Black Widow (24 page)

His mouth grazed the flesh left bare by the scoop neck of her blouse. “Enough,” he said.

“Let’s go in the house.”

“I was just about to suggest that.”

The instant the door shut behind them, he shoved her up against it, his mouth hungry on hers as he pressed his rock-hard pelvis against the soft, yearning hollow between her legs. Still kissing, he peeled off her blouse while she unbuckled his belt and tugged free the tails of his shirt. Across the living room floor and up the stairs, their clothes blazed a random trail of unorthodox pairings. Her panties and one of his socks in a puddle near the door. The other sock tangled with her bra, dangling from the fireplace screen. His belt coiled on the stairs next to the flowered skirt that huddled perilously close to the edge.

He crawled onto the bed and pulled her down with him. Her blood running dark and sultry, she knelt over him and took him inside her, thick and hot and exquisitely hard. He groaned in utter defenselessness. Fluid and boneless, she closed her eyes and let her body lead her through the firestorm.

His hands found her hips and his fingers sank into her tender flesh as he guided her movements, matched them to his own rhythm. Wave after wave of pleasure slammed into her, buoyed her up and took her higher and ever closer to the jagged edge of madness. “Look at me, Kat,” he demanded. “Open your eyes.”

His eyes had gone soft and blurry with passion. Kathryn tilted forward and he cupped her face in his hands, and they watched each other, witnessed each other’s vulnerabilities, each other’s strengths, each other’s emotions. She’d never trusted a man this completely before, but Nick DiSalvo was no ordinary man. “Let it take you,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Let it take you while I watch.”

When her body splintered, she cried out his name as fire raged upward from her core, stole away all her oxygen, tore through her from the center outward, leaving her limp and bruised and gasping. She fell onto him, spent and shuddering, and watched his face as he followed her over the edge. Nick looped his arms around her and buried his face in her hair. Her heart was beating so hard she thought it might explode, and her breasts were squashed unceremoniously against that solid chest.

Time passed. Eventually, she cleared her throat. Cleared it again. “Well,” she said.

“Shut up, McAllister,” he said gruffly. “Don’t spoil it for me with your mouth.”

Hiding a smile, she closed her eyes. After a while, she said, “Nick?”

“Mmph.”

“Do you think the Judge had something going with Wanita?”

“Holy mother of Moses, McAllister. We just shared the most incredible sex that I’ve ever experienced in my entire thirty-five years, and you’re already thinking about Wanita? I must be losing my touch.” He sighed dramatically. “At least it was good for me.”

“Fishing for compliments, are you, DiSalvo?”

He lifted a strand of her hair and played with it. “A man likes to know when he’s done his job well.”

She took his face between her hands, looked into those dark eyes. “You have done your job,” she said, “very, very well.”

“Does that mean I can quit the day job now?”

She raised both eyebrows. “So you can become a gigolo?”

“It’s a dirty job,” he said, “but somebody has to do it.”

“Sorry,” she said, “but I’m not sharing you, DiSalvo. Not until I’m good and done with you, anyway.”

He rolled her onto her back and kissed her. “You’re a royal pain in the ass,” he said with a tenderness that was at odds with his words.

She ran her fingertips up the back of his neck and into his hair. “You’ve already told me,” she reminded him. “I complicate your life.”

He flicked aside the gold locket, kissed the spot where it had lain. “I shouldn’t even be here,” he said. “I have a daughter waiting for me at home.”

Her hand paused in its stroking. “You’re free to leave,” she said, “any time you want to.”

“That’s the problem, McAllister. I don’t want to.”

For four years, finding Michael’s killer had been the only thing she thought about, the only thing she cared about, the only thing that mattered in her life. The need for justice had burned in her with obsessive fury. Now that she was so close, she couldn’t allow anything, not even her feelings for Nick DiSalvo, to get in her way. “You have to go home, Nick,” she said. “You can’t leave Janine alone.”

“What the hell is this between us, Kathryn? Because it’s not just sex. We both know that. There’s something happening here, something that quite frankly scares the bejesus out of me. I’m coming damn close to saying something I can’t take back.”

