Passion to Die for

by Marilyn Pappano

  “Where’s Maricci?” As if in deference to the quiet morning, A.J.’s words were pitched low. His voice was gravelly, as if it, too, needed rest.

  “Not up yet when I came out.”

  “So this is how he keeps an eye on a flight risk.”

  She smiled faintly. “I’m not a flight risk. Not anymore.”

  “Since you slipped a little in your position as our primary suspect?”

  “Since the truth began coming out.” Actually, since Sunday afternoon, when Tommy asked for her promise that she wouldn’t leave. When he’d shown his willingness to trust her.

  “‘And the truth shall set you free.’” There was a hint of cynicism to his voice.

  Again she smiled. “I associated a lot of things with telling the truth—horror, fear, revulsion, disappointment—but not freedom. But it is freeing in a way. The thing I feared most has happened. People know the worst. What they do with it…”

  “Is out of your control. Anyone who has a problem with it isn’t worth having around anyway.” He rubbed one hand across his face. “I got a report from the lab on your car.”

  “Good news or bad?” The voice came from behind Ellie an instant before the screen door creaked open and Tommy came out. He wore jeans and a Clemson T-shirt, faded and snug, and his feet were bare. If he realized it was too chilly for bare feet and arms, he didn’t show it.

  A.J. acknowledged him by directing his reply to Tommy. “It was definitely the car used to run down Martha Dempsey. The blood on the hood, the flecks of paint on her body, the fibers caught in the dent—all match. But there aren’t any fingerprints. Not on the steering wheel, the gearshift or the door handle.”

  Tommy grunted as he lifted himself onto a section of porch railing.

  Ellie looked from one man to the other. “Did you expect to find fingerprints?”

  “We expected to find yours,” A.J. answered. “You do drive the car every day.”

  “It suggests that you weren’t the last person to drive it, that whoever was wiped it clean,” Tommy added.

  “Or that you wiped the prints in the hopes that we would assume someone else had done it.”

  Maybe it was the early hour, or maybe her mind just wasn’t devious enough, but it took her a moment to understand what they meant. If she’d been the one to kill Martha, there would have been no need to get rid of the fingerprints; hers were supposed to be there. The only logical reason to clean them away was if they didn’t belong. Or to build an alibi.

  “And then what? I went back to the restaurant and drugged myself to make myself look innocent?” She’d meant to be flippant, but it came out laced with panic instead. The coffee cup shifted as her fingers went numb. Drawing a breath, she carefully set it on the floor, then clasped her hands together. She’d taken such relief in finding out that her drink had been drugged; she’d seen it as proof that she hadn’t been involved in Martha’s death.

  But in truth, her involvement was still a possibility. Those nine hours were still missing. She had no clue what she’d done.

  Her mouth didn’t want to open, her voice to form the words, but she forced them. “Oh God. You’re saying I might have killed my mother and tried to throw off the police.”

  “No.” Both men answered at once, Tommy’s tone more emphatic than A.J.’s.

  “We know what time you had the drink,” A.J. explained, “and we know what time the victim died. By then, you would have needed help keeping your eyes open. There’s no way you could have been driving that car.”

  Unless the drug was another part of her plan. What if there’d been nothing in her ale at the bar but ale, if she’d mixed the drug in later and poured it on her clothes to make it appear as a spill? What if she really had slipped out of the restaurant, killed Martha, wiped the car clean, drugged herself—

  Suddenly Tommy’s foot landed on the arm of the chair, stopping her agitated rocking, and he scowled at her. “Stop it. You didn’t come up with some elaborate scheme to kill your mother. This was premeditated. Whoever killed Martha planned to do it, and planned to frame you. She had the drug ready. She made sure you were out of the way, and then she hung back and watched Martha until she had her chance.” His look was supremely annoyed. “You don’t even know how to get hold of Rohypnol.”

  He was right. In her time on the streets, she could have gotten anything. But that was a long time ago. She didn’t have a clue where to look today. Didn’t want a clue.

