He walked partway to the door, then returned, staring into her face. “Did you run down Martha Dempsey?”
It was a logical question. He should have asked it sooner. She had asked it of herself, and it terrified her that she didn’t know the answer.
But it hurt coming from him. The emptiness in his eyes. The hard set of his mouth. The utter stillness that damn near radiated from him.
“I don’t know.” Her answer was barely audible—soft, frightened.
He stared at her a moment longer, the muscles in his jaw clenching. Then he walked away.
She watched him go, the door swinging shut behind him with a whoosh; then her legs gave out. Sliding down the cool tile of the wall, she sat on the floor, knees drawn to her chest, and imagined she still heard his footsteps. Down the hall. Into the kitchen. Past the storeroom. Out the rear door. Down the steps. She imagined he’d left her for good this time.
I’ll be here, he’d said.
Not any longer.
Before he reached the dining room, Tommy made a left turn and cut through the kitchen to the back door. He took the steps two at a time, then stopped suddenly as he came face-to-face with the crime scene techs, overseeing the loading of Ellie’s car onto a roll-back wrecker. They would take it to the police garage, where they would process it. Everything they found would be sent to the lab, where they would say yes, the blood belonged to Martha Dempsey; yes, the fibers came from her clothes; yes, this was the vehicle used to kill her; yes, Ellie Chase was their prime suspect.
The winch on the wrecker whined as it pulled the Beetle into place. Jarred into motion again, Tommy stalked across the gravel to the Charger, unlocking the door with the press of a button, rummaging through the console and the glove box. He found what he was looking for, a crumpled cigarette pack, under the vehicle manual in the glove box.
Tossing the pack and a book of matches onto the old porch that served as a loading dock, he lifted himself onto the ledge to sit before removing the sole cigarette from the pack, then studied it. It was the last cigarette in the last pack he’d bought. At first, he’d kept it around for an emergency, for those usually-late-at-night moments when he found himself alone and feeling weak. But other exertions had filled in nicely: a hundred push-ups, a quick run along the river, making love to Ellie.
Then he’d kept it as a talisman of sorts. It was right there, at hand during the day and easy to retrieve at night, so the fact that he hadn’t reached for it all these months proved that he’d really given up the habit for good.
Yeah, right. Proved that you don’t know what the hell an emergency is.
He slid the cigarette into his mouth, opened the matchbook and tore off one match. It came away easily and lit on the first strike. Surprising, since his hands were trembling and his lungs felt as if he’d just finished a hundred-mile fun run. He watched until the heat started to sear his fingertips, dropped the match to the ground and tore off another.
Robbie came out of the restaurant as the wrecker slowly pulled out of the parking lot with Ellie’s car. The crime scene techs were right behind it. He came to lean against the loading dock next to Tommy. “Jesus.”
Since there was nothing Tommy could add to that, he didn’t try. Instead, he lit the second match, the flame barely able to flicker thanks to his unsteadiness.
“You need help with that?”
“I’ve been lighting my own cigarettes since we were fifteen and stealing them from your granddad.”
“Yeah, but your hands don’t usually shake like that.”
Tommy dropped the second match, and it landed on a chunk of gravel, extinguishing itself an instant later. “She was planning to run away. She wasn’t going to tell anyone. She wasn’t going to say goodbye to anyone. She was just…going.”
The way his mother had. One day she’d been there and life had been normal—as normal as Lilah’s life ever got—and the next she was gone. No one knew where she’d gone. No one knew why. He’d spent most of his life wondering if she was alive or dead, if she’d married again, had more children, if she’d ever missed the son she’d left without so much as a hug.
Ellie owed her friends better than that, he’d told her. She owed him better. It would have killed him, finding out that she’d just vanished. That he truly meant so little to her that she could walk away without a word. He would have spent the rest of his life searching for her, even if she didn’t want him to find her, because God help him, he couldn’t have lived without knowing whether she was dead or alive. Whether she’d found someone else. Whether she’d missed him.