Her stomach turned over. “Don’t say it,” she begged. “Please don’t say it.”

“You’re inside me, Kat, like an itch I just can’t scratch. But what happens after this is all over with? What then?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

His mouth thinned. “You’re a hard woman,” he said.

“Not hard. Just determined.”

His eyes stayed on hers, searching deep, gauging, assessing. And then he rolled away from her. “I have to go,” he said.

She threw on a pair of sweatpants and a tee shirt and followed him downstairs. In the living room, in the dark, she stood by while he dressed silently, swiftly, every harsh, angry movement tearing holes in her heart. “Nick,” she pleaded. “Don’t be mad.”

Curtly, he said, “I’m not.”

“Look,” she said, “you have your job to do, and I have mine. You’ve known that right from the start.”

He sat on the couch and yanked viciously at his shoelaces. “I don’t need this,” he said. “I don’t need any of this.”

“And you think I do?”

“I think you’re deep into something that’s over your head, Kat, and you don’t know how to handle it.”

Furious, she said, “I think I’ve done quite nicely at handling it. I tracked down Ruby Jackson, didn’t I? And nobody’s killed me yet.”

He got up from the couch, stood there looking at her. “I wasn’t talking about the murders,” he said. “I was talking about us.”

And without even reminding her to lock up, he slammed out the door.

In disbelief, she stared at the closed door. And then, propelled by fury, she stormed across the room and flung it open. “Damn you, Nick DiSalvo!” she shouted. And then she froze as the shadowy figure who crouched on the ground beside the rear wheel of her Toyota looked up. Moonlight illuminated his face and flashed off the blade of the knife he’d just used to slash her tire. “Son of a bitch,” Nick said.

The intruder dropped the knife. Like a bullet, he sprang to his feet and took off, with Nick in hot pursuit. In the kitchen, Elvis began barking. Kathryn grabbed her flashlight from the hall closet, stepped into her shoes, and sprinted after them. Footsteps pounded in the darkness ahead of her as they ran into the shadows beneath the trees. “Come back here, you little son of a bitch!” Nick said, and then they crashed into the underbrush. She followed them, flashlight beam bobbing crazily, kudzu vines slapping at her face, her heart thundering as she heard a grunt and then saw the two of them rolling, flattening underbrush, grunting and cussing as they struggled.

“Let me go, you motherfucker!” the intruder said. “Let me go!”

“You sleazy little punk!” Chest heaving with the effort, Nick pinned the intruder’s arms to the ground and straddled his chest, grabbed him by the shoulders and began shaking him.

She finally reached them. “Nick!” she said, training the flashlight beam on the pair. “Nick, stop it!”

He ignored her, just kept shaking. “Nick!” she shouted, grabbing at his shoulder and yanking him around. “Stop it! He’s just a boy!”

Her words finally got through to him. He looked at her, his eyes glassy with fury. She stared back, then pointed the flashlight beam downward and got her first look at the intruder’s face. “Tommy?” she said in disbelief. “Tommy Russell?”

Nick’s chest heaved as he struggled for breath. His shirt was drenched with sweat. “You know this piece of shit?” he said.

“He was one of my students, five or six years ago.” She knelt on the ground beside the terrified, gasping boy. “He can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.”

“It weren’t my fault,” Tommy said. “Honest. She paid me! She paid me to slash your tires and put the snake on your porch. It weren’t my idea!”

Kathryn went cold inside. “What?” she said.

“She said she wanted to scare you, and I remembered that time Kenny Babcock brung that little bitty grass snake to school and you almost swooned. So I told her a snake would do it, and she paid me a hunnerd bucks to get one and put it there. A big one, she said. She give me another fifty to slash your tires. It weren’t my fault. I ain’t crazy enough to pass up easy money like that.”

Nick rocked back on his heels, and Tommy scrambled to his feet, his clothes torn and dirty. With the flashlight still trained on Tommy, Kathryn rested her free hand on Nick’s shoulder. He reached up and took her fingers in his much larger ones, and together they swayed back and forth in rhythm with his breathing. “She,” Nick said hoarsely. “She who?”

