When Night Falls (14 page)

* * *

After yet another sleepless night, Jess stepped out of the shower and ran a thick Egyptian cotton towel along her shivering body. She absolutely refused to imagine Liam’s hands instead, what they might feel like skimming down her belly and along her inner thighs—

Stop
it,
she admonished herself, then caught sight of her face in the foggy bathroom mirror. She leaned closer and wiped away the condensation, stared at her pale cheeks, the dark smudges beneath her eyes. She’d worked around the clock before. She’d gone without sleep more times than she cared to remember. But she couldn’t remember a time she’d looked so haggard, not even during the final days at the academy.

Frowning, she slipped into her silk robe and raised a comb to her damp, tangled hair. She was still fighting with it when the phone rang.

Adrenaline rushed. The sun had yet to come up. The hour was well before six.

This was not a social call.

Emily.

She ran into her bedroom and grabbed the handset from the nightstand. “
Clark
here.”

“Mornin’, Jess.” The words came in an easy drawl. “Didn’t wake you, did I?”

The room started to spin, and her heart flat-out stopped. She knew that slow voice, always wondered how its owner could sound so unaffected in light of the grimness he faced on a daily basis. “Phil? That you?”

“‘Fraid so, hon. McKnight wanted me to give you a call. We just had a body brought into the morgue, found down near the
Trinity River
.”

Jess sank onto her unmade bed. Dread turned her blood to ice. “And?”

“She was a pretty thing, looks to be a young white female, probably in her late teens. Brunette. Blue eyes. Died hard. McKnight thought she might be yours.”

Chapter 11

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J
ess splashed cold water against her face and tried to breathe. Her throat burned; her stomach churned.

Emily.

Dread lanced through her. She glanced up and caught her reflection in the mirror, tried not to cringe. She couldn’t go to Liam like this, couldn’t let him see her pale skin and bloodshot eyes. Couldn’t let him see the nasty fear lurking in her gaze. She had to pull herself together and be strong for him, had to be rock steady. Even if her heart was breaking.

“Please, God,” she said aloud. “Please don’t let it be her.”

She had to reach Liam before someone else did. She needed to be the one to tell him. She didn’t want him hearing it from Kirby, or God forbid a reporter. She didn’t want to call him, either, not when she knew what the news would do to him. No matter how much she hated the thought of doing so, she needed to tell him in person.

Her heart raced as she hurriedly dressed and ran out the door. She forced herself to breathe deeply as she drove, searched for the right words, just how to tell a father his daughter might be in the morgue.

They wouldn’t form.

How could they? How could words exist to tell a man the light of his life might be permanently extinguished?

By the time Jess stopped her car in front of Liam’s house, the first rays of the morning sun streaked across the eastern sky. Splashes of yellow and peach promised a new day, a new beginning. The nasty irony made her blood run even colder.

She glanced at the imposing stone fortress Liam had built for his daughter and braced herself. He was in there. Maybe sleeping, maybe just waking up, maybe preparing to take Molly for a run. The man who’d looked so tenderly into her eyes last night had no idea of the grim news awaiting him.

A fleeting thought of the night before flashed through her, of the fragile bond they’d forged. My God, she thought. If things had gone a little differently, if she and Liam weren’t such cautious people, he could well have ended up spending the night in her bed. Which meant he would have been there when the call came. Maybe even making love with her.

The thought unsettled her.

She pushed open the car door and started up the walkway. The insistent northern wind cut through her, making her realize she’d forgotten her coat.

The cobblestone seemed to elongate with each step she took. Her breathing turned choppy. Dead man walking, she thought grimly, but knew
she
was the executioner, the man strapped in the electric chair someone she couldn’t bear hurting. He’d suffered enough.

Finally, she reached the door and rapped her numb fist against the hard wood. Nothing. An interminable second dragged by before she knocked harder, louder. Then she reached for the bell, heard its deep chime echo through the house.

She hated the thought that he might still be sleeping.

At last footsteps sounded on the marble inside, and she braced herself. God help her, she’d never dreaded anything more. She took a deep breath as the door opened, knowing what the next few minutes would hold.

Marlena Dane stared wildly at her. “Detective
Clark
, thank God you’re here.”

