He did. He and Regan thought she had killed Helen because she wanted Paul and Paul wanted Helen’s money.
She was screwed.
“I don’t believe you,” Regan said. “And the police won’t, either. Not when I tell them what I saw tonight.”
She could deny it, Bailey thought. Steve might believe her.
Your mother told me you weren’t romantically involved. Which is what you would have told her whether you were or not.
She shivered. Or he might not.
I’m keeping an open mind, he’d said.
But that was before Regan went running to him with the news that on the night of Helen’s funeral she’d caught her stepfather kissing his personal assistant.
Bailey was the first one to find Helen dead. It wasn’t that big a stretch to imagine she was the last person to see Helen alive. That she was the one who killed her.
“Regan.” Even as she spoke, Bailey felt the hopeless-ness of her appeal. Except for the hectic color in her cheeks, the girl’s face could have been carved in stone. “You’re upset. We’re all tired. Maybe we should talk in the morning.”
She looked at Paul, willing him to get involved, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. His face was strained and pale.
He could still say something to support her. To protect her. All he had to do was tell the truth.
Why didn’t he say something?
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” Regan said. “I want you the fuck out of my house.”
Bailey struggled not to fall apart. “Okay,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster.
Which wasn’t much. Her knees wobbled as she crossed the marble floor to the front door. She tugged it open, her hands shaking.
She was never coming back.
SHE had to go back.
Bailey hugged her knees and stared at the blue-flowered wallpaper and faced facts. She couldn’t duck her responsibilities. She still had Paul’s backup files and the evidence boxes. She had to give them back.
She could go in the morning, early, when she wouldn’t have to face her mother and her questions, when there was a good chance Regan would be asleep. She would stack the cartons in his office and leave her letter of resignation on his desk.
Under the circumstances, she didn’t think he would require two weeks’ notice. And if he did . . . well, he wasn’t going to get it, that was all.
No more half-measures. No more going with the flow and hoping for the best and imagining things would somehow work out if she didn’t ask for too much, if she made other people happy, if she made them like her.
She was quitting. Tomorrow. And then she would get on with her life.
Assuming she wasn’t arrested.
Okay, she couldn’t think about that right now. Later she would figure out what to do about what Regan saw and what she would say and whether to talk to Steve or immediately hire a lawyer. Right now she just wanted every vestige of Paul Ellis out of her life.
Scrambling off her bed, she gathered an armload of loose papers, printouts of articles and clippings of reviews, promotion schedules and sales reports, notes and maps and lists. She hesitated over the notebook on her bedside table, the one with the purple cover. Her fingers traced the bold black words: TANYA DAWLER. MY DIARY. KEEP OUT.
She flipped it open.
The guys who have sex with you at a party on Saturday night won’t even talk to you at school on Monday morning. But they’ll talk about you. In the locker room, in the hall. You can act like you don’t care. I mean, they’re assholes, right? But it hurts! It hurts.
Bet they wouldn’t like it if I talked about them. Or their daddies.
Poor Tanya, with her dramatic exclamation points and defiant humor and desperate longing to be loved. The girl didn’t deserve to have her words, her feelings, thrust back into a dark box. Paul would never give Tanya her due. But she was part of another life, the life Bailey was getting rid off.
She swept the lid off one of the evidence boxes, prepared to shove everything inside.
And froze.
This carton wasn’t crammed with paper. This held labeled plastic bags and paper bundles, crime scene evidence.
She could deal with that. No problem. The problem was lying on top, a heavy, flat, familiar object, a granite plaque on a wooden stand—last year’s National Booksellers’ Optimus Award, presented to Paul Ellis for Breathing Space.
Bailey felt queasy. What was that doing here?
When—why—would Paul have added it to boxes she was taking away to inventory?
But she knew. She knew. Hadn’t she read the search warrant? Toolbox. Bookends. Trivet. Metal tray . . . Objects consistent with injury on victim’s skull.
She pressed her hand to her mouth. Oh, God.
She was so screwed.
No, she wasn’t, she told herself, swallowing panic. She couldn’t dump this on her parents. Paul had let her down, betrayed her, in every possible way. But there had to be something she could do. Someone she could turn to.
Steve, she thought, and lost her breath because she was so scared. And because he was the right person, the only person, she could call.
She held the picture of him in her mind, tough and solid and safe, those little lines of impatience between his dark brows.
Maybe he wouldn’t believe her, but he would listen. He was open-minded, and he knew what to do.
Anyway, there was no one else. Not in this town. Not in this life.