  He took her silence as agreement. “Your memory loss affects only the hours after you were drugged. Everything before then and since is clear. If you’d planned to murder Martha, you would remember it.”

  There wasn’t a blank time in her entire life except for those hours. She could recite every detail of Saturday evening, right up to the time she’d talked to Deryl at the bar. What’s hot?

  Tommy was right. She would remember.

  “In other news,” A.J. said, drawing her attention back to him, “I asked a cop friend in Atlanta to go by the victim’s house yesterday and talk to her neighbors. The house had been broken into and ransacked. No one saw or heard anything, and there’s no way to tell if anything’s missing. It could have been some lowlife who plans his burglaries with the obituaries, or it could have been the killer.”

  Retrieving anything that might connect the killer to Martha.

  Huddled inside the afghan, breathing steadily of Tommy’s scent, Ellie tried to force even the faintest of memories of the witch she’d drunk with in the bar. For God’s sake, she’d sat across from the woman, chatting with her, and the whole time, the woman had been biding her time until she could kill Ellie’s mother.

  And thanks to the drug, Ellie couldn’t remember a thing.

  The woman must have been a coldhearted snake. Of course, that was an apt description of Martha, too. Like gravitated to like.

  “Did they find anything having to do with me at Martha’s house?” she asked hesitantly.

  A.J. looked away a moment, as if he’d rather not answer, then shook his head. “Nothing.”

  No copies of her arrest reports or booking photos. No school pictures of her, no baby pictures. No reminders of the daughter Martha had abandoned until, suddenly, she’d found a new use for her.

  It didn’t hurt as much as she might have expected.

  “When I first saw her, she had copies of my arrest record.”

  “We didn’t find them. Not at her house, not on her and not at the bed-and-breakfast,” A.J. said. “I’m guessing the killer gave them to her and also took them away.”

  “Who would have access to that information?”

  “The police,” Tommy answered. “The court. The public defender’s office.”

  She smiled thinly. She’d had a different lawyer for each arrest, usually young, earnest people who’d still believed they could make a difference in their clients’ lives. Don’t get attached, one of the other girls had told her. They don’t last long.

  Nobody in Ellie’s experience had lasted long.

  Then she glanced at Tommy and amended that. He’d stuck with her long after any reasonable man would have walked away. Four and a half years, ups and downs, good and bad, he’d been there. And when things had gotten really bad, he’d come back. He’d believed in her, helped her to believe in herself.

  “Jared and Jeffrey didn’t see anyone at the bed-and-breakfast?” she asked.

  “Martha’s room had a private entrance,” A.J. replied. “As far as they know, she didn’t have any visitors. The last time they saw her was around seven Saturday evening.”

  Tommy slid to his feet, then leaned against the rail. “If her killer was also her accomplice, she must have taken Martha’s key, cleaned out her room, then returned the key before her body was discovered.”

  A coldhearted snake. Ellie huddled deeper into the afghan. “Now what?”

  A.J. shrugged. “We keep asking questions. Looking for answers. Try to find someone else with as much reason to want the victim dead as you
had.”

  Her stomach knotting, Ellie abruptly rose and went inside the house, leaving the door open and the two men talking quietly behind her. She didn’t slow until she was in the darkened kitchen, muscles clenched, nausea swirling inside her, standing at the sink, staring out the window at nothing.

  She wasn’t off the prime suspect list yet. Right now an argument could be made for her guilt as easily as her innocence. Lack of fingerprints on the car? The killer wiped it clean, or she did. The drugs in her system? Slipped by the killer into her drink, or taken deliberately on her own after the murder. Motive? Martha’s blackmail accomplice had wanted to silence her, or a bitter, angry daughter had wanted to end the blackmail.

  Without Martha’s copies of the arrest records, Ellie couldn’t even prove there’d been a blackmail attempt. As far as Tommy and A.J. knew, she could have made that up to provide another suspect for the killing.

  As far as she knew, she could be guilty.

