Keeping Watch: Heart of the Night\Accidental Bodyguard (21 page)

“How can the police know what was new, what Lew discovered only yesterday? I know everything that’s in those files, Kahler. If Lew jotted down notes or made a stray comment in the margin, it might tell me what he was thinking. No one else knows what was already there. No one else can recognize what’s been added.”

“Given the time frame, Garrison probably didn’t have time to make notes. I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I’ve got a feeling he found what he found and then, probably without thinking too much about what he was doing, he mentioned it to the wrong person. Maybe he was trying to feel them out and it backfired.”

“Lew wasn’t stupid.”

“I don’t mean to suggest that. But he’s dead, and my guess is that whatever he was talking about on your answering machine is the cause.”

She nodded again. It was the obvious conclusion.

“If you find something in the files, Kate, don’t act on it. That’s not your job. Come to me. I’ll pursue whatever it is, and unlike Garrison, I’ll bring along some backup. I don’t want you ending up like your boss.”

“Okay, big brother,” she agreed, smiling at him. “I can assure you I don’t want to end up…” She paused, the image of the room last night suddenly too vivid in her memory. “I promise, Kahler, not to make a move without you.”

S
HE HAD DROPPED
Kahler off and driven home in the early-morning traffic, changing lanes and making her exit automatically, her mind still involved with everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. It was almost too much to assimilate. Her brain worried at each separate event like a terrier working over a well-chewed slipper, trying to fit them together until, at the end of each train of thought, logic asserted itself to reiterate that they didn’t fit. Nothing tied together. At least, not in any way she wanted it to.

Her apartment looked ordinary in the light of day. She wondered why it didn’t look this way—safe and nonthreatening—when darkness fell. She threw her suit coat over the back of the sofa and began unbuttoning the silk blouse.

She wanted to get out of her clothes, send them out to the cleaners as soon as possible. She wanted to take a hot shower and wash her hair. As if by doing those things she could cleanse the horror of what she had found at Lew’s house from her mind.

She punched the play button on the answering machine by habit, not even looking at the display. She knew that she’d almost certainly erased both Kahler’s and Lew’s messages, automatically destroyed them, since there had been no phone numbers left with either. That was the usual deciding factor.

She was right. The voice that filled the room was not the accented one of the man whose couch she’d slept on last night. Its timbre was as deep, but it was homegrown, the cadence so familiar it didn’t even qualify in her mind as having an accent.

“I just wanted to say good-night,” the recording of Thorne Barrington’s voice said. “Call me when you get in.” And then he gave his number, which she knew was unlisted.

Her hand hesitated over the erase button, and instead, she hit rewind and listened again. The same tone as in the darkened hallway. Soft and intimate. Deliberately, this time she punched the erase button and listened to the machine destroy the message.

S
HE WAS MORE
than an hour late. It didn’t matter, of course, because when she got to the paper the police were already at work. Clusters of people stood around in stricken silence. Obviously news of Lew’s death had filtered out.

She put her purse down on her desk and stood a moment watching the shapes move behind the frosted glass walls of Lew’s office. Through the opened door, she caught glimpses of Kahler’s familiar figure, muscularly compact back and shoulders filling the starched blue shirt or his dark head bent over Lew’s desk. She even overheard the occasional comment, his voice directing the operation with unthinking authority.

She wasn’t surprised that Kahler had come to oversee this search himself. He believed that whatever Lew had found had gotten him killed. As Kate did. She only had to be patient and eventually Kahler would tell her if he discovered anything.

“You okay?” one of the feature editors asked. She was standing almost at Kate’s elbow, her eyes filled with concern.

Kate hadn’t even been aware when the woman had approached her desk. “I guess,” she said, questioning in her own mind if she’d ever be okay again.

“Someone said that…you found him.”

Kate nodded. The tightness was back in her throat, and she began to wonder if coming in today had been a good idea. Being here. Exposed. Surrounded by the curious, their eyes all searching for some response, some reaction, a display of emotion.

