Twice Kissed. Lisa Jackson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ show up at her doorstep. He could have called and told her about Mary Theresa, yet he’d decided to drive hundreds and hundreds of miles to see her in person.

      Drumming her fingers on the edge of the counter, she stared through the kitchen window. Snow covered the ground and bowed the branches of the trees. Without any light from the moon, the night was eerie, the solitude that she usually found so comforting oddly disturbing.

      “Mom?” Becca’s voice caught her up short. “What’s really going on?”

      Maggie shook her head and sighed. Instead of acting as if she didn’t know what Becca was talking about, she said, “That seems to be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question right now.” Running her fingers through her hair, she walked back to the living room and silently offered to help her daughter down the hallway. “I wish I knew the answer, Becca. Damn, but I wish I knew.”

      Chapter Four

      Detective Reed Henderson didn’t like being played for a fool, and in this case, the one involving Marquise or whatever the hell she wanted to be called, he was certain that someone was out to dupe him.

      He picked at his teeth with his thumbnail, reached into his top desk drawer for his cigarettes, and found, instead, a pack of nicotine gum. He hated the stuff but wadded a piece into his mouth and thought it a damn poor substitute for a Camel straight.

      A picture of Mary Theresa Reilly Walker Gillette aka Marquise was pinned over his desk. She was a looker, no doubt about it. Model slim with thick red-brown hair, eyes as green as jade, straight nose and perfect teeth surrounded by lips that were stretched into a smile that would light up any man’s day, she carried herself with the confidence of a truly beautiful woman who knew and calculated her effect on every man who happened to cross her path. Looking into the camera as if intent on seducing the man behind the lens, she exuded a sexual radiance that even he, after nearly twenty years on the force and the cynicism that came with the duty, recognized.

      Marquise had star quality. Few men would be able to resist her.

      Married twice, with a string of lovers, she didn’t seem particularly stable in her love life, but then, who could blame her? Men would’ve been salivating, their tongues dragging out of their mouths, if she so much as gave them a wink or a smile. Her first husband was a cowboy—a loner who had a temper that had put one man in the hospital. That was years ago, of course, when Thane Walker was barely sixteen, but Henderson believed that a man didn’t change. Once a hothead, always one. In years past, it seemed, Walker was forever just one step in front of the law.

      Then there was the second man to make the mistake of marrying Marquise—an older guy who liked his women young and flashy, but had trouble keeping this one under his thumb. Mary Theresa had become the third Mrs. Syd Gillette for a period of less than a year. He’d moved on, been married and divorced since. It was a wonder the guy still had any money.

      Her last boyfriend was ten years younger than she, a model with long, curly hair and a brooding, dark look that women seemed to find sexy. As far as Henderson was concerned, Wade Pomeranian was a spoiled pain in the butt.

      So what had happened to her? The question rattled around in his head like rocks in a hubcap—irritating and damned hard to dislodge. Was she dead? Murdered? Had she committed suicide? Had she just taken off on a lark? Or was this all just a publicity stunt, the actions of a desperate woman whose star, albeit not in the caliber of a Hollywood celebrity, had once flared bright but now had begun to fade?

      “Hell if I know,” he admitted, leaning back in his desk chair until it groaned in protest. He fingered his old baseball, the one that had been signed by Sandy Koufax when Henderson was just a kid, then gave it a toss. It arced perfectly one inch below the fluorescent lights before dropping into his open, waiting fingers.

      What the hell had happened to Marquise? The press was all over the case. As she was the cohost of Denver AM and hadn’t shown up on the set, the producer of the show had gotten nervous, checked around, and eventually called someone she knew on the force.

      In the intervening days Henderson had talked to most of the people associated with Ms. Gillette. He didn’t much like any one of them. Including her surly first husband. That guy was hiding something. Henderson could feel it in his bones. He intended to find out what it was; he just needed a little more time.

      He’d put out a nationwide APB on Marquise, with her description as well as that of her Jeep Wrangler and the license plate of the vehicle. He’d also filed a missing-person report through the National Crime Information Center via the FBI. Sooner or later, she’d show up—dead or alive, he couldn’t begin to guess. An enigma, that one. But people didn’t usually fall off the face of the earth.

      Then again, years ago, when he was still at the academy, he’d made a bet that Jimmy Hoffa would eventually turn up. That five bucks was history; he’d be damned if the same thing happened anywhere near his jurisdiction.

      The door to his office swung open and Hannah Wilkins poked her head inside. Though it was the weekend, she, too, was working. “No news on the whereabouts of Thane Walker?” she asked, eyeing him with disapproval as he flipped the baseball toward the ceiling again. He knew she objected to his lack of reverence when it came to things of value. Hell, everyone did. But he didn’t believe in gilded cages, and, because of it, he supposed, he’d lost Karen and the kids.

      “Nope. Walker seems to have taken a hike. Along with his ex-wife.” He caught the ball, careful to avoid his fingers’ touching Sandy’s signature, which was still intact, then gave it another toss toward the ceiling. “You talk to anyone at his ranch in Wyoming?”

      “Nope. No one answered.” She slid into the room and leaned against the doorframe. Folding her arms over her chest, stretching the blue wool of her jacket, she added, “But I called his other place—the spread in California. Talked to a manager there. No one knows what happened to him.”

      “Convenient.”

      “Very.”

      “Keep looking.”

      “I will.” She nodded, her short blond hair moving a bit, brushing her collar. “They both can’t be lost.”

      “You wouldn’t think so.”

      “And he claimed he didn’t leave with her. Remember you questioned him yourself the day that she was reported missing.”

      “I remember. He’d had a fight with her.”

      “He wasn’t the only one.”

      “But he was the last. Good ol’ Marquise was on a tear last week, wasn’t she?” he muttered, recalling that she’d had it out with the cohost of her morning program and her latest boyfriend as well as her first husband. And those were only the ones he knew about.

      “Walker’s not on the up and up.” Henderson frowned and replaced the baseball in its stand, a small metal replica of a catcher’s glove that once had been painted shiny gold, but now showed dull black where the paint had chipped away. Narrowing his eyes on the skyline of the city, visible through a thick, plate-glass window, he scratched with one finger at the itchy stubble beginning to shadow his jaw. “I don’t like the guy.”

      “This isn’t exactly a news flash,” Hannah remarked with that irritating half-smile of hers. “You don’t like anyone.”

      With good reason, he thought. Most people weren’t СКАЧАТЬ