Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (18 page)

“Staying in a safe place, I thought,” Bobbie Faye answered. “I had this wacky concept, call me crazy, that if the door was
locked
, people would stay on the
other side
and knock.”

“For someone trying to stay safe,” Cam sidestepped the issue, “you’re being stunningly sloppy. I could have been
anyone
barging in here.”

“If you had been anyone else,” Trevor said, “you’d have been dead before you stepped in the door.”

Bobbie Faye glared at Trevor. “The phone call. You knew he was on his way up here, and you didn’t tell me.”

“We were a little busy,” Trevor said, and Cam snapped his attention to the agent, and back to Bobbie Faye. He
wasn’t sure of the meaning, since the agent remained poker-faced, but Bobbie Faye’s expression was steeped in anger. “Breakfast in ten.”

“At least he has sense enough to keep you out of the kitchen,” Cam muttered, and Bobbie Faye smacked him on the arm.

“That toaster had it in for me, it is not my fault it caught your kitchen on fire, so quit bringing it up. And back to the point, what the hell are you doing? Specializing in breaking and entering now? Have you lost your mind?”

“I need to speak to Bobbie Faye,” he told Trevor, but Cam’s gaze stayed on her face. Cam understood, then, from the way she returned his gaze, that she hadn’t just been referring to him barging into Nina’s with her “locks” comment—she must have seen him breaking into her trailer. He turned back to the agent. “Privately.”

“Well,
that
would be new,” Bobbie Faye countered, glaring at the agent.

Trevor nodded to Cam and left the room as quietly as he’d entered.

Benoit squatted at the entrance to the alley where Sal had been shot; the remnants of the police tape fluttered from the streetlight a few feet away. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find that might help Bobbie Faye. The PD and crime scene techs and FBI had all been over the alley with meticulous precision. He had low expectations of finding a single clue, much less something that would help his friend, but he’d resolved—somewhere in the tug of war between duty and instinct—that he ultimately had to side with the fact that he’d known Bobbie Faye since high school, and she couldn’t be a murderer.

The scene looked so entirely different in the early morning light than it had on the surveillance footage. He slowly scanned the turn-of-the-century buildings which had been refurbished just a few years back; rustic, faded red brick warehouses that sported the patina of more than a hundred years of weather made the place warm and welcoming,
while simultaneously, the updated tinted windows, freshly painted trim, and extravagant moldings gave the place the feeling of luxury.

As he looked over the area, he paid particular attention to where the two surveillance cameras that should have captured the activities in the alley were located.

Interesting.

He walked over to where the murderer had stood, and looked back at the cameras, double-checking his theory: the murder had taken place in the direct line of sight of both cameras. Ten feet deeper into the alley, and only one camera would have caught the activity. Another five feet, and the murder would have been out of the range of vision of both cameras.

If the woman brought a gun and shot the man in cold blood—which she’d clearly done—did it make any sense that she wouldn’t have at least cased the place prior to the event? It didn’t look like a crime of passion, or a spontaneous decision, and it was clearly not self-defense. So, then, if she’d walked the alley even once to scope out the security, surely she would have noticed that she could have lured the jeweler a little deeper into the alley without risk of being caught on camera. The streetlight—located at the entrance of the passage—hadn’t illuminated the back part of the area, if Benoit’s memory served him. In fact, he mused as he walked farther to the back of the road, the murderer had nodded to someone who’d remained in the shadows right here . . . so was it intentional that she chose to stop where she did to shoot Sal?

Why bother to fake Bobbie Faye’s identity if the murderer hadn’t known, for certain, that she’d be recorded? She could have just worn a cap or hat, or some sort of disguise to cover her head and face, and she would have remained anonymous, especially if she’d chosen the shadows. And if this line of thinking was correct . . . then how angry was she now that the two surveillance tapes had disappeared without exposing the Bobbie Faye identity to the police? If someone had set that up as a frame, what would they do next?

And not a single bit of this reasoning helped Bobbie Faye.

