Reyes pursed his mouth dubiously. “You really trust me to do this?”
“Yes.”
He stared at her before snorting. “You don’t trust me. You just vetted me six ways to Sunday. You’ve confirmed I can’t have been behind attacking Luke.”
A.J. smiled faintly.
“Oh fine,” he said. “I’ll do it. And fall on the damn sword too. I admit my jackassery is more credible than his.” His brows lifted humorously. “I suppose this means I’m invited to the shindig.”
“Feel free to press your tux.” Because she remembered the stories about him and Luke’s maids, she tacked on an addendum. “If, however, you make one female at that party cry, I’ll personally handcuff you to a plumbing stack.”
Though Reyes had been enjoying their interaction, he seemed to understand she was serious.
“I stand warned,” he said without sarcasm.
LUKE, A.J., and the two men he’d come to think of as her inner circle watched
Jimmy Kimmel Live
in his personal sitting room. Kev was being interviewed—and not a minute too soon. Getting the slot on short notice had required finagling. Luke’s partner didn’t usually do the talk show rounds. How naturally Kevin bantered with the late night host impressed Luke. Maybe he wasn’t the only thespian at their firm.
“So there might be couch jumping at this party?” Kimmel prompted, referring to Tom Cruise’s infamous declaration of affection for Katie Holmes.
“There might be,” Kevin confirmed coyly. “There might even be a rock.”
“Any hints as to who’ll be dragging it around?”
Kevin flashed his teeth on cue. “That would be telling. And since my buddy Luke will strangle me if I blab, maybe now would be a good time to run that clip from
Final Death
.”
Somewhat to Luke’s annoyance, Martin switched off the TV before the footage rolled.
“Sorry,” Martin said, catching his muted huff. “I assumed you’d watched it already.”
“I have,” Luke admitted. “Just actor obsessiveness, I guess.”
Actually, he’d wanted A.J. to see it. She hadn’t said much about his films, though he was pretty sure she’d caught at least bits of them. He couldn’t help if he wanted her to like this one.
Final Death
was his best thus far, performance-wise.
For the moment, she was concentrating on business, her rangy frame semi-sprawled in a white and chrome Le Corbusier chair. “Reyes did a good job,” she observed. “The celebrity news venues are sure to re-air those bits. We just have to pray Luke’s people can pull this party out of thin air in time.”
“Rachel and Nettles promise me that’s on track. We’ll have champagne and a buffet for 200 by 5 p.m. tomorrow.”
Szymanski snorted in amusement. “Just a ‘small’ get together.”
“If there isn’t a crowd, the person we’re trying to lure might not have the nerve to sneak in.”
A.J. pushed to her feet like she had too much nervous energy. She pinned him with an adrenaline-brightened gaze. “You copied my men on the official guest list?”
“And your dad,” he assured. “Plus I emailed him the event staff.”
When she bit the side of her thumb, Martin reached from his chair to squeeze her elbow. “You’re not doing this by yourself. We’ll all make sure this comes off okay.”
“My dad’s sending extra guys,” she said with a hint of confession.
“Because this is a big operation,” Martin soothed. “If Parker didn’t think you could handle it, he wouldn’t let you move forward.”
“Maybe he thought I’d be angry if he refused.”
“A.J., your dad cares about your feelings but not enough to tiptoe around you to that extent. For that matter, I don’t care enough about them for that.”
Unoffended by this declaration, A.J. pressed her lips together and nodded. Still sitting, Martin smiled up at her. “You know your dad’s mantra: Plan the plan, cover every angle you can—”
“—then trust your team to do what you’ve asked.” She nodded again and straightened her shoulders. “If I stick to that, I won’t feel overwhelmed.”
“Exactly.” Martin gave her hands a squeeze. “Don’t forget, when it comes to the actual party, you’ll have the same job you did before: protecting Hoyt-Sands’ client. You know you’ll do what’s needed to keep Luke safe. And you know you can trust us to do the same for you.”
The reminder she’d be in danger caused Luke’s heart to wobble. Should they really do this? A.J. was tough but not indestructible. Was it worth risking her life on the chance this could be over?
She must have sensed him tensing because her gaze slid to him.
“I’m okay,” she said. “As long as you’re comfortable with the plan, so am I.”
