Protect Me, Love Part 9

Delia actually did a skipping step on her way across the floor. Being with him made her feel years younger, as if she hadn't lost the past five years, after all.

"We have work to do today, you know," she said as she bounced into the tumble of blankets next to him.

"We could do it later," he teased, running his finger slowly up the inside of her thigh till she trembled.

She'd found one of his blue chambray shirts in the closet and put it on. The cuffs hung winsomely past her fingertips. and the tails were halfway to her knees. She'd fastened only two b.u.t.tons in front, and the curve of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s was clearly visible almost to the nipples. She knew it was a provocative pose. She'd mant it to be, and she could tell by the heated look in Nick's eyes that he was responding as she'd hoped he would. She also knew that if they started making love now, they weren't likely to stop. The pa.s.sion was that strong between them. He opened her body all the way to her soul. Her hunger burned for more of that now, but she knew she would have to wait. She pulled the chambray shirt closed with a sigh and moved her leg just in time to keep his fingers from striking the point of no return.

"Okay," he said, sounding a little pouty. "I get the message. Buta"" he raised himself up on one gorgeously muscled arm and swept her down onto the bed with the other "a"you're not getting away without a kiss."

And what a kiss it was. He rolled on top of her with his thighs between hers so she could feel every inch of his magnificent, naked body pressing into hers. He lifted her against him with one arm, crushing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to his chest. His other hand cradled her head and held her while his mouth captured hers and his tongue invaded her so forcefully that she couldn't have resisted if she wanted to. Of course, she had no intention of resisting. She threw her arms around him and returned his almost savage kiss with equal hot, hard intensity. When they finally pulled away from each other, Delia lay out of breath in his arms. If he hadn't been the one to get up finally and say they'd better get going, she would have tossed her former resolve straight out into the snow and loved this amazing man all day long.

NiCK HAD wanted to keep Delia in his room this morning just so he could be alone with her, but there'd" been another reason, too. He still possessed a cop's instincts, and those instincts were telling him loud and clear that she could be in great danger in the day ahead, even more than she was now. That's why he did his best to talk her into staying at the Tivoli. Unfortunately, he hadn't succeeded.

He could understand why she felt she had to come out here this morning, why she couldn't hang out in bed with him instead. She had a mystery on her hands, a mystery that had just about consumed her life for years. If there was even a hint of a possibility she could unlock a single one of the closed doors to the puzzle of her past, she had to take that chance. And he had to take it with her, even when this sixth sense of his was telling him to grab her and run. So they'd left the Tivoli and plowed out into the snow, through sidewalks that were half shoveled or not shoveled at all. With each step they took, the warning alarms buzzed louder in Nick's head. Yet, now that they were here outside the building on Water Street where Penelope Wren lived, all of that noise inside Nick had fallen silent. He felt nothing but dead calm. Developers had obviously been at work on this block. Eighteenth-century row houses that had fallen into disrepair a decade or so ago were fixed up now, with re-pointed and cleaned brick fronts. Restored window casings sprouted planter boxes on the ledges, filled with snow where flowers would be in a warmer season. Christmas lights were strung along the edges of some of the boxes and more in the windows. Nick looked up as they mounted the stoop and saw that the Christmas lights in the third-floor windows were lit even in the morning brightness. Something told him those lights weren't on due to the occupant's excess of holiday spirit the evening before. Something also told him that third-floor apartment belonged to Penelope Wren. The marl-box in the entryway confirmed that intuition to be true. Delia grabbed the front door handle and turned it in vain, then turned I again. Nick could tell how eager she was to get inside and on to whatever revelation this building had in store, no matter how unpleasant Nick might antic.i.p.ate it to be. He could protect her. It was his job to do that, and more than just his job now. He could jump in front of her and take danger and even destruction on himself so it wouldn't strike her. But he couldn't shield her from the truth. He might pick her up in his arms right now and carry her out of here as fast as he could go, but he couldn't hold on to her like that forever. Eventually she'd make her way back here spite any and all efforts of his to prevent it. Facing the reality of this building, including its third floor, was inevitable for both of them. "The door's locked," he said, though that was also ready obvious.

