Home Before Midnight

by Virginia Kantra

  “No, it’s not. You can’t make yourself responsible for this the way you do for everything else that goes wrong.”

  Fatigue and frustration made her unwary. “Look who’s talking,” she snapped.

  Steve looked like she’d hit him in the face with a fish.

  Oh, God.

  She couldn’t believe she’d said that, that she could throw his admission of guilt over his wife’s death into his face like that.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That was rude.”

  His mouth twisted. “But true.”

  “No, I—”

  “You want the truth? The truth is, Paul Ellis murdered his wife. I don’t know about the rest of it. I don’t understand why anybody would steal Tanya Dawler’s diary, and I don’t like the idea that somebody was in your bedroom any more than you do. But I can’t go to the DA over my boss’s head and demand he reopen two cases based on a theory.”

  “And the diary,” she reminded him.

  “Sugar.” His voice was gentle. “We only have your word for it that the diary’s even missing.”

  She stared at him, stricken. “My word isn’t enough?”

  He shot her an impatient look. “For me, yeah. Not for the DA. It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is what I can prove. And I can’t prove any of this.”

  God, she was exhausted. If only she could think.

  “Unless Paul didn’t kill himself,” she said.

  Steve’s gaze narrowed.

  Her chest expanded with sudden hope. “If somebody killed him and staged it to look like a suicide, that would be proof, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not proof,” he said. “But it sure would be something.”

  Bailey held his gaze, breathless.

  “I’ll make a call,” he said.

  THE guys who have sex with you at a party on Saturday night won’t even talk to you at school on Monday morning. But they’ll talk about you, Tanya had scribbled in her childish, rounded handwriting. Bet they wouldn’t like it if I talked about them. Or their daddies.

  He could almost smell the vivid pink ink rising above the faded paper, a whiff of strawberry or bubble gum.

  Or maybe it was only Tanya’s ghost, trashy, cloying, and eternally young.

  Thumbing through her diary, he felt almost nostalgic. Not for her. She was, after all, a slut. But for the way he had been back then, the image of himself in her eyes.

  He is so cool. Sometimes when he comes by to pick up Billy Ray, my knees get weak. I think I’ll just die if he doesn’t notice me. And then I think I’ll die if he does.

  “LOOK, I already told your chief what I think.” The evidence tech’s exasperation traveled clearly over the line. “Talk to him. I’m not getting in the middle of some department bullshit.”

  Steve rubbed the back of his neck. The tech was under no obligation to talk to him—Paul Ellis wasn’t his case—and probably had better things to do with his Saturday night than repeat results over the phone to a rural detective. Because the two state labs, one in Raleigh, one in Asheville, served law enforcement all over the state, most evidence sat for weeks or months before processing. The state boys must feel they’d already gone above and beyond in complying with the DA’s rush request.

  “Sure. No bullshit. Guess I’m just bummed the bastard offed himself before I could serve a warrant for his wife’s murder. You do the actual testing?”

  Bailey stopped fussing with the covers of her bed to give him a long look. He wasn’t sure how much she could pick up listening in on his end of the conversation.

  The tech sighed. “Disks and swipes,” he confirmed. “Both turned up negative residue on the left hand and equivocal residue on the right.”

  “Equivocal, how?” he asked.

  “What am I, CSI? I don’t talk for your entertainment.”

  “How about a bottle of Scotch?” Steve suggested.

  “Is that how you all get things done in Stokesville?”

  “I don’t know about Stokesville,” Steve drawled. “But in D.C., Johnny Walker does the job.”

  “In these parts, it’s Jimmy Beam.”

  Steve grinned sharply. “Jim Beam works for me. One bottle of Black Label?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  He pulled out his notebook. “Tell me about that right hand.”

  Lubricated by the promise of bourbon, the tech became downright chatty. Steve ended the call satisfied.

  But he was far from happy.

  Bailey sat on the edge of her bed, the bed where she had recently shorted his control, blown his mind, and ended his three-year sexual drought, thank you Jesus.

  The possibility that she could be in danger, that she would willingly put herself in danger, tightened his chest.

  He cleared his throat. “Looks like you were right about Ellis.”

  “How do you know?”

  Steve hesitated. He never discussed cases off the job. But all he had to protect her was the truth. “What do you know about residue testing?”

  “Only what I’ve researched. Residue testing is notoriously unreliable. But when a gun is fired at close range—say, under twelve inches—the discharge from the barrel creates a smudge around the wound. And, of course, the discharge from the chamber deposits gunpowder soot particles on the shooter’s hand.”

