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Lover In The Shadows
Lindsay Longford


Guilty as sin?Had she gone mad? Molly Harris had woken at the break of dawn lying on the kitchen floor, clutching a bloody knife with no memory of how she'd gotten there. Now Detective John Harlan was at her door, and he was looking for answers. Compelling, mysterious, John was like no man she'd ever known–there was something haunting behind those dark glasses….The two of them had been brought together by the murder of Molly's parents, and now the death of her ex-maid. As suspicion wrapped around her, so did John–tailing her every move. Could he see through the darkness and discover whether this fragile lady was a cold-blooded killer or a victim of circumstance?









“You haven’t found anything except outdated birth-control pills. Are you satisfied now?”


“Such a leading question, Ms. Harris. I find it very difficult to resist the reply.”

He straightened and stepped toward her, but he didn’t touch her.

“In fact, I can’t resist. No, Ms. Harris, I’m not satisfied.” His voice was rough and grainy as he tugged the end of the robe’s tie and looped it around his hand. Letting the slippery fabric slide through his fingers onto her shoulder, he trailed the tie lingeringly across her neck, an unbearably prolonged caress of satin on her skin.

“Here, Ms. Harris,” he said as he unhooked the robe and handed it to her, “perhaps you should get dressed.” And let me remain unsatisfied, he added silently.


Lindsay Longford, like most writers, is a reader. She even reads toothpaste labels in desperation! A former high school English teacher with an M.A. in literature, she began writing romances because she wanted to create stories that touched readers’ emotions by transporting them to a world where good things happened to good people and happily ever after is possible with a little work.

Her first book, Jake’s Child, was nominated for Best New Series Author and Best Silhouette Romance, and received a Special Achievement Award for Best First Series Book, from Romantic Times. It was also a finalist in the Romance Writers of America RITA® Award contest for Best First Book.




Lover in the Shadows

Lindsay Longford







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


To Wes, whose courage and kindness during difficult days have taught our son what a real hero is—and, more important, what it takes to be a man.

Thank you.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER ONE (#u5d97e3e8-fc9c-5ddc-b466-698d569664e9)

CHAPTER TWO (#u3b027f7c-ba77-5281-a128-616a742835fe)

CHAPTER THREE (#ufd10b03f-5437-559f-a332-89f1da7c7125)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER ONE


The third time Molly woke up on her kitchen floor with the knife in her hand, she was too frightened to utter a sound.

This time the knife was spotted with blood. Dried, matte dark, it flecked the handle and clotted in the space where shining metal, wiped clean, met a wooden handle.

For a long time she lay with her cheek on the cold tiles and stared at the thing clutched in her white-knuckled fingers. Shadowy in the predawn, the slick black-and-white tile floor had become the color of smoke. Peaceful, this gray, in the silence. The tile felt cool against her cheek. Without turning her head, she let her gaze drift.

It would be so easy to lie here, curled up and lost in that gray blur.

So easy if she didn’t have to look at the knife wavering in her clenched fist.

Silver from the handle to the sharp point that fixed her eyes. Sharp, that point, razor sharp. The sweep of metal would slice cleanly, easily, through anything, with only the slightest pressure of wrist and fingers. She knew its power.

The silver point trembled with her effort to think. Her knuckle slipped against the edge and a pinhead of bright red dotted the blade.

She couldn’t move. It was only a small cut, scarcely noticeable, but the sight of her blood on that spotless metal sent her into gibbering mindlessness. Primitive instincts held her paralyzed on the cold floor, stiff against the terror washing through her in unending waves.

If she moved, her kitchen would dissolve into mist, everything familiar vanishing in a swirling vortex of motion, everything known becoming alien with each beat of her heart. Staring at the knife, she understood nothing and retreated deeper into the cave of herself, away from the howl of tigers prowling ever closer.

Something bumped against the outside door.

Metal gleamed as the knife jerked in her fist.

Molly shivered, a constant trembling running through her. Even the roots of her hair tightened with the effort of listening. Straining to hear in the thick silence, she shut her eyes, registering with every nerve in her body the sounds outside her kitchen.

But inside the kitchen, the click of the clock on the microwave oven marked the minutes, punctuation in the sentence of silence. Her heart beat loudly in her ears, louder than that inexorable click. She waited.

One minute. Two.

She waited.

For deliverance.

For horror to explode into her house once more.

She waited.

Suddenly, a thump on the open gallery that ran around the house. A rasp against the screen door, a sound light as breath against the window.

Then, once more, silence. Blood thick, heavy against her chilled skin. Heavy and insistent against her tightly closed eyelids, silence pressed down, suffocating her.

A scrape against the sill of the kitchen window.

The sound of something large moving outside on her open gallery.

Her heart banged against her ribs.

Her eyes snapped open. Heat flooded her, and her breath hazed the shiny metal in front of her.

Clutched in her hand, the knife had not changed.

She remembered going to bed earlier, with lights blazing around her. That much was clear. She recalled the quiet of the locked house around her, the dimly lit stairwell opposite her bedroom plunging straight into the belly of the house. She had lain facing that pitchy well, watching its shadows shift into shapes that hovered near her door as her eyes burned and twitched, and night deepened outside her window.

Oh, yes, she remembered staring into the darkness.

Sleep was a demon lover, furling his cape around her, tormenting and taunting, following close on her heels while, terrified, she ran for her life from his dark seduction.

Closing her eyes again, Molly rubbed her cheek against the floor. The tile against her face. Real. The knife in her hand.

That, too, real.

Like images curved and twisted in a fun-house mirror, everything familiar and ordinary was distorted now by the knife in her hand. From a far-off place, she felt the thing vibrating between her fingers like some terrifying dowsing rod that dragged her down to sunless caverns from which she’d never escape.

Wanting to disappear, to wake up in her bedroom with this moment only a disturbing nightmare half remembered in sunlight, Molly drew her knees to her chest, curling tighter into herself. As if they’d acquired a will of their own, though, her fingers gripped the knife even tighter.

Lying there, she grew gradually aware of other sounds—her raspy breathing, the drip of water from the sink faucet, the rain chattering against her shuttered windows.

And, close to her face, the knife rattling against the floor tiles.

That frenzied clatter finally broke her, sent her whimpering and scrabbling across the floor.

Eyes still shut against the monstrous vision in front of her, she edged back to the wall, the knife scraping the ceramic tiles with her movements.

When her hip bumped the corner of the room, she forced herself to open her eyes. With a courage she hadn’t known she had, she made herself observe the instrument of her terror.

Small flecks of drying blood spotted her thumb, but there in the burnished gleam of the knife blade, the reflection of an eye, large and wild, stared back at her. Shining in the dark, that eye watched her in silvery blankness.

An eye from a dark, mad place.

Hers, she realized with a gasp. Her face. Her eye.

Screams pushed at her clamped teeth and made her throat raw, but she held them inside. She clenched her jaw so tightly it hurt, knowing with a primal understanding that it was important not to scream.

Too close to a border she didn’t want to cross, she didn’t dare look back into that metallic eye. She sat up, her teeth clicking in a frantic, uncontrollable rhythm. She was shaking all over, the butcher knife still clutched in her fingers.

She couldn’t stop staring at the shining steel, the grain of the expensive wood in the handle, the splotches of blood on her hand and on the wood. As if staring at the minute details of the object would translate into understanding, she focused on the fine-grained wood.

There was no doubt about it. The knife was hers.

Just like the other times.

She’d used this knife more times than she wanted to recall. But no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t remember coming down to the kitchen and picking it up tonight. Like those other mornings, she had no memory of opening the drawer with its carefully arranged knives and sharpening blade, no memories now to explain this spider web of blood on her palms, the clots of blood between knife handle and metal.

Shuddering, Molly fought to take a deep breath, but the thunder of her heartbeat, roaring and all-consuming, was sucking the air from the room. Dizzy in that pounding vacuum, she couldn’t find air.

Tugging desperately, her fingers scrabbling at the neck of her pajamas, she dropped the knife. The clatter as it fell onto the tiles released her. Huddled in the corner of the kitchen, she inhaled, loud, ugly gulps harsh in the solitude. Tears ran down her cheeks and she scrubbed them, her fists abrasive against her cold, wet lips and eyelids.

She had to think.

She had to make sense of this latest incident.

Was she crazy, after all?

Bracing her palms against the wall, she lifted herself into a standing position. Her knees buckled, but she gritted her teeth and clung in desperation to the solid surface. Against all reason, she was relieved, relieved that her hands left no smear of blood on her pale gray walls.

There had already been enough blood.

Molly groped along the wall, flicking on the light switch when she came to it. Lightheaded and drunk with fear, she placed her palms on the wall, carefully, one after the other. She ended her journey at the stainless-steel double sink, where she gripped the lifeline of its curved, satiny edge.

The edge of the knife’s blade was curved, too.

Sweat popped out at her hairline, ran down her spine, and she found herself dry-heaving into the spotless basin. When the wracking convulsions ended, she yanked the faucet handle up as far as it would go.

Cold water gushed out and she cupped it again and again, faster and faster against her face, her hands, her throat. Water sprayed, dripped everywhere, yet she couldn’t stop rubbing her hands under the spray, rubbing and rubbing but still seeing blood on her fingers. Great rasping sobs tore through her.

But she hadn’t given in to screaming. Comfort of a sort in that knowledge. She hadn’t surrendered to the madness dimly seen in her reflected eye.

Her pajama top was plastered against her breasts when she finally gained control. Bent over the sink, she gripped its edge while water slithered down her neck. Damp and cold, the wet, silky fabric of her top brushed her nipples, chilling them into hard bumps.

After the first incident, she no longer slept naked, no longer left her windows open to the night lurking at their edge, to the darkness threatening now at the edge of her mind. The idea of being vulnerable was unbearable.

Whatever it was, that thump she’d heard on the gallery had been real.

Pulling the black, silky cotton away from her breasts with fingers that still trembled, Molly looked around her once-loved kitchen. Cool and serene, it bore no trace now of the violence that had splashed its walls with blood.

The tongues of both bolts on the door to the outside gallery were snug in their grooves. She’d always been careful about locking up before she went to bed. In the last year she’d become obsessed with the need to check and recheck locks and bolts, even braving the dark stairwell to come downstairs in the middle of the night and check again.

She remembered roaming the house last night, examining the locks in her gritty-eyed exhaustion, but she’d gone back to bed afterward.

She hadn’t slept. Not during the night. Never then.

During those lost, lonely months after the murder of her parents, sleep had eluded her.

