Keeper of the Bride

Chapter Four

THE SILHOUETTE FROZE.

“Hands up,” ordered Sam. “Come on, hands up!”

Both hands shot up. “Don’t hurt me!” came a terrified plea.

Sam edged over to the light switch and flipped it on. The sudden glare left both men blinking. Sam took one look at the man standing in front of him and cursed.

Footsteps pounded up the porch steps and two uniformed cops burst through the doorway, pistols drawn. “We got him covered, Navarro!” one of them yelled.

“You’re right on time,” muttered Sam in disgust. “Forget it. This isn’t the guy.” He holstered his gun and looked at the tall blond man, who was still wearing a look of terror on his face. “I’m Detective Sam Navarro, Portland Police. I presume you’re Dr. Robert Bledsoe?”

Nervously Robert cleared his throat. “Yeah, that’s me. What’s going on? Why are you people in my house?”

“Where’ve you been all day, Dr. Bledsoe?”

“I’ve been—uh, may I put my hands down?”

“Of course.”

Robert lowered his hands and glanced cautiously over his shoulder at the two cops standing behind him. “Do they, uh, really need to keep pointing those guns at me?”

“You two can leave,” Sam said to the cops. “I’m all right here.”

“What about the surveillance?” one of them asked. “Want to call it off?”

“I doubt anything’s coming down tonight. But hang around the neighborhood. Just until morning.”

The two cops left. Sam said, again, “Where’ve you been, Dr. Bledsoe?”

With two guns no longer pointed at his back, Robert’s terror had given way to righteous anger. He glared at Sam. “First, you tell me why you’re in my house! What is this, a police state? Cops breaking in and threatening homeowners? You have no authority to be trespassing on my property. I’ll have your ass in a sling if you don’t produce a search warrant right now!”

“I don’t have a warrant.”

“You don’t?” Robert gave an unpleasantly triumphant laugh. “You entered my house without a warrant? You break in here and threaten me with your macho cop act?”

“I didn’t break in,” Sam told him calmly. “I let myself in the front door.”

“Oh, sure.”

Sam pulled out Nina’s keys and held them up in front of Robert. “With these.”

“Those—those keys belong to my fiancée! How did you get them?”

“She lent them to me.”

“She what?” Robert’s voice had risen to a yelp of anger. “Where is Nina? She had no right to hand over the keys to my house.”

“Correction, Doctor. Nina Cormier was living here with you. That makes her a legal resident of this house. It gives her the right to authorize police entry, which she did.” Sam eyed the man squarely. “Now, I’ll ask the question a third time. Where have you been, Doctor?”

“Away,” snapped Robert.

“Could you be more specific?”

“All right, I went to Boston. I needed to get out of town for a while.”

“Why?”

“What is this, an interrogation? I don’t have to talk to you! In fact I shouldn’t talk to you until I call my lawyer.” He turned to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

“You don’t need a lawyer. Unless you’ve committed a crime.”

“A crime?” Robert spun around and stared at him. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. But I do need answers. Are you aware of what happened in the church today?”

Robert replaced the receiver. Soberly he nodded. “I…I heard there was some sort of explosion. It was on the news. That’s why I came back early. I was worried someone might’ve been hurt.”

“Luckily, no one was. The church was empty at the time it happened.”

Robert gave a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he said softly. He stood with his hand still on the phone, as though debating whether to pick it up again. “Do the police—do you—know what caused it?”

“Yes. It was a bomb.”

Robert’s chin jerked up. He stared at Sam. Slowly he sank into the nearest chair. “All I’d heard was—the radio said—it was an explosion. There was nothing about a bomb.”

“We haven’t made a public statement yet.”

Robert looked up at him. “Why the hell would anyone bomb a church?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. If the wedding had taken place, dozens of people might be dead right now. Nina told me you’re the one who called it off. Why did you?”

“I just couldn’t go through with it.” Robert dropped his head in his hands. “I wasn’t ready to get married.”

“So your reason was entirely personal?”

“What else would it be?” Robert suddenly looked up with an expression of stunned comprehension. “Oh, my God. You didn’t think the bomb had something to do with me?”

“It did cross my mind. Consider the circumstances. You cancelled the wedding without warning. And then you skipped town. Of course we wondered about your motives. Whether you’d received some kind of threat and decided to run.”

“No, that’s not at all what happened. I called it off because I didn’t want to get married.”

“Mind telling me why?”

Robert’s face tightened. “Yes, as a matter of fact,” he answered. Abruptly he rose from the chair and strode over to the liquor cabinet. There he poured himself a shot of Scotch and stood gulping it, not looking at Sam.

