ELEVEN
STEVE sat alone in near darkness.
His mother was in
Linville. His daughter was in bed. The house settled around him,
warm and constricting as a child’s blanket.
Steve sprawled in his
father’s old chair, making notes. This used to be his favorite
time, the quiet hours of the night, when a man could work
uninterrupted or think slow, deep thoughts about his life or make
slow, deep love to his wife.
His wife was
dead.
He didn’t like the
company of his thoughts anymore, or the direction of his
life.
At least he could
work.
Once—six months or a
week ago—that would have satisfied him. It didn’t now. His fault,
for letting personal feelings into an investigation.
This afternoon in his
truck, he should have coaxed Bailey into confiding in him. Or
scared her into confessing.
Except he didn’t want
her confession. He scowled at the lined yellow pad on his knee.
Maybe the chief was right and he should withdraw from the case.
Maybe he had been gone too long to be
effective.
Or maybe he’d been
back too long and lost his edge.
Compartmentalize. Depersonalize.
Detach.
He reviewed his notes.
The blood screen had arrived today, verifying Helen Stokes Ellis
had died with a blood alcohol level of .10. She hadn’t been
drugged. So she hadn’t helped herself to her husband’s pills, and
no one had slipped a Xanax in her nightcap, either.
Another dead end, damn
it.
The only thing Walt
Clegg hated more than a big case in his town was an unsolved big
case. The chief had backed Steve’s request to the DA to authorize a
rush job on the items seized from the Ellises’ home. But the
special request hadn’t done them a damn bit of good. None of the
items removed in the search appeared to have been used in the
attack on Helen. And now that he had the results—the negative
results—Walt Clegg was more convinced than ever that Steve was
blowing smoke up his ass. Unless he came up with something fast, he
wouldn’t even make it to his six-month review.
I’ll give it another whack, friendly lab guy had
promised, with a chuckle at his own little joke. But he didn’t hold
out much hope.
Neither did Steve.
He’d gone to trial without a murder weapon before . . . in D.C. But
folks around here would want concrete evidence to convict.
Especially since Ellis’s defense was sure to call an entire lineup
of high-paid, high-profile expert witnesses to refute the
prosecution’s case.
To convince a jury, to
persuade the DA—hell, even to get the chief on board and off his
neck—Steve needed means. Motive. Preferably something besides Ellis
screwing or wanting to screw his personal assistant.
Steve’s hand tightened
on his pen. The three most common motives for murder were sex,
property, and insults. Steve doubted Ellis hit his wife over the
head with an unidentified object and dumped her in the pool because
she criticized his writing.
Which brought him back
to Bailey. To Bailey and sex.
Okay, maybe I was attracted, a little, she had
admitted. But I never did anything about
it.
He could canvass her
neighbors, see if anybody could ID Ellis as a visitor to her
apartment. Right. Like Walt would spring for airfare to New
York.
So either Steve
believed her, or not.
He wanted to believe
her.
Four million should be
motive enough for anybody. Even a cursory examination of the
Ellises’ financial records revealed the couple had been living
beyond their means in New York City. The rent on their Central Park
apartment had been paid, but other debts—his car, her plastic
surgeon’s fees, their credit cards—had been allowed to pile
up.
So how did Paul Ellis
afford the services of a full-time personal assistant? What was
Bailey getting from Ellis she couldn’t get from her job with
Paragon Press? Room? Board? Payment in kind?
The pen
snapped.
Disgusted, he threw
the pieces across the room. Thinking with his dick again. It was
this damn case.
It was Bailey, a voice inside him whispered, but he
ignored it. He’d had lots of practice ignoring things that didn’t
fit his plans—a dangerous approach for a detective, but it got him
through the nights.
He walked across the
room to get another pen.
Paul Ellis may have
come to Stokesville to research, but the move had also allowed the
couple to retrench. Faced with several hundred thousand dollars in
debt, Steve reflected, Ellis could have decided his wife was worth
more dead than alive.
Selfish bastard. As if
you could put a price on someone’s life, a premium on the time you
had together.
A memory of Teresa
shuddered through him, her eyes begging for his understanding.
I’m not poisoning what’s left of my life with
treatments, Steven. He’d reasoned and raged and fought with
her about it. And poisoned the time they had left with his
frustration and his fear.
There was no way to
get it back. Each month, each week, each precious hour could never
be replaced.
He thought of Bailey,
pink-cheeked, scowling, and how he couldn’t get involved with her,
and wondered when the hell he’d made a habit of living with
regret.
His cell phone
vibrated. He reached for it. He wasn’t on call
tonight.