Why don’t you tell our viewers, Ms. August, how it felt to find your editor with the back of his head blown away, his brains splattered against the wall behind him?

“Excuse me,” Kate said, managing what was almost a smile. She moved past the sympathetic face of her co-worker to stand outside the opened door of Lew’s office. She found that she had put her hands again on their opposite shoulders, smoothing her clammy palms down the short, silk-knit sleeves of the summer sweater set she’d pulled blindly from her closet this morning.

Maybe if she appeared to be watching the police do their job, no one would ask questions or demand that she recount what had happened last night.
The public’s right to know,
she thought bitterly. Only not now. Not yet. Please, just not today.

“Did you find anything?” she asked when Kahler came out, pitching her voice low enough that the onlookers couldn’t overhear. The hazel eyes assessed her face, so she smiled at him. He shook his head, a single tight movement and then he moved past her, carrying the trailing team of men with him.

The contents of the familiar office were clearly visible from where she stood, the papers on Lew’s desk straight and more orderly than she’d ever seen them—Kahler’s imposed order, not Lew’s comforting disorder.

She wondered again who Lew had talked to yesterday. A friend of Barrington’s—that was all she knew for certain. Suddenly the remembrance of Lew jotting something on his desk calendar as they talked was in her head. The image of his pen moving quickly across the already crowded whiteness. She hadn’t told Kahler that. Maybe…

She glanced toward the newsroom doorway, but there was no sign of the cops. With their departure, most of the staff had made some pretense of getting back to business as usual. Someone would step in to organize, to direct the operation of the paper as Lew had for so many years. Maybe soon. They might even take over the office, clear out Lew’s things. There would be no reason not to. The police were apparently through here.

She stepped inside Lew’s office and pulled the door closed behind her. She waited a moment, feeling guilty, expecting to be challenged. She had no right to be here. Except this had always been her story, and Lew Garrison had been her friend.

When nothing happened, no protest concerning the invasion, she walked across the room to Lew’s desk. There were too many memories here, and she felt her eyes burn, suddenly and unexpectedly. She fought the emotion by pushing Kahler’s neatly stacked pile of documents off the calendar desk pad. She ran her finger down the right-hand side of the page, the place where Lew had been jotting notes as they’d talked. There were names and numbers written there, appointments, reminders as innocuous as “laundry 2:00.” Nothing about Barrington. Nothing that seemed to relate to their conversation yesterday.

“Damn,” she said under her breath. Just to be sure, she ran her finger across this week’s block of days. Maybe Lew had written whatever he’d written on the appropriate day. Yesterday had been Wednesday the tenth. Only it wasn’t. It was the thirteenth. Wednesday, the thirteenth. It took a moment for the significance to hit her. She looked up and found that the calendar page she was examining so closely wasn’t for July, but for March. Last March. Which meant someone had removed—she stopped and counted backward—four months’ worth of pages. She took all the pages out of the pad and rifled quickly through them, just to make sure that the missing months hadn’t been shifted to the back during the police search. They weren’t there.

Kahler must have taken them. But he’d said they’d found nothing, so why take the calendar pages. Unless it hadn’t been Kahler. Unless someone else had taken them. Someone who had reason to fear whatever Lew had jotted on their margins. She took a deep breath, trying to think. Either Kahler had lied to her, or he hadn’t noticed the pages were missing.

Kahler would have noticed, she thought. He was bright and he was thorough, which meant he’d taken them. There had to be a reason for that. Something he didn’t want her to see because he was afraid if she did, she’d pursue it, despite his warning.

Because it related to Barrington? Because she’d all but admitted to him how she felt about the judge, not exactly unbiased?
Call me,
Thorne had said on the tape. And before that,
When can I see you again?

To find out what she knew? To find out if Lew had told her whatever had gotten him killed? Kahler said no one had been waiting for her at her apartment last night and no one had followed her. Was it possible that the person involved hadn’t had to follow her because…because she had already gone to his house? Because he already knew that she wasn’t aware of whatever Lew Garrison had discovered?

