NINETEEN
STEVE nudged Gabrielle into a pew at the back of Saint Mildred’s Catholic Church. The nine o’clock mass was crowded with old folks anxious to escape the day’s heat and young families who couldn’t afford to miss nap time, with women with an eye on Sunday dinner and men with their minds on the afternoon ball game.
The homily was short and the choir’s ranks decimated by summer vacations. But the order of the mass was the same.
Lord, have mercy . . .
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world . . .
I am not worthy to receive you. Only say the word, and I shall be healed.
Standing and kneeling beside his daughter, Steve waited for the familiar litany of guilt, the self-disgust that rose from his soul like incense. But it didn’t come. Today, the memorized rituals brought comfort, not shame.
You’re not responsible for your wife’s illness. Or her treatment plan. Or her death.
Looking down at Gabrielle’s smooth, dark head and the gold hearts dancing at her ears, he felt an unexpected peace. A profound thankfulness.
For Gabrielle.
And for Bailey.
Bailey, solid, bright, straightforward, had stolen into his disciplined life like the light through those stained glass windows. Making him feel again. Making him believe again. Waking him to painful hope.
He stood for the final hymn, his heart pumping in an urgent rhythm that had nothing to do with the pounding of the organ in the choir loft. Because along with renewed life came renewed fear.
Somewhere out there, somebody hunted to keep a secret. Somebody who had killed and might kill again.
And until Steve caught him and put him away, that bastard threatened Bailey.
He steered Gabrielle from their pew into the stream of departing churchgoers. He needed to review the Dawler case again. Beyond the headlines and court reports, there had to be something that had sparked Paul Ellis’s interest . . . and his murder.
The congregation spilled into the sunshine and down the broad, flat steps. Under a stand of tall pine trees, children, released from church and careless of the heat, whooped and ran around some aging playground equipment.
“Lieutenant?”
Steve turned as Darian Jackson emerged from the shadow of the church porch, sweating and uncomfortable in his Sunday suit. Beside him, a handsome woman in a floral print dress chatted with the pastor.
Jackson came down the steps alone. “Welcome to Saint Mildred’s. I didn’t know your people were Catholic.”
“Her mother was.”
“Ah”
Sensing an opportunity, Gabrielle tugged on his arm. “Can I go play?”
Steve was restless, angry, jumping out of his skin with the need to do something, to protect Bailey. He looked down at his daughter’s hopeful face and drew a deep breath.
“Ten minutes.”
“Okay.”
She ran off.
“Must be tough,” Jackson observed. “Starting over in a strange place with new people.”
“We manage,” Steve said.
“I’m sure you do. Sure you do. Still, it takes a while to find your feet.”
Were they still talking about Gabrielle?
“There’s always prejudice against the new kid,” Steve said. “You can’t let it get to you.”
Jackson grunted. “Twenty years ago I was the only black officer in this department. There’s not much you can tell me about prejudice.”
“Guess not,” Steve said.
The children ran and played in the sunshine.
Something Jackson had said nagged at Steve. “You were here twenty years ago?”
Jackson nodded. “Fresh out of the army.”
“You work the Dawler case?”
“I was the responding officer. Although Chief Clegg—he was Detective Clegg back then—pretty near beat me onto the scene. Shit, every man on the force, seven of us, turned out that night. Never saw anything like it.” Jackson shook his head. “Never want to see anything like it again, either.”
Steve fought to contain his rising excitement. This couldn’t be the break he’d been praying for.
“Domestics are always the worst,” he said.
“He did them with the kitchen knives,” Jackson said. “Murdered them in their beds. Blood everywhere. Grandmother went down pretty quick. Sister, too. But the mother, Tammy, she must have woke up. She fought him. Fought her own son for her life. We found her in the hall.”
“And Billy Ray?”
“Curled up in the garage with a bottle of bourbon, drinking and crying and covered in blood. Most of it theirs. Kept talking about how he had to do it, how his life was worthless anyway because his family was all whores. How everybody was laughing at him and he had to be a man and stop their whoring. Nothing to do but bring him in.”
There was no satisfaction in his voice.
Steve raised his eyebrows. “You ever consider other suspects?”
Jackson stared across the playground. “Men were in and out of that house all the time, Lieutenant. We could have hauled in every migrant worker and trucker in the state for questioning along with a good number of married men in this town. But everything pointed at the boy. We had his confession. We had his prints, and only his prints, on the knives. Most folks just figured the boy couldn’t take it anymore.”
“That made it easy,” Steve remarked.
