After Midnight

After Midnight

By

Merline Lovelace

Copyright by Merline Lovelace

First Printing

Penguin Books/NAL

Feb 2003

Electronic Edition

July 2010

Cover art by Kelli McBride

Nothing good ever came out of the night.

Jessica Blackwell had accepted that grim truth long ago. As a consequence, she’d learned to function at peak performance on three or four hours of sleep snatched at random times in odd places. She’d also learned the danger of opening her door to strangers after midnight, even when they flashed a badge.

Particularly when they flashed a badge.

Eyes cold, palms suddenly damp despite the muggy June heat, Jess stared at the nickel-plated star nestled in leather and clipped to her visitor’s belt.

“Lieutenant Colonel Blackwell?”

She wrenched her gaze from the shield to the man behind it. He topped her by four or five inches, which didn’t happen often. At five-eight, Jess usually looked most men in the eye. Tipping her chin, she forced herself to return this one’s casually assessing gaze.

“Yes.”

“I’m Steve Paxton, Walton County Sheriff. I’d like to talk to you.”

Common sense made her cautious. Experience made her wary. “What about?”

“An incident that happened a few hours ago. Mind if I come in?”

The glass storm door muffled his drawl, but the politely disguised demand came through with shattering clarity. Whispers of another night, another such demand crawled along Jess’s nerves. Her every instinct screamed at her to slam the inner door and shut out the darkness. Shut out the rustle of the breeze combing through the palmettos. Shut out this unfamiliar, unwanted visitor in worn jeans, white shirt, and a green ball cap emblazoned in gold with the logo of the Walton County Sheriff’s Department.

The discipline gained with sixteen years as an officer in the United States Air Force stood Jess in good stead. Her hand didn’t so much as tremble when she reached out and unlocked the storm door. Metal hinges that had already fallen victim to the rust caused by Florida’s humidity creaked as she pushed open the door.

“Sorry to bother you so late.”

The ball cap came off, revealing a pelt of tawny, sun-streaked hair. Dispassionately, Jess inventoried broad shoulders. A square chin. A nose flattened at the bridge, as though it had connected with a fist or two in the past. His skin was dark oak, weathered by sun and wind, and his eyes were a clear, startling aquamarine, as unfathomable as the vast, changeable Choctawhatchee Bay only a few dozen yards from her front door.

Jess supposed most women would consider Steve Paxton sexy as hell. She might have, too, if all that muscled masculinity hadn’t come packaged with a badge.

“This could have waited until tomorrow,” he said with a smile that stopped just short of apologetic, “but I saw your lights on and decided to stop. Hope I didn’t disturb you?”

“No, I was just unpacking a few boxes.”

His glance roamed the great room of her rented condo. A sea of crumpled wrapping paper covered the parquet floors. Framed movie posters sat propped against various pieces of furniture, waiting for Jess to decide where to hang them. Stacked cartons lined one whole wall.

“Looks like you still have a few boxes to go.”

“Yes, I do.”

Ordinarily, she would’ve had her home in order by now. After seven moves in sixteen years, Jess had mastered the fine art of organizing her nest within a few days of reporting to a new assignment. This move was different. She’d arrived at Eglin, the sprawling air force base that ate up a good chunk of the Florida panhandle, almost a month ago and had yet to sort out her things.

A good part of that she could blame on her new job. With only a few weeks notice, she’d packed up, driven across country from California, and taken the helm of the largest supply squadron in the air force. The fact that her predecessor had been relieved of command and charged with attempting to cover up an illegal dump of several hundred gallons of paint solvent into an underground sewer system had certainly added a sense of urgency to the move.

The Air Force’s three-star director of Logistics had personally selected Jess for this assignment. She’d arrived at Eglin with specific orders to oversee the clean-up, get the EPA sanctions lifted, and help the JAG lawyers settle the lawsuits, all the while executing the 96th Supply Squadron’s other vital missions.

The challenges of her new command thrilled Jess and consumed her daylight hours. It was the long stretches between dusk and dawn that took their toll. The tightly closed plantation shutters gracing the windows kept the night outside where it belonged, but Jess had slept even less than usual since moving into this airy, spacious condo overlooking the bay.

The stresses already surfacing in her new job were only part of it, she knew. The other part had a lot to do with a badge identical to the one her visitor had just slipped into his back pocket. Folding her arms, Jess gave him a look of polite inquiry.

