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  Smothering a yawn, she straightened. “And then what? Back on the Witness Security program?”

  “Until we run Colenso to ground.”

  And then what? But she wasn’t about to voice that question. Fischer was breaking the rules for one night. It wasn’t good enough, but if it was all she was going to get, she was taking it.

  Minutes later, Fischer pulled into his driveway.

  Walking into the house was bittersweet. Fischer dropped his gear bag on the floor, kicked the door closed behind them and walked toward her. Taylor wound her arms around his neck. This time, for her at least, there was no ambiguity. What she wanted was clear.

  His mouth came down on hers as he walked her backward in the direction of the bedroom. The first kiss was unexpectedly soft, the second even sweeter. Her palms slid upward, peeling off his T-shirt. Seconds later, her shirt dropped to the floor and the back of her knees hit the bed.

  The bedroom was dark, the air faintly stuffy after days of the house being shut up. Light from the sitting room outlined Fischer’s shoulders as he unhooked her bra and peeled off her jeans, glanced off the planes of his face as he pulled her toward him. Winding her arms around his neck, she arched into him and lifted her mouth for his kiss.

  Reaching down, she unfastened his pants. He felt hot and sleek and smooth. He hadn’t had time to put a condom on, and abruptly, she didn’t want one. The decision was primitive and instinctual. She loved him; she had almost lost him. After tonight, she didn’t know when she would see him again, if ever.

  He cupped her face, his expression intense. A split second later they were on the bed and he was inside her. His mouth came down on hers and the night dissolved.

  The sound of Fischer’s phone woke Taylor. He was sitting on the side of the bed wearing pants but no shirt, his hair still damp from the shower.

  He answered the call, then moments later flipped the phone closed. “Bridges has a reported sighting of Colenso.”

  She raised herself on one elbow. “Portland?”

  “Just south. I have to go.” He leaned over and kissed her, his mouth firm, the kiss brief.

  Taylor watched as he pulled on a fresh shirt. “Is that a ‘goodbye, honey, I’m off to work’ kiss?”

  He shrugged into his shoulder holster as he walked toward the bed. “That’s an ‘if I touch you again, I won’t leave’ kiss.”

  He leaned down. This time the kiss was longer.

  “Don’t leave the house unless you need to, and don’t go into town. If you want to collect Buster, you can use Tate’s car, which is parked in the garage.” He extracted a set of car keys and some bills from his wallet and left them on the bedside table. “If you need food, order it in. I’ll be back tonight.”

  “And Burdett?”

  Unexpectedly, he grinned, teeth flashing white against his tanned skin. “We’ll talk about it when I get home.”

  The front door closed behind him. Taylor listened for the sound of his truck as he backed out onto the road and accelerated away, then pushed back the covers and slid out of bed. According to the alarm clock, it was just after nine.

  She gathered up her clothing, took one of Fischer’s shirts from his drawer and walked through to the bathroom. She needed fresh underwear, but that would have to wait until she picked up Buster. On the way through town she could call in at one of the malls and do a little shopping.

  As she stepped under the warm spray of the shower, she reviewed the pulse-pounding hours she and Fischer had spent locked together. There hadn’t been a lot of time for conversation, but as curt and unemotionally stated as it had been, the phrase “when I get home” was unexpectedly sweet.

  When she’d dressed and combed out her hair, Taylor picked up the phone and rang the cattery. Seconds later she set the receiver back down. Neil had picked Buster up two days ago.

  Perplexed that Neil had collected Buster early, when there was no way he could keep an eye on him when he was at work, she called the computer shop. An unfamiliar female voice answered. Neil had been sick for a couple of days and he wasn’t due back in for the rest of the week.

  Frowning, Taylor hung up and dialed Neil’s home number.

  When Neil picked up the phone, his voice was croaky but recognizable. He had collected Buster because when he had rung the cattery to check on him, the vet had said Buster had been sick and off his food. Since he was home with a virus, he had decided to collect Buster early.

  Taylor got directions for his house and hung up.