He checked the number.
No one he knew.
“Burke,” he
said.
“Um. This is Bailey
Wells.”
He felt a shot of
adrenaline that straightened his spine and cleared his head. “Are
you all right?”
“I . . .
yes.”
Hard to tell from
those two clipped syllables. He remembered the way she had held
herself together after Helen’s death. Something was up, or she
wouldn’t have called him. She certainly would never have called
after eleven o’clock at night. He got up again to
pace.
“What can I do for
you?” he said easily.
Silence.
“Bailey?” Not so easy
now.
“I need to see
you.”
Absolutely.
Not.
His instinctive male
response was to rush to the rescue, club swinging.
But it wasn’t so
simple. He wasn’t a caveman. He was a single dad working cop, and
Bailey was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. Even
if he wanted to, which he didn’t, he couldn’t leave his sleeping
daughter to meet with her.
“Can it wait until
morning?”
He heard her sharp
intake of breath and felt a twinge of . . . professional duty or
personal concern? It really didn’t matter.
“Bailey? Don’t hang up
on me now.”
“I won’t. I need to
talk to you. Tonight.”
“Okay.” Who the hell
was on duty tonight? There had to be somebody she could talk to.
Marge Conner, maybe. “Can you get to the station?”
“Yes, I . . . I have
my mother’s car.”
“Good. You get
yourself to the station, and I’ll have someone meet you
there.”
“No.” Her voice was
firmer. Louder. Scared. “It has to be you. I have to talk with you
personally.”
He couldn’t invite her
here. One of the first things you learned in training was to keep
the job separate from your private life. Cops who crossed that line
made trouble for themselves and their departments.
Her breath caught
again. “Please.”
Compartmentalize, he
told himself. Depersonalize. Detach.
And heard himself say,
“Let me give you directions.”
“I know how to get to
there.”
“Not to the station.”
His voice was grim. “Five eighty five Sawmill Road.”
“Five eighty five.
Thank you.” Her relief flowed over the line. “You won’t regret
it.”
Her voice made him
feel good. Foolishly good.
“Not a problem,” he
said, and hoped she was right. For both their sakes.
THE important thing
was not to panic.
The intruder moved
quietly through the darkened first floor of the big house, drawn
like a moth to the light still burning in Ellis’s study. It was
unfortunate Paul persisted in poking into matters that were really
none of his business. But he had the means and the opportunity now
to make things right.
Didn’t Daddy say folks
mostly got what they deserved? Helen’s death—and Burke’s
suspicion—provided the perfect justification for what he was about
to do.
Really, Paul had
brought this on himself.
He patted the bulge in
his jacket pocket the way another man might touch a rabbit’s foot.
For luck.
Not that he believed
in leaving anything to chance. That’s why he had to do this. To
protect himself. To protect his family and his way of life. A man
had a right to do that. That’s all he’d ever done.
Of course he’d
regretted the waste all those years ago.
He’d been appalled by
the mess and the fuss.
He would have managed
the business much better himself.
And he had, hadn’t he?
The last death had been simple—a debt called in, a favor promised,
no different from the deals he made every day at the courthouse or
over a cup of coffee at the diner.
Things weren’t quite
so simple this time.
The knowledge
sharpened his senses and thickened his blood. His heart pounded.
His palms were actually sweating. He could remember when sex felt
like this, edgy and risky and raw.
A long time
ago.
He blotted the sweat
from his upper lip with his handkerchief, smoothed his hair and
stepped through the study door.
BAILEY bowed her head,
willing her hands to release their death grip on her mother’s
steering wheel.
She’d made the right
decision. She had enough strikes against her without adding
withholding evidence and obstructing justice to the list. She
needed to tell Steve her story before Regan spewed her version of
that awful kiss to the police, before Paul . . .
Bailey’s stomach
pitched to her shoes. She couldn’t think about Paul
yet.
She peered through the
windshield. Steve lived in a white, two-story house in a block of
other white, two-story houses with detached garages, mature shrubs,
and neat lawns. The setting was familiar and nonthreatening. Much
better than the police station. Really.
Her heart beat high
and hard in her chest.
Uncurling her fingers
from the steering wheel, Bailey dragged herself from the car. She
hauled the evidence box from the back seat and stood staring at the
yellow porch light.
She braced her
shoulders and tottered up the walk. Before she reached the steps,
the front door opened. Her stomach rocketed from her shoes to her
throat.
Steve loomed, cut in
light and shadow, framed against the dim interior of the
house.
He gestured to the
box. “Can I help you with that?”
