Confessions

by JoAnn Ross

  "There's carbon stippling," she murmured, pointing out the unmistakable tattoo of powder soot imbedded in a ring around the head wound.

  "Yeah. Interesting you should recognize that."

  She heard the question in his voice. "In case J.D. didn't have time to fill you in, I'm a television scriptwriter. I specialize in crime shows." She tossed off the names of a few of the more successful ones and a made-for-television movie.

  "I've caught a couple of those. The ones I saw were pretty accurate," he allowed.

  "Thank you. I pride myself on my research." She looked up at him. The earlier anguish in her eyes had been replaced by an anger much chillier than the artificially cooled air in the freezer. "You know what this proves, don't you?"

  He crossed his arms. "Why don't you tell me?"

  "It proves I'm right. Alan shot Laura."

  "I'm not sure I get your drift."

  "I don't need a degree in forensic medicine to tell that my sister was shot from intermediate range."

  "I'd say twelve to sixteen inches," Trace agreed.

  "You said on the drive over here that you found her in the bedroom. In bed. Without any clothes on."

  "Yeah." He was still bothered about that part. Why lay out all that dough for fancy nightgowns if you weren't going to wear them? "So?"

  "So who else would Laura have allowed to get that close to her under those circumstances?"

  "Why don't you tell me? I didn't know your sister."

  "There are only two people most women will allow to see them stark naked. Their husbands and their gynecologists."

  "What about lovers?"

  "Husbands, lovers, same thing."

  "Sometimes not."

  Mariah shot him a sharp look. "What the hell does that mean?"

  "It means that a woman's husband and her lover are not necessarily always the same person."

  "Are you accusing my sister of having an affair?"

  He thought of the ribbon-bound letters and shrugged. "At this point I'm not ready to accuse anyone of anything."

  "She was not having an affair."

  "Whatever you say. Are you finished looking?"

  Her mind reeling with what the sheriff had just implied, Mariah dragged her gaze back to Laura's body, looking at it so intently Trace thought she might be memorizing her sister's features. She was.

  "Yes." She bit her lip as he drew the sheet back over the lifeless form.

  Her emotions in a turmoil, Mariah latched on to the one thing she could handle right now. It was up to Mariah to make certain Laura's killer did not get away.

  "It was Alan," she insisted.

  "Maybe." He shrugged. "Maybe not."

  Frustrated, Mariah tried another tact. "Did you find the weapon in the house?"

  "Sorry. But I'm not at liberty to discuss the investigation."

  "Not even with the victim's next of kin?"

  "No offense intended, Ms. Swann, but technically the senator's the next of kin."

  Mariah's response to that was an earthy, pungent curse.

  Trace turned off the lights. They were walking back down the dingy hallway when Mariah suddenly said, "Could you tell me where the rest rooms are?"

  Her face had turned the color of the puke green walls. "Right around the corner. First door to the left."

  She was gone before he could finish his instructions.

  After throwing up, Mariah splashed her face with cold water, then swirled more water that carried the scent and flavor of chlorine around in her mouth. She dug through her purse and located a lint-covered peppermint Life Saver, which she popped into her mouth. Then, taking a deep breath, she rejoined Trace, who was waiting exactly where she'd left him.

  "You okay?" His gaze briefly swept over her too pale face.

  "Fine. Thanks," Mariah lied.

  Although the basement was a great deal warmer than the autopsy room, she still felt chilled all the way to the bone. She felt, Mariah thought bleakly, as cold as Laura.

  His sharp eyes caught the slight shiver she tried to conceal. "My office is upstairs. How about I buy you a cup of coffee? Or tea," he amended, thinking about her dash to the toilet.

  The way her nerves were jangling, the one thing Mariah didn't need was any caffeine. But she'd try anything to warm up. "Tea always makes me feel like a kid with flu. But I could use some coffee, thank you."

  His office, tucked away in a corner on the third floor, was shabby, but neat. Two chairs, covered in an uninspiring mud-hued Herculon dating back to the earth tones of the 1970s, sat in front of a weathered pine desk.

