Obviously, before marrying Stuart, she hadn't been as contented as she'd thought herself, or she wouldn't have fallen so fast, so gullibly. She must have been desperate for a home, husband and children.
But she wasn't bored. Natalie knew that much. She could entertain herself. And since Stuart's death she had actually come to enjoy the quiet in the house. He'd almost always had the TV on when he was home, which had bugged her. He liked the canned voices. She'd come to realize he wasn't a self-sufficient man. He wanted stimulation, company, admiration. Silence drove him crazy.
Wherever he had intended to go once he ditched her, it wouldn't have been alone. Maybe he'd planned to buy a dumb, buxom blonde to gaze admiringly at him, Natalie thought spitefully, then was ashamed of herself.
The telephone stayed stubbornly silent, so she took the canisters from the cupboard and began mixing a recipe for snickerdoodles she'd never tried. The dough cooling in the freezer—why not hurry it up?—Natalie hummed quietly as she hunted for the cookie press. Above the refrigerator, maybe? Standing on a chair, she found it along with a waffle iron she never used. Maybe she should get it down and have waffles for breakfast.
The telephone shrilled and she jumped enough to almost overbalance from her precarious perch. Mumbling bad words under her breath, Natalie climbed down with the cookie press clutched in her hand and reached for the phone.
Sounding breathless, she said, "Hello?"
"Get you from the shower?" John asked.
To her annoyance, her heart leaped. "No, digging something out of a cupboard."
"Yeah? What are you up to?"
Baking cookies for you. To give me an excuse to see you.
Impossible to say.
"Oh, cleaning the kitchen," she lied. "I couldn't find … a new sponge."
"Oh, I saw 'em under the sink in the…" He stopped and was silent for a moment. "I guess you don't need me reminding you that I've stuck my nose in every cupboard in your house."
He could have told her where the cookie press was.
"That's okay," she said. "I want you to find out what Stuart did with the money, or who has it. And who killed that man upstairs." More lightly, she added, "I just hope it wasn't too much of a shock to find out that I'm not Miss Suzie Homemaker."
"Oh, I don't know. The number of times you've brought me cookies, I might award you the title, cobwebs behind the bookcases or not."
Ruefully eyeing the mess she'd just made, she said, "No more cookies. I promise."
"You make good ones."
"Thank you." She sounded as stilted as he did. It would be a cold day in hell before she took him any more.
After a moment, he said, "You okay there alone?"
"Of course I am!" Too much vehemence. "I'm fine."
"I doubt you'll be bothered. You were right. Why would anyone break in again?"
Oh, good. She could go back to her old life. No squabbling kids, no uncomfortable tension between John and his mother, no Hugh and Connor hanging around with beers in their hands, no … John.
Except, she supposed, as an occasional caller.
"You're not going to find out who killed Ronald Floyd, are you?" she asked.
His voice became weary. "I don't know, Natalie. I can't promise you. We need something to go on."
She nodded, and realized he couldn't see her. "Yes. I see."
"My mother gave me hell for not making an arrest yet."
"I'm sorry."
"No, she was right." He sounded gruff. "I wish I could give you that, at least."
She gripped the phone with painfully tight fingers. "Please don't apologize."
Nothing but him breathing for a moment. Then, "Maddie got an A on her spelling test."
Natalie had to swallow before she could say in a semblance of a normal voice, "Tell her I said congratulations."
"Will do." Another of those awkward pauses made her wonder what he was thinking. "I'd suggest dinner tomorrow night, but I don't dare. I'm handling that homicide in Bayview."
The headline for tomorrow morning's paper was two inches high: Prominent Socialite Murdered. The newsroom had been buzzing over the story. Ronald Floyd's death had been news, primarily because he had been murdered in her house. But this killing had stunned Port Dare, because of who the victim was. Rachel Portman's husband was a wealthy businessman and school board member, while she volunteered for half a dozen causes. Their neighborhood was one of the ritziest in town, the houses all enormous fake Tudors or Italian villas or some such, the views of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and shipping traffic spectacular. If the houses had security systems, it was to protect the home owners' jewelry and top-of-the-line stereo systems and computers, not the inhabitants themselves. Murders did not happen in Bayview.
