One-Night Alibi

by Kara Lennox

  When Elizabeth finally opened her eyes again, Hudson was drooped over her, perspiring as if he’d just run eight blocks to catch a bus during the height of a Texas summer. She was damp, too, their skin slicking together.

  “Oh...my...” she finally managed. It seemed some kind of profound words were called for, but she couldn’t begin to find them.

  “Guess I should have taken that storm warning a bit more seriously.”

  They were like a couple of survivors, except instead of a disaster, they had weathered the most pleasurable thing she’d ever experienced.

  Hudson slowly withdrew from her—even that felt good to her ultrasensitized flesh—and rolled onto his back. He slid one arm behind her and drew her against him into a sweet snuggle. Neither of them said anything else for a long time. There really didn’t seem to be any words that could sum up what had just happened. Maybe it was because they both knew this might be their swan song, that nothing lasting could occur between them for so many reasons. Or maybe they were just uniquely, biologically matched to produce the most intense earthquake of a sexual experience in the world. Whatever, Elizabeth didn’t try to analyze or compare or predict. She just pressed the side of her face against Hudson’s chest and listened to his heart as it gradually slowed to something close to normal.

  Curious, she pressed two fingers against her own carotid artery. Their heartbeats were perfectly in sync. She smiled, wondering if it meant anything or if it was just coincidence.

  He ran his palm against her upper arm. “What?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re smiling.”

  How could he know that? He couldn’t possibly see her face from where he was. “It’s silly,” she said. “But I was noticing that our hearts are in sync.”

  “Entrainment.”

  “What?”

  “When two people sit near each other and stare into each other’s eyes, their hearts will start to synchronize. It’s called entrainment.”

  “All it takes is staring?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  They’d gone way beyond staring. No wonder they were entrained. “How long does it last?”

  “I don’t know. I just heard something about it on NPR one time.”

  “You listen to NPR?” She thought National Public Radio would be too cerebral for a cop to be interested.

  “You have the strangest ideas about me,” he said, echoing what she’d said earlier to him. “I like flamenco, but sometimes I listen to NPR. Sometimes I listen to country music and sometimes hard rock and sometimes the shock-jock-du-jour.”

  “I am learning not to pigeonhole you.” She closed her eyes, reveling in this sweet, lightweight postcoital banter. It seemed so incredibly...normal. If she could make love to Hudson every night and talk to him like this for ten minutes afterward, she’d be the happiest woman on earth.

  Wow, where had that come from? Dangerous thought. Good sex and banter did not a healthy relationship make.

  “You hungry?”

  “What do you think? I barely ate two bites of the nice dinner you fixed, and now it’s probably stone-cold.”

  “I have a microwave.”

  She grabbed a satin robe from the closet while Hudson dragged on his jeans, going commando. She quickly heated up their dinners, and they sat on the floor in front of the TV with their plates on the coffee table and watched a hilariously stupid ’80s sitcom.

  The whole scene was so blessedly mundane, Elizabeth wanted to capture it and trap it in a jar, where she could take it out and examine it whenever she wanted. But the nature of such moments was fleeting; perhaps that was why they were so special.

  Once their stomachs were full, they stumbled back to the bedroom, shed their clothes, fell back into bed, and Hudson made good on his intention to take his time. She felt no impatience this time; she was content to let him explore the terrain of her body any way he liked. Every once in a while she gave him a languid caress along his rock-hard thigh or muscular back, but mostly she was lazy and let him play. He seemed to enjoy giving her pleasure in imaginative ways—licking, kissing, blowing, squeezing—and all of it was good, so good.

  When they made love again, it was a slow, sensual dance rather than a race to the finish, but no less satisfying. The only moment of tension Elizabeth felt—besides the expected, good kind—was when they were done and she waited for that inevitable moment when he made his excuses and left her bed. It was no less than she deserved after the way she’d acted their first night together, though she doubted Hudson was spiteful that way.

  It probably would be better if he left under cover of darkness—less chance he’d be recognized as he slipped to his borrowed car.

  But he didn’t leave.

  She fell asleep as content as she’d ever felt, idly wondering if this was that thing human beings chased after, this sense of completeness.

  It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t, and she was as prepared for that likelihood as she could be. But for now, it was enough.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HUDSON WAS DRAWN out of a deep sleep by the annoying song from his Project Justice phone. He opened his eyes, felt a moment of panic when he didn’t know where he was, then remembered and relaxed. Dawn was just beginning to break, and the soft morning light through the unshaded windows revealed Liz sprawled in the bed like a true hedonist, on her stomach with her limbs pointing out in four opposite directions, her face in the pillow, her gorgeous mop of hair a cloud of silk around her head and shoulders.

  His phone was in his jeans pocket. He got out of bed carefully so as to not wake Liz. By the time he got to his phone it had rolled to voice mail, but he saw who was calling—Beth, the scientist who ran the lab at Project Justice. She was also Mitch’s wife.

  His gut tightened, and he tiptoed out of the bedroom before returning the call.

  “Beth? Did you call?”

