Secret Alibi

by Lori L. Harris

  He nodded. Lexie grabbed her things, suddenly very anxious to escape, but uncertain what she was going to do once she did. She’d expected Jack or Garland to be waiting for her, but realized that she had no idea how any of this worked, and didn’t particularly want to ask. She just wanted out of here. She checked her cell phone, but found the battery dead. If no one was outside waiting for her, she’d find a pay phone.

  The clock on the wall indicated that it was just after 6:00 p.m., but because of the time of year, it was already dark.

  Lexie was slipping on her sterling silver charm bracelet when Jack came in the door. He wore faded jeans, a black T-shirt and a black leather jacket—not a bomber, but one cut like a sport coat. He wasn’t smiling. In fact, she couldn’t recall ever seeing him look any more serious than he did at that moment, his blue eyes moving swiftly over her and then the rest of the room, stopping only when they reached the man behind the counter. “How’s it going tonight, Art?”

  “Chief,” the officer replied in a tight voice. He immediately turned away.

  Possibly realizing that Lexie watched to see his reaction to the snub, Jack grabbed the manila envelope containing the rest of her belongings off the counter and took her by the elbow. “Come on.”

  He released her just outside the door. “Sorry it took so long.”

  “Don’t be. I can’t begin to thank you. And not just for the bail money.”

  Having spent twenty-eight out of the past twenty-nine hours in a windowless cell, she dragged in fresh, crisp air. The night was still too young for a moon.

  “Are you doing okay?” he asked.

  “Better.” She glanced back at the building behind her, once more thinking just how glad she was to be free, even if it was only temporary. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “I know you will,” he said simply, and motioned toward the sport utility waiting at the curb. “How about we get you something to eat? And maybe a double vodka to relax you. Then we’ll start making plans.”

  She nodded. There was no question of who was in charge. And for the moment, she was more than willing to give up control. She wanted a long, hot shower, clean clothes, her own soft bed and about a dozen hours of sleep.

  Jack got the car door for her, waited while she climbed in. As soon as he was settled behind the wheel, he opened the sunroof, almost as if he understood just how much she wanted to be free of any type of enclosure.

  Since he had mentioned food, she’d expected them to stop at a restaurant, but didn’t say anything even when it became obvious that they were headed out to her place. When they reached the outskirts of Deep Water, the scenery made a sudden dramatic change from homes and businesses to undeveloped land that was either thickly treed or densely covered in palmettos. The striping on the road pretty much disappeared, as well. Night air poured in, and the long wails of Kenny G’s sax filled the cab.

  Lexie glanced over at Jack, her gaze skimming his handsome profile, the elegant nose, the well-shaped mouth that usually appeared to be one second from forming a smile, but which was now held in a stiff line. Even in the dimness, the shadow of his beard added a disreputable edge to his stern appearance. She realized in that moment just how little she knew about the man. And maybe that wasn’t such a good thing, considering that she’d placed her life in his hands.

  Not wanting to get caught staring, she turned and looked out the side window. The moon now hung low, just behind the distant oaks. The sky was intensely clear. Though it was already cool out, without the insulation of cloud cover the temperatures would continue to drop rapidly.

  She looked back at Jack. “Mind if I turn on some heat?”

  He reached to close the sunroof, but she stopped him. “Could we leave it open? I like the fresh air,” she said.

  He lowered his hand. “Make yourself comfortable, then.”

  She kicked the heat on, felt the dry, warm air pour from the vents. She hadn’t given much thought to what she was going to do once she was released, but now she did. The idea of staying out at her place alone, something she had been doing for months and months now, suddenly left her feeling vulnerable.

  Maybe because, if she hadn’t killed Dan, which she hadn’t, then whoever had murdered him was still out there.

  Chapter Seven

  By the time they reached Riverhouse, the moon had crawled higher, leaching away the velvety blackness and creating shade beneath trees.

