Midnight Man (14 page)

Another flash went off, then another and another as the photographer, a short, sandy-haired man with a blond handlebar moustache, circled the body. The flashes continued steadily until finally the camera was dropped, allowed to rest hanging against the technician’s chest by a leather strap.

“That about wraps it up, Lieutenant,” the photographer said, stepping back.

“Okay, Lou,” Bud said. “Stand by. We’re going to see who we’ve got here.”

Pulling on a pair of latex gloves, Bud kneeled on a clear patch of floor. He studied the back of dead man for a long moment. He reached out and pulled at the man’s left shoulder steadily until the dead man flopped over and settled on his back. “Okay, now.” Bud sat back on his haunches. “Who is he?” he asked, looking up at Suzanne then over at John.

She steeled herself and looked down.

The dead man had a long, narrow, deeply tanned face with regular features. Without the rictus of a painful death, he might have been mildly good-looking, though it was hard to tell. The wide-open eyes were a muddy brown, starred with deep lines in the skin around them, more a result of the effects of sun and weather than age. He had crooked, yellowish teeth. One eyetooth overlapped the incisor. The hair was dark brown, straight, shot through with a few gray hairs.

Bud was watching her. “Suzanne?”

She stared for another two minutes, nauseated, and then shook her head. “I’ve never seen that man before in my life,” she said firmly.

“John?”

John had only glanced at the dead man, and then had returned his attention back to the room. He shook his head. “Don’t know him.”

Bud stood, dusting his hands. “Well, you might not know him, Suzanne, but he knows you. I need to ask you a few questions.” He looked over. “You, too, John,” he said, faint irony in his voice.

Suzanne didn’t need to ask what kind of questions Bud had for John, not with John’s knife through the dead man’s throat.

“Let’s take it to the couch,” John said, his arm still around her. Suzanne knew he was shielding her. They couldn’t see the body from the couch.

He settled her on the little couch, then sat down beside her, taking up about two-thirds of it. His left arm was behind her, her right side completely up against his left. He was effectively embracing her but that felt just fine. As a matter of fact, she had to clench her fists to resist the temptation to lean more heavily into him, to let his strength surround her.

His face was set and hard. He had placed the big black pistol on the coffee table, but close to hand, the butt facing him so he could pick it up and use it immediately if necessary. Though he was sitting, she could feel the coiled tension in his big body. At regular intervals, his eyes kept quartering the room, his gaze like a searchlight, only dark. She knew he had taken the measure of every person—two more technicians had joined the crime scene squad technicians milling around—and every object in the room. Something told her he was aware at all times of the position of every person and every object. And of her.

He might protect her, but he wasn’t going to comfort her. He was as remote and as untouchable—except in the most physical sense of the term—as someone on the moon. And yet he kept within touching distance of her at all times.

Bud sat down across from her, looking at her somberly, then he looked over to John. He pulled out a notebook.

“Okay, want to tell me what went on?”

John turned to her. You first, his look said.

Okay.

She ran a hand through her hair. It was still a little tangled, the quick swipe with the brush she’d allowed herself in the bathroom not enough make it smooth. She’d managed to wash her face and brush her teeth, though, which made her feel better. She put her hand down to straighten up and encountered iron-hard male flesh. John’s thigh. She snatched her hand away, only to find it caught in his.

His palm was hard, callused, his fingers curled tightly around hers. She didn’t pull her hand away, surprised at the comfort in that single touch.

Bud noted her hand in John’s but didn’t say anything. He looked at her expectantly. “Where do I start?” Suzanne asked.

“Why don’t we take it from when you came home last night? What did you do?” Bud looked at her expectantly and she felt a spurt of panic swell up in her chest. He wanted to know about last night?

“Last night?” she breathed, shocked.

Oh God, she couldn’t talk about it. The heat and the sex. Not in front of Bud. And how on earth could Bud know she and John had—

Oh.

It was after midnight. By last night, Bud meant a few hours ago. He didn’t mean—tell me about you and John and the wall. He meant—tell me about you and the dead man. Which was almost easier than the sex.

“Tell me about your day. Did you notice anyone following you? Anything unusual happen?”

“No, of course not.” Anyone following her? What a ludicrous idea. She started to shake her head then thought about it. She’d entered a new world, one in which she didn’t know the rules and had no survival instincts. In this new world, anything could happen. “I mean,” she corrected, looking at Bud and John, “maybe someone was, but I didn’t notice it. I probably wouldn’t. I guess I don’t think that way. But if anyone was following me, he had a very boring day. I met with a cloth importer, Cathy Lorenzetti, at nine o’clock in her office on Glisan. At ten I met with a colleague, Todd Armstrong, at his home. We had tea and discussed business. I spent the afternoon with a new client, going over the plans for the redecoration of her apartment. Not exactly the stuff thrillers are made of.”

Bud absorbed this information, making careful notes. “I’m going to be needing addresses and phone numbers.” Suzanne gave them to him. “And you got home around when?”

“Eight. It had been a long afternoon.” Very long, Suzanne thought. And tedious. “I was tired. I took a bath, had a light meal and turned in to bed.”

“That would be around what time?” Bud asked. He was taking copious notes, though she couldn’t imagine she was saying anything of any importance.

