her away, the back of her skull had come down hard against the edge of the radiator. Too hard. One look at the blood pooling around her head, and he’d known that she was done for, and that he had to get out of there before anyone figured out that he’d been in her room.
Even so, he’d taken precious minutes to go through her stuff and make it look like robbery was the motive. While he was ransacking her luggage, he’d found a daybook with the names of two locals. Rachel Gregory and Jake Harper.
At least he had that much. Not enough to satisfy the Badger, but he’d already put off his report as long as possible. Anticipating a nasty few minutes, he signaled for the waitress and paid for his drinks.
When he was outside on the street, he lit up a cigarette and took several deep drags before tossing it away. Finally knowing he couldn’t delay any longer, he pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed a number in Portland.
The Badger answered, and he started talking before Carter could get any of his carefully planned words out.
“Unfortunately for you, I’m listening to CNN. A woman visitor to New Orleans was killed this evening. I guess you made an effing mess of the assignment,” he said as soon as he heard Carter’s voice.
“Not my fault. Why didn’t you tell me she had martial arts training?”
“News to me.”
The man might or might not be lying. In Carter’s experience, the Badger said whatever was most effective at the time. And he might change his tune if another story was more convenient.
“Nobody can connect you with the incident?”
“I’m clean. I didn’t talk to anyone at the desk. I paid a delivery boy to ask for her room.”
“Okay.”
“Afterward, I went down the back stairs.”
“So you got away, but we’re at a dead end.”
“Not exactly. I got the names of two contacts that she visited in the city.”
They talked for a few more minutes with the Badger pressing him for results and Carter wishing he’d never accepted the freaking assignment.
Not that he had a choice. Once you got on the Badger’s Christmas-card list, you stayed on it.
After hanging up, he clamped his fingers around the phone as he automatically studied the evening crowd to make sure nobody was listening in.
Then he started planning his next moves.
Chapter Three
Rachel dragged in a breath and let it out. “I saw something in the cards.”
“Her death?” he clarified.
“I thought so. But it’s never hard and fast. There are always alternate interpretations of anything I see.”
He swore under his breath. “You were thinking, ‘You’re going to die.’”
“But I couldn’t say it. Not like that.”
“Did you warn her?”
“No.”
His voice turned sharp. “Why not?”
Rachel couldn’t help being defensive. “Would you tell anyone something that devastating? I could have been wrong. I never tell people anything so … upsetting. I let her know she was in for a rough patch. At the end of the session, she asked me to meet her at her hotel room tonight.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You think I’m lying?”
“No.”
They had been so close a moment ago. Too close, and they must have been thinking the same thing. It was time to put up some barriers.
She moved away from him and automatically felt to see if her hair was messed up. Some had come loose, and she worked stray strands back into place.
Her head was throbbing, making it hard to think.
“Coming here was a mistake,” she said as she stood up and smoothed out her dress.
He kept his gaze on her. “Something happened between us. Don’t you want to find out what it was?”
“Lust.”
“You know damn well it was more than that.”
Maybe she did, but she wasn’t going to admit it to him. Not now. Not when she was still shaking inside from the intensity of what she’d felt—on so many levels.
Turning on her heel, she left the office and walked through the restaurant, feeling the eyes of the maître d’ and some of the diners on her.
She kept walking, out onto the street, then headed back toward her building. The shop door was on Toulouse Street. The entrance to her apartment was in a little courtyard with an iron gate. She unlocked it, glad when the light came on as she stepped into familiar surroundings.
She’d fixed up the area with potted plants and patio furniture. Sometimes she sat down here; sometimes up on the upper patio outside her living room. Tonight she just wanted to get inside her apartment and lock the door.
When she was finally feeling safe, she sat down at the table by the window and stared out into the darkened street, trying to figure out what had really happened tonight.
A woman had been murdered. A woman she’d done a reading for a little over a day earlier.
Was Jake Harper’s harsh judgment right? Should she have warned Evelyn Morgan about what she’d seen? Had she played a role in her death by keeping silent? Maybe Evelyn would have left New Orleans. Maybe that wouldn’t have done any good, like in that book Appointment in Samarra, where the guy is heading for death no matter what he does.
She squeezed her hands into fists, grappling with the what-ifs.
She came back to the woman herself. There had been a strong streak of determination in Evelyn Morgan. She wouldn’t have run. She would have stayed around to accomplish her mission—whatever it was—but maybe she would have moved up her timetable. What if the meeting had been last night and Evelyn had left town before her murderer arrived?
Rachel had never felt so conflicted about a reading. True, she’d seen death in the cards before. But not murder.
Well, she hadn’t known it was murder. The cards hadn’t been that specific. And as she’d told Jake, there was always the chance she’d gotten it wrong.
She squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to banish the woman’s image from her mind. As she tried to focus on something else, her thoughts jumped back to Jake Harper. Another upsetting subject. For too many reasons.
All her life she’d felt a little apart from other people. No, to be brutally honest, she’d felt a lot apart. People made connections that she simply couldn’t manage herself.
Over the years she’d had lovers. The physical part had been all right, but she’d longed to find a soul mate—someone who would understand her and be there for her no matter what happened.
It had never come to pass. Somehow, she always put emotional distance between herself and other people because it felt as though something was missing in the relationship. Did she create that? Or was she missing some cues about human relations that came easily to everyone else?
When she and Jake Harper had met on the street, when they’d touched, she’d felt a zing of awareness that was totally alien to her.
She’d wanted to burrow into his arms. At the same time, she’d wanted to run from him. But she’d gone back to his restaurant, and when he’d started stroking her and kissing her, everything from the encounter on the street had only become more vivid.
She’d felt a need for him that burned in her brain and in her