  A law enforcement recruiting poster featured a scrubbed and polished young man in a starched khaki uniform standing beside a patrol car.

  A second poster advertised the Silent Witness program, while another more colorful one featured McGruff, the crime dog, dressed like Sherlock Holmes and advising citizens to Take A Bite Out Of Crime. Taped to the beige wall beside the poster were crayon drawings from a class of third graders, thanking the sheriff for a tour of the jail.

  On the opposite wall were FBI posters of most wanted felons who looked as if they'd come straight from central casting: a long-haired, tattooed biker, a wild-eyed Charles Manson lookalike and a sullen woman with a frizzy blond perm and four-inch long black roots who looked like a poster girl for sexually transmitted diseases.

  "Nice photo collection," she murmured. "And so much more original than the usual candid vacation snapshots of the wife and kids."

  "I don't have a wife. Or kids." He gave the wanted posters a cursory study. "And sometimes, as clichéd as it might seem, the bad guys really do look like criminals."

  "But not all the time," she noted significantly.

  "No." Trace frowned as he thought of the mild-mannered sixth grade science teacher and Boy Scout leader who'd strangled, then methodically dismembered five hookers before he and Danny had finally caught up with him. "Not all the time."

  He gestured toward one of the chairs. "Have a seat. Nobody's made coffee this morning, so I'll have to get some from the machine down the hall. How do you take it?"

  "With cream. Two sugars."

  He reached into a top drawer, grabbed a handful of change and left the office.

  Drained, Mariah sank down onto the seat he'd indicated. The wood-framed window offered an appealing view of the town square across the street.

  She watched as a young man threw a Frisbee to a remarkably talented springer spaniel who, from what she could tell, never missed. She envied both man and dog. They were playing on the fragrant green grass in the bright morning sunshine, oblivious to the horrors of the world around them.

  Had it only been yesterday that she'd been the same way? Until this morning, murder had always been an intriguing challenge. Fortunately, enough people shared her fascination with violent, unpredictable crime to have made her a very wealthy woman.

  Although she made her living thinking up innovative ways to kill people in the crime dramas she was best known for, her stories had always been born in the fertile ground of her imagination. She would painstakingly create her characters, weaving in enough sympathetic traits to win the audience's empathy, then murder the victims in ways that occasionally inspired letter-writing campaigns to the networks and advertisers from religious and moral watchdog groups.

  The complaints never disturbed her. In Mariah's world, any publicity you didn't have to pay for was good publicity.

  And when the script was completed, she moved on to the next story, the next murder, never giving those deceased characters another thought. They weren't real, after all.

  But, dammit, Laura was.

  Mariah lit another cigarette to get the smell of the autopsy room out of her nostrils.

  "It'll probably taste like toxic waste," Trace warned when he returned to the office. "And the cream is that nondairy stuff. But it's hot." He put a brown-and-white cardboard cup down in front of Mariah, then went around the desk, pulled an ashtray from one of the drawers and handed it to her.<
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  "Thanks." She took a sip of the coffee, found it as bad as he'd predicted, but drank it anyway, willing the warmth to replace the ice in her bloodstream. "May I ask you a question?"

  The leather chair behind the desk creaked as he leaned back in it. "Shoot."

  "Are you religious?"

  "Not particularly." Trace grimaced as he took a taste of his own black coffee. But like her, did not put it down. Unlike her, he needed the caffeine.

  "Do you believe in God?"

  He stared off into the middle distance as he considered that. His eyes were the color of steel, set deep in his unshaven, hollow-cheeked face. "I suppose I believe in what AA would call a higher power. Why?"

  "I didn't think I did. Not anymore, anyway." She drew in on the cigarette, thinking that the fiery hell she'd been taught to fear during her catechism days was too good for the man who'd murdered Laura. "But I realized, down in that room, that I'm not nearly the agnostic I thought I was."

