“So you came outside.”
She nodded.
“Were the lights on?”
“I think the pool lights—the underwater ones?—may have been. I turned on the patio lights myself.”
He took her step-by-step through her story, aware of Officer Margie Conner listening silently from her post by the coffeepot. Even though she didn’t contribute a question, he needed her there. For his own protection: a male detective never interviewed a woman without a female witness present.
Bailey Wells was a good interview subject, observant, coherent, and intelligent. He wondered again if she were guilty or just remarkably self-possessed. Cold.
Steve didn’t like cold women.
On the other hand, hysterics wouldn’t have saved Helen Ellis.
“Why did you jump in the pool?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t you? I didn’t know how long Helen had been . . .” She stopped, her hands clenching on the towel.
Dead,
Steve supplied silently.
Unconscious
.
Bailey’s knuckles were white. Maybe she wasn’t so cold, so unaffected by the death, after all. She could be exerting control to keep from falling apart.
He could understand that.
“I didn’t know how long she was underwater,” she said. “Recovery drops to twenty-five percent after four minutes without oxygen. I needed to start rescue breathing as soon as possible.”
“How do you know that?”
She blinked. Around the dilated pupils, her eyes were the color of the dark Jamaican rum he drank on his honeymoon, her lashes thick and straight. “I took a life-saving class in high school.”
He wasn’t talking about her life-saving skills. And he didn’t care about the color of her eyes. Annoyed with his momentary distraction, he asked, “Where did you learn how long somebody can go without oxygen?”
“Breathing space,” she said.
She didn’t make sense. Steve grunted noncommittally.
“
Breathing Space,”
she repeated. “The Nelson Crockett story?” When he still didn’t respond, she leaned forward in her chair. “It’s Paul’s latest book. Nelson Crockett was the Tennessee serial killer who strangled his victims. He liked to bring them back several times and . . .” She broke eye contact, looking down at her hands. “He liked to bring them back.”
Jesus.
Steve stifled a jolt of revulsion. He made another sound, inviting her to continue.
Bailey raised her head. “Unconsciousness usually occurs after the first minute, but if you begin artificial ventilation right away, the victim has a ninety percent chance of response. Of course, repeated assaults on the airway cause tissue damage, so the victim’s ability to breathe on her own once recovered is compromised.”
Steve made a grab for his slipping detachment. The last thing he expected when he was pulled from bed in the middle of the night was a lecture on deviant sexual strangulation by a woman who looked like an elementary school librarian.
“Did Mrs. Ellis give any sign of breathing on her own?”
“What? Oh. No.” Bailey shivered. “I kept trying until the paramedics came, but . . .”
Steve glanced at his notes. “How long?”
“I don’t know. I was trying to save her. I didn’t look at my watch.”
Steve raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t expecting sarcasm, either.
“It felt like forever,” she said.
Seven minutes, Lewis had told him.
“I tried,” Bailey said again. Her voice cracked.
Steve didn’t need her assurances. He had already interviewed the EMS workers on the scene. She’d done everything right. The paramedics had praised her presence of mind. Her technique. Her persistence. If she had wanted Helen Ellis dead, she would have fumbled. She could have quit.
Or she could have delayed just long enough to make her best efforts useless.
Recovery drops to twenty-five percent after four minutes without oxygen.
“And Mr. Ellis?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t understand.”
“Where was he?”
“He was there. He came as soon as I called.”
“Before or after you entered the pool?”
“Right before. I called—well, I screamed—and then I jumped in the water.”
“Did he help you recover Mrs. Ellis from the water?”
Her lashes fluttered. “I . . . No. I wasn’t really paying attention. I had to get her up on the side, and then I started rescue breathing right away.”
“And what did he do?”
“He called the ambulance.”
“Anything else?”
Her hands twisted in the towel. “He was very upset.”
Steve nodded.
“She was his
wife,
” Bailey said, as if men were responsible for their wives’ dying every day.
Memories rattled like leaves down an empty street. Deliberately, Steve let them go.
“How would you describe the Ellises’ relationship?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Would you say they had a happy marriage?”
Bailey jerked. “Of course.”
Of course. His mouth twisted cynically. Of course she would
say
it.
He took her through her story one more time, distilling it to the essential facts he needed to write her statement. Twenty minutes later, the interview was over. He wasn’t getting anything else from her tonight, unless she decided to make his job easier by copping to murder. Which she wouldn’t. She wasn’t stupid. He even doubted she was guilty, though he was keeping an open mind about that.
He stood. “You’ll want out of those wet clothes. Officer Conner will take them for you.”
