Secret Alibi

by Lori L. Harris

  “Too late.” Jack placed the take-out containers on the table and pulled a couple of soft drinks from the pockets of his jacket.

  “What is?”

  “That smile. As I was walking up, you were frowning.”

  She reached for one of the napkins trapped under a soda can. “I was thinking about my night in jail.”

  His expression turned serious. He sat, the wood beneath her buttocks and elbows rocking as his weight settled on the opposite side of the table. “You’re not going back to jail, Lexie. We’ll figure this out.”

  With the hand in the cast, she swiped at the loose hairs that floated forward onto her cheek. “As much as I want to believe that, it doesn’t feel as if we have all that much to go on.”

  “We’re just getting started.” Escaping carbonation hissed as he opened the drink. “Our investigation is still in its infancy.”

  She’d been attempting to open the food containers with her good hand, but suddenly looked away, the word infancy seeming to hang in the air between them. At least in her mind it did.

  Reaching across, Jack undid the lid on the box in front of her, obviously assuming she’d become frustrated at her inability to do something so simple.

  Lexie picked up one of the French fries. “Thanks.”

  “Sure. We need to eat and get back on the road. I want to get to our next stop before midafternoon.”

  She lifted the top half of the bun. “We’re not heading back to Deep Water to check out the charts?”

  “It’ll take Garland some time to get them. Day or two, or maybe even longer.”

  “Then where are we headed?”

  “Whittemore has patients until four today, so I thought it might be a good time to check out his cabin.” Jack took a bite of his sandwich. “Ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “What about Dan? Did he ever go there?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Having been raised in Boston, he wasn’t exactly the outdoor type. In the three years we were married, he only came out to Riverhouse a few dozen times.”

  Jack was about to take another bite of his sandwich, and then didn’t. “I got the impression that the place was a regular weekend retreat. Because of the way the second bedroom is set up as a nursery.”

  “I was hoping that we would spend more time there. As a family.”

  As she smoothed her napkin in her lap, her fingers brushing her abdomen, she didn’t think of the baby she lost. She thought of the one she carried. The tightness in her chest eased. Her emotions confused her. It was as if she was on some crazy theme park ride. One moment she was shooting downward through a dark twisting tunnel, certain she wouldn’t survive, and then the next she was sailing out into liquid sunshine, everything inside her filled with joy.

  Jack laid the sandwich down. “To the outside world Dan appeared to have it all. The successful practice, the nice home, the beautiful wife.”

  Even though his tone had dropped with the last of his observations, Lexie didn’t read anything into the compliment. “Dan came from a poor background. He worked his way through college and med school. He was a very good doctor. But for all his success, he always saw himself as that kid struggling to get out. In his mind he never arrived.”

  “What about the pregnancy? Was he happy about it?”

  Realizing she’d already said more than she was comfortable with, she reached for a rhetorical question instead of the truth. “Isn’t every father-to-be?”

  But Lexie knew that not every man was excited by the prospect of children. Especially if the pregnancy wasn’t planned. Or made the man feel trapped. She took a bite of sandwich, but no longer tasted the pork and barbecue sauce and bread. “What about you? Any children?”

  “None that I’m aware of.”

  It took a cola chaser to push the food past the knot in her throat. “Ever married?” She realized she probably should have asked sooner.

  “No. And no close calls.” He shut the empty foam box. “When you work undercover, you don’t meet many women who are looking to settle down in suburbia to raise children. Even if you are lucky enough to meet one between assignments, the divorce rate for cops is one of the highest for any profession. I had a gal pal who claimed the only way to be certain you didn’t end up in divorce court was never to get married in the first place.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “It’s been working so far,” he said as he climbed to his feet. He was grinning, which made it difficult to tell if he was serious and used the smile to take some of the edge off his words.

  Locking the cover closed on the food container, she couldn’t help but wonder where he would go after the trial. He’d moved to town to take the job and now there was no more job…and no reason for him to stay.

