Dead by Midnight (30 page)

He stood in the woods, darkness surrounding him, as the rain poured down, soaking him completely. He kept one hand over the binocular lenses, partially protecting them from the rain. The power had gone out over an hour ago, leaving all the houses in the neighborhood dark. But he had seen flickers of light through Lorie’s windows. Flashlights no doubt. And perhaps candles.

At present, she was under tight security with Sheriff Birkett living under her roof, there every night, and a deputy on guard duty 24/7. But divine providence would eventually smile down on him at the right moment, leaving Lorie vulnerable. And then she would be his.

He had loved her so deeply and completely and she was betraying him with another man. With Mike Birkett, the son of a bitch who had treated her so badly. Some women were just that way. The worse a man treated them the better they liked it. If only he had realized sooner that Lorie wanted to be punished.

He released his hold on the binoculars. They dangled from a strong, leather strap hanging from his neck.

He envisioned what the moment would be like when he claimed Lorie as his own, how she would look, what she would say, what he would do. The thought of her naked body aroused him unbearably. He would punish her and then screw her and then punish her again.

He would give her what she needed.

He would make her forget all about Mike Birkett.

He would become her hero. Her lover. Her protector.

He and no one else, not even the Midnight Killer, would decide Lorie’s fate.

Easing his hand out of his raincoat pocket, he reached under the coat and unzipped his jeans. He had to end the aching need. If he didn’t, he would do something foolish. Freeing his penis from his briefs and jeans, he thought about how Lorie looked in
Midnight Masquerade
. As he jerked off, images of her giving one of the actors in the movie a blow job flashed through his mind and helped him achieve a fast and furious orgasm.

Something aroused Nic from a light sleep. Had it been a sound? A light? Or simply instinct? With her eyes still half shut, she turned over in bed and wasn’t surprised to find Griff’s side empty. Scanning the room, semidark in the dawn light, she saw her husband’s silhouette poised on the balcony, his huge hands gripping the railing as he gazed out over the lake at the back of their house. How many times during their three-year marriage had she awakened to find Griff out of bed, often on the balcony or downstairs in his study? She knew that he seldom slept more than four or five hours at a time and that occasionally he would wake from a nightmare drenched in sweat.

Nic slipped out of bed, still naked from their lovemaking late last night, and walked across the room. Before she reached the open French doors, a cool breeze hit her skin. Griff lifted himself to an erect position and turned around to face her. She stood in the doorway and looked at her husband, daybreak painting the sky over the lake in vivid shades of pink and gold directly behind him.

He held out his hand to her.

She went to him.

He pulled her into his arms and held her against him.

“You’re cold,” he said as he ran his hands over her shoulders and down her arms. “Let’s go back inside.”

“How long have you been awake?” she asked as he slipped his arm around her waist and led her back into the bedroom, leaving the doors open behind them.

“Not long.”

“We should talk.”

“Talking is overrated.”

“Communication between a husband and wife isn’t,” she told him.

Griff led her to the bed, removed his robe, and lowered his head to kiss her. Nic lifted her hand between them and covered his lips with her fingertips.

He stopped and looked her in the eye. “You’re going to make me talk, aren’t you?” His lips curved in a hint of a smile.

“Put your robe back on and I’ll put on mine so our being naked won’t be a distraction.” She reached down, picked up his robe, and handed it to him.

While he put on the robe, she found hers lying on the floor and quickly retrieved it. After slipping into it, she motioned to Griff and he followed her into the sitting area of their bedroom. When they were seated together on the sofa, Nic reached out and took his hands in hers.

“Talk.”

“Someone is targeting my people,” Griff said. “It’s my responsibility to find out who and stop them before anyone else is killed.”

Nic squeezed his hands reassuringly. “I think you’re right. My gut instincts are telling me the same thing. The only difference is that you’re convinced the killer is someone from your past on Amara and I’m keeping an open mind. It could well be someone from your more recent past, even someone from our past together, someone who has nothing to do with Amara or Malcolm York.”

