Lover In The Shadows

“I don’t know,” Molly insisted. She’d been right. Detective Harlan was playing games with her. She was out of her league. She tried to separate their joined hands but lacked even the strength to do that. She found a disturbing comfort in the chain of his fingers around her wrist. It was, after all, a human touch, the beat of his pulse hard and fast against her own racing beat, their two pulses joined in a momentary mating that thundered in her ears.

That was real—the sound of her own heart pounding to the beat of his, male to female in her sterile, clean kitchen, the sound of her blood dancing to the rhythm of his.

She’d been wandering for so long in a land where she no longer knew what was real, what was illusory, that Harlan’s hard grip around her wrist gave her a peculiar solace. She could understand for the first time the way captives began to turn to their captors, sunflower to the slow-moving sun overhead.

As the thought flashed through her mind, he pivoted and stared at her, his golden brown eyes fixed unblinking on her face. She was lost in the swirling depths of their changing color, the deepening, darkening pupils, and she sighed, willing for the moment to surrender to the darkness pulling at her.

So much easier. He’d told her it would be. Told her in his low voice that once she told him everything, she could sleep, rest. And she wanted to, needed to. He’d known the need driving her and spoken to it, seduced her with that promise, seduced her with the gleam in his gold eyes. Her head was falling forward; she was tumbling into that golden darkness, falling willingly, knowing she would finally find peace once she gave up her struggle.

She’d resisted that seduction earlier, summoned the last of her waning strength and will, but now…He’d promised her she could sleep. He’d promised her everything would be easier if she told him her secrets. Caught in the glow of his eyes, mesmerized by the pulse beat drumming loudly in her ears, Molly opened her mouth to tell him—tell him everything.

But the pounding, it turned out, was only the red-haired man she’d seen earlier at the bayou banging on her screen door. An illusion, after all.

Letting her wrist drop to the table, Harlan turned to the man, annoyance thick in his soft tones. “Well, damn you to hell, Ross. Your timing is…” He stopped and fingered the bracelet before he continued in a milder voice. “I hope to hell you have the damn search warrant.”

Drawing a shaky breath, Molly stood up. She glanced from the intruder to Harlan and back. It would be more comfortable to talk with the second man. There was nothing intense, nothing threatening in his open face. “You’re going to search my house?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ross looked sheepish. “John was waiting for the warrant. It’s here.”

Pressing her clenched fists into her eyes, Molly waited. Footsteps clattered on her kitchen tiles, moved through her halls.

She’d been here when the police had searched the house after the murder of her parents. Today the familiar sounds were worse. She knew they wouldn’t find anything. She had done nothing, nothing. She sank into a chair and covered her face.

Suspended in an emotional limbo, she drifted, not marking time, barely aware of the sounds and people around her. Except once, when the hairs on her arm rose as someone strode past her. Without looking up, she knew it was John Harlan. He’d stamped her with awareness of him. She’d know him in the dark of a moonless night. He went into the hall, and she sank back into the stupor that had enveloped her when he’d held up the bracelet. At some level she knew she couldn’t stay like this forever, but for the moment, while the intruders tramped through her home, violating it in their own ways, she was protected by the heavy numbness muffling her.

Voices from a distance, faint.

More time passed.

“You got the Luminol, Ross?”

“Hell, no. Scott’s got it.”

The hiss of an aerosol sprayer.

“Looky here, boys. No, not there. The pinpoints don’t mean squat. Over here, this big area. Ain’t it purty?”

She recognized the long, thin fingers pulling her hands away from her eyes.

“Ms. Harris, you need to call your lawyer.” Detective John Harlan was staring at her with a curious, satisfied gleam in his eyes.

Morning had become afternoon. Afternoon, evening. And in the gloom of the rainy day and the evening darkness, all around her in the kitchen, areas of light glowed eerily. On the floor, on the wall, on the light switch.

“Blood, Ms. Harris. Traces show up with Luminol even when things have been washed down.” Harlan held up the butcher knife. It glowed around the crevice where the metal joined the wood.

Light blinded her as one of the technicians flipped the lights on.

“I told you I cut my hand.” She held up her clenched hands.

“Yes. I know you said that.” He was so gentle with her that she wanted to lean against his wide shoulder and weep. She’d been alone so long in unending twilight.

