Heart Of The Night

by Gayle Wilson

  “Excuse me,” Kate said, managing what was almost a smile. She moved past the sympathetic face of her co-worker to stand outside the opened door of Lew’s office. She found that she had put her hands again on their opposite shoulders, smoothing her clammy palms down the short, silk-knit sleeves of the summer sweater set she’d pulled blindly from her closet this morning.

  Maybe if she appeared to be watching the police do their job, no one would ask questions or demand that she recount what had happened last night. The public’s right to know, she thought bitterly. Only not now. Not yet. Please, just not today.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked when Kahler came out. pitching her voice low enough that the onlookers couldn’t overhear. The hazel eyes assessed her face, so she smiled at him. He shook his head, a single tight movement and then he moved past her, carrying the trailing team of men with him.

  The contents of the familiar office were clearly visible from where she stood, the papers on Lew’s desk straight and more orderly than she’d ever seen them—Kahler’s imposed order, not Lew’s comforting disorder.

  She wondered again who Lew had talked to yesterday. A friend of Barrington’s—that was all she knew for certain. Suddenly the remembrance of Lew jotting something on his desk calendar as they talked was in her head. The image of his pen moving quickly across the already crowded whiteness. She hadn’t told Kahler that. Maybe…

  She glanced toward the newsroom doorway, but there was no sign of the cops. With their departure, most of the staff had made some pretense of getting back to business as usual. Someone would step in to organize, to direct the operation of the paper as Lew had for so many years. Maybe soon. They might even take over the office, clear out Lew’s things. There would be no reason not to. The police were apparently through here.

  She stepped inside Lew’s office and pulled the door closed behind her. She waited a moment, feeling guilty, expecting to be challenged. She had no right to be here. Except this had always been her story, and Lew Garrison had been her friend.

  When nothing happened, no protest concerning the invasion, she walked across the room to Lew’s desk. There were too many memories here, and she felt her eyes burn, suddenly and unexpectedly. She fought the emotion by pushing Kahler’s neatly stacked pile of documents off the calendar desk pad. She ran her finger down the nght-hand side of the page, the place where Lew had been jotting notes as they’d talked. There were names and numbers written there, appointments, reminders as innocuous as “laundry 2:00.” Nothing about Barrington. Nothing that seemed to relate to their conversation yesterday.

  “Damn,” she said under her breath. Just to be sure, she ran her finger across this week’s block of days. Maybe Lew had written whatever he’d written on the appropriate day. Yesterday had been Wednesday the tenth. Only it wasn’t. It was the thirteenth. Wednesday, the thirteenth. It took a moment for the significance to hit her. She looked up and found that the calendar page she was examining so closely wasn’t for July, but for March. Last March. Which meant someone had removed—she stopped and counted backward—four months’ worth of pages. She took all the pages out of the pad and rifled quickly through them, just to make sure that the missing months hadn’t been shifted to the back during the police search. They weren’t there.

  Kahler must have taken them. But he’d said they’d found nothing, so why take the calendar pages. Unless it hadn’t been Kahler. Unless someone else had taken them. Someone who had reason to fear whatever Lew had jotted on their margins. She took a deep breath, trying to think. Either Kahler had lied to her, or he hadn’t noticed the pages were missing.

  Kahler would have noticed, she thought. He was bright and he was thorough, which meant he’d taken them. There had to be a reason for that. Something he didn’t want her to see because he was afraid if she did, she’d pursue it, despite his warning.

  Because it related to Barrington? Because she’d all but admitted to him how she felt about the judge, not exactly unbiased? Call me, Thorne had said on the tape. And before that, When can I see you again?

  To find out what she knew? To find out if Lew had told her whatever had gotten him killed? Kahler said no one had been waiting for her at her apartment last night and no one had followed her. Was it possible that the person involved hadn’t had to follow her because…because she had already gone to his house? Because he already knew that she wasn’t aware of whatever Lew Garrison had discovered?

  But Thorne hadn’t even asked her any questions. They hadn’t talked about anything dealing with the case—other than Lew’s phone call. Was Barrington astute enough to know from the little she’d said that she hadn’t been aware that Lew had made that call? That she certainly didn’t know to whom it had been made?

  She tried to reconstruct their conversation, the exact words, but it was no use. The words she remembered, the phrases that echoed in her head, burned into her memory, all concerned something else. Something very different.

  Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night wanting you. Thinking about you being there with me.

  She had done her duty. She had told Kahler about Lew’s phone call to Barrington’s friend. That didn’t mean she had to believe Barrington had something to do with Lew’s death. The man who had held her, who had kissed her last night, who had confessed how he felt, had not just returned from killing Lew Garrison. She had always trusted her instincts, and there had been nothing there last night except what he had openly confessed to—incredibly, the same obsession she’d felt for weeks.

  Someone tapped on the frosted glass upper half of the door, and Kate watched it swing open before she could formulate a reply. The editor who had spoken to her before stuck her head into the opening.

  “Kate?” she said. “I thought you must be in here. I looked everywhere else.”

