Whispers at Midnight (4 page)

“We got him. That’s our man right there. The guy’s an asshole.”

It was hot in the stairwell; the sound of their shoes hitting the metal treads echoed around their ears.

“Last time I checked, being an asshole wasn’t a crime. As for any evidence against him, we don’t have diddly-squat.”

“He has a history of beating up on her. She was scared enough of him the night she disappeared to run out of their apartment. He chased her outside. We’ve got half a dozen witnesses ready to swear to that. Nobody’s seen her since. What more do you want?”

“A lot,” Matt said dryly, pushing open the door and walking out into the sweltering heat. There’d been a whole string of hellishly hot days like this, nine or ten together. It was ninety-nine in the shade, and humid. He’d seen it before—the heat made people crazy. There’d
been more crimes, petty and otherwise, in the last two weeks than there had been in the previous six months. His eight-man department was swamped. They were all working pretty much around the clock, himself included. Today he’d been fighting crime since five
A.M.
, when Anson Jarboe had tried to sneak into his house after an all-night bender and been surprised by his wife, who’d been waiting in their darkened living room with a baseball bat. Anson’s shrieks as she’d given him what for had roused the neighbors, and the neighbors had called the sheriff. It was now five past eleven, and he knew from experience that the day—a Friday—was just getting underway. After people got off work, the county would really start to hop.

All he wanted to do tonight was sit in his air-conditioned house in front of the TV set with a cold beer in one hand and the remote in the other; there was a baseball game he was dying to catch.

Fat chance of that.

“Well, I—” Antonio began, then broke off, a grin splitting his homely face from ear to ear. Alarmed, Matt glanced around to see what had prompted such an uncharacteristic display of glee from his typically stone-faced deputy. When his gaze lit on the cause, he barely managed to swallow a groan. He’d known it had to be bad to wrest that kind of grin out of Antonio, but this wasn’t just bad—it was awful.

“Oh, Matt, there you are!” Shelby Holcomb’s face brightened as she spotted him. Waving, her face wreathed in smiles, she straightened up from peering into the window of his official car and headed toward him.

“Hey, Shelby,” he answered, his pace slowing.

Undeterred by his clear lack of enthusiasm, she kept on coming. Slim and attractive at thirty-two, a Benton native who had moved back to town four years before to take over the local Century 21 franchise, Shelby had twisted her honey-blond hair up in some kind of fancy-looking roll at the back of her head as her sole nod to the heat. Her makeup was on in full force, down to the bright red lipstick that gleamed as the sun hit it. She even had on a suit, for crying out loud, a powder blue number with a short skirt and elbow-length sleeves, which he guessed was no big deal for Shelby despite the soaring temperature
because the woman never seemed to break a sweat. Buttoned up the front, it exposed what Shelby no doubt considered an effective but tasteful amount of cleavage. She had on hose, and heels, and was carrying that damned notebook she was using as her latest weapon in the war of conquest she was waging. Not that he was about to fall anytime soon.

She’d been chasing him for years. Last summer, in what was one of the many brain-dead episodes that continued to distinguish his existence, he’d made the mistake of letting her catch him for a while. They’d hung out, had fun, gone to some parties, the movies, Savannah for dinner a couple of times. All in all, they’d had a good time. Then Shelby had started reading magazines with titles like
June Bride
and dragging him into jewelry stores and otherwise giving off all kinds of vibes that she was starting to pair him with “forever” in her mind.

Forever gave him nightmares. Forever wasn’t in his game plan. Forever and a woman? Not happening. At least, not anytime in the foreseeable future. Just the idea of being tied down to a wife and kids and a mortgage made him break out in a cold sweat.

He’d had enough responsibility in his thirty-three years to last him the rest of his life. No way was he taking on more when he was right on the brink of working his way free.

He’d come out with some lame speech in which not rushing things and her being way too good for him and his needing space had been the dominant themes. Then he’d run for the hills. She’d been gunning for him ever since.

“Matt!”

