Mirror Image (27 page)

He pulled his hands from beneath hers and dragged them down his loose jowls. "I need a drink. Want one?"

He returned to the couch moments later with a tumbler three-quarters full of straight whiskey. Avery said nothing, though she eyed the glass meaningfully. Defiantly, he took a hefty draught.

“Okay, I follow you so far. A gross error was made while you were unable to communicate. Once youwereable to communicate, why didn't you? In other words, why are you still playing Carole Rutledge?"

Avery stood up and began roaming the untidy room, making ineffectual attempts to straighten it while she arranged her thoughts. Convincing Irish that her charade was viable and justified was going to be tricky. His contention had always been that reporters reported the news, they did not make it. Their role was to observe, not participate. That point had been a continual argument between him and Cliff Daniels.

"Somebody plans to kill Tate Rutledge before he becomes a senator."

Irish hadn't expected anything like that. His hand was arrested midway between the coffee table and his mouth as he was raising the glass of whiskey. The liquor sloshed over the rim of the tumbler onto his hand. Absently, he wiped it dry on his trousers leg.

"What?"

"Somebody plans—"

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"How?"

"I don't know, Irish," she said, raising her voice defensively. "AndIdon't know where or when, either, so save your breath and don't ask. Just hear me out."

He shook his finger at her."Imay give you that spanking yet for sassing me. Don't test my patience. You've already put me through hell. Pure hell."

"It hasn't exactly been a picnic for me, either," she snapped.

"Which is the only reason I've restrained myself this long," he shouted.

"But stop bullshitting me."

"I'm not!"

"Then, what's this crap about somebody wanting to kill Rutledge? How the bloody hell do you know?"

His mounting temper was reassuring. This Irish she could deal with much more easily than the woebegone shell he'd been minutes earlier. She'd had years of practice sparring with him. "Somebody told me he was going to kill Tate before he took office."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"Shit," he cursed viciously. "Don't start that again."

"If you'll give me a chance, I'll explain."

He took another drink, ground his fist into his other palm, and finally relaxed against the back of the sofa, relaying that he was ready to sit still and listen.

"Believing me to be Carole, somebody came to me while I was still in the ICU.Idon't know who it was. I couldn't see because my eye was bandaged and he was standing beyond my shoulder." She recounted the incident, repeating the threat verbatim.

"Iwas terrified. Once I was able to communicate who I really was,Iwas afraid to.Icouldn't tip my hand without placing my life, and Tate's, in jeopardy."

Irish was silent until she had finished. She returned to the sofa and sat down beside him. When he did speak, his voice was skeptical.

"What you're telling me, then, is that you took Mrs. Rutledge's place so you could prevent Tate Rutledge from being assassinated."

"Right."

"But you don't know who plans to kill him."

"Not yet, but Carole did. She was part of it, although I don't know her relationship with this other person."

"Hmm." Irish tugged thoughtfully on the flaccid skin beneath his chin. "This visitor you had—"

"Has to be a member of the family. No one else would have been admitted into the ICU."

"Someone could have sneaked in."

"Possibly, but I don't think so. If Carole had hired an assassin, he would simply have vanished when she became incapacitated. He wouldn't have come to warn her to keep quiet. Would he?"

"He's your assassin. You tell me."

She shot to her feet again. "You don't believe me?"

"I believe you believe it."

"But you think it was my imagination."

"You were drugged and disoriented, Avery," he said reasonably. "You said so yourself. You were half blind in one eye and—forgive the bad joke—couldn't see out of the other. You think the person was a man, but itcouldhave been a woman. You think it was a member of the Rutledge family, but itcouldhave been somebody else."

"What are you getting at, Irish?"

"You probably had a nightmare."

"I was beginning to think so myself until several days ago." She took the sheet of paper she'd found in her pillowcase from her purse and handed it to him. He read the typed message.

When his troubled eyes connected with hers, she said, "I found that in my pillowcase. He's real, all right. He still thinks I'm Carole, his coconspirator. And he still intends to do what they originally planned."

