Eleventh Hour (33 page)

He took a step back, raised his head, and nodded to the reporters.

“Your wife’s name was Cleo, right, Senator?”

“That’s right.”

“You were married how long, sir?”

“We were married for five years. I loved her very much. When she left, I was devastated.”

“How did she die, Senator?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she tell you she was leaving you, Senator?”

“No.”

“Are you glad she’s dead, Senator?”

Senator John Rothman looked at the woman who’d asked him that. A very long look. The woman squirmed. He said finally, “I will not dignify that question with an answer. Anyone else?”

Another TV-news reporter yelled out, “Did you kill your wife, Senator?”

He didn’t say anything for a very long time, just looked at the reporter, as if he were judging him, and the conclusion he’d reached wasn’t positive. He said, his voice weary, resigned, “It’s always amazed me how some of you in the media, in the middle of a crisis—large or small—are like a pack of rats.”

There was silence, some shuffling of feet, some angry whispers and outraged faces.

Nick stared at the man she’d come so close to marrying. Some of the reporters who were furious at what he’d said started to yell out more questions, but stopped. Everyone was looking at him—his face was naked, open, the pain stark and there for everyone to see. She saw tears streaming down his face, saw that he tried to say something but couldn’t. Or pretended to. He shook his head at the straining group, turned, and walked away, his aides surrounding him, a barrier between him and all the reporters.

Tall, stiff, a man suffering. The reporters, all the camera crews watched him. And the thing was—no one yelled any more questions at him. The sound of the cameras was the only noise. She watched him walk out of the room, a man in pain, his head down, shoulders hunched forward. A tragic figure.

Nick was shaken. She’d never seen John Rothman cry. She felt a moment of doubt before she quashed it beneath the rippling fear she’d felt when she’d awakened from that dream and known, all the way to her soul, that all three attempts on her life had been made by the same man, the man John Rothman had hired to murder her.

The fact was that John Rothman had also tracked down his ex-wife and murdered her in cold blood. Or had he hired the same man to kill Cleo Rothman? The autopsy would show that she’d been dead for no longer than four weeks. That was when Cleo had written the letter that had saved her life. Only Cleo had died.

A local reporter turned and said with great understatement, “Senator John Rothman appears very saddened at the discovery of his wife’s grave by a hunter’s dog yesterday. Cleo Rothman’s remains were identified this morning. We will keep you informed as details emerge from this grisly case.”

Nick walked slowly to the TV and turned it off. She started shaking, just couldn’t help it.

She looked up to see Dane watching her from across the room. He was leaning against the door, his arms crossed over his chest.

She hadn’t heard him come in. And that was a surprise. She’d become very attuned to him over the past week. Only a week. It was amazing. She tried to smile, but couldn’t manage it. She said finally, “Did you see it?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no proof, Dane. Nothing’s changed. I know you must have found out that there’s no missing-person’s report on me because I did have the sense to write to my dean at the university about a personal emergency.”

“And your point would be?”

He didn’t move, just said when she held silent, his voice very low, “It’s time to tell me all of it, Dr.

Campion. There are no more distractions to keep us away from this. Linus is dead. Detective Flynn is with the district attorney deciding what to do about Captain DeLoach, and Weldon will survive. How is Senator John Rothman connected to you, Nick? I want all of it. Now.”

“Up until three weeks ago, he was my fiancé.”

“He was what? Jesus, Nick, I want to know how you could get caught up with a man old enough to be your father. I can’t believe that—No, wait, I want to know, but not just yet.” He crossed the space between them, jerked her against him, and kissed her.

When he let up just a bit, he was breathing hard and fast. Nick’s eyes, once tear-sheened, were now vague and hot. She said into his mouth, “Oh, God. Dane, this is—” She went up on her tiptoes and grabbed him tightly to her. She was kissing him, nipping his jaw, licking his bottom lip, her hands in his hair, pulling him closer, closer still, pushing into him, wanting him. She groaned when his tongue touched hers.

