Darker After Midnight Read Online Free Page A

detective told her. “The estate has been held in private trust for more than a hundred years. Got about ten layers of lawyers and legalese wrapped around the title to the place. Our perp claims he’s been renting it for a few months, but he doesn’t know anything about the owner. Says it came furnished, no contract, and he pays the rent in cash to one of the top law firms downtown.”
    “Has he said why he did all of this?” Tavia asked. “If he confessed to the shooting and the bombing, is he offering any excuse for what he’s done?”
    Detective Avery gave a loose shrug. “Why does any lunatic do these things? He didn’t have a concrete answer for that. In fact, the guy is almost as much of an enigma as the place he’s been living.”
    “How so?”
    “We’re not even sure what his real name is. The one he gave us doesn’t have a social security number or any record of employment. No driver’s license, no automobile registration, no credit report, voter card, nothing. It’s like the guy’s a ghost. The only thing we did turn up was a donation given to a Harvard University Alumni association made in his name. The trail dead-ends there.”
    “Well, that’s a start, at least,” Tavia replied.
    The detective exhaled a grunt of a laugh. “It would be, I suppose. If the record didn’t date back to the 1920s. Obviously it’s not our bad guy. I may not be the best judge of age, but I feel pretty certain he’s nowhere near ninety years old.”
    “No,” Tavia murmured. Thinking back on the night of Senator Clarence’s holiday party and the man she’d witnessed firing from the second-floor gallery of the house, she would have placed him somewhere around her age, mid-thirties at most. “A relative, maybe?”
    “Maybe,” the detective said. He glanced up as the door in theother room opened and a uniformed officer stepped in ahead of the line of men behind him. “Okay, here we go, Tavia. Showtime.”
    She nodded, then found herself taking a step back from the one-way glass as the first of the suspects entered the lineup room.
    It was him—the one she’d come to the station to identify.
    She knew him on sight, instantly recognizing the chiseled, knife-edge cheekbones and the rigid, unforgiving jut of his squared jawline. His short golden-brown hair was disheveled, some of it drooping over his brow, but not enough to conceal the piercing color of his steel-blue eyes. And he was immense—every bit as tall and muscular as she remembered. His biceps bulged beneath the short sleeves of a white T-shirt. Loose-fitting heathered gray sweats hung from his slim hips and hinted at powerfully muscled thighs.
    He prowled into the space with an air of defiance—of unapologetic arrogance—that made the fact that he was in a jail with his hands cuffed behind his back seem inconsequential. He walked ahead of the others, all long limbs and a loose gait that felt more animal than human. There was a slight limp in the otherwise smooth movement of his legs, she noticed. A spot of blood rode on his right thigh, a deep red splotch that soaked into the lighter fabric of his sweats. Tavia watched the stain grow a little with each long stride that carried him across the length of the lineup area. She shuddered a bit inside the warmth of her winter coat, feeling queasy. God, she never had been able to stand the sight of blood.
    Over the speakers, one of the police officers instructed the man to stop at the number 4 position and face forward. He did, and when he was standing facing the glass, his eyes fixed squarely on her. Unerringly so.
    A jolt of awareness arrowed through her. “Are you sure they can’t—”
    “I promise, you’re perfectly safe and protected in here,” Avery assured her.
    And yet that scathing blue gaze stayed rooted on her, even after the last of the three other men was led into the lineup and made to face forward. Those other men slouched and shifted, anxious eyes held low beneath inclined heads or