He shot to his feet, pacing back and forth, dragging his hands through his hair and gnawing worriedly at his lower lip. What in the h.e.l.l had happened? The ethyl chloride he"d used on her was harmless. And she"d woken up since then. What in the h.e.l.l...
Spying her purse, he grabbed it and dumped it out. Hairspray, a comb, a cell phone with a dead battery, loose coins, two prescription bottles and a thick wad of cash. Something hit the floor with a musical clink and he knelt, eyeing the stainless steel bracelet with dread. The red caduceus winked up at him mockingly as he lifted it.
The medical terms didn"t make much sense to him, the V2 and the medical jargon was all but foreign to him. Except the words cardiac murmur-those words, he understood all too well.
Turning, he studied her face with disbelieving eyes.
She"d gone and had a f.u.c.king heart attack on him.
"You little b.i.t.c.h!" he screamed. "b.i.t.c.h. f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!"
He stood up and lashed out with his boot, kicking the cot. In a fit of fury, he stormed across the cabin, cussing furiously, completely unaware that he was being watched.
Tanya hovered in the corner. Her own fear was slowly dissipating, washing away as the sense of irony settled in. She stared at the two bottles of pills and at the bracelet, moving closer. He cut her off and she shied away automatically, but he still came close. He stilled though and she watched as he shivered. Smiling, she moved over to the spilled pile of drugs by the girl"s purse.
"Poor thing," she whispered. Died of a heart attack.
He came to an abrupt halt, staring around with wild eyes. "Who"s there? Who the h.e.l.l is that?"
Looking up, Tanya studied him. It was the first time she had consciously looked at him. His features came into focus... Recoiling in horror, she shied away, letting her mind blur his features again. No...not ready...part of her whispered. She wasn"t ready to look at him. Wasn"t ready to remember what he had done. How he had laughed when she screamed and cried.
But the other part of her thought logically. Realistically.
He heard her.
"You can hear me," she said flatly.
"Who in the f.u.c.k is here?" he demanded. His eyes kept wheeling around in his head as he searched the room for her.
Slowly, Tanya stood, a smile curving her lips as she moved closer. Reaching out, she touched his cheek. "Take a guess."
A cold touch drifted down his spine, bringing Michael out of his restless sleep. It wasn"t the first time he had been woken up like this and he knew it wouldn"t be the last. A restless spirit hovered around him and he swallowed back the furious shout that threatened to escape him. Too late. Bitter knowledge burned inside him but he clamped a tight lid on it.
The poor girl didn"t need his anger.
"Hi," he said quietly, wondering if she would be stuck here, or if she was just a little lost.
There weren"t any words from her. Just a sense of confusion.
"It"s okay-takes a little time to move on sometimes," he said softly.
She sighed. He felt it like a breeze moving through the air. She was afraid, worried. She knew what had happened-she was angry, and she wanted her mother. Finally, images of her mom made her hurt enough, made her angry enough that she was able to speak. "Why did I leave...what"s going to happen to my mom? She"ll never know."
"I"m sorry."
"What do I do? Am I stuck here?"
At least this much, he could help with. "No...no, you"re not stuck. You can move on any time you"re ready to let go."
"I can"t go until I know Mom will be okay."
Michael promised, "I"ll make sure your mom knows that you"ve moved on. That"s what I do."
There was the beauty of youth, though. Sometimes, they did still accept what you told them. It took a while to coax her to move along, but eventually she did. She started to see the white light-one thing that the movies had gotten right. She moved toward it and there was one less ghost in his life.
But that meant somewhere out there, a young woman lay dead.
"You couldn"t have just left."
"Neither could you."
Lucas stood by the window, materializing out of thin air, his form more ghostly than normal. "You make me seem a lot more altruistic than I am. I cared about two things when I was alive, Mike. Me. You. That was it."
Walking past the window, Michael didn"t spare his brother a glance as he said, "Don"t give me that line. If you knew innocent girls were being killed, would you just walk away? This last one was just a girl. Younger than you were." Mike was quiet for a minute and then he looked back at Lucas. "People knew what she was doing to us, man. They knew what she tried to do to me. How many times did you have to save me from it, Lucas? Were there times that I didn"t even know about?"
Lucas" silence was answer enough. Mike had always suspected it but now he knew. His mother had been willing to sacrifice Mike for Lucas" sake, but now he knew the truth. She would have sacrificed him to score some c.o.ke. Mike wanted to be angry but he realized he just didn"t care.
