NINETEEN
STEVE nudged Gabrielle into a pew at the back of
Saint Mildred’s Catholic Church. The nine o’clock mass was crowded
with old folks anxious to escape the day’s heat and young families
who couldn’t afford to miss nap time, with women with an eye on
Sunday dinner and men with their minds on the afternoon ball
game.
The homily was short
and the choir’s ranks decimated by summer vacations. But the order
of the mass was the same.
Lord, have mercy . . .
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world . .
.
I
am not worthy to receive you. Only say the word, and I shall be
healed.
Standing and kneeling
beside his daughter, Steve waited for the familiar litany of guilt,
the self-disgust that rose from his soul like incense. But it
didn’t come. Today, the memorized rituals brought comfort, not
shame.
You’re not responsible for your wife’s illness. Or her
treatment plan. Or her death.
Looking down at
Gabrielle’s smooth, dark head and the gold hearts dancing at her
ears, he felt an unexpected peace. A profound
thankfulness.
For
Gabrielle.
And for
Bailey.
Bailey, solid, bright,
straightforward, had stolen into his disciplined life like the
light through those stained glass windows. Making him feel again.
Making him believe again. Waking him to painful hope.
He stood for the final
hymn, his heart pumping in an urgent rhythm that had nothing to do
with the pounding of the organ in the choir loft. Because along
with renewed life came renewed fear.
Somewhere out there,
somebody hunted to keep a secret. Somebody who had killed and might
kill again.
And until Steve caught
him and put him away, that bastard threatened Bailey.
He steered Gabrielle
from their pew into the stream of departing churchgoers. He needed
to review the Dawler case again. Beyond the headlines and court
reports, there had to be something that had sparked Paul Ellis’s
interest . . . and his murder.
The congregation
spilled into the sunshine and down the broad, flat steps. Under a
stand of tall pine trees, children, released from church and
careless of the heat, whooped and ran around some aging playground
equipment.
“Lieutenant?”
Steve turned as Darian
Jackson emerged from the shadow of the church porch, sweating and
uncomfortable in his Sunday suit. Beside him, a handsome woman in a
floral print dress chatted with the pastor.
Jackson came down the
steps alone. “Welcome to Saint Mildred’s. I didn’t know your people
were Catholic.”
“Her mother
was.”
“Ah”
Sensing an
opportunity, Gabrielle tugged on his arm. “Can I go
play?”
Steve was restless,
angry, jumping out of his skin with the need to do something, to
protect Bailey. He looked down at his daughter’s hopeful face and
drew a deep breath.
“Ten
minutes.”
“Okay.”
She ran
off.
“Must be tough,”
Jackson observed. “Starting over in a strange place with new
people.”
“We manage,” Steve
said.
“I’m sure you do. Sure
you do. Still, it takes a while to find your feet.”
Were they still
talking about Gabrielle?
“There’s always
prejudice against the new kid,” Steve said. “You can’t let it get
to you.”
Jackson grunted.
“Twenty years ago I was the only black officer in this department.
There’s not much you can tell me about prejudice.”
“Guess not,” Steve
said.
The children ran and
played in the sunshine.
Something Jackson had
said nagged at Steve. “You were here twenty years
ago?”
Jackson nodded. “Fresh
out of the army.”
“You work the Dawler
case?”
“I was the responding
officer. Although Chief Clegg—he was Detective Clegg back
then—pretty near beat me onto the scene. Shit, every man on the
force, seven of us, turned out that night. Never saw anything like
it.” Jackson shook his head. “Never want to see anything like it
again, either.”
Steve fought to
contain his rising excitement. This couldn’t be the break he’d been
praying for.
“Domestics are always
the worst,” he said.
“He did them with the
kitchen knives,” Jackson said. “Murdered them in their beds. Blood
everywhere. Grandmother went down pretty quick. Sister, too. But
the mother, Tammy, she must have woke up. She fought him. Fought
her own son for her life. We found her in the hall.”
“And Billy
Ray?”
