Now or Never (8 page)

The crisp cotton sheets were already turned down and the enormous French antique bed was puffy with pillows and covered with a soft cashmere throw. She could hardly wait to crawl into it.

She unhooked her gray skirt and stepped out of it, then tugged the sweater over her head and flung it onto the pale-carpeted floor. Her pantyhose and underwear followed in a little trail as she walked to the rose-marble bathroom.

She found a match and lit the lilac-scented candles amid the ferns and greenery surrounding the tub, then turned on the faucets. Leaning on the cool marble sink, she peered at herself in the mirror. She was shocked to find she looked so normal. She still looked like Mallory Malone,
star investigative reporter with her own successful prime-time show.

She climbed into the tub and lay back in the soothing warmth of the water, her eyes closed, waiting for the familiar scent of lilacs to transport her back to a memory she still treasured, to the one moment of perfect happiness she could remember. But tonight the magic wasn’t working.

She climbed wearily from the tub and wrapped a fluffy white towel around her. She looked in the mirror again.

Her own eyes stared back at her, dark with panic. She had forgotten to take off her makeup. Quickly, she went through the familiar nightly ritual: cleanser, toner, moisturizer, a little cream under the eyes. She was on automatic pilot.

She brushed her hair, then walked naked to the enormous closet. Still chilled, she put on a gray sweatshirt and a pair of white socks. She turned and stared at herself in the full-length mirror. It was as though the light had gone out inside her. And she was Miss Nobody again.

Her head drooped as she trailed desolately from the bedroom into the kitchen. She put water in the kettle and waited, motionless, for it to come to a boil. She fixed her favorite wild berry tea, but this time she did not even think about the lemon pound cake.

Carrying the mug carefully, she walked back to the bedroom and placed it on the silver tray on the night table, then climbed into bed. She sank thankfully back into the comfort of the white pillows, switched on the TV set, and pressed the mute button.

Headline News
flickered silently onto the screen. She sipped the tea and swallowed two Advil for her lurking headache, watching the world events listlessly.

After a while she turned out the lights. Shivering, she curled up in a fetal position, waiting for sleep to come and blot out her memories.

The comfortable bed seemed to be dragging her down, the soft pillows were stifling her, she was free-falling into a bottomless dark pit ….

With a terrified cry she shot upright. She flung off the covers and slid from the bed, shaking. Her throat was dry and little tremors rippled through her body. “Oh, God,” she whispered, “oh, God, no.”

She had not had the nightmare for a long time—she had thought it had finally gone, buried with all the rest of the bad things in the secret place in her mind, where she had banished it. But it was still there.
It was still there
.

Quickly, she turned on the bedside lamp, then the overhead lights, the bathroom lights and the closet. She ran through all the rooms, switching on every light, turning up every dimmer until the apartment blazed like a department store window at Christmas. She stared around, still trembling. There was no place for a ghost to hide now. She was in control again.

She went back to the bedroom and took a suitcase from the closet. Hurriedly, she began to fill it. Just simple things—workout stuff, sweatshirts, sneakers.

When she had finished, she looked at the bedside clock. It was two thirty. She would fax the spa in Tucson and tell them to expect her. That left three and a half hours to kill before she could call the airlines for a reservation on the earliest flight out. Three and a half hours before she could run away from Harry Jordan—and from her past.

At the same time, two thirty
A.M.
, Harry was in the gym at the Moonlightin’ Club. He had played a lengthy game of basketball and then worked out for forty-five minutes. He gave one final heave on the 160-pound overhead lift of the Nautilus machine, held it, then lowered it smoothly back into place. Sweat trickled down his neck into his tangled dark chest hair.

Watching him, Rossetti sighed. “I left a soft bed and a
warm woman to come here and find you, Prof. What’s with you? You have dinner with Mallory Malone, and you don’t take calls anymore? You too good for us regular cops now, or what?”

Harry toweled off the sweat. “I had a lot on my mind.”

“Me too, remember? You were putting my career on the line tonight with Ms. Malone. You don’t show up, you don’t call—”

Harry strode past him, heading for the showers. Rossetti followed.