“Didn’t make it wrong. A lot of folks—a lot of men—were already nervous. A lot of wives were upset. Clegg didn’t see any point in stirring things up by dragging out the investigation.”
That sounded like Clegg.
“And you agreed with him.” His voice carefully neutral.
“I was new on the force. Still on probation.” His gaze slid sideways to meet Steve’s. “It wasn’t my place to agree or disagree.”
Justification or warning? Steve could sympathize with the first. He chose to ignore the second. “And now?”
“Now I’m close to retirement. Pretty soon I’ll be living off my pension with an attic full of notebooks.”
Casual words, casually delivered.
A lot of cops kept their case notes. Steve did himself. Like high school yearbooks or empty liquor bottles on a dormitory windowsill or a serial killers’ trophies, the notebooks reminded you who you were and what you had done and sometimes what you had to atone for.
Given the subject, Steve didn’t think their mention was an accident.
“Must make interesting reading,” he said, equally casual.
“Interesting enough.”
“Maybe I could take a look.”
“I’ll be home all afternoon,” Jackson said. “You should drop by. Meet the wife.”
His wife, unless Steve was very much mistaken, was still on the church steps above them, talking to the pastor.
He nodded. “I’ll do that. Thanks.”
IT was hard to feel in control of your destiny when you were stashed in a cheap twelve-by-twenty motel room without room service or transportation.
Bailey couldn’t even control the temperature. The unit’s air conditioner had two settings: brain-rattling and freezing or ominously silent and hot.
She settled for steamy, stripping to athletic shorts and a black cotton tank top to work her way through the evidence box. Outside the sun was shining, but she kept the blinds closed, as instructed. The darkness didn’t do a damn thing to relieve the heat. Or the creepiness of her task.
She didn’t touch the plastic bags and paper-wrapped packages except to move them out of the way. The case summary alone was enough to give her chills, even in this sauna of a room. Wet splotches and bloody footprints, used condoms and an unopened pregnancy kit . . . Bailey pushed her hair out of her eyes and painstakingly noted them all. She turned hastily through the photos.
No wonder Steve was so good at dissociating.
He had to, to keep his sanity. To keep his humanity. She had a new appreciation for his job, and its cost. After only
a couple of hours, she felt on edge, depressed, and not one bit closer to finding an angle, an insight, or a flaw in the police investigation.
She rubbed her forehead. How could she? Everything she looked at was the result of that investigation. It had already been analyzed, evaluated, and entered into evidence by professionals.
Two years working for one of the best true crime writers in the business, and she still lacked Paul’s instincts. Or his ego. She sighed with frustration. Maybe if she had his notes, or his interview with Billy Ray . . .
She straightened slowly. The vinyl arm chair released her skin with a soft, sucking sound.
Or his interview with Billy Ray.
Her heart pounded. Was that what the intruder was after? The interview? But he had taken Tanya’s diary. Which meant . . .
Oh, God, she needed a computer. If she could get into Paul’s files, maybe she could figure out what it meant.
Think. She had read the diary. At least, she’d read parts of it. She should focus on that.
It was, as she had told Steve, extraordinary for its ordinariness, like a modern teenager’s facebook profile of likes and dislikes, crushes and peeves. Tanya Dawler had liked Madonna and the color black, disliked math and—what was that teacher’s name? Mr. D.—had a crush on Rick Springfield and her brother’s friend Trey, Trace, something like that. She worried about the shape of her nose and the size of her breasts, and she dreamed of becoming a singer, a model, an actress. The details were fuzzy and changed frequently, but the desire to strike out and hit it big stayed constant.
Bailey could sympathize. What she couldn’t do was imagine how any of this played into the girl’s death or Paul’s murder or the attack on her own father.
The knock on her door echoed through the room like a gunshot. She bolted upright in her chair as paper cascaded to the carpet.
Her heart thudded against her ribs. She felt giddy. Terrified or sleep deprived, at this point it didn’t matter. Should she answer?
“Housekeeping,” a light, accented voice called.
Sheesh.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
She was a moron. An idiot.
Still she sat frozen, listening, until she heard footsteps move away from the door, until she saw a shadow cross the blinds.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. Okay. Don’t just sit there, moron. Do something.
What had Steve told her? See if you can figure out who had a reason to steal Tanya Dawler’s diary.
Right. Bailey couldn’t even recall any names, only nicknames and initials. But she picked the papers off the floor, bending stiffly like an old woman. She lined her sharpened pencils like soldiers on parade. And she wrote down as many of Tanya’s notations as she remembered, frustrated she couldn’t even build a database but had to rely on paper and pencil. The point dug into the page.