That voice was even more familiar than Shelby’s, and came with its own set of worries. It belonged to Erin, the oldest of his responsibilities. He turned his head and spotted his sister as she popped out of the passenger seat of Shelby’s red Honda, which was parked behind his cruiser. A recent graduate of the University of Georgia, she was twenty-two, petite and pretty with short, tousled black hair and a mischievous grin, which at the moment beamed full-wattage at him. As their eyes met over the roof of the car, he couldn’t help grinning back at her, albeit a little ruefully. Erin, blast her sweet but
troublemaking little hide, had gone and gotten herself engaged to Shelby’s younger brother, Collin, who had set up a law practice in Benton the previous year. As Matt was paying for the wedding as well as giving the bride away and Shelby had taken upon herself the task of organizing the event, the opportunities for Shelby to hound him had multiplied exponentially. It seemed like everywhere he went lately she turned up.

“Yo, Erin,” he said with a touch of reproof. His sister knew Shelby was after him, and like the rest of his family—along with half the damned county—seemed determined to do her bit to help shoo him into the trap.

“I just wanted to get your opinion before I ordered the flowers.” Shelby smiled at him with determined charm. Matt obediently stopped walking as she reached him and looked down at the notebook, which she was flipping open practically under his nose. He’d been through this drill before: she showed him something—a picture, an estimate, a list—and he nodded and said, “Looks great.” Then she did what she wanted—with his money.

It was expensive, but easier and safer than arguing.

This time, however, the amount in question was so high that he protested before he thought.

“Fifteen hundred dollars? For
flowers?”
He met Shelby’s eyes. They smiled meltingly into his. Her lips parted. Her lashes fluttered. Alarmed, he dropped his gaze back down to the price list.

“I told her it was too much.” Apology in her voice, Erin joined them. She was wearing short white shorts that showed way too much of her tanned legs, in Matt’s opinion, and a lime green halter top that molded her ample breasts. Looking her up and down with a gathering frown, he made a mental note to have a chat with her sometime in the near future about the advantages of leaving something to the imagination. She apparently read his mind, or his expression, because as she met his gaze her grin returned and she gave a teasing little wriggle that set her breasts to jiggling.

He frowned at her, she wrinkled her nose at him, and they engaged in a potent but silent exchange of opinions as visions of convents filled his head. Then the sheer ridiculousness of the situation
occurred to him. Somewhere, he thought, angels must be snickering at the idea that
he,
of all people, had wound up with three increasingly babelicious girls to shepherd into womanhood. It had to have been the cosmic joke of the century.

“It
is
a lot.” Shelby sounded apologetic too as she curled surprisingly strong fingers around his elbow. “But I don’t think the florist is being unreasonable. You have to consider that besides the bride’s bouquet, we need nosegays for the bridesmaids, and boutonnieres for Collin and the groomsmen, and flowers for the church and centerpieces for the tables at the reception and—”

“Whatever you think,” Matt interrupted, feeling hunted. His uniform was khaki, long pants, short-sleeved shirt, and Shelby was taking full advantage of the looseness of his shirt sleeve to slip her hand right up under there to caress his biceps. The feel of her soft, meticulously manicured hand sliding across his overheated skin was enough to make him remember that he hadn’t gotten laid since he’d fled her bed at the end of March. Which was exactly what she had intended, he was pretty sure.

Antonio crossed his arms over his chest, looking thoughtful. “When Rose got married”—Rose was the younger of his two daughters—“I told her that she could choose between the flowers she wanted or the down payment on a new car. That’s how much the flowers were.”

“So what did she choose?” Matt asked, slightly interested.

“The flowers. Can you believe it?” Antonio shook his head at the folly of women.

“My idea is that we should just do the flowers ourselves,” Erin said, giving Matt a wicked smile that told him she knew where Shelby’s hand was. “We could get the cost down to five hundred dollars and still have practically the same thing.”

