A Widow's Guilty Secret (10 page)

This was the moment that they bonded.

Clearing his throat—as if that would somehow also clear the air and clear away the words that had just been uttered—Nick said, “I think your husband might have been blackmailing the senator for money. Did your husband handle the banking?”

“No, actually, I did. I’m a certified public accountant,” she explained. “I’ve been on maternity leave these last couple of months,” she added, “but until Andy was born, I worked full-time for a restaurant chain and took care of all our monthly bills as well. Peter hated being bothered with all those details,” she told him matter-of-factly. She realized now that he was just too busy with all the other things he was into. “So I just took over.”

“And you have a joint savings account?” Nick asked her.

“Yes—and a joint checking account, too.”

“Which bank?” he asked.

“First National Bank of Vengeance,” she told him. An ironic smile curved her lips. “I always said that it needed a better name.”

He made no comment on that. In his opinion, the whole
town
needed a better name than the one they had accepted. But that was neither here nor there right now.

“Would you mind coming to the bank with me?” he asked.

“No problem,” she answered. Lori would stay here with the baby, so she was free to take off and try to possibly help undo a little of the damage that her husband had been responsible for. “Mind if I ask what you’re hoping to accomplish?”

“I want to find out if Peter had another account, under his own name.” It wasn’t the smartest thing in the whole world to have a secret account in the same bank where your joint accounts with your wife are, but then the man in question didn’t strike him as being the sharpest knife in the drawer—even if he were the
only
knife in the drawer.

She might as well get everything over with at once, find out just how black the picture was, she decided. “All right.”

He didn’t want her to think he was rushing her. The bank still had over an hour and a half before it would open its doors.

Nick looked at his watch and did a quick calculation. “Why don’t I give you a couple of hours to have breakfast and get ready? I can come back at around nine and we can go to the bank then?”

“Do you have someplace that you have to be for the next two hours?” she asked. She had a feeling she already knew the answer to that, but waited for him to tell her anyway.

“No, but—”

“Then stay here,” she urged. “Once I get ready, I can make us all some breakfast—unless you already ate—”

He’d come straight from Big’s Dallas apartment to her door, stopping only for some coffee in order to fuel up and keep going—preferably awake.

“No, I haven’t had breakfast yet,” he answered.

Her smile lit up her face he noted, almost against his will.

“Okay, give me about ten minutes to get showered and dressed, and then I’ll see what I can come up with for breakfast.”

“Ten minutes?” he echoed incredulously, staring at her. “Did you just say that you could get ready in ten minutes?”

“Yes.” Suzy couldn’t see why he would look so surprised at that. “Why?”

He laughed shortly. “Nothing, except I’ve never known a woman yet who could get ready for anything in under an hour. Certainly not in ten minutes,” Nick scoffed.

She smiled at him, taking a tiny personal moment out of what felt like it had the makings of an absolutely awful day if the first hour was any indication.

“That’s because you’ve never known me before, Detective,” she assured him. And then she grew serious. “If you suddenly feel as if you’re starving, feel free to help yourself to anything in the refrigerator while you wait,” she tossed over her shoulder.

He stood where she’d left him, watching Suzy hurry up the stairs. The sway of her hips seemed almost rhythmic to him.

No,
he thought,
I’ve never known someone quite like you before.

Nick wasn’t aware he was smiling until he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window as he passed by.

Chapter 9

N
ick wasn’t one of those people who had a favorite restaurant or even a favorite dish. Ever since his divorce, he was more apt to eat whenever he was hungry rather than at a given time. He adhered to structure in his professional life. His private life, however, was a different matter. It was entirely flexible.

So when he sat at the kitchen table and the sheriff’s widow placed a Spanish omelet before him, urging him to “dig in,” he was surprised to discover his appetite kicking in. His taste buds came to life as a rather spicy, tantalizing taste registered when he took his first bite of the omelet.

Nick looked down at his plate as if he’d just had a whole new taste experience. That was as surprising to him as his unexpected attraction to Suzy Burris had been.

“What’s in this?” he asked.

“Is it too spicy for you?” she guessed, concerned. Lori had opted to take her breakfast later and was tending to Andy so it was just the two of them in the kitchen. Suzy slid into the chair directly opposite her unexpected guest.

“No, it’s not
too
spicy,” he allowed, “but it is definitely spicy. And really good,” he told her belatedly. He wasn’t much on giving compliments so it felt rather awkward on his tongue. But he thought it only right to let her know that he was enjoying what she’d just made. “What’s in this?” he asked again.

She merely smiled, pleased that she’d actually made something that the detective enjoyed eating. It had been a long time since she’d gotten positive feedback of any kind, and that included on her cooking. The only way she knew if Peter liked something or not was that if he didn’t like what she’d made, he’d leave it on his plate.

“Oh, a little bit of everything. That’s what’s so neat about this recipe, you can use practically anything you have on hand that’s edible. This time around I used ham, cheese, mushrooms, eggs, of course and one tiny, diced-up jalapeño. That’s the spicy part,” she told him with a grin, then nodded over toward the stove. “There’s more if you’re still hungry.”

