Heart of the Night: A Novel Read online

  There were times when she wondered where it would end. But, hell, she had to do something until midnight.

  CHAPTER 5

  “It’s twelve-oh-four, and this is Jared Snow, comin’ to you at the tail end of a cold and rainy Tuesday.”

  Savannah had been waiting, focusing with only half a mind on the memorandum she was dictating. At the slow, husky sound of his voice, she turned off her minirecorder and pressed its narrow end to her lips.

  “You’re listening to cool country,” he told her with a lazy smile, “95.3 FM, WCIC Providence. I’ll be playing nothing but the smoothest of country sounds till six. If you’ve just come home, find a comfortable place to dry off and warm up. If you’ve been home awhile, refill that mug with whatever feeds your senses, take a real slow breath, and relax. I’ve got Randy Travis, Juice Newton, and Exile comin’ up on 95.3 FM, the home of a little country in the city, WCIC Providence, kickin’ off a cool country streak with a new cut by T. Graham Brown. Jared Snow listenin’ with you in the heart of the night. Enjoy.…”

  She did, oh, she did. The tension that lingered in her body seemed to ease with the sound of his voice. The images that plagued her with each break from her work disappeared. In a leisurely motion she set the recorder on the desk. Raising her arms, she linked her hands on her forehead, pushed up the dark bangs that normally lay there and arched her back into a feline stretch.

  Jared Snow. He had a sexy voice, and a suggestive way of using it. He was smooth and easy; it was hard to listen to him and not melt. He talked as though he were lying beside her in bed, as though they had just made heated love and were in a comfortable embrace, basking in the afterglow. When he identified his station, he could as well be saying she turned him on, and when he announced the song to come, he could be telling her he wanted her again.

  Not for the first time, she wondered what he looked like. He had to look sexy. Not that looks mattered, certainly not when it came to Jared Snow. But she didn’t want him to look sleazy. She saw enough of that during an average day in court. She wanted him to be a sight for sore eyes. She wanted the reality of him to be wonderful.

  Maybe she wanted too much. Susan told her all the time that her expectations were too great. Maybe they were. Such had been her experience with Matt Briarwood. She had been twenty-one and in love, only to find that he merely wanted a few nights in bed. More recently she had entrusted a political corruption case to Bobby O’Neil and learned a month after the case ended in an acquittal that Bobby had accepted a bribe to back off.

  More than once Savannah wondered whether she was simply a poor judge of character. But she didn’t want to believe that. She decided that there were times when she felt so strongly about things that she was blind to reality. In Matt’s case, she’d been in love, which was enough to warp any young woman’s judgment. In Bobby’s case, she had seen a brilliant legal mind and had been so eager to put it to use that she had not been on the lookout for snags.

  She supposed she was an eternal optimist. Her only alternative was to go through life expecting the worst. That was too depressing.

  Dropping her arms, she leaned toward the briefcase that lay open on the desk and removed the pad of paper she used when she had talked with Will earlier. Chewing on her lower lip, she studied the words written there: KICK IN A COOL THREE MILLION.

  Over and over she read the phrase. Closing her eyes, she pictured the original, recalling the message in its entirety. As a ransom note, it got its point across, but why those words? Kick in a cool three million. Kick in a cool three million.

  Kickin’ off a cool country streak …

  Kick in a cool three million.

  Kickin’ back to an oldie …

  Kick in a cool three million.

  Kickin’ in at twelve twenty-two …

  Lots of people listened to Jared Snow. He had been holding down the twelve-to-six shift at CIC for two years, during which time he had no doubt built a sizable following. Lots of people listened, people like her who either didn’t want to sleep, didn’t need to sleep, or couldn’t sleep.

  Kick in a cool three million.

  Kickin’ off a cool country streak …

  The similarity had to be a coincidence.

  Pushing the pad and pencil away, she retrieved the small recorder, rewound it to find her place, then resumed dictation. The music played softly in the background. If Savannah had felt it would carry onto the recorder, she would simply have lowered the volume. She wouldn’t have turned it off. Jared Snow was too good to miss.