Tommy’s eyes grew wild, darted here and there as though he were looking for an escape route. And then he seemed to wilt. “Mrs. Pepperell,” he said. “Mrs. Georgia Pepperell.”

Chapter Fifteen

The house wasn’t quite as elegant as the McAllister place, but it ran a close second. There was a forest green Mercedes sports coupe parked in the circular drive, and when he rang the bell, the door was answered by a pasty-faced maid. She took one look at their uniforms and turned paler. “Good morning,” he said. “Is Mrs. Pepperell at home?”

The maid looked from him to Bucky and back again. “Come in,” she said in a stiff British accent. “I’ll locate the Missus.”

The entry hall boasted a massive crystal chandelier. Bucky gaped in awe at its thousands of winking crystals. “Hell of a dump, eh?” Nick said, looking around him.

“I never saw anythin’ like it,” Bucky said.

“You think this is something, you should see the McAllister place. Ah, here comes our lovely hostess now.”

Georgia Pepperell was dressed in tennis whites, and carried a racket in her hand. “Mr. DiSalvo,” she said in her genteel voice, “how nice of you to drop by.” She turned to Bucky and bestowed that siren’s smile upon him. “And Mr. Stimpson, I do believe?”

Bucky reddened. “Yes, ma’am. This sure is a lovely house you got here.”

“My husband’s great-great-grandfather built it in 1852, shortly before the start of the War. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. What can I do for you gentlemen today?”

“We’d like to ask you some questions,” Nick said.

Her eyes warmed, and he thought he saw a flash of humor in their emerald depths. “Why, of course, Mr. DiSalvo. Anything I can do to assist Elba’s finest.”

“Do you know a boy named Tommy Russell?”

Something flickered in her eyes, but her cool never fluttered. She was a Southern lady, true to her genteel upbringing, a steel magnolia all the way to the marrow in her bones. “Is there some reason why I should know him?” she said.

“According to him, you paid him a hundred bucks to leave that rattlesnake on Kathryn McAllister’s porch. And another fifty last night to slash her tires.”

“Well, then,” she said, “I guess that means it’s his word against mine, doesn’t it?”

“Tell me again about Michael McAllister.”

A muscle twitched in her jaw. “What on earth does Tommy Russell and his lies have to do with Michael?”

“You filled me full of bullshit the first time,” he said. “This time, I thought you might want to take a stab at the truth.”

The warmth in her eyes cooled with amazing rapidity. “I’m busy, gentlemen. I have a tennis date with Neely in a half-hour. I don’t have time to stand here and listen to your preposterous accusations.”

“I’m afraid you do, Mrs. Pepperell. You see, Bucky here’s gonna put his handcuffs on you, and then he’s gonna drive you down to the station and book you.” He eyed her attire. “You might want to change first. No knowing what kind of mess you might meet up with in a jail cell.”

She thrust her chin forward, and again he noticed how lovely her skin was. Like an airbrushed Cover Girl model. “And what, pray tell, are the charges?”

“Vandalism. Malicious mischief. Terrorizing. And that’s just for starters. We’re thinking about tossing in a little attempted murder charge to go along with the rest. A rattlesnake’s a pretty dangerous weapon to be playing games with.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said, “I wasn’t tryin’ to kill her. I just wanted to frighten her a little. Put the fear of God into her. Make her life a tad more difficult than it already was. I had high hopes that she might take the hint and leave town, but I obviously underestimated her.”

“Obviously. Care to tell me why you wanted her to leave Elba, Mrs. Pepperell?”

“You’re the detective, darlin’,” she said. “You figure it out.”

“She married Michael,” he said, “and you didn’t.”

Her eyes narrowed with fury. “He was mine,” she snapped. “Do you understand that?
Mine!
We were going to be married. Everybody thought I was marryin’ him for his money and his name, but that wasn’t it at all. I was crazy, absolutely
crazy
in love with Michael. And my daddy actually approved of the match. Oh, I knew that Michael’d had his days of cattin’ around, but I had my own methods for dealing with that. I knew I’d tame his wild ways once I got that gold band on his finger.” Her voice flattened. “And then
she
came along. Kathryn. That bitch stole him right out from under my nose. I was all set for a June wedding, and he came home from college wearin’ a wedding ring. Have you ever been betrayed, Mr. DiSalvo? Have you ever been hurt so bad it liked to rip the heart out of your chest?”

