Dying to Please Read online

  “That would be wonderful. Or we could all go to Milo's. Shaw is beginning to complain because he hasn't had a hamburger yet.”

  Sarah felt a private little zing at the mention of Milo's. Maybe one day she wouldn't associate Cahill's kisses with the hamburgers, but right now the two were closely linked in her mind. She felt a sudden intense craving for a hamburger herself.

  Staying in Mountain Brook meant she would be seeing him again. She didn't know if that was good or bad, but she definitely knew the idea was exciting.

  Barbara didn't know it, but the cleaners were at the house now. The rate for cleaning on Sunday night was higher than during the week, but Sarah thought it was well worth it for the Judge's family to be able to get into the house as early as possible tomorrow, since Barbara and her brood had a late-afternoon flight back to Dallas. Sarah planned, after leaving the Wynfrey, to go to the house to check that the cleaning job was adequate, but then she was going back to the inn to spend the night. Even though her quarters were totally separate, she wasn't ready yet to be alone there. Going back wouldn't be easy, she thought.

  Nor was it. The cleaners were already gone when she got there later that night, and she had to force herself to go inside, to walk down the hall and look into the library. A strong sense of déjà vu seized her just outside the door, and she froze; when she looked inside, would the Judge be sitting there in his recliner, his blood and brains splattered against the far wall, and on the carpet? Would the smell still be there?

  No, the smell was gone. She would be able to tell from here if it lingered, wouldn't she? The odor had been pervasive, finding its way down the hall, into the breakfast room, even the kitchen. All she could smell now was something clean and citrusy.

  Steeling herself, she entered the library. The cleaners had done a good job with the carpet and wall; they had evidently cleaned the carpet in the entire room, so no one could tell by a clean spot exactly where they had removed a stain. The recliner was gone; she had no idea where it was. Maybe the police had it, though what they would want with the recliner, she couldn't imagine. Or perhaps the cleaners had removed it from the room for some reason; maybe the odor was impossible to remove from leather.

  Tomorrow she would ask the whereabouts of the recliner. It might be in the garage, but she wasn't going to look for it tonight. Slowly she backed out of the room, turning out the light and closing the door. She didn't imagine she would ever again enter that room, for any reason.

  She hadn't collected the mail since Wednesday, but someone, probably Cahill, had brought it in and put it on the kitchen island. He'd have gone through the mail, of course, to see if there was anything suspicious, any correspondence that bore looking into. She flipped through the stack; if there had been anything unusual, Cahill had taken it with him, because all she saw was the normal bills, catalogs, and magazines.

  She left the mail on the island and went upstairs to her quarters. Everything was subtly wrong, out of place; someone had searched every inch, so she supposed she should be grateful for the relative neatness. At least the contents of drawers hadn't been dumped on the floor and left. She straightened the books in the bookcase, neatly stacked the few magazines, put the potted plants back in place, adjusted the position of a vase, some framed pictures.

  In the bedroom, her bed had been stripped. She gathered the discarded sheets to put in the wash, then went into the bathroom and began methodically putting it to rights. She couldn't put her life back the way it was, but she could reconstruct her immediate surroundings.

  She put out fresh towels, and arranged all her cosmetics the way she preferred.

  Back in the bedroom, she remade the bed, then opened the double closet doors and began rehanging her clothes, arranging them so what she wore most often was close to hand. Her shoes were a jumbled mess; she pulled all of them out of the closet, then sat down on the floor and paired them up, putting them back in the closet in neat rows.

  She really hated that someone had gone through her underwear drawer. She was a bit of a fanatic about her underwear, courtesy of two brothers who had loved to tease her by hiding it, or by tying her bra to a forked stick to make a slingshot. Older brothers were a real trial. She wished now she had a video of Noel with her very first pair of lacy panties stuck on his head; she'd love to show it to his Marine buddies. Her brothers had never treated Jennifer like that, but then she would only have cried, and that was no fun. Sarah had chased after them with fury in her eyes and murder in her heart; if she'd ever caught them, blood would have been shed.

  Sarah had been forced to hide her underwear for years, stuffing it in unlikely places so Daniel and Noel couldn't find it. Once they were gone, she had reveled in being able to have a real underwear drawer. She always neatly folded each garment, and the lacy, sexy stuff was in its own drawer. She didn't segregate by color—she wasn't that far gone—but it truly annoyed her to see her careful stacks all messed up and mixed together.

  Cahill had probably searched her underwear drawer personally. He looked like the type who would enjoy something like that. She could just see him holding up a pair of black lace—

  Oh, yes, she could see him. A wave of heat washed over her. She knew she was in real trouble, when the idea of him going through her underwear turned her on instead of making her angry.

  Maybe she should forget caution and just go for broke. She'd never devoted herself to a relationship before, but maybe Cahill was someone she could truly love. Maybe there could be something real and permanent between them, and she was in danger of losing it because she couldn't stop listening to her head instead of her heart. Yes, he'd just come through a rough divorce; a year wasn't enough time to emotionally recover; he'd admitted as much himself. Yes, the odds said he was a bad risk right now. But sometimes you lucked out, and won by going against the odds.

  So the real question was did she have the guts to give it all she had, to stop holding back? She had always used the Plan as an excuse for walking away before a relationship could really go anywhere; that excuse was real, because she truly wanted to execute the Plan; but the other part of her reason was that loving someone meant giving away some of your personal control, and she had always prized that above any man she was dating.

  If she became involved with Cahill, she might eventually walk away from him, but she wouldn't walk away heart-whole. He could do some damage to her. She suspected she could love him as she had never loved anyone before, if she let him get close.

  No matter what she decided, there were risks—big ones. She could either risk loving him and losing him, or she could risk missing out on the love of her life because she was afraid.

  Sarah didn't like thinking herself cowardly, in anything.

  “Do you recognize this man?” Cahill asked the next morning, letting a blurry photograph slide from a big envelope down onto the breakfast table. The photograph had been enhanced and enlarged, and it was still piss-poor. It was, however, all he had.

  Sarah looked at the photograph and gave a decisive shake of her head. Randall, Barbara, and Jon all crowded around and stared at it. “I don't think so,” Randall said doubtfully. “Not without seeing his face. He doesn't ring any bells, though. Why?”

  “He made the last call to your father, from a pay phone in the Galleria.”

  Barbara jerked back as if stung. “You mean he might be the killer?”

  “I can't make that assumption,” Cahill said evenly. “I'd like to, but I can't. But your father might have said something to this man about a visitor he was expecting, or any other detail that might help. I'd definitely like to talk to this guy.”

  They all stared at the photograph again, as if concentration would wrest an elusive memory from their brains. The man in the photograph was trim, wearing a light-colored suit, with neat pale hair, either blond or gray. His head was turned so that the camera caught only the line of his left jaw and cheekbone. Unless you knew the man well, it would be impossible to recognize him from that picture.

&n