Hiding in the Shadows Read online

  “That was apparently your view. But it really does appear that there was no evidence to arrest him. Or even for the FBI to fire him, for that matter. They demoted him, and he’s under close observation in L.A., something he’s well aware of, apparently. From everything Noah could gather, he’s been behaving himself for the last eighteen months.”

  “I told someone at the shelter that I had medical evidence that could ruin his career.”

  “Yes. Hospital records showing broken bones and severe bruising.” Kane held his voice even and steady, but it took effort. “You turned it over to the police in Seattle. But when they couldn’t prosecute him for the murders, you apparently decided that rather than let them prosecute for assault against you, you’d use the evidence to pressure him into signing the divorce papers and getting out of your life for good.”

  Faith shook her head. “And then what? I crossed the country just to make sure?”

  “Maybe.”

  And maybe not.

  Once again, Faith was unsure if that was her voice, her question—or someone else’s.

  She tried to think, to concentrate. “I was angry. I wanted … justice. That’s what Dinah said to me, that we had to have proof that would stand up in court or I wouldn’t get my justice. But as far as we can tell, up until the accident, everything that happened to me happened before I came to Atlanta. It has to connect, though, it just has to. Whatever Dinah and I were investigating here has to connect to my life before.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Then it is my fault Dinah’s in trouble.”

  “Dinah’s a grown woman with a damned good mind,” Kane said after a moment. “Whatever was going on, I doubt she was dragged into it unwillingly.”

  “What if I didn’t tell her everything? What if I took whatever it is they want, and I didn’t tell Dinah what I did with it?” She grimaced suddenly and set her wineglass on the table. “Dammit, not knowing what the thing is makes it sound so ridiculous when you talk about it.”

  “We could always call it the MacGuffin,” Kane suggested wryly.

  “Isn’t that a word Hitchcock coined? To name something in a movie that everybody was after?”

  He smiled faintly. “Another Hitchcock fan, I see.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, then, we’ll call it the MacGuffin until we know what it is.”

  Faith waited out a long, rolling rumble of thunder. “I just wish we knew.”

  “We’ll find out.” We have to find out. He didn’t speak the last words, but he might as well have.

  He wouldn’t let her help him clear up, and when he was done in the kitchen, he lit a fire in the fireplace. Faith wandered uneasily to the piano for a few moments and then to a window. The storm was going strong, and the rain was heavy now, blown against the windows by gusty wind in a rattle that told of sleet mixed in. It made her feel very jumpy.

  Be careful.

  That voice again, almost inaudible to her now.

  “I think this is going to go on all night,” Kane said, watching her as he stood by the fireplace.

  Move … now—

  “I think you’re right.” Baffled by the faint whisper in her mind, by her own tension, Faith winced as a bright flash of lightning illuminated the night, then she turned from the window. “And I don’t know why I have this compulsion to stand here and watch when it makes me—”

  For an instant, Kane thought it was the crash of thunder that cut off her words, but he saw an expression of puzzlement and then shock twist her features. Her right hand touched the upper part of her left arm just below the shoulder, and Kane saw scarlet bloom around her fingers.

  “Faith—”

  “Will you look at that?” She was staring at a mirror directly across the room from where she stood. A cobweb of jagged cracks radiated from a small hole in the center of the mirror.

  With more haste than gentleness, Kane grabbed her and pulled her away from the windows. “Goddammit, somebody’s shooting.”

  “At me?” She sounded only mildly interested.

  He sat her down on the couch and pried her fingers away from her arm. “Let me see.”

  Her sweatshirt bore two neat, round holes that were clearly entrance and exit points, and made it easy for him to tear the sleeve to expose the wound.

  “It’s just a scratch. I’ve always wanted to say that.”

  Kane had a hunch it was shock rather than courage that kept her voice strong and her words light. But she was right in that the wound was minor, a bloody furrow carved across no more than a couple of inches of the outside of her arm. He had no doubt, however, that it hurt like hell.

  He made a pad of his handkerchief and pressed it to the sluggishly bleeding spot, and looked at Faith’s pale, calm face. “Can you hold this in place while I call the police?”

  “Of course I can.” She did so, then looked at him with amazingly clear eyes. “But I won’t go to the hospital.”

  “Faith, this needs to be looked at.”

  “I can have Dr. Burnett look at it tomorrow when we go to talk to him,” she said calmly. “It’ll be fine tonight if you can just clean and bandage it.”

  “Faith—”

  “It doesn’t even need stitches. I’m all right, Kane, really.” She shivered suddenly as thunder boomed again. “I just … I don’t want to go out there tonight.”

  “All right.”

  He got a blanket and covered her with it before he went to call Richardson. He was careful to stay away from the windows, though he doubted there was any danger. Whoever had been out there was long gone now.

  That a shot had been taken on a night like this, with blinding rain making precision impossible, told him the act was a scare tactic, not intended to hit a live target; the bullet had found Faith only by sheer dumb luck. Nothing else made sense.

  But that hardly made the situation better.

  Kane disinfected and bandaged the wound. She never flinched or made a sound, just sat there and watched him, and for some unaccountable reason her gaze made him feel suddenly clumsy.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, taping the final piece of gauze into place.

