Before I Sleep (11 page)

“Okay,” she said. “I'll do it. But you have to get the information on Summers fast.”

“I know.”

“And Danny has to agree to my representing him. I can't just dive in on this on your say-so, Seamus.”

“He'll agree. Come home with me right now, and I'll wake him up out of his drunken stupor.”

“Fair enough.” But she had the feeling she was going to get a lot more than she bargained for.

Seamus still lived in the same modest bungalow. Pulling into his driveway behind him was like déjá vu, Carey thought, worse than the Pancake Place. She switched off her ignition and waited for her emotions to settle.

The night was windy, and the royal palms in Seamus's front yard were tossing wildly. Low clouds scudded across the sky, yellowed by the city lights below. Tall live oaks grew on either side of the house, old trees that spread their sheltering branches over the roof. In the daylight they provided cooling shade. At night they seemed to swallow the house in a dark cavern.

She shivered with an inexplicable sense of unease and found herself reluctant to get out of the car. Ghosts, she thought. This place was full of ghosts.

Seamus came back to her and opened her car door. “Come on in,” he said. “I don't want you sitting out here while I wake the old fart.”

She climbed out and watched him close her car door. “You don't have a lot of respect for your father,” she remarked.

“Not anymore.”

How sad, she thought, following him up the driveway and along the walk to the front door. She also found herself wondering how she could have lived with this man for six months and not heard one mention of his father. “Has he always been alcoholic? That would explain a lot.

“No.” But he offered no additional information, leaving her to wonder what the story was behind this.

A solitary lamp was lit in the living room. He didn't turn on any others. “Wait here. I'll go wake him up.”

So she waited, looking around a room that had once been familiar to her. It looked the same, but in the past it had never reeked of beer.

She turned as she heard him coming back down the hall. This time he had an old man on his arm. Danny Rourke was a little unsteady on his feet, bent and old-looking, far too thin to be healthy. But what Carey really noticed was the way Seamus held his father's arm. Regardless of how he might talk about Danny, Seamus loved him.

Seeing Carissa, Danny shook off his son's arm and tried to stand straighten His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed, and he swayed a little as he stood on his own, but there was pride there, under the alcoholic veneer, and she felt herself responding to it.

“Dad, this is Carissa Stover. She's an attorney. I asked her to look into your trouble with the IRS. Carey, my dad, Danny Rourke.”

Carey walked over to the old man and offered to shake his hand. His grip was strong, and he gave her a smile as he mumbled a greeting. Long ago, he had probably been a very attractive man.

“Mr. Rourke,” she said. “I told Seamus I'd look into the problem, but I can only do it if
you
want me to represent you.”

“I can't pay you.”

“Seamus is paying me, Mr. Rourke.”

“That's not right.” Danny looked up at his son. “You shouldn't do that.”

“Don't worry about it,” Seamus said shortly. “Just tell the lady you want her to represent you. All she's going to do is find out what the hell is going on, so I can figure out what we need to do about it.”

“It's my problem,” Danny insisted, his voice only slightly slurred. “I'll get what's coming to me.”

Seamus shook his head. “It's
my
problem, Dad. You made it my problem when you turned up on my doorstep. Now say yes to the lady so she can get home to bed.”

Danny's eyes reflected hurt and humiliation as he looked at Carey. “Yes,” he said. Then he turned and shuffled back down the hall to bed, steadying himself against the wall.

Neither Seamus nor Carey said anything until they heard the door close behind him.

Carey spoke first. “He's got a lot of pride.”

“Not enough to stay away from the bottle.”

“Don't you think you're being a little hard on him?”

“Hard?” He repeated the word disbelievingly. “Nobody pours the booze down his throat except him.”

“Alcoholism is a disease.”

“Sure. One that can be cured by refusing to bend the elbow.”

Carey thought of the pack of cigarettes in her purse and figured she wasn't so very different from Danny Rourke. Crutches could be very difficult to get rid of.

