Secretive Stranger

Chapter 4

Sophie switched off her recorder and stood up. “You’ve been wonderful, Mrs. Hoffman.” It had been a productive Monday afternoon, but she could see her eighty-one-year-old interviewee was wilted now.

“You’ve brought my memories to life again, child,” Mrs. Hoffman answered in German. She, too, stood up, with the help of a cane. “No one ever listened to my side before.”

“They should have.” Maybe it was a job, but Sophie still leaned over to kiss Mrs. Hoffman’s cheek. Before gathering up her work and jacket, she carted the German porcelain cup to the miniature kitchen in the back. Mrs. Hoffman always served some kind of fancy tea, but Sophie didn’t want the elderly woman cleaning up after her.

Her mind was still spinning from the stories Greta Hoffman had shared. She’d been just a girl when Hitler had invaded “her” Austria. She remembered a boisterously noisy city turning suddenly silent.

“People who talked suddenly disappeared-or were just plain shot down on the street, as if they were rabid dogs,” Mrs. Hoffman recounted. “Men used to go to the beer gardens to talk politics-that stopped. Women used to chatter with neighbors at the grocer’s-that all stopped. After the war, when people kept saying, how could you have let this happen, how could you not have known? About the gas chambers. The Jews.”

Sophie had heard this before, all through these hours of interviews, but Greta’s eyes were lonely and sad, lost in her old memories.

“What people didn’t understand is that we were all afraid. To speak against Hitler meant death. Day by day, month by month, more and more people disappeared. We knew they were dead. In our hearts, we knew. But we were all frightened of dying, too. So we walked with our heads down and we hid in our houses. My father…I still remembered his slapping my face. I’d laughed at something. On the street. Laughed out loud, drawing attention to myself. My father had never hit me before…”

It was another half hour before Sophie could make it to the door and really mean her “goodbye” this time.

“It was the whispers that were dangerous,” Mrs. Hoffman echoed again. “Any whisper of a transgression could bring on certain death. You didn’t have to do anything wrong. You were judged by those rumors alone. You think whispers have no power…but they do, child, they do.”

Night had fallen hard and cold by the time Sophie climbed onto the metro. From there she walked the few blocks home, carrying the usual ten tons of equipment and satchels, on crackling leaves, through wisps of fog.

She’d thought of Cord all day-and all last night-yet now Mrs. Hoffman’s words made her think of him in a different context. Greta’s comments about whispers and rumors nailed the whole atmosphere around D.C. Some said the city thrived on the power of whispers.

Cord’s brother had sure seemed to thrive on whispers and intrigue.

Sophie crossed the road, heard a horn blare at her lack of attention, and then hustled the last half block toward home. She wished she knew whether Cord thrived on intrigue the way his brother had.

The kisses from the day before had haunted her sleep, her daydreams…like a whisper that only her heart could hear. There was no shutting it off.

She wasn’t dead positive she wanted those heart whispers to shut down. She’d liked those kisses.

She liked Cord. He was sharp, easy to talk to, interesting to be with. He provoked a razzle-dazzle in her hormones that she hadn’t felt in a long time. Yearning. Heat. All that good wickedness.

Somewhere in the apartment, she had an old photo from when she was a little girl, wearing a pink scarf of her mom’s like a boa, holding a hairbrush for a fake microphone, dramatically pelting out a song at the top of her lungs. Apparently, as a kid, she’d been quite a rowdy, show-off ham. An extrovert to the nth degree. A singer, a dancer, a weaver of daisies.

But her foster parents had needed a quiet, well-behaved child, a good girl. So she’d become one. When you lost everyone and everything that ever mattered to you, you didn’t need to sing. You needed to survive.

Caution had become a religion for her. She’d positively never risked much with men. Yet, she’d wanted to yesterday afternoon. For a few moments, caution had disappeared and that wild, rowdy girl-child had whispered through her heart again with Cord.

