Home Before Midnight (38 page)

Authors: Virginia Kantra

Tags: #Contemporary Romance, #mobi, #Romantic Suspense, #epub, #Fiction

BOOK: Home Before Midnight

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If the tapes had been packed up with the rest of the evidence Burke turned over to the lab in Raleigh, he might already be too late. Unless he pulled strings at SBI the way he had at the prison. Something to consider for the future.

The important thing was not to panic. As long as he kept his head, as long as he kept control, everything would work out. Everything always worked out. Pulling his find toward him, he skimmed the pages, searching for the mention of his name.

“YOU can’t stay here alone tonight,” Steve said in his cop voice. Detached. In control. As if nothing at all had changed.

And maybe, for him, nothing had.
You make me feel,
he’d said.
Is that enough for you?

Bailey wiggled her jeans over her butt. She would be happy for his company, but she wouldn’t accept his protection as a present. Not if it came wrapped in that patronizing, “all part of the job, ma’am,” attitude.

“I’ll be fine. Besides, I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

“Then stay with me.”

Stay with him, sleep with him, be with him
. . . She flushed all over at the thought.

She fastened the button at her waistband, resolutely not looking at him. “For how long?”

Steve prowled her bedroom, his hands in his pockets, already fully dressed. She saw him glance from her Lisa Loeb poster to the romance novels on her bookshelves and felt even more exposed. “Your father’s discharged tomorrow.”

Tomorrow.
So his offer was a totally temporary thing. Which was fine with her, because there was no way she was staying in Stokesville. Although what was waiting for her in New York?

She bent to retrieve her bra from the floor. “Stay with you in your mother’s house? I don’t think so.”

“We’re not teenagers.” He sounded amused. “She’ll be thrilled.”

“Uh huh. And your daughter? I don’t know much about raising preteen girls, but I’m pretty sure flaunting overnight guests isn’t in the parenting manual.”

He raised his eyebrows. “So you can have my room. I’ll grab some pillows and take the couch.”

She was tempted. Too tempted. “Such a sacrifice.”

“Not really.” His eyes gleamed. “I don’t plan on actually sleeping there.”

Instant sexual meltdown.

She was in so much trouble here.

Ignoring the thrill his words gave her, the treacherous softening of her body and heart, she yanked her shirt over her head. “Thank you for your very attractive offer, but no. As you said, it’s only for one night. I’ll just . . .”

Her heart tripped in her chest. She felt a second’s unbalance, like the pause at the top of the stairs.

“What is it?” Steve asked quietly.

Nagged by a subtle sense of something wrong, she surveyed the familiar items scattered on her nightstand: a box of tissues, an empty water glass, a pencil. Two condom wrappers.

Her breath hissed out. “Where’s my lamp?”

His gaze narrowed. “Your lamp?”

“My father was hit with a lamp, you said. A brass lamp? With a white shade?”

“They took the shade for prints,” Steve said.

“He was in my room.” She found her confirmation in his eyes. “Whoever hit my father was in my room. But I don’t have anything valuable, I . . .”

She spun toward her desk, where the evidence boxes were stacked in random order, and counted. Everything was there. Wasn’t it?

She jerked the lid off the nearest carton and looked inside. She had never actually inventoried the contents. How would she know if anything was missing? But her feeling of being off balance, that breathless moment before a fall, grew.

“What is it?”

She opened another box and another.

“What are you looking for?”

She hardly knew. Until she flipped the lid of the last carton and realized it wasn’t there. Not on her bedside table, not on the floor, not in any of the boxes.

“Tanya Dawler’s diary.” She sank back on her heels, looking up at him in dismay. “It’s gone.”

EIGHTEEN

S
TEVE rocked on his heels, hands in his pockets. “Why? Fear of exposure? Blackmail? Did she do like that Holly-wood madam and write about her johns?”

Bailey released a breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding. “Heidi Fleiss never actually divulged the names of her . . . All right, no,” she said, when he looked impatient. “Tanya wrote about ordinary stuff—fights with her mom and how much she hated school and which boys she had crushes on. She hardly ever wrote about her clients. Not by name.”

“Whoever took the diary wouldn’t know that.”

“Still . . . it seems a big risk for a little return. Who cares who visited a prostitute twenty years ago?”

Steve shrugged. “An underage prostitute. Statutory rape’s a crime.”

“So is murder.”

His gaze sharpened.

Encouraged, she continued. “Paul always argued the police missed something important in the Dawler case. No one was threatening to publish a list of the women’s clients. Paul was writing about their deaths. What if Tanya’s diary was stolen because it implicates someone else in her family’s killings?”

“Billy Ray confessed.”

“Billy Ray is
dead
. He talked to Paul—”

“And Ellis is dead,” Steve finished for her. “I got that. What I also have, aside from your twenty-year-old crime, are three isolated deaths in two separate jurisdictions with plausible, unrelated explanations for each.”

