Nicky scowled after him, scooted off the bed, and grabbed the sheet to twine around herself. Under the circumstances, she didn’t need his attitude. And she didn’t understand. She was the one who should be doing the whole hate-yourself-in-the-morning thing, not him.
Unless . . .
He wasn’t guilty, and was just too damned stupid, stubborn, or macho (which was basically the same thing as the first two options combined) to tell her so.
The thing was, he had always made her feel safe.
Nicky paused in the act of stomping after him to consider. Her gaze touched on her panties, peeking out from under the comforter, which was now on the floor. Glancing around, she discovered her bra crumpled near the nightstand. The position of both was silent testimony to the urgency with which they had been discarded. She and Joe had been so hot for each other that they’d come together in what was practically a fever. For him to be so prickly and standoffish after such really great sex was a definite red flag. The question was, a red flag indicating what? Picking up her undies, she headed for the bathroom. They were going to talk this out, whether he liked it or not. That being the case, she preferred not to initiate the conversation while she was wrapped in a sheet and still all flushed and sweaty with sex.
Grimacing at the giant daisies on the glass doors of the tub enclosure, Nicky took the fastest shower on record, toweled herself dry, put on her bra and panties, brushed her hair, and, with an encouraging grimace at her own reflection, left the bathroom. He wasn’t in the living room, she was glad to see as she reached it, so she was able to step into her dress without an audience. Zipping it up in a hurry, she walked barefoot into the only other place he could possibly be: the kitchen.
Sure enough, he was leaning against the counter at the far end of the small, galley-style kitchen, smoking a cigarette. Just beyond him, beady little black eyes glinted at her through the glass in the back door, and after an instant’s surprise, Nicky realized that she must be looking at the pig she’d seen Joe with on TV. Since, at the moment, she was far more interested in the man himself, she ignored the pet in favor of focusing on Joe. He was fully dressed in the same jeans and T-shirt he had discarded earlier, and like her, he was barefoot. His jaw was dark with five o’clock shadow, his hair was tousled, and he radiated attitude.
Now she was prepared to deal with it.
“Okay,” she said, skirting the table that seemed to serve as both desk and eating area. “Now we talk.”
He pulled the cigarette from his mouth.
“Hell, yeah, it was good for me.” The falsely hearty tone grated. “How about you?” Then his mouth twisted and his voice returned to normal. “That what you had in mind?”
Nicky ignored what she recognized as a blatant attempt at provocation. Stopping in front of him, she crossed her arms over her chest and gave him the same direct look she would give any potentially difficult interview subject.
“This is where you tell me your side of the story.” Joe stuck the cigarette back in his mouth and took a long drag. He exhaled before answering, and the smoke curled around his head.
“What makes you think there is a my side of the story?”
“Isn’t there?” The smell of smoke tickled Nicky’s nostrils. Ordinarily, she hated the smell—but this was Joe.
“No, Pollyanna, there isn’t.”
Her eyes challenged him. “So all that stuff is true.”
“Hey, I’m not admitting to a thing. The charges were dropped, remember? I sure don’t want to get them reinstated.”
“They were dropped due to a technicality.”
He shrugged. “Worked for me.”
“Don’t you want to clear your name?”
“Not particularly.”
“CNN is going to say that you took bribes from drug dealers to let them stay in business.”
“I have no control over CNN. It can say whatever it wants.”
“If it’s not true, we can stop them. Or at least run a story giving your version of events.”
“There is no my version of events. I’ve got nothing to say.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? What if I don’t have a different version of events? What if their version of events is the only one there is?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t believe it.” “Don’t believe what?”
“Any of it. That you were a dirty cop. It just doesn’t ring true.”
He stared at her for a moment, sighed, and ground his cigarette out in the ashtray beside him before looking at her again.
“I think what you’ve got here is a bad case of afterglow. Just because you slept with me doesn’t make me a saint.”
A beat passed. Nicky could feel herself starting to simmer. His attitude, she realized, was beginning to get to her—big-time.
“Fine.” She turned on her heel and left the kitchen. “I don’t need you to tell me anything. I’ll find out on my own.”
“Wait a minute.” He followed, as she had fully expected him to do. She was already picking up her shoes as he walked into the living room and stopped, frowning at her. “Where are you going?”
“I have work to do.” Balancing on one foot, she slipped the other foot into her shoe. “Oh, by the way, the sex was great for me, too.”
“Nicky.” There was an underlying harshness to his tone that made her glance up at him as she stood on one leg like a flamingo and put on her second shoe. “You leave my past alone. It’s none of your business.”
“It is if we’re going to have a relationship.”
His brows snapped together. He folded his arms over his chest. “Who said we’re going to have a relationship? Honey, just for the record, I don’t do relationships.”
Her lips compressed and, feet firmly in her shoes now, she headed for the door. “We’re in one. You’re in denial. Get out of my way. I’m leaving.”
“Hold on.” He caught her arm as she went past him, turned her around, and zipped her dress the rest of the way up before she could protest. “And by the way, I damn well am not in denial. Having sex once does not equal a relationship.”
