Читать книгу Telling Secrets - Tracy Montoya - Страница 8

Alex’s stomach rumbled as he pulled his pickup into his driveway, an insistent reminder that it was well past dinnertime. Good thing he’d stopped on the way to get a sandwich, or he might have wasted away to nothing trying to conjure up a meal out of a half-eaten bag of Fritos and a case of beer. If memory served, he’d been putting off grocery shopping for too long.

The police had questioned him only briefly about his conversation with Sophie Brennan, but somehow, time had gotten away from him as he’d filled in his coworkers, who’d all wanted to know the latest on why one woman warranted a major sting operation.

All signs pointed to the fact that said woman was somehow connected to the grisliest homicide Port Renegade had seen in decades. But murder? Ritual killings? He wasn’t a go-with-your-gut kind of guy, preferring to deal with hard evidence, like footprints and broken plants. But from the little he’d observed of Sophie, he didn’t think she had it in her.

Trouble was, he believed her story about being psychic about as much as he believed that little green men were going to visit him tonight and take him into space for sinister experiments.

Grabbing the slender plastic bag containing his sandwich and chips off the passenger seat, he exited the truck and retrieved his mail from the squeaky outdoor box next to his driveway, shoving the few thin envelopes and solicitation postcards into the oversize right pocket of his parka before heading for his front steps.

A few years back, through some hard-core savings and wise investments, Alex had managed to parlay his park-employee salary into a down payment on a house in the mountains. The house itself was a butt-ugly three-story block of brown siding that looked like a Jawa sandcrawler from the original Star Wars film. But inside, it was a little piece of heaven, with cherry hardwood floors that seemed to glow from within and a huge stone fireplace to match an equally huge kitchen. The entire outer wall of the master bedroom was a series of windows that looked out on the snow-capped peaks of the Olympics. But what had really sold him was the sweet deck overlooking an enormous tree-lined backyard.

Trouble was he hadn’t yet had time to get much in the way of furniture, for the deck or the house, but one of these days, he’d fix that.

Once inside, he threw his jacket on the nearest milk crate and tossed his baseball cap and jacket after it. Shaking the sandwich out of its skinny bag, he sank gratefully into the one piece of quality furniture he did own—a dark brown recliner—which faced the love of his life—a fifty-two-inch wide-screen HDTV hooked up to stereo surround sound. A man had to have his priorities.

He kicked back his weight; the recliner’s footrest popped up, and Alex had everything he needed in life—a dinner he hadn’t made, a comfy chair and the sports update on channel seven. Actually, if he had telekinetic powers and could float a beer from the refrigerator to his tragically empty hand, life would be complete. Maybe he should ask Sophie Brennan if her Jedi powers extended to levitating objects….

Stop it. Thinking about Sophie Brennan was only going to get him into trouble. Big, fat, crazy-girlfriend trouble. Why he was a magnet for that type, he’d never know, but the sooner he forgot her, the better. No thinking about Sophie Brennan. No hitting on Sophie Brennan. No nothing on, near or around Sophie Brennan.

Although he had to wonder what was happening to her down at the station. Maybe he could just call—

With a hiss of disgust, Alex cut off that train of thought, concentrating instead on a search-and-rescue mission for his TV remote, which had apparently become lodged inside the chair somewhere. He’d managed to extract it and turn on SportsCenter when the doorbell rang.

And all he could hear in his head as he went to answer the door was the last thing Sophie Brennan had said to him: I’ll see you again. This murder is connected to you in more ways than you know.

Displaying a superhuman amount of self-control, Alex opened the door, discovering not Sophie standing behind it, but Sabrina and her husband, Aaron. Bree hadn’t changed out of the waterproof winter gear she’d worn to work, and Aaron still had on a suit, which told Alex that this couldn’t be good.

Her arms wrapped tightly around her body, Sabrina glanced at the sandwich in his hand. “Oh, wow, you haven’t gotten a chance to eat dinner yet? We’re sorry to bother you so late, Alex.”

