Trust Me (3 page)

What was her alternative?

Skye imagined running, hiding, maybe relocating closer to her stepfather. But if Burke was truly bent on finding her, he'd be able to do so sooner or later because she refused to cut all ties with the people and places she loved, refused to let him cost her any more than he already had. Besides, she didn't feel that close to her stepfather. He'd moved in with her mother when Skye was nine and moved out again when she was thirteen. Although her own father had died in a skiing accident when she was two, and Joe was all she'd ever really had as a replacement, they'd lived together for barely four years.

In any case, she couldn't leave Sheridan and Jasmine to run The Last Stand alone. They were a small army fighting for the victims of senseless violence. That was the only way they could make sense of what had happened to them.

"It'll be okay." She straightened her spine. "It just... threw me for a minute." What had she been thinking? She didn't have the luxury of crumpling beneath this news. Maybe they'd failed to uncover a connection between Burke and those three murders. But they had to keep trying, especially now. Before he attacked someone else. One of the lives she saved could be her own.

"At least sell the house and buy a gated condo here in town," Sheridan was saying. She'd been urging Skye to do that for ages, but Skye couldn't let go of the delta house. She'd moved back home after the stabbing and spent those last years with her mother. This was all she had left of her only parent, all she had left of her childhood--that period of time when she'd been so innocent, so unaware of evil in the world. It wasn't as if a condo was safe, anyway. When she was attacked, she'd been sharing an apartment off American River Drive and Howe Avenue with a woman who'd since moved 19

to a small town in Utah.

"Even that's too much of a concession. I'm going to live life on my own terms, not his." Or come as close as she could, one day at a time.

"I understand and yet..."

"And yet you're worried. Don't be. If Burke comes after me again, he'll get more than a pair of scissors in his chest."

She heard Sheridan's sigh. "Are you coming in today? A journalist from River City Magazine would like to speak to one of us. He's interested in doing an article. I thought we could use it to push ticket sales for our summer barbecue, since the issue comes out in May."

"Can't Jasmine do it?" Skye was scheduled to teach a new shooting class at the range, something she did on the side, after which she'd planned to take some flyers to Sacramento State University in hopes of recruiting more volunteers to work on future fund-raisers for TLS. But, after David's visit, she wasn't sure she could concentrate on either.

"Jasmine won't be available for a few days."

"Why not?"

"She got a call from Ft. Bragg. A little girl's gone missing up there.

They're hoping for some help in locating her."

"Who's looking for help--the parents?" Skye asked, perplexed that Jasmine's notoriety had spread to a coastal town six hours away.

"No, the FBI."

"No kidding? I have yet to meet a detective who's friendly to the idea of using a psychic." Even David seemed resistant to the possibility that Jasmine possessed certain gifts.

"I'm guessing they're desperate, willing to try anything, but they didn't mention her psychic abilities when they called. They asked her to profile the kidnapper."

"The FBI has its own profilers. That's what they've always told her in the past. How many times has she been turned away?"

"A lot of things are changing now that she helped solve the Ubaldi case. I think the FBI is beginning to realize she's as good as any of theirs, maybe better."

"We could've told them that," Skye said. "So what's happening with the missing child?"

"I haven't heard. Jasmine couldn't have reached Ft. Bragg more than an hour ago." There was a brief pause. "Can you handle the journalist, Skye?"

Skye glanced at the clock. She was still rattled, afraid to step foot out of the house but, at the same time, determined to make sure Burke didn't hurt 20

anyone else. She couldn't miss an opportunity to gain public support for those who felt lost or violated. "Of course. I'll reschedule my class for next Monday or Tuesday and be there as soon as possible."

Although it seemed to David as if the inverted delta where Skye lived, with its myriad natural and man-made channels, belonged in a world all its own, it was only an hour southwest of Sacramento, where she'd lived when she was attacked. Sherman Island was almost as close to the city of San Quentin, where one of the most famous prisons in the world existed in shocking contrast to the picturesque shores of San Francisco Bay and the affluent area surrounding it.

