Set the Dark on Fire (20 page)

“She wasn’t bad,” he admitted, studying her face. “More like troubled.”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out he thought the same of her, and she didn’t want to hear any more. She didn’t need him psychoanalyzing her. And her blood boiled with jealousy at the thought of him with another woman, this sultry siren who’d done him wrong.

“She worked at a strip club.”

Her mouth fell open.

“As a waitress,” he clarified, smiling a little. “And no, I didn’t approve. She kept it from me. I didn’t find out until after we moved in together.”

A liar and a slut
, a catty voice inside her head whispered. “Hmm,” she said aloud.

“She also did drugs. I didn’t know about that until too late, either.”

“Too late?”

“After we broke up.”

Judging by his expression, his girlfriend’s drug habit was something he felt responsible for. “So you found out she worked at a strip club and kicked her out on the streets?”

“Of course not,” he said with a frown. “I didn’t like that she’d lied to me about her job, but the tips were good and she was putting herself through college. We argued about it, sure, and then we … made up.”

In bed
. She felt a sharp tug in the middle of her chest, like a twisting knife.

“I bought her a ring. I thought she’d let me pay for her classes if we got married.”

“You were in love with her?” she asked, her voice steady.

He shrugged, as if the question didn’t bother him. “I thought so. But I was young and stupid and unrealistic. I wanted her to fit an ideal.” His eyes met hers, and Shay knew he was comparing her with his ex again. “She wouldn’t have.”

“Did you propose?”

“No. The night I planned to, she called and said she had to work late. I was pissed off and spoiling for a fight. I went to the club and found one.”

“With her?”

“Not exactly. She was waiting on a group of college kids. I’d been watching her all night, counting every drink she peddled, every smile she gave, every tip she collected. Acting like a jealous fool. When one of the guys copped a feel, I lost it.”

“You hurt him?”

“Nah. The bouncer pulled me away from him before I did any permanent damage. But she … we … it was never the same between us. She thought I didn’t trust her and she was right. I didn’t ask her to marry me, but I did ask her to quit. She refused.” He rubbed a hand over his shadowed jaw, looking every bit as drained as Shay felt. “After that, she was home less and less. She started staying out all night and skipping her classes, sleeping all day. Eventually, she moved out … and I moved on.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Ten years.”

“You feel responsible for a girl who lied to you and left you
ten years ago?”

“She died of a drug overdose last year. I was called in to identify the body.” He swallowed hard, his eyes bleak. “They found my name in her emergency contact info. Yeah, it was ten years ago, but I was the only person who cared about her. It was ten years ago, but I was the only one she ever trusted.”

Tears burned in her own eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I knew you’d understand. Sometimes we feel responsible for things that are beyond our control.”

He was talking about her mother. Not fair.

Giving her another pointed glance, he added, “And sometimes we have to let go in order to move on.”

She sputtered, incredulous. “You haven’t moved on!”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “I’ve dated other women, but I haven’t put much effort into making it last. In fact, I’ve actively avoided anyone who seemed … needy.”

She felt the color drain from her cheeks. “Is that what you think I am?”

He had the nerve to laugh. And the wherewithal to step out of striking range. “No,” he said, sobering. “You’re the first one who’s made me feel like moving on.”

She gripped the purse in her hands until her knuckles went white. It was appalling how much she wanted to believe him, to let go of her hang-ups and throw herself into his arms. Being this vulnerable terrified her, however, and she’d been hurt by men far too often. “Let’s not make this more complicated than it is,” she urged. “You’re lots of fun when you take your clothes off, but I never said I wanted to get serious. And the only moving on you’ll be doing is when you leave town.”

A muscle in his jaw ticked as he weighed her words. “I won’t share you,” he said quietly, looking into her eyes.

His possessiveness warmed her, scared her, confused her. She shook the feeling away, struggling to remain aloof.

“Are you still in love with Jesse?”

