Free Now or Never by Elizabeth Adler Page A

hellos and good-byes, and pushed through the heavy swing doors. They stood on the steps sipping their coffee, staring into the rainy night.
    “You got it in one, Rossetti,” Harry said.
    The windshield wipers blinked away the heavy rain as he drove the Jag back through the quiet city to Louisburg Square. It was three A.M. and he was exhausted, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep.
    Squeeze recognized the familiar sound of the Jag’s engine and the solid slam of its door. He was waiting in the front hall, tail wagging, eyes alert.
    Harry slipped on the leash and stepped out again into the rain.
    “This is a quickie, old fella,” he muttered, head down, avoiding the puddles. “Sorry about tonight, but I needed to be alone.”
    He grinned at himself—apologizing to the dog as though to a neglected wife. “Aw, what the hell, Squeeze,what I need is a drink. And what you need is a bone.” Hauling on the leash, he dragged the reluctant dog back up the street and in out of the rain.
    He strode into the kitchen, fed the dog the bone, and took a fresh bottle of Jim Beam from the cupboard. Pouring himself a slug, he added ice, then wandered into the sitting room and turned on the lamps, dimming them to a faint glow. He put Neil Young’s
Harvest Moon
on the CD player and settled back in his favorite old leather chair that was as beat up as his favorite old leather jacket.
    Sipping the bourbon, he savored it slowly on his tongue, then put his head back and let the music fill his head. The track was “Unborn Legend.” It was a song that always reminded him of his ex-wife, Jilly. But more than that, it described the way he’d felt about her when he’d met her. And even though he told himself it was over, passé, gone, that what he’d thought it was had really never been, the song still brought the ache back to the bruise in his heart.
    Squeeze dropped the bone onto the magnificent eighteenth-century silk Bokhara rug at Harry’s feet, then settled down, chewing contentedly. The rug had belonged to his grandmother. “Ah, what the hell. It’s only a rug,” Harry said resignedly. “It’s meant to be used. Before it became an antique, probably half a dozen babies peed on it, and maybe a few cats threw up on it as well.”
    He switched his thoughts to Mal Malone. He ran his meeting with her like a reel of film in his head, from the beginning, when she had given him that first challenging look. He re-ran her intelligent interest in the case and her horror when he’d told her what the killer had done. He re-ran the image of her looking at the photo-fit.
    There had been no flicker of expression as she looked at the face of the killer. No distaste, no horror—not even interest, for God’s sake.
    And that was what was wrong. Mallory Malone hadbeen interested at first, all right. He had seen it. Then when she had looked at the picture her face had become immobile. But her eyes, as she handed it back to him, had not. There had been a hint of something there. It wasn’t recognition, or even fear.
    For a fleeting instant, Mallory Malone had looked
haunted
.
    He sipped the bourbon thoughtfully. He thought Ms. Malone was hiding something and he wondered what. Could it be the pattern of the killings? Or the identity of the young victims? There was definitely something. She had done a good job of disguising her reaction—but then, she was an actress, or at least a woman with a public face. He thought she was everything he liked least: spiky, tough, a hard-bitten career woman all the way.
    Then he remembered the smile that had lit up her face when she’d seen Squeeze. He remembered the raindrops glittering like sequins in her hair and the unexpected blue-ness of her eyes. Perhaps he had got her wrong after all.
    He heaved a weary sigh. “Ms. Malone is a woman with secrets,” he told the dog. “She knows more than she’s telling. And I intend to find out exactly what that is.”
    Squeeze lifted his head and looked at him. He wagged his