Kincaid’s Dangerous Game

Chapter 3

Still smiling, Holt tucked the folded napkin and its contents away in his inside jacket pocket. The smile was only for show. He didn’t have any idea whether DNA could be recovered from the wooden skewer, and he didn’t know whether Billie would see through his bluff. Or, as she would no doubt put it, call him on it.

Waiting at the cash register for the mother-daughter duo to process his credit card, with his peripheral vision he could see her still sitting just as he’d left her, staring straight ahead, apparently at nothing. He wondered what in the hell she was going to do now. Was she really going to let him just walk away? He was her ride back to the garden shop, of course, but it wasn’t that far if she decided she’d rather walk.

What was going through her mind right now?

He wished now that he’d taken a little more time to study her playing style before rushing off to Vegas to meet her. He had no clue how this woman’s mind worked.

He signed the receipt, tucked it and his credit card in his wallet and returned the wallet to his pocket, then turned to check once more on his erstwhile lunch companion. His heart did a skip and a stumble when he saw that the booth where she’d been sitting was now empty.

Swearing, he slammed through the double doors and half ran to the parking lot. She wasn’t there. Since there was no way she could have gone farther in the time available, he reversed course and got to the restaurant’s foyer just in time to meet her as she came out of the restroom, drying her hands on her jeans and looking completely unperturbed.

“Ah, there you are,” Holt said, hoping she wouldn’t pick up on the fact that his heart was pounding and he was breathing like a marathon runner. “I was about to go off without you.”

“Yeah, right,” she said as she walked past him and pushed through the double doors. She was smiling that damn little half-smile of hers, the one that made her seem ancient and all-knowing.

About halfway to the car she threw him a sideways glance and said in an amused tone, “Do you really think you can get DNA from a wooden stick?”

“I don’t know,” Holt replied. “I guess I’m about to find out.”

She laughed. It was a low, husky sound, but like a shrilling alarm clock, it awoke the sensual awareness of her that had been dozing just below the levels of his consciousness. His skin shivered with it, a pleasurable sensation he tried without success to deny.

Determined to ignore it, he unlocked her side of the car and went around to do the same to his, since his restored 1965 Mustang didn’t come equipped with power door-locks. He slid into his seat as she did hers, and from the corner of his eye he saw her run her hands appreciatively over the black leather upholstery. He was suddenly acutely aware of the warmth of the leather seat on his backside. Although it was comfortably cool outside, the air in the car seemed too thick to breathe.

He got the engine turned on and the air-conditioning going full blast, and as he was waiting for it to take effect, she said in that same throaty voice, “I really do like your car, by the way.”

“Thanks.” Good God, what now? Was she actually flirting with him?

“Did you restore it yourself?”

“No. I got it from a grateful client.” He backed out of the parking place, then abruptly shifted gears and pulled back into it. “Tell me something,” he said as he slapped the gearshift into Neutral. “Why should you be afraid of the DNA result anyway?”

“Who says I’m afraid?”

“It’s not like you’re wanted by the police,” he went on, “or a suspect in a crime. All this is, is a family that’s trying to find their missing sister.”

Sister. Sistersistersister… Thank God he couldn’t see inside her mind, see that word pulsing there like the gaudiest neon on the Vegas Strip. Thank God for the years of training that would keep him from knowing the pain she felt with every starburst.

“Yeah, well,” she said, hating the gravel in her voice, “see, that’s the thing. I’m nobody’s sister. Okay?” Don’t deserve to be. Don’t you understand? I lost that right a long time ago.

“Pity,” Holt said softly, putting the Mustang once more into reverse. “These are some nice people. You couldn’t ask for a better family to be a part of.”

Yeah, right, Billie thought, and it was all she could do to keep from erupting in derisive laughter. Nice didn’t come anywhere close to describing the brother she remembered.

Then…something he’d said. Something that had been blasted out of her head at the time by the sound of that name: Brooke Fallon. But…she remembered now. He’d said brothers. Plural. But how could that be? She only had one brother.

