The room, which had been freezing last week, was stifling.
“They finally fixed the heater?” she guessed.
“Soon as the weather got warm again.” Darlene’s tone was condemning. “You couldn’t make this stuff up.” She leaned her elbows on the counter. “What do you need?”
“Is Luke Walker in? I’ve got some questions about that Tybee floater.”
“I saw him earlier. You want me to check?”
“Yes. Oh, and if he’s there, would you ask him to come down?” Harper couldn’t face a roomful of detectives right now.
“Sure thing.” Darlene picked up the phone and dialed quickly. As she waited for someone to answer, she confided, “Sometimes detectives don’t pick up. They think they’re too impor—Oh hello, Detective.” Her tone grew abruptly sweeter and she gave Harper a comic look. “Is Luke Walker around? Would you tell him he’s got a visitor in the lobby? Thank you.”
Harper waited by the door. She knew if she was purely doing what she’d promised Baxter, she would have gone upstairs looking for Daltrey. But there was more going on in her world right now than Xavier Rayne, and that was why she’d sought out Luke instead, right after her lunch with Dells.
That, at least, was what she was telling herself when the security door opened a few minutes later and Luke strode through it.
“I thought it might be you,” he said, when he reached her, his voice low. “What do you need?”
“Do you have a second to talk?” Harper shot a meaningful glance at Darlene, who was hanging on every word. “Somewhere quiet?”
“My car’s outside,” he said. He led the way, guiding her across the lot to a small two-door sports car.
Luke started the engine and shifted into gear, motioning for her to talk.
“First I have to ask about Rayne or my editor will kill me,” she said.
“There’s nothing new,” he said, steering into city traffic. “Off the record, we’re still looking at the people in that house. But we’ve got no murder weapon, and they are sticking to their story that he walked out alive, and that’s all they know. We’ve widened our investigation to take in the manager, a couple of enthusiastic fans. But everything points at the people he lived with. Particularly, the girlfriend.”
“But you’re no closer to an arrest?” she guessed.
He shook his head.
The traffic slowed to a crawl, and he glanced at her, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. “So, tell me. Why are we really here?”
“I talked to my dad,” she told him. “It’s worse than we thought.”
“How much worse?”
“It’s all true. He worked for Martin Dowell. He thinks he’s going to try to kill us both. But he’s mostly worried about himself.” She tried to strip all the emotion from her voice the way a cop would, but a slight tremor betrayed her at the end.
Luke gave a disgusted headshake, and signaled a right turn. “How close was he to Dowell?”
“He said Dowell owned him.”
Silently, Luke swung the car into an anonymous parking lot behind a downtown office building, and backed into a shady corner. He killed the engine and removed his sunglasses. His dark blue eyes held hers.
“You better tell me everything.”
Quickly, she described the phone call. Saying it all aloud made it clear how bad the situation really was. At the end, she told him the one thing she hadn’t admitted to anyone else, “Luke, I’m scared I’m going to die like my mom. Today I bought a gun.”
He swore softly. Reaching across the central console, he found her hand and pressed her fingers. “You’re not going to die. We’ll figure something out.”
He’d always been able to convince her of almost anything. This time, though, she wasn’t sure she believed him.
“I saw the man—the one who called me,” she told him. “Out at Tybee. Near my house.”
He looked stunned. “How the hell did he find you?”
“I don’t know, but I’m guessing he thinks Dowell’s going to find me, and he wants to be close when it happens. Either to save me or kill him. I don’t know which, anymore.” A headache had begun to throb behind her eyes, and she rubbed her forehead. “I keep dreaming…”
She looked out across the long rows of cars. There were no people around. Just rows of cars glittering black and red and silver in the winter sunlight like jewels.
“I keep dreaming I’m being chased. Every night I dream it. Every time I die.”
He studied her face, his hands resting on the wheel. “I think we need to take