“I’ve met your fiancée,” stated Sam. “She seems like a nice woman. Bright, attractive.” I’m sure as hell attracted to her, he couldn’t help adding to himself.

“You’re asking why I left her at the altar, aren’t you?” said Robert.

“Why did you?”

Robert finished off his drink and poured himself another.

“Did you two have an argument?”

“No.”

“What was it, Dr. Bledsoe? Cold feet? Boredom?” Sam paused. “Another woman?”

Robert turned and glared at him. “This is none of your damn business. Get out of my house.”

“If you insist. But I’ll be talking to you again.” Sam crossed to the front door, then stopped and turned back. “Do you know anyone who’d want to hurt your fiancée?”

“No.”

“Anyone who’d want her dead?”

“What a ridiculous question.”

“Someone tried to run her car off the road this afternoon.”

Robert jerked around and stared at him. He looked genuinely startled. “Nina? Who did?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. It may or may not be connected to the bombing. Do you have any idea at all what’s going on? Who might try to hurt her?”

There was a split second’s hesitation before Robert answered. “No. No one I can think of. Where is she?”

“She’s in a safe place for tonight. But she can’t stay in hiding forever. So if you think of anything, give me a call. If you still care about her.”

Robert didn’t say anything.

Sam turned and left the house.

Driving home, he used his car phone to dial Gillis. His partner, predictably, was still at his desk. “The bridegroom’s back in town,” Sam told him. “He claims he has no idea why the church was bombed.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Gillis drawled.

“Anything new turn up?”

“Yeah. We’re missing a janitor.”

“What?”

“The church janitor. The one who unlocked the building this morning. We’ve been trying to track him down all evening. He never got home tonight.”

Sam felt his pulse give a little gallop of excitement. “Interesting.”

“We’ve already got an APB out. The man’s name is Jimmy Brogan. And he has a record. Petty theft four years ago and two OUI’s, that kind of stuff. Nothing major. I sent Cooley out to talk to the wife and check the house.”

“Does Brogan have any explosives experience?”

“Not that we can determine. The wife swears up and down that he’s clean. And he’s always home for dinner.”

“Give me more, Gillis. Give me more.”

“That’s all I have to give, unless you want me to slit open a vein. Right now I’m bushed and I’m going home.”

“Okay, call it a day. I’ll see you in the morning.”

All the way home, Sam’s mind was churning with facts. A cancelled wedding. A missing church janitor. An assassin in a black Ford.

And a bomb.

Where did Nina Cormier fit in this crazy thicket of events?

It was eleven-thirty when he finally arrived home. He let himself in the front door, stepped into the house, and turned on the lights. The familiar clutter greeted him. What a god-awful mess. One of these days he’d have to clean up the place. Or maybe he should just move; that’d be easier.

He walked through the living room, picking up dirty laundry and dishes as he went. He left the dishes in the kitchen sink, threw the laundry in the washing machine, and started the wash cycle. A Saturday night, and the swinging bachelor does his laundry. Wow. He stood in his kitchen, listening to the machine rumble, thinking about all the things he could do to make this house more of a home. Furniture, maybe? It was a good, sound little house, but he kept comparing it to Robert Bledsoe’s house with its Steinway piano, the sort of house any woman would be delighted to call home.

Hell, Sam wouldn’t know what to do with a woman even if one was crazy enough to move in with him. He’d been a bachelor too long, alone too long. There’d been the occasional woman, of course, but none of them had ever lasted. Too often, he had to admit, the fault lay with him. Or with his work. They couldn’t understand why any man in his right mind would actually choose to stay with this insane job of bombs and bombers. They took it as a personal affront that he wouldn’t quit the job and chose them instead.

Maybe he’d just never found a woman who made him want to quit.

And this is the result, he thought, gazing wearily at the basket of unfolded clothes. The swinging bachelor life.

He left the washing machine to finish its cycle and headed off to bed.

As usual, alone.

THE LIGHTS WERE ON at 318 Ocean View Drive. Someone was home. The Cormier woman? Robert Bledsoe? Or both of them?

Driving slowly past the house in his green Jeep Cherokee, he took a good long look at the house. He noted the dense shrubbery near the windows, the shadow of pine and birch trees ringing both edges of the property. Plenty of cover. Plenty of concealment.

Then he noticed the unmarked car parked a block away. It was backlit by a streetlamp, and he could see the silhouettes of two men sitting inside. Police, he thought. They were watching the house.

Tonight was not the time to do it.

He rounded the corner and drove on.

This matter could wait. It was only a bit of cleanup, a loose end that he could attend to in his spare time.

He had other, more important work to complete, and only a week in which to do it.

He drove on, toward the city.

AT 9:00 a.m., the guards came to escort Billy “The Snowman” Binford from his jail cell.