C.J. Carmichael - Seattle after Midnight

Five minutes earlier than he’d said on the phone, Pierce steered into the service station across from the hotel and parked next to Will Livingstone’s Toyota. He acknowledged Will’s presence with a nod, then dashed into the small convenience store attached to the gas station. He poured himself an extra-large coffee and grabbed a bag of sunflower seeds and a new package of gum.

The kid behind the counter eyed him curiously. “Still staking out that hotel?”

“Another forty-eight hours.”

The kid nodded, trying to look as if this were no big deal to him.

Pierce pocketed the seeds, his gum and the change, then carried his coffee outside. Will unrolled his driver-side window.

“Seems like she’s here for the night again,” Will said. “You could probably go home for a few hours shut-eye and come back in the morning.”

“Probably,” Pierce acknowledged. But he wouldn’t. Will passed him the log they used to record Jodi’s movements.

“Thanks.” Pierce returned to his car and settled in. He tore open the tab on his coffee and took a sip of the bitter brew. Levering his seat back about ten degrees, he stretched out his legs.

Across the street the Charleston’s fairy lights sparkled. He wondered what Jodi was up to right now. Doing drugs? Getting loaded? What? He couldn’t imagine anything so bad that a middle-aged woman would leave her comfortable home and book into a hotel all by herself.

He shifted in his seat and thought about the husband. Steven Calder had left a phone message earlier in the afternoon, then again around five, while Pierce had been at Georgia’s. Unsurprisingly, Calder had been unable to contact his wife at home.

Pierce knew he should phone the man, but thoughts of Georgia kept distracting him.

Damn that woman. He couldn’t stop himself from glancing at the clock on the dashboard and calculating the hours until her program would begin. He wondered if he would feel the same magic now that he’d met her.

He opened the log and reviewed the entries that had been made by Jake, then Will. Jodi Calder’s movements while shopping that afternoon had been carefully tracked. She’d gone to a quick-stop grocer, a bookstore and an office supply shop.

Nothing suspicious in any of that.

In fact, there was nothing suspicious about anything Jodi Calder had done since her husband left town. Except for booking into this hotel room.

After an hour of waiting and watching while nothing happened, Pierce decided to do something he’d never tried in a case like this. He was going to knock on her hotel room door and ask her.

I LISTEN TO YOU, Pierce had said. I LISTEN TO YOU. As she prepared for that evening’s show in her studio, Georgia couldn’t stop the soundtrack in her head from repeating that line. Something in his delivery, in the heat of his eyes when he’d said it, made her knees feel weak and her insides tingle. She had to keep reminding herself that it was her program he was interested in. Not her body.

She pushed away from the desk where she’d been outlining a script and looked up from her control board through the window to the producer’s room. Larry Sizemore sat with his back to her, busy with his last-minute preparations, too. They’d had their preshow meeting half an hour ago. As usual, he’d met all her suggestions and ideas with stony acceptance.

She sighed and turned to the computer on her right. She had some phone calls to edit. Only very rarely did she air calls live as she had last night. Usually she worked prerecorded, edited calls carefully into her program.

Looking into her computer screen, a trick of lighting reflected her own image back at her. What she saw made her sigh.

She knew the image she presented on the air differed from the reality. Though she was twenty-eight, she looked at least five years younger. That might be a benefit to her in ten years, but right now she felt hampered, not only by her appearance, but by her background, her inexperience, her small-town naiveté.

She wanted Pierce to act on the attraction she was almost sure he felt. Not hold himself back the way he’d done tonight.

I listen to you. To you, Georgia, to you.

She wanted him to hold her in his arms and say those words. Then kiss her. And touch her… Eyes closed, she imagined how it would feel, how his arms would circle her waist, how he’d lift her chin with his finger then…

The phone rang, her private line, zapping fantasy into cold reality. Her first hope was that it was Pierce.

“Yes?”

But it was just Monty from the security desk. There’d been a delivery for her—did she want him to bring it up?

“No, I’ll be right there.” She ran down the double flight of stairs that led to the main foyer. Monty’s desk was to the left of the two revolving doors and the regular set of glass doors that led to the street.

Monty Greenfield, in his fifties and a little portly, straightened in his chair, pulling back his shoulders to better fill his stiffly pressed navy uniform. They usually had a couple of short conversations during the course of an evening. He was new here too, having started his job just weeks before she began hers. He’d needed a change of scene after his wife’s death, he’d told her. Apparently Nancy had been sick for a long time.

“Here you go, Georgia. Looks like you have an admirer.” He held up a loosely wrapped package, obviously flowers.

Flowers. Georgia hesitated, then stepped forward. Maybe this would turn out to be something else. From someone else.

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