Home Before Midnight

by Virginia Kantra

  Bailey averted her gaze, unsettled by this sight of him, by the late hour and his casual clothes. He was a police detective. It was easier to think of him as a police detective when he wore the suit.

  He opened the door for her with one hand and nodded towards the back of the house. “Kitchen’s that way.”

  She walked past him, past the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs, along a narrow hallway that smelled reassuringly of lemon furniture polish. Floral prints and faded family portraits of solemn-faced toddlers and smiling brides hung on the walls.

  “Nice place.” And not at all what she expected. She thought he’d be more the black leather and beer cans type. Unless this was stuff his wife had picked out.

  His eyes were hooded. Unreadable. “This is my mother’s house.”

  So they both lived at home. Dr. Phil would have a field day with that. Norman Bates from Psycho meets the crippled chick from The Glass Menagerie. Except Steve was way too virile to play old Norman, and Bailey was the one suspected of murder. . . . She winced.

  “She’s out of town this weekend,” Steve continued easily. “Back tomorrow night. She goes with her book club to the Highland games in Linville every year.”

  Bailey collected herself enough to ask, “She’s interested in log throwing?”

  “The correct term is caber toss. But I think she just likes men in kilts,” he said.

  Bailey smiled wanly. He was trying to put her at ease, she knew, filling the awkward silence, hiding his curiosity and impatience. As if it were perfectly okay for her to invade his home and his privacy at a quarter to twelve on a Friday night. No problem, he’d said.

  If only he knew.

  She had to tell him.

  “Something to drink?” He set the carton on the table in the breakfast nook, looking surprisingly at home against the oak cabinets and white ruffled curtains. Well, why not? He probably grew up here.

  “Oh, no. No, thank you,” she added politely.

  A smile touched the corners of his hard mouth. “You want to sit down?”

  Sitting would be good. Her knees were about to give out anyway.

  They faced each other across the table, the carton between them.

  Steve’s gaze flicked to it and then fixed on her face. “What can I do for you?”

  She opened her mouth, and nothing came out. Panic dried her mouth and constricted her throat. Maybe she should have accepted that drink after all.

  Steve sat motionless. Patient. Polite. Waiting.

  She worked enough moisture into her mouth to swallow. Could she do this? Once she confessed her suspicions, once she laid out her case, there was no turning back. Everything would change.

  Everything had changed already.

  She took a breath. Released it. And said, “I found the murder weapon.”

  EXCITEMENT hummed through Steve’s system like a low-level electrical charge.

  Easy, he told himself. Maybe she found the murder weapon. That would certainly explain her urgency in seeking him out tonight. But maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she was lying.

  He didn’t want to believe she was lying.

  Something shifted tonight when she showed up at his door lugging that box, her eyes full of desperate hope. Or maybe it happened this afternoon, when she climbed into his truck and he got that long look at her legs.

  Whatever it was, whenever it happened, the line had been blurred. Whether he liked it or not, whether he admitted it or not, he couldn’t regard her only as a suspect anymore.

  So here she was, in his mother’s kitchen, invading his territory, disturbing his peace, shaking his assumptions.

  And about time, too, Eugenia would say.

  Steve eased back in his chair, observing the strain in Bailey’s face and the resolute set of her shoulders. He hadn’t sat in a kitchen with a woman late at night since the early years of his marriage when he worked the swing shift. Not that he and Teresa talked about his cases. Teresa, loving, laughing Teresa, had never been comfortable when he walked through the door with the job still clinging to him like cigarette smoke, the tang of danger, the taint of family disputes, the stink of deals gone bad. He learned to shower before he joined her in bed, and he never brought the job home.

  He didn’t have that choice with Bailey. And if what she said was true . . . it would change everything. She could save this investigation and his ass. Or bury him in the hole he’d dug with Clegg.

  He cleared his throat. “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Why don’t I show you instead?”

  He glanced at the box between them. “In there?”

  She nodded.

  Standing, he lifted the lid of the box. No point worrying about fingerprints. He’d already lugged the thing into the house. And . . . yes. All right. There it was. A heavy, blunt object with sharp, squared edges.

  The hum grew from a buzz to a whine.

  “Looks like a tombstone,” he said.

  Bailey stood, too, her hair brushing his shoulder, and he felt a jolt that wasn’t electricity or suspicion. “I think it’s meant to.”

