Before I Sleep Read online

  “Show's going good, Carey,” he said, absolving her of her error in missing the meeting.

  “Yeah, it's hot But it's not about Otis.”

  “What do you care? It's good radio.”

  “Right” She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Can I bum a cigarette?”

  “You don't smoke.”

  “Now I do.”

  Most of the time she had the feeling that Bill didn't really see anyone except as cogs in the wheel of this station, but right now the look he gave her said he was seeing her, Carissa Stover. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of his desk drawer and passed them over. “ If you close the door, you can smoke in here. I won't report you to the air police. Otherwise, get the hell out back with the cat.“

  “Thanks. I'll bring them right back.” She turned to leave.

  “Carey?”

  She looked back at him, waiting.

  “If you want, you can pull the topic back to Otis. I know you can. But if it's too … difficult for you, just let the show go the way it's going. It's all right. Nobody said you had to bare your soul for ratings points. Okay?”

  She felt the sudden burn of tears in her eyes, and blinked rapidly. “Thanks. I'll think about it.” Then she turned and headed for the back lot, where she could smoke her first cigarette in fourteen years and talk to a cat that couldn't talk back.

  The cigarette made her feel light-headed and sick, and after three drags she dropped it to the dirt and ground it out under her heel. She stayed only to pet the station's cat.

  Pegleg, as the three-legged ginger tomcat was called, had turned up a couple of years ago in bad condition with tattered ears and an infected leg. Someone had taken him to the vet, who had amputated the bad leg and nursed him back to health. Apparently Peg figured that meant the station was home, and he'd stuck around ever since. There were bowls for cat food and water that someone always kept full near the weathered picnic table, and Peg seemed to like lounging on the table near the microwave antennas. He let all the station personnel pet him, but ran from strangers.

  Tonight he was feeling particularly friendly, and as soon as Carey put out her cigarette and sat at the table, he jumped into her lap, purring loudly.

  Carey scratched him behind his ears, realizing that her show was avoiding the subject of Otis because she was letting it, and she was letting it because she didn't really want to go there. And what was more, she was going to let it keep going its own way because she wasn't ready to do anything else.

  Her mind made up, she placed the cat gently back onto its perch, then went to take the cigarettes back to Bill. He was involved in a phone conversation, and merely wagged his fingers at her when she put the pack and lighter on his desk.

  The next hour went pretty much the same as the first. She began to feel she was almost running on automatic, safe and secure in the knowledge that people were arguing among themselves about the death penalty, and she didn't have a whole lot to do except keep the ball rolling. The plight of John William Otis was secondary in the minds of her listeners, and for now she was content to leave it that way.

  But then she saw a new caller pop up on her screen, and the subject tag that Marge had typed in made the hackles on the back of her neck stand up: Otis didn't do it.

  She interrupted a caller in the middle of a diatribe about lethal injection versus the electric chair, cut away to commercial, and stared at the glowing phosphor words. Otis-didn't do it.

  She punched the button that let her talk to Marge. “This guy who said Otis didn't do it. Did he say anything else?”

  Marge was busy loading carts, but she took time to answer, sounding a little harried. “I hate it when we have a string of short commercials. I didn't give him a chance to say anything else. Do you know how many calls I've been answering?”

  “Did he sound wild or weird or anything?”

  “I don't remember.”

  “Thanks.”

  Marge gave her the one-minute signal, and she nodded, staring again at the words. It was just her imagination, but they seemed to glow brighter than all the others. Bob from Gulfport. He wasn't a regular caller, but if he turned out to be some doped-up freak who didn't really have anything to say, she could disconnect him in an instant. She decided to go for it, even though it meant returning the show's focus to Otis.

  At Marge's signal, she punched the button. “Bob from Gulfport, you're on the air.” “Carey?”

  “Yes, this is Carey.” She had to smother a sigh, but resisted the temptation to disconnect him. People who started this way rarely tended to be good callers. “What do you want to say?”

  “John Otis didn't do it.”

  She felt a stirring of impatience. You couldn't just drop something like that and let it go. It made for bad radio. “Didn't do what?”

  - “He didn't kill his foster parents.”

  “Were you there? Did you see what happened?”

  The caller went silent. She reached for the disconnect button, but just before she hit it, he spoke. “I know he didn't do it. And I'm going to prove it.”

  “How are you going to do that? Don't you think his defense attorney tried to do that? The problem here, Bob, is that there wasn't any real evidence one way or the other. Otis was registered in a hotel in Vero Beach the night the murders happened, but nobody could remember seeing him. There was no evidence at the scene to suggest that someone else had done it. Do you have evidence?”

  “No, but I'm going to prove he didn't do it. I will. You'll see!”

  He hung up before she could disconnect him, and she heard the dial tone. Instead of cutting it out of the broadcast, she left it, deciding to use it.

  “Well,” she said to her listeners, “I can't imagine how he's going to prove it without evidence, and I guess he can't either, or he wouldn't have hung up.

  “But you know, that was another thing that always bothered me about this case. John Otis registered at a hotel in Vero Beach on Friday night, the day before the murders. And he checked out on Sunday afternoon and came home.

