Heart Of The Night

by Gayle Wilson

  He put both hands flat on the wall before him. The left was as finely made, as strong and powerful as it had ever been. The other was as scarred and damaged as he knew himself to be. His lips twisted with the irony that he had believed—even briefly—that a woman like Kate August might really want to enter his darkness.

  Vampire, he thought again, and the mutilated hand curled into a misshapen fist.

  KATE DIDN’T go straight home. Not because she was afraid.

  She just wanted to savor what had happened, to think about what it might mean. Her professional concerns had taken a back seat to events that might have begun as a result of her work but were, as she had suggested to Kahler, very personal.

  It was almost eleven when she pulled into the parking lot of her apartment house. Although it was well lighted, the lot was deserted at this hour on a weeknight. She sat in the car a moment, looking around the expanse of concrete and the low plantings around the building. For some reason she hesitated to get out of the car and walk the short distance to the entry door. This was a good neighborhood, which was why she had chosen it, but since the invasion of her home, nothing had felt the same.

  Angry with herself for letting the confetti bastard make her lose her courage, she opened the door and stepped out, pressing the automatic lock. She started across the browning strip of heat-dried grass that separated the lot from the entryway.

  With every step she took, the feeling she’d had in the car grew. The silence surrounding her felt wrong. Eerie. Like someone was watching her. Eyes following her passage. Only a few more feet. A few—

  “Hey!”

  Her blood froze. Congealed and stopped, clogging her veins with ice. She whirled around and found Kahler walking toward her. Her relieved gasp was audible.

  “What the hell, Kahler! You scared me to death. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She was overreacting, but given that he was very well aware of what had happened in her apartment two nights ago, it seemed that he’d have more sense than to sneak up behind her. At least he hadn’t touched her. Not like Barrington had earlier. She would have had a heart attack.

  “Waiting for you. I was worried that you hadn’t come home,” he said.

  His eyes were studying her face. She knew she looked like hell. It had been a long day, and she’d had almost no sleep for the last two nights. “Well, thanks, I guess, but you just came closer to doing me in than anything else that’s happened lately “

  “Working late?” he asked.

  She hesitated. She supposed she could classify the visit to Barrington as work. It wasn’t, of course, but he was a legitimate part of the bombing story. “Yeah,” she said. “And I’m really tired. Since the home visit of our prankster, I haven’t been sleeping too well. I’ve just been putting off coming back. Dreading finding something worse in my bed.”

  “You got the lock,” he reminded her.

  “I know. Maybe he can pick locks. Who knows?”

  “Want me to walk in with you? Check the place out?”

  It was a nice offer. He was a nice man, and she truly appreciated his concern. Concerned enough to sit in a dark parking lot waiting to make sure she got home all right.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “Sergeant Arnold said you’d called. You didn’t leave a message, so I thought maybe it was…personal.” The hesitation had been revealing. Kahler had given her enough clues in the last couple of weeks to know that he wanted their relationship to be personal. Only, after what had happened tonight—

  “Give me your key,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’ll take a look around, and then you’ll feel better. Sleep deprivation plays hell with your nerves.”

  “To say nothing of your looks,” she suggested, smiling.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the way you look, August. Even sleep-deprived.”

  She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. His eyes were still on her face. She put her key into the outstretched palm and said simply, “Thanks, Kahler. There’s nothing wrong with the way you look, either.” She wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be comfort for the fact that she knew he felt differently about her than she did about him. It was a pretty lame remark even if concern had been her motivation.

  He put his left arm around her and turned her in the direction she’d been headed when he had stopped her. His hand squeezed her shoulder slightly, and he said, “Come on. You’ll feel better inside.”

  Probably not, she thought, remembering the last two nights, but she obeyed. She really didn’t have a choice, unless she wanted to ask him if she could go home with him. Or unless she wanted to go back to Thorne Barrington’s dark mansion, to curl up in his arms, safe and sound from night terrors, maybe, but very vulnerable to a lot of other kinds of danger.

  KAHLER EXAMINED the apartment with a casual efficiency. She checked her answering machine while he walked back to the bedroom. There were two messages. She glanced toward the hall leading to the back and decided to play them while Kahler was doing his thing.

  After the familiar machine noises came the recording of the slightly accented voice of the man in her bedroom. “Kahler. They said you called Give me a ring as soon as you get home.” Short and to the point, she thought, smiling.

  The second message was from Lew. It was longer and far more intriguing. “I did what we talked about, Kate. And I found something that might be…I don’t know. Maybe important. Maybe nothing. Just call me. I’ll be at the office for a while. I need to run this by you.”

  The second call had come in at 7:40 p.m. Sometime while she’d been driving through the twilight streets of a subdivision trying to decide whether to go home or to eat out alone. More than an hour before she had ended up at Barrington’s mansion.

  “That sounded important,” Kahler said from the doorway.

  She nodded. Lew rarely called her at home. It was part of his unspoken code of management. “I better call him.”

  “It’s pretty late,” he said.

  “I’ll call his office. If he’s not there, I won’t bother him at home. Whatever he wants can surely wait until morning.”