Thinking of Lenore, he said truthfully, “Once.”

“Then you understand how I felt. I wanted to die. I wanted her to die. I used to drive by their house every night, park at the end of the driveway and sit there in the dark, imagining what they must be doin’ behind those walls. I used to call on the phone at all hours of the day and night, just to hear the sound of his voice when he answered.”

“Did you kill him?” he said softly.

She raised those elegant eyebrows. “Why, everybody knows that Kathryn killed him in a jealous rage because she found out he’d been whorin’ around on her. Michael had a lot of his daddy in him, Mr. DiSalvo. More than anybody knew, except maybe me, and his momma. Michael had his weaknesses, and one of them was beautiful women. I loved Michael anyway. Even after he betrayed me, even after he married that cold bitch, I still loved him. I would never have done anythin’ to hurt him. But I wanted to hurt her. I wanted that power, that victory, over her. And I got it.” Her smile was thin and cruel. “One Christmas Eve at the country club, when Kathryn was home sick with the flu, I gave her husband a very personal Christmas present in the gazebo on the back lawn. It was the high point of my life. You can’t imagine how I felt, knowing I’d cuckolded that bitch.”

Nick looked at her for a long time, at the elegant sweep of her jaw, the almond-shaped green eyes, the flawless skin. She had the body of a goddess and the soul of a reptile. “Bucky?” he said. “You got the cuffs?”

“Right here, Chief.” Bucky held them up like it was show-and-tell day at school.

“Take her in,” he said curtly, “and book her.”

The FedEx envelope was waiting on his desk, sent overnight from the State Bureau of Records at Annapolis, Maryland. Timothy Ward Crumley’s birth certificate. Nick picked up the package, looked it over, set it back down and brooded over a cup of coffee that was already going cold. He didn’t like what he’d learned this morning. The soft, white, decaying underbelly of this town was beginning to be exposed, and he wondered what other surprises lay in store for him.

He set down the coffee and ripped open the envelope. Turned it upside down and shook it, and the photocopied birth certificate fluttered out onto the desk. He picked it up, wondering why he should feel trepidation at uncovering one more rock and finding a snake under it, coiled and ready to strike. He was a cop, for Christ’s sake. It was his job to expose people’s secrets when it became necessary. And during a homicide investigation, it became imperative.

So why did he feel like a damn Peeping Tom?

He cleared his throat, unfolded the sheet of paper, and began to skim it. Name:
Timothy Ward Crumley
. Date of Birth:
January 16, 1995.
Place of Birth:
Baltimore City Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland
. Mother:
Wanita Joy Crumley
. Father—

“Oh, shit,” he said, and closed his eyes. “Oh, shit.”

On top of everything else, this was just too much. Wanita could have lied. She was, after all, a whore and a junkie who’d lied under oath. Or had she? If what the birth certificate said was true, her sister’s suspicions had been way off target. Whoever Wanita’s sugar daddy was, he wasn’t the father of her child.

He crumpled up the piece of paper and hurled it at the wall. “Damn it all to hell!” Furious, he got up and stalked over to it, picked it back up and smoothed it out, then read those damning words again, just to be sure he hadn’t imagined them. Father:
Michael Jeffrey McAllister
.

How the hell was he going to break the news to her that her husband really had been unfaithful to her, not just with one woman, but with at least two different women? He thought about how he’d felt when he’d learned that Lenore had cheated on him. It had been like taking a size thirteen combat boot hard in the gut. How the hell could he do that to her? How the hell could she get through something like that?

The same way she’d gotten through prison. By calling up that steely reserve she had in her spine and forging ahead, without looking to the right or the left. Kathryn Sipowicz McAllister was one tough lady. He wasn’t sure he could have been as tough in her place. Her toughness had gotten her this far; it would get her a little farther. But he’d be damned if he was going to be the one to tell her.