  She must have caught him staring, because she broke off. “What?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. I just think it’s cute when you get all technical.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Cute.”

  “Hot,” he corrected. “It’s very hot.”

  “Really? Projective particles,” she said experimentally. “Stellar bursting. Carbon tattoo.”

  He grinned. “That’s done it. Come here.”

  “Uh uh.” She slapped her hand in the middle of his chest. “You were telling me about residue testing. Did the lab find powder deposits on Paul’s hand?”

  He sobered. “Yeah, they did. But if Ellis fired the gun himself, you’d expect to find most of the residue on the back of his hand, with a smaller amount on the palm. The lab found trace amounts on both sides of Ellis’s hand, with slightly higher deposits on the palm.”

  He watched her brows draw together as she worked it out. “But if Paul didn’t fire the gun, how do you account for the residue on his hand?”

  “Say there was another shooter.”

  “The murderer,” she said flatly.

  He inclined his head in acknowledgment. “The murderer. He fires the gun, puts it in Ellis’s hand.” Steve wrapped his own large hand around her much smaller one to demonstrate. “Ellis’s palm picks up residue from the butt. And the back of his hand . . .”

  Her face turned to his. “Would be contaminated by residue from the shooter’s palm.”

  He stared down at her, dry-eyed, determined and achingly vulnerable, and his heart lurched in his chest. For a moment he couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe.

  This was why it was a mistake to mix sex with the job.

  She turned to face him, slipping naturally out of the protective circle of his arm. “What are we going to do?”

  Fear for her made him harsh. “You don’t do anything. You let the police do their jobs.”

  “The police want to treat Paul’s murder as a suicide. Isolated deaths, different jurisdictions, you said. But if the cases really are connected, they’ll never be solved by investigating them separately. And if the connection is the Dawler case—”

  He couldn’t let her go there.

  “I’ll go to the chief,” he said, in his best public relations voice. Never mind that Clegg wanted the Ellis file on his desk on Monday, and probably Steve’s resignation, too. “I’ll tell him we need to look into it.”

  “He won’t listen to you. That’s not what he wants to hear.”

  The hell of it was she was right.

  Steve didn’t know if the chief was bent on preserving the town’s reputation or on protecting his own ass. But it was obvious that Walter
Clegg wanted this case and the resultant media attention to go away.

  Too bad. Because now there was more at stake than Stokesville’s low-crime, small-town image.

  “I’ll make him listen,” Steve said grimly.

  “Not without evidence. You were right. We don’t have proof. I don’t think a missing diary is enough to convince him.”

  The tension in his jaw radiated outward like the pain from a bad tooth. “Then I’ll dig until I find something else. Something he can’t explain away or ignore.”

  She nodded eagerly. “I can help. I can—”

  “No.”

  She drew in on herself, shoulders hunched, brows together, mouth a little tight. And then the chin came out. “What do you mean, no?”

  “You’re not investigating. Your father interrupted an intruder. What if he decides to come back?”

  “Why should he come back? He has the diary.”

  “And what if that wasn’t all he was looking for? You can’t make yourself a target.”

  She flushed. “I’m already a target. The only way I can protect myself is to figure out why.”

  “The best way to protect yourself is to move in with me.”

  “That’s sweet.” She pressed his arm. “And I do appreciate the offer. But if we’re right, if somebody could be after me, I won’t put your mother and daughter at risk.”

  He leveled a look at her. “I can take care of my family. And you.”

  “I don’t need you to take care of me.”

  “You can’t stay here.”

  “I know,” she said, surprising him. “I don’t want to put my family at risk, either. I’ll go to a hotel.”

  His teeth ground together. “What happened to, ‘I don’t want to be the dumb dead girl’?”

  “You know what would be dumb? Refusing to acknowledge that as Paul’s assistant I have the best chance of figuring out what he knew that got him killed.”

  Steve wanted to argue. But in his gut, he knew she was right.

  It was his heart that kept protesting.

  “If you had access to his files, maybe. But we emptied his office. I turned his computers over to SBI.”

  “Yes, well . . .” Suddenly she wasn’t so eager to confront his gaze. “I backed up everything on my flash drive.”

  “You backed up . . .” He was dumbfounded. Irritated.

  “Everything. Before I moved out, so I could work from here.”

  “You’ve been holding out on me, sugar.”

