Silk Confessions (14 page)

S
HE WOULD BE
a strong partner, damn it.

Tempest clung to the thought like a personal mantra as
she and Vanessa waited for Bliss Holloway, Mating Game’s operations manager, to dispense with social niceties late that afternoon in the woman’s midtown home.

Vanessa had quickly agreed they needed to hear from such a key figure in the investigation as soon as possible. Since Wes was in the middle of interviewing potential suspects, that meant Vanessa would talk to Bliss, even if it meant bringing Tempest along for the ride.

After days of silence following the break-in, the MatingGame manager had finally returned Tempest’s phone call shortly after lunch. Vanessa and Tempest had set off together—an elegant street cop and a renegade socialite with little in common except for their united effort to help Wes close his files on the MatingGame killer.

The more Tempest thought about him interviewing suspects all afternoon, the more she worried. Maybe it was the way they’d parted that had unsettled her, but she couldn’t shake a bad feeling about the day.

Now, she followed Bliss Holloway down a short corridor in a beautifully appointed suite where she said the three of them could talk privately. Bliss, a self-made millionaire before she was thirty, continued to conduct her business from the penthouse floor of an upscale hotel even though Tempest had offered to purchase corporate office space for MatingGame.

Bliss was a woman with unflagging energy and vision, the kind of lit-from-within personality that Tempest admired immediately. Her respect for the woman had only increased the longer they worked together since Bliss actively sought ways to donate portions of MatingGame’s profit to private causes that helped a variety of underprivileged people from at-risk teens to low-income single mothers.

Her blond bob swung neatly across the shoulders of her jacket as she turned to look back at Tempest.

“I’ll admit, I was worried when I got back from Tokyo this morning and heard your message.” Their hostess led them into an open salon in the back of the penthouse after both Vanessa and Tempest had nixed her offer for tea. She gestured to a seating group near the fireplace and took a seat in an elegant wingback covered in dainty yellow flowers. “And now that you’ve arrived with a police detective in tow, I’m all the more concerned.”

Briefly, Vanessa filled her in on the break-in and vandalism at Tempest’s apartment, without mentioning the link to the murder they were investigating. And while Tempest had hoped Bliss would be able to offer an explanation that would somehow deflect attention away from the prostitution angle, instead she watched the woman’s face turn pale.

“Someone wrote those words on your door?” Bliss turned to Tempest as if for confirmation, her fingers smoothing over a weighty tennis bracelet at her wrist. At Tempest’s nod, she took in a deep breath. “What makes you think the vandals referred to MatingGame? Boucher Enterprises must own at least fifty companies worldwide.”

Vanessa interrupted before Tempest could answer, no doubt wanting to be in control of an interview where crucial information could be at stake. “The police have additional evidence linking MatingGame to prostitution and perhaps to a more serious crime. Do you have any explanation for this, Ms. Holloway? Do you know of any women—or men, for that matter—using your dating service in an illegal manner?”

Bliss opened her mouth and closed it, as if unsure how to begin. When she tried again, her words were steady
and calm. “To my knowledge, no one is using the service illegally, or I would have reported it immediately. But I’m afraid I may have information regarding the origins of the prostitution rumor.”

Tempest sucked in a breath, nerves tense. If MatingGame turned out to be involved in something illegal, it could cost Boucher Enterprises millions in damage control and lost revenues. The hit to their credibility would trickle down through the company to hurt so many people, and yet Tempest couldn’t stop herself from thinking she could withstand all of it if only the truth meant Wes wasn’t in any danger tonight.

His safety meant more to her than anything.

“As MatingGame has become more commercially successful, I find myself with more opportunities than ever to reach out to people in the city who need a hand.” She shifted in her wingback, adjusting her red-and-ivory-colored houndstooth skirt to cover her knees. “Recently, I needed some help around the office and because I work at home, I thought it would be okay to hire some young women away from their careers in the…um…
oldest profession
so they could have a fresh start.”

Vanessa leaned forward in her chair, leather jacket squeaking. “You hired hookers?”

“I hired desperate women with small children who really needed a way out of their situations.” Bliss straightened in her chair, spinning her words as smoothly as a trained politician.

“Where did you find call girls for hire, Ms. Holloway? I don’t imagine you run into your average street walker on this block too often.”

Bliss offered a tight smile, but her eyes remained cool. “This is New York, Detective. Let’s not forget that no
matter how lofty your address on Central Park West, you’re still hovering on the edge of a playground for crime.”

