Nightfall (7 page)

"I didn't do research," she shot back. "As a matter of fact, I wanted to avoid hearing anything at all about your case."

"You didn't succeed."

"I know. What was your job?"

"That doesn't make the tabloids too often, does it?" he said calmly. "I was a professor at a small liberal arts college. Generally innocuous profession, even if it kept me busier than my family would have liked."

"I wouldn't have thought you'd make a very good teacher," she said.

"Oh, but I was. Most of the female undergraduates thought I was fascinating."

"Did you do anything about that?"

"Do you mean did I fuck them? Or did I kill them?" he asked, leaning back in the chair and watching her.

"Did you cheat on your wife?"

"Read the tabloids," he suggested. "They have all the answers."

She bit her lip, frustrated, and he stared at her for a moment, his eyes on her mouth.

"What happened the day your family… died?"

"Was murdered, don't you mean?" He liked watching her squirm. Not very noble of him, but then, he took what enjoyment he could find nowadays. "I came home early that Friday afternoon. Diana was planning on taking the children on a visit to her parents the next morning, and I wanted to make sure she had everything she needed. The door was open when I got home, which was odd. Diana had always been pathologically paranoid about her safety. She never would have left the door open.

"I walked inside, and I found them."

"Them?"

"Diana was lying at the bottom of the stairs. In a pool of blood, quite dead." The lies were starting now, tripping off his tongue with the ease of long practice. "She had a knife in her heart."

He could see Cassidy shiver. "What did you do?"

"I think I must have gone into shock," he said, used to this by now. "I ran up the stairs, looking for the children. I must have gotten some of Diana's blood on my hands, because they found my bloody fingerprints all over the place. I couldn't find the children. When I did…" He'd gotten quite good at this part, at making his voice break as he spun the lies.

Cassidy was pale, suffering. He wondered just how far he could push her. "Their bodies were in the bathroom. Just lying there. I don't know what happened next. My mind went blank. When the police arrived I was kneeling by Diana's body, and the children were gone. Someone had removed their bodies, washed the blood away. I couldn't even bury them."

"That's… unbelievable," she said in a hushed voice.

"That was the consensus," he drawled, deliberately breaking the mood.

She'd believed him. Been drawn in by the tale, and now he'd snapped her out of it. She stared at him, white-faced with shock, and he could tell she wanted to run. He had that effect on her. He could also tell that she wasn't going to.

"For a while the family pulled together. The general and his wife flew into New York, and we all faced the media circus. Until the investigation kept coming up blank. No one could find any sign of an intruder in the house, and no one could
find any trace of my children's bodies."

She didn't flinch this time, though he knew she wanted to. Already she was toughening up. He was going to have to push harder.

"Once I was officially under suspicion things began to change. At first the general was my staunchest defender. It wasn't until the circumstantial evidence started piling up that he began to pull back. Right now he's waging a one-man campaign to get me drawn and quartered. It was no accident that my case went through the New York judicial system in record time. My father-in-law has powerful friends. He wants my head on a platter, and he wants it yesterday."

"Can you blame him? He thinks you murdered his daughter and grandchildren."

"I lost my wife and children," he said coolly. "My heart doesn't bleed for him."

She considered him for a moment. "You said circumstantial evidence. What was that?"

"Motive, opportunity, lack of alibi, physical evidence," he said. "No one else was seen leaving or entering the house that day. The coroner put Diana's time of death as close to the time I was seen coming home as he could possibly manage. My bloody handprints were on the walls, my fingerprints on the murder weapon, which happened to be a butcher knife from my own kitchen."

"And motive?" she asked breathlessly.

His eyes met hers for a still, silent moment. "I'm known to have a nasty temper. I had a not very discreet affair, and Diana wasn't going on a weekend visit to her family. She was leaving me, and taking the children, and she'd already filed papers trying to deny me access to my children."

"On what grounds?"

"That I beat them."

"Did you?"

"No."

"Then you had nothing to worry about. If there was no sign of physical abuse, then they couldn't keep you away."