Stop it, Soph. She pushed open the door, dug out her mailbox key, aggravated that she was daydreaming again. Some wary instinct warned her that Cord was holding back something serious. Actually, it would have been weird if he didn’t. They barely knew each other, no reason he should have shared private things with her. And his brother’s death was complicated.

The point, though, was that she needed to rein herself in until she knew more about him.

Not that he was likely to invite her for any more kisses, anyway.

As she tromped up the stairs, she decided she needed to get her mind off Cord altogether. A plan came together-she’d kick back, pop a glass of wine, settle with Caviar on the couch and call her sisters. She had her apartment key out, because sometimes even a scatterbrain such as herself could have a bright moment…only to abruptly discover that she wouldn’t need it.

Her apartment door gaped open.

She could hear the cat meowing from a distance inside.

Confused, she took a single step in…and felt her heart start slamming like a manic drum. Her living room was in shambles. Books and knickknacks had been tumbled off shelves. A broken lamp strewed shards on the carpet. Couch cushions looked as if they’d been ripped apart by shark’s teeth.

She sucked in a breath, and let it out in one loud screech for Caviar.

When the authorities arrived this time, she was sitting on the top step in the hall, still wearing her coat, the scrawny cat cuddled on her lap. She considered it a miracle she’d been able to punch in 911. Her fingers were still shaking. She was still shaking.

One trauma in a week was enough. As far as Sophie was concerned, two traumas were grounds for major hysteria. If she wanted to fold in a puddle and blubber for a good long time, she was entitled.

Two policemen showed up this time. The first, she remembered from before, because, humorously, he looked a little like a bleary-eyed bloodhound. Ed or George. Bassett, she thought. He took one look at her and sighed.

She’d sensed he hadn’t liked her when they first met, and this time he looked even more annoyed. “You’re developing an interesting pattern of attracting trouble, Ms. Campbell. Bad trouble. Now, why is that?”

Her jaw almost dropped. It was as if he were accusing her of causing this. “Detective, I just got home from work and found the door open. I haven’t a clue who would do this. Or why.”

“If you thought a burglar was inside your place, I find it interesting that you didn’t run like hell instead of staying right here.”

Again, Sophie couldn’t grasp what he was getting at. “I couldn’t just take off. There was Caviar.”

“Yeah. Right.” He let out another noisy, exasperated sigh, accompanied by another judgmental look. Eventually, his younger sidekick-a kid with fuzz on his chin and shiny shoes-hunched down beside her with paper and pen to take her statement, while Detective Meanie Bassett disappeared inside to examine the crime scene. She asked if she could get a glass of water, but the kid insisted that she wait, that she wasn’t supposed to enter her apartment until the detective gave an all clear.

Apparently, she could contaminate things. God forbid her fingerprints could show up in her own apartment. The hall was chilly and gloomy. She was tired and stressed when a third man showed up.

He shook her hand, identified himself as Ian Ferrell. He was older than Bassett, leaner than wire, sharp faced and sharp eyed. Sophie had no idea why she sensed this Ferrell was more in charge than the detective, but the minute he got there, things changed.

He wanted her to go into the apartment-with him. It was totally okay if she took a drink and took a minute in the bathroom, but then he wanted to walk through every room slowly with her. He wanted her to identify anything that was missing, also anything that had been moved or looked out of place. “Just study everything. Look past the damage. See if you can pinpoint specifically what the suspect was after.”

“You’re giving me the impression that you don’t believe this was a run-of-the-mill robbery,” she said anxiously.

“It could be. But we want to examine all the possibilities.” Ferrell seemed to be studying her more than the scene, particularly when she shuddered hard at the close-up of her living room.

Nothing she owned was particularly valuable, but everything had been handpicked and loved. She had nothing from her childhood but a few worn photos, certainly no belongings or keepsakes. It was as if the Campbell family had never existed. Sophie couldn’t imagine a reason in the universe why anyone would have ripped up the rental sofa, or yanked the books from the shelves, or opened up a lamp-table drawer that had nothing but scissors and thread and nail files and hand cream. What possible reason could anyone have to do this?

