Heart of the Night

by Barbara Delinsky

  “You could do it,” she whispered, sliding her hands up his chest, “and without much effort. It doesn’t take much to get me hot when I’m around you.”

  “What about naked?” he asked. The gray flecks in his eyes had darkened.

  At the slight pressure of her hand, he backed off her. She stood and began to undress, slipping off first her jeans, then her shirt, then her panties and bra. Her movements weren’t purposefully seductive, yet the effect on Jared couldn’t have been greater if she had done a bona fide strip tease. His face was flushed and his chest felt suddenly tight.

  She looped her aims around his neck. “I’m naked.”

  “I know,” he said in a raspy murmur. While he cupped her breast and sucked her nipple far into his mouth, his free hand set the rest of her on fire. When his fingers finally wound up high between her legs, he whispered, “You’re hot.”

  “And begging,” she breathed in a broken whisper. Her hands went to the snap of his jeans. “Please, Jared, hurry.” She lost patience with his zipper and, instead, began to stroke his swollen flesh through the denim.

  With a soft curse, he struggled out of the jeans. Then he stood, brought her tight against him and moaned. “God, do I love you.”

  “Then help me,” she whispered without restraint. She wasn’t sure why, but she had no patience at all. She needed him inside, and she needed it now. Backing her up a step until the backs of her knees touched the large, square coffee table, he lowered her to its surface and slowly, sensuously, stretched out over her. Linking his fingers with hers by her head, he watched her face as he entered her.

  She was beautiful all the time, he thought, but especially at the moment of his penetration. Her face was always the same, with elements of surprise and delight, yet always different, depending on what they’d been doing or discussing beforehand. This time, mixed with a canvas of love was relief, and even in spite of the relief, she was raising her thighs higher on his, opening herself to a deeper possession.

  Jared would have possessed her soul if she had let him, but he had to be satisfied with her body and her heart. Some time later, when he lay damp and spent between her thighs, he thought of that possession and realized how tenuous it was.

  “You’ll be mine,” he whispered into the tangled cloud of chestnut hair that cushioned his face.

  “I am yours,” she whispered back.

  “Forever and ever, amen?”

  “I want that.”

  “Then marry me.”

  “Soon.”

  “Now.”

  “Soon.”

  Taking her with him, he rolled off the table and onto the rug with a thud.

  “Jared!” she cried, on top now. “Good God, what are you trying to do?”

  “Knock some sense into you.”

  “I have all the sense I need.” She shaped her hand to his jaw, which hadn’t been shaved in a day and was pleasantly rough. “I just need time. That’s all. A little time to feel totally sure I’m the right one for you.”

  He came back with, “What about my being the right one for you?”

  She wanted to say that he was, that if she ever married, it would be to him. But she knew that would only spark a renewed why-wait attack, and she had had enough of the argument for a day.

  So she grinned and said, “Right? Right may have nothing to do with it. Face it, bud. You’re stuck with me awhile. I’m not goin’ nowhere until I hear more about the Grumpslaw.”

  Jared hadn’t thought about the Grumpslaw since the morning he’d talked Savannah to sleep, and he had no intention of thinking about the Grumpslaw now. So if that was what she needed to set her free, he mused with some satisfaction, she was in for a long imprisonment.

  * * *

  Imprisonment was a major topic of discussion the following Friday night when Savannah and Jared joined Susan and Sam for dinner at an inn in Wakefield.

  “The question is where to hold him,” Sam was explaining to Susan as they finished their salads. “The man’s like grease. He could slide through our fingers and be gone just like the stuff he’s stolen over the years. So we need maximum security, but the facilities are all mobbed, which doesn’t bode well for keeping a close eye on him.”

  “Not to mention the havoc he’d play with an overpacked prison population if given the chance,” Savannah added.

