“Know what I think?” he said, leaning back against the building’s thick brick outer walls, his hands on his knees, his body hunching over as he worked to draw the relatively fresh air of the courtyard into his lungs. “I think any man who can do that to what used to be a human being has got to have something very important left out of his own makeup. And when I think about a lady peeling off a body’s . . .” His eyes went wide as his voice trailed off, and for a moment Zach thought the captain was going to lose his last meal all over the flagged courtyard. Hamish scrubbed one beefy hand across his face, and swallowed hard. “Well, hell. Let’s just say that shooting a crossbow bolt through your old friend’s heart or poisoning your husband’s lover would be nothing after that.”
“Come on,” said Zach. “Let’s go.”
They went for a walk along a nearby grassy neutral ground filled with pink and white flowering oleanders and towering, leafy sycamores and elms. “Look at that,” said Hamish, squinting up at the roiling clouds overhead. “How many days have we been putting up with this? If it’s going to rain, I wish it would just do it and get it over with.”
“Any idea as to exactly who the Irishman was?”
“Not a blessed clue.” Shaking out his white handkerchief again, Hamish began to mop his damp face. He’d gone from being green to flushing red. “All the poor sot had in his pockets was a fancy gold watch he probably lifted off some sucker, a broken comb he doesn’t appear to have used much, and one hundred dollars in U.S. government currency.”
“U.S.?”
“That’s right. Oh, and this.” Hamish fished in the pockets of his uniform and came up with a small brown glass bottle he tossed toward Zach. “According to Austin Sinclair, it’s opium. Liberally laced with strychnine.”
Zach caught the bottle out of the air and held it up to the fading light. “Makes you wonder if our murderer doesn’t have some ready access to opium and laudanum.”
“Hell, you can buy them in any drugstore.”
“But you’d need to sign the poison books for the strychnine, wouldn’t you?”
Hamish let out a long, pained sigh. “Let me guess. You want me to check the poison books of every drugstore in the city?”
Zach gave him a slow smile. “Good idea.”
“Huh.”
They walked on in silence for a time as the hot wind kicked up and the clouds grew darker and the evening slid into night. “Where exactly was this warehouse where you found him?” Zach asked.
“Not too far from where your widow says she was attacked.”
“She was attacked. I saw it, remember?”
“Yeah, right,” said Hamish. “And what are you glowering at me like that for?” he demanded when Zach swung his head to stare at him. “You suspected her even when I didn’t. And I tell you, every day she’s looking more and more like the one we want.”
“Why? Because she’s capable of performing an autopsy, and you almost upchuck just at the sight of one?”
The red in Hamish’s cheeks deepened to an angry crimson. “She’s a woman, damn it. It’s just not natural, the things she does. Who wants a woman who’s capable of cutting up bodies and peering at their innards?”
“I admire her,” Zach said quietly.
“Yeah? Well, I’d think twice about taking anything she offered me to eat or drink, I can tell you that much.”
The tolling of the cathedral bell ringing out over the city told Zach it was just on nine o’clock, but the tall, narrow town house on the rue Dumaine was already dark when he got there, the only light a dim glow through the shutters of the front bedroom on the top floor. He thumped the door’s brass knocker, anyway, not really expecting anyone to answer, but in a moment he heard the sound of soft footsteps on the stairs. He waited, listening to the harsh squeal of a bolt being drawn back. Then the door swung inward, and he found himself looking at Emmanuelle.
She held a simple brass candlestick in one hand. The bare flame flickered and danced in the warm wind to cast a golden light over the delicate planes of her face and bring out a wine red glow in the cascade of thick dark curls tumbling down her back. She wore a simple peignoir of tucked white linen knotted by a sash at her waist, and he was very, very sure she wore nothing beneath it.
“You shouldn’t answer the door looking like that,” he said.
“I knew it was you.” She gave him an enigmatic smile and turned away, toward the spiral steps at the end of the hallway. After the briefest of hesitations he followed her, the door shutting behind him with a soft catch that echoed seductively in the empty, darkened passage.