Tempest sensed a subtle tension between the women, but couldn’t put her finger on it. Besides, right now, her sole concern was giving Wes whatever help she could to show him she was willing to work with him—for him—as soon as she got her own life straightened away.

She nudged into the conversation, hoping to speed things along. “So you met these women in the park?”

Bliss crossed her ankles beneath her chair. “No. I was simply making a point. I happen to have an old friend in the business who I’ve never managed to coax over to the other side, and I learned of these two troubled women from her.”

While Vanessa continued to quiz the MatingGame manager about the ex-hookers allegedly providing no more than clerical help, Tempest waited impatiently for their conversation to turn back to what seemed most important.

Finally, she interrupted them, too keyed up and worried about Wes to wait. “Do you have any reason to believe either of your office employees might be using MatingGame as a dating service?”

Bliss shook her head. “It’s against the rules for direct company employees, and I post all of the Mating Game profiles so I would see any—” She halted abruptly, her fingers pausing in an idle dance across the tennis bracelet. “Unless they broke office policy and used Blind Date.”

Perhaps she had the same bad feeling about the possibility as Tempest did, because Bliss was on her feet and hastening over to her computer before the words had all left her mouth. Vanessa and Tempest followed, their shoes sinking into the room’s plush white carpet as Bliss’s fingers flew across her keys.

“Should we call Wes?” Tempest whispered behind her hand while Bliss scanned page after page of data on a spreadsheet.

“We’ll head over to Mick’s Grill right after this and call him on the way.” Vanessa never took her eyes off the computer screen.

Bliss paused her scrolling screen to point to an entry in the Web site user log. “This is it. Marianne Oakes’s personal e-mail ID.” She shook her head, eyes wide with disbelief. “I can’t believe she would skirt the regulations and use our service after I gave her a chance to start over here.”

“This woman is one of your office staffers?” Vanessa copied down the line entry in a notebook while Bliss pressed a button to print the whole file.

“She’s been with me for six months,” Bliss con firmed, typing in the user name to search the rest of the log for repeated visits. “A really bright girl with lots of potential, but she fell on hard times last year and got involved in an escort service to pay the bills.”

Vanessa tapped the end of her pen on her notebook spiral. “Can you find out how many men she’s been in contact with? We have reason to suspect her in a murder committed the Saturday before this past weekend.”

Tempest hated the sick feeling in her belly that told her they were finally on the right track.

“It’s difficult to trace this since clients can use their private e-mail accounts in addition to the temporary boxes set up through Blind Date.” Bliss scanned her screen, shoulders slumping with the defeated look of someone who realizes how severely her trust had been misplaced. “But it looks like she’s been in touch with at least three men.”

Premonition turned to full-fledged icy dread.

“Is one of them KingKong?” Her voice caught on a hoarse note as she thought about Wes alone with a woman gone off the deep end.

Vanessa looked at her curiously but said nothing while Bliss squinted at the screen.

Tempest knew the answer when the woman paled.

“Yes. Do you think that’s the screen name of the murder victim?”

Not yet.

Tempest ignored the fearful part of her that said they might already be too late to help Wes tonight. If ever there’d been a compelling reason to shove aside her fears and scrounge together all her courage, this was it. They had to reach Wes before Marianne Oakes struck again.

Perhaps reading her thoughts, Vanessa pulled Tem pest to her feet and warned Bliss that she would be needed for questioning later that evening or the next day. Tempest barely heard the rest of their exchange as she remembered how Wes had been by her side when this person had crossed her path earlier in the week. She vowed this time, she would repay the favor and be there for Wes before anything happened to him.

“KingKong is the ID Wes is using?” Vanessa confirmed the fact with her before pulling out her cell phone as they left the penthouse suite and took the elevator down to street level.

“Yes.” She was grateful Vanessa would know how to get in touch with Wes before they drove down to Mick’s. The sooner they warned him, the better.

Distracted with worry, Tempest stumbled slightly to keep pace with Wes’s supremely athletic partner as they hurried up the street. Squinting through the darkness in a canopied tunnel erected over a construction zone, Tempest listened for Vanessa’s call to go through but lost sight of
the other woman in the crush of people get ting out of work for the day.

By the time she blinked her way back into the over cast haze of daylight along with the rest of the five o’clock pedestrian traffic, Tempest realized Vanessa was nowhere in sight.

Panic skittered over her. Hundreds of people shoved by her in their daily rush from work to home, yet Tem pest couldn’t remember ever feeling so utterly alone. Peering back into the construction tunnel, she saw no sign of Vanessa. She had vanished completely off a busy sidewalk.

