No Hero Page 7

  Dev grimaced as he pulled into the WACT parking lot, wanting to kick himself. He hadn’t meant to give her the satisfaction of responding to her questions. He never talked about his past. Ever. Not to anybody. But he’d been preoccupied with Jimmy’s death. Three of his scholarship kids in ten days. There was no way these homicides weren’t linked. Someone had targeted the boys because of their connections—to the center, to the scholarships…or to him.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” he muttered as an awful thought occurred to him. He retrieved his cell phone and hit the speed dial. “Penn,” he said when she answered. “Have you seen Nicky today?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Jimmy’s dead.” He spoke in a low tone, hoping Connor wouldn’t hear.

  “Jimmy? Oh my God, poor Jimmy.” He heard her voice thicken with emotion. “Oh, Dev, three of your four scholarship nominees. Nicky is—”

  “Yeah, I know.” He cut her off. “Is he there?”

  “No, but Tracy’s been helping him study. She’s here now, helping Katie learn her lines for the play. I’ll ask her…see if she can find him.”

  “Good. Call me back right away and let me know. I don’t want another phone call about a dead kid tonight.” He hung up.

  “Another dead kid?” Connor said. “So it was one of your teens.”

  Dev groaned inwardly. “Is this how you research all your stories—by eavesdropping? No wonder you have trouble keeping your damn facts straight.” He threw the driver’s door open and vaulted out.

  He slammed the door, cutting off her murmured retort, and stalked around the car. Just as well. He didn’t want to hear it. He glanced through the windshield. Sure enough, she had her mouth open and he knew as soon as he opened the door she’d be spouting another question. Well, he’d had it with her questions. And he figured he knew one surefire way to shut her up. He wrenched open the mangled passenger door and waited for her to get out.

  When she did, he didn’t move aside like the perfect gentleman. He told himself he was doing this to make her back off. That it had nothing to do with her spicy scent. It definitely had nothing to do with the battle he’d waged ever since he’d seen her that morning, to ignore the chemistry between them and forget just how good her lips had tasted the one time he’d kissed her. He told himself she’d really hate it if he gathered up that mad tangle of red hair and angled her head just the way he liked when he made a move on a woman.

  So he did, and the silken strands caught his fingers like spider webs.

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide, her mouth opening in a little O. Was she scared—or was she about to say something? He didn’t wait to find out. He lowered his head and touched her parted lips with his. To his surprise, her head tilted slightly backward, and she sighed.

  Oh hell. The soft warmth of her breath against his mouth sent desire shooting through him like a spear, straight to his groin. He pulled back to look at her, searching for something that would tell him he was wrong—that she wasn’t feeling the same desire he felt spilling through his veins.

  Her eyes drifted closed. Her sigh fanned his lips. He finally admitted to himself that he’d always wanted her, not just since he’d kissed her that night five months ago, but since forever. Since his first glimpse of that damn television show, since he’d first shaken her hand flirtatiously and asked her out, since before he’d discovered that her goal was to unearth all his darkest secrets and feed them to the world—or at least to the whole city of New Orleans.

  “Damn it, Connor,” he rasped, pulling her closer. He felt her arms come around his neck, felt her yield, willingly, and he knew, just as he’d known that night, that he could have her if he wanted to. Hot and naked. She wouldn’t say no. Waves of lust wracked him, banishing the haze of exhaustion and grief from his brain. His body hardened in anticipation of—

  Hell. He was doing this to scare her away, not take her to bed.

  At his hesitation, she tensed, but before she could pull away, he did. He lifted his head and gazed at her through lowered lids, then deliberately cocked one brow. To his surprise, a small moan escaped her lips.

  He swore, and set her away from him. “This—” he growled, “—is a really bad idea.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

  Speechless? Join the club.

  He let her go and grabbed the edge of the passenger door. She scooted out of the way as he slammed it shut. He stood there waiting to follow her across the parking lot and into the lobby of the WACT building. She didn’t move. After a couple of seconds, he said. “The disk, Connor?”

