Son of the Morning

by Linda Howard

  “There. Now you’ll have it if you need it.” He paused, staring at the computer with the ongoing chess game. His opponent had made a move. He studied the board, head cocked slightly to one side, then he chortled. “Aha! I know that gambit, and it won’t work.” Gleefully he moved a knight and clicked the mouse.

  “Who are you playing with?”

  “I dunno,” he said absently. “He calls himself the Fishman.”

  Grace blinked, staring at the screen. Naw, it couldn’t be. Kristian was playing with someone who had probably chosen that Net name with malice aforethought, to trick people into making just that assumption. The real Bobby Fischer wouldn’t be surfing the Net looking for games; he could play anyone, anywhere, and get paid huge amounts of money for doing it.

  “Who usually wins?”

  “We’re about even. He’s good,” Kristian allowed as he rehooked his other desktop.

  Grace opened her purse and pulled out her checkbook. “Want a pizza?” she asked.

  His head cocked as he pulled his mind back from cyberspace to check the status of his stomach. “Boy, do I ever,” he declared. “I’m starving.”

  “Then call it in; this one’s on me.”

  “Are you going to stay and split it with me?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I have things waiting for me at home.” She barely controlled a blush. Ford would have roared with laughter if he’d heard her.

  She wrote out a check for fifty dollars, then pulled out a twenty to pay for the pizza. “Thanks, buddy. You’re a lifesaver.”

  Kristian took the check and tip, grinning as he looked at it. “This is going to be a good career, isn’t it?” he asked, beaming.

  Grace had to laugh. “If you can stay out of jail.” She placed the laptop in the case and balanced the repaired modem on top of her unzipped purse. Kristian gallantly took the heavy case from her and carried it downstairs for her. Neither of his parents was in sight, but the sounds of gunshots and a car chase drifted from the den and pinpointed their location; both of the older Siebers unabashedly loved Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action movies.

  Kristian’s gallantry lasted only as far as the kitchen, where the proximity to food reminded him of the pizza he hadn’t yet ordered. Grace retrieved the computer case from him as he halted at the wall phone. “Thanks, Kris,” she said, and left the same way she had entered, through the darkened laundry room and out the back door.

  She paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. During the time she had been with Kristian, clouds had rolled in to block most of the starlight, though here and there was a clear patch of sky. Crickets chirped, and a cool breeze stirred around her, bringing with it the scent of rain.

  The light from her kitchen window, fifty yards to the right, was like a beacon. Ford was there, waiting for her. Warmth filled her and she smiled, thinking of him. She began walking toward her home, stepping carefully in the darkness so she wouldn’t stumble over some unevenness in the ground, the soft spring grass cushioning her movements in silence.

  She was in the Murchisons’ backyard when she saw someone in her kitchen, briefly framed by the window as he moved past it. Grace paused, frowning a little; that hadn’t looked like either Ford or Bryant.

  Oh, Lord, they had company. Her frown deepened. It was probably someone interested in archaeology or associated with the Foundation. College kids pondering a career in archaeology sometimes dropped by to talk, and sometimes she was the one they wanted to see, if they were having a problem with Latin or Greek terms. It didn’t matter. She didn’t want to talk shop, she wanted to go to bed with her husband.

  She was reluctant to go in, though of course she would have to; she couldn’t stand out there in the dark waiting for whoever it was to leave, which could be hours. She edged to the right, trying to see if she recognized the visitor’s car, hoping that it belonged to one of Bryant’s friends. If so, she could signal her brother to take his friend into his side of the house.

  Her familiar Buick sat in the carport, and beside it was Bryant’s black Jeep Cherokee. Ford’s scratched and dented Chevrolet four-wheel-drive pickup, which was used for field work, was parked off to the side. No other vehicle occupied their driveway.

  That was strange. She knew they had company, because the man she’d so briefly glimpsed had had sandy-colored hair, and both Ford and Bryant were dark-haired. But unless it was a neighbor who had walked over, she had no idea how he had arrived. She knew most of their neighbors, though, and none of them fit the description of the man she’d seen.