The phone rang, and he picked it up absently. “DiSalvo,” he said.

“I know,” Kathryn began haltingly, “that you have every right to be furious with me. But you have to understand how long this has been eating up my insides. I can’t let anything get in the way, Nick. Not until it’s over.”

He straightened slowly, let Timmy’s birth certificate flutter to the desktop. “I’m not mad at you,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“Don’t lie to me, DiSalvo. I can hear it in your voice.”

He cleared his throat. “No,” he said. “Really. I’m just tired. Rough morning.”

She hesitated, then said, “What about Georgia Pepperell?”

“We arrested her. I figure she’ll make bail by noon at the latest, but it put a serious crimp in her plans for the morning. She had a very important tennis match scheduled with your former mother-in-law.”

“What did she say?”

He picked up a pen and began to doodle. “She put up a tough front for a while, but then she crumbled like a cookie and admitted everything. You’re not exactly on her top ten list.”

“I just bet I’m not. She thought she had Michael all sewn up. It really threw her for a loop when he came home with me tagging along behind him.”

He cleared his throat again. “Yeah,” he said, “she, ah—she told us that.”

“Nick? Are you sure you’re okay? You sound funny.”

“I’m fine.” He doodled a three-dimensional picture of a box. In each of the four corners, he wrote a name:
Ruby, Kevin, Michael, Wanita
. What was the common denominator that brought them together? Where was the intersecting line where their lives collided?

“You sound so distant,” Kathryn said.

“What? Oh, sorry. I’m just thinking. Trying to puzzle it all out. It’s driving me crazy. I have this feeling that I’m missing something. Something so simple that I’m not seeing it, even though it’s staring me in the face.”

“We’ll find it. We have to.”

“We’re getting close. The back of my neck is itching like crazy. Listen, Kat? I’m sorry for coming down on you like that last night. I had no right.”

She paused. “I’d like to think,” she said, “that you had every right.”

His heart began to thud in a rapid, irregular motion. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that when this is over, when we’ve put it all to rest, we’re going to talk about us, Nick. There’s a lot that needs to be said.”

“I would like to see you tonight,” he said. “I would like to spend an evening with you, a nice, normal evening, one that doesn’t end with a visitation from the entire Elba police force. Do you think we could accomplish that?”

“I don’t know, DiSalvo. We could try.”

“Janine’s going to Sylvie’s tonight to spend the evening trading Leonardo DiCaprio pictures. Why don’t you come over to my place? I’ll throw a steak on the barbecue, we’ll put on some music. I have some great jazz CDs. Do you like jazz?”

“I love jazz.”

“Great. We’ll put on some jazz, and then we’ll turn out the lights and sit on the couch and make out like a couple of teenagers.”

“You do know how to tempt a woman, DiSalvo. What time should I be there?”

“Seven-ish okay?”

“Seven-ish is fine. I’ll see you then.”

He hung up the phone, feeling good for the first time since he’d left Georgia Pepperell’s house. He picked up Timmy Crumley’s birth certificate and looked at it again. And then he crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.

The less she knew about Michael McAllister’s sordid past, the better.

* * * * *

She and Elvis went running, along her favorite route, around Lake Alberta and up the County Road, circling back along Myrtle Street to home. Elvis was the ideal running companion. He always stayed at her heel, and he kept his mouth shut. It was a perfect combination. When they got back home, she collapsed on the couch, and he lay his head in her lap and worshipped her with those big, yellow eyes. “What a good doggie you are,” she said, rubbing at his ears and his chin. She bent down and he raised his broad snout and lapped her ear, a kiss that was amazingly dainty for so large a dog. “I love you, too, sweetie,” she said, and then wondered what kind of twisted priorities allowed her to admit tender feelings for a dog but not for Nick DiSalvo.

“It’s complicated,” she argued aloud. Christ, she barely knew the man. Had known him for all of two weeks, two weeks that they’d spent alternately sparring with and lusting after each other. It was too soon for tender sentiments. Not to mention that, after last night’s little exchange between Nick and his daughter, she suspected he was still harboring feelings toward his ex-wife.