Before I Sleep

by Rachel Lee

  “But it didn't,” Seamus said.

  Hollister shook his head. “No, it let up for a few days while the police patrolled a lot. They never did catch anybody. Then the police stopped corning as often, and the dealers came back.”

  “So you think this was a drug killing?” Gil asked.

  Hollister shook his head. “I saw that boy's picture in the paper. Mark my words, he was no dealer. I may not get around the way I used to, but my eyes are still as good as any eagle's, and I'd have recognized the boy if he was one of the dealers hanging out.”

  Seamus looked at Gil. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  Gil nodded. “Could you take a look at some photos and see if you recognize any of the dealers? Say tomorrow at the station?”

  Hollister hesitated. “Let me think about it. I probably could, but …” He looked away, and his hands were trembling in earnest. “Something's wrong in that neighborhood lately. I'm not saying I know what it is, but everybody's as nervous as a cat on a hot stove since the killing.”

  “That would make anybody nervous, wouldn't it?”

  “Not like this. Most especially since the dealers have gone away since then, most likely because the police are coming around too often. Seems to me they ought to be relieved, if it was just a case of one drug dealer killing another.”

  Seamus's respect for the man's intelligence increased greatly. “So what do you think is going on?”

  “I don't know.” He looked at the two of them from his reddened eyes. “I honestly don't know. But I got two things to tell you. First off, there was some unpleasant talk back about a month ago, about how we had to protect ourselves if the police wouldn't do it. I thought it was all bluster, but, well, you know. And another thing. I know I'm not the only one heard those shots.”

  “So why aren't people talking?”

  He shook his head again. “I can't say for sure. It's not like anybody is telling me why. Maybe it's just what Rico said to us, mat it was street justice, and we don't need to get involved if we don't want.”

  “Rico said that?”

  Sam nodded. “He said nobody can force us to be witnesses if we don't want. And I know folks are scared. Thing is, I'm not really sure what they're scared of.”

  Seamus looked at Gil, then asked, “Mr. Hollister, do you think one of your neighbors took the law into his own hands?”

  Hollister looked down. “I don't know,” he said finally. “But I tell you, ever since I saw that boy's picture in the paper, the possibility has been something I haven't been quite able to get out of my head.”

  CHAPTER 12

  14 Days

  It was nearly eleven by the time Seamus left the station. Glancing at his watch, he decided to head over to the radio station, and see what Carey was up to. He rationalized it by telling himself he just wanted to make sure she got home safely. The he didn't work; he knew perfectly well that he just wanted to see her.

  He turned the radio on as he drove, listening to her read an Otis poem over the air, as she had done last night, wondering if she was going to close her show every night with one of the poems.

  Not that it mattered. It was her show, the poems weren't bad … and he was beginning to get a bit of an itch about Otis himself. Especially since the preliminary autopsy suggested that Harry Downs bad been slashed to death with a razor or a scalpel.

  Carey was coming out of the station when Seamus pulled into the parking lot. The off-duty cop who'd been hired by the station was helping her carry a large box toward her car. Seamus pulled into an empty slot near Carey's car and climbed out.

  He recognized the cop. “Hey, Lou. When did you get turned into a mule?”

  Lou laughed the deep belly laugh that made him one of the best-liked cops in the department. “Hey, what's a guy to do when a lady staggers by carrying something this heavy?”

  Carey flashed a smile. “There's something to be said for machismo after all.”

  “Right,” said Lou. “I get the sore arms and shoulders tomorrow.” When Carey opened her tailgate, he shoved the box into the Jeep. “Well, since Rourke is here, I'll just say good night. Gotta get back to my coffee.”

  “Thanks an awful lot Lou,” Carey called after him. He waved back at her.

  Then, shocking Seamus, she opened her purse, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it.

  “You don't smoke,” he said.

  “You're right. I don't. Except for the last week.”

  “Put it out.”

  “Mind your own business, Rourke. I'll go to hell any way I want to.”

  He sighed and leaned back against his car, folding his arms. The shore breeze was whispering in the trees, giving the balmy night a sweet soft feeling.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “To make sure you get home safely.”

  She puffed on the cigarette and blew a plume of smoke into the night. In the light from the streetlamps, her skin had an unhealthy color, and her eyes looked sunken. He remembered she had probably had even less sleep than he had.

  “I talked to the IRS about your dad today,” she said finally.

  “And?”

  “And they're prepared to negotiate. If you want, I'll see what I can do.”

  “I wish you would. You're apt to keep your cool better than I could, given that he's my father.”

  “That's why people hire lawyers.” She flicked an ash, folded one arm beneath her breasts, and held the cigarette up near her shoulder.

  It was an unconsciously provocative pose, and he felt his erotic daydreams suddenly spring to life again. This was stupid. He needed to get out of here while he still could. But he stayed, his feet planted on the pavement as if they were glued. “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem. How is your dad?”

  “Okay, I guess. Tomorrow's the first day they'll let me visit him. They wanted to get him through the DTs first, I guess.”

