Speak No Evil (10 page)

“Jack . . .” Caroline protested and tried to pull her hand away—too late. He reached out, snatching it and pinning it to the table.

“Tell me you haven’t thought about us,” he demanded.

Caroline shook her head, confusion clouding her senses. “I-I can’t . . .”

“Can’t what?” he asked, his voice husky and low. He pulled her closer and Caroline didn’t have the will to resist. He leaned forward, his lips hot and soft. The light touch gave her an instant fever, a longing for more. Her body convulsed and she pressed her legs together, feeling the stirrings of desire. She jerked her hand away and sat back, inhaling a mind-clearing breath.

Jack simply looked at her, his brow furrowing. He didn’t sit back, didn’t move, simply looked at her with a mixture of disappointment and torment.

“Will you do me a favor?” he ventured.

“Of course.”

“I need you to promise me you’ll be careful coming and going . . . especially when you’re alone.”

“Of course,” Caroline reassured him. “Because of the break-in?”

His blue eyes pierced her. “Not exactly.”

 

The couple at the end of the dock, having finished their meal, walked past them on the way out, laughing together . . . in that easy way lovers had with each other.

The alcohol was supposed to numb Jack, but it had the opposite effect. It hurt to sit this close to her and not be able to touch her. He had never stopped loving her and his sense of duty warred with his heart. If she were anybody else, he would never consider saying what he wanted to say . . . what he felt compelled to say, despite years of commitment to his job. Still, he considered his words carefully, knowing he was about to step over the line.

Since the break-in at her house, his nightmares were giving him cold sweats at night. The Aldridge estate was a stone’s throw from the site of the Jones murder. There was a rising sense of dread in his bones that he couldn’t shake. If anything happened to Caroline—or to her sisters—because he kept what he’d learned from the coroner to himself... well, he couldn’t live with it.

He sipped at his beer, waiting for the couple to leave before continuing. “It’s just a hunch,” he said, once they were alone, “but it’s a strong one, Caroline . . . it’s not safe for anyone to be out alone at night.”

She laughed. “Now I suppose you’re going to offer to be my bodyguard?”

He didn’t smile. “I’m dead serious.”

Caroline visibly stiffened. “Why, Jack? Do you think there might be more murders?”

Jack took another long pull of his drink before answering, feeling tortured to the core of his soul. Still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to betray his badge. “Not sure,” he said. But those two little words held the entire welfare of a city within them and carried the weight of his professional responsibility. He was a police officer. Wasn’t that what he was supposed to do? Protect people? If he couldn’t even protect the woman he loved—that he had loved nearly his entire life—what the hell good was his badge?

The surrounding marsh took on a far less benign air.

The waitress brought Jack another pint without his having to ask for it and he waited for her to leave.

Caroline sat forward. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Jack?”

He weighed his words carefully. “Bottom line . . . we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”

But Jack did know to trust that feeling in his gut. Only once—ever—had he not listened . . . and the next morning they’d escorted him to the morgue to ID his mother’s body.

Judging by the condition of Amy Jones’s body, her murder had not been perpetrated impulsively—not fueled by rage or hostility. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t shake the feeling the murderer had been interrupted . . . preparing the body for something else . . . that this wasn’t his first murder . . . nor would it be his last.

He could see the wheels turning behind Caroline’s bright hazel eyes. “Are you going to hold a press conference?”

Jack’s shoulders tensed. He’d said too much already . . . and yet not enough. He’d rather lose his badge than lose her. Filled with turmoil, he shook his head.

“Don’t you believe people have the right to know?”

“There’s only one body,” he said pointedly, and felt like a hypocrite because that was precisely why he’d warned Caroline—so she could protect herself—but talking to the woman he loved was far different from sending an entire city into a panic.

Her expression suddenly turned to fury. “What about Amanda Hutto?”

“What about her?”

“She’s missing, Jack!”

“That’s the problem, Caroline. She’s missing. You can’t make a determination about a person’s fate when you have no body.”

Her nostrils flared and Jack sensed she wanted to say more.

“Do you believe her disappearance is connected to the Jones case?”

He shook his head. “I don’t see what a twenty-two-year-old college girl and a six-year-old kid have in common.”

Her shoulders were back and her expression revealed unreserved anger. “Remember Gaskins? His victims had nothing in common!” Caroline sat back in her chair, tossed her napkin on the table and whatever tenuous connection Jack had felt between them vanished. “Do you at least have a lead?” she asked, a little calmer now, but with an edge he’d never noticed in her before this second.