  She took another drink as she tried to put what she was feeling into words. "It's not that I want to believe Laura's in some mythical wooded glen like all those near-death experiences people describe, visiting with all our dearly departed relatives, listening to some heavenly choir," she stressed. "It's just that what's down in that room—her body—isn't her."

  She shook her head in mute frustration. "Does that make any sense?"

  Trace put his cup on the desk and locked his hands behind his head as he remembered an instance, during his days as a rookie cop, when he'd gotten into a similar theological discussion with a sergeant who, whenever he looked at all those bodies in the morgue, saw nothing but dead meat.

  At the time Trace had disagreed. He still did.

  "You look at the faces," he said quietly. "And they're empty."

  "Exactly. Everything that made Laura who she was, everything that made her special is gone," she stressed. "So where did it go? It couldn't just disappear into thin air."

  "All souls go to heaven?" Trace asked.

  Thinking that he was being condescending, she bristled. "Why not?"

  She'd expected a smirk. Instead he smiled and she was surprised to note that it held considerable charm. "Sounds good to me."

  Mariah was in no mood to be charmed by some small-town, black Irish cop. Even if his firmly cut lips did remind her of a Celtic poet.

  "Callahan," she murmured, "wasn't that Dirty Harry's last name?"

  He didn't directly answer her question. "You know," he mused out loud, "sometimes I think I should have become a chiropractor."

  "A chiropractor?"

  "Or a dentist. Going through life as a cop with the name of Callahan isn't always easy." This time the smile reached his weary eyes, turning them a gleaming pewter.

  Even as Mariah found herself momentarily intrigued by their warmth, she shook off the feeling. "So, when are you going to question Alan?"

  "As soon as he's out of surgery."

  "Too bad you can't do it while he's still under the sodium Pentothal."

  "Are you insinuating that the senator is a liar?"

  "He's a politician, isn't he? It comes with the territory." Her gaze turned serious. "You realize, of course, that this is going to turn out to be a media circus."

  "The thought had occurred to me."

  "Are you also aware that Alan Fletcher has a great many powerful friends? Not only here in Arizona, but in the rest of the country as well?"

  "You don't get to be chairman of the Armed Services Committee without some powerful friends."

  His easy drawl irritated her. Her gaze met his and held. "I just thought I should warn you."

  "Consider me warned." His gray eyes darkened, but his tone remained mild. Only a well-honed ear could have detected the steel in it.

  Mariah swallowed the rest of the thick brown brew and stood up. "Well, thanks for the coffee, Sheriff. I'd better check into the lodge. I've got a lot to do."

  "Before you go, I need to ask you a couple of questions. About your sister."

  She sat back down. "All right."

  "Were you close?"

  "When we were kids, we were as close as two people can be."

  "And later?"

  Mariah sighed. "Not as close as I would have liked."

  She'd never forget the knock-down-drag-out fight between them on her last night in Arizona. Laura had only been attempting to soothe the always turbulent waters between father and daughter when Matthew Swann had discovered her intention to become an actress, like her mother.

  But at the time, Mariah had viewed Laura as a traitor. Embarrassed, angry and young, Mariah had struck out with her most powerful weapon—words. She'd flung hurtful accusations like bullets, claiming Laura had abandoned her the same way she'd abandoned Clint Garvey on their wedding night.

  Knowing that her sister had never gotten over the painful events of that disastrous night, Mariah had gone so far as to suggest that Laura would never marry any man because of her unhealthy relationship with her own father.

  The word incest was never spoken, but the unpalatable suggestion had hovered over the room like a deadly cloud.

  When an apoplectic Matthew had demanded Mariah apologize, she'd refused. It was the last time she was to see her sister for a very long time.

  Then, two years ago, during a trip to California, Laura had surprised her by showing up on the set of a made-for-television movie. Their first meeting had been cautious. Their stilted conversation had reminded Mariah of two boxers, circling the ring, feeling each other out in the early rounds.