“So what’s the plan?”
Tommy took the cigarette from his mouth, studied it again for a time, then began methodically destroying it. Robbie had represented suspects in Tommy’s cases before. Copper Lake was small; there weren’t that many detectives or criminal defense lawyers. Conflict of interest had never been a problem for either of them before, regardless of the outcome. Work was work.
Except when it wasn’t. He couldn’t imagine anything less personal than this case.
“The plan,” he said after a moment, “is up to Isaacs and the lieutenant and the D.A.’s office.”
“You’re not going to work the case?”
Gather evidence and information that could result in sending Ellie to prison for the rest of her life? No way. Not even if he knew beyond a doubt that she was guilty.
She didn’t even know if she was guilty. I don’t know, she’d whispered, and he’d heard the fear, seen it in her eyes. She’d been so intoxicated that she didn’t remember if she’d gotten in her car, driven home and killed a woman in the street.
He’d never been that drunk, not once. But his mother had. Robbie had. No doubt Martha Dempsey had.
“Isaacs will want to confirm that the blood belongs to that woman,” Robbie said, leaning against the porch, ankles crossed, with that nine-mile stare he got when they were out on the river, the sun was shining and the fish weren’t biting. “There’s also the question of fingerprints on the car, on the steering wheel and the door handle. If there are any besides Ellie’s…” He trailed off, probably silently running down a list of things to prove or disprove.
Kiki would also have to talk to the bartender, the waitstaff and any diners who might have seen Ellie in the restaurant or bar the night before. The medical examiner would determine the time and cause of death, the lab would process the fibers from the car and try to match the curly red hair to the wig and Isaacs would collect Martha’s belongings from the bed-and-breakfast.
Then she, and whoever the lieutenant assigned to work with her, would go sifting through Ellie’s and Martha’s pasts, looking for a motive.
In Atlanta, not Charleston, where she’d told him she grew up.
What else had she lied to him about?
Robbie glanced at him. “She didn’t deliberately kill that woman.”
“No,” Tommy agreed.
But accidentally? How could he say no when Ellie herself couldn’t?
The ringing of his cell phone broke the heavy silence that had settled. He pulled it from his pocket, glanced at caller ID, then flipped it open. “This is Maricci.”
“Where are you?” It was A. J. Decker, the lieutenant in charge of the detective division, usually grumpy, always short and to the point.
“Outside Ellie’s Deli.”
“Where is she?”
“Inside with Isaacs.”
“You can’t work this case.”
“I know. But Kiki can’t work it alone.” She’d just made detective a few weeks earlier; she lacked the experience to handle a suspicious death on her own.
“I’ll be there in five. Tell Calloway he can go back to bed. We won’t be arresting his client today. But she’d damn well better not plan on going anywhere.” Decker ended the call before Tommy could respond.
“How’d he know I’m here?” Robbie asked.
Tommy shrugged.
Decker knew everything, or, at least, way more than he
should.
“If she tries to run off again…”
His jaw tightened and Tommy ground his teeth. “I’ll go home with her.”
Robbie gave him an are-you-crazy? look. Exactly what he was wondering himself. Seeing Ellie under the best of circumstances these days was tough enough. Babysitting her while she was a suspect in, at the very least, a felony hit-and-run or, at worst, a homicide was going to make that look like a day at the beach.
“If she’ll let you,” Robbie said after a while.
“You can tell her it’s not her choice. If she wants your help, then it’s got to be by your rules.”
“And what is Decker going to say when he finds out you’re moving into her house? You may be off the case, but you’re still a cop.”
“I can be a cop on vacation. Or, hell, I could not be a cop at all. Russ has always said he’d give me a job.”
The surprise in Robbie’s expression was nothing, Tommy would bet, compared to what he was feeling himself. The only two things he’d ever wanted to be jobwise were a cop and a retired cop. Nothing else had ever held even the slightest appeal, certainly not construction work.
