led toward the editing bay.
The room, no bigger than a closet, was arranged like a command module: two Beta tape decks canted on the desk, two monitors angled inward on the shelf above. Dave took the chair without asking and popped in the tape he’d retrieved. Jamie hovered behind him.
He didn’t take long to locate the footage of Nathan Biddle sitting atop a horse in a white cowboy hat and western-style tuxedo, looking like the man who had everything.
“This what you want?” Dave asked as he toggled doorknob-size dials back and forth, cutting and moving footage to the blank tape in the other Beta deck. “I remembered exactly when I shot this, because how many people would think of using a horse, instead of a golf cart?” A close-up shot of Biddle resting his five iron across the saddle horn zoomed forward on the screen. Dave twisted the knobs again. “This kind of work will be a lot easier to do when we get the new AVID system,” he said. “We’ll be able to do enhancements, pull out nat sound, do perfect lay-downs, everything.”
More interested in her subject than the technology Dave adored, Jamie commented softly, “Biddle would pull any stunt to get publicity for his charities.”
“Man, his looks sure have changed.” Dave brought the face on the screen into sharper focus. “Doesn’t even look like the same dude.”
“Okay. You can go play now.”
Dave got up and gave Jamie the chair, but then he hovered at Jamie’s shoulder and studied the viewer as she froze a frame showing a young woman smiling in the background.
“Biddle’s wife,” Dave said, and Jamie nodded.
“Film often catches things you miss in real time.”
They watched while the pale-skinned brunette beauty glanced over her shoulder at someone in the crowd. When she turned back toward the camera, she looked pensive, biting her perfect lower lip.
After a gravid silence, Dave said. “God, she’s pretty. You think he did it?”
Jamie sank back in her chair, hypnotized by the image before her. Susan Biddle had indeed been a pretty woman. “Go get me everything else we’ve got, okay?”
“Jamie, come on. You’ve seen it all a dozen times.”
“Well, I want to see it again, okay? Now go.”
Dave bounded away.
Jamie transferred the segment with the wife onto the new tape, then loaded a different cartridge into the first tape deck. This was tonight’s video. The one she didn’t use. She fast-forwarded past the parts of herself in a fright wig and came to Biddle’s face. Just like in the golf segment, he looked down from high up in a saddle. But Dave was right. He did look different. It wasn’t just the ranch clothes and the fact that he’d let his hair grow out. His Native American blood seemed to stand out now. In the lines of his face she could see shadows of the Osage warrior depicted in the famous George Catlin painting. The same high forehead, wide mouth, prominent nose. But mostly it was his deep-set eyes that seemed changed, transformed, revealed. Handsome and energetic in the older video, they looked darker now, more still. The quiet bottomless eyes of a man who had suffered too much. Even so, something about his face radiated such strength, such compassion, such integrity that Jamie’s instincts told her this was a man who could never murder anyone, much less his wife.
Again she watched the reaction that Dave had surreptitiously captured. The shocked realization that passed over the whole man when she told him Susan Biddle’s remains had been found. Nobody could fake that. Could they?
She froze the frame and her stomach tightened as she relived that first encounter. It had been so long since she’d been genuinely attracted to a man that she’d just about given up. Her big sister, Valerie, oh-so-happily married and busy making babies with a nice ordinary mechanical engineer in Kansas City, claimed Jamie had some kind of complex about bad boys. Valerie would never let Jamie forget her disastrous post-high-school fling with a motorcycle-riding wild guy named Ethan.
Could she help it, Jamie had argued the last time they’d talked about men, if she couldn’t imagine kissing ninety-nine percent of the nice guys she met, much less being married to one of them? But when she imagined kissing Nathan Biddle—as, unfortunately, she had—her insides thrummed. Maybe her sister had a point. Maybe she liked her men…complicated.
“You are going to end up all alone with a closet full of fancy suits,” Valerie had teased when Jamie passed her dateless twenty-fifth birthday.
So within a year Jamie had rekindled the thing with Donald, her tame college boyfriend. Stable, convenient and deadly dull, Donald was still living in Kansas City, practicing routine law. Living in Tulsa while Donald lived in KC hadn’t bothered her, because their relationship had always been long-distance. That should have been her first clue. But within six months they were going through the motions of being an engaged couple, and Donald suddenly became not-so-convenient. He started insisting that Jamie give up her career now that they were ready to “settle down” in Kansas City. Jamie came to the conclusion that going it alone was better than living a life she’d hate with a man she felt lukewarm about.
Even though she’d been relieved when she broke it off, extracting herself from that longstanding relationship had caused Donald, her family and herself considerable anguish. The next guy, she decided, was going to have to be well worth risking that kind of entanglement. He was going to have to absolutely knock her socks off.
But who would have guessed that the guy who would knock her socks off would turn out to be a reclusive murder suspect? She looked at the face on the screen, and suddenly that face, which she had seen in all kinds of poses, looked completely new to her. Studying old footage and photos of Nathan Biddle hadn’t been the same as meeting him in person.
“Somebody out there to see you.” Dave burst through the door, and Jamie jumped. He stood balancing a stack of older tapes and frowned at the handsome face on the screen. “He’s a different kinda guy, isn’t he?”
She hit the fast-forward button. “Who’s out there?”
“You ain’t gonna believe this. The DA.”
“Trent Van Horn? Here?”
“Yep.”
WHEN SHE SPOTTED Van Horn standing in the dimly lit reception area, Jamie’s first thought was, My, don’t we look pretty tonight. Apparently he was on his way to a “do,” dressed in a formal tux, with a red cummerbund to boot. His patent-leather shoes mirrored the low after-hours lighting, his longish hair shone silver where it was slicked back from his temples, and his pungent aftershave permeated the air. No one else was about. Even the receptionist had taken off for the day. Good. Maybe she could get Mr. Van Horn to speak candidly for a change.
“Trent. How are you?” Jamie put out her hand first.
“I’m fine, Jamie.” He gave her the standard handclasp. “I called and they told me you were still working at the station. I apologize for dropping by unannounced, but when I got your message, I figured you’d want a statement for the ten-o’clock broadcast.”
Jamie didn’t bother to respond to his self-serving apology. If Trent Van Horn wanted to stop by the station unannounced, he did it, no excuses needed. Jamie knew he wanted his face on the ten-o’clock news in the worst way. Shortly after taking this job in Tulsa, Jamie had figured out that Van Horn considered the media a handy
