Touch of Evil (27 page)

After promising Justine just this afternoon that he was willing to wait for her, work through their issues—whatever it took to forge a real relationship. After telling her in no uncertain terms he loved her.

Nice way to show it,
he thought as he loped down the corridor, making his way toward the exit.

He left the hospital in time to see her running to the passenger side of a marked department SUV, throwing open the door, and jumping inside before it took off. Though the truck’s emergency lights weren’t on, something in her movements, in what he saw of her expression, sent blue-hot alarm blazing up his backbone. Something was dead wrong there. Even more wrong than his behavior.

You’re being ridiculous,
he told himself.
She’s the county sheriff. She responds to emergency calls every day…

So why wasn’t she driving the same vehicle she’d used to
get here—the vehicle she’d left sitting in the lot? Had it refused to start, perhaps? What else could be the reason?

Whether out of paranoia or instinct, his gaze latched onto the white Suburban, his mind flashing to the last day Anne had driven off on a call, so angry with him that she hadn’t taken time for one final kiss good-bye.

Telemachus said to the other two,

“I shall not let these women die a clean death, for they were insolent to me and my mother, and used to sleep with the suitors.”

So saying he made a ship’s cable fast to one of the bearingposts that supported the roof of the domed room, and secured it all around the building, at a good height, lest any of the women’s feet should touch the ground; and as thrushes or doves beat against a net that has been set for them in a thicket just as they were getting to their nest, and a terrible fate awaits them, even so did the women have to put their heads in nooses one after the other and die most miserably. Their feet moved convulsively for a while, but not for very long.

—Homer, from
The Odyssey
(Samuel Butler translation)

Climbing into the passenger seat, Justine cried, “Go—and hurry. And whatever it is, tell me. You’re going to have to—”

As the vehicle lurched forward, Larry glanced at her. Or not precisely
at
her, but behind her.

This, combined with her surprise that her father hadn’t called
her,
was Justine’s sole warning before a pair of strong hands slipped something slim and dark over her head and pulled back hard against her neck—hard enough to cut off her breathing instantly.

Instinct brought her hands up, her nails digging into her
own flesh as she sought to remove the shocking pain and pressure. Swerving to the right, Larry stopped the truck and reached across her, even as she groped with one hand for her weapon. By the time her mind registered his betrayal, he had the gun, and her vision was swarming with thick, gray globs edged by lightning.

Drawing back her knees, she kicked out at Larry as she scratched the back of the strong hands still pulling the strap tight across her throat. She felt her foot strike Larry’s knee, heard him yelp with pain. But her lungs screamed for oxygen, and the gray globs exploded like a million fireworks. Her movements went from frantic to spasmodic, weakening and then stilling altogether.

The last thing she heard was Larry’s dim voice, saying, “Let up on her, all right? We can’t have her dying. Not here, anyway. Not yet.”

The SUV had barely reached the road when Ross saw it swerve onto the shoulder and stop abruptly. Was that…What was he seeing through the driver’s window? He couldn’t make out the deputy’s face, but he would swear he was watching some kind of struggle.

Heart pounding, Ross looked wildly around the parking lot but saw no one until a tan sedan backed out of its space. Recognizing Debbie’s Accord, he raced to catch her, regretting the hope that flashed over her expression as she jammed the brakes and began lowering the window.

He didn’t wait but instead tore open the passenger-side door. Jumping in, he watched her eyes round at his expression.

“What is it, Ross? What’s wrong?”

He pointed to the white Suburban, which had resumed its journey in the direction of the lake. “I need you to follow them,” he said, “but hang back some. It’s important they don’t see that we’re behind them.”

Debbie didn’t take her foot off the brake. “What on earth? What’s going on here? I’m not moving till you—”

“Just drive, will you?” he roared, not caring when she shrank back. “Either drive or get the hell out of the way and let me go alone.”

Hope is the most sensitive part of a poor wretch’s soul; whoever raises it only to torment him is behaving like the executioners in Hell who, they say, incessantly renew old wounds and concentrate their attention on that area of it that is already lacerated.