Harry stripped, turned on the shower, and stood under the spray, his head tilted back and his eyes closed.

“What kind of excuse is that?” Rossetti complained. “You’ve got a lot on your mind. And I don’t, is that it? I thought it was the two of us—the two Musketeers—searching for a killer. I guess it’s the three Musketeers, now that Malone’s in charge.”

Harry shook the water from his eyes and looked at the irate detective. “Wrong,” he said. “Mallory Malone declined to help us.”

Rossetti’s long jaw dropped. “She did?”

“She did.” Harry stepped from the shower and dried off. “She said there wasn’t enough information to build a TV program on. And that the photo-fit wasn’t accurate.”

“And how the hell would she know?”

Harry shrugged. He pulled on a pair of dark blue boxers and stepped into his Levi’s. “Maybe she’s got second sight, I don’t know. All I know is, she was hot to help and then she wasn’t.”

Rossetti glared suspiciously at him. “You come on to her or what?”

Harry laughed as he tucked in his shirt. “No, I did not make a pass at her. She is Ms. Frosty Freeze personified. Most of the time.”

“What about the rest of the time?”

Harry buttoned his shirt, thinking about it. “The rest
of the time she was kind of sparky but nice,” he said finally.

“Nice?”

“Yeah, you know, a nice girl. Woman,” he corrected himself, though now that he thought about it, there was something girlish under her career-woman facade. Perhaps it was the eyelashes. “She liked Squeeze.”

Rossetti grinned. “The way to a guy’s heart—it works every time. ‘Love me, love my dog.’”

“It didn’t quite get that far, Rossetti. Meanwhile, she pissed me off so bad, I had to come here and work it off. Otherwise I might have ended up punching someone.”

“Frustration, huh?”

Harry flung a weary arm across Rossetti’s elegantly tailored shoulders as they walked back through the gym to the lobby. The club was buzzing with people coming and going and the café area in the lobby was crowded. They grabbed some coffee, said hellos and good-byes, and pushed through the heavy swing doors. They stood on the steps sipping their coffee, staring into the rainy night.

“You got it in one, Rossetti,” Harry said.

The windshield wipers blinked away the heavy rain as he drove the Jag back through the quiet city to Louisburg Square. It was three
A.M.
and he was exhausted, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep.

Squeeze recognized the familiar sound of the Jag’s engine and the solid slam of its door. He was waiting in the front hall, tail wagging, eyes alert.

Harry slipped on the leash and stepped out again into the rain.

“This is a quickie, old fella,” he muttered, head down, avoiding the puddles. “Sorry about tonight, but I needed to be alone.”

He grinned at himself—apologizing to the dog as though to a neglected wife. “Aw, what the hell, Squeeze,
what I need is a drink. And what you need is a bone.” Hauling on the leash, he dragged the reluctant dog back up the street and in out of the rain.

He strode into the kitchen, fed the dog the bone, and took a fresh bottle of Jim Beam from the cupboard. Pouring himself a slug, he added ice, then wandered into the sitting room and turned on the lamps, dimming them to a faint glow. He put Neil Young’s
Harvest Moon
on the CD player and settled back in his favorite old leather chair that was as beat up as his favorite old leather jacket.

Sipping the bourbon, he savored it slowly on his tongue, then put his head back and let the music fill his head. The track was “Unborn Legend.” It was a song that always reminded him of his ex-wife, Jilly. But more than that, it described the way he’d felt about her when he’d met her. And even though he told himself it was over, passé, gone, that what he’d thought it was had really never been, the song still brought the ache back to the bruise in his heart.

Squeeze dropped the bone onto the magnificent eighteenth-century silk Bokhara rug at Harry’s feet, then settled down, chewing contentedly. The rug had belonged to his grandmother. “Ah, what the hell. It’s only a rug,” Harry said resignedly. “It’s meant to be used. Before it became an antique, probably half a dozen babies peed on it, and maybe a few cats threw up on it as well.”

He switched his thoughts to Mal Malone. He ran his meeting with her like a reel of film in his head, from the beginning, when she had given him that first challenging look. He re-ran her intelligent interest in the case and her horror when he’d told her what the killer had done. He re-ran the image of her looking at the photo-fit.

