Scarlet Nights (Edilean 3)

“And you know for sure that she’s here in Edilean?”

“There’s no mistaking the name of this town.”

“What’s she done?”

Mike hated having to tell this, but then, it was better than hitting her with the truth about Stefan. “You name it, she’s done it. Murdered her husband, for one. Not that he didn’t deserve it, but it’s still illegal.”

“She’s come to Edilean to kill someone?” Sara’s hand was on her throat.

“Honestly? We don’t know why she’s here, and a lot of what we know about her has come to us second- and third-hand.” He wanted to lighten the moment. “There’s a rumor that she’s so ugly that to trick Marko Vandlo into marrying her, she had to wear a veil over the bottom half of her face. The story’s even more remarkable when you know that she was sixteen and he was fifty-one.”

Sara didn’t let him take her off the main subject. “If she killed her old husband, why wasn’t she put in prison?”

Mike shrugged. “The family keeps what they do to themselves. The agents working on the case were told by an informer that the story was that he fell down some stairs and died. However, when his body was exhumed recently, he had three depressions in his skull that exactly fit a golf club.” Mike lowered his voice. “She specializes in duping people out of their life savings, and we really want to get her off the streets.”

“If she was doing something like that in Edilean, we’d all know about it.”

“Why she’d be in this little town is a big puzzle to everyone. She usually works out of cities, the bigger the better, so what’s in Edilean that she wants?” He waited a moment to give Sara a chance to answer, but she said nothing. “You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

“Not that I remember, but I’ve been so busy with the new store and Greg that I might not have noticed. My mother might know—”

“No! The fewer people who know about this, the better.”

“I understand,” Sara said, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

“What about the rich women who go to your shop? What do you know about their lives?”

She looked at him in speculation. “If you’re interested in them, then I’m your best bet as a contact. You did plan all of this, didn’t you? Luke ran me out of my apartment so you could come up through the tunnel and move yourself in.”

Before Mike could think how to answer that, Sara got up and started quickly walking down the path to her car.

Mike caught her before she’d gone three feet and held her by her upper arms. “Yes! You have been lied to and used shamelessly. But you don’t know how many lives have been ruined by this woman. There were some young girls who—”

“Greg! Did you take him away just before my wedding?”

There was no time to consider his answer. “Yes.” When she tried to twist away from him, he held on. “And they burned my apartment and everything in it just to give me a good cover. Sara, I’m sorry you were pulled in to this, but you have access to places and people that no one else in Edilean does. For all we know, Mitzi could be one of your clients.”

“You took the groom away before my wedding!” Sara said. “That isn’t fair.”

“I know,” he said softly. “But what Mitzi does to people is a great deal more than unfair.”

“Where is Greg?”

“Safe.”

“What does that mean? That you put him in jail somewhere?”

Mike knew that at the moment Greg was still being held in custody, but his lawyer was about to get him out. That was too bad, because the man in the cell with him was an undercover agent. But Mike couldn’t tell Sara any of that. “I was told so little about this case that there’s still a lot I don’t know. My captain told me about it, then when I said I needed to go home and pack, I was shown a newspaper photo of my apartment on fire.” When he saw the sympathy in her eyes, Mike relaxed his grip on her shoulders, but he didn’t release her.

“I’m sorry for all this,” he said again. “Some guy I knew way back in training remembered that I’d said my grandmother was from Edilean. That was when I was too young to know not to tell much about myself. When the name of the town came up, he remembered it and me, and the Feds contacted my boss, so here I am.”

Sara was frowning, but in a way that made Mike relax more, and he removed his hands from her shoulders. “It looks like I got blood on your dress.”

Sara glanced at the stains, then took his hands in hers and turned them palm up to look at the torn skin. “You did that on the rope?”

“Yeah.” He was watching her.

“I think that was the only time I’ll ever get to play Jane.”