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  Kermit Tiernay was too swollen and bruised to provide a readable expression, and he couldn’t speak with his jaw wired shut and his lips stitched.

  Jeremiah bit off a sigh. “How’re you feeling?”

  Croc nodded slightly, an acknowledgment that he was alive but that was about it.

  “You hang in there, okay? Trust me, I’m not going anywhere.” He turned to Deegan, was aware of Mollie fidgeting to his right, ready to jump out of her skin. “When’s the last time you saw your brother?”

  “Last Tuesday.” His voice was steady, straightforward. “I helped him get hold of guest lists from several parties. Between Griffen and a few other contacts, it wasn’t difficult.”

  “Did you know why he wanted them?”

  “Not at first.”

  “When?”

  “After the Greenaway robbery. I just assumed he was playing private eye.”

  So had Jeremiah. Now, he wasn’t ready to make any assumptions until all the facts were in. A hard lesson learned. “How long have you two been in touch?”

  “The past two weeks.”

  “Not before?”

  Deegan shook his head and glanced back at Frank, who stood quietly by the empty bed, taking it all in.

  Jeremiah kept pushing. “He sought you out?”

  “Yes. He asked me not to tell anyone, and I didn’t.”

  “Then your parents don’t know, your grandmother, Griffen Welles, Mollie-”

  “Obviously I didn’t know,” Mollie put in.

  Jeremiah glanced at her, knowing she was scared and upset, and he pushed back the memory of her sleek body last night. He said nothing, shifting back to Deegan, who shook his head. “Nobody knew.”

  Satisfied, Jeremiah turned back to Croc. He pushed back the conflicting emotions, the anger at himself and concentrated on what he had to do. “One finger up for yes, two for no. You can do it?”

  One finger went up.

  “Do you want me to find you a lawyer?” Jeremiah asked.

  Two fingers.

  “You know the police are here right now, listening in?”

  One finger.

  “Croc,” Jeremiah said, leaning over the hospital bed and the battered body of a young man he considered-he could no longer deny it-a friend. “Is someone setting you up?” He raised one finger, and Jeremiah asked, “Do you know who?”

  This time, Croc managed a shake of the head before his eyes, already heavy, closed and he drifted off.

  “I’ll tell Mother and Father.” Deegan Tiernay’s voice shook; the cockiness of the young man who’d tossed his girlfriend in the pool the other night gone. “They need to know.”

  Not want to know, Jeremiah noticed. “They haven’t heard from him?”

  “Not since they kicked him out. It’s been over two years.” He pushed a shaky hand through his hair. “They won’t like it that I’ve been in touch with him, but they’ll understand-I had no choice-”

  “Good heavens,” Mollie said, “I would hope they understand. Of course you had no choice. He’s your brother.”

  He smiled wanly at Mollie, without condescension. “I wish it were that simple.”

  “Your brother’s in trouble,” Jeremiah said, “but we don’t have the full story yet. We need to reserve judgment.”

  “Innocent until proven guilty? That’s not how it works in my family.” But he sucked in a breath before he said too much and turned back to Mollie. “After I talk to them, I’ll head back to Leonardo’s and clear out my stuff-”

  “Why? I’m throwing a party tomorrow night. I need your help.”

  “But I-”

  “But you what? You didn’t tell me you were in contact with your brother?”

  “Mollie, he’s a suspect in the attack on you on Friday. He might have made the threatening call on Monday-”

  “First things first, Deegan.” Her voice was strong, clear, confident. “Will you tell Griffen, too, or shall I?”

  “I’ll tell her,” he said, and retreated, with Frank Sunderland spinning on his toes and following him out.

  Mollie touched Jeremiah’s hand. “I’m sorry I jumped on you.”

  “I probably would have done the same in your place.”

  “Do you want to hang in here awhile?”

  He nodded, watching Croc sleep. “I can’t believe the little bastard’s a damned millionaire. Helen Samuel says his Atwood trust is worth a fortune.”