She actually swayed toward him. “Can I trust you?” she whispered, touching his broad chest. The thump of his heart against her hand was important to her in all the illusion. Underneath his black silk shirt, he was warm, safe. She wanted to laugh at that idea, but the reality of his heat against the palm of her hand drew her anyway. “If I tell you everything, will you help me? Can I trust you?” she repeated from the depths of her confusion and despair, wanting to tell him she was afraid she was losing her mind.

“If you’re smart, you won’t. You should trust your lawyer, not me. I’m not here to help you, Ms. Harris. That’s not what I want.” His eyes held hers, warning her. “You know, you never answered my last question, Ms. Harris,” he said in his deep voice. “How did the bracelet you say you always wear wind up underneath the exact spot where Ms. Milar was killed?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Molly whispered, shoving away the memories and anchoring herself to the beat of his heart.

“Call your lawyer, Ms. Harris.” He looked at her with a chilly pity. “You need him. The sooner the better. Because I’m going to find out the answer to that last question. And when I do, I’ll send you to prison. For life. Or to the electric chair.” The pity turned his eyes dark gold. “Call your lawyer.”

A sudden sizzle between them, as if a current had suddenly been turned on. “Yes. All right.” She stumbled toward the phone, but she couldn’t remember where it was.

His hands firm and strong, he turned her toward the wall. “I told you I don’t like murderers. And, Ms. Harris,” he said, his voice once more oddly formal, “I think behind your pretty face you’re a stone-cold killer.”

“A murderer?”

“Yeah.” The rigid planes of his face as cruel as those of any Inquisition judge, he motioned to the phone.

She could see the phone moving on the wall, toward her, away from her, shrinking, disappearing into the darkness that swooped over her and carried her at last into the peace she’d been seeking.

“Hell, John. Look what you’ve done.”

Harlan looked at the woman he held in his arms. He’d caught her as she sagged quietly to the floor, her silvery eyes locked on his blinking ones and then shutting as she took one step forward and collapsed into his arms like sea foam blown across the waves.

“What are you going to do with her?” Ross scratched his head and the red tufts sprang up. “She didn’t call her lawyer.”

“I know.” He looked at the fine tracery of blue veins in her eyelids, at the heavy smudges under her eyes. “I guess I’d look silly as hell carrying her into the station slung over my shoulder, wouldn’t I?” She scarcely weighed anything. He could feel her rib cage against his hands, her breath moving through her erratically.

“Police harassment, John, that’s what it would look like. ’Course, she has enough money to hire a tag team of lawyers to sue the department, too, my man. And you’re on the chief’s list of people he’d most like to roast over an open fire and carve up afterward.”

“Yeah, there’s that, too. So, Ross, you think she murdered that woman?” Harlan stood for a moment not quite sure where to head with his insubstantial burden. Her rapid, shallow breathing sent puffs of air against his chin. Achingly sweet, her breath.

Ross was right. There were layers of issues to be considered here.

“Oh, I’d guess she did. Who else? Her bracelet down at the crime scene, her fingerprints for sure all over the knife. All the evidence seems to point right at her, straight as an arrow.”

Struck by Ross’s comment, Harlan paused. “It does, doesn’t it? Very clearly. We’d have to be stupid to miss all the clues, wouldn’t we?”

“What’re you saying, boss?” More tufts of red sprang loose from the rain-flattened curls as Ross attacked his hair in bewilderment.

“I don’t know. I need to think about this some more.” He could smell the sweetness of her shampoo rising up from her hair. Or maybe it was the sweetness of her skin. Her lower lip trembled, its soft fullness oddly vulnerable to him as he watched her with her guard down.

“The fingerprints aren’t really important, John. Least-wise, I don’t think so. You said she even picked it up when y’all walked into the kitchen, so fingerprints won’t mean much, not with a good lawyer, I reckon. ’Course, our guy’ll insist she was smart enough to pick it up and give a reason for her prints. But, hell, John, I don’t know.”

Harlan carried Molly into the living room and settled her on the cream-colored cotton sofa. “Go upstairs and get a blanket, Ross. There’s not a damned thing down here to cover her up with.” He brushed her face. “She’s like ice. That’s all we need—having her go into shock on us while we’re questioning her. Hell, this is a fouled-up mess.”

