“A necklace,” she answered without hesitation. “It was a gold necklace.”
“Where is it?”
“I…I don’t know…at home,” she answered in confusion, trying to remember where the necklace was at that precise moment. “No, wait, it’s here.” She jumped up out of her chair and ran up the stairs and into the bedroom where she had slept the night before. She dug into her suitcase and pulled out her bathrobe, reaching into the pocket and breathing a sigh of relief as she felt the heavy gold of the necklace.
“Did you find it?”
She turned to see Tony standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She held the piece out to him wordlessly.
Tony took the necklace and scrutinized it closely. “I’ll admit, it’s an attractive piece of jewelry. But surely it’s not worth a man’s life.” He bent his head down closer to the necklace, his fingers moving over the thick centerpiece. “This looks like a locket. Does it open?”
Libby shrugged. “I don’t really know. I didn’t try to open it.” She watched impatiently as he worked with the center in an effort to get it to open.
“Ah-ha,” he said triumphantly as the locket sprang open. Then he frowned. “It’s empty.” He closed the locket once again.
“What on earth could this necklace have to do with any of this mess?” she asked softly, her utter confusion evident in her voice.
“I’m not sure, but at this point I don’t think we can discount the importance of it. There have been too many coincidences. A man comes into your pawnshop and leaves a necklace. He’s murdered and later that night your shop is ransacked and your apartment is broken into.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “I just can’t help but think that somehow everything ties in with the necklace…but why?” His brow wrinkled in perplexity. “Put this on. Until we know more, this necklace is the only thing we have to go on. At least with it around your neck, we’ll know where it is.”
She nodded and turned around, allowing him to fasten the necklace at the nape of her neck. It snuggled against her skin, the feel of it giving her no pleasure at all. Before when she had worn the piece she had enjoyed the feel of the warm gold nestled against her skin. This time was different because she now knew there was a possibility that the necklace had been the cause of a man’s death. That knowledge made it feel cold and alien against her flesh. She turned back to face Tony.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his finger reaching up and lightly touching her cheek.
She nodded and forced a small smile to her lips. “Just a little overwhelmed by all this.”
“Come on, let’s go back downstairs. I’m going to try to call Cliff and see if there’s any more information.” He placed an arm around her shoulders as together they went back down to the kitchen.
As Tony dialed the phone, Libby sank back down at the table. Before, her situation had seemed desperate—now it had taken on a new dimension. She reached up and touched the necklace around her throat. What secret could it possess that was so valuable it might have cost a man his life?
She turned her attention to Tony, who listened intently to somebody on the other end of the phone line. His sharply etched features were tense and his eyes were onyx orbs radiating intelligence. He looked like a man capable of handling danger. She certainly hoped so, for as she sat there watching while he scribbled something down on a notepad, she realized how very dependent she was on him at the moment.
“Whew.” He expelled a low breath as he hung up the phone.
“What? What were you able to find out?” she asked anxiously.
“I just spoke to Cliff. The case of Jasper Higgens has been taken away from the police department and handed to another agency…one working on the assumption that national security may have been compromised.”
Libby stared at him in amazement. “National security?” She emitted a squeak of unbelieving laughter. “What on earth could a necklace have to do with national security?”
“I don’t know.”
Libby released another burst of nervous laughter. “Two days ago I was simply an average pawnbroker, and now you’re telling me it’s possible that somehow I’m in the middle of some national security crisis.” She breathed a shuddery sigh. “Couldn’t we just give the necklace to somebody, you know, the FBI or the CIA?”
“I suppose we could,” he said thoughtfully. “However, I’m extremely reluctant, especially when I don’t know what’s going on. I think we’d be better off finding out exactly why this necklace is so important before we just blindly hand it over to anyone.”
“But how do we go about doing that?”
He shrugged and smiled. “We go to the Ozarks,” he said succinctly.
“We go to the Ozarks….” she repeated blankly. “And what do we do once we get there?”
“We go to Jasper Higgens’s lab, we talk to his associates. Surely he wasn’t working completely alone. Then we find out exactly what he was working on…and maybe that will give us some answers to this whole puzzle.”
“You’re crazy,” she exclaimed. “I say we just give the necklace to one of the people in the agency that’s working on the case.”
“Fine. We’ll just hand it over to somebody on the task force, but you choose who we give it to. And let me warn you, you’d better make sure he’s a patriotic, duty-bound guy who can’t be swayed to the wrong side of the tracks by a flash of cash. You’d better make sure he can’t be bought at any price and has no family who can be threatened, because if this necklace holds a secret that threatens the security of the United States, by handing it to the wrong person, you sell us all up the river.” His voice rang with passion, and his dark eyes blazed with the full depth of his emotions.
“Out of all the ex-cops in the world, I’ve got to get stuck with a flag-waving, national anthem-singing patriot with altruistic motives, placing the burden of our country’s freedom square on my shoulders.” She glared at him, irritated that he had managed to present to her an argument she couldn’t fight.