He pulled his hands out of hers and knotted them into fists. After working his hands open and closed a couple of times, he rubbed his palms up and down his robe-clad thighs.

“Sanders and I have begun going over records that date back to the inception of the Powell Agency, searching for anyone who might have a grudge against me personally or the agency in general. So far, we’ve found nothing that aroused our suspicion, but I’ve assigned half a dozen employees to go over the files and another half a dozen to work exclusively on this case.”

“You’ve already done all of that without discussing it with me.” Nic knew that by now she should be used to Griff making decisions and acting on them and then telling her after the fact. He couldn’t seem to get it through his thick skull that they were a team, as husband and wife and as business partners.

Griff frowned. “Do you object to what I’ve done?”

“No, I think you’re handling this in the best way possible, but it would have been nice if we had made these decisions together, if I’d known beforehand.”

“You know now.” He shot up off the sofa. “Damn it, Nic, I wasn’t hiding anything from you. I’m not keeping any secrets about this. I thought…” He paced back and forth in front of the fireplace.

Nic sighed heavily. “It’s all right.” She patted the sofa. “Come sit back down.”

He eyed the sofa. “If what Meredith sensed is correct, then the killer is an assassin. He’s been hired to do the killing. That probably means there is someone rich and powerful behind the murders, someone who is striking out at me through my people.”

“Meredith could be wrong.”

Griff sat beside Nic, but didn’t touch her. “I don’t think so. Yvette says that her abilities are the most powerful she’s ever seen.”

Yvette. It always came back to her, didn’t it? Yvette thinks. Yvette believes. Yvette wants. Yvette needs.

“Don’t look at me that way,” Griff told her.

“What way is that?”

“I thought we had finally worked through your suspicions about Yvette. You told me that you were going to try to be friends with her.”

“I am trying. I know she’s important to you.”

Griff grasped Nic’s shoulders. “She is important to me and so is Sanders, but no one is more important to me than you are.”

God, how she wanted to believe him. Damn it, she did believe him. He loved her with the same passion and devotion that she felt for him. She would bet her life on it. “I know,” she managed to reply in a choked whisper.

He caressed her cheek.

After clearing her throat, she asked, “So, while we have agents examining the records looking for someone from the agency’s past who might have hired an assassin, what are we going to do to find out if whoever hired the killer is someone connected to your past on Amara?”

“By retracing the steps Yvette, Sanders, and I took from the day we escaped from Amara until I returned to the U.S.”

“And will this involve your going back to Europe and Asia and searching for pieces of your past with Yvette and Sanders?”

“At this point, I see no need to do more than send agents overseas to do some in-depth digging, highly trained agents, men I trust implicitly. I plan to put Luke Sentell in charge, and if Yvette agrees, if and when he unearths something, I’ll ask Meredith to help him.”

“It seems you’ve given this a great deal of thought,” Nic said. “But there is one possibility that you haven’t considered.”

“What possibility is that?”

“That whoever killed Kristi and Shelley may be someone from my past. After all, I worked on some high-profile cases when I was with the Bureau.”

Alone in his hotel room in LA, he watched with morbid fascination as the two men cornered the woman and dragged her down to the floor. She fought them halfheartedly, her arms flaying, her head turning from side to side as one of the men lay down beside her and pulled her over and on top of him. The camera got a close-up of their genitals as the man rammed his penis into the woman and then quickly withdrew. The other man stood over her, a thin black whip in his hand. As the woman rode the man beneath her, the man behind her cracked the whip and brought it down over her bare buttocks. Again and again.

By the time she and her partner reached simultaneous orgasms—probably faked—her butt bore a series of red stripes. The skin had not been broken, only reddened and possibly bruised.

Moments afterward, the man standing over her tossed the whip aside and jerked the woman up and onto her knees. He reached down and yanked off her fancy mask, revealing Candy Ruff’s beautiful face. Terri Owens’s face.

At this moment in the movie, the revelation of Candy’s identity always excited him. Oddly enough, far more than any of the blatantly sexual acts.

