"God. I wish I'd never told him about the threats," she muttered, then reined in her thoughts, recognizing she was coming dangerously close to whining. "It's just some sicko's idea of a bad joke anyway."
"Death plus threat don't equal joke in my book, so don't expect me to apologize for suggesting you fill your father in. I wouldn't have been a
true
friend," Rachael added, mimicking Jillian's earlier inflection on the word, "if I hadn't."
"I know," Jillian agreed, feeling very tired suddenly. "And I'm not blaming you. You
are
a friend, Rach. I don't know what I'd do without you."
"Yeah, well, it helps that I mix a mean martini," her longtime partner in crime added with a grin in her voice.
Over the years, they'd been there for each other. Friends. Confidantes. Allies. Rachael had even tried out for the U.S. gymnastics team the year Jillian had made the Olympic squad. Most recently, Jillian had seen Rachael through a nasty divorce that had rocked the Palm Beach social scene and broken Rachael's heart. That had been six months ago, and Rachael was still recovering.
The elevator cruised to a smooth stop. When the doors slid open on a nearly soundless sigh, Jillian stepped out into the subtle lighting of a wide hallway carpeted in champagne-colored plush.
"You still with me?" Jillian asked after she was met by another long silence.
"Yeah, I'm here." Rachael's voice had grown soft. "And it goes both ways. You're my friend, too. I care. And I worry, you know?"
Yeah. Jillian knew. Their long-term friendship was rare in a Palm Beach matriarchal society that had elevated the air kiss to an art form and appeared vapid and benign on the surface. The underlying jealousies, competitiveness, and egos, however, proved it was anything but and were among the reasons Jillian had distanced herself from the whole high-profile social scene. Though it puzzled her that Rachael seemed to find some sort of solace as an integral part of it, she would never question her friend's motives.
Not that TV journalism was without its own peccadilloes. If Jillian wasn't struggling with her producer's indecisions over airing one of her investigative reports or vying for studio time with Erica Gray, the weather girl, then Grant Wellington, her coanchor, made it a point to be her very own personal pain in the tush.
"Did you catch what Grant did tonight?" Jillian asked in a blatant ploy to steer away from the subject of weird voice-mail messages and e-mails.
"You mean during the closing segment when he stepped on your lines in an attempt to throw you off-balance? Oh yeah—but only because I was looking for it. You covered it like a blanket on a baby."
"What is it with that man?" Jillian keyed her code into the touch pad of her security system and, when the little green light flashed, swung open the door to her penthouse. Once inside, she reset the lock and with a groan of pleasure slipped out of her red Ferragamo pumps.
"Other than the fact that he's an aging prima donna who knows his glow is fading, a card-carrying chauvinist, and an all-around Clydesdale's ass?"
Rachael's apt, if irreverent, take on Grant Wellington finally pushed out a laugh. "Yeah, other than that. I don't want his job," she added, sobering. "Why can't he get that through his ego-inflated head?"
Flipping on the foyer light, she stripped off her suit jacket and tossed the cranberry linen over her navy blue leather sofa as she went by. The white Italian tile felt wonderfully cool beneath her bare feet.
"You don't
have
to want his job," Rachael assured her. "Apparently you just have to show up to make him feel threatened."
Jillian hit the switch for the track lighting over her kitchen counter. Light flooded the lemon yellow walls of the galley kitchen and cast shadows into the open dining and living area. "I don't threaten people. I
never
threaten people."
'True," Rachael agreed, then added with meaning, "People threaten you."
"You managed
that
segue well." Jillian reached into the fridge for the bottle of chardonnay she'd opened last week. "But we aren't going to talk about threats or notes or bodyguards anymore,
capice?”
"That line would work so much better for you if you were Italian."
Again, Jillian laughed. "So sue me."
"You're already being sued," Rachael reminded her with a smile in her voice.
Jillian hipped the refrigerator door closed. "Yeah, but that will all go away when the indictment comes down."
She wedged the phone between her shoulder and ear and started working the cork. When she'd popped it, she reached up and slid a wineglass from the rack suspended beneath a bank of cupboards.
"When's it scheduled, anyway?"
"The indictment proceeding on Councilwoman Abramson? Next month." She filled her glass three-quarters full.
"Ought to be a real sideshow."
"Don't we both know it." Jillian sipped, savored, and then swallowed. "Look, sweetie, I'm bushed. I think I'll hit the shower, then call it a wrap. The weekend has never looked so good. You have any plans?"
'The usual."
Which meant Rachael was involved with some Angels of Charity social function.
"How's that going?"
"Fine."
Jillian heard the fatigue in Rachael's voice. "You work too hard."
"And that would be you playing the pot or the kettle?"
"OK. So we both burn a lot of midnight oil. At least I'm going to burn mine at home this weekend. I'm holing up here and compiling my notes on my Forgotten Man piece, and like Punxsutawney Phil, I ain't comin' out till I see my shadow—or until Monday, which, unfortunately, will probably come sooner. We're still on for lunch Tuesday, right?"
"Noon, The Four Seasons. I'll see you then. Now don't get ticked—you
did
lock up, right?"
Jillian smiled. "Yes, Mother."
"Get some rest."
"You, too. Bye."
"Bye."
Jillian hit the end button, set the cell phone on the black granite countertop, and tipped the wine to her lips.
"Vino.
Nectar of the gods," she murmured on a savoring sigh.
Rolling her head to relieve the tension burning in her shoulders, she walked into the living room, then hesitated when she spotted the blinking red light on her answering machine. Determined to ignore it and the little hitch of apprehension over what kind of a message she might find there, she headed for her bedroom, sipping wine and tugging her blouse out of her skirt on the way.
