Tess Gerritsen - Presumed Guilty

“How does this fit in with anything else?” asked Lorne.

“I’m not sure. All I know is, half her job résumé was pure fiction. Maybe Richard found out. If he did — and confronted her…”

Lorne turned to Miss St. John. “I need to use your telephone.”

“In the kitchen.”

Lorne spent only a few minutes on the phone. He emerged from the kitchen shaking his head. “Jill Vickery’s at home. Says she was home all evening.”

“It’s only a half-hour drive to town,” said Miss St. John. “She could have made it, barely.”

“Assuming her car was right nearby. Assuming she could slip right behind the wheel and take off.” He looked at Ellis. “You checked up and down the road?”

Ellis nodded. “No strange cars. No one saw nothin’.”

“Well,” said Lorne, “whoever it was, I don’t think he’ll be back.” He reached for his hat. “Take my advice, Chase. Don’t drive anywhere tonight. You’re in no shape to get behind a wheel.”

Chase gave a tired laugh. “I wasn’t planning to.”

“I can take him up to the cottage,” said Miranda. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

Lorne paused and looked first at Miranda, then at Chase. If he had doubts about the arrangement, he didn’t express them. He simply said, “You do that, Ms. Wood. You keep a good eye on him.” Motioning to Ellis, he opened the door. “We’ll be in touch.”

Light spilled from the hallway across the pine floor of the bedroom. Miranda pulled down the coverlet and said, “Come on, lie down. Doctor’s orders.”

“To hell with doctors. That doctor, anyway,” growled Chase. He sat on the side of the bed and gave his head a shake, as though to clear it. “I’m okay. I feel fine.”

She regarded his battered, unshaven face. “You look like a truck ran over you.”

“The brutal truth!” He laughed. “Are you always so damn honest?”

There was a silence. “Yes,” she said quietly. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

He looked up at her. What do you see in my eyes? she wondered. Sincerity? Or lies, bald, dangerous lies?

It’s still not there, is it? Trust. There’ll always be that doubt between us.

She sat beside him on the bed. “Tell me everything you learned today. About Jill.”

“Only what I read in the press file from San Diego.” He reached down and began to pull off his shoes. “The trial got a fair amount of coverage. You know, sex, violence. Circulation boosters.”

“What happened?”

“The defense claimed she was an emotionally battered woman. That she was young, naive, vulnerable. That her boyfriend was an abusive alcoholic who regularly beat her up. The jury believed it.”

“What did the prosecution say?”

“That Jill had a lifelong hatred of men. That she used them, manipulated them. And when her lover tried to leave her, she flew into a rage. Both sides agreed on the facts of the killing. That while her lover was passed out drunk she picked up a gun, put it to his head and pulled the trigger.” Exhausted, Chase lay back on the pillows. The pills were taking effect. His eyelids were already drifting shut. “That was ten years ago,” he said. “An era Jill conveniently left behind when she came to Maine.”

“Did Richard know all this?”

“If he bothered to check, he did. Only the last half of her résumé was true. Richard may have been so dazzled by the whole package he didn’t bother to confirm much beyond the last job or two. Or he may have found out the truth only recently. Who knows?”

Miranda sat thinking, trying to picture Jill as she must have been ten years ago. Young, vulnerable. Afraid.

Like me.

Or was the prosecution’s description a more accurate image? A man hater, a woman of twisted passions?

That’s how they’ll try to portray me. As a killer. And some people will believe it.

Chase had fallen asleep.

For a moment she sat beside him, listening to his slow and even breaths, wondering if he could ever learn to trust her. If she could ever be more to him than just a piece of the puzzle — the puzzle of his brother’s death.

She rose and pulled the coverlet over his sleeping form. He didn’t move. Gently she smoothed back his hair, stroked the beard-roughened cheek. Still he didn’t move.

She left him and went downstairs. The boxes of papers confronted her, other bits and pieces of that puzzle. She separated them into files. Article files. Financial records. Personal notes from M, as well as from other, unidentified women. The miscellaneous debris of a man’s life. How little she had known Richard! What a vast part of him he had kept private, even from his family. That’s why he had so jealously guarded this north shore retreat.

In the fabric of his life, I was just a single, unimportant thread. Will I ever stop hurting from that?

She rose and checked the doors, the windows. Then she went back upstairs, to the master bedroom.

Chase was still asleep. She knew she should use the other room, the other bed, but tonight she didn’t want to lie alone in the darkness. She wanted warmth and safety and the comfort of knowing Chase was nearby.

She had promised to look after him tonight. What better place to watch over him than in the same bed?

She lay down beside him, not close but near enough to imagine his warmth seeping toward her through the sheets.

Sometime during the night the dreams came.

A man, a lover, was holding her. Protecting her. Then she looked up at his face and saw he was a stranger. She pulled away, began to run. She found she was in a crowd of people. She began to search for a familiar face, a pair of arms she could reach out to, but they were all strangers, all strangers.

And then there he was, standing far beyond her reach. She cried out to him, held her hands out for him to grab. He moved toward her and her hands connected with warm and solid flesh. She heard him say, “I’m here, Miranda. Right here….”

And he was.

Through the semidarkness she saw the gleam of his face, the twin shadows of his eyes. His gaze was so still, so very quiet. Her breath caught as he took her face in his hands. Slowly he pressed his lips to hers. That one touch sent a shudder of pleasure through her body. They stared at each other and the night seemed filled with the sounds of their breathing.

Again, he kissed her.

Again, that wave of pleasure. It crested to a wanting for more, more. Her sleep-drugged body awoke, alive with hunger. She pressed hard against him, willing their bodies to meld, their warmth to mingle, but that frustrating barrier of clothes still lay between them.

He reached for her T-shirt. Slowly he pulled it up and over her head, let it drop from the bed. She was not so patient. Already she was undoing his buttons, sliding back his shirt, fumbling at his belt buckle. No words were spoken; none were needed. The soft whispers, the whimpers, the moans said more than any words could have.

So did his hands. His fingers slid across, between, inside all the warm and secret places of her body. They teased her, inflamed her, brought her to the very edge of release. Then, with knowing cruelty, they abandoned her, leaving her unsatisfied. She reached out to him, silently pleading for more.

He grasped her hips and willingly thrust into her again, but this time not with his fingers.

She cried out, a sound of joy, of delight.

At the first ripple of her climax he let his own needs take over. Needs that made him drive deep inside her, again and again. As her last wave of pleasure washed through her, he found his own cresting, breaking. He rode it to the very end and collapsed, sweating and triumphant, into her welcoming arms.