The words stung. Stiffening, she pulled away, opened the door, and glared back at him.
“Good to know,” she said with bite, and stepped out into the still-steamy night.
19
JOE STOOD ON his front stoop, watching Nicky stalk (there was no other word for it) down his poor, neglected lawn toward her car and had to stop himself from going after her. There wasn’t any need for it. Milton was still waiting patiently in his cruiser—a glance at his watch told Joe she’d been inside for maybe an hour and a half—and Joe saw him quite clearly as he opened his door and stepped out onto the street for a moment to say something to Nicky. Then he saw the light come on in her car as she opened the driver’s door, saw her glance prudently into the backseat, and saw her close the door, turn the lights on, and drive away, with Milton in patient pursuit.
She was safe.
Only then did Joe go back inside his house, feeling more on edge than he had in a long time. Introspection wasn’t his thing—he wasn’t much into exploring his inner landscape, as one of the shrinks they’d sent him to had put it—but he had experienced this particular sensation a time or two before, so he knew it for what it was: the deep, soul-wrenching loneliness that came from realizing that in this world of couples and families and webs of connected hearts, there was nobody, not one single solitary soul, he could truly call his own.
We’re in one, Nicky had said, meaning a relationship. The idea spooked him. As he’d told her, he didn’t do relationships. He wasn’t good at them. He’d been a one-man show for so long that the idea of linking up with someone else gave him the heebie-jeebies. To use shrink-speak again: Call him a commitment-phobe.
If you cared for somebody, then you were vulnerable. You could be ten feet tall and bulletproof. The other person is your Achilles heel, your exposed backside, your weak point—the thing that could destroy you.
He’d gone that route before. He wasn’t going there a second time. The thought of being that vulnerable again made his gut clench.
That meant that this thing with Nicky—this “relationship,” as she called it—needed to be put in the deep freeze fast, before it had a chance to spiral totally out of control.
In other words, smart guy, you need to stay out of her pants.
And this bummer of a realization, he thought with disgust, was coming right on the heels of the best sex he’d had in two years. Okay, make that the only sex he’d had in two years. Still, even without the burnish of months of damped-down desire, the sex had been phenomenal.
The thing was, the girl was phenomenal, too: gorgeous, smart, feisty, funny, and capable of turning him on with nothing more than a single glance from those come-hither brown eyes—the kind of girl a guy like him could go a lifetime without finding.
The kicker was that she believed in him. That was what got to him, hit him right in his wary, battle-scarred heart like a bullet with his name scratched on it.
Guys he’d worked with for years, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, neighbors, you name it, none of them had questioned whether or not he’d actually been guilty of the deeds that had been laid at his door. As far as he could tell, they’d just accepted the official version as the truth and gotten on with the program, not shunning him or anything, not denouncing him, just treating him like they always had, which probably said more about him than about them, really. He’d been a cocky son of a bitch, sure of the world and his place in it, sure that there was nothing life could throw at Joe Franconi that he couldn’t handle, because he’d already handled everything. Or so he’d thought.
He’d been wrong. Superman had found his kryptonite. The mighty had fallen.
And Joe Franconi had found something that he couldn’t handle after all. It had nearly killed him. But he had survived, and even managed to almost get himself put back together again.
No way was he going there again.
But now, in a turn of events that was as disconcerting as it was surprising, on no evidence at all, Nicky believed in him.
This was a woman to grab hold of and never let go.
The idea scared him silly.
“Women,” Brian said. “They’ll get you every time.” Joe glanced around sharply and discovered Brian, solid-looking as ever, disappearing into the kitchen.
Shit.
“Shut up, you,” Joe snarled after him. “And stay the hell out of my bedroom.”
“Hey.” Brian’s voice drifted back. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re off base there, pal. I’ve got some standards.”
None that Joe had ever been aware of, but then . . .
His cell phone began to ring.
“Chief, we got a confession,” Cohen, the officer on duty at the station tonight, said through the phone. “I think you ought to come down here and listen to this.”
ABOUT AN HOUR and a half later, when Nicky pulled up Twybee Cottage’s driveway, she was still mad. If she’d been suffering from afterglow, as Joe had put it, he’d done a fine job of curing her of it. Only the thought that there might be a reason for his less-than-loverlike-après-sex behavior, that maybe he’d been copping the attitude in a deliberate effort to push her away, kept her from mentally washing her hands of him then and there.
That and the sad fact that she was actually kind of crazy about the guy, attitude or not.
The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that the story CNN was getting ready to air was wrong. Joe’s romantic side might need some tweaking, but every instinct she possessed told her that this was a stand-up guy. He was hard-working and decent, and actually kind of sweet beneath his macho cop exterior, and the idea that he took bribes or even looked the other way while drug deals were going down around him was impossible for her to believe. But she’d given him every chance, and he hadn’t proclaimed his innocence, which, when she considered it, was one more telltale thing in his favor right there. In her experience, the guilty always proclaimed their innocence. It was the innocent who sometimes clung to the mantle of guilt, for a variety of reasons. Whatever the truth was, she was as sure as it was possible to be that she hadn’t heard it yet. Joe obviously wasn’t going to tell, so she would find out for herself, his “stay out of my business” be damned. She’d already put the wheels in motion to start digging deeper into his background. The great thing about having been a reporter for so many years was that she had friends in all kinds of places, and she knew all kinds of ways to get the dirt. If she couldn’t get the inside scoop, nobody could.
