Home Before Midnight (24 page)
Read Home Before Midnight Online
Authors: Virginia Kantra
Tags: #Contemporary Romance, #mobi, #Romantic Suspense, #epub, #Fiction
A long time ago.
He blotted the sweat from his upper lip with his handkerchief, smoothed his hair and stepped through the study door.
BAILEY bowed her head, willing her hands to release their death grip on her mother’s steering wheel.
She’d made the right decision. She had enough strikes against her without adding withholding evidence and obstructing justice to the list. She needed to tell Steve her story before Regan spewed her version of that awful kiss to the police, before Paul . . .
Bailey’s stomach pitched to her shoes. She couldn’t think about Paul yet.
She peered through the windshield. Steve lived in a white, two-story house in a block of other white, two-story houses with detached garages, mature shrubs, and neat lawns. The setting was familiar and nonthreatening. Much better than the police station. Really.
Her heart beat high and hard in her chest.
Uncurling her fingers from the steering wheel, Bailey dragged herself from the car. She hauled the evidence box from the back seat and stood staring at the yellow porch light.
She braced her shoulders and tottered up the walk. Before she reached the steps, the front door opened. Her stomach rocketed from her shoes to her throat.
Steve loomed, cut in light and shadow, framed against the dim interior of the house.
He gestured to the box. “Can I help you with that?”
She swallowed. “I hope so.”
His eyebrows climbed, but he didn’t say anything, just came down the steps and swung the box into his arms. Muscled arms. In the hours since the funeral, he’d changed from his suit into jeans and a plain dark T-shirt that clung to his broad chest and shoulders.
Bailey averted her gaze, unsettled by this sight of him, by the late hour and his casual clothes. He was a police detective. It was easier to think of him as a police detective when he wore the suit.
He opened the door for her with one hand and nodded towards the back of the house. “Kitchen’s that way.”
She walked past him, past the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs, along a narrow hallway that smelled reassuringly of lemon furniture polish. Floral prints and faded family portraits of solemn-faced toddlers and smiling brides hung on the walls.
“Nice place.” And not at all what she expected. She thought he’d be more the black leather and beer cans type. Unless this was stuff his wife had picked out.
His eyes were hooded. Unreadable. “This is my mother’s house.”
So they both lived at home. Dr. Phil would have a field day with that. Norman Bates from
Psycho
meets the crippled chick from
The Glass Menagerie
. Except Steve was way too virile to play old Norman, and Bailey was the one suspected of murder. . . . She winced.
Psycho
meets the crippled chick from
The Glass Menagerie
. Except Steve was way too virile to play old Norman, and Bailey was the one suspected of murder. . . . She winced.
“She’s out of town this weekend,” Steve continued easily. “Back tomorrow night. She goes with her book club to the Highland games in Linville every year.”
Bailey collected herself enough to ask, “She’s interested in log throwing?”
“The correct term is caber toss. But I think she just likes men in kilts,” he said.
Bailey smiled wanly. He was trying to put her at ease, she knew, filling the awkward silence, hiding his curiosity and impatience. As if it were perfectly okay for her to invade his home and his privacy at a quarter to twelve on a Friday night. No problem, he’d said.
If only he knew.
She had to tell him.
“Something to drink?” He set the carton on the table in the breakfast nook, looking surprisingly at home against the oak cabinets and white ruffled curtains. Well, why not? He probably grew up here.
“Oh, no. No, thank you,” she added politely.
A smile touched the corners of his hard mouth. “You want to sit down?”
Sitting would be good. Her knees were about to give out anyway.
They faced each other across the table, the carton between them.
Steve’s gaze flicked to it and then fixed on her face. “What can I do for you?”
She opened her mouth, and nothing came out. Panic dried her mouth and constricted her throat. Maybe she should have accepted that drink after all.
Steve sat motionless. Patient. Polite. Waiting.
She worked enough moisture into her mouth to swallow. Could she do this? Once she confessed her suspicions, once she laid out her case, there was no turning back. Everything would change.
Everything had changed already.
She took a breath. Released it. And said, “I found the murder weapon.”
EXCITEMENT hummed through Steve’s system like a low-level electrical charge.
Easy,
he told himself. Maybe she found the murder weapon. That would certainly explain her urgency in seeking him out tonight. But maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she was lying.
he told himself. Maybe she found the murder weapon. That would certainly explain her urgency in seeking him out tonight. But maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she was lying.
He didn’t want to believe she was lying.
Something shifted tonight when she showed up at his door lugging that box, her eyes full of desperate hope. Or maybe it happened this afternoon, when she climbed into his truck and he got that long look at her legs.
Whatever it was, whenever it happened, the line had been blurred. Whether he liked it or not, whether he admitted it or not, he couldn’t regard her only as a suspect anymore.
