Before I Sleep

by Rachel Lee

  “How old is he?”

  “Fifty-nine.”

  Carey shook her head. “I would have guessed seventy something.”

  “The sun and the bottle will do that to a person.”

  He walked her out to her car and opened the door for her. She didn't climb in immediately, though. Instead she leaned against the side of the car, folded her arms, and let the wind whip her hair around.

  She was reluctant to break the tenuous thread between them, she realized. She didn't want to drive away and go back to her lonely, empty life and thoughts of John William Otis. What she wanted was just a few moments of escape from all the burdens that seemed to weigh on her.

  “What?” he said finally. The streetlights cast strange shadows on his face.

  “My station manager told me to stop focusing solely on the Otis story,” she said. She wasn't sure what made her tell him that, but as soon as she spoke she knew she was seeking some kind of validation. And from exactly the wrong person, she thought unhappily. Seamus had already told her she was obsessed.

  “Did he say why?”

  “The advertisers are getting nervous. They think people will stop listening.”

  “Do you think that's a legitimate concern?”

  “What I think doesn't really matter, I guess. If the advertisers are getting nervous, they'll stop buying time on the show.”

  “Self-fulfilling prophecy, in other words.”

  “That's one way of putting it.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  She had forgotten how well he could listen. Toward the end, neither of them had been listening, and both had been doing a lot of shouting. “I'm not sure.”

  “Did he say you couldn't do Otis at all?”

  She shook her head. “He just wants me to do some other stuff, too.”

  “Well, that's reasonable.”

  “I guess. But it's weird.”

  “What is?”

  She waved a hand. “How little there is to say about a man's life. How little there actually is to say about taking a man's life.”

  He turned and leaned back against the car beside her. The rustle of the wind in the treetops and the clatter of the palm fronds was a soothing sound, like the rushing of water in a river. “What would you have people say?”

  “I don't know. It's just that—well, it seems so momentous to me. We should at least face the enormity of what we're about to do.”

  “I don't think most people consider it an enormity. They consider the crime that got him there to be enormous.”

  “I suppose. And, of course, most of them are safely removed from direct contact with what's going to happen.”

  “I don't think it's as simple as that, Carey.”

  “No, probably not. Nothing is ever that simple.” She shook her hair back from her face. “Maybe I'll use that for a monologue.”

  “What?”

  “That our hands are as dirty as Otis's.”

  He gave a short laugh. “That'll sure make you popular.”

  “Well, it's true. Whether we vocally support the death penalty, or just give it tacit approval, we're conspiring to commit cold-blooded murder.”

  He pushed away from the car and looked down at her. “That'll be sure to thrill your advertisers.”

  She shrugged.

  “Look, Carey. You're very involved with the case. But you're also a good lawyer, and you know how to look at all sides of an issue. Before you go out there and accuse John Q. Citizen of conspiring to commit cold-blooded murder, maybe you ought to consider that John Q. Citizen is merely trying to wrench justice from an impossible situation.”

  “It won't give the Klines back their lives.”

  “No, it won't. And that's why the penalty is so severe. No amount of restitution can repair the damage. All we can do is exact a penalty commensurate with the crime.”

  He reached out and touched her cheek gently. All of a sudden, she found it impossible to breathe, impossible to move. The night wind whispered in her ears as his fingertips whispered over her skin, making her feel more alive than she had felt in a long time.

  “I'm sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “That it didn't work out for us. That it got so ugly at the end.”

  “Breakups tend to be ugly, Seamus.”

  “But neither of us is an ugly person. I said things—well, I've regretted them ever since. If you happen to remember them from time to time, just tell yourself I didn't mean them. Because I didn't.”

  “We just weren't suited.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  They stood there looking at one another in the poor light from the streetlamps, and Carissa felt as if the night were suddenly hushed with expectancy. She waited. He waited.

  And nothing happened.

  Finally, she turned and slid into the car. Seamus watched while she dug her keys out of her purse, then reached out to close the door. He paused.

  “When are you going to see Otis?”

  She looked up at him, wondering why he should even care. “I'm going to drive up to Starke Sunday afternoon. I'll see him early Monday morning, then drive back in time to do my show.”

  He nodded. “I'll drive up with you.”

  Shock caused her heart to slam. An overreaction, surely. “Why? They won't let you see him.”

  “I don't want to see him.”

  He slammed the door without offering any explanation for why he was going with her. She hesitated, wanting to question him, but finally deciding she probably didn't want to hear his answers.

  She switched on the ignition and backed out of his driveway. As she drove away, she glanced into the rearview mirror and saw him still standing there, all alone in the night.

  CHAPTER 7

  17 Days

  Carissa awoke in the morning feeling worse than when she'd gone to bed just after two. Her eyes itched as if they were full of sand, her muscles felt leaden and achy, and her mouth felt as if a colony of moles had taken up residence. She hadn't slept well again; anxiety and fear had woven themselves into the few unpleasant dreams she had managed to have.

