Smoke in Mirrors

to give Ed Stovall an excuse for arresting us.”
    “Can you get it tested quietly?”
    “Sure. I know someone in the chemistry department. A grad student. He’ll do it, for a price.”
    “We need to check out Rhodes, too.”
    “That,” Deke said, “I will handle personally. I just hope I have more luck than I did with my other research.”
    “You didn’t find anything new on the Eubanks murder?”
    “Nothing more than what was reported in those clippings. Sebastian Eubanks, widely held to be a couple of bricks shy of a full load, was presumed to have been shot by a burglar he surprised in the mansion one night. No one was ever arrested. End of story.”
    Thomas gripped the arms of the chair. “Leonora is talking about playing lady spy. Mentioned signing up for some stress counseling from Rhodes. Said it would be a good way to get close to him. Maybe pick up more information.”
    Deke studied the bags. “Might work.”
    “I don’t give a damn if it would work or not. She’s not going to do it. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
    “The thing is, you don’t have anything to say about it,” Deke pointed out.

    Thomas looked at him.
    Deke held up a hand. “Remember what that therapist you dated for a while told you. You’ve got control issues.”
    “This isn’t a control thing. It’s common sense.” Thomas shoved himself up out of the chair and walked to the nearest window. He yanked the curtains open. “I don’t want her alone with that son of a bitch for five minutes. Rhodes is up to something. I can feel it. He may be dangerous.”
    Crystalline silence descended. It lasted only a few seconds but that was more than enough time for him to realize how much he had given away. Deke wasn’t the only one taken by surprise.
    “Sure, I understand,” Deke said. “Can’t be too careful around a guy with fake yellow eyes.”
    He thinks I’m jealous. Thomas tightened his grip on the curtain. Hell, he’s right.
    All he had been able to think about last night after leaving Leonora was how much he hadn’t wanted to leave her. When he had gotten back to the house he’d spent a couple of hours in his workshop, drilling holes in some boards he planned to use for shelving. The effort to distract himself from memories of the superheated kiss in her kitchen had been spectacularly unsuccessful.
    When he had awakened this morning he had taken Wrench up into the woods on the bluffs where the dog could run free of the leash. The two of them had prowled through the dripping trees for over an hour while Thomas had come to terms with the new reality in his life.
    He wanted Leonora more than he had wanted anything else in a very long time.
    With acceptance came the need for planning and action. So, okay, he had control issues. So what? He worked damn hard at staying in control. He’d practiced diligently since the nights when he’d been a kid trappedin a bedroom with Deke, listening to the noise of their parents quarrelling, both of them afraid to go to sleep because they might wake up and discover that their father had moved out.
    He had gotten so good at the control thing that when he was confronted with situations he could not control physically, he could at least control his own emotional reaction to the events.
    Take his divorce, for instance. In the end, he’d been more annoyed by the dissolution of a perfectly good business partnership than he had the ruination of his marriage. Which probably didn’t say much for the marriage, but that was another matter.
    The bottom line was that with Leonora he was, for the first time, conscious of feeling edgy and restless, not quite in full control. He needed to do something, anything.
    Before coming here to Deke’s house, he’d rearranged the drawer in the nightstand beside his bed. It hadn’t been easy. He’d been forced to remove a flashlight, the remote, some electrical cables, a stack of financial magazines, a carton of tissues, three pens and a notebook to get at the box of condoms that had somehow worked its way to the rear of the drawer.
    He had opened the box, removed two of the little packets and put them into his wallet. Then he had carefully placed the box back into the drawer. Right at the front, where he could find it again quickly. In the dark.
    It wasn’t much in the way of concrete action, but it was something.
    A man had to think positive.

    She heard the muffled squeak behind the paneled wall just as she pulled out the C tray in the