Mind Tricks (16 page)

Why was he surprised at this
turnaround? She was a con artist; she made a living from deceiving people, and
she was excellent at it. Hell, he’d congratulated himself on what a lucky
bastard he was to find a woman whom he liked, who liked him—who even liked him
in the middle of a murder investigation, for God’s sake. Yeah, that was the
second big tip-off that Emma couldn’t be what she seemed—and the second one
he’d ignored. Then, boom, just minutes after sleeping together, she kicked him
out her door.

Apparently once she got what she
wanted, she didn’t waste any time getting rid of you. But losing money to her
in a pet-psychic scam would have felt like less of a betrayal than…this.

But if she didn’t like him, why the
heck had she slept with him? A simple desire for sex didn’t explain it. In
these small towns, he would have heard long ago if she’d had a habit of sharing
her bed. It didn’t make sense.

Fuck. Lately his whole life made no
sense.

• •

It was a gorgeous, warm summer
night, but Emma piled blankets on the bed before sliding beneath them. She’d
taken a volcanically hot shower to wipe away any physical traces of Jake;
still, she continued to shiver.

She’d just had the best, almost
literally mind-blowing sex of her life—with a killer.

But sure, that made sense. After
all, she’d been working up to this accomplishment. First Antoine the cheater,
then David the klepto, and then Matty the date rapist. Now that she’d slept
with a murderer, she’d reached the apex of bad decisions. Who else was left?
Genocidal dictators? She doubted she’d find any of those in Maine, so she would
probably never have sex again.

Another shiver bucked through her,
and she pulled the blanket up to her chin. She should be sweating under this
mound of blankets, not trembling with chills.

The sound of Brutus’s toenails
clicking on the hardwood floors echoed up the stairs. Tonight, of all nights,
was a good night to have a dog in the house.

Did Jake realize what she’d seen?

She’d tried to appear calm even
while inside she was screaming over and over
Get out!
He’d left quickly enough afterward, which didn’t say much
for his boyfriend potential—aside from the fact, of course, that he’d killed a
woman only three nights ago.

God, how could she have been so
stupid
? Why had she decided to take
Jake’s word for his innocence after she hadn’t been able to see in his mind the
first time?

He was the lead suspect in a murder
investigation. She should have used common sense, as Jennie had urged her to,
and taken a peek inside his head before letting him inside
her
.

This time, the shiver wasn’t
entirely due to cold or fear.

Oh, that was nice. She clearly had
the worst judgment in the world about men, but her damn body was still thrilled
by the exquisite friction of Jake sliding in and out of her.

She shook herself to get her mind
back on track. The only important question was, Did Jake have any idea what she
saw?

And if Jake did realize that she
knew he’d killed Ginny, what would he do?

And if he
didn’t
realize, what was Emma going to do? Go to the police with a
story about seeing blood splattered all over a car seat when she had pushed
into his mind after having sex with him on her couch? That would be a fun tale
to tell.

Tomorrow. She’d deal with all these
questions tomorrow. Tonight, she just wanted to forget the sensation of Jake’s
hand cupping her cheek, his desire in his mind, the laughter in his eyes….
Emma’s lids dragged down, and her thoughts faded into jumbled images of blood
and of the ceiling light peeking around Jake’s naked shoulder.

The next morning, when she came
downstairs, Brutus was gone.

• •

Ian, his blue eyes concerned, slid
another cup of coffee into her hands. It was her fourth. If she drank it, she’d
probably bounce straight from extremely worried to maniacally jittery. But the
flavor was familiar and reassuring, and she swallowed almost a third of the
coffee before she pushed the mug away.

“All right. First things first.”
She took a deep breath, gave the mug another little shove so that she’d have to
lean forward a good distance to retrieve it again, and pulled a pad of paper
and a pen in front of her. “We have to contact Brutus’s owners to let them know
he’s missing.” That made her stomach twist like a snake in a bag. Once word got
out that a dog had gone missing from her kennels, business would drop like a
stone. Gritting her teeth, she wrote down
Phone
parents.