“What can I do for you, sheriff?”

“I need to know if you called or received a call from Ron Clark earlier this evening.”

“The realtor who leased me this condo? No, I didn’t. Why?”

“His wife found him dead earlier this evening.”

Jess didn’t blink, didn’t twitch so much as a muscle.

Her racing mind had conjured up a dozen possible reasons behind the sheriff’s visit. That one came like a punch to the gut.

“How did he die?” she asked, keeping her voice carefully neutral.

“We’ll have to wait for the ME to make the official determination, but initial indications are he hooked a garden hose to his Buick’s exhaust pipe and sucked gas.”

“And his wife found him?”

“Yes.”

Jess wouldn’t wish that brutal shock on anyone. Death in any form was wrenching enough. To find someone you love with eyes rolled back and mouth agape…

For a moment, the condo’s cool gray walls and lacquered white trim fuzzed into an institutional cream. Jess could almost see the swaying hospital curtains. Smell the pungent antiseptic. Hear the quiet click of the pump that had long since ceased to provide sufficient morphine to dull her mother’s pain.

They’d had plenty of time to prepare for her death. All three of them. Jess, her stepfather, Helen herself. In the deepest, most anguished corners of their hearts, they had all prayed for it. Yet Jess would never forget the dark, still moment just before dawn when she’d gone for fresh coffee and returned to find the nurse leaning over her mother and the heart monitor beside Helen’s bed blipping out a flat, unbroken line.

The cardboard coffee cup had crumpled in Jess’s fingers. Boiling liquid had spilled over her hand. To this day, the mere glimpse of the white, puckered skin webbing her right thumb and index finger reminded her of that awful moment.

Just as the sight of Steve Paxton’s badge had raised instant, searing memories of another night, some twenty-five years earlier. Rubbing the puckered burn, Jess fought back the image of the older, paunchier sheriff who’d pounded on her mother’s door so long ago. Paxton was a younger version of that genial red-neck, but Jess didn’t trust him any more than she had the original.

“I’m sorry for Mrs. Clark,” she told Paxton with utter truthfulness, “but I don’t understand why you would think I talked to her husband earlier this evening. Or what difference it would make if I had.”

“Well, it’s like this.” He toyed with the green ball cap, circling it around and around in his big hands. “Carolyn Clark said Ron developed a bad case of the jitters these past few weeks. Acted real nervous. At times seemed almost depressed. He wouldn’t tell his wife what was bothering him, though. She thought it might have had something to do with the business.”

Jess lifted her shoulders. “I don’t know anything about his business. Or about Ron Clark, for that matter.”

“Didn’t you say you leased this place from him?”

“Yes, I did, but we transacted most of our business long-distance. When I found out I was coming to Eglin, I got the email address of his realty office from an ad he’d placed in the Air Force Times.”

“When was that?”

“A little over a month ago. Clark emailed me pictures of various properties, including this condo. He did the same with the lease, which I printed out, signed, and sent back to him.”

Paxton nodded, but his glance had dropped to her hands. Only then did Jess realize she was still rubbing the old burn. Hunching her shoulders, she slid her palms in the front pockets of her ragged cut-offs.

The sheriff brought his gaze back to hers with a leisurely sweep that took in her bare legs, her bra-less state under the midriff-skimming UCLA T-shirt, and total lack of anything approaching make-up. Jess couldn’t decide if the glint in those unnerving, incredible eyes belonged to the man, the cop, or both.

“So you never spoke to Ron Clark personally?”

“I stopped by his office to pick up the keys when I drove into town. He had them waiting, we went over the terms of the lease, and I left. That was the one and only time I had a conversation with the man. Now suppose you answer my question, sheriff. Why did you ask if I’d called or received a call from Clark?”

“Carolyn overheard her husband on the phone at home. Ron sounded agitated, so she went into the den to see what the problem was. According to her, Ron said your name, dropped the receiver onto the cradle, and stood looking at the wall.”

Jess’s skin prickled. “My name?”

“Your name, Colonel Blackwell.”

He rolled the military title Southern style, slow, courteous, but Jess’s heart was pounding too hard and too fast to appreciate the local flavoring.

