the one who had ended it, Jenna still cared for him.

  Cancel that: nine years had passed. She loved him.

  Her shuttered gaze met his. Something about his expression must have alerted her that he knew, because she smiled brightly. “I’ll make a copy of a couple of Lydell88’s emails, if you want them.”

  “Great idea.” Maybe it would stop him from doing something rash like reaching out, snagging her wrist and pulling her close again.

  Jaw tight, he watched Jenna collect the file and walk out of the room.

  The thought that they were close to lovemaking momentarily wiped his mind clean of anything else. The fierceness of his response set him on guard.

  With the investigation now heating up, staying close to Jenna, and allowing her memory, and his, to unlock, could be the most effective way to finally capture the murderer who had eluded him for six years.

  Like it or not, Jenna had become the key to solving the case. He couldn’t afford to be separate from her right now.

  If he made love with Jenna, maintaining any kind of professional distance would be impossible and, with the stalker now a tangible threat, he needed to maintain his clarity of mind.

  Satisfaction eased off some of his tension. Decision made.

  He wanted Jenna in his bed. And she wanted him, but they would have to wait. Protecting Jenna and making progress on the investigation had to take precedence.

  He had already lost Natalie and Jared.

  He couldn’t lose Jenna.

  Chapter 13

  Jenna stepped back into the room just as the lights went out.

  “Wait here,” O’Halloran said quietly. “I’m going to check the fuse box, just in case.”

  She heard the faint sound of his footfall, felt the displacement of air as he glided past.

  Not wanting to sit alone in the dark with the sound of thunder rolling overhead, she followed O’Halloran out into the hall and watched as he shone his flashlight into the fuse box. “It looks okay.”

  She trailed him to the kitchen and watched as he shrugged into the shoulder holster. The metallic click as he slid the clip home in the Glock sent a chill down her spine. She had watched O’Halloran unload the gun and place both the gun and shoulder holster on the kitchen counter; she just hadn’t thought he would have to use it.

  He paused at the kitchen door. “I won’t be long. The whole street is in darkness, so he hasn’t tampered with the power this time. I think this outage is genuine. A bolt of lightning probably knocked out the transformer.”

  The kitchen door shut behind him. Her spine tingled at the silent way O’Halloran had moved through the darkness. Unnerved by being alone in the dark, she found the penlight she had used earlier.

  Swinging the beam around the kitchen, just to make sure she was still alone, she walked quickly to the kitchen door, opened it and stepped out onto the back porch. A blast of cold air and rain instantly soaked her.

  O’Halloran ghosted in out of the pitch-blackness, his eyes shooting dark fire. “What are you doing outside?”

  Jaw taut, Jenna ignored the question. She was in no mood to explain that after the episode with the stalker in the so-called safety of her house, outside had seemed a whole lot safer. “Did you find anything?”

  “He’s not on the property.” O’Halloran stepped beneath the porch and slicked wet hair back from his face. His shirt was plastered to his shoulders, water trickled down his chin.

  Lightning lit up the back garden with a searing white glow, and, a split second later, a crack of thunder made her jump.

  He stepped inside, found the towel that he had used earlier and blotted his face and hair. “That’s it,” he said grimly. “You can’t stay here. We can’t stay in my apartment, either, because I can’t guarantee that he doesn’t know where I live, which means a hotel.”

  * * *

  Jenna stepped into O’Halloran’s apartment, a brief stop-off on the way to a hotel, while he packed a bag.

  Curiously, she looked around as he led the way through a large modern apartment with vaulted ceilings and dark hardwood floors softened by rich Turkish rugs. Warm lamplight glowed, pooling softly over comfortable sofas and highlighting an array of interesting oils on the walls.

  They stepped into a wide hallway. The white walls, which would have been uncomfortably sterile if left bare, again, were adorned with an interesting collection of paintings. “I didn’t know you liked art.”

  He paused by the doorway to a bedroom. “I like it. I just don’t know anything about it. Luckily, my mother solves that problem. Every year she runs a charity art auction. I donate, and she insists on turning the donation into a bid on a painting.”

  Jenna stared at the delicate watercolours lining the hall. They all matched and she was suddenly certain that O’Halloran was well aware of that fact.

  The paintings gave Jenna an odd, narrow glance into O’Halloran’s family life. She knew from the careful selection that his mother had done her best to decorate his walls with light and beauty, and to turn the sterile barn O’Halloran had chosen, the very antithesis of a family home, into a comfortable apartment. And O’Halloran had let her.

  The fact that O’Halloran’s mother had a hand in decorating also told her that O’Halloran lived alone.

  The thought was oddly disturbing. She was used to living alone. As a writer, solitude suited her for the most part, but O’Halloran was different. Despite his occupation as a cop, she had always considered him to be a family man.

  It was an odd moment to take her head out of the sand and confront her phobia about being involved with either a soldier or a cop, because it was a fact that they needed their families more than most. The thought that at the end of a day of dealing with hardened criminals and maybe even the rawness of death, O’Halloran had come home to a cold, empty apartment made her chest squeeze tight.

  Despite the art on the walls, the apartment was hollow, and it was lonely.

  Within minutes, O’Halloran had what he needed. Glad to be leaving the too-revealing confines of his apartment, Jenna climbed back into his vehicle.

  She studied street signs as he accelerated out of the center of town and found an on-ramp to the Southern motorway. “So...where are we going?”

  He checked the rearview mirror then flipped open the glove compartment and extracted an accommodation booklet, which he handed to her. “Find a hotel or motel. I’m just going to drive for a while and make sure we’re not being followed.”

  Half an hour later, feeling exhausted, Jenna walked into the double-room suite she had booked in the Lombard Hotel.

  O’Halloran stepped in beside her and put their bags down. “Choose the room you want and I’ll take the other.”

  Minutes later, after
placing her bag in the nearest room and making a brief survey of the suite, which had a small kitchen, Jenna took a shower, changed for bed and brushed her teeth.

  While she was in the bathroom, she took stock of her bruises. The ones around her neck hadn’t developed much beyond red marks, so hopefully they would fade by morning, but her knee was a different matter. The dark bruise was large and spectacular, and the knee was still sore.

  After rubbing in some arnica, which she’d brought with her, she quickly dried her hair then walked through the lounge to her bedroom. On the way, she glimpsed a slice of tanned torso as O’Halloran peeled out of his shirt. At that moment, his gaze snagged on hers for long enough that she froze in place and her stomach clenched. Then he looked away.

  Cheeks burning, feeling like a love-starved voyeur, Jenna continued on toward her bedroom, closed her door and slid into bed. Flicking off the light, she lay in darkness and tried to relax, but her heart was still racing. She hadn’t mistaken O’Halloran’s initial response. His gaze had been narrowed and she had gotten the impression that he hadn’t minded in the least that she was seeing him with his shirt off.

  Somewhere in the distance she could hear O’Halloran taking a shower. Every time she thought about the comprehensive way O’Halloran had kissed her back at her house she melted down, although he hadn’t pushed any further. Sometime during the evening he had seemed to back off, leaving her floating in limbo.

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out when and why the change had happened. When O’Halloran had made the connection about Natalie’s online friend, his whole focus had altered.

  She had felt his instant shift away from her and back to Natalie and Jared. When she’d seen him staring at Nat’s photo, she had gotten the message loud and clear. No matter how focused O’Halloran was on investigating her stalking and protecting her—no matter how seductive that seemed—she couldn’t allow herself to forget that his primary motivation was the same one that had driven him for the past six years. The need to solve the murder of his wife and child.