Читать книгу Deadly Reckoning - Elle James - Страница 8

“Found her right there.” Judd Strayhorn, one of the local retirees, pointed to where the medical examiner squatted beside the naked body of the dead woman. “I didn’t move her. She looked pretty dead already, what with her face buried in sand and her skin all white and waxy-like.”

Gabe’s gaze raked the beach hoping for clues, articles left behind, footprints, besides Judd’s and the medical examiner’s. He searched for anything that would tell him how this woman was murdered, who did it and how the body ended up where it did. “Thanks, Judd. If you don’t mind coming down to the station later, we can get your statement in writing.”

“Anything you want.” Judd shook his head, staring across the yellow crime scene tape at the girl’s lifeless form. “Hate to think of what the parents of this girl are going to go through. I have a daughter a little older than her.” He sighed. “Crying shame.” The older man’s shoulders sagged as he gathered his fishing pole and tackle box and trudged up the steep hillside to the road.

Gabe couldn’t help but empathize. He didn’t have a daughter himself but, as he’d only recently learned, he did have a son. Breaking this kind of bad news to parents had always been the hardest part of his job. Now, as a parent himself, Gabe was pretty sure it was about to get harder.

Chief Tom Taggert crossed his arms over his chest. “Think she’s the girl from the missing person report last night?”

“Dark red hair, about five foot fourish.” Gabe nodded. “Yeah. Got to be the one.”

“Her friends said she disappeared from the beach down below the lighthouse round midnight.” The chief snorted. “She’d told them she was going to get a blanket from the car.”

“Had a high tide last night. Think she waded out and got caught in the undercurrent?” Cape Churn was known for its wicked undercurrent. Not many parents let their small children play in the water near the lighthouse, preferring to take them down the coast to a less dangerous beach. But the teens and young people on vacation at Cape Churn didn’t always stop to check the conditions or adhere to the warnings.

“Have to wait for the M.E.’s determination. Can’t imagine she’d go in alone, though, and not with the water as cold as it’s been.”

“Yeah,” Gabe agreed. “And if it was an accident, that wouldn’t explain why she’s naked, when her friends described her as wearing jeans and a hoodie.”

The M.E. straightened and walked toward the chief, stepping over the yellow tape. “Tom.” He peeled the rubber gloves from his hands and turned to stare down at the victim.

“Gordon.” The chief nodded toward the woman’s body. “Murder?”

“That would be my bet. I can’t say for certain until the autopsy is complete, but there’s bruising around her throat. I’ll get the report to you ASAP. Until then, I’d be looking for a potential killer.”

The M.E. left the chief and Gabe and climbed the steep path behind them.

“I hope you didn’t think you’d left the big-city problems behind you in Seattle.” The chief stared out at the ocean.

“That’s what I was wishing for.” Gabe shook his head. “I came home for a quiet, safe place to live.”

“We don’t always get what we wish for. I told you when you signed on we were normally quiet, but sometimes we have blips on the radar. The blips always seem to come with the fog. You know as well as I do that some of the more superstitious locals call the fog the Devil’s Shroud.” He shot a glance toward Gabe. “What was the weather like last night?”

“Foggy,” Gabe answered, his tone flat, matter-of-fact. He’d almost forgotten the Devil’s Shroud tales the old-timers spoke of in whispers as if by speaking of it aloud, the shroud would gain strength.

Tom shook his head. “That damn fog can be a real curse. It can hide a lot of sin.”

Gabe couldn’t argue with the chief. Fog provided great cover for someone intent on committing a crime. “I’ll canvas the area around the lighthouse. Maybe someone saw or heard something.”

“You do that. And next time there’s a fog, keep your loved ones close. We may have a killer on the loose, and I don’t want you taking any chances. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.” Gabe believed in caution—especially with a case as serious as this one. He wasn’t naive about small towns, but he really hadn’t anticipated a murder in his hometown of Cape Churn. He felt as old as Judd Strayhorn as he ascended the path to the road above and climbed into his cruiser. So much for letting Dakota have free rein on his bicycle. Just because the killer’s first target had been a woman didn’t mean teenage boys were any safer.

Gabe gritted his teeth. Yet another reason to argue with the teen he still didn’t know any better than he did when the boy’s mother dropped him off four months ago.

Dakota was testing him, he knew it. What Dakota didn’t know was that Gabe didn’t give up. And given that Dakota’s mother had, Gabe was more determined than ever to make his relationship with his son work. The boy wasn’t on his own yet, and he needed to know he had a home to go to, even if he resented the man he refused to call Dad.