There had been no flicker of expression as she looked at the face of the killer. No distaste, no horror—not even interest, for God’s sake.

And that was what was wrong. Mallory Malone had
been interested at first, all right. He had seen it. Then when she had looked at the picture her face had become immobile. But her eyes, as she handed it back to him, had not. There had been a hint of something there. It wasn’t recognition, or even fear.

For a fleeting instant, Mallory Malone had looked
haunted
.

He sipped the bourbon thoughtfully. He thought Ms. Malone was hiding something and he wondered what. Could it be the pattern of the killings? Or the identity of the young victims? There was definitely something. She had done a good job of disguising her reaction—but then, she was an actress, or at least a woman with a public face. He thought she was everything he liked least: spiky, tough, a hard-bitten career woman all the way.

Then he remembered the smile that had lit up her face when she’d seen Squeeze. He remembered the raindrops glittering like sequins in her hair and the unexpected blue-ness of her eyes. Perhaps he had got her wrong after all.

He heaved a weary sigh. “Ms. Malone is a woman with secrets,” he told the dog. “She knows more than she’s telling. And I intend to find out exactly what that is.”

Squeeze lifted his head and looked at him. He wagged his tail and returned to the bone.

“‘Love me, love my dog,’” Harry repeated, smiling. Glancing at his watch, he decided to call her in the morning. Which was only a couple of hours away by now.

T
HE MAN DROVE
the gunmetal-gray Volvo carefully around the corner. He was late getting home this evening. He didn’t like that, but it couldn’t be helped. There had been a problem.

The treelined street was pleasant, with large well-kept houses set back on velvet-green lawns. Expensive automobiles were parked in the driveways, and gardeners toiled for seasonal perfection, replacing dying spring bulbs with fresh early summer flowers.

His home was at the very end opposite a vacant lot, hidden from its neighbor by a thick bushy screen of leylandia. Leylandia wasn’t as beautiful a shrub as he would have liked, but it had the advantage of being dense and fast-growing, and that had taken precedence over beauty. The rest of his garden, though, was a showplace, his pride and joy.

He swung the Volvo up the driveway and pulled into the garage. He switched off the engine and pressed the remote, waiting until the garage door was fully closed before he got out of the car. Taking a red box-file from the seat, he slammed the door and locked it.

The locks on the back door of the house were expensive and complicated. There were two of them: a Chubb deadbolt and a Yale mortise lock. He took out the keys, unlocked each one, stepped inside, then turned and
relocked them. He pushed two enormous bolts into place, one into the floor, the other into the wall.

As he walked through the tidy white-tiled laundry room into the kitchen, he glanced sharply around, his dark eyes taking in every detail. It was exactly as he had left it.

He strode into the hall and examined the front door, which had the same arrangement of locks and bolts. They were firmly in place.

Satisfied with his security arrangements, he went to the wood-paneled study and placed the box-file on the desk. He walked away—then, irritated, turned back and realigned the pile of books waiting for his attention. He straightened the pens in the pewter containers, putting the red ones together, then the blue and then the black. He couldn’t work unless everything was neat and precisely arranged. “Ship-shape,” his father, a navy man, used to call it.

At least “a navy man” was what he grandiosely told people his father had been, and it was partly the truth. But even as a young lieutenant, his father’s drinking had been a problem. There were “incidents”: barroom brawls, fights in foreign ports, drunkenness on duty. He was warned. Then he had gone too far—he’d beaten up a woman, a prostitute in San Diego, and almost killed her. His father had been dishonorably discharged.

He was six years old at the time. His mother had told him the sorry story later, though of course she’d never let on to their neighbors. She kept it a family secret. Meanwhile, her husband staggered from job to job as a traveling salesman, eternally on the road and eternally in the saloon.

It wasn’t the only family secret.

The boy had been sleeping in his mother’s bed since he was out of diapers. He had always hated it—she was a big woman with large floppy breasts that she still offered to
him to suckle every night, even after he was weaned and no longer wanted her milk. And then shamefully, she kept offering them to him all the time he was growing up.