“The job isn’t finished yet.”
“It strikes me that a bodyguard ought to cultivate a more positive, optimistic outlook. You know, so that the client doesn’t get too scared.”
“In my experience, scared clients tend to follow orders better than the carefree, never-take-anything-seriously kind.”
Vivian glanced down at the hem of her nightgown peeking out from beneath her trench coat. Then she looked at Nick. His hard profile was shadowed with the stubble of a morning beard. His hair was tousled and his shirt was wrinkled and smudged with soot. They both smelled of smoke.
“The front desk staff at the Burning Cove Hotel is going to get a shock when we check in,” she said. “We look like we spent the night in a sleazy nightclub and then wandered into a very bad alley. We don’t even have any luggage.”
“I think we can assume that the front desk staff at the Burning Cove is very well trained. Given the nature of their clientele, they’ve probably seen it all. I’ll bet they won’t even blink at the sight of us.”
“But we’re supposed to be posing as newlyweds, right?”
“So? We decided we couldn’t wait to get to the honeymoon suite at the Burning Cove. We spent our wedding night at a convenient beach.”
She wondered how he had spent his first wedding night. Depressed and mortified because he had been unable to consummate the marriage? Or was his bride the one who had been unable to deal with the physical side of things? Maybe he had discovered too late she was mentally unbalanced? There were not a lot of reasons for granting annulments. They ranged from humiliating to horrifying.
“Before you ask,” Nick said in the same too-even tone he had used when he had asked her if there was a man in her life. “Technically speaking, my marriage that wasn’t a marriage lasted about three weeks. The reality is that it ended on the wedding night.”
“I see,” she said gently. “I’m sure it was complicated.”
“You have no idea.”
Chapter 16
The failure was devastating. Inconceivable. First the loss of the journal and now a fumbled commission. A man could only take so much stress.
Jonathan Treyherne’s fingers trembled so badly he could barely get the key into the lock of his front door. When he finally made it over the threshold he whirled around and slammed the door shut. He took several deep breaths, trying to come to grips with what had happened.
The gas bomb should have worked. If the hastily concocted plan had gone well it would have appeared as if Brazier and her lover had died in a house fire. An accident. People died in house fires all the time. In addition Brazier was a photographer. That meant there were bound to have been a lot of chemicals and film lying around. The chemicals were not highly combustible but most people, including most cops, didn’t know that. As for the film, it was notoriously unstable and flammable.
Yes, the strategy had been put together without a lot of forethought. Nevertheless, it should have worked. But Brazier and the man had made it safely out of the house and now they were gone. Vanished. There was no way to know where they were at that moment; a hotel or an auto court most likely. He would find them eventually. He had to find them. There were only five days left to complete the commission. He had never missed his own, self-imposed deadlines.
He had been distracted by the theft of the journal. That was the problem.
He turned on the light and studied his reflection in the hall mirror. Nothing had changed. Good breeding, an elite education, and a handsome inheritance had endowed him with the perfect camouflage. He was every inch a member of the upper class, descended from an old, established East Coast family. No one suspected the hunter beneath the surface.
Under that charming façade, however, the hunter was howling. His book of encrypted poems had disappeared from the safe less than forty-eight hours after he had undertaken his most recent commission.
He was finding it increasingly difficult to suppress the rising panic. In his frantic effort to identify the thief he had wasted time spying on his elderly housekeeper and gardener. He had broken into their little cottage and torn the place apart. He had found nothing to indicate that they were anything but what they appeared to be—hardworking, respectable, and utterly oblivious to the true nature of their employer. In his frustration he had fired both of them.
He was equally certain that none of his former clients knew who or what he was.
It had dawned on him that since the police had not come knocking on his door he could probably assume that whoever had stolen the journal moved in the criminal underworld. He had a few connections there himself. In desperation he had placed a call to an anonymous telephone number. He had left a message. Within hours the unknown individual who called himself simply the Broker had returned his call. The Broker had said that, for a fee, he would put out the word that someone was willing to pay any amount of money for a certain book of poems. So far no one had signaled a willingness to sell.
Maybe the thief had been killed by a fellow criminal, one who had no interest in a notebook filled with poems. Maybe the volume had wound up in a city dump.
But he was afraid to let himself believe that the journal had been discarded or destroyed by someone who did not comprehend its value. He had to know exactly what had happened to it.
Again and again he told himself that the precautions he had taken by encrypting the commissions were sufficient to protect him. He had tried to convince himself that there was nothing in the journal that could be used to identify him. But he knew that was not entirely true. There was a great deal of information in the poems. Names, dates, addresses, methods. A smart cop or a savvy special agent at the Bureau might be able to put it all together in a way that pointed at him.
The man gazing out from the mirror realized that his sanity if not his life depended on balancing two equally critical tasks. He had to recover the poems before someone realized what they really were.
But he also had to complete the commission. This one was too important. It could not be ignored, set aside, or postponed.
Jonathan turned away from the looking glass and went into his study. He poured a stiff shot of brandy with a shaking hand and gulped down half the glass before he was satisfied that his nerves had begun to steady.
He lit a cigarette and went to stand at the window, looking out into the endless night. After a moment he began to think clearly once again. The Broker was his best hope for tracking down the journal. For now there was nothing more that could be done on that front.
It was time to get back to the business of completing the commission. The first step was to find Vivian Brazier.
Chapter 17
Burning Cove
The next day . . .
You’re taking a vacation in Burning Cove?” Lyra asked, voice rising in astonishment. “After losing everything in that dreadful fire last night?”