  And Seamus. Of course, Seamus. His voice was in her ears when her eyes opened as if he had been part of the dreams that had dogged her. He probably had been. Seeing so much of him after having convinced herself that she hated his very guts had unsettled her.

  It unsettled her even more when she realized that she was looking at the lump of the pillow beside her and wanting to cry because it was just a pillow and not a shoulder. Not Seamus's shoulder. Her throat grew so tight that it hurt to breathe.

  “God!” Throwing back the covers, she forced herself to get up.

  Staggering across her bedroom in a body that didn't want to obey, she decided to take a run to get the blood flowing. She pulled on her shorts, sports bra, and a tank top, clipped her hair back, and headed downstairs, making up her mind that tonight she was going to take an antihistamine to help her sleep. Enough was enough.

  She grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and swallowed half of it on her way to the door. When she opened the door, the late-morning Florida heat poured over her, washing away the dregs of her energy. The sun glared, hurting her eyes, and she stood there on the threshold trying to get up the will to step out into it.

  The newspaper was on her doorstep, wrapped in clear plastic, and it suggested a good excuse to stay in. She could scan it for stories for tonight's show.

  She settled for the paper, deciding that in this heat she'd only drop before she ran two blocks. She picked it up and turned to go back in. That's when she saw her door.

  How she had missed it when she opened it, she couldn't imagine, except possibly the sun's glare had distracted her. But facing it now, she felt herself go suddenly light-headed with anger.

  Someone had spray-painted the carved wood in screaming red with the words BLEADING HEART.

  There was a sound in her head like a dry twig snapping, and suddenly she was gasping for brea
th, overwhelmed by fury and fear. She didn't even reach out to see if the paint was still wet. She ran inside, closing the door with a bang and locking it.

  She leaned back against it, trying to catch her breath.

  It was just paint, she told herself. Graffiti. It meant nothing.

  But it meant something. It meant that someone had found out who Carey Justice was, and had gone to the trouble to find out where she lived.

  And that made the blood in her veins run cold.

  The Pinellas County sheriff's deputy who responded to her call was pleasant, polite, and not very helpful.

  “Do you know if any of your neighbors are mad at you?”

  She shook her head. “I don't think so. I don't know any of them really well. We work different hours.”

  He made a note in his notebook. “Anybody else who might have it in for you?”

  “Oh, anyone of a half million listeners to my radio show.”

  “You do radio?”

  “Talk radio. WCST.”

  He looked up. “You're Carey Justice.”

  She nodded.

  He made a note of that, too. “I listen to you sometimes.”

  “Anyway, I think this is linked to the shows I've been doing lately on the death penalty and John William Otis.”

  When he looked up again, his eyes had grown opaque. “I heard what you're doing. Stirring up a real hornet's nest.”

  “That's my job.”

  He made another note. “I guess that would explain what the ‘bleeding heart’ means.”

  “It was the first thing I thought of.”

  He nodded. “Well, to be quite frank, there's very little chance we'll ever catch who did this. I'll talk to your neighbors, find out if anyone saw anything, but if they didn't …” He shrugged. “Like you said, it could be any one of a half million people who think Otis ought to fry.”

  She managed to stifle a sigh. “Look, I'm not worried about the paint. I can have the door fixed. What I don't like is that someone made a connection between me and my radio persona, and they found out where I live. How would someone do that? The radio station doesn't let that information out.”

  He nodded, closing his notebook. “You might've given that away when you told everybody you'd worked as a prosecutor on the case. Somebody might have gone to the trouble to find out your name.”

  She hadn't thought of that. Damn, she hadn't thought of that.

  “And of course, somebody could have followed you home from the station.”

  That thought gave her chills. “Not last night.”

  “It didn't have to be last night,” he pointed out. “All I can tell you is to keep your windows and doors locked, and be cautious. If anything else happens, let us know. In the meantime, we'll try to find out something about the graffiti, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “And you might consider doing something else on your show. If you've attracted some kind of nut, that might put him off.”

  That only made her angrier. There was a little issue here called free speech.

  She walked the deputy to the door. After he stepped out, he turned to face her. “Otis should fry,” he said. “It's what he deserves for killing those people.”

  She couldn't even reply. Her face felt as stiff as if it were carved from wood.

  She watched him walk out to his car, a young, swaggering buck in the white shirt and green pants of the Sheriff's Department. Like most cops, he walked as if he owned the world.

  Well, she decided as she closed her door on the sight of him, maybe tonight she'd do a little show for him about police perjury and misconduct. She certainly had enough stories in her war chest to get that ball rolling.

  And she could spend the evening imagining the smile being wiped off his smug young face.

  The first thing she saw when she pulled into the station parking lot at a little after three that afternoon was the graffiti that covered the entire front side of the building.

  Fry Otis and Burn WCST had been sprayed in vivid red paint across the wall, along with Kill Justice and Fry Carey. A TV crew was out front, filming the building, but she hardly saw them. She pulled into a parking slot, then sat staring at the vandalized building.