Had something happened to her? Or had she simply jumped in the nearest cab, forgetting all about Wes’s girlfriend of the month?

As much as she wanted to figure it out, Tempest was no detective. The person who would know how to help Vanessa was Wes, and right now she needed to reach him before Marianne Oakes got to him first.

Knowing she didn’t stand a chance of hailing a cab at rush hour, Tempest stepped onto the first bus she saw, a 7th Avenue local that dropped her on 18th Street, only a few blocks from Mick’s. She didn’t think anyone had purposely followed her onto the bus, but public transportation overflowed with commuters at this time of day and there had been a crowd at the bus stop.

To be safe, she picked up speed as she walked through the lower West side, pedestrian traffic thinning out the farther west she went. After she passed 8th Avenue, the evening had turned completely dark with less street light to brighten the gloom. Just past 9th Avenue, the skies opened in a downpour that sent what few people had been on the streets back indoors.

Leaving Tempest running headlong through the cold, wet night alone.

Finally spying the awning for Mick’s Grill, one of the few businesses with a storefront in a predominantly warehouse district, she peered over her shoulder into the dark, relieved to find the street empty for nearly half a block. Her heart had been racing for nothing.

Now she only needed to make sure Wes got the message about Marianne Oakes, and leave it up to him to decide what happened to Vanessa.

She’d wrestled with a guilty conscience ever since she hightailed it out of midtown where Wes’s partner had disappeared, but Wes would know what to do. Hurrying past a row of windows outside of Mick’s, she had almost reached the shelter of the awning when an iron hand clamped over her mouth.

W
ES TRIED TO BE SUBTLE
as he checked his watch for the third time at a booth just inside the front door of Mick’s Grill. His sixth date seemed like a nervous, self-conscious woman and he didn’t want to give her any more reason to feel ill at ease, but the longer Vanessa went without answering her phone, the more he worried.

He’d tried Tempest’s apartment three times and Vanessa’s cell phone twice. No answer on either one.

Why did they have to leave Tempest’s apartment in the first place? He told himself Vanessa could handle any trouble if they went to the market or ran a couple of errands, but they should have been back by now.

Unease crept down his spine along with restless tension. He peered out the window onto the street, his gaze chasing shadows while darkness cloaked the city. Re minding himself to pay attention to his date so he could finish up their meeting and call it a day, he decided to cancel his last two appointments so he could check on Tempest.

But as he wrenched his attention from the narrow windows, he realized the woman across from him was staring outside with even more apprehension scrawled across her features than churned inside him.

“Everything okay?” The cop in him went on alert. The woman—Mary? Mary Anne?—hadn’t said much since she sat down beyond a few cursory replies to questions he’d asked her. He hadn’t given her any reason to be so
nervous that the trembling of her hands caused the wine in her glass to vibrate with the force of it. “Did you want me to walk you to your car?”

“No!” The very idea seemed to startle her, propelling her out of her seat. She gathered her purse, a well-worn brown leather bag with a frayed handle. “I mean— Sorry we didn’t hit it off right away, Wesley. Maybe we shouldn’t take this any further.”

She extended her hand, catching him off guard by leaving so suddenly. Was it him who made her nervous? Or did she have another reason for an obvious case of jitters?

He held up his hand in the classic surrender pose, hoping to put her at ease long enough to ask her a few more questions. His intuition started buzzing overtime. What if she knew something about his case? She
was
a blonde. Of course, half of his appointments today had been fair-haired as well.

Still, he couldn’t afford to check on Vanessa and Tempest now if this was the woman he’d been searching for.

“I understand if you’d like to get going, but do you mind if I ask what’s the rush?” He stared meaningfully at the distance between them across the table. “I’m not crowding you, right? And I swear I won’t walk you to your car if you don’t want me to. But I don’t have any where else to go if our date doesn’t work out tonight, so whether or not we hit if off, I’ve got nothing but time to talk.”

With one more glance over her shoulder she sat back down, perching on the edge of her seat as if ready to take off at a moment’s notice. “Maybe for another minute or two.”

“Are you meeting someone else?” He couldn’t imagine why else she’d need to check the front door so often. Leaning back into his seat, he kept his body posture unnaturally relaxed in an effort to gain her confidence.

As job duties went, Wes would rather take punches from a high-flying druggie right now than force himself to stay so still when tension tightened inside him.

But when she pulled a small inhaler free from her purse and took a long breath of some sort of medicine, he could tell he’d done the right thing in sticking around. He watched some of the tension slide out of her shoulders before she shook her head, her blond dye job shaking loose of the two chopsticks she’d used to hold it in place.