“So, tell me about ’em,” she said, concentrating everything she had on keeping her tone light, making her interest seem only casual. Inside her head was a cacophony of thoughts, a jabbering madhouse of incomprehension and confusion, a babel of questions she couldn’t ask without giving herself away.

“Why should you want to know?” He tossed her a look as he headed out of the parking lot. “If you’re not, as you say, the person I’m looking for, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

Panic seized her. It was only a few short blocks to the garden center; he’d be dropping her off in a minute or two. But she had to know. She had to know.

She could feel herself beginning to tremble inside. How much longer could she keep him from noticing?

She shrugged with elaborate unconcern. “Hey, it sounds like an interesting story, okay?” Paused at a traffic light, he looked over at her again, smiling sardonically. She gave him back her most winning smile. “I’d really like to hear it.”

Holt felt a quickening, a swift surge of exultation. He’d never been fishing in his life, but he imagined this must be what a fisherman experienced when he felt that unmistakable tugging on his line. “It’s kind of a long story,” he said with doubt in his voice. “Don’t you have to get back to work?”

There was a moment of absolute silence, yet he could hear her sigh of frustration like a faint breath, hear the crackle of tension in her muscles and joints like the rustling of fabric on skin. He wondered if it was because he couldn’t read her the usual way, with his eyes, that he seemed to be developing the ability to pick up on her with his other senses.

The garden center loomed ahead. Holt slowed, turned into the parking lot. He pulled into the first empty space he came to and stopped, leaving the motor running, then looked over at Billie. She was sitting motionless, facing forward, and from her profile he could see behind her glasses, for once. Her eyes were closed. For some reason that jolted him, and he saw her in a way he hadn’t been able to up till now.

Vulnerable.

“Yeah. Okay, sure.” She let out a careful breath and gave him a thin, empty smile-no dimples, this time. “Listen, thanks for lunch.” She opened the door, slid her legs out, then looked back at him. “And good luck finding her-the person you’re looking for.” She got out of the car.

He was in a quandary, letting her go. He wondered if this was what a fisherman would call letting the fish “run.” If it was, he decided he didn’t have the nerve for it. He had her hooked, he was sure of it. Had her almost literally in his hands. Yet, short of bodily kidnapping her, he couldn’t reel her in. Not yet, anyway. He couldn’t bear to let her walk away from him, but at this point, what choice did he have?

The funny thing was, he was pretty sure she didn’t want to walk away from him, either. If she was Brenna Fallon, as he was dead certain she was, her insides had to be a mess right about now. He’d just dropped a hand grenade into her life. She had to have a million questions she was dying to ask but couldn’t, not without admitting who she was. Or, to use another one of those damn poker analogies that seemed to be everywhere lately, folding.

Again, he couldn’t be sure, since he hadn’t watched her play very much, but he had an idea Billie Farrell didn’t fold very often.

She’d paused, standing in the V of the open car door, and in that moment he heard himself say, “I’m going to be around awhile…”

She ducked down to give him her knowing half smile. “Right-for your sister’s wedding.”

He gave her back a huff of unamused laughter. “If you really want to hear the story, come by my hotel after work. I’ll buy you a drink-or you can buy me one.”

“A drink?”

“A beer…martini…something with an umbrella in it-hell, I don’t care.”

Her smile broadened. “How ’bout a Diet Coke?”

“Whatever turns you on,” he heard himself say, and it wasn’t something he was in the habit of saying.

“Where are you staying?” Her voice was both husky and breathless, and the frisson of awareness took another meander across his skin.

He gave her the name of his hotel, a good-size one located well off the Strip. She nodded. “I know where it is.” She straightened and firmly closed the door.

Holt watched her walk away, watched a stiff November wind lift the blond feathers of her hair to catch the desert sunlight. And, after a while, let go of the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

He was driving back to his hotel when his cell phone rang. Since he wasn’t a big fan of people who tried to talk on their cell phones and drive at the same time, he picked it up and glanced at it to see if it was somebody he could ignore. When he saw who it was, he thumbed it on, said, “Hang on a minute…” and pulled into a strip mall parking lot. He turned into the first vacant spot he came to and turned off the motor, then picked up the phone again.

