Payback. Jasmine Cresswell
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their conclusions? But Adam was pretty convincing. On top of that, you’re telling me now that you may have seen Ron. If you’re correct, that means Castellano can’t possibly have murdered him. Since he isn’t guilty this time around, it does give cause to wonder if the police might have been wrong on the previous occasions, as well.”
“Even if Ron is alive, we don’t know what happened the night he disappeared,” Luke pointed out. “There’s no reason to give Castellano a free pass. Ron might have managed to trick him and escape. In which case Castellano would be guilty of attempted murder at the very least.”
Avery was silent for a moment. Then she shook her head. “If Castellano tried to kill Ron and didn’t succeed, why is Ron still hiding? Why didn’t he come home and identify Castellano as the would-be killer? Even if Ron was injured or suffering from amnesia for a while, it seems his memory is in full working order now. You yourself said that he ran away when you saw him. That means he recognized you and didn’t want to talk to you. Why doesn’t Ron want to be discovered? Who is he hiding from?”
“Castellano is the logical suggestion,” Luke said. “He’s a convicted criminal and his blood was in the hotel room, so there must have been a fight.”
“Not necessarily. The fact that Castellano’s blood was in the hotel room doesn’t provide any information about why he was there.”
“Why else would he have gone to Ron’s hotel room if not for robbery or some other crime?”
“He might have been there for the simple reason that he was an accomplice of Ron’s,” Avery suggested. “If Ron wanted to disappear, what could be more convincing than staging a room to look as if he’d been fighting for his life against a known killer?”
Avery seemed as determined to believe Ron was alive as the police were determined to believe he was dead. Luke found himself in the bizarre position of trying to rein in her willing acceptance of his own story. “But if Ron isn’t hiding from Castellano, who is he hiding from?”
“His families,” Avery said quietly. “Both of them.”
“That can’t be the explanation.” Luke hoped he sounded convincing. “Avery, if Ron was tired of his families, why not say so? You don’t go to the huge trouble of faking your own death just to avoid the hassle of getting divorced!”
“Most men don’t go to the huge hassle of maintaining two marriages, two homes, two completely separate lives. Most men aren’t bigamists. Ron apparently doesn’t react like most people.” With a sudden, jerky movement Avery pushed back her chair. “The more you try to dress it up and make it look pretty, the more convinced I become that Ron wanted out of his life—and so he ran.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Luke said.
“Then give me a better interpretation of the facts.”
“We don’t have enough facts to speculate in any meaningful way. Right now, though, I suspect professional gamblers would say the odds are in favor of me being mistaken and Ron being dead.” Luke felt obligated to provide Avery with that out if she wanted to take it. Hell, everyone else who’d heard his story had taken the route of assuming he was an idiot, so she was entitled.
She tilted her head back, searching his face. “You don’t think you’re mistaken, do you?”
He debated for a second and then gave her the truth. “No. I’m sorry, Avery. I’m almost as certain as I can be that I saw Ron Raven.”
“Then I’m grateful to you for telling me what you saw. Now all that’s left is for me to decide how to deal with this. I just finished telling you how competent and self-sufficient I am. I need to prove it.”
“Even the strongest and most independent person sometimes needs a friendly listener. Anytime you want to discuss your options with me, Avery, I’ll be happy to listen and offer any advice I can. After all, I’m the person who opened up this can of worms.”
“Right now, I’ve just about exhausted my capacity for rational discussion. I need some time alone to think. Thanks for the offer, though, Luke. Later on, I’ll probably take you up on it.” She got up and walked in the direction of his office door, bumping into the corner of his credenza as she passed by. For graceful, controlled Avery, the clumsy movement demonstrated a distress level that was the equivalent of a normal person tumbling flat on her face.
Luke escorted her to the restaurant door, his hand beneath her elbow. “You’re upset. Let me call you a cab.”
“Thanks, Luke, but I’d rather walk. Fresh air seems very appealing right now. Goodbye.”
Luke watched Avery weave a not-quite-straight path to the corner of the block. When she turned out of view, he didn’t even attempt to return to his office and his chore of checking invoices. Instead he made his way to the kitchens and silently began preparing a port wine reduction to garnish the beef tenderloin that would be on tonight’s menu. Cooking was usually absorbing enough that he could lose himself in the process. But today, his brain remained disengaged from his hands. Despite the heavy weight in the pit of his stomach, he was fairly sure he’d done the right thing in contacting Avery. Unfortunately, doing the right thing apparently could leave you feeling like hell.
Perhaps he should call Kate and warn her that her mother…He cut off that insidious thought before it could carry him down any of the dangerous paths that led to Kate. He’d taken that walk too many times already, and he sure as hell didn’t plan to take it again. He’d told Avery what he’d seen and his responsibilities in regard to Ron Raven’s resurrection were now ended.
It was time to move on, leaving Kate locked safely in the past, where she belonged.
Five
Later the same day
Kate Fairfax—formerly Kate Raven—not only loved her mother, she’d always admired her. Her respect had been heartfelt, even during her teenage years when she’d been intimidated by her mother’s unfailing elegance and exquisite taste. In self-defense, Kate had indulged in a few years of grunge dressing just to prove that she didn’t give a flying flip about clothes or makeup. On her eighteenth birthday she’d reinforced her rebellion by getting a tattoo of a dragon on her butt, a gold ring threaded through her left nostril and multiple piercings in both ears.
Her efforts provoked a satisfactory bellow of outrage from her father, but unfortunately nothing much from her mother. After complimenting Kate’s choice of earrings, Avery offered a mild comment to the effect that she’d always wanted to have a tattoo but was too much of a coward to endure the pain.
Since her mother didn’t seem to care in the slightest about the nose ring, and it was a major pain to keep the hole disinfected, Kate had given up on it within three months. By the end of her first semester in culinary school, she’d allowed half of the ear piercings to close, and by the time she graduated, she had acquired a fair-size wardrobe of clothes that weren’t black, weren’t denim and had no rips anywhere.
The tattoo, however, she’d never for a single moment regretted. Luke had christened the dragon Puff, and had woven several highly erotic fantasies that supposedly revealed the secret story of how Puff came to end up living on her butt. It was only after they broke up that she happened to hear the old Peter, Paul and Mary song and understand why he’d picked that name. It annoyed her every time she glimpsed the dragon in her bathroom mirror and realized that she was still mentally calling him Puff. There was also the problem of the tiny jeweled egg that she kept buried in a shoe box in her closet. This, according to Luke when he gave it to her, was the egg from which Puff had hatched several centuries earlier. The fact that she had neither given the egg away nor found the courage to display it on a shelf suggested an unhealthy level of neurosis about the ending of their relationship.
Her memories of Luke sometimes seemed impossible to shake, and Kate was frustrated by her inability to banish him to the trash can of past mistakes. She was twenty-seven, for heaven’s sake, which ought to be old enough to recognize when a relationship had been doomed from