  “He’s tapped into it?”

  “We don’t know.” He winced at the we. “Damn, I can’t believe I’ve collaborated on a story with her.”

  Mollie smiled. “You two are a lot alike.”

  “Don’t you start, too. That’s what she keeps telling me. You walked into a hell of a scene, didn’t you?”

  “Deegan was sobbing. The cop guarding Croc called your friend Frank.” She was silent a moment, her clear gaze on the broken body in the neat, clean bed. “What do you suppose drove him onto the streets?”

  “I don’t know, but he got into Harvard. After that, things seemed to fall apart. Maybe the parents can tell us.”

  “Do you think they will?” she asked.

  Jeremiah took in a breath. “I’ll find out, one way or the other.”

  She curved a hand around the back of his neck, slid her fingers into his hair, and kissed him lightly. “Yes, you will, and not because you’re a reporter.” She dropped her hand, smiled warmly. “You’re also his friend.”

  “Mollie.” His voice quaked, but he ignored the knot of fear in his throat. “If the attack on Croc wasn’t a coincidence-if he was set up-then someone’s trying to cover their own tracks.”

  She nodded, still steady, although he could see that she’d followed his thinking, perhaps had already reached the same conclusion. “I’m the common denominator, and we still don’t know what it means, if anything. And I was attacked and threatened-” She swallowed visibly, but maintained her composure. “If Croc isn’t the jewel thief, or if the police don’t accept him as the jewel thief, I could be in danger.”

  “You could be in danger, period.”

  “Well. I guess next time I speak to Leonardo, I’ll tell him he’s not paranoid after all for having such an elaborate security system.”

  “You’ll be there?”

  “Waiting for you,” she said, and left him alone with Croc, aka Blake Wilder, aka Kermit Tiernay.

  Jeremiah leaned over the kid’s sleeping body. “Where the hell your folks get a name like Kermit? No wonder you went off the deep end.”

  He pulled up a chair and sat, wondering if Kermit Tienay’s parents would show up.

  14

  “Your brother’s a derelict and a jewel thief?” Griffen repeated for at least the third time, her stunned rage upon hearing news of Kermit Tiernay no surprise to Mollie. She, Griffen, and Deegan were at Leonardo’s pool, sitting in the shade, oblivious to the bright, hot afternoon sun. Griffen sputtered, still furious. “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t know for sure,” Deegan said, remarkably calm under the circumstances. “I only suspected.”

  Mollie watched a chameleon scurry into the grass. “We still don’t know your brother’s the thief.”

  Neither reacted to her comment. Griffen, straddling a lounge chair, her sundress billowing in front of her, was still beside herself. “This explains why you’ve been acting so weird. You should have called the police, Deegan. They could have picked him up before he did any more damage.”

  “Call them with what? I didn’t even know where to find him.” He was on his feet, pacing, the only sign he was affected by the morning’s events. “I did the best I could with what I had.”

  Griffen wasn’t mollified. “Well, maybe someone did him a favor by beating the crap out of him. This thing was escalating. I’m glad it’s over.”

  Deegan paused a moment, his gaze resting on his lover. “As Mollie said, we don’t know that Kermit is guilty.”

  “It’s the most obvious, easiest explanation. So, it’s
probably the right explanation. That’s how things work in the real world, even in Palm Beach. Conspiracies are for the movies. Most criminals are idiots. Your brother’s an idiot who got mugged by an idiot.” She leaned back and hoisted up her knees, her bare feet on the chair in front of her. She squinted up at Deegan. “Simple.”

  He sighed, threw up his hands, and grinned suddenly, turning to Mollie. “Don’t you love it when she’s on a tear?”

  “Go to hell,” Griffen told him.

  Mollie shook her head. “I’m not saying a word.”

  But all the fight had gone out of Griffen. “So, how’d Mum and Dad take the news their number one’s son’s back in town?”

  Deegan’s grin faded. “About like you’d expect.”

  “Ah. Flared nostrils and no comment.”