  “What is it?” Kate asked

  “Judge Barrington’s on the phone. Line one. I thought you’d want to take it. Since it’s Barrington,” she added.

  “Thanks,” Kate said. She had felt a brief flutter of unease at the comment, and then she realized all the woman could know about Barrington was that he’d been Jack’s first victim. She would assume the call had something to do with the story. No one could suspect that her connection to him was far more personal. She waited until the editor closed the door behind her, and then she took a deep breath, and she picked up the phone.

  “Kate August,” she said.

  “Kate?”

  With the sound of her name, all the doubts she had had about Thorne Barrington’s possible involvement in what had happened to Lew last night—doubts she hadn’t even acknowledged—seemed to slip out of her head.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “You’ve heard?”

  “On the news. They said you found the body. Are you okay?”

  For some reason his concern caused the moisture to sting behind her lids again, but she fought it.

  “Not really. It was…To be honest, it was just as awful as Austin.” She realized that he might not know what she meant, so she added, explaining to a man who certainly needed no explanation of the horror Jack wrought, “I went to Austin. I thought I wanted to see…I had thought, if I was going to be working on the story, I needed to understand—”

  He interrupted. “Kate,” he said softly. Only her name, his voice, again rich with concern, caressing her agitation. And then, “Don’t. Don’t think about it.”

  She took another breath, trying to obey. She knew that wasn’t what she needed to talk to him about. Not today, anyway. Maybe sometime they might talk about that, but today…

  “I told Kahler about Lew’s call,” she said.

  There was a small silence. Maybe he was trying to put that together with what she had said before, but he was as smart as she had always been told he was.

  “His call to my friend?”

  “Lew left a message on my machine last night. Something about doing what we’d talked about. Asking around about you was one of
the things we’d discussed. Kahler heard the message. Lew’s call to your friend must have been one of the last things he did.” An explanation for why she’d told Kahler.

  “Of course,” he said simply.

  “The police will probably want to talk to you, Thorne. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know how to—”

  “There’s nothing to apologize for. A man’s dead. As far as the police are concerned anything he did might be important.” There was a silence, and then he added what she hadn’t asked for. “His name is Greg Sandifer. We’ve been friends since elementary school. He’s a doctor. Not mine, but…the fact that he is a doctor is probably one of the reasons Garrison called him.”

  She didn’t say anything. She knew why he was telling her this. Not to pass on to Kahler, but for her own information. To satisfy her own need to know what his friend had told Lew. To put to rest the doubts that he must have realized had crept, certainly unwanted, into her head since she’d found Lew’s body. For her information—personal and not professional.

  “You didn’t have to tell me that,” she said.

  “Call him,” he said. “Tell him I said to talk to you. Ask him anything you want about his conversation with Garrison.” He began to reel off a number, and her hand automatically found a pen, adding the seven digits to the crowded calendar page on Lew’s desk. “That’s his private number. The fact that you have that number should be introduction enough.”

  “I don’t—” she began, not really certain what she needed to tell him.

  “Call him,” he ordered, interrupting, and then the connection was broken.

  She stood a moment with the phone in her hand, the dial tone annoying. Finally she put the receiver back on the cradle and looked down on the number Barrington had given her. He was right. She did need to know exactly what had been said to Lew Garrison. She needed to know for her own information. Personal

  DESPITE THE FACT that Thorne had given her Dr. Sandifer’s private number, she still had some problems getting through. He refused to speak to her at first. She had thought it only fair to give her name and the paper’s name, and he had refused to take the call. She had then used Barrington’s name and the reminder that she had been given Sandifer’s private number. The masculine voice that finally replaced the smooth politeness of his secretary’s was brusque.

  “I told Lew Garrison everything I have to say to you people. If Thorne did give you this number—”

  “Lew’s dead,” Kate said, breaking into his indignation.

  “Dead?” Sandifer repeated, as if it were a word he’d never heard before.

  “He was murdered last night. Apparently your conversation was one of the last he had. The police will almost certainly want to talk to you to confirm exactly what was said. Because Lew was working on my story, asking questions I’d suggested, I’d like to know what you told him. Judge Barrington gave me your name and number and said to tell you to talk to me.”

  “Why? Why would Thorne want me to talk to you?” he asked. The voice that had been full of anger and then shock was ripe now with suspicion. It was certainly a legitimate question. Kate wasn’t sure she had a legitimate answer.

  “For personal reasons,” she admitted finally.

  Sandifer said nothing for a moment. He was so quiet she could hear background noises from his end of the line, voices, faint and indistinct.

  “Are you trying to tell me…” he began, and then he stopped. Apparently the thought of Thorne Barrington being involved with a reporter was simply beyond his comprehension. “You and Thorne are…” Again, he paused, and despite the situation, at the obvious disbelief in his tone Kate’s mouth moved, almost a smile.

  “Involved,” she affirmed. The word had been in her mind and it had simply come out. Why not? It was true, given last night.

  “Peg said you’re a reporter.”

  “That’s right,” Kate said.

  “Look, in spite of what you claim, I can’t tell you anything about Thorne. I don’t talk to the press about my friends.”