“Nick, no, no, we can’t—oh hell.” He wrapped his arms around her hips and lifted her off the floor, carrying her to the bed. He’d never wanted a woman like he wanted her. There was so much, too much really. His brother, all the death, and now the damned senator, more confusion, more secrets. No, he couldn’t do this, not the right time, not the right place. He pulled back, lightly traced his fingertip along the line of her jaw, touched her mouth. “Nick, I—” She grabbed him, pulled him flat on top of her.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop.” She was kissing him all over his face, stroking him, reaching to touch all of him she could reach.

“Oh hell.” He wanted to cry, to howl. He didn’t have any condoms, nothing. He wasn’t about to take the chance of getting her pregnant. Okay, okay, it didn’t matter, getting himself off wasn’t that important, at least not now. Nick was what was important. She’d been engaged to that damned senator? That old man who looked like an aristocrat, the bastard? Well, no matter, she wasn’t going to marry him, she wasn’t going to marry anyone.

He stripped her jeans down her hips, off her ankles and threw them on the floor. She was trying to bring him back to her, but he held her, looked a moment at the white panties she’d bought that were French cut, and he had those off her in a lick of time. She was beautiful, he couldn’t stand it. He was breathing hard, so hard, and he was panting. “It’s okay, Nick. Let me give you pleasure. Just hold still, no, don’t try to strangle me. Lie back and let me enjoy you.” He had her legs open, and he was between them, kissing her belly, then he gave her his mouth and within moments she screamed and went wild. God, he loved it, just loved it, and gave her all he could.

When at last she fell back, her heart pounding nearly out of her chest, breathing so hard she wondered if she would survive, he came up over her. He was harder than the floor, harder than the damned bedsprings, and he hurt. He also knew it was a good thing he had his pants on, otherwise he’d be inside her right this instant. But it just wasn’t important, at least not now. He wondered if there was a drugstore nearby. Hey, a gas station, anyplace that sold condoms.

He pulled himself over her and began kissing her, slow, easy kisses, and he knew she could feel him. It took a long time before he slowly pulled away from her and sat up on the side of the bed. He looked down at her long legs, flat white belly, and slowly laid his palm flat. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

She gave a small moan, looked surprised, then smiled up at him. “So are you.”

He grinned. It didn’t hurt quite as much. He was getting himself back together. He forced himself to concentrate on pulling her panties back up, then working on her jeans. Just before he zipped up the jeans, he leaned down and kissed her belly again. Oh God, he wanted her. No, no. He spent several minutes easing her upright, straightening her clothes.

He paused for a moment, leaned forward, and cupped her face in his palms. “This is just the beginning.

You’re wonderful, Nick. But I can’t believe you were engaged to John Rothman.”

“At this moment, I can’t believe I was either,” she said, and kissed him.

She leaned forward, resting her face on his shoulder. He stroked her back, up and down. He shouldn’t be surprised, he thought, but he was, closer to floored, actually. “John Rothman is far too old for you.

Why would you ever want to marry a man who’s close to the age of your father?”

His voice sounded back to normal, and so she got herself together and pulled away from him. “John Rothman is forty-seven in years, but much less in the way he looks at things, the way he feels about things. At least that’s what I thought.”

“If he paraded around naked in front of you, I can’t imagine that you’d be licking your chops, would you?”

She was so surprised by what he said that she hiccupped. She said, smiling, “I don’t know. I never saw him naked.”

“That’s good.”

“Why would you care?”

“It’s really very simple, Dr. Campion. I decided about three days ago that your next fifty years are mine.

I saw that they found his wife’s body?”

“That’s right. Fifty years might not be enough.”

“He told everyone that she ran away from him? Three years ago? We’ll begin with fifty years, then renegotiate, all right?”

“Yes, he told everyone she ran away. His senior aide was gone as well, a guy named Tod Gambol, and everyone believed she ran away with him. Yes, all right, we’ll start with fifty years, then go from there.”

“Was Tod Gambol found with the dead wife?”

“Evidently not.”

Dane said slowly, “What happened? Did you find out that she didn’t leave him?”

“Oh no, Cleo left him, all right. I believed that, no doubt in my mind at all. She’d been gone three years, and he’d divorced her, although she’d never responded, couldn’t be found. Of course I accepted it. I loved him. I was going to marry him.”

“But she didn’t leave him. He killed her.”

“Nope. Fact is, she did leave him.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“I also know that she was alive up to four weeks ago.”