—The Marquis de Sade, in a 1781 letter to his wife from prison

Justine woke to a throbbing in her neck, the kind that told her she must have slept with her head turned at an awkward angle. Eyes still closed, she struggled to recall the dream, but nothing remained of it but the dark miasma of some shocking betrayal.

Shake it off,
she told herself, and reached to rub her neck.

Or tried to. Her hands were trapped, bound up in…
the covers?
And she felt something, road vibration. Was she in a moving vehicle?

Jolting fully awake, she heard men talking, slamming her with realization: This was no dream. It was a nightmare, real and present, encircling her neck and accounting for her pain. Though forced upright by the strap, she could at least breathe. For the moment.

They meant to kill her; that much was clear. But bound as she was, what could she do to stop them?

“Regular payments, soon as it’s up and running,” came the voice behind her.

It was all Justine could do to feign unconsciousness. For she had heard that voice before, heard it when her father had
played Noah’s digital recorder into the phone. This was the same man who’d dared take her son, the same bastard who’d put the rough hemp rope around Noah’s thin neck…

“Cash payments—I want cash,” insisted a second, even more familiar voice. Shock broke over Justine again in fresh waves.
Larry Crane,
her chief deputy—the one man she had trusted. “To my campaign before the election and then afterward, to me. I won’t have the same damned footprints in my bank accounts that you left all over hers and Savoy’s. Still can’t believe nobody figured that out. Not all that subtle, once you look at the initials, Mr. Sunrise Happy Doodle. You think you were being funny, or did you mean to send a message?”

Justine tried to think, but couldn’t. What had Larry figured out that she’d missed? SHD—of course. Oh, God.

“A real comedian—that’s me.” Laughter, clipped and mirthless, followed. “Cash’ll be fine, Crane, now that you’ve gone too far to back out on me.”

“Is that what happened with Savoy?” Larry asked, sounding nervous. “He try to screw you over once you paid him?”

“Didn’t work out too well for him, either. Dumb ass turned his back on me—me with a handy silk handkerchief in my pocket—while he was looking through that abandoned car for evidence.”

The disjointed thought floated through Justine’s mind that Savoy must have called Laney to tell her he’d found her car, must have gotten her cell number while investigating the noose found in her aunt’s kitchen.

“Started running his mouth about how he hadn’t signed on to help snatch kids and he wasn’t killing anybody, not even this bitch sheriff.”

The speaker gave Justine’s neck a vicious yank, hard enough to make her cry out and struggle against the pain. He kept the pressure tight so that bloody starbursts exploded in her vision and her lungs collapsed on themselves.

“I figured to warn you off by dumping the body in your pasture,” he said, “but you couldn’t take the hint, could you? You stubborn goddamned…”

His words dissolved into the roaring in Justine’s ears. Spasming, her body jerked so hard it threatened to pull her shoulders from their sockets as she fought the cuffs that bound her hands behind her. Kicking wildly, she bit down on her tongue and tasted blood.

“C’mon, man. Not in the truck.” Edged with panic, Larry’s plea cut through the awful din. “Tough explaining stains in my truck—and we can’t get caught. I
can’t.
”

“What’s wrong with you? Have you gone crazy?” Blue eyes wide, Debbie stared up in alarm, her mouth an open circle and her hands tight on the wheel.

With no time for her questions, Ross jumped out of the car and went around to her side. Something in his face must have scared her, for he saw her going for the lock as he ripped the door open and dragged her from the car.

“I’m sorry, Deb. I’m really sorry.”

“What—
No!
” she cried as he climbed in and threw the Honda into gear.

Barely registering the next words she screamed at him, he mashed the gas pedal to the floorboard, spinning the car’s tires before they abruptly bit into the lot’s surface and flung him toward the road.

A passing car slammed its brakes, horn blaring, as Ross cut off the driver. Ignoring the noise, he looked straight ahead, but by now the county SUV was out of sight.