The sight of Martin holding A.J.’s hands had sidetracked Luke from realizing he’d been let into the inner circle—not only by her but also her colleagues. It couldn’t be SOP to let clients see this sort of self-questioning. Luke suspected he shouldn’t make a big deal of it.
“I say we stay on track,” he voted.
“Great,” Martin said. He rose from his chair and stretched.
Szymanski followed his example more noisily.
“I’ll be right outside,” he said once he’d dropped his arms. “Don’t stay up too late, you two. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
A.J. blinked and Martin did a small double take. Szymanski was assuming A.J. was sleeping here tonight—no sneaking around required.
Luke knew there was a reason he liked the man.
*
In spite of her intent to focus on what she could control, so many thoughts racketed through A.J.’s brain she felt like she had a pinball parlor in her skull. Once Szymanski and Martin left, she and Luke moved to his bedroom. Unable to relax, she gave in to impulse and strode back toward the door.
“I’m going out for a minute. I want to double-check a setting on the hall cameras.”
Luke caught her by the shoulders before she could. “Sit or I’ll sic Sven on you.”
“What?”
“Sit,” he repeated. He pushed her gently but firmly to the side of his bed. Lowering himself beside her, he bumped her knee with his. He was in pajamas, but A.J. hadn’t undressed yet. She wasn’t ready to be off duty. Luke patted her on the leg. “Your men have the cameras under control. I saw Szymanski and another guy checking them earlier. I want to talk to you about something before tomorrow.”
His tone suggested the topic was difficult.
“That doesn’t sound good,” she said.
“It’s not bad. Just . . . complicated.” Luke ran his hands through his hair in that way he had: the one that made her want to run her fingers through it too.
Pushing that aside for the moment, she gave him her full attention. “Do you want to call off tomorrow? It’s not too late.”
“No, I—” He turned on the bed to face her more directly. “Look, I probably should have brought this up before. I was hoping you’d remember it yourself.”
Her mind raced in a new direction. He wasn’t talking about their night together after the bar fight. They’d discussed that already, along with why she’d ignored his calls. He was over that, she thought.
Just ask
, she told herself, impatient with her own foot-dragging. If this were bad news, she’d deal with it. “What were you hoping I’d remember?”
“I have to start at the beginning. It’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She’d said this a little curtly, but his smile of answer was beautiful. “No, you’re not. Grumpy or not, you’re hanging right in with me.”
Claiming she wasn’t grumpy would have delayed him more. Doubtless, she was a bit. She lifted her eyebrows to tell him to go on.
“Okay,” he said, delivering the word on a sigh. “As you know, I grew up in rural Minnesota, in a small town in farm country. The community had maybe 2,000 people, and everybody knew everybody—or thought they did. We kids were raised what they call ‘free range’ today. Walked to school by ourselves. Wandered the woods. Got ourselves to and from baseball games.”
“Ate apple pie?” she suggested because he’d paused.
“You betcha,” he confirmed humorously. “Anyway, I was a pretty normal kid. Not the most popular or the least. Not the best at sports or the worst. I got into trouble now and then, but I wasn’t a problem child. I was happy, I think, looking back. My biggest worry was whether the fight I’d heard my parents have the night before would mean they’d get divorced. Other than that, I was oblivious to most things besides myself.”
“Obviously something happened to change that.”
He took her hands and rubbed them with his thumbs. “This might sound arrogant, but the thing that stood out about me was my looks. I was eleven. Not tall, but I had the white-blond hair most kids grow out of by then. Light eyes. Straight teeth. All the stuff old-school cereal boxes were made of. I was the perfect American boy, or some people’s idea of that.
“There was one family—the Danielson’s—around whom a whiff of old scandal swirled. They had money, which automatically made them exotic, and their history in the area went way back. Once upon a time, they farmed the whole township. Lennart Danielson was a retired judge, and he still got deference for it. The story was his wife ran away with another man soon after giving birth to their daughter, Vivianne. As it turned out, the truth was stranger, but we didn’t know that then.
“The judge’s daughter, Vivi, was an odd duck. She was in her thirties. Never left home, never married, rarely spoke to anyone except in the course of her volunteer work at the library. Once a week, she’d read books to the little kids. Some liked her. Others burst into tears if their parents prodded them to sit. Vivi had a strange vibe—too intense—and I guessed some kids picked up on it.” Luke shook his head in memory. “Story Time got awkward now and then.”
Luke’s hold on A.J.’s hands had tensed. She turned hers beneath them. “What did Vivi Danielson have to do with you?”