  “A hunter’s moon,” she said as they arrived. “That’s what my grandfather used to call a night like this.”

  Was there someone out there even now, watching her arrival, hoping that, before too long, she’d be alone?

  After turning off the engine, but still seated behind the wheel, Jack looked over at her. Their gazes connected and for a few moments they just watched each other. Her pulse hammered and she could feel a slight tingling along her nerves. When he’d brought her home before, they’d sat as they were now, the air between them charged not with uncertainty and fear, but with sexual hunger. Within moments, they’d been kissing. They’d stumbled out of the car. Remembering, she felt the unexpected thrum of awareness.

  In the near silence of the interior of the car, the engine made subtle sounds of cooling. She looked through the windshield, toward the house, but it wasn’t the structure she was seeing. It was the hood of the car, now bathed in moonlight. It hadn’t been their intended destination two months ago. Certainly not the most comfortable spot for sex. Things had just gotten away from them.

  She recalled the sensation of the warm polished metal sliding beneath her like satin sheets as the cooler night air had briefly chilled exposed skin.

  Lexie looked out the side window. That night had been a mistake, and yet she couldn’t think of the results of it in those terms. But she wondered how Jack was going to react when she finally told him about the baby.

  “You should be prepared,” he said. “Cops aren’t particularly neat when they do a search.”

  “Do you know if they found anything?”

  “They didn’t come up with a twenty-five-caliber handgun, which I’m sure they considered very disappointing.” Jack reached for the door handle. “There will be a list inside of what was taken.”

  She hadn’t realized just how worried she’d been, until she felt relief flooding through her. “I was afraid they might find it.”

  Sensing Jack’s sudden stillness next to her, she looked over at him. “It’s not what you think.” But when their gazes met, she realized that even at this late date, he wondered if he had misjudged her.

  “Then what is it?” he asked quietly.

  If she hadn’t been so tired and scared, she might have been able to work up some anger. But she was tired. And she was scared. And Jack was one of the few people she had to count on. So if there were moments when he questioned his decision, she was just going to have to cut him a lot of slack.

  “It’s just that planting a gun here at the cabin wouldn’t have been all that difficult.” Lexie rubbed her head. “So why wasn’t it found? Why not hide the twenty-five for the police to stumble across?”

  Instead of looking at her, Jack stared out the windshield. “Because the weapon is registered to the killer. Letting the actual gun be found was out of the question, but leaving anything else—knowing that a ballistic test would be run, and that when it was, the test would reveal that it was the wrong weapon…”

  “But if no weapon turned up, the police would just assume I dumped it,” she added, looking over at him once more.

  Jack reached for the door handle again. “We’ll talk about what the cops do and don’t have after you’ve had something to eat and a shower.”

  She followed him up the walk and into the house, but halted just inside the door. Even after Jack’s warning, she was shocked by the mess, which started at the front door and continued through the living room and into the dining room. The drawer contents of the entry cabinet had been dumped out on the cabinet top. The furniture in the living room showed signs
that it had been shifted, and one chair was still turned over as if its underside had been searched. None of that mattered, though. Lexie plopped her purse on top of the mess on the foyer table. Furniture could be righted, the previous contents of drawers returned. The only thing that was important was that she was home. That she’d sleep in her own bed tonight.

  Lexie walked into the room, pretending to scan it, but what she wanted to check was the fireplace. She’d thrown the directions to the pregnancy test into the grate. Turning toward it, she saw that it had been swept clean. Had the directions and packaging been fully burned? Or had their not-quite-decipherable remains intrigued the police?

  Being concerned at this point was ridiculous. Eventually, she would have to tell Jack. Maybe she had wanted to pick the moment, but even if he learned it from the cops, did it really matter? It wasn’t as if she expected a marriage proposal.

  What did worry her was that his finding out from another source would damage the trust that was building between them. And the possibility that Jack might believe the baby wasn’t his.