Jess went very still. Her heart staggered. She took in Liam’s former lover standing there, wearing red silk pajamas and an open black robe, and feared she might be ill. Of all the possibilities she’d imagined, finding Marlena here was not one of them. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that Liam would leave her last night with the taste of her lips on his and turn to Marlena.

But it should have. She was the detective assigned to find William Armstrong’s daughter, nothing more.

The bitter splash of reality burned and scraped, shredded.

“Marlena.” She managed to speak. “I need to see Liam.”

“He’ll be out in a minute.”

“It’s important,” Jess added.

“Let me go see what’s keeping him,” the flushed woman said, then turned and vanished down the hall.

Emotion crammed its way into Jess’s throat, her heart, making breathing difficult. She couldn’t believe what a fool she’d been, what a dangerous path she’d let her thoughts race down.

Numbly, she looked around the foyer. The mirror she’d forced Liam to look into no longer hung above the marble-top table. A stack of flyers sat on the shiny black surface, Emily’s picture smiling up at her. The word
reward
stood out.

“You had no right to answer the door.” Jessica heard Liam’s harsh voice from the back of the house. “You shouldn’t even be here, damn it.”

“I was worried,” Jess heard Marlena say. “Mr. St. Clair said he needed to talk to you but couldn’t find you. I couldn’t imagine where you could be, thought maybe—”

“That I’d fallen apart?” Liam growled. “So you rushed over to save the day? I was in the shower, damn it. St. Clair had no right to call you. I’ve already told him that.”

Relief pulsed through Jess, so pure and profound, for a gossamer moment, she forgot why she stood in Liam’s foyer in the first place. He hadn’t invited Marlena over. He didn’t want her here. He hadn’t shared his bed with her, his body, while Jess lay alone in the darkness, longing for something that could never be.

“It’s not her, damn it.”

Liam’s low growl stabbed through her, and she blinked to see him striding toward her, all tall and forbidding. His eyes were wild, the planes of his face harsh. His dark hair was damp, his jaw unshaven. He looked capable of tearing someone apart with his bare hands. And the truth cut her to the quick.

He already knew.

She swallowed, hard. “Liam—”

“My private detective already told me about the girl by the Trinity River, and I’m afraid you’re wasting your time every bit as much as Marlena wasted hers rushing over here to check on me. That girl is not my daughter.”

Her heart beat harder, faster. “Have you heard from her?” she asked, hopeful. “Did she call? Is she home?”

Liam stopped mere inches from where she stood. “She’s not here, but she’s not there, either.”

Jess braced herself, realizing Liam’s words were rooted in faith and hope, a parent’s undying love for a child. Not fact. She looked at the granite man standing so close, at the harsh set to his jaw and the severe lines at the corners of his eyes, and realized how close to the edge he was teetering. He knew about the girl found overnight. He knew she was dead. He knew she could be his daughter, even if he refused to voice the possibility.

Never in her life had Jess wanted to touch someone more, to fold her arms around another human being and hold on tight. But she also knew Liam wouldn’t accept sympathy from her. He didn’t want her compassion, didn’t know what to do with it.

He only wanted her to do her job, even if doing so ripped her heart into shreds.

“Liam,” she said as levelly as she could, “I know this is hard for you, but we need you to come downtown, to look—”

“No. There’s no reason for me to go to the morgue. My daughter is alive.”

“I want to believe that, too, but until we go—”

He took her hand and drew it to his chest, splaying her open palm against the gray cotton of his Henley shirt. “She’s here, damn it, I can feel her. She’s not on some cold slab.”

Jess bit back a sob but could do nothing about the tearing deep inside. Beneath her fingertips she felt Liam’s heart beating hard and true, so unlike the frenetic pounding of her own. It was breaking in two, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “We have to be sure.”

“I am sure.”

“Liam—”

“Why are you doing this?” he rasped. All tall like that, with whiskers darkening his jaw and those midnight-blue eyes glittering, he looked like he stood face-to-face with his own personal Judas. “I didn’t take you for the kind of woman to enjoy turning a grown man inside out. Are you trying to see how much I can take without snapping in two?”

The words were harsh, the pain behind them unbearable. It slammed into Jess, knocked the breath from her lungs. She knew he was lashing out but also knew nothing she could say, nothing she could do, would ease his anguish. The depth of his torment was too great, the strands of the bond they’d forged the night before too tenuous.