"Are you getting anywhere?"
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'm afraid so."
Which meant the husband, she guessed. She knew him. He had been in a particularly foul mood last week when they discussed changing the look of his weekly advertisement.
"Oh, dear," Natalie said.
"You may say so." A muffled voice sounded in the background. "Oh, hell. Evan's calling me. Listen, we'll talk tomorrow?"
"If you have time."
"Night."
With that, he was gone. No I miss you. Not even a Can we have a lunchtime tryst? Just, We'll talk tomorrow.
Natalie took the cookie dough from the freezer, dumped it into the garbage beneath the sink and cleaned the kitchen.
Around a mouthful of French fries, Baxter argued, "He's got an alibi."
"The son of a bitch did it," John said flatly.
Monday morning, and they were sitting in the car outside the Italianate monstrosity in Bayview where Rachel Portman had been murdered as she emerged from the marble shower in the master bath Saturday morning at approximately nine o'clock. The front door had been conveniently unlocked, and some jewelry was missing from the small safe she had apparently opened in expectation of wearing a piece she kept in it. Strangely, other valuable pieces were left dumped on the dresser, as if to suggest the intruder had rushed out with only part of his booty. Her body had been discovered when she failed to show at a hospital luncheon benefit she was chairing.
This was the first time they'd been alone to discuss the case, instead of running around interviewing everybody and his mother. Baxter had been in a hell of a mood the past few days, sullen and snarling. John knew his own wasn't much better. Natalie's departure had left a hole in his life that gaped. He didn't like her being alone, either. Whatever reason said, the intruder-murderer was still at large, his purpose still something of a mystery. John disliked failure, which the lack of an arrest equated. And he hated looking at the man beside him in the car and wondering if his tension didn't have to do with their failure not to find the murderer, but to find the money.
And here was a thought: what if John had been the one to find the key while the two of them were alone in Natalie's house? If Geoff Baxter was the one who had killed once, would he have balked at dealing with his partner?
John swore to himself and watched Baxter unwrap his bacon cheeseburger. Sauce oozed as he lifted it to his mouth. Seeming not to notice, Baxter scowled at the windshield. "Could've hired someone."
John thrust a napkin at him and readjusted his own thinking. "Assassins being readily available on every street corner in Port Dare, Washington."
Geoff looked down in vague surprise and dabbed at the sauce festooning his tie. Wadding up the napkin, he continued the argument, "How hard is it to find some scumbag who'll do anything for a thousand bucks?"
Hell, why not just ask for a cop? John thought sourly.
He took a swallow of coffee. "Tricky, if you're a prominent businessman." Damn it, he should have gotten something to eat, too, but the fast-food burgers hadn't appealed. He sighed. "I think he did it himself." Suddenly energized, he reached for the key in the ignition. The older crime had of necessity to be put on hold; whatever agenda he or Baxter had. For now, they might as well
do more than the motions. This one they could solve. "Let's go talk to his faithful secretary again."
She was lying and he knew it. Classic story: handsome, older, well-to-do boss and the pretty twenty-something secretary who had taken to frequently traveling together. She was shocked by the murder but so far steadfast in her story: he'd been out of the office, it was true, but she had been with him. They were inspecting a building he had recently purchased near the waterfront.
John had hoped twenty-four hours of thinking it over might have shaken her. If anything, her resolve had grown more steely. Interestingly so, he thought—she was starting to get ticked that they were hassling her.
They left her house and decided to interview the husband again. John thought of himself as a patient man, but today he just wanted to make a damned arrest and go home. He could get a baby-sitter, or see if his mother would watch the kids, call Natalie and suggest…
"I wonder," Baxter said thoughtfully, "if she's really protecting Portman."
John snapped back from a fantasy that involved candlelight and Natalie's soft hand in his, her hair a dark cloud around her shoulders, lips parting… "Huh?"
