Brazen Virtue (8 page)

He found her where he’d left her, sitting huddled on the sofa. Her eyes were closed so that he thought, hoped, she was asleep. Then she was looking up at him. Her eyes
were huge and completely dry. He recognized the dull sheen of shock too well.

“I can’t make it play.” Her voice was steady, but so quiet it barely carried beyond her lips. “I keep trying to restructure the scene. I came back early. I didn’t go out at all. Kath decided to tag along for the evening. Nothing works.”

“Grace, let’s go to the kitchen. We’ll have that tea and talk.”

She accepted the hand he held out but didn’t rise. “Nothing works because it’s too late to change it.”

“I’m sorry, Grace. Why don’t you come with me now?”

“They haven’t taken her away yet, have they? I should see her, before—”

“Not now.”

“I have to wait until they take her. I know I can’t go with her, but I have to wait until they take her. She’s my sister.” She rose then, but only to go to the hall and wait.

“Let her be,” Ben advised when Ed started forward. “She needs this.”

Ed thrust his own hands into his pockets. “Nobody needs this.”

He’d seen others say good-bye to someone they loved this way. Even after all the scenes, all the victims, all the investigations, he couldn’t feel
nothing
. But he’d taught himself to feel as little as possible.

Grace stood, hands cold and clasped, as they carried Kathleen out. She didn’t weep. She dug deep for feeling, but found nothing. She wanted the grief, needed it, but it seemed to have crept off into some corner and curled into itself, leaving her empty. When Ed’s hand fell on her shoulder, she didn’t jerk or shiver, but took a long breath.

“You have to ask me questions now?”

“If you’re up to it.”

“Yes.” She cleared her throat. Her voice should be stronger. She’d always been the strong one. “I’ll make the tea.”

In the kitchen, she set the kettle on, then fussed with cups and saucers. “Kath always keeps everything so neat. All I have to do is remember where my mother kept things, and …” She trailed off. Her mother. She’d have to call and tell her parents.

I’m sorry, Mom, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t here. I couldn’t stop it
.

Not now, she told herself as she fumbled with tea bags. She couldn’t think of it now. “I don’t imagine you want sugar.”

“No.” Ed shifted uncomfortably and wished she’d sit down. Her movements were steady enough, but there wasn’t a breath of color in her face. There hadn’t been since he’d found her bent over her sister’s body.

“How about you? You’re Detective Paris, aren’t you? Ed’s partner?”

“Ben.” He put his hand on the back of a chair to pull it from the table. “I’ll take two teaspoons of sugar.” Like Ed, he noted her lack of color, but he also recognized her determination to see this through. She wasn’t so much fragile as brittle, he thought, like a piece of glass that would snap rather than shatter.

As she set the cups on the table, she glanced at the back door. “He came in through here, didn’t he?”

“That’s the way it looks.” Ben took out his own pad and set it next to his saucer. She was holding off the grief, and as a cop, he had to take advantage of it. “I’m sorry we have to go into this.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She lifted her tea and sipped. She felt the heat of the liquid in her mouth but tasted nothing. “There isn’t anything I can tell you, really. Kath was in her office when I left. She was going to work. That was, I don’t know, six-thirty. When we got back, I thought she’d gone to bed. She hadn’t left the porch light on.” Details, she thought as she fought back another brush with hysteria. The police needed details, just as any good novel did. “I
started to go into the kitchen and I noticed her door, her office door, was open and the light was on. So I went in.” She picked up her tea again and carefully shut her mind to what happened next.

Since Ed had been there, Ben didn’t have to push. They all knew what had happened next. So he’d go back. “Was she seeing anyone?”

“No.” Grace relaxed a little. They would talk about other things, logical things, and not the impossible scene beyond the office door. “She’d just gone through a nasty divorce and wasn’t over it. She worked, she didn’t socialize. Kathy’s mind was fixed on making enough money to go to court and win back custody of her son.”

Kevin. Dear God, Kevin. Grace picked up her cup in both hands and drank again.

“Her husband was Jonathan Breezewood the third, of Palm Springs. Old money, old lineage, nasty temper.” Her eyes hardened as she looked at the back door again. “Maybe, just maybe you’ll find he took a trip east.”

“Do you have any reason to think the ex-husband would want to murder your sister?”

