Damaged (12 page)

The glimpse of sympathy in his gaze at the end of their meeting had almost been her undoing. It had been a split second, a look that passed between the two of them and left her reeling. Stunned. Disgusted with what she’d wanted to do.

She’d wanted to bury her face in his shirt, inhale its crisp cotton, feel her tears dampen and warm the tension between them. She knew that he would give her that comfort.

And more.

She had seen it in his eyes. The brilliant blue had taken on an intensity, charged with heat, edged with fire.

What the hell is the matter with you?
She strode down the hallway to her office, her thoughts furious, jumbled.
He’s the managing partner for God’s sake. You don’t screw your boss. You’d be committing career suicide—not to mention emotional hara-kiri—in one single leap.

She stalked through her doorway and shut the door.
He doesn’t even like you.

That stung.
And what about Ethan?

She stared out the window. She had no answer to that.

Disgust mushroomed in her chest. She was yearning for the comfort of Randall Barrett to absolve her of her mistakes, knowing that if she had only acted differently a girl might not have died.

And in such a horrible, grotesque manner.

How could she live with that? She sank into her office chair and lowered her face in her hands.

She knew in that place deep inside her where hard truths could not be eroded by a sympathy-laden glance that she’d made a terrible mistake.

And she didn’t know how to make it better.

Saturday, May 5, just before 1:00 p.m.

A
long line of cars marked the street where St. Mark’s Cathedral was located. News trucks hogged the prime parking spots, their satellite dishes gleaming in the watery spring sunshine.

Kate glanced at her watch and picked up her pace. Lisa MacAdam’s funeral service would begin in twelve minutes. She was glad she’d walked. The parking would be a killer. And she had no doubt she’d get caught in the glut of mourners at the end. She wanted to be able to leave quickly.

Each strike of her heel on the pavement matched the pounding of her heart. The knowledge that she’d have to sit through Lisa’s funeral had left her edgy. Nauseated. Terrified.

But it was her act of penance.

Most of Halifax’s legal community and what appeared to be all of Lisa’s high school had shown up. Dark-suited legal eagles swept past swarms of teenage girls huddled together in the parking lot. The girls held hands or hugged one another. Kate was a little surprised to see so many of Lisa’s classmates. Hadn’t Lisa been a bit of a loner? She
wondered if the girls were more distressed at the loss of Lisa or by the shattering of their innocence.

She remembered Gennie’s funeral. The other girls, watching her. The circumstances beyond their limited experience. She’d hurried past them, hoping for a touch on her sleeve, but none of the girls had moved. They’d just stared at her. Some with pity in their eyes. Some with blame. These girls, these friends of Lisa’s, knew nothing of Kate. Yet she found herself hurrying past them, unable to meet their gaze. Just as she had fifteen years ago.

A news camera panned over the mourners. Several reporters stood off to the sidelines, mics tucked discreetly in the folds of their jackets, ostensibly respecting the grief of the attendees, while scanning faces, hoping to see if someone was willing to put their grief into words.

Kate wasn’t. Never would.

Marian MacAdam sat down on the pew next to her son. She felt him shift slightly away from her. His reticence toward her had always made her heart constrict. She had learned over the years that the more she lavished her only child with love, the less it was returned.

Despite her own antipathy toward her daughter-in-law, Marian had thought Hope had suited Robert. But strangely, Hope hadn’t been enough for him. Two years ago he surprised everyone by walking out the door.

And Robert hadn’t been enough for Lisa. Marian liked to believe that he had loved his daughter but his career, his all-consuming jet-setting power-hungry career, had prevented him from acting on that love. Otherwise, how could she explain how indifferent he was to his own daughter’s suffering?

And she didn’t mean Lisa’s final moments. She meant
all the moments leading to this. All the times Lisa’d asked her daddy to fly home to see her in the school play, all the times Lisa’d asked her father to take her with him, all the times Lisa had stopped asking because she knew the answer would never change.

When Robert walked out that door two years ago, he checked out for good. He never admitted it—he played lip service to the custody agreement—but the reality was that he was never home. And Marian suspected he liked it that way.

How, Marian wondered, had she managed to raise a son who could abandon his own flesh and blood?

But now he sat by her side. Viewing his daughter’s coffin with the same drawn expression as he’d viewed her remains yesterday.

Hope sat on the pew opposite them. She had not acknowledged them. In fact, she’d barely acknowledged anyone. She sat by herself. She stared straight ahead.

