The silence inside the cabin was so prolonged and absolute that Dent imagined he could hear the dust motes spinning in the stifling air.
Bellamy stood frozen, her gaze fixed on Moody as he hauled himself up out of his chair, wove his way over to the screened door, pushed it open, and stepped out onto his sorry excuse for a porch.
Tilting his face skyward, he remarked, “Looks like we finally may get some rain.”
Dent glanced out the nearest window and noticed that clouds had gathered in the west, blocking out the setting sun. The atmosphere inside the cabin was gloomy, but due less to the weather than to Moody’s disturbing disclosure.
When he came back inside, the screened door shut behind him with a loud clap that caused Bellamy to jump. As though there had been no suspension of conversation, she asked gruffly, “You think I killed her?”
Moody halted and, swaying on his feet, eyed her up and down. “You? No.”
“But you said… you said…”
“I said that if you saw her with her purse in her hand, you had to have seen her before the tornado struck.”
“Maybe you got it wrong,” Dent said. “Maybe the purse was found at the scene, and you’re too drunk now to remember where you got it and when.”
Moody glowered at him. “My crime scene was compromised, but I know when I came by the fucking purse. It’s in my notes,” he said, gesturing to the file lying on the bed. “Dated.”
Bellamy returned to the bed and sat down beside Dent. In a haunted, breathy voice, she asked, “I had to have seen her purse there, in her hand. Why else would I have said that?”
“You only imagined it because you’d seen her carrying the purse,” Dent said. “Within days, everyone knew the position her body was in when she was found. It was all over the news.”
She looked deeply into his eyes as though desperate to believe his explanation. But he didn’t think she did.
Moody settled back into his chair. “The bruise on the front of her neck was a band.” He ran his finger across his throat in an even line. “The ME’s opinion—which I shared—was that she’d been strangled by a garrote of some kind. Typically that happens from behind. She was overpowered and didn’t put up a struggle.”
Dent felt a slight tremor go through Bellamy. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“We didn’t get any skin or blood from beneath her fingernails.” Addressing Dent, he said, “First thing I looked for when I questioned you was scratch marks on your hands and arms.”
“I didn’t have any. Did Strickland?”
“None that couldn’t be explained by him crawling under his Mustang to escape the tornado.”
“That should’ve eliminated us as suspects.”
“Not necessarily. She also had a knot on the back of her head, which she’d got before she died. What we figured is that she was struck from behind. By what, we were never able to determine. She fell facedown and was rendered unconscious, or at least too stunned to defend herself while the perp finished her off.”
“With her panties,” Bellamy said quietly.
“According to you, your stepmother, and the housekeeper who did the family laundry, she wore only one kind. Made of stretchy lace. Strong enough to choke someone to death. Rupe demonstrated in court how it could have been done. That was another of his shining moments.”
“Didn’t his courtroom shenanigans irk Strickland’s defense attorney?” Dent asked. “Did he ever file an appeal?”
“Right away, but before the appellate court had time to consider his case and make a ruling, Strickland was killed.”
“How did the lawyer react to his client’s murder?” Dent asked.
Moody snorted a mirthless laugh. “He moved over to the DA’s office. At Rupe’s urging. He’s still there, far as I know.”
Bellamy said, “Allen died for nothing.”
“Far as I know.”
Later, when he thought back on it, Dent figured it was Moody’s smirk that had set him off. He saw it, and the next thing he knew, he had closed the distance between the bed and Moody’s chair, and he was bearing down on the former detective.
“You and Rupe made quite a team. He was the brains and you were his bitch boy. It was working so well, why’d you quit?”
“Back off.”
“Not till I hear from you what I want to hear. You’ve admitted you knew Strickland was innocent from the get-go. How did you know?”
“I told you. He said that Susan had laughed at him. Guys don’t—”
“Give me a break, Moody. Guys don’t admit it and then whine about it. If she turned him down, he would have been steamed. He would have been cursing her, calling her names. Which would have been implicating, not exonerating. So sell that rationale somewhere else, because to me it smells like bullshit.”
“His brother—”
“Who you said could have been lying. You had to have had something else that cleared Allen. What was it, Moody?”