“This isn’t about you and me, Liam. It’s about your daughter. Coming here this morning is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she told him honestly. Emotion scratched at her. Only a few hours before she and this man had shared tender moments—stolen moments—but the memory of them prompted her to speak honestly, as a woman to a man, not a cop to a—

She could think of no word to describe her relationship with William Armstrong.

“Standing here, seeing the pain in your eyes…” She swallowed against the thickening of her throat and resisted the urge to push up on her toes and lay her hand against his face. “I want to help you, damn it! I want Emily alive. But what I want doesn’t change the fact there’s a young girl down at the morgue, and she could be—”

“She’s not.”

Frustration tore through Jess. He was a strong man, the kind who shoved everything deep inside. The possibility Emily could be dead was too awful to consider, so he simply wasn’t.

She glanced at Marlena standing quietly in the doorway to the dining room, then she laid a hand against Liam’s arm. “I’ll go with you,” she said gently but firmly. “I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

He stared at her fingers against his flesh. “No.”

“Liam,
please.”

He pulled away and grabbed the stack of Emily’s pictures from the console table. “We’re wasting time,” he said flatly as he turned and strode away. “I’ve got flyers to post, and you’ve got my daughter to find.”

She followed him down the hall and grabbed his arm as he entered the darkened kitchen. “Ignoring the situation won’t change anything. I know you’re hurting—”

He swung toward her. “I’m not ignoring anything.”

“I hope to hell and back you’re right,” she said, alarmed by his refusal to consider the possibility. This was one situation he couldn’t change through sheer force of will. “Come with me. That’s the only way we can make this awful cloud go away.”

He tore away from her. “Go if you want to, Detective, but leave me out of it.” He grabbed a set of keys from the counter, hesitated. “Last night was a mistake. I should never have gone to you. I don’t know why I did. The lines are too tangled as it is. You shouldn’t come here again, not unless you’ve found my daughter and are bringing her with you.”

Jess watched the door slam behind him, and the tears broke free. She didn’t try to stop them. She’d never seen a human in so much pain, and having it be Liam only made it worse. She didn’t understand the draw she felt toward him, the compulsion to reach out. The man was used to willing things into being, but he couldn’t will his daughter into coming home and he couldn’t will that body into not being Emily’s.

“He’s not worth your tears, Detective.”

She glanced back to find Marlena in the doorway. “He’s hurting.”

“If he is, it’s the first time in his life, which probably only makes him more dangerous. What is it they say about a wild animal in pain?” Sadness tinged Marlena’s voice. Moisture glazed her eyes. “I was scared half out of my mind when that private detective called, unable to reach Liam. But did you hear how that man talked to me? He couldn’t have cared less that I raced over here to check on him.”

Jess realized Marlena still had feelings for Liam, feelings he didn’t return. She hated to think how badly that must sting. She and Liam had only shared a few embraces and a couple of kisses, and already she’d lain restless in her bed last night. She couldn’t imagine being his lover, having him in her bed, in her body, then having nothing at all.

Stolen moments, she thought again. That’s all he had to give. “I’m sorry.”

The other woman pulled her robe tighter and withdrew a set of keys from her leather purse. “Now he’s turned his back on you, too. I’d warn you again not to fall in his trap, but I can see you’re already there. I’m real sorry, too. I know how it feels to be cast aside by William Armstrong, to be discarded like nothing more significant than an old beer can. Keep your eyes open, Detective, or you run the risk of slipping and falling even further. Trust me, it’s a long, hard climb out.”

* * *

“Cause of death appears to be strangulation. The girl put up a fight, though. We’ve got skin under her nails.”

Jess looked away from Kirby to the overflowing file sitting atop her cluttered desk. A picture of Emily and Liam awaited her there, father and daughter in hiking gear somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. They looked so happy. So alive.

“I’m going to send a car to pick up Armstrong,” Kirby said. They stood in the belly of the detective bullpen, already humming with activity despite the fact the clock had yet to reach nine. “We need him to make an ID. There was nothing on or with the body.”

Jess fought the emotion tightening her chest. She had a job to do. She had to remain objective. But the thought of a squad car picking up Liam and driving him to the morgue, of an unknown, uncaring person forcing him to look at that body, ripped her up inside. Among those on the force, too many still believed he’d gotten away with murder. Too many would enjoy watching him fall apart.