  “Why? You didn’t shoot me.”

  Still holding her arm gently between his hands, he looked up to find her smiling faintly. “I can’t be flip about this, Faith.”

  “I see that. Kane, I’m fine. My arm hurts, and I won’t be lingering near any windows for a while, but I’m all right.”

  “You must be one of those people who shine in a crisis.”

  “You didn’t do so bad yourself.”

  He realized he was compulsively smoothing with his thumbs the tape holding the bandage in place, and forced himself to release her and lean back. “Yeah, well, I’ll get the shakes later. And speaking of delayed shock—which do you prefer, whiskey or hot tea?”

  “Tea, please.”

  When Richardson arrived a few minutes later, Faith answered the detective’s questions with no visible anxiety. Not that there was much she could tell him.

  “I saw the cracked mirror first, and thought how odd it was. Then my arm burned suddenly, but it wasn’t until I put my hand over it that I felt the blood. Even then, I didn’t immediately realize I’d been shot. I never heard it.”

  “The storm was right overhead,” Kane told his friend. “There was so much noise we couldn’t hear the shot or the bullet going through the window and smashing the mirror.”

  Richardson went over to examine the mirror. “It’s gone all the way through and into the wall.” He took down the mirror, then produced a penknife and dug into the Sheetrock. Within a very few minutes, he held a misshapen slug.

  Even across the room Kane read Richardson’s expression. “I guess ballistics are out? No chance of tracing it to a particular gun?”

  “I can’t even tell what caliber it is, and I doubt the lab will be able to either.” He eyed the distance to the window, then went to examine that as well. Like the mirror, the windowpane was marred
by a small hole surrounded by a web of cracks.

  “Too dark to see much now,” he said. “I can come back tomorrow and take a stab at the trajectory, try to figure out where the shooter was. But if he was standing more than a few feet away, he couldn’t have hoped to hit what he was aiming at, not in this weather.”

  Kane said, “There’s no fire escape, and we’re on the fifth floor. Unless he was outside on the balcony—which is possible, if doubtful—he couldn’t have been any closer than the apartments on the other side of the courtyard. And that building is a good hundred feet away.”

  Richardson studied the distance from the hole in the window to the floor, then compared that with the distance between the hole in the wall and the floor. “Well, he sure as hell didn’t shoot upward from ground level, or down from a higher spot. Do those apartments across the courtyard have balconies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then we’ll look for a vacant or currently unused apartment. I’m willing to bet we’ll find one matching the trajectory of the shot. Somebody sat over there watching this place, and when they saw Miss Parker at the window …”

  “But I stood there at least a couple of minutes before I moved away,” Faith protested. “And it wasn’t until then that I was shot.”

  “Then he was probably trying to scare you, and just got lucky with the shot.”

  “Lucky,” she murmured.

  Richardson smiled. “A figure of speech.” He looked at Kane. “Did you two do anything today that might have gotten somebody’s attention?”

  “God knows. We talked to some people.”

  “In other words, you were driving all over Atlanta poking into corners.”

  “Guy, I’d swear nobody followed us. And as far as I could tell, no one we talked to reacted in any unusual way to our questions.” He had filled in the detective on their suppositions and conclusions, and Bishop’s discovery about the murder investigation in Seattle.

  The detective sighed. “Well, somebody was obviously upset enough to warn you off. Maybe you should pay attention. Get out of Atlanta for a while and let me do the poking around.”

  “You know I can’t do that. But I can hire a couple of security guards to keep a closer eye on this place. And I’ll sure as hell have blinds installed on those windows first thing tomorrow.”

  “Put one of the guards in the garage to keep an eye on your car,” Richardson suggested. “And it wouldn’t hurt to hire another private cop to follow you whenever you leave and make sure he’s the only one doing that.”

  Kane grimaced slightly, but nodded.

  “When’s Bishop due back?”

  “He isn’t. He’ll get here when he can, but something’s breaking in a case he’s on, so there’s no way of knowing.”

  “Have him call me and fill me in on whatever information he digs up.” Richardson looked at his friend steadily. “I mean it, Kane. This little stunt, coupled with the break-ins at Miss Parker’s apartment, tells me for damn sure that whatever’s going on is deadly serious. You get yourself killed, and the paperwork’s going to be hell.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Kane said dryly.

  Richardson put the flattened bullet into a plastic evidence bag. “I’ll file a quiet report on this incident. But it’s the last time, Kane. Anything else happens, and I won’t be able to keep it under my hat.”

  “Understood.”

  Kane showed the detective out and when he returned to the couch, Faith said, “He seems a good friend.”

  “I’m blessed with a few,” Kane agreed. He looked at her searchingly. “I know it’s a stupid question to ask if you’re all right, but I’ll ask anyway. Are you?” She looked so small and still under the blanket, her hair dulled by the low lights of the room and her face ashen.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He looked into her big, shadowed green eyes and saw the fear and pain she was determined to deny. “Faith—”

  “I know I should probably call it a day, go to bed and sleep, but … I’d really rather not do that just yet.” She drew the blanket tighter around herself, the strain showing now in the tension of her posture, and fixed her gaze on the fire. “I don’t want to be alone right now.”