  She started. Then, with a frustrated glance, she said, “You know, I have a first name. It’s Reghan.”

  He let the corner of his mouth drift upward. “Oh, I know,” he drawled. “And a middle one too. Maria.”

  Her eyes flashed, then she turned and wordlessly stalked toward the large glass front doors. They went through the lobby to the elevators, where she punched the button for the eleventh floor.

  As kisses went, that one had been insubstantial. Their lips had barely touched. But it hung in the air between them like a giant sword as the elevator made its slow ascent to the eleventh floor. He let it hang there. He’d accomplished what he’d wanted. He’d made her intensely uncomfortable.

  Unfortunately, his brilliant idea had backfired on him. Because he was now fighting a raging urge to push her up against the wall and kiss her again, and again, and again, until she begged him to make love to her.

  Using more willpower than he knew he had, he banished the vision of her beneath him with all that gorgeous red hair fanned out across his pillow, and impassively surveyed her office.

  “Nice digs,” he grated. His gaze lit on a brass plaque. It was the regional award she’d won for the Maxwell kidnapping story. Right. He’d heard about that.

  He tapped it, and said neutrally, “Nice. Congratulations.”

  She blushed, and he smiled to himself. He’d totally flustered her. That was good.

  “So let’s see this famous DVD,” he said.

  At that instant his phone rang. It was Penn. “Tracy said she saw Nicky just before she got here, about an hour ago.”

  “Okay, good,” he said, relieved. “Tell her I said for him to come and stay at the center for a few days. But don’t tell them why.” He hung up as Connor picked up the remote control and pointed it at the DVD player.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  He nodded, not sure what he expected from this. She was clearly convinced of the importance of what Fontenot had said. It was hard to believe the little weasel had any loftier goal than getting back into the spotlight, or maybe to get his parole hearing moved up.

  Still, with three dead kids and no solid leads, Dev couldn’t afford to dismiss even the slightest chance that she was right about the maniac’s threats. Besides, he reminded himself, there was always that one percent.

  Propping a hip on the edge of her desk, he picked up a pencil and fiddled with it as she queued up the disk. The first thing on the screen was a close-up of Connor, smiling and talking to the cameraman. She fast-forwarded. “Hey,” he said. “I don’t get to see all of it?”

  “That was just setup. What we’re looking at is the raw footage. It was never edited for airing. Fontenot mentions you about forty minutes in.” She pressed fast-forward, watching the screen. “Right about here,” she said, then pulsed the picture forward almost frame by frame. “He’ll sit back and tent his fingers, then he’ll start in on you.”

  On the small screen, Fontenot put his fingertips together in front of his chest and licked his lips. Dev sat up a little straighter.

  “—he returned to Seattle and cleared up that twenty-year-old charge,” Fontenot was saying.

  Dev tensed at the sound of the scumbag’s voice.

  “That’s right. He did. As I said, his stepfather’s death was ruled self-defense.” Connor’s recorded voice sounded brittle, self-conscious.

  Fontenot continued, sneering. “So Devereux Ga
utier is a noble protector. And he has at least one staunch supporter.”

  Supporter? Reghan Connor? He glanced at her. Her cheeks were tinged a faint pink. Just like her image on the screen.

  “I’m not here to talk about Dev—Detective Gautier,” she said to Fontenot. “I’m here to interview you—at your request, if I may remind you. So, Mr. Fontenot—”

  “Yes, I did request this interview,” he interrupted. “Now that Detective Gautier’s lies and deceit have been made public, I would like to speak out regarding what he did to me.”

  “You stated in court that you blame Detective Gautier for the accident that put you in a wheelchair.”

  “Of course. With a careless brush of his hand,” Fontenot imitated the gesture, “he trapped me forever in this metal prison.”

  “ Mr. Fontenot, it was the justice system that put you in prison.”