  Lexie suddenly spun toward the front door as a solid rap landed on it, her heart slamming hard against her ribs, the hand with the cast resting at the base of her throat.

  She nearly came out of her skin when Jack touched her shoulder.

  “Take it easy. That’s probably just the pizza.”

  Home delivery pizza? He may have made it sound as if there was nothing to worry about, but he still reached inside his jacket for his weapon. “You aren’t actually going to open the door to some kid with a gun in your hand? You’ll scare him half to death.”

  Jack motioned her to move to a position that would place her out of the direct line of sight when the door was opened.

  “I’ll just give him a good tip to make up for it.” Standing to one side of the door, he opened it.

  She was so unsettled that she didn’t question Alec Blade’s appearance in her home until he was already inside. He held a couple of plastic grocery sacks in one hand, a large bottle of wine in the other.

  He was taller than Jack by several inches, and where Jack’s hair was dark blond, this man’s was nearly black. They didn’t look like brothers, she thought. Not until you reached the eyes. Not the color, but the shape and intensity.

  Lexie didn’t miss the speculation in the brother’s gaze when he looked at her. She was becoming accustomed to seeing it in the faces of people she passed. Did she do it? Did she kill her husband? Was she that kind of monster?

  But with Alec Blade’s background as an FBI profiler, there would be additional questions, too, wouldn’t there? Was that why he’d accompanied his brother this morning and why he was here now? In hopes of dissuading him from helping her?

  She lifted her chin slightly. “I don’t suppose any introductions are needed.”

  “No,” he said succinctly, and didn’t offer anything additional, making it fairly obvious that he didn’t approve of her.

  “We just got here ourselves.” Jack locked the door. “So I haven’t had a chance to check everything,” he said, as he tucked his weapon away. “Alec, why don’t you inspect the windows and doors in here while I examine the other rooms?”

  “Sure.” Alec walked on through to the kitchen first.

  Lexie followed Jack toward the short hallway that led to the two bedrooms and the cabin’s one bathroom. Jack flicked on the hall’s ceiling light. The door to the nursery was closed, as was the bathroom door. The door to her room, however, was standing open. Walking past the closed doors, he turned on the overhead light in her bedroom before entering.

  Lexie remained in the doorway. Not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t seem to make herself move forward. The mess in the living room had been bad enough, but it was nothing compared to the way this looked.

  Most of the dresser drawers stood open, and those few that were shut had been closed on bras, panties and Tshirts. The top surface was littered with more of the same. The lamp from the bedside table sat on the floor next to the pine piece, the contents of the single drawer dumped on top. She thought about what had been in that one drawer, the bits and pieces of her recent life that she had kept close at hand in case she woke at night and needed them. The self-help book written by a woman who had lost her child to SIDS. The book of her grandmother’s poems that her grandfather had had bound for her on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The bottle of Valium that her psychologist had prescribed and she had never taken. And then there was her journal, which she suspected the police had confiscated. She thought of everything she’d written in there and knew it wouldn’t help her cause.

  She’d made her bed the morning she was arrested, but someone had ripped back the spread, the sheets and even the mattress pad, exposing the bare mattress beneath. And amazingly, perhaps because it seemed so unnecessary, the action seemed to be the biggest assault of her privacy.

  Jack crossed to the closet and looked inside briefly before moving on to the windows, making sure they were locked and that the drapes were drawn completely. When he motioned her into the room, she managed to enter.

  “Stay here while I clear the other rooms.”

  As soon as the door closed behind him, she ripped open drawers, crammed whatever her hand touched into them. When one was full, she went on to the next, repeating the process, not even caring if she put things away where they didn’t belong. As long as they were out of sight, as long as when she looked at the room, she didn’t have to feel the violation.

  She didn’t hear Jack open the door. It wasn’t until she had jerked the sheets from the bed that she saw him standing there watching her.

