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“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.
