Confessions (5 page)

Her voice had been the kind of sultry, whiskey baritone that could make all of a man's nerves stand on end. And when those huge one-of-a-kind emerald eyes bore down
on you from the oversize movie screen, it was as if she were aiming down the barrel of a gun. As a bonus, she'd been a helluva good actress, too.

“Now that you mention it, I can see the resemblance,” Trace decided finally. It was in the unflinching directness of the eyes, the remarkable cheekbones, the pointed, argumentative chin. But mostly it was attitude.

“Actually, Laura looks more like our mother.”

He didn't miss her use of the present tense. Death took getting used to. Murder took even longer.

Belatedly realizing what she'd said, Mariah sighed and stabbed the cigarette out on the rock. “This sucks.”

“Yes. It does.” He stopped being a concerned listener and went back to being a cop. “Look, I don't know when we're going to be able to track down your father and with the senator in surgery—”

“You need someone to identify my sister's body,” Mariah guessed flatly.

“The sooner we get an ID, the sooner we can compile more evidence to help us apprehend her killer.”

Mariah realized that he was talking about an autopsy. Her lips pulled into a tight line. Her gaze drifted, once again, to the bedroom window.

He stood up and put the Stetson back on, adjusting the black felt brim so that a shadow fell over his face. “I'll drive you into town.”

Mariah was not fond of men who issued orders. But at the moment, she didn't feel up to driving back down that steep winding road, either.

“Let's go.” She stood up and although he wouldn't have thought it possible, given how tight those jeans were, managed to jam her hands into her back pockets. The gesture pulled the crimson shirt tight against her high, firm breasts.

They walked side by side to the Suburban. He opened
the door and with a palm to her elbow, helped her up into the passenger seat.

“I'll be right back. I want to tell J.D. where he can reach me and arrange to have your Jeep driven into town.”

“The keys are in the ignition.”

Mariah watched him enter the house that had smelled like gingerbread cookies, lemon oil and Pine Sol back in the days when it had belonged to her grandmother.

Experience had taught Mariah to trust her intuition about people, and that sixth sense was telling her that Trace Callahan was both intelligent and competent. Her sister was in good hands.

Laura.

Mariah felt the tears stinging at the back of her lids and resolutely blinked them away. There would be time for tears later. Right now she had work to do.

She lit another cigarette and began to compile a mental list.

First she had to identify Laura's body. Then she had to call her mother and inform the woman she'd always known as Maggie—never Mama, or heaven forbid, Mom—that her firstborn daughter was dead.

She'd have to face her father's unrelenting disapproval for the first time in more than a decade. She had to try to offer condolences to her wounded son-of-a-bitch brother-in-law without gagging.

And then, somehow, she was going to have to dig down deep enough to find the inner strength to get through the funeral.

In addition to all that, although he didn't know it yet, Mariah had every intention of helping Whiskey River's new sheriff apprehend her sister's murderer.

Then, and only then, when the heartless monsters who'd shot Laura dead, cruelly cutting short a very special life, were behind bars, would she allow herself to cry.

T
he medical examiner's office was in the basement of the town's eighty-year-old redbrick courthouse. Since the ancient elevator tended to be iffy, Trace decided to skip it.

As Mariah accompanied him down first the narrow flight of stairs and then the long, poorly lit hallway, she couldn't quite shake the feeling that none of it was real, that she was plotting out a script.

Beautiful wife of charismatic senator is killed in an isolated ranch house during a thunderstorm, she set up the scenario. With the help of the murdered woman's sister, an award-winning television writer, the crime is solved, the politician husband is arrested and justice wins in the end.

No, Mariah considered. That plot left the wife still dead. She erased the mental slate in her mind and began again.

Beautiful wife of charismatic senator is
shot and wounded
during a thunderstorm. While she lies in a coma, dogged small-town sheriff and glamorous television writer, estranged from her family for years, set out to prove the husband guilty.

The smoking gun is found. The senator gets a pair of silver bracelets and a ride in the back of a patrol car to jail, where he breaks down and confesses.

His wife wakes up in the hospital, seemingly no worse for her harrowing experience and requests a cup of herbal tea and a divorce.

The sisters embrace. The music swells.

“Whatever would I have done without you?” the older sister asks tearfully.

The younger one shrugs. She is not only glamorous and famous, but modest as well. “Hey,” she says, “that's what sisters are for.”

So, in sixty minutes, minus commercials and a network newsbreak, justice is served, a family is reunited, and the story ends on a happy, upbeat note.

It was a nice scenario, Mariah considered with an inward sigh. Too bad things didn't work that way in real life.

Unfortunately, there was one thing that was exactly like it appeared on television. And that was the morgue.

Trace flipped the switch beside the door. The rows of fluorescent tubes flickered to life, casting a bright, but complexion-draining light over the scene. Cool air was blowing from the vent above the loading dock door of the windowless room. “The doc's probably out getting breakfast.”

