Dead Before Dark

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Neal was right, of course.

  Anyway, she wanted to wait for word about Randy. She spent the night mostly staring into space but occasionally dozing into a fitful sleep, dogged by the familiar unfinished puzzle dream.

  Now, glancing toward the glass doors, she sees that it’s still dark outside. The sun should be coming up soon, though; it’s past six A.M.

  She stretches and stands. This time, she takes her belongings with her when she goes to the restroom, hanging her coat and purse on a door hook as she splashes some cold water on her face.

  Looking into the mirror above the sink, she sees blatant evidence of two sleepless nights and a murder in between. Beyond the predictable dark circles around her eyes, her wavy hair is out of control; her skin is dry and her lips are cracked from being exposed to the elements outside Randy’s house yesterday.

  She checks her purse for something that might help—lip balm, a comb, lotion, a barrette. Nope. She isn’t the type to primp away from home. In her coat pocket, though, along with the iPod she forgot to remove the other night, she finds a stray rubber band. Not a coated hair elastic, but the plain old office supply kind—from the bundle of mail she took from her box when she returned from Curaçao, she realizes.

  It’ll have to do.

  She finger-combs her curls the best she can, gathers them into a ponytail, then winces as she snaps the band around it, the rubber tugging painfully at a few strands.

  Better, though, she decides, looking into the mirror.

  Back in the waiting room, she returns to her lonely vigil.

  Remembering her iPod, she removes it from her pocket and inserts the white ear buds. Maybe music will make things a little brighter in this darkest hour before the dawn.

  Oh, who is she kidding?

  Even music isn’t going to let her forget Carla’s death for one instant.

  Still, what else has she got to do?

  As her thumb reaches to work the scroll wheel, Detective Lambert appears.

  “Ms. Sloan?” His gaze is solemn behind those storybook wizard glasses.

  She yanks out the ear buds. “You can call me Lucinda.”

  “Lucinda.” He nods. “Randy’s back home. He took a red eye. I told him you’ve been here all night. He wants to see you right away.”

  A beach town in the off-season is the perfect place to commit a crime, Lucinda concludes as she turns onto Randy’s deserted street a few blocks from the beach.

  There’s no one around, really, to part the blinds and make note of a strange car prowling the street. No one would have heard terrified cries for help even if the sound made it past the storm windows, even if the wind and surf didn’t sweep them away.

  Still…

  Someone, somewhere, might have seen something. Heard something.

  Experience has taught Lucinda that someone usually does.

  A squad car sits again—or, perhaps, still—in front of Randy’s house.

  Lucinda parks a few doors down and walks past the mostly deserted homes of the Barakats’ neighbors, holding two cups of deli coffee balanced against her hip on a spongy beige cardboard carrier. One is laced with lots of sugar and half and half; the other black and unsweetened.

  She knows, of course, how Randy takes his coffee; they drank a lot of it together during those late night investigations.

  Filmy sunlight has broken through the clouds. The wind off the ocean feels colder, though, than it did yesterday, permeating Lucinda’s body and blowing her hair across her face. The strands tickle her cheeks, and she slaps at them like a joyless kitten pawing at dangling yarn.

  Randy’s car, mud-spattered and coated with road salt, is parked behind Carla’s in the driveway. Lucinda walks past it, approaching the Barakats’ front door for the second time in twenty-four hours.

  A uniformed officer answers her knock. She recognizes him, having seen him around the station yesterday. He’s considerably more friendly now that she’s being admitted to the inner circle.

  “Lucinda Sloan, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here, want a hand with the coffee?”

  “No, thanks, I’ve got it.”

  “Randy’s waiting for you. He’s in the kitchen. Go on in—it’s that way.”

  As she moves beyond the threshold, she can smell Lysol and bleach, but nothing more. The windows are cracked open. Randy’s fellow officers must have worked to air out the house after Carla’s body was moved to the morgue yesterday.

  Lucinda can’t help but notice that the house isn’t the charming dream house she imagined. A cursory glance as she moves through the living room and dining room shows that while the place is nicely furnished—mostly in blond wood and beige upholstery, with a couple of pastel prints in metallic frames hanging on the walls—there are none of the little personal touches that make a house a home.

  She can’t help but compare the place to Neal and Erma’s, with its family photos, tchotchkes, and collections galore. Or even to her own apartment, which feels a lot more lived in—even though she’s alone, and has only been there a month.

  So Randy and Carla aren’t into stuff. So what?

  That doesn’t mean this isn’t a happy home.

  No…. But it doesn’t feel happy.

  Well of course the house gives off a bad vibe. Carla died here.

  But it feels like there’s more to it than that.

  Pausing in the kitchen doorway, she spots Randy and immediately curtails the little argument with her psychic self.

  He’s sitting with his back to her, slumped forward with his head resting on his forearms folded flat against the table.

  Lucinda watches him for a moment, a fist of regret squeezing her heart. He’s a good guy; the best. He doesn’t deserve this pain.

  What is he going to do now? How is he going to live with this?

  And why, why, why did he lie about the last time he’d spoken to Carla?

