Greg Iles - Sleep No More

Lily’s head began shaking like she had Parkinson’s disease. “What are we going to do?”

“They won’t find anything. I’ll-”

“What are we going to do about Mallory?”

He started to go to her, but then he realized that the fear in her eyes had been replaced by fury.

“How could you do this to us?” she whispered. “How did we get here?”

“Lily-”

“You still love her, don’t you?”

“What?”

Lily was nodding, her eyes flicking back and forth, focusing on nothing. “You still love Mallory. You always have.”

“You know that’s not true.”

Her face was so white that he feared she might faint. “How could Mallory have done any of this if you didn’t still love her? That’s what’s kept her alive all these years!”

Waters stepped forward, his hands held out to calm her, but Lily backed away as though afraid he would strike her.

“What kind of husband are you?” she cried. “What kind of father are you?”

“Lily, please. Listen to me.”

“She told me about you getting her pregnant! While you were in Sybil’s apartment. She told me about the abortions. She thinks my miscarriages happened because of what you made her do.”

“That’s impossible.”

Lily’s eyes were wild. “When I lost those babies, I knew there was a reason. I searched for some mistake I’d made…some sin I had to pay for. But it wasn’t my sin, was it? It was yours. ”

Before he could reply, she turned and fled the den.

He stood alone in the roaring silence, his options exhausted, his hope all but gone. The second hand on his watch seemed to be flying.

Lily stood on the porch of Linton Hill and watched the police pull out of her driveway. Two squad cars, then a van from the crime lab. Each of her hands held a fragment of a Wedgwood coffeepot shattered by a careless policewoman. A family heirloom, Princeton pattern. Her husband’s hushed voice sounded from the foyer behind her. He was talking to his attorney. The police had demanded John’s presence at the station for questioning. In fourteen years of marriage, she had never heard her husband sound afraid, except during the worst of her depression, when for a week she had actually considered suicide.

He sounded afraid now.

As the police vehicles rolled up State Street, Lily felt the tears she had suppressed throughout the search. In addition to manhandling her family’s most precious belongings, the searchers had also taken away several boxes of photographs, all three home computers-Annelise’s Apple notebook included-and an assortment of clothes from John’s closet. The clothes had been unceremoniously dumped into plastic bags and thrown in the back of the van. The only mercy of the morning was Penn Cage’s warning. An hour before the search, John had driven Annelise to Lily’s mother’s house, so that she would not have to witness the event.

“Lily?”

She turned. Even in his black cashmere sweater, John already looked like a man on the run. His face was drawn, almost haggard, and his bloodshot eyes had dark bags beneath them. He had spent the remainder of last night dumping the stolen truck and walking home while Lily slept with Annelise.

“I’ve got to go to police headquarters,” he told her.

“They broke my grandmother’s coffeepot.”

He took the fragments from her hand. “I’ll have it repaired. I’ll send it back to England and have the factory do it.”

“It won’t ever be the same.”

“No.” He touched her arm. “But it will be all right.”

“I’ll go with you.”

He set the fragments inside the foyer, then came out and hugged her. “Penn’s going to meet me there. I don’t want you exposed to any of that. You should go check on Ana.”

“When do you have to leave?”

“Now.”

A surge of panic went through her, but she steadied herself so that he wouldn’t worry more than he already was.

“I’ll call you and let you know what’s going on,” he promised. “Keep your cell phone on.”

“I will.”

John’s face became as serious as she had ever seen it. “Depending on how the questioning goes, Penn thinks I could be arrested this morning.”

She closed her eyes and reached for his hand.

“If that happens, Penn will contact you about bail. You should follow his instructions to the letter.”

She wanted to speak, but all she could manage was a nod.

John hugged her once more, then went down the steps to his Land Cruiser. As he drove down the lane leading to State Street, Lily felt something deep within her give way. Last night’s hysterical anger had withered into ashes during the search, leaving only terror at the impending destruction of her family. Her terror made her ashamed. Fear could not help her. Nor could it help John or Annelise. She had to overpower her fear and use the only weapon she had ever really had: her mind. The shattered china coffeepot in the foyer could never be made right again, but her family could. People were different from objects. After bones healed, they were stronger in the broken places. A family could be like that.

She could do nothing about the murder case. That was Penn Cage’s job. But the other threat was something else. She allowed an image of Cole holding his pistol to Annelise’s sleeping head to fill her mind, but instead of fear, she felt cold, implacable rage, all of it focused on the woman who had wrecked her life. Her hands shook with the power of her hatred for Mallory. As she stood on the porch of her violated home, she heard a voice that seemed the voice of a stranger, but it came from her own lips.

“You can’t do this,” it said. “Not to my family. I will not let you do this.”

She turned and hurried into the house. In the kitchen, she drew an eight-inch carving knife from the butcher’s block and ran her finger along its serrated blade. Then she grabbed her cell phone and her keys and ran for her car.

Waters sat in a plastic chair on one side of an aluminum table bolted to the floor, Penn Cage to his left. Detective Tom Jackson sat across from them, and Jackson’s partner, the short, pockmarked officer named Barlow, paced the tile floor in the space behind Jackson.

An audiotape recorder sat on the table, the tape spooling slowly through the machine, but this was only for backup. A large video camera stood in the corner of the room, recording Waters’s every nervous tic as he faced the detectives.

Tom Jackson treated the questioning as he had the whole business, with the regretful firmness of a friend forced by circumstance to carry out an unpleasant task. He acted as though Eve’s brutal murder were a crime any man might have committed in the heat of passion.

“We’re not arresting you yet,” he said. “But things don’t look good, John. We have a lot more evidence than you and your attorney are aware of, and I want to be straight with you about that.”

Penn’s skeptical look told Waters that his lawyer doubted the police would be straight about anything.

“You know that we have a videotape of your vehicle near the hotel within one hour of the murder,” Jackson said. “You know you were twice seen going into Bienville with the murder victim. You don’t know that for the last two nights, FBI forensic technicians have been going through that mansion with special lights and chemicals, and they’ve found biological evidence of considerable sexual activity.”

At the mention of FBI involvement, Penn shifted in his chair.

“That evidence is now being sent to the FBI lab in Washington. It will be compared with the semen sample taken from Eve Sumner’s body, and also with the blood you gave yesterday.”