The Midnight Hour Read online

  “Tony, we have to get up! I have to be back in court in about twenty minutes.”

  He groaned and lifted his head, looking down at her with an expression in his eyes that was not quite a smile. The rest of him stayed just where it was.

  “You—are—beautiful—and—sexy—and—” he said, punctuating his words with butterfly kisses dropped on her mouth.

  “Late,” Grace finished for him tartly. She shoved at his shoulder again. A woman in love or not—and she would have to consider that more carefully later—she was also a judge, and she had to be back in her courtroom by one o’clock.

  He grimaced comically and rolled off her, lying on his back, with no apparent concern for his nudity, and crossing his arms beneath his head as he watched her scramble off his bed with scant dignity.

  “Whoever said women were the romantic sex obviously never made love to one,” he said in a complaining tone.

  “In, out, thank you, lout,” Grace replied pertly over her shoulder, grinning at him and disappearing into his bathroom for a quick shower to the accompaniment of his shout of laughter.

  He appeared moments later, while she was rinsing off the soapy lather she had quickly applied, and stuck his head around the curtain, watching her ablutions with interest.

  “I could join you,” he suggested with an exaggerated leer. That he was still naked was obvious from the triangle of bare arm and shoulder, chest and hipbone that she could see.

  “What time is it?” she demanded by way of a reply, turning off the taps. He obligingly handed her a towel, then glanced at his watch.

  “12:39.”

  Grace groaned again. Wrapping the towel around herself, she stepped out of the tub.

  Tony was standing there naked, just as she had surmised. He caught her by the shoulders, dropped a quick kiss on her mouth, grinned at her, and stepped into the tub, pulling the curtain shut.

  “Hurry!” she urged as he turned on the water.

  Walking into the bedroom, she saw that he had thoughtfully gathered up her clothes from the various places where they had been dropped. Everything—bra, panties, hose, shell, and suit—was in a neat little pile on the bed. Her shoes had been placed side by side on the floor nearby.

  Hurrying into her clothes, watching the clock with one eye, Grace thought, who in her right mind wouldn’t fall in love with a man like that?

  She felt a warm tingling kind of glow rush over her skin from her head clear down to her toes.

  She was stepping into her shoes when he emerged from the bathroom, body gleaming wet and a small white towel clutched modestly around his waist. With his broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, hairy-chested athlete’s body, he looked so hunky she would gladly have fallen on him a second time—if she didn’t have to be in court at one P.M.

  “Hurry,” she admonished him again. The time was 12:43.

  “I already did. That’s why they call it a quickie,” he observed with a wry smile as she rushed by him on her way to the living room, where she had left her purse.

  “Get dressed,” she hissed, ignoring his lame attempt at humor. Fortunately, men tended to be speedy about pulling on their clothes, she thought, and all she had to do was run a brush through her hair and apply lipstick and powder and she was as good as new.

  Her purse was just inside the door, where she had dropped it when Tony had first kissed her. Snatching it up, she hurried to the mirror over the fireplace.

  She was applying the finishing touch—a thin layer of a translucent lipstick in a shade called all-spice—when her gaze was caught by the framed picture on the mantel. The frame was dark wood, the picture itself was small, and it was positioned to the far left, which, she thought, explained why it had not caught her eye earlier.

  Because, as she picked it up, she realized that it should have caught her eye. It was a candid summer snapshot of a girl of perhaps ten or eleven, pretty but way too thin, dressed in a filmy white dress with smocking on the bodice and a white ribbon tied in her hair. She had long straight hair as black as Tony’s, and huge, shadowed, dark eyes. She was smiling—grinning hugely, actually. Her arms were lifted and opened wide as though to show off the flowers that surrounded her. They were roses, and the child stood in the midst of a huge circular garden in full bloom. The flowers were lush enough so that Grace, looking at the picture, could almost smell their perfume. Every blossom was a beautiful, creamy white.

  It was in color, but the child’s black hair and dark eyes and the white of her dress and the velvety cream of the roses gave the impression of a black-and-white print. The effect was haunting.

