Molly pulled her hand free and turned her ring around. Her palm was red where the prongs had pierced her skin. “No. Of course not.” Lying was becoming second nature to her. She didn’t understand why she was reluctant to tell Paul that she was pretty high on the list of suspects.
“Really?”
She nodded emphatically.
“Good, but I’m kind of surprised. Being on the scene, so to speak, you might have been their logical target. Didn’t they have a bunch of questions about why Camina left?”
“Yes, but it’s not a problem.” Molly swallowed the bitterness in her mouth.
“No?”
Her hair swung into her eyes as she shook her head. She looked down at her hands where she’d wadded her skirt.
“Great. That’s terrific. They’d be crazy to think you had anything to do with her murder, no matter how things looked.”
Molly wished he wouldn’t keep harping on how things looked. She knew exactly how things looked to Detective Harlan, and he wasn’t crazy. Persistent. Relentless. Determined. But not crazy.
Paul’s thick eyebrows were still drawn together as he continued, “But, listen, if they bother you, you call me, okay? I’ll give you an alibi, find you the best lawyer in the state, whatever. You know I’ll help you. I’ve already told you that.”
“I do need your help, Paul.” Molly rubbed her hands down her charcoal gray skirt. Her damp palms left their mark on the smooth, light wool. “Here’s the situation. I haven’t minded living alone on the bayou until this incident,” she lied, “but now I’m frightened. I want one of Dad’s guns back. Unless you’ve sold them?” She made her hands stay calmly in her lap, when what she wanted was to grab his and grip them, shake him into agreeing with her.
He jumped to his feet.
“You didn’t want those guns in the house after your folks were shot. You said you couldn’t stand to look at your dad’s collection, and Reid didn’t want them, either. That’s the only reason I took them.” He was scowling at her. “Guns are dangerous, Molly.”
“I know, Paul. That’s why I want one. There aren’t any streetlights out where I live, and it takes the police at least twenty minutes to reach my home. If I’m able to call them.”
“Why don’t you get a dog if you’re scared? For damn sure I’d be scared witless out there myself after all that’s happened. But a gun…” He walked away from her to his desk, then back again. “A dog’s the best idea, hon. Really.”
“Maybe. But I want Dad’s 9 mm Luger.”
“You could hurt someone with a gun, Molly.”
“I know. That’s the idea, Paul. I don’t want anybody in my house who doesn’t belong there.”
“Damn, Molly, I never knew you had this bloodthirsty side to you.” He was digging in his heels. “I can’t let you have one of the guns. That doesn’t make any sense. It’s a damn fool idea, is what it is. Get a dog. They bark. They make noise.”
“And after my dog barks like crazy, what then, Paul? What if the intruder comes in anyway? And the telephone doesn’t work?”
He glowered, a five-year-old on the brink of pouting. “I still think you should get a dog.”
“Dogs can be poisoned.” Molly didn’t want to beg, but she would. “Listen, Paul. I’m not going home without Dad’s gun, without some kind of protection. I’ll rent a room at Sally Lou’s Motel out on the highway first.”
“You’re dead set on this, aren’t you?” He pulled at his mustache.
“Maybe you could rephrase that?” Molly asked gently.
“What?”
“Dead’s not one of my favorite vocabulary choices these days.” She didn’t have the strength to go into that house tonight by herself, unarmed, unprotected. And she wasn’t about to phone up her friendly local detective John Harlan and ask him to hold her hand while she checked through her house again.
“Come on, Molly, get a dog.” He was weakening.
“I don’t want some helpless animal killed because of me.”
“But you’d shoot someone?”
“If I had to.” A chill went down to her toes. “If someone were threatening me, I would shoot him, Paul.”
“You’d be in a pickle if you did.”
“I’d be dead if I didn’t.” The knowledge was there inside her. She had to take care of herself.
“You know I hate guns. I always have. I only went hunting with Reid and your dad because Reid was my buddy. I mean, I liked your dad, too, but hunting was their thing, not mine.”