But Thorne hadn’t even asked her any questions. They hadn’t talked about anything dealing with the case—other than Lew’s phone call. Was Barrington astute enough to know from the little she’d said that she hadn’t been aware that Lew had made that call? That she certainly didn’t know to whom it had been made?

She tried to reconstruct their conversation, the exact words, but it was no use. The words she remembered, the phrases that echoed in her head, burned into her memory, all concerned something else. Something very different.

Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night wanting you. Thinking about you being there with me.

She had done her duty. She had told Kahler about Lew’s phone call to Barrington’s friend. That didn’t mean she had to believe Barrington had something to do with Lew’s death. The man who had held her, who had kissed her last night, who had confessed how he felt, had
not
just returned from killing Lew Garrison. She had always trusted her instincts, and there had been nothing there last night except what he had openly confessed to—incredibly, the same obsession she’d felt for weeks.

Someone tapped on the frosted glass upper half of the door, and Kate watched it swing open before she could formulate a reply. The editor who had spoken to her before stuck her head into the opening.

“Kate?” she said. “I thought you must be in here. I looked everywhere else.”

“What is it?” Kate asked.

“Judge Barrington’s on the phone. Line one. I thought you’d want to take it. Since it’s Barrington,” she added.

“Thanks,” Kate said. She had felt a brief flutter of unease at the comment, and then she realized all the woman could know about Barrington was that he’d been Jack’s first victim. She would assume the call had something to do with the story. No one could suspect that her connection to him was far more personal. She waited until the editor closed the door behind her, and then she took a deep breath, and she picked up the phone.

“Kate August,” she said.

“Kate?”

With the sound of her name, all the doubts she had had about Thorne Barrington’s possible involvement in what had happened to Lew last night—doubts she hadn’t even acknowledged—seemed to slip out of her head.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“You’ve heard?”

“On the news. They said you found the body. Are you okay?”

For some reason his concern caused the moisture to sting behind her lids again, but she fought it.

“Not really. It was… To be honest, it was just as awful as Austin.” She realized that he might not know what she meant, so she added, explaining to a man who certainly needed no explanation of the horror Jack wrought, “I went to Austin. I thought I wanted to see… I had thought, if I was going to be working on the story, I needed to understand—”

He interrupted. “Kate,” he said softly. Only her name, his voice, again rich with concern, caressing her agitation. And then, “Don’t. Don’t think about it.”

She took another breath, trying to obey. She knew that wasn’t what she needed to talk to him about. Not today, anyway. Maybe sometime they might talk about that, but today…

“I told Kahler about Lew’s call,” she said.

There was a small silence. Maybe he was trying to put that together with what she had said before, but he was as smart as she had always been told he was.

“His call to my friend?”

“Lew left a message on my machine last night. Something about doing what we’d talked about. Asking around about you was one of the things we’d discussed. Kahler heard the message. Lew’s call to your friend must have been one of the last things he did.” An explanation for why she’d told Kahler.

“Of course,” he said simply.

“The police will probably want to talk to you, Thorne. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know how to—”

“There’s nothing to apologize for. A man’s dead. As far as the police are concerned anything he did might be important.” There was a silence, and then he added what she hadn’t asked for. “His name is Greg Sandifer. We’ve been friends since elementary school. He’s a doctor. Not mine, but…the fact that he is a doctor is probably one of the reasons Garrison called him.”

She didn’t say anything. She knew why he was telling her this. Not to pass on to Kahler, but for her own information. To satisfy her own need to know what his friend had told Lew. To put to rest the doubts that he must have realized had crept, certainly unwanted, into her head since she’d found Lew’s body. For her information—personal and not professional.

“You didn’t have to tell me that,” she said.

“Call him,” he said. “Tell him I said to talk to you. Ask him anything you want about his conversation with Garrison.” He began to reel off a number, and her hand automatically found a pen, adding the seven digits to the crowded calendar page on Lew’s desk. “That’s his private number. The fact that you have that number should be introduction enough.”