  He managed a thin smile. “Pretty much. They were deciding whether to see him in the hospital when I left.”

  Mollie resisted a knee-jerk negative reaction. She didn’t know what had occurred between Croc and his parents. Maybe they, too, had done the best they could with what they had and had simply tried to save a nineteen-year-old son bent on self-destruction. On the other hand, she couldn’t imagine her parents kicking her out and not seeing her for over two years. They weren’t always tuned in the way other parents she knew were, practicing what their friends sometimes called “healthy neglect.” Discipline was never much more than a knitted brow, and she and her sister had had more freedom early on than most of their friends. But they knew they had their parents’ unconditional love. They took it for granted, as, Mollie thought now, children should. But they instinctively appreciated and never abused that love. It just wouldn’t have occurred to them to do so.

  Such was not the case, it seemed, in the Tiernay household.

  “What did Kermit do to get tossed out?” Griffen asked.

  “He embarrassed the family.” Deegan’s tone was neutral, even a trace of sarcasm impossible to detect. “He flunked out of Harvard for no reason anyone could understand. He just chose not to do the work. Then he had the gall to ask for a year off to sort things out and work odd jobs. My parents said he could go to school or get out.”

  “ ‘Get out’ as in ‘you’re on your own but we love you and want to keep in touch’ or ‘get out’ as in-”

  “As in ‘we disown you.’ ”

  She grimaced. “Ouch.”

  “Was he abusing drugs or alcohol?” Mollie asked.

  “He got drunk maybe twice that I can remember, but that wasn’t it. He didn’t have his act together at nineteen, and my parents decided the only way he would ever get it together was if they severed all ties. They truly thought they were doing the right thing.”

  Griffen snorted in disgust. “There has to be more. Was he lighting cats on fire, screwing the household help? You don’t just toss a kid out and sever all ties because he wants to wash cars for a year. I mean, why not give him the year?”

  “Kermit has always had a vivid imagination,” Deegan said. “He’s sensitive, maybe too sensitive. He went against the grain.”

  “Yeah, well, now he’s snatching brooches out of people’s pockets.” Griffen shook her head, just not getting it, and turned to Mollie. “How’s this sitting with Tabak?”

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t talked to him without a cop around since he’s seen Croc…Kermit.”

  “Well.” Griffen shook her head, as if trying to shake off the tensions of the past hour. “We’ve got a party to plan-unless you want to cancel.”

  Mollie thought a moment, then shook her head. “No, let’s do it. We won’t invite the world, and we’ll keep it low-key. If the police have their thief, there’s no need to worry about him striking again, and it’ll prove that whatever ax he had to grind with me, I wasn’t intimidated. And if they don’t have their thief-” She settled back, breathed in the warm, scented air. “Then maybe he will strike again.”

  “And we can catch him in the act,” Griffen said.

  Mollie eyed her young intern. “If you don’t want to be involved-”

  “No. It’s okay. In fact, it’s perfect. My parents would approve, carrying on in the face of adversity and all that, and Kermit…Croc…” He faltered, his only display of emotion. “I think he’d understand, too.”

  “Good.” Griffen sat up and dug in her big leather bag for a clipboard and her laptop. “Then let’s get to work.”

  Jeremiah found Mollie on her back in the pool, her toes pointed, her head tilted back, blonde hair floating out around her. Not sure how to work the gate release in the Jaguar, not wanting to scare the hell out of her, he’d called from the driveway, and she’d opened up. She must have scooted right back into the pool. He could see the portable phone on her chair, which was covered, he noticed with a tug of amusement, with a towel covered with the busts of various composers. He recognized Beethoven’s scowl.

  “Any news to report?” she asked, barely moving in the still, azure water.

  “I’m just back from my apartment. I checked in with the guys and asked them to look after my critters. All considered, reptiles are low maintenance. Albert started to regale me with tales of eating snake in the jungles of southeast Asia.”

  “Think he has designs on yours?”