In fact, for the first time since meeting her—at just fifteen—he saw not the sweet susceptible girl he had fallen in love with and nearly married, nor the woman who had practically left him standing at the altar . . . nor the object of his current obsession, but a total stranger. “Maybe,” he admitted, clamming up. “I can’t say.”

 

A sudden chill jetted down Caroline’s spine.

Despite the warm breeze, she wished she’d brought a sweater.

The chirping of crickets and the croaking of frogs were suddenly like death shrieks. The night seemed forbidding, black, and that scent she had become so ambivalent about lately turned foul, like the indissoluble smell of decay.

Her emotions hovered close to the surface.

Her memory flashed to that day on the beach with her brother. What if it were Sammy who was missing right now? She remembered Karen Hutto’s face, full of anguish and pain. There was a city full of Karen Huttos out there—all of them ready to protect their children—if provided the right information. She didn’t understand a sense of due process that endangered the welfare of others.

Whatever she felt for Jack, it was eclipsed by an overwhelming desire to do the right thing. No, she
needed
to do the right thing.

The waitress returned to ask Jack if he wanted another beer, but before he could respond, Caroline picked up her purse and fished through it for her wallet, retrieving her credit card. She handed it to the waitress, smiling tautly. “Dinner’s on me,” she announced, turning to Jack. “I’ll expense it.”

He looked too shell-shocked to protest and the waitress hesitated only a moment before walking away with Caroline’s card.

Caroline stood. “Thanks for the conversation, Jack. It was very enlightening.”

He sat there, peering up at her, his blue eyes shuttered, and Caroline was too rattled to know what more to say. He seemed somehow cold and removed, and this moment, she felt anything but. Every nerve in her body was screaming and her heart was thumping like a fist against her rib cage. She couldn’t just sit there and pretend everything was okay.

She followed the waitress inside to sign the check and left Jack sitting alone, not daring to look back to see if he watched her leave. All she knew was that this time, she wasn’t helpless. She didn’t have to sit idly by and watch the world go to hell.

O
nly a blind man could have missed the screaming front-page headline in the morning edition of the
Tribune
.

 

S
ECESSIONVILLE
C
REEK
K
ILLER
: A
UTHORITIES
F
EAR
M
ORE
D
EATHS

 

Jack did a double take at the dispenser outside the Lockwood station, and fished money out of his pocket to pay for a single issue. Once he had it in his hand, he went inside and threw the paper unceremoniously onto his desk, then sat down, cursing.

He wasn’t at his desk more than twenty seconds before his partner came in to show him a copy of the same paper. Jack threw him out and got up and slammed his door shut. Don Garrison was a good detective, but with his mildly competitive nature it was a little like rubbing salt on a wound right now.

He understood why Caroline felt driven to warn the masses. The Hutto girl. It hit her right where she lived—in the long shadow of her brother’s death. She was thinking with her heart, not her head.

He sat down and took a deep breath as he fished his cell phone out of his pocket. Even before he exhaled, he was dialing Caroline’s number.

No answer.

He wasn’t surprised. He hung up and dialed again, and again, leaving a message only after the third time he heard her short, impersonal greeting.

Maybe he should have expected this—and he would have from her mother—but this was Caroline. Despite her abrupt dismissal last night, her preemptive action blindsided him.

 

“You aren’t qualified to run this paper!”

Frank Bonneau’s voice boomed throughout the brick walls of the old building. Beyond the glass doors of her office, Caroline could see that heads were down in the newsroom, staff members hiding in their cubicles as though they were holed up in trenches, bracing for heavy artillery.

Having been dragged in against her will, Pam sat in a corner chair in Caroline’s office, head down, not daring to speak a word. Frank had been yelling so long and hard that even her office windows were beginning to fog. To say he was angry was an understatement.

Caroline let him blow off steam, feeling worse for Pam than she did for herself, because she had expected his anger. For better or worse, she believed she was doing the right thing and she was prepared to defend her action.

Red-faced, waving a copy of today’s
Tribune,
he continued shouting, “Do you have any idea what the
Post
will do with this?”

The “this” he was talking about was the front-page story Caroline had pushed through late last night after leaving Jack. Colluding with Pam on the paper’s final twelve
P.M.
bedtime, she’d given Pam the story and the byline. They had worked together all night, until the last possible minute, verifying information and securing a second source.