He knew, of course, that Delia wasn't about to be stopped by something as trivial as a lock. She turned back to the row of mailboxes in the entryway. There was a door buzzer under each. She hesitated a moment before pushing one then another. Checking the name plates and apartment numbers for those two b.u.t.tons, Nick could see what Delia was trying to do. She was hoping to ring the buzzers of apartments at the rear of the building. That way n.o.body would lean out the window to see who was down here. There was no response for a moment. Then a voice crackled through the intercom grill set into the same bra.s.s facing as the row of mad boxes "Who's there?" The voice was hardly recognizable" as male or female.

When Delia didn't answer right away, Nick chimed in. "Mailman," he said.

He knew he was helping Delia do something he thought unwise, but he'd already surrendered to the inevitability of the situation. Still, he held his breath, hoping the person attached to that crackling voice would be savvy enough not to let somebody into his or her budding on the strength of such a flimsy identification. At the same time Nick guessed that his mailman charade would work. Too many people were too eager to find out what was being delivered to resist that particular temptation, especially at Christmastime. A moment later the door release buzzer sounded and he and Delia were inside.

"We'd better get upstairs fast before whoever that was opens their door," Delia said.

She was already at the stairway to the first floor and climbing. Nick shrugged and followed. They hot footed up to the first landing then down a narrow hallway to the next staircase. He kept close behind her up the next flight of stairs and back down the third floor hallway toward the front of the building again. Not till he saw the doorway of that front apartment did he grab Delia's arm and thrust her out of his way so he could approach first. She didn't resist, maybe because she'd seen the same thing he had and understood his concern. The door to the third floor front apartment was ajar. In New York City, an unlocked and open door to a residential s.p.a.ce like this one more often than not signaled trouble.

Delia tapped Nick on the arm. "Take this," she said. He turned from staring at the crack in the doorway just long enough to see that she was handing him the gun he'd given her yesterday. He shook his head and took his own weapon from the back of his waistband. She did understand that there was danger, after all.

"You stay out here," he said' softly hoping in vain that she would cooperate for once.

He raised his gun next to his face and slightly forward in quick-response position, then pressed his left palm flat against the apartment door and pushed. He peered at the s.p.a.ce revealed by the gradually opening door, but could, see nothing unusual. He pushed the door open wider. Still nothing. Both the hallway into the apartment and the room beyond were brightly illuminated, and that made him as uneasy as the Christmas bulbs in the third-floor window had done.

He motioned for Delia to stay put while he darted across the s.p.a.ce in front of the open doorway to the opposite side. He peered through into the apartment from this new angle. Again, he saw nothing suspicious.

"Are you going in?" Delia whispered.

Nick signaled her to be silent, then nodded. He was definitely going in. He had no choice. He remembered experiences like this one back when he was a cop. This moment outside the door to possible danger was the longest and scariest of all. That was one reason for making the entrance fast, like ripping off an adhesive bandage before you could think too much about how much it was going to hurt. Nick took a deep breath and wished he didn't sense that Delia was right behind him.

DELIA WASN'T about to stay in the hallway. She had to know what was going on here. She followed Nick as he crept along the hallway wall. She couldn't help but be impressed by how formidable, even deadly, he looked with that gun in his hand. She could all but see every muscle in his body, tense as steel and on the verge of a spring-to-action at the slightest provocation. If there was peril in one of these rooms, Nick was obviously ready. It occurred to her that he would have been a real a.s.set to PEI all these years she'd kept him off her roster of operatives. Maybe all of that could change now. Yet she didn't feel comfortable thinking in terms of the future where Nick was concerned. She still had too many questions about him for that.