  “You talked to Lew,” she reminded him.

  “That’s exactly what I told Garrison.”

  “That you wouldn’t talk about Barrington?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Sandifer didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he sighed, deeply enough to be audible.

  “He came up with some crap about Thorne’s migraines being emotional.”

  “Psychogenic,” she said.

  “As a matter of fact, that’s the exact word he used.”

  “We had a mutual source,” Kate acknowledged.

  “But the way Lew said it, he made it sound as if it equated with crazy. That’s not what the term means, Ms. August.”

  “Are they?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t Thorne’s doctor.”

  “But?” Kate asked softly, because the qualifier had been in his tone.

  “In my opinion, they’re not.”

  “In your opinion? Or based on something you know? Something you’ve heard.”

  Again there was silence. “I don’t discuss my friends with reporters,” he said finally.

  “But that is what you told Lew yesterday. Nothing else?”

  “Our conversation was very brief. I was ticked off that Lew would even ask, that he thought I’d supply any information about a friend’s medical condition. Even if I had any information. I’ve known Lew a long time, and frankly I was surprised he’d call me and ask that. I thought it was out of character. I remember telling him to leave Barrington alone. I called him a couple of less than complimentary epithets, and I hung up. Then I called Thorne and told him what had happened. I was angry at Lew, but I didn’t kill him if that’s what y’all are thinking. If you and the cops are trying to make some kind of case out of me calling Lew a couple of names—”

  “No one thinks anything like that,” she reassured him, smiling slightly. “You’re not under suspicion, Dr. Sandifer. That’s not why I’m calling you. It’s not why the police will call. They’ll just want to know if you told Lew anything…” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Incriminating.”

  “Incriminating? About me?”

  “No,” Kate said.

  “About Thorne?”

  “Yes.”

  “They think Thorne had something to do with Garrison’s death?” The question was derisive. Apparently, Greg Sandifer was just what he’d claimed to be, a friend of Barrington’s.

  “I think it’s more a matter of checking out all the possibilities. They know Garrison called you concerning Judge Barrington’s injuries, and they know someone killed him shortly after your conversation. They’ll just be trying to determine if the two are in any way related.”

  “I can tell you that they’re not. Not in any way,” Dr. Sandifer said. “If that’s all, Ms. August?”

  “You can call Judge Barrington. He really did give me your number.”

  “You can be assured that I will,” he said succinctly, and then the connection was broken.

  Kate put Lew’s phone back in the cradle and stood a moment looking down at it. She hadn’t handled that conversation very professionally, but at least she knew that the friend of Barrington’s Lew had called hadn’t told him anything that might have gotten him killed. Apparently Dr. Sandifer had given her editor no real information at all about Barrington’s injuries. She took a deep breath and realized only then how tense she had been. Now she could relax, knowing that the doubts that had begun to circle in her head like vultures were groundless.

  She would have to call Kahler and give him Dr. Sandifer’s name. Barrington would, of course, but she needed to confess to the detective that she had made her own call. Kahler would probably chew her out, but the relief she felt as a result of Sandifer’s comments would make his lecture a lot more bearable.

  She took another careful survey of the materials on Lew’s desk, but Kahler had apparently told the truth about that. With the exception of the
missing pages from the calendar, nothing else here seemed to relate to Jack. The material she had collected through the months she’d been involved in the story was in the file drawer of her desk—with the exception of the pictures of Barrington that had been taken from her apartment. That was something else she needed to confess to Kahler. Since he now knew something of what she felt about Thorne, that confession would finally be possible. She could pretend that she had just discovered the photographs were missing.

  She walked out of Lew’s office and closed the door behind her. She was a little surprised that Kahler hadn’t ordered the office locked, but maybe their search had been thorough enough that he was convinced there was nothing else to be learned from Lew’s papers. Or maybe Kahler, bless his heart, had left it open so that she would have the opportunity to do exactly what she had just done—to take her own look around.

  She sat down in her chair and opened the bottom left-hand drawer of her desk. It was immediately apparent that something was wrong. Half the file folders were lying face down in the front of the drawer, the rest propped drunkenly against them.

  She hesitated a moment, trying to decide what was going on. Finally, she picked up the fallen folders and pushed them to the back of the drawer, all upright again. She began to thumb through the tabs on top, but she knew what was missing. The thick collection of her materials relating to the Tripper bombings was gone, just like the newspaper pictures she’d taken home. She wouldn’t be able to do what she’d told Kahler she’d do, read through all the material to see if there was anything—

  Suddenly she remembered. That was the other thing she and Lew had talked about. She had told Lew that Kahler had found the Mays connection by reading back through the dockets of Barrington’s cases, and then Lew had said something about maybe that’s what they ought to do. Read back through everything to see if there was anything they’d overlooked.

  She had been so smug that day, bragging about knowing every detail included in the material. But maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe Lew had done exactly what he’d suggested they should do—read back through all the files. Maybe he’d taken them into his office, sat down at his desk, the material she’d collected spread out before him, and gone over it all with a fine-toothed comb.