“I'm amazed he could eat.”

Trace's only response was a shrug. Taking a new cop out for a Denny's Grand Slam after he'd watched his first autopsy had long been viewed as a rite of passage.

A metal table stood in the center of the linoleum floor. Beside the table was a scale, like that used in supermarkets to weigh apples and oranges. Although a camera was fixed to the ceiling overhead, allowing photographs of record to be taken, the room lacked the overhead microphone that
would allow the forensic pathologist to record his findings for later transcription. Instead, metal clipboards hung from hooks on the bilious green wall.

Between the clipboards and the old-fashioned black wall phone was a cork bulletin board covered with official memorandum, some of which, Mariah noted absently, were years old. Against the opposite wall, rather than the tidy steel compartments she routinely wrote into her scripts, was a walk-in freezer.

Trace gave her a judicious look. “Are you sure you're up to this?”

“I'm sure.”

Watching her wrap her arms around herself, Trace suspected that it was not the cold she'd find inside the freezer Mariah Swann was trying to ward off, but the iciness that had taken hold of her heart.

She took a deep breath. “Let's get it over with.”

Mariah had witnessed death before. She had even, on one memorable occasion, in the name of research, sat in on an autopsy. She had to leave the room to throw up when the pathologist popped the top of the skull with a tool that resembled a crowbar, but so had the detective assigned to the case.

This time, however, she had a personal connection to the sheet-draped body stretched out on the wheeled gurney. This was no anonymous skid row slashing victim; this was her sister.

Trace drew back the cloth covering Laura Fletcher's face. He watched the myriad emotions flicker across Mariah's face: first shock, then startled recognition, followed an instant later by pain. Then, ultimately, love.

When she reached out to smooth away a few strands of auburn hair from her sister's cheek, he made a move to stop her from contaminating the evidence, then decided, what the hell.

“That's where she was shot?” she asked, observing the smudged wound at the left temple. Though she was almost as pale as her sister and her trembling hands betrayed her tumultuous emotions, Mariah's voice remained steady.

“There and in the chest.”

“I want to see.”

“I'm not sure—”

She raised her chin. “I said, I want to see what was done to my sister, Sheriff.”

Their stares locked and held. Fuck it, Trace decided. He didn't feel up to arguing the point.

Hoping she wasn't going to faint on him again, he yanked back the sheet.

At the sight of Laura's nude body, Mariah flinched and unconsciously put a hand to her own breast as if she suddenly felt the impact of the gunshot herself.

Trace watched her thoughtful gaze move back and forth, from one wound to the other. The lady, he decided, was no cream puff.

“There's carbon stippling,” she murmured, pointing out the unmistakable tattoo of powder soot imbedded in a ring around the head wound.

“Yeah. Interesting you should recognize that.”

She heard the question in his voice. “In case J.D. didn't have time to fill you in, I'm a television scriptwriter. I specialize in crime shows.” She tossed off the names of a few of the more successful ones and a made-for-television movie.

“I've caught a couple of those. The ones I saw were pretty accurate,” he allowed.

“Thank you. I pride myself on my research.” She looked up at him. The earlier anguish in her eyes had been replaced by an anger much chillier than the artificially cooled air in the freezer. “You know what this proves, don't you?”

He crossed his arms. “Why don't you tell me?”

“It proves I'm right. Alan shot Laura.”

“I'm not sure I get your drift.”

“I don't need a degree in forensic medicine to tell that my sister was shot from intermediate range.”

“I'd say twelve to sixteen inches,” Trace agreed.

“You said on the drive over here that you found her in the bedroom. In bed. Without any clothes on.”

“Yeah.” He was still bothered about that part. Why lay out all that dough for fancy nightgowns if you weren't going to wear them? “So?”

“So who else would Laura have allowed to get that close to her under those circumstances?”

“Why don't you tell me? I didn't know your sister.”

“There are only two people most women will allow to see them stark naked. Their husbands and their gynecologists.”

“What about lovers?”

“Husbands, lovers, same thing.”

“Sometimes not.”

Mariah shot him a sharp look. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that a woman's husband and her lover are not necessarily always the same person.”

“Are you accusing my sister of having an affair?”

He thought of the ribbon-bound letters and shrugged. “At this point I'm not ready to accuse anyone of anything.”

“She was not having an affair.”

“Whatever you say. Are you finished looking?”

Her mind reeling with what the sheriff had just implied, Mariah dragged her gaze back to Laura's body, looking at it so intently Trace thought she might be memorizing her sister's features. She was.

“Yes.” She bit her lip as he drew the sheet back over the lifeless form.

Her emotions in a turmoil, Mariah latched on to the one thing she could handle right now. It was up to Mariah to make certain Laura's killer did not get away.

“It was Alan,” she insisted.

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “Maybe not.”

Frustrated, Mariah tried another tact. “Did you find the weapon in the house?”

“Sorry. But I'm not at liberty to discuss the investigation.”