He just looked at her. "Maybe not. Unfortunately the jury didn't tend to think I'd be smart enough to figure that out. The prosecution painted me as a violent man, willing to kill my wife and children rather than let them leave me. There were other disappearances as well. The woman I'd been known to have an affair with disappeared around the same time, and the jury was ready to convict me of anything they could."

"Is it true? Are you a violent man, capable of murder?"

He rose then, and leaned across the desk, close enough so that he could smell the coffee on her breath, the scent of her perfume. Another erotic pulse throbbed. "You're going to have to figure that out, aren't you?" he murmured.

She stared up at him, mesmerized. "Why should I?"

"Because you're curious. You can't help yourself, Cassidy. You look at me and wonder whether I'm some kind of monster, who butchered his wife and children, or whether I'm just a poor victim of a crazy judicial system. Your heart wants to bleed for me, I can see it, and you want to believe me, but you can't quite bring yourself to do it. So you're torn. You don't know whether to comfort or revile me. Do you?"

He could see the faint flush of color on her translucent cheekbones, the aching warmth in deep green eyes. "Would you let me comfort you?" she asked, her voice hushed.

It was like a blow, ripping away the layers of protection, the defenses, so that she struck, straight to that dark, empty place that had once been his heart. He stepped back, away from her, away from the dangerous seduction of her compassion, away from the first real threat he'd come across since that night, endless nights ago, when he'd knelt in the pool of his wife's blood and watched her die.

"No," he said. And he turned and left her, almost running, suddenly, irrationally afraid.

"I'm not certain this was such a good idea after all," Mabry said from the open doorway.

Cass looked up from the neatly stacked files of papers on Sean's walnut desk. She'd been at it since Richard Tiernan had abruptly walked out on her—reading, cataloguing, inuring herself to horror.

The initial police report was there, and the coroner's report as well. Diana Scott Tiernan had died of massive blood loss, caused by a slashed aorta. The fetus was approximately seven weeks old, and had suffocated once Diana Tiernan's heart had stopped pumping.

There were signs of a struggle. She was bruised, with small traces of blood under her fingernails. Blood that had matched the scratches on her husband's arms. Scratches he insisted came from an encounter with a stray cat.

Cassidy had read it all with a kind of shocked detachment. These weren't people she knew, she told herself. If she could just manage to convince herself it was all a fiction, an Agatha Christie murder mystery, then the sick burning at the pit of her stomach would leave her.

She glanced up at Mabry's pale, perfect face. "Not a good idea?" she echoed. "Why do you say that? You're the one who got me up here in the first place."

Mabry grimaced. "Sean was determined that you should come and visit, and who can hold out against your father when he gets in his moods?" She drifted into the room with her unconscious, model's grace, deliberately avoiding the green leather chair. Cass wondered why.

"So he's not really been sick? Never has been?" she asked, leaning back.

"I don't know," Mabry said simply. "I do know he's actually gone to the doctor on several occasions, which would have been unheard of when I first met him. He's refused to let me come with him, and when I asked him what was wrong he simply told me it was constipation. And frankly, if there's one thing Sean isn't, it's anal retentive."

"Do you really think he's sick?"

Mabry shoved a slender hand through her perfectly straight hair. "I don't know. But if he is, I still doubt that has anything to do with his determination to have you here."

"And it couldn't be anything as healthy as simply missing his family." Cass stared down at the desk, her voice neutral. It didn't hurt. She'd stopped letting Sean hurt her years ago.

"I don't think so. If it were, he would have made some effort to get Francesca back here as well. You know he dotes on the child."

"I know," Cass said, stifling her unreasoning sense of jealousy. She adored her baby sister, as did they all. She just wished there'd been a time when Sean had thought she was as bright and quick and wonderful. "And just when did Sean come up with the notion that he needed me here? I don't suppose it happened to coincide with Richard Tiernan's release from jail?"

"What was the reason he gave you for wanting you here?"

"To help him on the Tiernan book. He says he's never done nonfiction before, that it's too detailed for his creative brain, and he needs some editorial help."