He stepped back, inviting them in with a casual motion of his head. “You’re not bothering me.” He gestured to Sabrina to take the recliner and swung a chair from his dining-room set over for Aaron. Although he could have sat in one of the chairs, as well, Alex decided to choose between the worn bean bag squatting in front of the TV or one of the handy, all-purpose plastic milk crates that dotted the floor plan of his house—he opted for the latter, kicking it over a few inches into optimal conversational position. “Beer?” he asked them both, seeing as that was about all he had to offer them at the moment.

“Sure.” Aaron shed his coat and draped it over the back of the chair before sitting down.

“None for me, thanks,” Sabrina added.

Once Alex had returned with two cold Thomas Kempers from the fridge, he handed one to Aaron and sat down. “So, what’s up? Not that I don’t appreciate the visit, but you both look like this is more than a friendly house call.”

Sabrina glanced at Aaron, who leaned forward, resting his elbows on his parted knees. “You’re right, Al. I wanted to talk to you about the murder victim you found today.”

Suddenly, Alex wished he’d chosen the bean bag—the mere mention of the day’s events caused what had remained of his energy level to plummet, and he just wanted to sink into the bag’s nubby softness and forget everything that had happened today. Including and especially the people in his living room, friends though they were. He reached up and rubbed one of his eyebrows. “My talking to your colleagues for more than my entire work shift didn’t give you the information you needed?”

“Alex—” Sabrina began.

“Sorry.” Just because he’d had a crappy day didn’t mean he had to take it out on them. “I’m just tired. Hungry. And freaked out.”

She moved up to the edge of the recliner, so she, too, was leaning toward him. The two of them looked like a pair of shrinks waiting for him to tell them about his childhood. “No, Alex. It’s just…” She flung her hands in the air and turned to Aaron, clearly growing exasperated. “Tell him.”

Aaron took his cue. “The county medical examiner hasn’t had a chance to look at the body yet, but from the look I got, it seems like our guy was killed with a garrote. No blows to the head, gunshots or anything that would handicap him—someone strong and stealthy came up behind him and slipped a cord around his neck.”

Like he needed to hear that before he’d had a chance to finish his sandwich. Damn cops. “You think he might have been immobilized somehow? It did look like some sort of cult got a hold of him.” Alex looked down at the floor, tracing the grooves between the wood planks with his gaze. Anything to avoid picturing what he’d seen that morning.

“Maybe. But we didn’t see any ligature marks on his body. M.E. can tell us for sure.” Aaron took a swig of his beer, then leaned back in his chair, resting one ankle on the opposite knee. “But as for it being a ritual murder, I don’t think so.”

“Pretty much all reports of satanic-cult murders in the U.S. have turned out to be something completely different,” Sabrina chimed in. “There are no documented cases of a satanic cult murdering anyone, ever. Just lots of mass hysteria. There’s a report that came out of SUNY–Buffalo awhile back that investigated nearly 12,500 instances of so-called satanic activity and concluded there was no evidence such cults even existed.”

Alex narrowed his eyes at her.

She shrugged, a sheepish smile spreading across her face. “You learn some interesting things when you’re married to a police detective.”

“Ah.” He took a drink of his beer. “But what about the stab wounds?”

“The cross and circle?” Aaron asked. “Inflicted postmortem, judging from the amount of blood. And they mimic a murder that took place in Ohio a couple of years ago—a priest was convicted of killing a nun, and he tried to make the murder look like a satanic killing. In this case, someone wasn’t being that creative.”

“But why?”

Sabrina started moving around in her seat, first tucking her legs under her, then shifting around until she was in a lotus position. She drummed the back of her right hand against her leg for a few seconds, and then her feet went back on the floor. And since he’d known the woman since they’d gone to high school together, he knew that her fight-or-flight mechanism was kicking in big-time. Whenever the going got tough, tough Sabrina got moving. And if she couldn’t move, she’d dance around in place until she could move.

And from where he sat, she was moving like crazy right now.

He set his beer on the floor with a thud. “What?”