“Curled up in the
garage with a bottle of bourbon, drinking and crying and covered in
blood. Most of it theirs. Kept talking about how he had to do it,
how his life was worthless anyway because his family was all
whores. How everybody was laughing at him and he had to be a man
and stop their whoring. Nothing to do but bring him
in.”
There was no
satisfaction in his voice.
Steve raised his
eyebrows. “You ever consider other suspects?”
Jackson stared across
the playground. “Men were in and out of that house all the time,
Lieutenant. We could have hauled in every migrant worker and
trucker in the state for questioning along with a good number of
married men in this town. But everything pointed at the boy. We had
his confession. We had his prints, and only his prints, on the
knives. Most folks just figured the boy couldn’t take it
anymore.”
“That made it easy,”
Steve remarked.
“Didn’t make it wrong.
A lot of folks—a lot of men—were already nervous. A lot of wives
were upset. Clegg didn’t see any point in stirring things up by
dragging out the investigation.”
That sounded like
Clegg.
“And you agreed with
him.” His voice carefully neutral.
“I was new on the
force. Still on probation.” His gaze slid sideways to meet Steve’s.
“It wasn’t my place to agree or disagree.”
Justification or
warning? Steve could sympathize with the first. He chose to ignore
the second. “And now?”
“Now I’m close to
retirement. Pretty soon I’ll be living off my pension with an attic
full of notebooks.”
Casual words, casually
delivered.
A lot of cops kept
their case notes. Steve did himself. Like high school yearbooks or
empty liquor bottles on a dormitory windowsill or a serial killers’
trophies, the notebooks reminded you who you were and what you had
done and sometimes what you had to atone for.
Given the subject,
Steve didn’t think their mention was an accident.
“Must make interesting
reading,” he said, equally casual.
“Interesting
enough.”
“Maybe I could take a
look.”
“I’ll be home all
afternoon,” Jackson said. “You should drop by. Meet the
wife.”
His wife, unless Steve
was very much mistaken, was still on the church steps above them,
talking to the pastor.
He nodded. “I’ll do
that. Thanks.”
IT was hard to feel in
control of your destiny when you were stashed in a cheap
twelve-by-twenty motel room without room service or
transportation.
Bailey couldn’t even
control the temperature. The unit’s air conditioner had two
settings: brain-rattling and freezing or ominously silent and
hot.
She settled for
steamy, stripping to athletic shorts and a black cotton tank top to
work her way through the evidence box. Outside the sun was shining,
but she kept the blinds closed, as instructed. The darkness didn’t
do a damn thing to relieve the heat. Or the creepiness of her
task.
She didn’t touch the
plastic bags and paper-wrapped packages except to move them out of
the way. The case summary alone was enough to give her chills, even
in this sauna of a room. Wet splotches and bloody footprints, used
condoms and an unopened pregnancy kit . . . Bailey pushed her hair
out of her eyes and painstakingly noted them all. She turned
hastily through the photos.
No wonder Steve was so
good at dissociating.
He had to, to keep his
sanity. To keep his humanity. She had a new appreciation for his
job, and its cost. After only a couple of hours, she felt on edge,
depressed, and not one bit closer to finding an angle, an insight,
or a flaw in the police investigation.
She rubbed her
forehead. How could she? Everything she looked at was the result of
that investigation. It had already been analyzed, evaluated, and
entered into evidence by professionals.
Two years working for
one of the best true crime writers in the business, and she still
lacked Paul’s instincts. Or his ego. She sighed with frustration.
Maybe if she had his notes, or his interview with Billy Ray . .
.
She straightened
slowly. The vinyl arm chair released her skin with a soft, sucking
sound.
Or his interview with Billy Ray.
Her heart pounded. Was
that what the intruder was after? The interview? But he had taken
Tanya’s diary. Which meant . . .
Oh, God, she needed a
computer. If she could get into Paul’s files, maybe she could
figure out what it meant.
Think. She had read the diary. At least, she’d read
parts of it. She should focus on that.