"And you believe him?" Mabry asked.

Cassie didn't hesitate. "Not for a moment. Sean isn't the kind of person who asks for help, and I'm the last person he'd come to if he was forced to admit he needs it. As for details and facts, when has Sean ever troubled himself about them?"

"He's got a reason for having you here, Cassie. And I don't like it. I don't trust him, or his infatuation with Tiernan's case."

"What do you mean, infatuation?"

"He's obsessed by it. And by Richard himself. He's got more passion, more interest in his work than he's had in years, and it's all due to a horrifying crime. It's bad enough that Sean is living and breathing murder. I don't want you dragged into it as well."

"You think he did it," Cass said flatly. "You really believe Richard Tiernan slaughtered his family. How in God's name can you bear to have him in the house? To talk to him?"

"I didn't say I thought he did it," Mabry said, tossing her famous head of hair.

"Then if you don't…"

"I didn't say that, either. I don't know what to believe. All you have to do is look into Richard Tiernan's eyes and you see things you wished you never had to. The kind of things that will haunt you."

Cassidy felt an answering chill run down her spine. Mabry was the least fanciful human being Cass knew. It was her serenity, her ability to accept things at face value, that made her so restful, and so important to Sean. If she could see ghosts in Richard Tiernan's dark eyes, then ghosts were most definitely there.

She needed to leave. Turn her back on her father the first time he really seemed to need her, and run for safety.

If only she could.

"You've been married to Sean for almost ten years. Surely you know by now there's no getting him to say anything he doesn't want to. I'm sure he'll reveal his master plan for me in his own good time," Cass said with deceptive ease.

Mabry just looked at her. "You're right, of course. I only hope that he gets around to it before too much time passes. Before it's too late."

Cassidy rose abruptly, needing sunshine, fresh air, smiling faces. She was unlikely to find any of those three commodities in Manhattan. Any more than she was likely to find safety.

"Too late for what, Mabry?"

Mabry shook her head. "I don't know, Cass. I just have a bad feeling about this. And it's only going to get worse."

Richard was lying in the darkened room, stretched once more on the bed that had belonged to one of Sean's children. He never slept much—a few hours here and there, but when the wheels started spinning too quickly, when the lights grew too bright and the pain started, then he had no choice but to shut himself away. He couldn't face anyone right now. Not and be sure he could keep controlling the darkness, the fury that coursed through him.

Sean wasn't the kind of man who paid attention to closed doors. The murky light of the hallway threaded into the room as he stood there, his stocky figure filling the frame. Beyond him the apartment was still and silent.

"The women have gone out," Sean said. "Probably gone shopping."

"Anyone ever tell you you were a male chauvinist pig?" Richard inquired, not bothering to turn his head.

"Any number of femi-nazis," he replied. "I view it as a badge of honor. Name me one woman who doesn't like to shop. Your wife, for instance? Didn't she have staggering credit card bills?"

"You read the trial transcripts, Sean. You know that as well as I do. You never forget anything."

"True enough." He wandered into the room, closing the door behind him, closing in the murky darkness. He sat down in the chair beside the bed. "So what do you think of her?"

He didn't pretend to misunderstand. "You already asked me that."

"What happened this morning? I left the two of you alone, and I expected…"

"What did you expect, Sean?" He let the savagery emerge in his voice. "You think I'd have her spread out on the desk, her skirt pushed up to her waist?"

"I'm the girl's father," Sean said coolly. "Watch your mouth."

"You're the girl's father, and you don't have any qualms about handing her over to me."

"Oh, I have qualms aplenty. I'm willing to take the chance."

"It's not you who's taking the chance, is it, Sean? What if I turn out to be a crazed murderer? Another Ted Bundy?" He sat up, turning on the light beside the bed, and Sean blinked like a blinded owl. "You know what they say. That I murdered my wife and children, that I probably killed countless other women. They haven't found Sally Norton's body, but that's the only thing that's kept them from charging me with that murder as well. What if I can't resist? If I have to stab every woman I fuck?"