he have any news?”
“Not that he shared with me.”
“Okay. So I guess I’ll see you when I see you?”
“Yeah. I’ll check in.”
“You’d better.” She disconnected the call, then sucked on the cigarette until her cheeks hurt. God, it tasted so good.
She punched in Hannah’s number, but no surprise, her friend didn’t answer. Carlotta left her a message with her whereabouts and the reasons why, then ended the call, shaking her head.
Normally, she wouldn’t think twice about Hannah not answering her phone. Her culinary friend, who dabbled in catering—and body moving when Coop permitted—had a lot of men, er, irons in the fire. But recently, Jack’s profiling partner, Maria, had accused Carlotta of not knowing anything about her good friend. Carlotta had bristled at the allegation, but admittedly, it had made her curious about what was going on when Hannah couldn’t be located or made vague excuses to escape.
She tapped some ash off the end of her cigarette, causing the charms on her bracelet to clink. She fingered them, shaking her head over the idea perpetuated that the charms on the bracelets sold by Olympian Eva McCoy for charity were not only unique to the wearer, but were also predictive. Her particular bracelet’s charms were a puzzle piece, an “aloha” charm, three hearts bound together, two champagne glasses toasting and a woman whose arms were crossed over her chest—which looked a little too much like a corpse for Carlotta’s comfort.
If she looked hard enough, she could find connections to her life. She was trying to figure out the puzzle of her father’s guilt or innocence, for example. And shortly after donning the bracelet, she’d met Mitchell Moody, the son of June Moody, the woman who ran Moody’s Cigar Bar. Mitch was currently on military leave from Hawaii.
It was a flimsy connection, but a connection nonetheless.
As far as the three hearts linked together, one might say that it could refer to the three men in her life: Jack, Coop and Peter. The champagne glasses…well, she would certainly celebrate once The Charmed Killer was apprehended…with someone.
And the weird corpse-looking charm, she didn’t want to think about.
Carlotta took a final deep drag on the cigarette, then exhaled leisurely while she glanced over the roofs of the quiet neighborhood. Where she and Wesley lived in Lindbergh, she’d grown accustomed to the boom of car radios and the scream of sirens. Here, the only thing disturbing the peace were suburban crickets.
She squinted at a flash of something—light? metal?—from the house closest to Peter’s, which was slightly up the hill and partially hidden by trees. There was a movement outside a window. As she continued to stare, she could make out more details and realized that someone was standing on a terrace in partial light.
Staring at her with binoculars.
Unnerved, she walked back inside and secured the door, dismissing the incident as typical neighborly snooping. In light of Angela’s scandalous behavior, she suspected more than one set of binoculars had been trained on the Ashford house over the past few months.
She suddenly felt very exposed.
After washing her face and donning silky tap pants and a matching camisole, she snuggled down in the mountain of pillows and set the alarm on her phone so she wouldn’t oversleep. She needed to allow extra time to get ready for work, not to mention drive an unfamiliar car along an unfamiliar commute. While she was scrolling through the features, her phone rang, startling her so badly she nearly dropped it.
She hadn’t realized how skittish she’d become.
But when she looked at the caller-ID screen, she smiled. Jack.
She connected the call. “Are you calling to tuck me in?”
His sexy laugh rumbled over the line. “Yup. What are you wearing?”
“Sweatpants and big fuzzy socks.”
“Good, that should keep Ashford in his place.”
She sighed. “What do you want, Jack?”
He made a rueful noise. “I mentioned that the GBI is coming on board The Charmed Killer case.”
“Yeah.”
“They want to interview you as soon as possible.”
Her heart raced—when would this ghastly situation end? “I can come down in the morning before I go to work. Eight o’clock?”
“Okay.”
“Jack, will you be there?”
“Couldn’t keep me away.”
“Good night.”
“You, too.”
6
Carlotta woke to a piercing noise. As she reached for her cell phone to turn off the blaring alarm, her mind raced to orient herself. Light poured in from a veranda—Peter’s veranda. In a rush it all came back to her—coming home with him and being ensconced in the lap of luxury, sleeping like the dead imbedded in a mattress fit for royalty, the ugliness of The Charmed Killer far, far away. She stabbed at her phone, but the frantic alarm didn’t stop.
And then she realized the wail wasn’t the alarm on her phone. It was the house security alarm.
Her heart vaulted to her throat. As she leaped out of bed, she wondered if Peter had inadvertently tripped it as he’d left for work. But the clock showed it was seven-thirty—much later than he said he’d be leaving. She rushed to the closed bedroom door and scanned the small security panel on the wall above the light switch. A red light glowed next to the words Motion Detector. Someone had set off the device on the first floor—meaning they were inside the house.
Carlotta’s throat convulsed in fear. If Peter was running late and had accidentally set off the alarm, he would’ve disarmed it by now. She turned the dead-bolt lock on the door and backtracked to her cell phone, only to find the battery dead.
The crashing noise of glass breaking sounded from the first floor, confirming her fear that someone was in the house. From the nightstand, a landline cordless phone rang, startling her so badly she cried out, then she clamped a hand over her mouth, realizing she’d just advertised her whereabouts to the intruder. She scrambled to answer the phone. “Hello?”
“This is the security monitoring service,” a man said. “We were alerted that your home alarm has been tripped. What is your password?”
Carlotta frowned. “Password? I don’t know. I don’t live here.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, I’m a guest in the house. I think there’s an intruder—I heard something downstairs.”
“I’ll send the police,” he said, his voice full of solemn concern, “but I need to put you on hold and contact the owner at an alternate number. What’s your name?”
“Carlotta