A grim idea flashed through his head, a location that had haunted his nightmares since his last trip there with Justine. Following fear as much as instinct, he raced toward the turnoff, though at every intersection he slowed to look both ways for the missing vehicle.

With no luck, he continued, praying he was wrong about
this, that he’d somehow misinterpreted what he’d seen before scaring Debbie half to death and committing a fistful of crimes in the process.

But a grave awareness overtook him, a grim knowledge that lurked beneath the surface, steadying his hands, his heart, and steeling his mind for whatever was to come.

Call someone,
that segment of subconscious commanded.
You can drive and call for help at the same time.

But with at least one, maybe more of the department’s deputies involved, where exactly could he call? Whom could he trust?

As he reached for his phone, he caught his first glimpse of the taillights. Taillights of a large vehicle headed toward Bone Lake.

As the pressure eased, Justine sucked in precious oxygen and willed herself not to whimper, not to weep, not to think about the child depending on her or the father who would hardly be surprised that, once again, his daughter had trusted the wrong man.

Not Ross.
But she’d messed up there, too, holding herself back for so long, then walking out rather than making certain he knew that whatever happened with his cousin, she would be on his side. On
their
side.

So tell him,
whispered a voice inside her head. A voice she hadn’t heard in years. Hadn’t really listened to in even longer.

Mom?
she asked, opening her eyes to see her mother smiling at her. Her mother, as beautiful and statuesque as she’d been before the cancer struck her.

Sitting at her vanity set, she set down her brush and looked into her mirror at the girl on the bed.
Tell your father how he made you feel. Talk it over with him.

She caught a lingering note of her mother’s perfume, and
Justine was back there, in her parents’ bedroom at the new house, the one built after the fire. Lying on her stomach on the comforter, all of eleven, maybe twelve, and aching with grief she didn’t dare express, grief for both the brother she had lost and the father who’d turned his back on her.

You killed him…
His words roared back at her, as clear as ever—words spoken in those first raw weeks after the fire.

He hates me,
Justine told her mother.
He hates me because it was all my fault.

Her mother turned on the little stool where she sat. Leaning forward, she shook her head, her dark eyes leaking tears.
No. He hates himself. Because he’s never been so wrong.

And just that quickly, it came spinning back. The fire marshal’s report, which her mother had explained to her in detail while her father stood at her side mutely, stoic in his grief. The blaze’s origin—an ashtray containing a lit marijuana cigarette, hurriedly shoved under her brother’s bed when he’d run downstairs to see his friend’s new truck. The ignition point the edge of a sheet that came into contact with the burning joint.

Eddie had perished in a fire he’d accidentally started. Died because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing his only sister to a mistake he may have realized was his own.

But Justine had refused to hear it. Had absorbed almost nothing except her father’s inability to look her in the eye.

Had understood so little, until an adult’s perspective allowed her to see it all with new eyes: her father’s regret and shame for lashing out as he had. Her shattered confidence pushing her toward a string of flawed decisions.

So many mistakes, so little forgiveness. Not so much for her father or the men in her life, but for a woman who thought she’d deserved no better…

Another jerk at her neck. A jolt of pain so sharp, it made Justine gasp, her eyes flaring.

“Awake now, are you?” Standing outside the open truck door, Erik Whatley of Southern Humane Detention leaned in to leer at her, the sunset turning golden the silver of his hair. “Good. I want you to feel every minute. I want you to die in agony, you bitch.”

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

With no weapon and little hope that the help he’d called would make it in time, Ross had hung well back as the white Suburban pulled off the road into the darkening woods. He waited as long as he dared, then followed, leaving the headlights off in the hope he wouldn’t be spotted.

Debbie’s car rolled forward, wallowing in ruts before getting stuck. Cursing, Ross tried to back up, but it was no use. The Accord had taken him as far as it could.

He climbed out of the car and ducked when he spotted headlights flickering through the trees behind him. Keeping low, he raced into the shadow of the trees, cutting through the brush toward the lake. He paused only once to look back over his shoulder in the hope that someone—preferably the cavalry—had arrived. But seeing nothing, Ross decided the vehicle, and the answer to his prayers for help, had passed by on its way elsewhere.