  She had already picked up the phone and begun punching in Lew’s private number at the paper. She let it ring maybe fifteen times, but no one picked up. She put the phone back in its cradle and looked up to find Kahler watching her

  “He must have gone home,” she offered.

  “I guess I’ll do the same,” he said, moving toward the door.

  “Thanks for coming in with me. And for waiting for me.”

  “You weren’t at the paper?” he asked.

  She had told him she was working late, but if she thought Lew had been at the office when he tried to get in touch with her, then it was obvious she hadn’t been.

  “I had an interview,” she said.

  “They must work the night shift,” Kahler suggested. He had stopped at the door, hazel eyes assessing.

  She shook her head, knowing he was too smart for her to lie to. Especially a lie as stupid as that one.

  “Whoever you were interviewing,” he explained, pretending to believe she was puzzled by the comment.

  “I went to see Barrington,” she said.

  “Pretty late for a social call. Or maybe the…interview lasted a while.”

  “I drove out to see Mays today. I wanted to touch base with the judge about what he told me.”

  “What did Mays say?”

  “Pretty much what you’d expect. That he has nothing to do with Jack. That the state and Barrington framed him on the firearms charge. That Barrington’s an SOB who put him away in order to advance his political career.”

  “Sounds like he gave you an earful.”

  “Of hate. He’s still spewing it out. Barrington’s a favorite target.”

  “You think he’s Jack?” Kahler asked.

  “What does it matter what I think? Do you think he’s Jack?”

  “Give me a gut reaction,” he suggested.

  Sh
e took a breath, trying to decide what she thought, remembering the cold gray eyes. But it didn’t feel right. Gut reaction. “No,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I don’t.”

  Kahler nodded.

  “Are you still going to talk to him?” she asked.

  “Eventually. I do have a couple of other cases I’m working on. I haven’t had time to get around to Mays yet, but I will. It’s too big a coincidence to ignore.”

  “Is he right about Barrington? About going along with a frame? You read the transcript.”

  “I didn’t have time. But what if Barrington did do what Mays said? What’s so wrong about putting a killer away, however you can, for as long as you can?”

  “The same thing that’s wrong with cops planting evidence. With federal labs skewing test results to favor the prosecution. You know what’s wrong with it.”

  “The idea of the judge screwing the old man—metaphorically, of course—” Kahler said, an edge of sarcasm in his voice, “doesn’t sit too well, does it?”

  “It just doesn’t fit with what I believed about him.”

  “Maybe you better reexamine some of your beliefs,” he suggested. “And in the meantime, come put the chain on the door. Things will look better in the morning. They always do.”

  He closed the door behind him. Kate waited a moment, listening to his footsteps fade. She crossed the small living room to slip the chain into place. When she turned around, the apartment looked cold and empty. It was home, but it sure didn’t feel very welcoming.

  She didn’t want to go into the bedroom the prankster had invaded, but the idea of spending another night trying to sleep on her couch wasn’t appealing. She hated it, but there wasn’t any need to try to deny how she felt, at least not to herself.

  Her eyes found the phone and her mind replayed the message Lew had left. She glanced again at her watch. Maybe she should try Lew at home. He’d certainly understand her need to know just what he thought he’d found out about the case that had baffled everybody for the last three years. Lew would certainly understand—even if she woke him up to ask.

  She looked up Lew’s home phone number in her address book and again listened to the phone, counting the rings before the answering machine picked up. She put the receiver back in its cradle without leaving a message. If Lew wasn’t at home, that meant he must still be at the paper, maybe just not in his office. Looking at microfilm, maybe. Reading the articles the local papers had done on the Barrington bombing. Trying to decide if the “might be nothing” thing he’d discovered might be something instead. And if he were still at the paper…

  Without giving herself time to decide it was a bad idea, Kate picked up her purse, scrambling through the junk to find the car keys she had dropped inside. It might be a wasted trip, but at least it would burn a few more minutes of the night—a few minutes’ reprieve from trying to sleep in the contaminated apartment.

  Chapter Nine

  Lew wasn’t at the paper. They told her that he’d left around eight, which didn’t make a lot of sense, given the contents of the message on her machine. Lew had definitely indicated he would be working for a while, and then he’d left the office less than half an hour later.

  She even went upstairs to see if he might have put a note on her desk to explain where he was going. He must have known that the enigmatic message on her machine would set her wondering. There was, however, nothing on the surface of her desk except the same mess that had been there when she’d left the office this afternoon. And the door to Lew’s office was locked.

  It took her about ten seconds after she got back into her car to make the choice between going back to her apartment or heading to Lew’s house.

  As she drove, she fought the useless speculations about what Lew might have discovered. She tried to remember his exact wording and wished she’d saved the message so that if this journey turned out to be a wild-goose chase, she could at least play back the tape when she got home. I did what I promised…Or I did what we talked about… She wasn’t positive how Lew’s opening sentence had been phrased.