“Ten o’clock. I checked my watch and I remember hearing the grandfather clock—the one over there in the corner—chime ten.” Bud turned around to look where she pointed and nodded. “I read for about twenty minutes, then turned out the light. I might have dozed a little, off and on, but I was feeling restless.” Suzanne could almost feel John’s intense scrutiny beside her. He seemed to be listening to her with every cell in his body. Surely he must know he was a big reason she’d been unable to fall asleep. “Then I heard the clock chime midnight and I realized that I was having trouble falling asleep so maybe I should heat up some milk.”

“You had to walk through this room to get to the kitchen, right?” Bud gestured with his head.

“Yes. The house is a little odd in the layout because it was originally a factory. Industrial spaces are laid out quite differently from residential spaces. A residential space is divided up into day areas and night areas but this one isn’t. Essentially, my apartment is four large rooms, one after the other. My office first, the public space, and then the private spaces—the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom. The bedroom’s through there.” She pointed, shivering inwardly at the memory of huddling in fear in the closet. John’s hand tightened on hers.

It was large and hard and callused. Suzanne suddenly had a very vivid sensory memory of the hard calluses on his fingertips brushing over her breasts, brushing lower. He’d opened her roughly before plunging inside her, the calluses on his hands grating very sensitive flesh…

She turned and their eyes met and the breath left her body at the heat and power of those gunmetal dark eyes. He was remembering, too.

“So,” Bud prodded, not looking up from his notes. “Let’s see if I got it straight. You can’t sleep, so you get up and go to the kitchen—“

With difficulty, Suzanne wrenched her attention away from John. She struggled to concentrate. “Yes. Well, no. First I went to the window in my bedroom, just for a second. It was snowing, very lightly. I love it when it does that, just a few fat snowflakes falling down. It was what I call an aurora borealis night—you know, when the clouds are low enough to reflect the lights from downtown?”

Bud nodded but John looked blank. Well, he wasn’t from Portland. Apparently he wasn’t from anywhere in particular. Though he must have spent some time in the south. There’d been a faint southern inflection in his voice, whispering in her ear as he thrust hard and fast inside her. She bit her lips. She couldn’t be thinking about this now.

“Suzanne?” Bud was looking at her oddly. Thank God he wasn’t a mind reader. “Go on.”

She couldn’t talk and think of John at the same time. She turned to look at Bud, like spot focusing while dancing. “So I was watching the lights reflected off the clouds when I realized that I was seeing other lights. Or rather a light. A focused one, flickering off the hedges. I watched it for a while, and couldn’t understand what it was.”

Bud rose and gazed out the window, measuring, then looked back at John when he sat down again. “A flashlight,” he said.

“From the office,” John confirmed.

Suzanne looked from one to the other. “Yes, you’re right.” How annoying. It had taken her at least ten minutes peering outside the window, puzzled, to reach that conclusion. “So I decided to go check to see—“

“Jesus, Suzanne,” Bud said, half rising out of his seat.

“You fucking what?” John roared, outraged. His hand crushed hers in a hard grip. “You’re looking at the flashlight of an intruder and you fucking go check it out! What the hell’s the matter with you, lady?”

Suzanne recoiled. It was the first time she’d heard him use what probably was a sailor’s vocabulary. She wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. She tried to jerk her hand out from his, but he held on tight. There was no breaking that grip, no getting away.

She wanted to be indignant, to respond icily to both Bud and John—John especially—but the truth was they were right. She hadn’t thought her actions through. Like last night—no, like the night before last—when John had lectured her on what she needed to secure the building.

Her mind simply didn’t run along those tracks.

Bud was scowling heavily now. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard and I’ve heard a lot in my time. You realize you might have an intruder in the house and you amble on over to see what he’s doing?” His deep voice was heavy with disapproval as he wrote in his pad. “Do you realize how reckless that is?”

Suzanne refrained from rolling her eyes. “Well, that’s not quite what happened, so you don’t need to raise your voice. I went to investigate what the light source was. Not having yet reached the conclusion that I had an intruder in the house like some lightning-swift people I know.”

Irony was lost on them. Bud was writing busily and John had released her hand to rise from the couch, gun in hand, and look outside the windows. He pulled back the curtains and peered intently out from first one window then the other. His broad shoulders blocked the entire window out. He stood watch for a moment, silent and motionless, then checked the door to the kitchen, the door to the bedroom. At each movement, he checked back at her as well, as if in the space of a few seconds she could disappear or someone could leap out from behind the couch to steal her away. He moved swiftly, silently, like a panther pacing the perimeter of a cage. When he returned to the couch, he placed the gun quietly back on the table, within reach. He placed his left arm again around the back of the couch, only this time he cupped her shoulder.

“Did you switch on the lights?” Bud asked.

“No,” Suzanne replied. She was suddenly struck by the idea that that might have saved her life. The intruder would have come after her immediately. “Good Lord, if I had—“ She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It would be your blood spatters the crime scene unit would be studying right now instead of his.” John finished the sentence for her, his grip almost painfully tight on her shoulder. There were pale lines of some strong emotion—anger?—around his mouth.

Suzanne drew in a shocked breath. Her mind reeled at how close it had been. She remembered the intense feelings in the closet. How fiercely she wanted to live.

So close. She’d come so close to dying. A movement of her fingers, a flick of the light switch, and it would have been over. The blood drained from her face as she thought of what the intruder’s gun could have done to her.