“That’s none of your business,” she said, her heart racing with anxiety. “This morning you said you didn’t want me! You can’t just—change your mind about us, and notify me afterward. I’m not your doormat, Luke. And I’m not your girlfriend.”

He shoved his hands into his front pockets, a scowl darkening his face. “What if I said I would stay?”

The center dropped out of her stomach. It took her a moment to compose herself, to push aside her emotions and reassemble her defenses. “Don’t bother to make empty promises,” she said, a thousand past disappointments making her voice gritty. “This is Tenaja Falls. No one with a lick of sense ever stays.”

19

Luke was back at Dark Canyon with Shay, lost in sensation once again, gritting his teeth in pleasure at the feel of her slick heat around him, her cushiony hips in his hands, and her soft, wet mouth under his
.

When he lifted his gaze to her face, he saw Leticia instead of Shay, her head listing to one side, eyes hollow, skin gray. He pulled away from her in dismay
.

That disturbing scene dissolved into another
.

He was walking down a long, dark hallway, his footsteps echoing loudly. Urged forward against his will, he opened the door to the morgue and approached a shrouded form on a stainless steel exam table. Reaching out with a shaking hand, he uncovered her face. The dead woman on the table wasn’t Leticia, or even Yesenia Montes. It was Shay. Bloody and broken, her slender neck gouged by monster teeth
.

He jerked awake with a start.

Wilson Dawes, one of the rookie firemen Luke had been sharing quarters with, was hovering over him, cordless phone in hand. “It’s for you.”

He sat up and took the receiver, remembering that his cell phone was still out of order. Wilson had caught him in an awkward moment, sweating, panting … and fully aroused.

Jesus Christ. This was great fodder for his next psych eval. His cock didn’t know the difference between a sex dream and a nightmare.

“Thanks,” he said in a hoarse voice, adjusting the blanket around his waist. Either Dawes didn’t notice or wasn’t fazed, because he lumbered away with a sleepy yawn, unself-conscious in his own underwear.

Luke lifted the phone to his ear. “Meza.”

“We have another body.” It was Clay Trujillo.

He straightened, shaking off the remnants of the dream. “Attacked by a lion?”

Pause. “No.”

His heart jumped into his throat. “Who is it?”

“Bull Ryan.”

Holy hell. Luke hadn’t been in town long, but he knew Bull was the owner of Tenaja Building Company. He was also Jesse Ryan’s father. And Clay’s.

The deputy wouldn’t have woken him up unless the circumstances were suspicious. This was a wrongful death investigation.

“You shouldn’t be there,” Luke said cautiously.

“I know.”

“Where is it?”

“On the new construction site.”

That was reservation land, out of his jurisdiction. “You call in the FBI?”

“Yeah, but they won’t get here for a while and … we thought you should see this.”

He was already on his feet. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

It took him more like fifteen, but he drove as fast as he dared along the deserted dirt road. By the time he arrived at the site, the morning sun was peeking over the edge of the horizon. A small group of construction workers was gathered around a collection of beat-up trucks in the gravel parking lot.

Two tribal police SUVs blocked the exit. Samson Mortero stood guard next to them, his rifle turned up toward the pink-blue sky.

Luke parked alongside the other vehicles and nodded at Samson, who allowed him to walk past without a word. There was a definite advantage to working with other Indians on a sensitive case. They weren’t likely to run their mouths about the details.

A group of construction workers waited on the sidelines, shifting their feet restlessly and talking amongst themselves in Spanish. Luke continued on to the office trailers, where Clay and Chief Mortero were waiting for him.

The chief greeted him somberly, as expressionless as ever. Clay looked as though he was trying to remain calm, but he was a young man in a grueling situation. He wasn’t able to keep the anger, or the suspicion, off his face.

“Go take a look,” he bit out, jerking his chin toward the open trailer door.

Luke did, stepping into the small office lightly, careful not to touch or disturb any of the evidence. There was a lot of it. Papers strewn across the room. Files ransacked. Chairs overturned.

