Page 90 of Ice Cold Christmas
“Any other run-ins with the law you think I need to know about?” Melody asked.
He swallowed. She wasn’t fleeing from him. Wasn’t staring at him as if he was, indeed, a monster. She sat beside him. She’d hugged him. She was right there for him. “No more run-ins with the law.” His shoulders rolled back. The weight felt a bit lighter, but he still needed to tell her, “I swear, I will never hurt you.” Never.
“I know.”
Jenner opened the door.
Melody climbed from the limo, and her gaze swept the cavernous parking garage. Only a handful of cars occupied the spaces. The place felt light, actually. Open. Plenty of illumination.
The SUV that had trailed them parked nearby. Calista turned off the vehicle and climbed out, with Luis exiting on the passenger side. Victor had introduced her to the guards right before they’d all left his place that morning. Melody knew she was safe, with Victor and Jenner and the two guards, but, standing in that parking garage, a shiver still skated down her spine.
She found herself looking toward the elevators. Two elevators were at the elevator bank. All the doors were shut. She had the random, sudden thought that they needed to open. The doors should open. He had to hurry up and appear. He was coming and?—
“You always parked right over there.” Victor pointed to a space near a large, white column. The black coat he wore stretched with his movements, sliding over his broad shoulders. “When I came out that night, you were already gone.”
She walked toward the indicated spot. It was empty, so she stood in the middle of it. From that position, she had a perfect line of sight to the elevator. Her gaze kept wanting to go to the elevator doors.
Once more, she thought…The elevator should open. Fear pulsed. The doors would open, and he would help?—
“I was supposed to follow right behind you.” Grim words from Victor. “But Dario stepped into my path and wanted to talk about the company. Or, more specifically, my plans for the company and where the hell he’d fit into them.”
So, Dario had been upstairs when she left. Victor had been upstairs. Her gaze shifted a bit to the left. “Were those security cameras always here?”
“Yes. The footage was reviewed after you vanished. You were seen entering your vehicle. Just you. You cranked it up, and you drove away.”
A shiver slid over her. “And my car was never found?”
“Never. I had an investigator tell me it was probably sold, chopped up, and sent out in pieces.”
At least I wasn’t chopped up in pieces. Except…her hand dropped to her stomach. Slid over the scar that rested beneath her sweater.
“The camera perched on the column gave us a clear view of your front seat,” Victor added. “It was just you in the car.”
“What about the backseat?” The question pulled from Melody as another shiver worked over her body. “Could you see that?” She forced her hand to drop back to her side.
Victor had followed her to the empty parking spot. “No.” His lips thinned. “And I wondered about that. Was some bastard in the back of the car? Had he snuck in the vehicle? Was he waiting for you? Because you didn’t go home. You were supposed to go home, but you never made it there. This is the last place you were seen.”
Calista advanced toward them. Her gaze was considering as she surveyed the scene. “Probably would have been easy enough to avoid the cameras and slip into the back of her car. Perp would have just needed to stay low, beneath the line of sight.” She pointed to the closest camera. “It wouldn’t pick up a ground image from here.”
Behind her, Luis nodded. “The trick would have been getting into her car without setting off the vehicle’s alarm, but a good booster would know how to get inside, no problem.”
Benny Turner had been good at boosting cars. Benny Turner had been waiting behind the police station. He’d had the knife, and he’d slashed at her with it.
Melody’s scar seemed to burn on her stomach.
An elevator dinged. She jumped, and her gaze flew right back to the elevator bank. The doors of one elevator opened and?—
Dario rushed out. Dario, followed by two uniformed security guards.
What in the world was Dario doing there?
Red mottled his face as he charged forward. “You sonofabitch!” he snarled at Victor. “I know what the hell you’ve done!”
The two uniformed security guards locked their hands on him and hauled Dario back before he could get within fifteen feet of Victor.
“You stole the company!” Dario yelled. Spittle flew from his mouth. “You took everything!”
“Sir?” One of the guards—his name tag ID’d him as Rodney West—fired a fast glance at Victor. “He has his security pass, so he got upstairs, but then he broke into your office. We were gonna escort him back to his vehicle. Didn’t, ah, know if you wanted the police involved. We were gonna call you first, once we had him off the premises, since it was a family matter.”