  “Oh, and you tell me everything.”

  Wisely, he ignored that. “You can go through Ellis’s files?”

  She nodded. “All I need is a computer.”

  “First we get you into a motel,” Steve said grimly. “Then we worry about a computer.”

  Still, she hesitated. “What about my parents? I mean, they’re all right tonight, but Dad should be released tomorrow. If you’re right, if this guy comes back, they could be in danger whether I’m here or not. Dad’s already injured. And my mom can be scary, but she’s no match for an intruder.”

  He hated that he couldn’t reassure her. That he couldn’t protect her or her family. “I could request additional drive-by patrols for the house. But this might be a good time for your parents to take a little vacation.”

  “My parents don’t take vacations.”

  “A family visit, then.”

  “My aunt Grace lives in Kinston. But I don’t see my parents making a road trip while Daddy has a concussion. He does all the driving.”

  “Let me talk to your father’s doctor. Maybe I can persuade him to admit him to the hospital, keep him for another day.”

  “And leave my mother all alone in the house?”

  “She could stay with your sister. Leann lives closer to the hospital anyway.”

  And after a trip to the hospital to drop off Dorothy’s car and back pillow, it was all arranged.

  THE Pinecrest Motor Lodge off Highway 85 lay just beyond the tangle of off-ramps at the city limits. It boasted cable TV in all the rooms and a diner across the parking lot that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day.

  Steve chose it because the doors were reinforced steel and some of the rooms faced the back. Bailey accepted it because it was only forty-nine dollars a night and she was tired enough to sleep standing up.

  She waited in his truck with the doors locked and the motor running while he registered her.

  “Won’t they think it’s suspicious if I don’t come in?” she had asked before he climbed from the truck.

  “Not if we register as Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

  “Gee, I’ve never checked into a cheap motel under an assumed name before,” she said, trying to make a joke of it, trying not to reveal how much his precautions scared her.

  His eyes warmed, but the set cast of his face didn’t change. “Another first,” he said.

  He entered the room ahead of her, carrying her hastily packed bag and some essential groceries: bread, peanut butter, a paperback romance.

  Bailey watched as he set the groceries on the minifridge, checked the windows, and closed the blinds, tempted to ask if he was going to look under the bed for monsters, too. But there was nothing remotely funny about the hard line of his mouth.

  “I can’t assign an officer to watch you,” he said. “Even if I could convince Clegg you’re in danger, the department doesn’t have the manpower.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I could stay,” he offered abruptly.

  She looked at him, big and tough and ill at ease in the middle of her shabby motel room, and her heart stumbled.

  She wanted him to stay. And felt guilty she had unintentionally forced him to a choice.

  “No, you have to get home to your daughter. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know what time,” he warned.

  She forced back her instinctive protest. He had other duties, another life, away from here. She had no real claim on him at all. Somehow, sometime during the past twenty-four hours, she had begun to turn to him, to depend on him. That didn’t mean she had to make things more difficult for him because he had a job to do and a daughter to raise.

  “I’ll be here,” she said.

  It wasn’t like she had a car. Or much choice.

  But he still didn’t leave her. “You want anything before I take off?”

  She smiled wryly. “Something to do?”

  To her surprise, he took her request seriously. “There’s an evidence box in the truck. You could look through that.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “The missing link.”

  “You want me to solve the mystery of evolution?” she teased.

  Steve didn’t smile. “I want you to figure out who had a reason to steal Tanya Dawler’s diary.”

  Right.

  She stood by the door as he went out and came in bearing the box. He was wearing his cop face again, the one that said he had already gone away from her in his head.

  “You lock up behind me, and don’t answer the door for anybody else. Here’s my cell phone number and the department number. My home number’s on the back.”

  “You forgot the number for the poison control center and my pediatrician.”

  She appreciated his concern. She ought to be grateful for his willingness to take charge of a situation that was totally beyond her expertise. But she didn’t like being treated like one more detail he had to take care of.

  His mouth quirked. “Funny. Just be careful.”

  “You, too.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Her chin angled up. “If somebody out there is targeting anyone who investigates the Dawler case . . . I’m just saying you should be careful, too.”

  He kissed her then, hard and slow, leaving her shaken and clinging to him.

  The thought made her uncomfortable. Her clinging days were over, she thought, as she locked the door behind him and flipped the security bolt. She wasn’t putting her trust and pinning her fu
ture on another man. This time was different.

  Steve was different.

  She was practically sure of it.