The former detective looked at Bellamy where she still sat on the end of the bed. When his bleary gaze came back to Dent he said, “When I’m ready.”
“When you’re ready? What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, I’ve said all I’m gonna say to you.”
“You lousy sot. She needs to know what you know,” Dent shouted. “Like fucking now.”
“Watch yourself, boy.” Moody struggled to stand up, but when he stood face-to-face with Dent, Dent didn’t back down, not even when Moody picked up his pistol from off the TV tray.
“What?” Dent scoffed. “You’re going to shoot me?”
“Just keep pushing me and see.”
“I don’t think so. You’re too chicken-livered.” Dent leaned closer until the barrel of the pistol was touching his shirt.
Bellamy gave a strangled cry.
“It’s all right,” Dent said. Holding Moody’s hostile stare, he said, “He’s not going to pull the trigger.”
“Don’t be so goddamn sure.”
“The only thing I’m sure about is what a coward you are. You didn’t have the guts to stand up to Rupe Collier, and you don’t have the guts to blow your own brains out now.”
“Dent!”
Bellamy sounded anguished and frightened, but neither he nor Moody heeded her.
Moody’s face was congested with anger. He was breathing hard. Dent felt the barrel of the pistol wavering as though the hand holding it was trembling.
“At least only one man died on account of me,” he snarled. “I gotta live with that. You gotta live with nearly killing a whole airplane full of people.”
Dent hit him. Hard. Moody took the blow on the chin and it sent him reeling backward, arms windmilling, until he broke his fall against the kitchen bar. He sank to the floor and landed in a heap.
Dent walked over to him, took a handful of his hair, and forced his head up. Moody looked at him through glazed and bloodshot eyes. “Don’t measure me by your yardstick, you miserable turd.” He bent down close. “You would’ve framed me for murder if you could’ve. You’ve had almost twenty years to set the record straight about your dirty dealings with Rupe Collier. You haven’t. Instead, you’ve been skulking in this hellhole, trying to drown your guilt in whiskey. Bellamy and I gave you a chance to atone, and you still can’t own up to what you did. You’re a god-damn coward.”
Making his disgust plain, he released Moody’s hair, went back to the bed, took Bellamy by the hand, and pulled her up. On their way to the door, he paused. “You know, Moody, Rupe Collier is so dazzled by his own image, so far up his own ass, he no longer knows right from wrong. What makes you worse than him, you do.”
“I can’t fly in this.”
Neither Dent or Bellamy had said a word since Dent had retrieved his pistol from the wobbly TV tray, shoved open the screened door, then stood aside and brusquely motioned her through it.
She had left the case file on the bed. As Dent dragged her past Moody, she’d paused, feeling she should say something. But the truth of it was, her revulsion matched Dent’s. Her eyes met the detective’s briefly before his head dropped forward. Without another word, she and Dent had left the dreary cabin.
For twenty minutes, he’d been speeding down the state highway in the direction of Marshall, pushing the rented sedan as though expecting it to respond with the velocity of his Corvette and cursing when it didn’t.
The sky had grown increasingly dark. Raindrops had begun to land hard on the windshield. Without music from the radio, or conversation between them, each splat sounded loud and ominous.
A jagged fork of lightning and the sequential crack of thunder emboldened her enough to speak. “I can’t fly in this,” she repeated, since Dent hadn’t responded the first time.
Now, he jerked his head around toward her. “Do you think I would?”
“Then…” She gestured at the airport signpost as they whizzed past it.
“I’ve got to secure that airplane. Anything happens to it, it’s my ass.” Snidely, he added, “Unless you’re good for it. You’ve got a lot of money. Maybe your daddy would buy it for you.”
“Shut up, Dent. You’re only mad at yourself.”
“Myself?”
“For being so hard on Moody.”
“Wrong. If I’d been as hard on him as I wanted to be, I would have killed him.”
When they reached the airport, he whipped into a parking space, his motions conveying his short temper as he shut down the car, got out, and slammed the door. Braving the elements, he ran toward the entrance to the airport terminal.
Bellamy cringed when another drumroll of thunder vibrated through the car. She didn’t want to be stranded inside it with nothing to protect her from the storm except for the window glass and a few panels of thin metal. But leaving the car and exposing herself to lightning and thunder was out of the question, even for the short time it would take her to run into the terminal.