But he couldn’t turn his back on Justine, no matter what it cost him. So he simply blundered forward, deeper into the gloom.

Erik Whatley pushed a gun in Justine’s face. Not Lou’s gun, which had been taken from her inside the Suburban, but the same SIG Sauer she had lost in these very woods the night of Laney Thibodeaux’s attack. But a bullet didn’t scare her half
as much as the rope Whatley had coiled over his shoulder. A rope that told her all she needed to know of his plans for her.

Whatley said, “I should’ve shot you when I followed you out here that time before. Or should’ve bashed your fucking head in with the golf club.”

“You…” she slurred. “You bastard…”

“I gave you warning after warning to quit pretending you didn’t know about your husband’s deal with us and—”

Head drooping, Justine flexed her knees, feigning a collapse even as a desperate strength coiled in her muscles. Though her hands remained cuffed and she couldn’t see where Larry was, she knew she was running out of time. Time for anything except enough of a surprise to cause confusion. Maybe, if she was supremely lucky, enough confusion to escape into the gathering darkness.

When she didn’t respond, Whatley leaned in close to whisper, “Or maybe I should’ve killed that kid of yours, that goddamned little freak.”

Seizing her fury, she launched herself up and forward, slamming the top of her head into the man’s face, hitting him hard enough to send a fresh crop of stars bursting across her vision. Yelping with the impact, Whatley staggered backward.

Justine tried to run. But with her arms pulled back and her world careening, she managed only a few steps before pitching forward. Her ribs slammed into a stumplike cypress knee with an audible crack and splintering pain.

A deafening roar of gunshot followed, dirt and wood chips spraying her and acrid smoke burning her nostrils. But she couldn’t suck in a deep breath, couldn’t even cry out. The agony of her rib cage wouldn’t let her.

“Just a warning, Sheriff,” Larry Crane said, speaking from a spot not far to her left. His voice shook, a last vestige of the old Ichabod, but she heard the resolve, perhaps even the desperation,
of a man who had gone too far to turn back. “Don’t move. Because I’m ready to prove I’ve got the goddamned guts to do this.”

Nearby, she heard Whatley groaning, “God damn it—bitch broke my nose.”

Ignoring him, Justine scooped out shallow breaths and tasted something metallic—more blood from her bitten tongue?

“Larry, why?” she managed, barely achieving a whisper. Trying again, she asked, “Why? After all I’ve—”

“It’s not my fault,” he insisted. “It’s these damned greedy doctors and their expensive treatments. They feed your hope with science—fertility drugs and surgery, in vitro, egg donorship. And then a surrogate—we have to pay for her, too. Nobody ever brings up how all this costs a fortune, how fast that stuff eats through your savings—and the second mortgage you had to take out. They just assume that you can—”

“Please, for
my
son,” Justine pleaded.

Larry spoke over her. “I can’t tell Marianne there’s no more money. It’s breaking her heart tending everybody else’s kids when
she
deserves to be a mother. Besides, I’ve had enough of these bastards saying I don’t have the balls to make my own kid. And telling me I’d never have the guts to grab a little on the side to pay for treatment.”

Misery resonated through Crane’s voice, as if the pathetic worm still saw himself as poor, maligned Ichabod rather than a Judas.

“Not…not grabbing a little here.” She gasped the words, her breathing growing more painful with each word. “This—it’s murder.”

Footsteps crunched through the dried leaves, and Whatley stooped to shove a noose over her head. “She’s had as much of a fucking explanation as she’s going to get. Now get up, bitch. Up before I shoot you where you lie.”

As he snugged the knot around her neck, Justine wondered, Would it be quicker and less painful dying from a bullet or swinging from a branch?

With his eyes adjusting to the twilight shadows, Ross pushed his way through the Spanish moss hanging like webs meant to entangle man-size prey. He’d been moving in the wrong direction, his heart pounding and sweat streaming from his failure to find Justine, when a gunshot drew him like a beacon.

