Before I Sleep

by Rachel Lee

  “So,” said Carey, keeping her gaze on Marcia, “Jamie could have driven to Florida when he was seventeen. If he had wanted to. Or he could have bought a bus ticket.”

  Gerry shrugged. “I suppose. The thing is, he didn't. He was here.”

  “Gerry,” Marcia said tentatively.

  Carey took advantage of the moment, the way she so often had as a prosecutor. “Where exactly was your son on the day the Klines were murdered?”

  “Exactly?” Gerry said blankly. “What in the world …”

  “I mean, was he here? In this house? In his own bed? Did he have dinner here and breakfast here, with you? Did you actually see him with your own eyes?”

  “Look…” said Gerry angrily, rising to his feet.

  But Carey pressed on. She'd pressed on even in the face of irritated judges. No accountant was going to stop her. “Was he here, or did you lose track of him, say between noon on Saturday and noon on Sunday? Did he tell you he was going to stay with a friend? Or did he call and say he'd be out late, and then claim the next day that he'd left early? What really happened? In detail!”

  Gerry raised a finger, his face twisted in anger, but Marcia never took her eyes off Carey. Something in her face seemed to crumple.

  “I don't know for sure,” she said finally, her voice qua-very.

  “Marcia!” her husband barked. “You don't have to say anything at all. You gave them a sworn statement five years ago, and they have no right to anything else.”

  Marcia did look at him then. “Yes, they do, Gerry. I told them he was at home. I told you he was at home. And I really thought he was. But you were away that weekend, remember? And I never thought Jamie would lie. He had never lied to me before, even when he'd done something really bad. So I just assumed what I said was true, that he was here in Atlanta, and that saying he was at home simply kept Kevin Rutland out of it. You know how you feel about the Rutlands. They'd have been appalled, and you would have been appalled, if we did anything that dragged them into that mess in Florida. So I hedged the truth just a tiny bit.”

  “Marcia…” Her husband's voice had grown quiet, almost disbelieving.

  “Until this very minute, I honestly believed he was right here all the time. But when Miss Stover said all that about the car and was he really here every minute or did I lose track of him… And then, thinking of what they said about what's happening in Florida… Gerry, maybe I was wrong! Maybe he lied to me! Maybe he didn't really go to spend the weekend with Kevin after all!”

  CHAPTER 18

  5 Days

  The maid brought tea and coffee for everyone, giving Marcia a chance to calm herself. Her hands trembled so badly that the bone china cup rattled against the saucer as she held them. Her husband ignored the beverages and stared at nothing in particular, a man stunned.

  Finally, he looked at Seamus. “You're not going to charge Marcia with perjury, are you?”

  “I don't see the point,” Seamus answered. “She said what she thought was true at the time. I'm just glad she had second thoughts about it now. I would like Kevin Rutland's phone number, to confirm whether Jamie was there, if you don't mind.”

  Gerry nodded wearily. All his anger was gone, and he looked whipped.

  “And credit cards. You said you give the children credit cards. Did Jamie have one?”

  “Yes, he did. A small limit, naturally. One doesn't want to give a child too much money.”

  “No, that wouldn't be a good idea. I don't suppose there's any chance you would have kept the bills from so long ago?”

  “Well, of course I kept them.” He grimaced. “I'm an accountant. I keep everything for at least seven years.”

  “Would it be possible for me to see Jamie's?”

  Marcia was considerably calmer now, and while Gerry left the room Carey turned to her. “Was there anything Jamie was upset about right before that weekend? Anything to do with his brother?”

  Marcia's eyes teared up again. “I was just thinking about that. Friday night, John called. Apparently he'd had a terrible argument with his foster parents and had been thrown out. Jamie thought he'd been thrown out for good, but I told him no parent would do that, not for real. I don't know whether he believed me or not. But I do know that Jamie was upset about it. He said something about the Klines not deserving a son like Johnny.”

  Meanwhile, Gerry had returned with a file folder. He sat at his desk and flipped it open, leafing through a stack of credit card bills. When he was about halfway through, he froze. “My God,” he said.

  “What?” asked Seamus.

  Now it was the accountant's hand that trembled as he passed a receipt to Seamus. Carey leaned over to look at it.

  James Henry Otis had spent the night of the murders in a cheap motel in Tampa.

  “Didn't you notice that when you paid the bill?” Seamus asked him.

  Gerry's face was ashen. “I didn't pay the bill. The children pay their own credit card bills. It's their responsibility.”

  “Do you have a picture of him you could give me?” Seamus asked.

  Gerry nodded.

  And Marcia began to sob.

  Ten minutes later they departed, photo in hand.

  “Well,” said Carey, as they walked out to their rental car, “we now have motive and opportunity.”

  “It's not enough. Not by a long shot.”

  She paused to look at him as he unlocked the car door. “It's enough to give me a lever if he calls the station again this week.”

  Seamus opened the door for her. “Maybe. Jesus, we've got to get our hands on this guy before it's too late!”

  “Maybe Kevin Rutland has talked to him.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  Seamus drove to a pay phone and placed the call to Kevin Rutland, who was these days working in his father's corporation. He was put through almost immediately.