Yet, the way Ferrell kept studying her made something click in her mind. “You don’t think this is a chance robbery, do you?” More clicks followed that first one. “Two crimes in the same building within a week is just too much coincidence? But, Mr. Ferrell, Jon’s death was ruled an accident. Why would you think there was a relationship?”

“No one said there was,” Ferrell said patiently.

Sophie decided she must be crazy or something. The authorities seemed to be treating her as if she were guilty, instead of the victim-how paranoid could a girl get? Obviously, she wasn’t thinking straight. And how could she, given the state of her home? The darned thief had upended all eight purses in her closet. Her computer had been turned on. All her CDs and disks taken. At Ferrell’s urging, she checked her hard drive, which seemed to have all her data files intact, but it would take her hours of messing with it to be certain.

Bassett intervened at that point, told her they wanted to take her system with them.

“What? You can’t do that. I need it. It’s got all my work on it-” Well, that wasn’t totally true, because she had her laptop. Her laptop was her secondary backup. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that this whole mess was spinning out of control. She had two solid days of translating work to do on her system. The police heard her; they just didn’t seem to care. Being broken into felt like…an assault. Someone who’d never lost their home and family might not get how huge a violation this was. A stranger had touched the things of her heart. Broken them, diminished them. And on top of her neighbor’s traumatic death last week, it was just too much.

“Taking the desktop is necessary,” Bassett said, as if that should settle it.

Nothing was settled, as far as Sophie was concerned. The search continued. Her hands got shakier and her stomach queasier. The thief had pilfered through her freezer. What on earth had he expected to find there? And in her bedroom, drawers were yanked open, her lingerie and jewelry strewn all over the place, her mom’s pearls abandoned on the floor. The state of the pearls made her eyes sting more than anything else. She ran to pick them up-or tried to.

“No, Ms. Campbell,” Ian Ferrell said gently, “The best chance for us to find prints is to work with the items we know the perpetrator touched.”

Sophie hadn’t had a temper tantrum since she was five. She never lost it. Ever. But tarnation, she was coming darn close. “Those are my mother’s pearls. No one is taking my mother’s pearls or touching my mother’s pearls. That’s it, guys. That’s the line. I mean it-”

“Listen, Ms. Campbell,” Ferrell said patiently, “our guys will probably be here for just a couple of hours. Do you have somewhere you could go? There isn’t anything else you can help us with, so you could get some fresh air.”

“I don’t want fresh air, and I’m not leaving the cat.”

“Now just think,” Bassett said flatly, “you’re not going to feel safe staying here alone tonight anyway, are you? I’m sure the cat will be fine. And tomorrow morning, if you wouldn’t mind coming down to the station to make a statement-”

“Are you guys crazy or am I? I’ve already made a statement. I’ve told you everything I know. I’m the one who’s the victim here, remember?”

At the precise moment she was about to wring George Bassett’s jowly neck-or let a bunch of frustrated tears spring loose-she saw Cord striding in her front door.

Maybe she wasn’t the kind of woman to depend on a hero-and she hadn’t lived a life where she could possibly need one-but when he met her eyes, she flew toward him faster than a thief for a bank vault. He had her tucked under his shoulder in two seconds flat.

Every sensory nerve in her body took him in. His face was windburned, his pulse fast, as if he’d been running. He was wearing old corduroys and his battered sheepskin jacket, and he hadn’t shaved. The feel of his scratchy chin on her forehead, the heat and strength of his long, tall body-she couldn’t remember such a sense of belonging with someone else. Maybe she was just traumatized, but who cared? Damn but he felt good.

“You needed more hell, did you?” he murmured.

Naturally, she was curious how he’d showed up right then, but she didn’t ask. She didn’t care. “This has been a nightmare,” she said helplessly. “I can’t imagine why anyone would have done this to me. Why, how, who-anything. So much wealth around here, why would anyone pick on me?”

He didn’t answer, just took charge-not in a big, noisy way. He just stepped in, intervened. The next few minutes passed in such a blur that they barely registered. She noticed something in the way Bassett and Ferrell responded to his showing up, the way they talked to him-they knew Cord.