  “Oh, right, I did just call you.” She sounded a little sleepy and distracted, as if she’d been up all night working in the lab.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “You said you wanted to know right away when I got results on that watch.”

  Hudson rubbed his eyes and glanced at the antique mantel clock. “At six in the morning?”

  “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t know it was that early.”

  “You’ve been working all night?”

  She paused before answering. “It’s how I foil morning sickness. I stay up all night.”

  That made him smile. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “No one else here knows yet. Anyway, I didn’t realize it was quite that early. No windows in the lab.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  “Well, the material you spotted is definitely human blood.”

  The tightness to his gut returned. “Did you test it for DNA?”

  “It was a pretty small sample, but yeah, I got a partial profile. It’s pretty close to Elizabeth Downey’s...but not an exact match. It probably belongs to a close female relative.”

  “Like her mother, for instance? She doesn’t have any sisters that I know of.”

  “Yes, it could be her mother. But it was a tiny amount of blood. It could have come from something as innocent as a scratch on the wrist, even a mosquito bite.”

  Or it could have got on the watch when Holly Mandalay was murdered by her own husband. It was a dark, horrible thought, not one Liz would welcome. But didn’t she deserve to know what had happened to her mother?

  “Does this have a bearing on the Franklin Mandalay murder case?”

  “Not directly. At least, not that I know of. I know I shouldn’t use Project Justice resources for something unconnected to the case, but I can’t help feeling it might be relevant.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t. Daniel’s not chintzy with resources. He’s always saying that the clue that solves the case can come from an unexpected source. What do you think is going on here?”

  “Elizabeth�
��s mother disappeared when she was a teenager. Officially, it looked like a case of abandonment. Money was withdrawn from her bank account, her purse and her car disappeared.” Hudson had learned that much by reading old newspaper articles found on the internet. “But personally, I think that bastard Mandalay murdered her. Maybe she was threatening divorce, maybe she wanted to take Liz away from him. I don’t know. But if she’d abandoned the family, she would have taken her watch with her. Instead, it was locked in a wall safe.”

  Hudson heard a noise. He looked up to see Liz standing in the doorway, stark naked, with the most awful expression on her face.

  “Thanks for calling, Beth. I’ll get back to you.”

  “You’re wrong,” Liz said.

  “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

  “He didn’t kill her. He couldn’t have done that. I know he did some bad things, but he loved his family. It tore him to pieces when she left.”

  “Forget I said it, okay? It’s probably not true. I’m a cop, and my mind likes to work itself around crimes. I’m probably wrong.”

  “You don’t think you’re wrong at all. You’re just saying that to placate me.”

  He started to deny it, but he could see in her eyes that she’d pegged him perfectly. He couldn’t lie to her; it would only compound the problem.

  “It’s something I have to look into,” he said.

  “Why? It has nothing to do with my father’s murder.”

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know what’s significant and what’s not.”

  “You decided to follow a meaningless clue because you’re morbidly curious. And you have some ridiculous idea that you’ll give me closure by finding my mother.

  “Well, I don’t want closure. I don’t want to know what happened to her, okay? Just leave it alone.” She turned and disappeared into the bedroom, slamming the door.

  Hudson scrubbed his face with his hand. Damn. That hadn’t gone well.

  Maybe he was morbidly curious. But figuring out the Mandalay family history might help him learn more about what made a man like Franklin Mandalay tick. What motivated him? What sort of criminal elements would he mix with, and why?

  No matter what Liz believed, he was going to pursue this lead. He simply wouldn’t do it around her.

  He heard the shower going a few minutes later. Though he’d fantasized about joining Liz under the warm spray, he guessed that wasn’t going to happen. This was his cue to find the rest of his clothes and put them on. He’d worn out his welcome.

  Liz made an appearance a few minutes later, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt bearing the logo of the clinic where she worked. She still looked incredible, even with no makeup.

  Hudson was already dressed and had spent a good five minutes trying to figure out how to use her complicated coffeemaker. Surely some caffeine would ease this awkward situation.

  “I tried to make coffee, but I don’t have a doctorate in nuclear physics.”

  That brought a slight smile to her face. “It’s a ridiculously complex machine, but it does make good coffee.”

  He stood aside as she proficiently added beans to the grinder, then filtered water. She adjusted levers and dials, and soon lights began blinking and the thing started hissing. She set a mug under the spigot just in time to catch the dribble of coffee the wicked machine produced. He had to admit, it smelled good. But he’d probably imposed on Liz enough.

  “I really should go.”

  “I don’t mind fixing you coffee,” she said. “I went a little sideways for a minute there, but as you can probably tell, the subject of my parents pushes a lot of my hot buttons.”

  She was making quite an effort on his behalf, and he appreciated that. But that guarded look in her eyes hadn’t been there last night. She’d lost confidence in him because he’d suggested the unthinkable. She wanted to believe the man whose DNA she carried had some goodness in him; Hudson, on the other hand, seemed anxious to discover the worst.

  That must be how it looked to her. Hudson would be hard-pressed to earn back her goodwill.