Baxter sounded almost like himself. He had at least become reluctantly interested in the case. He continued his train of thought, "Maybe hubby was perfectly happy with his marriage. Maybe his girlfriend was the one who wasn't happy."
John had briefly considered the possibility Saturday, of course, and discarded it on the basis of the secretary's youth and apparent distress and shock.
Genuine, he wondered now, or shock at the very real brutality of committing a murder?
"Possible," he conceded, cursing himself for being so preoccupied with seeing his own girlfriend that he was more interested in resolution than truth.
Ralph Portman was staying at the Inn By The Sea, in a suite often used for entertaining or honeymoons. Although it was midafternoon, he answered the door in a bathrobe, his face ravaged. "Have you arrested someone?" he asked with hope.
"I'm afraid not, Mr. Portman," John said stolidly. "May we come in?"
The husband's face crumpled, and he backed away to let them in. Sobs shook him as he sank onto the chintz-covered sofa. The two cops glanced at each other. Baxter went down the hall to the bathroom and returned with tissues, which he put in the businessman's hand. John sat, too, and Baxter stood to one side, arms crossed.
Eventually Portman controlled himself, wiped his eyes, blew his nose and looked up in intense grief. "What can I do to help?"
"Tell us the truth," John said in a hard voice. "Mr. Portman, where were you Saturday morning at nine?"
Comprehension penetrated his grief only slowly. "Yesterday? You don't think…?"
"We think you're lying. That you weren't with Ms. Ryan at all."
He cried again, noisily, but eventually confessed that no, he wasn't. She was lying to protect him. He appreciated it, but he shouldn't have let her. She'd seen immediately that he might be suspected—didn't they always look at the husband?
The truth was, he and his pretty secretary had arranged for him to come to her house at a few minutes after nine. They were having an affair, he confessed.
"But, oh God, I love my wife." He stared not at them, but at the videotape he wouldn't be able to turn off: the one where he was on his way to have cheap, extramarital sex while his Rachel was being struck down. "I would never…"
"And Ms. Ryan. Was she home when you got there?"
The meaning of his question penetrated far more quickly. "You can't think…" He blundered to his feet and ran down the hall to the bathroom, where he lost everything he'd eaten that day.
When he returned, it was numbly. "No," he said. "She wasn't there. I waited quite a while, thinking she'd run out to get something. Maybe gone to the bakery, or…" He swallowed, spoke in the voice of an automaton. "We met in the parking garage at the office. She thought it was the next morning we were to … get together." Remembering, he quivered. "Yesterday. She was very sorry, she'd done some quick errands on her way in. The line at the post office was long, she said, which was why she was late. I didn't think anything of it. She'd agreed to come in on Saturday since we had a deal in the offing. Of course she had things she'd intended to do over the weekend."
"Did she seem shaken? Unlike herself?"
He frowned in concentration. "Well, a little. But that was because of the misunderstanding. She felt bad."
"What about her clothes? We saw her later, of course. I'm just wondering if you noticed anything unusual."
"Only that…" He stopped. "She had a run up her panty hose. A really bad one. I wondered, since she was doing errands anyway, why she hadn't bought new ones."
"Perhaps," John said, rising, "we had better have another talk with Ms. Ryan."
"She wouldn't have…" But his eyes showed the horror of the knowledge that she might very well have done just that. He, too, was imagining his pretty secretary rushing out of his house, stopping the car somewhere in a quiet cul-de-sac to change clothes. Swearing, perhaps, as she punctured the nylon of her hose but knowing she was already late and hoping to be in the office before her boss arrived so that she could raise her eyebrows and say, "Today? Oh, I'm so sorry! I thought…"
A stop at the post office elicited the information that, in fact, Saturday morning had been, as usual, slow. No lines. Yes, the clerk knew Ms. Ryan, she often brought over the mail from Portland, Schultz and McArdy. No, he was quite sure she hadn't been there yesterday morning.