She looked up at Ed then. “They didn’t part amicably. He’d been cheating on her for years and she’d hired a lawyer and a detective. He might have found out. Breezewood is the kind of name that doesn’t tolerate any grime attached to it.”

“Do you know if he ever threatened your sister?” Ben sampled the tea even as he thought longingly of the coffeepot.

“Not that she told me, but she was frightened of him. She didn’t initially fight for Kevin because of his temper and the power his family wields. She told me he’d put one of the gardeners in the hospital once because of an argument over a rosebush.”

“Grace.” Ed laid a hand over hers. “Have you noticed
anyone around the neighborhood who made you uneasy? Has anyone come to the door, delivering, soliciting?”

“No. Well, there was the man who delivered my trunk, but he was harmless. I was alone with him in the house for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“What was the company’s name?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know …” She rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. Details always came easily to her, but thinking now was like fighting through a fog. “Quik and Easy. No ‘c’ in quick. The guy’s name was, um, Jimbo. Yeah, Jimbo. He had it stitched over the pocket of his shirt. Sounded like Oklahoma.”

“Your sister was a teacher?” Ben prompted.

“That’s right.”

“Any problems with the other staff?”

“Most of them are nuns. You have a hard time arguing with nuns.”

“Yeah. How about the students?”

“She didn’t tell me anything. The fact is, she never did.” It was that thought that had her stomach churning again. “The first night I came into town, we talked, had a little too much wine. That’s when she told me about Jonathan. But since then, and for most of our lives, she closed off. I can tell you that Kathleen didn’t make enemies, and she didn’t make friends either, not close ones. For the past few years, her life has been wrapped up in her family. She hasn’t been back in D.C. long enough to make any ties, to meet anyone who would want—who could do this to her. It was Jonathan, or it was a stranger.”

Ben said nothing for a moment. Whoever had broken in hadn’t come to rob, but to rape. There was a feel to a robbery attempt, a feel to a rape. Every room but the office was as neat as a pin. There was a smell of violation in this house.

“Grace.” Ed had already come to the same conclusion as his partner, but had taken it one step further. Whoever had broken in had come for the woman he’d gotten, or for
the one sitting next to him. “Is there anyone who has a grudge against you?” At her blank look, he continued. “Is there anyone you’ve been involved with recently who might want to hurt you?”

“No. I haven’t had time to get involved enough for that.” But just the question was sufficient to start the panic. Had she been the cause? Was she the reason? “I’ve just come off a tour. I don’t know anyone who would do this. Not anyone.”

Ben picked up the next stage. “Who knew you were here?”

“My editor, publisher, publicist. Anyone who wanted to. I’ve just done twelve cities with plenty of PR. If anyone had wanted to get to me, they could have done so a dozen times, in hotel rooms, on the subway, in my own apartment. It’s Kathleen who’s dead. I wasn’t even here.” She took a moment to calm down. “He raped her, didn’t he?” Then she shook her head before Ed could answer. “No, no, I don’t want to focus on that right now. I can’t really focus on anything.” She got up and found a small bottle of brandy in the cupboard beside the window. Taking a tumbler, she poured it half full. “Is there more?”

Ed wanted to take her hand, to stroke her hair and tell her not to think anymore. But he was a cop with a job to do.

“Grace, do you know why your sister had two phone lines in her office?”

“Yes.” Grace took a quick slug of the brandy, waited for the punch, then took another. “There’s no way to keep this confidential, is there?”

“We’ll do what we can.”

“Kathleen would hate the publicity.” With the tumbler cupped in her hands, she sat again. “She always wanted her privacy. Look, I don’t think the extra phone line really applies to all of this.”

“We need everything.” Ed waited until she drank again. “It’s not going to hurt her now.”

“No.” The brandy wasn’t helping, she realized, but she couldn’t think of a medicine for her sickness, and the brandy seemed the best she could come up with. “I told you she’d hired a lawyer and so forth. She needed a good one to fight Jonathan, and good lawyers aren’t easily had on a teacher’s salary. She wouldn’t take money from me. Kathy had a lot of pride, and to be frank, she always resented—never mind.” She took a long breath. The brandy had headed straight for her stomach and was turning it over. Regardless, she drank again. “The other line was for business. She was moonlighting. For a company called Fantasy, Incorporated.”