The note had drastically altered Irish's opinion. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. "This is the first contact he's had with you since that night in the hospital?"

"Yes."

He reread the message, then remarked, "It doesn't say he's going to kill Tate Rutledge."

Avery gave him a retiring look. "This has been a well-thought-out assassination attempt. The plans were long-range. He'd hardly risk spelling it out. Naturally, he made the note obscure, just in case it was intercepted. The seemingly innocent words would mean something entirely different to Carole."

"Who has access to a typewriter?"

"Everybody. There's one at a desk in the family den. That was the one used. I checked."

"What does he—or she—mean by 'whatever you're doing'?"

Avery looked away guiltily. "I'm not sure."

"Avery?"

Her head snapped around. She had never been able to fudge the truth with Irish. He saw through it every time. "I've been trying to get along better with Tate than his wife did."

"Any particular reason why?"

"It was obvious to me from the beginning that there was trouble between them."

"How'd you figure that?"

"By the way he treats her. Me. He's polite, but that's all."

"Hmm. Do you know why?"

"Carole either had, or was planning to have, an abortion. I only found out about that last week. I'd already discovered that she was a selfish, self-centered woman. She cheated on Tate and was a disaster of a parent to her daughter. Without raising too much suspicion, I've been trying to bridge the gap that had come between him and his wife."

Again Irish asked, "Why?"

"So I'd know more about what is going on. I had to get to the source of their problem before I could begin to find a motive for a killer. Obviously, my attempts to improve their marriage have been noticed. The killer figures that it's Carole's new tactic to put Tate off guard."

She chafed her arms as though suddenly chilled. "He's real, Irish. I know it. There's the proof," she said, nodding down at the note.

Not yet committing himself one way or the other, Irish tossed the sheet of paper down on the coffee table. "Let's assume there is a killer. Who's gonna ice him?"

"I have no idea," she replied with a defeated sigh. "They're one big, happy family."

"According to you, somebody out there at the Rocking R ain't so happy."

She provided him with a verbal run-down of names and each person's relationship to Tate. "Each has his ax to grind, but none of those axes has anything to do with Tate. Both his parents dote on him. Nelson's the undisputed head of the family. He rules, being stern and affectionate by turns.

"Zee isn't so easy to pigeonhole. She's a good wife and loving mother. She remains aloof from me. I think she resents Carole for not making Tate happier."

"What about the others?"

"Carole might have had an affair with Eddy."

"Eddy Paschal, Rudedge's campaign manager?"

"And best friend since college. I don't know for sure. I'm only going by Fancy's word on that."

"What a cliché\ How does this Paschal character treat you?"

"He's civil, nothing more. Of course, I haven't put out the signals Carole did. If they were having an affair, maybe he just assumes it ended with the accident. In any event, he's dedicated to Tate winning the election."

"The girl?"

Avery shook her head. "Fancy is a spoiled brat with no more morals than an alley cat in heat. But she's too flighty to be a killer. Not that she's above it; she just wouldn't expend the energy."

"The brother? Jack, is it?"

"He's extremely unhappy with his marriage," she mused, frowning thoughtfully, "but Tate doesn't figure into that. Although. . ."

"Although?"

"Jack's rather pathetic, actually. You think of him as being competent, good-looking, charming, until you see him next to his younger brother. Tate's the sun. Jack is the moon. He reflects Tate's light but has none of his own. He works as hard as Eddy on the campaign, but if anythinggoes wrong, he usually gets blamed for it. I feel sorry for him."

"Does he feel sorry for himself? Enough to commit fratricide?"

"I'm not sure. He keeps his distance. I've caught him watching me and sense a smoldering hostility there. On the surface, however, he seems indifferent."

"What about his wife?"

"Dorothy Rae might be jealous enough to kill, but she would go after Carole before she would Tate."

"What makes you say that?"

