Dangerous Refuge

chapter Twenty



Sweetie, you don’t obey orders worth a damn.” The words were softly spoken and colder than the wind.

Tanner. Thank God.

As his hand lifted from her mouth, anger replaced fear in a rush of heat. She spun to face him.

“My name isn’t sweetie and you were gone more than twenty minutes,” she managed to whisper, though her heart felt like it was running a marathon behind her ribs. “Did you have to scare me?”

“You’re lucky I didn’t coldcock you. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“My car quit and my cell phone is out of juice,” she shot back in a low tone.

He made a strangled sound and shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

“Am I the only one having a hard time yelling in whispers?”

Tanner didn’t know whether to laugh or bang his forehead against hers. “Go back to the car.”

“You scared the hell out of me,” she said between breaths. Her mouth tasted like a hangover laced with bile.

“Good. Go back to the car,” he said again.

“Is anyone else here? Why is the TV on? Why are we whispering?”

“Not quite. I don’t know. It beats yelling until I figure out what’s going on. Then I’m going to be so loud you’ll get a headache.”

“Wouldn’t it help to turn on the lights?” Shaye asked, ignoring the threat.

“Doubt it. Go back to the car.”

“If no one’s here—”

“I don’t have time for this,” he said curtly. “Just stay out of the way and don’t touch anything you can leave fingerprints on.”

Wanting to argue some more, quivering from too much adrenaline, Shaye followed Tanner down the hallway and into the room at the end.

The source of the eerie blue light was a big aquarium. The water was faintly cloudy. Fish that looked like bloated Japanese drawings hung in the water and gulped at her with goggle eyes. A trickle of moisture hung on the outside of the tank, transparent beads trailing down, glowing like a cat’s eyes in the odd light.

“Over here,” Tanner said. “I found him like this.”

Shaye’s emergency training overcame her nerves. “Is he alive? Does he need help?”

“No.”

She glanced past Tanner’s feet. Rua—if that was who it was—was a heavyset man, more muscle than fat, arms thick in the black T-shirt emblazoned with the logo FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE.

At least, that was what Shaye thought it had said when it was intact. Some of the lettering had been ruined.

“Bullet holes?” she asked, not quite believing.

“Yeah. He lost his last fight but good.”

She swallowed. “Is it Rua?”

“The driver’s license showed a buzz cut, but the rest looks pretty much the same. I’m assuming it’s Rua until I find out otherwise.”

Rua’s shaved head looked gray blue in the aquarium light. His eyes were open, still shiny with moisture.

Carefully she bent down and touched the dead man’s neck. The skin was resilient, slightly cool to her touch, but nothing close to cold. “He hasn’t been dead long,” she said.

Tanner watched her with new respect. She’d been so frightened her cheeks were bone pale, but her hand didn’t shake as she checked a corpse for life.

I shouldn’t be surprised. She ran scavengers off Lorne’s body, waited for the deputy, and gave a coherent report.

She’s too damn brave for my peace of mind—sneaking into the house, hoping to find me, and not knowing what shape I was in or who else might be here.

Tanner couldn’t help thinking how badly it could have gone if the killer had still been in the house. It made him want to yell at Shaye.

Later, he promised himself. When we’re a long way from here.

That was the most important thing—not being found at a murder scene he had no intention of reporting.

“I didn’t hear anything,” she said.

“Neither did I. It must have happened about half an hour before we got here. He’s still warm, considering the temperature of the room. And the floor underneath his right hand is still damp.”

“Someone other than you was mad at Rua,” she said.

“I’m not even mad at him,” Tanner said, low and hard. “I just wanted some answers.”

“And then maybe you’d get mad?”

“Depends on the answers.”

Rua’s eyes stared up, seeing something a lot more distant than the ceiling.

“Let’s go,” Tanner said. “I’d like to search him and the house. Coins likely are here somewhere. No landline, so a cell phone might tell us who he’s been talking to. But we’ve been here too long as it is.”

“Did you call the police? Don’t we have to wait for them?”

“If I was working this case, I’m the first guy I’d lock up, no matter what I said.”

“But you didn’t do anything.”

Tanner smiled grimly. “B and E followed by a corpse? Yeah, sure. Nothing at all. Like Lorne.”

“But if we don’t tell the police, isn’t that a crime?”

“Only if we were here. Did you touch anything?”

Shaye felt like reality had shifted and she was stumbling around trying to stay on her feet. “I . . . not with my fingertips.”

“How about the front door?”

“The wind opened it for me. I didn’t see anything I wanted to touch except that window, and you yanked me back before I reached it.”

Mentally Tanner retraced his route, and the one Shaye had taken. He knew he hadn’t touched anything. He’d have to hope she hadn’t. There wasn’t time to wipe down every possible surface.

Not that he was real worried about it. The lab techs—if they were called in at all—were usually six to eight weeks behind in their work. Unless there was something important about the death, it would be written off as a drug deal gone south, a B and E and an unlucky homeowner, or a falling-out among marginal thugs. A red case, with no one to snitch on the murderer.

It would take a chain of similar deaths before anyone official would be interested enough to demand a full, expensive effort to find the murderer.

But Tanner didn’t want to be caught because some D.A. wanted a reelection cause.

“Are you sure about the fingerprints? If they’re around, and someone cares enough to spend a lot of taxpayer money, your prints will be found.”

“Which is why we should stay here until the cops come,” she said.

The innocence of a civilian who has never been on the wrong side of the law, he thought wryly.

“Look,” he said. “You and I have no alibi except each other. I’m from out of town. My uncle might have been killed by Rua. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to find out I had Rua’s address.”

“But—”

Tanner kept talking. “The first thing the cops here will do is check with Sheriff Conrad. He won’t be interested in a complex story that leaves me innocent. He’ll be much more interested in a simple story that has me locked up. And in the meantime, whoever actually did this is still running around.”

She sighed. “Maybe Rua had bad friends. Maybe he was selling drugs.”

“Place smells like sweat, not drugs. His death is connected to Lorne’s gold, and maybe to Lorne himself. Wishing it was different will get us in trouble. Move it, honey. I don’t want to meet any neighbors.”

“You’re sure about this?” Shaye asked as he led her away from the aquarium’s glow.

“I’m sure that we won’t get any answers on the inside of a jail cell.”

She looked at the fish tank. The water drops outside the tank still glowed, but there weren’t as many. “What about the water on the outside of the fish tank? It’s drying up, so it’s not a leak. Something splashed.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” Tanner said. “The bottom was disturbed, too. But I don’t have time for a fast search, much less a thorough one.”

Shaye looked over her shoulder as he hustled her from the room. The fish were staring up at their own watery ceiling, as motionless and silent as the corpse a few feet away.