simply didn’t know.
The bottom line was that the Blood of the Rose was now Stephen’s. Her Rose, the stone she had sat with at her mother’s bedroom hearth as a child, her heart pounding at its fire, at the red tears in its depths. We have to put it away now, baby. But someday it will be yours.
Tara curled her fist against her mouth and coughed over something hard that lodged in her throat. She turned the corner onto Race Street.
She’d get the gem back. She would.
C. Fox Whittington arrived in the door of Remmick’s—his favorite pub—just shy of seven o’clock. He waded through the crowd to the bar, feeling the tension of the day peel off layer by layer. Fox had been looking forward to this for hours since the last nail had been pounded home into a complex matter involving a six-month-old murder, a well-faded beauty queen and a slice of lemon pie.
The case had consumed him for weeks now and if the law of averages held, he could count on an easy month or two before another humdinger passed his particular desk. But first, he thought, he would enjoy a night of soft music, fine bourbon whiskey and maybe a good steak, medium rare.
A gaggle of pretty women clustered near the bar to his right. Ordinarily, the type of women who came to bars on their own didn’t appeal to him, but the blonde on the stool closest to him left her friends’ conversation long enough to catch his eye and smile shyly. Fox felt his heart shift a little.
She wasn’t Adelia. There would never be another Adelia. But she had a similar way of cocking her head to the side, a way of sweeping her gaze demurely downward after that brief touch of their eyes. Fox smiled back at her.
Maybe, he thought. Maybe this was the one.
Tara’s cab drew up in front of Stephen’s home at six minutes past seven.
The house was three ostentatious floors of diamond light trickling out the windows, making the afternoon’s snow sparkle on the lawn. She had grown up here after her mother had married Stephen’s father but Letitia had legitimately bequeathed the house to Stephen—even Tara’s will said that. It had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s before him. It was rightfully his, just as the Rose was rightfully hers.
Tara stared at it long enough that the driver cleared his throat. “Oh, thanks. Sorry.” She checked the meter and shoved a generous handful of bills at him.
“You want me to wait?” He frowned at all the money.
“No. Keep the change.” She had a feeling that it was going to take a while for her to seal this deal.
She got out of the taxi and stood on the sidewalk. An errant clump of snow fell from one of the telephone wires overhead and hit her squarely on the shoulder. Tara let out a startled sound that showed how tense she was. She heard the cab’s wheels crunch over ice as the car rolled again, then she started up the walk.
The sound of the car had receded before her nerves eased enough that she realized Stephen’s front door was open. On a December night? He was arrogant, yes, and showy about his wealth. He was also stingy. He wouldn’t throw handfuls of money at the utility companies if he could help it. Tara went to the door.
“Hello?” she called.
There was no answer from within the house. But, she noticed again, there was a great deal of light. She stepped into the entry, then through a second, inner door into the main hall.
Her gaze barely glanced off the curving central staircase but she shivered a little anyway and found herself remembering the time Stephen had pushed her down those steps. She’d broken her arm. He’d told their parents that she’d tripped. He’d explained it with wide-eyed amazement and they’d believed him. He’d always been an excellent liar.
“Hello?” Tara called again. “Stephen, what on earth are you doing? Heating Philadelphia? Did you suddenly decide to give something to charity?”
Still, there was no answer. Tara strode purposefully down the hall. She was annoyed. He was up to something but, as usual, she couldn’t even begin to fathom what it might be. Stephen always kept a few cards hidden up his sleeve.
Tara kept calling his name as she went down the hallway. She turned into the library, Stephen’s favorite room, then she stopped cold. “What on earth?”
It was dark in here, though light spilled in from the hallway and the windows. She could see just enough to make out the details of the room. For some bizarre reason, Stephen was lying on the floor. She crossed to him slowly.
“Stephen, this is ridiculous.” She nudged his beefy shoulder with her toe. “Get up.” She wanted to say, Get up or I’m leaving. But, of course, she wouldn’t do that, not without the Rose, and they both knew it.
Stephen didn’t move.
Exasperated, Tara knelt beside him. Then she frowned. The fireplace poker was beside him, hidden on his far side.
It had blood on it.
Her body reacted to what she was seeing before her mind even registered it. Her heart began jackhammering. Her gorge rose. She felt suddenly chilled; her skin had gone dewy and damp.
“No, no, no,” she whispered, not aware she did it aloud. “Stephen?” She touched his wrist. There was no pulse.
He was dead.
The realization went through her like a shot of electricity. She couldn’t feel grief, not for him, a man who had perpetrated cruelty after cruelty on her for too many years to count. But shock rolled through her body, somehow cold and hot all at once. And she knew that somehow, even in death, he would still manage to hurt her.
Call an ambulance, she thought first. But he wasn’t just dead. He’d been killed and she had found him. The press had followed every detail of their court battle. She had told the cab driver—emphatically—not to wait. And she’d given him a huge tip, mostly because she’d been too nervous and too impatient to worry about taking change back.
Real fear began to beat in her blood. She could make an anonymous call to 911, she realized, but then she should just leave.
Tara shot to her feet and spun for Stephen’s desk and the phone there. She grabbed it and it dropped from her nerveless fingers. She cried out instinctively at the clatter it made on the desk then she picked it up again and managed to punch in the correct numbers.
“I—yes,” she babbled to the voice that answered. “There’s a body. Somebody’s dead here. You should—” Tara broke off and pressed a trembling hand to her temple as something else occurred to her. The Rose! Had Stephen been killed for the Rose? “The ruby!”
She slammed down the phone. Her gaze swung wildly to Stephen’s safe. It was open. She took a quick step that way but then her foot came down on something vaguely round and hard, something that pressed into the rug beneath her weight and made her ankle roll. Tara gasped at the pain and looked down.
The Rose. On the floor?
She bent and grabbed it. She had the wild thought that heat pulsed from it, that the ruby somehow knew who she was and that it welcomed her touch. Then she heard a sound. Somewhere…over there, she thought, near the window.
The killer was still in the room