“I didn’t expect you to have retired so early,” he said, following her up the gently curving staircase that led to the house’s first-floor living quarters. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you.” Her feet were bare, he noticed, her flanks lean and naked and sensuously obvious through the thin cloth of her wrapper. He knew he should look away, but couldn’t.
“I wasn’t asleep. Dominic is spending the night at his grandparents’, and Rose has gone out, so I decided to go to bed early and read.”
Impossible to ignore the image her words provoked, of that slim body sprawled naked between crisp white sheets, her hair spreading out silky and sinfully free. In an age when most men and women went to bed wrapped in yards of linen or cotton, and with night-caps on their heads, Emmanuelle de Beauvais obviously slept naked.
At the top of the stairs she turned to face him, the flickering candlelight playing over her delicate features and the loose, sinfully dark fall of her hair. Behind her, the parlor and dining room lay in darkness, but the door to the gallery had been left open to the night air and the sweet scents of the courtyard below. “Did you find him?” she asked. “The Irishman, I mean.”
“We found him.”
Something in his face, or maybe in his voice, told her the truth. She swung away, one hand coming up to press against her lips. “Oh, God. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Anyone seeing her now would think she really cared, that it grieved her to learn of that bedraggled Irishman laid out on Dr. Austin Sinclair’s cold slab. “The man tried to kill you,” Zach said. “Why should you be bothered by his death?”
She went to stand in the open doorway, the flame of her candle flaring up wildly as the wind hit it, then snuffed it out. She set it aside. “Partially, I suppose, because his death is linked somehow to me. But any death diminishes me.”
“You’re probably the only person in this city who feels that way about this one. We don’t even know his name.”
She stepped out onto the gallery, the hot wind snatching at her loose hair to blow it about her face, her bare feet padding lightly on the wooden floorboards as she went to stare out at the darkness below. “Which means you probably have no idea who hired him, either, do you?” she said after a moment.
“No. But we know how he died,” Zach said, then added, when she looked back at him in inquiry: “Strychnine-laced opium tablets.”
“Mon Dieu. What a horrible death.”
“Horrible for him, yes, but it just might lead us to his killer. Strychnine’s a registerable poison. If the man who hired that dead Irishman bought it in this city, he’ll be on some druggist’s books.”
She wrapped her hands so tightly around the gallery’s square wooden railing that the skin glowed white in the night. “He might not have bought it,” she said after a moment. “It occurs naturally in some seeds and plants, strychnine—just like the poisonous oil in tansy. If someone knew how to obtain the one, he’d probably know about the other, wouldn’t he?”
Zach walked over to stand beside her, close enough that when the wind blew, he was aware of the long, fine skirt of her peignoir billowing against his leg. “So who would know how to extract it? Besides Papa John,” he added softly, when she didn’t answer.
She lifted her head, and he saw the fear in her eyes before she hid it with a downward sweep of her lashes.
“Jesus,” he said, feeling suddenly as if someone had kicked
him in the chest, knocking the air out of him. “You know how to do it, don’t you?”
She nodded, her face pale and strained in the dim light of the night. “We worked on it together, the three of us. Henri and Philippe and I. You see, in small doses, strychnine can be used to rid the body of intestinal worms. Like tansy.”
“Does anyone else know you experimented with it?” Zach asked, his hands falling hard on her thin shoulders, jerking her around to face him. “Anyone.”
Her head fell back, her lips parting as she stared up at him. “I’m not sure. Charles Yardley. Hans, perhaps. Why?”
“Because I have a captain who’s convinced himself that you’re our killer, and this little piece of information would probably be enough to make him think he’s got a solid enough case to put a noose around your neck.”
She drew in a quick, hitching breath, but she didn’t flinch away from him, didn’t flinch from what he’d said. “What about you?” she asked, staring at him, her eyes roving intently over his face. “What do you think, Major?”