  Thinking of her isolated in her limbo of no memory drove him to say, “You aren’t alone, Faith. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But my confidence that you’d be safer here with me was obviously misplaced. I’m sorry. Noah was right; I should have taken better precautions from the beginning.”

  “You had … other things on your mind.”

  “That’s no excuse. I made your safety my responsibility, and I should have followed through. But tomorrow I’ll take those steps I mentioned to Guy, make it impossible for anyone to get close or to see inside. I’ll make sure we have an escort when we leave here. You’ll be safe, I promise.”

  She nodded, but said, “If I could only remember. We’d be ahead of them then. We’d know what it is they want and why they want it so badly. We’d know who they are. Maybe we’d even know where Dinah is.”

  “You can’t force your memory to return.”

  “I’ve been out of the coma now for almost a month. I should be remembering something. Those dreams are only flashes—I don’t remember them, not really, I just see them happening. And what do I know about myself? I play the piano, it seems. I’m nervous about storms.” She drew a shaky breath. “My mother and sister were horribly murdered, and I can’t remember, can’t feel anything about it. I married a man who abused me, who terrified me, yet I could pass him tomorrow on the street and never recognize his face.”

  “Faith—”

  “What’s my favorite color? My favorite food? Do I like to read? Do I like animals? Flowers? Did I love Tony Ellis before he beat me?”

  Kane pulled her into his arms and held her while she cried. He didn’t urge her to stop or tell her everything would be all right; crying was obviously something she needed to do. Careful of her injury, he wrapped both arms around her, rested his cheek against her soft hair, and just held her.

  It was a long time before she finally quieted, before she said in a muffled voice against his chest, “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She pulled back a little. “I don’t usually cry.” Then she laughed shakily. “At least, I don’t think I do.”

  “You’re entitled. More than entitled.” Since his handkerchief had been employed earlier, he used a corner of the blanket to wipe her cheeks. “And I bet you feel better now, don’t you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Then I count it as a good thing.” He brushed a strand of her hair away from her face and smiled at her when she finally met his gaze. His fingers lingered on her face, and he thought how soft and warm her skin was.

  He had never before seen eyes that particular shade of green, like seawater. It would be so easy to sink into them and lose himself. So easy to think of nothing but the ache of loneliness and longing he felt, to forget everything else. Everyone …

  Kane realized he was staring at her mouth, that his hand had moved to cradle the back of her head and was drawing her toward him. And he froze.

  Faith blinked as if coming out of a daze, then very slowly pulled away from him and got to her feet. “I think I’ll turn in now after all. Good night, Kane.”

  “Good night.” His voice sounded normal, he thought.

  He sat there for several minutes staring into the fire. Then he pulled out his wallet and opened the section where he kept photographs.

  She hated posing for pictures and always had, so this was a candid shot. He had surprised her at the beach, catching her in a brief yellow two-piece that showed her splendid body to advantage. The click of the shutter had just missed her scowl; his own glee at finally capturing her on film after several frustrated attempts had amused her, and she had laughed, giving him a wonderful picture.

  It was the only picture of Dinah he had.<
br />
  “Come back to me,” he murmured. “Come back before …”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. Even to himself.

  “There’s no sign of infection,” Dr. Burnett said as he finished rebandaging Faith’s wound, “so the shot’s just a precaution. In the meantime—”

  Faith smiled at him as she pulled down the loose sleeve of her sweater. “I know. Don’t stand in front of any more windows.”

  Burnett washed and dried his hands at the small sink in the examination room, then nodded at the nurse, who left silently. When they were alone, he said, “Faith, what’s going on? A gunshot wound?”

  She wasn’t certain how much she should tell him, and with the new tension between her and Kane, she hadn’t felt able to seek his advice before they had parted just a few minutes before, he to question the remaining staff members, she to check in with Burnett and get her arm examined. Going on the theory that the least said would probably be best, she replied, “The police are investigating.”

  “You have no idea why someone shot at you?”

  Lightly, she said, “It was the middle of a storm and at night, and for all I know whoever it was never even aimed the gun, much less aimed it at me. It was probably a fluke. Just a fluke.”

  Burnett looked unconvinced, but nodded and changed the subject. “So how are you doing otherwise? I called your apartment over the weekend but didn’t get an answer.”

  “I’m … staying somewhere else.” Before he could question that, she went on quickly, “And I’m fine. I get tired a bit too easily, but that’s all.”

  “No headaches? Dizziness?”

  “No, nothing like that.” Sometimes I hear the sounds of water rushing, just inside my head, you understand, but that’s probably nothing at all to worry about …

  “Any unusual muscle weakness or numbness anywhere?”

  “No.”

  Burnett nodded again and studied her soberly. “Any memories come back?”

  “Not really.” Faith shrugged, wincing when she felt a twinge of pain in her arm. “More knowledge. I found out I play the piano, for instance. I … found out some things about my past, my life before I came to Atlanta, but not through remembering. Sometimes I have dreams that might be memory, but it doesn’t feel that way.”