The question of the moment concerned why he was taking so many precautions now. The total silence suggested that there was n.o.body in this apartment but the two of them. As they pa.s.sed one empty room after another, his military-alert pose began to appear a little dramatic. Delia was tempted to rush on ahead of him to confirm her suspicion that they were entirely alone here. Then she could get down to searching for anything she might find out about Penelope and Tobias Wrena"what they were doing in New York, how long they'd been here, what their connection was to the events of these past few days. In fact, a search might turn up more such information than a face-to-face interview with the Wrens ever could. For that reason Delia was almost glad to find the place empty. Then they got to the bathroom.

The first sign of trouble was a smudge, so small Delia would later wonder why she'd even noticed it right off like she did. The mark was on the edge of the door just abOVe the lock plate, and in the dimmed light from the hallway she couldn't even see what color it was. Her heart started thumping anyway, even before Nick eased the door open and they both saw what waited inside. Penelope Wren was on the floor, halfway in and halfway out of the bathtub, as if she might have been trying to crawl in there to escape her terrible fate.

Suddenly, for Delia, it was five years ago and she had just awakened to find poor Morty Lancer's body cold and dead next to her in her bed. All she could think about was getting out of there. She stepped away from the bathroom door and slammed her back against the opposite wall so hard one of the pictures was shaken from its hook and fell to the floor with a shattering sound. Delia didn't look at the picture or more than peripherally register its fall. She was riveted on Penelope and Nick leaning over her body, taking her pulse, listening for her heartbeat. How useless all of that was. There is nothing as still as the stillness of death. Delia had never had that thought before or even realized it was true, but she did so now. She didn't need to lift Penelope's wrist or listen to her chest to know without the tiniest shadow of a doubt that the woman would never stand up from that floor on her own again.

"She's dead," Nick said.

Delia wanted to shout, I know. I know. You don't need to tell me.

She stood silent instead, pressed against the wall, wishing she could dissolve into and through lt and be out of here. The doorway beckoned Down the hall, just a few yards and she'd be gone. She'd clean out her accounts and be on a plane leaving the country before even Nick could catch up to her. Maybe that's what she should have done five years ago, left the country altogether. Mexico, the Islands, maybe Greecea"didn't Greece have some kind of non extradition policy? Of course, that probably didn't include murder. All of these thoughts and more raced through her head in the" seconds it took for Nick to rise from where he'd been crouched on one knee next to Penelope.

Delia knew that if he turned around and she saw his face, she'd be lost. She could never run away, with him watching her, and with all she felt about him no matter how conflicted it might be, beckoning her to stay. She let her panicky thoughts of flight pa.s.s. Maybe that was a decision to stay and face whatever came next. Maybe it was a failure to make any decision at all. Either way, when he turned toward her she was still pressed against the wall. She gazed up into his eyes and sought sanctuary there, but he looked as stricken as she felt.

"We should get out of here," he said. "There's nothing we can do for her now, and I don't want you involved."

He was already checking out ways to cover any tracks they might be leaving behind, wiping the doork.n.o.b and the edge of the door where he'd put his hand. She could tell he was being careful not to remove the smudge.

"I don't want to leave just yet," she said.

"The police could be on their way here right now., Nick's tone was urgent, and he sounded determined. Delia was determined, too.

"I have to see what I can find," she said. "Besides, it looks like we're the first people to have been here since... it happened."

She turned away from the bathroom doorway and started toward the other rooms of the apartment. She didn't like to think about what "it" had been.

"By the way," Nick said from close behind her, "I would say she died sometime last evening."

Delia was almost to the archway that led into the living room when she caught on to the significance of that.

"I saw Penelope last night," Delia said. "Yes, I know you did."

Delia spun around to face him. "I didn't kill her if that's what you're implying."

Her voice was choked, and she was right on the edge of breaking down. She held her body tense, as if to keep herself from toppling over that edge.

