Night Whispers Read online

  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.

  48

  Paris 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 been sent home by you. The only people in the house 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 l