by Lisa Jackson
Already too long.
Aunty-Pen could arrive home at any moment, and what then? She really could be trapped up here. “No way.”
Removing the jump drive from her pocket, she wondered how many laws she was breaking. Probably half a dozen, but she kept at it, downloading all the information pertaining to Blondell O’Henry onto her portable drive. “Come on, come on,” she whispered, as time seemed to stretch and . . . Oh, no! The sound of the garage door rolling upward reached her ears.
Oh, Jesus!
Panicked, Nikki stared at the screen. Her file was still loading . . . sixty-five percent, sixty-eight percent.
She heard a car pull into the garage.
Damn!
A car’s engine purred loudly, the smooth rumble audible through the walls. Aunty-Pen’s Mercedes.
Eighty-two percent.
“Oh, please.”
The engine died.
Ninety-five percent.
Almost . . . almost . . .
A car door slammed shut with a solid thud.
Oh, God!
Ninety-eight percent.
Nikki was sweating now, her palms and fingers damp.
The back door opened and footsteps sounded.
One hundred percent.
On automatic, Nikki pulled the jump drive out of the CPU, crammed it into her pocket, and shut down the computer as footsteps clicked across the hardwood floor of the kitchen and Nikki heard a rustle of paper—grocery bags?—as she climbed out of her uncle’s desk chair, slid it into place, and tiptoed to the door of Alexander McBaine’s escape route. It was her only way out because the front door was visible through the foyer to the kitchen.
Her throat as dry as sand, she tried the door.
Locked.
Damn!
But she still had the keys she’d found in his desk in her pocket. Maybe . . . Oh, please! With fumbling fingers she extracted the ring and put the first key into the lock. No go! The metal clinked softly. Another key into the lock. It too wouldn’t turn. Surely one of these opened the door. If not . . .
She slid in the third and then the fourth key as the computer’s shutdown music played.
Oh, no!
“Hello?” her aunt called from the kitchen.
Nikki, mentally making up excuses for when she had to face her, tried the fifth key just as she heard footsteps against the marble in the foyer.
Click!
The lock sprang.
Quickly, she opened the door and slid through and, as it shut softly, heard, “What the devil? I was sure I opened these!”
The blinds. Nikki had forgotten to reopen them. Praying not to catch her aunt’s attention, she slowly turned the lock on the inside of the door and tried to ignore the fact that she was in a tight, closed space. Yes, the hallway ran behind her, but she couldn’t move yet, couldn’t take a chance that her footsteps would be heard, so she had to fight the feeling that, in the darkness, the walls seemed to be closing in on her and she was having trouble getting enough air.
“What’s going on here?” Penelope McBaine asked, and Nikki prayed it was a rhetorical question that wasn’t aimed at her, hiding as she was, one six-panel door separating her from her aunt.
Holding her breath, Nikki could only imagine that her aunt was eyeing the computer, or feeling the CPU to find out that it was still warm, or turning it on to view the past history, to see what had been accessed and when.
All this cloak-and-dagger stuff was about to become her undoing. Her entire scalp prickled and she could scarcely breathe. She heard her aunt walk around the room, and then heard a door creak open. The closet. Next, of course, Aunty-Pen tried the door to the passageway, and it rattled in front of Nikki but didn’t move.
What if Aunty-Pen has her own key?
How would she explain herself?
From the other side of the door, she heard: “For the love of Mike, I could have sworn . . . Now, where is that key?” More footsteps. The creak of a drawer being pulled open. “I know I put them in here the last time I used them.”
Nikki closed her eyes. Her blood pounded in her brain. The drawer was shut with finality.
“What did Alex do with them?”
Another drawer was opened and slammed shut. It was only a matter of time before she either realized the key ring dangling from Nikki’s fingers was missing or found another set somewhere.
At that second, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket, jangling the keys. Crap! She jammed her hand deep into the pocket and retrieved the vibrating phone to see that Reed had finally called her back. Too bad. She couldn’t talk to him now.
