A Deadly Reunion (21 page)

Making our way up to the bar, I let
Annabelle order the drinks as I turned and surveyed the people
around me.

Some faces I recognized, some I didn’t, yet
all looked suitably respectful and silent.

“Hey,” someone said softly from my side.

I turned to see Thorne.

“You came,” he pointed out quietly.

I nodded my head.

“
You look...” he trailed off.

“Nice?”

“Yeah,” he managed softly.

“I sure hope she looks nice,” Annabelle
interrupted as she turned around and handed me a drink, “that’s my
top and jacket.”

“Then those are nice clothes, Annabelle,” as
Thorne spoke, he looked at his drink quickly, a little too
quickly.

Letting my brow crumple, I reminded myself
that small towns were, by definition, small towns. Everybody knew
everybody else. You knew everything about their lives too. I’d
joked before that Annabelle and Thorne could get along well, but
now I realized they must have had loads of opportunities.

Something was keeping them apart.

“Now I know you can’t tell us anything, but
this being Wetlake, I’m going to ask anyway. Do you have any leads?
Have you caught the serial killer yet?” Annabelle asked
directly.

Thorne looked up sharply at two little
words: serial killer.

Everybody else was referring to what had
happened as murders. Only two people referred to it as serial
killing: Denver and Annabelle.

“You’re right about that, Annabelle; I’m not
going to share details with you. But we’re trying as hard as we can
to solve this.”

I took a sip of my drink and then another as
I realized I desperately needed something to do with my hands and
my attention. This conversation was rapidly becoming awkward, and I
was stuck in the middle of it.

“How’s Nancy?” I asked quickly.

Both Thorne and Annabelle looked at me
sharply, but the quality of their gazes was completely different.
While Thorne looked a little shocked and sickened, Annabelle just
looked... sharp. Yet that sharp flicker didn’t last
long.

“Okay,” he answered simply. “But I’m not
going to tell you anything more, and please don’t ask me.”

I nodded.” Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” he tried.

Damn, you couldn’t script a more awkward
scene.

We could barely look at each other and we
could barely talk to each other, and there Annabelle was, looming
over Thorne’s shoulder, making him even more nervous with every
passing second.

I suddenly realized there might be a history
between those two, but I sure as heck wasn’t forward enough to
pry.

“Do you have any word from the mechanic?”
Thorne nodded my way.

“He said it will take a while to repair.
Plus, he has to coordinate with the hire car company.”

“I’m sorry you have to stay longer than you
wanted to.” He took a sip of his beer.

“You’ve got a big life to get back to,”
Annabelle added.

I tapped my finger hard on the side of my
glass, but I didn’t say anything. “How is the...” I began asking,
determined to shift the subject off the murders and myself. But I
couldn’t think of anything to ask, and it would be exceedingly
pathetic and banal to inquire about how the weather had been of
late.

“I need to talk to you,” someone snapped
from behind me.

Turning, I already knew who it was. Not only
did I recognize the voice, I recognized the sudden and sour change
to Thorne’s expression.

Denver.

There he was in that exact same suit, that
exact same tie, and that exact same shirt. Either he owned matching
copies of everything, or he hadn’t changed clothes since he’d
arrived in Wetlake.

Neither had he changed expressions, because
he still looked at me with that dark and barely concealed fury.

“We’re kind of busy here,” Thorne said
through gritted teeth.

Denver didn’t even look down; he only glared
my way. He flicked his head towards the door.

It was beyond rude.

Okay, Thorne had overstated it when he’d
said we were busy; I was standing there trying not to look too
awkward while grasping for a question that didn’t include the
weather. Still, you didn’t come up to somebody, nod your head
towards the door, and demand they come and talk to you.

“Where do you get off being so—” Thorne
began.

“It’s fine.” I put a hand in front of Thorne
to stop him from killing his brother. “I’ll just be a few seconds,”
I said, turning my attention back to Denver.

His jaw was locked, his expression stiff and
unyielding.