"People knew. They walked away. Time after time. If somebody had done something, we might have made it out of there."
"You did make it out of there. h.e.l.l, so did I. Just not quite the way I planned."
Nausea churned in Michael"s gut. "That"s not funny, Lucas."
Lucas laughed bitterly. "I wasn"t trying to be funny, pal. But I did get out. You think I wanted to hang around there waiting until it was the right time to get away from her? Every second we hung around, you were in danger. And that last night, I could have killed her. What if they"d found you? We did get out. I"m just sorry it was h.e.l.l on you for as long as it was."
h.e.l.l-Dear G.o.d, that didn"t even cover it. How many nights had he lain awake wondering if dawn would ever come, and the monsters would fade with the light, if the voices that whispered to him were demonic dreams manifested by his own mind or if they were real?
It had taken him years to come to grips with the fact that they were real. Even longer to not wake up terrified when that ghostly touch came on him at night.
He saw ghosts. They touched him, spoke to him, whispered to him-and begged him for help in finding their killers. He never saw those who pa.s.sed peacefully at the sunset of their lives. Only those whose lives were ended far too early.
With a weary sigh, he flicked on the switch in the bathroom, squinting at the overly bright light . Turning on the water, he bent over and splashed it on his face until the rest of the cobwebs faded. With his hands braced on the tiled edges of the sink, he stared at his reflection. He was starting to look old. It wasn"t lines on his face, though, or gray in his hair. His hair was still a deep, dark brown and the only lines on his face were the little ones fanning out from his eyes.
It was the eyes that made him look old.
"You going to look for the girl? You never have that much luck finding them once they"ve pa.s.sed on."
Drying his face on the towel, Michael said, "I"m going to find the sheriff. Then I"ll go out to the field. The lady there will know the girl"s pa.s.sed. If she"s not ready to help now, she will be soon."
Sarah"s bark woke her up. Sitting up, Daisy whistled and the retriever obediently left the window and came over to her, ears perked and waiting. "Who"s out there, girl?" she asked softly, dragging a hand through her hair. Her curls tangled around her fingers and she sighed. She"d been so d.a.m.ned tired, she"d gone to bed before her hair had dried all the way.
Bad move for a woman whose hair curled the way hers did.
She stood up and moved over to the window, peering through the blinds. The sleek little convertible moving up the road wasn"t one she recognized. The full moon shining down was bright enough for her to see pretty well-buffed to a high shine, late model, and the top was down. She didn"t know a person in town that owned that kind of car.
And since she didn"t recognize it, Daisy had a good idea who it was.
FBI Agent Michael O"Rourke.
It was the middle of the night. She didn"t have to be a cop to know it was a bad sign, an agent showing up on her front door this late. Turning away from the window, she moved to her dresser and pulled out a pair of jeans. Drawing them up over her hips, she grabbed the bra she draped over the foot of the bed and put it on. Just as the truck pulled up in front of the house, she tugged a skinny strapped tank top on. Glancing in the mirror, she made a face at her reflection. Her hair was a mess.
Making a side trip to the bathroom, she splashed some cold water on her face and slicked her damp hands over her hair. The door bell rang. Turning away from the mirror, she padded away out of the bathroom and down the hall.
Sarah waited patiently at the door, her liquid eyes black in the darkness. Reaching out, Daisy turned on the light, giving her eyes a second to adjust before looking through the Judas hole. "Out kind of late, aren"t you?" she asked as she unlocked the chain to let him in.
His eyes were grim. There was a chill to his features that made her gut go cold. And suddenly, Daisy wished she had stayed in bed. Wouldn"t have mattered though. She felt cold all over. A cop knew what was wrong when a person was woken up in the middle of the night. It was because somebody had died.
"Why are you here?" she asked softly, backing away from him. She rested her hips against the hall table and folded her arms around her chest.
"She"s gone."
"Tanya?" Daisy asked, clenching her jaw.
"No...Tanya hasn"t pa.s.sed on yet," he said quietly. He continued to watch her closely and she saw the answer in his eyes.
Daisy had never seen anybody who looked as haunted as he did. She prayed she"d never see it again. Swallowing the knot in throat, she said huskily, "Then you"re going to have to explain who you are talking about. Tanya is the only one who has died recently."
"I told you that he had taken somebody else."
It seemed like the pit of her belly dropped out. Closing her eyes, she said, "No. You said he just took her." One hand closed into a tight fist and she fought against the useless burst of fury. No.