“No. I’m not meeting anyone. But I’ve got a psycho ex-boyfriend who likes to check up on me, and I really have no business drawing nice guys like you into my life until I figure out how to deal with him.” She cast him an apologetic smile, her fingers trembling on the inhaler until she dropped it back into her purse.

A psycho boyfriend?

And with blinding clarity, Wes knew where to look for his murder suspect. He just didn’t know how it tied into MatingGame or Tempest.

Lightning flashed outside the bar, the jagged bolt of brightness illuminating the window beside their table for an instant.

“Should I be worried?” He said it with a smile, but deep inside, he was already damn scared. Not for him self, because he could handle whatever came his way.

But, oh God, was he ever scared for Tempest.

“Not for yourself.” Her expression changed, her eyes clouding faster than the stormy sky over Manhattan. “But he gets pretty pissed with me whenever I venture out without him. He’s a mechanic with a lot of macho bullshit pride. Some guys just don’t get the message, you know?”

He was about to ask her more about her ex-boyfriend—a mechanic might very well possess lockpicking
skills—when something snagged his peripheral vision. A woman passed by the windowpane beside their table, a brief reflection of a familiar figure outside in the rain.

Tempest?

She was there one minute and then she was gone.

Shooting to his feet, he stepped back from the booth he’d shared with his latest blind date.

“Will you wait up just one minute, Mary?” He wanted to question the woman further, to find out what made her so edgy tonight, but if Tempest was here in stead of her apartment, something must be very wrong.

He’d learned a long time ago not to question his instincts, and they were kicking into overdrive tonight. The cop buzz rattled his ears so loudly he felt as though he had a whole hive humming in his head. He didn’t know what Mary’s crazy ex-boyfriend could want with Tempest, but his gut told him that he’d been looking for a killer in all the wrong places for the last few days.

The murderer wasn’t a woman who’d used MatingGame. It was a furious man who couldn’t stand the idea of his girlfriend going out with anyone else. A man who killed anyone who got near his woman.

Darting through the happy-hour crowd that was even thicker tonight than the evening before, Wes wound his way to the exit and wrenched open the door. Rain poured down on the street outside, reflecting the bar lights and streetlights across the slick, shiny surfaces of cement sidewalk, blacktop road and brick buildings.

She was nowhere.

“Tempest.” He shouted her name, startling two women sharing a cigarette under Mick’s awning.

No reply. No sign of her or Vanessa. No sound but the sheeting rain that drowned out all other noises. He reached automatically for his cell phone and hit redial, hoping like
hell he’d been wrong about seeing Tempest. Maybe she’d pick up her phone and he could just write off the vision of her in the bar’s window as wishful thinking.

Instead, the phone rang and rang.

Something had gone wrong tonight. Massively, horribly wrong. The realization body-slammed him like one of Vanessa’s kung fu moves, scrambling his brain for one valuable instant and forcing him to acknowledge he would be devastated if anything happened to Tem pest. He’d been wracked with guilt when Steve went missing, but this…It would level him completely.

Feet already in motion, he sprinted down the sidewalk in the direction he swore he’d seen her. He skidded to a halt in the alleyway where she’d flashed him just last night—her beautiful body full of life and so damn vulnerable.

Cold rain fell harder, pounding him with its wet weight in relentless sheets. Seeing nothing in the alley, he turned on his heel, ready to search the whole damn West side.

His foot crunched something on the pavement.

Bending, he picked up the object. A compact mirror.

Tossing the broken glass in a trash can, he continued back out into the street, slowing his pace enough to do a visual sweep of the sidewalk as he jogged. And prayed.

She had to be safe, damn it. He wouldn’t accept anything less. Couldn’t conceive where he would be with out her.

And as the rain pelted his brain, it seemed to drive home the message he’d been afraid to face.

He loved Tempest.

The simple truth blared out of him even as he faced a fear unlike anything he’d ever known. He’d been too much of a chickenshit to admit he’d felt something deep
and real with her when she’d asked him. And now that he was faced with the prospect of never getting to tell her, the fact that he loved her seemed elementary. Fundamental to who he was and what he wanted in life.

Didn’t matter that he’d known her for a handful of days. He’d fallen in love carefully—thoughtfully—in his past and made piss-poor decisions. Maybe it made a weird sort of sense that now—when he’d operated on blind instincts with someone he’d known for less than a week—he was positive he had it right.

But he’d never have the chance to tell her as much unless he found her. Fast.