She had a sudden, sharp memory of Paul demanding his laptop, complaining. I can’t write the damn book on hotel stationery.
Right there with you, Paul, she thought.
But Paul was dead.
She was alone. She had to figure this out herself, with or without a computer.
She reviewed her pathetic penciled list. Too bad she didn’t have a client list for the brothel business to compare it with. Or a school directory. Mrs. Buncombe, the faculty yearbook advisor, used to insist Bailey check all the students’ names against the listings in the student directory.
Yearbook.
The idea snapped on like the bathroom light. If she could get her hands on a yearbook, maybe she could match Tanya’s abbreviations to names and faces. A male teacher whose last name began with D; an upperclassman named Trey—no, Trip, that was it; an S.W. with a blond ponytail. People who knew Tanya or her brother.
It was a place to start.
It was something to do.
Nineteen years ago, Tanya had been a freshman in high school. If she had lived, she would be thirty-five now, older than Bailey, almost as old as . . .
Bailey caught her breath. Digging for her cell phone, she punched in her sister’s number.
Leann answered the phone against a babble of background noise. Bailey could hear their mother, apparently fixing lunch for Rose in the kitchen. “Bailey? Where are you? We missed you in church this morning.”
“I’m fine. I’m . . .”
Hiding out under an assumed name in a sleazy motel by the highway. Her hand tightened on the phone.
“Doing research,” she said.
“For that book? Hang on. The apple juice, Mom. On the second shelf.”
A sudden wave of love for her family swamped Bailey, swelling her throat. “How’s Daddy?”
“Oh, you know. He’s grumpy because his doctor admitted him to the neurology floor, and then Mama told all the nurses he had brain damage, which of course he doesn’t. But basically they’re fine.”
Bailey caught herself grinning. “Listen, can I ask you a favor?”
“Apple juice, Mama. Behind the pudding.” Leann blew out a breath. “Okay, shoot.”
Bailey cleared her throat. “Do you still have your old yearbooks?”
She had just ended the call with her sister when her phone chirped. She glanced at the familiar New York area code before she pressed the button. “Hello?”
TWENTY minutes later, Bailey sat cross-legged on the quilted motel spread, her phone clutched in her hand. Her mind whirled. Her stomach churned.
She should be flattered. Nervous. Hopeful. She felt . . . numb.
When the knock on the door came this time, she barely jumped. “Who is it?”
“Mr. Smith.”
Steve.
She roused enough to consider running to the bathroom to reapply her deodorant and brush her hair. Stupid. She couldn’t leave him standing outside while she primped. Scrambling off the bed, she opened the door.
He scowled at her from the sunlit strip of concrete. “Did you check through the peephole?”
No kiss, no compliment, no hi-honey-how-was-your-day. He was in full cop mode, those double lines cutting between his brows, his mouth hard.
She blinked. “I knew it was you.”
“You should still check.”
This was what it would be like to be with him: the tension and the terse replies, the sense that his head, if not his heart, was otherwise engaged.
Unless she did something about it.
“I was distracted.”
“What’s the matter? Is it your father?”
“He’s fine. I’m fine. I’m great. Never better.”
Steve’s gaze narrowed. “What happened?”
She hugged her elbows, suddenly glad she had someone to share her amazing news. Wishing he would take her in his arms. Hoping his reaction would help her somehow to make sense of her own. “Paul’s agent called.”
“So?”
“So . . .” She drew a deep breath. “She wants me to finish the book.”
“Ellis’s book,” he said without expression.
She nodded, anticipating surprise. Congratulations. Maybe even an argument.
“Are you going to do it?”
His lack of reaction brought her chin up. “I could. I have access to his sources. To his notes. Or I will once I get my hands on a computer.”
“Laptop’s in the car.”
“Oh.” That was it? “Well, great. Thanks.”
He set a white paper sack on the air-conditioning unit under the window. “I stopped by Crook’s Barbecue. I figured you’d be tired of peanut butter by now.”
A man who brought barbecue home could be forgiven almost anything. Even a less than enthusiastic response to Paul’s agent.
“I love Crook’s,” Bailey said. After all, if he was making an effort, so could she. “That’s one thing you can get around here you can’t find in New York.”
His dark gaze collided with hers. “There’s lots of things you can get around here you can’t get in New York.”
She waited, breathless.
B
ut he looked away, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “Hot in here.”
She bit back her disappointment. “You shouldn’t have dressed up for dinner.”
He glanced down at his rumpled dark suit as if he had forgotten he had it on. “I took Gabrielle to church this morning.”
Home Before Midnight Page 28