  Chapter Nine

  Even with the address and a map, finding Fleming’s cabin took longer than Jack would have anticipated. Several street signs were missing and some of the roads were pretty much dirt tracks.

  The driveway to Whittemore’s place wasn’t any different. Long and narrow, a dark tunnel of foliage. There was no light at the end, just more shadows.

  The cabin was large and modern, with wide decks circling the upper levels. Instead of wood railings, thick, tubular metal coated in red paint had been used.

  Huge chunks of window glass interrupted the cypress siding, but appeared to be almost random.

  Leaning forward, Lexie peered through the windshield. “From the way he always talked about it, I was picturing something small and rustic.”

  “What do you think it’s worth? Three or four hundred thousand? A lot of money to have tied up in a weekend getaway for a man with money problems.”

  There were no cars in sight and no lights on inside the house. As he stepped out of the SUV, Jack looked around the clearing. He glanced to where Lexie stood next to the vehicle. “Well, if he was here Friday night,” Jack said, “it wouldn’t be surprising that no one saw him.”

  He closed the door, unconcerned that the sound would alert someone to their arrival.

  “What do you know about Whittemore’s love life?” Jack asked.

  “Nothing really. The times that he came over to the house for dinner, he always had a date, but it never seemed to be all that serious. I’ve heard him say that he had no intention of getting married.”

  Lexie followed Jack as he walked around the lower level. “What are we doing here?”

  Because of the deep shade beneath the tree canopy, there was no grass, no lawn. Just sandy soil covered in a loose loam that left perfect indentations of their footsteps. Jack wasn’t particularly concerned that Whittemore would notice their tracks.

  There were no windows on the lowest level, only a single steel door around back fastened with dead bolts. Two of them. Which seemed a bit extreme, but perhaps because of the remote location, there had been problems with breakins.

  Only after making a complete circle of the structure did he climb the front stairs.

  “You’re not thinking about going in there, are you?” Lexie asked, trailing behind, obviously nervous.

  “No.” As appealing as the idea was, Jack wasn’t ready to break any laws quite yet.

  He looked in the windows one by one. The first revealed a large two-story space with wood floors and dark leather sofas, the next was the dining room. Nothing looked particularly out of place. Had Fleming been here Friday night as he insisted? With a date of one gender or the other?

  Jack turned and stared back down the driveway. Maybe he was wrong about Fleming Whittemore. Perhaps he was protecting the identity of a male lover.

  Lexie wandered to the metal rail. “Can we go? This place is really beginning to give me the creeps. I guess it’s all the shadows and the silence. Or the sense that just about anything could happen out here and no one would ever know it.”

  Facing him, she rubbed her arms slowly. She was wearing black slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. Both seemed to hug her curves—the fullness of her breasts,
the soft flare of her hips, the nicely rounded, firm derriere. Jack’s fingers curled.

  Last night, lying there on her couch, knowing she was just in the other room, sprawled in the very bed where he had made love to her that night…

  And tonight it would be his bed in which she slept. Alone.

  Jack withdrew his phone from his pocket. “I just need to make a quick call.” He dialed the Deep Water PD number and asked for Frank Shepherd.

  When the other man picked up, he said, “Hey, Frank. Just thought you might want to know that the cellular reception out at Fleming Whittemore’s cabin is better than good. I’m standing on the front porch right now.”

  There was a slight pause. “Maybe he just didn’t want to talk to her, Jack. Or was too busy in the sack.”

  So Frank had known about the supposed date. “Maybe. Or maybe he was showering off the blood from murdering his partner. Whittemore had dried mud on his clothes, but his hands had been scrubbed until they were pink. Don’t you even wonder about that, Frank?”

  Before the other man could say anything, Jack hung up. His intent with the call was to give Frank something to stew about. Jack figured that, unless the charts turned up something useful, he’d already spent as much time as he dared chasing after Whittemore. He’d leave him to Frank. No matter what else Shepherd was, he was the kind of detective who would go to great lengths to prove he was right.