As he pleasured himself, his hand moving rapidly up and down the length of his penis, tears trickled down his cheeks. He hated them, every last one of them. If not for their wicked acts captured on film for the world to see, he wouldn’t be doing this. It was their fault that he found it difficult to achieve an orgasm unless he was either watching
Midnight Masquerade
or thinking about it, reliving the scenes in his mind.

The man on screen threaded his fingers through Candy Ruff’s long, blond hair and forced her face against his erection. Without being prompted, she opened her mouth and began licking him from tip to root.

Candy Ruff took her fellow actor’s cock into her mouth.

Watching her on film while she sucked her on-screen partner’s dick, he wept. His body shook with a combination of pleasure and shame when he climaxed. As the tremors continued rippling through his body, he turned onto his side and glanced at the bedside clock through a haze of tears.

2:30
A.M
. Pacific time.

She felt his warm breath against her cheek when he nuzzled her ear. Coming awake languidly, her nipples peaking and awareness tightening inside her, Lorie sighed as she turned and reached for Mike.

If this is a dream, dear God, I don’t ever want to wake up.

Her body ached with pleasure and longed for more. More of Mike. His mouth on hers, his lips tasting every inch of her, his tongue flicking across her nipples and between her thighs. His big hands smoothing over her from head to toe, his fingertips seeking and finding every erogenous zone. Mike on her, over her, behind her…inside her. Their first time had been fast and fierce, the second time slower, more sensual, more explorative. They had slept briefly, awakened, made love, slept and awakened again.

Mike ran his hand down her back and cupped her butt, pulling her toward him and pressing her into his morning arousal. He kissed her, a light brush of his lips across hers. Sighing dreamily, she caressed his cheek, her fingers encountering dark, scratchy beard stubble.

“I need to shave,” he said.

“Later. First things first.” She rubbed herself against him.

He laughed. “That’s what I like, a woman who has her priorities straight.”

“Do you have to go into your office today?” She kissed his shoulder, bit it softly, and then licked the bite.

Mike groaned. “I’m afraid so. But I don’t have to be there until ten.” He threw one big, hairy leg across her and hoisted himself up and over her. “That gives us plenty of time for more important matters.”

She brought her arms up and around his neck as she stared into his eyes. “I wish…” She had been about to say that she wished this could last forever.

As if reading her mind, he said, “It is what it is. Not the past, not the future, just here and now. Is that enough for you?”

“Yes.” She lied to him, told him what she thought he wanted to hear.

“I do love you, Lorie. I always have and probably always will.”

She saw the truth in his eyes, but she also saw the sadness and regret.

“I know. I feel the same way.”

He lifted her hips and lowered his mouth to hers, kissing her as he pushed slowly and deeply inside her. They lay together, their bodies joined, their breaths mingling, as they kissed with tender passion.

If only she could capture this perfect moment and keep it for the rest of her life. But the moment passed, as all moments do. The gentle kisses turned passionate. The blissful stillness of lying together in the preliminary stage of lovemaking exploded into fulfillment-seeking action. They exchanged dominant positions twice. She shoved him over and got on top, riding him hard and fast as he urged her on and then after she reached her first climax, he toppled her onto her back again and brought her to a second climax before he came.

“There’s a problem with Mrs. Owens,” Ashley White said as she came rushing toward the nurses’ station. “Monique is with her and trying to calm her down, but she’s real agitated. I’ve never seen her like this.”

“Do you have any idea what upset Miss Terri?” Lila Newton asked the nurse’s aide. Mr. Ransom hadn’t shown up this morning, so she knew his morning visit had not caused the problem.

“No, ma’am, I don’t have the foggiest.”

“Is there someone in her room?”

“No, ma’am. I didn’t see a soul. Of course, one of the other patients from a nearby room could have wandered in and out before we heard Mrs. Owens throwing things and hollering like crazy.”

“Let me see if I can’t calm her down without resorting to medication.” Lila came out from behind the waist-high counter and hurried down the corridor past the security guard, Ashley on her heels. Halfway down the hall, she heard an awful caterwauling coming from Terri’s room, and Monique, one of the day-shift aides, talking to her sternly yet pleadingly.