  Lexie kicked the pile of linens out of her way. “What about the nursery?”

  “The same,” Jack said.

  She turned away. They’d touched her baby’s things. They had ripped open and riffled drawers where she had painstakingly arranged disposable diapers, pajamas and footies for a baby whose ashes she had already spread in the Atlantic.

  “Damn bastards!”

  Jack crossed to where she stood in the center of the room. He squeezed her shoulder briefly. “Why don’t you gather up some clothes and go take a shower?”

  Lexie offered only a nod. Her emotions were so close to the surface now that saying even one word might lead to a complete breakdown. She deserved to have one, a really noisy one with lots of hysterical crying, but the truth was that it wouldn’t change anything, wouldn’t help her situation. And getting overly distraught just might endanger the baby.

  WHEN JACK ENTERED the kitchen, Alec was on his cell phone. “I shouldn’t be here long.” Alec glanced up and, seeing Jack, motioned toward the three wine-filled glasses on the counter. Grabbing one, Jack leaned against the counter a short distance away. The police had posted a list of what they’d taken on the refrigerator door, and he took it down and glanced at it. A personal journal—the kind that could be really damaging if Lexie had written how much she hated her ex-husband or wanted him dead—and given what Jack already knew, it seemed very likely that she had.

  He glanced down at the list again. The other items were mostly records. Phone bills, charge card statements and the like. Jack was uncertain what his colleagues were really looking for. Maybe a receipt for a twenty-five automatic. Or maybe Shepherd was hoping to link Jack to Lexie, and in the process, to Dan Dawson’s murder.

  Jack slid the list into his jacket pocket and waited for Alec to finish his conversation with his wife. When would Alec get around to asking him where he’d been Friday night? When he did, Jack would have no other choice than to lie. He hadn’t minded lying to Shepherd, figured if the detective wanted to know where Jack was that night, he could work a little harder for the answer. But with Alec, it was different.

  “I love you, too,” his brother said, and then flipped the phone closed.

  “How’s Katie doing?”

  “Fine,” Alec stated simply as he grabbed one of the wineglasses.

  For several seconds Jack just
watched his brother shape the pizza dough. He’d expected Alec to pick up something from Mama’s Pizza, but realized he should have known his brother wouldn’t settle for take-out anything.

  Thinking just how good a cold beer would taste, Jack took a sip of the barely chilled red wine. “You really are a culinary snob.”

  “For wanting my pizza to be fresh and hot, instead of soggy?”

  “Like I said.” Jack plucked one of the slices of pepperoni from the cutting board and popped it into his mouth as he paced by. He’d been so busy making arrangements to get Lexie out of jail that he hadn’t eaten any lunch. “Pizza is pizza to most people. Edible at all temperatures and even if it’s been sitting uncovered in the refrigerator for a week.”

  “Why stop at a week?” Alec had anchored a tea towel around his waist as a makeshift apron, and had tossed a smaller one over his shoulder, which he now removed to wipe his hands. “Why don’t you see if you can locate some Italian herbs?” He pointed to the cabinets next to the stove.

  “Did you look over the packet I gave you?” Jack asked as he nudged the small bottles aside. He’d put together everything he had—copies of Andy’s notes, the 35 mm photos taken at the scene, the autopsy report, including the M.E.’s photos—and given everything to Alec to examine, hoping his brother might see something that he’d overlooked. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a copy of Shepherd’s notes, which at this juncture would probably have been more helpful. Especially in trying to determine where they needed to go first with their investigation.

  Chopping onions, Alec nodded. “The evidence is as compelling as any that I’ve seen. With the medical examiner’s window for time of death between eight-thirty and eleven-thirty, that leaves Lexie without an alibi and with multiple motives. Garland’s a damn good attorney, but with that much circumstantial evidence, it’s going to be tough to keep the jury open to the possibility that she didn’t do it. Most juries love the kind of evidence the prosecution is going to present to them.”