She swallowed. “I hope
so.”
His eyebrows climbed,
but he didn’t say anything, just came down the steps and swung the
box into his arms. Muscled arms. In the hours since the funeral,
he’d changed from his suit into jeans and a plain dark T-shirt that
clung to his broad chest and shoulders.
Bailey averted her
gaze, unsettled by this sight of him, by the late hour and his
casual clothes. He was a police detective. It was easier to think
of him as a police detective when he wore the suit.
He opened the door for
her with one hand and nodded towards the back of the house.
“Kitchen’s that way.”
She walked past him,
past the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs, along a
narrow hallway that smelled reassuringly of lemon furniture polish.
Floral prints and faded family portraits of solemn-faced toddlers
and smiling brides hung on the walls.
“Nice place.” And not
at all what she expected. She thought he’d be more the black
leather and beer cans type. Unless this was stuff his wife had
picked out.
His eyes were hooded.
Unreadable. “This is my mother’s house.”
So they both lived at
home. Dr. Phil would have a field day with that. Norman Bates from
Psycho meets the crippled chick from
The Glass Menagerie. Except Steve was
way too virile to play old Norman, and Bailey was the one suspected
of murder. . . . She winced.
“She’s out of town
this weekend,” Steve continued easily. “Back tomorrow night. She
goes with her book club to the Highland games in Linville every
year.”
Bailey collected
herself enough to ask, “She’s interested in log
throwing?”
“The correct term is
caber toss. But I think she just likes men in kilts,” he
said.
Bailey smiled wanly.
He was trying to put her at ease, she knew, filling the awkward
silence, hiding his curiosity and impatience. As if it were
perfectly okay for her to invade his home and his privacy at a
quarter to twelve on a Friday night. No problem, he’d
said.
If only he knew.
She had to tell
him.
“Something to drink?”
He set the carton on the table in the breakfast nook, looking
surprisingly at home against the oak cabinets and white ruffled
curtains. Well, why not? He probably grew up here.
“Oh, no. No, thank
you,” she added politely.
A smile touched the
corners of his hard mouth. “You want to sit down?”
Sitting would be good.
Her knees were about to give out anyway.
They faced each other
across the table, the carton between them.
Steve’s gaze flicked
to it and then fixed on her face. “What can I do for
you?”
She opened her mouth,
and nothing came out. Panic dried her mouth and constricted her
throat. Maybe she should have accepted that drink after
all.
Steve sat motionless.
Patient. Polite. Waiting.
She worked enough
moisture into her mouth to swallow. Could she do this? Once she
confessed her suspicions, once she laid out her case, there was no
turning back. Everything would change.
Everything had changed
already.
She took a breath.
Released it. And said, “I found the murder weapon.”
EXCITEMENT hummed
through Steve’s system like a low-level electrical
charge.
Easy, he told himself. Maybe she found the murder
weapon. That would certainly explain her urgency in seeking him out
tonight. But maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she was
lying.
He didn’t want to
believe she was lying.
Something shifted
tonight when she showed up at his door lugging that box, her eyes
full of desperate hope. Or maybe it happened this afternoon, when
she climbed into his truck and he got that long look at her
legs.
Whatever it was,
whenever it happened, the line had been blurred. Whether he liked
it or not, whether he admitted it or not, he couldn’t regard her
only as a suspect anymore.
So here she was, in
his mother’s kitchen, invading his territory, disturbing his peace,
shaking his assumptions.
And about time, too, Eugenia would
say.
Steve eased back in
his chair, observing the strain in Bailey’s face and the resolute
set of her shoulders. He hadn’t sat in a kitchen with a woman late
at night since the early years of his marriage when he worked the
swing shift. Not that he and Teresa talked about his cases. Teresa,
loving, laughing Teresa, had never been comfortable when he walked
through the door with the job still clinging to him like cigarette
smoke, the tang of danger, the taint of family disputes, the stink
of deals gone bad. He learned to shower before he joined her in
bed, and he never brought the job home.
He didn’t have that
choice with Bailey. And if what she said was true . . . it would
change everything. She could save this investigation and his ass.
Or bury him in the hole he’d dug with Clegg.
He cleared his throat.
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Why don’t I show you
instead?”
He glanced at the box
between them. “In there?”
She
nodded.
Standing, he lifted
the lid of the box. No point worrying about fingerprints. He’d
already lugged the thing into the house. And . . . yes. All right.
There it was. A heavy, blunt object with sharp, squared
edges.
The hum grew from a
buzz to a whine.
“Looks like a
tombstone,” he said.