Burke was locked away in San Quentin, along with more than 5,000

other men, behind stone walls that were over a century and a half old.

Notorious for its menacing appearance, as well as its green gas chamber, this prison provided a home for the worst of the worst. And David knew its bloody reputation was well-earned. Even death row was crowded. San Quentin housed around 600 condemned inmates. The rest of its population consisted of lifers and a lower percentage of men who, like Burke, were in for less time and a lesser crime.

As the police-issue sedan bumped against yet another drawbridge, David frowned at the prospect of seeing Burke again. He'd worked tough cases in the past, but he'd somehow managed to crack most of the big ones.

Sometimes he got lucky and the right piece of evidence fell into his lap; other times it was sheer determination and hard work, his refusal to leave any stone unturned, that made the difference. Occasionally it was intuition.

But nothing had brought him the answers he needed on the three young women who'd been murdered in homes along the American River, and the frustration was beginning to wear on him. Particularly now that Burke was getting out.

Calling ahead to make sure he could arrange a visitation, he turned off River Road onto 4 West. He wasn't sure why he felt compelled to speak to Burke face-to-face. He hadn't seen him since court, but he suspected Skye's attacker would be unlikely to share anything new. In the intervening years, David had tried to communicate with him more than once. Burke had refused to meet with him but accepted a handful of telephone calls. In each conversation, he'd played innocent, as if he could fool David as easily as he did everyone else.

But futile though it seemed, David couldn't let Burke disappear into society without one last attempt to engage him, to see if he could gain some scrap of information that might finally crack the difficult cases, now long cold, in Sacramento.

21

For Skye. For the others.

David hit the brakes and barely kept his coffee from tipping over as he ran into the bumper-to-bumper traffic clogging the San Rafael Bridge. The Bay Area was almost always congested. He preferred the slower pace of life in Sacramento. Although his parents and older sister--who'd recently divorced again and moved home--still lived in San Jose, he'd left two years after graduating from San Jose State with a B.S. in Forensic Science. He'd planned on becoming a scientist, but eighteen months of working on fiber analysis as an intern had turned out to be too tedious for him. That was why he'd changed his aspirations and become a police officer instead. He needed a job that allowed him to move around, change his days, talk to people--and he enjoyed the constant challenge.

Just as he reached the other side of the bridge, the fog cleared enough to show the prison, sitting off to one side, seemingly as benign as a college campus.

But the electrified perimeter fence, topped with barbed and razor wire, and the forbidding machine-gun towers, gave the reality of the place away as he drew closer. The somber air that pervaded the grounds hung over him far more densely than any fog as he drove into visitor parking, located a space and got out of his car.

There was something singularly hopeless about San Quentin. It had the state's only gas chamber and nearly twice as many inmates as the prison was originally designed to accommodate. Then there was the presence of so many notorious cold-blooded killers--Kevin Cooper, convicted and sentenced to death for the hatchet-and-knife massacre of the Ryen Family; Richard Allen Davis, who'd kidnapped and murdered Polly Klaas; Charles Ng, who'd tortured and murdered eleven people; Richard Ramirez, "The Night Stalker." Cary Stayner, Brandon Wilson, Scott Peterson. The list went on and on, setting this place apart from any other on Earth. Sprawling over 435 acres, San Quentin was a contained city of the dammed, complete with its own zip code. According to anyone who'd been there, that was Hell, California 94964.

While he passed through the outer gate, the inner gate and the security checkpoints, David considered how living in such a place might affect a man like Burke. No doubt it'd fill him with indignation and rage. He'd thought he was too good to get caught. And once he'd been hauled in to stand trial, he'd expected to outmaneuver the system so he wouldn't have to pay for his crimes.

After David had firmly established his identity and the purpose for his visit, a female corrections officer showed him into a small visitor's booth.

22

"Just a minute," she said and disappeared, probably to follow up with whoever had been ordered to bring Burke out of his cell.