Wrapping her arms around herself, Molly glanced slowly around the room. She wouldn’t think now about the other rooms off the shadowy hall.

Like the door, the kitchen shutters seemed undisturbed, but she couldn’t tell if the windows behind the shutters were still locked until she made herself move away from the sink.

Everything was where it should be—the red enameled teapot on the black mirrored stove, the black-and-white place mats on the table.

One thing only stood out of place…the long-handled knife on the floor.

She couldn’t pick it up.

Apparently she’d gone out, roaming in the night with that blood-speckled knife in her hand, returning to lock herself in behind her bolted doors and windows.

Or someone had come in.

And vanished, leaving her locked in?

Not possible.

Molly looked away from the knife. She understood she was going to have to do something. She wished she knew what.

Deep inside her, the fine edge of control was popping, shredding in audible snaps. She wouldn’t survive finding herself another time curled up on the floor. She knew that as well as she knew anything.

Turning back to the sink, she turned the water on more slowly this time and splashed her face and scrubbed her hands yet again while she sorted through her terror-blasted thoughts. Numb, scarcely aware of what she was doing, she lathered her hands over and over, soaping and scrubbing her nails, her palms, between her fingers, as she tried to reason through what had happened. Step by step, using logic to distance herself from the edge of the chasm, she considered the possibilities.

Thought was a barricade against the fears nibbling at the edge of her consciousness.

She could call the police. As much as she loathed the idea of seeing them in her house again, she probably should call them. But if she did, they’d think she was crazy.

Maybe she was. But she’d always heard if you thought you were crazy, you probably weren’t. Right now she wasn’t sure where that theory left her, aside from giving some perverse comfort. The police would do one of two things—either ignore her or laugh at her.

She couldn’t blame them. What, after all, was there for them to check out? Her knife? Her blood in its handle?

Her outstretched fingers shivered as she looked at them.

Of course it was her blood.

Unthinkable if it were not.

Frantically she searched her hands, looking for scratches on one hand, pressing the water-pruned skin, stretching it, looking between her fingers.

She sagged against the sink when she found the deep cut at the base of her right thumb. A gouge into the flesh. She touched it, felt the flap of skin. Obscene.

In her shock at finding herself once more on the kitchen floor, she hadn’t felt the dull throb of the gash in her hand. Hadn’t felt anything. Until now. As if she’d turned on a switch, her whole body ached.

Maybe she had been sleepwalking.

Drying her hands against her pajama bottoms and rubbing so hard against her leg she had to bite her lips against the pain, Molly tested that idea. The pain, real in its viciousness at the bottom of her thumb, was so alarming that she panicked to think she’d been sleepwalking, wandering upstairs, downstairs, all around the town…

“Stop it.” Her voice was startling in the quiet of the orderly kitchen, the single sound in all that humming silence.

She wouldn’t let herself lose control.

Molly took ten deep breaths. “Okay,” she said when she’d finished. Needing the reality of a human voice, even her own, she continued, “Okay. No one came in. Fact. Nobody could have.” Thinking, she shook her head slowly, and wet strands of hair slid across her chin. “Not past all those locks. And out? Leaving everything locked behind? Only a ghost, maybe. And there’s no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as the Bermuda Triangle.”

In spite of her weak attempt at humor, she shuddered again in the dim morning. She would have found greater comfort if she could forget all the people who did believe in the Triangle and ghosts. In the uncertain light of these moments between night and dawn, the idea of ghosts fluttering through her home wasn’t something she could cope with. Not after everything else. Ghosts who slipped through locked doors and windows. No, much better a real, tangible explanation for what was happening to her, no matter how terrifying.

That left sleepwalking.

But she didn’t have a history of sleepwalking.

She no longer dreamed.

Her breath came in wheezes. On TV she’d seen a report about the behavior people were capable of while in the grip of unconscious sleep.

The reporter had interviewed a woman who “woke up” over and over in her kitchen, eating, making sandwiches. Other people discovered themselves eating cigarette butts as if they were food. Nocturnal bingeing. People did strange things in the nighttime hours.

Murder, even.

A man had, supposedly, walked out of his house, driven to a relative’s home, strolled in and murdered the family.

While he was asleep.

Sleepwalking.

Madness.

Molly touched the wound on her hand.

Her blood.

She rubbed the spot over and over, trying not to think about alternatives.

Her blood.

He’d been watching her for a long time. Prowling around her house, moving silently along the gallery, watching her during the long nights. Now, he moved closer. It was time.

The small smack against the kitchen door shot Molly upright, her hands over her mouth.

A second smack. Purposeful.

She edged to the door. Worse to stay listening to that muffled sound and not know what it was.

If she wanted to keep her sanity, she had no choice.

Holding the shutter carefully so that she could look out onto the gallery, Molly saw only darkness.

Again the sound came, lower, from the floor.

Staring through the window, Molly saw a shimmer of motion, a flick of dark against dark. Something was out there.

Eyes were gleaming up at her.

Real eyes, not metallic reflections of her own fear-glazed self. A stray cat. Real. Nothing to make her hide behind locked doors jiggling with imagined fears.

Drawn to the reality of the cat, she carefully released the bolts. Damp air rushed in as she held on to the screen door and looked down at the cat staring back at her with unblinking gold eyes.

Large, with powerful muscles along his flanks and shoulders and a broad head with a bumpy, hooked nose, he was the most beautiful animal she’d ever seen. Rain-wet, his black coat was shiny and sleek.

“Hey, puss,” she whispered, looking down the length of the gallery. Off to her left she thought she saw movement, but it was only a mourning dove winging off into the rain, disturbed by the rattle of the opening door.

Imperiously unmoving, the cat sat with his long tail curled around his front paws and watched her with unwinking golden eyes.

“Looking for any port in a storm, fella?” Molly stooped and touched her nose to the screen door close to the cat, comforted by the presence of another creature. This big cat with his unwavering gaze was solid and tangible in the quicksand of her thoughts. “You’re a beauty, you are.” Molly looked at his neck. “No collar? That’s a shame. I’ll bet there’s someone out there looking for you, cat.”

The cat tilted his head and lifted his paw to the door. He tapped it, an arrogant demand for service. Molly pressed her finger to the door and the pad of the cat’s big paw flexed. His claws pierced the screen around her finger, encircling the tip. Trapping it in the cage of his claws.

“Careful, buster. What do you want, anyway?”

The cat’s eyes never blinked.

“Oh? As if I should read your mind, huh? Food and a cozy spot next to the fire?”

Unmoving, utterly still, he watched her.

“Listen, buster, this is Florida. You’re not going to freeze.” Molly surveyed his body. Long, muscle-padded haunches. “You’re obviously not hungry. Couldn’t be. Vamoose, fella.” She tried to pull her finger away, but the cat tightened his grip, his eyes never leaving hers.

“Hey, this isn’t funny. Shoo, go away. I can’t help you. Sorry, but the last thing I need is a cat around here right now.” She wiggled her finger, but the cat held it firm. “If you were a dog, maybe I’d let you stay. I could use a real big, real mean dog. A brute. With a nasty disposition. A dog I’d keep for sure.” She pulled harder, futilely.

Uneasy, Molly raised her voice and looked around, sensing something ruffling her nerve endings. “Hey, listen, puss, let go. I want to shut the door, okay?” Molly thunked the screen with the fingers of her free hand.

So fast she never saw his movement, like dark lightning streaking, the cat fastened a paw around her hand, capturing a second finger and holding it with his claws through the screen.

“Well, buster, now we’re in a fine mess. Let go,” she ordered, glaring at the animal.

His gold gaze held hers. There was something in his somber stare that kept her looking, looking past the darker gold flecks, as if she were moving down a golden corridor faster and faster and faster, wind and air rushing past her, golden eyes locked on hers, drawing her deeper into that spinning gold….

Molly shook her head. Light lifted the edges of gray from the gallery and she could see out into her yard, down to the bayou veiled in rain. She sighed, exhausted and wrung out.

Looking back at the sleek animal in front of her, she frowned. “So, I’m a sucker for helpless critters, cat, but you’re the most unhelpless beast I’ve ever seen. And, like I said, you’re not a dog. Besides, cats are always looking down hallways as if they see something, and, puss, I don’t need you seeing things that go bump in the night, you know? I’m having enough problems figuring out which bumps are real and which ones aren’t. I don’t need you spooking the heck out of me.” Her voice dropped to a shaky whisper.

Not breaking her skin, the cat curled his claws tighter. That arrogance she’d noted earlier gleamed back at her from his gold eyes.

“You have some nerve, cat. Anybody ever tell you that? Yes, I know I like cats. Ordinarily.”

The cat arched his back, his claws still hooked in the screen around her fingers. Damp heat from his large body came to her in the chilly, rain-dark dawn.

Molly hesitated. “Listen, if I let you in, you can’t stay, hear? I mean, this isn’t your home away from home. You can come in for a while. Just until…” She stopped. She knew what she was doing. She knew she didn’t want to deal with the knife still in her kitchen. Twisting her fingers caught in his grasp, Molly continued, “Just until, okay?”

The cat blinked and sat back on his haunches, releasing her.

“Stinker. Bully.” She unlocked the screen door. “I guess you wouldn’t turn down a meal, huh?”

Padding in, his tail lifted, the cat moved across her gray floor like a dark cloud over shadowy water. Passing her refrigerator, he circled the kitchen until he came to the spot on the floor where she’d woken up.

For a long moment he stayed there.

He stopped next to the knife and looked back at her. His ears angled to the hall off the kitchen, listening. Listening to something beyond her hearing.

Molly watched the ripples move across his skin and felt an answering shiver move across her own. “Hey, c’mon, cat. Don’t do this to me. Really.” She rubbed her arms.

Smelling the handle of the knife, the beast parted his mouth in a feral baring of teeth. A low growl curled around the kitchen. His canines were long, white and very sharp.

“Stop it. This isn’t funny. I mean it,” Molly added, nerves twanging as he looked back at her with those wild gold eyes. He blinked again and moved closer to her, loose-jointed and muscular, stopping at her feet.

“All right. That’s fair,” she said, bending to pick him up. His fur was warm against her cold skin. “Unlike some guys, at least you listen. But you’d better mind your p’s and q’s, okay?” she babbled into the silky fur at his ear. “Or you’re out of here. And don’t count on gourmet food, either. Got it?”

Silently, he rested his front paws on her forearm, claiming her.

Molly held the heavy cat tightly to her as she walked through the rooms of her house, checking every window from top to bottom, every latch. All closed. Bolted. As they always were. She’d changed the locks, too, after the second incident. Even her brother Reid didn’t have a key to the new locks.