At the same coffin.

Encasing the remains of a child that no one had loved enough to save.

Marian closed her eyes.

Kate walked through the heavy oak doors of the cathedral. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the dimness after the brightness outside.

Several people stood in the vestibule, taking in their bearings like Kate. There was a couple, the man balding and the woman tastefully outfitted, and then another fair-haired man who stood off to the side. They were all dressed in suits, which suggested friends of Judge Carson, but Kate recognized none of them. The couple looked as if they’d graduated at least fifteen years before her, although the blond man was younger. Almost as one, they moved toward
a small red-haired teenager handing out programs of the service, her pale blue eyes lined with black but rimmed with pink. It was strange how an event could connect people in a way they never would have imagined a week ago. Now here they were, an older couple who led the way, and a younger man who courteously allowed Kate to walk ahead of him through the doorway.

Then all their paths parted as they stepped onto the bloodred carpet that bisected the pews. A strange hush swallowed their footsteps. It was the hush of the living who wanted to be silent like the dead girl on the altar, but betray the fact that their hearts are still beating by the nervous flipping of the program pages, the uneasy shifting of bodies on pews, the whispered words of greetings as they found a familiar face in the throng.

Kate didn’t look around to see if she knew anyone. She hoped no one would see her. She wanted to be by herself.

She slipped into a pew near the back. There were very few spaces left. The teenage girls she’d seen in the parking lot had better hurry up and get in the cathedral, or they wouldn’t get a seat.

She glanced down at the program.

Lisa’s gaze met hers. Kate’s breath stopped in her throat. Lisa looked like a typical teenager. And yet she didn’t. There was something in her eyes, a pain that went deeper than the usual teenage angst, a loneliness that Kate understood only too well.

She wished she’d met her.

She wished she’d helped her.

She wished she could change places with her. Give this young girl her life back.

But she had wished that before.

It hadn’t changed a thing.

Ethan stood at the back of the cathedral. The funeral was set to begin in approximately one minute. The mourners had been ushered in from the parking lot and were now settled into the pews.

His eyes rested for a moment on the back of Kate’s sleeked head. She hadn’t seen him. But he’d seen her. Oh, he’d seen her. His nerves had jolted through his body as she stood hesitantly on the threshold of the church. She wore a little black dress, with a cropped jacket that reminded him of Audrey Hepburn. It hung around her hips—she’d lost weight since they broke up; he hadn’t noticed that last Friday because she’d been wearing a raincoat. The starkness of her clothing also accentuated her pallor. As usual, she wore very little makeup, but her lips had a pale pink sheen that reminded him of the inside of a seashell.

She didn’t look left or right. Just walked over to the closest pew and slipped into it. Within minutes she was joined by a muted group of teenage girls who’d exchanged looks of dismay at having to sit so far in the back.

There must be at least five hundred people here. He pressed his lips together.

Four hundred and ninety-nine mourners.

And, the team fervently hoped, one killer.

Contentment swelled within him. And satisfaction. It’d been a good week so far.

He’d gotten another case. Again.

That’s what careful planning did for you. The weather forecast had held true—their accuracy for predicting rain was usually about ninety percent in his experience—and the girl had been found on schedule.

Fortune had thrown a little luck his way. The girl was a
judge’s daughter! He liked to think it was fate telling him not-so-subtly that he would exact justice for the wrongs done to him. Dr. K had almost fainted when he found out.

It just goes to show that fortune favors the bold.

And to cap off his week, he’d come to her funeral to savor the moment. He usually didn’t get this pleasure. Most of his patients were lost to their families before he began his procedure. Hardly any had funerals, and when there was one, there were so few family members he would have stood out.

He sat still, feeling the energy of the mourners. Pain, shock, disbelief.

Fear.

He absorbed it.

It filled his cells, transmitting an energy to his muscles that only his body could accept. Getting his fingers ready for the painstaking, precise work they excelled at.

His gift.

The world was just seeing it now.

He basked in the energy around him.

He glanced across the aisle. Three little schoolgirls sat with tears smudging their makeup. Lovely, firm bodies on two. The third was out of shape. He bit back a sigh. The muscles might be flaccid, but there was always something to learn from it. He had to remember that.

And then the woman next to them. He couldn’t believe his luck when
she’d
arrived at the church. She was a class act, a lawyer by the looks of it. Again, it was a sign. He walked into the church next to her, breathing in her faint scent of lavender. He bet her muscles were nice and smooth, her flesh firm under that dress she wore.

