Thicker Than Water (6 page)

Jones stood there, looking at the mess, shaking her head from side to side as if the sight rendered her unable to move or speak. She pressed her hands to either side of her head, fingers digging in her own hair. “Oh, Jesus, look at all this,” she whispered.

“Jones.”

She whirled when Sean said her name, one hand clenched in a fist and the other pressing to her chest as if to keep her heart from busting out.

“Easy, easy, it's just me.”

“MacKenzie. What the hell are you doing here? Are you
following
me?”

“Hell, no. I was getting some background for my story.”

She tipped her head to one side and lowered the fist. “How?”

He opened his mouth, closed it again.

“Well, you sure as hell couldn't be interviewing neighbors at this hour. What were you doing, digging through the trash?”

It was supposed to be a sarcastic little barb, and he would be damned before he admitted that it was dead-on target. There was nothing
wrong
with digging through the trash. “You're the one breaking and entering,” he reminded her.

“The door was open.”

Arguing in whispers was an interesting concept, he thought. Each of them tried to whisper more forcefully than the other.

“It
was,
” she said, apparently mistaking his silence for doubt.

“I know, I know, I saw.” He took her arm. “Let's get out of here before both our asses wind up behind bars.”

She tugged her arm free. “You go on. I have to look around some more.” Her eyes were on the scattered files, scanning them as if trying to read the labels.

“Jones, someone broke in here tonight.”

“Obviously.”

“Well, has it occurred to you that it might have been the killer?”

“Gee, no, I hadn't thought of that,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“He might still be around here somewhere, Jones. Did you think of
that?
”

That brought her head up. Her eyes leveled on his, widening a little. Her body went so still that he didn't think she was breathing for a second. The idea of someone else in the apartment frightened her. Good. She
should
be frightened. But after a second, she seemed to decide her reasons for being there outweighed her fear.

“Maybe you should go check out the rest of the place,” she suggested. “Make sure no one else is around.” Then she turned away from him, dropping to her knees to scan the file folders littering the floor.

“Right, and leave you here alone to abscond with whatever evidence you find.” He knelt right beside her, checking the videocassettes. Some were commercially made, with printed labels, films that sounded like porn, with titles like
Mistress Mary's Discipline
and
Dungeon Lover.
Others had white labels on them with handwritten titles. Sean pulled out his penlight for a better look, because the handwritten ones were harder to read in the dark. He flicked the light on and read them aloud in a whisper. “
Vanessa. Marianne. Barb & Sally.
” He looked at Jones. She was still pawing frantically through the files that carpeted the floor. “Just what is it you're looking for?”

“I'm not looking
for
anything. I'm just looking.” She took his light from his hand, shining it on papers with an air of impatience, then stopping the beam on something that lay on the floor, something that reflected the light with its glossy surface. Photographs, Sean thought, but as soon as he thought it, she dropped an empty folder on top of them.

“What was that? Was that something?”

“No. Nothing.” She shone the light elsewhere; then, getting to her feet, she scanned the few files still in the open drawers.

“What is it you expect to find in the files, Jones?” He got up, too, brushing off his pantlegs, waiting for a chance to see what it was she had covered up.

“How would I know?”

“Then why do I get the feeling you're looking for one that says
Julie Jones
on it?” Then he lifted his brows. “Or should I be looking for a tape with that label instead?”

She turned toward him, probably about to tear him a new one, he thought, but then she went still at the sound of a bell—just one single ping. “What's that?”

“The elevator.” He grabbed the light from her, shut it off and ran back through the apartment to the still-open door. He peered out into the hall. She came up behind him a couple of seconds later. “Is it…?”

Lieutenant Jax was striding down the hall toward them, flanked by the same two cops from the hotel room. Sean ducked back inside. “Police,” he whispered. “Come on.”

The two of them ran through the apartment, ducked back into the study and closed the door behind them. Sean went to the window and parted the curtains, looking for a balcony. What he found was even better. Thank God this was an old building. He yanked open the window, turned and held out a hand to Jones. “Come here.”

“What the hell are you doing?” she whisper-shouted at him.

“Fire escape. Come on. Hurry.” Taking her hand in one of his, holding the curtains for her with the other, he helped her out first, then climbed out after her. As he did, he glanced back into the room, at the floor. And, yes, it was dark, and his light was in his pocket now—but he didn't see the file folder covering up the photographs anymore. It had been kicked
aside, and he didn't see the photos at all. Maybe they'd been kicked aside, too, but he didn't think so.

He had an inkling that those photos were in Jones's pocket by now. Sighing, he closed the window behind them and turned to where she stood on the black metal landing, looking down at the skeletal flights of iron stairs and the street below. “You all right?”

The wind blew none too gently, and it carried a bite of autumn chill with it. She nodded but didn't speak. She kept looking down, and he thought maybe heights were not her favorite thing in the world. He had no idea why, but he squeezed past her, so he was in front, then reached behind him and caught her wrist in his hands.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Relax, Jones. This is strictly business.” He pulled her hand up, pressed it onto his shoulder. “Just hold on to me, okay?” And then he started down the fire escape's zigzagging stairs.

She stayed right behind him, her hand closing tight on his shoulder, the second one quickly following suit on the other side. The fire escape was a good one, as fire escapes went, but even the best of them tended to sway and jiggle. Every time this one did, her nails dug into his flesh, right through his clothes. He moved slowly, carefully, because the thing was noisy. He figured he had maybe five minutes, maximum, before the cops noticed the window unlocked and came outside to check. It might be far sooner. Jax was sharp; she didn't miss much. If he'd been alone, he could have taken it twice as fast and been gone by now, despite the noise.