  Jack was nearly to the car when the cell phone rang. He expected it to be Frank, so he was surprised to hear Garland Ramsey’s voice.

  “Those charts should be here by five-thirty.”

  “How’d you get them so quickly?”

  “The prosecutors are playing it safe. And, at this point, they don’t see the evidentiary value of these records to their case.”

  THE LAST TIME Lexie had been in Garland Ramsey’s office, she hadn’t yet been charged with Dan’s murder. But she had still been nervous, having just come from the confrontation with the woman at the end of the support meeting.

  Lexie thought about Amanda. Why had the young woman been in Whittemore’s office this morning? Was there some way she could get the girl’s last name?

  As she approached the building’s front door, Lexie sidestepped a well-dressed man and a toddler. The office was located on the second floor of what had been the county’s government building in the early 1900s. The structure had been completely restored to its former glory, a hundred years’ worth of bird droppings, grime and mildew sandblasted away to reveal the aged patina of the limestone and the craftsmanship of European workers.

  Jack pulled open the front door. Their footsteps echoed on the marble floors and resonated in the cavernous space as they crossed to the wide, central staircase that led to a broad landing where politicians had once pontificated. From there, two narrower sets of stairs continued upward. The law firm of Ramsey, Peterson and McGuire took up the whole floor.

  There was a sense of hushed silence as the receptionist showed them into a conference room. “Mr. Ramsey will be with you in a few moments. He suggested that you might want to go ahead and look through the documents that were sent over.”

  The space was done in what Lexie called lawyer decor. Muted moss-green paint, lots of dark trim, mahogany table, plush carpet.

  The artwork depicted natural Florida: the beaches, the Everglades, the deeply shaded oak hammocks and piney plains dotted with longhorn cows. All of the canvases looked expensive. The signature on the cow painting caught Lexie’s attention. “K. L. Blade?” She glanced toward Jack. “That would be your sister-in-law?”

  “It would.”

  “She’s talented.”

  Jack unsealed the box in the center of the conference table. “Yes.”

  When he didn’t elaborate, Lexie wondered if he was too preoccupied with what he was doing, or if he wasn’t all that crazy about his sister-in-law. Lexie didn’t know Katie Blade, but she’d seen her around.

  She moved toward the narrow table at the opposite end of the room. A carafe of coffee and pitchers of water had been set up.

  She glanced back at Jack. “Would you like something?”

  Looking up, he shook his head. “No thanks.”

  Lexie helped herself to water, then returned to where he had unloaded the patient files. She pulled out a chair, intending to sit, but was brought up short by the sight of them.

  After only seventy-two hours, the blood splatters had faded to a point it would have been hard to say what had made them. The rusty-brown shade could have just as easily been paint or some type of food. But the sight of them drove Lexie to the large window overlooking Laishley Park.

  If Jack noticed, he didn’t say anything. Sipping water, she stared out at the descending dusk. For obvious reasons, she hadn’t thought about the coming holidays. Sometime in the past few days, though, wreaths had been added to the lamp-posts surrounding the city park. On several of the large catalpa trees, clear lights had been haphazardly strung in patterns that somehow managed to resemble constellations. On the smaller trees and the two gazebos, the twinkling lights were placed closer together and more evenly, so that from where she stood looking the overall illusion was that of a fairy tale village sprawled beneath the Big Dipper.

  A couple ambled along the brick walkway, pushing a stroller. Kids ran about in one of the open areas, playing a game of tag, the coming holiday adding another level to their limitless energy.

  As Lexie’s eyes returned to the couple pushing the stroller, she reached out, pressing her fingers to the window. Longing expanded inside her. That’s what she’d wanted when she married Dan. That sense of completeness. Like the fairy tale village beneath the Big Dipper, she now realized that happily-ever-after was an illusion, born of naiveté.

