Home Before Midnight

by Virginia Kantra

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  She didn’t scream. Too bad. She flinched once like a startled cat, and something—a man’s black dress shoe—tumbled and bounced on the porch.

  Her shoulders squared. Turning, she smiled at him ruefully over an armload of clothes. “We have got to stop meeting like this.”

  Steve stared stonily back. “You mean, at crime scenes?”

  Bailey’s smile faded. “I meant you have a habit of sneaking up behind me.”

  “I don’t sneak. But apparently you do.”

  Her chin lifted a notch. “Oh, right, because anytime I plan on committing nefarious acts under a cloak of secrecy I call Chief Clegg and request a police escort. What are you doing here?”

  Steve didn’t answer. He had no authority to stop her from going into the house. He knew it, and from her attitude she knew it, too.

  Her gaze cut to Lewis, standing beside her on the porch. “You called him, didn’t you?”

  Lewis bent to pick up the shoe. When he straightened, not only his ears but his whole face was red.

  “Officer Lewis felt I should know about any attempts to remove evidence from a crime scene,” Steve said.

  Bailey sighed. “You’re angry.”

  “I am not angry.” He bit the words out.

  He was deeply, coldly furious. With Walt, for failing to keep him in the loop. With Ellis, for forcing him to tip his hand. With Bailey, for going behind his back to contaminate the scene and incriminate herself.

  And with himself, for caring. The vise tightened around his head.

  “Look, I’m sorry I interrupted your date,” Bailey said.

  He ignored her apology. His “date” was sitting in the front of his air-conditioned pickup nursing a large tub of popcorn and an even bigger attitude.

  Compartmentalize. Depersonalize. Detach.

  He had hoped to keep the investigation neutral. As long as he treated Ellis as a victim, there was still a chance the writer would cooperate. But no way could he let Bailey leave the crime scene with an armload of Ellis’s clothes.

  He was already too late to prevent the folds from rubbing together. But maybe whatever blood was on them had dried. Maybe there was no blood.

  Steve’s jaw clenched. Yeah, and maybe there was a Santa Claus.

  He nodded toward the bundle in Bailey’s arms. “What have you got there?”

  “Medicine,” she answered promptly. “Paul forgot to pack his prescription last night, and I stopped by to pick it up.”

  “Medicine.” Not a question. A challenge.

  “In my purse.”

  He ran his fingers lightly under the strap at her shoulder, observing the slight widening of her eyes. “This purse?”

  She nodded, speechless.

  “May I?” he murmured.

  Without waiting for her reply, he slid the bag down, his fingers brushing the crook of her elbow, the inside of her wrist. He kept his touch impersonal as he maneuvered the strap under Paul’s clothes and over her arm. But he was close enough to hear the faint catch of her breath. To notice the baby-fine texture of her skin. To smell her.

  Shit. He took a step back.

  “Do you mind?” His hand paused on the zipper.

  She shrugged. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  He wished he could believe her.

  He withdrew the brown prescription bottle with two fingers. “This it?”

  She eyed him warily, as if she expected him to bust her for drug possession. But she said, “Yes.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In Paul’s medicine cabinet. Why?”

  “Did Officer Lewis see you take it from the cabinet?”

  She glanced uncertainly at Lewis, red and stoic beside them. “I guess so. He was standing right there.”

  “Lewis? You confirm you observed Ms. Wells remove this bottle from Ellis’s medicine cabinet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now things got dicey.

  “Is it okay if I take these for analysis?” Steve asked. He watched her draw a breath, the objection forming on her lips and in her eyes, and added, “Just one.”

  One pill and the bottle, for fingerprinting. That was all he needed. He waited, intent on getting this one small concession. If he could lull her into saying one yes . . .

  “Why would you . . .” He watched her intelligent, expressive face as she puzzled it out.

  “The toxicology screen,” she said slowly. “You told me the ME was waiting to see if Helen’s blood alcohol levels contributed to her fall.”

  Steve didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

  “You think she was drugged,” Bailey said.

  He didn’t want to spook her. He hadn’t tipped his hand yet. “I’m keeping an open mind,” he said. “She could have taken the pills herself. I have to eliminate as many possibilities as I can.”

  “I guess that would be all right,” Bailey said. “Just one?”

  “That’s all. I’ll just put the rest . . . Lewis? We need a kit.” The officer scrambled for the evidence bag in his car. “The lab folks will want the original container,” Steve told Bailey.

  “Why?”

  “The label,” he lied without hesitation. “It’s got the strength and dosage on it.”

  “Won’t they get that from an analysis anyway?”

  He ignored her question. When Lewis returned, Steve transferred the bottle’s contents into a baggie and dropped the remaining pill and the bottle itself into a paper evidence bag to preserve the prints.