"He didn"t kill her. She died."
Perplexed, Daisy opened her eyes and glared at him. She shoved off the table and planted her hands on her hips. "d.a.m.n it, O"Rourke, you"re not making much sense. Now granted, it is the middle of the night and I"m in dire need of a caffeine rush. But if you"re going to come here and tell me that a girl is dead-" She clamped her mouth shut and hissed out a breath. She took a deep breath. Tried to think, turned his words over in her head. Nope. Still didn"t make sense. Looking back at him, she said in a tight voice, "You need to remember something. I"m a cop. I"m the town sheriff. I take a dead girl pretty d.a.m.ned seriously. Especially since we have a killer using my town as his hunting ground."
His lashes lowered, hiding the haunting blue of his eyes. "She was sick-bad heart. I told you that. I think her heart gave out."
With that, he turned on his heel and started for the door.
"Hey!"
He paused, looking over his shoulder.
"Where in the h.e.l.l do you think you"re going?"
"Out to the field. Tanya might be ready to talk to me."
Propping her hands on her hips, Daisy stared at him. "Why? What changes things from this morning?"
"Because a girl is dead," Michael said, his tone patient, as though he was talking to a small child.
"Yeah and this morning, talking might have saved her."
Michael"s lips curled in a sad smile. "I don"t think so-you don"t understand, Sheriff. The deceased, they are like kids. Like a young one, scared, confused and alone in the dark. She couldn"t this morning-it just wasn"t time, not for her."
"So because it wasn"t time for her, some young girl was raped and tortured, probably scared to death-" her voice faded away at the look on his face.
"No. She wasn"t hurt. I don"t know what happened. But there-wasn"t that tortured touch to her. I need to go. Are you coming?"
d.a.m.ned jerk, Daisy thought a few minutes later as she drove over the rough roads. He sat next to her in silence. h.e.l.l, she couldn"t even hear him breathing. Spends so much time with his ghosts, he acts like one.
It was unsettling. She couldn"t hear him. He sat so still he could have been carved from marble-yet her senses were entirely too attuned to him.
He smelled good. Trapped in the close confines of the car, she was aware of just how good he smelled. Daisy had always been a sucker for the way a guy smelled. She didn"t particularly care for cologne on a man, just the clean smell of soap and male.
And d.a.m.n, this particular male was something else.
She was entirely too aware of him.
Being this close to him made her skin feel hot and itchy, made her aware of the way her clothes felt against her flesh, how her hair blew around her face in the breeze. Her heart started to slam against her ribcage and her breathing sped up. Against the steering wheel, she could feel her palms getting sweaty.
Up ahead, the gravel road ended and she had to turn off onto the dirt road. Eventually, that would end and there would be little more than two ruts in the dirt to follow and then they"d have to get out and walk the rest of the way to the field. She was looking forward to it, because she had to get out of this d.a.m.ned truck.
Then maybe she could think something else beside him.
Alone, in the middle of the night, with a man she didn"t really know and there were murders being committed in her county, and the only thing that Daisy could really think about was how d.a.m.ned good he smelled.
Twenty minutes later, she had her wish.
Following behind him, she slammed her flashlight against her thigh and tried to figure how this had happened. "You know, I am the sheriff. I think I should be the one walking in front."
He didn"t say anything.
Daisy slid her gaze back down the length of his back. And stared at his a.s.s. Again.
Now she wasn"t thinking about how good he smelled. For the past fifteen minutes, she had been trailing after him and in the bright patches of moonlight, she had been left to admire one very fine a.s.s. "Any reason why you insist on being in front?" she asked irritably.
"Not sure where she is."
Tanya.
As they crossed into the clearing, she reached up to rub at her temple. "I"m still not entirely sure why we came out here. How can she help us? How can you even be sure you"ll see..."
Something cold brushed against her. Daisy froze, jerking around, but she couldn"t see anything.
Her eyes flew to Michael"s face but he wasn"t looking at her. He seemed to be staring at somebody just to Daisy"s left, somebody roughly Daisy"s height. His eyes were gentle, a soft smile on his face.
He didn"t say a word.
"Why is Daisy here?"
Michael shrugged. He focused his thoughts, projecting them so that he didn"t have to speak them aloud for them to be heard, "She"s the sheriff-if something"s happened, shouldn"t she know?"
"Why?" Tanya"s voice was flat and grim, her eyes angry. "It"s too late to do anything now."