  After finishing that memorandum, she dictated two letters for her secretary to type the next day. In the middle of the second one, Jared spoke to her again.

  “That was Gary Morris, harmonizing with Crystal Gayle, and I’m Jared Snow,” he drawled, “sittin’ with you in the heart of the night. Don’t touch that dial. It’s set at 95.3 FM, WCIC Providence, all day, every day, your best bet for a little country in the city…”

  His voice faded as the music began, but she held its memory inside her far longer.

  He was tall and dark, she decided. Rakish, rather than suave. He had the lazy smile she associated with his voice, and more often than not it was crooked. She imagined broad shoulders, a tapering torso, long legs. He wore form-fitting sweaters with nothing underneath, and jeans that fit like a glove, leaving no doubt as to his sex.

  With a soft moan of dismay, Savannah snatched up the recorder, and inhaled, ready to speak. The breath silently seeped out. She had no idea where she had left off. Lips tight, she rewound the tape, listened for a minute, then finished the letter. She managed to quickly dictate another one before Jared returned.

  “Ronnie Milsap, ‘Where Do the Nights Go.’ I spent some time with Ronnie not long ago. Nice guy. Nice song.”

  Savannah had been concentrating on her work, so she had not heard the song, but if Jared said it, it had to be so. Threading her fingers into her hair, she began to loosen the pins that had kept it in a neat twist since morning.

  “I’ve got lots more coming up for you from the home of cool country sounds, 95.3 FM, WCIC Providence, starting with one of the sweetest I’ve heard in a while, a new one from Dolly Parton.…”

  Dolly started singing, and Savannah’s hands went still in her hair. She disliked Dolly Parton. She wasn’t sure why. Dolly sang nicely enough, beautifully, in fact. But she was too short, too blonde, too busty. Jared had called her song one of the sweetest he had heard in a while. Maybe that was what bothered Savannah. Maybe she was jealous.

  “For God’s sake,” she muttered and removed the hairpins with a vengeance. When they were in a neat pile on the desk, she ran her fingers through her long brown hair to relieve the little kinks that had set in. Then, tossing the mane over her shoulder, she picked up the recorder again. But she was feeling restless, not at all like working. A hot bath and a cup of warm milk sounded nice.

  Neither one hit the spot. No sooner had she sunk into the tub than she began to think about Megan. After no more than five minutes in the water, she climbed out, toweled herself dry and, drawing on a soft cotton nightgown, went for the milk. It left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.

  So she climbed into bed, set the radio to play for an hour, drew the covers to her chin, and waited for Jared Snow to speak. She didn’t have long to wait.

  “It’s one-twenty,” he told her in the gently raspy tone that caressed her mind, “twenty minutes after one in the Ocean State. The WCIC forecast calls for clearing by morning, but I can still hear the rain on my roof. Don’t go out if you can help it, it’s a raw thirty-nine degrees, a perfect night to curl up with a blanket, a glass of wine, a special someone. I’m Jared Snow. In the heart of the night you’re tuned to WCIC, 95.3 FM. Still got more than four hours of the smoothest of country sounds. Stay with me while I kick in a cool cut from Conway Twitty.…”

  With the start of the music, Savannah rolled to her side. WCIC. Kick. It was a natural. Jared Snow was not the only disc jockey to link the words. She had he
ard Joseph Allan Johnson do it. And Melissa Stuart. It was obviously part of the station’s logo, like “cool country” and “a little country in the city.”

  Kick in a cool three million.

  Kick in a cool cut …

  Coincidence. That was all.

  Still, she wondered. She thought about work, too, as she lay there. Had she properly prepared one of the witnesses for the arson trial? Would the upcoming fund-raiser for Paul be another small stepping stone toward the governor’s office. She wondered about turning thirty-one on Saturday and whether she could have a baby at forty-one. Most of all, she thought about Megan.