  The screen door closed, then the front door. A moment later bare feet sounded on the floor, muffled on ancient rugs, sharper on wood. The steps came straight to her, and before she could react, before she could even stiffen, Tommy wrapped his arms around her from behind.

  She didn’t think about pushing him away, as she’d been doing for far too long. She leaned back against him, immediately feeling the heat of his body through the afghan, and lifted her hands to clasp his. “I hate this.”

  “I know.”

  “I could be guilty.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  “Those nine hours I lost…”

  “They were taken from you,” he corrected. “By the killer.”

  “I want them back.”

  His breath rustled her hair. “That’s probably not going to happen, babe.”

  The doctor had told her that at the hospital the day before. It wasn’t fair. Things she would dearly love to forget remained crystal clear in her mind after fifteen years, and events she desperately needed to remember would likely remain a blank forever.

  Tommy sighed again. “Decker said the medical examiner is releasing Martha’s body today. What do you want to do?”

  Do? What was there to—

  A funeral. Burial. That was what daughters normally did when their mothers died. She’d never imagined picking out a casket for Martha, had never imagined even knowing when either of her parents died. “I suppose she should be buried next to my father.” Her voice took on a thick, clogged quality. “I don’t even know where that is.”

  “I’ll find out.” His mouth nuzzled closer to her ear. “It’s okay to cry, Ellie. She may have been lousy at it, but she was still your mother.”

  She opened her mouth to insist that she had no tears to shed over the mother she’d never had, but a sob came out instead. She turned in his arms until they were facing, her cheek pressing against his shirt, and she wept angry, bitter, heartsore tears. A lousy mother, a lousy father, a lousy family. Her only remaining relatives were total strangers, sharing nothing with her but genetics. She was thirty and alone in a way she’d never been.

  Though she’d been alone in all the ways that mattered for half her life, she deserved better than that. She didn’t mourn Martha’s death. She was just mourning what should have been.

  When the tears slowed, she raised her head to look at Tommy in the lightening room. “A.J.’s wrong. I didn’t want her dead. Just out of my life.”

  “He knows that. He’s just thinking like a cop.”

  She swiped one hand across her cheeks to dry them. “And what are you thinking like?”

  Tommy stared at her a long, still moment, his face mere inches away, his dark gaze steady and intense. Something passed through it—hesitation, doubt—then he quietly answered, “A man who loves you.”

  She’d heard the words from him before and had treasured them every time, but she’d known they were always based on fantasy: the woman he thought she was, the normal, average, undamaged woman she’d pretended to be. But now he knew that woman had never existed, and he could still talk about her and love in the same breath. He could still sound as if he meant it.

  Her hand trembled when she lifted it to his face, when she grazed her fingers across his cheek. He’d showered and shaved while she was out on the porch; he smelled of soap and shampoo, and his jaw was smooth as silk. He was unbearably handsome, and serious, and good, and he loved her. Her. What did it matter if her mother and father hadn’t? What did anyone matter besides him?

  Ellie rose onto her toes, her lips following the same trail her fingers had taken, touching his cheek here, brushing his jaw there, stroking her tongue across that sensitive spot at the corner of his mouth. He remained motionless a moment, and for one panicked instant, she wondered if loving her despite the fact that she’d been a prostitute and making love to her knowing she’d been a prostitute were two different matters for him.

  Then he turned his head the few inches necessary to claim her mouth, and he pulled her closer, hard against his body, against his arousal, and the panic faded.

  So long…Since he’d held her, since he’d kissed her, since she’d felt safe in his arms. So long since she’d felt his warmth and savored just the pure sweetness of him, and always before, no matter how right it seemed, she’d felt unworthy. This morning she felt as if she’d come home.

  She didn’t know if she initiated the kiss or he did, but suddenly his lips were on hers, his tongue probing, his mouth stealing the very breath from her. She clung to him, lost herself in him, protesting with a soft whimper when he broke away and pulled back far enough to gaze down at her.