“But you hunted. You went with them, Paul. And you shot your share of ducks down at Lake Okeechobee every Thanksgiving.”
“I have a better idea. Why don’t you stay with me until the cops catch whoever did it?”
“What if it takes six months? A year? Never? I can’t stay with you, Paul.” Molly put everything she had into her last question. “Please, Paul. Be my friend and help me?”
In the end, he agreed. He seemed miserable. She was uncomfortable. He told Annie to let his next patient know he was running late. Molly waited on the couch until the room closed in around her, then went out to the reception area.
“I’m going to walk around for a few minutes, Annie. I’ll be right back. I need some fresh air.” She laughed at Annie’s expression. “Yes, Paul put in the most expensive and technologically advanced environmental-control system he could find—did I leave anything out?”
Annie shook her head. Her glossy black hair caught the light. “Not a single thing. It’s the kickiest.”
“Kickiest?”
“That’s what my eight-year-old says all the time.”
“I won’t go far. Around the colonnade, the portico. I want to smell the rain, that’s all.”
She stepped out into a gray day that had slid into a grayer twilight. Most of the offices were closed, because some of the doctors still took the traditional Wednesdays off. With flooding in the lowlying areas and beaches a problem after two days of a steady downpour, other doctors had obviously gone home.
Paul hadn’t.
Molly walked to the west side of the building, past empty offices. Not yet four o’clock, but the lights in the parking lot had come on, their subdued glow friendly and welcoming. Outside their cones of yellow, though, darkness slid under the trees and crept toward the building.
The scrape of a shoe against the mosaic set into the brick flooring startled her. It had come from the farthest end of the west corridor. She didn’t move as she tried to catch her breath. At that end the complex seemed deserted.
She backed up, step by step, placing her feet noiselessly on the tiles.
Something brushed her cheek lightly, like a lover’s kiss in the dark. Cool, wet, clinging. Gulping for air with burning lungs, she turned and ran, flailing wildly at her face. The clatter of her heels clicking and slipping on the wet tiles echoed behind her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He’d followed her on the rain-swept roads from her house to the medical center, watched as the wind buffeted her and her oyster gray umbrella. When he saw her turn into the offices on the east side of the center, he lagged behind, giving her enough of a lead so that she wouldn’t hear him or see him as he trailed her on the outside of the colonnade, matching his steps to hers, moving when she moved, her shadow.
He thought he’d made a mistake when she paused with her hand on the heavy metal doorknob. As she turned, he faded backward, only a leaf moving behind him as he disappeared into the foliage. He waited patiently, rain dripping off the ends of his hair, down his neck and under his collar, and soon a thin blond woman left the office. Her collagen-plumped lips were bracketed with white parentheses and her shoulders were slumped, but as he watched, she flipped her hand under her toned hair, straightened, and by the time she’d reached the portico, she was humming.
Yawning, he leaned forward, letting the blood flow into his head. He was tired. He should have gone back to his apartment and spent the afternoon sleeping. He needed sleep. And he would, but first he wanted
to find out why sweet Molly had torn out of her house like a bat out of hell and driven ten miles over the speed limit all the way into town and through it until she skidded to a stop in Dr. Paul Bouler’s parking lot.
Harlan’s ears popped as he yawned again. For a moment he entertained himself with the idea of curling into a ball under the hedge and sleeping. Her footsteps would wake him. He shook his head, arched his back and touched his toes. Drops of water skittered off leaves and flew with his movements. He edged forward, blended with the hedge and stilled his breathing while he waited for Molly to come back out.
The dentist, her ex, came out a side door to the suite of offices, clambered into an expensive sports car and left. Molly remained inside. Interesting, Harlan thought, running his hand under his collar and stopping the river of water running down his back, very intriguing, but he would stay on Molly’s trail. Harlan knew the ex would return. The reason for his abrupt departure would become clear. Patience.
