crossed over her chest, the scene she’d pictured several times in her nightmares.
Piper pressed a hand against her chest. She had to think. She had to breathe. And she had to get away from here. Still, she wasn’t sure how long it took her to tear her gaze away from the rose petals and get down the flight of stairs. She ran then, and she didn’t stop to use her cell phone until she’d dashed into the coffee shop down the street.
IT WAS DUNCAN SUTHERLAND’S day off, and to make sure he enjoyed every minute of it, he’d scheduled a 7:00 a.m. tee-off time. Although he preferred a low-key, laid-back approach to life, there were some deadlines that had to be met. And a tee-off time was sacred. Plus, he needed a break from work. Ever since accused serial killer Patrick Lightman had been set free, Duncan had been reviewing the FBI’s files during every minute of his spare time. He’d been the lead profiler on Lightman, and he was determined to put the man back in jail. There had to be something in the files that had been overlooked, some detail or angle that he hadn’t seen yet.
The first phone call came just as he was about to step into the shower.
A quick look at the caller ID told him it was bad news. His brother Cam never called except to report trouble or ask a favor. Either one might interfere with the perfect day he had planned. Cam’s last call had been a favor. Duncan had transported a veterinarian from Montana to upstate New York to reunite him with his ex-wife.
He let the phone ring four times, then gave up and answered. “Trouble or favor?”
Cam laughed.
So it would be a favor. “I’m teeing off in an hour,” Duncan warned. “And what time is it in Scotland anyway?” His brother had taken some time from his job at the CIA to run off to Scotland with Adair MacPherson. They’d recently become unofficially engaged and they were going to deliver the news in person to their respective parents, who were both on a working vacation there.
“Relax. I just wanted to know if you’d given any more thought to going up to Castle MacPherson and poking around in the library?”
“Some.” Cam had been nagging him about that ever since he’d shown him the sapphire earring that Adair and Vi had discovered in the stone arch. His brother believed that someone had been sneaking into Castle MacPherson for nearly six months, and they still had no idea who the intruder was. But the nocturnal visits had started right about the time the New York Times had run a feature article on the castle and those missing jewels that Mary Stuart had reputedly worn at her coronation. Cam’s theory was that the visitations had something to do with the missing jewels. That would have been his own best guess.
“You’re the profiler in the family,” Cam said. “If anybody can get some handle on who the intruder was, it’s you. You always had a knack for getting into people’s heads.”
As the youngest of triplets, Duncan supposed that he’d developed that knack as a survival skill. And it had been part of what had drawn him to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. The other part of it had been what had drawn all three of them into some kind of law enforcement—the arrest of their father for embezzlement. They’d been nine when it had happened, and Duncan still carried the image in his mind of the three of them standing in front of their mother as the police handcuffed their father and led him away. Duncan also remembered what he’d felt—a fierce kind of happiness that David Fedderman couldn’t hurt their mother anymore.
“He’s still out there,” Cam continued. “And the rest of Eleanor’s dowry has to be at the castle somewhere. You don’t want to miss out on a chance to find it, do you?”
It was Duncan’s turn to laugh. As the middle triplet, Cam had always felt the need to compete, especially with Reid, the first born. “You should try that ‘miss out on a chance’ tactic with Reid. You could always get him with it when we were kids.”
“I intend to,” Cam said. “But serving on the vice president’s Secret Service detail is keeping him hopping. Besides, the strategy will work more effectively after you find either the necklace or the other earring. Help me out here.”
“Not on your life. My philosophy has always been to not take sides when it comes to the two of you and your competition.” Waiting it out until the dust settled had always worked well for him.
“It was worth a shot. But you can’t tell me that you don’t want to find part of Eleanor’s dowry. You were fascinated by those sapphires when you were a kid.”
A brother, especially one with CIA training, knew what buttons to push. The truth was Duncan had been thinking about visiting the castle. The summer he was ten and they’d had daily playdates with the MacPherson girls, he’d spent hours studying Eleanor’s wedding portrait, and he’d memorized the legendary jewels. Two thumbnail-sized sapphires hung from each earring and one of the jewels on the necklace rivaled the Hope Diamond in size.
There was a story there that hadn’t been told. Tradition held that the jewels had been Eleanor’s dowry, but there was no record of what had happened to them until the first earring had shown up less than a month ago when lightning had struck the stone arch and loosened some stones. Someone had hidden it. Who? And why? Those were the questions that drove all of his investigations.
“So—will you go?” Cam prodded.
Duncan shifted his thoughts back to the conversation and stalled. “I thought that you and Adair had run off to Scotland to see what you could dig up about the sapphires on that end.”
“That’s our plan, but the rest of Eleanor’s dowry is at the castle. And I still think there’s something in that library that holds the key.”
Once again, he had to agree with Cam’s assessment. The security had been beefed up at the castle, and the local sheriff was sending regular patrols now.
“The air is a lot fresher up there than it is in that basement you work in at Quantico,” Cam said. “It’ll be fairly quiet. No wedding is scheduled, just a photo shoot for some fancy architecture magazine. Daryl will be visiting Vi on the weekend. The two of you might be able to get in a game of golf.”
Daryl Garnett was Cam’s boss at the CIA and he’d recently become engaged to Vi. He was also a scratch golfer. Leave it to a brother to know your weaknesses. Duncan glanced at his watch. The minutes to his tee time were slipping away.
“If I tell you I’m planning on going up there this weekend, will you go back to your fiancée and our parents and leave me alone?”
“You’ve got it, bro. My job with you is done,” Cam said, and clicked off.
It wasn’t until Duncan was stepping out of the shower a few minutes later that the second call came. And it meant he’d have to cancel his tee time and perhaps even his trip to the castle. There was a chance that the Rose Petal Killer had selected a new victim.
2
DUNCAN SHOWED HIS BADGE TO THE young uniformed officer standing on the landing of the small apartment then ducked his head to step inside. The space was small—one room where a minimum of furniture had been artfully arranged to separate the eating area from the living space. The floor between the couch and fireplace was completely covered by a white sheet sprinkled liberally with bloodred rose petals very much in the style of the Rose Petal Killer.
He’d get back to that in a moment. For now he took in the other details. A tiny kitchen was tucked into an alcove