  She started shaking, but not from fright. Anger filled her with white heat. If she could have gotten her hands on the people who had done this, she would have put the fear of God into them. And worse, she had the sickening feeling that this was going to be the final straw as far as the station was concerned. If Bill Hayes didn't order her to stop talking about Otis, the owners probably would.

  She climbed out of the car with her laptop, her sweater, and her bottled water. There was no hope of escaping recognition by the TV crew. The reporter, Adela Gutierrez, had worked with her on some promos together in the past, and of course a lot of the media people socialized at station Christmas parties.

  But she could try to limit the damage. Before she came within camera range, she signaled to Adela that she wanted to have a private word with her. Then she turned her back so that if the cameraman tried to catch her, he'd get nothing but brown hair and the back of her white blouse.

  Adela wrapped up her segment, then told the cameraman to wait and not to film anything until she told him to. Hearing that, Carey turned and walked over to her.

  Adela greeted her with a smile and a handshake. “You've really stirred it up this time, Carey.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “You'll give me a comment, won't you?”

  “Well, that depends. I haven't talked to Bill Hayes yet, so I don't know what the station's position on this is going to be.”

  Adela nodded. “But you can still say what you think.”

  “On one condition. That you don't give my real name on air. I don't want some nut to know who I really am. It would be too easy to find me.”

  “That might be a little difficult, Carey. You have a personal tie-in to the Otis case, and you might put a lid on me, but somebody else will let it out. It's part of the story.”

  “The story is the vandalism.”

  She shook her head. “The story is that you're a former state attorney who prosecuted the case, and you still have doubts about it, doubts that you're bringing up on the air to run a marathon about Otis. The vandalism is just a sidebar.”

  Carey's stomach sank. She hadn't thought her shows about Otis were newsworthy. And that was really dumb, she realized, because she had had the subjects of other shows turn up as news in print or on television; there was no reason she should have assumed that the media wouldn't be interested in this story.

  Now she was facing a reporter who wanted a scoop for tonight's five o'clock news. If Adela was right about the thrust of the story here—and she probably was—then even if Carey refused to speak to her now, it would be all over the papers in the morning anyway.

  “All right,” Carey finally said. “I'll answer just one question, as long as it isn't about the station.”

  Adela hesitated, then nodded. “Fair enough.” She pursed her lips a moment, then turned to stand beside Carey, microphone at ready. “Mike?”

  The cameraman settled his minicam more firmly on his shoulder, made some adjustment and said, “Go ahead.”

  “I have with me WCST talk-show host Carey Justice. Carey, how do you feel about the graffiti? Are you afraid?”

  “No, I'm not afraid, Adela. I'm angry. There's no need to vandalize private property. Whoever did this should have just called my show and spoken his piece.”

  “But what about the threats against you and the station?”

  Two questions, Carey thought, but decided to answer anyway. “This is just an exercise of free speech. It goes to show that feelings run high on this issue. That's all.”

  Then, before Adela could ask yet another question, Carey ducked past her and headed for the door, aware that the camera followed her all the way. She could hardly wait to see how this turned out on tonight's news.

&
nbsp; Inside, the station seemed perfectly normal. Becky Hadlov sat at the reception desk, talking on the phone. As Carey passed, Becky handed her a stack of messages, all of which were calls from reporters at area newspapers and TV stations. Great.

  Becky put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. “Bill wants to see you.”

  Of course Bill wanted to see her. He was probably going to read her the riot act. In fact, it wouldn't surprise her if he asked her to pay for repainting the front of the building. Anything seemed possible today.

  “He's in the snack room,” Becky called after her.

  Carey switched directions and headed toward the back of the building. The snack room was usually empty at this time of day, but this afternoon it was crowded. A surprising number of show hosts were there along with Bill, as were some of the advertising and marketing people, a number of the producers, and some of the techies.

  Carey stopped short. “Did I miss a meeting notice?”

  Bill shook his head and pointed to an empty chair. “We're talking about the graffiti.”

  “Oh.” She sat, putting her laptop, sweater, and bottled water on the table. She had the uncomfortable feeling that Bill was about to make an example out of her. Well, she told herself, she could always find another job.

  “As I was saying,” said Frank Villiers, one of the marketing people, “we're already getting ads yanked from Carey's show. National advertisers don't seem to be too concerned yet, but local advertisers are bailing out. If she stays on this topic, we'll lose an awful lot of revenue over the next few weeks.”

  “And it's impossible to tell how many listeners we're losing,” said the marketing director. “We're not due for another ratings sweep for five weeks.”

  “She was topping the ratings in the last sweep,” said Ted Sanders, a surprising ally from Carey's perspective. They were poles apart, politically. “I wouldn't be all that sure that a lot of people are turning her off. She's always discussed controversial issues from a liberal perspective. And the conservatives seem to love to argue with her.”

  Carl Dunleavy, the afternoon host, spoke. “I think we need to be reasonable here. Carey's been pushing an important issue into public awareness. And I think all of us who have shows have been seeing spillover into our programs.”