She examined her thumbnail, picking occasionally at the cuticle. “There’s more about what the police found on the body. Besides the manner of death, the garrote, there was other thing that didn’t match the Ohio murder.”

He was really growing tired of this. “Garrote, sheet, stone altar, stab wounds. What else do I need to know?” He turned to Aaron, appealing to the man’s sense of decency to put him out of his misery and just spit it out already. “You’re my best friends, but I’m about to shake you both until one of you starts talking. What didn’t match?”

“Something was placed in the victim’s hand, probably by the killer,” Aaron said quietly. “A crow feather.”

Everything stopped. Time, his breathing, his heart. From far, far away, he could hear Sabrina talking to him but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Blindly, he reached for his beer bottle, and when his fingers touched the cool, slick surface, he closed his hand around it and brought it up, taking a long, long swig out of it. But even alcohol didn’t dull the pain blooming in slow motion inside his chest.

He inhaled sharply, glad to find that his lungs were still working, and forced the world back into focus. “A crow feather?” He knew that the redundant question wasn’t going to magically make them give him a different answer, the answer he was hoping for.

Something in his reaction had Sabrina on her feet. She crouched down beside him and put her hand on his arm. Then she nodded. “Just like when Wilma Red Cloud was killed.”

Another time, another place. Another murder that had happened years ago, on a reservation in South Dakota. A murder that had changed his life and had nearly wrecked his mother.

He’d forgotten. He’d made himself forget. He and his mother never talked about that time—even when he was a kid and had tried to get her to talk about it, she’d refused. And she’d been right; some things were best left in the dark.

Until, that is, they forced themselves out into the open again.

Crow carrier.

Clutching the bottle, so slick with condensation it nearly slipped out of his fingers, Alex shook his head sharply. Focus, don’t think. Just focus. Don’t feel. “So you think this might be tied to…” Say it.

But he couldn’t say it, so he just looked up at his friends, hoping they couldn’t see that he was drowning.

Sabrina rubbed his arm, her eyes wide with something he didn’t want to name. “Your father? Al, I’m so sorry, but that’s exactly what we think.”

“EXCUSE ME, CAN I HELP YOU?”

Alex clenched his teeth and stifled a groan as yet another elderly resident of the Sunnyside View Apartments tapped on his truck window. With the pad of her index finger still pressed against the glass, the woman peered inside, actually moving her head around in circles as she scanned the cab’s interior.

According to Aaron, Sophie had been released hours ago because, as she’d predicted, the police had had no evidence to tie her to the murder in the park. So here Alex was, sitting outside her apartment complex, having gotten here on a crazy impulse with no plan as to how to get her to spill her guts. But she’d known about the body, and if she knew that, then she probably knew something about his father. Once he figured out the best way to approach her, he wasn’t leaving until he’d gotten the information he needed.

But first, he had to get through Sophie’s neighbors, who were all significantly older than she, and apparently took their personal security very seriously. At least five Sunnyside octogenarians had trundled out in the last ten minutes to ask him what it was he wanted, who he was there to see and how long he planned to wait before he went home. Now that resident number six had arrived, he knew he had to figure out his plan sooner rather than later. Obviously Sophie’s neighbors weren’t going to give him the five damned minutes of quiet he needed to calm down and get himself together.

He tried to smile at the woman outside his truck, but his face felt tight and uncooperative. “I’m just waiting for someone,” he finally said, knowing full well that she wasn’t going to just nod and walk away.

“Oh?” She clamped her hand around the top of the glass, so he couldn’t roll it back up without crushing her knobby fingers. “Who are you waiting for?”

He clenched his fingers around the steering wheel, half-tempted to wrench the thing off, just for some kind of release. “Sophie.”

“Sophie who?” She leaned in closer, her beady eyes and half of her gray perm filling up the space between the window glass and the top of his door.

“Sophie Brennan.”