“Maybe later,” he told her. “Right now, I have a feeling that if I get too full, I’m just going to get sleepy, and there’s no time for that. The clock’s ticking on this,” he said with emphasis.

That had a very ominous sound to it, Suzy thought. “What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.

He’d made a quick pit stop to his desk at the station and had run into one of the FBI special agents who had been assigned to the triple homicide. The special agent had yet to figure out how, but he felt that the murders were somehow tied in to Dr. Grayson’s disappearance. And the longer the woman remained missing, the less likely, in the special agent’s opinion, that she would be found still alive.

The information had been shared with him in confidence. It wasn’t for the general public’s knowledge and despite the fact that Suzy Burris wasn’t exactly part of the general public in this case, he still felt that he couldn’t share it with the sheriff’s widow, at least not at this time.

“Nothing that I know of,” he told her, his voice devoid of any emotion. “But the sooner we find out who killed your husband and the others, the sooner we can get him—or her—off the street, and that can only be a good thing.”

Suzy read between the lines. This wasn’t over yet. “So you think this person might kill again?”

She was watching him so intently, he could almost
feel
her eyes on him. Nick realized that it took effort for him not to react. He kept his focus on the case and
not
on the fact that something about Suzy Burris was definitely getting to him.

It had to be the vulnerability angle, he told himself the next moment. The fact that she was a petite, slender blonde with sky-blue eyes was neither here nor there. He’d interacted with his share of attractive women and hadn’t experienced any feelings one way or another.

Yet feelings—dormant feelings—kept insisting on coming into play here.

“If he’s a serial killer, yes,” he told her, controlling his voice. “If this was done strictly for revenge or some other specific reason known only to the killer, then no. But we’re not at the point when we can be sure of that one way or another,” he told her. “And since that’s the case right now, I’d much rather err on the side of caution than be too laid-back and face possible consequences because of that.”

Suzy had eaten rather quickly while the detective talked and now rose again, taking her plate to the sink. “All right,” she announced, crossing back to the table and him, “I’m all yours.”

He had no idea why that simple sentence hit him the way it did, or why, for just a fraction of a moment, his imagination went to places that had nothing to do with his investigation and everything to do with him as a man—and her as a woman.

The glimmer of sexual attraction he had become aware of yesterday seemed to have been simmering on some backburner ever since, and now kept insisting on springing forward, grabbing at and demanding his full, undivided attention.

He had no time for that now—or ever, really. He’d tried marriage once, found that it was an ill fit for him and had made his peace with that years ago as the ink dried on his signature on the divorce papers.

Or so he had believed until he’d encountered Suzy Burris. Now he seemed to have this—for lack of a better term—pervasive restlessness haunting him. It was hiding in the corners of his focus, popping out at will, unannounced and unexpected, to throw him off balance.

“Detective?” she said, looking at him curiously. When he still made no response, Suzy came closer, tilting her head as she looked at him and tried again. She used his first name this time. “Nick?”

“Sorry, just thinking,” Nick said, brushing off the question he saw in her eyes.

He felt fairly confident that the woman would assume that he was thinking about the case—and not her. Although right now, she very well could figure into this scenario prominently. He needed to find out if there was anything that Suzy Burris
did
know about her husband’s dealings.

“When you met your husband, was he already the county sheriff?”

When she met her husband, she couldn’t help thinking, he seemed like a completely different man. Which had been the real Peter Burris? The one from those days, or the one who’d died approximately three days ago?

She shook her head in response to the question. “No, he was working a security detail at a nightclub in Dallas.” She recalled that Nick had mentioned the DPD yesterday. “He never said anything about having worked as a police detective anywhere.”

Well, if he had amassed the kind of record that Burris had, he wouldn’t have readily admitted his connection to the police force to anyone, either. Nick thought.

“So when your husband stopped working security detail, was that your idea, or his?” Nick asked.

Your husband.

What a joke, she thought. Husbands were supposed to share things with their wives. Right now, she couldn’t think of Peter as anything but a stranger.

“His,” she told Nick, then admitted, “it happened rather suddenly, actually. He came home one night and said he had this big surprise—that we were leaving Dallas because he’d scored a plum position—he was going to be a county sheriff.”

At the time, she welcomed a change of scenery. Things had already been getting stale and going badly between them. A change of venue could be the shot in the arm they both needed, she’d reasoned.

But she’d been wrong.

“I thought we’d be moving to Houston or San Antonio— When he said we were getting a house in Vengeance, I thought he was kidding. I’d never
heard
of Vengeance until then,” she confessed.

He nodded understandingly. “It’s not exactly on the list of the country’s ten major cities. Did you try to talk him out of it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I didn’t have the heart. He seemed too excited about getting the job. And, to be honest, I wasn’t exactly happy about where I was working, so leaving wasn’t really a hardship.”