  Or maybe some people actually did find it. Her grandparents certainly had. But she wouldn’t. She was no longer naive about anything. And most especially about the likelihood of future relationships. Even if she was acquitted, how was she going to put this behind her? When people looked at her, they would always wonder if justice had truly been served.

  And if she was convicted…

  Topping up her glass of water, she returned to the table. This was her life they were talking about. No matter how uncomfortable the blood made her, she needed to be involved in what Jack was doing.

  “Have you found anything yet?”

  He looked up as she sat. “There are some similarities between the patients. They all appear to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, and unmarried.” He slid a chart across so Lexie could read it. “Do you recognize the handwriting?”

  “The first two entries belong to Dan. The last one, I don’t recognize. Possibly a nurse.” Disappointed, she leaned back. “So there’s really nothing here?”

  “And it’s what’s not here that may be the most telling. There are only twenty-two charts instead of twenty-three.”

  “Maybe Nidia miscounted.”

  “Given the importance of these charts to her job, I doubt she would make that kind of mistake.”

  Lexie inhaled sharply and then let her breath out slowly. “You’re right. So where’s the missing one?”

  With a heavy sigh, Jack looked up. “It could be just about anywhere. And the fact that it’s missing may mean absolutely nothing. Welcome to police work. Lots of leads, lots of dead ends.”

  As he flicked the cover on the chart closed, the photo in front caught Lexie’s attention. On a patient’s first visit, a photo was snapped and placed in the front of their file. It served two purposes—to help alleviate the possibility of any type of record mix-up, and to help foster the illusion that a patient wasn’t just a number and a medical condition.

  Pulling the file toward her, she flipped the cover open and stared at the young woman with the long dark hair and wide-set brown eyes. Not a stranger, as she had expected.

  Jack, who already had gone on to the next chart in the pile, stopped what he was doing. “Do you know her?”

  “Yes. She was at t
he Sisters-in-Loss meeting on Saturday, and she was going into Fleming’s office this morning. She was one of Dan’s patients. At least that’s what Marian said.”

  “Wouldn’t they need the chart if they were seeing her today?”

  “Sure. Ideally. But charts do go missing sometimes.” Lexie ran a finger along the series of numbers on the end tab. “Out at the Pierson Clinic, every patient is assigned a number that matches her file. The color coding helps when it comes to a misplaced file, but if one goes AWOL, it can still take some time to locate it.”

  Returning to the treatment notes, Lexie’s eyes narrowed. “This can’t be right. The last entry says that she miscarried at eleven weeks.” She glanced back at the photo a second time to be sure she wasn’t mistaken. “But Amanda said that she gave her baby up for adoption.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” Lexie looked up. “Do you think it means anything?”

  “I think it means we’re not done for the night.”

  MORE THAN FOUR HOURS later, Lexie looked around the small bedroom, at the mission style furniture that was obviously new, at the neatly made bed where she would sleep tonight. Jack’s bed. The only one in the house.

  Even after nearly two years, a dozen unpacked boxes still filled the second bedroom. Almost as if Jack hadn’t wanted to get too comfortable. As if the years of working undercover had made it impossible for him to relax into a place, to accumulate the “stuff” that most people had by the time they reached thirty.

  Lexie ran the brush through her wet hair a final time and then tossed it into her open suitcase. Disappointment and frustration battled inside her. And right below both of those there was the ever-present fear about her future.

  After leaving her attorney’s office, they’d driven to Pierson, hoping to talk to Amanda. Finding the house dark and a For Sale sign in the front yard, Jack had knocked on the door of two neighboring homes. He’d been told that after her mother passed, Amanda had moved away. They didn’t know where, though. And no one seemed to recall a pregnancy. What they did remember quite clearly was that Amanda had gone off the deep end after her mother’s funeral, had even been admitted briefly to a mental health facility.