The woman seemed to consider that for a moment. “Sophie never has gentlemen callers, especially after nine o’clock. I’d know about it. What’s your name? Where do you live? What makes you think she wants to see you this late? The poor girl has her weekend study group tomorrow morning, you know.”

“Ma’am, I’m not a gentleman caller. I’m just—” He yanked the keys out of the ignition, pausing when he couldn’t think of how to finish that last statement. What was he? And more importantly, why couldn’t he have just walked up to Sophie’s apartment right away, instead of lurking out here and rousting the blue-haired brigade? “Wait a minute. Who are you? Where do you live? Because you can’t be building security.”

“Millie Price. And I’m not going to tell you where I live.” She backed away from the window, raising her chin—all the better to slant a superior look at him. “You might be a rapist.”

Oh, for the love of— “I’m not a rapist, ma’am. I’m a park ranger.” He sighed. “I’m here to talk to her about my father.” There. Just enough personal information so that maybe the woman would sense she’d crossed a line and back off already.

“I’m going to need to see some ID.”

He pushed the door open and jumped out of the truck cab, his boots crunching into the snow. She reared back, clearly affronted, then fished her hand into the pocket of her lumpy light blue winter coat. Pulling out a pair of reading glasses, she settled them on her face and tilted her head so she could peer over the rims at him. Was it his imagination, or was an old lady who dressed like a Smurf actually getting all up in his face?

“Ma’am, with all due respect, I’m not here to see you. I’m here to see Sophie,” he said. “And unless flames start shooting out of her apartment or you hear screams from behind her door, the rest is none of your business.” With that, he brushed past her and headed for the building’s front gate.

He heard her scurry along close behind him. “I’ll have you know your presence is every bit my business,” she huffed. “I’m the Sunnyside Neighborhood Watch captain, and you, sir, are a loiterer.”

He felt a hand clutch at his parka. Mustering up the last of his patience, he turned to face her. “Look, Torquemada—”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Price,” a soft voice interrupted from a few feet away. And when Alex looked up, Sophie Brennan was standing underneath a nearby streetlight, her arms crossed over her chest against the cold night air. Again, she wasn’t wearing a coat, and instead of the clunky black shoes she’d had on earlier that day, she wore a pair of thick suede and cork Birkenstock sandals over her socks. Her face looked flushed and her eyelids heavy with sleep, as if she’d just tumbled out of bed and directly into the parking lot, pausing only to slip on yet another pair of inappropriate footgear. “I know him. Your work here is done.”

Sophie delivered that last without the faintest trace of irony, for which he had to hand it to her, but it didn’t seem to cheer Millie any. Clutching the lapels of her puffy blue coat with both hands, the elderly woman harrumphed at him and lumbered off like a grouchy bear that had had its supper stolen. It occurred to him that though he’d read the word plenty of times, he hadn’t ever actually heard a human being harrumph before.

Once Millie was safely out of earshot, he focused his attention on Sophie, who rarely if ever had gentlemen callers, especially at midnight. And he felt an absurd urge to brush away the snowflakes that were falling gently onto her hair. Either that or wrap his arms around her and lose himself and all the pent-up anger and frustration and confusion he felt in her. He immediately squashed that jacked-up impulse—there was a reason he was here, and it wasn’t to put the moves on a woman who was basically a stranger to him and possibly connected to his murdering fugitive of a father.

“One of my neighbors told me a guy about my age was hanging around outside,” she said. “I thought it might be you.”

“Of course you did. You’re psychic.” He wiggled his fingers at her sarcastically, pretending to shoot lightning bolts out of the tips.

“And you are poorly socialized and have awkward people skills.” With that, she turned away from him and headed down the brick walkway toward Sunnyside’s front gate, her heavy sandals slapping down the path, leaving tire-tread patterns in the thin layer of snow.

“I need to talk to you,” he called out after her.

Without turning, she unlocked the gate and pulled it open, causing the wrought iron to creak mightily on its hinges. Just when he thought he was going to have to make a run for it and muscle his way in after her, she turned and held the gate open. He jogged toward her, needing no further invitation.

