against her car.
Clearly the detective hadn’t driven a Jaguar lately. He should have warned her that getting where they were going could scratch the paint job on a vehicle she couldn’t afford to purchase a second time. If she was going to drive her dream car—a Jaguar—this was it.
She worried about the car so that she didn’t have to think about where they might end up. He’d said the house had private beach access. Or rather, what he’d said was that there was a single path down to the water and that the property was fenced off.
They hadn’t driven through a fence. Anyone could access the road from down below. They wouldn’t be able to hang out down there, though. The busy highway didn’t have enough shoulder to allow anyone to hang out without being noticed. And in the way.
Almost as though he’d read her mind, Larson pulled to a stop, and when she crept up as close to his bumper as she could get without hitting him, she saw the newish-looking double-story gate that had prevented him from going any farther. The iron bars were slowly opening.
Looking to the right and left of that gate, she also saw the ten-foot-high fencing that went as far as she could see. Iron poles that were cemented into the ground, placed only an inch apart, crisscrossing at the top. No way for anyone to climb the fence, or shimmy up a pole, either, since there wasn’t enough room in between them to wrap an arm around.
Holy crap, she thought. He hadn’t been kidding about getting her someplace safe. He’d lied to her when he’d promised her that, if she testified, she’d never have to deal with Ken Freelander again. Not that a crooked prosecuting attorney was anything he could have predicted or prevented.
But the point was, he made promises he couldn’t possibly keep.
Like promising her that he’d protect her this time around. He was only one man. So many things were out of his control. So much could go wrong.
Still, at the moment, she was better with him than without him. And it was good to know that he hadn’t lied about the place being protected from easy intrusion.
Keeping her mind focused on the goal in mind—getting Ken back behind bars—she followed the detective through the gate.
THE...HOUSE...WAS a shock. Gray boards, peeling slivers of wood in places, had long since lost their paint. Leaving everything but her purse—which held her cell phone—and pepper spray key chain, she climbed out of the Jaguar and stood for a moment, staring at the smallish building.
It wasn’t the Taj Mahal. It wasn’t even as nice as the freshman dorm she’d lived in in college. Or the tract home she’d visited the previous week to see a client whose bones were not yet healed enough to allow her comfortable travel to Bloom’s office.
Sam Larson wasn’t looking to her for approval or even a reaction. He was all business as he headed up decaying steps toward a door. Bloom stepped gingerly forward—not sure she trusted the steps, in spite of the fact that a man twice her size had just bounded up them—until she noticed the new boards giving support underneath the porch.
For some reason that small sign of repair, of attention and care, gave her the impetus to focus on Ken behind bars, and not on the fact that this place was supposed to be her new home. Albeit temporarily. Stepping with as much authority as she could muster, she made it to the front door without shaking.
Or even feeling like shaking.
The door was as ancient-looking as the rest of the house, but it was solid. And bore new dead bolt locks. Two of them. He unlocked them and handed her the keys.
To say the inside wasn’t what she’d been expecting would be a huge understatement. Nor did it resemble anything like any of the places she’d lived over the last two decades. But it was...doable. Reminded her of the little place her folks had lived in on the farm when they’d first married. Before they’d built their current, more modern, fancier home. Also on the farm. The old place was a guest house now, of sorts. Nothing fancy. Isolated. But clean if you didn’t look too closely.
Sam’s choice of safe house was certainly off the beaten path. So far off Ken would never believe she’d inhabit such a place. Or probably ever visit himself. But those trees, the snarls of weedy undergrowth, the dirt road, the...dirt...in general, wouldn’t be an impediment to the types of people Ken had supposedly befriended.
“There are two bedrooms,” the detective was saying, heading from the entry, past a galley kitchen, through the great room toward a hallway at the back. “One has its own bathroom, the other uses the bath here off the hall.” He was opening doors as he went, showing her an iron tub that reminded her, again, of that old house on the farm. It had been a place she’d gravitated to when she’d been home for summer vacations. More home to her than the house she’d lived in with her parents before her uncle and father had decided to ship her away for being too smart.
Before her mother had chosen to side with them.
Plush white towels in varying sizes hung on the rods. She caught sight of a price tag on the back of one of them. The toilet was new. Linoleum, like that in the other parts she’d seen of the cottage, was yellowed and curled around the base of the new white porcelain.
Three types of shampoo, a full bar of soap and a container of body wash lined the back wall of the tub. The shower curtain still had creases in it from being packaged.
Had the house just been made habitable for her purposes? And if so, who’d paid for it?
Could they somehow stick Prosecutor Trevor Banyon with the tab?
The bedroom immediately across the hall was small, but as clean as the rest of the house. An old double bed sat on scarred linoleum. The comforter and pillow cases resembled the shower curtain in their even creases. A window faced the front yard. It was a little low for her liking.
“It’s bolted shut,” Larson said, observant as always, apparently. She’d been eying the old latch and wondering...
“It’s completely reinforced with rebar.”
“Rebar?”
“It’s steel bar used in construction to reinforce concrete.”
She nodded. Feeling a bit cramped standing there alone with him in the small room. She noted a dresser. A door that she assumed opened to a closet. And she moved toward the hall, grateful when he stepped aside to give her clear passage.
Her wedge sandals had a two-inch sole, but her eyes only came to his nose as she passed. She didn’t look closely.
Instead, she concentrated on what had to be new paint in the hallway. The same off-color, not bright enough to be white and not golden enough to be beige—that she’d noted on walls in the front room.
He led her to the second bedroom. Stood back while she looked around. A charging station sat on a nightstand on one side of the king-size bed. The comforter, a nondescript beige, had no crease marks. If anything, it was slightly wrinkled, as though it had been crammed into a dryer that was too small for it. A couple of paintings hung on the walls. They were washed-out prints of boats that looked as though they’d come from a dollar store.
They made Bloom want to paint.