  “The first time I saw you…” His voice was hoarse, unsteady, his breathing ragged. “Someone had reported an intruder at the old general store. The front door was locked, so I went around to the back. When I went in, you were standing where the bar is now, turning around slowly with your arms open wide and this look on your face, and I thought, ‘Damn, she’s beautiful.’” He touched one hand gently to her cheek. “And, ‘Damn, she’s hot.’” His fingers brushed across her jaw to her throat. “And, ‘Damn, I want her.’” Warm and callused, they skimmed the neckline of her shirt and made her skin ripple. “That’s never changed, Ellie. It never will.”

  Never. What an incredibly lovely word, ranking right up there with love and always, the kind a woman could wrap around herself and delight in.

  To keep the tears at bay, she asked, “What look?”

  He loosened the top button of her shirt, then the second, touching her more than was necessary, less than she needed. “Happiness. You were totally, unquestionably happy.”

  She remembered the day, of course. She’d just signed the papers on the building, taking on a debt that, ten years earlier, would have seemed impossible. To save money, she was going to live in the cramped rooms above the restaurant, now an elegant private dining room, and she was committing to a future of long days and hard work. But she’d allowed herself that one moment of pure bliss. She’d had a dream and the chance to make it come true. More than she’d had for so many years.

  With her top unbuttoned, his hands were at her waist now, and he was slowly backing her against the counter as his mouth teased back and forth along her jaw. An intense desire to surrender completely to the sensation—to stop talking, stop thinking—made her voice thin when she pushed ahead.

  “I looked at you and thought, ‘God, he’s gorgeous.’ And then you showed me your badge, and I just wanted to run away and hide.”

  “I never knew. Not then. Not the first time we kissed. Not the first time you tempted me upstairs and into your bed.”

  Her laugh startled her. “You talk as if some time actually passed between all that. And I think you were the one doing the tempting.”

  “Twenty-six hours. And you definitely were the seducer. All I did was kiss you—” he did it again “—and touch you here—” he brushed her throat again “—and here—”

  The thin silk and lace of her bra provided no barrier to
his caress. She felt every degree of heat in his palm and every scrape of his rough skin. Her nipple swelled before he reached it, the ache intensifying when he ducked his head to kiss it.

  “And you suggested we go upstairs to your bedroom. It was your idea.” His grin was smug, sexy, at odds with the fierce hunger in his eyes.

  “Because I didn’t want to have sex in the kitchen,” she weakly protested.

  “And here we are in the kitchen again. Do you still prefer beds over countertops?”

  “I do.”

  His breath feathered over her ear, making her shiver. “Lucky me. I have one just a few yards away.” Taking her hand, he led her out of the kitchen, a quick turn through the hall, into his bedroom and straight to the bed.

  His kiss was leisurely, lazy, as if he knew they had the rest of their lives to enjoy it. He nuzzled her mouth, wet her lips with his tongue, then nipped her lower lip before sliding his tongue inside.

  Lifting hands that trembled, she skimmed her palms across his cheeks, then down to his chest, broad and muscular, tapering to a narrow waist and narrower hips. The cotton of his shirt was soft and fitted snugly. She curled her fingers in it and tugged it free of his jeans. When she slid her hands underneath to the heated silk of his skin, over rock-hard muscles and flat nipples, then swept back down to the button of his jeans, he made a guttural sound and his tongue stabbed deeper. When she managed, with much fumbling, to undo the button and zipper, his groan vibrated through her.

  He caught her wrist, pulled her hand away from his arousal and undid her own button and zipper. They broke apart long enough to shuck the rest of their clothes and find a condom in the nightstand drawer, then tumbled onto the bed in a tangle of limbs.

  He pushed into her, quick, hard, deep, no longer interested in taking his time. She savored the connection for a moment, the familiar warmth, then arched her hips, rubbing tantalizingly against his length, drawing another groan from him.

  With one hand on either side of her head, he braced himself above her, staring down at her, his gaze dark. “God, I’ve missed you.”