It was, as she had
told Steve, extraordinary for its ordinariness, like a modern
teenager’s facebook profile of likes and dislikes, crushes and
peeves. Tanya Dawler had liked Madonna and the color black,
disliked math and—what was that teacher’s name? Mr. D.—had a crush
on Rick Springfield and her brother’s friend Trey, Trace, something
like that. She worried about the shape of her nose and the size of
her breasts, and she dreamed of becoming a singer, a model, an
actress. The details were fuzzy and changed frequently, but the
desire to strike out and hit it big stayed constant.
Bailey could
sympathize. What she couldn’t do was imagine how any of this played
into the girl’s death or Paul’s murder or the attack on her own
father.
The knock on her door
echoed through the room like a gunshot. She bolted upright in her
chair as paper cascaded to the carpet.
Her heart thudded
against her ribs. She felt giddy. Terrified or sleep deprived, at
this point it didn’t matter. Should she answer?
“Housekeeping,” a
light, accented voice called.
Sheesh.
“I’m fine,
thanks.”
She was a moron. An
idiot.
Still she sat frozen,
listening, until she heard footsteps move away from the door, until
she saw a shadow cross the blinds.
She drew a deep,
shuddering breath. Okay. Don’t just sit there,
moron. Do something.
What had Steve told
her? See if you can figure out who had a
reason to steal Tanya Dawler’s diary.
Right. Bailey couldn’t even recall any names, only
nicknames and initials. But she picked the papers off the floor,
bending stiffly like an old woman. She lined her sharpened pencils
like soldiers on parade. And she wrote down as many of Tanya’s
notations as she remembered, frustrated she couldn’t even build a
database but had to rely on paper and pencil. The point dug into
the page.
She had a sudden,
sharp memory of Paul demanding his laptop, complaining.
I can’t write the damn book on hotel
stationery.
Right there with you, Paul, she
thought.
But Paul was
dead.
She was alone. She had
to figure this out herself, with or without a
computer.
She reviewed her
pathetic penciled list. Too bad she didn’t have a client list for
the brothel business to compare it with. Or a school directory.
Mrs. Buncombe, the faculty yearbook advisor, used to insist Bailey
check all the students’ names against the listings in the student
directory.
Yearbook.
The idea snapped on
like the bathroom light. If she could get her hands on a yearbook,
maybe she could match Tanya’s abbreviations to names and faces. A
male teacher whose last name began with D; an upperclassman named
Trey—no, Trip, that was it; an S.W. with a blond ponytail. People
who knew Tanya or her brother.
It was a place to
start.
It was something to
do.
Nineteen years ago,
Tanya had been a freshman in high school. If she had lived, she
would be thirty-five now, older than Bailey, almost as old as . .
.
Bailey caught her
breath. Digging for her cell phone, she punched in her sister’s
number.
Leann answered the
phone against a babble of background noise. Bailey could hear their
mother, apparently fixing lunch for Rose in the kitchen. “Bailey?
Where are you? We missed you in church this morning.”
“I’m fine. I’m . .
.”
Hiding out under an assumed name in a sleazy motel by the
highway. Her hand tightened on the phone.
“Doing research,” she
said.
“For that book? Hang
on. The apple juice, Mom. On the second shelf.”
A sudden wave of love
for her family swamped Bailey, swelling her throat. “How’s
Daddy?”
“Oh, you know. He’s
grumpy because his doctor admitted him to the neurology floor, and
then Mama told all the nurses he had brain damage, which of course
he doesn’t. But basically they’re fine.”
Bailey caught herself
grinning. “Listen, can I ask you a favor?”
“Apple juice, Mama. Behind the pudding.” Leann blew
out a breath. “Okay, shoot.”
Bailey cleared her
throat. “Do you still have your old yearbooks?”
She had just ended the
call with her sister when her phone chirped. She glanced at the
familiar New York area code before she pressed the button.
“Hello?”
TWENTY minutes later,
Bailey sat cross-legged on the quilted motel spread, her phone
clutched in her hand. Her mind whirled. Her stomach
churned.
She should be
flattered. Nervous. Hopeful. She felt . . . numb.
When the knock on the
door came this time, she barely jumped. “Who is it?”
“Mr.
Smith.”
Steve.
