Night Whispers (43 page)

"I know how it looks," Sloan said achingly. "I don't expect you to believe this, but I had no idea any of that was going to happen." She swallowed before she could go on. "I—I loved your family, every one of you."

Courtney's gray eyes were so like Noah's that Sloan was unconsciously memorizing the color of them in the sunlight, even though they were glaring at her with cold animosity. "I'm not stupid enough to believe any of that."

Sloan accepted her condemnation with a nod. "I don't blame you." She started to turn; then she realized something so poignant that she had to blink back tears before she could turn back. "Thank you for not accusing me of being a murderer as well as a spy."

Courtney dismissed her gratitude with an indifferent shrug. "I'm not stupid enough to believe you killed Edith."

Sloan turned away because there was nothing more to say, but Courtney wasn't quite finished. "I stayed home from school because I figured you'd come here, but you'd better never come back. Noah's gone and you're lucky. He isn't just mad. He hates you."

Sloan nodded. "I understand. Do you think, if I waited awhile and wrote him a letter, that he'd at least read it?"

"Not a chance," Courtney said as she turned her back on Sloan and walked away.

Courtney waited until Sloan was pulling out of the drive; then she turned and walked backward slowly, watching her leave. She lifted her palms to her eyes and pressed hard to keep the tears back.

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S
loan had been too miserable during the drive back to Bell Harbor to worry about what impact the news of her arrest would have on her life and job in Bell Harbor, but within hours of her return, she had no doubt.

When Sloan called her mother at Lydia's shop to tell her she was home, Kimberly ignored Lydia's complaint and actually took the rest of the day off "for personal reasons." Sara terminated a meeting with an important client and arrived immediately after Sloan's mother; then they both doted on her as if she were ill, bringing her small treats and favorite foods in attempts to restore both her mood and her appetite.

Sloan didn't realize they were doing this because she looked ill. With her arms wrapped around a throw pillow, she sat curled tightly into a corner of the sofa and told them what she knew about the murder.

They'd both recognized Paul aboard Noah's boat when they saw him on the news, and Sloan saw no reason not to tell them the truth about her relationship with Paul. Rather than upset her mother, however, Sloan let them believe it was Noah Maitland that Paul had gone to Palm Beach to investigate, and she left Carter out of the picture. She told them about Paris and Carter and people she'd met and things she'd done, but she left out her brief love affair with Noah. She didn't know how to discuss him or if she could do it without breaking down.

When she ran out of things to talk about, Kimberly went into the kitchen to make Sloan a cup of tea while Sara made an attempt to lighten Sloan's mood that backfired badly. "Did you see any Mr. Perfects anywhere?" she teased.

Sloan had to fight to control her expression. "I… well… yes."

"How many?"

"Not many. One."

"Only one? Palm Beach is the gathering place for an awful lot of Mr. Perfects. You must not have been looking around."

Sloan closed her eyes and saw a tanned male face with a square jaw, beautiful gray eyes, and an insistent mouth leaning toward her. She swallowed. "He was as perfect as it gets."

"Did you meet him?"

"Oh, yes," Sloan said weakly. "I met him."

"And did you go out with him?"

"Yes."

"And?" Sara prodded.

Sloan's voice dropped to a whisper, and she had to clear her throat "We liked each other."

"How much did you like each other?" Sara's smile wavered as she watched Sloan's face and listened to her voice.

Sloan laid her cheek against the pillow she was holding and swallowed. "A lot."

"Do we have a name?" Sara asked.

"Noah Maitland."

"Noah Maitland?" Sara uttered. "
Noah Maitland
?" Like many residents of Bell Harbor, Sara subscribed to the
Palm Beach Daily News
and kept up on the social whirl there. "Listen to me. Even if he weren't an arms smuggler, you wouldn't want him. He has a different rich, glamorous woman with him in every picture I've seen of him, but he never sticks with any of them."

Before Sloan could reply, her mother returned from the kitchen with the tea and spoke up, her voice gentle but firm. "I don't think Sloan should give up hope that all this will work out. Edith's murderer will be found, and then Paris and Carter will realize she was innocent, and they'll forgive her. And so far, no one has said that anything illegal has been found on Noah Maitland's boats. I'm sure he's innocent or Sloan would never have—" She glanced tenderly at her unhappy daughter and said with certainty, "Or else Sloan would never have fallen in love with him. The truth will come out about his innocence, and Sloan can apologize to him. I'm sure he's a kind, gentle man who will understand and forgive her." She looked at Sloan. "Isn't that true, darling?"

Sloan thought of her last phone call with Noah and lifted teary eyes to her mother. "No."

A few minutes later, Sloan realized she had to take immediate steps to help her get over all this. She reached for the phone and called the police department. "Matt, this is Sloan," she told Lieutenant Caruso. "I'd like to come back to work tomorrow instead of Monday, if you can use me."

"Are you back in town?" he asked, and when she said she was, he told her to report for duty in the morning. Caruso hung up the phone and strolled over to Jess Jessup's desk. "Sloan is home. I told her she could come to work tomorrow. I hope that's okay with Captain Ingersoll. I mean, she's been charged with murder…"

Jess stood up. "Caruso, you're an ass."

"Where are you going?" Caruso called after him.

"You can reach me on the radio if you need me," he replied, but before he left, Jess stopped at the dispatcher's desk. "Sloan is back," he told the dispatcher. "She's at home."

Before Jess reached his car, the dispatcher had put the word out to the officers on duty around Bell Harbor.

Within ten minutes, a parade of police cruisers began to arrive in front of her house.