Molly didn’t realize how tightly her fingers were wound into the cat’s fur until he reached up and batted her face with the pad of his wide paw, drawing her attention. “Sorry about that,” she said, stroking the fur down his back and over his tail. He stretched up onto her shoulder. “Listen, cat,” she said, looking at him eye-to-eye and still feeling tremors way down in the cold spot inside her, “I’m at my wit’s end, and I can’t figure out what to do next. I’m too scared to fall asleep, and I’m so tired I don’t know what’s real anymore. I’m talking to a cat, and you don’t even purr.”

She sank into a chair in the living room and propped her feet on the matching footstool. Clutching the cat’s warm, sinewy body to her, she remembered the feel of the cold floor, the gleam of the knife. The look in her own reflected eye. Molly shuddered. “Hey, fella, I’m in over my head in really bad stuff,” she whispered, “and I’m sinking fast.” She buried her cold face in his fur.

Arranging himself in her lap to his satisfaction, the cat fixed her with that unwavering gaze as she muttered to him. He was so still and calm that some of her own tension seeped from her as she stroked him endlessly from ear to tail tip, the smooth, sleek fur and firm muscles solid and real against her fingers.

And all the while she stroked him, the cat was silent.

Moving closer, he watched her lean back in the chair, pale brown hair clinging to the chair fabric, her hands tangled in the black silk of the cat’s fur. Saw, too, the lines around her drawn, silvery gray eyes, the smudges of exhaustion underneath. He sensed the immense effort she was making as her small hands moved in an endless, hypnotic rhythm.

She might drowse now. Possibly. Or not.

He could wait.

But he knew she wouldn’t sleep.

Not tonight.

The piercing shrill of the doorbell jerked Molly to her feet. While she’d drifted off somewhere in her mind, the cat had disappeared, leaving long strands of black fur clinging to her fingers. Anxiously she brushed her hands down her pajamas, wincing at the ache in her hand.

She had no idea what time it was.

Peering through the privacy hole on the door, she saw that rain still dripped down the eaves and spattered the gallery. Her stomach curled in nauseating twists as she looked at the detective’s shield held eye level by the man standing in an easy, legs-apart stance at her front door.

Unlocking the door but keeping the chain on, Molly leaned her head against the doorjamb.

Choice had been taken from her.

“Yes?” Her voice was thready. To herself as she heard the edgy notes, she sounded guilty of unnamed horrors.

“Police.” Anonymous behind the silver-rimmed, round dark lenses of his sunglasses, he could have been anyone.

“Yes. I see.” Dread was moving through her in long rollers, gaining force, growing large and overpowering like enormous waves far out at sea.

She saw, too, the second man sitting in the passenger side of the black car parked in her driveway. She’d never heard it drive up. She must have dozed off.

Trying to sort out this new set of events, Molly rubbed her forehead fretfully against the edge of the door.

“We need to talk with you, ma’am.” Florida sand in his voice, a native, like her. She didn’t recognize his tough, sharp-planed face, though.

Molly cleared her throat. “What about?”

“I’ll explain. May I come in?” Against the stark black of his shirt and jacket and the sleek black of his hair, the man’s face was pale.

Yielding to the authority in his voice, in the bracing of his hand against one lean hip, Molly almost removed the chain. But caution and the ever-present fear stopped her. Sunglasses on a rain-dark morning? “Look, can you give me a name? A badge number?” She was having trouble swallowing.

There was a long silence. She saw him look toward the man in the low-slung car, shrug and turn back to her.

“Sure. John Harlan.” He held the shield closer to the door, his gesture somehow mocking. “Badge number 8973. You can call—”

“I’ll look it up,” she said through the crack, and she shut the door very carefully with shaking hands.

Racing upstairs, knees turning to syrup with fear, Molly looked up the phone number for the local police, rolling the edge of her pajama top between her fingers as she waited for an answer, trembling at each suddenly loud sound of her house, each creak and sigh of a branch against a window.

According to the desk sergeant, Harlan, badge number 8973, was supposed to be at her house.

The wave that had been building crashed around her and pulled her out to sea. There in the dark depths where monsters dwelt, it built again in slow, sickening swoops of power.

Smoothing the rolled edge of her pajama top flat, Molly unbuttoned the garment slowly, making herself go through the simple, grounding motions. She couldn’t afford to think.

Skimming off her bottoms, she slid into jeans and a sweat shirt and ripped a brush through her hair. Red scrawled across her cheek as she tried to put on lipstick, and she flung the lipstick case back onto her dresser with a violence that surprised her.

Wiping the slash of crimson off her cheek, she shuddered.

She didn’t need any more red today.

She hurried down the stairs. “I called the police station,” she muttered as she opened the door.

“Good.” His voice was like hot chocolate on cold ice cream, just that edge of hardness under the smooth.

Bigger and more powerful than she’d realized, he filled the doorway and stepped into her house, wiping his feet carefully.

The bottoms of his expensive black slacks were mud spattered. Bayou mud and dried sand.

Backing up, Molly wanted to slam the door and run.

He must have seen something in her face, because he stopped. “Do we have a problem here?” He was all waiting stillness, power held in abeyance.

“No. No problem,” she said, hearing the lie, knowing he did, too, as he inclined his head toward her, listening carefully. She cleared her throat. “How can I help you? What’s happened?” She twisted her fingers together and sensed, rather than saw, his gaze behind the mask of dark glasses follow their movements. She stopped, let her hands lie easily along the side seams of her jeans.

And tried to breathe past the constriction in her chest. “What do you want?”

He slid a notebook from his shirt pocket. Underneath his jacket, she glimpsed his thin, black leather belt, the shine of its narrow buckle. Glimpsed, too, the edge of a shoulder holster.

As he flipped open the notebook with his long, thin fingers, Molly braced herself.

“You’re off the beaten path here, Ms.—” He checked his notebook, but she didn’t believe for a minute that he didn’t remember her name. Something about his careful stance, his slow turning of pages told her he knew.

She let him play out his game.

“Ms. Harris.” He nodded, but Molly didn’t answer. The sigh of an early morning wind filled the silence between them.

She couldn’t have spoken. Didn’t know what to say. She only knew she had to hold on to the center of her being with every ounce of energy she had or she’d go spinning apart.

He nodded again. His pen slid along the edge of his notebook. “Ms. Harris, do you remember seeing or hearing anything unusual last night?”

She wished she could. “Nothing,” she said, worrying the cuticle of her thumb with her finger. “I was asleep.” The lie trembled off her lips.

His pen moved steadily across the page. “Were you.” It wasn’t a question.

Reflexively glancing at the slash in her palm, she stopped abruptly. “Why? What’s happened?”

He reached out for her hand, turning it in his. His hand was strong, his fingertips rough. “Painful cut.”

“I was peeling vegetables, carrots. For soup.” Her throat gone dry, she swallowed and coughed.

“Sore throat?” he asked, still holding her hand palm up.

His fingers closed around her hand, capturing it.

“No.” She was afraid to tug her hand free.

He tilted her hand toward the light and studied it. “There’s a nasty virus going around.” He looked at her. The glasses concealed his expression as he said, “You want to be careful, Ms. Harris. You could be coming down with something.”

“No. I’m not catching a cold.” Molly knew he wasn’t asking out of concern for her health. “Why are you here?” She withdrew her hand, managing not to jerk it out of his light, careful grasp.

“There’s been a problem. Down at your part of the bayou. Near the boat pier.”

Feeling as if she were moving through shifting sand, Molly went to the living room window facing the bayou and looked out. Off in the distance she saw a van and several figures milling around the edge of the water. “What happened?” She turned back to face him, but the light was at her back and she couldn’t see him clearly even though he removed his sunglasses and hooked them into his pocket, but she had an impression of grim eyes, golden brown, watching her.

“Someone was murdered last night on your bayou.”

Murdered. “Are you sure? Murdered?” The word tolled through her, over and over, like the deep-toned bells of the First Presbyterian Church in town. Murder. Irrevocable.

“Oh, yes, we’re sure.” His thin mouth lifted. “No question. Two fishermen passing by early this morning saw the body and called us. Yes, we’re sure.” His long fingers curled around his notebook. “You know anything that could help us?”

“I told you. I was asleep.”

“Yes. So you did.” Threat, implicit. Explicit in the dark velvet of his voice, in the hidden gaze.

At some level, ever since she’d woken up on the kitchen floor, she’d been envisioning news like this. But it still short-circuited her brain and left her struggling for an answer while John Harlan’s golden brown eyes followed her every twitch and movement.

“Who?” Her heart pounding like a captured bird, she couldn’t hold his relentless gaze.




CHAPTER TWO


“Why don’t you put on your shoes, and we’ll go down to the bayou together? We believe you could save us some time if you can identify the body.” The detective’s mild voice coaxed her, his tone soothing. She didn’t trust him for a minute. He’d reached for her hand again and his thumb rested lightly, so lightly against the wound in her palm that she felt as if he’d manacled her to him. “Can you do that, Ms. Harris?” He released her wrist with an unreadable expression.

She shivered as his fingers brushed the edges of hers.

“Will you come down to the bayou, please, and take a look at her?” Relentless, his mild voice, deceptive in its honeyed assault that hid the sting.

“Her?” Needing breath, Molly tugged at the neck of her sweatshirt. Nightmare visions, bloodred, danced in her brain.

John Harlan’s gaze watched the nervous pulling of her fingers against the often-washed cotton. “Ah, I’ve distressed you.” His words were oddly old-fashioned. No sympathy in his deep voice, though, despite his polite words. He shifted, one hip slanting forward, the expensive fabric of his slacks flowing and tightening with the casual movement. “Something bothering you, Ms. Harris?”

“You said someone has been murdered. Murder bothers me,” she breathed through chalk-dry lips.

“I’m sure it does,” he said, stepping so close that the power in his looming form and wide shoulders made her claustrophobic. “Well, that makes at least two of us then. I don’t like murder, either.” His courteous expression, at odds with his tough face, never altered as his voice dropped so deep that Molly felt its vibration down to her toes. “Or murderers.”

Molly retreated. She couldn’t help her backward step. Not for the life of her could she have stayed unmoving in the face of his inexorable advance.

“Shoes?” he reminded her gently, his hands resting easily on his narrow hips, not touching her. Yet she felt the press of his broad palm hot at the base of her spine.

She bolted for the kitchen.

As fast as she moved, he followed right on her heels through the living room into the kitchen.