  The child, of course, had to be Rachel. It could be no one else.

  Looking at it, Grace felt a lump rise in her throat.

  Tony walked into the room then, fully dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans. He was smiling, his face warm and relaxed, his eyes bright and teasing.

  His expression changed in the space of a heartbeat as Grace met his eyes across the room and his gaze fell to the picture she held in her hand.

  He stopped walking and, for the space of a pair of heartbeats, simply looked at her. Grace could tell from his eyes that he was absorbing the psychic equivalent of a fist to the stomach.

  “She was beautiful,” Grace said at last, in a very soft voice.

  He moved then, coming to stand beside her. When he reached her side, he looked down at the picture in her hand and gently lifted a finger to touch the image beneath the glass.

  “She was, wasn’t she?” Grief was there in his eyes, and in the white lines bracketing his mouth, but his voice was steady.

  “She looks so happy. Whose garden was it?” He needed to talk about his pain, Grace thought, if he was ever going to move beyond it.

  “Hers. Rachel loved roses. That was taken the summer before she died. She and I went to a nursery near where we lived and bought all the white rosebushes they had in stock. When we got them home, I dug up a garden for her in the backyard of our house in Cleveland and planted them. That whole last summer, I watered and fertilized and sprayed the damned things and did everything but pray over them to keep them alive. Hell, I probably prayed over them, too. They were still blooming when she died. When I left Cleveland, I dug them up and brought them with me. Because she had loved them, I couldn’t bear to leave them behind.”

  Grace thought of the circle of scraggly, dead-looking rose bushes in the backyard of the house they were standing in.

  “Are they here?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Once in a while I remember to water them, but they’ve never bloomed since I moved them. I ought to dig them up and throw them away, but I can’t bring myself to do that to—Rachel’s roses.”

  If there was a slight break in his voice before he said his daughter’s name, that was all.

  “Oh, Tony . . .” Paradoxically, it was Grace who had tears in her eyes as she looked up at him. Going up on tiptoe, she kissed his cheek and then his mouth, her lips soft and comforting. He wrapped his arms around her, and for a moment, without speaking, he held her tight.

  Then she felt his hold shift and realized that he was looking at his watch.

  “It’s 12:54,” he said, letting go of her and taking the picture from her hand to place it back on the mantel. “If we leave right now, you’ll only be a few minutes late.”

  “Oh, gosh.” He seemed okay, or at least as okay as it was possible to be under the circumstances. But she hated to just rush away, when he might need to talk or something.

  “I’m fine,” he said firmly, apparently getting some inkling of what she was thinking from her expression as she looked at him. “Let’s go. You’ve got a courtroom of people waiting on you.”

  But he wrapped his arm around her waist and kept it there all the way to the car and, Grace thought as she returned the favor, to heck with what nosy Mrs. Crutcher might think.

  Chapter

  41

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE in the middle of the day?” It was a little after three. Dominick, having
apparently just arrived at the station, stopped by Tony’s desk on the way to his own. Traffic in the squad room was light at that time of the day, with only one other detective, Joe Gonzalez, at his desk. “You’re on night duty. You’re supposed to be home sleeping.”

  “Working on something.” Deeply absorbed in what he was doing, Tony was slouched in his chair, his chin resting on one fist, and he barely glanced up at his brother. In fact, he was comparing fingerprints on his computer screen. A thumbprint taken from Grace’s house was on the left. On the right, a series of thumbprints flashed past as the computer trolled for a match. He had already run through the files of drug-related arrests associated with Hebron High School with no luck. Now the computer was comparing prints taken from the files of individuals who had appeared before Grace in court over the past two years. Of course, not everyone who had appeared before her had fingerprints on file, and a number of other people who might have a reason to want to scare her or Jessica probably also didn’t have fingerprints on file, but still the exercise was necessary.

  Detective work, Tony had discovered, was largely a process of elimination, assisted by common sense and luck. His standard operating procedure was to rule out everything he could, then go with what was left.