Bull Ryan lay facedown in the middle of the floor. He couldn’t have been there long, probably since quitting time the day before, but the smell of death was overwhelming and would only get worse as the day grew warmer.

There was no blood, no gunshot wound, no knife sticking out of his back.

The only injury, as far as Luke could tell, was at the top of his head. His scalp had been lacerated and was hanging at an odd angle, like a misplaced flap.

Now Luke understood Clay’s fury It flowed through him as well, cold and deliberate, hardening his heart and icing his veins.

Bull Ryan had been
scalped
.

Luke knew immediately that his people were not responsible for this. The Luiseño had never practiced scalping. None of the California Indians had.

Nor did Bull appear to have died from the injury. There was almost no blood, indicating that the wound had been inflicted postmortem. Whoever did this scalped Bull Ryan after they killed him.

The idea that someone would defile a corpse this way chilled and disgusted him. The fact that they had done so with the clear intention to cast suspicion upon, and aspersions toward, his own culture, enraged him.

It was difficult to stay in the room without flying off the handle, to continue his silent examination when he wanted to shout in anger, but Luke kept a quiet front. The evidence would have to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb, and he was sure the FBI would be meticulous. They might be condescending and culturally insensitive, but they were always meticulous.

For now, Luke limited himself to studying the piece of paper clasped in Bull’s dead hand. It appeared to be an employment application. Crouching down, he nudged the top of the page with his penlight, revealing a young man’s slanted scrawl:

Dylan Phillips.

“Fuck,” he muttered, standing abruptly. Shit piled on top of shit.

Outside the trailer, Chief Mortero studied him dispassionately and Clay looked as though he was ready to throw down.

Luke had a flash of intuition. Clay Trujillo didn’t think one of his own people was responsible for this … cultural mutilation. He thought
Luke
had done it.

“You got something to say to me?” he asked Clay.

Chief Mortero raised his dark brows. “This is a conversation …” he trailed off, nodding toward the group of workers in the near distance, “… not meant to carry on the wind.”

Luke agreed one hundred percent. He pointed at Clay. “Let’s take a walk.”

Clay followed him readily but Chief Mortero stayed behind, which was even better. Luke didn’t want anyone to come between his fists and Clay’s face.

“You can’t think I had anything to do with that,” he said as soon as they were out of earshot, standing on a clearing of sandy, hard-packed dirt.

“You’re an outsider. And an Indian.” He squinted at Luke’s neatly pressed clothes and close-cropped hair. “Sort of.”

Luke saw red. It was the same kind of insult he’d heard throughout his childhood.
You’re not Indian
enough. You act too white
. Coming from a guy with blue eyes, it smarted hard. “I have more Native blood than you ever will.”

Clay lifted his chin. “At least I’m proud of who I am.”

Luke grabbed him by the front of his uniform. “And I’m not? Why, because I have short hair? That ponytail might have gotten you a lot of pussy in college, pretty boy, but it doesn’t make you any more Indian than me.”

Clay shoved him backward. “You brought this trouble,
Chief
. It followed you here.”

“I didn’t bring shit,” he returned, standing his ground. “This town was already fucked up when I came.”

“Oh, yeah? I heard there was a hit on you.”

Luke’s blood ran cold. “Who told you that?”

“Mike Shepherd.”

Christ. There truly were no secrets in Tenaja Falls. “The guys in Vegas wouldn’t mess around with fires or cryptic signs. They’d just shoot me in the head and be done with it.”

“Why didn’t they do that the first time?”

Luke had considered this question before. A bulletproof vest was not an inconspicuous accessory. “Maybe they wanted me gone, not necessarily dead.”

“Mission accomplished.”

“Yeah,” he said dismissively, no longer bitter about the turn of events.

“We don’t want you here, either. Take your bad vibes somewhere else.”

This community didn’t want him? How ironic. But Luke was damned if he was going to let anyone tell him he couldn’t stay. “I have no motive to harm Bull Ryan. You, on the other hand, are his estranged son.”

“I prefer the term
unacknowledged,”
he said, his voice dripping sarcasm.