“Brooke-”

“Have you seen her? Is it her?” Her voice was high and anxious, on the edge of tears.

“I’ve just come from having lunch with her-”

“Oh God…”

“-and, to be perfectly honest, I can’t be sure. She says she’s not your sister, but…”

Now her voice dropped to a husky mutter. “I don’t understand.”

Holt sighed deeply. “Look, I’m pretty sure Billie Farrell and Brenna Fallon are one and the same. She’s probably got her reasons for not wanting to admit it. I imagine it wasn’t easy being on her own at fourteen. She’s learned to be careful about who she trusts.”

“Did you tell her-” Brooke expelled a breath in an impatient hiss and reined herself in. “Yes, okay. But the pictures I gave you-has she changed so much?” Her voice was wistful, close to tears again.

He ran a weary hand over his eyes; he was beginning to feel the effects of a night without sleep. “Hard to tell. If I could just see her eyes…” He gave a huff of frustrated laughter. “But she wouldn’t take off the damn dark glasses.”

Brooke laughed, too, a small gulp. “I know, I keep watching the poker game over and over, screaming at the TV screen, Dammit, Bren, take off the damn sunglasses!”

There was a long pause, and then she said softly, “She has very distinctive eyes, Holt. Not like mine, or Cory’s. Hers are…I guess they’re what you call hazel. But they’re sort of golden, actually. Almost the same color as her hair.”

“According to Cory,” Holt said, “those are your mother’s eyes. Your brother Matt has them, too.”

Billie was in her bathroom, huddled under the warm shower spray, trying to think.

She’d asked for the afternoon off, pleading illness, and since she’d never done such a thing before, ever, her boss had not only given it to her, but had expressed his concern for her health.

“Probably just a bug-one of those twenty-four-hour flu things,” Billie had told him. And the truth was, she did feel kind of sick to her stomach.

She didn’t know what to do. She really had not seen this coming. The thing with Miley, yeah; she always had suspected her past would come back to haunt her one day. She just hadn’t thought the ghosts would come from so far in her past.

Every instinct she had was telling her to get the heck out of Dodge-she’d even gotten her old suitcase down out of the overhead storage in her parking garage, but had left it sitting empty beside the back door. Because what was the point? Holt Kincaid had managed to find her once, and he’d surely find her again, no matter where she ran. She couldn’t go back on the streets where she could vanish into the legions of anonymous dispossessed; she wasn’t fourteen anymore-she was a grown-up member of society, fully documented and therefore traceable.

What was she going to do? What could she do?

It was at that point in her panic that she’d headed for the shower. She did some of her best thinking in the shower.

So. What were her options?

Running would always be her first choice, but in this case, probably a bad one. Not only would it be futile, at best only postponing the inevitable, but there was the thing about brothers. Holt Kincaid had said brothers.

Admit it, Billie, you’re dying to know what that’s about.

And, the man with the answers is dying to tell you.

So why don’t you do it? Go see the man, buy him that drink-or let him buy you one-and see what he has to say. What are you afraid of?

Afraid?

That did it. She turned off the water and yanked back the shower curtain. Grabbed a towel and scrubbed her skin rosy and her hair into layers of spikes, every movement jerky with anger. If there was anything in the world Billie hated, it was being afraid. She was done with being afraid. Done long ago with feeling scared and helpless. Knowledge was power, right? These days, Billie Farrell was all about having the power. Which meant she had to have the knowledge.

And the man with the knowledge was Holt Kincaid.

The ringing telephone dragged Holt into consciousness from the depths of a sound and dreamless sleep. He groped first for his cell phone, then realized it was the room phone that was making the racket.

What the hell? he thought. A glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand told him it was three o’clock in the afternoon, since it was obviously daylight. Too early for Billie to be off work. He picked up the receiver and growled, “Kincaid.”

“Hey, you up for that drink?”

“Billie?” He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, scrubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Where are you?”

“In the lobby. What’s the matter, did I wake you up?”

“Yeah, well…I didn’t get much sleep last night.” He was wide awake now, and his heart was going a mile a minute.