Benoit looked at the case from the point of view of a cop, as well as that of the DA, who was also his friend. Bobbie Faye had a reputation for helping people out of jams, even if that meant bending and breaking the law. She’d skated off the last disaster without being charged (and there were a multitude of charges which could have been levied, starting with destruction of public property to reckless endangerment . . . crap, the list was too long to think about); he suspected the only thing that had saved her ass then was Cam and, possibly, the Fed, Trevor, pulling strings. (Of course Cam, the idiot, hadn’t told her he’d called two senators on her behalf.) Even without a clear-cut motive, a good DA—and his friend was damned good—could argue that she
habitually
allowed the means to justify the ends, that she had grown accustomed to the law not holding her accountable, and so she’d come to the point where she believed that she could get away with killing Sal.

For what reason? Benoit didn’t know, but with the sheer number of crises involving Bobbie Faye yesterday, he was willing to bet his badge that something major was up. It wouldn’t be all that hard for a DA, and probably most any jury, to leap to the conclusion that anything that would drive Bobbie Faye as hard as she was driven the day before was probably extremely compelling, and if she’d mangle a house and blow up a bridge, was murder all that hard to believe?

John watched through the sights of his scope as Bobbie Faye talked to the asshole cop, Cam. They both looked over at someone else in the room, but that person remained out of John’s sight. Now they focused completely on each other again. Arguing, it looked like. They were usually arguing, though, so it was no surprise.

He didn’t have a shot. Neither did the men he’d hired.

It had taken a couple of hours from the time he’d made
the call to the time his assistants had arrived. Once he had the operating budget wired into his account from the buyer, John worked fast, hiring the best he knew in the merc business. There was a brief moment when he thought about going after the diamonds himself, but he’d decided he’d rather not turn into the target. Besides, the rewards were going to be significant: enough freaking money to live on for a couple of years and getting even with Bobbie Faye.

The two hours he’d waited for the mercs to arrive had been passed scouting out where Bobbie Faye had gone after she left Marie’s. Lake Charles was a small town, and there weren’t that many hotels to check. Discreetly spreading around cash got him past the morals of a host of hotel clerks, and since every one of them had been a dead end, he moved on to Bobbie Faye’s friends. Nina was the closest friend, and her place wasn’t on any four-one-one, but John knew a couple of the models Nina used for her agency. Now, if Bobbie Faye would just move into his sights, everything would be perfect.

Nina had no intention of going to sleep—she’d get her job done there in Taormina and wrap things up with the photo shoot in the villa, both of which would probably take a couple more hours. There was a corporate jet fueled up on the runway at Catania; thank God it was a military base—she’d get first preference flight out. Flight time back to Louisiana was about twelve hours, if they pushed it, and she had a feeling she needed to be home. She dialed Bobbie Faye’s phone number, only to smile when she heard her friend’s extremely grumpy hello.

“So,” Bobbie Faye said, “do you keep any weapons in this place? Because I am feeling an extreme need for weapons this morning.”

Nina was pretty sure she heard Cam in the background. “Obviously you haven’t looked in the exercise suite.”

“Exercise? Why would you keep . . . oh. Don’t answer that. Don’t you have Italian men to handcuff or something?”

“Already done. And I’m heading home, so I’ll be on a plane for a while—I’ll call you when I hit New York. Try not to blow up the state before I get there—I want to move some of my art to a safe place.”

“One of these days, you’re going to call me and I’m going to tell you that absolutely
nothing
is going on, everything is quiet, and people aren’t yelling at me.”

“Sure, B. And when you do, I’ll know that they are treating you very nicely in the padded cell.”

Cam peppered her with so many questions about yesterday, Bobbie Faye wanted to kick him, but she’d learned her lesson: no kicking big things without her boots on. Right then, she was barefoot, which was the only damned thing that saved Cam’s shins. She plopped down on the sofa and stalled on answering—as much to annoy him as to take a moment to remember that Punching Big Cops was a Bad Thing. Even if he was an ex-boyfriend. Not only was he being a cop, he was being a
jerk
cop, using his interrogation tone and cutting off her attempts to ask him what he’d been up to in her trailer. He grew agitated with each ensuing detail, so she gave him only the minimum highlights of the day’s activities and the search for the diamonds. He didn’t need to know about Marie’s day planner note.

“So you’re helping Francesca? Are you nuts? What am I talking about?” He threw his hands up, and paced in a circle. “You practically have the label
Crazy, Inc
. trademarked.”

“And I’m getting it tattooed on my ass, too.”

“You don’t even
like
the woman. She always competed for everything you had, all through school.”