Without commenting on the idea that Tommy would even consider quitting the police department because of Ellie, Robbie said cynically, “Yeah, but he’d make you work.”
It was a family joke that Tommy and Robbie had skated by their entire lives without exerting themselves over anything. Today it didn’t seem funny. Nothing did.
“There’s Decker,” Tommy said with a nod toward the alley and the black pickup turning in. “I’ll talk to him. You go warn Ellie.”
Chapter 6
Ellie was exhausted and daydreaming about bed and aspirins and quiet when Tommy and Robbie returned to the dining room. No, she corrected with a glance over her shoulder. Tommy, Robbie and A. J. Decker. He was older than the other two men, a few inches shorter, broader in the shoulders. His hair was brown, his features average and his expression always unreadable. He should have been forgettable, but there was something about him, some sense of authority, of knowing, that made him the opposite.
And just the sight of him made Kiki Isaacs flinch. Ellie liked him better for that.
He greeted Ellie with a nod and a polite murmur of her name, then asked Kiki to step outside with him. He gestured for Pete to follow, leaving Ellie alone, she supposed, so she and Robbie could speak in private.
But Tommy didn’t go with them.
Robbie sat down at Ellie’s table while Tommy stood on the other side of the room. “They’re not going to arrest you right now.”
She exhaled, and thought that must be what it felt like for a balloon to deflate. Tension whooshed out—not all of it, by any means, but enough to make her suddenly feel limp.
“Here are the rules, though. Number one. If you even think of leaving town, I’ll turn you over to Kiki before you can finish the thought. Okay?”
She nodded, though truthfully she wasn’t ruling out the idea. Thanks to Martha, damn her soul, every ugly detail of Ellie’s life was going to come out. There was nothing she could do to stop it. But she could be gone when it happened. She could avoid the looks on everyone’s faces, the shock, the little snubs as they inevitably turned away from her.
“Second,” Robbie went on, “to make sure you cooperate with rule one, you’re getting a roommate. You’ve already tried to run once. We’re not taking a chance on it happening again.”
Roommate. Nice way of saying guard. Worse than that, another way of saying Tommy. The knot in her gut told her; a look at him confirmed it. Numbly she realized she was shaking her head. “N-no,” she finally said. “I don’t want—I won’t—”
“It’s not an option, Ellie. If you want my help, you’ve got to do what I say.”
Wonderful. It would be like old times. Except that they weren’t friends. They weren’t dating. They weren’t having great sex. They couldn’t even carry a conversation.
But he was still a cop, and she was a suspect in Martha’s death. She’d never be able to let down her guard around him.
Not that she’d been able to anyway for the past six months.
She found her voice again, stronger this time, cooler. “Won’t A.J. frown on that?”
“I’m on vacation starting today,” Tommy replied. “He doesn’t much care what I do.”
Invite Tommy into her home for the next however many days or weeks. She would rather go to jail.
Liar. She’d been to jail too many times. Fingerprinted, photographed, strip-searched and locked in a cell like an animal. She’d been pepper-sprayed and restrained, and had a few up-close-and-personal run-ins with some scary inmates. Up-close-and-painful. She had sworn the last time that she would never go back.
Resigned to company for the foreseeable future, she looked grimly at Robbie. “Can I go home soon?”
“Yeah, Decker said go ahead.”
Instantly, she pushed the chair back and got to her feet, then rested one hand on the tabletop for balance. The queasiness was fading, replaced now by hunger. The best she could recall, she hadn’t eaten dinner last night.
A stupid thing to think about, when Martha was dead.
“If he asks questions…” Her gaze on Robbie, she tilted her head in Tommy’s direction.
Robbie’s grin was halfhearted. “You mean when, don’t you? He’s curious as hell about everything, you know.” The grin faded. “Answer them. Truthfully.”
