Amanda Stevens - Secret Sanctuary

Did William Pierce harbor doubts about Cullen’s transformation as so many others in town did?

Elizabeth didn’t. Not really. She’d always known there was a good side to Cullen. He’d just never allowed anyone to see it.

What was it Becca had said to her earlier? You use your aloofness and even your intelligence as a sanctuary, a safe place to hide away the real you so you won’t get hurt.

Had Cullen’s juvenile delinquency been his sanctuary? Elizabeth wondered.

He was staring down at her, watching her closely, and her breath caught painfully in her throat. Would she never get over this silly crush? This terrible yearning that caused every nerve ending in her stomach to quiver if he so much as glanced at her?

“You’re the one who found the body?” he asked her.

She nodded, buying herself a moment to collect her poise. “Yes, in the solarium. Her name is Bethany Peters.”

One dark brow lifted. “You knew her?”

“She was a student at Heathrow College. She was in my Theories of Criminal Behavior class last semester.” Elizabeth tried not to dwell on the irony.

“Was she a guest at the party?” He addressed this question to William Pierce.

“No, none of us had ever seen her before.”

Cullen turned back to Elizabeth. “What were you doing in the solarium?”

She hesitated. “The ballroom was very crowded. I just wanted a chance to catch my breath.” Would he think she’d been dancing all night instead of people-watching from a secluded corner? Instead of daydreaming about him?

One could only hope.

“Why the solarium?”

“It has this wonderful glass dome. I wanted to watch the storm a bit.” The intensity of his gaze made Elizabeth even more nervous. Her hand crept to her throat, and she found herself explaining, “It’s an air mass thunderstorm rather than an organized system, you see, and I wanted to observe the redevelopment of new convection along the outflow of the previous cells.” Shut up, shut up, shut up, she admonished herself, but she couldn’t seem to stop babbling. “The main cell, of course, was well into its dissipating stage by that time,” she finished lamely.

Cullen ran a hand through his short, spiky hair. “Uh, right. Do you have an idea what time you left the ballroom?”

“Midnight. I heard the clock in the foyer chime.” Elizabeth pressed her lips together to keep from blurting out any more irrelevant facts. She had the unfortunate habit of resorting to trivia when she got nervous, and she had always been nervous around Cullen.

“Did you see anyone else in the foyer? In the hallway outside the solarium? Anyone lurking outside?”

“No. Maybe. I’m not sure.” She drew an unsteady breath and told him about the open door in the solarium and the yellow flash she’d seen beyond the terrace. “It might have been nothing more than a reflection. I can’t be sure. I certainly can’t say beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was a person.”

“If it was, we’re not going to find any footprints in this weather,” he said grimly.

Elizabeth’s fingers tightened around the fastener on her cloak. “I don’t think it very likely, but I suppose it’s possible someone could have been inside the room when I first entered, and then left through that door. I didn’t turn on a light.”

“Why not?”

“As I said, I slipped away from the party to be alone for a few minutes. I didn’t want anyone to see me.”

Cullen’s glance sharpened. “Were you afraid someone would follow you into the solarium?”

As if. “No. I just thought someone might see the light and become curious. And, also, it was easier to observe the storm in the darkness.”

“I see. When you went back to close the door, that’s when you saw the body?”

She nodded. “I lost my balance on the wet floor and fell. For some reason, I looked up and I saw her hanging from one of the steel supports….” Elizabeth broke off, shuddering in spite of herself.

She wasn’t unfamiliar with death. In her Criminal Investigations courses at Heathrow, she taught her students how to dissect crime scenes analytically and view murder victims objectively. As a graduate student, she’d interned with the Worcester Police Department in order to research her doctoral thesis, and just a few months ago, she’d attended a series of seminars conducted by an FBI profiler. She knew crime. She lived and breathed crime.

But when the victim was someone you knew…someone so young…

“I’ll need statements from all of you,” Cullen said to the Pierces who stood clustered behind Elizabeth. “For now, I want everyone to remain out here. We need to keep the crime scene as virgin as possible.”

Elizabeth winced. “I’m afraid…that is, the solarium may already have been compromised.”

“Someone besides you has been in there?” Cullen asked sharply.

“We rushed in without thinking when Elizabeth told us what she’d found,” Drew explained. “She tried to keep us out, but we couldn’t know for certain the girl was dead. We thought we might be able to help her.”

Cullen glanced at Elizabeth. “How many went inside?”

“All of them,” she admitted gloomily.

He shook his head in frustration. “We’ll have to cross-check fingerprints then. I’ll also need a copy of the guest list.” He turned to the uniformed officer who stood directly behind him. “Make sure guards remain at all the exits. No one leaves, no one gets in without my say-so. I don’t care who it is,” he said pointedly at the Pierces. “I don’t care what excuses they give you.”

“Surely you don’t expect everyone to wait around here indefinitely,” Geoffrey Pierce, Drew’s uncle, complained. “I have things to do.”

“At this hour?” Cullen gave him a speculative look. “What kind of things would they be?”

Geoffrey didn’t answer, just stood there looking unpleasant. A tall, slender man with thinning blond hair, he hadn’t managed the approach to middle age with quite the same grace as his older brother, William. And he didn’t seem to have William’s compassion. He was handsome, as all the Pierces were, but something about his expression, about the cruel set of his lips, made him seem at once sinister and weak.

Drew put a hand on the man’s arm. “Detective Ryan is right, Uncle Geoffrey. We screwed up. Let’s not make things worse.” To Cullen he said, “We’ll do everything we can to cooperate.”

“I’m counting on that.” Cullen took a pair of latex gloves from his overcoat pocket and snapped them on. He handed another pair to Elizabeth. “Show me the body, Elizabeth.”

THE FIRST THING Cullen noticed about the solarium was the temperature. The room was still frigid even though Elizabeth said she’d closed the outside door. He could feel the chill though his overcoat, but then, the heavy fabric was still damp from the rain.

He wondered now, as he followed Elizabeth toward the back of the solarium, if he might have been able to prevent the tragedy if he’d accepted the moonlighting job as a security guard for the Pierces. Probably not. So far, it appeared that the murderer had been able to slip in and out without being detected by any of the other guards or guests which suggested to Cullen that the suspect was someone familiar with the Pierce compound. Someone who had either come in the front gate as a guest, or through the back entrance with the hired help.

But that hardly narrowed the field. Party-goers had come from all over the state, and in Moriah’s Landing alone, half the population had either received invitations to the party or been hired to work in some capacity at the compound.

In short, the killer could be anyone, Cullen thought grimly as he tugged at the neckline of his sweater.