The One Safe Place. Kathleen O'Brien

warm and wet where she had been, and he knew she was losing the fight.

      “Crying is weak,” she whispered. “I haven’t cried since the day she died. I can’t afford to be weak, can’t you see that? I have to be strong until they catch him.”

      It was too cruel. He tightened his arms around her. And as he felt her slender body press against him, he was suddenly reminded of a small, broken bird he had once treated. It had been brought to him much too late. The bird had died in his hands.

      Determination shot through him like a burning streak of light. She had come here for protection, and by God he would make sure she got it.

      “No, you don’t,” he said softly. “You’re not alone anymore. Just this once, let someone else be strong for you.”

      She tensed again, holding her breath. And then, weeks and weeks too late, this brave, grieving woman finally allowed herself the luxury of tears.

      DOUG LAMBERT laughed to himself as he passed a policeman on the street. For a minute, he considered asking the cop for a dollar, just to enjoy the thrill of looking into his eyes and knowing the dumb bastard had no idea who he was.

      But ultimately it wasn’t worth it. Cops were too stupid to live—fooling them wasn’t even very much fun.

      While they scrambled around, putting out their asinine all-points bulletins about millionaire murder suspect Douglas Lambert and scouring all the obvious places in vain, Doug was hiding in plain sight.

      Living at a squalid, smelly homeless shelter.

      See, that was the key. The cops had no imagination. They never even thought of looking there. They believed he was rich, spoiled, incapable of enduring hardship, unwilling to sleep on anything but his expensive Turkish sheets or to eat anything but five-star cuisine.

      Morons. They didn’t know a damn thing about Doug Lambert. He came from a filthy, wretched nothingness, and he was perfectly comfortable returning there for as long as it took.

      Actually, it had been almost embarrassingly easy. Get a box of Clairol do-it-yourself color and go a few weeks without a shave or a hundred-dollar haircut.

      Take out your expensive front bridgework and let your lips cave in over a toothless mouth. He felt smug to think how everyone had urged him to get implants—he could certainly afford them. But he didn’t like doctors, he didn’t like pain, and so he had settled for the best damn dentures on the market. See, now, what a good decision that turned out to be?

      Then splurge five bucks on cast-off jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of stained sneakers. After that you could walk right up and spit in that flatfoot’s ugly face, and the damn fool would never know the difference.

      Still, Doug knew he had to find out where Faith had gone. He could feel the urge building inside him, until it was so big now it was almost a physical pain. Sometimes he thought he couldn’t breathe around it.

      He had to find her.

      He wasn’t stupid enough to hire a private detective. The police would be looking for that. But there were other ways. A man like him knew plenty of useful people whose names weren’t in the Yellow Pages.

      By the time he arrived back at the shelter, he had come to a decision. He wouldn’t wait any longer, with this anger, and the desire that was its twin, building inside him like a tumor. He was patient, but he wasn’t a waffler. He liked action.

      He sat down, put his hand into the pocket of the drunk slumped next to him and pulled out a couple of quarters, staring in the man’s eyes the whole time, daring him to object.

      And then he dropped them into the pay telephone in the hall and dialed a number he knew well but almost never used.

      He needed relief, and there was only one way to get it.

      Faith Constable had to die.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      “LET GO OF THAT, you diabolical son of a—”

      Faith squatted down by the vacuum cleaner, tugging with all her strength at the drapery pull that was half-in, half-out of the Hoover-monster’s long silver snout. But she’d forgotten to turn the motor off, so the monster was still roaring, sucking in, as if green tassels were the most delectable treats on earth.

      “I…said…let…go!”

      It was too late. By the time she reached the power switch, the tassel had disappeared. The monster’s roar dwindled to a sick choking sound, and the air smelled ominously of burned rubber.

      She bit back a curse, remembering just in time that Spencer was in the room. She glanced at him.

      “Sorry,” she said. “This machine is giving me a hard time.”

      Tigger had been watching her the whole time, whining and growling and thumping his tail. But Spencer just kept staring out the large picture window, which offered a spectacular view of the hickory, birch, sycamore and maple that dotted the Autumn House property, thickening until gradually they blended with the untamed woods beyond.

      It was gorgeous. But she was pretty sure Spencer wasn’t communing with nature. His shoulders were stiff, his arms tightly wrapped over his bony chest, his eyes unblinking, probably fixed on his own tragic thoughts.

      He was so unhappy, she thought with a twist of pain. And she had no idea how to help him.

      Suddenly overcome by her own incompetence—if she couldn’t control a simple vacuum cleaner, how was she going to cope with parenting a traumatized little boy?—she sank to her knees. She glared at the vacuum and wondered what on earth to do now.

      Frankly, she had no idea. As anyone could tell you, Faith was the world’s worst housekeeper.

      It wasn’t something she’d ever been ashamed of before. She worked hard all day, and her interior design company was successful. So she hired a “domestic technician” to perform lemony magic at her apartment once a week.

      Sometimes on Fridays Faith opened her door with her eyes shut, just to savor the sparkling fresh smell that said Delilah had been there. She valued a clean house, all right. She just didn’t have a clue how to make it happen except by writing a check.

      Still, how hard could it be? She wiggled her middle finger down the tube of the vacuum, but encountered nothing but smooth plastic. She squinted into it, but saw only blackness. She tapped it against the floor as hard as she dared, but nothing emerged except a puff of dirt that billowed up into her eyes and mouth.

      Coughing, she scanned the room. She could not face Reed Fairmont and tell him that she had lost a wrestling match with a vacuum cleaner. Especially after she’d so stupidly wept all over his shirt last night.

      He undoubtedly already thought she was a weakling. She couldn’t add hopeless incompetent to the mix.

      She was smart. She was creative. She could think of something…

      Of course! A metal hanger.

      Five minutes later she’d broken two fingernails, the stitches in her shoulder ached and the hanger was wedged down the long snout, as lost as the tassel. She rubbed her stinging, sooty eyes and made a mental note to give Delilah a raise. A big one.

      “Well, well,” a dry voice observed. “You must be the new housekeeper.”

      Faith looked up. A tidy little woman, probably seventy-something, stood in the doorway, a casserole dish in her hands and wry amusement in her sharp brown eyes. The woman was all skin and bones, but somehow so authoritative in her plain—but very expensive—black pantsuit that Faith found herself scrambling to her feet.

      “Hi,” she said, trying to brush the dirt from her white polo shirt. How stupid to have chosen white! “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you knock.”

      “I don’t knock,” the other woman said. “I’m Theo Burke.”

      Faith hesitated, unsure whether that