Her mouth parted in a sigh as his thumb lingered against the deep curve of her lower lip. He lifted his hand away. Not smart to touch her, he knew that. He didn’t want to touch her delicate face, and scarcely comprehended the impulse that drove him as he brushed a strand of light brown hair away from her pointed chin.

Carrying a brilliant red-and-pink comforter, Ross returned. “You really think she’s guilty, boss? She’s awfully pretty.” Glancing down at Molly, Ross handed the quilt to Harlan.

“Hell, Ross, you know better than that. What she looks like means diddly except to a jury. Looking like an angel at the left hand of God will sure help her if this goes to trial.” He watched the flutter of her eyelashes, those spiky, thick frames for her remarkable eyes. He wanted her awake, awake so the false innocence in her gray-blue eyes would remind him not to let his guard down.

Harlan wrapped Molly up in the bright quilt, its brilliance bleaching her already drained face of any remaining color.

Ross shook his head regretfully as he looked at the small bump that was Molly Harris under the quilt. “You believe she’s our killer, huh? That teeny girl?”

Smoothing her hair back from her face once more, Harlan nodded. “Yeah. Actually, I do. But I don’t like the fact that the evidence is being handed to us on a silver platter.”

“Most victims know their killers.”

Irritated somehow by the oft-repeated cop fact, Harlan raked his hands through his hair. “I know. But it makes me uncomfortable when a case looks this simple.” And something about her alibi for her parents’ murder needled his intuition and irritated him. Well, it would come to him.

Harlan tucked the comforter around her narrow, bare feet. A few grains of sand sprinkled into his hands as he moved her toes.

Dried sand, caught between her toes. He brushed her feet carefully, and more grains drifted into his hands. The bottoms of her feet were scratched. Several small cuts crisscrossed the smooth soles. Shell cuts. Weed abrasions.

Possibly from the shells dotting the shore of the bayou.

“Damn, boss.” Ross shifted uneasily. “This doesn’t look good. I wish to hell she’d called her lawyer before she keeled over.”

“Me, too.” Harlan stretched, arching his back as he fought the contradictory urges to shake Ms. Molly Harris awake and to wrap her tighter in the warmth of her cheerful quilt until its brightness bled into her wan face.

A whimper, faint but audible, escaped her. Her mouth moved as if she were trying to say something, but no words came out. Harlan had the strangest feeling she was screaming, but he frowned, troubled by the idea of Molly Harris silently screaming somewhere in the darkness.

He considered the idea. If she’d done what he thought she had, she should be screaming. And if she hadn’t…

Reaching a decision, he rose. “I’ll be damned if I like this case one little bit. It stinks to high heaven. I mean, I love messy cases, but not where I get the real strong sense that somebody’s doing my work for me. Let’s give the crime-lab boys a chance to do their thing, pin down time of death, do the blood typing, and then we’ll visit Ms. Harris again. We don’t have to arrest her today. She’s not going anywhere.” Harlan watched the rapid lift and fall of the quilt over Molly’s breasts, the shuddering movement touching him in spite of the Luminol glowing in the kitchen, the evidence proclaiming the innocence in her eyes a sham.

Blood had been spilled here. Spilled and washed down. Old blood. Fresh blood.

More blood than a bad cut would produce.

He glanced at her small hand, where the line of the wound was obscene against the smoothness of her skin. It was a nasty cut. Lifting her palm, he studied the cut again.

There was something odd about the way the wound came around the base of her thumb, but he couldn’t figure out what.

He wanted to take her into the station for questioning, photograph the wound and see if the samples of the blood from the wooden handle matched hers or Camina Milar’s.

She whimpered again, her mouth opening in that silent scream. Smoothing his rumpled hair, Harlan dismissed the feeling that somewhere, locked in the darkness of her unconscious, Molly Harris was screaming for help. Too fanciful. He wanted to leave her soft mouth with its maybe screams behind him. Wanted to get back to work. Knowing he was stupid for doing so, he touched her mouth briefly, his finger pressing lightly into the defenseless contours.

“So, what’s the plan, boss?”