  But she did know that he had told her he’d check out Mays’s possible association with any of the current hate groups and that he would contact people who knew Barrington and make some inquiries about his injuries. Based on what Thorne had told her, she knew that Lew had done exactly what he’d promised as far as pursuing information about the judge’s injuries was concerned, so if he’d found out something that might be important…

  Her mind retreated from that conclusion. She didn’t want to believe that Lew had learned anything that might have made him change his mind about Barrington’s involvement in the confetti package or in invading her apartment to leave that distinctive message between the sheets of the bed she slept in every night.

  Into her head drifted Thorne’s confession. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night wanting you. Thinking about you being there with me Was it possible that because he was sexually attracted to her he had…

  Again, she forced the rejection of the thought that seemed disloyal, somehow, after what had happened between them tonight. Between them, she thought, remembering her earlier fears. Despite her worries over how whatever Lew wanted to tell her might reflect on the man she had admitted she was obsessed with, she liked the sound of that. The reality of it. Between them.

  There were lights on inside Lew’s house. He must have had some errands to run between leaving the paper and coming home Maybe he had talked to someone else between the time he’d put the message on her machine and the time he’d left the office. That would help explain why he wasn’t there when he’d clearly indicated he planned to be around a while.

  She opened the car door and stepped out onto the brick driveway. She had been here before. Lew had hosted a few employee Christmas parties before his wife’s death from ovarian cancer almost four years ago. To everyone’s surprise, Lew had chosen to keep this house in the suburbs rather than moving into a town house or an apartment, smaller and more convenient for a man living alone. It must get lonely at times, she thought, rattling around in this big empty place alone. Lew didn’t talk about his private life, and she didn’t ask. She considered him a friend, but they didn’t have that kind of relationship.

  She rang the bell and heard the distant melodious chime. The street behind her was as quiet and peaceful as you’d expect from a neighborhood with houses in this price range. Very far removed from the crime and violence that plagued the hearts of major cities. Out here in this pricey neighborhood the inhabitants could imagine themselves safe from that particular taint of society’s ills.

  There was no response to the bell. She hesitated, wondering if she could be mistaken about the meaning of the lights. Maybe Lew simply left a few burning downstairs as a safety precaution. She was going to feel like an idiot if he showed up in his pajamas and robe, awakened by her repeated demands at his door. Even as the image formed, she pressed the ivory-colored button again and listened to the interior chime once more.

  Her hand dropped to touch the elaborate brass handle of the door and without her conscious direction, her thumb pressed the release. The latch moved downward and the door opened. A sense of unease twisted in her stomach. Not the slight worry about embarrassing herself she had felt before, standing outside nnging her boss’s doorbell at eleven-thirty on a weeknight. This was much stronger, much more compelling Doors were supposed to be locked at night. That was the twentiethcentury reality, even in the old, exclusive neighborhood where this house stood.

  The foyer the opened door revealed was dark, but there was light filtering in from somewhere beyond the hall. The white-and-pink marble squares of the foyer floor reflected the shadowed illumination from the house’s interior, softly gleaming in the dimness, inviting in their timeless beauty. She opened the door a little wider, leaning into the entrance hall without actually stepping inside

  “Lew,” she called, pitching her voice into the waiting stillness. There was no answer, so she ca
lled again, more loudly this time, her voice echoing slightly, bouncing off the cold expanse of the marble. Unanswered. The feeling that something was wrong was growing, fear, as it had in the parking lot tonight, mushrooming with sick certainty inside her body. What was she so afraid of? she wondered. Why the hell was she making such a big deal of this?

  Because she was spooked, and she had been for a couple of days. Because of the confetti and maybe because she had talked to Mays today, had seen the cold hatred in his eyes. The craziness. All of this was crazy. She ought to get out of here. Lew would be at the office in the morning. She could talk to him then, and he’d never have to know she’d come to his house tonight. This was as stupid as walking into Barrington’s mansion that night because the gate had been open. I don’t know why he didn’t shoot you, Kahler had said. That was the normal twentieth century response to someone entering your house at night. What she was doing was dangerous. Stupid and dangerous.

  Except, her rational mind reminded, there had been something wrong at Barrington’s. Her instincts then had been right on the money, and something wasn’t right tonight. Despite the urge to cut and run, she knew that something was very wrong here.

  Steeling herself, she stepped inside the foyer, but she left the door open behind her. She tried to remember the layout of the house from the parties she had attended here. That had been several years ago, and the house then had echoed with noise and color, filled with Christmas smells. Candles and holly and perfume. Spiced cider. While she stood uncertainly in the darkened foyer, the pleasant memories swirled inside her head.

  “Lew?” she called again, questioning the silent darkness. There was still no answer, so she walked across the marble squares, her footsteps echoing as hollowly as her voice had. She remembered the layout as she walked, the pieces of memory floating into her head. Spacious living room to her right. Dark. The dining room where Lew’s wife had arranged the buffets during those Christmas parties was on her left. She kept walking, past the stairs that rose beyond the double doorway to the living room. They were nothing like the curving staircase at Thorne’s house. Only the darkness at the top was the same.