  Susan wasn’t sure if she believed that. “I’d have thought it would be the other way around. Matty’s a runt. I’d picture him being kicked around—” She caught herself. “I almost said mercilessly, except that he doesn’t deserve any mercy. It’d serve him right to be raped. He’s an animal.”

  “But clever, very clever,” Sam said. “He’s been in prison before and no one touched a hair on his head. He can manipulate people when he has to, and they don’t even know he’s done it.”

  Savannah had read the reports, too. She knew everything there was to know about Matty Stavanovich, but whether she recognized the real Stavanovich was impossible to tell. He was a master of deceit. “We’ve got him, though. The grand jury didn’t have much of a problem returning the indictment.” She had appeared before the grand jury on Wednesday. Stavanovich had been formally charged on Thursday, and bail had been revoked. He was being temporarily held in a federal facility pending a decision on placement. “If necessary, we’ll keep him where he is and push for a speedy trial, which would suit me just fine.”

  Jared recalled the incredible amount of work, not to mention the pressure that accompanied the kind of trial Savannah faced. He’d lived through more than one trial like it with Elise. For those days and weeks, he’d been shut out of her life. He knew that Savannah would never do that, still he felt uncomfortable about the burden she would carry. “You talked about three months,” he said. “Will that give you enough time to prepare your case?”

  “It should.”

  He turned to Sam. “Any leads on the Cat’s accomplice?”

  Sam wished there were. He and Hank had been but two of many assigned to the case, and neither the state police nor the FBI, both of which had greater resources than the local police, had had any luck. “He’s probably left the area, but we’ll keep after him. He can only run so far. The drawing the artist came up with after working with Megan has been circulated through departments all over the country. Something may turn up, either on him or on a second accomplice.”

  “Second?”

  Savannah explained. “Someone went to Mexico. It couldn’t have been Matty, since he was here raping Megan—”

  Susan interrupted. “For God’s sake, Savvy, do you have to be so blunt?”

  “She was raped,” Savannah said quietly.

  “Okay, but don’t repeat it time and again.”

  “You were the one who mentioned rape before.”

  “I was referring to the Cat, and he deserves it. Meggie didn’t.”

  “I know that.”

  Sam leaned close to Susan. He knew that Savannah’s words had hit her the wrong way. She was extremely sensitive when it came to Savannah. Though this dinner had originally been Susan’s idea, she’d entertained second thoughts once the invitation had been extended and accepted. Those second thoughts had been cause for more than one neat scotch.

  Despite all Sam had said and done to assure her, Susan was convinced that he would see her beside Savannah and decide he had chosen the wrong twin after all. Not that Savannah was available. Still, Susan worried.

  Unnecessarily, as far as Sam was concerned.

  Opening his hand on her thigh beneath cover of the white linen tablecloth, he asked softly, “Want us to talk about something else?”

  But Susan was determined to handle it. It upset her to think of Megan and what she had been through, but if Savannah could do it, so could she. Besides, this was Sam’s work. She didn’t want him to think he couldn’t talk shop when she was around.

  She held up a hand in apology to Savannah. “Sorry. Go on. You were talking about Mexico.”

  Savannah looked at Sa
m, who hitched his chin back at her. So, in a quiet voice, she continued. “Matty claims he was in Mexico during both the kidnapping and the Cranston heist. He has all kinds of paperwork to prove it. Obviously someone went in his place. Whoever it was may not have even known what he was doing.”

  Jared found that hard to buy. “I can’t believe that someone would spend a week, or five days, or whatever, signing someone else’s name without knowing what he was doing.”

  “Oh, he knew what he was doing,” Savannah corrected, “he just didn’t know why. Matty’s the type to come up with an explanation that a patsy would find perfectly logical.”

  Susan thought of the day she and Sam had left the Jaguar with Matty. “I saw plenty of mechanics around his shop. Would he have sent one of them?”

  Sam shook his head. “We’ve checked. They’re all clean, but we expected that. Matty wouldn’t do anything so obvious. He probably used someone from somewhere else entirely.”