“Whatever you think,” Matt said again, desperate to end the conversation. The only thing worse than being kept abreast of every little detail of his sister’s wedding plans was being stalked by Shelby at the same time. He hadn’t realized it while they’d been seeing each other, but the woman had the tenacity of a bulldog; once she got her teeth into something, she never willingly let go.

More fool he for letting her sink her teeth into him in the first place.

The cell phone clipped to Matt’s belt began to ring. He had a pager, but it could only be accessed by an employee of the sheriff’s department. Many of his friends, neighbors, relatives and other assorted county residents preferred to bypass the whole official process and call him on his personal line. At least answering it provided an excuse for him to step away from Shelby without making his discomfort with what she was doing obvious. She looked after him in transparent disappointment as her discreetly dislodged hand dropped to her side.

Thank God Erin’s wedding was only a little over three weeks away, Matt thought. He was starting to feel harassed to the max. On top of everything else, playing cat and mouse with Shelby without saying or doing something that would hurt Erin’s relationship with her new family was getting old fast. It was no damn fun being the mouse.

“Got to go,” Matt said as he hung up, feeling relieved and doing his best to hide it. He looked at Antonio. “Mrs. Hayden’s out walking her dog down Route 1 again.”

Antonio made a face.

“So what’s wrong with that?” Erin looked from one to the other of them with a mystified frown.

“All she’s wearing are her shoes and a big sun hat,” Matt clarified. Mrs. Hayden was ninety if she was a day, and growing increasingly forgetful. Lately she had tended to forget to put on her clothes. This was the fourth time since the weather had turned nice in March that they’d gotten a call from a scandalized driver reporting that she was strolling naked alongside the road as her equally ancient shih tzu snuffled at grass clumps from the end of a leash.

“Can’t somebody else deal with it?” Shelby asked with a hint of impatience, tapping her fingers against the cover of the notebook as if that were the most important thing in the world.

“She likes Matt,” Antonio said, grinning again. Matt was beginning to realize that lately a great many of his deputy’s rare grins were being had at his expense. “If any of the rest of us come near her, she clobbers us with her hat. She lets Matt take her home.”

Erin chortled. Shelby looked disgusted.

“See ya,” said Matt, taking full advantage of what he could only regard as a heaven-sent opportunity to escape. He never would have thought it possible, but he found as he retreated in good order to his cruiser that today he was actually grateful for having been personally notified that Mrs. Hayden was having one of her more bizarre senior moments again. He’d rather deal with a naked nonagenarian than a love-thwarted thirty-something any day of the week.

With Antonio riding shotgun, he lifted a hand in farewell to his sister and his ex-girlfriend, then drove out of the parking lot.

The question of Marsha Hughes’s whereabouts was temporarily put on the back burner as he sped off to make the county safe from the hazards posed by dotty old ladies.

4

June 29

O
N THIS RAINY MIDNIGHT
, Benton was as steamy as the inside of a hot shower. It was as dark and haunted feeling as a dungeon. It was also, Carly Linton discovered as she paused to catch her breath beside the huge birch that had anchored the front yard for as long as she could remember, not quite as dead asleep as such a small town should have been at so late an hour. One person at least was awake, and she was looking right at him—or, rather, part of him.

Nice butt,
was her first thought, as, muscular and tight and hugged by a pair of well-worn jeans, the butt in question moved into her line of vision. Not that she was into noticing men’s butts. Not anymore. Since her divorce she’d felt more like kicking them than drooling over them, nice or not. The state of the butt was merely a fleeting observation, made in passing, as the beam of her flashlight locked onto a man on all fours backing out of the crawl space beneath the front porch of her grandmother’s house. Correction,
her
house now. Her grandmother had been dead for more than three years, and the turreted Victorian mansion, which Carly had inherited, had been empty since Miss Virgie Smith, who’d been renting the place, had moved into an assisted-living home in Atlanta two months before. By all rights it should have been empty still. As in, no one living there, no one home, no one crawling out from beneath the dilapidated
porch. Typical of the way her luck had been running lately that it was not.