"I've never killed anybody in my life," she said, still choking the words out that had to be said, for last night and for five years ago. "I know that." "Do you?"

He didn't answer right away. Something in his eyes, or maybe something that wasn't in his eyes, told her what he'd said was almost true. But not entirely. She turned and continued into the living room, moving much faster than before.

"Delia, listen to me."

Nick was behind her with his hands on her shoulders. There was pleading in the way he'd asked her to listen. She couldn't succ.u.mb to that, not yet anyway.

"No," she said sharply, and jerked herself out of his grasp. "I have to search."

"For what?"

Delia was suddenly struck by h w hysterically funny a question that was, so much so, she almost started laughing. What did she have to search for? The meaning of her life? The answers to death? The impossibility of her position made everything absurd somehow, and eerie, too, like the flickering reflection of the Christmas lights flashing off and on from the window. What could she expect to find here that would tear down the mountain of suspicions against her, the lingering doubts in Nick's mind? Now she'd be considered a prime suspect in Penelope's murder as well as poor Morty's. Delia had the motive. She'd had the opportunity, too, since she was only blocks from this place last night. This was beginning to feel very deja vu indeed.

Delia set herself to searching, rummaging through drawers mostly, hoping she'd know what she was looking for when she found it. That turned out to be exactly the case when she got to the lap drawer of the desk near the window with the Christmas lights. Delia found a letter there from, of all people, her brother Samuel. Before she'd even read the contents, she knew this was about as important a clue to what had been happening to her and around her as there could possibly be.

Chapter Eighteen.

"What's that?" Nick asked, nodding toward the envelope and two pages of closely written stationery in her hand. Delia couldn't answer just yet. She Was still too stunned. She'd been astonished enough to find a communication from the older brother who'd virtually disappeared from their family years ago. Then she saw the return address on the envelope, and true shock set in. According to this letter, Samuel was living right here in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side near Riverside Park. Delia's first thought, when she was once again able to think, was that Samuel might have been dumped up there in the kind of inst.i.tution bailout that had sent so many poor, stricken souls back to the city streets whether they were mentally equipped to cope there or not. The Upper West Side had become a chief wandering zone for many such unfortunates. But why wouldn't the Lester money have shielded Samuel from such a fate? She'd been out of touch with the family too long to know the answer to that. "Delia, is something wrong?" She looked up at Nick as if she might have forgotten he was present, though that was only partly true.

"It's a letter from my brother," she said.

"Samuel?"

"Yes." It sometimes slipped her mind that Nick's history with her family meant he knew a lot about them, even the sad story of Samuel. "You would never have met him, but I'm sure you heard about him."

"I met him. I knew him pretty well, in fact."

Delia was gazing at the letter, though she hadn't yet read beyond the first sentence. She was wondering if she could bring herself to read farther when Nick's words jolted her attention back to him.

"That can't he true," she said. "You couldn't have met him. You must be thinking of somebody else."

"It is true. I used to take your father to see Samuel, once a week or so."

Delia remembered her father's visits to Samuel all too well. She'd tried not to resent them when she was in her teens, but she couldn't help it. She didn't like to think of her beloved dad having such a close relationship with someone who made no pretense of wishing her nothing but harm. Samuel had made it very clear that he hated her. That was one of the reasons he'd been inst.i.tutionalized when she was still an infant. He'd tried so many times to hurt her that he'd finally had to be put away. She understood how his addled mind saw her as the enemy taking over his territory. Unfortunately, understanding that had never kept her from feeling the hurt of having a brother who wished she'd never been born.

"Samuel and I even got to be friends," Nick was saying. "As much as that was possible for him, anyway." *

"You liked him?"

Delia could feel some of that old resentment. Here was another man in her life professing affection for this person she'd grown up thinking of as a scary monster. If there was a single, consistent image in her nightmares from those years, that image was of Samuel.