  “Well.” Bailey’s tone was dry as she tucked the baggie full of pills into her purse. “You’ve got what you came for. Can I go now?”

  He glanced at her sharply. Had she understood the significance of the two bags?

  “In a minute.” No way around it, he decided regretfully. He couldn’t let her leave with Ellis’s clothes, even if stopping her revealed his suspicions . . . and aroused hers.

  “What else have you got there?” he asked.

  “A suit,” she said with exaggerated patience. “For the funeral.”

  “Why isn’t it on a hanger?”

  “I’m taking it to the dry-cleaners.”

  “And whose idea was that?”

  She stiffened as his implication sunk in. “Oh, no. You can’t actually think—”

  “Dad?”

  DAD?

  Bailey jerked her gaze from Steve’s grim face to the child standing on the sidewalk behind him. A pretty girl, nine or ten, with smooth, honey-toned skin, butterfly earrings dancing at her ears, and big dark eyes.

  Not his date.

  His daughter.

  Bailey’s stomach was in knots. Her mind spun like a hamster in a wheel, pumping furiously, going nowhere, as she struggled to reconcile the hard-eyed, hard-assed detective questioning her with the existence of a child. His child.

  He didn’t wear a wedding ring. She’d looked. Not that she was interested in him in that way. But after a few months in New York, checking a man’s ring finger became an instinct, a survival reflex, like learning to ignore panhandlers on the street or carrying your purse up under your arm.

  “You’re married?” she asked Steve.

  “My mom is dead,” the girl announced.

  Oh. A little of Bailey’s indignation leaked away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with genuine sympathy. Anything less made her a monster. “That’s tough.”

  The girl ducked her head between her shoulders. “Can we go now?” she asked Steve.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “I told you to stay in the truck.”

  Her lower lip stuck out. “It’s hot.”

  “That’s why the air-conditioning is on. Turn on the radio.”

  “The stations here suck. Can’t I wait out here with you?”

  The cool, tough detective looked hot and harassed. Bailey hid a grin. Karma was a bitch. “No, you can’t.”

  “Are you going to arrest her?”


  Bailey laughed.

  Steve shot her a hard look, and she sobered up fast. Maybe he was.

  “Not today,” he said. “Get in the truck.”

  The girl turned her large, dark eyes on Bailey. “You’re in trouble.”

  “Yeah, I got that.” Bailey shifted the itchy load in her arms, trying not to drop anything else. Trying not to think too hard about that “not today.” “But I said I was sorry.”

  The child nodded. “That always helps. He’ll get over it.”

  “Gabrielle,” her father said in quiet warning.

  “I have to go now,” the child told Bailey politely. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too,” Bailey said, surprised to realize it was true. She watched the girl drag her feet to the curb before she said, “Cute kid.”

  Steve’s lips tightened.

  “Good manners,” Bailey added, goading him.

  “She takes after her mother.”

  The dead wife.

  Which was a hell of a conversation stopper, but still a better topic than, say, what Bailey was doing sneaking out of the house with Paul’s dry-cleaning. “How did she . . . That is, how long since her mother, ah . . .”

  Died.

  The word lay between them, unspoken. Unavoidable. Southern ladies considered euphemisms for death just plain tacky. Nice folks did not “pass away.” “Lost” was acceptable, but the word had always implied a certain carelessness to Bailey. She was pretty sure Steve Burke hadn’t lost anybody. His wife had been taken from him, and from the tension in his body, he was still pissed off about it.

  His expression shuttered. “Two and a half years. Cancer.”

  That poor kid. She must have been, what, like six? Seven? And her father . . .

  Steve used to be with the Washington police department, Bailey’s mother had said.

  That’s why he’d left. That’s why he was here. In Stokesville. Good place to raise a family, he’d said.

  Oh, God. Bailey’s assumptions splintered and shifted like a kaleidoscope.

  “I am so sorry,” she said, and she wasn’t only expressing sympathy for his loss. She was apologizing for misjudging him.

  “Thank you.” His face was like stone.

  O-kay. Obviously his impression of her hadn’t changed one bit.

  “Well.” She fidgeted. “I’m sure you want to get back to your daughter. I’ll just—”

  “Why that suit?” he asked.

  Sweat collected under her arms, in the small of her back, between her breasts. “Excuse me?”

  “Did you pick out that suit yourself? Or did Ellis ask for it?”

  “He asked for his black suit. He only has one.”

  “So he told you to take it to the cleaners.”

  She could see where this conversation was headed. She didn’t like the direction. “He needs it for the funeral.”

  “Which is Friday. Why not wait? Take it to a one-hour cleaners on Thursday, when you’re back in the house.”

