“Hell, yes, you’d better tell me.” Paterno’s head snapped up. His gaze narrowed. “Who?”
“I don’t know. I was asleep and thought I heard someone, a man, whisper ‘Die, bitch!’ as he hovered over my bed, but when I really woke up and turned on the lights, no one was there. I even checked the bedroom floor but the only thing I accomplished was to convince my daughter I’m certifiable and should be locked in some kind of lunatic asylum.” She sighed. “The upshot was that no one was in the house who shouldn’t have been.”
“But you ‘felt’ that someone was there?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t bring it up before because I can’t say for certain. I’ve got a serious memory problem, I’ve been having crazy, disjointed dreams and I might have imagined the whole thing. Maybe it was part of a nightmare.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No,” she admitted, her blood turning to ice when she thought of the feeling that someone was hovering over her bed. So close. So evil. So intent on doing her harm. “I—I’m not sure about anything. Even today when we visited my father. He was certain I was someone else, someone named Kylie and I . . . I can’t remember enough to prove him wrong.”
“He’s pretty sick, isn’t he?”
“Very,” Nick answered. “The nurse thought it might have been his painkillers talking.”
“But you don’t know if he was rambling or there was some truth to his accusation.” Again the hound-dog face was turned toward Marla as Paterno scratched a note to himself. “So, I’m asking again. Who do you think would want to harm you or kill you?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
Paterno’s gaze swung to Nick. “You seem pretty close to all this. Have you got any ideas?”
Nick hesitated. “I haven’t been down here long enough to figure it out. I know that my brother has been working odd hours, and he keeps to himself more than I remember in the past.”
“And the corporation’s got financial troubles.”
“Its share.”
“Why would Mrs. Cahill’s husband want to kill her?”
“No one said he did,” Marla cut in. “Alex wasn’t hovering over my bed that night,” she added indignantly. She would have recognized Alex’s voice. But he wasn’t home, was he? He had to be called back to the house. Could he have snarled his threat, dashed out of the room and . . . what? Gotten into his Jag and driven to a late meeting . . . “It wasn’t Alex.”
“Be that as it may, is there any reason he’d want you dead? Have you got a lot of life insurance? Does he have another woman? Does he think you’re involved with someone else,” he asked, and his gaze traveled pointedly to Nick again.
“I don’t think so.”
The chair creaked as Paterno pushed himself to his feet. “We don’t have enough here, no concrete evidence that someone’s out to kill you, to warrant police protection.”
“I’m sure I don’t need it,” Marla insisted. “The house is a fortress.”
Paterno didn’t look convinced. He clicked his pen nervously. “No security system is foolproof. If your intruder was real, that proves it.” Sifting through the pages on his desk, he pulled out a copy of a pencil drawing.
“This is a composite sketch of the man we think killed Charles Biggs. One of the nurses on staff got a look at him and talked to the police artist.” He handed the sketch to Marla but the shaded drawing meant nothing to her, nor to Nick. “Now,” Paterno turned on his computer and typed rapidly, “we took this, did a computer enhancement and came up with this.” An image of a mustached man in squarish glasses and a thrusting jaw came into view. Paterno rotated the screen and Marla gazed at the face of a stranger.
She shook her head.
“How about now?” Paterno clicked on a key and the mustache disappeared.
“No . . .”
“And now?” The glasses came off.
He tried several different combinations, adding beards and changing hairlines and color, but each image was just another stranger to Marla. “You have to remember I don’t even know my own family,” she admitted.
“What about you?” Paterno asked Nick.
Leaning forward, Nick studied the images as the detective flipped through them again. “I don’t think so,” he finally said and Paterno, a disheartened expression converging on his oversized features, snapped the computer off. “We’re looking for Pamela Delacroix’s daughter,” he said. “She’s married to a guy named Robert Johnson. Haven’t found her yet.”
“I’d like to talk to her when you do,” Marla said. “To offer my sympathy, if nothing else.”