KILLING ME SOFTLY (34 page)

The warmth stunned her. The scent of leather and patchouli seduced. Instinctively she slipped her arms into the sleeves and hugged the jacket, refused to analyze why he'd given it to her.

"It's been more than eighteen months," he said, and the ragged edge to his voice surprised her. "There's nothing left."

Maybe he meant of their relationship. Maybe he meant the crime. She chose to go with the latter. "Where was his body?" she asked, turning back toward the clearing.

Cain swore under his breath, but he stepped forward anyway and pointed beneath the largest tree.

Renee thought she was prepared. She herself had asked to come here. She knew what had happened. But seeing the spot where her brother had died peeled scabs off old wounds, and the horror and the grief came pouring back. She stepped forward and went to her knees, put her hands onto the bed of decaying leaves—and found it soft.

The tears surprised her. She thought she'd cried all of them she had to cry. But they gathered and stung, and through their blurry haze, she envisioned her brother lying in the leaves, just like they had as children.

Bender's words came back to her, and with a hand she fought to steady, she put her finger to the ground and began to trace. First a
C
. Then an
A
. An
I
…

Cain's foot stomped down on the letters. "Christ Jesus, Renee, what the hell—"

It was the first unchained emotion she'd heard in his voice since she'd called him Robi. Bracing herself she looked up, almost gasped at the disbelief twisting his features, as though instead of scribbling letters in the leaves she'd shoved a knife into his gut and twisted.

"Bender," she said with a hard thrum to her heart. "Bender said Adrian wrote the first three letters of your name in the mud before he died."

He tensed. "Bender?"

"The rookie cop who found him."

"I know who Bender was," he said darkly. "What I don't know is what the hell you're talking about. I was here, damn it. I wrote the report. There was nothing written in the dirt."

She pushed to her feet and stood, wrapped her arms around her middle. "Bender said your report was a lie."

The lines of Cain's face hardened. "Then Bender was lying."

Maybe. Or maybe they'd both been played. "He sounded scared, Cain. He was shaking."

Eyes narrow, he glanced around the clearing. There was a stillness to him, a readiness, and instinctively her gaze looked to the leather holster strapped around his shoulder, the Glock he could have in his hands before she could blink. His hands were open, ready.

But it was the memories that chilled her, the holocaust of them darkening his gaze. He was there, she realized, back in time to the evening he'd crouched near her brother's body.

A long moment passed before he turned back to her, but even when he did, she wasn't sure what he saw. "When did you talk with Bender?"

She swallowed hard. "The night he was murdered. He contacted me, arranged to meet me in the Quarter. Said he couldn't live with the lie, that I deserved to know Adrian's dying words … two names I'd never heard before—and yours."

She wasn't there.

Edouard threw the cruiser into Park and grabbed his service revolver, ran toward the house. Six and a half minutes had passed since her phone call.

He'd wanted her to be there, damn it. He'd wanted her to slip from the bushes or bolt from across the street, run to him the second she saw his car. That would mean she was safe. That she'd gotten away—

The old Creole house was too damn still. Too damn dark. Ungodly quiet. No sound came from within. There was only the unwanted soundtrack of warblers and robins.

Training told him to go slow. Case the house. Scope out the scene. Exercise caution.

The cold fist in his stomach demanded that he kick in the front door.

The fist won. "Lena!" he wanted to shout. But that was one mistake he did not allow himself to make. He couldn't risk giving the perp even one second to get crazy on him.

So he ran. Quietly. From box-filled room to box-filled room. They were all empty. And they all seemed to breathe with him. The parlor. The dining room. The kitchen. At the end of the hall he swung open the door and found the big bedroom, saw stacks of clothes on the bed, a half-packed suitcase on the floor.

Everything inside of him was roaring and screaming, shredding the cold precision of the cop he'd been for the majority of his life. He saw the room through the eyes of a man, who now stared at broken glass and a knocked-over chair, the phone lying on the floor.

