Free Third Degree by Greg Iles Page B

here with me, if you want to.”
    “I don’t,” he said, but he flicked off the light switch. “The windows are locked, by the way. All of them.”
    She shifted under the covers, then slid her hand into her back pocket and eased out the clone Razr. In one continuous motion, she opened the phone and slipped it into her front pocket. Warren was a black silhouette in the dark, leaning on his bureau.
    “When I read that letter,” he said hoarsely, “I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart.”
    She slid her thumb lightly over the Razr’s keypad. Keying in a message was child’s play, but blindly pressing the proper sequence of buttons to put the phone into text mode wasn’t. She turned her head and looked at Warren as she worked her thumb over the faintly tactile buttons, trying to keep his eyes focused on her face.
    “I’m not having an affair,” she said softly. “I haven’t had one in the past, either. I would never do that to Grant and Beth.”
    Warren flipped out the cylinder of his revolver and spun it. “I wouldn’t have thought you could.” The cylinder snicked home. “But the letter says different.”
    “That letter is bullshit.” Laurel had the Razr in text mode. She began keying her message to Danny, her eyes never leaving her husband’s face. “Someone faked it to mess with your head.”
    To her surprise, Warren seemed to be considering her suggestion. “Who would fake something like that?” he asked, as though talking to himself.
    “Somebody who wants to drive you crazy. And it’s obviously working. Warren, if you lift a hand to me again, I’m calling the police and hiring a divorce lawyer.”
    This was pure bravado. Even in near darkness, she could see his neck and jaw muscles tightly flexed. Danny’s letter had utterly transformed him. With an infinitesimal movement of her right thumb, she pressed SEND and slid her hand out of her pocket.
    “I still have the aura,” she said with genuine anxiety. “My arms are tingling, and I’m craving ice cream.”
    “Imitrex only shortens the headache, you know that.”
    She closed her eyes again.
    “You’ve got to get up,” Warren said. “I want to see your computer. You can lie on the sofa in the great room.”
    Laurel prayed that Danny was already reading her message. She’d risked a lot to send it, and she hadn’t sent the message Danny would have wanted her to. But she still had the phone, and in her heart she still believed she could talk Warren down from this flight of rage—so long as her computer concealed its secrets. At bottom, the idea that Warren Shields, M.D., might shoot the mother of his children was preposterous. But what he might do to a man who had fornicated with and impregnated her was another matter.
    “Get up, goddamn it!” Warren snapped, kicking the side of the mattress.
    The violence of his anger was what worried her, for it was wholly new. Laurel stood slowly, gathered the comforter around her shoulders, and padded into the hall that led to the kitchen.
Run, Danny,
she thought.
For Michael’s sake, run.
     
Chapter 6
     
    Danny McDavitt was lying on his back in a sea of clover when his cell phone chirped, signaling the arrival of a text message. He hadn’t heard that sound since the day he’d told Laurel that he couldn’t leave his wife and watched her crumble before him.
    Danny didn’t reach straight for his phone. He knew the true worth of lying in sun-drenched clover, waiting for the touch of a woman who loved him. There had been more than a few moments in his life when he’d been certain that he wouldn’t survive into the next minute, much less live to lie in a fragrant bower like this one, waiting for a beauty like Laurel Shields. In the air force, Danny had been known as an even-tempered guy, even among pilots. But falling in love with a woman he could not possess had rewired part of his brain. An emotional volatility was loose in him, and it frightened him sometimes. The chirping phone, for