Blood Bond (25 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE WIRED RIBBON CUT
cruelly into her wrists, but what hurt more was her knees as she struggled against Aidan dragging her toward the edge of the trail, where it petered out at the rocky edge. She kept falling, her knees hitting the stony earth. Without the use of her hands to break her fall, she'd also struck her shoulder on the rocks, and sliced her cheek on something sharp.

“Damn it, Marva, I can just knock you out if you'd rather,” Aidan said.

“Aidan, you don't have to do this!”

Aidan laughed shortly. He almost sounded genuinely amused. “Right. And then you'll go straight to your boyfriend, right? The dark and handsome detective?”

He paused then, turning to face her with the ends of her restraining ribbons wrapped around his own hands, almost like a short leash. “You should see yourself around him,” he added. “You're like a grade school girl with a crush. You know that?”

Despite her fear and pain, Marva was stung by the cruelty of his words. Even Aidan didn't believe she could ever have a man like Joe.

“Don't get me wrong,” he said. “We were happy for you. You should have heard Gail: ‘Finally, Marva's fallen for a man with balls.' ”

“You—talked to her? About me and Joe?” That meant they'd talked after Tom Bergman died. Only a few days ago.

“Oh, yeah. We talked. Just because Gail didn't want us to be together anymore, didn't mean she didn't want to be friends.” His bitterness was matched by what seemed like genuine astonishment. “Friends! You know what she said to me?
‘
There's no reason things can't go back to the way they were before.' ”

“She broke off your affair,” Marva said.

“Yeah.” Aidan laughed bitterly. “I guess you could say that.”

The strain on her wrists increased as Aidan tightened his grip, but Marva didn't think he was even aware he was doing it, and she struggled to keep quiet.

“Why couldn't you just let her go?” she asked. “Just move on.”

“I did. I did!” Aidan's voice rose in anger. Spittle flew from his mouth as he became more and more furious. “I let her marry him, didn't I? I stepped aside. I congratulated them when she got knocked up. Twice! And when she had a
boy
—you can't imagine how that killed me, Marva. She had that bastard's son. It should have been mine. That's why I had girls. I know it. I was meant to have my son with her.”

“How long have you been trying to get her back?” Marva asked as they approached the edge of the cliff. She was desperate to keep him talking—but she also wanted to know. All those years, Aidan showing up in his preppy clothes with different dates and wives on his arm, smoking cigars with Bryce, charming the ladies, and squatting down to talk to the children. Had it all been for show? It couldn't be, could it—a charade that spanned a decade, a lie that he took home with him every time he left Gail's company?

“I didn't,” Aidan said bitterly. “Not for a long time. I got married, didn't I? I built up my practice.”

“Here,” Marva couldn't help pointing out. “Everyone expected you to go to Sacramento, but you settled for here. You could have been great there.”

“I
would
have. With her. She just—she didn't have enough faith in me.” Aidan jerked on the ribbons and Marva cried out in pain. “I would have given her more than Bryce ever could. What's she got—that tacky stucco house and a Foothills Golf Club membership? You know what we used to talk about?”

When Marva didn't answer Aidan paused again and turned. He seemed to want to see the answers in her eyes; the moon and stars gave just enough light, combined with the fading beams of the car, that she could see the crazed fury reflected back in his.

“The
governor's mansion
.” He spat the words out as though they were poison. “It was her idea. She used to say, before it all happened, before Jess died, she said I'd be governor someday and she'd be my first lady.”

“Oh, Aidan,” Marva said, sorry for him despite her terror, her fury. Her sister had never meant that. Gail had played him; even in college she'd known how to read a man and echo back what he most wanted to believe about himself.

“Yeah, it's sad now,” Aidan said, quieted a little. “Knowing what we could have had. And instead, she made me do . . . this.”

Marva raced to distract him. “When exactly did you start seeing each other again?”

Aidan actually smiled, and for a fleeting moment the bitterness lifted. “Back in the spring, when the protestors came to the house. Bryce was off playing golf. Gail called me after she called you, because you were out of town. She practically begged me to come over. So I did. I stayed with her until the cops came. She was so upset, and Bryce wouldn't even pick up the phone. I told her she deserved better and for once she listened.”