Hunting required infinite patience. To his left, a cat slunk quietly under the shelter of the hedge and settled, wet and miserable. Hunching his shoulders, Harlan waited, his ears tuned to the sounds around him. Raindrops slipping over the leaves, plopping to the ground. The electric hum of the parking lights off to his right. In the distance, the slap of tires against the road. A creaking of shoe leather.
Harlan lifted his head, angled it to the right. His nostrils flared. Lightly, lightly, over the clean smell of wind and rain, came a stench of evil.
His head swiveled as Molly came out of the office door, the wind catching it out of her hand and slamming it behind her. Her slow stroll through the deserted colonnade gave him time to slip easily behind her. Her hair swung against her shoulders, the pale brown strands catching against the gray knit sweater, swinging free as she turned her head, staring his way. The feeble light outside one of the offices turned her hair to melted caramel.
Harlan slowed his breathing. Molly frowned, took a step forward and stopped, peering ahead down the long west passage of the colonnade. Staying in the gloom of the landscaping, he focused ahead of her, his eyes dilating in the rain-induced twilight.
He could smell it stronger now, that stench of corruption, and he eased his way forward, his shape blending with the phantasms of light and shadow lurking in the dusk.
When he was three feet ahead of her, breathing in and out silently, slowing his heartbeat, Harlan sensed a presence. He suspended his motion midstep, his right foot hovering over a sodden clump of leaves, waiting.
Molly’s backward step, her clattering flight away from him and her raspy breathing sent him slipping quickly after her, and the scent blew away with a whirl of wind. Looking behind him, Harlan saw a lingering aura that faded even as he stared, its reddish glow shimmering in the darkness at the corner of the building.
Gone. Nothing there. Only an awareness curling inside him of something nasty.
Harlan heard the scratch of Molly’s fingernails against the metal of the doorknob, her quick inhalation as she shut the door behind her. Hovering near the solid door, he heard, too, the fabric of her skirt whisper against the wood as she leaned back, panting. Flattening his palm against the wood, Harlan felt the stuttering vibration of her small heart, banging like that of a terrified bird.
He slid his hand down the door, tracing Molly’s small, slight shape on the other side.
Immobile except for the slow sweep of his gaze, Harlan surveyed the complex.
Something had been here.
Something that threatened Molly.
Interesting.
Merging back into the shadows, he stayed alert, senses vibrating.
Some time later—he’d lost track of time now—Molly left, hurrying across the colonnade. He saw the gleam of her keys as she ran across the parking lot to her car, skidding to a halt. Her purse thumped heavily against the door and back onto her hip. She shoved the key into the slot and leapt inside, slamming the door behind her.
The snap of the locks was loud.
Sounds and smells had become hyperintense, his senses honed.
Safe behind the steamy windows of her car, she slumped over the steering wheel and buried her head between her white-knuckled hands. Where her hair parted over her slender nape, the skin gleamed, pale and fragile in the dimness. Like satin sliding between his thumb and forefinger, he could feel it, could taste its sweetness on his mouth. She made him hunger for impossible things.
Of all people, Molly Harris had pierced the wall around him. He’d let down his guard briefly when he’d held her in his arms on the bayou, but he’d been lucky that all he’d done was kiss her.
Perhaps a little more than kiss, if he were honest with himself, and he made a point of facing the truth about himself—his nature, his weaknesses—no matter how unpalatable the truth was. If he’d made love with her—well, it wouldn’t have been love, but something else entirely—if he’d weakened, worse things could have happened than losing his job. Disaster.
Concentrating, Harlan saw her flick open her purse, pull out a tissue and blow her nose. Her shoulders squared with determination and she turned the key, the tiny click of metal alerting him, and he slipped between the hedge and an oak tree, invisible to her as she whipped the car around in a three-point turn and passed him.
She had a gun in her purse.
She hadn’t had one when she’d gone into the medical building.
As she turned onto the road, Harlan remembered what had tickled his memory about her alibi for her parents’ murders. Her alibi had been her ex-husband.
His, of course, had been innocent Molly Harris.
Her parents had been shot to death.
And now sweet Molly had a gun, one given to her by her friendly ex.