  Over the years, it had proved to be a surprisingly successful strategy.

  “How’s the girlfriend holding up?” Dom asked.

  Wary of what the brother who knew him so well might be able to read in his eyes in answer to that, Tony didn’t even glance up.

  “Fine.” If he had hoped the monosyllable would deter Dom, well, he hadn’t really expected it to.

  Dom laughed and said, “Mama likes her.”

  “She told me.”

  “Did she?”

  “At length.” Tony did glance up at his brother then. “What do you two do, gossip about me over the phone all day long?”

  “Nah. No more than fifteen minutes a day, at the most.” Dominick was grinning.

  Despite his displeasure over being the subject of his family’s interested speculation, he had to smile at the picture thus conjured up: his mother and Dominick with telephone receivers pressed to their ears, yakking away.

  Dominick was getting more old-womanish all the time. Tony told his brother so and received a punch in the shoulder for his pains.

  “Afternoon, gentlemen.” Gary Sandifer walked into the squad room, the tan trench coat that was his trademark swirling around his legs as he moved.

  “Captain,” Tony and Dominick both said. Under his breath, Tony added to Dom, “Good God, is everybody coming in early now?”

  “We’re short-handed, what with you and Penick and Baer having been pulled out for the babysitting gig. Lots of things are going down.”

  “Yeah?” Tony glanced at Dom with interest.

  Before Dom could reply, Sandifer stopped by his desk.

  “How’s the Judge Hart thing coming?” he asked.

  “It’s coming, and that’s about all I can say.”

  “Tell me what you got.”

  The computer continued its endless blinking as Tony held up his fingers, counting off points as he enumerated them.

  “Number one, I got an allegedly stolen and recovered teddy bear, no prints, no nothing. Number two, I got oil on a mirror, pure mineral oil, generic, no recoverable prints on the mirror but one unidentifiable one lifted off the bedroom doorknob. I’m trying to find a match for it. Number three, I got a cake made by Holliman’s Grocery in Westwind Shopping Center, telephone order placed by a ‘Stanley,’ according to the bakery’s records, with a phone number that turned out to be a fake. It was a distinctive cake that one guy remembers decorating. Nonpoisonous, standard ingredients, no crime committed in ordering it or purchasing it, no reason for the clerk who rang it up to remember anything about the person who picked it up. It was paid for in cash. Number four, I got a dead hamster on ice at the morgue, drowned in a plastic bag. City water. No fingerprints on the bag. Some fibers on the animal that we have not been able to match to anything.”

  “In short, you got zilch.” Sandifer sounded resigned.

  “But,” Tony continued, “this morning we caught a break. Number five, the bozo left a no-longer-functional key to the house stuck to the kitchen door with chewing gum.”

  Sandifer looked at him with an arrested expression.

  Tony nodded. “Yep. Whoever this guy is, he made a mistake. Now we got DNA. From the saliva in the gum.”

  Sandifer frowned. “That’s not going to help you run him down.”

  “No, but it means we’ll be able to make a positive ID when I find him.”

  “Sure you’ll find him?” “Positive.”

  “Hurry this up as much as you can, then. We can’t keep Judge Hart and her daughter under guard indefinitely. The powers that be tell me that the D.A.’s already started bitching about the costs. And we need you back on the job.”

  “We’re going after Lynn Voss,” Dom said.

  “Jesus, I want to be in on that.” Tony grimaced. Much as he wanted to get Voss, he wanted Grace kept safe more. The only problem was, he wasn’t sure in his own mind that she or Jessica was actually in any physical danger. It was possible that they were, but it was more likely that the perp would turn out to be nothing more than a crank. He’d exaggerated his sense of their impediment for the sake of obtaining the protection that Grace wanted.

  Tony meant to do his best to see that the guy had the book thrown at him when he was caught. Especially if, because of him and his antics, he missed out on the operation that would finally nail Voss.

  “Keep at it,” Sandifer said, and moved on toward his office.