This time, Ms. Ryan cracked. She seemed stunned that they had even considered her as a suspect. All her planning, it appeared, had been designed to point the finger at her lover if the police didn't believe in a burglary gone bad. She, too, cried.
"He was afraid to leave her," she sobbed. "We'd never have been able to be together if she didn't…"
"Die?" John suggested softly.
Her face twisted. "Yes! He didn't have the guts." She buried her face in her hands.
John reached for his handcuffs. "Melissa Ryan, I'm placing you under arrest for the murder of Rachel Portman. You have the right to remain silent…"
She went unresisting. Booking her, talking to the prosecutor and doing paperwork ate up the rest of the afternoon and a good part of the evening. John surfaced long enough to call his mother, who picked up the kids at their after-school day care and went home with them.
"Make sure they do their homework," he said unnecessarily.
When he was finally free to leave the station, feeling exhausted and somehow dirty, John still had to detour by the inn again to tell Rachel Portman's husband that his mistress was under arrest for having murdered his wife.
Portman reeled and, apparently voiceless, nodded. His eyes had a curiously blank look that John had seen before: shock and grief mixed with deep wounds dealt by the knowledge of his own culpability.
"Can I call someone for you, Mr. Portman?"
A man appeared behind him. "I'm Ralph's brother, Detective."
"Ah. Good." John watched as one of Port Dare's most prominent businessmen stumbled away. "Keep an eye on him."
"Yes." They shook hands. "I can't believe…"
Nobody ever could. John wondered if Ralph Portman would ever be able to forgive himself.
He surfaced from his brooding to realize he was driving to Natalie's house, not home. It was eight-thirty in the evening. Would she mind?
She came to the door in a pair of leggings and a baggy sweater, her hair loose and her feet bare. "John!"
"Can I come in?"
"Of course you can!" She backed up. "Is something wrong?"
"No. I just arrested…" Hell, it would be spread over the papers tomorrow. He'd already talked to a reporter from the Sentinel himself. "I arrested Ralph Portman's girlfriend. She apparently had more permanent arrangements in mind."
Natalie gasped. "She killed his wife? Herself?"
"All by her lonesome." He moved his shoulders restlessly.
Debbie had hated it when she kne
w he came home straight from a murder scene or an arrest. "I wonder what you've been touching," she had said with a shudder, eyeing his hands as if they dripped blood, as if he might smear it on her if he touched her.
Shaking away the memory, John asked, "Can we talk about something else?"
Natalie's face held quick compassion. "Of course we can. Let's go sit down. Do you want a cup of coffee? Did you have dinner?"
Dinner? He looked blankly at her. He knew he'd skipped lunch. He hadn't even been aware of dinnertime passing.
"It's not food I want," he said in a voice that sounded odd even to his ears. "Will you come here?"
She gave him a searching look but came, accepting his need to hold her in a bruisingly tight grip. He laid his cheek against her head and breathed in a flowery scent that made him picture a tropical scene: gaudy flowers and a waterfall and luxuriant vegetation. Hawaii, maybe.
She felt so damned good against him, the swell of breasts and the hair that spilled over his hands and the length of her thighs against his. She was taut in the right places, soft in the others, begging his hands to cup her buttocks and lift her.
He groaned and tugged at her hair. Natalie tipped her face up willingly and met his mouth with a fierce passion that told him she had ached these past nights for him just as he had for her.
He kissed her as if he were a starving man offered the staff of life. He wanted to block out the memory of Rachel Portman's bloody, naked body, of the vicious selfishness he'd seen, of the torment her husband would live with forever. Natalie was goodness, decency, a warm, welcoming sexuality. Plundering her mouth, he prayed she wouldn't imagine blood on his hands.
He lifted his head and said hoarsely, "I need you."
"Yes." She pressed her open mouth to his throat and murmured. "Let's go downstairs. To the guest room. So there's no ghost."
"No ghost," he agreed, and let her tug him with her.
The room was feminine, with butterflies on the wallpaper and pale blue carpet and a puffy chenille-covered comforter on a double bed. His feet would hang over.
HIS PARTNER'S WIFE Page 19