Bobbie Faye didn’t want to get into the whole “Francesca’s family could get killed, and by the way, they’re my extended family, too,” since she’d never explained that connection to Cam before. “Francesca competed with everyone, Cam. I mean, holy geez, with a dad like Emile, she learned competition from birth. Besides, she never really went after anything I cared all that much about.”

“Yeah. Got it. Thanks.”

“You know what I mean. You hated her. You don’t count.”

“And the warm and fuzzy just keeps on coming.”

“Well, gee, Cam, the next time you barge in to announce to me what an idiot I am, I’ll be sure to dial the decade back to the fifties and—what the hell—I’ll have some tea and crumpets and a nice side dish of Don’t-Mind-Me, I’m-A-Doormat disorder waiting for you while I tie my apron on. Now, if that’s all you want, I have diamonds to find.”

“Where were you Saturday night?”

“Why?”

“Just answer the question, Bobbie Faye,” he barked. He paced away from her, fighting his temper. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, as he usually did with a headache. “Can’t you ever just answer a damned question?” He looked like crap, from the bloodshot eyes to the rumpled slept-in look of his clothes.

With his arm bent and his muscles flexed, she realized again how sexy Cam was. Taller and lankier than Trevor, at six-four, he intimidated a lot of people, particularly with that cop glare he’d perfected, and he was an unusually natural leader, both on the football field and off. He had always been sexy to her, even when he was a gangly fourteen-year-old to her scrawny twelve. But she also always saw the guy she’d grown up with. The guy who’d let her drive (and, oops, wreck) his first car, the one who would have never admitted, in a million years, that he liked the movie
E.T
. She especially noticed his biceps as he stood there, and how his sweaty shirt plastered against ripped abs.
Oh, God
. She was a bicep and abs junkie. She was going to have to quit, cold turkey, because look where it got her: one guy who’d conned her into complete humiliation, another one who was determined to continually berate her for everything she’d ever done wrong. She probably didn’t even breathe right. So that was it. AA. Abs Anonymous, here she comes. She wondered if there was a patch for that.

“I was home alone,” she finally answered when he’d leaned in, about to ask again.

“All night?”

“Well, yeah.” He’d been demanding in his tone before, but now Cam verged on belligerent.

“Alone?”

“Cam!”

“Well? I have to know. Were you alone?”

“What in holy hell crawled up your ass and died?”

“It’s police business, Bobbie Faye.” Cam’s voice hammered the air and echoed off the loft walls. “
Yes
or
no
, were you alone?” He watched her carefully as she leaned forward, confusion spreading across her eyes, and her robe fell open and oh holy hell, there was her cleavage spilling over next-to-nothing pjs and he had to look away.

“Yes. Alone. What’s going on?”

“Is there anybody who can confirm you stayed home? Was Stacey there?”

“No, she spent the night at Janie’s down the street. Did something happen Saturday night?”

He breathed in and out a minute, his gaze fixed across the room on a plant by the window, pushing away the image that open robe had seared in his mind. It reminded him, too much, of weekends they’d laze around, barely bothering to dress. “Yeah,” he finally said, “something happened.” He couldn’t exactly tell her that she was now a suspect in the murder of the jeweler, and he wasn’t about to tell her about the casings he’d found or, dear God, the surveillance footage Benoit hadn’t turned in yet. He’d already made one lapse in judgment, had already bent rules he’d sworn never to bend, much less break. Giving her details of an ongoing investigation where she was the suspect? Wrong. Plain and simple. “And you’re sure you don’t have anyone who can confirm you were there all night?”

“No. No one. It’s not like I go home to the male equivalent of Winna, so what do you expect?”

She said it so low, so quietly, but certainly not calmly, and he couldn’t look away. Why in the hell hadn’t he thought about the fact that everyone that gossiped to him about her would also make it a point to fill her in on every single damned thing he did? He knew if the Winna thing kept going, he’d eventually mention it to Bobbie Faye. Not that she cared, he knew, because if she cared, they wouldn’t have broken up. But he’d planned . . . hell, he didn’t know what he’d planned. He knew he hadn’t thought he’d be sitting across from her, while she sat in a robe and skimpy pjs, with a (if rumor was true) rogue agent in the other room, doing God knows what, having this discussion on the heels of her being a suspect in a major murder case.