  “Now folks, why would a guy go to Vero Beach, drive all the way back here to commit murders like that, drive back to Vero Beach, then come home the following afternoon to be arrested?”

  But no one tried to answer the question. No one really seemed interested in the man on death row.

  Maybe that was the whole problem, she thought as she drove home that night. Nobody gave a damn about John William Otis.

  And maybe it was time someone did.

  CHAPTER 4

  18 Days

  Seamus Rourke looked across the breakfast table at his father, and figured there was little in the world he less wanted to see.

  Danny had been with him three days now, and Seamus was beginning to feel as if his life was coming apart at the seams. The old man was a constant reminder of things he absolutely didn't want to think about.

  Worse, after three days the old man still smelled like booze. Seamus, who'd always considered himself a reasonably tolerant man, was discovering there was something he couldn't tolerate at all.

  “Did you go to AA yet?” he asked.

  Danny looked up from his plate of bacon and eggs, his eyes still reddened and bleary. “Nope.”

  “Look, Dad, I told you that was a condition of staying here.”

  “And I said I'd do it.”

  It was the voice of an annoyed father speaking to an importunate son. The thing was, it didn't work anymore on this son.

  Seamus pushed his plate aside, his breakfast half-eaten. “I told you how it's gonna be. That's my final word on the subject. I'm sure as hell not going to live with a drunk.”

  He stomped out of the kitchen, grabbing his jacket from the chair where he'd laid it. His gun was already holstered on his belt. He pulled his car keys off the peg beside the door without sparing a backward glance for the man he held partly responsible for turning his life into a living hell.

  As he walked out the door, he heard his father s
ay forlornly, “I wasn't drunk that night, boy. I wasn't drunk.”

  But he'd been drunk every night ever since, Seamus thought bitterly. He slammed the door, then slammed the car door after he climbed in. Fuck him, he thought. Fuck him anyway.

  He peeled out of the driveway with a squeal of tires, and left rubber when he had to brake for a stop sign. “Dammit!” He slapped his hand on the steering wheel and forced himself to calm down. Little in this world could make him as angry as Danny Rourke—or Carissa Stover.

  But he didn't want to think about her either. Christ, what was she doing, turning her show into a John William Otis marathon? The last three nights she had opened with a monologue about the guy, and the ensuing discussion had revolved around the death penalty and whether society was responsible for making monsters like Otis. He was thinking about not even tuning in tonight.

  Because she made him listen. This time he couldn't just soak up the liquid honey of her voice. No, he found himself listening to her arguments, and getting madder than an angry wasp. Four times last night alone he'd had to stop himself from picking up the telephone and giving her a piece of his mind. Just what did she think she was doing?

  He sure as hell didn't like the way she was making him think about John Otis as a man. He didn't like the creeping sense of guilt she was giving him over what that murdering son of a bitch had been through as a child. Hell, he was a cop. When somebody brought something like that to his attention, he did his damnedest to put an end to it. But nobody had told anybody about what was happening to that boy. Why should he feel guilty about something he hadn't even known about?

  Finding that thoughts of Carey were only making him angrier, he wrenched them away from her and thought about the old souse, otherwise known as his dad. He was just barking when he threatened to throw Danny out if he didn't go to AA, and he knew it.

  That was the worst of it. He couldn't throw the old man out. He'd seen what happened to people like Danny when they had no one to turn to anymore. They wound up living under highway overpasses or in cardboard boxes in alleys, going hungry and spending whatever money they could find or beg on a bottle of cheap wine.

  Well, he wasn't going to have that on his conscience, too. His conscience was already overloaded.

  By the time he pulled into the police-station parking lot on First Avenue Norm, he had a grip on his temper.

  It was a beautiful day, he told himself. The last of the rain had dried up, and for once the air was clear of the heavy humidity. A warm breeze blew, stirring the leaves on the trees, and it was as perfect an August morning as he could have asked for. And while he was working, there would be no room in his thoughts for Danny and Carey.

  These were small blessings for which he decided to be suitably grateful, especially since there was little else in his life to be grateful about right now.

  He took his place at the table in the robbery-homicide squad room, which was really two rooms that used to be one. Some of the guys still groused about how the other room had control of the air-conditioning for both, but Seamus didn't much think about it. It was one of those “what's the point?” issues in his life.

  He scanned his mail and discovered that a defense attorney had subpoenaed him for a deposition next Thursday in an attempted-murder case. He couldn't remember whether it was the domestic violence case or the hit-and-run that had turned out to be deliberate. He made a note on his calendar, notified the State Attorney that he'd be there, and wrote a note to himself to review the file to refresh his memory.

  Gil Garcia slid into the chair beside him. A good-looking man of forty, Gil had inky black hair dashed with gray, the weathered face of a man who'd seen it all, and a warm, disarming smile. The wisdom in the squad room was that Seamus was a bulldog who wouldn't let go of a case, and that Gil could charm anyone into talking.

  Gil's charm hid a tough, life-hardened cop who seldom took anything at face value. He wasn't cynical, the way some cops got, but he wasn't quick to trust.