Gabe crept along the road headed north toward the lighthouse, stopping at the few vacation cottages and homes along the way. Most remained deserted, the summer season not fully kicked off. Schools in Seattle and Portland were still in session. In Gabe’s mind that gave them approximately two weeks to find the killer. After that, they’d have a boatload of potential victims converging on Cape Churn for summer vacation. More people to sift through, and more crime to keep them busy.

With mostly the local population to deal with at this time, how hard could it be to find a killer in a town of less than eight thousand people?

Kayla stood at the edge of the cliff her cottage rested on, her easel propped between the rocks, oil paint stiffening on her palette, a light, cool breeze flipping her hair into her face. She scanned the horizon, hoping for something to catch her eye and spark her inspiration. To her far left, about a half mile away, another jut of rocky cliffs pushed out into the ocean.

Through the trees behind the edge of the cliff loomed the shadowy outline of a building. She couldn’t make out much, but Kayla made a mental note to ask Jillian Taylor, the real-estate agent, who lived up there.

But no matter where her gaze fell, nothing grabbed her, and no matter how hard she tried to concentrate, the colors wouldn’t take form on the canvas. Last night’s scream echoed in her head, over and over. She’d assumed it was a lingering part of her dream. The fog had completely swallowed up her house, she couldn’t even see as far as the defunct lighthouse that stood a hundred yards from the cottage.

With conditions like that, if someone truly had been in trouble outside, she couldn’t have done anything to help her without risking falling off the cliff.

When Kayla had come out that morning, the sun had burned off the remaining fog and she saw no evidence of a woman, or any of the youths she’d seen yesterday evening, going down to the small stretch of sand below the extremely steep cliffs surrounding the lighthouse.

She’d been too wary to check out the trail they’d used to descend to the beach below. Although her pregnancy wasn’t outwardly visible yet, she could feel the changes in her body, the way her center of gravity was shifting. Steep steps on an unfamiliar trail was a risk she wasn’t willing to take unless absolutely necessary. Instead, she’d stood at the edge of the cliff and stared down, panning the narrow strip of beach butting up against the rocky cliffs. Nothing stood out. No sign of people. Just nature at its most rugged and beautiful.

The splendor of the rocky coast, the drifting clouds and the steely gray of the ocean called to the artist in her. In a burst of optimism, she’d run back to the house, grabbed her easel, brushes and paints out of the car and hurried back out to paint the edge of the world.

But as soon as she’d taken the brush in her hand, her throat closed up just as it had the night she’d been attacked. Her muse refused to come out of the dark and dance in the daylight.

Kayla stood in the sunshine, her hand holding a paintbrush and a palette filled with blobs of oil paints in varying colors of the earth and sky, and nothing came to her.

Tears filled her eyes and she recognized the new sense of tightening in her throat as the sobs she’d held back since the attack. The fear she’d spent the last two weeks suppressing. It was one thing to be uninspired to paint while she was still in Seattle, with all of its noise, its unfriendly bustle, its shadowed alleyways and crush of strangers. But this was supposed to be a place she could recover, a place to banish her fears and get on with her work. If she couldn’t paint here, then that meant there was a chance that the attack outside the gallery had shaken her enough to kill her muse.

Kayla’s hands trembled, the tremors jarring the brush from her fingertips. It fell to the rocky ground at her feet.

As she bent to retrieve the brush, a large male hand got to it first.

Kayla screamed and jumped back, the palette filled with paints clattering to the ground. Her hip caught the leg of the easel, jolting it so hard the canvas caught the breeze and flew over the edge of the cliff to crash against the rocks below.

A man leaped forward, yanking her toward him, crushing her against his chest.

Kayla fought him, kicking him in the shins and shoving her hands against his chest.

“What the hell—”

“Let go of me! Let go!” she yelled, landing a solid kick to his ankle.

His grip loosened enough that for a moment, she thought she could back away from him. But he caught her hand, jerking hard, once again slamming her into his solid, muscular chest so hard it took her breath away. This time, before she could punch, scratch or hit him, he clamped her arms against her sides. “Will you be still? I’m not here to hurt you.”

“You could have fooled me,” she said, barely able to push the words past the fear blocking her vocal cords.

“If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t have grabbed you.”

“Huh?” Kayla finally looked up into eyes so blue they rivaled the hues of the morning sky. “You grabbed me so I wouldn’t get hurt?”

“You were about to fall over the edge of the cliff.” He spun her in his arms, still holding her close.

She faced the edge of the cliff only a foot away.