“So you coming down, or what?”

“Yeah, sure. Give me five minutes.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll be in the bar. Want me to order for you?”

“Make it the coffee shop,” Holt said, swallowing a yawn. “You can order me a cup of coffee-black.”

As he lurched into the bathroom to splash water on his face and run a comb through his hair, he was wondering one thing: Would Billie be wearing her sunglasses?

In the parlance of Vegas, he was willing to lay odds on it.

Billie would have given a lot to be able to keep her heart from pounding when she saw Holt Kincaid standing in the entrance to the coffee shop. But although she’d learned to control a good many of her body’s natural reflexes, pulse rate wasn’t one of them.

Schooling her visible movements to be slow, careful, deliberate, she picked up her Coke and took a sip, then watched over the rim of the moisture-beaded glass as he spoke to the hostess, who pointed him toward the table where she was sitting. She smiled as she saw the hostess’s body language change in the subtle and indefinable ways of a woman in the presence of a very attractive man.

He was attractive, no denying that. Wearing the same slacks, jacket and open-at-the-neck dress shirt he’d had on this morning, he didn’t look quite so out of place in the hotel restaurant as he had wandering among the potted plants at the garden center. But no matter what kind of setting he found himself in, she thought, Holt Kincaid wasn’t a man to fade into the woodwork.

The hostess’s eyes followed him as he zigzagged his way across the almost-empty dining room, and so did Billie’s. When he pulled out the chair opposite her, she saw that he had a bedspread wrinkle across one cheek, and something in her chest did a peculiar little flip.

Another thing she hadn’t learned to control-yet. She definitely needed to work on that.

Holt settled into the chair and reached for the cup of coffee steaming on the table in front of him, gave her a little nod of greeting and drawled, “Miss Billie.”

“Wow,” she said, lifting her eyebrows, “that didn’t sound like California.”

He drank coffee, grimaced and set it down. “I said I live in L.A. I was born and raised in Georgia.”

“Really. You don’t have an accent. Usually.”

“I left the South behind fairly early on. It still crops up now and again, I guess.”

Most people would have missed the slight flinching of the soft skin around his eyes when he said that, but Billie didn’t. And she thought, Aha. He’s got ghosts in his past, too.

She filed the knowledge away for future reference.

“Sorry about your nap,” she said, and her eyes kept coming back to the wrinkle mark on his cheek. She had the strongest desire to reach out and touch it. Why did it seem so poignant to her? Something about that mark on the supercool, iron-hard Clint Eastwood clone brought to mind images of unexpected innocence…or vulnerability.

He regarded her while he drank coffee, then said, “I wasn’t expecting you this early.”

“Well, here I am.” She lifted a shoulder, not about to concede how badly she wanted what he had to give her. Billie didn’t give her opponents that kind of advantage over her, not if she could help it.

Holt didn’t say anything, just watched her over the rim of his coffee cup. She fought down impatient anger and said lightly, “You were going to tell me a story.”

His eyebrows rose. He set down the cup. “Just like that? No social niceties?”

She gave a little tiff of sarcastic laughter. “Social niceties? What do you want to do, put money in the jukebox and dance?”

Unbidden, the thought popped into Holt’s head that dancing with Billie Farrell might be a very nice thing. Unsettled by the notion, he gave her a thoughtful smile. For a moment the air between them did the sizzle and crackle thing, and then he thought, What the hell am I doing? He cleared his throat, shifted around in his chair and frowned. “I’m just trying to think where to start.”

“How about, who hired you to find…this woman?”

He nodded. “Fair enough. His name is Cory Pearson.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No,” said Holt, “of course you haven’t. But the story begins with him. When Cory was a little kid his dad went off to fight in Vietnam. He came back changed-nothing like the loving daddy who used to tell his little boy bedtime stories he made up himself. He was moody and withdrawn…started drinking heavily, couldn’t hold a job. It was a familiar story at that time.

“Anyway, as time went on, the family grew to include four more children-two boys, and then twin girls. When their father was having one of his spells of PTSD, it was Cory’s job to keep the little ones out of his way while his mother tried to talk her husband back from whatever hell he’d gotten lost in. Finally, one night when the little girls-the twins-were about two, their father had a violent episode during which he shot his wife and then himself.”