If that should have alerted something on her internal wary scale, it didn’t. Nothing did.

“I’m taking her out of here for a while,” Cord told the cops. “Get her something to eat, a drink.”

She said, “Caviar’s traumatized. I really don’t want to leave him alone.”

Cord noted the cat cuddled under her coat, gently hooked the mangy feline under an arm and escorted him to her bed in the other room. “He’s a tomcat,” he reminded her. “I do believe he’s had a few terrorizing experiences in the past and survived them.”

“But he’s a tomcat who came in from the cold. He wants shelter now. I don’t want to let him down.”

“Sophie.”

“What?”

“You’re not letting him down,” he said patiently. “We’re just getting out of here for a few minutes. Grab some food. Find a quiet place to just chill for a while. Then we’ll come back here. I’ll sleep next door. You won’t be alone. The cat won’t be alone. How’s that for a plan?”

It was a good plan. It was the best plan she’d ever heard. She wanted to be with Cord and away from here, more than anything she could imagine wanting.

But the complete trust she wanted to feel with him wasn’t quite there. She wanted it to be. Sophie knew perfectly well she was a sissy in the guy department, too damned afraid of being abandoned to give trust unless she had every lock latched, every T crossed, every possible question out on the table. But still…she couldn’t just make those worry buzzers in her heart totally shut off.

“I should call my sisters. And Jan and Hillary and Penelope-the neighborhood women. They’ll have seen the cop cars. They’ll be concerned.”

“So bring your cell,” Cord said.

Well, sheesh. After that, she couldn’t think of any more objections.

Bassett and Ferrell undoubtedly thought he was going along with their plans by getting Sophie out of the way, but Cord’s motivation came from an entirely different source.

Outside, his car was double-parked-not an uncommon occurrence around D.C.-but at the cost of tickets, a lot easier to pull off when you had the authorities’ permission. Sophie didn’t seem to notice where he was parked. When he helped her into the passenger seat of his Bronc, she flinched at the passing lights of a cop car. By the time he’d started the engine, his jaw felt glued together.

She looked more fragile than a rose petal. Fragile, crushable and damned scared. She got out her cell phone, obviously intending to call her sisters and friends, but for a few moments she just sat silently, locked in her seat belt and folded up inside her jacket as if hoping she could disappear.

Cord weaved in and out of traffic, turning right on Pennsylvania, his veins pumping adrenaline. He wished she could do exactly that-disappear. The woman was in danger. And because the cops thought Sophie was guilty of something, they weren’t going to protect her. They wanted to use her.

It was Ferrell who’d called him, and that message was still ringing in his mind. Ferrell told him about the break-in, told him if there was ever a good shot at getting information out of Sophie Campbell, it was now. She could have staged the break-in herself, to divert suspicion. If she hadn’t, then whoever Cord’s brother had been blackmailing believed that Sophie either had the evidence-or knew where it was.

Jon’s autopsy had come back. There’d been two critical blows-one to the back of the head, one to the forehead. The latter had propelled him down the stairs, and was how he’d ended up lying on his back, but it had been the first blow that had really been the killer. There was no hard evidence to pin down the culprit, but according to Bassett, it was either a woman or a short man.

The cops had figured the killer as a woman from the start. More than ever, they wanted Cord to grill Sophie. Or as Ferrell put it, grill her or seduce her. Whatever worked to get information from her.

Cord’s grip tightened on the wheel while he listened to her calling friends on her cell phone. She left messages for her sisters, didn’t reach Hillary, but connected to Jan Howell…who questioned her on every detail, what happened, what the cops said, what she’d said, making promises to tell everyone else so she didn’t have to repeat the call, offering to immediately come over-on and on. When Sophie hung up, she leaned back against the seat as if too wiped out to hold her head up.

“Hillary…she’s the one with the extraordinary, um…?” Cord had a hard time keeping the brunettes straight.