It was times like these, when she was tired and—
She stopped midthought, midstride, her heart rate suddenly revving.
Standing painfully still in her bedroom doorway, she cocked an ear toward the hall, certain she'd heard something ... in the kitchen, maybe. She waited several beats... heard only a ringing silence, and let out a stalled breath when she decided it was just the icemaker dropping cubes or something equally benign.
Shaking off the little frisson of unease and the sting of anger that accompanied it—all because some jerk had decided to spook her with death threats—she made herself pull away from the edge and picked up on her train of thought again.
It was times like these
when she wished she had someone to come home to. Someone who could soothe her aching shoulders, someone who would be glad to see her, greet her with a glass of wine, then tumble her into bed for a nice, frisky round of hot, sweaty sex.
"A live-in masseuse and a dog would take care of the first two," she decided. And the other two ... she let out a gusty sigh. The other hadn't been on the table for longer than she liked to think about. Actually, hot, sweaty sex had
never
been on the table. Or the bed. Or the floor. Polite, pleasant sex, yes, and so completely unmemorable she couldn't recall if the last time had been four or five years ago. She didn't like to think about that, either.
Just like she didn't like to think about the death threats.
But she did. Again. She thought about them a lot, even though she tried to downplay it. They were getting to her. Even in her own home, she felt wary—and she didn't like it.
A shiver she couldn't stall inched down her spine when she thought of the first chilling message that had been left on her home voice mail two weeks ago:
"Star light, star bright,
first star 1 see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish 1 might,
have the wish 1 wish tonight.
I wish you were dead, Jillian.
What do you wish for?"
The voice had been chilling, genderless, almost like a child's voice. But no child could have relayed such hatred and evil intent. The second message, sent to her office e-mail and as yet, untraceable by the police, had been identical in content.
Stone-faced, she looked in the direction of her living room. She could no longer see her answering machine, but in her mind's eye the red light blinked on and off like a that She hated herself for being spooked by the thought that another message might be waiting for her there. Hated it more
that she'd been too much of a coward to confront the possibility head-on as soon as she'd walked in the door.
"Well, hotshot, there's only one thing to do about it, isn't there?" she murmured, still staring down the hall toward the machine.
She made herself walk back to the living room. The answering machine sat in mocking silence on her end table. The display blinked with the number 5.
With a jerky motion, she punched the
play
button, crossed her arms beneath her breasts, and waited in tense silence. The first two messages were hang-ups—telemarketers, no doubt. The third was her accountant reminding her to file her
quarterlies.
The fourth was from Steven Fowler.
"Jillian—please call me. It's been a month. You haven't returned my calls or answered my e-mails. You haven't let me see you. Please, we can work this out if—"
She hit the
delete
button without listening to the rest of Steven's message. The bastard. He'd sucked her in, made her think they might have a future together. It had taken him two months to get around to mentioning the wife and kids back in Chicago—and that had only been after the wife in question had called Jillian and threatened to make her the object of the biggest character assassination to ever hit the
National Enquirer
and every sleaze tabloid in between.
Jillian had been horrified. She wasn't a home wrecker, but she had been a chump.
Of course,
he planned to divorce her.
Of course,
he'd meant to tell Jillian about his "complication" sooner, but
whoops,
the time had never been right.
Pretty damn big
whoops.
Shaking off the humiliation and the pain of that experience that still cut a little too close to the quick, she skipped to the last message.
"Jillian—it's your father. We need to talk. Please give me a call."
Her relief over not finding another threat on her machine was lost in her complicated feelings for her father. She loved him, she really did... but she was not going to knuckle under to him on this. He had to quit bulldozing his way into her life.
And she had to quit letting the threats rule her thoughts.
Returning to her bedroom, she set her wineglass on her bedside table, shrugged out of her blouse, then reached behind her back to unfasten the zipper on her skirt. Next she lost the bra. With a blissful sigh, she rubbed her palms along the undersides of her breasts, worrying away the irritation caused by the underwire cups.
After another quick sip of wine, then an admonishment to "pace yourself, Kincaid," she left half a glass to lull her to sleep and headed for the adjoining bathroom.
She turned on the shower, eased out of her panties, then retraced her steps back into the bedroom to turn on her sound system. Slipping her Paulinho Nogueira
Late Night Guitar
CD into the changer, she upped the volume and headed back to the bathroom.
Again a noise—unfamiliar, out of place—stopped her. She stood stock-still, one hand on the door. Heart kicking like a Rockette, she cocked her head, listened, then hissed out a breath on a concise expletive.
Nothing. There wasn't a thing out of sync beneath the beat of the sultry guitar rhythms. And she had to stop allowing this nonsense to shake her. She lived in a high-security building, for God's sake. Her penthouse was virtually impenetrable. If anyone had tripped her alarm, a patrol car with siren blaring would be parked out front right now and a contingent of private security officers would be storming the building, guns drawn.
Willing her heart to settle and her backbone to stiffen up, she stepped into the shower stall and tipped her face toward me hot, pulsing spray. She lathered her hair with shampoo that smelled of rain forest and lush tropical blooms and wished she hadn't watched late-night classic movies last week. Even in black-and-white, the shower scene from
Psycho
had been chilling—possibly more so
because
of the lack of color.
The images of the blood-splattered shower wall in the bathroom of the Bates Motel drifted through her mind as she stood there, naked and completely vulnerable and honed just one more sharp edge to the knifelike tension she was beginning to despise.