“Come on,” he said. “I'll walk you to the car.”

“But I need some information if I'm going to get to work on Danny's case.”

He looked embarrassed. “Oh. Yeah.” He picked up a crumpled piece of paper from the end table and handed it to her. “This is the letter from the IRS. It's all I've got. God knows what happened to his business records. If he didn't lose them, they were probably on the computer he sold— or on the boat the IRS confiscated.”

“There's probably enough information here to get started,” she said after scanning the letter. “At least enough to find out exactly what they want.”

“A gallon of blood and a pound of flesh,” he said. “And how they expect him to make any money to pay them back when they've taken his boat beats the hell out of me.”

“How old is he?”

“Fifty-nine.”

Carey shook her head. “I would have guessed seventy something.”

“The sun and the bottle will do that to a person.”

He walked her out to her car and opened the door for her. She didn't climb in immediately, though. Instead she leaned against the side of the car, folded her arms, and let the wind whip her hair around.

She was reluctant to break the tenuous thread between them, she realized. She didn't want to drive away and go back to her lonely, empty life and thoughts of John William Otis. What she wanted was just a few moments of escape from all the burdens that seemed to weigh on her.

“What?” he said finally. The streetlights cast strange shadows on his face.

“My station manager told me to stop focusing solely on the Otis story,” she said. She wasn't sure what made her tell him that, but as soon as she spoke she knew she was seeking some kind of validation. And from exactly the wrong person, she thought unhappily. Seamus had already told her she was obsessed.

“Did he say why?”

“The advertisers are getting nervous. They think people will stop listening.”

“Do you think that's a legitimate concern?”

“What I think doesn't really matter, I guess. If the advertisers are getting nervous, they'll stop buying time on the show.”

“Self-fulfilling prophecy, in other words.”

“That's one way of putting it.”

“So what are you going to do?”

She had forgotten how well he could listen. Toward the end, neither of them had been listening, and both had been doing a lot of shouting. “I'm not sure.”

“Did he say you couldn't do Otis at all?”

She shook her head. “He just wants me to do some other stuff, too.”

“Well, that's reasonable.”

“I guess. But it's weird.”

“What is?”

She waved a hand. “How little there is to say about a man's life. How little there actually is to say about taking a man's life.”

He turned and leaned back against the car beside her. The rustle of the wind in the treetops and the clatter of the palm fronds was a soothing sound, like the rushing of water in a river. “What would you have people say?”

“I don't know. It's just that—well, it seems so momentous to me. We should at least face the enormity of what we're about to do.”

“I don't think most people consider it an enormity. They consider the crime that got him there to be enormous.”

“I suppose. And, of course, most of them are safely removed from direct contact with what's going to happen.”

“I don't think it's as simple as that, Carey.”

“No, probably not. Nothing is ever that simple.” She shook her hair back from her face. “Maybe I'll use that for a monologue.”

“What?”

“That our hands are as dirty as Otis's.”

He gave a short laugh. “That'll sure make you popular.”

“Well, it's true. Whether we vocally support the death penalty, or just give it tacit approval, we're conspiring to commit cold-blooded murder.”

He pushed away from the car and looked down at her. “That'll be sure to thrill your advertisers.”

She shrugged.

“Look, Carey. You're very involved with the case. But you're also a good lawyer, and you know how to look at all sides of an issue. Before you go out there and accuse John Q. Citizen of conspiring to commit cold-blooded murder, maybe you ought to consider that John Q. Citizen is merely trying to wrench justice from an impossible situation.”

“It won't give the Klines back their lives.”

“No, it won't. And that's why the penalty is so severe. No amount of restitution can repair the damage. All we can do is exact a penalty commensurate with the crime.”

He reached out and touched her cheek gently. All of a sudden, she found it impossible to breathe, impossible to move. The night wind whispered in her ears as his fingertips whispered over her skin, making her feel more alive than she had felt in a long time.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“That it didn't work out for us. That it got so ugly at the end.”