Talking herself through her rising panic, she reached for her cell phone and placed a call to Olivia, who answered immediately. “Where are you? What’s that racket?”
“It’s thunder.” But she didn’t say where she was. “How’s Daddy?”
“Doing better, actually.” Judging by the unnatural brightness in Olivia’s voice, Bellamy suspected that she was at his bedside and putting up a false front. “He’s eager to talk to you.”
“I’d like that. But first, tell me how you’re holding up.”
“Hanging in there. I talked to Steven earlier today. That helped.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“And, in spite of everything, he was happy to see you yesterday.”
“I’m glad to hear that, too.”
“I’ll hand the phone to Howard now.”
Through the phone, Bellamy could hear her father urging Olivia to use this time to get something to eat. Seconds later, his weak voice whispered, “Hey, good-lookin’.”
“Whacha got cookin’?”
“Olivia won’t be gone long. She knows something’s up, and it’s scaring her.”
“Maybe you should tell her.”
“It would only cause her to fret, and she’s got more than enough to worry about. I tried to talk to her today about my funeral service. She wept so hard I didn’t have the heart to continue.”
Bellamy made a murmur of regret. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I told you what you could do for me. Any progress?”
It wasn’t exactly progress that Dent had been attacked with a knife. Or that Van Durbin and his photographer had captured compromising pictures of them at the airport and outside Dent’s apartment. But the tabloid exploitation of her circumstances now seemed of little or no importance compared to the seriousness of the circumstances themselves.
“Do you remember Allen Strickland’s brother, Ray?”
“Yes,” her father replied. “He was mouthy with us at the trial, and after Allen was killed, he came to the corporate offices and tried to bluster his way past the guards. He was subdued and escorted off the property. That’s the last I’ve heard of him. Why?”
“He was mentioned in a conversation I had today with Dale Moody.”
“So you saw him? So soon?”
She didn’t waste her father’s time explaining how the meeting with the former detective had come about. “He’s a chain-smoking alcoholic living alone in squalor. He admitted that he never thought Allen Strickland was guilty, but he stopped short of confessing exactly how he and Rupe Collier engineered his conviction.”
“I’m surprised he would admit even that much.”
“He’s a broken man. This case ruined his career and his life. He claims still not to know who killed Susan.” She hesitated to tell him more, but then remembered the importance this held for him. “There’s something else, Daddy.” She told him how she’d come to describe the crime scene.
“But you were never at the crime scene,” he said.
“It seems I was. I just don’t remember being there.”
There was much to explain and only a brief time in which to cover it. Cringing each time lightning struck, she talked her father through it as quickly as possible.
“When I mentioned Susan’s purse, Moody jumped on it immediately. Is it true that he brought it to you days later?”
“Yes,” he said hoarsely. “We were told it had been found in a tree.”
She sighed. “Then it seems certain that I either witnessed the crime or came upon Susan’s body soon after she was killed. In any case, I saw it before the tornado ravaged the area.”
“Jesus, Bellamy. Oh, Jesus.”
She’d expected a swift and firm denial that she’d been anywhere near the crime scene. Instead, he sounded as though his worst fear had been realized.
“Daddy, what?” When he said nothing, she pressed him, “Do you think that I intentionally withheld information?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then did it ever occur to you that I had memory lapses?”
“No. I would have gotten help for you.”
“Would you?”
Instead of answering, he said, “Ah, Olivia’s back and she’s brought with her… What is that? Vegetable beef soup. I’d better go now, sweetheart, and make sure she eats all of it. Thank you for calling.”
Then he was gone, and his sudden disconnect left her stunned.
The entire conversation seemed surreal. She needed to think it through and determine what it meant. But just then Dent returned. He got in and quickly pulled the door shut against the gusting wind.
“Damn, it’s blowing.”
“What about the airplane?”
“The hangar manager figured it must belong to somebody important, so he’d already moved it inside. I tipped him twenty bucks.” He took a longer look at her. “You okay?”
Lying, she nodded.