“Not even with the victim's next of kin?”

“No offense intended, Ms. Swann, but technically the senator's the next of kin.”

Mariah's response to that was an earthy, pungent curse.

Trace turned off the lights. They were walking back down the dingy hallway when Mariah suddenly said, “Could you tell me where the rest rooms are?”

Her face had turned the color of the puke green walls. “Right around the corner. First door to the left.”

She was gone before he could finish his instructions.

After throwing up, Mariah splashed her face with cold water, then swirled more water that carried the scent and flavor of chlorine around in her mouth. She dug through her purse and located a lint-covered peppermint Life Saver, which she popped into her mouth. Then, taking a deep breath, she rejoined Trace, who was waiting exactly where she'd left him.

“You okay?” His gaze briefly swept over her too pale face.

“Fine. Thanks,” Mariah lied.

Although the basement was a great deal warmer than the autopsy room, she still felt chilled all the way to the bone. She felt, Mariah thought bleakly, as cold as Laura.

His sharp eyes caught the slight shiver she tried to con
ceal. “My office is upstairs. How about I buy you a cup of coffee? Or tea,” he amended, thinking about her dash to the toilet.

The way her nerves were jangling, the one thing Mariah didn't need was any caffeine. But she'd try anything to warm up. “Tea always makes me feel like a kid with flu. But I could use some coffee, thank you.”

His office, tucked away in a corner on the third floor, was shabby, but neat. Two chairs, covered in an uninspiring mud-hued Herculon dating back to the earth tones of the 1970s, sat in front of a weathered pine desk.

A law enforcement recruiting poster featured a scrubbed and polished young man in a starched khaki uniform standing beside a patrol car.

A second poster advertised the Silent Witness program, while another more colorful one featured McGruff, the crime dog, dressed like Sherlock Holmes and advising citizens to Take A Bite Out Of Crime. Taped to the beige wall beside the poster were crayon drawings from a class of third graders, thanking the sheriff for a tour of the jail.

On the opposite wall were FBI posters of most wanted felons who looked as if they'd come straight from central casting: a long-haired, tattooed biker, a wild-eyed Charles Manson lookalike and a sullen woman with a frizzy blond perm and four-inch long black roots who looked like a poster girl for sexually transmitted diseases.

“Nice photo collection,” she murmured. “And so much more original than the usual candid vacation snapshots of the wife and kids.”

“I don't have a wife. Or kids.” He gave the wanted posters a cursory study. “And sometimes, as clichéd as it might seem, the bad guys really do look like criminals.”

“But not all the time,” she noted significantly.

“No.” Trace frowned as he thought of the mild-mannered sixth grade science teacher and Boy Scout
leader who'd strangled, then methodically dismembered five hookers before he and Danny had finally caught up with him. “Not all the time.”

He gestured toward one of the chairs. “Have a seat. Nobody's made coffee this morning, so I'll have to get some from the machine down the hall. How do you take it?”

“With cream. Two sugars.”

He reached into a top drawer, grabbed a handful of change and left the office.

Drained, Mariah sank down onto the seat he'd indicated. The wood-framed window offered an appealing view of the town square across the street.

She watched as a young man threw a Frisbee to a remarkably talented springer spaniel who, from what she could tell, never missed. She envied both man and dog. They were playing on the fragrant green grass in the bright morning sunshine, oblivious to the horrors of the world around them.

Had it only been yesterday that she'd been the same way? Until this morning, murder had always been an intriguing challenge. Fortunately, enough people shared her fascination with violent, unpredictable crime to have made her a very wealthy woman.

Although she made her living thinking up innovative ways to kill people in the crime dramas she was best known for, her stories had always been born in the fertile ground of her imagination. She would painstakingly create her characters, weaving in enough sympathetic traits to win the audience's empathy, then murder the victims in ways that occasionally inspired letter-writing campaigns to the networks and advertisers from religious and moral watchdog groups.

The complaints never disturbed her. In Mariah's world,
any publicity you didn't have to pay for was good publicity.

And when the script was completed, she moved on to the next story, the next murder, never giving those deceased characters another thought. They weren't real, after all.

But, dammit, Laura was.

Mariah lit another cigarette to get the smell of the autopsy room out of her nostrils.

“It'll probably taste like toxic waste,” Trace warned when he returned to the office. “And the cream is that nondairy stuff. But it's hot.” He put a brown-and-white cardboard cup down in front of Mariah, then went around the desk, pulled an ashtray from one of the drawers and handed it to her.

“Thanks.” She took a sip of the coffee, found it as bad as he'd predicted, but drank it anyway, willing the warmth to replace the ice in her bloodstream. “May I ask you a question?”

The leather chair behind the desk creaked as he leaned back in it. “Shoot.”

“Are you religious?”

“Not particularly.” Trace grimaced as he took a taste of his own black coffee. But like her, did not put it down. Unlike her, he needed the caffeine.

“Do you believe in God?”