  “You must be looking forward to that.”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes I wish he'd just go away.”

  She looked at him, took another drag on the cigarette, then tossed it to the pavement and ground it out with her toe. “You blame him, don't you?”

  “I blame myself.”

  She sighed and tipped her head back, looking up at the night sky as if she could find the answer to a riddle there. “You blame everyone,” she said finally. “You blame yourself because you weren't there—although exactly how you were supposed to know your kid was going to get seriously ill beats me. You blame your dad because he was driving, you blame your wife because she didn't use the car seat, you blame her for killing herself, and you blame yourself for not reading her mind and knowing she was going to—”

  “Carey …”

  She shook her head and looked at him. “You even blamed me for trying to make you happy. Or maybe you blamed me because I almost did, and you couldn't live with it because you've got some crazy notion that you need to pay for what happened for the rest of your life.”

  “Carey …”

  “But mostly you blame yourself, Seamus. For everything. Did it ever occur to you that sometimes things just happen? That sometimes you can't be in control? That you weren't even there, for God's sake, so how could you have affected anything? And as for not being there … Christ! You're a cop. You were on the job. Nobody can be two places at the same time.”

  He felt the black lash of hatred for her. He hated it when she cut him open in her surgical way. He hated her for saying all the things he couldn't say himself.

  “Go visit your dad tomorrow, Seamus.” She turned and headed for the driver's side of her car. She opened the door and turned to look back at him. “And try to remember that your father, your wife, and your baby were the victims of a drunk driver.”

  He wanted to strangle her.

  “ In fact,” she continued in the same hard voice, as if determined to drive a point home, “you might even remember that no matter what your father did or didn't do, he probably couldn't have avoided the
accident. Drunks drive right into headlights, remember?”

  She climbed in, started her car, and drove away, leaving him standing there overwhelmed by an impulse to violence so strong that it scared him. But as soon as he felt the fear, the anger seeped away.

  She hadn't said anything he didn't already know. The problem was, he knew it with his head. It was his gut that wouldn't listen.

  Carey kicked herself all the way home. Her attack on Seamus had been unforgivable, and she knew it. It wasn't as if she'd said those things out of some desire to help him. No, she had said them to protect herself. Seamus was getting too close again, involving himself entirely too much in her life, and his showing up tonight for no good reason had been like setting a match to a fuse. Every self-protective instinct she possessed had kicked into high gear.

  But that wasn't fair to him. She had no idea why he was suddenly spending so much time in her life—wanting to see that she got home safely struck her as an excuse, not a reason—and she was afraid of the toll if she started to care for him again.

  As if she had ever stopped caring. The gloomy realization struck her just as she was pulling into her driveway. It wouldn't hurt this much, she admitted, if she didn't care.

  She should never have called him about Otis in the first place. Getting him involved hadn't done a damn thing to help. All it had done was pull the pin on the hand grenade that was her love for him. If she didn't keep a safe distance, her whole life was going to blow up in her face all over again.

  “Shit.” She said the word quietly, but with feeling, as she sat in her car. She had turned the ignition off, and the only sound in the stillness of the night was the tick of her cooling engine and the distant sound of traffic on Roosevelt Boulevard.

  Maybe she ought to take a long drive across the bay. It had been a while since she had done that, and it always soothed her nerves. And maybe, if she drove far enough and long enough, she could put things in their proper perspective.

  She leaned forward to shove the key back into the ignition, but just as it slid home, headlights pulled into the driveway behind her.

  Her heart climbed into her throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe. She stared into the rearview mirror at those headlights and tried not to think about just how thin the canvas top of her Jeep was. It was no protection at all against a knife or a bullet, and locking the doors would be no help at all. God, why hadn't she just bought an ordinary car?

  The headlights turned off and someone climbed out of the car. Twisting in her seat, she tried to decide if she should make a run for it. Then she recognized Seamus.

  “Shit!” Suddenly furious, she grabbed the door handle and wrenched the door open. “Son of a bitch! You scared me to death!”

  He froze a couple of feet away. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you got home safely.”

  She was shaking in reaction to the adrenaline pumping through her veins, mad enough to spit but afraid that her legs would give out if she tried to stand. She fumbled for her purse and lit another cigarette.

  This time Seamus didn't say anything about it. All he said was, “I'll wait until I'm sure you're safely inside. Would you like me to check the house?”

  She drew a deep drag of smoke and looked at her trembling hand, watching the way the glowing tip of the cigarette bobbed wildly. “Nobody's going to try to kill me,” she said finally.

  “Probably not. The Harry Downs thing put me on edge.”

  “Yeah, but there's a difference. If the murder was really related to Otis, then the whole damn Bay Area knows I think he might be innocent. I don't think I'd be real high on the victim list.”

  “You can't know that.” Then, after a moment, “Want me to carry that box inside for you?”

  Finally she climbed out of the Jeep and faced him. “You're crazy, you know that?”

  “It's been rumored.”

  “After the way I talked to you down at the station, what the hell are you doing here?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “What you said was true. Anyway, I'm crazy. So I'm here.”