“Not much to begin with.”
A.J. couldn’t read Luke’s eyes. They were locked on an internal distance. He shook himself and went on. “By the time she started her volunteer work, I was too old to be read to. She had another odd habit, though. When the weather turned cold, which it does in Minnesota, she’d drive around in her dad’s Cadillac and force mittens on any young person whose hands were bare.”
He’d startled her into laughing. “She
forced
mittens on people?”
“She’d slow the car to a crawl and trail whoever it was until they accepted her offering. Once they gave in, she’d drive off. Apparently, she bought them in bulk through a catalog.”
“That
is
strange.”
“Yeah.” Luke breathed out a slow sigh. “Kids being kids, some of the older ones made a game of teasing her. They’d take the mittens and throw them away. See how many pairs they could trick her into giving them. Stupid stuff like that.”
“Is that what you did?” A.J. asked curiously.
Luke shook his head. “My parents were strict about treating people with respect. They’d have tarred my bottom if news I’d mocked her got back to them. They said Miss Danielson just wanted to connect to people and didn’t know a better way. I wasn’t a brat, but I wasn’t a saint either. I tried to avoid her. If I couldn’t, I was polite and got away as fast as I could. It didn’t seem to me she paid me more attention than she did other kids.”
He blinked and was silent for a heartbeat. A.J. squeezed his hands in encouragement.
“On April 9, 2001,” he said, “a Monday, on my walk home from school, I spotted Vivi Danielson pulled into the weeds on the verge of the cracked two-lane. She had a different vehicle from her father’s Caddy. The hood was up like she had car trouble. I remember groaning in my head when she waved her arms at me, but I knew something about engines from working on tractors with my dad. I also knew hardly anyone drove that road. If I didn’t stop to help, she might be stuck for hours.”
“So you listened to your conscience.”
“I listened to my conscience.”
What happened next couldn’t possibly be good. A.J. pulled one of his hands to her mouth to kiss. She kept the gesture brief. Though the backs of her eyes were burning, she didn’t want to make this harder on him by showing too much sympathy. “What did she do to you?”
“Knocked me out with chloroform when I leaned underneath the hood. I played sports, but I wasn’t a big kid. She had no trouble lifting me into the trunk of the rental car, where she bound me up in duct tape. She’d been planning the abduction for a while. Packed her bags. Stole a pile of cash from her dad’s wall safe. Used a false name to sign for things. When she drove out of town, she erased me from existence for the next five months.”
A.J.’s former cop mind boggled. “People didn’t notice you and she went missing at the same time?”
“Nope. Everyone assumed a passing stranger had taken me. Minnesotans, especially in small towns, tend to assume their neighbors don’t commit heinous crimes. Also, Vivianne wasn’t reported as being gone.”
“But . . . she lived with her dad. He’d have noticed she wasn’t there.”
“She told Lennart she was visiting a friend from boarding school. Mind you, she didn’t stay in touch with the girls she knew there, but people convince themselves of what’s comfortable. Eventually, after getting nowhere, the investigators realized the local Mitten Lady might be a person of interest. They spoke to her father, who—as luck would have it—had been the magistrate on a number of their cases. They’d have known him anyway. The town
was
named after his family. When he acted like everything was hunky dory, the cops took him at his word.”
In Luke’s shoes, A.J. would have said this with more anger. She was outraged just hearing it. “So, basically, no one who might have found you was looking in the right direction.”
Luke gathered up her hands and kissed them like she had his. A tear spilled from the corner of his left eye, rolling slow and gleaming in the glow of his bedside lamp.
“No one but you,” he said huskily.
If the tear hadn’t stunned her, this would have. “Me?”
“Vivi hid me in New York, in the basement of a brownstone.”
Her jaw fell, her body rocking back slightly. He couldn’t be saying what she thought he was.
“It’s true,” he said. “Vivianne had the crazy idea I was the perfect son she should have had. She was going to find some fair-haired man to marry or else pretend she’d been hitched to one and he’d died. Either way, people would like her then. She’d fit in with normal folks. Logic didn’t come into it. That’s just how her mind worked. She wanted me to play along, but I couldn’t. At first, it was stubbornness. I defied her, because I couldn’t admit the Mitten Lady had gotten the best of me. Unfortunately, by the time I was desperate enough to try lying, I’d lost my chance to make her believe me.”