Stealing Shadows - Hiding In The Shadows Part 35

Faith turned back to the bookshelves and began scanning the t.i.tlesagain. She really had no idea what she was looking for. All the bookswere novels, ranging from mystery, romance, and science fiction toblockbuster best-sellers and literary fiction.

If nothing else, Dinah had certainly ranged widely in her reading.

Faith plucked a few t.i.tles off the shelves and flipped through them, feeling helpless and frustrated.

Which book? How could she possibly guess what might be important?

"We'll have to go through them one by one," Kane said behind her. "Check

every book. That is-if you really don't know what we're supposed to find."

"I really don't know," she said.

He let out a short breath that sounded impatient.

"Okay. You start in here, and I'll take the hallway."

"She had a lot of books," Faith murmured.

"There's another wall of shelves in her bedroom," Kane said, then turnedand went into the hall.

An awful lot of books.

More than an hour later, Faith had taken down, searched, and replaced ontheir shelves nearly half the books, without finding anything out of theordinary.

A few bookmarks. A years-old grocery list. Theater ticket stubs.

She sat on the floor, her legs out before her, touching her toes andstretching her sore muscles gingerly.

She was tired. And she was frustrated.

Dammit, Dinah, where is it? Where do I look?

She didn't know. And if it had been Dinah trying to help her find somenecessary clue, she was being silent and unhelpful now.

Faith got to her feet and went into the hallway, intending to ask Kaneif he'd found anything. She a.s.sumed he would have told her if he had,but the silence was wearing on her nerves and she wanted to hear thesound of his voice.

He wasn't in the hallway, though books stacked neatly on the floor gaveevidence of his efforts.

Faith went on down the hall, moving noiselessly, not sure why she feltthe need to be silent. At the end of the hallway were the two bedroomsand bathroom.

In the room that had undoubtedly been Dinah's, Kane sat on the bed, hisbowed head in his hands, shoulders hunched, utterly still.

Faith had a confused impression of a lovely room decorated in coolshades of blue, of patterns and materials that were feminine withoutbeing frilly, of more bookshelves and oil paintings of seascapes and afew figurines that were beautiful and tasteful and didn't clutter up the room.

Then she crept away silently, back to the living room. Mechanically, shecontinued searching through the books, looking at each one from cover tocover before returning it to its shelf. She didn't realize she wascrying until everything got blurry and she saw wet splotches on the pageshe was staring at.

"d.a.m.nit," she whispered. "Danmit."

"Any luck?"

Faith put one last book back on the shelf, got to her feet, and lookedat Kane as he stood in the door- way. She thought he was calmer, less angry. Or maybe he was simply as tired as she was. They'd been inDinah's apartment nearly three hours.

"No. How about you?"

"Not so far." He frowned at her, seemed about to ask something, but inthe end didn't.

Faith wondered if her eyes were red. She said, "I thought of something afew minutes ago. My apartment was searched at least a couple of times.

Do you think this place might have been searched too?"

"Maybe. Right after Dinah disappeared, I went through here with afine-tooth comb, and the police searched it as well. The security systemhas been active, and the only ones who are supposed to come in are thecleaning crew. But there's always a chance somebody else got in. If theydid, though, they were neat about it.

The cleaning service was under orders to report any- thing out of theordinary-and I certainly haven't noticed anything out of place."

Faith went over to sit in an armchair near the fire- place. "I keepthinking I should know just where to look. That note ... it a.s.sumed I'dknow. 'Inside the book," it said. As if there were only one book. Oneimportant book."

Kane sat on the arm of the couch near her chair.

"And you have no idea what book would be important." He didn't say itderisively or accusingly, just matter-of-factly.

She pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes. "No. But I-"

Her head lifted abruptly, and she stared at him. "Did Dinah use a dayplanner? A date book?"

"Two of them. One she kept with her in the jeep, for business, the otherone here for personal stuff."