Carefully, Nikki felt around the wall and found the light switch. Wondering if she was making a horrible mistake, she clicked it on and then removed her shoes.
No longer hearing any sounds from the other side of the door, she turned and walked in her stocking feet along the unheated corridor, which ran alongside an interior wall and eventually dumped into the garage. Her uncle’s escape route was now, hopefully, hers.
Quickly. Quietly. Running on tiptoes along the plywood floor that ran the length of the house, she reached the far end. Paused. Heart thudding. Listening hard. She heard nothing in the garage. Snapping off the light with one hand, she cautiously opened the door and found herself one step away from Aunty-Pen’s Mercedes, its engine still ticking, raindrops running down the windshield and off the hood. Wasting no time, she cut across the cement, skirting the water dripping from the luxury car, hoping she was leaving no footprints. At the main door, she slipped through. But only when she was on the far side of the property, out where she could breathe the fresh, rain-drenched air, did she pause to slip on her shoes and then hurry along the path wedged between the fence line and the foliage.
The day was dark, clouds blocking the sun, rain coming down in a torrent. Nikki glanced back once and saw, in the warm light of the kitchen window, her aunt’s silhouette as Penelope peered through the gloom.
For a second Nikki felt a twinge of remorse. What she’d done wasn’t right—was downright criminal, actually—as she’d committed a theft. But it was done now, and she realized she should probably feel a whole lot worse than she did.
Get the hell out of here before you get caught. She probably sees you already, so you’d better come up with a damned good story when you meet her again.
Feeling like a traitor, the keys and jump drive in her pockets suddenly weighted down like lead, Nikki let herself out the back gate to run past the campfire as she made her way to her car.
Once behind the wheel and on her way home, she could breathe again, feel a little better. Learning more information on what had led to Amity’s death would be worth it. Maybe she could finally help bring justice to her friend by exposing the truth. Maybe she could even assuage her own guilt a little.
“Come to the cabin, okay?” Amity had begged, her words seeming to echo through the interior of Nikki’s Honda. “. . . Please. It’s a matter of life or death!”
December 12th
Fourth Interview
“If you would just tell me your story, how you remember things,” Nikki Gillette begs from her side of the glass window, as if she pleads with me enough, she will finally get through. She’s gripping the dirty receiver as if her life depended upon it, her fingers clenched tight, her knuckles showing white in her desperation. “Talk to me. Let me know what really happened. If not to clear your conscience or to vindicate yourself, then, at least for those who died because of you.”
“Everyone dies,” I say before I can stop myself.
She blinks. Surprised. Her eyes spark with anticipation, as if she thinks she’s broken the dam of my silence, and when I don’t elaborate, she tries to bait me again. “I know, but this is different. This is murder.”
An ugly word. In an ugly place. My skin crawls whenever I let my mind wander down that forbidden path that reminds me I’m not free but locked away. If some had their way, the key to my freedom would be thrown away forever.
&
nbsp; “I can help,” Nikki is saying, and I want to believe her—oh, how I would love to give into that soothing balm of trust, to open up and tell her everything, but it won’t help. Of course it won’t.
“You’re accused of awful crimes,” she is saying, her eyes wide, her eagerness for the truth palpable, despite the smudged glass and thick walls separating us. “Either you’re innocent and should want to clear your name, or you’re guilty, and if so, everyone wants to know, I mean I want to know the answer to a simple question: Why? Why would you do something so heinous?”
I bristle a little at that and feel my eyes narrow a fraction. Who is she to judge me? Who is anyone? Hopefully, I hide my irritation, and my facade must work because she’s still blathering on.
“Just help me understand. I know we’ve had our differences, for years. You never liked me hanging out with your daughter, but . . . please, for your children’s sake . . .”
My children. Oh, dear God, the innocents in all of this. I blink against a sudden wash of unwanted tears, and Nikki reacts.