Other things moved through the underbrush as well. Birds startled from cover by the blast, raccoons or maybe small deer or a possum eager to avoid the larger creatures disturbing their domain. No snakes yet that he’d heard, but they had to be here, too, along with their alligator cousins so close to the water.

Bulling his way through thorny vines, Ross forged ahead, nothing in his hand for a weapon but the arm-size branch he’d snapped off a fallen tree. Not enough to stop a bullet, but that wasn’t going to dissuade him. Not when fate had allowed him a chance, however minute, to stop death in its tracks this time and save the woman he’d driven off with his words.

Finally close enough, he heard the rough murmur of conversation, pulled Justine’s choked questions from the mix. “Why? Why…kill…those musicians? What’ve you got to do with—”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” came a voice Ross recognized.

And it finally sank it, what Debbie had been shouting as he’d driven off in her car.
You’re not him, Ross. You’re not Erik!
The ex-husband who’d abused her.

Gwen’s desperate, cash-strapped lover, Erik Whatley.

But had he come alone, desperate enough to steal a department SUV to catch Justine off guard?

“And that’s the beauty of it.” Whatley sounded absolutely gleeful, like a man freed of unbearable burdens. “Whatever happens here tonight gets pinned on some psycho. Now get up. On your feet.”

Branch poised, Ross moved even nearer, until he finally spotted a silhouetted form bent over a second figure. Justine, lying on her side. In one of Whatley’s hands, Ross recognized a gun, while the other held the end of a rope coiled over one shoulder.

Whatley pulled it, dragging Justine like a leashed animal. With a choked cry, she moved to her hands and knees and struggled desperately to her feet. Whatley jerked back even harder, causing her to fall forward once again as he laughed. “God, this is gonna be fun. See how you like struggling for survival for a change.”

Ross rushed at the bastard. Swinging the branch like a baseball bat, he made contact with Whatley’s skull even as Whatley swung the gun around to shoot him.

Ross heard the crack, felt the force of the blow traveling up his arms. But the gunshots didn’t give him time to worry.

The gunshots from a wholly unexpected angle.

“Ross!” Justine called, desperate to be heard over the shooting going on around them, between Larry on the one side and some unseen gunman on the other.
Let it be help,
she prayed. Help enough to save them. “Ross—get down.
Please.
”

As he lowered himself, something struck him, turned him. Sprawling awkwardly, he landed facedown with a grunt, his hand reaching to cover the dark blood at his left shoulder.

“Behind you, Deputy—move and you’re dead,” came the order, harsh, commanding, and stone-cold. “Toss the gun into the bushes or you’ll spoil everything.”

“Head down. Don’t move,” Justine whispered frantically.
For no help had found them, but something even more frightening than Whatley—and a hell of a lot scarier than the traitor Crane.

“I…I surrender. Please don’t shoot me. Please.” The deputy sobbed the words, pitching his weapon underhanded, but too far away for Justine to get to. Whatley’s, on the other hand…But was the man unconscious after Ross’s attack? Or was he lying still as she was, trying to fly beneath the newcomer’s radar until he knew what was going on?

Ross must be thinking the same thing. Closer to Whatley, he was studying the still form and inching forward on his stomach.

“Don’t worry, Deputy. You won’t be shot,” the newcomer called back, each word brittle ice. “Not if I can help it. On your knees, and hands up. You, too—all of you,
on your knees.
”

Justine and Ross made eye contact. In the split second before he went limp, she saw a promise in his gaze. A promise that, despite the bullet that had struck him, his “collapse” was part of a plan to save them.

As Larry whimpered and followed the orders, Erik Whatley gurgled, choking on his own blood. The armed man was on him in an instant, bending too quickly for Justine to make out his face. Plucking up Whatley’s weapon, he stuck it in his belt before snatching up the coiled rope and roaring, “You
dare
try passing off your sloppy work as mine?”

