minute he got there, things changed.
He wanted her to go into the apartment-with him. It was totally okay if she took a drink and took a minute in the bathroom, but then he wanted to walk through every room slowly with her. He wanted her to identify anything that was missing, also anything that had been moved or looked out of place. “Just study everything. Look past the damage. See if you can pinpoint specifically what the suspect was after.”
“You’re giving me the impression that you don’t believe this was a run-of-the-mill robbery,” she said anxiously.
“It could be. But we want to examine all the possibilities.” Ferrell seemed to be studying her more than the scene, particularly when she shuddered hard at the close-up of her living room.
Nothing she owned was particularly valuable, but everything had been handpicked and loved. She had nothing from her childhood but a few worn photos, certainly no belongings or keepsakes. It was as if the Campbell family had never existed. Sophie couldn’t imagine a reason in the universe why anyone would have ripped up the rental sofa, or yanked the books from the shelves, or opened up a lamp-table drawer that had nothing but scissors and thread and nail files and hand cream. What possible reason could anyone have to do this?
Yet, the way Ferrell kept studying her made something click in her mind. “You don’t think this is a chance robbery, do you?” More clicks followed that first one. “Two crimes in the same building within a week is just too much coincidence? But, Mr. Ferrell, Jon’s death was ruled an accident. Why would you think there was a relationship?”
“No one said there was,” Ferrell said patiently.
Sophie decided she must be crazy or something. The authorities seemed to be treating her as if she were guilty, instead of the victim-how paranoid could a girl get? Obviously, she wasn’t thinking straight. And how could she, given the state of her home? The darned thief had upended all eight purses in her closet. Her computer had been turned on. All her CDs and disks taken. At Ferrell’s urging, she checked her hard drive, which seemed to have all her data files intact, but it would take her hours of messing with it to be certain.
Bassett intervened at that point, told her they wanted to take her system with them.
“What? You can’t do that. I need it. It’s got all my work on it-” Well, that wasn’t totally true, because she had her laptop. Her laptop was her secondary backup. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that this whole mess was spinning out of control. She had two solid days of translating work to do on her system. The police heard her; they just didn’t seem to care. Being broken into felt like…an assault. Someone who’d never lost their home and family might not get how huge a violation this was. A stranger had touched the things of her heart. Broken them, diminished them. And on top of her neighbor’s traumatic death last week, it was just too much.
“Taking the desktop is necessary,” Bassett said, as if that should settle it.
Nothing was settled, as far as Sophie was concerned. The search continued. Her hands got shakier and her stomach queasier. The thief had pilfered through her freezer. What on
“No, Ms. Campbell,” Ian Ferrell said gently, “The best chance for us to find prints is to work with the items we know the perpetrator touched.”
Sophie hadn’t had a temper tantrum since she was five. She never lost it. Ever. But tarnation, she was coming darn close. “Those are my mother’s pearls.
“Listen, Ms. Campbell,” Ferrell said patiently, “our guys will probably be here for just a couple of hours. Do you have somewhere you could go? There isn’t anything else you can help us with, so you could get some fresh air.”
“I don’t want fresh air, and I’m not leaving the cat.”
“Now just think,” Bassett said flatly, “you’re not going to feel safe staying here alone tonight anyway, are you? I’m sure the cat will be fine. And tomorrow morning, if you wouldn’t mind coming down to the station to make a statement-”
“Are you guys crazy or am I? I’ve already made a statement. I’ve told you everything I know. I’m the one who’s the victim here, remember?”
At the precise moment she was about to wring George Bassett’s jowly neck-or let a bunch of frustrated tears spring loose-she saw Cord striding in her front door.
Maybe she wasn’t the kind of woman to depend on a hero-and she hadn’t lived a life where she could possibly need one-but when he met her eyes, she flew toward him faster than a thief for a bank vault. He had her tucked under his shoulder in two seconds flat.
Every sensory nerve in her body took him in. His face was windburned, his pulse fast, as if he’d been running. He was wearing old corduroys and his battered sheepskin jacket, and he hadn’t shaved. The feel of his scratchy chin on her forehead, the heat and strength of his long, tall body-she couldn’t remember such a sense of belonging with someone else. Maybe she was just traumatized, but who cared? Damn but he felt good.
“You needed more hell, did you?” he murmured.
Naturally, she was curious how he’d showed up right then, but she didn’t ask. She didn’t care. “This has been a nightmare,” she said helplessly. “I can’t imagine why anyone would have done this to me. Why, how, who-anything. So much wealth around here, why would anyone pick on me?”
He didn’t answer, just took charge-not in a big, noisy way. He just stepped in, intervened. The next few minutes passed in such a blur that they barely registered. She noticed something in the way Bassett and Ferrell responded to his showing up, the way they talked to him-they knew Cord.
If that should have alerted something on her internal wary scale, it didn’t. Nothing did.
“I’m taking her out of here for a while,” Cord told the cops. “Get her something to eat, a drink.”
She said, “Caviar’s traumatized. I really don’t want to leave him alone.”
Cord noted the cat cuddled under her coat, gently hooked the mangy feline under an arm and escorted him to her bed in the other room. “He’s a tomcat,” he reminded her. “I do believe he’s had a few terrorizing experiences in the past and survived them.”
“But he’s a tomcat who came in from the cold. He wants shelter now. I don’t want to let him down.”
“Sophie.”
“What?”
“You’re not letting him down,” he said patiently. “We’re just getting out of here for a few minutes. Grab some food. Find a quiet place to just chill for a while. Then we’ll come back here. I’ll sleep next door. You won’t be alone. The cat won’t be alone. How’s that for a plan?”
It was a good plan. It was the best plan she’d ever heard. She wanted to be with Cord and away from here, more than anything she could imagine wanting.
But the complete trust she wanted to feel with him wasn’t quite there. She wanted it to be. Sophie knew perfectly well she was a sissy in the guy department, too damned afraid of being abandoned to give trust unless she had every lock latched, every T crossed, every possible question out on the table. But still…she couldn’t just make those worry buzzers in her heart totally shut off.
“I should call my sisters. And Jan and Hillary and Penelope-the neighborhood women. They’ll have seen the cop cars. They’ll be concerned.”
“So bring your cell,” Cord said.
Bassett and Ferrell undoubtedly thought he was going along with their plans by getting Sophie out of the way, but Cord’s motivation came from an entirely different source.
Outside, his car was double-parked-not an uncommon occurrence around D.C.-but at the cost of tickets, a lot easier to pull off when you had the authorities’ permission. Sophie didn’t seem to notice where he was parked. When he helped her into the passenger seat of his Bronc, she flinched at the passing lights of a cop car. By the time he’d started the engine, his jaw felt glued together.
She looked more fragile than a rose petal. Fragile, crushable and damned scared. She got out her cell phone, obviously intending to call her sisters and friends, but for a few moments she just sat silently, locked in her seat belt and folded up inside her jacket as if hoping she could disappear.