“When Carolyn asked if he was all right, Ron turned and walked right past her. She heard the garage door open, then close. She thought he’d left for the office, thought maybe the phone call had something to do with your lease. She went upstairs to take a bath. When she came back down an hour or so later, she found her husband slumped over the steering wheel of his Buick.”

Five seconds ticked by, ten. Jess’s nerves were screaming when the sheriff broke the small silence.

“As far as we know, your name was the last thing Ron Clark said before he killed himself. You have any idea why, colonel?”

“No.” She looked him square in the eye. “Do you?”

If she was lying, she was damned good at it.

Steve had been a cop long enough to crack the most impenetrable facades. He’d seen them all. The wide-eyed, I’ve-got-nothing-at-all-to-hide innocence. The belligerent, in-your-face challenge. The wounded disbelief at being questioned regarding a crime. Despite his years of separating the bravado from the bullshit, though, he couldn’t get a handle on this woman. All he knew was that a blip had appeared on his internal radar screen the moment Mz…correction…Lieutenant Colonel Blackwell had opened her front door.

Of course, the little blip might have something to do with the fact that this woman with the creamy skin, sleek spill of mink-brown hair, and killer legs didn’t look like any colonel he’d ever come across during his two years as an Army MP. Granted, that was back in the dark ages, before so many women had chosen to make the military a career and started hitting the top ranks. Before a ten-year stint with the Atlanta PD widened Steve’s horizons considerably. Before Christy had burst into his life and widened them even more.

Burying the memory of his ex- in the black pit where it belonged, he replied to the challenge in Jessica Blackwell’s steady gaze. “No, ma’am, I don’t know why you were on Clark’s mind just before he killed himself. But I plan to find out.”

“When you do, perhaps you’ll tell me?”

It was a dismissal. Cool. Polite. Unmistakable. Steve’s radar pinged again, but he accepted his marching orders with an easy smile.

“I expect I will.”

She opened the door and waited. She was a woman used to issuing commands and having them obeyed. With a nod, Steve walked out into the night.

Hot air flavored with the sharp tang of pines seeped into his lungs. The silvery glint of moonlight on water only yards away drew him. With a rhythm older than time, the vast Choctawhatchee Bay lapped at shores fringed with short, spiky palmettos.

The bay pulled at something deep inside him. It had since the moment his Jeep had glided onto the bridge that spanned the eastern neck of the shimmering, shallow waters. He’d been on vacation, driving south at the time, intending to cut straight to the Gulf and follow the ocean until something or some place snagged his interest.

The divorce had done that to him, made him restless, rootless. After Christy had decamped with two truckloads of her fussy antiques, he’d avoided going home to an empty house and filled both his days and nights with work. He hadn’t realized how close he’d come to the edge until an ex-employee had walked into a YMCA daycare center and opened fire with an Uzi. Steve was the first officer on the scene. To this day, his stomach knotted whenever he remembered how close he’d come to emptying his own .45 into the murdering bastard’s head.

The next week he’d thrown a carry-all and his fishing gear into his Jeep and hit the road. He still wasn’t sure why he’d decided to stop and fish the bay instead of driving on to the Gulf. Maybe it was the lure of redfish and rainbow trout in the hundreds of bayous feeding waters once paddled by prehistoric Indians. Or the clean, hot air he drew into his lungs instead of the gas fumes he’d breathed in Atlanta. Or the lack of anything approaching hustle in the sleepy village where he stopped to gas up. Whatever it was, he’d checked into the Bay View Motel and rented a bass boat the next morning.

By the following week, he’d burned, peeled, and burned again. The week after that, he’d called his boss from the marina and quit the Atlanta PD, then putt-putted out to fish the bay once more. When he’d come in that evening, the Walton County sheriff had been waiting for him. Cliff Boudreaux had heard a big city cop was drifting around the bayous. He just wanted to say hey, and find out how long Paxton intended to stay in the area. One beer led to another, and a job offer soon followed.

That was seven years ago, and Steve still fished the bay.

Boot heels crunching on the shell walk that ribboned through the trendy condo community, he strolled past his unmarked cruiser toward the boat dock. His hip found a comfortable hitch on one of the wooden piles. With the unconscious need of a man whose mind had recognized the sense in not smoking but whose body was still waiting to be convinced, he reached in his shirt pocket. When he pulled out a pack of cinnamon flavored Dentyne instead of the cigarettes he craved, his mouth twisted.