They walked into the center courtyard of the building, which was built like a giant doughnut. Apartments circled about ten stories into the air, completely surrounding the courtyard. Besides some landscaped areas that were going to need replanting soon, the interior of Sunnyside View boasted a small swimming pool, a large brick sunning area and a staff nurse who, according to the sign by the door marked with a red cross, was on call 24/7. He wondered what someone Sophie’s age was doing in a place like this. He wondered what connection someone like her had to his father. He wondered why every instinct he had told him Sophie Brennan was a good person, when she obviously was hiding some sinister connection to the one human being he hated in this world. And all of that wondering made him want to shake her until she abandoned this psychic garbage and just told him the truth.

He followed her into an elevator, and she pressed the button for the eighth floor. An uncomfortable silence stretched between them as they watched the numbers slowly tick upward, until, finally, the doors opened and they both spilled gratefully into the hallway. As soon as they were inside her apartment, he sprung.

“Jack Runningwater.”

“Excuse me?” A small, confused line appeared in between her eyebrows as she made her way toward the cheerful yellow kitchen that sat in the far corner of the apartment.

“Jack Runningwater. I’m playing word association with you—that’s your game, isn’t it?” He followed close behind, watching as she fished two glasses out of one of the cupboards. “What does that name mean to you?”

She was silent for a moment as she filled both glasses with ice water from the beat-up refrigerator’s dispenser; then, she shook her head. “Absolutely nothing,” she tossed out casually. Too casually, in his opinion.

He paced to the far side of her kitchen and gripped the counter with both hands. Pushing off it, he turned to stalk toward her. “Sophie, it’s late, and I’m not in the mood for games,” he said quietly as he closed the space between them. Anger wasn’t an emotion he entertained very often, so he tried one last time to rein it in, to keep the discussion civilized, even when everything he’d been through years before suddenly felt raw and immediate. “Just tell me what you know.”

Picking at the soft V neckline of her pale green sweater, she stared at the floor, her eyes unfocusing slightly as she considered his words. She appeared to concentrate for a few seconds, and then she looked up. “I don’t know anything. I’m sorry, is it supposed to mean something to me?” Her words were soft and polite, too proper for his taste, too gentle for what he was feeling.

“Yes, princess, it’s supposed to mean something. You know that as well as I do.” He knew he was coming on too strong, knew he was probably frightening her, but the confused and angry fog that had enveloped him since Sabrina and Aaron had visited him earlier that evening had wrapped around him once more, and now he was going up and down this emotional roller coaster on autopilot.

She pushed one of the water glasses she’d filled across the counter toward him. “Alex,” she said calmly. “Why don’t you sit down, and drink some water, and you can tell me what you know. Then maybe I can hel—”

Lunging forward, he slammed his palm against the counter beside her, causing her to shrink abruptly away from him. “I’m not asking you to do your pretend psychic thing. You know something,” he hissed. “You know him.” It had been so long since he’d thought about his father—he hadn’t expected it to hurt anymore. But it did, and the more he spoke to her, the more that anger bubbled up to the surface, causing him to lash out at her.

Her deep blue eyes were no longer sleepy—in fact, they looked almost afraid. Of him.

Ah, crap. It wasn’t like him to try to intimidate anyone, much less a woman who was so much smaller than he was. And if he hadn’t been so desperate for the truth, he might have tried the more effective and less jerk-like method of charming the information out of her first, before attempting the caveman approach. His anger lifted as suddenly as it had come, and he straightened, fully intending to back away and apologize.

That was before she pulled out the barbecue fork.

He didn’t know where she’d gotten it from, but before he’d even registered that she was moving, she’d braced one hand against his chest, and the other held a large, two-pronged fork mere millimeters from his left eyeball.

“Uh, Sophie…”

“That’s Princess Sophie to you.” Her hand was as steady as an oak tree, and she didn’t look even remotely scared of him anymore. Though her voice hadn’t risen in volume, she looked like a woman who’d put a fork through his eye if she had to. “And for your information, I don’t know a Jack Runningwater. I have never met a Jack Runningwater. I have no idea why you keep throwing that name in my face, though I really wish I did, because I’m a naturally curious kind of person.”

