Trust With Your Life

Chapter Four

Thirteen minutes isn’t a long time if you’re waiting for a taxi, and it’s a short amount of time if you’re waiting for a doctor. But if you’re waiting for the cops, Molly decided, it feels like a day and a half.

Alec pleaded another minute or so while Molly stayed on the emergency line, and his voice grew a little more desperate, then trailed off. She assumed he had departed. Normally very civic-minded, she decided there was no way she was going to make an attempt to try to stop him.

As she sat with her head pressed to her knees and her back against Jerry’s front door, it passed through her mind that she should probably call all the neighbors and warn them. But she didn’t know any of their numbers and wouldn’t have known what to say in any case.

The police were efficient and polite when they showed up, two young Mission Verde cops, ringing Jerry’s door and calling out nicely, “Miss Jakes. It’s the police.”

They dutifully checked her town house, walking in and out of every room after they had thrown open her front door, but Alec Steele was nowhere in sight. The three were joined a few minutes later by two additional officers, one a woman.

Ten minutes after that, four Orange County P.D. members arrived, one of whom was the plainclothesman Molly had talked to at last night’s freeway accident scene. He obviously hadn’t had any sleep, either, and his manner had deteriorated to a point where even the excuses she made to herself on his behalf didn’t allow her to like him.

“You’re telling us you drove this guy from the accident scene out to your house?”

“He held a gun on me, Officer. And as I’ve told all eight of you, I didn’t know he was there until I was too far away from any cop to yell for help.”

At that, Lieutenant Cortez, as Molly had heard one of the others call him, turned and yelled for the rest of them to start searching the area for Alec. Molly described her car, and the female cop went to look and see if it was still in her car space. Molly didn’t see her keys anywhere but couldn’t remember what had happened to them last night, so really had no idea if Alec Steele had them or not.

Cortez and Molly stayed put, she on her pink-and-green flowered couch, he pacing in front of the fireplace. “So when did you know this Alec Steele from before?”

Cortez had called Lt. Lester DeWitt of the Summer Point precinct and run the whole story by him, and DeWitt was frantic over this new development. He had asked to speak to Molly.

She repeated her story about the night Paul Buntz was murdered.

“So how does this Alec Steele fit into the Brooker case, Lieutenant?” Molly had demanded.

The cop had given her no answers, only promised to come by with an assistant district attorney that evening to explain “what you need to know about this.”

Molly handed the phone back to Cortez. He listened for a minute, then slammed down the receiver, about as happy as Molly over the Summer Point detective’s stonewalling.

Cortez resumed his questioning. “And you didn’t see Steele get into your car?”

“No.”

“Did any of the other men involved in the accident mention his name to you?” Cortez stopped and stared at Molly, his hands on his hips. His coat jacket was pushed back, and she could see his holster.

“The only guy I worked on who was alive didn’t do anything but gag after I gave him mouth-to-mouth.” Molly folded her arms across her chest, wishing she had not been barefoot. There was something about talking to this angry cop without wearing shoes that made her feel guilty.

Cortez started pacing again. “Okay, let’s take this from the top, Miss Jakes. Tell me everything Alec Steele said to you.”

She started with Alec’s “put your hands back on the wheel” and kept talking, all the while wondering where he’d gone to. He wouldn’t get far with that handcuff hanging from his wrist, even if he did take her car. Once the police put out an alert on the plates, they would catch him.

That conclusion made her feel uneasy as she got to the part in her reconstruction where she was making tea for a man holding a gun on her. Just as she was figuring out some way to explain how she had forgotten to tell Cortez last night about the gun she had accidently carried off from the wreck, thereby having it to pull on Alec Steele, the female cop came running into the living room.

“He’s taken her car. It’s not in her carport.”

“Great. He’ll be out of the county by the time we get this on the air.” Cortez glared at Molly, then turned back to the patrolwoman. “Call the car in and put out an APB on Alec Steele. Get his description from the others.” He turned to Molly. “You did give them a description?”

“Yes.” She was anxious to ask Cortez why Alec thought the cops were out to kill him but decided to keep her questions for the district attorney this evening.

Molly listened as he gave a few more gruff orders to the other officers as they returned. “And bring Miss Jakes into the station. We’ll get her complete statement there.”

“Wait a minute. I have to go to work today.”

Cortez faced her again, his pockmarked skin oily and pale with fatigue. “We need your statement, Miss Jakes. A very dangerous individual is on the loose, and you may have important information. It’s your duty.”

“I don’t think I need or deserve a lecture on civic duty, Officer,” she replied.

He seemed to soften a bit and used a more civil tone. “This is for your own good. If he has your keys, he could get back in the house. He’s very dangerous.”

“How dangerous? What did he do?” Molly thought of the guy with the bullet in his back. A cop, maybe this one in front of her, might kill Alec if he resisted their efforts to apprehend him. “Did he shoot that man in the wreck last night?”

Cortez ignored her question and ordered the uniformed officers out on assignments, then turned and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “No one was shot last night.”