  The drive to the small cottage Neil rented took less than five minutes. Locking the car, she strolled to the front gate, automatically checking out the street, which was lined with an eclectic mix of modern bungalows sitting cheek by jowl with the old miners’ cottages that had formed the original heart of Cold Peak. Stately oaks lined the street, softening the down-at-heel appearance of some of the houses.

  She studied Neil’s cottage, which was definitely on the down-at-heel side. Despite the sunny weather, the house was shut up and the curtains were drawn. Farther down the street she could hear the blare of a radio, and across the road a baby was crying. In contrast Neil’s cottage was silent, although if he was as ill as he had sounded on the phone, that was no surprise. He was probably in bed and simply wanted to sleep.

  She lifted the latch on the gate and stepped onto the mossy, overgrown path. Instead of walking directly to the house, she checked out the small adjacent garage. Neil’s car, visible through a small window, was a sporty SUV painted metallic purple with ski racks and, from the look of the speakers at the rear of the vehicle, a state-of-the-art stereo system. The vehicle went with his character, slightly quirky and demonstrating his love of equipment.

  She walked around the side of the garage and found a side door standing slightly ajar. When she stepped inside, she almost tripped over a cat cage.

  Already on edge that the garage door had been left open, leaving Neil’s car, which was in all likelihood the most expensive asset he owned, open to theft, she studied the cage.

  She didn’t own a cat cage, which meant either Neil had bought one, or the cattery had loaned him the cage when he had taken Buster. The fact that the cage was open made her frown, although it was possible Neil had carried the cage inside the house before opening it. Feeling even more unsettled, she did a circuit of the garage and checked underneath the SUV, just in case Buster had bolted and taken refuge in the garage. She was tempted to call his name, but an inbuilt caution kept her quiet. Neil’s cottage was giving her a definite creepy feeling.

  When she had exhausted all possibilities in the garage, she did a circuit of the house. As she studied the silent cottage, the breeze lifted and a tree branch scraped over the side of the house. For a disorienting moment she had a flashback to Letty’s house and the moment she had stepped into the hall and seen the old lady’s body. Tension tightened down her spine and a small, inane fact registered.

  Neil was a computer buff. On the phone he had said he had a virus, not a cold or the flu.

  Thirty-Seven

  Fischer took a call as he drove. Tate was out of danger, although, like Shaw, he would be in recovery for days. The drug Colenso had used should have put them both into cardiac arrest. Their survival was owed to Bridges getting them almost immediate medical attention.

  Relieved, he set the phone down and tried to concentrate on driving. After what had happened last night—and this morning—his normal level of concentration was shot. After months of meticulous planning, nothing about the investigation, or Taylor, was predictable.

  The sun glanced off the windshield of a passing car, a spot of brightness in a dull day, and without warning, the road seemed to disappear. For an endless moment he was staring at a face, although this time it wasn’t his father, it was Taylor.

  The image dissolved, replaced by the windscreen of an oncoming car. He wrenched the wheel and the truck swung back onto the right side of the road. The car flashed past, fishtailing. His right front tire hit the verge and t
he truck slid sideways, plowing through a ditch before coming to a halt inches short of a fence.

  Throwing the truck into Reverse, he depressed the accelerator. The tires spun and the rear wheels dug more deeply into the mud. Unbuckling his seat belt, Fischer shoved the door open, climbed out of the cab and adjusted the hubs. Seconds later, he put the truck in four-wheel drive and drove off the verge. As soon as he hit the hard surface of the highway, he adjusted the hubs for on-road use, did a U-turn and headed back toward Cold Peak.

  He wasn’t psychic. He had only had one other vision before, and that had happened when he had been eight years old and his father had died. Back then, the image of his father’s face had been accompanied by a suffocating pressure in his chest. This time there had been no physical symptoms.

  His phone vibrated. It was Bridges. Colenso’s body had just turned up at the Portland morgue. He had been executed: a double tap to the back of the head.

  Fischer’s jaw tightened. “Call Bayard. Tell him his man is in Cold Peak. It’s Martin Tripp.”