If he killed her, the legal community would begin to wonder if they were being targeted. A deviation from his plan. But a tempting one.

He pictured laying her body out. He smothered the giggle that threatened to break through his lips and glanced at the woman. A whitish aura outlined her face.

He blinked.

When he looked again, the aura had gone. But her face was pale. Her eyes glowed like pools of warm whiskey. Hot toddy. He felt the blood pulse through him, his dick grow hard.

Stop.
Stop
.

He needed to be pure, sterile. Clean.

He would never be accused again of having an inappropriate relationship with his patient. He would never be called a dirty little bastard again. Right, Mom?

He scanned the crowd. There were other girls here. Ones whose eyes were already deadened. Like that black girl over there in the corner.

His gaze was drawn irresistibly back to Whiskey Eyes.

He’d have to wear sunglasses if he found her on the street. Her eyes were so clear. They looked right through him.

And he didn’t like that.

The service was interminable. Marked by poignant eulogies, reflective yet hopeful hymns and the solemn words of the officiating clergy who had baptized Lisa fifteen years ago and had never seen her since.

Kate had sat through a service similar to this. The year her sister died was the same year Lisa was born. You’d like to think that the eternal circle of life was kicking in, providing some order to the universe but, as life would have it, Lisa died a tragic death, too. Kate had no doubt there was another baby being born who would face a similar tragic death in fifteen years, whose passing would rend the fabric of her family and leave them unraveled.

God, why did it have to happen?

God didn’t answer.

She bowed her head. The program sat unopened on her knee. Lisa’s eyes met hers. But this time they were brown, deep. Fringed with darker lashes. Filled with laughter. They were always laughing eyes. Playful, flirtatious Imogen. Gennie. Wanted to be grown up, like her sister. Wanted to be part of the in crowd.

Those eyes had been glazed with drugs on a Friday night, tinged with defiance. Until their car rounded the corner too fast. Then those beautiful brown eyes rolled in wild panic, first at Kate, then at the guardrail. Within a few seconds, they were unseeing. How could Kate walk away from that accident, literally wrench open the door and stumble out of the car, but her sister be lifeless, her body smashed and bloody?

It was all about angles and impact and speed. That’s how the accident reconstruction experts looked at it. Kate looked at it differently. It was about one moment of careless judgment, one minute of pressing the gas pedal too hard while trying to make her sister understand that she needed to find new friends, ones that didn’t sneak off onto the back porch and snort up. Had it been frustration that had made her foot press too hard on the pedal or one drink too many? She’d never know. How ironic that she’d been trying to save her sister from making bad choices, when she herself had made not just a bad choice, but a fatal one.

Had Gennie suffered? Had there been agonizing pain before the final oblivion?

The organ began to play a mournful dirge. The refrain was familiar. Tears swelled in Kate’s throat. Bile was right behind it.

She needed to get out of here.

She looked wildly around. She was boxed into the pew
by three girls, all of whom sat in tears. Mourners were rising slowly to their feet, folding the programs into their purses, murmuring phrases like, “It was a beautiful service,” to one another.

Kate stood. The air pressed in on her. Floral perfumes, citrus aftershave. Some really cheap cologne worn by the girl next to her. Her breakfast pushed up through her esophagus.

Ethan sat in one of the pews on the side. The rest of the team had distributed themselves at various preassigned spots. Walker and Lamond had filmed everyone entering the cathedral and were now watching the exits. Redding and Brown were videotaping the cars and license plates in the parking lot, as well as the side streets. After Ethan saw Kate go in, he chose an aisle seat slightly behind and to the side. He told himself it was an optimum vantage point to observe the mourners. It also happened to be an optimum vantage point to observe Kate. He’d caught her staring at the picture of Lisa MacAdam. She had a look of such stark anguish in her eyes that he felt a pang of sympathy.

And with that came doubt.

Maybe she hadn’t put her firm first over Lisa MacAdam’s interests. Maybe she had tried to do the right thing.

If she hadn’t, she sure as hell was paying the price for it now.

The organ filled the church with a deep, nasal chord that vibrated through his body. The service was ending.

Kate rose from the pew, her face a shocking white against the jet of her dress. The program slipped from her fingers. She didn’t notice.

Her jaw was rigid. She gripped the pew in front of her.

Jesus, was she going to faint?