  “My dear Reghan. You are smarter than that. I’m not talking about the penitentiary. I’m talking about this damn chair. You know the story. During his oh-so-daring rescue of his partner, Maxwell, and his wife, Gautier slammed me against a marble-topped table and broke my spine. I will never walk again. That cretin stole my freedom.” His eyes narrowed smugly. “But I am not defeated. I have resources I have not even begun to tap.”

  Dev suppressed a shudder of revulsion as the camera moved into extreme close-up on the lunatic’s eerie, pale eyes. What a disgusting piece of inhumanity.

  “Here.” Connor’s whisper cut across Fontenot’s words, raspy with anticipation. “Listen.”

  “I will reach out, Ms. Conner.” Fontenot’s voice rose to the pitch and cadence of a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. “I am the father, the child, and the spirit. No one can equal me. Your Detective Gautier will suffer much more at my hand than I ever did at his. He will know the hell of watching that which he values most, destroyed.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” Dev muttered, shocked. He jumped up and grabbed the remote control from Connor’s fingers and hit reverse. Fontenot’s words were almost exactly what he himself had lamented to Penn last night—make that early this morning. Impotent fury warred with grief as he listened to the bastard’s words a second time. Then he slammed the remote down on the desk. “When did you tape this?” he demanded.

  She picked up the DVD case and handed it to him. It read, Fontenot, February 24. Just after Dev had left for Seattle.

  “If I’d known—” he started, his voice gravelly with emotion.

  On the other side of the desk, Connor seemed to shrink before his eyes. Her face was pale, her nostrils pinched, her eyes shimmering. “I didn’t make the connection at first,” she whispered hoarsely. “I wasn’t sure. I am so sorry.”

  Her apology registered in his brain on some level, but his entire consciousness was focused on what Fontenot had said. He picked up the remote, rewound, and played it one more time, noting every facial expression, every slight change in tone, every nuance. He straightened and paced, pushing his fingers through his hair, arguing with himself about whether he was reading too much into the old man’s words. It was a fairly generic statement, maybe even a diabolical maniac’s version of the childhood warning “You’ll be sorry.”

  “This is the date you recorded the interview?”

  Connor had eyes only for him. She nodded.

  “When did it air?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It hasn’t. We’re not going to show it. My producer and I felt that it was too disturbing. Airing it would only be sensationalizing Fontenot again.”

  “Why now?”

  She frowned at him. “Why what?”

  “Why’d you decide to do an interview with him now, after all this time?”

  “I didn’t request the interview—Fontenot did. He called my producer.”

  Right. Fontenot had said that on the recording. Dev stopped pacing. “Then I guess the question is, why did he wait so long?”

  “I asked him that,” she said on a nervous laugh. “I asked him a lot of things. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions. He barely responded to anything I said. I’m sure he got me up there just to tell me this—” she waved toward the TV. “I didn’t have enough sense to understand what it meant.” Her voice broke on the last word. “And now three teenagers are dead and I—I could have stopped it.”

  For a second he was taken aback. She blamed herself? “If he is somehow engineering these murders from prison, we’ll get him,” he assured her. “I’ll request the prison records of every visitor he’s had, every phone call he’s made or received. We will get him.” He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted her to understand that he didn’t blame her.

  She swallowed. “It really bothered me, the way he talked about making you suffer. I thought it was all bluster. But now I can’t stop thinking it’s my fault they’re dead.”

  He searched her face. “Don’t. We don’t even know for sure that Fontenot’s involved.”

  “Just wait,” she said dully. “You haven’t heard it all. There’s more. A lot more.” She nodded toward the remote he still held.

  He started to press play, but before he could, a phone chimed.

  “That’s mine,” she muttered, pulling it out. “This is Reghan Connor,” she said, then listened. “What?”

  Dev’s phone rang, too. When he raised it to answer, Givens’ strident voice hit his ears.

  “Your girlfriend’s house has been vandalized,” the detective said sourly.

  “Girl—are you talking about Connor?” he asked. “What happened?”

  “Somebody wrote her a note—all over her front porch.”