She’d left the knife in the middle of the floor. She saw it as soon as she stepped into the room. How could she have forgotten it? She jerked to a stop. Then, moving in slow motion, her brain disconnected from her body, she reached down, picked the knife up by the wooden handle and turned to face John Harlan, the knife extended toward him.

Arms folded across his chest, he rested against the arch of the door between the kitchen and the living-room hall. Satisfaction moved across his austere face like a faint cloud as he remarked, “A mite large for peeling vegetables, I’d think.”

“Yes,” Molly answered, her words mechanical as she felt the knife tremble in her outstretched grasp.

He smiled, the edges of his thin, beautifully shaped lips curling up. His smile didn’t begin to reach to the depths of his golden brown, watchful eyes. “Interesting decorating idea. You often store your kitchen utensils on the floor?”

“I dropped it. When I heard the doorbell.” Stiff-legged, holding the knife out from her as far as she could, Molly walked to the sink and let the damned thing fall into it. Sagging over the basin, she drew shallow breaths as she stared at the dried water spots on the stainless steel. Numb, she wanted to pray, but found no words as the walls closed in on her.

No way out.

Crackle and static as the detective spoke into his handset. “Yeah, Ross. In the sink. Yeah, when you finish down there. No hurry.” And then again he was close behind her, the heat from his body radiating against hers. “Your knife, Ms. Harris?” On the surface nothing more than mild interest, but underneath, oh, underneath where it counted, she heard the quiet threat in his deep voice. Lifting the knife from the sink by its sharp point, he repeated, “Yours?”

She nodded. Of course it was. She’d already admitted as much. Everything in the house was hers. Had been hers since her parents had been killed a year ago. Home invasion. Burglary gone out of control, the police had decided.

Murdered. Their blood on the floor, the walls.

The police had never caught the killer. Or killers.

Molly tugged once more at the neck of her sweatshirt. Air. She needed air. Running to the door to the porch gallery, she flung it open and stood shivering in the morning air, gasping.

The rain had become a silvery drizzle in the gray light, the soundless shapes down at the bayou emerging from the mist and disappearing back into it. The murky coil of water drifted by them.

Even chilled, she found the wet air hard to breathe, and she couldn’t stand the rasping sounds she made. Weakness to let Detective John Harlan see her fear.

When he closed his palm over her shoulder, she jumped.

“Might be a virus after all,” he murmured as her breath rattled in her throat. He raised his eyebrow, an elegant arch of black against his night-pale skin.

His grasp of her shoulder seemed heavy, but she knew the force was all in her own mind, not in the actual weight of his fingers curving over her. “Maybe you’re right,” she whispered, the air cool and damp against her face. Her pulse pitter-patted at the base of her throat. “Maybe I am coming down with a cold.”

“Or something. But we’ll see, won’t we?”

She nodded.

He slanted his head toward the bayou. “In the meantime, to help you stay healthy, shoes?” His words once again seemed to carry another message, but Molly couldn’t decipher it or his slow, appraising glance, which began at her feet, moved leisurely over her and ended at her fingers clenched in the neckline of her shirt.

“All right.” Molly looked at the sinuous bayou. Down there. Someone had been murdered during the night.

“I think you might even know the victim.” He turned her back into the kitchen with almost no effort.

“What?” Her knees gave way and she lurched against him before she regained her balance. She couldn’t have resisted the strength in those thin fingers if she’d had to. She felt the implied power and yielded. “All right. I don’t think I’ll be able to help you, though. I’m sure I don’t know her,” she said through stiff lips.

“Won’t know if we don’t go look, will we?” He scratched the center of his broad back against the wall and watched as she pulled on her sneakers and tied them. “Ready?” And there he was, his hand clamped around her elbow. Despite his impression of lazy strength, he moved too fast for her.

Pulling free, she stopped. “Why do I have to identify whoever that is?” Wildly she pointed to the bayou but didn’t, couldn’t, look again in the direction of the sullen water drifting past her property. “Was?”

“You don’t have to.” His hand returned firmly to her elbow. “It will probably be unpleasant.” He walked her to the gallery. “I’m sure you want to cooperate with us, don’t you, Ms. Harris?” Silky smooth with warning, his voice vibrated through her. “There’s no reason not to help us unless you have something to hide. You don’t, do you, Ms. Harris? Have anything to hide?”

He’d moved her to the stairs leading from the gallery to the lawn and onto the grass before she could speak. Raindrops splatted her face as she looked at his fingers gripping her arm.

“Of course not.” Glancing at him, she said, “And I don’t need your help walking across my own yard. You can turn me loose.” She shot him a glance filled with all the frustrated anger and fear and hostility boiling in her. “Unless you’re arresting me?” Saying the words out loud diminished her fear and gave her strength. She shrugged herself out of his grasp, surprised by the ease with which she freed herself.

“Arresting you? Now why would you think I’d arrest you, Ms. Harris?” The amusement glinting in his golden brown eyes disabused her of the notion that she’d had anything to do with the fact that she was now walking unaided down the sloping, rough terrain leading to the bayou.

Detective Harlan was playing games with her. Watching her reactions, he was enjoying toying with her.

But then he had nothing to lose.

She did.

Her freedom.

Her sanity.

“As I said, why would you think I’m arresting you?” His voice intruded on her chaotic thoughts.

Letting her antagonism snake between them, Molly slipped her cold hands into her jeans pockets. “Doesn’t it make sense that I would think you were trying to see if I had stabbed that woman, whoever she is?”

“Ah, well, Ms. Harris, I don’t remember saying she’d been stabbed.” Though his heavy eyebrows drew together in puzzlement, his voice mocked her.

“You told the other detectives to pick up my knife for evidence. I assumed—”

“Assumptions are dangerous, Ms. Harris. Especially where murder’s concerned. I’m a cop. I don’t assume anything. I just, well, I just look at what I find. Evidence. You know.” He was so close to her that his thigh brushed against hers, a solid flex of muscle.

Avoiding him, Molly stepped sideways. She couldn’t look at the black plastic bag on the ground at the water’s edge. She’d seen the body bag in that quick glance through her living-room window and hadn’t been able to look at it since then. She lengthened her stride, trying to put distance between herself and Detective Harlan. With his air of casual menace, he made her uneasy, made her skin itchy. “I knew because you told the other detectives to collect the knife,” she insisted dully.

“Of course I did. Such an interesting place to find a knife, wouldn’t you agree?” His long legs kept effortless pace with her shorter, hurried strides. His warm hand on the inside of her arm stopped her before she could break into a run. “Are you a murderer, Ms. Harris?” he asked politely, his low voice skimming over her skin, frightening in its indifference.

Molly saw the dead woman’s face framed by the partially zippered plastic bag. She swayed, his hands slid to her waist, and with John Harlan’s imprisoning arms around her, Molly felt the world go cold and dark.

She came to sitting on the wet grass, Harlan’s hand pressing her head between her knees. Nothing had changed.

Everything had changed.

“Ah, you did know her then?” His fingers were firm around the column of her neck.

“Yes.” Letting her head rest on her knee, Molly wiped the tears, the rain, whatever, away from her face. “She was my friend. My maid. Had been my maid for two years. I fired her three months ago.” She pressed her face against the frayed denim at her knees, drying the hot tears burning her eyes, her mouth, her soul.

“I see.” He hunkered at her side, the fabric of his slacks tight against his muscular thighs.

“No! You don’t!” With Camina lying on the ground in front of her, her frizzy blond hair splashed against the black plastic, Molly was suddenly filled with explosive rage. Using John Harlan’s arm, she pulled herself upright, and he rose with her in a graceful unwinding of muscle. “Someone killed my friend!”

“Simple cops that we are, we were able to figure that much out, Ms. Harris. I know our reputation is occasionally less than what we’d like, but, trust me, we had no trouble identifying this as murder.” His laugh was rough-edged. He stepped close to her, but he didn’t let his wide shoulders block her view of Camina.

He was standing knee-to-knee with her, his palms flat and hot at her waist. Such heat in his broad hands. Rain glittered in his hair, spotted his black jacket, the gleam of his black shirt. She could smell the heat of him rising to her in the rain, clean, fresh. This close to him, she realized for the first time that he wasn’t as tall as she’d thought. He’d seemed enormous, terrifying, as he’d stood on her front porch. In fact, he was under six feet.

Only a man.

Then Molly looked into his face and realized that John Harlan was every bit as terrifying as she’d believed.

Nothing merciful in his golden brown eyes, no amusement in the mouth curling in a smile, nothing but steel in the grip of his hands. Implacable.

And he was hunting her.

Acknowledging the understanding between them, he tipped his head. “There’s something else I want you to take a look at.” Marching her in front of him like a captive, he kept his hands tight around her waist. The toe of his shoe bumped the bag. He nodded to one of the technicians, who unzipped the plastic farther down.

“I can’t. I can’t.” Sobs bent Molly in two. She saw the dark, rain-wet blood on Camina’s blouse. That was enough. Covering her mouth, she pleaded, “No more, please. I want to go home.”

“In a minute.” Harlan was impatient as he stepped around Camina, leading Molly to the dock. “She was found there.” He indicated the body on the ground and then pointed to a trail of blood leading from it to the pier. “But she was killed here. On the dock. Why was your maid—your friend, I think you said—waiting on your boat dock last night, Ms. Harris? Who was she waiting for?”

There were muddy footprints at the edge of the dock. A smudged pattern danced from one end of the dock to the other, the outline of Camina’s footprints washing away with the drizzle.

And then, of course, the blood. Couldn’t forget that. There was always the blood.

“Why was your maid on this dock last night, Ms. Harris?” Harlan’s voice was relentless. “Tell me. I know you’re hiding something, Ms. Harris. I just haven’t figured out what. But I will, you know. Sooner or later, I’ll find out. I always do.” Like water plinking into a sink, driving a person crazy, his words fell around her. “You know you want to get out from under the burden of what you’re keeping to yourself, whatever you’re hiding behind that cool little mask.” He touched her face. “Think what a relief it will be to tell me everything, Ms. Harris, to get rid of all those secrets you’re guarding so earnestly.” He paused and lifted her hand, traced the wound.

“I don’t have anything to say. I’m not hiding anything.” Molly looked him straight in the face.

“No secrets? Ah.” He paused. “Well, we all have them, you know. Believe me—” he curled her fingers over the gash in her palm “—there’s nothing you can say that I haven’t heard before, Ms. Harris. There’s nothing you can’t say to me.”

His voice caressed her, seducing her with its false gentleness, until Molly wanted to tell him everything. But she couldn’t. She anchored herself with that knowledge even as his words continued to curl around her.

