Lisa Jackson – Secrets and Desire: Best-Kept Lies / Miss Pruitt's Private Life / Secrets, Lies...and Passion (страница 9)

“Hey, Randi!” Sarah Peeples, movie reviewer for the Clarion, was hurrying toward Randi’s desk. Sarah’s column, “What’s Reel,” was published each Friday and was promoted as “hip and happening.” A tall woman with oversize features, a wild mop of blond curls and a penchant for expensive boots and cheap jewelry, Sarah spent hours watching movies in theaters, on DVDs and tapes. She lived and breathed movies, celebrities and all things Hollywood. Today she was wearing a choker that looked as if it had been tailored for a rottweiler or a dominatrix, boots with pointed toes and silver studs, a gray scoop-necked sweater and a black skirt that opened in the front, slitted high enough to show off just a flash of thigh. “I was beginning to think I might never see you again.”

“Can’t keep a good woman down,” Randi quipped.

“Amen. Where the hell have you been?”

“Montana with my brothers.”

“The hair is new.”

“Necessity rather than fashion.”

“But it works for you. Short and sassy.” Sarah was bobbing her head up and down as if agreeing with herself. “And you look great. How’s the baby?”

“Perfect.”

“And when will I get to meet him?”

“Soon,” Randi hedged. The less she spoke about Joshua, the better. “How’re things around here?”

Sarah rolled her eyes as she rested a hip on Randi’s desk. “Same old, same old. I’ve been bustin’ my butt…well, if you can call it that, rereviewing all the movies that are Oscar contenders.”

“Sounds exhausting,” Randi drawled.

“Okay, so it’s not digging ditches, I know, but it’s work.”

“Has anything strange been going on around here?” Randi asked.

“What do you mean? Everyone who works here is slightly off, right?”

“I guess you’re right.”

Sarah picked up a glass paperweight and fiddled with it. “Now, when are you going to bring the baby into the office and show him off?” Sarah’s grin was wide, her interest sincere. She’d been married three years and desperately wanted a baby. Her husband was holding out for the big promotion that would make a child affordable. Randi figured it might never come.

“When things have calmed down.” She considered confiding in Sarah, but thought better of it. “He and I need to get settled in.”

“Mmm. Then how about pictures?”

“I’ve got a ton of ’em back at the condo. Still packed. I’ll bring them next time, I promise,” she said, then leaned back in her chair. “So fill me in. What’s going on around here?”

Sarah was only too glad to oblige. She offered up everything from office politics, to management changes, to out-and-out gossip. In return, she wanted to know every detail of Randi’s life in Montana, starting with the accident. Finally, she said, “Paterno’s back in town.”

Randi felt the muscles in her back grow taut. “Is he?” Forty-five, twice divorced with a hound-dog face, thick hair beginning to gray and a razor-sharp sense of humor, the freelance photographer had asked Randi out a few years back and they’d dated for a while. It hadn’t worked out for a lot of reasons. The main reason being that, at the time, neither one of them had wanted to commit. Nor had they been in love.

“He’s been asking about you.” Sarah set the paperweight onto the desk again. “You know, unless you’re involved with someone, you might want to give him another chance.”

Randi shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“You hiding something from him?”

“What?” Randi asked, searching her friend’s face. “Hiding something? Of course not…Oh, I get it.” She shook her head and sighed. No one knew the identity of her son’s father; not even the man himself. Before she could explain, Sarah’s cell phone beeped.

“Oops. Duty calls,” Sarah said, eyeing the face of the phone as a text message appeared. “New films just arrived. Well, old ones really. I’m doing a classic film noir piece next month and I ordered a bunch of old Peter Lorre, Bette Davis and Alfred Hitchcock tapes to review.” She cast a smile over her shoulder as she hurried off. “Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend? Drop by if you don’t have anything better to do….

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I won’t hold my breath.”

Good thing, Randi thought, as she didn’t seem to have a moment to breathe. She had way too much to do, she thought as she turned on her computer.

And first item on her agenda was finding a way to deal with Kurt Striker.

“…that’s right. All three of ’em are back in Seattle,” Eric Brown was saying, his voice crackling from his cell phone’s connection to that of Striker’s. “What’re the chances of that? Clanton lives here but the other two don’t. Paterno, he’s at least got a place here, but Donahue doesn’t.”

Striker didn’t like it.