"I was browsing through family photo albums, trying to glean information. Dorothy came into the living room to get a bottle from the liquor cabinet. She was already drunk. I rarely see her, except at dinner, and then she hardly says anything. That's why I was so surprised when, out of the blue, she began accusing me of trying to steal Jack. She said I wanted to pick up with him where I'd left off before the crash."

"Carole was sleeping with her brother-in-law, too?" Irish asked incredulously.

"It seems that way. At least she was trying to." The notion had distressed Avery very much. She had hoped it was only an alcohol-inspired delusion that Dorothy Rae had drummed up white sequestered in her room with her bottles of vodka. "It's preposterous," she said, thinking aloud. "Carole had Tate. What could she possibly have wanted with Jack?"

"There's no accounting for taste."

"I guess you're right." Avery was so lost in her own musings, she missed his wry inflection. "Anyway, I denied having any designs on Dorothy Rae's husband. She called me a bitch, a whore, a home wrecker—things like that."

Irish ran a hand over his burred head. "Carole must have really been something."

"We don't know for certain that she wanted either Jack or Eddy."

"But she mast have put out some mighty strong signals if that many people picked up on them."

"Poor Tate."

"What does 'poor Tate' think of hiswife?"

Avery lapsed into deep introspection. "He thinks she aborted his baby. He knows she had other lovers. He knows she was a negligent parent and put emotional scars on his daughter. Hopefully, that can be reversed."

"You've taken on that responsibility, too, haven't you?"

His critical tone of voice brought her head erect. "What do you mean?"

Leaving her to stew for a moment, Irish disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a fresh drink. Feet spread and firmly planted, he stood before her. "Are you leveling with me about that midnight caller you had in the hospital?"

"How can you even doubt it?"

"I'll tell you how I can doubt it. You came to me, what was it, almost two years ago, with your tail tucked between your legs, needing a job—any job. You'd just been fired from the network for committing one of the worst faux pas in journalism history."

"I didn't come here tonight to be reminded of that."

"Well, maybe you should be reminded! Because I think that's what's behind this whole damned scheme of yours. You plunged in that time over your head, too. Before you got your facts straight, you reported that a junior congressman from Virginia had killed his wife before blowing his own brains out."

She pressed her fists against her temples as that horrible sequence of events unfolded like a scroll in her memory.

"First reporter on the scene, Avery Daniels," Irish announced with a flourish, showing her no mercy. "Always hot on the trail of a good story. You smelled fresh blood."

"That's right, I did! Literally." She crossed her arms over her middle. "I saw the bodies, heard those children screaming in terror over what they had discovered when they had come home from school. I saw them weeping over what their father had done."

"Hadallegedlydone, dammit . You never learn, Avery. Heallegedlykilled his wife before blasting his own brains onto the wallpaper." Irish took a quick drink of whiskey. 'But you went live with a report, omitting that technicallittle legal word, leaving your network vulnerable to a slander suit.

"You lost it on camera, Avery. Objectivity took a flying leap. Tears streamed down your face and then—then—as if all that wasn't enough, you asked your audience at large how any man, but especially an elected public official, could do such a beastly thing."

She raised her head and faced him defiantly. "I know what I did, Irish. I don't need you to remind me of my mistake. I've tried to live it down for two years. I was wrong, but I learned from it."

"Bullshit," he thundered. "You're doing the same damn thing all over again. You're diving in where you have no authority to go. You're making news, not reporting it. Isn't this the big break you've been waiting for? Isn't this the story that's going to put you back on top?"

"All right, yes!" she flung up at him. "That was part of the reason I went into it."

"That's been your reason for doing everything you've ever done."

"What are you saying?"

"You're still trying to get your daddy's attention. You're trying to fill his shoes, live up to his name, which you feel like you've failed to do." He moved toward her. "Let me tell you something—something you don't want to hear." He shook his head and said each word distinctly. "He's not worth it."

"Stop there, Irish."

"He was your father, Avery, but he was my best friend. I knew him longer and a whole lot better than you did. I loved him, but I viewed him with far more objectivity than you or your mother ever could."