  He read the name—Paul Ellis—and below it, etched into the granite where “Beloved Husband” should be, were the words National Booksellers’ Optimus Award, the book title, Breathing Space, and last year’s date.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I found it in the box about half an hour ago.”

  “See it before?”

  She nodded again, and her hair slipped forward over her shoulder, slippery as silk and distracting as hell. “Paul used to keep it on his desk as a sort of paperweight.”

  Steve took a step away from the table. Away from her and her hair. “When did you notice it was missing?”

  “I didn’t. I mean, you don’t take much notice of stuff you see every day, do you? Unless you’re Sherlock Holmes or something.”

  Her attempt at humor didn’t fool him. He knew her well enough now to recognize the tiny signs of stress and to appreciate the effort she made to hold herself together.

  “Did you pick it up? Touch it?”

  “Recently?” she asked.

  “Ever.”

  “Possibly. Probably.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “That means my fingerprints will be on it, won’t they?”

  Oh, yeah.

  “Unless somebody wiped it,” he said grimly.

  “Would that be better or worse?” Her throat moved as she swallowed. “For me, I mean.”

  Things looked bad for her either way. But she was smart enough to have figured that out, and he didn’t have the heart or the knowledge yet to tell her how bad.

  So instead he said, “Why don’t you tell me what you were doing with the box.”

  “It’s an evidence box.”

  “I can see that.”

  She cleared her throat. “Paul used his connections with the district attorney’s office to get them to release the evidence collected for the Dawler trial from their property room.”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  She plunged on. “When Regan . . . When I moved back to my parents’ house, Paul suggested I take the boxes with me. To inventory.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I assumed because he didn’t want to do it himself. It’s a time-consuming job,” she explained.

  “And you had the time,” Steve said flatly.

  “Well, no. Not really. But I thought I might get to it. After the funeral.”

  “Okay.”

  Echoes of their earlier conversation played in his head. It wouldn’t be the first time an employer took advantage of an employee.

  Paul wouldn’t do that.

  Seems to me he does it all the time.

  “So you took the boxes,” Steve prompted.

  “Yes. Well, no. Paul offered to carry them to the car for me while I packed.”

  His intuition hummed like a tuning fork, raising the hair on the back of his neck. “And this was when?”

  “Thursday around
five.” Bailey met his gaze, her dark brown eyes determined and unhappy. “Before the search.”

  Well, shit.

  “Anybody see Ellis move the boxes?” he asked without much hope.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Regan might have.”

  He made a mental note to ask. “Did you open them? Inspect the contents?”

  Bailey pleated her fingers together in her lap. “Not then. I opened one that night, but I didn’t find anything.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  Her head snapped back as if he’d slapped her. “Nothing. Something to do. Something to read. If you must know, I found Tanya Dawler’s diary. Which doesn’t have anything to do with why I had to talk with you.”

  “Why me? Why now?”

  She hesitated. Preparing to lie? he wondered. The possibility bothered him more than it should have. People lied to him all the time.

  “You know how in books or movies when the girl gets a threatening letter or hears a scary noise in the basement, and instead of contacting the authorities, she decides to handle whatever it is herself?”

  Where was she going with this?

  “You mean the girl who winds up dead?”

  “Exactly.” She met his eyes with devastating frankness. “I don’t want to be the dumb dead girl.”

  Their gaze held.

  She wasn’t dumb. She was sharp and competent, loyal to a fault . . . and in a shitload of trouble. It took guts for her to come here tonight. His respect for her grew. As did his concern.

  “Not dumb at all.” He leaned back in his chair in a wasted attempt to restore some distance between them. “So what’s my role in this movie of yours?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I could really use a hero about now.”

  His lungs expanded. Was it possible . . . could she possibly . . .

  No and no.

  Do the job. Go through the motions.

  Maybe it wasn’t very heroic, but if he was going to save her, he had to do it by the book.

  He got out his notebook. “Tell me again what you were doing with the box.”

  He took her back over and through her story until he was satisfied she’d told him everything she remembered. But he still didn’t know how she felt or what she thought, all the things any competent defense attorney would toss out as speculation that were suddenly, vitally important for reasons Steve didn’t want to think about.

  “What made you think this could be the object used in the attack on Mrs. Ellis?”