  “Hey, at least your babysitting job has perks,” Dom said suggestively, prodding Tony’s shoulder with an elbow.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” Tony shot his brother a quelling glance.

  “Yeah.” Dom grinned, and headed for his desk. Tony returned his attention to the flashing fingerprints.

  Nearly an hour later, he still had nothing. No matching fingerprints. No lab report on the DNA in the chewing gum, although they’d promised to rush it. He’d even run a check on that attorney, Colin Wilkerson, who had been giving Grace trouble, and had come up empty.

  Not that he had expected anything else. His gut instinct still told him the perp had to be a kid. But he would have liked it to have been Wilkerson.

  He stood up to leave.

  “See ya,” he said to his brother, who was busy working the phone.

  Dom looked over at him, receiver to his ear, his finger poised over the keypad. “Hey, you wanna shoot some baskets for a little bit before you go?”

  There was a basketball goal set up at one edge of the parking lot behind the station house. He and Dom had shot a lot of ball there over the years.

  Tony shook his head. “No, not today. I’ve got to go take care of my girls.”

  It was only as he saw the arrested expression on Dominick’s face that Tony realized what he had said.

  He turned and walked out before Dom could comment.

  If his brother made a joke, he would throttle him.

  The last time he’d said that—my girls—had been about ten years ago.

  Then, he’d been referring to Glenna and Rachel.

  My girls: that’s what he had called them, with easy, affectionate familiarity. The phrase had been part and parcel of the lost, bright years before his life had been consumed by pain.

  He couldn’t believe he’d used it again.

  For Grace. And Jessica.

  My girls.

  Chapter

  42

  TONY HAD SOMETHING on his mind. Over the next few days, Grace could sense the difference in him, although there was no outward change in his behavior. He was there every day when she and Penick arrived at the house. If he and Jessica weren’t playing ball in front of the garage, they were in the backyard with the dogs, or in the kitchen starting supper. True to his word, Tony was a good cook, and Jessica, to Grace’s a
stonishment, proved to be an eager and an apt pupil. As basically a noncook herself, Grace was surprised but pleased to discover this latent talent of her daughter’s.

  Tony picked Grace up every day at around eleven-thirty, and every day, without even bothering to discuss it, they adjourned to his house for what he termed, with a teasing grin, “lunch.”

  The sex was fantastic, and in the evenings, when they did no more than talk about everything and anything, he was a charming, interesting, and sensitive companion.

  Sometimes they went over different facets of the investigation, twisting and turning possibilities like pieces of a puzzle as they tried to make the facts fit into certain scenarios. Sometimes they talked politics. He was no admirer of Bill Clinton, whom he called “the president after Bush,” laughing when it took several repetitions for Grace to get the joke. Sometimes they talked about one of Tony’s cases, and sometimes they talked about one of Grace’s.

  Grace told him about her marriage. The reason for the breakup—Craig’s infidelities—no longer hurt, but his increasing lack of interest in Jessica infuriated Grace. She, too, had been the child of a father who had started a second family and subsequently lost all interest in the children from his first, so she knew what it felt like. As a consequence, she did her best to fill in the gap left in her daughter’s life by Craig’s lack of interest. But the one who suffered, of course, was Jess.

  Tony talked about his wife, Glenna, but only briefly. The last time he had seen her had been at Rachel’s funeral, and he would be perfectly content never to see her again. Her mother’s defection in the face of Rachel’s illness had been a pain that she should not have had to suffer. Tony would never forgive Glenna for it.

  Grace didn’t blame him.

  They talked about books and TV shows and movies, and public personalities, and the foibles of their relatives, particularly in-laws. No matter what the topic was, they never seemed to run out of things to say.

  Grace realized that the fear she had lived with since finding Mr. Bear by the road had largely dissipated. At night, with Tony in the house, she felt completely and utterly safe. Her main continuing source of anxiety was Jessica. She could not help but worry when her daughter was away from her during the day. But she trusted Gloria Baer. So far, thankfully, no attempt had been made to bother Jessica at school.