Always a Thief - Kay Hooper [71]
He lifted his head suddenly and looked at her, smiling but with fierce eyes. “If you laugh, I swear I'll strangle you,” he told her in a voice that was still husky.
Either she had given herself away somehow, she thought, or else the connection between them was growing stronger.
She cleared her throat and tried to stop smiling. “I'm sorry, but I can't help it. I'm not amused because this is funny, I'm just sort of . . . startled. What happened? I mean, one minute we were having a perfectly rational conversation, and the next minute we were . . .”
“Yes, we were. We certainly were.” He kissed her, then eased away and pulled his jeans up, zipping them but not bothering to fasten the snap. “Let's do it again.”
“Wait a minute.” Trying to think clearly because something was bothering her, she tapped the middle of his chest with her index finger in a useless bid to get his full attention. “What you told me about your—your sting. You're over here just to catch Nightshade, that's the plan, right?”
“Mmmm,” he agreed, nuzzling her neck.
“Then—” She gasped when he gently bit her earlobe, and she felt her eyes starting to cross. “Then why did you take that dagger the night we met?”
“Camouflage,” he murmured, but not as if the subject interested him much. “You would have wondered if I hadn't taken anything that night.”
“Oh. Umm . . . Alex? I know I asked you before, but . . . did you steal the Carstairs diamonds?”
“No.” He stopped exploring her neck long enough to swing her up into his arms. He kissed her and started toward the bedroom, adding cheerfully, “I just borrowed them.”
“Why can't she be identified?”
Both Wolfe and Jared looked at Storm, and the latter said, “You mean Jane Doe?” They were still in the computer room and still brainstorming the situation.
“Yeah. Why can't she be identified?”
“No fingerprints, for one thing,” Jared began, then stopped and nodded slowly as he realized Storm's meaning. “Why doesn't the killer want her identified.”
“It's an important question, isn't it? A piece of the puzzle. He makes damned sure she can't be identified yet leaves signposts all over the place pointing to the museum.”
“So,” Wolfe said, “either her identity would lead us far from the museum, or else it would get us a hell of a lot closer to seeing a big piece of the puzzle. Another assumption, but a reasonable one.”
“The police are working on an I.D.,” Jared noted.
“But are they working on the right thing?” Wolfe frowned at the Interpol agent. “The killer went to the extreme of using a blowtorch to obliterate her prints. That says to me that he knew or had good reason to believe the prints were on file somewhere.”
“Criminal, police, or military,” Storm said. “All are routinely printed. Some states' DMVs are beginning to print drivers, but it's not universal yet. There are other groups with databases, but those are primaries. Covers a lot of territory.”
“But it does narrow the field,” Jared noted. “Gives the police somewhere to look. If they can ever get a usable print to run against the databases.”
“The military tends to be possessive of its information,” Wolfe noted. “Max might have to pull a few strings. That's assuming the police forensics people can produce a usable print.”
Storm said, “It could be just another signpost, you know. Another way to make us look for something that isn't there. I mean, he's already gone to so much trouble—just planting that knife in the basement the way he did, for instance—that maybe using a blowtorch to destroy his victim's prints is just one more bit of sleight of hand. No pun intended.”
“We're spending too much time second-guessing ourselves, that's the trouble,” Jared said.
“You've been a cop a long time,” Wolfe said, staring at him. “What do your instincts say?”
Promptly, Jared replied, “That knowing who Jane Doe is will give us a very big piece of the puzzle.”
“Then I say that's the assumption we follow,” Wolfe said rather surprisingly. “What does Alex think?”
“About Jane Doe? He hasn't