He brought up one hand to cup her chin. “I think whoever is behind these killings is more than a bit mad.” He rubbed his thumb back and forth across the smooth skin of her cheek. “And you’re not mad.”
“I could be.” A wry smile touched her full lips. “I could be wildly, deviously insane. Maybe you just don’t know it.”
“I know you.” The urge to do more than touch her face was strong; the urge to pull her woman’s body warm and close to his, to know again the heady wine of her kiss, to run his fingers through her silken hair and touch the yielding softness of the naked flesh so temptingly obvious beneath thin white linen. Shuddering, he put her away from him and went to stand at the edge of the gallery, one shoulder resting against a wooden post, his gaze fixed on the lightning crackling through the thick, dark clouds above. The night wind blew around them, warm and heavy with damp from the rains that kept threatening and threatening, but never came.
“Three years ago,” he said, “at a fort out West, there was a series of killings. They weren’t like these in the sense that at Fort McKenna, each death seemed unrelated to the last, but they kept happening. Men, women”—he paused, swamped for one unexpected moment by a remembered tide of rage and grief and irrational but soul-twisting guilt—“even a child. The only thing those people had in common was that they died. Brutally. I wasn’t a provost marshal then, just a captain at the fort, but the first man killed was one of my men, and I was young enough—and cocky enough—to think I could catch whoever was doing it.”
She came to stand beside him. Lightning split the sky, tearing open the night with startling flashes of brilliant white, but she was watching him, not the storm. “And did you catch him?”
“Eventually.” Eventually, but not soon enough, Zach thought; not for Rachel, not for all the others, and he had to tighten his jaw against the urge to say more. “The man doing the killings was one of the lieutenants at the fort. He was even younger than I was, just twenty years old, a West Point graduate, good Maryland family . . . he seemed to have everything going for him.”
“Was he insane?”
Zach let out his breath in a long, painful sigh. “I don’t know. I’m not a doctor, but he didn’t appear to be. That was probably the most frightening part of it. He seemed so lucid, so intelligent, so . . . normal. But he was lacking something. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve come to believe that what he lacked was a sense of his own fundamental tie to humanity. He had such an all encompassing arrogance that he genuinely believed whatever he wanted was more important than anything else, more important even than another man’s life.”
“And what did he want? Why was he killing?”
Zach turned toward her, his spine pressing hard against the post behind him as he reached out to her, his hands riding low on her hips to draw her close. “It was just a game,” he said, his hands moving in slow circles, her flesh smooth and warm and comforting beneath its thin covering of linen. “A contest of wits. His wits, against mine.”
She rested her forearms against his chest, not pushing him away, but not drawing him closer, either. “Why? Did you know him?”
“He wasn’t a friend, but yes, I knew him.”
“There, you see? You knew him, and still you had no idea of what he was capable.”
“I know he wouldn’t have been troubled by the death of some unknown opium addict who tried to skewer him with a bowie knife in the Irish Channel.” The wind caught at her hair, tangling it across her face, and he brought up one hand to smooth it back, his fingers light as a caress against her cheek. “Sometimes I think you’re too aware of the ties that bind you to the rest of humanity.”
She gave a soft laugh tinged with a hint of self-mockery. “I don’t know about that. Lately I seem to spend less and less time worrying about humanity, and more time worrying about myself.”
She would have turned her face away then, but he caught her chin, forcing her to look up at him again. “You’re scared, aren’t you?” he said, his gaze searching those beautiful, carefully composed features. “You might not show it, but that doesn’t mean the fear’s not there.”
Her breath came out in a keening sigh, as if she’d been holding it forever and found it a relief to finally let it go. “I’m terrified,” she said simply, her eyes wide and vulnerable as she stared back at him. “Dominic has already lost his father. I don’t want him to lose me, too . . . whether it’s to this killer, or to Captain Hamish Fletcher’s noose.”