She roused enough to
consider running to the bathroom to reapply her deodorant and brush
her hair. Stupid. She couldn’t leave him standing outside while she
primped. Scrambling off the bed, she opened the door.
He scowled at her from
the sunlit strip of concrete. “Did you check through the
peephole?”
No kiss, no
compliment, no hi-honey-how-was-your-day. He was in full cop mode,
those double lines cutting between his brows, his mouth
hard.
She blinked. “I knew
it was you.”
“You should still
check.”
This was what it would
be like to be with him: the tension and the terse replies, the
sense that his head, if not his heart, was otherwise
engaged.
Unless she did
something about it.
“I was
distracted.”
“What’s the matter? Is
it your father?”
“He’s fine. I’m fine.
I’m great. Never better.”
Steve’s gaze narrowed.
“What happened?”
She hugged her elbows,
suddenly glad she had someone to share her amazing news. Wishing he
would take her in his arms. Hoping his reaction would help her
somehow to make sense of her own. “Paul’s agent
called.”
“So?”
“So . . .” She drew a
deep breath. “She wants me to finish the book.”
“Ellis’s book,” he
said without expression.
She nodded,
anticipating surprise. Congratulations. Maybe even an
argument.
“Are you going to do
it?”
His lack of reaction
brought her chin up. “I could. I have access to his sources. To his
notes. Or I will once I get my hands on a computer.”
“Laptop’s in the
car.”
“Oh.” That was it?
“Well, great. Thanks.”
He set a white paper
sack on the air-conditioning unit under the window. “I stopped by
Crook’s Barbecue. I figured you’d be tired of peanut butter by
now.”
A man who brought
barbecue home could be forgiven almost anything. Even a less than
enthusiastic response to Paul’s agent.
“I love Crook’s,”
Bailey said. After all, if he was making an effort, so could she.
“That’s one thing you can get around here you can’t find in New
York.”
His dark gaze collided
with hers. “There’s lots of things you can get around here you
can’t get in New York.”
She waited,
breathless.
But he looked away,
shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “Hot in
here.”
She bit back her
disappointment. “You shouldn’t have dressed up for
dinner.”
He glanced down at his
rumpled dark suit as if he had forgotten he had it on. “I took
Gabrielle to church this morning.”
“And you didn’t have
time to change afterward?”
His expression
shuttered. “I had things to do.”
What things? she
wanted to demand. But he had already retreated someplace she didn’t
know how to follow. Maybe he wasn’t that different from Paul after
all, she thought in despair.
And maybe she was the
one who hadn’t changed.
Who needed to
change.
She thought about it
as she cleared a space on the brown quilted spread to sit and he
pushed the table closer to the bed. She popped the lids from their
sweet tea and spooned coleslaw onto paper plates while he shifted
the evidence box to the floor.
Like an old married
couple, dividing chores without speech. She flushed.
The spicy aroma of
good barbecue filled the room. She waited until he had worked his
way through half a pile of barbecue before she dragged a hush puppy
through ketchup and pointed it like a gun.
“Tell me about your
day.”
His mouth quirked. “Or
you’ll shoot?”
Biting the end off the
hush puppy, she wagged the stump at him. “You have no idea what I’m
capable of.”
“Obviously not,” he
murmured. Now that he’d eaten, he looked . . . not relaxed, she
thought. But more approachable. “Tell me about this book
deal.”
She accepted the
change of subject. For now.
“It’s not a deal yet.”
She chewed and swallowed. “I haven’t decided whether I want to do
it.”
“Why wouldn’t
you?”
“No good reason. The
advance would pay my bills. I’d be able to stay in Stokesville
while I figure out my next move. Or at least until the sublet on my
apartment is up.”
“Would it be under
your name?”
“What?” Now how had he
zeroed in on the thing that bothered her most?
“The book. Would your
name be on the cover?”
“Yes.” She dug her
plastic fork into a heap of barbecued pork. “Somewhere. Paul’s
agent suggested ‘by Paul Ellis with Bailey Wells.’ ”
“Don’t do
it.”
She felt a flare of
resentment. What did he know about it? “It’s more acknowledgement
than I’d get if Paul had written the book.”
“Paul isn’t writing
the book. You are.”
