Kitabı oku: «A Widow's Guilty Secret», sayfa 2

Chapter 2

Nick prided himself on the fact that his reflexes had always been quick. This time was no exception.

One minute he was talking to the unfortunate, freshly minted widow. The next he was stretching out to catch her and keep her head—as well as the rest of her—from hitting the floor.

Beside him, Juarez stood frozen, almost in as much shock, in his own way, as the sheriff’s widow. His partner was definitely in need of a crash course that would teach him exactly how to be a useful member of the police force. Right now, the man was undoubtedly well meaning, but also rather useless. The man had a great deal to learn before he could be considered a good detective.

Nick was fairly convinced that Jason Juarez had found himself in his present position only because he was related to someone either on the force, or someone who was embedded within Vengeance’s less-than-dynamic town counsel. Whichever it was, the so-called guardian angel might be trying to be kind to the young man, but in the interim, he or she was setting the course of detective work back by half a century.

Juarez, he knew, was relieved when the FBI special agents had descended on the town and, specifically, the “dig” where the bodies had been found. They’d been summoned by the town fathers because one of the victims was Senator Merris. The special agents had been set to take over the entire crime scene, but he had managed to get them to agree that this would be worked as a team effort. That meant that information would be shared—supposedly.

Nick turned his attention to the woman he’d just caught. When he’d made his initial assessment of her, he’d judged that she weighed under a hundred pounds. If he wasn’t right on target, he was close. Suzy Burris felt as if she weighed next to nothing at all.

Striding into the house ahead of the flustered Juarez, his arms full of unconscious damsel in distress, Nick headed straight for the sofa.

“Get the door, Juarez,” he tossed over his shoulder at his partner.

It took the detective a second to process the order, and another second for embarrassment to creep up his lanky torso, reaching his cheeks and turning them a faint shade of pink.

“You want it closed?” he asked.

“No, I want you to take it off the hinges and take it with us when we leave,” Nick bit off sarcastically as he lay the woman down on the sofa. “Yeah, I want it closed,” he snapped quickly before the befuddled, wet-behind-the-ears detective took him at his word and started removing the door from its hinges. He wouldn’t have put it past him.

The door shut and then he heard Juarez hurrying over to the sofa.

“Is she—is she all right?” the younger man asked nervously. He shifted slightly from foot to foot as he hovered about like a confused hummingbird, searching for a destination where he could alight.

“She just found out that her husband’s dead, what do you think?” Nick asked, trying not to let his irritation break through. Part of that irritation had to do with the fact that he had yet to tell the woman the worst part: that her husband had been murdered.

No doubt feeling foolish, Juarez looked down at the unconscious woman. “I guess she’s not all right.”

There was sympathy in the younger man’s voice.

At least he had the right emotional response, Nick thought. That was a start, although being too sympathetic wasn’t a good thing, either. Nick was convinced of that. It wasn’t exactly recommended for someone in their line of work. Getting too involved could get in the way, clouding their judgment and hindering them from doing their job right.

At least, that had been the case back in Houston.

Out here, when he’d accepted the job, he’d just assumed that police work involved tracking down lost dogs and occasionally finding a child who had wandered off from his or her parents. Solving homicides like the ones they were faced with came as a complete and utter surprise to him. While it was, sadly, right up his alley, Nick had come to Vengeance to take an extended break from that sort of thing.

Still, he had to admit that part of him felt suddenly alive again. He hadn’t missed the nonstop pressure of the life he’d led as a detective in Houston, but he did find that he missed the challenges that sort of life had perpetually thrown at him.

At least occasionally.

“Make yourself useful,” he instructed Juarez. “Get me a compress for her head.”

The younger detective looked a little lost as he glanced about the room, as if searching for something to use to make this happen.

Nick sighed. This partnership was going to test his patience. If Juarez got in the way, the feds were going to want them both off the case—and as far as he was concerned, Vengeance was now his town and that made the murdered men his case.

“Kitchen, towel.” Nick snapped out the words in staccato fashion, firing them at Juarez as if they were bullets. “Make it wet. Cold water,” he emphasized as Juarez headed toward the section of the house where he assumed the kitchen was located. “Don’t forget to wring it out,” Nick added, raising his voice so that the other man could hear him.

Otherwise, Juarez would probably be bringing him a towel that left a trail of dripping water in its wake.

A beat later, Juarez cheerfully called back, “Got it!”

Nick shook his head, mentally telling himself to be patient.

When he glanced back down at the sheriff’s widow, her eyes were open and she looked up at him, appearing somewhat dazed.

“Welcome back,” he said, then placed his hands on her shoulders in gentle restraint as Suzy tried to sit up. “I’d hold off on that for a couple of minutes or so if I were you,” he counseled, then added with a marginally amused smile, “Remember what happened the last time you ignored my advice.”

Suzy sighed and remained where she was, even though it made her tense to lie down in a stranger’s presence. For a second, she closed her eyes again, trying to regain her bearings.

“This isn’t some cruel joke, is it?”

He heard the hopeful note in her voice and caught himself feeling sorry for her. The next moment, he banked down that emotion. He knew from experience that that was only asking for trouble.

“I’m afraid not.”

She opened her eyes to look up at the man who had unwittingly thrown her world into such turmoil. “Peter’s really dead?”

“He’s really dead,” Nick confirmed. “His body was found in a shallow grave by a group of geology grad students.” After that, all hell had broken loose. It was going to be hard keeping a lid on the investigation, what with the news media already poking around.

Suzy was having trouble thinking, trouble processing this. She’d been so focused on telling Peter she wanted a divorce that this had completely thrown her for a loop.

And unleashed a great deal of guilt.

“How did he die? Was it a car accident?” she asked hoarsely.

“No.” His voice was emotionless, giving nothing away. “The sheriff appeared to have been choked to death.”

Her eyes widened in astonishment. “Someone killed him?”

Nick nodded, thinking that, all things considered, she was handling this rather well. “It certainly looks that way.”

“Who?” she whispered, hardly able to force the word out.

“That’s what we’re currently trying to find out,” Nick told her honestly.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the other detective approaching. Contrary to instructions, Juarez had brought back a dripping towel. He held it out to Nick like a peace offering.

Nick made no attempt to take it from him. “Mrs. Burris is conscious again, Juarez. We won’t be needing that now.” Then, because the detective appeared to be at loose ends as to what to do with the now unnecessary towel, Nick ordered, “Take the towel back to the kitchen, Juarez.”

Happy to be given instructions to follow, the younger man quickly retraced his steps and eagerly did as he was told.

“You’re very patient with him,” Suzy observed.

It struck her as odd, even as she said the words, that she would notice something so insignificant, given what she’d just been told. Was she going crazy? Or was she just being insensitive to Peter’s fate? Neither answer seemed like the right one.

Nick shrugged off the comment and the implied compliment behind it. “He reminds me of my kid brother,” he told her. He hadn’t realized that until just now, he thought, but now that he’d said it out loud, he realized that Juarez and Eddie had the same lost puppy appeal, the same eagerness to please.

It took him a second to realize that the sheriff’s widow was asking him something.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, can I sit up now?” she repeated. She didn’t feel up to being restrained again. She wasn’t even certain just how she’d react to that.

Right now, all sorts of emotions collided within her as disbelief, anger, guilt and a sliver of relief all vied for practically the same space.

The last reaction made her ashamed. Peter had been, after all, her husband and the father of her child, relief over his death, even the barest hint of it, shouldn’t be entering into the equation, she upbraided herself.

Even worse was what was missing.

What she realized was conspicuously missing was grief. Where is the grief? she silently demanded. Shouldn’t she be feeling that predominately instead of all these other emotions that were racing through her?

What was wrong with her?

“Slowly,” the detective was saying to her.

She blinked, confused. Had she missed something? “What?”

“You can sit up,” Nick repeated. “But do it slowly,” he cautioned. “You really don’t want to get dizzy and pass out again.”

She didn’t like the frailty his warning implied. It wasn’t as if she was made out of spun glass. If she had been, she would have shattered long before now.

“That was the first time I ever passed out,” Suzy informed him with a touch of annoyance in her voice.

“First time you had a husband who was murdered, I suspect,” Nick speculated.

Suzy flushed. She could feel the color rising to her cheeks, making them hot.

“Yes,” she answered hoarsely, waiting to see where he was going with this.

“Drastic news brings out drastic results,” he told her matter-of-factly. “Want some water?” Without waiting for an answer, he glanced at Juarez. His partner was just coming back into the room. “Juarez, get Mrs. Burris a glass of water.”

Without a word, the other detective turned on his heel and went back to the kitchen.

“Makes him feel useful,” Nick said in response to the protest he saw hovering on the widow’s perfectly formed lips.

“You always anticipate everything?” she couldn’t help asking.

He flashed her another amused smile. Amid the vulnerability, he detected a feisty streak. He found it rather appealing.

“Saves time,” he told her. “But no, I don’t always anticipate everything, just the obvious things.”

“Like my fainting,” she assumed.

“Being told that a spouse was murdered usually comes as a shock to the person doing the listening,” he said, never taking his eyes off hers.

Suzy heard the detective’s emphasis on the telltale word: usually. Did that mean he thought that she was innocent, or did he actually think she had something to do with Peter’s murder? If the latter, she knew she should be outraged at the very idea, but she still felt too drained, too devastated by the news, to summon that sort of a response.

“It did,” she told him as firmly as she could, the look in her eyes challenging him to say something different.

Juarez had returned with a tall glass filled to the very brim with water. Nick put his hand out for it, then offered it to the widow.

Suzy took the glass with both hands to hold it steady and drank deeply. Strange as it seemed, the cold water helped her pull herself together and focus.

She couldn’t allow herself to go to pieces. There was no one around to help her put those pieces back together again. No one to really rely on, except herself.

Just like the old days.

“Thank you,” she said to Juarez, offering him the near-empty glass. Her words elicited a shy smile from the young detective as he took the glass from her.

“My pleasure, ma’am.”

Ma’am. She was way too young to be a ma’am. Or maybe she wasn’t. After all, she was someone’s mother now.

“You up to some questions?” the other detective asked her. She nodded, wanting to get this over with. “When did you last see your husband?”

“Yesterday morning at breakfast.” That seemed like a hundred years ago now, she thought. Had it only been a mere twenty-four hours?

“Did he seem particularly preoccupied or troubled to you?” the detective asked.

She looked at this stranger for a long moment, wondering how to answer his question. Did she tell him that she and Peter had grown apart? That they hardly spoke to one another these last few days, except to talk about the baby? Or did she keep her secret and pretend that everything had been just fine?

Pressing her lips together, Suzy paused for a moment as she searched for some plausible middle ground. “If you’re asking me if he seemed different than usual yesterday, the answer is no, he didn’t.”

Her words, Nick noted, were carefully orchestrated. He read between the lines.

“How long have you and your husband been having marital problems?” he asked gently.

The question surprised not only Suzy, but the other detective as well. Juarez stared at him, openmouthed. “You didn’t tell me you knew the sheriff and his wife, Nick,” Juarez said, sounding slightly irritated at being shut out this way.

“I don’t, do I, Mrs. Burris?” Nick asked, looking at the woman.

She didn’t bother addressing his last question as she focused on the one that not only caught her off guard, but upset her, as well. She didn’t want any dirty laundry to mar Peter’s memory. As far as the people in the county were concerned, he was an exemplary sheriff.

“What makes you think we were having problems?” she asked.

The question told him all he asked. He was right. Had there been no problems, she might have issued an indignant denial, or at the very least, stared at him as if he was being boorish. But she didn’t. She was defensive. Because there was something to be defensive about.

“Let’s just say I’ve been there,” he answered evasively.

This wasn’t about him, and Nick had no intentions of revisiting his own failed attempt at marital bliss. He’d married far too young and it had all fallen apart on them not that long after the vows. In keeping with his marriage, he’d been divorced young as well. He’d learned a lesson along the way: He was no good at marriage.

“Were you two talking?” he asked, trying to sound as kind as he could under the circumstances.

“Yes,” she snapped back, then shrugged helplessly as she amended, “But just barely.” She paused again, searching for a way to phrase what she wanted to say. “We’ve just had a baby—”

“Congratulations,” Juarez said with enthusiasm. “Me, too. I mean, my wife, too—except not yet. I mean—”

“He means his wife’s due anytime now,” Nick interjected. He’d heard about nothing else this entire last week. “Go on,” he coaxed Suzy, “you were saying …?” He trailed off, waiting for her to fill in the blanks.

“Despite that, Peter’s been rather distant lately,” she admitted.

The next moment, she regretted the words. Why was she baring her soul to these men? What did any of this have to do with whoever had killed Peter?

“Some men feel threatened by a baby,” Nick told her, recalling what he’d once heard. “They think that they’re being replaced in their wives’ affections.”

Suzy shook her head. She wanted to stop any further conjecture before it got too out of hand.

“Having the baby was Peter’s idea,” she told him, then added, “he thought that the baby would bring us closer together.”

He noticed she didn’t say “again,” which meant that they probably hadn’t been all that close to begin with. Nick decided to press a little further. “How bad did it get?”

Enough was enough. Suzy’s own protective instincts, the same one that had her protecting her sister from their parents’ inebriated wrath, kicked in.

She glared at this intruding detective. “What does any of this have to do with my husband’s murder?” she demanded.

“Just trying to establish the sheriff’s frame of mind the last few days before he was killed,” he replied matter-of-factly.

She really didn’t like exposing her private life like this to strangers, but then, what did it matter, anyway? Peter was dead and that meant her world would have to go through some pretty drastic changes—even faster than she’d initially anticipated. After all, she had been planning to divorce Peter. All in all, a divorce was rather a drastic life change in itself.

She blew out a breath and plunged in. “I was going to ask Peter for a divorce when he got home last night.” She addressed her words to her shoes, not feeling up to making eye contact with the detective who was doing all the questioning right about now.

But then, he’d probably take that as some sort of a silent admission of guilt, she realized. Blowing out another breath, she forced herself to look up at the man.

“Except that he didn’t,” she said quietly once she’d reestablished eye contact.

Something sharp pricked at his insides the moment their eyes met. Nick tried to shrug it off. It didn’t budge.

“I see,” he said without a shred of emotion evident in his voice, successfully masking his feelings.

It was at that moment that Detective Nick Jeffries made a stunning and rather uncomfortable discovery. He realized that he was attracted to this woman, deeply attracted. Moreover, it wasn’t just her delicate looks that had hooked and reeled him in, it was her underlying vulnerability, which he could see she tried to cover up at all costs.

But the very existence of that vulnerability had awakened his dormant protective streak, a streak he had thought he’d successfully laid to rest more than a few years ago.

Apparently, he’d thought wrong.

Chapter 3

As Nick tried to bury this unsettling and somewhat annoying realization, Juarez’s cellphone rang.

Juarez snapped to attention and seemed to go on high alert even before he pulled his phone out of his pocket. He blinked, clearing his vision, and then looked at the screen to identify the caller.

Rather than just answer it, the young detective continued to stare at the name, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Finally, he glanced up at Nick and said numbly, “It’s my wife.” The next moment, he shivered as a sudden attack of nerves seized him. His mouth choked out, “This could be it.”

“It?” Nick repeated. Completely focused on the sheriff’s widow, he had no idea what his partner was talking about.

Juarez nodded, still staring at the phone. “The baby’s due anytime now,” he said, repeating what he’d said earlier—and the day before, and the day before that. “She could be calling to tell me that she’s in labor.” His voice took on a panicked note as it went up two octaves, then cracked.

“Don’t you think you should answer it, then?” Nick coaxed, utterly mystified at the way his partner’s mind seemed to work—if indeed it actually was working at all, which he was beginning to doubt.

“Yeah, right,” Juarez cried.

He fumbled with the cellphone, managing to almost disconnect himself from the incoming call before he finally hit the right key to answer it.

Juarez’s hands visibly shook as he put the cellphone to his ear. “Tina? Is it time?” His eyes grew huge as he listened to his wife’s answer. Literally stunned, his eyes shifted over to look at Nick. “It’s time,” he announced breathlessly.

He gave every indication that he was about to hyperventilate.

“Then I suggest you start breathing evenly, get in your car and go,” Nick responded, uttering each word slowly, as if he were speaking to someone who was mentally challenged.

“Right. Go.” As if someone had fired a starter pistol, Juarez scrambled for the door. But when he reached it, he suddenly came to a skidding stop. The rest of his brain—the part that knew it was on duty—kicked in. “What about you?” the younger detective asked. “If I take the car, you’ll be stranded. How are you going to get back to the squad room?”

Nick waved away his concern. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll call someone,” he told the other man, his tone confident. And then he ordered, “Go. Your wife needs you. And try not to hit anything on your way there,” he called after the swiftly departing detective.

“Okay,” Juarez yelled back.

When Nick looked back at the sheriff’s widow, she had an odd expression on her face. He couldn’t begin to interpret it.

“Something wrong?” he asked her.

Suzy shook her head. “I just envy his wife, that’s all,” she said wistfully. “He looked really excited about becoming a father.”

“He looked really clueless,” Nick corrected. “And so far, that seems to be pretty much his natural state,” he added in what turned out to be a completely unguarded moment. It was out of character for him. As a rule, he didn’t usually let on what he thought of the people he worked with—or the ones he questioned for that matter.

“Still, he loves her.” And love had a way of making up for a host of failings, she thought. “You can see it in his eyes.”

Nick took his cue from her wording, following it through. “And what did you see when you looked into your husband’s eyes?” he asked, curious as to what her answer would be.

Suzy shrugged in a careless manner that seemed a little too precise to him—and possibly practiced. “Barriers. Walls. Someone I didn’t know.”

And that, she knew, had been the true reason for the death of their marriage. Because she’d realized that after all this time, Peter was more of a stranger to her now than he had been when they’d first gotten married.

Was the woman saying that because it was how she’d actually felt, or was she laying the groundwork to distance herself from whatever the investigation would turn up about the sheriff?

She wasn’t as easy to read as he’d first thought. Nick felt himself being reeled in a little further, despite his resistance to the idea. He knew he was on slippery footing.

“Did your husband have any enemies?” Nick asked her.

Suzy thought for a moment, but it really didn’t matter how long she took, she decided. She would arrive at the same conclusion: she didn’t think so, but she didn’t know for sure.

With a sigh, Suzy shook her head. “Not that he ever mentioned, but to be honest, I really don’t know. I know that Peter was away at night more and more. When I asked him about it a couple of times, he said that he was working late on a case.” It had sounded like an excuse to her at the time, but maybe she was doing Peter a disservice. “Maybe he was,” she said out loud. “But at the time, I thought that there was another woman in the picture—or six.”

How had she arrived at that number, Nick wondered. Most women would have said one or two. “Six?”

When he said the number, it sounded foolish. Suzy shrugged. “Sorry, that was flippant. I really don’t know how many he was seeing—or if he actually was seeing someone else. My pregnancy had me pretty miserable and looking back, maybe I took it out on him.”

Added to that, she’d worked until a little more than a week before she delivered. What that translated to, Suzy thought, was that she and Peter hardly saw each other toward the end.

Nick wasn’t quite ready to allow this line of questioning to drop just yet. “Did you ever find anything concrete to back up these suspicions, something that might have got you thinking he was seeing someone else?”

“I didn’t look,” she admitted, unconsciously raising her chin again defensively. “I didn’t want to be one of those snooping, bitter women.” Besides, she thought, as long as she didn’t find anything, there was always the hope that she was wrong. Other times, she was fairly sure she wasn’t wrong. “To be honest,” she continued in a distant, quiet voice, “I was a little relieved when I thought that Peter was seeing someone else.”

Nick came to his own conclusions: a guilty conscience might welcome a level playing field. “Because you were seeing someone, as well?” he guessed, watching her face intently.

Stunned, she stared at him. Despite the growing chasm between Peter and her, she’d never once thought of seeking solace in someone else’s arms. She might not have been in love with Peter, but she was definitely loyal to the institution of marriage.

“What?” she cried, thinking she’d heard wrong. But the expression on the detective’s face told her that she hadn’t. “No, of course not. Why would you say something like that?” she asked.

“Just a natural assumption,” he answered mildly. “If your husband was seeing someone, that made you feel less guilty about you seeing someone.”

“You have it all wrong,” she informed him with more than a touch of indignation.

“Then enlighten me.”

Suzy took a breath. She really didn’t like baring her soul this way, but she knew she had no choice. If she kept things back from this man, she was certain that he would think the worst.

“If Peter was seeing someone else, that would have made me feel less guilty about not having feelings for him.”

Now, there was a novel approach to marital discord, Nick couldn’t help thinking. “I see. And when did you stop having feelings for him?”

Suzy shrugged again, her slender shoulders rising and falling beneath the light blue cotton blouse she had on. She thought of telling the detective that was none of his business, but he’d probably counter that protest by telling her that right now it was. She might as well avoid a verbal squabble with him and just answer the question.

“I don’t think I ever started to have feelings for Peter, not the deep, everlasting kind. Don’t get me wrong,” she cautioned quickly, not wanting the detective to come away with the wrong impression. “There was a really intense attraction between us from the very first moment we met, but there turned out to be nothing behind it, nothing substantial. At least, not for me,” she told him sadly. With all her heart she wished that there could have been. But this was a case where wishing just didn’t make it so.

“But there was for him?” Nick questioned, watching her closely.

To him, half of police work was getting a feeling for the person you were dealing with, looking beneath their layers, their complexities. He was fairly certain that he would be able to tell if this woman was lying to him.

The answer to the last question was yes, but how did she get that across without sounding conceited?

“Well, Peter said he loved me, that he wanted to take care of me for the rest of my life,” Suzy said. A rueful smile curved her mouth as she remembered the first stages of their relationship, before the wedding ring, the disappointments and the baby. “You have no idea how good that sounded to me at the time.”

She raised her eyes to Nick and he saw a defensiveness entering the bright blue orbs, as if the woman dared him to find fault in her words.

“I had less than an ideal childhood,” Suzy added by way of an explanation, “and just wanted someone to care whether I lived or died. Peter said he did.” At the time, that seemed to be enough of a basis for marriage. “So I married him, hoping that I’d eventually feel the same way about him.”

“But you didn’t.” It wasn’t really a guess at this point but a conclusion drawn from what she’d already told him.

“Well, I didn’t want him dead.” And then she relented slightly, adding, “But I didn’t particularly want him living with me. Especially when he was growing so distant—not that I really blamed him for that.” This was all coming out really badly. To her ear, it sounded as if she was digging herself into a hole. “I began to think that the whole thing—marrying Peter—was a mistake.

“The baby wasn’t a mistake,” Suzy quickly added in the next breath, anticipating what the detective was probably thinking. “But on the other hand, no baby should be used as a way to keep a marriage together. It’s not fair to the baby or to the two people involved.”

That all sounded very noble. Maybe too noble, Nick thought. “Do you know how much insurance your husband was carrying?”

Suzy frowned, confused for a moment. “Life insurance?”

“Yes, life insurance,” he repeated, a trace of impatience in his voice. “How much was your husband carrying?”

She was still reeling from news of Peter’s murder. Practical questions like the one the detective had just posed hadn’t even occurred to her yet.

“I have no idea,” she told him. “As far as I know, he wasn’t carrying any.” And then, although she didn’t want to believe anyone would even remotely think this horrible way about her, that she would kill someone, especially her husband, for money, Suzy demanded, “Why? Do you think I had him killed so I could get the insurance money?”

The whole thing was too ludicrous to believe—yet the detective obviously saw it as a possibility. Suzy didn’t know whether to be angry—or afraid. Was she going to need a lawyer on top of everything else?

Nick deliberately didn’t answer her directly. “It’s been known to happen.”

“Well, not as far as I’m concerned,” she retorted angrily. Stress and overworked hormones had her fairly shouting at him. “I’m an accountant. I have a good job and I don’t need extra money from some stupid life insurance policy.”

“Everyone needs extra money,” Nick told her matter-of-factly. And women had killed their husbands for reasons other than money.

Her eyes flashed. Okay, she was getting really tired of this verbal sparring match. If he thought she’d killed Peter for the money, she wanted him to come out and just say it.