Ben cocked a brow as he wrote it down. “Fantasy calls?”

“That’s a PG way of putting it.” On a sigh, Grace rubbed the heels of her hands under her eyes. “Phone sex. I thought she was being pretty innovative, even wondered how I could work it into a plot.” Her stomach turned over again, so she reached for a cigarette. When she fumbled with the lighter, Ben took it, flicked it, then set it beside the tumbler of brandy. “Thanks.”

“Just take it slow,” he advised.

“I’m all right. She was making a lot of money, and it seemed harmless. None of the callers had her name or number, because everything was put through from the main office, then she called the john—I guess that’s the word for it. She called him back collect.”

“Did she ever mention anyone who got a little too enthusiastic?”

“No. And I’m sure she would have. She told me about the job the first night I got here. If anything, she seemed to be a little amused by it, and a bit bored. Even if someone had wanted more personal contact, they wouldn’t have been able to find her. Like I said, she didn’t even use her
own name. Oh, and Kath told me she didn’t talk anything but straight sex.” Grace spread her palm on the table. They’d sat at this very spot that first night, while the sun went down. “No bondage, no S and M, no violence. She was very picky about who she’d talk to. Anyone who wanted something, well, unconventional had to go elsewhere.”

“She never met anyone she talked to?” Ed asked.

It wasn’t a fact she could prove, but one she was sure of. “No, absolutely not. It was a job she took just as professionally as her teaching. She didn’t date, she didn’t go to parties. Her life was the school and this house. You lived next door to her,” she said to Ed. “Did you ever see anyone come here? Did you ever see her stay out past nine in the evening?”

“No.”

“We’ll need to check on the information you’ve given us,” Ben began as he rose. “If you remember anything, just call.”

“Yes, I know. Thanks. Will they call me when—when I can take her?”

“We’ll try to make it soon.” Ben glanced at his partner again. He knew, better than most, how frustrating it was to mix murder and emotion, just as he knew that Ed would have to work out his involvement in his own way and time. “I’ll file the report. Why don’t you tie things up here?”

“Yeah.” He nodded to his partner as he rose to take the cups to the sink.

“He’s a nice man,” Grace said after Ben had left. “Is he a good cop?”

“One of the best.”

She pressed her lips together, wanting, needing to accept his word. “I know it’s late, but would you mind not going yet? I have to call my parents.”

“Sure.” He stuck his hands in his pockets because she still looked too delicate to touch. They’d only begun to be
friends, and now he was a cop again. A badge and a gun had a way of putting a lot of distance between him and a “civilian.”

“I don’t know what to say to them. I don’t know how I can say anything.”

“I can call them for you.”

Grace drew hard on her cigarette because she wanted to agree. “Someone’s always taking care of the ugly things for me. I guess this is one time I have to do it myself. If something like this can be easier, it’ll be easier for them to hear it from me.”

“I can wait in the other room.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Grace watched him walk out, then braced herself to make the call.

Ed paced the living room. He was tempted to go back to the murder scene and sift through everything but held back. He didn’t want to chance Grace walking in on him. She didn’t need that, he thought, to see it all, to remember it all. Violent death was his business, but he’d never grown completely immune to the ripples it caused.

One life was over, and often dozens of others were affected. It was his job to look at it logically, to check out the details, the obvious and the elusive ones, until he compiled enough evidence for an arrest. It was the compilation that was the most satisfying aspect of police work for him. Ben was instinct and intensity; Ed was method. A case was built, layer by logical layer, fact by detailed fact. Emotions had to be controlled—or better, avoided altogether. It was a fine line he’d learned to walk, the line between involvement and calculation. If a cop stepped over the edge on either side, he was useless.

His mother hadn’t wanted him to be a cop. She’d wanted him to join his uncle in the construction business. You’ve got good hands, she’d told him. You’ve got a strong
back. You’d make union wage. Even now, years later, she was still waiting for him to turn in his badge for a hard hat.

He had never been able to explain to her why he couldn’t, why he was in for the duration. It wasn’t the excitement. Stakeouts, cold coffee or, as in his case, tepid tea, and reports in triplicate weren’t exciting. And he certainly wasn’t in it for the pay.