The 9th Judgment (Women's Murder Club 9)

Which is why Sarah had put the Morleys on her to-do list, done several run-throughs to check out the traffic patterns at nine p.m. in their neighborhood, and pinpointed where to stash her car and where to hide. On one of her drive-bys earlier in the week, she’d even seen Jim Morley leaving the house in his Mercedes. He was stocky and muscular—the kind of build people called “brawny.”

Sarah definitely did not want to run into Jim Morley tonight. And she wouldn’t. The Morleys were having a Big Chill party in their backyard and would be treating their friends to a live performance of a retread rock-and-roll band from the ’60s. She could hear the first set now, electric guitars twanging over screeching mics.

What a fantastic cover of sound.

Fifteen minutes ago, one of the valets had parked the last guest’s car down the hill and was now hanging out in the street with his buddy. Sarah could hear their muted laughter and smell the cigarette smoke.

She was going to do it. She’d made up her mind. And there was no better time than now.

Sarah glanced up at the Morleys’ bedroom window, and, after taking a breath, she darted out from the sheltering shrubbery and ran twenty feet to the base of the house. Once there, she executed a maneuver like the one she’d practiced many times on the climbing wall at the gym. She jammed the left toe of her climbing shoe against the clapboard, gripped the drainpipe of the gutter with her right hand, and stretched up to the window ledge.

Halfway through the ten-foot climb, her left foot slipped, and she hung, heart pounding, body splayed vertically against the wall, right hand gripping the drainpipe, desperate not to pull down the gutter and create a clamor that would end with a shout or a rough hand at her back.

Quit now, Sarah. Go home.

Sarah hung against the wall for interminable seconds.

Her forearms were like cables from hours of just hanging by her hands from the bar across her closet doorway—not just until she couldn’t hold on for another instant but until her muscles failed and she peeled off the bar. She’d strengthened her fingers by squeezing a rubber ball when she drove her car, watched TV—any spare moment at all. But despite her strength and determination, there was still some light from the moon, and Sarah Wells was not invisible.

As she clung to the wall, Sarah heard a car stop around the corner of the house and voices of new guests coming up the walk. She waited for them to enter the house, and when she figured it was safe, she took her hand off the drainpipe and reached for the molding below the window. When she had a firm grip, she pulled herself up until she was able to hook a leg onto the sill of the westernmost window of the Morleys’ bedroom.

She was in.

Chapter 46

SARAH WRIGGLED OVER the sill and dropped to the carpet.

Her head swam with a high-octane blend of elation, urgency, and fear. She glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand beside the Morleys’ huge four-poster bed and registered the time. It was 9:14, and Sarah swore to herself that once the blue digits read 9:17, she’d be gone.

The spacious room was dimly lit from the light in the hall. Sarah took in the heavy, Queen Anne–period maple furnishings, evidence of an inheritance as well as the bazillions the Morleys had made in sporting goods. There were little oil paintings near the bed, a huge plasma-screen TV in the armoire, photos along the walls of the handsome Morley clan in sailboats—walls that now thrummed with a pounding rock-and-roll beat.

Sarah was on her mark and ready to go. She crossed the long, carpeted room, then shut the door leading out to the hallway and locked it. Now, except for the blinking blue light of the digital clock, she was completely in the dark.

It was 9:15.

Sarah felt along the wall, found the closet door, opened it, and threw on the switch to her headlamp. The room-sized closet was fantastic, and she wouldn’t have expected less from the Morleys. There were racks and racks of clothes, hers on one side, his on the other; a triple-paned floor-to-ceiling mirror at the back wall; everything you could ever ask from a closet—except a safe. Where was it?

Sarah worked quickly, looking behind evening gowns and running her fingers along baseboard moldings and shelves, feeling time whiz by as she inventoried the Morleys’ frickin’ closet.

She would have to leave. Empty-handed.

Sarah had just turned off her light and exited the closet when she heard footsteps on the hardwood. They stopped outside the bedroom. The doorknob twisted back and forth, then a man’s voice shouted, “Hey! Who locked the door?”

Sarah froze. Should she hide? Break for the window in the dark?

The man called out again: “It’s Jim. I need to use the can.” His laugh was sloppy with drink. He put on a high-pitched, fruity voice. “Hello Kitty? Is that youuuu?”

Sarah’s heart nearly stopped. It was Jim Morley, and he was pounding on his bedroom door.

“Hey. Open up!”

Chapter 47

SARAH RAN TO the window, whatever might be in her way be damned. She had her hand on the sill when a door opened into the room and light poured in. Morley had entered the bathroom from the room next door, and his hulking frame was silhouetted by the bathroom light.

He called out as he fumbled for the switch on the bedroom wall. “Is someone here?”

Sarah’s mind did a backflip. Without the light, she could see him better than he could see her. She had to brazen it out. “Jim,” she said, “can you give us some privacy, please?”