This was worst than she’d thought, so Lila turned around and went back up the hall. She logged out a vial from the locked medicine cabinet and picked up a hypodermic in case she needed to sedate Terri. She would use the medication only as a last resort.

The door to room 107 stood partially ajar, enough so that Lila immediately got a glimpse of the items that had been thrown onto the floor. A plastic water pitcher and matching cup, Terri’s breakfast tray, with food splattered in every direction, and the extra blanket that was usually folded and tucked neatly at the foot of the bed.

Lila entered the room, careful not to step on the specks of scrambled eggs and the small puddles of coffee. Monique looked at Lila and shook her head.

“I don’t know what set her off,” Monique said. “It’s not like Mrs. Owens to act up this way.”

“Did you say anything that might have upset her?”

“No, ma’am. I swear I didn’t. I didn’t say nothing to her except I guess she’d miss her son’s visits while he was out of town.”

“That shouldn’t have upset her,” Lila said. “Mr. Tyler’s gone out of town before and it hasn’t seemed to bother her.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Miss Terri,” Lila called as she approached the bed where Terri sat straight up, her good arm flaying wildly as she mumbled incoherently. “What’s got you so all-fired upset this morning?”

Terri’s gaze met Lila’s and for a couple of seconds she quieted. “Mu…mu…su…su…buh, buh…” Frustrated by her inability to communicate verbally, Terri pointed to the adjustable wheeled table from which she had tossed her breakfast tray.

Lila gazed down to the spot where Terri’s purple-tipped finger pointed. Grape jelly had been smeared on the top of the over-bed table. Apparently, Terri had used the index finger of her left hand to try to print out a word using the grape jelly as paint.

Terri concentrated on Lila’s face as Lila tried to read the word, but all the letters weren’t legible. She managed to make out what appeared to be a “T” and an “L” and maybe either an “S” or a very crooked “R.”

“T-L-S?” Lila asked.

Terri shook her head.

“T-L-R?”

Terri nodded.

T-L-R. T-L-R. Lila looked at the smeared lettering again. Tyler? “Were you trying to spell out Tyler?”

Terri nodded and motioned wildly with her left hand.

“You want to see Mr. Tyler?” Lila asked.

Terri nodded. “Mmm…mmm…”

“But don’t you remember, Mr. Tyler went out of town for a few days.”

Tears pooled in Terri’s eyes.

Lila leaned over and whispered, “Do you want me to call Mr. Ransom?”

An odd expression crossed over Terri’s face before she shook her head.

Knowing that Lila was right-handed and the stroke had paralyzed her right side, Lila asked, “All right then, do you think you could use your left hand if I got you a pen and some paper?”

Terri pursed her lips and tried again to speak. Puffs of air emerged through her lips, creating the sound of the letter “F” that she repeated several times as she glanced at the bedside table.

Lila glanced at the table, completely bare after Terri’s tirade, except for the telephone. Since she was unable to verbally communicate, Terri received very few telephone calls. “Did you receive a phone call that upset you? Did Mr. Tyler call you?”

Terri stared wide-eyed at Lila as she reached out and grabbed Lila’s arm.

Lila pulled Terri’s hand from her arm and patted her gently. “Did Mr. Tyler’s wife or your uncle Clement call you and tell you something that upset you?”

Terri shook her head.

“Did Mr. Ransom call?”

Terri shook her head and then, slapped her chest repeatedly. “Mu…tok…Ty.”

“Oh, you need to talk to Mr. Tyler. Is that it?”

Frowning and shaking her head, Terri squeezed Lila’s hand, a look of desperation in her blue eyes.

“You relax and I’ll see what I can do to get in touch with Mr. Tyler and Mr. Ransom—”

Terri went wild again, flaying and hollering and fighting Lila’s attempts to calm her. Feeling as if she had no choice, Lila prepared the hypodermic and with Monique’s assistance, administered the mild sedative. Within a few minutes, the medication took effect, enough so that Terri settled down, but she kept mumbling incoherently as she finally drifted off into a light drug-induced sleep.