“What about calling the police?”
Ian asked.

Of course. And given that she now
knew Jake had killed Ginny, she should be seizing this chance to bring the
police out to the house—and show Jake that they would be keeping an eye on her.
But somehow she couldn’t rally the enthusiasm and relief she knew she should
feel. “Do the police even handle stuff like this? What if Brutus merely escaped
again?” That was wishful thinking, she knew. If Brutus had escaped, he’d been
considerate enough to shut the door after him.

“I think the police should still be
told. If someone finds Brutus wandering down a road, they might call the police
to let them know. And if Brutus was taken, that’s stealing, right?”

“Right.” She scribbled
Call police
. Also, Brutus’s owners would
probably want her to bring in as much assistance as possible.

Ian opened his mouth to say
something, hesitated, inhaled as if to start speaking, and then shut his mouth
again.

“What?” Emma demanded.

“This sounds crazy. Paranoid.”

“What?”
Paranoid was exactly the frame of mind she was in.

“Maybe Brutus didn’t escape from
the leash line a few days ago. Maybe he’d been set free by someone. And that
same person set him free last night, too. Do you lock your doors?”

“This is Maine, not New York City.”

“I guess that means no.”

Emma reached for her coffee mug before
thinking better of it. She was already too snappish. “Yes, you’re right: I
don’t lock my doors.” Even after her disastrous night with Jake, it hadn’t even
crossed her mind. What a ninny. Too dumb to live. “Anyone could have opened the
door to set Brutus free last night.” And anyone could have unclipped him from
the leash line the day before. “But Brutus had dug those holes in his kennel,
not a person.”

“Sure, he’s always keen to escape.
But how could he have gotten off that leash? Or opened a door last night and
then closed it again after himself?”

She didn’t want to admit it could
be true, because that would mean someone had been watching her house—had been
watching her—for days now. Whether that someone was a goofy kid with too much
time on his hands or a person with the more malicious intent of ruining her business,
she didn’t much care. Someone had been watching her.

Jake? He’d had the opportunity, and
he’d been in the neighborhood when Brutus had “escaped” from the leash line.
But he simply didn’t strike her as the type who terrorized others for fun.

On the other hand, he hadn’t struck
her as the type to kill people, either. Still, she couldn’t shake the belief
that this sort of mean prank wasn’t Jake’s style.

“I told you the idea was paranoid,”
Ian said. “I mean, why would someone do that? And
who
would do that?”

“Someone who doesn’t like animals,”
Emma said. Someone who didn’t like her.

Or someone who didn’t like Ian. She
couldn’t hog all the ill-will for herself. Severe damage to her business would
lead to her having to let Ian go.

Or, if she was being generous, she
could widen the field and admit Brutus’s parents as possible targets. Brutus,
after all, was the only dog missing. And it would’ve been so much easier to
take another dog from the kennels than to risk coming inside her house.

“Brutus wouldn’t go off with a
stranger, would he?” Ian asked. “I mean, I imagine he’d bark or growl or
something.”

Thinking that someone she knew had
taken Brutus was far worse than thinking it was a random act. She swallowed the
coffee starting to burn its way back up her throat. “I’m going to leave a
message on Brutus’s owners’ answering machine, and then I’m going to call the
police,” she said, pushing her chair back.

And the sooner she herself could
get started looking for Brutus, the better.

• •

Jake shut down his computer,
stacked the papers on his desk into neater piles, and leaned back in his chair,
the silence of the empty office filling every space.

Another day of waiting for the
police to show up to arrest him. Another day of trying to keep his employees’
spirits out of the dungeon even as orders continued to dry up. No more
cancellations, thank God, but no more new orders, either, which was ominous
during what should be the busiest part of the year.

The lack of business meant he had
had all too many opportunities to remember what a total disaster last night had
been.

His hand reached for the telephone.
No, he wasn’t going to call her, no matter how much he wanted to discover the
reasons behind her inexplicable hot-then-cold flip-flop last night. But he’d
call Mickey to make sure that he’d picked up the Woodhaven backup disks from
Emma’s house. Jake had phoned him about it in the morning but wanted to be one
hundred percent sure that if the police seized his company’s computers
tomorrow, most of the information would be safe.