Jess arrived first, and Sara answered the door. They had not seen each other since he'd appeared at her house after the barbecue on the beach, and Sara faltered when she saw him standing there. "Come out here a minute," Jess ordered, drawing Sara forward onto Sloan's porch. "How's she doing?"

"She's fine," Sara said firmly. "She's terrific."

Jess wasn't deceived. "How is she really doing?"

"Fair."

He nodded as if he expected that; then he did the last thing Sara expected him to do or wanted him to do. He reached out and tipped her chin up, and his smile was without mockery or flirtation. "Do you think we could bury the hatchet for her sake for a while?"

Sara nodded warily, taken aback by the gentleness in his face as he looked at her. "I'd like that, Jess."

For the rest of the afternoon and evening, a steady procession of police cruisers arrived at Sloan's house and disappeared after a little while. Boxes of pizzas and sandwiches from fast-food restaurants accumulated on the living room table as Sloan's friends on the force invented excuses to come by and say hello.

Sloan knew better.

They had come to show their support and to cheer her up. It worked until Sloan went to bed that night. Alone in her bed, there was nothing to distract her from remembering Noah. She fell asleep thinking about the times she'd lain against his side after they'd made love, her head on his shoulder, his hand idly caressing her, until they both slept. Or made love again.

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P
aris wasn't fooled one bit by Detectives Cagle and Flynn's courteous tone. They were sitting in her living room the day after her great-grandmother's funeral, and they were trying to make her incriminate herself in her great-grandmother's murder.

"I'm sure you can understand why we're baffled," Flynn was saying. "I mean, if Sloan killed Mrs. Reynolds, why would she wipe her prints off her own gun and then 'hide' the gun where we couldn't miss it? Her prints on her own gun wouldn't have incriminated her. The
gun
incriminated her because it fired the shot that killed Mrs. Reynolds."

"I told you before," Paris stated, "I don't know the answer to that."

"Sloan said the gun was still in its original hiding place, not under the mattress, on the morning after Mrs. Reynolds's death. She checked. Do you think someone else could have put the gun under the mattress?"

"Who?" Paris countered angrily. "The servants had all been sent home by you. The only people in the house that morning who didn't work for you were Paul Richardson and Sloan, my father and me, and Gary Dishler."

"That's the confusing part," Cagle put in.

"Yes, isn't it?" she countered. "You obviously don't think Paul Richardson or Sloan could be guilty."

"Richardson is FBI and he has no motive. Your sister has an unblemished record as a police officer and she was working for him. Believe me, if all that weren't true, your sister would be staring at a lifetime in prison. Now, let's see, who does that leave us with—who had a motive for wanting to see your great-grandmother dead and Sloan in prison, and who was here to move the gun under the mattress?"

Paris stood up, ending the interview, and motioned to Nordstrom, who was hovering in the hallway. She was through with being nice to people who treated her badly. "Nordstrom," she said coldly, "please show these men to the door, and lock it behind them. They are never again to be allowed past the gates."

Flynn dropped his friendly pretext. "We can get a warrant."

Paris nodded toward the door. "Do it, then," she said. "But until you have one, kindly get out and stay out!"

When the front door closed behind them, Cagle looked at Flynn with a wry smile. "That was a genteel way of saying 'fuck off,' wasn't it?"

"Yeah. I'll bet she was just as genteel when she pointed that Glock at her great-grandmother's chest and pulled the trigger."

Paris wasn't feeling genteel. She was panicked. She paced slowly back and forth across the living room floor, trying to think of who the murderer could be. She wasn't as willing as the police were to discount Paul Richardson or Sloan. Paul was obviously a liar and a phony, and he was fully capable of using people ruthlessly. He knew how to use a gun, and he would know how to fix things so it looked like someone else was guilty. He had no heart. He had broken hers. The problem was… he actually seemed to believe that
Paris
had killed her great-grandmother.

Sloan was as dishonest and heartless as he was. She'd pretended she wanted Paris to think of her as a real sister; then she tricked her into loving her like one. She'd filled Paris's head with touching stories about their mother and made Paris yearn to be part of their family in Bell Harbor. In retrospect, it was easy to see that Sloan had only accepted their invitation to come to Palm Beach so that she could smuggle an FBI agent into their midst, and then they could both try to destroy Noah.

Absently rubbing her throbbing temples, Paris went over what the detectives had said and what they'd implied. They seemed to be absolutely convinced that Sloan was telling the truth, and that whoever put her gun under her mattress was the killer. The police were convinced it wasn't Sloan or Paul, and Paris knew it wasn't her father or herself.

That only left Gary Dishler.

At first the idea seemed absurd, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized how little she actually liked the man. When he'd come to work for her father a few years ago, his position as assistant had been well-defined, but now he seemed to be in charge of everything. Generally, he treated her father with deferential respect, but there had been a few times when she'd heard him use a clipped, impatient tone that was completely inappropriate. She'd seen him lose his temper with a housemaid and fire her on the spot because she'd touched some papers on his desk.

The more Paris considered it, the more unpleasant and unsavory Dishler seemed to her. She couldn't imagine why he would want to hurt her great-grandmother, but she wasn't entirely sure he was incapable of it.

Her father was going through condolence cards in a spacious second-floor study with connecting doors to his bedroom on one side and to Gary Dishler's office on the other. The hallway door into Dishler's office was open, but the connecting door was closed. Paris carefully closed the hallway door into her father's study so they'd have complete privacy. "We have a problem," she said as calmly as she could.

"What is it?" he asked, slitting open another envelope.

Paris sat down on a chair in front of his desk. "Do you know how Gary really felt about Great-grandmother? I know she was rude to him from time to time."