She snorted a laugh. “That’s why I get the big bucks.”
“And the glory.” Paterno chuckled without much humor. “Don’t forget the glory.”
“Never.”
Paterno swung his gaze to his bulletin board where the photos of the accident scene and Pam Delacroix’s mangled, bloodied Mercedes were posted. “So why the accident? Why try to kill off Marla?”
“That, I don’t know,” Janet admitted as Paterno turned his attention back to the pictures on Kylie Paris’ drivers license. They looked enough alike to pull it off, and yet, there were too damn many unanswered questions. He tossed the license back to Janet. “Well, I guess we’d better find out if your theory holds water.” He felt a moment’s satisfaction that at least they had something new to go on, thin as it was. “Let’s go have a chat with Mrs. Cahill.”
“If that’s who she really is.”
Chapter Nineteen
Clutching James as if she thought someone would snatch him from her arms, Marla leaned against the back of the elevator in the apartment building on Fulton Street. Over seventy years old, built of yellow brick, the apartment house was wedged between the University of San Francisco and Alamo Square, close enough to the house on Mount Sutro, the elegant old manor she’d called home ever since leaving the hospital. The elevator seemed eerily familiar, the smells and sounds of this tired building nipping at the worn edges of her memory.
Had she lived here? If so, how long, and how had she ended up as Alex Cahill’s wife, or pretending to be his wife? She’d been in this elevator before. She knew it. At the thought, her legs turned to rubber and her throat went dry. Trepidation battled with curiosity. She needed to find out who she was, what was behind the door of Kylie Paris’s apartment. Yet it scared her to death.
You have to find out. You have no choice.
Nick stood next to her. Gaze trained on the digital display of the floors, he waited as the elevator landed. His shoulders were tight, the cords in the back of his neck evident, the air thick.
James cooed softly against her neck and she closed her eyes. No matter what, she wouldn’t give him up.
Never.
She’d die first.
The doors to the elevator car parted. Marla’s heart jolted. She found herself staring into a long, oval mirror on the wall facing the elevator.
The woman in the reflection looked haunted. Tall and slender, gripping a baby as if she thought he might disappear into thin air, the image was a woman she didn’t know. There were no more bruises on her skin, no visible stitches. Short mahogany-colored hair feathered around high, pronounced cheekbones, wary green eyes, arched brows and a straight nose dusted with freckles. A wide, sensual mouth trembled before her lower lip was caught between white, remarkably straight teeth.
Marla Cahill?
Kylie Paris?
Who?
She met Nick’s eyes in the reflection, saw his iron will in the set of his jaw, the determination in the thin line of his mouth, the shadow of fear in his eyes. “Let’s do this,” he urged.
She nodded. Fought the urge to run.
Lies. Her life had all been lies, she thought as, by instinct, she turned right and entered a hallway that was eerily familiar. Her heart thudded, her chest was tight, nervous sweat broke out on her back. “I’ve been here before,” she said to Nick, swallowing hard. “Damn it, I know it.”
They stopped at the door of 3-B. The place Kylie Paris called home. Nick knocked, rapping hard.
Not a sound issued from inside. No murmur of the television set, no scuffling of feet, no gasp of surprise, no eye in the peephole, no greeting warning the visitors that an inhabitant was on her way to the door. Nothing but silence. Dead air.
“What now?” Marla asked, standing on worn gray carpeting in this narrow, poorly ventilated corridor. The lights were dim, the whole feeling dingy and colorless. “I don’t have a key.”
“Then we’ll get one from the doorman.”
“How?”
Nick scratched at the day’s growth of beard on his cheek. “Let’s see if he thinks you’re Kylie. Give me the baby and go downstairs, insist that you lost your key. See if he lets you in.”
“All right,” she said, certain that his ploy wouldn’t work.
She was wrong. The doorman, who hadn’t been at his post when they arrived, offered her a patient smile showing off a gap in his teeth, and produced a key from a locked box in a closet. Pushing seventy, with thick silver hair and an amused expression, he said, “You know, Ms. Paris, you should make a duplicate and hide it somewhere. What would you do if old Pete wasn’t here to bail you out?”