Authors: Virginia Kantra

Tags: #Contemporary Romance, #mobi, #Romantic Suspense, #epub, #Fiction

Home Before Midnight (8 page)

BOOK: Home Before Midnight

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Steve nodded.

“Good. Wrap this up as quick as you can. The media is already circling. Let’s not give the buzzards anything to feed on.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Just do your job,” Walt said.

Easy enough for him to say, Steve thought as he got into his truck to make the forty-minute drive to the Medical Examiner’s office.

Do the job.

Get through the day.

Go through the motions.

Easy enough to do. Hell, he’d been operating on autopilot for almost three years. He ought to be relieved the chief didn’t want any more from him than the standard minimum requirement.

But he wasn’t. Dissatisfaction rode with him all the way to Chapel Hill like a sullen drunk in the back seat.

REGAN Poole had thought her day couldn’t possibly get worse. How could it get worse? It started with a fucking phone call at fucking four o’clock in the morning that shattered her sleep and her psyche.

It wasn’t fair. Children weren’t supposed to have to deal with bolt-out-of-bed calls in the night. That was a parent’s job. She remembering fumbling with her cell phone, heart pounding as she waited for her father’s tired voice on the other end of the line.

Can you come pick me up?

...
bail me out?

...
send me money?

...
tell me everything will be all right?

But it wouldn’t be all right, Regan thought with a sting at her heart, whatever Paul said. He wasn’t really her father. Her real father was dead.

And now her mother was, too.

Regan’s hand tightened on the receiver. Count on Helen to make it all about her, even if she had to die to do it.

The telephone on the other end of the line rang mindlessly. Endlessly.
Pick up, pick up, damn you, pick up . . .

Paul hadn’t been able to get hold of Richard. That’s what he’d said. Maybe it was even true. Maybe Richard had caller ID. God knew her brother was smart enough, selfish enough, to ignore a call in the middle of the night from their drunk and incoherent mother or the stepfather they both despised.

She jiggled the phone. More likely Richard had been out last night. Or he was wasted. Or stoned. Son of a bitch.

Which was why she was stuck calling him now.

Grievance built under her breastbone, pushing out the pain. She didn’t like to make personal calls at work. Someone might see and feel they had to make allowances for her. Regan never made allowances for herself. At twenty-three years old, she was the youngest account manager at the Buckhead bank branch, and she had to be better than any of them.

She jabbed her brother’s number into the phone again.
Pick up, please pick up . . .

“ ’Lo?” Richard’s voice slurred.

Relief, grief, and worry flooded her eyes and spilled out. Not in tears. She would not let herself cry. In anger.

“Christ, Richard, it’s two in the afternoon. Did you just wake up?”

“Regan?” She pictured him blinking and unshaven, trying to focus. To cope. “What’s up?”

She pulled herself together. She could do this, she assured herself, shaking. She could do a better job of breaking the news than Paul had done.

“It’s Mom,” she said, reduced to mouthing her stepfather’s words after all. Because in the end, what else was there to say? “There’s been an accident.”

WITNESSES lied.

Bodies didn’t.

Not as long as the medical examiner knew his stuff.

Or in this case, her stuff, Steve thought, watching as Dr. Elizabeth Nguyen bent over the body of Helen Stokes Ellis. The ME was small, dark, and decisive, with black-rimmed glasses above her blue surgical mask and slender, gloved hands. She’d appeared surprised by Steve’s presence in her autopsy room. But when he didn’t badger her with questions or puke on his shoes, she seemed to warm to him.

Or maybe she just warmed to her work.

She examined the body clothed and then naked, photographing and cataloging it with reassuring thoroughness: hair color, eye color, weight, scars, moles, dental work, age and general condition. The damp hair streaming over the table’s edge gleamed with expensive highlights. The legs were waxed and tanned, the eyebrows plucked, the manicured hands scrupulously maintained. Delicate scars from cosmetic surgery traced the jaw and hairline.

Looking at the pale, crepey skin of the body’s naked belly and upper arms, Steve felt a stab of profound pity. A flood of regret. Helen Ellis had been able to cheat age, but not death.

You could never cheat death. All you could do was make the most of the time you had.

Teresa had tried to show him that, but he’d learned it too late.

Nguyen paused and clicked off her mike. “I’ll want an X ray of the skull,” she told her assistant. She glanced at Steve. “You have a witness who claims the victim was drinking?”

The specter of Bailey’s white, determined face and anxious eyes joined Steve’s personal ghost gallery.
Helen usually fixed herself a nightcap at bedtime.

He nodded.

“Well, I won’t have the tox screen results for a couple of days,” Nguyen said. “But based on the head laceration, I can tell you now that the victim didn’t slip and fall.”

The back of Steve’s neck prickled.