  “He assured me not.”

  She went very still. “And Croc?”

  “Kermit Tiernay is making steady progress. He should be able to make a limited statement to the police tomorrow. It’s not easy to talk with your jaw wired shut, and he’s still swollen, which doesn’t help.”

  “Nothing more from the police?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Any word on when Croc will be released from the hospital?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know.” He bit off the words, not angry at the question or anyone, just frustrated with his fruitless days, his own worries. He hated worrying. Better just to gather information, jot it in his notebook, chew on it, and write it up. “I don’t even know if he has a place of his own. He needs an attorney…damn!”

  Mollie dropped her feet and stood in the pool, the water up to her neck. The burn from her necklace was healing fast, some of its redness already gone. She swirled her arms through the water, studying him. “Croc hasn’t asked for your help?”

  “No.”

  Jeremiah dropped into a chair in the sun and watched her splash backwards, kicking her feet up in front of her, not swimming so much as playing in the water, stretching, perhaps easing out some of her own tension. He could feel it coiled in him. A long, hard day that had yielded more questions than answers.

  But there was, he thought, something very sexy about being fully clothed around a woman in a swimsuit. Hers was turquoise, the color of the water, and thus made her look even less clothed.

  She flipped over onto her stomach and swam over to the edge of the pool, hoisting up her forearms. Water dripped down her face, and her hair was slicked back, making her eyes seem even more bottomless, the lashes ever blacker. “So, have you reached any conclusions about the attack on Croc?”

  “I don’t have enough information yet.”

  “But you have theories,” she said.

  “Theories are the easy part.” He knew he sounded short and grumpy, didn’t care. Of course, she didn’t seem to care, either. “It could have been a random attack. It could have been an attack by a professional. It could have been an attack by an amateur. It could have been intended to kill him, scare the hell out of him, scare the hell out of someone else, mislead him, mislead someone else.”

  “These someone elses. Meaning who?”

  “You, me, the police, the real jewel thief if it’s not Croc.”

  “The real jewel thief? How would an attack on Croc mislead the real jewel thief?”

  Jeremiah shot to his feet, unable to sit still. “I don’t know. My point is, we can speculate endlessly and end up right back where we are, knowing next to nothing.”

  She stretched out
her arms, still hanging onto the edge of the pool, and eased her behind up as she did a slow frog-kick that struck him as intensely erotic. But she was preoccupied with her sleuthing. She didn’t think like a cop or a journalist. She wasn’t bound by their professionalism, their cynicism, their ethics, and she was seldom impartial or removed from her emotion. Yet it would be a mistake, Jeremiah knew, to underestimate the keenness of her mind, her ability to see nuances and layers that others might miss. She was, he remembered, a woman who could unravel the intricacies of a symphony and zero in on the essence, the appeal, of a particular client.

  Still, right now, he had to admit he was more interested in that wet, slim body. He watched her, feeling the heat of the afternoon, of his own body.

  “Speculating,” he told her, “will make you crazy. You have to force yourself not to go beyond the facts.” He moved to the edge of the pool, squatted down in front of her. “And the facts still have you in the thick of things. I just can’t figure out how or why.”

  “Because Croc is Kermit Tiernay, my intern’s older brother.”

  “That’s one reason. You’re also still the only known common denominator, the only victim of violence, the only person who’s received a threatening call.”

  She dipped her chin under water, studying him. “I’m just a publicist who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I hope so,” he said.

  Her eyes widened in irritation. “Are you still keeping an open mind about me? You think it’s possible I’m lying?”

  He frowned. “Mollie, I simply said I hope you’ve just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can take that at face value.”

  “Then you don’t suspect me,” she said stubbornly.

  He scooped up a handful of water and flicked it playfully into her face. “Go up and get dressed. If I go up with you, we might not make it back down here until morning. I promised Croc I’d be back this evening.” He eased to his feet, felt the day’s dramas all the way to his bones. “I still can’t get my head around the little bastard being a rich kid.”