How nice that he felt the need to add that last bit. Before this morning, he and Tommy had both believed she was a truthful person: honest, honorable, normal. They were about to find out just how many times she had lied to them. Lied to everyone. Even herself.
“He’s on our side,” Robbie said as he also stood.
Tommy didn’t say anything in his defense. He didn’t need to. Ellie could trust him. She’d always been able to trust him. He really was an honest and honorable person. He would do his best to help her, to make sure she really was innocent—or really was guilty, in which case he would do the honest, honorable thing and turn her in.
No. If she really was responsible for Martha’s death, she would turn herself in.
“Can we go?” she asked quietly in his direction. Peripherally, she saw him step back and gesture toward the kitchen.
Outside, Kiki and A.J. were talking. She didn’t look happy that her suspect was walking away without handcuffs; he was impossible to read, as usual.
Ellie breathed deeply before walking down the steps. Her car was gone. Good. She never wanted to see it, or the dent in the hood, or the blood staining the lime-green paint, again.
Robbie patted her arm, said, “I’ll call you,” then got in his own car.
Ellie slid into the passenger seat of the Charger, fastened the seat belt, then closed her eyes. Home. Aspirin. Bed. If she could sleep, maybe the nightmare would end when she awakened. She would find out that she’d really tied one on, that it was all liquor-induced, that Martha was alive and well and planning to destroy her and she was still free to run away where no one would ever find her again.
Then Tommy got in beside her and started the engine, and he looked so somber that there was no doubt this was one nightmare she couldn’t wake up from.
Just drive, she silently urged, and he did, turning down the alley, then onto Oglethorpe. A moment later, they passed the Jasmine, and Ellie stared at the mansion. Had the police claimed Martha’s belongings yet? Had they found the originals of the papers she’d given Ellie, or were they back in Atlanta? Had Martha brought anything else with her that might connect the two of them?
Like what? A family photograph? Ellie couldn’t remember ever having one taken. A sentimental keepsake, a drawing Ellie had done for her as a child, her favorite stuffed animal when she was little, a lock of her baby-fine hair?
Martha didn’t have—hadn’t had a sentimental bone in her body. Any drawings Ellie had done had earned a grunt and a toss toward the trash can. The day they’d thrown her out, they’d also th
rown out all her belongings—clothes, books, the threadbare teddy that had sat on her bed. If there’d been any souvenirs of her infancy or childhood, they’d gone, too.
One day she’d had a home and a sorry excuse for a family, and the next day she’d had nothing but the clothes she wore.
They took the long way home—by a whole two or three minutes—turning onto Thurmond Lane, following it to the end and making a sharp left onto Cypress Creek.
Every muscle and nerve in her body tightened again as she got out of the Charger. Instead of going into the house, she walked to the end of the driveway and stared off to the west, looking for sign of the—the accident? Murder?
“There aren’t any skid marks.” Tommy stopped beside her, six feet of pavement separating them, his own gaze directed down the street. “There was some blood, but the fire department washed it away when we were done.”
“Where?”
He pointed to a spot halfway between her driveway and the neighbor’s. On these last few blocks of Cypress Creek, houses were widely spaced; the distance was two hundred feet or more. Not far enough.
“Who found her?” Her voice sounded too normal to be her own. Turmoil inside, and cool control outside. Now that the shaking and the vomiting had stopped.
“Father O’Rourke. He was on his way home after spending the night with one of his parishioners who had emergency surgery.”
She knew the priest slightly; he’d often dropped by the nursing home to see Tommy’s grandfather while they were visiting, too.
“We don’t have a time of death yet, but it was a while before Father O’Rourke came along. Four, maybe five hours. There’s not a lot of traffic here late at night.”
“No one saw or heard anything.” She said it flatly, not as a question, but Tommy shook his head. No one saw her run down Martha in the street. That was good news. But no one saw anyone else do it, either.
Abruptly, she turned and started toward the house. Her little yard was neatly mowed, the flower beds planted just last weekend with purple and yellow pansies. Her house. Her home.
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