He called for backup from his precinct, needing all the help he could scavenge when his whole world came down to the safety of one woman.

I
T WOULDN’T BE
a good night to die.

Tempest couldn’t help but think all evidence of her murder would be wiped away in the downpour showering over her nightmare as she struggled against her captor dragging her past 11th Avenue toward the Hudson River. With one clammy palm clamped over her mouth, the man sealed her nose flat to her face, making breathing all but impossible. Screaming was out of the question.

The man who held her was so strong, his grip on her so ironclad, she imagined they looked like a couple running to get out of the rain with half his coat draped over her head. In reality, he had her stuffed inside his jacket to bind her even more tightly to his side, his knife jabbed convincingly against her right hip ever since he’d taken her. Had it been five minutes? Ten? It couldn’t be much longer than that since they’d only walked a long block.

A monster of a human being—at least six foot five—
her tormentor had grabbed her outside of Mick’s Grill, moments before she would have reached Wes. Safety.

But she refused to think about that now when she needed to figure out how to get away. Back to Wes. He didn’t deserve to have another woman forsake him, and she wouldn’t let the psycho bastard who held her rob Wes of the chance to know how much she wanted him. How much she already regretted her decision to put off her happiness for the sake of independence.

She’d been doling out a few items from her purse to leave Wes clues à la Hansel and Gretel, but she needed to do more than that if she didn’t want to end up as fish food for whatever creatures populated the Hudson River these days.

Scary, scary thought.

Right up there with never again seeing the lines around Wes’s eyes crinkle up when he smiled.

She’d wanted her independence, right? What better time to prove to herself that she could be self-reliant? If she could break free of monster man, she would consider herself as kick-ass ready for life as any woman ever had been. And then, by God, if she survived this ordeal, she would embrace Wes Shaw with both hands and allow herself to be happy. Never again would she feel inferior to her poised and gorgeous mother or the dozens of people employed by Boucher Enterprises who seemed smarter and more efficient than her. She was Tempest Boucher, connoisseur of all things roman tic, and that would damn well have to be enough.

Remembering a few self-defense moves from her kickboxing class, she dropped to her knees suddenly, going completely weightless in her captor’s grip. He lost his hold on her, his big, meaty paw catching her hair awkwardly as she dashed away.

For about two seconds.

He caught up to her before she could fling herself in the headlight beam of an oncoming car, her desperate attempt to free herself foiled in no time.

“What the hell are you doing?” The man roared at her. It was the only way she could hear him over the unyielding din of the rain. “No one runs away from Luther.”

Perhaps he wasn’t worried any longer about some one seeing them in this warehouse district of the city be cause he brandished the knife in front of her as a warning. This part of the West side was deserted, with only a few abandoned buildings and burnt-out shops between them and the river.

She went still against him, frustrated that a total stranger could harbor so much fury toward her. Who was this man and how did he fit with Marianne Oakes? The lunatic’s grip tightened around her rain-soaked clothing. Wes’s trench coat around her shoulders pro vided her with little barrier between her and her captor, but it managed to comfort her on a mental level some how, giving her a little extra strength.

“Why are you doing this?” Tempest shouted back at him without considering the wisdom of engaging in conversation with a crazy man. But maybe he’d get distracted if he started talking. She’d been so close to escape a minute ago. All she needed was a little more of a head start.

“I can’t let my Marianne go back to spreading her legs for any guy with a few bucks to spare.” He spoke close to her ear, his words angry and cold as he yanked her toward an abandoned gas station. “And I sure as hell can’t allow the owner of her whorehouse to go unpunished. I tried to get you today in midtown, but I nailed the wrong damn woman.”

Nailed? Dread pooled in her belly as she thought about Vanessa disappearing this afternoon. Had he shot her?

Fear froze Tempest from the inside out as she realized Marianne Oakes wasn’t responsible for anyone’s murder. It was this man who’d done the killing. A jealous boyfriend who’d come unhinged.

But no matter that she’d finally figured out the mystery, she’d never be able to share it with Wes at this rate. Luther’s knife glinted dangerously close to her face again, a tangible reminder that her time was almost up unless she thought of something. Fast.

Too bad the only thing that came to mind was how much she loved Wes Shaw.

With that realization making her more determined than ever to get away, she reached into her purse with her free hand and flicked out the last remaining object. The newspaper photo of her with Wes.

She watched the clipping float down to the pavement for an instant before it succumbed to the deluge, a wet piece of paper plastered to the concrete, no doubt smudged beyond recognition.