“The cops had already been in here, I saw them leave. They were out front, not in back anymore. So I got the sheriff in through the service entrance to the stairs. I thought it was a good way to make a point, don’t you think, Pallack? I thought you might want to pay me to take him away.”
“Do you have any idea who this is?”
“He said he was Dixon Noble, a sheriff from Virginia. Why did he break in here?”
“It doesn’t concern you. Jesus, the damned man was carrying an arsenal,” Pallack said, and looked down at his desk, where Makepeace had piled the sheriff’s weapons.
“He was ready for business. A cell phone, one big Beretta, one little derringer in an ankle holster, and a tough little five-inch Fallkniven, a fine knife.”
“It’s a knife, so what?”
Dix wondered if Makepeace was going to take the knife his father had given him when he’d turned sixteen. “One should enjoy fine tools, Pallack.”
Dix could hear Pallack prowling, back and forth, in front of him. “This is all we need, this fool sheriff playing vigilante. At least he didn’t get into the safe.”
Charlotte asked, “But why did he break in? What could he have hoped to find?”
“Don’t be stupid, Charlotte. The sheriff wanted to find the bracelet. If you hadn’t worn the damned thing —”
“Then why did you give me that bracelet for a wedding present? Of course I’d wear it, for God’s sake.”
“The sheriff broke in here to find a bracelet?” Makepeace said in a bemused voice. “What bracelet? Why should he want this bracelet so much?”
Charlotte ignored him. “Thomas, you didn’t even bother to tell me it belonged to another woman until after the sheriff saw it on my wrist and recognized it. Why didn’t you tell me that when you gave it to me?”
“Like you would have appreciated wearing another woman’s jewelry. Look, it doesn’t matter, Charlotte. I wasn’t really the one who wanted you to have that bracelet, it was—never mind. What’s done is done.”
But Charlotte wasn’t buying it. “It was your little joke on me, wasn’t it? Yours or that bitch mother of yours.”
“Don’t call her that! She isn’t—wasn’t a bitch. Damnation, I should have known you’d never have my mother’s heart, or her intelligence. You were supposed to find out what the damned sheriff knew, pretend you were interested in him, but did you manage it? Of course you didn’t. And look what you’ve brought us now—the sheriff breaking into my home.”
“Again, why is the sheriff so interested in this bracelet?” Makepeace asked.
Charlotte said in a flat voice, “It belonged to the sheriff’s wife.”
“Shut up, Charlotte.”
“Why? It doesn’t matter if Makepeace knows.”
“Did the sheriff find the bracelet?” Makepeace asked.
“No, of course he didn’t find it,” Pallack said. “I threw it in the bay an hour after Charlotte told me he’d recognized it.”
“So the reason this guy came to San Francisco was because of this bracelet? But how did he even know about the bracelet?”
“It was a piece of bad luck,” Pallack said.
“What’d you do, Pallack? Kill his bloody wife, decide you liked her bracelet, and take it off her?”
Dix thought his heart would stop. It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, sit there and pretend he was still unconscious. He wanted to yell at Pallack to answer Makepeace, but Pallack ignored him.
“So this guy has nothing to do with Julia Ransom?” Makepeace asked.
“No,” Charlotte said.
Pallack said, his voice low and vicious, “If only the cops had arrested Julia Ransom for murdering her husband, but you didn’t leave enough evidence to point at her. If you’d done it right, found those journals in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to call you again.”
“And if I weren’t here again, the real blackmailer, Soldan Meissen, would still be bleeding you dry.”
“All right. Yes, you’re right,” Pallack said. “Now you’ve only got one more thing to do, and that’s get rid of the sheriff. Then you leave town. No more questions, do you understand? Just do what I tell you.”
Dix could swear he felt the air change, and it was coming from Makepeace. Was Pallack nuts? Talking down to a psychopath who’d just as soon slit his throat as breathe?
Makepeace gave a clipped laugh that wasn’t a laugh at all. It made Dix’s skin crawl. His head was clear now. He could focus, at last. Makepeace had pulled his arms around the back of a chair and tied his wrists. He began to work the ropes.
“So what if the sheriff did find them? Those journals?”
“He couldn’t have gotten into the safe even if he’d found it. The journals are there, exactly where I put them.”
“I don’t know why you still have them. First you believed Julia Ransom had the journals and I burned her house down to make sure they weren’t found. Then you told me it was Soldan Meissen who’d stolen them from Ransom’s house all along. Why not just destroy them? Are you planning to read them like bedtime stories?”
Dix felt Pallack’s fury at that dig. One sharp-edged moment passed, then another. But he said only, “If you’d