Harlan looked away from Molly Harris and the spread of her shiny hair against her couch and reached his decision. “I’m going back to the station. You catch a ride with Tanner, but I want one of you to stay with Ms. Harris until she comes to. You, preferably. If you can?”

“Sure. I’ll work something out. No problem.” Ross grinned. “Hell, this is the closest I’ve come to having a date in a month of Sundays. I reckon I can hang around here awhile.”

“Good.” Harlan heard the tiny whimper again, and it disturbed him. Molly Harris was getting under his skin, when all he wanted was to see her in jail, where he figured she belonged. “Call the medic and have him hang around, too, Ross, okay?”

Ross nodded and reached for his walkie-talkie.

As he studied Molly Harris’s unconscious form, the pain moving over her face like shadows slipping across the moon, Harlan’s uneasiness deepened. He couldn’t escape the impression that he was missing something important about her. And he damn sure didn’t like the feeling that he wanted to stay with her.

He wanted to banish Molly Harris from his thoughts, wanted to roar down her driveway and leave her behind, never giving her another thought. And yet he wanted to keep touching her cool, satiny skin until it warmed, wanted to see her face soft and gazing up at him—

The latter instinct was so strong that he had to restrain himself from heading for the door in two long strides. He rubbed the last of the clinging grains of sand from his hands. Ms. Harris had been walking barefoot in sand and brush, that much was for sure. He sighed.

“The medic’s on his way up from the bayou.”

Harlan shrugged, his still-damp jacket sticking to his slacks. “From the looks of her, Ross, I figure she’s suffering from stress and exhaustion, but have him check her out. Then you stay out of the way until she’s awake. If the medic thinks she’s having any problems, get her to the hospital ASAP, got it? I don’t want any complaints about this case. Understand?” He frowned, that odd reluctance to leave keeping him where he stood despite his better judgment.

“Got it in one, boss.” Waggling a skinny arm, Ross waved him on his way. “Go on along, lil’ dogie.”

Harlan laughed. “You been hanging around the cowboy crew again, Ross?” From the corner of his eye, he caught the shiver of Molly Harris’s hair, tea against the cream of the couch.

“Yup.” Ross tipped back an imaginary hat. “You’d be surprised what you can learn from that bunch of ramblers, boss.”

“Yeah? Watch it. Those dudes can get you in trouble.” Harlan glanced around Molly’s living room once more. It had a surprising familiarity. The pictures in the file had frozen the room’s dimensions in his mind, but even the white on white of its furniture resonated inside him, like a faraway chime on a still afternoon. “Well.” He shrugged. “I’m gone, Ross. Check in with me after you finish here.”

Once more the kitchen was dark. Walking through the room’s eerie Luminol glow, Harlan stared at the dirty cat-food plate. It was the only messy thing in Molly Harris’s kitchen. He reached down and picked up the plate, carrying it to the sink, where he rinsed it. He opened the dishwasher and slid the plate between two rubber-coated prongs.

A glass. Two cups. One plate. In a rinsed-out pan, a fragment of milk scum clung like cobwebs to the edge.

Ms. Harris had made herself hot milk sometime last night.

He glanced around at the well-equipped kitchen. New appliances. Refrigerator. Stove. Pausing, he frowned. Why hadn’t she heated her milk in the microwave?

Harlan took the pan out of the dishwasher and carried it to the stove. Placing it on the grate above the gas burner, he thought for a moment.

She would have been in the kitchen, heating her milk. Sleepless, wanting hot milk so she could fall asleep at some point during the long night.

As if he could see her, a small, solitary form in the night moving slowly about her kitchen, he knew that.

At the stove, he looked up and straight out toward the dock.

In the gray half-light of the rainy winter evening, he could see the dark band of the bayou, the wooden finger of the rickety pier jutting into the water.

At night, what would she have seen?

The glow of Camina’s cigarette. Molly would have seen that bit of light. If she’d been up, wandering through her house, she would have seen the red glow of Camina’s cigarettes.

Turning away from the window overlooking the sink and the bayou, Harlan faced the microwave. His back was to the bayou and the long, empty expanse of lawn.

In the glass door of the microwave, shadows moved behind him, reflections like ghosts shimmering in back of him, watching him.