“But his name is
established. His name sells. And anything I wrote would be based on
his work. His ideas.”
“Then write something
based on your own ideas. Sell that. I thought you were working on a
kids’ book.”
She scowled. “It’s not
that easy. Although . . . I did pitch my YA book to
her.”
“Good for you.” His
approval warmed her all the way through. “And?”
“And she asked to read
the complete manuscript.” Impossible to contain the glow of
pleasure.
“That’s good, right?
That she wants to see the whole thing.”
She allowed herself a
small smile. “It’s very good.”
“So why are you even
thinking about the other job?”
Because she was
terrified of failing.
“Well . . . it would
pay more.”
“In the short term,
maybe. You need to think long term. Look at this as an investment
in yourself and your career.”
“What if she doesn’t
like it?”
“What if she does?” he
countered. “Do you really want to be stuck finishing Ellis’s book
when you could be working on your own?”
“No-o.”
“Then leave it. Put
all this behind you.”
“I
can’t.”
“Why the hell
not?”
“Because even if I
don’t write the book, I need to go through Paul’s files. I have to
find what he knew that would lead someone to kill
him.”
His face was
unreadable. “Sugar, there may not be anything. Not if we can’t turn
up his interviews with Billy Ray.”
“I have the
interviews.”
Steve went very still.
“You have transcripts?”
She shook her head.
“Paul never gave them to me to transcribe. But I should have the
original files.”
“You have the tapes.”
Steve bit the words out. “And you never told me.”
“They’re not tapes,”
she hastened to assure him. “They’re audio files. On his computer.
Paul never went anywhere without his laptop. Most come with
built-in microphones now to enable Internet conferencing, but he
actually used a microphone jack—you know, like some students use to
tape their professors’ lectures? He recorded the interviews
directly onto his hard drive.”
A muscle jumped beside
Steve’s mouth. He pushed away his half-empty plate. “Let’s hear
’em.”
He went out to the
truck.
So much for sharing
the news of their day over dinner.
She was clearing away
the remains of their meal when he returned with a slim black
laptop.
“I’ve got this,” he
said, taking hold of her plate.
Her hand instinctively
tightened. She wasn’t used to accepting help. Particularly domestic
help from a man. “I can do it.”
“So can I. What I
can’t do is access your boss’s files. Sit. Work.”
She sat. While the
computer booted, she retrieved her flash drive from her purse and
plugged it into the USB port. The contents flashed on the
screen.
“What’s this?” Steve
stood by the bed, her penciled list in his hand.
“All the names and
abbreviations I could remember from Tanya’s diary. Not very many,
I’m afraid.”
“Mind if I copy
it?”
“Of course
not.”
The mattress dipped
under his weight. Bailey glanced at the stretch of his suit pants
over his thighs and then away. It just figured that the first time
she was alone with a man in a motel room, they’d both be doing
paperwork.
She hadn’t come home
to find romance.
She hadn’t made love
with him expecting to find her happily ever after.
But now that they were
here, she wanted to touch him. She wanted to burrow under his cop
suit and find the man inside.
Put all this behind you?
She only wished they
could. Sighing, she turned her attention to the computer screen.
Fortunately, the laptop Steve had provided had a sophisticated
sound card.
She searched Paul’s
files using keywords. Dawler. Billy Ray.
Interview. Nothing.
She scrolled through
his documents, looking for unfamiliar icons or names.
Nothing.
She tapped softly on
the base of the keyboard. Paul was brilliant and computer savvy,
but he wouldn’t waste his time with an elaborate retrieval
system.
“If I were an audio
file,” she murmured, “where would I be?”
Music, she thought. She clicked on his music
folder. A window opened with a list of song titles, dates . . .
Dates.
“Found them,” she
announced.
Steve leaned over to
look. She could smell him, musky and male, and feel him, hard and
warm against her shoulder blade. “How many?”
She scrolled. “Three
since we moved here.”
“Try that one. The
most recent.”
She clicked. And
flinched as Paul’s smooth, remembered voice flowed from the tiny
keyboard speaker.