  Taylor stopped to listen. The wind rustled gently in the trees, emphasizing the damp chill of the day. Next door, she could hear the television playing out a morning soap. In the distance was the steady hum of traffic. The wind gusted, branches scraped against windows and dry leaves flipped along the ground.

  She hadn’t seen any sign of Buster outside, and she didn’t have a cell phone, so she couldn’t ring from the safety of Tate’s car and ask Neil to step out of the house. The sensible thing to do would be to leave.

  Moving slowly, she retraced her steps. She was beginning to feel faintly ridiculous. Neil was sick and obviously bedridden. Buster was probably sleeping on the end of his bed. Colenso had been sighted south of Portland that morning. It was unlikely he could have made it to Cold Peak by now.

  On impulse, she stepped closer to the house and peered into a window. Through a gap in the curtains she could make out a pair of feet tied to the end of a bed. The metallic click of a round being chambered made her freeze. She let out a breath. “What are you going to do, Tripp? Shoot me in the back of the head?”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “Shooting me in Cold Peak wouldn’t be smart, and I think you’re a lot smarter than you’ve ever made out.”

  “Put your hands on your head. Turn around and face me. That’s better.” He indicated with his gun that she move away from the side of the house. His gaze was cold and as steady as the hand that held the gun. “When I was twelve, tests showed I had an IQ of one hundred and seventy.”

  “And I bet your daddy’s IQ was even higher.”

  “Both of my parents had genius IQ’s.”

  She cocked her head on one side. “Helene Reichmann?”

  Tripp’s expression didn’t change. “Don’t try the psychological stuff. I’m better at it than you.”

  “If it wasn’t Reichmann, who was it? I bet you lost someone near and dear. Three cabal members have been murdered—”

  “Four. We killed the final mark.”

  A shadow flickered. Her gaze followed the movement. She caught a flash of white fur.

  Tripp’s mouth flattened. “Don’t bother with the tricks—”

  A sound halfway between a howl and a wail jerked Tripp’s head around. Taylor took a gamble and launched at him, chopping at the gun. Tripp’s fist caught her in the jaw, knocking her sideways. She hit the ground, twisting and rolling to lessen the impact. The gun detonated and dirt kicked up, showering her face.

  She surged to her feet. Tripp leveled the gun for a second shot and seemed to slow, stop, as she looked directly down the barrel of the gun. A split second later the side of Tripp’s head vaporized. Another round punched through his chest, but the insurance wasn’t required: he was dead before he hit the ground.

  Taylor stared at the lone figure stepping through the front gate, the Bernadelli still held in a two-handed grip and aimed at Tripp’s prone body, and wondered why she was surprised to see Fischer.

  With a shudder she wiped her palms, which were speckled with blood, on her jeans, and stepped around Tripp. When he had aimed at her the second time, her arms must have flung up to “stop” the bullet, although she had no memory of doing it.

  Her legs were distinctly shaky as she walked toward Fischer

  He had made the shot from the sidewalk with a handgun. That had to be more than seventy feet, yet he had been pinpoint accurate, aiming at Tripp’s head.

  Normally, in a high-risk situation, it was standard procedure to shoot for the chest area but a chest shot didn’t ensure that the target was taken out, whereas the head shot did.

  He surveyed the grounds and the house. “Is there anyone else?”

  “I checked out the house before Tripp turned up. There doesn’t appear to be anyone in there except Neil, and he’s tied to the bed.”

  Still holding the gun on Tripp, he jerked her into his arms. “I thought I was going to be too late.”

  Taylor’s heart squeezed tight at the rawness of Fischer’s expression, at everything he hadn’t said but which was plainly present in his eyes. And in that moment she decided the pros and cons of falling in love with him didn’t matter; she loved him, period. She had obsessed about his motives for getting close to her, but the reality was he had been there for her in the exact moment she had needed him most. With Fischer’s degree of accuracy with a handgun he could have chosen to wound Tripp and keep him alive, but he had made a choice; he had blown Tripp away, choosing her instead of preserving a major lead in his investigation.