  Bailey considered his question, her head to one side. “You gave me a copy of the search warrant, remember? This is exactly the kind of thing you were looking for. Plus, it was so obviously out of place in this box.”

  “Any idea how it got there?”

  “I can’t be sure. I didn’t see.”

  “But you have some idea.”

  She nodded silently.

  Still protecting that asshole.

  “Can you tell me? For your statement,” he said.

  “Right. All right. I think Paul put the award in the carton and carried it out to my car so that you wouldn’t find it if you searched the house.”

  She almost had it.

  “Or so I’d find it in your possession,” Steve said.

  Her eyes widened. He felt like crap. Like she was six years old and he’d just told her there was no Santa Claus. Or twenty-six and he’d told her the guy she’d had a crush on for the past two years had totally set her up for the murder of his wife.

  “Did you two have a disagreement?” Steve asked gently. “Words, maybe?”

  Her hands twisted in her lap. “No. Tonight he said . . . He wants me to go back to New York with him.”

  Son of a bitch.

  “Is that what you want?” Steve asked. Very cool. Detached. Professional.

  “Not anymore.”

  He fought a fierce flare of satisfaction. “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She gave him a small smile that struggled to match his, cool and professional. “Personal reasons.”

  It pissed him off. “How personal?”

  She blushed. “It’s not what you’re thinking. More professional personal, if you know what I mean.”

  He didn’t have a clue. Any more than she had any idea what he was thinking. Which was a good thing, because some of his thoughts weren’t professional at all.

  “Maybe you could explain it to me,” he suggested.

  She sighed. “I went to work for Paul Ellis because I wanted to write my own book. That was two years ago.”

  She was writing a book? he thought, amazed. Impressed. But what came out of his mouth was, “You haven’t finished a book in two years?”

  “Oh, it’s finished.” She looked down like it was no big deal. Like finishing a book was nothing. “But it’s not ready to submit.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Paul told me.”

  Anger bubbled through him. She was so smart. How could she be so dumb where this one guy was concerned? “You think a guy who killed his wife and stuck you with the murder weapon is the best person to turn to for career advice?”

  Bailey winced.

  Steve winced, too. This was not the detached, just-the-facts-ma’am discussion they should be having.

  She rallied. “It’s not like I knew two years ago that things were going to work out this way. Anyway, one doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”

  Fuck detached.

  “Sure it does. The guy’s a user. He’s proved he’ll put his interest before yours. Maybe he doesn’t want to lose you as a personal assistant. Or maybe he doesn’t want the competition.”

  She shook her head. “That’s a nice theory. And an even nicer compliment. But there’s no way Paul could consider me competition. Even if I were any good, I don’t write true crime.”

  He let himself be diverted. “What do you write?”

  “YA. Young adult fiction,” she explained, as if he might not know what that was.

  “The Princess Diaries,” he said. “The Outsiders.”

  Bailey’s smile lit her eyes. Her face. “Your daughter?”

  He nodded. “I’m no expert, but I bet I know more about what girls that age like than Ellis does. I bet you do, too.”

  Her mouth opened. He could practically see the wheels spinning inside her pretty head as she absorbed his words.

  “Paul knows a lot about the industry,” she said.

  “Does he know you don’t want to go back to New York with him?”

  Her gaze dropped. “Not yet.”

  “When were you planning to tell him?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Steve made a disbelieving noise.

  “It’s true,” she insisted, her big brown eyes fixed on his face. “That’s why I was packing up the boxes. To give everything back to him.”

  “You were going to quit,” Steve said with heavy skepticism.

  “Yes.”

  “The day after his wife’s funeral.”

  The chin came up. “Yes.”

  He didn’t buy it. She was too conscientious, too self-effacing, too fucking loyal to leave her boss in the lurch like that.

  “Why?”

  Bailey moistened her lips. “There was a little, uh, awkwardness before I left tonight.”

  Awkwardness? What the hell did that mean?

  “What kind of awkwardness?”

  “Well . . . Paul was drinking.”

  Terrible images flooded Steve’s brain. Had her boss hurt her? Hit her? What? “Are you telling me what happened or making excuses for him?”

  Again.

  She flushed. “I’m trying to tell you what happened. Paul was drinking, and before I left, he . . . kissed me.”

  TWELVE

  THE intruder paused in the doorway, his heart pumping.