Bailey stood, too, her
hair brushing his shoulder, and he felt a jolt that wasn’t
electricity or suspicion. “I think it’s meant to.”
He read the name—Paul
Ellis—and below it, etched into the granite where “Beloved Husband”
should be, were the words National
Booksellers’ Optimus Award, the book title, Breathing Space, and last year’s date.
“Where did you get
this?”
“I found it in the box
about half an hour ago.”
“See it
before?”
She nodded again, and
her hair slipped forward over her shoulder, slippery as silk and
distracting as hell. “Paul used to keep it on his desk as a sort of
paperweight.”
Steve took a step away
from the table. Away from her and her hair. “When did you notice it
was missing?”
“I didn’t. I mean, you
don’t take much notice of stuff you see every day, do you? Unless
you’re Sherlock Holmes or something.”
Her attempt at humor
didn’t fool him. He knew her well enough now to recognize the tiny
signs of stress and to appreciate the effort she made to hold
herself together.
“Did you pick it up?
Touch it?”
“Recently?” she
asked.
“Ever.”
“Possibly. Probably.”
She pushed her hair back from her face. “That means my fingerprints
will be on it, won’t they?”
Oh, yeah.
“Unless somebody wiped
it,” he said grimly.
“Would that be better
or worse?” Her throat moved as she swallowed. “For me, I
mean.”
Things looked bad for
her either way. But she was smart enough to have figured that out,
and he didn’t have the heart or the knowledge yet to tell her how
bad.
So instead he said,
“Why don’t you tell me what you were doing with the
box.”
“It’s an evidence
box.”
“I can see
that.”
She cleared her
throat. “Paul used his connections with the district attorney’s
office to get them to release the evidence collected for the Dawler
trial from their property room.”
He lifted an
eyebrow.
She plunged on. “When
Regan . . . When I moved back to my parents’ house, Paul suggested
I take the boxes with me. To inventory.”
“Why would he do
that?”
“I assumed because he
didn’t want to do it himself. It’s a time-consuming job,” she
explained.
“And you had the
time,” Steve said flatly.
“Well, no. Not really.
But I thought I might get to it. After the funeral.”
“Okay.”
Echoes of their
earlier conversation played in his head. It
wouldn’t be the first time an employer took advantage of an
employee.
Paul wouldn’t do that.
Seems to me he does it all the time.
“So you took the
boxes,” Steve prompted.
“Yes. Well, no. Paul
offered to carry them to the car for me while I
packed.”
His intuition hummed
like a tuning fork, raising the hair on the back of his neck. “And
this was when?”
“Thursday around
five.” Bailey met his gaze, her dark brown eyes determined and
unhappy. “Before the search.”
Well, shit.
“Anybody see Ellis
move the boxes?” he asked without much hope.
“I don’t know. I don’t
think so. Regan might have.”
He made a mental note
to ask. “Did you open them? Inspect the contents?”
Bailey pleated her
fingers together in her lap. “Not then. I opened one that night,
but I didn’t find anything.”
“What were you looking
for?”
Her head snapped back
as if he’d slapped her. “Nothing. Something to do. Something to
read. If you must know, I found Tanya Dawler’s diary. Which doesn’t
have anything to do with why I had to talk with you.”
“Why me? Why
now?”
She hesitated.
Preparing to lie? he wondered. The possibility bothered him more
than it should have. People lied to him all the time.
“You know how in books
or movies when the girl gets a threatening letter or hears a scary
noise in the basement, and instead of contacting the authorities,
she decides to handle whatever it is herself?”
Where was she going
with this?
“You mean the girl who
winds up dead?”
“Exactly.” She met his
eyes with devastating frankness. “I don’t want to be the dumb dead
girl.”
Their gaze
held.
She wasn’t dumb. She
was sharp and competent, loyal to a fault . . . and in a shitload
of trouble. It took guts for her to come here tonight. His respect
for her grew. As did his concern.
“Not dumb at all.” He
leaned back in his chair in a wasted attempt to restore some
distance between them. “So what’s my role in this movie of
yours?”
“I don’t know,” she
admitted. “But I could really use a hero about now.”
His lungs expanded.
Was it possible . . . could she possibly . . .
No and no.
Do the job. Go through the motions.
Maybe it wasn’t very
heroic, but if he was going to save her, he had to do it by the
book.
He got out his
notebook. “Tell me again what you were doing with the
box.”
He took her back over
and through her story until he was satisfied she’d told him
everything she remembered. But he still didn’t know how she felt or
what she thought, all the things any competent defense attorney
would toss out as speculation that were suddenly, vitally important
for reasons Steve didn’t want to think about.