  What if—

  No. You know he didn’t have anything to do with it.

  Of course he didn’t.

  He couldn’t have.

  But it’s been such a long time…. How well do you know him now?

  Frustrated by the track her thoughts are taking, she clears her throat. “Randy.”

  He lifts his head and turns, tears running down his sorrow-scoured face. “Somebody killed her, Lucinda. Somebody killed her.”

  It’s a little-boy wail, and it pierces her soul, sending her to his side.

  This is Randy. She knows him. Trusts him.

  She blindly puts aside the hot coffee cups and bends over him, holding him, stroking his hair as he shudders and soaks her shoulder with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, over and over.

  When the tide of despair begins to ebb, she finds her way into a chair, pulling it close beside his, an arm draped around his shoulder.

  “I can’t believe she’s dead. I have to go down to the morgue….” His voice breaks.

  “Can’t someone else do that for you?”

  “No, no, I have to do it, because…I just can’t believe it.”

  “I’m so, so sorry, Randy.”

  He nods, plucks a tissue from the box on the table, blows his nose.

  What more is there to say?

  “I know how hard this is. I know how much you loved her.”

  In the midst of crumpling the tissue, he glances up at Lucinda. Something flickers in his blue eyes, giving her pause.

  But then it’s gone, and he slumps in his chair, shaking his head. “This can’t be happening.”

  How many times has she heard those words from the families of doomed missing persons?

  Over time, the stunned disbelief gives way to grief, and anger, and eventually—if their ordeal ends with the discovery of a body, which many do not—grim acceptance.

  All of those emotions abrade Randy’s handsome face now, along with blatant exhaustion and none of the hope families of missing persons struggle to keep alive until the end, should th
ey be fortunate enough to find closure.

  Randy’s journey was over before it began, and closure—the certainty that his wife will never come home again—brings no relief.

  Neal arrives at Lucinda’s apartment before the detective team.

  Wearing rubber gloves, he pockets her keys and closes the door behind him, wiping the slush from his sneakers.

  As a detective, he’s entered unoccupied homes on countless occasions. All in a day’s work.

  Why, then, does this feel so wrong?

  Because I know her, and somehow, I feel like I’m invading her privacy. Even though this is a crime scene now.

  He looks around. The apartment has come a long way since he came with her to give it a second look on a blustery December day, at her request.

  “I like it, but I’m not sure about it,” she’d said. “I need another opinion.”

  “About the neighborhood?”

  “God, no. About the place itself. It’s an old building. Really old.”

  He asked where it was, and when she told him the cross streets, he understood the “God, no.”

  As Philadelphia neighborhoods go, Society Hill is among the safest.

  It’s also the last place he’d expect Lucinda Sloan to settle. She’s never liked to talk much about her past, but Neal knows she likes to keep some distance between herself and her blue blood roots.

  She always did, anyway.

  But maybe, the older she gets, the more she feels the need to reconcile the past.

  Her mother, her father, Randy…

  Randy.

  Carla.

  Fresh shock courses through Neal. What the hell is going on?

  He walks into the living room, looking for signs of an intruder. There are none that he can see, but how would he know? He’s only been here once before, on that first day, before she moved in.

  “The apartment is great,” Neal told Lucinda, after a walk through and a cursory inspection of the pipes and the outlets. “I just have one question: why here?”

  “You mean, this neighborhood?”

  “I mean, this neighborhood.”

  She shrugged. “It’s convenient, and it’s nice, and it’s affordable. Why not?”

  “The next thing I know, you’ll be calling your mother for lunch.” He winked at her, and she gave him the finger.

  He’s never met her parents, but he’d heard of them even before he met Lucinda. Who hadn’t? Charity golf events, black tie fund-raisers, on the board of this and that foundation…Bitsy and Rudolph Sloan, and their forebears, have long been fixtures in Philadelphia society.

  Back when Neal first encountered their daughter, fresh from her parents’ home—or clutches, as Lucinda preferred to phrase it—she bore the remnants of what struck him as adolescent rebelliousness.

  Not only that, but she was full of crap—or so he believed.

  A staunch Irish Catholic, he was predisposed to skepticism when a family he was working with brought a so-called psychic on board to help locate a missing teenager.

  She advised the investigators to concentrate the search in an industrial area east of the city, despite the fact that the girl had last been seen near the Amtrak station and was widely believed—within the police force, anyway—to be a runaway.

  Lucinda claimed that the girl had been boldly abducted from a city street by two men in a black pickup truck, raped and kept alive for nearly two weeks before they decapitated her and buried her head in a box near an abandoned brick factory.

  Neal took all that with a grain of salt. He and the other investigators humored her, though, and looked where she said to look.

  Lucinda was correct, as it turned out. Right down to the fact that the box was from an electronics store.

  Who was he to argue with facts, extraordinary as they might be?

  Neal found a new and instant respect for the wayward heiress who wore defiance like gang colors. Yet there was a sensitivity there, too, a vulnerability, somewhere beneath the brash and jaded facade.