  Well, she wouldn’t find out who he was until she went inside. She took a step toward the house and suddenly stopped again, squinting through the darkness. Something had moved between her and the house, something dark and furtive.

  A chill ran down her spine. Icy shards of alarm ran through her veins, freezing her in place. Wild possibilities darted through her mind: a gorilla had escaped from a zoo… or there was a really, really big dog in her backyard.

  Then it moved again, ghosting silently up to her back door. It was a man. She blinked in astonishment, wondering why someone was skulking around in her yard, and going to the back door instead of the front. A robbery? Why would any thief with half a brain break into a house where the lights were still on and the occupants were obviously at home?

  Then the back door opened, and she realized the man must have knocked on it, though softly, because she hadn’t heard anything. Another man stood in the door, a man she knew. There was a pistol, the barrel long and curiously thickened, in his hand.

  “Nothing,” the first man said, his voice low, but the night air carried the sound.

  “God damn it,” the other man muttered, stepping aside to let the first man enter. “I can’t stop now. We’ll have to go ahead and do it.”

  The door closed behind them. Grace stared across the dark yard at the blank expanse of her back door. Why was Parrish Sawyer there, and why did he have a pistol? He was their boss, and if he’d called to let them know he was coming over, for whatever reason, Ford would have called her to come home. They were on cordial terms with Parrish, but they had never socialized; Parrish played in the more rarefied stratosphere of the rich and well connected, qualifications Grace’s family didn’t have.

  “Do it”—that was what he’d said. Do what? And why couldn’t he stop?

  Puzzled and uneasy, Grace left the shadows of the Murchisons’ yard and walked across her own. She didn’t know what was going on, but she was definitely going to find out.

  While she had been cooking earlier she had opened the kitchen window so she could enjoy the freshness of the spring day, and it was still raised. She plainly heard Ford say, “Damn it, Parrish, what’s this about?”

  Ford’s voice was rough, angry, with a tone in it she’d never heard before. Grace froze again with one foot lifted to the first step.

  “Where is she?” Parrish asked, ignoring Ford’s question. His voice was indifferent and cold, and the sound of it made the hairs lift on the back of her neck.

  “I told you, the library.”

  A lie. Ford was deliberately lying. Grace stood still, staring at the open window and trying to picture what was happening on the other side of the wall. She couldn’t see anyone, but she knew there were at least four people inside. Where was Bryant, and the man she’d seen enter the kitchen?

  “Don’t give me that shit. Her car’s here.”

  “She went with a friend.”

  “What’s this friend’s name?”

  “Serena, Sabrina, something like that. Tonight’s the first time I’ve met her.”

  Ford had always thought fast on his feet. The names were enough out of the ordinary that it gave the lie a bit of credence, where a plain Sally wouldn’t. She didn’t know why Ford was lying, but the fact that he was doing it was enough for Grace. Parrish had a pistol, and Ford didn’t want him to know where Grace was; something was very wrong.

  “All right.” It sounded as if Parrish exhal
ed through his teeth. “What time will she be back?”

  “She didn’t know. She said they had a lot of work to do. When the library closes, I guess.”

  “And she carried all of the documents with her.”

  “They were in her computer case.”

  “Does this Serena-Sabrina know about the documents?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Now Parrish sounded a little bored. “I can’t take the chance. All right, stand up, both of you.”

  She heard chairs being scraped back, and she moved silently to the right, so she could see inside the window. She was careful to stand back, so if anyone glanced out the window she wouldn’t be framed in the pool of light.

  She saw Bryant, shirtless, his hair damp; he must have just gotten out of the shower, which told her that Parrish and the other man had arrived not long before. Her brother’s face was drawn and pale, his eyes curiously blank. Grace moved another step, and saw four more people.

  There was Ford, as pale as Bryant, though his eyes glittered with a kind of anger she’d never seen before. Parrish, tall and sophisticated, his blond hair expensively styled, stood with his back to the window. The man she’d seen earlier stood beside him, and another man stood just inside the interior kitchen doorway. The man at the doorway was armed; his pistol, like Parrish’s, was silenced. The third man would also be armed, Grace thought, since the other two were.

