Lullaby for the Nameless (36 page)

“Ash…”

“Shhh. Save your strength,” she said, vaguely aware of the sounds of footsteps in the forest. Someone shouted, “Over here,” while someone else called in on a radio for an ambulance, and then she felt a presence behind her.

“What the hell happened?” Winters asked.

Tain knelt on the ground beside her.

“Kur—” Ashlyn turned, the dull ache turning to a roar again with the sudden movement. The clearing was empty. “Kurdy shot Parker.”

“What?” Tain asked. “Why?”

Why. The question always asked.

The one they seldom could answer.

“How is he?” Tain asked.

She swallowed. “Clean shot through and through, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”

Craig lifted his bloody hand back up and put it over hers. For the first time since before her assault she looked him in the eyes and saw the ghost of a smile before his eyes flickered and closed.

In the aftermath of a police-involved shooting, there are a lot of questions to answer, and a lot of time is spent on paperwork and procedure, crossing every
t
, dotting every
i
. When the victim is a police officer who’s been suspended everything triples.

At least, that’s how it felt to Ashlyn. She’d been through it before, after she shot and killed Craig’s partner.

Emma Fenton had her exclusive and was only too happy to raise questions about Ashlyn’s actions and whether she was responsible for Parker’s death, but what was undeniable was the set of footprints found at the scene. Footprints that didn’t match hers, Craig’s or Parker’s.

And the skin and blood they found on the butt of the shotgun. Skin and blood that matched Ashlyn’s.

When the tests were completed, another unexpected detail emerged: the bullet that had torn through Craig’s shoulder and lodged itself in his Rodeo had been fired from the same gun that had been used to kill Hank Jeffers’s wife and children. Whatever Parker’s game, he’d used Kurdy. Maybe to try to get them involved, maybe to draw them back to Nighthawk Crossing. Kurdy had been innocent of the crime he’d originally been suspected of, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d killed Parker, and whatever he knew about the case would remain unknown until the day the police caught up with him.

Ashlyn was pretty sure it wouldn’t be anytime soon.

Tain and Ashlyn walked toward the hospital doors.

“Everything okay?” Tain asked.

She knew he was wondering how she felt about going to visit Craig, but she avoided the subject. “That depends. Are you going to quit?”

“You know me too well.”

“I think after what happened to your daughter, you thought being a cop would help you make sense of it all. That you’d be there to save other children from Noelle’s fate. When we stood over that little boy’s body last year, you looked down at Jeffrey Reimer and realized you couldn’t save them. All you could do was deal with the fallout after it was already too late.”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.

“Sometimes, we don’t get answers, Tain,” she said as she stepped inside. She turned around to face him. “Sometimes all we do is clean up a big mess.”

He let the door fall shut behind him. “You’re okay with that? What if we’d known the truth about Millie eighteen months ago?”

Eighteen months ago, when Tain had broken through the front door of the cabin, he’d ducked just in time to avoid having a shotgun blast rip his head apart. In the seconds it took for Bobby Hobbs to realize he’d missed, Tain had lunged forward and knocked Hobbs back onto the floor. Bobby had lost his grip on the shotgun, which had gone spinning across the floor toward the back door, which Ashlyn had just entered. Craig had been right behind her.

Tain had his hand wrapped around Hobbs’s throat, and she pried him off the suspect. It wasn’t until she’d pushed him back and Craig had cuffed Hobbs and removed him from the cabin that Ashlyn had looked up, still catching her breath, to see the petite blonde girl in the corner of the room, wearing an old-fashioned white nightgown.

“Millie? Millie Harper?”

Ashlyn had reached out toward her, but the girl slid down into the corner of the room, eyes wide with fright, hands rising to cover her face.

“It’s okay, Millie. He’ll never hurt you again. We’ve got you. You’re going to be okay now.”

“Please.” The girl looked up, tears streaming down her face. “Please. Please let me die.”

Millie had been put on a psych hold hours later, when she grabbed a pair of scissors and tried to stab herself in the chest.

Ashlyn had assumed Millie never got pregnant, which was why she’d survived. It had never occurred to her that Millie had murdered her baby, a sacrifice to prove her devotion to an abductor who believed the only way she could truly prove her worth was to give up the most important thing in the world.

Her own child.

Parker had learned her secret and exploited her vulnerability. The sacrifice Millie had made to save her own life had ultimately destroyed it.

Ashlyn was torn between the guilt she felt over Millie’s death and the disgust she felt over what Millie had done. She knew she shouldn’t blame Millie; the girl had been abducted, raped and held captive for months, but that didn’t change the fact that every time Ashlyn thought about Millie murdering her own child she felt the rage boil up inside her, and when it passed she was left with nothing but her own emptiness.

She stopped outside Craig’s hospital room.

“When Noelle’s mother killed her, how’d you learn to forgive her?” she asked.

Tain pushed the door open and started to walk inside.

“Who says I have?”