He shifted his hand to the nape of her neck, his thumb splayed against the soft white flesh of her throat. “I won’t let that happen to you.”
She met his gaze unflinchingly. Met it, and held it. “And if it turned out your friend Fletcher was right about me? Hmmm? What would you do then, Major? Would you still stop it from happening?”
He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t need to. She read the answer in his eyes, and smiled. If Hamish was right, then Zach would go out of his way to make sure she swung. She knew it, and she didn’t care. It had always been there between them, the rivalry and the challenge and the danger, feeding the passion and giving a cutting edge to the hunger.
She was still smiling when he tangled his fist in her hair, tipping her head back and pulling her hard against him. She came up on her bare toes, her arms twining about his neck, her body arching warm and supple as she pressed against him, a soft whimper easing out of her as she opened her mouth to his.
It was a kiss of fire, of need and fear and passion, all too long denied. He was drowning in her kiss, burning in it, his mouth slanting, seeking, demanding, taking, giving. She brought up one bare foot to let the sole slide sensuously, invitingly down the length of his leg, and he caught at her thigh, felt the edges of her peignoir slide open, felt her flesh smooth and bare beneath his searching fingers. She moaned deep in her throat, her hands pulling at the buttons of his coat. The wind gusted hot and wild around them, lightning flashing white and stark and almost instantaneous with a rolling crescendo of thunder that shuddered the gallery and rumbled on and on and on.
“I want you,” he whispered, the words slurred by the movement of his mouth against hers. His hand slid up her leg, up over the warm, naked curve of her hip to dig into the soft flesh of her bottom and pull her tight against the throbbing length of his erection. “Here. Now. Nothing held back.”
“Nothing,” she said simply, and he pushed her through the French doors, into the darkened dining room beyond. There were a dozen or more reasons why he shouldn’t be allowing this to happen, but at that moment, he didn’t give a damn about any of them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The dining room was little more than a pattern of shadows on the edge of Zach’s consciousness, a darkened unknown where lightning gleamed on polished rosewood and looming sideboards appeared reflected in the flash of a massive mirror suspended high above an empty hearth. He thrust her back from the open doors and the fury of the gathering storm, and they
clung to each other, tongues twining, hands seeking, bodies yearning. His hip banged into what felt like the edge of a table. A chair went over as they careened into it, and he tore his mouth from hers long enough to bear her down onto the floor.
The movement pulled apart the edges of her peignoir, baring to his gaze her full, high breasts and the beckoning shadow at the juncture of her thighs. He yanked at the white sash still knotted like a slender binding about her waist. It came free in his hands and he tossed it aside, then looked up to find her staring at him, her eyes intense. He kept his gaze locked with hers as he lowered his head to close his mouth over one rosy peak, and she cried out, her back arching, her shoulders coming off the ground when he sucked the nipple between his lips.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, cradling his face between splayed fingers as he made love to her breasts with his tongue and his lips and the heat of his breath. She squirmed beneath him, her voice a frantic whimper, her hands tightening in his hair, holding him to her, willing him to devour her. He’d dreamed of making slow, sweet love to her, of touching her and tasting her everywhere, but already he was near the edge, swirling away in a white heat. No, he was over the edge, and she was there with him, frantic hands sweeping down to pull at his clothes. He reared up to fumble with his sword belt and rip off sash, coat, shirt. She rubbed her palms over his bare chest and arched her hips invitingly beneath him, and he was so hungry for her, he thought he might die.
“Now,” she said in a guttural whisper, her long, slim legs wrapping around him as she lifted straining against him. “Please. Now.”
Bending forward, he caught her open mouth with his in a deep, wet kiss of shuddering breath and aching need as he fumbled with the buttons of his trousers. Already she was tugging at the waistband to yank them down over his hips. Then her hand closed around his erection, and he gasped into her mouth.
“Mon Dieu,” she said with a shaky laugh as her hand moved up the aching, rigid length of him.
Midnight Confessions Page 24