“Please, stay with her for a while,” Lila instructed Monique. “And have someone check on her every thirty minutes the rest of the morning.”

Once back at the nurses’ station, Lila telephoned Mr. Ransom’s home. Ramona Cosgrove answered, “Owens residence.”

“This is Lila Newton, the RN in charge of Mrs. Terri Owens here at Green Willows Rehabilitation and Convalescence Center. May I please speak to Mr. Ransom?”

“I’m afraid you can’t talk to him,” Ramona said. “He’s not here.”

“When do you expect him? This is rather important.”

“Couldn’t say. He went out of town.”

“Oh, I see.” Lila debated whether she should ask for a way to reach Mr. Ransom, but since technically the situation with Terri was not an emergency, she said, “If you hear from Mr. Ransom, would you please ask him to contact me, Lila Newton.”

“I don’t expect he’ll be in touch. He’s off somewhere up-state doing research for his new book. When he goes off that way, I never know when he’ll be back. Sometimes it’s a week or more, and other times, he’s gone only a few days.”

After speaking to Ramona, Lila gave some thought to phoning Mr. Tyler’s wife, but decided against it. She and the staff would simply deal with Terri the best they could for the time being. After all, that’s what they were paid for, wasn’t it, to take care of their patient’s needs, both physical and emotional? Who knew what was going on in Terri Owens’s mind? It could be little to nothing, and certainly not cause enough to have either her son or ex-husband rush back to Danville.

For over a week, Lorie had been trying to talk Mike into allowing her to go to Treasures, to work in the storeroom, do inventory, price merchandise, or prepare brochures for their new summer sales items. She needed to do something—anything—that would get her out of the house and help keep her mind off the Midnight Killer and Shelley’s murder. This morning, she had finally persuaded him to drop her by Treasures on his way in to work.

“Please, I promise to stay out of sight in the back of the store. I can do inventory and place new orders and have lunch with Cathy and we can discuss plans for the tea shop and—”

“Stop!” Mike had held up a restraining hand. “I’d rather you stayed here, but I know you’re going crazy being cooped up this way.”

She had given him her best begging-puppy-dog look. “Please, please, please. No one other than you and Cathy will even know I’m there. And you can post a deputy to watch the shop if that will make you feel better.”

“Okay, against my better judgment, I’ll take you to Treasures. And I’ll have Buddy keep an eye on the shop. He’s got guard duty today.”

She had thrown her arms around Mike and kissed him. That kiss of gratitude had quickly led to other things, and those other things had required removing a few clothes.

An hour later, Mike had escorted her into Treasures through the back entrance and given her strict instructions on what she could and could not do. He had also told Cathy that he expected her to see to it that Lorie followed orders and had made Cathy practically sign a blood oath that she would look after Lorie.

Everything had gone smoothly until midafternoon, when UPS made a delivery. As usual, Kerry Vaughn, the UPS guy, brought the stack of boxes in on a dolly and wheeled it straight to the storeroom.

When Lorie heard the door open, she looked up from where she sat on the floor going through the merchandise on the bottom shelves in the storeroom. She had been marking the sale prices on the winter, Valentine, and hadn’t-sold-in-six-months items. Kerry’s unexpected appearance startled her. She had promised Mike that no one other than Cathy would see her while she was at Treasures.

“Afternoon, Lorie,” Kerry said as he pushed the dolly into the room. “Sure is good to see you back at work.”

“Uh…hi, Kerry. It’s good to be back, but I’m keeping a low profile for the time being.” She glanced at the open door. “So don’t mention to anyone that I’m here, okay?”

“Sure thing. I understand.” Kerry shoved the door partly closed and then he unloaded the boxes and stacked them in the corner. “It’s a shame the way some people around here have been acting. I just want you to know that I think the world of you and so do my mom and my wife. We’re hoping the FBI catches that crazy Midnight Killer real soon.”

Looking up at Kerry, she smiled. “I appreciate that. Right now, I need all the friends I can get.”