As David waited on a hard metal chair in the cold, win-dowless room, he wondered if Burke would refuse to see him--but doubted it. Oliver would be too eager to let David know that he'd slipped beneath the net.

Sure enough, a door opened on the other side of the thick glass that divided the room, and Burke strode in. About five foot nine, with a medium build and sandy-blond hair, he looked thinner but more muscular than when David had seen him in the courtroom. He wasn't wearing handcuffs or shackles. With only six days until his release, he'd be a fool to break any of the rules and everyone recognized the unlikelihood of that happening.

It wasn't here that Burke would misbehave--it was out there, after he'd set up the veneer of normalcy that shrouded his sick intentions.

With a polite nod, he sat down and picked up the phone that would enable them to communicate. "Guess you heard the good news, eh?"

He was gloating, just as David had predicted. "I did," he said, holding a handset to his own ear.

"That's what playing by the rules will get you."

"Or snitching on a fellow inmate," David said mildly.

A dark cloud passed over Burke's even features. With his ice-blue eyes and delicate, almost feminine features, he seemed younger than his thirty-six years, more like a harmless yuppie than a convict. His nonthreatening appearance definitely worked in his favor; at least it had with the jurors at his trial, who'd deliberated for hours before reaching a verdict.

Even with a solid DNA profile proving it was Burke's blood on Skye's sheets, his family--the whole community--couldn't accept that a successful dentist with a loving wife and daughter and hundreds of devoted patients was capable of such a heinous crime.

"Johnny and I weren't friends," Burke said of the inmate he'd used. "I didn't even like him."

"Did he know that?" David asked.

Burke ignored the question. "The San Francisco police needed my help. They were grateful for it."

"Help that coincided nicely with your parole hearing, I might add.

Congratulations on timing it so perfectly."

David expected a small smile or some other sign of acknowledgment.

But Burke simply persisted in creating the image he was hoping to sell.

"They know I'm not like the others in here."

Irritated, David couldn't resist pressing him a little harder. "Do you think the families of the women you murdered believe you're any different?"

23

Silence. Then Burke chuckled in what David interpreted as mock sadness. "I'll never be able to convince you, will I?"

"You expect me to believe that bullshit you told the jury?"

"It's true."

"No, it's not." But Burke was such a skilled liar that some members of the jury had viewed rock-solid evidence with skepticism. As far as David was concerned, even the San Francisco police had been conned by this crafty man or they wouldn't have recommended him for parole no matter how many inmates he ratted out.

"Believe what you want." Burke waved his free hand. "It's over. It doesn't matter anymore."

"It matters to me." Withdrawing the pictures he'd brought, pictures of Meredith Connelly, Amber Farello and Patty Poindexter--the three girls murdered near the American River--David used his shoulder to support the phone and held them to the glass. "This is why."

As Burke's eyes moved from one photograph to the next, they flickered with recognition but not remorse. "I've told you already. I've never seen those girls before in my life. It's not as if they were my patients or anything."

Because he was too intelligent for that. He'd chosen random victims, victims in an area other than the one in which he lived, victims with no apparent tie to him. He thought he was smarter than the police, and it galled David no end that so far that seemed to be true.

"I won't give up, you know," David said. "Ever."

Burke held the phone casually, toying with the hem of his prison-issue jeans. "Then you'll be wasting your time."

David put the pictures back in his shirt pocket. "What will you do for a living when you get out?" The dental board had revoked Burke's license when he was convicted, so he couldn't establish a new practice in California.

And if he tried to go elsewhere, a background check would reveal his criminal record.

For a moment, the congenial facade slipped and David glimpsed what he saw as the real Oliver Burke. Sullen. Full of self-pity. "Thanks to you, I've lost a vocation that required six years of schooling and several more years to develop into the success it was. My wife had to sell my practice for pennies on the dollar just to survive."

"Thanks to me?" David echoed. " I'm not the one who attacked a woman with a knife."

Their eyes locked. "She attacked me."