“Tell me about them. The children.”
As if she doesn’t already know.
As if she hasn’t lived with the knowledge as long as I have.
As if she hasn’t had her own secrets.
“I want your story told,” she says, for what? The dozenth time? The hundredth?
I stand, slamming the receiver back in its cradle and motioning to the guard in one quick motion.
“No!” I’m sure she says, but I can no longer hear her or see her as I’ve turned my back to the window. Oh, I can feel her staring at me through that little pane, but I don’t look back. I thought I could do this, I thought I could say something, but I can’t, not yet.
I wonder about life and death and God and heaven and hell as I’m walked back to my cell. I believe in God. I do. I have. Even when heaven and hell were used to torment me and coerce me and the fear of God’s wrath was the reason I surrendered.
Once alone, I walk to my bed and fall to my knees to pray again. Squeezing my eyes shut as I invoke His name, I hope by everything that is holy that God is still listening.
CHAPTER 19
“Okay,I’.m outta here,”Morrisette said as she stopped at Reed’s office.
It was after eight. They’d spent the day going over files and evidence and, of course, interviewing Blondell O’Henry and her daughter, Blythe, at her apartment and had tried to determine if talking to anyone else in the case was worthwhile. Tomorrow Reed would go over the testimony he hadn’t yet perused, and hopefully the lab would come back with updated reports on the evidence that was being retested. The DNA information would take several weeks, even though they’d asked for a rush job. They also wanted blood-spatter analysis and anything else with trace evidence that could be tested with new equipment and new eyes.
“It could be that she’ll be released,” Kathy Okano had told them earlier in the day at a short meeting in her office after lunch. “The state could decide that twenty years is enough, one way or the other.”
“But not if you have anything to do with it?” Reed had guessed from the side chair near her desk. For once, Morrisette had been seated as well.
“That’s right.” Okano’s jaw was set, her eyes thinning a bit behind the lenses of her glasses as she’d thought. Situated on her desk, her cell phone had started playing some tune and she’d quickly snapped it off, not missing a beat. “I told you, from reading the evidence, I think Blondell is guilty, but”—she’d held up one long finger and looked from him to Morrisette—“on the off chance she is innocent, then, of course, she should be freed immediately and somehow compensated.” Okano’s lips had pursed thoughtfully. “If that’s the case, and she really did not pull the trigger, then we need to find out who did.”
“The stranger with the serpent tattoo,” Morrisette had said. “Talk about a needle in a haystack!”
“I don’t care if it’s twenty haystacks. If we have to enlist the help of the public, through the press, then that’s what we need to do. Whatever it takes. We have to find the guy and put him away. Once we find him, we’ve got to have an air-tight case against him, get a conviction, lock him up, and throw away the key.”
“If the killer isn’t Blondell O’Henry,” Reed said.
Okano nodded, her blond bob bouncing. “Goes without saying.”
Morrisette outwardly agreed, and only later, as they were out of the ADA’s earshot, did she add, “Sure, why not?” She’d been walking quickly down the hall, her boot heels clicking on the hard floor. “And in our free time, we’ll find the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, and Amelia Earhart,” she’d added to Reed as they’d reached his office. “Isn’t it just great that some people think we can work miracles? It’s not just Okano. At least not for me. My kids are the worst. The absolute worst. They seem to think I can solve all the problems in the world, or at least in their world. I tell them life’s not fair, then work my ass off to try to make things right for them.” As Reed opened his mouth, she held up a hand. “I know I’ve done it to myself. Guilty as charged, but my point is, there are only so many damned miracles I can work in any given day. Like it or not, the assistant DA might just have to stand in line.”
She’d taken off again, her footsteps fading down the hallway, and Reed had decided to call it a night himself. He was tired and hungry and probably needed to work off some steam and frustration with a case that seemed to get more complicated rather than less as he tried to put together the pieces of a crime that was committed two decades earlier.