When Lorie started to get up, Kerry held out his hand to assist her. Once on her feet, she signed for the delivery and they chatted for a couple of minutes before Kerry grabbed hold of the empty dolly and turned to leave.

Suddenly, they heard a woman’s voice calling from outside in the shop. “Is that you back there, Lorie?”

With her heartbeat rapidly accelerating, Lorie glanced past Kerry and saw Cathy trying to block Tracie McLees’s charge toward the storeroom. Tracie was one of their best customers, a real sweetheart of a person, but Lordy, Lordy, did that woman love to gossip.

“My goodness, why didn’t you tell us that Lorie was back?” Mrs. Webber followed Tracie. Mrs. Webber, another valued customer and Nell Birkett’s first cousin once removed, had befriended Lorie the moment she returned to Dunmore nine years ago.

“Please, ladies.” Cathy blocked the storeroom entrance. “Lorie’s doing inventory. She’s not back at work full-time and we’d appreciate y’all keeping her presence here hush-hush.”

“You can trust us not to say a word,” Paul Babcock said from where he stood in the middle of the shop. As usual, he was going through the display of antique postcards. “We don’t want anybody causing trouble for you, Lorie.”

Kerry shrugged. “Sorry. I guess I was talking too loud or something. I didn’t mean to give you away like that.”

“It’s all right. It couldn’t be helped, I guess.”

After Kerry left, Cathy came into the storeroom. “Should I call Mike?”

“Heavens, no. He’ll blow this all out of proportion and come rushing over here for no good reason.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t stop Kerry, but Mrs. Webber had me so distracted that I didn’t realize—”

“It’s not your fault. No harm done. Thank goodness the customers here in the store are people who genuinely like me and won’t rush out of here to tell the whole town that I’m at Treasures.”

“I hope you’re right. And it should be okay, if Tracie can keep her mouth shut. You know how she is.”

An hour later, a small group representing the WCM—Women for Christian Morality, a radical, fundamentalist organization—showed up outside Treasures. Within ten minutes after those five ladies began marching up and down the sidewalk in front of the shop, reporters from two Huntsville TV stations and from the local newspaper appeared on the scene.

So much for trusting people who liked her. Lorie would lay odds that Tracie had accidentally let it slip about Lorie being at Treasures. Depending on who she told or who overheard her, the news probably traveled at the speed of light.

“I recognize three of those good Christian women out there protesting,” Cathy said. “One is a former customer, Sheila Smith, one is Rita Martin, a friend of my mother’s, and the other is our old sixth-grade teacher, Doreen Culp.”

Lorie sneered. “I always hated Miss Culp and she didn’t like me. She’s the type who never should have been allowed to teach children. If she’d been around during the Spanish Inquisition, she’d have loved getting the chance to torture people.”

By the time Mike showed up, spitting mad and barking orders to his deputies to disperse the crowd, the streets were lined with curiosity seekers, some having left the downtown stores where they worked in order to join the horde and see what all the fuss was about.

Cathy, who had closed Treasures to keep the would-be intruders at bay, unlocked the door to let Mike in and then quickly locked up again. Lorie could hear him clearly from her hideaway in the back of the shop.

“I was afraid something like this would happen.” Mike tromped into the shop. “Where’s Lorie?”

“In the storeroom,” Cathy said. “Buddy’s standing guard at the back door. Unfortunately, a small crowd has gathered out there, too. I swear I don’t understand this herd mentality that has turned normal people into raving lunatics. How five uptight, narrow-minded rabble-rousers like Miss Culp could stir up such a stink in such a short period of time is beyond me.”

“I put in a call for help to Patsy Elliott. I’m hoping that in her capacity as a minister, she can talk sense into the WCM ladies,” Mike said as he marched toward the storeroom. “I brought three deputies with me, including Jack, and five more are on their way to help with crowd control. I want this situation ended peacefully.”

Cathy followed Mike. “Do not blame Lorie for any of this. If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine. I was busy with Mrs. Webber and couldn’t get away from her in time to stop Kerry Vaughn before he took a delivery back to the storeroom.”