  “Mr. Rutland, my name is Seamus Rourke. I'm a detective with the St. Petersburg, Florida, Police Department.”

  “Oh. I've never been there,” said a young man's cultured voice with Georgia's tentative drawl.

  “Well, that answers one question I was going to ask you. But you do know James Henry Otis?”

  “Yes. At least I used to. We went to school together and hung around together a lot back then.”

  “Have you seen him or heard from him since he was released from the hospital a month ago?”

  There was a pause. Finally the young man said slowly, “I haven't seen Jamie since his brother was convicted of murder years ago. Even if he hadn't gone to the hospital, my family wouldn't have approved. We don't associate with that sort. I don't know anything about him.”

  “I see. Mr. Rutland, I really need your help here, so if you could stay with me a few moments?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you happen to remember the weekend when Jamie's brother committed the murders in Florida?”

  “Vaguely. It stuck in my mind because that was when Jamie started to have his breakdown. At least I think it was. It was months, of course, before he got bad enough to be hospitalized, but that's when he started acting strangely.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was terribly upset because his brother had phoned and said his foster parents had thrown him out. I know we spent most of the evening together after the call. Jamie could hardly talk about anything else. He was very upset. Too upset, I thought at the time.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, Johnny may have been his brother, but Jamie hadn't seen him much in years. Johnny came up to visit once or twice, I recall, and a couple of times Jamie went down to visit Johnny, but there wasn't a whole lot of contact between them, other than occasional phone calls. Besides, I'd had fights with my parents like the one Johnny had. Or at least I thought I did. Maybe Jamie didn't tell me everything. Anyway, I remember getting bored with it and telling him to cut it out, that it wasn't his problem.”

  “How did he feel about that?”

  “He got mad at m
e and went home.”

  “Would he have gone to visit anyone else?”

  “I doubt it. It was late. Besides, I was his best friend. Most of the other kids wouldn't put up with him for long.”

  “When did you see him next?”

  “At school on Monday.”

  “How did he act?”

  “He wouldn't talk to me. I thought he was being extreme, so I blew him off. After that, he didn't have any friends at all, especially after we heard Johnny had been charged with murder. Some of us really wondered about Jamie. He'd been in trouble with the law, and there were a couple of times he went over the top, hitting a teacher and pulling a knife. Up until then, we kind of ignored it, because we'd all heard how tough it had been for him as a kid, and our parents thought we should make allowances. But after Johnny was charged—well, we all kind of wondered if Jamie was any better.”

  “So he was ostracized?”

  Kevin Rutland hesitated. “I don't know that I'd say that, exactly. People were polite to him. It's just that nobody wanted to be alone with him after that. Besides, he pretty much dropped out of everything himself. He used to be fun, at least, but after that, he just got dark and quiet. Brooding. He even got so he didn't answer when anyone talked to him.”

  “When he was talking to you that night after his brother called, did he say anything about going to Florida?”

  There was a long pause. Finally, “You don't think he murdered those people, do you?”

  Seamus looked out at the steady flow of traffic, trying to decide how to answer that. “I'm just clearing up a few details. Did he say anything about it?”

  “No. Not to me. But he did say they ought to be killed.”

  “Damn it!” Carey said after Seamus related the conversation. She slapped her hand on the dashboard. “Damn it, I should have come up here to take Marcia Wiggins's statement myself!”

  “Hindsight,” Seamus said shortly. They were approaching the airport, and traffic was getting thick. “You had an affidavit that confirmed his alibi.”

  “No, I was a fool. People lie. People he all the damn time, and I knew it even then! I should have questioned the affidavit! I should have talked to his mother myself. My God, who had a better motive to lie than his mother?”

  “Carey, nobody was seriously looking at James Otis as the killer. Why should we have? He lived all the way up here, he was just a kid—who was going to suppose he could even get to Florida? How many seventeen-year-old kids do you know with their own cars and credit cards?”

  “These days there are a lot of them.”

  “Right. And we never see them because they come from good families, and if they ever do wind up in trouble, it's usually because of underage drinking, drugs, or DUI. Not because they crossed state lines in their own cars, using their own credit cards, in order to kill somebody they hardly know. It was such a long shot nobody even seriously thought about it. You know that.”

  “It doesn't make it any better.”

  “Besides, we had the problem of no forced entry. It had to be somebody with a key, or somebody the Klines let into the house. That pretty much pointed to John.”

  She laughed almost bitterly. “Right. Except now we know that Jamie knew the Klines well enough that if he had shown up on their doorstep unannounced, they'd probably have let him in because he was John's brother.”

  “We know that now. We didn't know that then.”

  “Yeah.” She shook her head and wrapped her arms tightly around herself, trying to hold in all the feelings that were roiling inside her. “God, what a lousy investigation!”

  Seamus pulled into the rental car return place. “I'll be back in just a minute. Quit beating yourself up, Carey. It's not going to help.”

  But she couldn't stop. She'd been one of the people on the team that had dismissed James Otis too quickly and too easily. But she had believed John was innocent, so why in hell hadn't she looked more closely at his brother?

