To Die For

He rubbed his face. “Good point. All right, let’s get moving. I’m having your ex-husband interviewed, too, by the way.”

“Jason? Why?”

“It struck me as a little odd that he’d call you like that, after five years of no contact at all. I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“But why would Jason try to kill me? It isn’t as if he’s the beneficiary of any insurance policy I have, or that I know anything he wouldn’t want-” I stopped, because I did know something about Jason that would hurt his political career-and I had the picture to prove it. He didn’t know I had the picture, though, and I wasn’t the only one who knew he was a cheating scumbag.

Wyatt’s eyes had that hard, piercing cop look. “What?” he said. “What do you know?”

“It can’t be that I know about him cheating on me,” I said. “That doesn’t make sense. For one thing, I haven’t said anything for five years, so why would he all of a sudden get worried about it? And I’m not the only person who knows, so bumping me off wouldn’t accomplish anything.”

“Who else knows?”

“Mom. Siana and Jenni. Dad knows Jason cheated; Mom eventually told him that much, but he doesn’t know any specifics. The women he cheated with certainly know. Probably his family. And it isn’t as if knowledge that he cheated on his first wife, over five years ago and with someone who isn’t his current wife, would wreck his political career. Dent it, maybe, but not wreck it.” Now, if it were generally known that he’d been caught coming on to my seventeen-year-old sister, that would wreck his career, because that put him in the category of pervert.

“Okay, I’ll give you that. Anything else?”

“Not that I can think of.” Like I said, Jason didn’t know I had copies of those pictures, so I was safe on that count. “Anyway, Jason isn’t violent.”

“I thought you said he threatened to trash your car. To me, this is definitely in the same ballpark.”

“But that was five years ago. And he threatened to trash my car if I went public about him cheating on me. He was running for the state legislature at the time, so that would definitely have hurt him. And to be fair, he only did that when I threatened to go public on him if he didn’t give me everything I wanted in the divorce settlement.”

Wyatt tilted his head back and surveyed the ceiling. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Because you’re a smart man,” I said, and patted his butt.

“Okay, if you don’t think it’s your ex-husband-I’m going to check him out anyway-do you have any other ideas?”

I shook my head. “Dwayne Bailey has the only reason I can think of.”

“C’mon, Blair. Think.”

“I am thinking!” I said in exasperation.

He was getting exasperated, too. He put his hands on his hips and looked down at me. “Then think harder. You’re a cheerleader; there must be hundreds of people who’d like to kill you.”

Chapter Twenty

My resultant shriek stopped the hum of voices that came from outside his closed office door. “You take that back!”

“All right, all right. Pipe down,” he muttered. “Shit. I take it back.”

“No you don’t. You meant it.” As a rule of thumb, you never let a man take something back on the first attempt. Section three, paragraph ten, of the Southern Women’s Code states that if one (meaning a man) is going to be a shithead, one must pay for it.

“I didn’t mean it. I’m just frustrated.” He reached for me.

I drew back before he could touch me, jerked the door open, and swept out. Just as I had thought: everyone in the big, busy open room was staring at us, some openly, some pretending not to. I stalked silently to the elevator, and let me tell you, various aches and pains were making themselves felt, so stalking hurt. Creeping would have been better, but there’s just no way to creep with attitude. My feelings were hurt, and I wanted him to know it.

The elevator doors opened and two uniforms got out. Well, the uniforms had men in them, but you know what I mean. Silently Wyatt and I entered the elevator, and he punched the button.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said as soon as the elevator doors closed.

I shot him a dirty look but didn’t say anything.

“I’ve seen you get nearly killed twice in four days,” he said raggedly. “If Bailey didn’t do it, then you have an enemy somewhere. There has to be a reason. You know something, but you may not know that you know it. I’m trying to dig out some information that will point me in the right direction.”

I said, “Don’t you think you should check out Bailey’s alibi before assuming there are ’hundreds’ of people who want to kill me?”

“Maybe that was an exaggeration.”

Maybe? An exaggeration? “Oh? Just how many people do you really think want to kill me?”

He shot me a glittering glance. “I’ve wanted to strangle you myself a time or two.”

The elevator stopped, the door opened, and we stepped out. I didn’t respond to that last statement because I figured he was trying to get me mad enough to say something rash myself, like maybe accuse him of tampering with my brakes, since he admitted having wanted to kill me, and then I’d have to apologize because of course he didn’t really mean that, either, and I knew it. Rather than surrender the high ground, I played dirty and kept my mouth shut.

When we walked out into the parking lot, Wyatt caught me around the waist and turned me to face him. “I really am sorry,” he said, lightly kissing my forehead. “You’ve been through a lot these past few days, especially today, and I shouldn’t have teased you, no matter how frustrated I am.” He kissed me again, and his voice roughened. “When you spun into the intersection and that first car hit you, I thought my heart would stop.”

Well, hell, there was no point in being petty, was there? I leaned my head against him and tried not to think about the sickening terror I’d felt this morning. If it was that bad for me, what had it been like for him? I know how I would have felt if I’d been behind him and watched him get killed, which is what I’m sure he thought had happened to me.

“Your poor little face,” he murmured, stroking my hair back as he examined me.

I hadn’t been just sitting in the police station all day waiting for my face to swell up and my eyes to turn black. One of the cops had given me a plastic sandwich bag, and I’d filled it with ice and applied it, off and on, to my face, so however bad I looked wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I’d also put an adhesive strip across the cut on the bridge of my nose. I thought I looked like a boxer who’d just finished a fight.

“J. W.,” someone said, and we both looked around as a gray-haired man in a gray suit approached. With his hair, I personally thought he should have worn a suit with more color in it, or at least a nice blue shirt, so he wouldn’t have given such a blah impression. I wondered if his wife had no fashion sense. He was short and stocky, and looked like a businessman, except that when he got closer, I could see he had that distinctive sharp gaze.

“Chief,” Wyatt said, from which I deduced (duh!) that this was the chief of police, Wyatt’s boss. If I’d ever seen him before, I didn’t remember it; in fact, at that moment, I couldn’t even remember his name.