“I also checked the weather radar,” he continued. “This is only the leading edge of a wide band of storms that isn’t predicted to move out until after midnight or better, so I stopped by the rental office and told them we’d be keeping the car overnight.” He turned the ignition key. “I made note of a hotel a few miles back.”
It was a short drive, but by the time he pulled the car under the hotel’s porte cochere, he could tell that Bellamy was holding herself together by sheer force of will. She’d kept her eyes closed and hadn’t uttered a sound. She was drawn up as taut as a bowstring, and her lips were so tightly compressed they were rimmed with white.
He parked the car where it wouldn’t block the through lane, got out, and went around to open Bellamy’s door. With a hand beneath her right elbow, he gently eased her out and placed his arm around her shoulders as he guided her through the entrance.
It was a moderately priced chain hotel, having a typical lobby with a navy and burgundy color scheme, polished brass lamps, and silk plants. Since Bellamy seemed incapable of moving, he secured a room with his own credit card, which he was reasonably sure would clear.
Within minutes of entering the lobby, he was unlocking the door to a room on the third floor and shepherding Bellamy inside. He went straight to the wide windows and closed the drapes, then used the remote on the nightstand to turn on the TV, which would help to muffle the noise of the storm. He switched on all the lamps.
Bellamy hadn’t moved from the spot where he’d left her. He went to her and chafed her upper arms. “Do you get like this every time it storms?”
“Since the tornado.”
“Have you seen somebody about it?”
Through chattering teeth, she laughed, but not because what he’d said was funny. “Thousands of dollars’ worth of somebodies. I’ve tried every form of therapy imaginable. None has helped.”
“Do you have something to take?”
“I stopped getting the prescription filled.”
“How come?”
“The medication didn’t help, either. It only made me woozy in addition to being petrified.”
“Maybe you should try the Dr. Denton Carter remedy.” His arms went around her and pulled her close.
But when he bent his head down to nuzzle the side of her neck, she pushed him away. “That’s your remedy for everything.”
“It works for everything.”
Although she’d squirmed out of his embrace, it hadn’t been altogether unsuccessful. A smile was tugging at the corner of her lips, which had regained some of their color.
“I’ve got to go move the car,” he said. “Are you going to be all right if I leave you alone?”
“I’m usually alone when this happens. I’ve learned to panic quite well in private.”
He bent his knees to bring himself eye level with her and tilted his head. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes. Inside, with the drapes drawn and the lights on, it’s better. I’ll take a hot shower. That’s calming, too.”
“Okay then.” He walked toward the door, but she stopped him. When he turned back to her, she said, “You didn’t get yourself a room.”
He held up the key card. “Yes, I did. Don’t use all the hot water.”
He found a parking spot not too far away from the building. On his race back, he had to lean into the strong wind. Small hail stones pelleted him and bounced on the pavement. The lightning was ferocious. But it wasn’t raining all that hard, so when he reentered the lobby, he was relatively dry. And starving.
From the lobby phone, he called their room. When Bellamy answered, he asked if she wanted to join him in the restaurant. “Or would you rather me have them box up something and eat in the room?”
“I’d prefer that.”
“Need me to come up and wash your back?”
She hung up on him.
He had his hands full when she opened the door to him twenty minutes later, fully clothed, but her hair still damp and smelling of shampoo. “What’s all this?”
“Vending machine toothbrushes. And paste,” he added with emphasis. “Two cheeseburgers, two fries, two beers for me, one split of white wine for you. We’ll toss for the peach cobbler. That was the last of it.”
While she spread their dinner on the round table, he took a quick shower, returning to the main room dressed but without his damp boots.
Bellamy seemed to be as hungry as he was, and they ate quickly, deciding to save the cobbler for later. He carried his second beer over to the bed, rolled the pillow into a ball, and supported his head on it as he stretched out on his back.
“This is cozy.” He patted the space beside him. “It could get cozier.”
“Cut it out, Dent. I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“Sleeping was last night’s agenda. Not what I had in mind for tonight.”
With a decisive punch, she muted the TV. Then, curling up in the easy chair, she put her hands palm to palm and slid them between her knees as though to warm them. But it was also a slightly protective gesture, which should have alerted him to what was coming.
“What Moody said—”
He interrupted her with a long, drawn-out groan. “Talk about a mood kill.”