He had very dark eyes, making his pupils nearly invisible. Molly began to tremble suddenly and clenched her fists at her side. “Don’t b.s. me, Lieutenant. I saw the wound. The guy lying by the Bronco who was wearing a gun. He had a hole in his left shoulder—”

“You’re mistaken, Miss Jakes. No one was shot. But one of the men who was killed in the accident was a police officer. He was a good man. He had been out looking for Alec Steele the last time the station heard from him. He must have been bringing him in when the wreck occurred. Steele was lucky to get out alive and find your accommodating car to hide in.”

“Looking for him? Why? Has it got something to do with the Brooker case, too?”

“I can’t comment on that.”

“Can you comment on the fact that it’s too much of a coincidence that, in a county of seven million people, two witnesses in a murder trial were involved in the same fatal car wreck?”

Cortez blinked. “No, I can’t. You got any explanation for that coincidence?”

“None.”

“Then we’ll leave it there. For now.”

Molly sighed, stood and walked over to Cortez, unable to shake the feeling that the cop was lying. “I’ll come in, but it’ll have to be later this afternoon, after I check on my men.”

Quickly she explained about the crew of installers, ending by pointing to the mantel clock above the fireplace. “It’s already almost eight. I have to be there by nine, so if you’ll excuse me, I need to get dressed and call someone to come pick me up.”

Cortez took a card from his pocket and handed it to her. “That’s my address and phone number. I’ll be back in around two. Be at the precinct by then, or I’ll come and get you.”

“Don’t you ever go home?” This small attempt at a more human interaction was ignored.

“I’ll see you at two, Miss Jakes. And let me take this opportunity to advise you that if you fail to appear, I have the authority to issue a warrant for your arrest, despite your friends at the Summer Point Precinct.”

What a jerk, Molly thought. A real hardball player. “You won’t need to do that, Lieutenant. I’m willing to cooperate, even though you’re treating me like a criminal.”

For a second, Cortez’s face softened, the wrinkles in his forehead slackening into his thick head of hair. But then he turned away and headed for the door.

Molly watched as he walked away. He never turned around or said goodbye, just slammed the door shut behind him.

Molly put Cortez’s business card on the coffee table and reached for the phone. She called Rafe Amundson, her installation foreman, at the shop. He agreed to send someone out, then proceeded to give her an earful about the new female cable puller, who didn’t pull fast enough to suit Rafe.

Rafe was sixty-three, one of the last icons of the prebreakup days of Ma Bell, when “men were men and women stayed home,” as he was fond of saying.

Rafe loved stirring up trouble, especially over equal rights and E.E.O. regulations, and hearing that he was in a balky mood threatened Molly’s last remaining hold on mature behavior. He enjoyed baiting her. She decided to give him a big thrill this morning and really get into it with him.

“Tell you what, Rafe. Why don’t you come here and get me yourself? We’ll discuss Sandra Jackson’s abilities on the way out to the client’s.”

Molly hung up and headed for the shower. As she cranked the window closed, her mind replayed Cortez’s denial that anyone had been shot. Though she was no medic, she was sure of what she had seen, and the round hole in the victim’s shirt didn’t look like anything he could have picked up from being bounced out of a car.

There were so many questions.

And there was Alec Steele.

Molly shook her head hard, wishing she could shake the thought of him away. He’d terrified her. And yet compelled her. Something told her he wasn’t truly a kidnapper and killer.

But what the heck was he then? Sexy as hell, some demented part of her brain answered. Disgusted with herself, Molly soaped up and washed her hair, running the water as hot as she could stand. She cut herself twice while shaving her legs and swore loudly over her lack of concentration. Ten minutes later, she was wrapped in her baggy robe heading for the bedroom.

With any luck of the bad variety, Rafe would be here before she was ready, and he’d have “women are never ready on time” ammunition to use against her during her planned consciousness-raising session.

She threw the towel and bathrobe onto the carpet in a heap, and wiggled her damp legs into panty hose. With a snap she put on her bra, then opened the closet and stared at clothes while brushing tangles out of her hair. Business suits, silk blouses and tailored dresses filled most of the space. But this morning she wanted something different. She sorted through an assortment of “mistake” buys: tweed culotte pants that made her legs look fat, a blue angora sweater dress that shed worse than a cat, a leather miniskirt that bunched up at the waist.

Finally she grabbed a beige silk dirndl and its matching cropped jacket. With a white sleeveless blouse, the outfit enhanced her skin, moderately freckled with typical brunette undertones of peach and brown. She hung the clothes on the doorknob and dropped to her knees to hunt in the bottom of the closet for beige pumps.

The bells from the front door chimed merrily. “Damn.” Molly was beginning to suffer from the lack of sleep. She suddenly felt furious, for the mistaken call for help that had halved her sleeping time, for the gruesome accident, for the damn Aussie stranger who didn’t seem at all suited to his adopted role as a criminal.

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