  She didn’t know what was going on, but she was sure of one thing: she needed the police. She would call them from the Siebers’ house. She took a cautious step backward.

  “Go into the bedroom, both of you,” she heard Parrish say. “And don’t do anything stupid, like trying to jump one of us. I can’t tell you how very painful it is to be shot, but I’ll be forced to demonstrate if you don’t cooperate.”

  Why was he making them go to the bedroom? She had heard enough to know that she was the one he really wanted, and he seemed to be concerned about the documents she carried.

  If Parrish wanted the documents, all he had to do was say so; he was her boss, and she worked on the assignments he gave her. It would break her heart to give up the tantalizing papers, but she couldn’t stop him from taking them. Why hadn’t he just called, and told her to turn them over tomorrow morning? Why had he come to her house with a gun in his hand, and brought two armed thugs with him? None of this made sense.

  She started to walk quickly back to the Siebers’ house, but impulse led her around the corner of the house to where she could look into the bedroom window. She waited for the light to come on, waited to hear voices in the room, but nothing happened, and abruptly she realized Parrish had taken them to Bryant’s bedroom, on the other side of the house. Given the configuration of the house when they had divided it, Bryant’s bedroom was at the back of the house with the kitchen. Parrish would have had to take them up the hallway to the front of the house, then through the connecting door into Bryant’s part of the house and back to the bedroom.

  As quickly as possible Grace retraced her steps, taking care to remain in the deepest shadows. A water hose was curled like a long, skinny snake around the protruding outside faucet; she skirted it, and also sidestepped a big sifting board one of the men had propped against the house. This was her home; she knew all its idiosyncrasies, the little traps for the unwary. She knew where the squeaks in the floor were, the cracks in the ceiling, the ruts in the yard.

  Light was already shining from Bryant’s window. She pressed her back against the wall and sidestepped until she was right beside it. She moved her head around, slowly, trying to move just enough that she could see inside.

  One of the men stepped to the window. Grace jerked her head back and stood rigidly still, not even daring to breathe. He jerked the curtains together, shielding the window and darkening the spill of light.

  Blood thundered in her ears, and sheer terror made her weak. She still couldn’t breathe; her heart felt as if it were literally in her throat, suffocating her. If the man had seen her she would have been caught, for she couldn’t possibly have moved.

  “Sit on the bed,” she heard Parrish say over her pounding heartbeat.

  Grace’s lungs were finally working again. She gulped in deep breaths to steady her nerves, then once again shifted position.

  The curtain hadn’t quite fallen together. She moved so she could see through the slit, see Ford and Bryant—

  Parrish calmly lifted his silenced pistol and shot Ford in the head, then quickly shifted his aim and shot Bryant. Her brother was dead before her husband’s body had toppled to the side.

  No. No! She hung there, paralyzed. Somehow her body was gone, vanished; she couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t think. A dark mist swam over her vision and the unbelievable scene receded until it was as if she saw it at the end of a long tunnel. She heard them talking, their voices oddly distorted.

  “Shouldn’t you have waited? There’ll be a discrepancy in the times of death.”

  “That isn’t a concern.” Parrish’s voice; she knew it. “In a murder-suicide, sometimes the killer waits awhile before killing himself—or herself, in this case. The shock, you understand. Such a pity, her husband and brother conducting a homosexual affair right under her nose. No wonder the poor dear got upset and went a little berserk.”

  “What about the friend?”

  “Ah, yes. Serena-Sabrina. Bad luck for her; she’ll have an unfortunate accident on the way home. I’ll wait here for Grace, and you two wait in the car, follow Serena-Sabrina.”