  It was all well and good to say that it appeared Jamie was too far away, and they did have an affidavit from his mother saying he was home all weekend, but that didn't ease her conscience any now.

  And worse, she believed that John had known his brother had committed the murder. Who else would he stay silent for all this time except the little brother he had once killed to save? Damn, it was as obvious as the nose on her face! Why hadn't she seen it back then, when it would have saved so much grief? So much death.

  It was Friday. John Otis would be executed early on Wednesday. Time was running out, and now they had the weekend in front of them, a time during which it would be almost impossible to do anything to stay the execution.

  Not that they really had enough yet. God, they needed more!

  They arrived at the gate just in time to board their flight Carey sat in the window seat and wondered if Seamus was going to sleep all the way, as he had last time. She didn't know which would drive her crazier, being left alone with her own thoughts, or talking to Seamus for the next several hours.

  As they were taxiing down the runway to takeoff, Seamus reached out and took her hand. She felt contradictory urges to yank it away and keep it there forever.

  “Carey?” He leaned toward her. “Remember what you told me about my guilt trip over my wife and daughter?”

  She looked at him, not knowing how to take this change of subject. “What do you mean?”

  “You told me I'd done the best I could, and that's all anybody can do. I'm finally starting to believe that. Maybe it's time you took your own advice. You did the best that you could.”

  Carey looked away, staring out the window as the runway began to pass by in a blur. Acceleration pressed her back into her seat, and finally she felt that heart-stopping bob as the plane took flight.

  Her best, she thought bitterly, hadn't been enough.

  Carey was the one who dozed off on the flight, and awoke as they were approaching Tampa with a stiff neck and a headache. Seamus was reading the book she had brought along. Apparently he had pulled it out of the side pocket of her carry-on when he realized she wasn't going to be much company.

  When he felt her stir, he turned to look at her. “Get a good nap?”

  “I was out like a tight, but now my neck is stiff and my head is killing me.”

  He reached out and put his hand on the back of her neck. “Let me rub it.”

  At his merest touch, her body felt shivers of delight that her brain resented, but she couldn't bring herself to pull away. His fingers were working the tension out of her so quickly that she could feel the difference, and with the tension, the headache began to let go.

  “Better?” he asked after a few minutes.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He removed his hand, leaving her feeling ridiculously bereft. “How's your guilt trip?”

  “Vicious.”

  He nodded and leaned his head back against the seat. As the plane made its approach, the ride was growing bumpier.

  “Are you really over yours?” she asked.

  “I'm beginning to think so. At least the worst of it. I realized the other night after I cleaned out my daughter's room that I've been hanging on to the guilt to avoid feeling the loss. Their deaths left a great big hole in my life, and I filled it with guilt. Make sure you don't do that.”

  She looked down at her hands, feeling moved in a way she couldn't quite identify.

  “About this morning,” he said, catching her unawares. “Are you going to tell me what it was I did that pissed you off?”

  In the past, he wouldn't have asked. And it was only now that she realized that his failure to ask had always left her feeling unimportant. Feeling as if he didn't care. She turned her head, feeling the residual stiffness in her neck protest. “It doesn't matter.”

  “Yes, damn it, it does matter. You were angry with me, and I want to know why. I apologized for not being there, so it has to be something else. I'm not a mind reader, Carey. I can't fix it if I don't know what it is.”


  She felt as if a hitherto closed door in her life had suddenly opened. He was trying to bridge the silence that had once helped cause the end of their relationship. And she was in danger of falling into the old pattern of not telling him how she was feeling and why. She'd come a long way from the girl who had once had an affair with him. In the intervening years she'd become downright blunt about anything and everything she had an opinion or feeling about.

  Except now, with Seamus. Being with him had her walking on those old eggshells again because … because at the very bottom of it all, she feared that if she expressed the less pleasant things he made her feel at times she would lose him.

  She was still looking at him, but she hardly saw him as she understood something about herself. The icy silence across the breakfast table had reminded her of all the times their relationship had been silent. Times she had forgotten because the memories of their flaming fights were so much quicker to spring to mind.

  But the silences had probably been as deadly as the fights.

  It amazed her how difficult it was to explain what happened, but she tried. “It was … it was that I was feeling… well, raw. And you weren't there, so I thought you were regretting what happened.”

  “But I explained.”

  She nodded. “You did. And then I didn't want to admit how vulnerable I was feeling …” Her voice trailed away, and she averted her face. She wouldn't have believed it could be so difficult to admit such a simple thing.

  Seamus reclaimed her hand, and he squeezed it “That's always been hard for you to admit, hasn't it.”

  She nodded, still unable to look at him.

  “Well, for what it's worth, I feel vulnerable as hell.”

  Then she did look at him. “You do?”

  “You better believe it. You twist me up in ways no other woman has ever done. You think I'm not worried about what happened between us last night? You think I didn't consider looking for a place to hide this morning? But regardless, there's one thing I can tell you for an absolute fact. I never once regretted our lovemaking last night.”

  In that moment, she felt as safe as she had ever felt with him. Before, she had never considered that he might have as much to lose as she did. In fact, she had believed him to be emotionally removed from their relationship, so bound up in his guilt and grief that nothing she might do would affect him at all.