Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [161]
“Could mean anything,” she told herself. “Rear Window, for example, or right wing or anything and Renee’s name is Nielsen…” Her neck ached and she glanced at the clock. It had been an hour and half since the last “message” from her sister. Since then nothing. Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown, just like Dean’s family always insinuated. Fat chance. Connie and Jim were always looking for ways to prove that she, even if capable of being Becca’s guardian, at least was too mentally unbalanced to handle the trust fund Dean’s father had set up for her child. It was all so sick. She’d been crazy to let Becca spend any time with them, but she’d had no choice. And she wasn’t crazy! Mary Theresa had contacted her.
So where is she? Her heart leapt to her throat as she thought of the car accident and the fact that some other vehicle had edged M.T.’s Jeep off the road. Had something happened to her since the message? Could the person responsible for Renee’s death have found her sister?
“Come on, Mary. Come on,” she said nervously. Rubbing the strain from the muscles in her shoulders, she stood.
Thump!
She froze.
Outside, from the direction of the thud, a cat screamed.
Maggie started for the kitchen.
Click.
A lock gave way and Maggie’s heart, fueled by adrenaline, pumped wildly. With a squeak, a door opened. Maggie felt a cool rush of outside air creep into the house.
“Mary Theresa?” she called, praying it was no one else.
Henderson had just turned off the answering machine in his apartment and was sorting through the day’s stack of bills and junk mail while deciding whether to heat up a TV dinner or just roll into the sack and ignore his rumbling stomach. The phone jangled and he snatched up the receiver, answering quickly, by rote. “Henderson.”
“Officer Bates, Colorado State Police.”
Henderson’s mind clicked into gear.
“You put out an APB on a black Chevy Blazer, and I think we found it.”
“Where?”
“Off an old mining road near Crested Butte. It’s a wonder we found it at all. Got a crew on it already.”
“Anyone inside?” he asked, feeling a niggle of anticipation. This might just be the break they were looking for.
“Don’t know yet, but it looks bad.”
“Single car?”
“Far as we can tell.” The officer gave specific directions to the spot; Henderson asked to be kept posted and then he hung up. Walking to the desk in the second bedroom, he opened the top drawer and, cussing himself all the way, opened the cellophane around a three-month-old pack of Camel straights—the pack he’d saved for an emergency such as this.
“Damn you, Marquise. Where the hell are you?” he asked, poking a cigarette between his teeth as he rummaged in the drawer for a match. He found a lighter that refused to spark and thought it a grand irony if tonight, when he was finally going to break down and have a smoke, he couldn’t come up with a damned match.
“Shit,” he grumbled, and opened his briefcase on the off chance that an old book of matches was in one of the pockets. Instead he found the copy of the legal documents for MER, Inc. There was something about the holding company that bothered him, the same way he felt when he woke up on a camping trip in the desert a while back and found a scorpion crawling up his arm—that if he didn’t do something and quick, think fast, he was going to get stung. Something was wrong with the damned corporation.
Sitting in the desk chair, the unlit cigarette wedged between his lips, he started reading, flipping through pages and pages of Articles of Incorporation, lines of legalese that sometimes blurred before his tired eyes. “Hell,” he thought, finding nothing when finally, buried deep in the text, a name came to light—the third name involved in the corporation: Renee Warner.
“I’ll be damned.” How could he have missed this?
Three women linked together.
Marquise.
Eve Lawrence.
And Renee Warner a.k.a. Renee Nielsen, a woman lying dead on a slab in the morgue. “Well, I