“Mickey, it’s Jake. How are you
doing?”

“Oh, dammit, I knew I forgot
something today.” Mickey exhaled loudly over the phone. “I didn’t get your
disks. Listen, I’ll run over there now and call you back, okay? Where are you?
At the office?”

“Right.” Sad that he was so
predictable. Sad that even when his company had no business, he was still at
the office. He should be trying to pick up women at the Wild Rover, not here.
Of course, all the women who hung out by the Wild Rover probably thought him a
killer. And the last woman who’d believed him innocent had practically kicked
him out the door last night. Maybe he’d be better off seeking out women who
liked an edge of danger.

Five minutes later, Mickey called
back. “Jake, Emma doesn’t have the disks. I’m over at her house right now, and
she can’t find them.”

He was starting to think that
everything connected to Emma Draper automatically became overly complicated.
This shouldn’t be so difficult. It was just a few disks that he’d personally
handed to her less than twenty-four hours ago. “Are you sure?” Could Emma have
been so pissed off at him that she’d tossed the disks into the garbage or, even
better, into one of the kennels behind her house?

“She says they aren’t where she put
them last night.”

Mickey cleared his throat, and Jake
cringed. Christ, he hoped Mickey wouldn’t ask about last night. “Maybe the dog
knocked them down on the floor or something,” Jake said quickly to deflect any
questions.

“Well, I don’t think so. Emma tells
me that someone entered her house early this morning and apparently stole
Brutus away. Maybe he took the disks with him, too.”

“Say that again. Someone kidnapped—dognapped?—Brutus?
Has Emma found him yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“God, she must be devastated.” She
liked Brutus—he had seen that in how she petted him whenever he came within
reach and how her ferocious scowls at the dog’s escapades so easily reversed
into grins. But a dog being snatched out of her kennel, really her home, would also
be a huge black mark against her business. And her business was what her life
revolved around.

In a way, he and she would have
been a good pair. They could have saved each other from getting subsumed by
their work lives.

“Yeah.” Mickey dropped his voice, and
Jake remembered that he was calling on his cell phone from her house. Maybe
Mickey was even in the room where they’d screwed like bunnies before she’d made
him hippity-hop away. “She’s putting a good face on it—”

As always. He didn’t know anyone
who concealed her feelings as well as Emma.

“—but she’s worried about the dog.
She’s been driving around all day, looking for him, and she’s totally wiped
out. She might appreciate you coming over.”

Mickey was about a day behind in
the news, apparently. Emma wouldn’t want to see him—she’d made clear last night
that any relationship they had had was over.

“Why don’t you ask her first if
she’d like me to stop by?” Jake suggested.

About fifteen seconds of silence
passed, and then Mickey came back on. “She says no thanks.” Mickey’s voice
lifted at the end, inviting elaboration from Jake.

Jake ignored it. “Has she made up
‘missing’ posters for Brutus? If she has, she can e-mail the poster over here,
and I’ll print out a bunch and put them up on my way home.” Maybe he and Emma
weren’t carving each other’s initials into trees anymore, but that didn’t mean
he was going to do nothing about Brutus’s kidnapping. He liked the critter,
too. And he still owed her for going with him to the Waterview a few days ago.
If he helped her now, maybe he could wash his hands of her forever. “The guy
who took Brutus might let him go if he thinks all the locals are looking for
him.”

“Hey, good idea.” There was a
scratching noise—Mickey must have put his hand over the mouthpiece of the cell
phone—but Jake could hear her murmuring. Then Emma’s voice rang through the
line.

“Jake?”

His idiot heart double-thumped.
What was it about this woman that tangled him up inside? “Uh, hi. Sorry to hear
about Brutus.” He recovered his mental balance. “I was telling Mickey that if
you need someone to put up posters, I’ll do it. E-mail a poster to me, and I’ll
print out copies here.”