From the moment the issue hit the stands, the phones began to ring—the police department, Pam’s new source at CPD, wanting to make certain he wouldn’t be identified, Jack, random strangers, other reporters wanting more information.

“In all my forty-some years,” Frank was yelling, “I have never seen more shoddy journalism! Who in their right mind releases a story like this when there’s only one body! Congratulations, Ms. Aldridge,” he said. “You’re going to scare the shit out of this city based on speculation!” He shook his head in disgust and hurled the paper onto her desk. “I would never have approved that!”

“Then you should have stayed last night.”

In protest of the changes forthcoming, Frank had gone home early and Caroline bumped one of his front-page stories—not that she had intended to do anything behind his back. It had just turned out that way, and she didn’t call him because, well, she didn’t want an argument.

“I am not going to baby-sit you, and I am not going to spend my last years in the newsroom butting heads with a snot-nosed girl who thinks she knows more than anyone else because she went to an Ivy League school and worked at a handful of sensationalized rags!”

“I have never worked at a rag!” Caroline assured him, trying to keep her voice calm. “Every paper I have ever been associated with has received industry recognition. That’s completely unfair to say, Frank.” She understood the principles of journalism and she could back her story. “I stumbled on a lead,” she said defensively. “I ran with it and my source is one hundred percent reliable.”

“Your source is anonymous!” he shouted back, riling himself all over again.

“We checked with a second source at CPD, who verified that the possibility of a serial killer has been discussed.”

“Surprise, surprise! A second anonymous source!”

And now, Caroline was getting angry. She’d had about enough of his temper tantrum. “We quoted on background! That’s perfectly legitimate! Not the same thing as anonymity!”

“Are you really going to teach me about journalism?” he asked, his eyes bulging and his face florid.

Caroline brought her tone down, realizing how high it had risen in response to his. “We named both sources as detectives and Pam called to verify everything. We even corroborated details with the roommate.”

“That’s another thing!” he said, his tone rising again. He peered over at Pam. “Did you or Pam do this goddamn interview?”

Pam ducked her head lower.

“I did the initial interview but gave Pam the story.”

“You gave her the byline when you brought the key details to this piece of speculative fiction?”

“No! Pam had her own source at CPD. I only gave her the lead! She went after it and wrote the story.” Caroline was perfectly willing to accept his anger for her part in this, but she was not going to have him take it out on Pam. “Considering that I am the publisher, I didn’t want to set a precedent by writing the story myself.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you gave a story to an inexperienced journalist!”

“Damn it, Frank! Have you even bothered reading her résumé? She’s got plenty of experience and she’s damned good! You haven’t even given her a chance! She’s been waiting two years to move into the newsroom! Even my mother hoped you’d make room for her, but you apparently are such a control freak that even Flo was afraid to step on your toes!”

He came forward and tapped his index finger so hard on the offending paper that Caroline thought he would break his finger. “This is stenographic journalism at its worst! You’re going to take heat for this one—no, correction!
We
are going to take heat for this one! The
Post
will hang us with this! We are holding on by the skin of our teeth here, and the only reason we haven’t gone belly-up is because people respect us. We’ve still got a little cachet in this city, but not if we’re going to run cowpats like this!”

“This story’s no different from a thousand I have read!”

“That’s the point, Caroline. We’re better than that! This is ‘he said, she said’ bullshit! If you’re going to run a story like this, you need to roll up your sleeves and do some real investigative journalism! Identify your sources, stand by them.” He shook his head. “As for your mother . . . she would roll in her grave if she knew what you’d done!”

That was the one thing Caroline couldn’t bear to hear.

Caroline dug in her heels, defending her position. “We
did
go after this story. We spoke to the best friend, we corroborated details. I felt it was our responsibility to inform the public of what I’d learned. Don’t you think people have a right to make decisions about their lives with all the information available?”

“Goddamn it!” he exploded. “It’s not our responsibility to warn the public, Caroline—it’s our responsibility to report news responsibly! I would never have sent this story to the desk. If you want to run this newspaper like a fish rag, you can do it by yourself!”

He stormed out of her office suddenly, slamming the door and shouting obscenities that no office should ever have to hear.

Caroline turned her attention to Pam. “Sorry about that.”

“He’s so angry,” Pam said, standing as she stated the obvious.

Caroline was angry too, but not for the same reasons. “He’ll get over it.”

Pam looked ashamed, despite Caroline’s defense of her, which only made Caroline feel worse. “I’ve honestly never seen him like that.”

