Smoke in Mirrors(84)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

Leonora said nothing. She was too busy staring at the glittering shards that littered the floor.

“We’ve wasted enough time.” Roberta came toward her down the aisle formed by the bookcases. “You and I must take a little trip. Get up, Leonora. Do you hear me? Get up right now.”

She stayed crouched near the floor, looking at the fragmented images of herself in the shards. The bits and pieces of her reflections gave a whole new meaning to the words pull yourself together, she thought.

She started to giggle.

“Stop it.” Roberta transferred the gun to her left hand, reached down, grasped Leonora’s upper arm. She was a large, strongly built woman. She did not expect to encounter any resistance from her drugged victim.

Leonora made no effort to resist. She summoned all the strength and willpower that she had left and lurched to her feet.

Simultaneously she clawed at Roberta’s face with her right hand.

Roberta saw the long, jagged piece of broken mirror clutched in Leonora’s fingers. She shrieked in reflexive fear and fell back, putting up both arms in an instinctive move to protect her eyes.

Leonora raked her glass claw downward, not caring what part of Roberta’s anatomy she struck. The shard bit into flesh.

A keening scream reverberated in the library.

Blood spouted. Not all of it was Roberta’s. Leonora felt the sting of glass slicing through the skin of her palm.

The gun fell from Roberta’s fingers. She shrieked again.

Leonora raised her bloody hand and tried another slashing swing. She missed this time because Roberta was reeling back down the aisle, her arms still raised to defend her face.

Leonora dropped the shard and grabbed the gun with both hands. She swung around. The aisle of books looped and dipped like a roller coaster. She stumbled toward the far end.

She knew now that she could not get to her keys, let alone try to drive a car. But if she could get as far as the concealed flight of steps that led to the third floor she might be able to barricade herself inside the narrow passage until help arrived. The entrance was just around the corner out in the hall. All she had to do was stay awake.

A dark figure blotted out the light in the doorway.

“Leonora,” Thomas said.

A glorious sense of relief flooded through her. She lurched into his outstretched arms.

“Knew you’d come,” she whispered.

She was vaguely aware of Deke in the hallway. Claws clicked on the wooden flooring. Wrench.

Behind her, Roberta screamed in raw rage. Leonora managed to turn her head.

Roberta rushed toward the door, a huge chunk of mirror clutched in her hands.

“Shit,” Deke said, “she’s gone crazy. Get out of her way.”

“Wrench.” Thomas pulled Leonora out of the doorway, back into the hall, and motioned with the flat of his hand.

Wrench flashed through the opening, utterly silent, a sleek, fast predator doing what came naturally.

Inside the library, Roberta screamed.

There was no place to run. Leonora heard a crash. Books tumbled from the shelves. A body hit the floor hard.

She raised her head from Thomas’s shoulder and looked into the library. Roberta sprawled on her back in one of the aisles, sobbing in fear, her bleeding arm thrown across her face. Wrench stood guard over her, the wolf in his genes etched in every line of his taut body.

“I thought you said he was a reincarnated miniature poodle,” Leonora whispered.

“Must have been a poodle with attitude,” Thomas said. “Hell, you’re bleeding.”

She wanted to smile, but she was so tired. He picked her up in his arms. It felt wonderful.

When he swung around to carry her toward the staircase she caught a glimpse of a reflection in the strange mirror that produced the double images.

For just an instant she thought she saw a familiar face, not her own, smiling at her from the other side of the antique looking glass.

You can go to sleep now, he’ll be there when you wake up.

We’re going to name our first daughter after you.

I know. Thanks. Good-bye, sister.

Good-bye, Meredith.

The hallucination in the mirror vanished.

Chapter Twenty-three

The next day they gathered together in Thomas’s living room. A cheerful fire blazed. The hearth tiles glowed in all their splendor. Deke and Cassie sat side by side on the sofa. Their knees touched.

Leonora lounged in one of the recliners, feet stretched out toward the flames. She had bandages on her palms and she still felt wan and washed out, but the stuff they had given her in the emergency room had gotten rid of most of the drug in her system. She was feeling much better, all things considered.

Thomas occupied the other recliner. Wrench napped on the floor.

Ed Stovall sat very straight in an armchair. He did not take out his notebook. This was supposed to be a private conversation, he had explained. Off the record.

“I’m no shrink, but I think it’s safe to say that Roberta Brinks must have started out warped and then got downright nutzoid over the years,” Thomas said. “Just your ordinary, garden-variety sociopath. The kind of freak no one even notices until after she’s murdered a few folks.”

“You still haven’t explained how you and Deke realized I might be in major trouble yesterday afternoon,” Leonora said.

“Thomas wanted to run down a few loose details,” Deke replied. He rested one hand on Cassie’s knee.

“I just wanted to know for sure who was blackmailing whom.” Thomas steepled his fingers. “When Deke got into Rhodes’s bank records he discovered that a couple of large transactions had been made during the past year. They were credited to a numbered account in an offshore bank. At first we assumed they were the profits Rhodes had made from blackmailing Osmond Kern.”

“But just to be on the safe side, Thomas had me check Kern’s bank records, too,” Deke continued. “He wanted to make sure the amount of the blackmail payments matched.”

Cassie frowned. “I take it they didn’t?”

“No,” Thomas said. “In fact, we found no large transactions at all in Kern’s account. But we discovered a lot of smaller payments going into that same offshore account. They transferred like clockwork on the first of every month.”

“We followed a hunch and went upstream in Kern’s bank records,” Deke said. “Those payments stretched back for years. The offshore account number didn’t appear until three years ago, though. Before that the money went into a bank in California. The account was in the name of a trust, but we were able to get a social security number off some tax records.”