In the meantime, she meant to put the fear of God into CNN in hopes of getting them to hold off on airing that story. She was going to see to it that word got to the company brass that there were serious problems with the factuality of the report. As for the reporter, she was pretty sure that backing him down would require no more than two little words: Dan Rather.
She meant to make sure that he heard them first thing the next morning.
For tonight, though, she was concentrating on Tara Mitchell. The ghostly image she’d seen in the window at the Old Taylor Place was permanently emblazoned in her mind, no matter how assiduously she tried to avoid thinking about it. Tara’s ghost was the one most often seen; Tara had been channeled by Leonora, had come through in Nicky’s own dreams, and her murder had been the catalyst for the nightmare of Karen and Marsha Browning’s murders. Tara, Nicky was beginning to feel, was the linchpin to the case. In her quest to obtain a personal possession of Tara’s for Leonora’s use, she had been trying to contact Tara’s family. So far, she couldn’t find them. It was as if, when they’d left Pawleys Island, they had dropped off the face of the earth.
Of course, having their daughter murdered was bound to have caused all kinds of trauma to the family. Maybe the parents had split up. Maybe they’d left the country. There were a hundred and one good explanations for why they seemed to have disappeared.
But now she was curious. She needed to know what had become of them. She needed to find them in order to patch what was beginning to feel like a glaring hole in the fabric of the investigation.
After leaving Joe, she had gone to talk to a couple longtime residents who had known the Mitchells when they had lived on the island. She hadn’t gotten a lot of information, but she’d gotten enough to give her a few fresh leads and make her curious to know the rest.
As soon as she got inside the house, she was going to follow up on those leads via computer.
With that intention in mind, Nicky parked in her usual spot beside Livvy’s Jaguar and got out of the car, anxious to get inside and online while the interview she’d just completed was fresh in her mind. Her escort was right behind her; he would be pulling up the driveway any second. She didn’t actually need to wait for his arrival to get out of her car, not when her family was clearly home and her back door was just a few yards away. Still, she walked quickly toward the steps. Her heels sank into the gravel, and she could hear the faint crunch of her own footsteps. She could hear, too, the roar of the sea and the inevitable chorus of insects. Lights were on in the house, as usual—she didn’t think there was ever a time when someone wasn’t home—and the porch light was on, too. Its yellow glow made the night beyond the light seem very dark.
As she rounded the front of Livvy’s car, it occurred to Nicky that the night was dark. A glance skyward told her why: A heavy cloud cover obscured both moon and stars. She registered the absence of a breeze, the steamroom-like humidity, the sense of expectancy in the air. There would be a storm before morning.
She had almost reached the back steps when an object just at the edge of the circle of light caught her eye. Frowning, she looked closer and discerned that the object was pink and about the size of a shoebox. Livvy must have dropped something on her way into the house. . . .
Nicky walked over to it and bent to pick it up. Her hand was almost on it when she saw what it was: Livvy’s purse.
Livvy would never in a million years have dropped her purse in the driveway and just left it there.
“Liv?” Nicky picked up the purse and looked around uncertainly. She was at the corner of the house now, and the magnolia tree loomed, wide and fragrant with waxy, white blossoms, to her left. Just beyond the magnolia, the crepe myrtles running along the far side of the house added their distinctive spicy scent to the night. There, near the bushes, about thirty feet away in the dark, alley-like side yard, something moved.
“Livvy?”
The movement stopped. There was a moment—an instant, really—in which everything was captured by the camera of her mind’s eye as if in a freeze-frame. During that moment, Nicky stared, uncomprehending. It was dark as a cave there, in that corridor between the bushes and the house. She could just barely discern a shape, hunched and vaguely triangular, rising from the ground. She had the impression that it was a person and that it had turned to look at her. Then the smell struck her. It had been there all along, an earthy, musky aroma floating beneath the scent of crepe myrtles and magnolia and the sea, but she only realized what it was, and where she had smelled it before, when something glinted silver in the darkness.
Then it hit her like a baseball bat to the stomach: The silver glint was a knife. The scent, which she had smelled before on that nightmarish night under the pine trees, was blood.
Livvy’s purse had been left on the ground. Now Nicky was holding it in her hands.
Her heart lurched.
“Livvy!” Nicky screamed, hefting the purse like a weapon and charging toward the hunched figure as what she was looking at became all too hideously clear. Her sister—her sister—was being butchered before her eyes. “No! Get away from her! Help! Help!”
The figure leaped up and fled. It was a man—that was the one thing she was positive of. He seemed to be running hunched over, but from what she could discern through the darkness, he was unnaturally broad and bulky—and surprisingly fast. She could hear the dull thud of his feet on the grass.
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