The gurgling stopped abruptly, but the newcomer kicked him to be sure. Repeatedly, for all the good it did, cursing as he did so and jerking on the rope around Justine’s neck.

She grunted in pain. A grunt that had the man adding, “I’ll need you to stand, Sheriff.”

Oh, God. It’s Simon Cordero.
The man who’d drugged and raped his “special project,” Laney Thibodeaux, and hanged the band’s other members, then had the nerve to play the
generous benefactor at Caleb LeJeune’s funeral. The generous benefactor married to a beauty queen from South America. Was that where he’d heard of scopolamine’s illegal uses?

“Hurt,” Justine said, arm wrapped protectively around her ribs as she chanced a lie. “Can’t get up.”

“A shame,” the bald man answered. “I’ll have to shoot you here.”

As he turned the gun on her, Larry saw his moment, lurched to his feet, and tried to run. In an instant, Cordero swung and sighted, firing a shot that took the deputy down, his shrill shriek echoing beneath the moss-draped canopy. Not a killing shot, though, for Larry sobbed, “My ear, my ear—you shot it off. It’s gone!”

“Quiet,” Cordero ordered. “Don’t ruin this for me with all your bleating, or I swear I’ll shoot off the other one—or maybe your dick, if you’ve got one.”

Though moving hurt like hell, Justine managed to get her feet beneath her. “There’s no reason to hurt anyone. You can still walk away from—”

“You’re wrong there—or simply lying. I want this case closed. An officer already known for her corruption dispensing a little vigilante justice, before unfortunately taking her own life.” Cordero gestured with his gun toward the spot where Ross lay unmoving. “I’m gonna need him up, too.”

Something akin to humor came to his voice as Cordero added, “Because I’ve already seen the elephant. I’ll need something more for my last time.”

Numb with shock, Justine stared down at the still form, her back turned to Cordero. She could no longer be certain Ross’s ruse was an act, considering the dark stain spreading at his shoulder.

But then Ross slitted his eyes open and mouthed the words,
I’m still here.

A ribbon of warmth flowed through her, a relief like nothing
she’d felt in all her life.
I love you,
she mouthed back, exaggerating each word so he would understand, before she whipped around, intent on saving at least one of their lives.

Still in his pocket, Ross’s phone vibrated beneath his hip. Had the help he’d called arrived?

But in the dimness of this patch of woods, there was no way Ed Truitt would find them. Not without direction, and certainly not in time.

“You…you killed him, you bastard,” Justine told Cordero, the raw current of her pain convincing. Stepping toward him, she said, “You killed Ross—Laney’s cousin. You care about Laney, don’t you?”

Justine was taking a calculated risk, he knew. A guess based on the fact that Laney had been left alive, though she’d been brought to this spot.

“She looks so much like my wife,” Cordero told her. “The way my Serafina looked when we married.”

“I’m sure she was very beautiful,” Justine answered, “and I’m sure you miss her very much. The bluffs, right? She died on the bluffs beside Lake Whitney.”

When he didn’t answer, she pressed further, angling farther from Ross as she spoke. Risking death to give him some chance of survival.

Tuning out his pain, Ross crawled closer to Whatley’s body and prayed the man had carried something else besides the gun Cordero had taken. Even a pocketknife…

“You two liked to fish there, didn’t you?” Justine asked. “Was that why you chose that place to hang her, because it was special to—”

“No!” Cordero glared at Justine, his gun shaking with his outrage. “
She
did it herself. Did it to punish me. Because she found out about Laney. She…My Serafina knew all about us—”

“Laney? You were…you were having an affair with—”

“Laney kept saying she needed money to care for Jake, but I knew better. Knew damned well the bitch was nothing but ambitious—perfectly willing to screw me if it would keep me focused on getting a recording contract for the band.”

Ross felt the truth slide into place. Laney had been lying when she’d claimed Kenneth, a platonic friend, as her lover. She’d lied, too, about her pregnancy, unwilling to admit she’d slept with her married agent.

“So she was using you,” Justine prompted, her words a snare to keep the killer talking and ensure that his focus remained fixed on her.