LITMIR.BIZ

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Mariah one last worried look, squared his shoulders and headed toward Rudy Chavez with a swagger that would have done John Wayne proud.

      “Put your head between your knees,” Trace advised Mariah gruffly. He pressed his palm against the top of her head, urging it down. “That should help.”

      She shook off his touch. “Help?” Her laugh was short and bitter. Her eyes were dull with the sheen of shock. “Help who? Laura?”

      The question didn’t demand a response, but Trace answered her anyway. “I’m afraid it’s too late for your sister.”

      “Too late.” She squeezed her hands together until her knuckles turned white and pressed them against her eyes. “It was the damn river.”

      “The river?”

      “It was flooding. Someone had put up a stupid barricade and I was afraid to try crossing it in the dark.” Her hands limply dropped to her sides. She lowered her forehead to her knees, not to keep from fainting, but because the pain shooting through her was so intense. “I spent the rest of the night in Camp Verde.”

      A slow breath shuddered through her. She lifted her head again. “When was she killed?”

      Trace knew where she was headed. He also knew second-guessing fate was asking for trouble. “We don’t know exactly,” he hedged. “Not yet.”

      “Surely you have a ballpark estimate.”

      “The coroner’s currently putting the time of death between two and three.”

      “This morning.”

      “Yes.”

      “Dammit.” Trace recognized the expression in her bleak gaze. It was one he was personally familiar with. Guilt. “If I’d only gotten here on time, she’d still be alive.”

      Something made him want to take both her soft hands in his and hold on tight until he could convince her that such thoughts were self-destructive. That they could eat away at your insides like battery acid. Cursing softly, he sat down beside her.

      “You can’t know that,” he said, attempting to soothe the accusations running rampant in her head. He knew, all too well, exactly what those voices sounded like.

      “I told her I’d be here by midnight. If I had—”

      “The intruders might have killed you, too.”

      “Intruders?” She looked at him in surprise.

      “Right now it appears your sister woke up during a robbery.”

      “A robbery.” She bit her lip, taking it in. “Then Alan wasn’t the one who killed her?”

      “Why would you think the senator shot your sister?” he asked with a studied lack of inflection. Just the facts ma’am.

      “Because Alan Fletcher is a son of a bitch who only married my sister for her money and her political connections.”

      Her color had returned. Her eyes cleared. Scarlet flags waved in her cheeks. Trace watched her spine stiffen and knew she wasn’t going to faint.

      “If that’s true, you’d think he’d want to keep her alive.”

      “Not really,” Mariah argued. As she reached into her bag for her cigarettes, the mists began lifting from her mind. She was beginning to be able to think again.

      On some distant level she knew there would still be pain to deal with. A horrendous amount of pain and remorse and regret. But at the moment, she found it easier to concentrate on the crime as if it were a new script she was writing.

      “Since I doubt if Laura asked Alan to sign a prenuptial, he’d be first in line to inherit her money, not to mention a sizable trust fund. And this ranch.

      “As for political support, our father handpicked the ambitious bastard to be his son-in-law.” She shook out a cigarette and went digging for the art test matches in the depths of the bag. “The only thing that would make the mighty Matthew Swann retract his political support would be if he discovered a Communist Party membership card lurking in Alan’s wallet.

      “Of course, now that the Evil Empire is no longer a threat, he might even turn a blind eye to that.” She jammed the cigarette between her lips and was appalled to discover that her hands were trembling too badly to light it.

      Her scorn, Trace noted, appeared to be evenly divided between her brother-in-law and her father. She was angry and bitter and didn’t bother to hide it.

      As he took the matches and lit the cigarette, Trace also realized she hadn’t yet asked about the senator.

      “Your brother-in-law was shot, too,” he told her.

      “Is he dead?”

      “No. He’s in surgery, but the doctor says he’s not in any danger.”

      “Too bad.” She drew in the smoke and shook her head. “Hell. This will probably earn him another fifty thousand votes come election time.

      “Has anyone notified my father?” Now that she thought about it, Mariah was surprised that he wasn’t here trying to control this scene and everyone in it.

      “My dispatcher has been trying to reach him. Apparently he’s in New Mexico. No one seems to know how to get hold of your mother.”

      “That’s probably because she left town when I was five.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      Mariah shrugged and exhaled a thin blue cloud. Her throat was raw from a night of cigarettes. She really was going to have to stop one of these days. “There’s no need to apologize.”

      She looked back at the house, her gaze drifting to the upstairs window as if hoping to see her sister standing there.

      Trace remembered how, when he’d finally gotten sprung from the hospital, he’d taken a cab to the police garage and sat in the driver’s seat of the unmarked cruiser, imagining Danny riding shotgun beside him.

      At the time, he’d felt foolish and hoped like hell none of the other detectives would discover him there. They hadn’t, and oddly, for that brief time, he’d actually felt a little better. Not good. But better.

      “My mother lives in Bel Air. I see her quite often.” Since it was obvious he didn’t know, Mariah decided she may as well be the one to tell him. “She’s Margaret McKenna.”

      Mariah gave him credit for keeping the surprise from showing. Instead, his eyes narrowed and moved slowly over her face in a judicious appraisal.

      Margaret McKenna had been an old-style, Hollywood bombshell. Her haughty, Ice Queen performances had radiated with the type of carnality often imitated but rarely equaled. Kathleen Turner had come close in Body Heat, Trace decided. Madonna? Sharon Stone? Forget it.

      Her voice had been the kind of sultry, whiskey baritone that could make all of a man’s nerves stand on end. And when those huge one-of-a-kind emerald eyes bore down on you from the oversize movie screen, it was as if she were aiming down the barrel of a gun. As a bonus, she’d been a helluva good actress, too.

      “Now that you mention it, I can see the resemblance,” Trace decided finally. It was in the unflinching directness of the eyes, the remarkable cheekbones, the pointed, argumentative chin. But mostly it was attitude.

      “Actually, Laura looks more like our mother.”

      He didn’t miss her use of the present tense. Death took getting used to. Murder took even longer.

      Belatedly realizing what she’d said, Mariah sighed and stabbed the cigarette out on the rock. “This sucks.”

      “Yes. It does.” He stopped being a concerned listener and went back to being a cop. “Look, I don’t know when we’re going to be able to track down your father and with the senator in surgery—”

      “You

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