He told himself he ought to do it and leave Jones to face the music. But instead he kept to the slow pace all the way to
the bottom, where the fire escape ended with a good ten feet left between it and the ground.

“Put the ladder down,” Jones whispered, pointing urgently at the folded up ladder that would extend almost to the ground, when released.

“No way. You think Jax would miss something like that?”

“Then how are we—”

“We jump.”

She shook her head side to side, backing up a step.

“Come on, Jones, it's not that far.”

She met his eyes. “You go first.”

If he did, he thought, she wouldn't go at all. And for some reason, the idea of her getting caught wasn't one he relished as much as he thought he should. “We'll go together.” He slid his arm around her waist, pulled her to the edge. She resisted, but he said, “Trust me, Jones. I won't let you get hurt.”

She looked up at him—surprised, maybe—but just when she opened her mouth to argue, he tightened his grip on her waist and jumped. She clutched him as they fell, even though it was only a second until they hit the ground, falling apart. He got to his feet first, reaching down to help her up. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“Told you so.”

She released his hand and brushed herself off. Sean could barely believe they'd made it undetected. He took Jones by the arm and led her around the building, via the alley he'd been in earlier. His bag of rescued garbage still sat right where he'd left it, near the front corner of the building. Her Jeep was just beyond it, parked by the curb. There were plenty of other vehicles parked the same way up and down the street, so he fig
ured the cops wouldn't have had any reason to note her plate number. He looked at some of the cars more closely. The dark sedan in front of the building hadn't been there before he'd gone inside. It was, he assumed, what the cops had driven here, and it was empty. He strained his eyes for a closer look. Yep. Crown Victoria.

Quickly he led Jones to the Jeep, opened the driver's door. Hell, she hadn't even locked it, and the keys were dangling from the switch.

He glanced back at her. “Go on, get in and get the hell out of here.”

She nodded, but she didn't get in. She gripped his eyes with hers instead. Big, brown and scared right now. It almost knocked the wind out of him. He had never seen Julie Jones look like that. Never.

“You're not going to tell anyone about this, are you?” she asked him.

Shit, for a second he thought she was going to thank him for helping her out. He was an idiot. “Not until I know what's going on, Jones. But believe me, I
will
find out.”

“Don't,” she whispered. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“But it does have something to do with
you,
doesn't it?”

She pursed her lips, then turned away and got into her Jeep. He closed the door as she started it up. Then he yanked the door open again. “Put on your seat belt, Jones.”

Pursing her lips, she pulled the belt around her, yanked her door closed and popped the clutch. The Jeep jerked, nearly stalled, but managed to take off. He heard her grinding gears and winced. Poor freaking car. If the transmission survived long enough for the kid to get her license, it would be a miracle.

When her taillights were out of sight, Sean jogged into the alley, grabbed his bag of garbage and then ran a block to where he'd left his car. He didn't relax until he got home, safe and sound. And even then, the questions kept going round and round in his mind. What was Julie Jones hiding? And what did she have to do with the murder of Harry Blackwood?

* * *

Julie pounded the steering wheel with a fist. She hadn't found the documents. There hadn't been anything there with her name on it, but that didn't mean a thing. Any one of those dozens of folders and reams of papers could have been the one she was looking for, but she hadn't had time to check them out.

What if the police found the truth in that mess? What if they found out about Dawn?

God, if it hadn't been for that bastard MacKenzie showing up, she could have scooped them all up, thrown them into a trash bag from Harry's kitchen and carried them home.

If it hadn't been for MacKenzie showing up, I'd have been caught there, red-handed,
an inner voice whispered.
I never would have found that fire escape in time to avoid the police, much less had the gumption to go down it in the dark.

Oh, God, the police. She imagined them—the two officers, and that bitch Detective Jackson—were gathering up the papers and documents and videotapes one by one, even now. They would probably sit in a roomful of cops and go over all of them. If they found out the truth, her life would be destroyed. They would take Dawn away from her. Track down her birth mother's relatives—the very same people Lizzie had been compelled to run away from all those years ago—and hand her over to them.

Dawn.

Shivering all over, Julie kept steering the Jeep with one hand, dipping into her jacket pocket with the other. She pulled out the two photographs she had found on the floor, both of them taken in a place so jarringly familiar that the sight of them had almost floored her. They'd been taken at Young Believers' compound.

She looked at them now, tried to make out the faces in the group shots. And finally she realized why one of those faces seemed so familiar. The young man with the three-piece suit and the automatic rifle was Harry Blackwood.

“He was there,” she whispered. Not as one of the inmates, though. Those who lived at the place didn't wear suits but plain, functional clothes more suited to working in the greenhouses and gardens. No, Harry must have been one of Mordecai's visiting dignitaries. The men who brought large sums of money in exchange for some of Mordecai's crops.

Julie lowered the photos toward her pocket, glanced up at the road and saw the glowing orange eyes and red-brown coat in her headlights' beam. Startled, the deer froze in the middle of the road. Equally startled, Julie jerked the wheel hard to the left and jammed her foot on the brake. The Jeep's rear end skidded right, so she jerked the wheel right, overcorrected, and sent it skidding the other way. Her body jerked hard against the car's motions, but the seat belt kept her from being whipped across the seat. She thought she was going into the brush at the side of the road for sure, but somehow she pulled out of the skid, and the back end's fishtailing slowed and finally stopped. She forgot about the clutch, and the car bucked and then stalled.