  She planned what she would do the next day, mentally shifting her schedule around to allow time with Will. She even climbed out of bed once to jot down a note of two appointments her secretary could postpone. Then she returned to bed, huddled beneath the covers listening to the rain, and waited for Jared Snow’s voice.

  The last thing she remembered was his telling her that it was coming up on two-thirty and he was kickin’ off another string of six.

  * * *

  The taut and silent faces that met Savannah in the Vandermeer kitchen at eight the next morning told her that there was no news.

  Sam joined her for a quiet meeting in the hall. “I just talked with Chris,” he said, “and they haven’t found a thing. No cash purchases of vans, no shady types checking into local hotels. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Providence County had gone pure overnight.”

  “Not quite,” she remarked dryly. “Did you give Chris the names of Will’s managers?”

  Sam nodded. “They’ll split up, Ginny and him, so they can hit all three this morning.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll give the lab a little longer, but I doubt they’ll come up with anything useful. This was a clean job, Savvy.”

  “I hate clean jobs. They mean that our quarry is smart.”

  “Depressing, but true.”

  She nodded toward Will, who stood at the kitchen window. “Did he sleep?”

  “For an hour or two. No more. He’s pretty edgy.”

  “No wonder. How about you? Get much sleep?”

  “Enough.”

  “Was Susan okay?”

  “Not bad.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She decided to bake a cake at one this morning.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “A rum cake,” Sam said, then his eyes narrowed on Savannah. “Does she always drink, or is it the situation?”

  “Both, I suppose.”

  “You suppose? She’s your sister. Don’t you know?”

  “I’m not her keeper,” Savannah said a bit sharply, then quickly gentled her tone. “I try to do more, but she denies there’s a problem.” She shrugged. “Maybe there isn’t.”

  Sam said nothing.

  “Is she still sleeping?”

  “I guess so. She hasn’t been down yet.” His gaze shifted. “I take that back. Here she comes.”

  Savannah turned to find Susan approaching. She was wearing a pair of tight jeans with an oversized sweatshirt emblazoned with rhinestones that made her face look pale. Her hair had been hastily drawn into a loose, voluminous pony tail. She wore socks but no shoes. Savannah guessed she had just woken up.

  “I heard the bell,” she said in a groggy voice. Hesitantly, even a bit painfully, she looked from Savannah to Sam. “Anything new?”

  He shook his head in silence. He was intently studying her face.

  Uncomfortable with that, she turned to Savannah. “So we just wait?”

  Savannah nodded.

  “Will you stay here?”

  “I’ll be back and forth to the office. I’ve got a couple of appointments I can’t change, and, anyway, there are a load of phone calls I can more easily make from there.”

  Susan accepted that. She looked too tired and worried to argue. Stuffing her hands in the pockets of her jeans, she said, “It’s spooky here. Megan’s everywhere. I kept waking up, thinking about her.”

  “So did I, and I was across town.”

  “Is it better or worse the longer they keep her?”

  “I don’t know,” Savannah said. She looked questioningly at Sam, but he couldn’t help her out.

  “A kidnapping is a kidnapping,” he said. “She’s been gone for little over a day. We have to assume it’ll be at least two or three before she’s back. If the exchange hasn’t been made by next week, ask me again.”

  Susan shot him a look of annoyance.

  “What did I do?” he asked.

  “You could have been a little more encouraging.”

  “You want me to lie?”

  She faced him head-on. “At this hour, and with the night I just had, yes.”

  “You look pretty good.”

  “That’s a bald-faced lie. I look like death warmed over.”

  “No,” he insisted. “You look good. I like you without makeup.” Barely pausing, he said, “How about some breakfast?”

  She made a face. “How can you think of eating at a time like this?”

  “I’m hungry. Dinner was a long time ago, and delicious as that rum cake was—”

  “I thought I said to lie.” She turned to Savannah and said in a prim voice, “The cake fell. I don’t know what happened to it. I’ve never had that experience before in my life.”

  Savannah wasn’t about to ask how many rum cakes Susan had made before. She suspected about as many as she had made herself, which was none. She could understand the attempt, though. Doing something would be better than doing nothing, and since the cupboards were full, why not? “Maybe something’s wrong with the oven,” she suggested.

