Free Before I Sleep by Rachel Lee Page A

would.”
    Carey glanced over her shoulder. “Meaning?” She was careful to make the question pleasant.
    “You like excitement.”
    “True enough.” Why else would she have dragged Seamus Rourke, whom she would have been happy never to see again, all the way over here on a mere wisp of intuition?
    She turned back to the windows and saw Seamus walking up with his usual, insouciant stride. That was the very first thing she had noticed about him, she remembered: that walk. That “I'm comfortable in my body and with my maleness” walk that had caused an instantaneous sexual reaction in her.
    He still had the walk, and she still had the reaction. Great. Wonderful. Like she needed this?
    He was wearing a lightweight dark blue suit, white shirt, and tie. She recognized the slight bulge at his hip that was his gun, and remembered watching him strap it on his belt in the mornings, an action that had always somehow left her feeling that they couldn't possibly be on the same side. She had carried a badge, too, back then, but not a gun. That gun had marked a major difference between them.
    Or so she had thought. But what was the difference? she asked herself now.
He
could shoot a perp if necessary.
She
had sent one to the electric chair. Maybe it had been realizing that there really was no difference that had been the final straw for her.
    He reached the door and pulled it open, letting in a gust of warm, moist air that was laden with the sound of the wind, clattering palm fronds, and passing traffic. He stepped through, and the door closed, shutting out the mixed sounds of nature and civilization.
    “Hi,” he said.
    “Come on back.” Carissa turned and led the way to the booth she'd commandeered. When she closed that door, no one would be able to hear what they were saying.
    She pointed to a stool and he took it. Then she rounded the console and sat on the other side, facing the familiar array of buttons and slides. They grounded her somehow and, with Seamus this close, she needed to be grounded.
    “So what's up?” he asked, unbuttoning his suit jacket and letting it fall open.
    All of a sudden her intuition seemed flimsy, and she wished she had never called him. What did she have, after all, except a time proximity between two events that were probably totally unrelated?
    “Carey?”
    His tone was impatient. She recognized it from the days when she had been battling through an endless crisis of conscience, and he had started to get tired of her unending talk about the law, justice, and her job. He'd even called her a one-trick pony. Maybe she was. She was still talking about the same things on the radio.
    “Carey?” This time there was no impatience, but instead genuine concern. She looked into his gray-green eyes but couldn't read them. He'd always had unreadable eyes— when he wanted to. “Did something happen to you? Did somebody threaten you?”
    She shook her head quickly. “No. Sorry. I'm sorry. It's just—you're probably going to laugh at me.”
    “Since when does that bother you?”
    She wanted to tell him she didn't care what he thought about
her,
but even as she opened her mouth to say so, she realized that wasn't strictly true. “I just… well, I want you to give me a full hearing, okay? Somebody's life could depend on it.”
    He sighed. “Otis.”
    “Yes, Otis!” Her temper was close to snapping, and she had to force herself to remain calm. She was not ordinarily so close to the edge, but the whole idea of a man being executed in part because of things
she
had done was eating her alive—especially since she had always harbored a belief that he was probably innocent. “You're not going to tell me that you want this man to be executed if he's innocent?”
    “He's not innocent. He was convicted of murder.”
    “And for you it ends there?”
    He nodded. “For me it ends when I make my testimony in court, counselor. It
has
to end there, whether the suspect is convicted or not. We've been over this a