She jammed the lid back on the box and scrambled for her cell phone.
ELEVEN
STEVE sat alone in near darkness.
His mother was in Linville. His daughter was in bed. The house settled around him, warm and constricting as a child’s blanket.
Steve sprawled in his father’s old chair, making notes. This used to be his favorite time, the quiet hours of the night, when a man could work uninterrupted or think slow, deep thoughts about his life or make slow, deep love to his wife.
His wife was dead.
He didn’t like the company of his thoughts anymore, or the direction of his life.
At least he could work.
Once—six months or a week ago—that would have satisfied him. It didn’t now. His fault, for letting personal feelings into an investigation.
This afternoon in his truck, he should have coaxed Bailey into confiding in him. Or scared her into confessing.
Except he didn’t want her confession. He scowled at the lined yellow pad on his knee. Maybe the chief was right and he should withdraw from the case. Maybe he had been gone too long to be effective.
Or maybe he’d been back too long and lost his edge.
Compartmentalize. Depersonalize. Detach.
He reviewed his notes. The blood screen had arrived today, verifying Helen Stokes Ellis had died with a blood alcohol level of .10. She hadn’t been drugged. So she hadn’t helped herself to her husband’s pills, and no one had slipped a Xanax in her nightcap, either.
Another dead end, damn it.
The only thing Walt Clegg hated more than a big case in his town was an unsolved big case. The chief had backed Steve’s request to the DA to authorize a rush job on the items seized from the Ellises’ home. But the special request hadn’t done them a damn bit of good. None of the items removed in the search appeared to have been used in the attack on Helen. And now that he had the results—the negative results—Walt Clegg was more convinced than ever that Steve was blowing smoke up his ass. Unless he came up with something fast, he wouldn’t even make it to his six-month review.
I’ll give it another whack, friendly lab guy had promised, with a chuckle at his own little joke. But he didn’t hold out much hope.
Neither did Steve. He’d gone to trial without a murder weapon before . . . in D.C. But folks around here would want concrete evidence to convict. Especially since Ellis’s defense was sure to call an entire lineup of high-paid, high-profile expert witnesses to refute the prosecution’s case.
To
convince a jury, to persuade the DA—hell, even to get the chief on board and off his neck—Steve needed means. Motive. Preferably something besides Ellis screwing or wanting to screw his personal assistant.
Steve’s hand tightened on his pen. The three most common motives for murder were sex, property, and insults. Steve doubted Ellis hit his wife over the head with an unidentified object and dumped her in the pool because she criticized his writing.
Which brought him back to Bailey. To Bailey and sex.
Okay, maybe I was attracted, a little, she had admitted. But I never did anything about it.
He could canvass her neighbors, see if anybody could ID Ellis as a visitor to her apartment. Right. Like Walt would spring for airfare to New York.
So either Steve believed her, or not.
He wanted to believe her.
Four million should be motive enough for anybody. Even a cursory examination of the Ellises’ financial records revealed the couple had been living beyond their means in New York City. The rent on their Central Park apartment had been paid, but other debts—his car, her plastic surgeon’s fees, their credit cards—had been allowed to pile up.
So how did Paul Ellis afford the services of a full-time personal assistant? What was Bailey getting from Ellis she couldn’t get from her job with Paragon Press? Room? Board? Payment in kind?
The pen snapped.
Disgusted, he threw the pieces across the room. Thinking with his dick again. It was this damn case.
It was Bailey, a voice inside him whispered, but he ignored it. He’d had lots of practice ignoring things that didn’t fit his plans—a dangerous approach for a detective, but it got him through the nights.
He walked across the room to get another pen.
Paul Ellis may have come to Stokesville to research, but the move had also allowed the couple to retrench. Faced with several hundred thousand dollars in debt, Steve reflected, Ellis could have decided his wife was worth more dead than alive.
Selfish bastard. As if you could put a price on someone’s life, a premium on the time you had together.
A memory of Teresa shuddered through him, her eyes begging for his understanding. I’m not poisoning what’s left of my life with treatments, Steven. He’d reasoned and raged and fought with her about it. And poisoned the time they had left with his frustration and his fear.
There was no way to get it back. Each month, each week, each precious hour could never be replaced.
He thought of Bailey, pink-cheeked, scowling, and how he couldn’t get involved with her, and wondered when the hell he’d made a habit of living with regret.
His cell phone vibrated. He reached for it. He wasn’t on call tonight.
He checked the number. No one he knew.
“Burke,” he said.