It was obvious from
the nature of his greeting and the tone of Billy Ray’s reply that
they had met before. Paul started the interview with simple,
seemingly caring questions. How had Billy Ray
been? Did he need anything? Was he sleeping?
Bailey forgot to take
notes. She was helpless to do anything but listen, fascinated and
repelled, as Paul wielded his voice like an oyster huckster’s
knife, prying and sliding, seeking the weak spot that, with the
right pressure, would yield the juicy meat inside.
The questions became
more pointed.
Did you know your sister was pregnant when she
died?
She deserved to die, Billy Ray’s voice said.
Whore.
Bailey bit her
lip.
But the child—your nephew—was innocent. Did he deserve to
die?
Billy Ray muttered
something that sounded like, Son of a
whore.
That’s not his fault, Paul said smoothly.
Any more than it was
yours.
Bailey recoiled from
his insinuation. She had never realized before how manipulative he
was. Was it death or distance that made her finally hear him this
way?
Did you know she was pregnant? Paul
repeated.
Billy Ray was silent.
Maybe he nodded, because Paul asked, Who told
you?
Everybody would laugh at me. She’d come to school with her
belly sticking out, and everybody would laugh, he
said.
Who said?
Silence.
Who told you she was pregnant? Paul pressed.
Tanya?
No.
Who was the baby’s father?
Not me. The words burst out. He said they’d say it was mine. But it wasn’t. I never
did. Not with my sister.
No, of course not, Paul soothed. Only someone who
knew him well would hear his revulsion. Or his excitement. Bailey
knew him very well. She shivered.
A
friend would tell you if your sister was going to have a
baby, Paul said. If she was going to
shame you.
He did. He told me. My only friend.
And so you never told the police.
No.
All these years, you were silent to protect
him.
Bailey’s nails dug
crescents in her palms.
He didn’t do it, Billy Ray insisted. It was me. My responsibility. He
understood.
But he was there.
Not then. Not when I did it. Before.
He brought you the whiskey.
He was my friend.
Who was it, Billy Ray?
Bailey held her
breath. Behind her, Steve tensed.
Can’t tell.
Can’t, or won’t?
Billy Ray remained
stubbornly silent.
Paul switched tacks.
He told you to do it, didn’t he? He told you
to kill your sister.
Because he cared about me.
He didn’t care about anybody but himself. Or why are you
in prison alone?
He was my friend.
He was the baby’s father.
Billy Ray howled, an
animal sound. Nn-oo.
A scrape, a crash, and
the guard’s voice, jumbled together.
Everything’s all right, Paul said, sounding
breathless. Thank you,
officer.
But everything was not
all right. In the background, Bailey could hear Billy Ray weeping.
She felt sick.
You think about what I said. Paul’s voice was flat.
Calm. Cruel. I’ll be back. You think about if
you really want to be locked up for the rest of your life because
your “friend”—the word was vicious—fucked your sister and duped you into getting rid of his
little bastard by murdering them both.
Bailey twisted her
hands together, not daring to look at Steve. She was shaken and
angry and ashamed. “He should have gone to the
police.”
Steve didn’t say
anything.
“Or Billy Ray’s
lawyer.” She knew she was reaching, but she wanted—too late—to do
something that would help the situation. That would excuse her own
part in it. “I mean, he might have had grounds for a new
trial.”
“That would have
helped book sales.” Steve’s tone was dry.
“It would have helped
Billy Ray!”
“Unless he was killed
to prevent him from giving Ellis a name.”
She twisted in the
chair to face him. “But then why was Paul killed? If he didn’t know
who Billy Ray’s ‘friend’ was . . .”
“Maybe our mystery
killer was afraid he’d figure it out.”
Bailey exhaled. That
made sense. “You need to tell Chief Clegg. Once he sees the
interview—”
“I
can’t.”
“I’ll make a copy of
the file.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Steve’s face was set. His eyes were like stones. “The Dawler case
is closed. Sherman is going to the DA tomorrow to request Ellis’s
death be ruled a suicide. According to Clegg, it’s over. I’m done.
I go to him with new evidence now, and I can kiss my job
good-bye.”