Why had her ex-husband given her a gun?
A friend was a wonderful thing to have, Harlan mused as he started the car. Letting the engine idle, he scanned the parking lot and colonnade, the dim lights showing over the office doors.
Tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, he saw again, like a flash of light in the dark, the image of Molly with her head between her hands, her fists clenched.
Who was doing who a favor?
And where had the friendly Dr. Bouler been in those seconds when Molly had bolted down the empty corridor back to his office?
Harlan slipped into first gear and followed Molly. He knew where she was going. He didn’t have to hurry. She wouldn’t be far ahead of him.
He sighted through the slashing rain as the windshield wipers labored to clear a view. Thoughtfully he shoved his sunglasses up through his wet, rumpled hair and settled them on his head.
Adrenaline was flooding through him with the twists and turns of the hunt.
He didn’t feel like sleeping anymore.
His whistle was tuneless as he trailed Molly through the rain. Almost out of sight far ahead of him, she braked and turned, heading for the road paralleling the bayou, her red lights a blurred glow that winked and disappeared.
“Catch you later, Ms. Harris,” he murmured and smiled, thinking about friends and favors.
Approaching her house in the dark, Molly slowed in the driveway. Shells crunched underneath tires as she stopped. She was relieved that she’d left the lights on. Looking at the graceful house shining like a sanctuary in the dark, she wished she hadn’t left all the shutters open, though.
From outside, anyone could follow her progression from one room to the other throughout the house—upstairs, downstairs. With the lights blazing from each room, the windows became a silent stage where the story of her life unrolled.
Seeing the rooms as separate stages, she realized abruptly how open her home was. Living so far from town, she hadn’t concerned herself with privacy when she was growing up. None of them had. Who, after all, was there to walk casually by and peer in their windows?
The solitude of those days, idyllic and serene, mocked her with memories, taunted her with the knowledge that she would never again go into her house and le
ave the windows unshuttered. The sleepy rural solitude of childhood days had become a threat to her with its masking of eyes, eyes glowing in the dark, staring—
“Enough,” she muttered, grabbing her purse. She’d have herself so damned goosey she’d end up sleeping in the car, or turning around and driving pell-mell back to Sally Lou’s Motel after all. Although she’d agreed with every one of Paul’s points about having a gun, she’d needed something more than her locks and jimmy bars. Maybe getting the gun back from Paul hadn’t been the smartest idea. She was embarrassed to admit that having it reinforced her determination not to wind up screaming on her kitchen floor until she couldn’t scream anymore. Never again.
Taking her foot off the brake, she rolled to a stop under the porte cochere off the left side of the house, the side opposite the kitchen and under the gallery outside her bedroom.
She held the gun loosely by her side as she locked the car doors behind her and walked across the wet veranda and around to the kitchen entrance, looking inside the bright rooms like a stranger as she passed them. Molly made herself breathe deeply and evenly. She didn’t allow herself to dwell on those fearful seconds outside Paul’s office.
Instead, as she walked slowly past her flowerpots and boxes, she made plans. She should see Bob Nolan tomorrow. He’d drawn up her parents’ wills, hers. He could recommend a good criminal lawyer. She’d be smart to have a name handy if Detective Harlan showed up tomorrow with a warrant for her arrest.
If the police decided to arrest her, she hoped they would send someone else. She didn’t think she could endure having Harlan surround her with his presence, fix those golden eyes on her and handcuff her. Molly shivered. Not Detective Harlan.
If she weren’t arrested, she’d go back to work. She’d been missing too many days, and she didn’t want the dentists in her territory to start ordering from someone else. She’d been doing a half-hearted job lately contacting them and checking to see if they needed new supplies or equipment. She was lucky she’d been allowed to keep the Gulf Coast area this long, but her bosses wouldn’t be understanding if she had two abysmal quarters in a row. They’d made appropriately sympathetic noises for the first period—they understood her situation; of course they didn’t want to imply that family wasn’t important; but ultimately, was she coming back to work or not?
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