“Boobs. Yes.” Sophie didn’t open her eyes. “That figure of hers is so ironic. She’s soft-spoken, very shy, and a doctor-smarter than any ten people I know. Yet all people notice are her looks.”

“Hard not to.”

“I know. Women prejudge her, too. I’m just saying…she’s a true-blue kind of person.”

In Sophie’s judgment, Cord mused. “And Jan, the friend you did manage to reach. She’s the real tall glass of water, looks like she dresses at an art museum? The one who starts shooting the bull before she’s even said hello?”

Sophie opened one eye then. “She was great to me when I first moved here and knew nobody.”

Which meant, Cord figured, that she didn’t think a whole lot of Jan, either, but wasn’t about to knock someone who’d been good to her. “She was a friend of my brother’s?”

“Cord, every woman in the neighborhood knew your brother, and more than ninety percent, I’d guess, made a play for him. I never kept track of who he slept with. I didn’t care. Still don’t.”

She changed subjects. “I don’t want to be gone for too long.”

“We’ll be back in a couple hours, no more. Are you hungry for anything special?”

“I couldn’t possibly eat a thing,” she assured him.

Uh-huh. He used his cell to order takeout. In less than an hour, he’d picked up the brown bag, spread out a stadium blanket from the trunk and had Sophie installed on the grass with a view of the Washington Monument. She plowed through the War Sui Gui, then the Shrimp Fried Rice, then two egg rolls and a little Steak Kow.

Cord started to worry if he’d bought enough. The blanket wasn’t much protection against the cold ground, but her jacket was warm enough for the Arctic, and overall, she just seemed to calm down. “I love the Washington Monument,” she said-or tried to say. Her mouth was pretty full.

“Yeah, me, too. Hate politics. Hate a lot about Washington. But when I look at the monument lit up at night…”

“It gives me shivers. Good shivers.”

It didn’t give him shivers, but something was right about this place, this time, this country. Her. Him. Although, once she’d inhaled all that food, she lost some of that lost look and started talking.

“Both those policemen knew you,” she said in an accusing tone.

“Yeah, of course they did.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“Because they’re the ones who told me about Jon’s death. I’ve spent more hours with them than I’d care to count.” When she tucked up her legs and didn’t respond further, he pushed with a “What?”

“There’s something you’re not telling me. Something everybody’s not telling me. Something’s…wrong.”

“Of course there is. Two serious crimes took place in your apartment building in less than two weeks.”

“That part, I get. What I don’t understand is why I keep getting the feeling the police are hiding information from me. As if they know something about who might have vandalized my place, but for some reason they don’t want to tell me the whole story.”

There were others out, enjoying the night. People always loved seeing the monuments at night, and lovers traditionally used the strolls around the mall to snuggle together. Yards away, Cord heard the hum of conversation, a woman’s whispers.

The only whispers he wanted to hear, though, were Sophie’s. Her hair looked like a spill of silver in the starlight, her eyes liquid dark. Magical. He wasn’t the kind to believe in magic or spells…yet, there was something he couldn’t explain when he was with Sophie. For one thing, he knew perfectly well the cops didn’t want him telling her the truth.

Yet, how could he possibly protect her if she didn’t understand more of the bigger picture?

“Sophie…I think the police don’t totally trust you.”

Her response was an immediate chuckle. “Of course they do. Everyone trusts me!” She pointed to her face, as if it would be obvious to anyone looking at her that she couldn’t fib without broadcasting it to the universe.

But when he looked at her face, all he could think of was wanting to kiss it. To see her eyes widen with vulnerability. To see those soft red lips part, to let him in. Just him. Only him.

Hell. Where had that come from?

He tried to get back on track. “The police think you might have some idea what the thief wanted from your apartment.”

“How am I possibly supposed to know what that could be?”

He said patiently, “From what Bassett said…you had a stash of money in your cookie jar. A hundred bucks. No one took it. You had some jewelry, but no one took that, either. Computer, TV, electronics-all the stuff thieves go for was still there. So the thief had to want something else. And maybe that ‘something’ is related to my brother’s death-because why else would the two traumatic incidents take place in the same building, within two weeks of each other?”