  Slowly the mist cleared from Grace’s vision. She wished it hadn’t. She wished she had died right there, wished her heart had stopped. Through the gap in the curtains she could see her husband sprawled on his back, his eyes open and unseeing, his dark hair matted with… with—

  The sound rose from her chest, an almost silent keening that reverberated in her throat. It was like the distant howl of the wind, dark and soulless. The pain ripped out of her. She tried to hold it back with her teeth, but it boiled out anyway, primitive, wild. Parrish’s head snapped around. For a tenth of a second—no more—she thought that their gazes met, that somehow he could see through that small gap into the night. He said something, sharply, and lunged for the window.

  Grace plunged into the night.

  Chapter 2

  SHE NEEDED MONEY.

  Grace stared through the rainy night at the ATM; it was lit like a shrine, inviting her to cross the street and perform its electronic ritual. It was thirty yards away, at most. It would take her only a couple of minutes to reach it, punch in the necessary numbers, and she would have cash in her hand.

  She needed to empty out the checking account, and probably a single ATM wouldn’t have enough cash on hand to give her that amount, which meant she would have to find another ATM, then another, and every time she did the odds that she would be spotted would increase—as well as the odds of being mugged.

  The ATM cameras would all film her, and the police would know where she had been, and when. A sudden image of Ford blasted into her brain, paralyzing her anew with shattering pain. God, oh God. The inhuman, involuntary keen rose in her throat again, rattled eerily against her clenched teeth. The sound that leaked out made a prowling cat freeze with one paw uplifted, its hair standing out. Then the animal turned and leaped and vanished into the rain-washed darkness, away from the crouched creature who emitted such a ghostly, anguished sound.

  Grace rocked back and forth, pushing the pain deep inside, forcing herself to think. Ford had bought her safety with his life, and it would be a betrayal beyond bearing if she wasted his sacrifice by making bad decisions.

  A slew of late-night withdrawals, all after the estimated times of death, would cement her appearance of guilt. Kristian would know what time she had left the Siebers’ house, and Ford and Bryant had been killed at roughly that time. They had both been partially undressed, and in Bryant’s bedroom. Parrish had set up the situation with his usual thoroughness; any cop alive
would believe she had walked in on a homosexual encounter between her husband and her brother, and killed them both. Her subsequent disappearance was another point against her.

  The men with Parrish had been professional in their manner; they wouldn’t have done anything sloppy like leave fingerprints. No neighbors would have seen strange cars parked at the house, because they had parked elsewhere and walked to the house. There were no witnesses, no evidence to point to anyone except her.

  And even if by some miracle she convinced the police she was innocent, she had no proof Parrish had killed them. She had seen him do it, but she couldn’t prove she had. Moreover, to the cops’ way of thinking, he wouldn’t have had a motive, while she obviously had plenty of motive. What could she offer as proof? A batch of papers written in a tangle of ancient languages, which she hadn’t even deciphered yet, and which Parrish could have gotten from her at any time simply by telling her to turn them over to him?

  There was no motive, at least none she could prove. And if she turned herself in, Parrish would get the papers, and she would end up dead. He would make certain of it. It would be made to look as if she’d hung herself, or perhaps a drug overdose would cause a brief scandal about the presence of drugs in jails and prisons, but the end result would be the same.

  She had to stay alive, and out of police hands. It was the only chance she had of finding out why Parrish had killed Ford and Bryant—and avenging them.

  To stay alive, to stay free, she had to have money. To get money, she had to use the ATMs no matter how guilty it made her look.

  Would the police freeze her bank account? She didn’t know, but if they did they would probably need a court order to do it. That should give her a little time—time she was wasting by huddling behind a trash bin, instead of walking across the street to the ATM and getting out what she could, while she could.

  But she felt numb, almost incapable of functioning. The thirty yards might as well have been a hundred miles.

  The shiny black surface of the wet pavement reflected the distorted, surreal image of the lights: the brightly colored hues of neon, the stark white of the streetlights, the never-ending, monotonous progression of the traffic light through green, yellow, red, over and over, exerting its control over nonexistent traffic. At two A.M. there was only an occasional car, and none at all for the past five minutes. No one was in sight. Now was the time to approach the ATM.