Saving Grace. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ way or another, he would get to the bottom of it.

      A cool September wind, heavy with impending rain, rattled the rusty chains of an old metal swingset in what passed for a play area as he made his way across the uneven pavement to apartment 14-B.

      Did the little girl in the snapshot play there? he wondered. It hardly looked safe, with two swings barely hanging on and the bare bones of a glider with no seats swaying drunkenly in the wind.

      If Grace Solarez turned out to be just as she appeared—a brave stranger who had risked her own life to save his daughter’s—he planned to do whatever it took to ensure she wouldn’t have to live in this bleak place anymore.

      If not—if it turned out she had a role in his daughter’s ordeal—he would see that she paid, and paid dearly.

      As he climbed the rickety ironwork stairway to the second level of the building, he thought he saw a curtain twitch in the apartment next to 14-B. Other than that, the place seemed eerily deserted.

      He rang the doorbell and heard its buzz echo inside the apartment, then waited impatiently for her to answer. She had to be here. He’d called McManus Freight, her employer, as soon as he hung up from talking to Mike and had learned Grace Solarez hadn’t reported to work since the night of the kidnapping, eight days ago.

      Besides that, Mike said she had one vehicle registered in her name, an old junkheap he could plainly see decomposing over in the parking lot.

      He rang the buzzer again and added several sharp knocks for good measure. The curtains fluttered next door again and he was just about to see if the nosy neighbor might be able to tell him anything about his quarry’s whereabouts when he heard a faint, muted rustling behind the door inside her apartment.

      It swung open, barely wide enough for the safety chain to pull taut. Through the narrow slit, he could make out little more than tangled brown hair and a pair of huge dark eyes, very much like the pair belonging to the girl in the snapshot he held.

      “Grace Solarez?”

      The eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yes?”

      Now that he was here, he hadn’t the faintest idea where to start. He cleared his throat. “Hello. My name is Jack Dugan. I need to speak with you, please.”

      “About what?” Her voice sounded thready, strange, as if she’d just taken a hit of straight oxygen in one of those hip bars downtown.

      Maybe she was a junkie. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t waited around long enough to give a statement to the police and maybe that’s why she was no longer with the Seattle PD.

      Would a junkie have stuck around the scene long enough to rescue a terrified little girl?

      So many damn questions and she held the key to all of them.

      He pushed them away for now. “I’ve had investigators working around the clock for the past week, trying to locate you.” He watched carefully for some reaction in those eyes: curiosity, guilt, anything, but they held no expression, as deep and fathomless as a desert canyon.

      The nosy neighbor was at it again. He could see movement in the window and fought down annoyance. He didn’t care for an audience and somehow he doubted she would either. “May I come in?” He tried a friendly, casual smile he was far from feeling. “I swear, I left my ax-murdering kit at home.”

      Those eyes studied him for a moment longer, then she pushed up the safety latch and opened the door.

      The inside of the apartment was as depressing as the exterior. It had the unlived-in air of a seedy motel room, the kind where they charge you extra for sheets.

      A particularly ugly gold-and-blue couch ran the length of one wall and a matching chair faced it, but they were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The only anything in the room. He frowned. There were no pictures on the wall, no books, no knickknacks. None of the little personal items people liked to scatter around the corners of their lives.

      So Grace Solarez wasn’t much of an interior decorator. There was no law against that.

      He shifted his attention from her home and looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time. She appeared as tired and worn-out as her surroundings, with sallow skin and huge purple shadows under her eyes.

      And she was younger than he would have expected. Late-twenties, maybe. Certainly too young to have that look of fragile despair haunting those big dark eyes.

      She wore a thin T-shirt, faded gray from many washings, a pair of worn cutoffs and nothing else. His gaze was drawn to her long, slim legs, to the soft curve of her breasts under the threadbare cotton, and Jack was astonished—and disgusted—at himself for the little kick of awareness in his gut.

      Maybe Piper McCall was right. His business partner was always telling him he’d been too long without a woman. There might be some truth to that, especially if he could get all worked up about one who looked like she’d been on the wrong end of a runaway bus.

      She had left the door open, so she could call for help if he decided to attack, he imagined, and now she clutched the frame as if she couldn’t stand without it.

      “Why did you say you’ve been looking for me?” Her voice again sounded thin, disoriented.

      “I don’t believe I said.” He decided to put his suspicions away for now. Whatever her reasons for being there, whatever her involvement, she had plucked Emma from that burning car where the man who took her would have been willing to let her burn.

      “I’ve come to thank you,” he finally said.

      “For?”

      “For saving my daughter’s life,” he said quietly.

      She frowned and he noticed her knuckles were bony and white on the doorframe. “Wh-what?”

      “Oh, and to give you this.” He thrust out the picture.

      At the sight of it in his hands, those huge dark eyes widened even farther and what little color he could see in her face leached away like sheets left hanging too long in the sun.

      With a soft, almost apologetic moan, Grace Solarez collapsed in a tangled heap on her gold shag carpet.

      Chapter 2

      For an instant after she fell, Jack just stared in shock at the tangle of dark hair hiding her face. Maybe she was a junkie coming off a bad trip. Maybe that’s why she risked almost certain death to save Emma—because she was too high to know any better, so whacked out she had lost all sense of self-preservation.

      The reminder of how very much he owed Grace Solarez—junkie or not—spurred him to quick action and he knelt by her side. “Ma’am? Ms. Solarez?”

      She didn’t answer. He pushed back a thick hank of hair to find her eyes closed, her face the color of faded news-print. Her skin felt hot, and up close she looked even more haggard than she had at first, with those dark circles ringing her eyes and cracked, swollen lips.

      If not for the slight rise and fall of her chest under the thin shirt, he would have thought she was dead. He started to roll her over but a tiny cry СКАЧАТЬ