“Good God,” Billie exclaimed.

Holt nodded, picked up his cup and found it empty. A waitress appeared to refill it. He thanked her, waited until she had left, then went on. All the while Billie sat without moving, without seeming to breathe, even, her face gone still and pale as death.

“Since there was no other family, the kids were taken by social services. Evidently, no foster family could be found to take all five, so they were farmed out all over the system. Eventually, the four younger children were adopted-the two boys by one family, the twins by another.”

Billie spoke almost without moving her lips, and devoid of all inflection. “What about Cory?”

“He was older, about twelve by that time. Too old for most adoptive parents to consider. He stayed in foster care for a while, but ran away so many times trying to find his brothers and baby sisters, that he eventually wound up in juvenile detention. By the time he graduated out of the system when he was eighteen, his brothers and sisters had vanished-adopted and gone.”

Billie muttered under her breath.

Holt nodded. “He was just a kid, and a known troublemaker at that. What could he do?” He paused, cleared his throat and wondered whether, behind those dark lenses, there might, just possibly, be tears in her eyes. Was it his wishful thinking, or did her mouth have a softness about it he hadn’t seen before?

As if determined to deny that, she cleared her throat and said harshly, “Okay, so he’s hired you to find the four siblings-I get it. So why did he wait so long? Vietnam-that had to be…what, thirty years ago?”

Holt nodded. “That’s a question Cory has asked himself. Mostly, I think he’d just given up. He managed to turn his own life around-went to college, became a journalist, a war correspondent. Fairly famous one, too-won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Middle East wars. Was captured and held prisoner for a while himself.” He paused. “It was while he was in an Iraqi prison that he met a man, an aviator who had been shot down during the first Gulf War and had been in that same prison for eight years. They were rescued together. Eventually, Cory married the man’s daughter, Samantha. It was Sam who convinced Cory he needed to find his brothers and sisters. That’s when he contacted me.”

“Because you specialize in finding people.” Billie’s lips twitched slightly, too quickly to be called a smile.

“That’s right.” He spoke very softly now, too, watching her face. It occurred to him that she seemed to have gone a shade whiter, if that was possible. “As I said, I’ve found the two boys. Wade is a homicide detective in Portland, Oregon, and Matt is in Southern California-splits his year between teaching inner-city kids and being a whitewater rafting guide, which is quite a feat, considering a rock-climbing accident put him in a wheelchair a few years back. I also found one of the twins-Brooke. That was a couple of months ago. She told me-”

Billie stood up so abruptly Holt flinched back as if from an expected blow. “Like I said-can’t help you,” she mumbled, and there was no question about it now…her face was the color of cold ashes. She paused, then made a valiant attempt at a smile, obviously trying to backtrack, mend what for her had to be a catastrophic breakdown of her defenses. “Look…thanks for the Coke…Gotta go. Wasn’t watching the time…I’m supposed to be-sorry.”

She walked away, moving as rapidly through the dining room as the closely set tables would allow.

He didn’t try to stop her, or follow her, either. He knew desperation when he saw it.

Billie managed to wait until she’d turned the corner and was out of Holt Kincaid’s line of sight before she bolted. Fortunately, she’d played a tournament in the hotel and knew where the restrooms were. Even so, she barely made it into a stall before becoming wretchedly, violently ill.

Thankfully, the restroom was empty. She threw up until she had nothing left in her stomach, then collapsed onto the cold tile floor, pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them in a vain effort to stop the shaking. The pressure of sobs was like an iron fist squeezing her chest, and she hauled in air in great gulps and clenched her teeth so hard in her determination to hold them back, her jaws screamed in agony. She tore off her sunglasses and dug the heels of her hands into dry, burning eye sockets. But no matter how hard she pressed, no matter how viciously she tried to scrub them away, the images came. Images she thought she’d blocked out of her mind forever. Memories of pain and fear and humiliation and shame.

Brooke…oh, Brookie, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry…