Lover In The Shadows

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.