When we made it out of the pub, I was
suddenly caught by how chilly the air felt, reinforced by how darn
frosty Denver was as he led me forward along the street.

The top and jacket I’d borrowed from
Annabelle were made out of thin fabric, so I immediately brought my
arms around myself and tried to rub some warmth into my bristling
flesh.

Denver glanced at me, but he sure as heck
didn’t offer me his coat. Instead he gestured for me to walk on a
little.

“You know, what is this about?” I trotted
along after him, but I made sure to give the back of his head a
solid death stare.

Hot or not, a tortured soul or not, this
arrogant act of Denver’s would get old pretty quickly.

“I didn’t want to talk to you about the case
in front of the people at the pub,” he answered as he drew me into
the mouth of an alleyway.

“
Right...” I managed. Though I’d opened my
mouth intending to fire another volley his way, I quickly processed
what he’d said. “What’s... going on?”

He didn’t answer me immediately. Instead he
took a step back, thumbing his nose as he looked down at the
ground. “Things are a lot more complicated than they look.”

Why did I get the sudden impression that
Denver wasn’t just talking about the case? There was something
about the exact attention behind his gaze and the way he kept
glancing my way with jerky movements that told me he was trying to
imply a lot more than his words revealed.

Nodding, I neatened my hair. “Okay.”

It was a pathetically weak thing to say, but
I didn’t know what to add. Though Denver loved to ask questions, he
did not like to answer them. No doubt I could have him pinned up
against the wall with a knife to his throat and the guy wouldn’t
reveal a thing.

Though having him pinned up to the wall was
a suddenly distracting and rather improper thought considering the
situation, I quickly coughed and fixed my attention on a small,
dark section of wall behind his left shoulder.

“A lot of things aren’t making sense here,”
he now added, his voice hoarse, “this is a confusing
situation.”

I nodded enthusiastically.

Which was stupid, because this was not a
situation to get enthusiastic about.

Blushing and glad for the dark night around
us, I let my arms drop from around my middle as heat took to my
skin. “Yes it is,” I agreed weakly.

“There is a lot that can go wrong,” he
managed.

I nodded. Hell, I nodded so quickly and so
repeatedly I could have been one of those Elvis dolls you stick on
the dashboard of your car to impress old people and the very, very
young.

He dwindled into silence.

I had to say something.

“
Denver... look, I’m sorry about before,” I
teetered back and forth on my feet, unsure whether I wanted to take
a step closer or a step away.

“It was reckless,” he said blankly.

I clenched my teeth together and sucked a
breath through them.

“
But maybe I got a little...” he trailed
off and coughed.

“Angry, frustrated, rude?” I suggested.

He looked up darkly, though somewhere under
the pools of shadow drawing beneath his heavy eyebrows was a
flicker of humor. “Maybe,” he growled.

I managed a cautious smile. “What is this
really about? I’m picking up on a subtle undercurrent,” I pointed
out bravely.

“It’s about the murders,” he answered, not
budging slightly.

Damn, Denver knew how to keep his true
intentions hidden.

Fine, if he wanted to play that game, I was
happy to join him.

“
I thought... you might want to know what’s
going on,” he straightened his shoulders as if he were getting
ready to tackle an immovable object head on.

That immovable object was undoubtedly
me.

Yet if he wasn’t going to say what was
really on his mind, I wasn’t going to budge either.

“And I thought you would not be able to tell
me.”

“You’re right; I’m not going to tell you
everything,” he conceded.

Well darn, wasn’t this just the most edgy,
tense conversation I’d ever had.

I waited.

“I thought you’d want to know that we
couldn’t find anything too suspicious with your car.”

I faltered at that. I hadn’t even begun to
suspect that there would be anything suspiciously wrong with my
car.

Before another surge of fright could tackle
me to my knees, Denver shook his head rapidly. “On the face of it,
it appears to have just broken down.”

“
Right...” I managed.

“I talked to the mechanic, and it should be
ready in several days.”