  Well, hell, it had been nice while it lasted. He never should have tasted the forbidden fruit. Until last night, he’d never known he could feel such happiness. And until this morning, he hadn’t known he could feel such disappointment—with the world at large, and with himself.

  She set the mug in front of him, along with a small carton of half-and-half. He creamed the coffee and took a sip. “Good stuff. But I probably should go.”

  She didn’t argue. “I’ll walk you down. You need a key to get into the garage.” She found her purse and dug around for the passkey. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  He nodded. He wasn’t exactly ready, but now was probably better than later, before he gave in to the temptation to defend his actions. She didn’t want to hear his theories. She didn’t want to hear anything that contradicted her fantasy version of her mother’s fate. He would give her that...for now.

  After checking that the hallway was empty, they walked to the elevator, but it appeared to be stalled somewhere above them.

  “Probably someone moving in or out,” Liz said. “Let’s just take the stairs.”

  “Are you going to work today?” he asked as they trotted down five flights of concrete steps.

  “Yes. It’s best for me to keep busy.”

  “Be really careful, okay? We’re rattling cages. The real murderer could be getting nervous. In fact, why don’t you call in sick?”

  “No. That’s cowardly. I’ve done nothing wrong and I won’t hide. I figure I’ll just go about my business, and whoever is watching me will get bored.” At his worried look, she added, “I’ll keep my office door locked. I’ll be fine.”

  When they reached the door to the garage, Liz slid her passkey through the card reader.

  “Wait. I don’t like how this feels.”

  “Me neither, Hudson, but you can’t take it back. You found my mother’s blood on that watch, and you can’t undo that.”

  “A goodbye kiss, at least?” he wheedled.

  She wavered. “You know what that can lead to.”

  “In a parking garage?” Sensing surrender, he leaned in to kiss her. She melted against the door. She tasted of coffee and some kind of sweet lip balm, and he sank into the kiss, wanting to prolong it as long as possible. He pressed his body against hers, and he could feel her heart beating against his.

  Together. Entrainment.

  The door opened suddenly and she lost her balance; Hudson held her and kept her from falling. Just then a bright light shone right in his face and a strident voice demanded, “Sergeant Hudson Vale, did you spend the night with the murder victim’s daughter?”

  * * *

  HUDSON JUST STOOD THERE, frozen like the proverbial deer in headlights, but Elizabeth went into action. She yanked Hudson back inside and pulled the door closed as fast as she could, nearly smashing a helmet-haired TV reporter and her cameraman in the process.

  “No comment!” Hudson yelled just before the door snicked closed. For a few moments, he and Elizabeth just stared at each other in stark terror, gasping for breath.

  “How did they know?” he demanded of no one in particular.

  “It doesn’t matter. They know.” She turned and retraced their steps through the basement. What else could she do except bring Hudson back upstairs to her apartment? She couldn’t throw him to the media wolves.

  “We’ll claim mistaken identity,” Hudson said decisively. “If I can get out of here somehow, Project Justice will create an alibi—”

  “The camera was three feet away. You weren’t even wearing the hat and sunglasses, and I was in your arms. There is no way out of this. We can’t deny it.”

  “Well, don’t get mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the world, the fates, and I’m mad at my father for getting himself killed at such an inconvenient time. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he did it on purpose just to get us in trouble.”


  “I know he was a major manipulator, but not even Franklin Mandalay would go that far just for spite.”

  Halfway up the stairs, Elizabeth ran out of steam and sank onto one of the steps, leaning against the wall. “Hudson, what are we going to do? However bad things looked before, they look a hundred times worse now.”

  “We’ll call Daniel Logan.”

  “Are you kidding? He specifically told us not to be seen together. He’s going to be furious, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he dumped the case.”

  “He wouldn’t do that. Once he commits the foundation to seeking the truth in a case of injustice, he sees it through to the end.”

  “Until today,” she muttered. “Look, don’t call Daniel. Call Joe. See if he can defuse the situation.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

  Once they were back in her apartment, Hudson used his silver cell phone to call Joe. Elizabeth needed to keep her hands busy, so she toasted some bagels while listening with one ear to Hudson’s conversation. He outlined the situation in the least inflammatory terms possible, leaving out any particulars as to why, exactly, Hudson had been in Elizabeth’s apartment at seven in the morning. She had no doubts Joe would draw his own conclusions.

  “We can do that,” Hudson said. “Sure. Right. Thirty minutes. Got it.” He disconnected, then took a long sip of the coffee Elizabeth had set in front of him on the dining-room table.

  “What did he say?”

  “How do you feel about leaving the building in a garbage container?”

  “Seriously?”

  He grinned. “No. We need to be down in the parking garage in thirty minutes. Joe will make sure it’s cleared of reporters, then we’ll get in a car and he’ll take us out of here. You need to pack a bag with whatever you might need for a few days, but don’t sweat it too much. If you forget something, it’ll be provided.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Daniel’s house. It’s secure and comfortable, and you’ll be safe there until...”