“Paterno arrived three days ago and Donahue rolled into town yesterday.”

Just hours before Randi had returned. “Coincidence?” Striker muttered, not believing it for a second as he stood on the sidewalk outside the offices of the Clarion.

There was a bitter laugh on the other end of the line. “If you believe that, I’ve got some real estate in the Mojave—”

“—that you want to sell me. Yeah, I know,” Striker growled angrily. “Clanton lives here. Paterno does business in town. But Donahue…” His jaw tightened. “Can you follow him?”

“Not if you want me to stick around and watch the condo.”

Damn it all. There wasn’t enough manpower for this. Striker and Brown couldn’t be in three places at once. “Just stay put for now. But let me know if anything looks odd to you, anything the least bit suspicious.”

“Got it, but what about the other two guys? Paterno and Clanton?”

“Check ’em out, see what they’re up to, but it’s Donahue who concerns me most. We’ll talk later.” Striker hung up, then called Kelly McCafferty and left a message when she didn’t answer. Angry at the world, he snapped his phone shut. All three of the men with whom Randi had been involved were here. In the city. Great… Just…great. His shoulders were bunched against the cold, his collar turned up and inside he felt a knot of jealousy tightening in his gut.

Jealousy, and even envy for that matter, were emotions Striker detested, the kind of useless feelings he’d avoided, even while he’d been married. Maybe that had been the problem. Maybe if he’d felt a little more raw passion, a little more jealousy or anger or empathy during those first few years of marriage, shown his wife that he’d cared about her, maybe then things would have turned out differently…Oh, hell, what was he thinking? He couldn’t change the past. And the accident, that’s how they’d referred to it, the accident had altered everything, created a deep, soul-wrenching, damning void that could never be filled.

And yet last night, when he’d been with Randi… Touched her. Kissed her. Felt her warmth surround him, he’d felt differently. Don’t make too much of it. So you made love to her. So what? Maybe it had just been so long since he’d been with a woman that last night seemed more important than it was.

Whatever the reason, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Couldn’t forget how right it had felt.

And it had been so wrong.

In an effort to dislodge images of Randi lying naked in front of the fire, staring up at him with those warm eyes, Striker bought coffee from a vendor and resumed his position not far from the door, protected by the awning of an antique bookstore located next door to the Clarion’s offices.

A familiar ache, one he rarely acknowledged, tore through him as he sipped his coffee. Leaning a shoulder against the rough bricks surrounding plate-glass windows etched in gold-leaf lettering, he watched the door of the Clarion’s building through a thin wisp of steam rising from his paper cup. Pedestrians scurried past in trench coats, parkas or sweatshirts, some wearing hats, a few with umbrellas, most bareheaded, their collars turned to the wind and rain that steadily dripped from the edge of the awning.

His cell phone rang and he swung it from his pocket. “Striker.”

“Hi, it’s Kelly.”

For the first time in hours, he smiled as Matt’s wife started rattling off information. The men at the Flying M were still upset about Randi’s leaving. Kelly was working to find a maroon Ford, one that was scraped up and dented from pushing Randi’s vehicle off the road in Glacier Park. Kelly was also double-checking all of the staff who had been on duty the night that Randi was nearly killed in the hospital. So far she’d come up with nothing.

Striker wasn’t surprised.

He hung up knowing nothing more than when he’d taken the call. Whoever was trying to kill Randi was either very smart or damn lucky.

So far.

Cars, vans and trucks, their windows fogged, sped through the old, narrow streets of this part of the city. Striker glared at the doorway of the hotel, drank coffee and scowled as he considered the other men in Randi McCafferty’s life, at least one of whom had bedded her and fathered her son.

Paterno. Clanton. Donahue. Bastards every one of them.

But he was narrowing the field. He’d done some double-checking on the men who had been involved with Randi. It was unlikely that Joe Paterno had fathered the kid. The timing was all wrong. Kurt had looked into Paterno’s travel schedule and records. Paterno had been in Afghanistan around the time the baby had been conceived. There had been rumors that he’d been back in town for a weekend, but Kurt had nearly ruled out the possibility by making a few phone calls to Paterno’s chatty landlady. Unless Paterno hadn’t shown his face at his apartment and holed up for a secret weekend alone with Randi, he hadn’t fathered the kid. Since Randi had been out of town most of the month, it seemed Joe was in the clear.