“What he said about you living with what nearly happened.”
“But didn’t.”
“Still, it can’t be easy to know how close you came to—”
“Taking out a hundred and thirty-seven people?” Watching her down the length of the bottle, he took another drink of beer, then set it on the nightstand and came off the bed, all in one motion. “Thanks a lot. I’ve now officially lost my buzz.” He moved to the dresser and leaned into the mirror above it to inspect the cuts on his face.
“Why did you voluntarily leave the airline after the incident?”
“Too bad it’s not Halloween. I could trick-or-treat.”
“Why won’t you talk about it?”
“I wouldn’t even need a mask.”
“It might help if you opened up about it.”
“Bad as these bruises look, I may still have them come Halloween.”
“Dent?”
“What?” He came around so quickly she actually recoiled.
But she didn’t give up and go away. “Why won’t you talk about it?”
“Why are you so damn curious? Morbid fascination? Are you one of those people who goes online to watch videos of plane crashes, people jumping off buildings, multi-car pile-ups?”
“Don’t do that.”
“What am I doing?”
“Slamming the door. Getting defensive. Is that how you were with the investigators?”
“No, we all became chums. Christmas cards. Birthday greetings. They name their babies after me.”
She frowned. “You told me that the only way you can relate to a woman is sexually.”
“All evidence to the contrary.”
“This is your chance to relate to one, to me, in another way.”
“That way is no fun. No fucking fun.”
He returned to the bedside table, picked up the bottle of beer, and took a swallow from it. As far as he was concerned the conversation was over. But Bellamy continued to watch him with those damn soulful eyes that pulled him in and under, and, before he’d even planned it, he asked, “What do you want to know?”
“You were the co-pilot?”
“Yes.”
“You spilled your coffee?”
“Isn’t that what I told you?”
“The mechanic, replacing the electrical panel—”
“All true.”
“The weather?”
“Also a factor, but not severe enough to ground us.”
“But when you were on takeoff—”
“The most critical time of any flight.”
“—you were instructed to turn left to avoid a thunderstorm.”
“Which was the right call.”
“Lightning struck the plane.”
“Popping several circuit breakers, including one that controlled the CVR. Cockpit voice recorder. Which wasn’t relevant until later.”
“A fire warning came on for the left engine, but there wasn’t a fire.”
“Just like I told you. False warning.”
“But the captain shut down the left engine.”
“Correct.”
“That’s what he did.”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I flew the frigging airplane!”
His shout was followed by an abrupt, charged silence. Bellamy sat upright. He cursed himself and moved back to the bed, where he sat down on the end of it and pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. He kept them there for a minute or more, then slowly lowered his hands and looked over at her.
“The captain didn’t like me, and the feeling was mutual. He was a totally by-the-book kind of guy, and that kind of pilot. He regarded me as a misfit who didn’t fit the image and didn’t deserve to wear the uniform. In a best-case scenario, we wouldn’t have been scheduled to fly together. But we were. That was the hole in the first slice of Swiss cheese.”
He stopped to collect his thoughts, to relive that instant in time when he realized that the captain had made an egregious error. “I told you earlier that he reacted as he’d been trained to do on a 727. The thing was, that’s not what we were flying. We were flying an MD80. He’d been trained on the 80, of course, but his upgrade had been recent. When the event occurred, an older reflex kicked in. He reacted to the fire warning without checking the instruments for secondary indications of a fire. Oil temp. Oil pressure. EGT. Exhaust gas temperature.
“I instantly checked the gauges. Nothing said fire or damage. I realized the goddamn warning was false. By now we’re in a steep left bank, and our airspeed is decreasing. The right engine is pushing the airplane further to the left. The nose is dropping, right wing is tipping up. The airplane wants to roll over.”
“That’s what you reacted to.”
“Yeah. I jammed the right rudder to try to bring it out of the turn. I pulled back on the yoke to try to bring the nose up and get the craft level, while bringing it back to the right to straighten it up. And it all had to be done immediately and simultaneously. There wasn’t time to think about it or talk it over. There were no options.