“Tell me, Ms. Harris. It won’t be hard. And you’ll be glad when you don’t have to hide anymore. You won’t have to lie. Won’t have to worry about what you’ve said or not said. Everything finally out in the open. Secrets will destroy you, you know. Why don’t you tell me? Everything. And then you can sleep.” And, though he wasn’t touching her, his hand seemed to brush over her cold face, warming it. “You haven’t been sleeping, have you? And you’re tired.”

Even though she’d insisted that she’d slept all through the night, he’d known somehow she hadn’t.

Tender, filled with understanding, the flow of his voice surrounded her. “I know you’re hiding something, Ms. Harris. And I want to help you.” He brushed her hair away from her face. The wet ends clung to her cheek, and he lifted them free. “Let me help you. You need to tell me. And you will—like I said, sooner or later. So why not now?”

Weaving a seductive pattern around her, into her weary, frightened mind, John Harlan’s hypnotic voice went on and on, and she fought it, fought with every ounce of energy left in her.

But oh, yes, she wanted to tell him. She was so tired of being alone. And she wanted to sleep with no shadows hovering at the edge of her mind. To sleep…

The thought stirred in her sludge-thick mind and wouldn’t go away.

His was the voice of her demon lover, cajoling her, and she wanted to surrender to the velvety ease he promised. She could sleep if she were in jail, if she were safe behind metal bars hard as the steel she sensed in John Harlan. To yield to sleep, to let his cape wrap around her and to forget, if only for one night…. To sleep.

“I…” She shook her head. Raindrops scattered onto him from her swinging hair.

“Yes?” he encouraged. “Go ahead.” He led her closer to the disappearing trail of Camina’s footprints. “What happened, Ms. Harris? Did she come here last night to ask for her job back? Is that how it started?” He waited, his warmth in front of her, the rain cold on her back. “Did she come to tell you that you shouldn’t have fired her? Did you argue? And strike out? Not meaning to, I know,” he said reassuringly, betrayal lurking in the darkness of his voice.

For a long time Molly stood, head down, watching the bloodstains grow dimmer in the increasing rain while John Harlan’s voice drummed against her.

“What happened?” Endless patience now in the way he never moved, endless understanding in his low voice.

And none of it real.

“Did you come out here, Ms. Harris? Did you see Camina Milar standing here in the rain last night?” He pointed to the dock. “You could have seen her from upstairs in your house. From your living room. From any room with a view of the bayou.” He shrugged. “She was outside here…for a long time.” He pointed to a pile of lipstick-marked cigarette butts. “Think about her, all alone out here in the rain, waiting, hour after hour. What happened, Ms. Harris?”

She would tell him everything. She opened her mouth.

Something flickered in the grass at the edge of her vision, a motion of the tall grass as though a creature stole through it. Distracted, Molly was released from the spell of Harlan’s voice, and she lifted her head and looked at him.

“Nothing!” Moving very carefully—she had no wish to stir the power hiding inside him—she pulled his hands away from her waist and turned toward her house. Over her shoulder she threw back at him, “Aren’t you supposed to Mirandize me or something if I’m a suspect? Read me my rights?”

She was freezing—shock setting in. Too much had happened. She had to go inside. She would be safe there. Later, she would think about the vision he’d created of Camina standing outside, cupping her hands around her lit cigarette and smoking steadily while the rain fell around her in the dark.

And then she had died.

Stabbed.

That was how it had been.

Must have been.

Screams building inside her, Molly ran to the house, across the gallery and into her kitchen. Huddling in the corner, she sank once more to the floor and jammed her fist into her mouth to stop the screams.

If she started, she might not stop.

Ever again.

Harlan watched the slim, fragile figure of Molly Harris vanish into rain as silvery gray as her wide, innocent eyes. He’d seen eyes that innocent before, eyes that stared at him with all the innocence anyone could ever ask for. But those innocent eyes had been lying, lying all the way to the electric chair. Years ago that had been, but he’d never forgotten his brother’s innocent eyes pleading with him, his brother lying with his last breath.

And why should he forget? After all, his brother had been arrested with a gun in his hand, his bloodstained shirt casually tossed into the back seat of his convertible. A lovers’ quarrel. People lied all the time and looked back at you with shiny-eyed innocence.

Molly’s eyes had been circled with exhaustion. He’d known she was lying about having slept through the night. She hadn’t slept well for a long time, and the strain showed in the fine lines around her eyes, in the faint tremble of her soft mouth, in the constant quivers he’d felt every time he touched her. Nothing sexual in those shivers. Something else.

He’d liked the feel of her slim waist between his hands, though, he thought regretfully; had liked the feel of those shivers rippling against his fingers. Had thought about sex. Hard not to with her staring dazed at him, trembling, the rain misting in her pale brown hair.

Hot, wild sex, her tea-colored hair sliding across his chest, her eyes blurred with pleasure as she moved with him. Yeah. He’d thought about sex even as he’d looked into Molly Harris’s innocent face and wondered if she had, as he suspected, stabbed Camina Milar.

Harlan raked his hands through his own hair, dismissing the feel of Molly lingering still against his palms. He thought instead about the strain he recognized in her.

That strain showed in the way she started at every sound. Guilt? Fear? They were flip sides of each other sometimes. Fear of being caught? Fear of what she’d done when she’d stepped outside the boundaries of normal behavior? Possibly.

Watching her run recklessly to the safety of her house, he slicked back his wet hair and brushed off the knees of his grimy trousers. Looking at the mud stains and God only knew what else, he frowned. Hundred-and-fifty-dollar pants, and he’d be lucky if the cleaners ever got them clean. Well, hell, nobody’d ever promised him that a detective’s lot was an easy one. He slapped at an oily smear along the calf.

At the sharp crack of the screen door, he snapped his head in the direction of the house, staring at the door that had slammed behind Molly Harris as she fled into her curiously colorless house.

Her newly decorated house.

Rain ran in rivulets down the back of his neck as he regarded the graceful lines of the house. From the crushed-shell driveway leading up to the porte cochere and tall columns at the front entrance, to the long, low windows opening onto the gallery, the house was a superb example of old county architecture.

He’d recognized the address as soon as he’d seen it on the crime report. Before collecting his partner, Ross, and heading to the crime scene, on an impulse and out of curiosity, Harlan had pulled the files on the last murders at this lovely, idyllic house. While Ross drove the car, Harlan had skimmed the reports, reading for highlights while he refreshed his recollections of one of the most horrifying crimes in Palmasola County in the past fifty years.

With the prominence of the family involved and all that beautiful, beautiful money, the case had had all the earmarks, except sex, of a grocery-store scandal rag. Because of the money involved, the detectives on the case had followed the principle of cui bono, but the lovely daughter and charming son had had ironclad alibis. So did the lovely daughter’s ex-husband. Random home invasion. Murder as a result. And the homicide division had never solved the case. Reading over the files as Ross throttled the car down to a sedate fifty-five, Harlan wished he’d been one of the investigating detectives. The case had the feel of something pulpy and rotten at the core. His favorite kind.

Now, thoughtfully eyeing the lines of the gracious old mansion, he tilted his head. Too easy to know why Molly Harris had redone her kitchen and living room. Would have taken an idiot not to understand.

Her parents had been killed there. She’d found them shortly after midnight.

Molly Harris was edging along a mighty thin wire, and something had put her out there, something in addition to the unsolved year-old murder of her parents.

He’d give a good damn to know what was stringing her so tight right now. The more he thought about Molly Harris, the more he wished he’d been on that original case.

And wished he could have been one of the first officers to question her, because the scent of something rancid about the murders called to him in the darkest part of his soul. His mouth tight in derision, he smiled to himself. An alibi was only an alibi until it fell apart.

If Molly Harris with her innocent eyes had had secrets a year ago, he would have broken her. He clasped his hands and raised them skyward, stretching out the kinks. He’d have broken sweet Ms. Molly, broken her with immense pleasure.

Either way, though, she was hiding something now. He’d known that even before she answered her front door. Her voice quavering all over creation had been the first giveaway. He’d almost found out what she was protecting so fiercely, too. But he’d screwed up somehow this time. Next time he wouldn’t. He’d crack her like a sweet almond.

Tasting the rain on the edge of his mouth, he smiled. Before Ms. Harris saw the last of him, he’d know all her secrets, one way or the other.

He hadn’t Mirandized her. Hadn’t really thought he should yet. But if she’d blurted out a confession, Thomas would have been royally pissed off, and rightly so.

It would have been his final foul-up with the chief. If Molly Harris had confessed to him, Harlan would have been lucky if Thomas had kicked his rear to Mount Vesuvius and let it fry there.

That would have been the best-case scenario.

He didn’t want to think about the worst-case one.

Shrugging as he kicked at the tough saw grass and sandy clumps near the pilings of the pier, Harlan frowned. In the grainy light, something glinted underneath the dock, caught between the rough slats.

Stepping carefully onto the mucky, spongy ground, he looked up at the bottom of the pier. There. He could see it glittering. Gold.

Holding on to the top of the pier with one hand and straining with the other, he swung one-handed out over the dark water and reached, grabbed and swung back to the shore again, the thin gold bracelet dangling from his fingers.

A prize. The catch was broken, snapped off. Only luck he’d seen the thing. He smiled. Luck.

“Hey, Ross?” Harlan beckoned the tall, red-haired, crime-scene technician over. “Look what I have.” Holding the shiny chain up, he continued, “Tell Tanner I’ll be through with Ms. Harris in about twenty minutes and we’ll head back to town. I’m goin’ to stroll up to the big house and ask one or two more questions,” he said, mockingly swinging the bracelet in front of Ross’s face. “Maybe I can hypnotize her into confessing, and we can all go home.”

“Sure, boss, but the guys aren’t anywhere near through down here. We baggied the victim’s hands, collected some evidence off the pier, but a lot of stuff has washed away with the rain. I don’t think we’ll find the murder weapon unless a blood match shows up on that knife you wanted us to get. We’re waiting for the search warrant on that. Should be here soon.”

“Good.” Harlan strode to the large white house glimmering ghostly in the rain and mist. In spite of everything that had happened, Molly Harris had chosen to stay in the family home. Interesting.

She was at the kitchen sink staring out at him as he approached. He heard the water running from the faucet, and thought of Lady Macbeth futilely washing her hands over and over again after the murder of the king.

Tapping on the screen door, he opened it without waiting for her invitation. “Ms. Harris?”

“Yes?” She cleared her throat.