“When you jumped back, you almost backed off the edge,” he said, his breath stirring the tendrils of hair beside her ear.

Rocks slithered over the side, the larger ones pinging against others on their way down to splash into the ocean.

Kayla swallowed hard to keep the bile from rising in her throat. She gulped a lungful of air to settle her stomach. It wasn’t until she remembered to breathe that she became aware of the solid wall of muscle pressed against her back and the strong arms circling her waist, keeping her from toppling off the cliff.

“It’s a long, bumpy trip down that way.” His chest vibrated against her back, sending crazy electrical surges across her nerve endings everywhere his body touched hers, from the backs of her thighs, across her buttocks and around her waist where his arms tightened. The tingling nerves had nothing to do with fear, but something altogether different.

Kayla stiffened. “You can let me go, I’m not suicidal. I won’t throw myself over the side, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

His arms loosened slowly, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether or not to believe her. He backed away before he let go of her, giving her the space she needed to edge away from the cliff.

She turned and faced the man, her eyes narrowing. Over six feet tall, dressed in a navy-blue uniform, he sported a shiny silver badge on his chest. Broad shoulders filled his navy shirt, the lines tapering to a trim waist and hips.

Kayla inhaled and let out the breath slowly. An officer of the law. Nothing to be afraid of. Other than the way her heartbeat galloped when she stared into his light blue eyes.

Kayla had never seen eyes that blue. His sandy-blond hair ruffled in the wind, giving him a casual, open and appealing look. As if the blue eyes weren’t enough, they were accompanied by high cheekbones and a dimple in his left cheek when he smiled, which he was doing now. The effect was to take her breath away, yet again. Out of nervous habit, Kayla’s hand reached for the locket she kept hanging from a chain around her neck. Not until her hand met bare skin did she remember that the locket with the picture of her parents had been lost on the night she’d been attacked. She flinched, and pulled her hand away.

“Hi. Gabe McGregor, Cape Churn police officer.” He held out a large, callused hand.

She eased her hand out toward it.

His fingers closed around hers, engulfing them in a warm handshake. It felt good compared to the cool breeze blowing in off the water.

Too good. For two weeks now, she’d had to steel herself to keep from flinching at every man’s touch. Her therapist had said it was a perfectly normal reaction to an attack like hers, but it was still unsettling—and part of the reason why she’d chosen such an isolated place to stay. So why did she feel no urgency to get away from Officer McGregor’s touch? The lack of fear was odd … and a little disturbing.

“Kayla Davies.” She pulled her hand free of his. “Do you always sneak up on people?”

That dimple flashed and Kayla could swear his blue eyes twinkled in the morning sun. “I called out, but I guess you were caught up in what you were doing.” His smile twisted. “Sorry about the canvas.”

She shrugged. “I hadn’t actually put paint to it.” She glanced up at him, raising a hand to shield the eastern sun from her eyes. “What brings you out to the lighthouse, Officer McGregor?”

“Call me Gabe.” His smile returned briefly before it disappeared and his face grew serious. “I’m here on business.”

“Business?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He reached into his uniform pocket for a notepad and pen. “Were you anywhere near the lighthouse last night around midnight?”

Kayla looked back at the cottage, her lips curling upward on the corner. “Yes. I’m staying in the cottage beside it. I was in bed trying to sleep. Why?”

He tipped his head to the side. “I didn’t know anyone was renting it. How long have you been there?”

“I arrived around dusk last night.”

“Did you notice anyone else out here?”

“Some kids went down a trail to the beach just before dark.” She squatted to retrieve the paintbrush that had been forgotten in their earlier struggles and placed it in her work case. “I counted three girls and two boys.”

“Anyone else?”

She nodded in the direction of the cliff with the building tucked into the trees. “I thought I saw a man along the cliffs to the south. I think he was walking a dog. I was inside, looking through the window, so I can’t be certain. After the sun set, I closed the blinds on that side of the house.” She didn’t tell him why she’d closed the blinds. He didn’t have to know that the new resident of the lighthouse cottage was afraid of the dark.

“What about at midnight? Did you see or hear anything?”

“Like what?”

“Anything out of the ordinary. A car, voices, someone screaming?”

Kayla gasped. “What?” The air around her got warmer, perspiration beading on her forehead.

“Did you hear a car drive up, voices, a scream, anything?”

“Screaming?” Kayla’s hand rose to her throat where the air refused to move into her lungs. “Did something happen?”

Officer McGregor’s lips pressed into a line. “One of the girls in that group showed up this morning on the beach half a mile away. She’d been murdered.”