  It was obvious that Connor was getting the same information from whoever had called her, because her face, which had just begun to regain some of its color, turned sickly pale again. Her fingers were white where they gripped the phone. He heard her talking, asking questions, but he had all the information he needed.

  “Thanks for the tip,” he said to Givens and hung up. “Let’s go,” he said to Connor.

  “I don’t understand,” she was saying, still on her call. She’d pressed her hand against her chest.

  “Connor,” he snapped. “Let’s go.” He glanced down at the remote in his hand and quickly spotted the eject button. He aimed at the TV and pressed the button.

  “But this is the police.” She held up her phone as if to show him.

  “Screw that. I’m the police,” he said firmly as he grabbed the disk, “let’s go see what happened.”

  …

  As they approached her house, Reghan saw the blue flashing lights reflecting off the leaves of the trees. She’d almost gotten used to the sight. But not illuminating the front of her own home. Dev pulled in behind the two police cruisers and jumped out.

  For a second she thought he’d forgotten her. He stalked around the front of his car and took two long strides toward the house, then stopped and propped his fists on his hips. With a spotlight plus several flashlight beams throwing shadows here and there, he didn’t look real. He looked like some kind of superhero, standing tall and daring the bad guys to go ahead and bounce bullets off him.

  She stared at his back a moment, trying to mesh the man who had lived a lie for twenty years with the larger-than-life figure in front of her right now. She couldn’t do it. Trick of the light, she figured. She was about to start crawling across the seat to the driver’s side door when he turned and headed back in her direction. He jerked open the passenger door.

  “What happened?” she asked, squinting toward her front porch, but the glare kept her from being able to see anything. “What did they do to my house?”

  Without answering, he guided her closer to the porch. The sea of people gathered in the yard parted to let them through. Her heart pounded as they approached her front steps. There was a distinct odor in the air—odd, yet familiar.

  Then she saw it. Something wet and red was splattered all over her porch, dripping and glistening in the dazzling brightness. She gasped, and a suffocating weight on her chest squee
zed the air out of her lungs. The edges of her vision began to turn black.

  Her house looked like it was bleeding.

  Chapter Five

  The next thing she knew, she was wrapped in warmth and protection, and Dev’s low voice was reassuring in her ear. “Easy now. It’s just paint.”

  At first, she couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Panic was crawling up the back of her throat, followed by nausea. Fragments of thoughts were all she could grasp. Not blood. Paint.

  “Connor?” he murmured. “Stay with me. Don’t faint on me, girl.”

  Red. Blood. Paint? Slowly the darkness faded from her eyes. She wasn’t going to faint. Thank goodness. She tried to say it out loud, but she was too busy fighting to keep the rising panic under control. Dev’s grip on her waist tightened, and finally, the panic gave up and quit trying to burst out of her chest.

  She shaded her eyes with her hand. “That’s what the smell is,” she whispered. “Paint.”

  But the paint wasn’t spilled or thrown. Slowly, the dark red morphed from gaping, dripping wounds into recognizable patterns. They were words. Scrawled across the boards of her front porch floor in dark red paint were the words, LEAVE HIM ALONE OR REGRET IT.

  Someone jostled her. It was a young man in a jacket with the letters NOPD stamped in gold on the back. Suddenly, she felt as if someone had tossed her into an episode of Law & Order.

  “Paint’s still wet,” an officer yelled from behind her. She half-turned toward the voice.

  “Check the doors,” another officer called from the opposite end of the porch. “Make sure the house is secure.”

  A metallic scraping sound drew her attention. One of the officers was scraping paint off a windowsill into a small white envelope.

  Dev turned her away from the activity and the awful bleeding words. “Go back to the car,” he said softly, giving her a little push in that direction.

  She heard him, but she couldn’t move on her own. She felt paralyzed by the sight of the warning message slashed across the front of her house. She clenched her fists. Someone had done this to her. Someone had been in her house and stolen her disk, and now they had come back and defiled her property.