No, she wouldn’t have used the microwave at night. She wouldn’t have wanted to turn her back on all that darkness.

He knew that about her. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

That ability to leap from A to Z was part of his luck. One of the things that made him a good cop. One of the things that made the chief crazy, because Harlan couldn’t explain it.

He didn’t know where the knowledge came from. He’d always had it. Not being given to flights of fancy, he tried not to examine the source of his knowing. He didn’t believe in psychic mumbo jumbo, but even so, some things were better left unexplained, even for a cop whose intuition had always given him an edge.

He didn’t like mysteries, though—especially when they were his own. So intuition was as good an explanation as any.

Glancing around the kitchen one last time, he knew Molly Harris had roamed through her kitchen last night, had her cup of milk and had gone outside. The knowledge was just there, inside him.

Stepping out onto the gallery, he looked down the rain-swept lawn toward the driveway and saw Tanner waiting beside the car. Walking toward him, Harlan turned once and stared back at the house encircled by moss-heavy oak trees, the moss hanging wet and gray in long loops.

The first-floor gallery, unscreened, wrapped the lower portion of the house. Off the rooms upstairs, a second gallery ran from the sides of the house all around to the back. With no outside staircases, that gallery was accessible only from the inside rooms opening onto it. On the tall, floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the house, the drapes and shades were drawn back. He saw the light shining on the table next to the sofa, saw Molly Harris’s red-and-pink quilt, imagined the thin line of her arm hanging down to the wooden floor. Imagined her soft mouth open in silent pleading.

The house had been closed off from outside eyes when he and Ross had first driven up. He’d thought it secretive as they drove up the winding driveway hedged by enormous double yellow hibiscus bushes. Climbing into his car and nodding to Tanner, who wandered back down toward the bayou, where bright searchlights sliced the dark, Harlan decided that Molly must have opened the shutters and pulled back the drapes when she’d fled back to the house after his earlier questioning.

He’d fought the urge to pursue her to the house.

Just as he now disregarded the sense that he should turn around and go back to her house.

Stay with her.

She’d been defenseless in his arms as he’d carried her past the open gallery into the huge, empty house.

Trying to ease the tightness between his shoulder blades, Harlan rolled his shoulders.

Firing up the engine, he let it idle for a long time as he continued to stare at the house, at the image of Molly in the long window facing him, the light shining down on her, while outside, night crept silently closer. Finally, he shifted into first and drove away, the rain blurring the windshield.

Stay with her.

The shoulder harness pulling against his chest, he turned and saw the house disappear behind him into the sheeting rain. Just before he looked back at the driveway, he frowned.

He thought he’d seen a shape move at the corner of the house.

Molly woke up abruptly, her heart pounding sickeningly.

The gleam of the lamp on the table turned the man’s hair carroty.

Her pulse slowed as she recognized him. He’d been here with Detective Harlan. She turned her head.

No one else was in the room.

Her mouth was dry—sleepy dry, not the cotton dry of fear. She wet her lips. They were cracked.

She yawned. She’d slept the afternoon through. Unbelievable. Perhaps she ought to see if the man wanted to Molly-sit in the evenings.

“Hey there, Ms. Harris.”

Struggling to rise, Molly found she was cocooned in her quilt, the wild hues splashing the somber, clean whiteness of her living room with streaks of reddish color.

Pushing the quilt away, she gagged, remembering the dark stains against Camina’s blouse, remembering other stains. “Where is everyone?”

“All gone. Harlan told me to stay until you woke up. The doc checked you out. You keeled over like a chopped tree and went right to sleep. Doc said to let you sleep, that you’d wake up in your own good time.”

“I was asleep?” She wanted verification. “Did I…” How could she ask him if she’d gotten up, draped in her comforter, and roamed her house, eyes open wide but her mind asleep, off guard?

“Relax. You never said a word.” His grin was wide and uncomplicated.

She’d been right. Nothing hidden in this man, unlike John Harlan with his enigmatic flashes of irony, his comments that implied more than they said. She shivered and pulled the comforter over her shoulders. She was glad the redhead had stayed with her. She didn’t like the idea of waking up and knowing that the detective had watched her in her sleep, watched her while she was vulnerable. She shivered again.

“I just…slept?” Molly huddled into the quilt, relieved.