It was an accident,
Bailey had insisted.

Wrap this up as quick as you can,
the chief had said.

Bodies didn’t lie.

“What does the head laceration tell you?”

“In the crime scene photos, all the pool surfaces are rounded. If your victim slipped and struck her head against the side, the steps, even the railing, I’d expect to see a single impact site with non-specific bruising. No laceration and, obviously, very little blood.”

Nguyen positioned the head on the table and then gestured for Steve to join her behind a screen. The X ray hummed.

So far she hadn’t told him anything the responding officer hadn’t seen. He waited until the ME resumed her position beside the table before he asked, “So what do you see?”

“Single impact site. Linear laceration.” She traced it for him with the instrument in her hand. “The scalp is split. Your victim was struck with a heavy blunt object with at least one sharp edge and sufficient force to break the skin.”

Fine. That accounted for the blood. But did it account for the death?

“Enough force to kill?” Steve asked.

“Probably not,” Nguyen admitted. “I’ll examine the lungs, of course, but my guess is she was still conscious, or at least alive, when she entered the water.”

“Signs of struggle?”

Nguyen shook her head, continuing her deliberate examination of the body. “There are no defensive wounds on her arms or hands. No residue under the fingernails. She could have been unconscious, although there’s no sign the body’s been dragged. She may simply have been dazed by the blow. Disoriented. Possibly drunk, as well.”

So she
was
nightcapped. Literally.

“Any chance the injury was sustained after drowning?” Steve asked without much hope.

“Unlikely. X ray will tell us more, but from the angle of the laceration, I’d say she was struck from above and behind. She probably never knew what hit her.” The ME switched her mike back on, signaling the end of their conversation.

Steve didn’t mind. He already had the information he came for. Now he needed to decide what to do with it.

Water hissed from the tap and drummed in the deep metal sink. The air was cold. Steve thrust his hands into his pockets as the medical examiner made the first shocking cut from shoulder to shoulder across the breasts and then the midline incision, chest to pubis. The body sighed open. The cavity yawned, slick and red.

He could leave now.

The internal exam wasn’t likely to tell him anything Nguyen hadn’t already divulged.

But he stayed, driven less by his detective’s need to know than by an impulse to be there for the plucked and pampered woman on the table in a way he’d failed to be there for Teresa, to accompany her into death. He stayed out of pity and respect, the way other cops attended the funerals of other crime victims.

Because Helen Ellis’s death was a crime. He was sure of that now.

But to prove it, he needed to find the weapon. A motive.

The murderer.

BAILEY thrust her hand to the back of her parents’ mailbox, ignoring the barking of her neighbor’s dog and the rumble of traffic behind her.

Although classifying the single car cruising down this one-and-a-half lane rural road as “traffic” just proved she’d already been home too long.

The engine idled to a stop behind her. Bailey braced. All she needed to make her day complete was a verbal assault from a redneck in a truck.

“Come here often?” a man drawled.

Her heart raced. She knew that flat, deep voice. Clutching her parents’ mail, she withdrew her arm and turned.

Lieutenant Steve Burke leaned across the bench seat of a black Ford pickup, his windows rolled down and his eyes amused.

She felt a jolt of . . . surely that was dislike?

“Not if I can help it,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to tell you the body’s been released. You can have your funeral.”

She refused to feel grateful. “Shouldn’t you tell Paul?”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “I did. He said you were making the arrangements.”

His voice was neutral, no accusation at all, but she rushed to Paul’s defense anyway. “He’s very upset.”

The detective unfolded from his seat, reminding her all over again how big he was—the kind of ex-jock who’d hung over her sister’s locker in high school. He probably tried to use his size to intimidate people, Bailey thought scornfully as she watched him round the hood of his truck toward her.

She bet it worked, too.

“Upset enough to call a press conference?” he asked.

“What?”

“That’s what he told my chief. Told me to wrap up the investigation, or he was talking to reporters.”

Oh, dear.
No wonder Steve’s voice sounded flat. He was probably ready to murder somebody himself.

Not that anybody had been murdered, she told herself. It was purely a figure of speech.

Burke leaned against the door of his truck. “So tell me about this new book he’s writing,” he invited.

She eyed him warily. “Why?”

“Maybe I’m curious.”

Maybe. And maybe he was looking for a way to defend his department by discrediting Paul.

She cleared her throat. “Well . . . It’s about the Dawler murders. Are you familiar with them?”

“Mother was a prostitute. Grandma and probably sis, too. Kid gets drunk, decides he can’t live with the shame anymore and, instead of offing himself, kills his entire family with a kitchen knife.”

“That’s an oversimplification of the story, but yes.”

“Yeah, I heard your boss thinks the police case left things out.”

BOOK: Home Before Midnight

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