  Patience brings payoff. The detective’s credo has served Neal well where Lucinda Sloan is concerned.

  Early on, they crossed paths again and again in an effort to locate missing persons, evolving into colleagues, then friends, and now, perhaps family is the most appropriate term for their relationship. Lucinda has become as close to Neal as his own daughters are—perhaps even more so, because he doesn’t have to share her with Erma, and because he and Lucinda have been to hell and back together more times than he cares to count.

  This is a brutal business.

  You can’t help but grow hardened over time until you’re almost immune to the victims’ pain, to their loved ones’ pain, even to your own. You know it’s there—the pain—but you can’t let yourself feel it because if you do, you’ll never be able to get up the next morning and do what has to be done.

  This time, Neal is dangerously close to emotional involvement. He needs to take a step back, pull himself together, regain professional detachment. For Lucinda’s sake, for Randy’s, for Carla’s.

  He remembers Randy Barakat’s wife as a sweet, if needy girl.

  Not woman.

  Girl.

  He remembers thinking—the first time he realized that something was simmering between Randy and Lucinda, which was pretty much the first time they ever came into contact with each other—that Carla Karnecki didn’t stand a chance.

  Lucinda was no girl.

  She was woman enough for Randy, and he—unlike scores of others—was man enough for her.

  It wasn’t just that Randy was a cop, and a damned good one. She’d dated, and discarded, plenty of cops before.

  It wasn’t that he was as fearless as she, as extraordinarily good-looking as she, with just as sharp a sense of humor, or that he was as masculine as they come, with old-fashioned manners.

  It wasn’t even that his family background had bred in him a steely core similar to her own, though for different reasons. His mother was an Irish Catholic, his father an Arab—coming from fiercely religious backgrounds into a marriage that was denounced by both families.

  His strength appealed to Lucinda, but as Neal saw it, the main reason Randall Barakat captured her heart was that he never once questioned her uncanny ability. Not skeptical or fascinated or even all that curious, he simply accepted her for who she was.

  Neal wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the way Lucinda and Randy clicked.

  “Those two are written in the stars,” Erma commented on the one and only occasion she saw the two of them in the same room.

  “I doubt that,” Neal said, though he was secretly impressed his wife had picked up on it too. “He’s engaged to someone else.”

  “Then I feel sorry for her.”

  “For Lucinda?” he’d asked, surprised, because feeling sorry for Lucinda Sloan was not customary by any means.

  “No,” Erma said. “For the someone else.”

  Randy had married her, though, in the end. Carla.

  And now she’s dead.

  And her bloody ring was in Lucinda’s possession.

  And Ava Neary—where does she fit into all this?

  Neal has been going over every detail, running the facts through his head like a computer processing forensic evidence, looking for a match.

  So far, he hasn’t come up with a connection.

  In the kitchen, Neal sees the empty coffee pot sitting on the counter, where Lucinda left it. They’ll dust the whole area for prints.

  The whole place.

  Careful not to disturb anything, he moves through the apartment, past a couple of closed doors to the bedroom at the end of the hall.

  He stares at the unmade bed for a long minute. This is where the album was found.

  Backtracking down the hall, he opens a door.

  Linen closet.

  Neatly stacked towels and sheets, everything in perfect order.

  He opens another door.

  The bathroom.

  “Sweet Jesus,�
� spills from Neal’s lips, and he stares in disbelief.

  Chapter Seven

  “Here…You should drink this.” Lucinda slides the takeout coffee cup toward Randy.

  “Where did it come from?” He sips it.

  “I brought it. It’s probably cold by now.” As if he notices, or cares.

  “Thank you.” He sets down the cup and looks at her. “I’m glad you came. When they first told me that you were in town, I was shocked for maybe the first few seconds. Then I thought, of course she is. Of course she’s here. For some reason it made perfect sense.”

  “It did?” Because it still doesn’t entirely make sense to her.

  He nods. “I have no idea how you got here, but Lucinda, I need you.”

  He needs me.

  And I need to be here for him.

  “Have your parents been here, or your sister?” she asks him.

  “My parents were spending the winter in Florida. They’re trying to get home. Julie was getting her kids off to school and finding someone to watch them later, and then she has to go pick up my parents at the airport.”

  “I can go to the airport, or I can watch the kids,” she offers. “So that your sister can be with you.”

  “No…. That’s sweet, but no. Thanks.”

  “Does she still live in Cherry Hill? Because it’s really no problem for me to—”

  “Yes, she still lives there. But I need you here more than I need her. She’s freaking out. You can imagine.”

  Yes, she can. Randy’s sister, a divorced single mom, is notoriously excitable. The drama queen, he always called her.

  Lucinda realizes that while there’s so much she doesn’t know about his life now—so much that’s changed—there is still a lot that hasn’t.

  “Well, what can I do, then?” she asks him.

  “Just be here with me. Please. I don’t want to be alone right now.”

  “You won’t be,” she promises, patting his arm. “I’ll stay as long as you need me.”

  She has to tell him about the ring, but she’s not sure where to start, or whether it’ll upset him.

  He looks as though he’s about to say something, too.