A lovely throat it was, too, long and curving into her washed-out, winter-white sweatshirt with its gaping neckline. White was her color, all right. She looked like a pale nun, a streak of winter rain…He curbed his thoughts.

“I have three additional questions I need to ask you.” Stepping into the white-and-black kitchen, Harlan watched her nervous step back, forward. He liked the fact that she was nervous. She should be. Keeping her nervous suited him. “If you don’t mind?”

“Would it matter if I did? Should I call my lawyer?” That edgy animosity he’d caught earlier surfaced through her cool, husky voice. She was dragging herself together with an incredible effort, questions she should have asked him earlier now obviously coming to mind. Or maybe she’d decided how to play her role.

Either way, her struggle for control interested him. Under other circumstances, Molly Harris would be a woman with a certain sass and vinegar to her.

Sticking her hands under the water, never letting her gaze drift from his, she added, “I can, you know. I have a lawyer, and he can be here in thirty minutes. And I would still be considered a cooperative witness.”

He’d been right. Ms. Harris had a dash of cayenne under all that fragile sweetness. Well, it was going to be fascinating to find out what else she had hidden. He was beginning to like the idea of discovering Molly Harris’s secrets.

Coming closer, walking right up to the sink, he decided he liked, too, the way the washed-thin, rain-soaked sweatshirt clung to her small curves, skimming down her shoulders to mold her delicate breasts and outline their rain-chilled peaks. Where the sweatshirt rode up to her waist, caught there by the waistband, he could see the soaked and sandy rear end of her jeans, the ridged outline of her panties showing against the butter-soft denim.

He reached past her.

She shuddered but didn’t step away.

Ms. Harris had courage, too.

Pushing down the faucet lever, he turned off the relentless gush of water. “Conservation, Ms. Harris,” he murmured into her ear.

She leapt back, the toes of one bare foot tripping against the heel of the other. “What were your questions, Detective? I’ll decide if I should call my lawyer. Ask your damned questions and then,” she said, false civility riming her words, “please, get out of my house. Since you don’t have a search warrant.” One hand with its chewed nails crept toward her neckline until she realized what she was doing and jammed both hands into her pockets.

“Certainly,” he said, matching her politeness. “And no, we don’t have a search warrant. But it should arrive any minute.”

She flinched, the wings of her shoulders drawing together as if he’d struck her.

“My questions are simple, really—should be no trouble for you to answer.” He strolled around the room, looking, touching, knowing she was watching his every nonchalant move. He toed the dish of food on the floor. “You have a cat, hmm?”

“Is that one of the three questions?” The triangle of her face tightened, the skin around her full lips pinched with effort. Her wet hands dripped onto the black-and-white tiles.

Harlan moved.

She jumped.

Handing her a paper towel he’d torn off from the rack in back of her, he nodded. “Fair enough. All right. That’s question number one.”

Looking for a trick, she studied him. Her eyes changed to a clear no-color, only that lovely, translucent shimmer of innocence shining in them. “No. I don’t have a cat. I fed a stray this morning before you came.”

“Did you now?” Indifferent once he’d learned what he wanted to know—the look of her when she was telling the truth—he turned his back to her. He glanced down the hall off the kitchen, but in the glass of the door he watched her reflection as he flicked the light switch. There was a very small, almost-imperceptible fleck of blood at the edge of the tab. But he saw it. Smelled the faint fetor of blood.

“Question number two?” She had wadded up the paper towel and clutched it between the small mounds of her breasts. Her hands were shaking again and her breasts trembled with the deep-down quaking he’d seen earlier.

“Ah, well, that’s an easy one, number two is.” Keeping his back turned, he reached into the pocket of his slacks.

Her shoulders hunched and her hands dropped to her sides, her suddenly relaxed fingers letting the wadded paper fall to her feet. She stooped to pick it up and he pivoted and moved in one step, trapping her while she was kneeling on the floor looking up at him.

“Do you know whose bracelet this is, Ms. Harris?” He held the gold chain in front of her.

She did. The dilation of her pupils gave her away. As he watched the blood drain from her face, he wondered distantly if she would lie.

Slowly, as if she’d aged thirty years in an instant, she rose to her feet and reached out to the shiny trinket. “Yes. It was my mother’s. And then mine. Where did you find it? I wear it all the time.”

She stopped, clamping her hands over her mouth, realization smacking her in the face.

“Well, Ms. Harris,” he said, swinging the bracelet back and forth, “therein lies a tale.” Pulling out a kitchen chair, he motioned for her to sit. “And since you’ve asked me a question, I’ll answer it and add one more of my own. Sit down, Ms. Harris.” He pushed her unresisting body into the chair.

Bonelessly she molded to the contours of the chair, in much the same fashion as her sweatshirt had shaped itself to her. “Go ahead.” Her hands were clasped in front of her, so tightly Harlan had the impression that if she ever let go, she would shake apart, all control lost.

He was tempted for that instant to force her hands apart and see what happened. The craving to see Ms. Molly spinning out of control was becoming increasingly strong in him. Too strong. It would warp his judgment.

He placed the strip of gold on the table.

She didn’t touch the bracelet.

“Before I tell you where we found this—” he traced it with his index finger and watched the muscles of her throat convulse once as she swallowed “—you tell me when you last wore it. Not a question, merely quid pro quo, as the man said.”

“You know I must have lost it yesterday.” Defeat shivered in her murmured answer.

“Possibly. Or last night?”

He waited, but she didn’t respond.

“Ah. Well, here’s your answer, Ms. Harris. It was hanging underneath the boards of your dock. Caught there. Right below where the first of the bloodstains appear. Interesting, isn’t it? But that’s a rhetorical question, Ms. Harris, not one of my final two.”

Nodding, she didn’t reply. He heard the click of her teeth, saw the narrow muscle along her jawline bunch into a small knot. She kept nodding.

“Question number three. Why did you fire your maid, who was also your friend?”

Still fisted, her small hands banged onto the table. The thin circlet bounced. “I don’t have to answer that.” The nails were chewed right into the cuticle.

Stress. Fear.

Guilt.

He stroked her narrow index finger, touching the ragged cuticle and staring into her eyes as he asked his last question. Very gently, so gently that he knew he surprised her, he said, “Question number four. If you wear that bracelet all the time, Ms. Harris, and you were inside sleeping the entire night, how did this bracelet get from your wrist—” he held up her right wrist, the bones as thin as the wishbone of a chicken, that easily snapped “—to the dock underneath Camina Milar while she was being murdered?”




CHAPTER THREE


Back and forth, the gold chain swung from Detective Harlan’s fingers.

Needing it as a reminder of all that she’d lost, she’d never taken the bracelet off, not even when she showered. She’d grown so accustomed to the feel of the metal on her skin that she no longer paid attention to it unless it snagged against her clothes. With her wrist cuffed in John Harlan’s strong fingers, Molly wondered why she hadn’t missed the bracelet this morning. Surely she should have noticed its absence from around her wrist.

But she hadn’t noticed much of anything, apparently. Hadn’t noticed herself strolling downstairs and picking up the butcher knife and—what?

She knew one fact that the harsh-faced man in front of her didn’t. The bracelet had been around her wrist when she’d gone to bed.

“Detective Harlan,” she began, fighting the cold numbness spreading through her, “are you arresting me?” She no longer had the will or the ability to fight him, not with the bracelet swaying in front of her, slipping around and around the detective’s long finger as he idly swung the gleaming strand and watched her with those opaque, gold eyes.

In that instant as he studied her with that unnerving, silent assessment, Molly had the oddest fancy that his eyes would glow in the dark.

She shook her head.

At some point in the last year she’d gone mad. There was no other explanation.

In the loneliness of the long days and nights since violence had ripped through her home, she’d lost whole chunks of her life. She no longer understood herself or her behavior. Her competent, organized existence had vanished the night she’d walked in and found her parents lying in the blood-spattered kitchen. Since that night, nothing about her life had been normal.

She understood nothing, felt nothing except the panic of an ever-tightening noose around her neck.

With her free hand she grabbed the neckline of her sweatshirt. It was so tight. “Are you arresting me?”

“I haven’t decided yet, Ms. Harris.” His smile taunted her. Still capturing her wrist in his warm fingers, he returned the piece of jewelry to the table, staring at it as it snaked across the bleached pine. Tipping his head toward the chain but not looking at her, he asked, “How much does a bauble like this cost, Ms. Harris? Two thousand?”

“I don’t know. My father gave it to my mother for their twenty-fifth anniversary.” Wearily she answered his question, understanding that he was listening for nuances of tone, looking for motives. Motives strong enough to send her out in the night to murder her friend. “I never asked.”

“Really? How very uncurious of you, Ms. Harris.” And now he looked down at her and smiled, a cold, calculating smile. “Three thousand, maybe?” His smile let her know he knew almost to the penny how much the bracelet had probably cost.

“I don’t know,” Molly insisted. She’d been right. Detective Harlan was playing games with her. She was out of her league. She tried to separate their joined hands but lacked even the strength to do that. She found a disturbing comfort in the chain of his fingers around her wrist. It was, after all, a human touch, the beat of his pulse hard and fast against her own racing beat, their two pulses joined in a momentary mating that thundered in her ears.

That was real—the sound of her own heart pounding to the beat of his, male to female in her sterile, clean kitchen, the sound of her blood dancing to the rhythm of his.

She’d been wandering for so long in a land where she no longer knew what was real, what was illusory, that Harlan’s hard grip around her wrist gave her a peculiar solace. She could understand for the first time the way captives began to turn to their captors, sunflower to the slow-moving sun overhead.

As the thought flashed through her mind, he pivoted and stared at her, his golden brown eyes fixed unblinking on her face. She was lost in the swirling depths of their changing color, the deepening, darkening pupils, and she sighed, willing for the moment to surrender to the darkness pulling at her.

So much easier. He’d told her it would be. Told her in his low voice that once she told him everything, she could sleep, rest. And she wanted to, needed to. He’d known the need driving her and spoken to it, seduced her with that promise, seduced her with the gleam in his gold eyes. Her head was falling forward; she was tumbling into that golden darkness, falling willingly, knowing she would finally find peace once she gave up her struggle.

She’d resisted that seduction earlier, summoned the last of her waning strength and will, but now…He’d promised her she could sleep. He’d promised her everything would be easier if she told him her secrets. Caught in the glow of his eyes, mesmerized by the pulse beat drumming loudly in her ears, Molly opened her mouth to tell him—tell him everything.