"Yes, I liked him. He needed friends from outside the rest home. Your father felt strongly about that. I was one of the few opportunities Samuel had for a friendship like that to happen."

"It wasn't a rest home," Delia said, sounding more at ease with the subject than she felt. "That's a term the family used to cover up the truth. He was in a mental inst.i.tution."

"Whatever."

Nick was watching her warily, as if he could hear what lay beneath her surface calm, as if he might think she was about to explode. She could see that att.i.tude in his eyes, and it made her more agitated than ever and less able to keep that agitation under control.

"Whatever?" she said. "Whatever Samuel needed, it was not rest. They locked him up in that place, supposedly for life, so he wouldn't hurt anybody when he flew into one of his violent rages. Nowa"" she brandished the letter in front of Nick's face "a"now, he's out."

"I don't believe it."

"See for yourself."

Nick took the envelope out of her hand. She watched as he looked it over, including the return address.

"From this, what you say appears to be true," he said.

"It's true, all right. He's out of that inst.i.tution and living in Manhattan. What do you think about that?"

Nick.shook his head slowly. He continued to examine the envelope until she took it out of his hand.

"I asked what you think of my emotionally disturbed brother Samuel being right here in Manhattan."

"I don't know exactly what to think. I would have said he was too sick to be released from the hospital, at least back when I knew him."

"Well, I'd say that his being here could explain a lot of things."

Nick studied her for a moment. "What things?"

"Things like what's been happening to me these past few days."

"You mean the fact that someone's been stalking you and trying to run you down? You think Samuel could be the stalker?"

"No," she admitted. "I've seen the color of that man's eyes, and I know he's not Samuel. But my brother is mentally disturbed,- isn't he? He could have hired it done. Unlike me, he has his share of his inheritance, even if he has somebody managing it for him. He must have some access. With even a fraction of the Lester money at his disposal, he could afford to have anything done to anybody. Not to mention the fact that he's always hated me. Did you know that?"

"I heard about it," Nick said in a guarded tone. Delia wondered if this was the way Nick used to talk to Samuel, as if he had to be handled with kid gloves because he might go off the deep end otherwise.

That possibility didn't please her at all.

"I heard a lot of things from Samuel," Nick was saying. "He didn't necessarily mean any of them."

"Did he mean the threats of the terrible things he'd do to me if he ever had the chance?"

"I don't think so," Nick said, but he didn't sound altogether certain of that. He paused a moment. "I don't know,"" be amended more quietly. "He was a troubled guy, and he desperately didn't want to be. He was angry with you for being normal."

"That certainly wraps him up in a neat little package. Meanwhile, I'm the one who's being terrorized."

Nick looked at her for a moment without speaking. "That's right," he said finally. "You are." He sounded sad. "You're the one being terrorized, and Penelope Wren is the one who's dead."

Penelope had slipped from Delia's mind when Samuel's letter turned up. She could hardly believe she'd stopped thinking about a woman who had once taken care of her and was now a corpse on the bathroom floor. What was this situation making Delia into? She didn't know if she could face the answer to that, at least not right now.

"Let's get out of here," she said, and headed for the door to the outside hallway.

"Where are we going?" Nick asked.

She waved the letter and envelope where he could see them. "We're going to follow up on this."

DELIA INSISTED on taking a cab uptown to the West Side. It was a long ride to make in total silence. Nick's practice in the past had been to keep himself at a distance from some of the more convoluted aspects of the Lester family saga. Samuel was an exception to that rule. He was maybe the most lonely person Nick had ever met in his life, shut away in that gilded cage of a high-priced lockup and doomed to spend his entire life there, or so it was supposedly planned. Edward Lester understood his son's sorrowful solitude and was heart-broken for him. That had been painfully obvious in the many long, silent trips back from those visits to Samuel Nick would drive while Mr. Lester stared out the window, lost in a sorrowful solitude of his own. Tears rose in his eyes more than once after his visits to his son. Nick had seen them there and respectfully glanced away.