  Gradually, emotional walls began to go down. Enough so that Mariah believed that while they'd probably never regain the relationship they'd once shared, perhaps, if they both continued to try, they'd be able to create something equally satisfying.

  She began turning the empty cup around in her hands as she considered bleakly how she'd thought they would have time to patch things up.

  "Did she happen to discuss her marriage with you?"

  "Only in passing."

  "Did you get the impression her marriage was a happy one?"

  "How could it be? Considering who her husband was."

  "That sounds a lot like conjecture."

  Mariah swore. "All right, I'll admit to being prejudiced. But that doesn't mean the man isn't a rat. And although Laura never got into specifics, whenever the conversation would drift Alan's way, I received the definite impression that she was far from happy. Which wasn't that surprising, considering all the rumors about his infidelity."

  "Rumors aren't necessarily fact."

  "True. But believe me, Sheriff, in Alan's case, they were more than true. In fact, the worm even hit on me once. During one of his political fund-raising trips to California."

  She scowled. "He actually had the gall to invite me up to his hotel suite. Allegedly to discuss my relationship with Laura, but since his hand was on my knee at the time, I had the impression that his wife wasn't uppermost in his mind."

  The senator was either incredibly nervy. Or stupid. "You didn't take him up on his offer." It was not a question.

  "I assured him that if he ever touched me again, he'd learn exactly how a bull feels when a cowboy with a pair of nutcutters turns him into a steer."

  Trace inwardly flinched. "Did you tell your sister about the incident?"

  "Of course not. I figured she had to know what kind of man she'd married. Why should I make her feel worse?"

  "Did she ever mention another man?"

  There it was again. That not very subtle accusation. She lifted her chin and met his veiled gaze straight on. "My sister would not sleep around."

  "You're sure of that."

  "Absolutely."

  "Would you happen to know if she had a friend whose name began with the initial C?"

  C? Clint Garvey immediately came to mind. Deciding that Laura's brief, disastrous elopement was none of this man's business, Mariah said, "No."

  From the way she'd begun tearing that cup into little pieces, Tra
ce knew she was lying. He'd bet the Suburban, along with a year's pay on it.

  "Your sister and her husband have been married a long time not to have children."

  She arched a brow. "I believe that's what they call a leading question, Sheriff."

  "I suppose it is," Trace said agreeably.

  "Not that I can see what bearing it would possibly have on this case, Laura always wanted a large family. But things didn't work out."

  Trace decided against mentioning the home pregnancy test the evidence unit had found in the bathroom waste-basket. "One more question."

  Something new had crept into his voice. Something that had her instantly on alert. "All right."

  "Your earlier comment about all the senator's powerful friends—" he braced his elbows on the scarred wooden arms of the chair, linked his fingers together and eyed her over the tent of his hands "—were you concerned about my competence to investigate this case?"

  "Or were you worried that when push came to shove, I'd turn out to be just one of those stereotypical, corruptible rube cops you write into your television programs?"

  Mariah had the grace to flush. A band of tension tightened at the back of her neck. But she held her ground.

  "I'm not sure."

  The answer wasn't the one Trace would have preferred to hear. But he couldn't help respecting her honesty. He pushed himself out of the chair. "When you decide, let me know."

  "I'll do that." Mariah stood up as well and tossed the tattered pieces of cardboard into the metal wastepaper basket. "Are you finished questioning me?"

  "For now. I'll drive you to the lodge. When J.D. arrives with your Jeep, I'll have him drop it off there."

  "I'd appreciate that."

  Silence settled over them on the short drive. Suddenly exhausted and emotionally drained, she leaned her head against the passenger window.

  When he pulled up in front of the lodge office, she unfastened her seat belt and opened the door. "Thanks for the ride."

  "No problem." She was already on the curb. "Oh, one more thing, Ms. Swann."

  Mariah glanced back over her shoulder and found herself staring into a rigid, determined face that was a dead ringer for Dirty Harry. His heavily lidded eyes were hard gray stones, his poet's mouth was pulled into a grim line.