  Sam smirked.

  Susan frowned.

  Sensing she’d better quit while she was ahead, Savannah said, “I’m on my way to the office. I’ll talk with you later.”

  * * *

  The news at the office was no more encouraging. “Nothing from the lab,” Savannah told Paul when he stopped by shortly after nine. “Nothing from Ginny and Chris. Nothing from the people we put on the phones. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the Cat struck again.”

  “What does the Cat have to do with this case?”

  “Not a thing. Just thought you’d like to know.”

  “What did he get this time?”

  “Oh, roughly a hundred thousand in jewelry, silver, and art from the Monroe house in Cranston.”

  “Are they sure it was the Cat?”

  “Who else helps himself and leaves without a trace?”

  “Have they questioned Stavanovich?”

  “Can’t find him.”

  “Swell. This is getting embarrassing, Savvy.”

  “Mmmm.” She inhaled an exaggerated breath. “Anyway, I’ve sent Hank out to cruise around. He’s got one or two informants who will let him know if they’ve seen or heard anything about Megan. I even have someone in Corrections looking to see who of our dear friends has been released from prison lately. Beyond that, I don’t know what to do.”

  Paul was totally composed, more so than any other person she had seen that day. But then, Paul was always composed. Part of it was the image he upheld, part was his experience, and part was the fact that, as attorney general, he was detached from the nitty-gritty details of things. He rarely bloodied his hands in the arena. He had assistants to do that, assistants like Savannah.

  “There’s nothing to do but wait,” he said.

  “It’s hard.”

  “That’s because you’re a doer and doers don’t usually wait. But we have no choice, Savannah. If we move too far, too fast, or too freely, we’re apt to blow this case. Neither of us wants to do that.”

  She knew he was right, though she was uneasy with his pointed warning. Paul was, she knew, a political creature, while she was a humanitarian one. One of the reasons their relationship worked so well was that they tempered each other.

  In this situation, however, Savannah didn’t want to be tempered. Megan was her friend. The political
ramifications of the case didn’t concern her at all.

  “I feel like I’m blowing it by sitting here doing nothing,” she complained. “I wish Will would let us go to the FBI.”

  “I doubt they’d do more than you’ve already done.”

  “Maybe not,” she mused. Still, the weight of responsibility was on her shoulders, and it was awesome.

  Paul left. Savannah took several phone calls and made several others concerning her upcoming trial. She met with one of the lawyers to discuss preparation of a rebuttal to pretrial motions for an extortion case that was on the docket for a month later. She phoned the Vandermeer house, but nothing had happened.

  Frustrated, she called information for the number of WCIC. She jotted it on her pad, stared at it for several minutes, picked up the phone to call, then put the receiver down.

  Coincidence. There couldn’t be a connection. Or if there was, she had already taken care of it. That was why she had phoned the Department of Corrections earlier. The idea that one or more of Megan’s abductors had spent time in Rhode Island correctional facilities, where they might have listened to and been inspired by WCIC, was a shot in the dark, but those shots seemed the only ones she could take.

  Temporarily satisfied, she stashed several extra pads of paper into her briefcase and went to the law library. She could be reached there if anything happened, and in the meanwhile, she would be doing research.

  By one in the afternoon, though, she was back in her office. Again she lifted the phone to call WCIC. Again she replaced the receiver without pushing a button. Then she took several incoming calls and an hour later she drove to the Vandermeer house. She already knew that nothing had happened, but she wanted to stop in, if only for a short time.

  While she was there, Hank returned, but his informants had had nothing to say. “Either they really know nothing, or whoever is involved is so big that they’re terrified.”

  Savannah chose to believe the first, since the second was truly frightening. “Who’s big?” she asked. “Why would someone big get involved in a kidnapping?”

  Neither Hank nor Sam had answers for her, and Sam had worse news to report. “We won’t get any help from his managers. They haven’t seen a thing.”