“Now this took seconds. Seconds. During that time, he and I are yelling at each other. He was shouting at me that it was his aircraft, and I was telling him that what I was doing had to be done. We’re shouting over each other. It was a damned good thing that CVR circuit breaker had popped. That saved us both some embarrassment later on.
“Anyway, I managed to pull us out of it. He stopped yelling. In eight, no more than ten, seconds, he’d pieced it together, realized his error and how close it had brought us to a catastrophe. He even thanked me, I think. At that point, we were both awfully busy.
“Passengers were screaming. The flight attendants were trying to restore calm. We had no way of knowing the extent of the injuries or damage to the cabins. We were still flying in moderate to severe turbulence on one engine.
“I asked him if he wanted to restart that left engine, since apparently nothing was wrong with it. He opted to leave it off. He took control again and we returned to the airport. Disaster averted.”
He stared at the pattern in the carpet between his feet. “No one died, but a lot of people were injured when we pitched. One was a baby that was in his mother’s lap, not strapped in. Lawsuits were filed, and the airline paid out millions to settle.” He looked over at Bellamy and said with a bitterness that went bone deep, “You know the rest. It made big news.”
He got up and walked over to the window. Parting the drapes, he looked out. “Stopped lightning.”
“Your actions saved them.”
“I got lucky.”
“You know better. Why weren’t you hailed a hero?”
He sighed. “Because you can’t have a first officer taking over for a captain who’s flying the airplane. He had twenty years’ experience on me. He was an airline golden boy. Give him another few seconds, he would have realized what had happened and what needed to be done to fix it. He would have done exactly what I did.”
“But you didn’t have those seconds to spare.”
He shook his head. “We were going in, and it’s a miracle that we didn’t in spite of what I did.”
“Did the captain own up to his mistake?”
“Yes, but he also took some of the credit for reversing it and saving everyone.”
“You didn’t tell them otherwise?”
“No, we covered for each other. There was no voice recording to disprove us.”
“So why did you leave the airline?”
“While the NTSB was still investigating the event, a reporter for one of the networks went digging into my past and discovered that, in my youth, when my girlfriend turned up dead, I was named a suspect by the police. ‘He was later cleared of all suspicion,’” he quoted, sneering.
“Like hell I was. The implication was that, despite the spiffy uniform, I was still a shady character. The story didn’t sit well with the airline. Even after the accident report had been completed, I was urged to extend my leave. That was as good as telling me to get lost. So I got lost.”
“Letting them and everyone else think—”
“Whatever the hell they wanted to,” he snapped.
“You didn’t care?”
“No.” He crossed to the night table, picked up the bottle of beer, and drained it.
“It didn’t bother you to walk away from it?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you on either count.”
He turned to her, poised for a fight, ready to argue, but her expression was soft and misty, and it instantly deflated him. He sat down on the side of the bed, bending his head low, and, for a moment, said nothing.
Then, “The airlines have rules and regulations for a reason. From the crew members’ socks to how they fly the airplanes, there are standards that everyone’s gotta adhere to. They’re responsible for the lives of thousands of people every day. To be good at moving all those people, to do it efficiently and safely, everything has to be done uniformly.
“But that word crawls all over me. I tolerated it while I was in the air force. We were at war. I got it. Orders had to be followed. But in the corporate world? Regulation socks?” He shook his head. “The captain was right: I wasn’t a good fit. So I didn’t mind leaving the structure.” Looking over at her, he said, “But to walk away from the flying was tough. That was bad.”
“You still fly.”
“And I love my airplane. But I miss the big ones. I miss jet propulsion.”
“You could always go back.”
“No. Even if an airline would consider hiring me, which is highly unlikely, I took a position. I gotta stick to it.”
“You could fly corporate jets.”
He waited for a moment, then, acting on impulse, reached across the distance separating them. He slipped his hand beneath her shirt and curled his fingers inside the waistband of her jeans. Pulling her out of the chair and toward him, he said, “Buy one. I’ll fly you.”
Positioning her between his thighs, he pushed up the hem of her shirt, undid the button on her jeans, and spread open the two ends of the waistband with his thumbs.
“Dent…”
“We related on your level, Bellamy. It’s time we came down to mine.”
Then he pressed his open mouth against that wedge of pale, smooth skin.