Dane crossed his arms over his chest. “How do you know that for a fact? Did Senator Rothman assure you that she was alive and well and screwing around with his aide?”

“No. The bottom line is that Cleo Rothman wrote me a letter. She hasn’t been dead for three years—just for a month, at the most, and the tests they’ll run will prove it. No, John Rothman didn’t kill her three years ago.”

“Why did she write to you?”

“To warn me. She told me about the first girl John’d planned to marry, way back just before both of them graduated from Boston College. He killed her because Elliott Benson, a rival, had seduced her. He got away with it, she said, because he was smart, and who would ever begin to suspect a young man who was engaged to be married of suddenly killing his fiancée? The final police verdict was that it was a tragic automobile accident. She said that John cried his eyes out at her funeral, that her parents held him to comfort him.”

“How could she have found out about that? Did he talk in his sleep? Don’t tell me he confessed it to her?

”

“No, she found a journal in the safe in his library. She wrote that one day she noticed that the safe wasn’t locked. She was curious and opened it.

“So when she opened it and found the journal, she read it. He wrote all about how he’d killed a girl—

Melissa Gransby was her name—how he’d planned it all very carefully and gotten away with it. A simple auto accident on I-95, near Bremerton. She must have written at least a half dozen times in that letter how smart John was, how I had to be careful because I was going to be the next woman he killed. She wrote that John had come to believe that I was sleeping with Elliott Benson, too, just like Melissa did, that I was betraying him, even before we were married.”

“Who is this Elliott Benson?”

“He’s a powerhouse in Chicago, a very rich and successful businessman, an investment banker with Kleiner, Smith and Benson. He and John have been rivals for years and years.

“Cleo wrote that she didn’t know if he’d killed other women, but she knew he would have killed her if she hadn’t left and she knew he was going to kill me and I should run as far away as I could, and quickly.

”

Dane, frowning, said, “Why would a man who’s supposedly so smart keep a damned journal where he actually confesses to a murder? And leave that journal in a safe in his own home, for God’s sake, and then, to top it all off, he leaves the safe open? That’s really a long way from being smart, Nick. This whole thing’s a stretch. It just doesn’t feel right.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Nick said, “I thought the same thing at first. But listen, Dane. I knew Cleo Rothman, I knew her handwriting. The letter was from her, I’m positive about that. She told me she had the journal, that she took it with her, to keep John at bay in case he wanted to come after her. It was her only leverage.”

“Why didn’t she just go to the police with the thing? It was a confession, after all.”

“She wrote that John had many important, powerful friends, and that many of those powerful people owed him favors. She said she could just see him saying that as his wife—she knew his handwriting, of course—she had written it herself, that it was all an attempt on her part to ruin him. I could practically taste her fear in that letter, Dane, her sense that she was a coward, but that everything was against her, that she had no choice but to run. Do you think the cops would have believed her, launched an investigation?”

“They would have looked into it, of course, but it wouldn’t have helped if they believed she was vindictive, that she wanted to ruin a good man, and there was no other proof but the journal. Anyway, John Rothman wrote that he killed this Melissa Gransby because she cheated on him with this Benson character?”

“Evidently so. John couldn’t forgive her. The pages were full of rage, over-the-top, unreasoned rage, and Cleo wrote that she could see that Melissa’s unfaithfulness had changed him, twisted him, made him incapable of trusting a woman.

“She wrote that it did make a bit of sense since his mother had cheated on his father, and it hurt him deeply. Evidently he told her this when they were first married.”

“Did he tell you this? About his mother?”

She shook her head. “No, he’s never told me anything.”

“So Cleo Rothman found his journal, read his murder confession, and she just up and left him? With this aide? Jesus, Nick. Ain’t a whole lot of credibility here.”

“No, no, she wrote that she didn’t leave with anyone. She said she didn’t even know where Tod Gambol was. She was never his lover, had never been unfaithful to John. She loved John, always loved him, but she was terrified, and so she just ran. She became convinced that he was going to kill her, too, because she’d heard rumors that she was sleeping with Elliott Benson. Knowing this, knowing that he’d already killed a girl because she’d supposedly cheated on him, she knew he would believe the rumors and try to kill her just like he did Melissa.