  “This is Stokesville,” she reminded him wryly. “There is no one-hour cleaners. Anyway, Paul asked me to take care of it. So I did.”

  “Do you do everything he asks you to?”

  Pretty much.

  She recoiled from the realization like a slap. Some things you didn’t think about. She had enough on her plate without exploring the flaws and failings of her relationship with Paul.

  “It wasn’t that big a deal. I was over here anyway. To pick up his medicine.”

  “And that’s the real reason?”

  Her heart beat faster. “What other reason could there be?”

  Steve shrugged. “He’s a crime writer. Him sending you back to a closed crime scene, tracking fibers, leaving fingerprints, removing evidence . . . It looks bad, that’s all.”

  For her, he meant.

  She could barely breathe. It looked bad for her.

  “I didn’t . . . He’s upset. I’m sure he never thought of that.”

  Steve met her gaze, his dark eyes almost pitying. “Maybe he didn’t. But he should have, shouldn’t he?”

  SEVEN

  CHIEF Walter Clegg stared out his office window at the tree-lined, flag-draped streets of his town, his hands clenched behind his back.

  He couldn’t argue with the results of the autopsy. Or with Burke’s carefully prepared affidavit for a warrant to search the Ellis home. That didn’t mean he had to like them.

  At this moment, Walt wasn’t feeling any too warmly toward Burke, either. Steve Burke was a good cop, dogged, honest, and imaginative. But the very qualities that had led Walt to hire him also made him a pain in the ass.

  Walt fumbled for his handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his forehead. Once the media learned the contents of the warrant, they would know the police were looking for a murder weapon. And once that happened, interest in the case—and in Ellis and in his books—would explode.

  Damn writer deserved what was coming to him, poking around where he didn’t belong. But once the media was let loose on a story, they might sniff out even an old, cold trail. A trail Walt had believed buried twenty years ago.

  Walt turned away from the window, folding his handkerchief back in his pocket. It couldn’t be helped now. Steve Burke would do what he had to do.

  And so would Walt.

  REGAN rode the escalator down to baggage claim, her mind reeling and her stomach churning with grief and caffeine. She shouldn’t have drunk a Red Bull for breakfast. She should have bought a bagel at the airport instead. She shouldn’t have taken a plane at all. I-85 was a bitch around Charlotte, but if she’d tackled the six-hour drive from Atlanta to Stokesville she’d at least have her car. She’d have control. She wouldn’t be stuck waiting for a ride at the fucking airport, the way she had every Christmas holiday from seventh grade on.

  Slinging her purse over her shoulder, Regan stalked to the carousel. The other passengers got out of her way.

  “Help you with your bag?” offered a middle-aged guy in a suit.

  Regan narrowed her eyes and he backed off.

  “Regan?” A woman’s voice, almost unaccented, like one of those newscasters on TV. “Regan Poole?”

  So she didn’t have to wait after all. Regan grabbed her Louis Vuitton bag off the moving belt and turned.

  The voice belonged to Paul’s dweeby secretary, Bailey something, standing there wearing an uncertain smile and really awful clothes—a black T-shirt and totally boring khaki slacks. Honestly, you’d think living in New York would have taught her something about fashion.

  Regan raised her eyebrows coolly, pretending not to recognize her. “Yes?”

  Dweeb girl flushed. Her gaze was dark, direct, and insufferably kind. “Bailey Wells. We met in New York. I’m so sorry about your mother.”

  I just bet you are, Regan thought.

  “Where’s Paul?” she asked.

  “He couldn’t get away. Can I take your suitcase?”

  Regan gripped the handle tighter. “I can manage. Where’s the car?”

  She was being a bitch. So what? She was entitled. Somebody should be as miserable as she was right now. Paul wasn’t here, Richard wasn’t coming, and her mother . . . God, her mother was dead.

  Bailey made an obvious and convenient target. Helen used to make fun of her. And while Regan made a point of never seeing eye to eye with her mother, adopting Helen’s dislikes now that she was dead seemed an excellent way to demonstrate her loyalty.

  Bailey’s smile faded. The pity in her eyes didn’t. “I parked in the hourly lot. It’s not far.”

  “I know how far it is.”

  Flying to and from boarding school for six crappy years, Regan had learned her way around fucking Raleigh-Durham airport.

  Only the airport had changed. Everything changed. Regan glared when Bailey touched her arm, silently redirecting her steps, and waited in sullen silence as her stepfather’s secretary fed a dollar into a new, automated parking kiosk.

  “All set.” Bailey rea
ched again for Regan’s suitcase, and this time Regan let her have it. It was hot, and she was sick of lugging the damn thing anyway. “Right this way.”