in front of her apartment and they got out. Her earlier euphoria hadn’t dimmed with the news. Lindy had touched her doll. But when?
* * *
SHEP SENSED SOMETHING was wrong the moment Charlie started to unlock the door to her apartment and he saw the fresh marks in the wood near the lock.
“Don’t move,” he whispered close to her ear and quickly stepped past her to open the door.
It didn’t take but a minute to search the small apartment. The place had obviously been broken into but the intruder was long gone. He could guess what the person had been looking for. The scarf.
He came back into the living room to find Charlie where he’d left her.
“It was Lindy,” she said. “I can smell her perfume.” Shep caught the familiar scent as well. “She was looking for the scarf.”
“Someone was looking for the scarf,” he said, only able to agree to a point.
Charlie sighed and took off her coat to hang it by the door. “At least she didn’t make too big of a mess.” She began picking up the coats that had been thrown on the floor by the coat rack.
“I’ll do this if you want to see to the bedroom since it’s so late,” Shep said. The mess in the living room and kitchen weren’t bad. Whoever had done this had also emptied out all the dresser drawers in the bedroom and ransacked the closet.
A while later, she came out of the bedroom saying she was finished. There was a knock at the door and they exchanged looks. Daniel? She motioned for him to go into the bedroom as she headed for the door.
Shep was wondering why he still had to hide when he heard Charlie say through the locked door, “Who is it?”
“It’s me. Amanda. I have to talk to you.”
He looked back at Charlie from the bedroom door. She groaned and motioned him away before she opened the apartment door. Like before, he left the door ajar so he could listen. If this was the woman who’d doctored Charlie’s food at the restaurant, he wasn’t about to leave them alone in the same room without hearing what was going on.
“Amanda?” Charlie said. “Do you realize what time it is?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to get home,” Amanda snapped, like it was Charlie’s fault she was at her door so late.
“What are you doing here?”
“We have to talk.”
“It’s the middle of the night. Can’t it wait until Monday?”
“No.”
He got a glimpse of the blonde forcing her way in before he stepped back out of sight, still leaving the bedroom door ajar.
* * *
“WHAT IS SO important that it can’t wait?” Charlie said, taking a step back as Amanda forced her way in. “I just got back from the hospital. Tara had her baby. A girl.” She closed the door and turned to find Amanda standing in the middle of the apartment, taking it all in with a critical eye. Clearly she wasn’t impressed with what she saw.
“I figured you were out with one of your boyfriends,” the woman said, completely ignoring the part about Tara and her baby girl. “One is apparently not enough for you.”
Charlie shot a glance toward the partially open bedroom door before crossing her arms over her chest and demanding, “What is it you want, Amanda?”
“Something is going on with Greg, but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
Amanda made a rude noise. “I know about the two of you.”
“There is no two of us. Greg’s my boss. That’s it.”
“Then how do you explain the two of you in the bar down the street from the office?”
How did she explain that? “If you must know, I’d forgotten Tara’s baby shower gift at my apartment. I stepped into the bar to get out of the snow to decide whether to go home for the gift or just go to the shower. It was that simple. Apparently Greg came out of our building and saw me. He insisted I have a glass of wine before going back out in the storm.”
Amanda sneered at her. “What did you talk about?”
“Nothing exciting. I asked him if he hired a headhunter to get me to come to work for him. He said he did—along with others besides me. We talked about my latest client and my presentation.” At least she thought they might have. She wasn’t about to tell Amanda that Greg had been in a peculiar mood and had seemed to want to talk