She walked around him and headed for the elevators. He caught up with her in two strides. “By the way, the answer is yes.”
She glanced up at him. “What was the question?”
“You asked your brothers if anyone was ever faithful, and I’m telling you yes, some are.”
She reached to push the button for the elevator. He grabbed her hand and forced her to look at him. “I’ve got a lot of examples,” he said softly. “But there’s only one you need to know about.”
“Oh? Who?”
“Me.”
She didn’t know how to respond. “Why are you telling me this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought you ought to know that I’d be faithful.”
“If you ever married.”
“That’s right,” he replied. “If.”
The conversation was cut short when his cell phone rang. Henry was calling, and he sounded frantic.
“Where are you?”
“Right down the hall. What’s going on?”
“You’ve got to get back here right away. You’ve got to see this.”
Alec had already turned around and was pulling Regan along as he strode back to the offices.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t need to answer her because Henry was standing in the doorway, and as soon as he spotted Alec and Regan coming around the corner, he blurted, “I opened this letter. It’s on our hotel stationery, and it came in one of our envelopes. You know what that means? He was here. He was in the hotel.”
Alec let go of her hand and went to the desk. She touched Henry’s arm and said, “Take a deep breath.”
“Regan, he was here.”
She nodded. “Yes, I heard you. And he sent a letter?” she asked, but she was already walking over to his desk.
She leaned against Alec and looked at the sheet of stationery Henry had put on the blotter. He’d placed a long silver letter opener on the edge of the paper to keep it from folding up again.
It wasn’t a letter, though. It was another murder list. This one had a different heading. “Our Murder List” was written on top of the paper, and the Our was underlined several times. The killer had hand-printed this one. All of the names on the list were there, but lines had been drawn through Ms. Patsy’s name and Detective Sweeney’s. There were question marks next to Shields’s name and the references to the two bodyguards.
Another name had been added to the list. Haley Cross. On the bottom, just below her name, he’d written, “You owe me for this one too.”
Alec was on his cell phone dialing Wincott. While he was waiting for the detective to answer, he asked Regan, “Did you know this woman?”
She didn’t pick up on the fact that he’d asked about the woman in the past tense.
“No,” she said. “Alec, we have to warn her. Oh, dear God, the police need to find her before…”
Henry pointed to the paper. His voice was shaking when he said, “There’s a line through her name, Regan, like he’s already… you know… killed her.”
“Henry, we cannot assume just because he’s put a line through her name that she’s dead. He might not have… Oh, God.” She could feel the panic building inside. “There has to be time to save her.”
Wincott answered the phone, and Alec let go of Regan and walked toward the hallway as he explained what Henry had found.
Regan was feeling sick to her stomach. She leaned against Henry’s desk and stared at the wall. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “Why would he send me this? And what in God’s name does he mean by ‘Our Murder List’?”
“Haley Cross. I swear I’ve heard that name before, but I can’t remember where.”
Alec ended the call and walked back into the office. “Wincott and Bradshaw are on their way over.”
“On Sunday?” Henry realized how foolish the question was as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
“John was at work, but Bradshaw was home.”
“Are they going to look for the woman? Are they…”
Alec put his arm around her. “It’s too late.”
She jerked away. His quick acceptance that the girl was dead infuriated her. “You can’t know that. If they could just warn her… if they could find her and…”
Alec rubbed the knot in the back of his neck while he watched her pace. “They know where she is.”
“Where?”
“In the morgue.”
“Oh, God.”
She sagged against Alec, bowed her head, and closed her eyes. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. Henry had all but fallen into his chair.
“How did he kill her?” he asked.
Alec was staring at the article on the wall behind Henry’s head. It all suddenly clicked. He didn’t answer Henry’s question, but said, “She was running on the path in-”
“Conrad Park,” Henry blurted. “That’s where I read the name. Regan, don’t you remember? I told you about it. At least I think I told you.”
Alec walked over to read the article again. “You’re quoted here as saying you run there at least three nights a week.”
“Yes, I did.”
“But then the track was finished upstairs,” Henry said.
Alec got Wincott on the phone again. “Where are you?”
“Getting out of the car in front of the hotel.”
“What was the physical description of Haley Cross?”
“I’ve got some copies of the file with me, and I’ve got her photo. Hang on, Alec, I’ll be right there.”
Alec was too impatient to sit and wait. He paced the hall instead. When Wincott jogged around the corner waving the file folder, Alec said, “Would you mistake Haley Cross for Regan?”
“Oh, come on. I wouldn’t mistake any woman for her.” He stopped, opened the folder, and held up Haley Cross’s photo. “Maybe from behind… the long hair, approximate height and weight. I guess it’s possible.”
“What’s possible?” Regan asked. She was standing in the doorway, but she stepped back when Wincott and Alec walked in.
Wincott answered her. “Mistaken identity,” he said. “Where’s the letter?”
A couple of seconds later, he and Alec were staring at the list again.
Wincott read the list and the note out loud. “ ‘You owe me for this one too’? So he’s making Regan take some of the responsibility, isn’t he?” Wincott said. “That’s what I think the note implies.”
“So, make the leap, John.”
“Okay,” Wincott answered. “He thinks Regan should have been there instead of Haley.”
Alec nodded. Then Wincott asked, “You think he was waiting in the park for Regan?”
“If he read the article in the paper, wouldn’t he assume she still runs there?”
“Are you saying he killed that woman by mistake?” Regan asked.
Alec turned to her. “Yes. I think he went there to kill you.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
The police had withheld important details about Haley Cross’s murder, and neither Alec nor Wincott wanted Regan to know what those details were. She was already scared, and the autopsy report alone was enough to make a hardened cop shudder.
Still, there was the possibility that one of those details might trigger a memory that could help them.
Wincott leaned against the office window, one ankle crossed over the other, with a bottle of water in one hand and the autopsy report in the other. Alec sat next to her on the sofa. Regan couldn’t understand how the two of them could look so relaxed while they took turns relating some of the horrific facts of the poor girl’s murder. When Alec told her what the killer had done to her legs, Regan became nauseous and could feel the blood rushing from her head.
Alec noticed the way she was gripping her hands together in her lap, a telltale sign that she was having trouble, and there were tears in her eyes, but she kept it together. He was proud of her, and had they been alone, he would have put his arms around her and told her so.