Kane got up and went to the antique desk near one of the windows. Hetook a black leather book out of the top drawer and came back to hand itto Faith. "I've been through it a dozen times," he said, sitting on thecouch. "So have the police. In the first few weeks, we retraced hersteps those last days, trying to find some clue to what happened toher."

He paused. "I never saw anything unusual in there, nothing that drew myattention."

But that would have been the point. Not to draw anyone's attention.

Faith examined the book carefully. It was the usual sort of day planner,with an address book and calendar and tabbed sections for appointmentsand schedules and notes. There was a pocket in the front cover forDinah's business cards, and several pages of clear plastic sleeves forthe cards people had given her.

There was, as far as Faith could see, nothing out of the ordinary.

She looked through the sections one at a time, turning each page slowly.

It wasn't until she reached the second-to-last section intended for

notes that she looked up at Kane. "There are no pages here. The tab says notes should be in this section, but all the pages are missing."

"I didn't notice that. But it might mean nothing.

Dinah could have torn them out one or two at a time, never intending to

keep them. People do that."

Faith closed her eyes, thinking. "if I knew some- body might try to get some information I had, that someone could come looking for it, I just

might write it down twice. Once in a reasonable place where I could be fairly sure it would be found-and then again somewhere else."

"Where?" Kane asked.

Faith stared down at the planner. "When you're looking for something and

you find it, you stop looking. Right?"

"Right. "

She turned the final tab, which was labeled misc., and discovered

several lined pages with a scattering of reminders written in Dinah's

hand. Faith ran her finger down them slowly.

Get the jeep's tires rotated. Find out Sharon's birthday. Have a putting green installed in Conrad's office.

Faith looked up at Kane and repeated that one aloud. "Conrad?"

He smiled slightly. "Conrad Masterson. A financial manager who's also a golfing nut.

Dinah was wondering what to get him for Christmas.

"Oh." Faith returned her gaze to the pages. More reminders. To trace the

whereabouts of a catalog order that had not arrived. To schedule aroutine checkup with her doctor. To return a Stephen King novel to thelibrary.

Faith stopped again at that one. "But she buys his books."

"What?" Kane leaned toward her.

She looked up at him with a frown. "This note says she has to remember

to return a Stephen King novel to the library. But she buys his books in hard- cover I found half a dozen." "I found two," Kane said slowly.

"Does she even take novels out of the library?

Kane had to think about that for a moment. "I don't think so. She used the library for research, but she was always willing to buy a book, even by a new author.

Building a personal library was important to her." He indicated the bookshelves throughout the apartment.

"Obviously." "Then I think," Faith said, "we should look for more

Stephen King novels."

They found the handwritten list of names in the fourth King novel on thebedroom shelves.

There were six names, all men. Five were prominent Atlanta businessmen,two of whom were politically active. The sixth man, Kane told Faith, hadcommitted suicide a week before Dinah vanished.

The third name on the list was Jordan Cochrane.

But what caused Faith and Kane to look at each other in surprise was thesingle word Dinah had written and twice circled at the bottom of thepage: Blackmail "Blackmail," Tim Daniels said, "is a nasty business, andthe kind of dirt men pay to keep under the rug tends to be bad enough toprovide a motive for murder." "Or suicide," Kane said. "One man on thelist took care of his apparent problems by blowing his brains out, andit emerged afterward that for about six months before he'd been tryingto pay back some money he had borrowed from the company he worked for.

It was a lot of money. He would have gone to jail for a long time if thecompany had found out, and his very churchgoing wife would havebeen disgraced."

"I'd call him a likely target for blackmail," Daniels allowed. "a.s.sumingsomebody found out what he was UP to. "And if he was paying hushmoney, it was probably next to impossible for him to also pay back themoney he'd embezzled. Which probably explains the suicide.

Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d was caught in a no-win situation."

"I'd say," Daniels agreed.

"We can also a.s.sume that since his name was lumped in with the fiveothers, all these men were probably being blackmailed. Which begs thequestion-"

"Who's doing the blackmailing?" Faith supplied.

"Exactly."