Still holding the fork in place, she took her hand off his chest, glaring at it briefly as if it had touched him without her permission. “But what I do know,” she continued, “is exactly what I told you before—that the murder victim you found is connected to you somehow, you’re in danger and I have this nagging feeling that I should stay close to you, because I think I can keep you safe. The problem is, I want to stay close to you about as much as I want to stick this thing in my own eye.” She waved the barbecue fork at him, then tossed it on the counter with a clatter, a look of mild disgust twisting her pretty mouth. “Now, I think you were just leaving.”

He nodded, backing away so she’d see he wasn’t a threat. “I’m sorry.” He felt small and really stupid after that speech. Belatedly taking his baseball cap off his head, he ran his hands through his short hair. He didn’t know why, but he suddenly wanted her to know he meant that apology. “You know, I almost believe you’re not lying to me,” he said. It was the closest he could come to admitting that she might not be the monster he’d created in his head.

She looked him straight in the eye. “I’m not lying to you, Alex.”

He took a deep breath. If he wanted the truth, he needed to speak it himself. “But I don’t believe you’re psychic.”

“Then believe this.” She moved near enough that he could count the freckles dusting her nose, smell the scent of flowers coming from her hair. She might not be psychic, but somehow, in some definitely-not-his-type kind of way, she was magic. And he so didn’t want her, of all people, to be magic. “I am not a danger to you,” she continued. “I have no ill will toward you, and I would do anything, anything I could to prevent something bad from happening to you.”

Then she reached out and closed her hand around his arm. He opened his mouth, but no words would come out.

And she gasped.

Without stopping to think about the advisability of his actions, he let his gaze drop to her lush pink mouth, knowing exactly what she’d felt the minute she’d touched him. “What, Sophie?” he murmured.

“I don’t know what it is about you—” She stopped, licked her lips.

That was funny, because he didn’t know what it was about her, either. He moved closer, breathing her in, mesmerized.

“—that makes me suddenly compelled to say some really bizarre things….” She shook her head, backed away, and whatever it was that had flared up just then dissipated as the space between them grew. Her expression flattened, and she was clearly back to business; the only hint of what had just happened was the faint blush left behind on her cheeks.

“Never mind—I’m going to leave that alone for a little bit.” Her eyes grew slightly unfocused as she reached up and rubbed her temple. “Humor me for a minute. Who is Jack Runningwater?”

The name was like a blast of cold water in the face. He had to get out of here. She was beautiful, and she wasn’t his usual dim-and-too-skinny type, and she probably had a voodoo doll of him somewhere in her apartment that she’d bewitched. He was angry at her. He didn’t trust her. He did not, could not, be even the slightest bit attracted to her. For God’s sake, she knew something.

“Tell me,” she urged.

He didn’t want to, feeling the old shame he always experienced whenever anyone drew a connection between him and Jack Runningwater, but he knew he should, given that he’d been firing the name at her like a rain of bullets earlier in the conversation. At the very least, maybe revealing some of his cards would get her to inadvertently show some of hers. “Do you remember when Wilma Red Cloud was killed?”

She nodded, the line between her eyes returning as she obviously struggled to recall the details that had been splashed across newspapers and on the evening news so many years ago. “The first female tribal president of the Oglala Lakota. We read about her in school. Wasn’t she murdered—”

He nodded, cutting her off. “Strangled by a man from her own tribe. No one knows why, though they suspect he was jealous, or angry that a woman was in such a powerful position.” He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the scuffed linoleum on her floor. “I have it on good authority he was just a no-good drunk.”

Her expression cleared as she made the connection. “Jack Runningwater. That’s the man who killed her.”

“I was six,” he said, not acknowledging her revelation. “I don’t remember much about him. I just know one minute I had a home and a family, and the next, my mother was dragging me off the reservation and halfway across the country.”