And catalog them as evidence, although Steve didn’t have much hope of finding anything useful. He hadn’t found any blood on the pool deck, and Bailey’s jump into the contaminated water would account for any traces on her clothes.
Had she thought of that?
He waited for her to object. When she didn’t, he nodded and continued. “I’ll have a statement prepared for you to read over in the morning. If you don’t mind coming by the station to sign it—”
“It was an accident,” Bailey blurted.
Well, hell
. Slowly Steve surveyed her thin, intense face, her dark-as-rum eyes. He was going to get his confession after all. His faint disappointment surprised him.
He sat back down, nodding at her to continue.
Bailey expelled a shaky breath. “I’m not quite sure how to say this.”
Tension thrummed through him. “Take your time,” he drawled.
“Helen is . . . was . . . Helen usually mixed herself a nightcap at bedtime. I don’t want to make too much of this, but she probably wasn’t very steady when she came downstairs.” She fixed her gaze on his face, willing him to believe her. “She must have slipped and fallen.”
No confession. Just a simple explanation designed to get them all off the hook. Isn’t that what he wanted? Nothing sensational, nothing involved that would set off tremors in his own life or in the department. He didn’t do high-profile, high-intensity cases anymore.
He did his job.
“Thank you, Miz Wells,” he said dryly.
“You could check for blood-alcohol levels.”
“We certainly could,” he agreed.
Realization darkened her eyes. “You were going to anyway.”
He didn’t say anything.
The flush returned, warming her cheeks. With her darkened eyes and messy hair, Bailey Wells looked less like a librarian and more like she’d just crawled out of bed. Or, with the right persuasion, could be tumbled onto one. The observation disturbed him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, clearly mortified. “I didn’t mean to tell you how to do your job.”
“Occupational hazard,” he said.
She nodded. “Because you’re a police officer.”
Detective,
he thought.
“Because your boss is a crime writer.” Steve smiled thinly. “Goodnight, Miz Wells.”
MIZ Wells
. Not Bailey.
Bailey watched the big-bodied detective saunter from the kitchen, looking tough and rumpled and suspicious. Misgiving churned in her stomach.
He didn’t like her. He didn’t believe her.
She huddled in her drying clothes on the hard kitchen chair, stinking of chlorine, hugging her stomach. That was okay. Lots of men didn’t like her. Her sister Leann was the pretty one, the popular one, the one with boobs and boyfriends and a date to the prom. By the time Bailey figured out her invisibility to the opposite sex was at least partly a function of age—what seven-year-old could compete with a high school cheerleader?—her identity was set. Brainy Bailey, flat-chested, hardworking, and reliable. The kind of student teachers trusted to run errands in the hall. The kind of daughter parents trusted home alone on a Saturday night.
But Steve Burke didn’t trust her.
He wanted her
clothes
. She knew what that meant. She felt violated. Scared.
She tightened her grip on the towel as the room wavered around her. That was so wrong. It was unfair.
Helen
—clammy skin,
don’t think about it,
slack mouth,
don’t,
empty, gleaming eyes—
was dead
. Bailey’s breath came faster. Paul had enough to deal with right now without some macho cop with a prejudice against crime writers turning a painful personal tragedy into a terrible public spectacle.
Would you say they had a happy marriage?
Oh, God
. Her stomach heaved with a terrible mix of guilt, fear and sympathy. Maybe he was right not to trust her.
A hand touched her shoulder.
“You all right?” Officer Conner’s face, creased with concern, swam before her.
Bailey blinked; forced herself to smile. “Fine. Thank you,” she added even as her insides rebelled.
“You sure?”
“Yes, if you’ll just . . . I need to . . . Excuse me,” she mumbled, and hurried to the powder room off the kitchen, where she was violently, wretchedly sick.
PAUL Ellis ran a shaking hand over his hair. The evening had
not
gone as planned.
Now he had some hulking detective in his study asking him questions in a flat, deep drawl. “Do you have friends you can stay with tonight, sir? Family?”
He couldn’t think. “I’ll be fine.”
“You shouldn’t be alone,” the detective said.
Paul exhaled noisily. “I won’t be. Bailey is here.”
Thank God for Bailey. She had surprised him, jumping into the pool like that. But her presence, her devotion, provided an invaluable backup.
“It might be better for you both if you found someplace else to spend the night,” Burke said, stolid as a rock. “We’re likely to be tied up here for some time.”
“Why? It was an accident.”
“That’s certainly what it looks like. But your wife did hit her head. I’d just like the chance to look around, rule out the possibility of an intruder.”
Paul didn’t believe the intruder theory for one minute. And neither, he bet, did the detective. The implication was unbearable. Intolerable.
God
.