Free Darkness before the Dawn by Anne Stuart

cream.”
    His faint smile was hardly reassuring. “I remember,” he said. “Do you want anything to eat? Your sister left some croissants.”
    “Sounds good,” she said with equal courtesy. “I’ll take one with grapefruit marmalade.” Better to attack, she thought, than to wait for him to bring it up.
    She didn’t waste any time dressing, making do with faded jeans and an oversize cotton shirt. Randall hated jeans, hated casual clothes. She left her feet bare as a final act of defiance.
    In the full daylight of her sister’s living room, she got her first good look at him in six years. He’d aged, of course. That handsome face of his had new lines, lines that certainly hadn’t come from smiling, she thought as she accepted the coffee, being careful not to touch him. No gray in his hair yet, no drooping of skin and muscle. It was his eyes that were old, she realized. Their expression belonged to a man twice his age. He’d already seen too much when she’d known him before—what more had he seen in the last few years?
    He waited until she’d seated herself in the overstuffed chair where she’d spent most of last night, then went calmly, gently on the attack. “Why did you scream and rip the shower curtain down?”
    She’d taken a sip of the coffee, and the blissfully strong caffeine was flowing through her veins. She didn’t even falter;she lifted her eyes to meet his. “The hot water shut off, and I got a blast of ice water,” she said.
    “How long did it take you to come up with that answer?”
    “I would have had plenty of time while I was in Kate’s room,” she replied. “But actually, I just thought of it right now. Pretty good for spur of the moment.”
    “Not good enough. Did you kill Francis Ackroyd in that bathtub?”
    She leaned back, considering him for a moment. “Did Bud Willis send you here to extricate us?” she demanded, refusing to answer his question.
    “No.”
    “Let me rephrase that. Did Bud Willis send you to Chicago three days ago?”
    “Bud Willis doesn’t send me anywhere.”
    “Dammit, Randall,” she said, her spurious calm vanishing, “why are you here? And don’t tell me it’s coincidence—I won’t believe you.”
    “I wouldn’t lie to you, Maggie—”
    “Bullshit,” she said inelegantly.
    “I’m here because of Francis Ackroyd,” he continued smoothly, ignoring her outburst. “But not because of his death. He was selling government secrets to the Eastern bloc. We were trying to put a stop to it.”
    She blinked and digested the information in no more than a moment. “How?” she demanded. “How was he getting the information in the first place? How was he managing to pass it?”
    Randall gave a long-suffering sigh. “If we knew that, dear heart, I wouldn’t have to be here. No one knows how he was doing it or who was helping him. He couldn’t have been doing it alone—that much is certain. The question is, who else was involved? Your sister seems a good possibility.”
    “What!” she shrieked. “You’re out of your mind, Randall! Not that I didn’t already know that. Kate is the sweetest, most innocent, most loyal—”
    “Kate’s in the midst of a nasty custody battle. Such thingsare notoriously expensive, and espionage pays quite well. She may not have known what she was getting in to, and then when she found out, she had a blowup with Francis at work, lured him back to her apartment, and murdered him.”
    Maggie controlled her temper. Randall was very good at infuriating people, just to see them lose control and let something important slip. She wouldn’t give him that pleasure. “You don’t believe that.”
    He smiled faintly. “No, I don’t believe that. But it’s a possibility.”
    “What makes you think Kate had anything to do with Francis’s untimely death?”
    “I happened to be in his apartment when you lugged his body back and dumped it onto the kitchen floor. That aroused my suspicions.”
    “Damn you, Randall. Why