From where he was sitting, Nick thought, Burris had it all—a beautiful wife and a promising career. What had he done that caused it to all go south on him?

“Did your husband happen to say what brought about this sudden change in careers?”

This keeping things to himself had its roots in those early days, she realized now. “No, only that he thought his luck was finally changing.”

“So you didn’t know that he was a dirty cop,” he pressed, watching her face for some telltale sign that would indicate she was lying to him, or that she’d known that her husband was corrupt.

Suzy grew very still. He saw all the joy that had been there only moments ago while they were casually talking, abruptly disappear.

“What did he do?” she asked in a voice that was completely drained of any emotion, any feeling. A voice that belonged to a shell-shocked woman.

Ordinarily, Nick didn’t pull punches, but he found himself weighing his words, searching around for euphemisms.

“I think he might have been doing favors for people who were in a position to show him their gratitude. Apparently, some of the cases he handled while on the force had to be dismissed when crucial evidence would mysteriously go missing.

“When your husband moved on to work security at that nightclub he somehow got wind of the fact that Senator Merris had being siphoning off millions from his oil company, funneling it to his election campaign. He used the money to get himself elected, while other people wound up going bankrupt. Your husband found out and used this to blackmail the senator. Merris pulled some strings, got the old sheriff to suddenly retire and gave your husband the county sheriff’s job in exchange for his silence.”

He paused for a moment, letting his words sink in, and then told her, “From some of the things your husband had on his computer, I’d say that the blackmail didn’t exactly end there.”

She felt overwhelmed and struggled to find a way to rise above this quicksand of demoralizing corruption.

She asked the same question she’d put to him earlier. “And this is what ultimately got Peter killed?” It was all very hard to fathom—but she had this sinking feeling that, if anything, the detective with the kind eyes was now trying to downplay all this for her benefit.

“That would be the logical assumption—except that the senator was found dead, too,” he reminded her, and went on to mention again the fly in the ointment. “And I still don’t know how David Reed figures into this.”

It would take her a long, long time to put this all behind her. She wasn’t in love with Peter, but she’d still believed that, at bottom, he was a good man. Now that belief just mocked her and made her feel incapable of judging a person’s true character. Any guilt over her lack of grief was wiped out by the fact that, apparently, she’d been married to someone she didn’t know. Someone she
never
got to know.

“I
knew
there were things that Peter was keeping from me, but I had no idea it was something like
this.
I just thought his secrecy had to do with other women he was seeing.” Had there been signs that she’d missed? Or had she just been oblivious to it all because she’d wanted to be?

“He had his share of those, too,” Nick told her.

He would have rather not said anything about it, but he knew the media. Once they started digging, they would splash it across the TV screen. He wanted Suzy to be prepared for the firestorm rather than be taken by surprise.

She struggled not to loathe the man she’d married—the man she’d
thought
she’d married.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Suzy cried, anger flaring in her voice. “Why would Peter want to have a baby with me when he had all this going on at the same time? Why would he want to stay married to me at all?”

Nick could easily see why the sheriff would have wanted to stay married to Suzy. Why
any
man would have wanted to be married to her. He had trouble seeing why Burris had so wantonly thrown it all away.

Nick approached her question from another, logical angle. “Maybe he wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Being married with a family adds to the image of an upstanding lawman. You told me that most people liked the sheriff—”

She shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong about that, too. Seems I was wrong about everything else,” she said disparagingly.

She was standing, facing the kitchen window, no longer able to make eye contact. Afraid that if she saw pity in Nick’s eyes, she’d break down and cry. That was the last thing she wanted to do, fall apart in front of someone else.

Nick sensed what she was going through, what recriminations she was heaping on herself in the privacy of her own mind. He’d been there himself, except that his wife hadn’t been in a place of public trust. But she’d turned out to be a fraud and a cheat in her own way just the same. He had felt just as empty, just as devastated, just as betrayed as he knew Suzy was feeling right now.

He came up behind her. Placing his hands on her shoulders, he turned Suzy slowly around to face him. “None of this is your fault.”

So he’d already said before. She kept her eyes down, not wanting to meet his. Her voice was thick with emotion and tears she refused to shed.

“Maybe not, but being blind is. How could all this have been going on and I didn’t have a clue?”

He’d asked himself that same question at the time. “Don’t forget, the sheriff was undoubtedly very good. He managed to fool a lot of other people besides you—otherwise, he would have been up on charges and in prison a long time ago,” Nick told her.

She supposed he had a point, but that didn’t help her now.

“If I’d only known, I wouldn’t have agreed to have Andy.” Anguish filled her eyes. “How am I going to be able to tell my son, when he starts asking questions about where his father is, that his father was murdered because all the lying and cheating he’d done had finally caught up with him?”

Rather than answer her question, Nick asked her one of his own. It was short and to the point. “How do you feel about Andy?”

“Well, I love him, of course.” That wasn’t the issue. “He means everything to me, but—”