So, not a party, after all. Aidan had gotten lucky—been there at the right place and the right time, when Gail needed someone. So she'd latched on to him. But Marva knew it would only have lasted until she got her footing again, until she felt safe. “How long did it take her to end it with you?”

“It was good. It was
great
between us,” Aidan snapped. “Just like it used to be. And then out of the blue she tells me she's seeing someone else.”

“Did she tell you who?”

“She—yes,” Aidan said, shaking his head, his incredulity undiminished even now. “She won't be with me but she'll fuck a guy who lives three doors down. She said it didn't mean anything, it was just convenient. She told me to find someone else. But I was done finding someone else. I did it twice, because she told me to.”

Two marriages, Marva thought. Two innocent women, two children, all pawns in the one-sided game Aidan played with Gail.

“So you killed Tom.”

“No.
No
. It's just that when the anniversary came around this time, and she told me
he
would be coming over that night, I thought maybe I'd send her a message of my own. I wasn't going to kill anyone, I just wanted to make her pay attention for once, to do something she couldn't ignore.”

“The blood . . .” Marva put it together. “Wait a minute. You
wanted
her to think it was protestors again. You wanted her terrified, especially if Bryce didn't take it seriously. You thought it would send her right back into your arms like it did the first time.”

“No. It wasn't like that. You make it sound—it was just so that she would
understand
. That I could have protected her. That I
cared
about her, unlike Bryce. And then Bergman just
happens
to be standing out there, I mean what are the odds? What are the goddamn odds? And that bucket was heavy, I couldn't stand there holding it all night—I dropped it.” He tugged more gently on her restraint and she looked into his eyes, flashing with crazy fever as he leaned closer. “And he fell down. I didn't do that. He did that himself. He fell, and I couldn't believe it, and he twitched around for a while but it was obvious he was dead.”

“But Aidan . . . why did you kill
her
?”

Aidan paused, his hand tight on the wire, and stared at her. His eyes were wild, his breath coming heavy. “I went to see her and I told her that a man was dead because of her. That this bound us together. She didn't understand. She threatened to turn me in.”

“So you killed her to shut her up?”

“No. It wasn't that. You see, I told her I accepted her the way she was. Her needs. I told her I'd
share,
” Aidan said, his voice roughening into a hoarse sob. He wiped his face along his sleeve and cleared his throat. “I said if she had to have other men, I'd look the other way. I begged her. I got on my
knees
. But she laughed at me, and then she told me she couldn't respect that. That she told her lovers she'd stopped sleeping with Bryce, and Bryce never knew about anybody else. That a man who'd share a woman . . .” He broke into a harsh sob for the second time, choked it off. “A man who'd share a woman was weak. And she needed a strong man. Well, I fucking showed her strong. Didn't I? I showed Gail who could be stronger.”

Marva staggered, dizzy with his revelations, and was rewarded with a painful jerk on her wrists.

“Nobody attacked you at your house, did they,” she said, breathing hard.

“Sure they did—I paid a guy to. Though I didn't mean for him to hit me quite that hard. I mean . . . Jesus. These stitches.”

“And the panties? You sent those, too.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, why not keep up the tradition? I always figured it was Jess's family, but it didn't really matter. I just wanted to keep the cops' focus off me.”

He laughed then, a hoarse bark.

“I would have loved to see Gail in those—I made sure they were her size.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

JOE NARROWLY MISSED DRIVING
off the road for the second time. The descent would have been fiery and fatal; the rock face of the mountain fell away at a nearly vertical angle in places. The light from his headlights glanced off the asphalt surface of the road, and the rock formations, with only weak illumination from the moon to augment it.

Bertrise muttered once or twice, but to her credit she said nothing further about his driving. At the guard shack, the wooden arm of the restraint was undisturbed; Aidan must have driven around it. Joe didn't bother, and crashed right through.

Bertrise still said nothing.

And then Joe needed to talk. “Damn, damn,” he said. “Marva . . .”