  Which wasn't a bad thing in a cop, Seamus thought. People lied, and sometimes they lied without any good reason to do so. What's more, if you had two witnesses to an event, you were likely to get two entirely different stories out of them. Hell, they wouldn't even agree on what the perp was wearing.

  Gil had a theory about that, which was probably why he hadn't become cynical. He believed that people didn't really remember events. “They remember their emotional impressions of what happened,” he liked to say. “The brain fills in the details, and as often as not they're wrong.”

  Seamus was inclined to agree with him, which meant there weren't any really good witnesses, there were only people who appeared to be good witnesses. Which meant there wasn't any such thing as truth, just something that appeared to be true. Seamus wasn't sure he liked the implications of that, but it was another of those “what's the point?” issues.

  Gil checked his own messages, made a couple of calls, then turned to look at him. “Ready to get to work on the Mayberry case?”

  Seamus patted his pocket to make sure he had his notebook, then shoved himself back from the table. “Let's go.”

  The Mayberry case had been assigned to them just two days ago, when the original detective on the case had had a heart attack. They'd spent the last couple of days getting up to speed from a file review, and from the stricken detective's young partner.

  Three weeks ago, a young man named Doug Mayberry had been shot to death riding his bicycle through a quiet neighborhood. One of the strangest elements of the crime was that no one had seen or heard a thing, even though it had happened in broad daylight and most of the residents were retired people who were home a lot of the time. The young man had bled to death in the street before he was discovered.

  Seamus quite frankly didn't believe that no one had seen or heard anything. The gunshot had to have been audible, even with windows closed and air conditioners running. Surely some retiree had been out working in his yard. Dogs must have barked. The young man had probably cried out for help.

  Equally striking was that the victim seemed to have no enemies. Everyone seemed to like him, and both his girlfriend and his parents said he hadn't been in any fights or arguments in recent memory.

  Consequently, Seamus was convinced that someone was lying. Probably even several someones. And that meant that people were scared. He wanted to know why they were scared every bit as much as he wanted to know who had killed Doug Mayberry. This kind of fear didn't arise from having heard gunshots or shouts. Terror came from knowing something that could get you hurt.

  It was Gil's turn to drive, so he slid into the passenger seat and rolled down the window to let out the heat that had built up in the car.

  They drove north on Forty-ninth, to an area populated by stuccoed cinder-block homes that had been built in a time when land was still relatively cheap and available. The yards were spacious and mostly well cared for, boasting manicured lawns despite the area's water shortage. People who moved here from the Northeast just couldn't imagine a yard without grass and found it perennially difficult to believe that in a place where it rained so often, a place surrounded by water, there could be a shortage.

  Here and there, though, were signs of the coming reality: xeriscaping with native plants, and yards that sprouted palm trees and were covered with white gravel.

  The neighborhood was upscale enough that it hadn't suffered from the blight that was gradually creeping into some older, less well-to-do neighborhoods as retired householders died. In this area, new retirees kept moving in to replace the ones who had passed on. There was even evidence that young families had moved in: bicycles, swing sets, and wading pools.

  But there was a population shift going on in the entire county, with more young people arriving and fewer retirees moving in. St. Petersburg, which had been nicknamed God's Waiting Room, was gradually growing younger, and with that reversal came a concomitant increase in crime.

  In short, Seamus didn't think he'd be looking for a new line of
work anytime soon.

  It was the same day of the week as the murder, and about the same time of day. Gil and Seamus figured that by knocking on doors they'd have a decent chance of finding out who had most likely been at home at the time of the killing, and maybe they could get them to talk.

  Gil pulled the car over and parked against the curb, but he didn't immediately turn off the ignition, preferring to let the air conditioner keep them cool.

  “Quiet,” Gil remarked.

  “Yeah.” No one was outside, no one was walking down the street, and as they sat there and watched, there weren't even any other cars.

  Seamus scanned the houses, and the blank eyes of windows stared back at him. Some had their blinds or curtains drawn against the heat, others appeared to be black mirrors. Nothing and no one stirred. He kept waiting for a curtain to twitch, or some nosy neighbor to peer out to see who was parked at the curb, but the houses might well have been devoid of life.

  “So maybe nobody did see anything,” Gil remarked.

  “Somebody would have heard something.”

  “Maybe this is the only neighborhood in the world where nobody peeks through the curtains to see what's going on when they hear a loud noise or shouting.”

  Seamus nodded, scanning the houses and street again. “It's like a scene out of some science-fiction movie,” he remarked finally. “I could see this kind of quiet if everybody in this neighborhood worked.”

  “But they don't.” Gil sighed and rubbed his chin, his palm rasping on the fastest-growing stubble in the department. “Well, let's give it a little while. We got a two- or three-hour window on the actual murder anyway.”

  They didn't have to wait long. Five minutes later a green-and-white St. Petersburg patrol car pulled up beside them. Gil rolled down his window and the cop car rolled down its passenger side window.

  “Hey, Rico,” Gil called to the man in the green-and-white, “how's it going?”

  “Hey,” Rico Minelli replied. Resting his left forearm on the steering wheel, he leaned toward them. “You wouldn't be the call I got about suspicious strangers in a parked car, would you?”