“Three deaths?”

“Helen Ellis was killed, too.” His eyes were dark and weary.

Bailey felt an instant’s shame. In her focus on Paul and Billy Ray, her worry over her father and her excitement over the diary, she had forgotten Helen.

“Do you think . . . Could her death be connected, too? She’s from Stokesville. Maybe she knew the Dawlers.”

“I don’t see Helen and Tammy Dawler moving in the same social circles,” Steve drawled.

“Her husband, then. Jackson Poole. He could have been a client.”

Steve shook his head. “What if he was? You still have to make a case based on motive, means, and opportunity. Paul Ellis was in debt. He stood to benefit from a four-million-dollar life insurance policy. The murder weapon was from his study, and he tried to frame you for the crime.”

She was shaken, her conviction and her confidence fading under the force of his attack. “Well, if you’re going to put it that way . . .”

“It’s my job to put things that way. We need to look at this rationally.”

His job.
This was all a job to him.

She should be grateful for his expertise. But she couldn’t escape the unwelcome feeling that maybe she was a job to him, too.

Squash that thought.

“I’m rational. I’ll be as rational as you want. But I can’t compartmentalize the way you do. I can’t be impersonal.” She pulled herself to her feet. “Somebody was in my room. Somebody attacked my father. That makes it personal for me. If there’s a link to the Dawler case, to my work for Paul, then this is my fault.”

“No, it’s not. You can’t make yourself responsible for this the way you do for everything else that goes wrong.”

Fatigue and frustration made her unwary. “Look who’s talking,” she snapped.

Steve looked like she’d hit him in the face with a fish.

Oh, God.

She couldn’t believe she’d said that, that she could throw his admission of guilt over his wife’s death into his face like that.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “That was rude.”

His mouth twisted. “But true.”

“No, I—”

“You want the truth? The truth is, Paul Ellis murdered his wife. I don’t know about the rest of it. I don’t understand why anybody would steal Tanya Dawler’s diary, and I don’t like the idea that somebody was in your bedroom any more than you do. But I can’t go to the DA over my boss’s head and demand he reopen two cases based on a theory.”

“And the diary,” she reminded him.

“Sugar.” His voice was gentle. “We only have your word for it that the diary’s even missing.”

She stared at him, stricken. “My word isn’t enough?”

He shot her an impatient look. “For me, yeah. Not for the DA. It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is what I can prove. And I can’t prove any of this.”

God, she was exhausted. If only she could
think
.

“Unless Paul didn’t kill himself,” she said.

Steve’s gaze narrowed.

Her chest expanded with sudden hope. “If somebody killed him and staged it to look like a suicide, that would be proof, wouldn’t it?”

“Not proof,” he said. “But it sure would be something.”

Bailey held his gaze, breathless.

“I’ll make a call,” he said.

THE guys who have sex with you at a party on Saturday night won’t even talk to you at school on Monday morning. But they’ll talk about you,
Tanya had scribbled in her childish, rounded handwriting.
Bet they wouldn’t like it if I talked about them. Or their daddies.

He could almost smell the vivid pink ink rising above the faded paper, a whiff of strawberry or bubble gum.

Or maybe it was only Tanya’s ghost, trashy, cloying, and eternally young.

Thumbing through her diary, he felt almost nostalgic. Not for her. She was, after all, a slut. But for the way he had been back then, the image of himself in her eyes.

He is so cool. Sometimes when he comes by to pick up Billy Ray, my knees get weak. I think I’ll just die if he doesn’t notice me. And then I think I’ll die if he does.

“LOOK, I already told your chief what I think.” The evidence tech’s exasperation traveled clearly over the line. “Talk to him. I’m not getting in the middle of some department bullshit.”

Steve rubbed the back of his neck. The tech was under no obligation to talk to him—Paul Ellis wasn’t his case—and probably had better things to do with his Saturday night than repeat results over the phone to a rural detective. Because the two state labs, one in Raleigh, one in Asheville, served law enforcement all over the state, most evidence sat for weeks or months before processing. The state boys must feel they’d already gone above and beyond in complying with the DA’s rush request.

“Sure. No bullshit. Guess I’m just bummed the bastard offed himself before I could serve a warrant for his wife’s murder. You do the actual testing?”

Bailey stopped fussing with the covers of her bed to give him a long look. He wasn’t sure how much she could pick up listening in on his end of the conversation.

The tech sighed. “Disks and swipes,” he confirmed. “Both turned up negative residue on the left hand and equivocal residue on the right.”

“Equivocal, how?” he asked.

“What am I, CSI? I don’t talk for your entertainment.”

“How about a bottle of Scotch?” Steve suggested.

“Is that how you all get things done in Stokesville?”

“I don’t know about Stokesville,” Steve drawled. “But in D.C., Johnny Walker does the job.”

“In these parts, it’s Jimmy Beam.”