But there was nothing to say. So he shut up again. And unless he broke every speed limit and claimed every bit of dumb luck tonight, there would be very little he could do for Marva.

He spotted the car before he realized that's what it was; the taillights cast a dissipated red pool in the encroaching fog. He lurched the car through the parking lot, kicking up gravel and bottoming out on something that scraped hard against the underbody. When he was still a car length away from Aidan's Volvo his front tires hit some sort of trench and came to a violent stop, Joe and Bertrise thrown forward against their shoulder restraints.

Joe was out of the car while Bertrise was still pulling at her seat belt. He drew his gun and trained it on nothing as he crouched and ran forward. There was just enough light that he could make out a moving form ahead—dangerously close to the drop-off.

“McKay!” he shouted. The form moved, and as Joe scrabbled closer, he made out two distinct shapes. A man draggling a woman, her wrists bound.

Aidan turned and for a second no one moved; then he yanked on the bindings on Marva's wrists and made her cry out.

“Throw your gun over!” Aidan yelled. “Throw it, or I'll push her!”

Joe hesitated, trying to see if he could get a shot in, but Aidan ducked behind Marva. There was a sound—like a shudder on the wind, a sigh, and he realized it was Marva. Without thinking he took a few more steps closer and Aidan dragged Marva back with him. Horrified, Joe realized they were inches from the edge of the rock outcropping.

“Okay—okay,” he yelled, and threw the gun.

“You too! The other one!” Aidan yelled, and Joe heard a rustle behind him; a second later Bertrise's gun sailed past him and over the edge. They all listened as an impossible amount of time passed before there was the sound of metal striking rock far below. And still nobody moved.

“Don't do it,” Joe said, not recognizing his own frantic voice. “Don't you let her go.” He put his hands out in front of him, wide, and slowly took one step and then another. There was still fifteen feet between them, and as he crept closer, Aidan glanced quickly over his shoulder at the cliff and wrapped his arms tightly around Marva from behind.

Had Aidan decided to go down with Marva? To condemn himself to the same death he'd planned for her, the same one he'd sent Gail to last week? But as Aidan yelled at Joe to keep back, he saw Marva lift her foot, her black suede pump with the demure buttons—he'd noticed them at the service, the way they made her legs turn prettily at an angle—and she smashed it down, and even before it made contact with Aidan's instep he knew how badly that was going to hurt and he gave up edging toward them and flat-out ran so that he reached the pair just as Aidan was jerking his foot away in howling pain and Marva was teetering backward.

Joe seized her forearm and pulled hard, sending her crashing to the ground, her arm making a popping sound and crumpling as she screamed, but there wasn't time, he turned his attention to Aidan, who howled and threw himself at Joe with surprising strength.

Instinct kicked in then, the legacy of the thousands of drills Joe had done under Liu Chenwu's watchful eye. The
jing
took over as his hands formed the rake shape, and he tensed and tore through the Xiao Jia, his fist chopping straight out from his side, catching Aidan in the ribs and knocking him loose like a spider knocked from a wall.

Eyes wide, mouth gaping as he struggled for breath, Aidan staggered backward and over the cliff behind him.

The noises Aidan's body made as it glanced off the rock face and landed at the bottom were horrible, and Joe dropped down next to Marva with the single thought of shielding her from the sound, of wrapping his arms around her head so that all she heard was the beating of his own heart, and even if he was too late for that, he was there to hold her until she stopped shaking and the backup units arrived and cast the scene in surreal yellow light.

EPILOGUE

JOE WAS WATCHING ODELL
play Dawn of War II on Fisch's enormous IPS panel monitor. It was a joke that Fisch, the least tech-savvy of all the department, had the best setup. He was at a conference downstate for a couple of days and Odell was making the most of his absence.

On the screen, Space Marines and Orks forces charged a bloody urban combat zone, blowing away their foes in bloody eruptions of gore.

“Excuse me, boys,” Bertrise said from the doorway.

“Hold your damn horses, woman,” Odell muttered, clicking furiously.

“You can just keep on playing with yourself, Odell. You're not the one with a visitor.”

