Apprehended by Jan Burke Read Free Book Online

inside and called you—I mean, called the sheriff’s office.”
    Emma had logged the call in at about nine, when things were still hopping from the fire. “So the last time you saw him was about when?”
    â€œI guess it would have been about six-thirty.”
    â€œAnd do you know what time it was you came in from the garden?”
    â€œA little before sundown; before eight, I suppose.”
    He looked at his watch. It was just after one o’clock in the morning; the refinery had been burning since eight-thirty. The man could have been out there in the garage for a long time. In this heat, even the coroner might find it difficult to set a time of death very accurately. He did as much of the paperwork as he could, then asked if she would mind if he looked around.
    She didn’t object, but asked him if it would be all right if she waited back in the bedroom. “It’s cooler in there,” she explained.
    Remembering the air conditioner, he understood.
    He looked over the living room and the professor’s study. If Joseph Darren left a suicide note, it was not on any of the clean and tidy surfaces of either room. There was, in fact, nothing very personal in them. Next he looked through the bathroom. Towels and washclothes neatly folded on the rack; chrome on the fixtures shining, toothbrushes in a holder, toothpaste tube rolled from the bottom. No thumbprint on the bottom edge of the medicine cabinet, like you’d see in his own house.
    All the contents were in well-ordered rows. The medications were lined up, labels facing out. Nonprescription on one side, prescription on another. The Valium bottle was there, half-empty even though it was recently refilled. Maybe the professor had considered pills before he decided to stick with family traditions.
    The other prescriptions were mostly leftover antibiotics; none past their expiration dates. There was only one made out to Kaylie. Premarin.
    Premarin. Where had he heard of that before? He stretched and yawned. Premarin. Oh, sure—his mom had taken it. Estrogen, for menopause.
    Menopause? Kaylie? Maybe she needed it for some other reason. She was only forty, for godsakes. Some women went through it that early, he knew. But Kaylie?
    Well, if she was going through it, she was. It didn’t really bother him. No children, but at forty, maybe she didn’t want to start a family. Hell, she was going to be a grandmother. Step-grandmother.
    He felt a familiar sensation. Tugging at a mental thread.
    Something had bothered him, earlier. In the garage. The light being on? No, he could understand that. She wouldn’t turn it off, not with him in there. She walked in, saw him hanging there, probably was so shaken she ran back out and didn’t venture back in.
    But she had ventured back in. He knew then what it was that had bothered him. The dryer. Lord Almighty.
    He leaned against the sink, suddenly feeling a little sick to his stomach. What kind of woman washed a load of laundry in the same room where her husband was hanging from the rafters?
    Slow down. Slow down, he told himself. It was weird, no doubt about it. But not necessarily meaningful. Maybe she cleans when she gets upset. The house was so immaculate, it was almost like being in a museum.
    He would just ask her about it. He walked to the bedroom door and knocked.
    â€œCome in,” she called.
    He opened the door. This room, unlike the others, was slightly in disorder. The bed was rumpled, although made. An old-fashioned walnut dressing table held a silver mirror and brush and comb, a few lipsticks and other make-up items, a couple of small bottles of perfume and a small cluster of earrings, as if she had been sorting through them, choosing which pair she would wear. Photographs of a couple he recognized as her parents, long dead now, took up most of the rest of the space on it.
    Two walnut nightstands, apparently part of the same set as the dressing table, stood at either