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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.