“What made you think
this could be the object used in the attack on Mrs.
Ellis?”
Bailey considered his
question, her head to one side. “You gave me a copy of the search
warrant, remember? This is exactly the kind of thing you were
looking for. Plus, it was so obviously out of place in this
box.”
“Any idea how it got
there?”
“I can’t be sure. I
didn’t see.”
“But you have some
idea.”
She nodded
silently.
Still protecting that
asshole.
“Can you tell me? For
your statement,” he said.
“Right. All right. I
think Paul put the award in the carton and carried it out to my car
so that you wouldn’t find it if you searched the
house.”
She almost had
it.
“Or so I’d find it in
your possession,” Steve said.
Her eyes widened. He
felt like crap. Like she was six years old and he’d just told her
there was no Santa Claus. Or twenty-six and he’d told her the guy
she’d had a crush on for the past two years had totally set her up
for the murder of his wife.
“Did you two have a
disagreement?” Steve asked gently. “Words, maybe?”
Her hands twisted in
her lap. “No. Tonight he said . . . He wants me to go back to New
York with him.”
Son of a bitch.
“Is that what you
want?” Steve asked. Very cool. Detached. Professional.
“Not
anymore.”
He fought a fierce
flare of satisfaction. “Why not?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She gave him a small smile that struggled to match his, cool and
professional. “Personal reasons.”
It pissed him off.
“How personal?”
She blushed. “It’s not
what you’re thinking. More professional personal, if you know what
I mean.”
He didn’t have a clue.
Any more than she had any idea what he was thinking. Which was a
good thing, because some of his thoughts weren’t professional at
all.
“Maybe you could
explain it to me,” he suggested.
She sighed. “I went to
work for Paul Ellis because I wanted to write my own book. That was
two years ago.”
She was writing a
book? he thought, amazed. Impressed. But what came out of his mouth
was, “You haven’t finished a book in two years?”
“Oh, it’s finished.”
She looked down like it was no big deal. Like finishing a book was
nothing. “But it’s not ready to submit.”
“How do you
know?”
“Paul told
me.”
Anger bubbled through
him. She was so smart. How could she be so dumb where this one guy
was concerned? “You think a guy who killed his wife and stuck you
with the murder weapon is the best person to turn to for career
advice?”
Bailey
winced.
Steve winced, too.
This was not the detached, just-the-facts-ma’am discussion they
should be having.
She rallied. “It’s not
like I knew two years ago that things were going to work out this
way. Anyway, one doesn’t have anything to do with the
other.”
Fuck detached.
“Sure it does. The
guy’s a user. He’s proved he’ll put his interest before yours.
Maybe he doesn’t want to lose you as a personal assistant. Or maybe
he doesn’t want the competition.”
She shook her head.
“That’s a nice theory. And an even nicer compliment. But there’s no
way Paul could consider me competition. Even if I were any good, I
don’t write true crime.”
He let himself be
diverted. “What do you write?”
“YA. Young adult
fiction,” she explained, as if he might not know what that
was.
“The Princess Diaries,” he said. “The Outsiders.”
Bailey’s smile lit her
eyes. Her face. “Your daughter?”
He nodded. “I’m no
expert, but I bet I know more about what girls that age like than
Ellis does. I bet you do, too.”
Her mouth opened. He
could practically see the wheels spinning inside her pretty head as
she absorbed his words.
“Paul knows a lot
about the industry,” she said.
“Does he know you
don’t want to go back to New York with him?”
Her gaze dropped. “Not
yet.”
“When were you
planning to tell him?”
“Tomorrow.”
Steve made a
disbelieving noise.
“It’s true,” she
insisted, her big brown eyes fixed on his face. “That’s why I was
packing up the boxes. To give everything back to him.”
“You were going to
quit,” Steve said with heavy skepticism.
“Yes.”
“The day after his
wife’s funeral.”
The chin came up.
“Yes.”
He didn’t buy it. She
was too conscientious, too self-effacing, too fucking loyal to
leave her boss in the lurch like that.
“Why?”
Bailey moistened her
lips. “There was a little, uh, awkwardness before I left
tonight.”
Awkwardness? What the hell did that
mean?
“What kind of
awkwardness?”
“Well . . . Paul was
drinking.”
Terrible images
flooded Steve’s brain. Had her boss hurt her? Hit her? What? “Are
you telling me what happened or making excuses for
him?”
Again.
She flushed. “I’m
trying to tell you what happened. Paul was drinking, and before I
left, he . . . kissed me.”