Sorrowful or not, however, there was never any question that Samuel belonged exactly where he was. Without question, he was dangerous, but contrary to his ravings and Delia's, fears, he had never in his life hurt anyone other than himself. Whatever the source might be of Samuel's psychotic rage, he was the sole victim. That was the primary reason he needed constant custodial care. That was the reason Edward Lester could never bring his son home, no matter how much he longed to do so. Even medication only halted Samuel's self-destruction temporarily. Still, he'd never struck out at those around him, even those whose job it was to restrain and imprison him. That was why Nick found it hard to believe Samuel was responsible for terrorizing Delia. That was why the possibility of Samuel as her stalker had never entered Nick's mind. Besides, Nick had understood that Samuel had been locked up with no chance of release.

But that wasn't what troubled Nick most and kept him staring out his own side of the cab through this long ride made longer by streets narrowed to single lanes bordered in banks of snow. He wasn't even most concerned with what might be waiting for them at the address on the envelope Delia had waved in his face, then had torn away. He was most unsettled of all by Delia herself and the deep sadness he'd seen in her eyes when she spoke of Samuel, deep sadness mixed with what he guessed to be carefully controlled rage. If he was right about that, what could her repressed anger make her capable of if it suddenly slipped its bonds? Could she, after all, have been the one who killed Mortimer Lancer? Could she have the cold heart of a murderer? He knew she could be stubborn, but he had never known her to be hard-hearted. In fact, it was the very softness of her heart, so obvious to him beneath the guard of her defenses, that had drown him to her in the first place and continued to draw hima"until now. Could he have been wrong about her all along? The possibility plagued him, block after block, all the way to Ninety-first Street.

Riverside Park was a blanket of white, and Nick found himself reminded of Denver yet again. The buildings here were mostly What they call prewar and often divided into much larger apartments than was otherwise the case in Manhattan. Nick had been in some of those apartments in the course of his work. They were pretty nice. Maybe Samuel was living well. Still, Nick couldn't imagine Samuel on his own. Maybe he was being taken care of by a family in a private home situation, or there could be a group hostel up here somewhere. There was also always the possibility of Samuel having undergone a miraculous cure, but somehow Nick didn't think that was the case.

He wished he'd been able to read the letter Delia found. She'd stuffed it into her pocket before he could do much more than peruse the envelope to see if the handwriting looked familiar. He'd seen some pages in Samuel's journal once, and the envelope could possibly be in the same hand. Nick couldn't be sure, and he didn't want to ask Delia to let him examine it again. He could feel her sadness, deeper even than before, filling the cab. He respected that sadness and her silence and left her to herself.

Samuel's address turned out to be a building with a doorman. He asked their destination, and Delia gave the apartment number from Samuel's letter. When the doorman asked who he should say was calling, she answered, "Penelope Wren," without so much as a flutter of her long lashes. Once again Nick was struck by how expertly she lied. It bothered him to see her do that even in a good cause like this one. Honesty was something he put a high value on. Meanwhile he held his breath to see what would happen when the doorman called up to Samuel's apartment with the news that Penelope Wren was supposedly downstairs.

The doorman turned back from the phone on the wall and smiled. "Go right up," he said.

"Thank you." Delia smiled back at him. No one would ever have guessed that she'd just identified herself as a woman who lay murdered on a bathroom floor a few miles away.

Nick had stopped to make an anonymous call to the police before hailing the cab to bring them uptown. The detectives would have arrived at Penelope Wren's apartment by now. Nick mentally reviewed the places he'd wiped to remove his fingerprints and Delia's. He thought he got them all, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure. He was worrying over that small chance of error as the elevator moved upward. Delia stood in front of him, maintaining her silence. She didn't have to speak to tell him how tense she was. He could see it in the rigid set of her shoulders. She was as anxious as he was about what they would find on the eleventh floor.