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“How could I let this happen?” He scrubbed his hands down his face. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
Marin didn’t move. She couldn’t. It felt as if she’d been doused with a bucket of water. Griffin looked everywhere in the room except at her. The icy fingers of rejection began to claw at Marin’s belly. He turned for the door.
“Griffin?” She managed to push the word out around the boulder in her throat.
He hesitated ever so briefly, his hand on the doorknob. Marin’s breath stilled in her lungs. But then he was gone. Without looking back. She heard the chime of the elevator and then its door closing, but still, she didn’t move. It wasn’t until her teeth were chattering that she pulled the cashmere blanket from the back of the sofa and wrapped her body in it. Marin took some solace in the warmth it provided. Too bad the blanket didn’t help alleviate the shame she felt.
CHAPTER8
The sound of the fire alarm awakened Marin from a fitful sleep. Disoriented, she glanced at her clock. Five a.m. She’d been asleep for barely forty-five minutes. She fell back down against her pillows, closing her eyes until the persistent ringing permeated the fog of her brain.
“Oh, my God!”
Marin jumped out of bed, grabbing her phone from the nightstand and her neatly piled clothes from a bench at the end of the bed. She slid her feet into her Skechers and headed for the front door, crying out when she bumped her knee on the corner of an end table in the dark living room. Snatching up her backpack from the chair in the foyer, she shoved her clothes inside. The alarm was still blaring when she reached for the door handle. Her father’s voice in her head stopped her from bolting out the door, however.
She turned on her heel and dashed to her kitchen, shooting up a prayer of thanks for the paranoia of the previous owners of the penthouse. She turned the key in the dead bolt on the back door leading to a private stairwell only accessible from her apartment.
“If the fire alarm ever goes off,” her father had advised her when she’d bought the place, “use this stairwell. It’s constructed from concrete blocks. A fire anywhere else in the building would never be able to permeate it.”
Marin placed her hand on the door, checking it for heat. Feeling nothing, she opened it cautiously.
“Bless you, Daddy,” she said when she slipped from her kitchen into the cool, quiet, smoke-free stairway. “And bless the archaic ordinance that says buildings within Washington, DC can only be thirteen stories.”
She trudged down the stairs, her exhaustion making her feet feel like lead.
“Shitty week is an understatement, Not-So-Special-Agent Dickweed,” Marin mumbled to the quiet walls. “Twofires! Who gets stuck in two freaking fires in one week?” She rounded the corner leading down another flight. “And two friends dead in the same week. How does that happen?”
She was surprised by the burn of more tears behind her eyes. Marin swore she’d cried them all out last night. “And let’s not forget the knife fight on the Metro where an innocent girl was injured.” She swiped at her nose as she descended another floor.
“And, thanks, by the way, for leaving me hanging last night, you colossal ass!” Marin’s mumble had risen to a shout, her words echoing off the cement walls as tears streamed down her face. “Because every woman enjoys being rejected in the middle of hooking-up.” She stomped around another corner. “You can forget your cushy security job with my family,” she yelled. “I’m calling my big brother right now to tell him what an ass you are!”
Marin sank down on one of the steps and dug her cell phone out of her pocket. “Great. With my luck, there will be a cute fireman waiting to rescue me, and I’m strutting around in my SpongeBob pajama pants.” She leaned her head against the wall and sighed. “No signal. It figures.” A fit of hysterical laughter bubbled up from her throat. “And to think, a few days ago, all I cared about was getting a date to Ava’s stupid wedding.”
She pushed to her feet. “Back to square one on that quest.”
Quickly jogging down the last four floors, she pushed through the exit door into the boiler room. The fire alarm was still blaring, although its sound was partially drowned out by the loud hum of the machinery that kept the eighty-one units of the Dupont comfortable. Marin glanced down at her phone, relieved to have signal finally. She scrolled for her father’s number, needing to hear his voice right now. Just as she was about to press the call button, however, she tripped and went sprawling across the floor. Marin glanced back to see what had caused her to fall.
It wasn’t a what, but a who: Seth, the building’s maintenance man. Lying on the floor in a pool of blood. A scream of shock caught in Marin’s throat. She struggled to breathe. She glanced around the vast room while her limbs were frozen in terror. Could whoever have done this still be here hiding? Not wanting to find out, she scrambled to her feet and ran to the lobby with a speed she didn’t know she possessed.
* * *
“We have to stop meeting like this, Chef Chevalier,” said the distinguished police detective who’d interviewed her and Griffin two nights ago. He set a steaming cup of tea down in front of her before he slid into the chair opposite hers. “Mayhem seems to be following you around, lately.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” She reached out to pick up the tea, but her hand was shaking too badly to manage it, so she shoved her fingers into her pockets instead.
Marin had been sitting in the manager of the Dupont’s office for over two hours while a string of firefighters and police officers asked her the same questions, over and over again. Her head was pounding so badly; she was surprised none of the others in the room heard.
“You didn’t exit your apartment at all after arriving home last evening?” the detective asked.
“No.” She swallowed painfully remembering how it had taken her an hour to drag her limp body off the sofa and into the shower. After thirty minutes of sobbing under the warm spray of water, she’d staggered to her bed, wrestling with sleep for several more hours. “Not until the fire alarm went off this morning.”
“And Agent Keller, what time did he leave?”
Not soon enough.Shame made Marin’s cheeks flush. She imagined the detective interpreted her blush a totally different way.
“Uh, he stayed for maybe fifteen minutes, but I’m not sure exactly. They keep a log at the front desk.” She nearly choked on the last two words remembering that the last two people to man the front desk were now dead.
“And no one else came to the penthouse last night?”