But the pounding, it turned out, was only the red-haired man she’d seen earlier at the bayou banging on her screen door. An illusion, after all.

Letting her wrist drop to the table, Harlan turned to the man, annoyance thick in his soft tones. “Well, damn you to hell, Ross. Your timing is…” He stopped and fingered the bracelet before he continued in a milder voice. “I hope to hell you have the damn search warrant.”

Drawing a shaky breath, Molly stood up. She glanced from the intruder to Harlan and back. It would be more comfortable to talk with the second man. There was nothing intense, nothing threatening in his open face. “You’re going to search my house?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ross looked sheepish. “John was waiting for the warrant. It’s here.”

Pressing her clenched fists into her eyes, Molly waited. Footsteps clattered on her kitchen tiles, moved through her halls.

She’d been here when the police had searched the house after the murder of her parents. Today the familiar sounds were worse. She knew they wouldn’t find anything. She had done nothing, nothing. She sank into a chair and covered her face.

Suspended in an emotional limbo, she drifted, not marking time, barely aware of the sounds and people around her. Except once, when the hairs on her arm rose as someone strode past her. Without looking up, she knew it was John Harlan. He’d stamped her with awareness of him. She’d know him in the dark of a moonless night. He went into the hall, and she sank back into the stupor that had enveloped her when he’d held up the bracelet. At some level she knew she couldn’t stay like this forever, but for the moment, while the intruders tramped through her home, violating it in their own ways, she was protected by the heavy numbness muffling her.

Voices from a distance, faint.

More time passed.

“You got the Luminol, Ross?”

“Hell, no. Scott’s got it.”

The hiss of an aerosol sprayer.

“Looky here, boys. No, not there. The pinpoints don’t mean squat. Over here, this big area. Ain’t it purty?”

She recognized the long, thin fingers pulling her hands away from her eyes.

“Ms. Harris, you need to call your lawyer.” Detective John Harlan was staring at her with a curious, satisfied gleam in his eyes.

Morning had become afternoon. Afternoon, evening. And in the gloom of the rainy day and the evening darkness, all around her in the kitchen, areas of light glowed eerily. On the floor, on the wall, on the light switch.

“Blood, Ms. Harris. Traces show up with Luminol even when things have been washed down.” Harlan held up the butcher knife. It glowed around the crevice where the metal joined the wood.

Light blinded her as one of the technicians flipped the lights on.

“I told you I cut my hand.” She held up her clenched hands.

“Yes. I know you said that.” He was so gentle with her that she wanted to lean against his wide shoulder and weep. She’d been alone so long in unending twilight.

She actually swayed toward him. “Can I trust you?” she whispered, touching his broad chest. The thump of his heart against her hand was important to her in all the illusion. Underneath his black silk shirt, he was warm, safe. She wanted to laugh at that idea, but the reality of his heat against the palm of her hand drew her anyway. “If I tell you everything, will you help me? Can I trust you?” she repeated from the depths of her confusion and despair, wanting to tell him she was afraid she was losing her mind.

“If you’re smart, you won’t. You should trust your lawyer, not me. I’m not here to help you, Ms. Harris. That’s not what I want.” His eyes held hers, warning her. “You know, you never answered my last question, Ms. Harris,” he said in his deep voice. “How did the bracelet you say you always wear wind up underneath the exact spot where Ms. Milar was killed?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Molly whispered, shoving away the memories and anchoring herself to the beat of his heart.

“Call your lawyer, Ms. Harris.” He looked at her with a chilly pity. “You need him. The sooner the better. Because I’m going to find out the answer to that last question. And when I do, I’ll send you to prison. For life. Or to the electric chair.” The pity turned his eyes dark gold. “Call your lawyer.”

A sudden sizzle between them, as if a current had suddenly been turned on. “Yes. All right.” She stumbled toward the phone, but she couldn’t remember where it was.

His hands firm and strong, he turned her toward the wall. “I told you I don’t like murderers. And, Ms. Harris,” he said, his voice once more oddly formal, “I think behind your pretty face you’re a stone-cold killer.”

“A murderer?”

“Yeah.” The rigid planes of his face as cruel as those of any Inquisition judge, he motioned to the phone.

She could see the phone moving on the wall, toward her, away from her, shrinking, disappearing into the darkness that swooped over her and carried her at last into the peace she’d been seeking.

“Hell, John. Look what you’ve done.”

Harlan looked at the woman he held in his arms. He’d caught her as she sagged quietly to the floor, her silvery eyes locked on his blinking ones and then shutting as she took one step forward and collapsed into his arms like sea foam blown across the waves.

“What are you going to do with her?” Ross scratched his head and the red tufts sprang up. “She didn’t call her lawyer.”

“I know.” He looked at the fine tracery of blue veins in her eyelids, at the heavy smudges under her eyes. “I guess I’d look silly as hell carrying her into the station slung over my shoulder, wouldn’t I?” She scarcely weighed anything. He could feel her rib cage against his hands, her breath moving through her erratically.

“Police harassment, John, that’s what it would look like. ’Course, she has enough money to hire a tag team of lawyers to sue the department, too, my man. And you’re on the chief’s list of people he’d most like to roast over an open fire and carve up afterward.”

“Yeah, there’s that, too. So, Ross, you think she murdered that woman?” Harlan stood for a moment not quite sure where to head with his insubstantial burden. Her rapid, shallow breathing sent puffs of air against his chin. Achingly sweet, her breath.

Ross was right. There were layers of issues to be considered here.

“Oh, I’d guess she did. Who else? Her bracelet down at the crime scene, her fingerprints for sure all over the knife. All the evidence seems to point right at her, straight as an arrow.”

Struck by Ross’s comment, Harlan paused. “It does, doesn’t it? Very clearly. We’d have to be stupid to miss all the clues, wouldn’t we?”

“What’re you saying, boss?” More tufts of red sprang loose from the rain-flattened curls as Ross attacked his hair in bewilderment.

“I don’t know. I need to think about this some more.” He could smell the sweetness of her shampoo rising up from her hair. Or maybe it was the sweetness of her skin. Her lower lip trembled, its soft fullness oddly vulnerable to him as he watched her with her guard down.

“The fingerprints aren’t really important, John. Least-wise, I don’t think so. You said she even picked it up when y’all walked into the kitchen, so fingerprints won’t mean much, not with a good lawyer, I reckon. ’Course, our guy’ll insist she was smart enough to pick it up and give a reason for her prints. But, hell, John, I don’t know.”

Harlan carried Molly into the living room and settled her on the cream-colored cotton sofa. “Go upstairs and get a blanket, Ross. There’s not a damned thing down here to cover her up with.” He brushed her face. “She’s like ice. That’s all we need—having her go into shock on us while we’re questioning her. Hell, this is a fouled-up mess.”

Her mouth parted in a sigh as his thumb lingered against the deep curve of her lower lip. He lifted his hand away. Not smart to touch her, he knew that. He didn’t want to touch her delicate face, and scarcely comprehended the impulse that drove him as he brushed a strand of light brown hair away from her pointed chin.

Carrying a brilliant red-and-pink comforter, Ross returned. “You really think she’s guilty, boss? She’s awfully pretty.” Glancing down at Molly, Ross handed the quilt to Harlan.

“Hell, Ross, you know better than that. What she looks like means diddly except to a jury. Looking like an angel at the left hand of God will sure help her if this goes to trial.” He watched the flutter of her eyelashes, those spiky, thick frames for her remarkable eyes. He wanted her awake, awake so the false innocence in her gray-blue eyes would remind him not to let his guard down.

Harlan wrapped Molly up in the bright quilt, its brilliance bleaching her already drained face of any remaining color.

Ross shook his head regretfully as he looked at the small bump that was Molly Harris under the quilt. “You believe she’s our killer, huh? That teeny girl?”

Smoothing her hair back from her face once more, Harlan nodded. “Yeah. Actually, I do. But I don’t like the fact that the evidence is being handed to us on a silver platter.”

“Most victims know their killers.”

Irritated somehow by the oft-repeated cop fact, Harlan raked his hands through his hair. “I know. But it makes me uncomfortable when a case looks this simple.” And something about her alibi for her parents’ murder needled his intuition and irritated him. Well, it would come to him.

Harlan tucked the comforter around her narrow, bare feet. A few grains of sand sprinkled into his hands as he moved her toes.

Dried sand, caught between her toes. He brushed her feet carefully, and more grains drifted into his hands. The bottoms of her feet were scratched. Several small cuts crisscrossed the smooth soles. Shell cuts. Weed abrasions.

Possibly from the shells dotting the shore of the bayou.

“Damn, boss.” Ross shifted uneasily. “This doesn’t look good. I wish to hell she’d called her lawyer before she keeled over.”

“Me, too.” Harlan stretched, arching his back as he fought the contradictory urges to shake Ms. Molly Harris awake and to wrap her tighter in the warmth of her cheerful quilt until its brightness bled into her wan face.

A whimper, faint but audible, escaped her. Her mouth moved as if she were trying to say something, but no words came out. Harlan had the strangest feeling she was screaming, but he frowned, troubled by the idea of Molly Harris silently screaming somewhere in the darkness.

He considered the idea. If she’d done what he thought she had, she should be screaming. And if she hadn’t…

Reaching a decision, he rose. “I’ll be damned if I like this case one little bit. It stinks to high heaven. I mean, I love messy cases, but not where I get the real strong sense that somebody’s doing my work for me. Let’s give the crime-lab boys a chance to do their thing, pin down time of death, do the blood typing, and then we’ll visit Ms. Harris again. We don’t have to arrest her today. She’s not going anywhere.” Harlan watched the rapid lift and fall of the quilt over Molly’s breasts, the shuddering movement touching him in spite of the Luminol glowing in the kitchen, the evidence proclaiming the innocence in her eyes a sham.

Blood had been spilled here. Spilled and washed down. Old blood. Fresh blood.

More blood than a bad cut would produce.

He glanced at her small hand, where the line of the wound was obscene against the smoothness of her skin. It was a nasty cut. Lifting her palm, he studied the cut again.

There was something odd about the way the wound came around the base of her thumb, but he couldn’t figure out what.

He wanted to take her into the station for questioning, photograph the wound and see if the samples of the blood from the wooden handle matched hers or Camina Milar’s.

She whimpered again, her mouth opening in that silent scream. Smoothing his rumpled hair, Harlan dismissed the feeling that somewhere, locked in the darkness of her unconscious, Molly Harris was screaming for help. Too fanciful. He wanted to leave her soft mouth with its maybe screams behind him. Wanted to get back to work. Knowing he was stupid for doing so, he touched her mouth briefly, his finger pressing lightly into the defenseless contours.

