with every step. She bowed her golden hair out of sight so that she felt, rather than saw, the second person—lighter in weight—hurry behind the hired killer at a faster pace.
Claire held her breath, closed her eyes and prayed. She couldn’t make out the sounds of the elevator at this distance. So she hid there, hunching beside the aquarium, letting terror and grief hold her still long after the vibrations of the footsteps through the floorboards had faded. She waited until her thighs and knees began to cramp. Waited until she sensed that she had been alone for several minutes.
Then she slowly pushed to her feet. Her purse dropped into her shaky grasp as she stared down the long hallway into the darkness. Before fear made her foolish, before grief sent her into shock, Claire turned. On numb feet, she stumbled toward her father’s office, praying for some sort of miracle every step of the way.
“Daddy?”
The steel door frame was as cold beneath her fingertips as the blood flowing through her veins.
Her father’s chair was empty. She stepped inside and summoned her courage to walk around Cain Winthrop’s immaculate desk and take a peek. Claire gripped the edge of the mahogany top, nearly collapsing with relief.
Then shock and compassion pushed aside the traitorous emotion. She wiped away her tears and knelt down as she fully absorbed the awful truth. There was a body on the floor, with two neat bullet holes piercing the heart and forehead.
Her father wasn’t dead.
But Valerie Justice was.
“BUT, DAD, I’m telling you—I saw Valerie murdered!” Claire thrust her right index finger beneath her left palm, furiously signing the word for murder as she spoke. “That man shot her in your office. He had a gun. A silencer. I saw him.”
“Slow down, sweetheart. You’re slurring your words. I thought you said you saw a murder.”
Still breathless from fear, the fastest drive of her life across the city and her run up the front steps of her family’s Mission Hills home, Claire’s frustrated sigh left her light-headed. She shrugged free of Cain Winthrop’s placating grip on her shoulders and signed an emphatic statement. “I did.”
“I thought you were meeting Rob Hastings for drinks tonight. After that school thing you went to.”
Meeting the platonic friend her father had handpicked to become something more than a friend had completely slipped her mind. But, despite the stab of guilt she felt, even standing up a good friend didn’t seem important now. She drew her palm across her forehead and closed her hand into a fist, signing the message, “I forgot.”
“You forgot?” He scratched the top of his snowy white hair and shook his head. “Rob’s a nice boy. I know he’ll do big things with the company. It’s not like you to go off on some wild goose chase when—”
“I went to see you!” Claire tamped down on her impatience and turned away. Sure, her father could communicate with her about manners and dating, but he refused to listen to her account of what she’d seen in his office.
After crouching behind the aquarium for several overwhelming minutes that had dragged on forever, then venturing forth to discover Valerie’s body, Claire had decided to leave the Winthrop Building, risk a speeding ticket and drive home in record time. A regular phone was useless to her, and a cell only good if she could use text messaging. Somehow, she doubted reporting a murder to the police in a cutesy memo would get the immediate response she needed. In fact, she suspected they’d see it as some sort of prank.
She’d needed her TDD phone—Telecommunication Device for the Deaf. One she could speak into or type a message on that would be translated into a computerized voice at the other end of the line. A phone that would print out questions and conversation on a screen she could respond to.
Schooling her patience, Claire turned to face the familiar blue eyes. Urgent and scared hadn’t gotten through to him. She’d try cool and rational. “Dad. Listen…”
She’d given up the whole Daddy thing as soon as she realized he wasn’t taking her story any more seriously than the new guard at the front desk of the Winthrop Building had. And since she hadn’t wanted to take the chance of running into the man in black or his unknown accomplice, searching the darkened hallways for a more familiar—more sympathetic—face to help her didn’t seem like much of an option, either.
I’ll come back for the body. Claire hadn’t waited to witness that, too, or to become one of the well-erased traces he’d bragged about to his unknown comrade.
She articulated her words as succinctly as possible, carefully monitoring her volume and pauses through the speech processors behind her ears. “I know what I saw. I will never forget that man’s face. I won’t forget Valerie’s, either. There was hardly any blood on her face or blouse. But her hair was caked with it in the back. It was pooling on the plastic mat beneath your desk.”
“Please, dear. That’s such a gruesome picture.”
“Yes…it was.” She took a step closer, curled her fingers around his sturdy forearm and begged him to listen. “I came here first to use the TDD phone—and because I knew you’d want to be there when the police arrive.”
Cain Winthrop’s indulgent expression sobered. “You’re calling the police?”
“Yes.” Hadn’t she just signed it out and spoken the words? She’d been panicking in two languages and he still didn’t grasp the urgency of the situation.
Shaking her head, Claire left her father and hurried into the study. She ignored the walls of books she loved and sat behind the walnut writing desk that had once been her mother’s. Claire typed in the request for the police department’s information line and waited for the computer to locate the number and automatically dial it.
The words scrolled across the screen as the operator picked up. “KCPD information hotline. How may—”
Her father pressed a button on the phone and disconnected the call. Claire shot to her feet. “Dad!”
“Don’t call the police.”
She read his lips in disbelief. “We have to. Valerie is dead in your office.”
“Nonsense.”
“Dad—”
“What’s all the commotion in here?”
Claire heard the buzz of a new voice in her ears and groaned. She turned a silent plea to her father as the striking, fifty-year-old woman with frosted brunette hair joined them. If it had been difficult to get her father to believe her, it would be impossible to get any help from her stepmother.
“It’s nothing, Deirdre.” Cain explained away the argument between father and daughter. “Claire went up to the office this evening to surprise me, and I wasn’t there. It’s all a little confusing.”
“I’m not confused. My ears might not work, but I have 20/20 vision. I live by what my eyes tell me. I know what I saw.”
Deirdre signed the question, “I thought you were on a date with Rob Hastings.”
Claire rolled her eyes and turned away. Maybe she should call Rob