So here she was, in his mother’s kitchen, invading his territory, disturbing his peace, shaking his assumptions.
And about time, too,
Eugenia would say.
Eugenia would say.
Steve eased back in his chair, observing the strain in Bailey’s face and the resolute set of her shoulders. He hadn’t sat in a kitchen with a woman late at night since the early years of his marriage when he worked the swing shift. Not that he and Teresa talked about his cases. Teresa, loving, laughing Teresa, had never been comfortable when he walked through the door with the job still clinging to him like cigarette smoke, the tang of danger, the taint of family disputes, the stink of deals gone bad. He learned to shower before he joined her in bed, and he never brought the job home.
He didn’t have that choice with Bailey. And if what she said was true . . . it would change everything. She could save this investigation and his ass. Or bury him in the hole he’d dug with Clegg.
He cleared his throat. “Want to tell me about it?”
“Why don’t I show you instead?”
He glanced at the box between them. “In there?”
She nodded.
Standing, he lifted the lid of the box. No point worrying about fingerprints. He’d already lugged the thing into the house. And . . . yes. All right. There it was. A heavy, blunt object with sharp, squared edges.
The hum grew from a buzz to a whine.
“Looks like a tombstone,” he said.
Bailey stood, too, her hair brushing his shoulder, and he felt a jolt that wasn’t electricity or suspicion. “I think it’s meant to.”
He read the name—Paul Ellis—and below it, etched into the granite where “Beloved Husband” should be, were the words
National Booksellers’ Optimus Award,
the book title,
Breathing Space,
and last year’s date.
National Booksellers’ Optimus Award,
the book title,
Breathing Space,
and last year’s date.
“Where did you get this?”
“I found it in the box about half an hour ago.”
“See it before?”
She nodded again, and her hair slipped forward over her shoulder, slippery as silk and distracting as hell. “Paul used to keep it on his desk as a sort of paperweight.”
Steve took a step away from the table. Away from her and her hair. “When did you notice it was missing?”
“I didn’t. I mean, you don’t take much notice of stuff you see every day, do you? Unless you’re Sherlock Holmes or something.”
Her attempt at humor didn’t fool him. He knew her well enough now to recognize the tiny signs of stress and to appreciate the effort she made to hold herself together.
“Did you pick it up? Touch it?”
“Recently?” she asked.
“Ever.”
“Possibly. Probably.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “That means my fingerprints will be on it, won’t they?”
Oh, yeah
.
.
“Unless somebody wiped it,” he said grimly.
“Would that be better or worse?” Her throat moved as she swallowed. “For me, I mean.”
Things looked bad for her either way. But she was smart enough to have figured that out, and he didn’t have the heart or the knowledge yet to tell her how bad.
So instead he said, “Why don’t you tell me what you were doing with the box.”
“It’s an evidence box.”
“I can see that.”
She cleared her throat. “Paul used his connections with the district attorney’s office to get them to release the evidence collected for the Dawler trial from their property room.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
She plunged on. “When Regan . . . When I moved back to my parents’ house, Paul suggested I take the boxes with me. To inventory.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I assumed because he didn’t want to do it himself. It’s a time-consuming job,” she explained.
“And you had the time,” Steve said flatly.
“Well, no. Not really. But I thought I might get to it. After the funeral.”
“Okay.”
Echoes of their earlier conversation played in his head.
It wouldn’t be the first time an employer took advantage of an employee.
It wouldn’t be the first time an employer took advantage of an employee.
Paul wouldn’t do that.
Seems to me he does it all the time.
“So you took the boxes,” Steve prompted.
“Yes. Well, no. Paul offered to carry them to the car for me while I packed.”
His intuition hummed like a tuning fork, raising the hair on the back of his neck. “And this was when?”
“Thursday around five.” Bailey met his gaze, her dark brown eyes determined and unhappy. “Before the search.”
Well, shit.
“Anybody see Ellis move the boxes?” he asked without much hope.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Regan might have.”
He made a mental note to ask. “Did you open them? Inspect the contents?”
Bailey pleated her fingers together in her lap. “Not then. I opened one that night, but I didn’t find anything.”
“What were you looking for?”
Her head snapped back as if he’d slapped her. “Nothing. Something to do. Something to read. If you must know, I found Tanya Dawler’s diary. Which doesn’t have anything to do with why I had to talk with you.”
“Why me? Why now?”
She hesitated. Preparing to lie? he wondered. The possibility bothered him more than it should have. People lied to him all the time.
“You know how in books or movies when the girl gets a threatening letter or hears a scary noise in the basement, and instead of contacting the authorities, she decides to handle whatever it is herself?”
Where was she going with this?
“You mean the girl who winds up dead?”
“Exactly.” She met his eyes with devastating frankness. “I don’t want to be the dumb dead girl.”
Their gaze held.
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