“So, what’s the plan, boss?”

Harlan looked away from Molly Harris and the spread of her shiny hair against her couch and reached his decision. “I’m going back to the station. You catch a ride with Tanner, but I want one of you to stay with Ms. Harris until she comes to. You, preferably. If you can?”

“Sure. I’ll work something out. No problem.” Ross grinned. “Hell, this is the closest I’ve come to having a date in a month of Sundays. I reckon I can hang around here awhile.”

“Good.” Harlan heard the tiny whimper again, and it disturbed him. Molly Harris was getting under his skin, when all he wanted was to see her in jail, where he figured she belonged. “Call the medic and have him hang around, too, Ross, okay?”

Ross nodded and reached for his walkie-talkie.

As he studied Molly Harris’s unconscious form, the pain moving over her face like shadows slipping across the moon, Harlan’s uneasiness deepened. He couldn’t escape the impression that he was missing something important about her. And he damn sure didn’t like the feeling that he wanted to stay with her.

He wanted to banish Molly Harris from his thoughts, wanted to roar down her driveway and leave her behind, never giving her another thought. And yet he wanted to keep touching her cool, satiny skin until it warmed, wanted to see her face soft and gazing up at him—

The latter instinct was so strong that he had to restrain himself from heading for the door in two long strides. He rubbed the last of the clinging grains of sand from his hands. Ms. Harris had been walking barefoot in sand and brush, that much was for sure. He sighed.

“The medic’s on his way up from the bayou.”

Harlan shrugged, his still-damp jacket sticking to his slacks. “From the looks of her, Ross, I figure she’s suffering from stress and exhaustion, but have him check her out. Then you stay out of the way until she’s awake. If the medic thinks she’s having any problems, get her to the hospital ASAP, got it? I don’t want any complaints about this case. Understand?” He frowned, that odd reluctance to leave keeping him where he stood despite his better judgment.

“Got it in one, boss.” Waggling a skinny arm, Ross waved him on his way. “Go on along, lil’ dogie.”

Harlan laughed. “You been hanging around the cowboy crew again, Ross?” From the corner of his eye, he caught the shiver of Molly Harris’s hair, tea against the cream of the couch.

“Yup.” Ross tipped back an imaginary hat. “You’d be surprised what you can learn from that bunch of ramblers, boss.”

“Yeah? Watch it. Those dudes can get you in trouble.” Harlan glanced around Molly’s living room once more. It had a surprising familiarity. The pictures in the file had frozen the room’s dimensions in his mind, but even the white on white of its furniture resonated inside him, like a faraway chime on a still afternoon. “Well.” He shrugged. “I’m gone, Ross. Check in with me after you finish here.”

Once more the kitchen was dark. Walking through the room’s eerie Luminol glow, Harlan stared at the dirty cat-food plate. It was the only messy thing in Molly Harris’s kitchen. He reached down and picked up the plate, carrying it to the sink, where he rinsed it. He opened the dishwasher and slid the plate between two rubber-coated prongs.

A glass. Two cups. One plate. In a rinsed-out pan, a fragment of milk scum clung like cobwebs to the edge.

Ms. Harris had made herself hot milk sometime last night.

He glanced around at the well-equipped kitchen. New appliances. Refrigerator. Stove. Pausing, he frowned. Why hadn’t she heated her milk in the microwave?

Harlan took the pan out of the dishwasher and carried it to the stove. Placing it on the grate above the gas burner, he thought for a moment.

She would have been in the kitchen, heating her milk. Sleepless, wanting hot milk so she could fall asleep at some point during the long night.

As if he could see her, a small, solitary form in the night moving slowly about her kitchen, he knew that.

At the stove, he looked up and straight out toward the dock.

In the gray half-light of the rainy winter evening, he could see the dark band of the bayou, the wooden finger of the rickety pier jutting into the water.

At night, what would she have seen?

The glow of Camina’s cigarette. Molly would have seen that bit of light. If she’d been up, wandering through her house, she would have seen the red glow of Camina’s cigarettes.

Turning away from the window overlooking the sink and the bayou, Harlan faced the microwave. His back was to the bayou and the long, empty expanse of lawn.

In the glass door of the microwave, shadows moved behind him, reflections like ghosts shimmering in back of him, watching him.

No, she wouldn’t have used the microwave at night. She wouldn’t have wanted to turn her back on all that darkness.

He knew that about her. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

That ability to leap from A to Z was part of his luck. One of the things that made him a good cop. One of the things that made the chief crazy, because Harlan couldn’t explain it.

He didn’t know where the knowledge came from. He’d always had it. Not being given to flights of fancy, he tried not to examine the source of his knowing. He didn’t believe in psychic mumbo jumbo, but even so, some things were better left unexplained, even for a cop whose intuition had always given him an edge.

He didn’t like mysteries, though—especially when they were his own. So intuition was as good an explanation as any.

Glancing around the kitchen one last time, he knew Molly Harris had roamed through her kitchen last night, had her cup of milk and had gone outside. The knowledge was just there, inside him.

Stepping out onto the gallery, he looked down the rain-swept lawn toward the driveway and saw Tanner waiting beside the car. Walking toward him, Harlan turned once and stared back at the house encircled by moss-heavy oak trees, the moss hanging wet and gray in long loops.

The first-floor gallery, unscreened, wrapped the lower portion of the house. Off the rooms upstairs, a second gallery ran from the sides of the house all around to the back. With no outside staircases, that gallery was accessible only from the inside rooms opening onto it. On the tall, floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the house, the drapes and shades were drawn back. He saw the light shining on the table next to the sofa, saw Molly Harris’s red-and-pink quilt, imagined the thin line of her arm hanging down to the wooden floor. Imagined her soft mouth open in silent pleading.

The house had been closed off from outside eyes when he and Ross had first driven up. He’d thought it secretive as they drove up the winding driveway hedged by enormous double yellow hibiscus bushes. Climbing into his car and nodding to Tanner, who wandered back down toward the bayou, where bright searchlights sliced the dark, Harlan decided that Molly must have opened the shutters and pulled back the drapes when she’d fled back to the house after his earlier questioning.

He’d fought the urge to pursue her to the house.

Just as he now disregarded the sense that he should turn around and go back to her house.

Stay with her.

She’d been defenseless in his arms as he’d carried her past the open gallery into the huge, empty house.

Trying to ease the tightness between his shoulder blades, Harlan rolled his shoulders.

Firing up the engine, he let it idle for a long time as he continued to stare at the house, at the image of Molly in the long window facing him, the light shining down on her, while outside, night crept silently closer. Finally, he shifted into first and drove away, the rain blurring the windshield.

Stay with her.

The shoulder harness pulling against his chest, he turned and saw the house disappear behind him into the sheeting rain. Just before he looked back at the driveway, he frowned.

He thought he’d seen a shape move at the corner of the house.

Molly woke up abruptly, her heart pounding sickeningly.

The gleam of the lamp on the table turned the man’s hair carroty.

Her pulse slowed as she recognized him. He’d been here with Detective Harlan. She turned her head.

No one else was in the room.

Her mouth was dry—sleepy dry, not the cotton dry of fear. She wet her lips. They were cracked.

She yawned. She’d slept the afternoon through. Unbelievable. Perhaps she ought to see if the man wanted to Molly-sit in the evenings.

“Hey there, Ms. Harris.”

Struggling to rise, Molly found she was cocooned in her quilt, the wild hues splashing the somber, clean whiteness of her living room with streaks of reddish color.

Pushing the quilt away, she gagged, remembering the dark stains against Camina’s blouse, remembering other stains. “Where is everyone?”

“All gone. Harlan told me to stay until you woke up. The doc checked you out. You keeled over like a chopped tree and went right to sleep. Doc said to let you sleep, that you’d wake up in your own good time.”

“I was asleep?” She wanted verification. “Did I…” How could she ask him if she’d gotten up, draped in her comforter, and roamed her house, eyes open wide but her mind asleep, off guard?

“Relax. You never said a word.” His grin was wide and uncomplicated.

She’d been right. Nothing hidden in this man, unlike John Harlan with his enigmatic flashes of irony, his comments that implied more than they said. She shivered and pulled the comforter over her shoulders. She was glad the redhead had stayed with her. She didn’t like the idea of waking up and knowing that the detective had watched her in her sleep, watched her while she was vulnerable. She shivered again.

“I just…slept?” Molly huddled into the quilt, relieved.

“Oh, you squeaked a few times, like you were trying to say something. That’s all.” He stood up and stretched his long arms toward the ceiling. “John said to check in with him when you came to. I’m supposed to tell you not to take any out-of-town trips.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I’m supposed to tell you also that John will be back tomorrow. You’ll need to have your lawyer with you. If you want, you can come into the station instead, though.” He wrinkled his face, too young and embarrassed to be comfortable confronting her with their suspicions.

“Yes. Of course.” Molly cleared her throat. “Why didn’t Detective Harlan arrest me today?”

“Well, you’ll have to ask him, ma’am. Tomorrow,” the redhead said reassuringly. “I don’t think he was afraid you’d run off, though. You aren’t going to, are you?” Worry creased his freckle-splotched face. “Because Harlan would kill me if he thought I hadn’t made it clear that you were only being questioned, ma’am, not arrested. No cause to do anything foolish, ma’am.”

“Not yet, anyway?” Molly managed a laugh. It wouldn’t have fooled John Harlan, its high pitch patently false even to her own ears, but the young technician smiled back in relief.

“Well, good night then, ma’am. You want to lock up behind me?”

Wrapped in her quilt, Molly still felt shivers edging bump by bump up her spinal column. “Oh, yes. I’ll see you out through the kitchen.” Rising too quickly to her feet, she was momentarily dizzy, but she steadied herself on the arm of the couch. “Do you mind waiting with me here while I close the drapes and lock up?” She shot him an easygoing smile, not letting on how desperately she wanted him to stay in her house all night while she slept. This young man. But not John Harlan. She wouldn’t have slept had he remained behind.

“Nope, I don’t mind. You want some help?” He walked toward the front door.

“No. Thanks, anyway. It will only take me a second more down here.” She had to check the locks herself. She didn’t trust anyone else, not even this blue-eyed young cop.

While Ross Whittaker—he’d told her his name—waited, Molly went through her nightly routine. With him by her side, she felt safe from the fear that she was whirling off into some world she’d never escape from.

Ross Whittaker was so normal that he made her believe during these moments that she’d imagined everything that had happened to her in the last months.




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