“Breakups tend to be ugly, Seamus.”

“But neither of us is an ugly person. I said things—well, I've regretted them ever since. If you happen to remember them from time to time, just tell yourself I didn't mean them. Because I didn't.”

“We just weren't suited.”

“No. I guess not.”

They stood there looking at one another in the poor light from the streetlamps, and Carissa felt as if the night were suddenly hushed with expectancy. She waited. He waited.

And nothing happened.

Finally, she turned and slid into the car. Seamus watched while she dug her keys out of her purse, then reached out to close the door. He paused.

“When are you going to see Otis?”

She looked up at him, wondering why he should even care. “I'm going to drive up to Starke Sunday afternoon. I'll see him early Monday morning, then drive back in time to do my show.”

He nodded. “I'll drive up with you.”

Shock caused her heart to slam. An overreaction, surely. “Why? They won't let you see him.”

“I don't want to see him.”

He slammed the door without offering any explanation for why he was going with her. She hesitated, wanting to question him, but finally deciding she probably didn't want to hear his answers.

She switched on the ignition and backed out of his driveway. As she drove away, she glanced into the rearview mirror and saw him still standing there, all alone in the night.

C
HAPTER
7

17 Days

C
arissa awoke in the morning feeling worse than when she'd gone to bed just after two. Her eyes itched as if they were full of sand, her muscles felt leaden and achy, and her mouth felt as if a colony of moles had taken up residence. She hadn't slept well again; anxiety and fear had woven themselves into the few unpleasant dreams she had managed to have.

And Seamus. Of course, Seamus. His voice was in her ears when her eyes opened as if he had been part of the dreams that had dogged her. He probably had been. Seeing so much of him after having convinced herself that she hated his very guts had unsettled her.

It unsettled her even more when she realized that she was looking at the lump of the pillow beside her and wanting to cry because it was just a pillow and not a shoulder. Not Seamus's shoulder. Her throat grew so tight that it hurt to breathe.

“God!” Throwing back the covers, she forced herself to get up.

Staggering across her bedroom in a body that didn't want to obey, she decided to take a run to get the blood flowing. She pulled on her shorts, sports bra, and a tank top, clipped her hair back, and headed downstairs, making up her mind that tonight she was going to take an antihistamine to help her sleep. Enough was enough.

She grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and swallowed half of it on her way to the door. When she opened the door, the late-morning Florida heat poured over her, washing away the dregs of her energy. The sun glared, hurting her eyes, and she stood there on the threshold trying to get up the will to step out into it.

The newspaper was on her doorstep, wrapped in clear plastic, and it suggested a good excuse to stay in. She could scan it for stories for tonight's show.

She settled for the paper, deciding that in this heat she'd only drop before she ran two blocks. She picked it up and turned to go back in. That's when she saw her door.

How she had missed it when she opened it, she couldn't imagine, except possibly the sun's glare had distracted her. But facing it now, she felt herself go suddenly light-headed with anger.

Someone had spray-painted the carved wood in screaming red with the words
BLEADING HEART.

There was a sound in her head like a dry twig snapping, and suddenly she was gasping for breath, overwhelmed by fury and fear. She didn't even reach out to see if the paint was still wet. She ran inside, closing the door with a bang and locking it.

She leaned back against it, trying to catch her breath.

It was just paint, she told herself. Graffiti. It meant nothing.

But it meant something. It meant that someone had found out who Carey Justice was, and had gone to the trouble to find out where she lived.

And that made the blood in her veins run cold.

The Pinellas County sheriff's deputy who responded to her call was pleasant, polite, and not very helpful.

“Do you know if any of your neighbors are mad at you?”

She shook her head. “I don't think so. I don't know any of them really well. We work different hours.”

He made a note in his notebook. “Anybody else who might have it in for you?”

“Oh, anyone of a half million listeners to my radio show.”

“You do radio?”

“Talk radio. WCST.”

He looked up. “You're Carey Justice.”