Luke studied his tense face, knowing Clay was struggling to hide how much being illegitimate bothered him. “Does Jesse know you’re in love with his wife?”

Clay’s mouth twisted bitterly, but he made no reply.

“Maybe I’ll ask him myself.”

“You do that.”

Luke felt some of his anger seep away, because he could empathize with Clay. Although Bull hadn’t treated him like a son, Clay mourned the loss all the same. Luke knew how that was. He missed his own father, a man who’d never really been there for him and still wasn’t.

“Is Jesse at the station?”

Clay nodded. “Sleeping like a baby.”

“I’ll meet you over there,” Luke said. “But first, I’m going to send Garrett out to pick up someone. A person of interest.”

“Who?”

“Dylan Phillips.”

Dylan arrived at school dead tired. He hadn’t slept well last night, after Angel left, and he hadn’t slept at all the night before.

As soon as he got home from work tonight, he was going straight to bed.

He stopped by the vending machines on the way to his locker and bought a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew. Chugging it, because he needed the caffeine rush before his first-period class, he made his way through the teeming masses, shouldering past giggling cheerleaders and raccoon-eyed Goths.

He entered his locker combination and opened it automatically, going through the motions. The sugary soft drink was already kicking in, rousing him from his zombielike state. When he saw what was pasted inside his locker, the green plastic bottle slipped from his hand, hitting the ground at his feet and spraying sticky yellow liquid all over his Vans.

Ignoring the mess, he reached out to grab the picture.

It was a graphic, full-color shot, totally Not Safe for School, obviously printed out from a porn site on the Internet. The woman in the photo had her hand between her splayed legs, fingers spreading herself open, showing everything she had to offer.

Her body was that of a stranger, but her head, obviously applied by Photoshop, belonged to Shay.

Rage swept through him at the sight. Although the cut-and-paste job was good, he recognized the photo of Shay that had been superimposed over the porn star’s face. It had been taken during a backyard BBQ at the Pinter residence on Chad’s seventeenth birthday.

“Motherfucker,” he muttered, crushing the printout in his hands.

Down the hall, there was a burst of male laughter. Dylan looked their way, only to see Chad with a group of his football buddies, all holding copies of the same picture. When Chad was sure he had Dylan’s attention, he leaned forward and licked the page.

“Motherfucker,” he said again, through clenched teeth.

Chad laughed and disappeared down the hall with his friends, who were making rude jokes and clapping him on the back.

By the time the bell rang, Dylan still hadn’t moved. He was standing at his open locker door, shaking with anger, the fake picture of his sister crumpled in his fist.

He felt like he was going to explode.

He wanted to blow something apart.

There were no incendiary devices in his locker, because he wasn’t that stupid, but there were plenty of dangerous materials in the chemistry lab. He pictured breaking the glass case in Mr. Richards’ office, stealing a shitload of stuff, and rigging a homemade bomb to put inside Chad’s locker.

In this fantasy, severed limbs and general mayhem ensued. Followed immediately by his arrest, expulsion, and incarceration.

“Damn it,” he breathed, knowing he couldn’t go that route.

He couldn’t even fight Chad the old-fashioned way, mano a mano, at least not on school grounds, without getting into trouble with the law.

After taking a few deep breaths to calm his fury, it occurred to him that he didn’t need to use chemical warfare or even his fists. He didn’t have any explosives on him, but he did have a buck knife. He’d thought it might come in handy at the job site this afternoon, or he wouldn’t have brought the contraband item to school.

Now he would use it to exact some revenge.

Going to class was out of the question in his volatile state of mind, so he shut his locker and picked up his soda. It was still half full. Lifting the bottle to his mouth with one hand, he shoved the picture into his pocket with the other, continuing down the hall and across the quad, making his way out to the parking lot and walking off school grounds.

After breakfast, Angel sent Yoli and Daniel out to wait for the school bus. “I want to talk to you for a minute,” she said, putting her hand on Ricardo’s shoulder before he could follow them.