“Um. This is Bailey Wells.”
He felt a shot of adrenaline that straightened his spine and cleared his head. “Are you all right?”
“I . . . yes.”
Hard to tell from those two clipped syllables. He remembered the way she had held herself together after Helen’s death. Something was up, or she wouldn’t have called him. She certainly would never have called after eleven o’clock at night. He got up again to pace.
“What can I do for you?” he said easily.
Silence.
“Bailey?” Not so easy now.
“I need to see you.”
Absolutely.
Not.
His instinctive male response was to rush to the rescue, club swinging.
But it wasn’t so simple. He wasn’t a caveman. He was a single dad working cop, and Bailey was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. Even if he wanted to, which he didn’t, he couldn’t leave his sleeping daughter to meet with her.
“Can it wait until morning?”
He heard her sharp intake of breath and felt a twinge of . . . professional duty or personal concern? It really didn’t matter.
“Bailey? Don’t hang up on me now.”
“I won’t. I need to talk to you. Tonight.”
“Okay.” Who the hell was on duty tonight? There had to be somebody she could talk to. Marge Conner, maybe. “Can you get to the station?”
“Yes, I . . . I have my mother’s car.”
“Good. You get yourself to the station, and I’ll have someone meet you there.”
“No.” Her voice was firmer. Louder. Scared. “It has to be you. I have to talk with you personally.”
He couldn’t invite her here. One of the first things you learned in training was to keep the job separate from your private life. Cops who crossed that line made trouble for themselves and their departments.
Her breath caught again. “Please.”
Compartmentalize, he told himself. Depersonalize. Detach.
And heard himself say, “Let me give you directions.”
“I know how to get to there.”
“Not to the station.” His voice was grim. “Five eighty five Sawmill Road.”
“Five eighty five. Thank you.” Her relief flowed over the line. “You won’t regret it.”
Her voice made him feel good. Foolishly good.
“Not a problem,” he said, and hoped she was right. For both their sakes.
THE important thing was not to panic.
The intruder moved quietly through the darkened first floor of the big house, drawn like a moth to the light still burning in Ellis’s study. It was unfortunate Paul persisted in poking into matters that were really none of his business. But he had the means and the opportunity now to make things right.
Didn’t Daddy say folks mostly got what they deserved? Helen’s death—and Burke’s suspicion—provided the perfect justification for what he was about to do.
Really, Paul had brought this on himself.
He patted the bulge in his jacket pocket the way another man might touch a rabbit’s foot. For luck.
Not that he believed in leaving anything to chance. That’s why he had to do this. To protect himself. To protect his family and his way of life. A man had a right to do that. That’s all he’d ever done.
Of course he’d regretted the waste all those years ago.
He’d been appalled by the mess and the fuss.
He would have managed the business much better himself.
And he had, hadn’t he? The last death had been simple—a debt called in, a favor promised, no different from the deals he made every day at the courthouse or over a cup of coffee at the diner.
Things weren’t quite so simple this time.
The knowledge sharpened his senses and thickened his blood. His heart pounded. His palms were actually sweating. He could remember when sex felt like this, edgy and risky and raw.
A long time ago.
He blotted the sweat from his upper lip with his handkerchief, smoothed his hair and stepped through the study door.
BAILEY bowed her head, willing her hands to release their death grip on her mother’s steering wheel.
She’d made the right decision. She had enough strikes against her without adding withholding evidence and obstructing justice to the list. She needed to tell Steve her story before Regan spewed her version of that awful kiss to the police, before Paul . . .
Bailey’s stomach pitched to her shoes. She couldn’t think about Paul yet.
She peered through the windshield. Steve lived in a white, two-story house in a block of other white, two-story houses with detached garages, mature shrubs, and neat lawns. The setting was familiar and nonthreatening. Much better than the police station. Really.
Her heart beat high and hard in her chest.
Uncurling her fingers from the steering wheel, Bailey dragged herself from the car. She hauled the evidence box from the back seat and stood staring at the yellow porch light.
She braced her shoulders and tottered up the walk. Before she reached the steps, the front door opened. Her stomach rocketed from her shoes to her throat.
Steve loomed, cut in light and
shadow, framed against the dim interior of the house.
He gestured to the box. “Can I help you with that?”
She swallowed. “I hope so.”
His eyebrows climbed, but he didn’t say anything, just came down the steps and swung the box into his arms. Muscled arms. In the hours since the funeral, he’d changed from his suit into jeans and a plain dark T-shirt that clung to his broad chest and shoulders.
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