She cocked her head, looked at him with such empathy. “Cord, I understand why you want there to be a reason for your brother’s death. The fire that killed my parents…it haunted my sisters and me for years. We just wanted there to be a reason, some way to make sense of what happened, something we could blame. But there was never a reason, not that anyone could find. I know it’s hard. I know. Even if you weren’t close to your brother, I totally understand why you feel pushed to find a reason for his death, something that mattered. Something that could help you put closure on the loss…”

Guilt felt like a coffin nail. He hated not being able to totally fill her in. Sophie still didn’t know Jon’s death was a murder. The authorities had honest reasons for keeping the cause of death quiet, but that failed to appease his conscience. Her warm compassion bit. He knew he hadn’t earned her sympathy.

“Sophie…” He’d brought a bottle of wine with the take-out dinner. Maybe wine wasn’t precisely legal out there in the open, but she stopped looking so white and anxious after a couple of paper cups. He poured her a little more. “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. About any reasons you can imagine why someone might have broken into your place. Think.”

She took another sip. “Well…my foster parents left me a nest egg. At the time they took me in, they were considered too old to adopt, by the rules then. But they created a trust for me, because they knew…” She gulped again. “They knew I had nightmares for years, about losing my home, my parents, my family, everything. They didn’t want me to be afraid that could ever happen again. So they wanted me to have something to fall back on. But, Cord, I can’t imagine anyone knows about that but my sisters. I’ve traveled too much with my job to have accumulated much, and I’m pretty sure no one would say I run around looking wealthy.”

He definitely wouldn’t say that. She ran around in clothes and colors that made her look nondescript-and he was beginning to understand why. She didn’t want trouble. She did everything but stand on her head to not attract trouble, any kind of trouble…so this whole mess had to be her worst nightmare.

Her revealing the business about her nest egg showed that she trusted him-was risking her trust on him.

That alone revealed her innocence to him, in both senses of the word. The more he knew her, the more time he spent with her, the more beautiful he could see she was. The wrong kind of beauty. The dangerous kind of beauty. The true-blue vulnerability in her eyes was the kind that could attract the worst predators. And Cord sure as hell couldn’t be the only man who saw beneath the silly clothes and glasses to the Sophie underneath.

Impatiently, he said, “Come on, Soph. There has to be something else.”

This conversation was getting nowhere-at least not in the direction it was supposed to go. The more Cord believed in Sophie’s innocence, the more he realized that the guilty party, the one who murdered his brother, was still out there free. And Sophie was a stop sign in the way.

Sophie shrugged her shoulders. “You keep saying there has to be something else. But I’ve told you all the something elses I can think of, Cord.”

He tugged at the collar of her jacket when he caught her shivering. “When the police looked into Jon’s death, they were uneasy about some loose ends. They had the impression Jon was hiding something.”

“You mean drugs?”

“Not drugs. But something that explains all the trap doors and hidey-holes and locked gadgets in his apartment. I don’t have the whole picture,” he said, with complete honesty. “But I’m getting enough to be…worried. And now someone’s ransacked your place.”

She shook her head in bewilderment. “You’re making it sound as if you believe there’s a connection.”

Cord had had it with juggling what he could tell her and what he couldn’t. Maybe he couldn’t tell her the authorities’ “truth.” But he could sure as hell choose to share his own. “I believe my brother was involved in something unsavory. Even as a kid, he was always looking for ways to make a buck without having to do anything as annoying as real work. The way this appears, I think Jon had information about certain important people. Affairs, mistakes-that kind of thing. I don’t know who or what. But I believe his ‘victims’ want that information back, and are particularly worried what happened to it since Jon died.”

Sophie gulped down more wine and held out her paper cup. “No matter what the police said, you don’t think your brother’s death was an accident, do you?”

“Nope. I don’t.”

She waggled her cup. “More wine.”

“Don’t you think you’ve had quite a bit?”

“Not if we’re going to talk about murder.”

He filled her cup again and quit arguing.