Caroline felt suddenly confused. She’d reacted in anger and fear. Had she abused the power her position afforded her? “You can go,” she said.

The moment Pam walked out of her office, Caroline’s office phone rang again—probably Jack for the hundredth time. After his first message, she didn’t really care to talk to him. He was angry, too. He felt betrayed. She understood that, and she had braced herself for his anger, believing she was doing the right thing—but suddenly she was no longer quite so sure. The vehemence with which everyone seemed to be reacting to this story took her by surprise. She truly thought she was doing the right thing. Contrary to what some might think, it wasn’t about selling papers. It was about doing something that mattered, and arming a community—her community—to deal with what was to come.

She had sacrificed Jack for her sense of duty. There was no way she would have betrayed him for less than moral decency.

Again the phone rang, and she stared at it, tentatively picking up the receiver. She was grateful to hear Josh’s voice on the other end. “Caroline?”

“Jesus! Thank God it’s you!”

“Taking heat?”

“You wouldn’t believe how much!”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. “I can’t say I’m on your side. I actually called to ask where you left your head.”

Caroline sat in her chair, feeling utterly defeated. “Not you, too!” “Damn it, Caroline . . . your sources are two anonymous investigators—you didn’t even name them as CPD. You could have at least specified neither was with the county solicitor’s office. They could point the finger at me!”

Caroline leaned her head into her hand, a bad feeling settling in her stomach. She had reacted. She had made a decision in the heat of the moment. She wasn’t prepared for this. When her mother had drawn up the will, surely she hadn’t expected Caroline to assume this role so soon. Maybe Caroline had made a mistake? And, worse, she had dragged Pam into it.

Josh’s tone, at least, was gentle, even if his words made her feel sick. “I’m already taking shit over it. You have to reveal your sources,” he pressed.

Caroline’s gut twisted. “I can’t, Josh.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Won’t. But I will assure you that both my sources are one hundred percent reliable.”

“Jesus, you come home for one month and you’ve already done more damage to my politics than I could have with all my pot-smoking college days.”

“You didn’t smoke pot in college,” Caroline reminded him, her voice hollow.

“You know what I’m sayin’, Caroline. If you don’t reveal your source, they could assume it’s me. I’m the closest to you. You have to make this right.”

If she revealed either of her sources, both of them could lose their badges, and Pam had promised her source anonymity. It wouldn’t be right to reveal one and not the other. God, it seemed she had made a mess of everything. “I can’t, Josh!”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “All right, well . . . I’ve gotta go.”

“Are you mad?”

“Not mad. Disappointed. See you tonight.”

He hung up, and Caroline held the phone in her hand for the longest time, knowing the instant there was a dial tone, it would only ring again.

 

The instant Caroline hit the street, blue lights flashed in her rearview mirror.

Dismayed after the day she’d had, she tried to determine what traffic sin she had committed in the fifty or so yards since leaving the garage. A few hard glances channeled her anxiety into anger.

Navigating her way through rush-hour traffic, she pulled over as soon as she could, but not before finding a decent spot, unwilling to delay others simply because Jack was angry with her. The instant she pulled over, Jack pulled his unmarked car up alongside her, parking at an angle in front of her as though to prevent her from leaving. Nor did he bother turning off his blue lights as he got out of the car.

He was at her door by the time she rolled down the window, his jaw set with a fury that must have escalated with every ignored phone call during the course of the day. At last count, there had been thirteen. She tried to keep the anger from her tone. “Do you mind telling me why you’ve pulled me over?”

His tone was cold and hard. “License, please.”

Caroline rolled her eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

If his eyes had been daggers, she realized she would be a dead woman sitting behind the wheel of her car. “License!” he demanded.

“Okay, so now what . . . you’ve been demoted to traffic cop?” Caroline was exasperated, but she complied, taking her license out of her purse and handing it over.

“That’s a distinct possibility,” he told her, snatching the license from her hand. “Do you understand what you’ve done, Caroline?”

This was precisely what Caroline had been trying to avoid all day. “Yes, Jack, I know what I’ve done. I’ve alerted the public to look after themselves since you guys don’t seem to be up to the job.” It was unfair to say, she realized, but she didn’t appreciate his attitude.

A muscle at his jaw twitched. “Is that right?”

“Yes, for God’s sake! We have a missing child and a mother who’s traumatized. We have at least one dead body and reason to suspect there will be more—yes, I do believe that’s what I’m doing!” Maybe she hadn’t gone about it right, but she was trying to help.