  “Like where?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. He’s been all over the country, Matty has. We wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “We track down every clerk who processed his receipts and pray that one of them will take a look at Matty’s picture and swear that he wasn’t the one who signed the bill. We can also take those receipts to a handwriting expert who’ll tell us whether or not Matty was the one who signed. He very conveniently kept the receipts for us, but they’re carbons. We want the originals for a more valid analysis. We’re working on getting them now.”

  “Any sign of the money yet?” Jared asked.

  Sam shook his head.

  “Or Megan’s gun? Or her watch?” Susan asked.

  “The guy covers his tracks,” Sam acknowledged begrudgingly. “We won’t find those things. We won’t even find any clothes with tiny glass splinters that could be matched up to the French door he broke. He dumped everything.”

  “Do you know where he held her?” Jared asked.

  “Nope. Megan didn’t see a thing. She was in a laundry bag coming and going. She said the drive was endless, at least an hour, she thought. Given the terror she must have been feeling, I’m sure it seemed longer than it actually was. It was probably closer to half an hour, but even then there’s a lot of territory to cover. Half an hour could have taken them into either Massachusetts or Connecticut.”

  Jared had been closely following the televised news reports on the case. “Stavanovich’s face has been all over the place. What are the chances of someone coming forward—maybe one of his unsuspecting dupes?”

  “Not great,” Savannah said. “Let’s face it. The friends of men like Matty don’t sing in the boys’ choir. Like Sam says, he’s clever. I’d put money on the fact that whoever he used has good reason to keep his or her mouth shut, and even better reason to fear him.”

  “He’s a disgusting man,” Susan muttered simply because she needed the outlet.

  No one argued.

  But Jared was lost in thought. He had originally been intrigued by Matty the Cat, and now he was intrigued by Matty the kidnapper. “He planned it all out. It’s incredible. He mapped out every little detail of the crime, even planned a second crime, the robbery, to coordinate with it, and he had an alibi for both. How much you want to bet that he used cars he was servicing to transport Megan from one place to another.”

  Savannah and Sam looked at each other.

  “Possible,” she mused.

  “Probable,” he decided.

  But Jared wasn’t done. “And the fact that he never robbed clients of his, yet he chose to kidnap a client. He deliberately broke the mold.” He sat back in his seat, leaving a hand on his fork, pushing a sliver of onion around his otherwise empty salad bowl. “And then there’s the issue of the ransom note. He’s a classical music buff, yet he chose wording for the note to suggest he listened to country. He thought of everything.”

  “Maybe not,” Savannah cautioned. “There are still a couple of things that don’t make sense.”

  He abandoned the fork. “Like?”

  “Like the alarm system. How did he know it wasn’t working? I want to find that out.”

  “The tour guide,” Susan murmured.

  The other three stared at her.

  “Tour guide?” Savannah echoed blankly.

  “When we were in Matty’s office that time, Sam was looking at the pictures on his wall. They were taken in Mexico, in Chichén Itzá. Matty said he’d hired a private guide to see the ruins there.” With a hint of smugness, her gaze moved slowly from one face to the next. “I’ve been to Cancún, and to Chichén Itzá. The trip takes somewhere around two hours each way. Allowing for another hour, minimum, at the ruins, Matty and his guide would have been together for five hours at the least.” Her eyes held Sam’s. “Unless Matty’s private guide was an idiot, he’d be the one to say yea or nay to a picture of Matty.”

  Sam studied her for a minute, then arched a pleased eyebrow. “Not bad, Suse. Not bad at all.”

  Jared thought it was brilliant. “Could be what you need,” he told Savannah, who was grinning.

  “I’d love it. It would be the kind of slip up that would drive the Cat nuts.” She looked at Sam.

  “I’ll put someone to work on it first thing in the morning.”