Joe turned and there she was: Marva, giving him the better half of a smile, her eyes flashing amusement. She wore a dusty shade of pale green today, and her skirt swirled around her ankles, which were clad in tooled black boots. Around her neck was some sort of silver amulet, and she hadn't pinned her hair back for once. The effect was, absurdly, of a sorceress out of one of Madiha's fairy-tale books.

“Surprise,” she said, almost shyly.

Joe glanced at Bertrise, who gave him a little half wave. “Okay, Odell, I'll take over for Joe. Show me how it's done.”

Joe walked across the room to Marva and took her arm, guiding her out of the office. The chief's conference room was empty; just big enough for a round table and four chairs, and lined on one wall with boxes that hadn't made it into storage yet, it had the advantage of a window and a door that closed.

They sat down, and Marva pulled a package from her tote bag. It was large and floppy, wrapped in pale gray tissue paper.

“Go ahead,” she said, “open it.”

Joe did, and knew when his fingers first brushed the fabric that Marva had made him a quilt. He unfolded it and held it up.

Strips of deep gray flannel alternated with fabrics in a dozen shades of black and navy, all angling into each other, disappearing and emerging farther down the length of the quilt. The fabrics were dark but the effect wasn't; there was movement in the design, and his eye was carried along by the way Marva had joined the pieces.

“I've had these fabrics for a long time,” Marva said. “I didn't know what to do with them until—well, until I met you.”

“Thank you,” Joe said. He wasn't sure exactly what to say, but he knew he would cherish the quilt. He folded it carefully, then set it on his lap; already it was warming to his body.

“What will you do now?” he asked. He'd seen the official documents and paid attention to the grapevine; he knew that Aidan's family had taken the body home to Boston to bury. That a onetime client of Aidan, apprehended on unrelated charges, had confessed to acquiring the blood for Aidan and also knocking him out in his garage for a couple hundred bucks, and had mailed the panties for him. That Bryce had already started seeing a woman who taught a spin class at Gail's health club. That Deanne Mentis was considering a lawsuit against the department.

But he'd heard nothing from Marva until today.

“Well,” she said, “I'm going to have Thanksgiving with Mom. Just us, we're going out to some restaurant she wants to try in the city. And then I'm leaving for two weeks. I've been asked to teach a master quilt class at Asilomar. It's fully booked,” she added, and twin spots of pink appeared in her cheeks.

“That's great,” Joe said, genuinely pleased.

“Yes, and I've decided to teach more out-of-town classes in the spring. This is kind of my trial run. I'm booked out east—upstate New York, Virginia, North Carolina. Then, we'll see. Oh, and I'm going to be helping Mother move. The house is too big for her.”

“She's moving closer to you?”

Marva grinned. “I prefer to think of it as closer to Bryce and the kids. They're going to need her. And she needs to be needed.”

Joe nodded, noticing what she wasn't saying—that Marva wasn't going to be the one taking over for Gail.

“Well. That's all good, then.”

“How are things with . . . you?”

Joe wasn't entirely sure what she was asking; took a chance. “Amaris—my girlfriend—we've split.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

“Thanks, but I think we're both okay with it. I'm going to take a little vacation time while my niece and nephew are out of school on holiday break. My brother and his wife and I are taking my folks skiing. Well, my mom says she won't try, but we might get my dad out there.”

“That's wonderful,” Marva said.

For a moment Joe considered asking: whether he could call her, when she was back in town. And then she stood and he saw what he should have seen from the start: that she was moving fast away from him, away from everyone, finally on her own path and picking up speed. And that it was better than all right that way.

He walked her out to her car. It was a clear late November day, warm enough for shirtsleeves, with the faint scent of fallen leaves on the air. Joe opened Marva's door and as she stepped past she kissed him softly on the cheek, just a brush of a kiss, barely more than an impression.

“Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”

Joe was about to protest that he'd only been doing his job, but he realized as the words came to his lips that it wasn't true, so instead he laid his hand on the roof of her car for a second. Then he stepped back and watched her drive off into the manicured streets of town, until she disappeared out of sight, and he closed his eyes for a moment and imagined her leaving Montair far behind.