  Giving up, she opened the tailgate and let him heft the box.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “Sally Dyer got me a bunch of press clippings on the Otis case. I haven't had a whole lot of time to look at it, but I wouldn't have thought the Sentinel had printed so much about it.”

  She unlocked the door, and they stepped inside. Seamus put the box on the lowboy at her direction, then insisted on checking out the house. She waited for him with a feeling of impatience, wishing him gone now. He didn't seem to be in any mood to oblige.

  When he came back downstairs, she decided to apologize. Maybe then he'd go away, and she wouldn't have to keep feeling bad about the way she had jumped on him. “Look,” she said. “I'm sorry about what I said. I had no business giving you a hard time.”

  “Like I said, it was all true.”

  “That doesn't give me the right to say it.”

  “Why not?” It was a rhetorical question, and his smoky eyes said he didn't expect a response.

  She gave him one anyway. “You're crowding me, Rourke. I see you everywhere I turn.”

  “Hey, you were the one who called me.”

  “About Otis.”

  “And Otis is what has me turning up so often. You've had death threats because of your shows about Otis.”

  “I get death threats all the time.” Well, actually, only rarely, but she wanted to sound as if she didn't give a damn, because if she let him know she was scared to death, he'd never go away. Having him play watchdog was not good for her sanity.

  “But you don't get calls all the time from a guy who may well be a murderer.”

  He had her there. She glared at him, but couldn't think of a good argument. Her brain was fried after three hours on the air, and exhaustion was rapidly catching up with her. Memories of awaking this morning with Seamus beside her were beginning to waft around the edges of her thoughts like the fleeting fragments of nearly forgotten dreams.

  “Look,” he said finally. “I'll admit it. I've got you in my blood like cocaine. I keep remembering the high, and I keep wanting more of it.”

  “Cocaine isn't any good for anybody.”

  “Exactly.” The smile he gave her was almost sad. “I'd like to have sex with you again. But I'm afraid of the price tag. So hey, it's out in the open, now we can ignore it and concentrate on business. If John William Otis didn't kill the Klines, we're getting awfully close to running out of time.”

  It was like a one-two punch, and she nearly gasped for air. He'd like to have sex with her? Seamus had never been I that crude. Like most men, he wasn't comfortable with terms like “making love” but he'd never, ever referred to just “having sex.”

  And then following it right up with the reminder that they had only two weeks left before Otis would die, and absolutely nothing at all that might help save him, left her feeling almost KO'd.

  But then she was struck by something else. “You believe he's innocent?”

  “I didn't say that. Let's just say I'm keeping an open mind about it. But having an open mind is making me awfully nervous.”

  She nodded and decided to forget everything else he'd said. It was the easiest way to deal with it, and the quickest way to get back to a safe distance while pretending normalcy. “Want some coffee?”

  He shook his head. “You need some sleep, and so do I. If I hang around, neither of us is going to get any.”

  She didn't have to ask why not. She knew. He walked out the door and closed it behind him with finality.

  But nothing was final, she realized. Her entire body was aching with a longing that hadn't been fulfilled in five long years. And all because the jerk had said he wanted to have sex with her.

  Wrenching her thoughts away from those dangerous paths, she picked up the box and carried it into the kitchen, determined to read the stuff Sally had given her until she was too tired to do anything but fall straight to sleep.
/>   The next morning Carey went to visit Evan Sinclair at the State Attorney's Office. The new criminal courts complex had been opened just after she'd left the State Attorney's Office, so it wasn't a familiar place she was coming back to. Somehow it still managed to have the same look and feel, though. Or maybe it was just the number of familiar faces, some of whom greeted her in a friendly fashion, others of whom looked quickly away. She decided some of them must have their noses out of joint over her coverage of Otis. It wasn't like there could be any other reason now that she was spending so little time in the practice of law.

  Evan greeted her warmly enough, and even got her a cup of coffee. He closed his office door, though, before they started talking.

  “I'm getting cross-eyed looks since I asked for this file,” he told her. “I figure now that you've come to see me, my stock around here is going to be zero.”

  “Why should it matter? You're not the one making the ruckus.”

  “Nobody's real keen on having this case reopened.”

  “There isn't enough time to do that.”

  He shrugged. “You know what was really interesting? It usually takes three or four days to get old files out of die storage.”

  “I know.” She looked at the folder on his desk. “It wasn't in storage, was it.”

  He shook his head. “Even more interesting. Harry Downs asked for it last week.”

  “Oh, God.” The thought made her queasy. Could Harry have had some doubts, too? He'd certainly been gung ho during the trial.

  “Yeah,” he said, “that was kind of the way I felt. Oh, God.” He looked at the folder. “But there's nothing in it, Carey. I read it over yesterday afternoon. Briefs, pleadings, motions, orders … it's a complete record of public documents. No trial notes, no interview notes, nothing. You could have pulled this record together from the clerk's office, except for the police reports. Those are still here. And the depositions and trial transcripts.’’ He pointed to a stack of blue-bound court reporters’ books nearly two feet high.