  Susan beamed. “There. Now that we’ve solved your case, Savvy, we can eat.” Tipping her head, she crooked a finger at the busboy. “We’re ready for our main course. If you’d be so good as to pass that message along…”

  * * *

  Jared and Savannah returned to Providence just in time for Jared to change into jeans and go on the air. Savannah sat with him in the sound booth for a while. She was comfortable there now, knew when she could talk and when she couldn’t. While the music played, they talked quietly—about Susan and Sam, about the difficulty Savannah was having with one of the other lawyers in the division, about the office building in Honolulu that Jared had just sold and the high rise he was buying into in Seattle.

  At times they simply listened to the music. Watching Jared during those times, Savannah grew convinced that he was a true romantic. He felt the words. The subtle changes in his features suggested that he could put himself into a song as easily as she could, and that knowledge only enhanced her feelings for him. He was a sensitive man. His manner toward her proved it. She loved him deeply for that.

  It was nearly two in the morning when he woke her up. She was sitting on the floor and had fallen asleep against his leg. Fearing that she would end up cramped and sore if she stayed that way much longer, he sent her upstairs to bed.

  At two-thirty the first call came. A light went off on the telephone console signaling his private line. Having just started a new song, he reached for the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  At first there was silence.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  A woman’s voice came on then, quiet, almost timid. “Jared?”

  He didn’t recognize the voice, which puzzled him. The list of people with access to that number was short. “Speaking.”

  Again there was silence. Had the call come in on any one of the station’s other lines, he would have been tempted to hang up. But this was his private line, so he waited.

  Finally, the same quiet, hesitant voice came again. “I just wanted to thank you. You’ve given me strength.”

  Jared searched his brain for a flicker of familiarity but found none. “I’m glad.” Gently he asked, “Who is this?”

  “I’ve been listening for almost as long as you’ve been in town. The nights are so long. If you hadn’t been here…”

  Still gently but more puzzled than ever, he asked, “Who is this?”

  There was a long pause, then a small click.

  Replacing the receiver, Jared put both elbows on the table before him and his chin in his hands. Several things about the call bothered him, first and foremost that it had been on his private line. Besides that, he had been di
sturbed by the woman’s near-whisper. There had been a tightness to it. He wondered why.

  When it came time to move into the next song, he brought the mike close. “You’re listening to 95.3 WCIC Providence,” he said in a low, lyrically husky drawl. “That was George Strait, and this is Jared Snow, keepin’ you company through the darkest hours of the day. The graveyard shift they call it; I can understand why. It can be long and lonely when you’re sittin’ by yourself. So listen in. I’ll play you the best I’ve got, a little country in the city at WCIC Providence, kickin’ off a string of six with Earl Thomas Conley. Jared Snow, here, in the heart of the night, think bright so I’ll know you’re there.…”

  He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say, but hoped he said it anyway. Knowing he could do no more, he returned to the contracts he had been reading before the call had come in.

  Earl Thomas Conley segued to the Eagles, who segued to Juice Newton, who segued to the Desert Rose Band. Then the button on the telephone console lit up again.

  He had an odd premonition as he reached for the phone, even hesitated a minute, wondering whether he should just let it ring. But that would be harder than answering. “Hello?”

  “I’m sorry I hung up,” the woman said softly, quickly. “I shouldn’t be calling, but I have to talk to someone, and the rest of the world is asleep.”

  Jared didn’t pretend not to connect this call with the last. “How did you get my number?”

  “By accident,” she said in the same fragile but hurried way. “No, that’s wrong. I meant to get it. It wasn’t hard. With a little ingenuity, most things aren’t hard to get. It’s knowing what to do with them that’s hard.”

  “You knew what to do with my number,” Jared reminded her.

  “But I lost my nerve and hung up.”

  “And now you’ve called back.” He didn’t want to ask her name lest she hang up again. She was clearly upset about something. He felt an odd responsibility to draw her out. “Do you live here in Providence?”