Free The Morning After by Lisa Jackson Page B

and, finding a spare key where Bobbi had always kept one behind the hose bib, he let himself into the garage, stepped out of his shoes and walked into her kitchen. The shades were pulled down and the light over the stove was burning softly, just as always. He hadn’t been in the cottage in months and yet it was familiar. The only reason he’d risked visiting her house was that he was certain he’d be thrown off the case. The second the D.A. caught wind that he’d been intimate with a victim, Reed would be diverted to other cases and all the information on Bobbi’s death would be off-limits to him. Which galled the hell out of him.
    He walked in stockinged feet across the worn hardwood, through a small eating space to the living room, arranged just as he remembered, with overstuffed furniture, colorful throws and plants growing in every corner. Newspaper sections were scattered on the coffee table. He didn’t disturb them, but noted that it was the morning edition of the Savannah Sentinel , dated two days earlier. Bobbi, or whoever had been in the cottage, had been reading about the local news. The boldest headline was about a reconstruction project in the historic district and the byline was Nikki Gillette. One of the most irritating women he’d ever met, one of those dogged, do-anything-for-a-story reporters who was ever trying to get ahead. She had the looks for it. Curly red-blond hair, bright eyes, tight ass, but she was trouble. Not only an aggressive reporter, but the daughter of the Honorable Judge Ronald Gillette.
    Reed carefully swung his penlight past the paper to a plate with a nearly burned, half-eaten piece of toast. Jelly congealed in one corner of the plate, and a cup of coffee, again half drunk, showed lipstick stains on its rim. Breakfast. Two days earlier.
    He walked into the master bedroom. The sheets were rumpled, half off the bed, a pillow on the floor, but he knew from experience that it wasn’t a sign of a struggle. Bobbi always left her bed in disarray. “I think it’s sexy that way, don’t you?” she’d asked him once as she stood on her tiptoes and kissed the bend of his neck. “That way the bedroom always looks like you’ve just made love and are ready to go at it again.”
    She’d never seen his military-sharp bed or austere room with a single dresser, thirteen-inch TV, half-mirror and rowing machine.
    The closet door was open. He swept the penlight through the interior. Dirty clothes were falling out of a basket on the floor, dresses hung neatly above. Using a cloth he opened the dresser drawers and found underclothes, sachets, T-shirts and shorts. Nothing out of the ordinary. Her nightstand gave up a vibrator, creams, Kleenex, a broken picture of her dressed as a bride and a worn copy of the Bible. Nothing unusual. Nothing incriminating.
    The bath was as untidy and smelled of a perfume he recognized. Bottles of makeup, hair products, aspirin and lotion littered the small counter. A hairbrush, filled with dark hair, was pushed against one of those magnifying mirrors that lit up. In the medicine chest were the usual ointments, creams, feminine products, fingernail polishes and medications: Vicodin, Percoset and a full month’s supply of birth control pills.
    Obviously not used for quite a while.
    The claw-footed tub with its recently added showerhead needed to be scrubbed.
    But there was nothing out of the ordinary.
    The second bedroom, used as a study and general catchall, was a mess, but not out of the ordinary for Barbara Jean Marx. This cottage was “temporary” she’d told Reed on the last morning he’d seen her. They were lying in the bed, tangled in sheets, with the smell of sex hanging heavy in the air. “Just a stepping-stone to something bigger once the divorce is final.”
    “I thought it was,” he’d said.
    “We’re hung up on a technicality. I want more money. He doesn’t want to pay it.”
    “You told me it was over.”
    “It is.”
    “I mean legally.”