The Lady Has a Past (Burning Cove #5) - Amanda Quick Page 0,97
to plan.
One thing had gone very wrong: Marcella had expected Raina to show up for the client interview.
“No need to thank me,” Lyra said. She set the cup and saucer down on the coffee table and got to her feet. “I appreciate the answer to my question. I’ll be going now. I don’t want to delay you any longer. I’ll see myself out.”
She grabbed her purse and headed for the door. Her intuition was screaming at her now, telling her to get out of the dark, shadowed house.
She took only three steps before Marcella spoke behind her.
“Stop or I will pull the trigger of this gun,” Marcella said.
Lyra froze beside the large liquor cabinet. She took a breath and turned around very slowly. Marcella was on her feet, a pistol in her hand. She appeared to know exactly what she was doing with the weapon.
“You figured it out, didn’t you?” Marcella sighed. “I was afraid of that. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, right from the beginning. But thanks to you coming here today I might have one last chance to end this the way it was supposed to end.”
“With Raina dead? That’s what you intended, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I wanted her dead, but I did not want to draw the attention of Luther Pell.”
“In that case, you miscalculated. Badly. Pell would have walked into hell to find the person who murdered Raina.”
“But the beauty of my original plan was that he would have had the killer handed to him on a platter,” Marcella said. “Charles Adlington.”
“Who would also have been conveniently dead because you would have shot him in what would have looked like a desperate but doomed effort to protect Raina.”
“But you showed up instead, and the next thing I knew, that fool Charles was on the ground and probably dying because you hit him with a golf club.”
“But you had to be sure. And now you’re going to murder me because you know I figured it out.”
“You leave me no choice. I’ll find another way to deal with Raina Kirk.”
“Why do you want her dead?”
“Because she murdered Graham Enright and stole my file. I have no idea where she hid it, so killing her is the next best thing to recovering it. It will be easier to search for it once she’s gone.”
The sound of the front door opening had an electrifying effect on Marcella. Panic flashed in her eyes.
“Who is it?” she shouted. “Who’s there? Go away or I’ll call the police.”
“I doubt that,” Raina said.
She appeared at the arched entrance of the living room. Lyra marveled at her cool, businesslike demeanor, as if this were just another meeting with a client. She was carrying Simon’s briefcase in her arms. It was positioned like a shield across the front of her body.
Marcella moved quickly to put the barrel of her pistol against Lyra’s head.
“If either of you move, Miss Brazier is a dead woman,” she said.
“I’m Raina Kirk,” Raina said, ignoring the threat. “I believe you’ve been trying to get hold of me, Mrs. Adlington. Or should I call you the other face of Janus?”
“So you do have my file.”
“Yes,” Raina said. “It was obviously very special to Enright.”
“The bastard. We were lovers for a time. I don’t know why I allowed myself to trust him. I suppose it was because I thought of him as a kindred spirit. I believed that Graham and I understood each other, that he viewed me as his equal. I convinced myself that there was a bond between us. That we would make a good team.”
“Enright had a talent for molding himself into whoever he wanted you to think he was,” Raina said.
“I didn’t realize he had created a file on me until shortly before his death. He asked me to do him a favor. He wanted me to steal some secrets from a powerful man. It was too dangerous. I refused. That was when he told me about the file. He threatened to turn it over to the FBI. I knew I had to get rid of him and destroy the file. But killing a man like Enright is not a simple matter. I had to be careful.”
“Then you heard that he had taken cyanide.”
“I was immediately suspicious,” Marcella said. “It just wasn’t in Graham’s nature to take his own life. You’re the one who put the cyanide in his coffee, aren’t you?”