Mentally, he attempted to close up shop as he drove to Nikki’s house near Forsyth Park. The rain had stopped, the streets were drying, and the streetlights cast their blue glow over the city. At least traffic was light, though it wasn’t usually a problem as Nikki lived close enough to the station that often, if he’d spent the night, he walked to work the following morning.
Tonight he expected Nikki to pounce on him the minute he walked through the door. However, as he let himself into the apartment he was bombarded by a happily yipping Mikado; Nikki didn’t appear.
“Nik?” he shouted as he shrugged out of his coat.
“Up here! Down in a minute.”
He snagged a couple of bottles of beer from the fridge, opened them, then walked up the curved stairs to her working loft, where he found her at her desk, her fingers flying over the keyboard.
“Deadline?” he asked, then dropped one of the long-necked bottles onto the corner of her desk.
“Ummm. Yeah. Seems like there’s this big story, a woman convicted of killing her children twenty years ago is about to be released from prison? You heard about it?” She glanced up, her smile impish as her gaze met his, but her fingers kept moving, the keyboard clicking.
“I might have heard a rumor or two around the station.”
“Give me a sec.” She turned her attention to the computer monitor again. “I’m just about finished.”
“Take your time.” He unbuttoned his collar, then sat on the padded cushion of her window seat. It was dark now, but the backyard was visible because of landscaping lights placed strategically in the shrubbery.
She barely looked up, her attention riveted to her computer screen. As she concentrated, her smile fell away and her eyebrows drew together. He figured she might still be pissed at him for not taking her to the women’s prison today, but she seemed over that argument, at least for the moment.
As he took his first swallow of beer, he thought about their plans to live together after the wedding. They’d agreed that he’d give up his apartment and move in. It was the sensible solution. He’d put what he’d saved for his own house into their combined finances, and they’d refinance the house together. It sounded good on paper, but there was a part of him that worried, as this was really her house, great as it was. He’d use the second bedroom as his home office and study, and ditch everything but his flat-screen, recliner, and desk. Still, he knew it would be better if they found a place together. He’d s
aid as much, and she’d shrugged, saying there was plenty of room in this house, that they could, as their family grew, expand to the lower levels and give up the tenants.
He hadn’t fought the idea.
And it was an incredible house, close enough that he could walk to the station house.
For now, they could make it work.
“There!” She looked up from the computer and gave him a satisfied smile. “Done and submitted. Take that, Norm Metzger.” Snagging the beer from the corner of her desk, she joined him on the bench seat, sitting close enough to drape one leg over his. “So are you going to tell me about your day? How’d it go with Blondell?” She took a long swallow from her bottle, and he noticed her throat as she swallowed.
“As well as could be expected.”
“She’s still claiming her innocence?” she asked, shifting, her leg sliding against his.
“Not just claiming. Shouting it. At least her lawyer is.”
“Jada Hill isn’t known to be demure.”
“Ha.”
“Anything new on the case?” She feigned innocence as she lifted the bottle to her lips again, but he saw the eager spark in her green eyes.
He shook his head.
“No surprise there.”
“Unfortunately, no surprises anywhere.”
“Hmm, too bad.” She arched a sexy little eyebrow at him, and her hand touched his shoulder. Warm. Soft. Breaking his concentration. The corners of her lips twitched, and her green eyes darkened a bit.
“Ms. Gillette, are you flirting with me?”
“Never.”
He let his free hand fall to her leg. “What is it you want, Nikki?”
“Just you.” She whispered the words into his ear.
“Yeah, right,” he murmured, but he couldn’t deny the heat that was suddenly invading his blood, the hardness that was growing between his legs. “I know you better than that, girl, but you know what?” He plucked the bottle from her hand and set it, along with his, on a small table. “You asked, so you’re gonna get.”
“Just what I wanted to hear.” Wrapping her arms around his neck, she kissed him hard. Lips parting, tongue touching his, she pulled him down to the floor with her and made him lose all doubts about the upcoming marriage.