I nodded. If I’d been feeling in a bolshie
mood, I would have pointed out that it was not Denver’s place to go
talking about my car to the mechanic; it was my car. Then again, he
was a Federal Agent investigating two heinous murders, so I kept my
mouth shut.

Staring at my shoes as if they held the
secrets of the universe, I waited for him to continue. When he
didn’t, I glanced up to find him staring at his own shoes with just
the same level of fixed concentration.

Dear god, I felt like I was back in high
school. In the real world, in the adult world, you didn’t have
conversations as awkward and stilted as this. If you had something
to say, you just said it. If you were too polite or sensible to
open your mouth, you excused yourself and walked away instead. You
didn’t just stand there in the mouth of an alleyway shuffling your
feet.

“Patti—”

“Denver,” I said at the same time.

“You go first,” I prompted.

He paused then swallowed gruffly. “You
should stick to main roads when you head home,” he managed
hesitantly, clearly changing what he wanted to say at the last
moment.

“So I can head off on my own then?”

“At this stage it seems fine. Thorne was
right. None of the other victims received threats like yours; they
didn’t receive threats at all. No postcards, no newsletter
messages, no blue pins. As far as we can tell, they had no warning.
Though I don’t for one second think that means anything
conclusive,” he snapped ferociously.

I put a hand up. “I’m not arguing with you,
Denver. Despite the fact I think you’re a jerk, I also think you’re
a trustworthy one and a well-trained one too. And I already told
you, I will do what you tell me to.”

I could have said a lot of things, and I
could have used insults a lot worse than world’s biggest jerk.
Nevertheless, my words had an effect on Denver. Rather than letting
loose with another blast of rage, he pressed his lips together into
a hard and thin line. “I thought you said I wasn’t a jerk?”

I raised an eyebrow tersely. “I’m a
complicated woman.”

Denver laughed.

He actually laughed. “Now that’s an
understatement.”

“And what, you’re a simple guy? If you were
a simple guy, we wouldn’t be having this conversation full of
double entendres and things left unsaid.”

He stopped laughing.

Instead he again stood there silently with
all the intensity of a star.

“It’s a bad idea to get involved with you
right now,” he answered through gritted teeth.

Wow, he was being honest and upfront,
finally.

“You are 100% right,” I swallowed any
disappointment that dared to tighten my stomach. “So let’s leave
what’s in the past in the past. What I need to know from you now is
whether I can leave when my car is ready and whether I will be
safe.”

“
No new information has come up. Though I
can’t repeat the exact details of the investigation, I can say that
currently you’re not in it. Nothing seems to indicate... you will
be next,” he managed uncomfortably.

Forcing myself to straighten my back and
steel my breath to stop my fear from spiraling out of control, I
nodded stiffly.

Then I stopped.

No new information had come up, I repeated
his words in my mind and they instantly reminded me of what I’d
learnt about Nancy.

Maybe he saw my sudden unease, because his
eyebrows crumpled down in a snap. “What?” He even took a jerky step
towards me.

“
I...” I swallowed, my mouth dry and my
throat itchy, “look, it’s likely nothing, but,” I began.

“Tell me,” he snapped.

“Nancy,” I said simply.

“I’m not going to tell you what happened,”
he began.

I put my hand up to stop him. “No, look, I
was talking to Annabelle, and she told me some... disturbing things
about Nancy. Apparently, Nancy was the one who printed those
postcards out, and Annabelle caught her defiling yearbook photos of
me too. And apparently she went to great lengths to try to find out
where I lived and how much I earn.”

Denver snapped his lips closed and looked
pensive.

I wanted him to say something, but instead
he clutched his chin with one hand and rubbed his bristle with
crooked fingers.

“
Annabelle also said that... Nancy was
always unstable, psychopathic even. I know this is going to sound
strange, but ever since she saw me, she’s been acting very strange
around me.”

“Is that it?”

I gave a startled breath. Is that it? I’d
just told him that Nancy had been asking suspicious questions about
me and was likely the one who’d stashed a threatening postcard in
my room.