  Her arms clamped around his neck, the movement convulsive. She’d read that scent was the most powerful sense, and right then she could attest to that. Fischer smelled hot and edgy and wonderfully familiar.

  Dipping his head, Fischer fastened his mouth on hers. Long seconds later he lifted his head and released her. “Time to go to work.”

  After Taylor and Fischer had conducted a comprehensive search of the property, Taylor located a kitchen knife and cut Neil’s legs free. The cuffs Tripp had used to fasten his hands to the bed took a little longer, because she had to find the keys. Luckily, she located them in Tripp’s briefcase and didn’t have to search the body.

  Pushing to his feet, Neil stared out of the window at Tripp’s body. “Is he dead?”

  “Would you have a problem if he was?”

  Neil turned away from the window, his expression stark. “No.”

  Fischer walked in the door, the gun still in his hand. “Muir’s here.”

  Taylor recognized two of Cold Peak’s finest with Muir—Driscoll and Hart—along with two other officers she hadn’t met.

  Within minutes the house was cordoned off, and Neil was taken to the Cold Peak medical center for a check over, although from an initial examination his only physical symptoms were chafing on his ankles and wrists and dehydration. Half an hour later, with the coroner’s clearance, Tripp’s body was bagged and removed, and the complications of jurisdiction had been smoothed out with a phone call from Fischer’s boss, Rear Admiral Saunders. Muir wasn’t happy. Cold Peak was front-page news, and the paperwork would keep him tied to his desk for weeks, but he couldn’t argue with the fact that his double homicide had been solved.

  With Tripp’s body out of the way, Taylor and Fischer did a circuit of the house, searching for Buster. Taylor gave the flattened area of grass where Tripp had been lying a wide berth as she began calling. At the first call, Buster began to howl.

  Crouching down, she parted the leaves of a dense rhododendron. It took long minutes, and Fischer retreating several yards, before Buster finally materialized from the shadows. Seconds later, she scooped him up. He was tense and on edge, his pupils dilated, but the reason he was so desperate was plain. He had lost weight, and if Tripp had picked him up two days ago, he probably hadn’t been fed since.

  Fischer opened the door of the cat cage. Taylor pushed Buster in, slammed the door and fastened it before he could double around and shoot back out. The mome
nt was oddly warming. Not exactly your quintessential family snapshot, but close enough.

  Thirty-Eight

  The house in Portland, Maine, was relatively new, an expensive designer aerie set on a cliff overlooking a wild coastline. Xavier studied the waves surging in against dark rocks. Despite the extensive plantings there was clear evidence that there had been a large house here before. When he had rung the local council the previous day, his findings had been verified. This had originally been the site of the old Webster mansion, which had been built in the nineteen hundreds. It had burned to the ground in 1954, the same year his father had disappeared.

  At the time the mansion had burned down the owner had been listed as Charles Everett Richmond. Richmond, a reclusive millionaire, had perished in the fire, and the house had passed to his daughter, Elizabeth, who had sold it soon after. The property had changed hands just once more, when Tripp had bought it.

  Xavier’s spine tingled as he studied the lay of the land, and his conviction that he had found the location of Reichmann’s house—and the site of his father’s murder—grew. According to the original plans of the Webster mansion, which he had viewed in the local historical society’s archives earlier that afternoon, there had been a cellar beneath the house that had linked with a series of natural caves. He hadn’t found anything resembling a cellar entrance in the house that presently occupied the site, which meant the entrance had to be somewhere in the gardens.

  Fifteen minutes later, one of Xavier’s agents, Tony, jimmied open the lock of a garden shed. Xavier stepped inside and immediately noted the unmistakable outline of a trapdoor.

  Flicking on the flashlight he’d brought with him, he lifted the trapdoor, tested the first step of the ladder, then descended into the cavity and waited for Tony to join him.

  The cellar was cavernous and empty. Breath pluming on the stale, cold air, Xavier conducted a circuit of the room, ducked beneath a beam and found a second door. Within minutes, Tony had broken the locks and Xavier stepped inside.