"Lena?" He barely recognized his own voice. His body convulsed as he moved to the bed and dropped to his knees, pulled up the bed skirt and looked underneath.

The rush was so intense he went light-headed. For a fraction of a second. Then he was back on his feet and swinging around the room—

The old black-and-white cat damn near got shot.

Shiloh, his name was. She'd had him for at least fifteen years. And he was standing with narrowed eyes at the entrance to the hall.

Slowly Edouard approached him, followed when Shiloh turned and slunk toward the other side of the house. That's when he saw the broken lamp.

And the butcher knife.

And the blood.

Training went out the window. Because God Christ have mercy on his soul, he knew what was behind the closed door.

"No!" The roar wobbled in his ears. "Lena!" He ran toward the door and kicked it open, saw the dark form writhing on the floor—and Lena Mae pressed against the wall in a corner, with some kind of metal container in her hands.

Relief almost felled him. "Jesus," he roared, and was by her side before his heart could so much as beat. "Are you all right?"

She didn't answer, didn't move, didn't so much as blink. Her eyes were huge and dark and swollen. Her cheek was bleeding. Her lip was split.

He wanted to hold her in the worst kind of way. Instead, he lifted the canister from her hands and read the label. Paint thinner.

The moaning perp would not be going anywhere soon.

"Eddy."

Her voice was so damn soft, filled with a kind of emotion that should have been destroyed years ago. "You came."

She sounded surprised. That was his fault. His and his only. "Of course I came," he growled, easing her into his arms and burying his face into her hair. The hot moisture stinging his eyes surprised him. Fisting a hand in her hair, he pressed a kiss to her forehead and stared over her head—saw the portrait.

The room. It wasn't a spare room as he'd initially thought. It was her studio, where she did her painting. Canvases leaned everywhere, some painted on, others bare. Many of the faces he recognized. Others he did not.

The portrait at the back of the room embodied a combination of both. He recognized the features, the mane of silver hair and the intense, hawkish eyes, the wide cheekbones and strong jaw. But underlying the features was a kindness, a gentleness, he'd not seen in the mirror since before he left for Vietnam.

"Eddy," she whispered, but before he could look down, her body went limp in his arms.

That's when he saw the blood.

His name.
His goddamn name.
Cain stared down at Renee, at the cold horror in her eyes, the sorrow and the contrition, and saw memories he didn't want to see.
Her
memories. Through
her
eyes. The sight chilled him, the way she was dwarfed by his big jacket. She looked small somehow, fragile. Vulnerable. Once he'd wanted nothing more than to protect her from the world—and herself. The urge was still there, to reach out and pull her into his arms, promise her everything would be okay. That he would make it okay. So he crushed it.

"What others?" he asked with deliberate precision.

The breeze kept blowing hair into her face. She pushed at it, shoved the tangled strands behind her ears. "Evan," she said, and her voice was strong. "And Lynn. I've been looking for them since I returned, but no one's heard of them and there's no mention in any police report."

The names meant nothing to him. "Did it ever occur to you?" he asked in a voice she'd once said made her skin crawl, "that Bender was lying just like that prostitute you told me about? That you were being set up?"

"Hindsight is easy," she said, and her voice lashed. "But that morning you came to me with blood on your shirt." She paused and closed her eyes, opened them a heartbeat later. "You didn't want to talk."

Streaks of sunlight cut through the oaks and fell on her face, returning him to that morning in her kitchen, when he'd found her sitting at the table staring at a cup of coffee. Her eyes. Christ, he would never forget the revulsion he'd seen in her eyes. "So you decided I must have killed him."

"No."
Her voice was soft, but the word echoed through the stillness like a cry for mercy. "We were going to meet that evening," she said, "at the cottage. You said it was important."

The memory twisted through him, the ring and the wine and the rose petals, the foolishly romantic words he'd rehearsed all afternoon. Gabe had said he was loco to propose after such a short time and in the middle of the biggest case of his career, and maybe Gabe had been right. But there'd been so much darkness. And she'd been such a bright light.

"When I got out of the shower that afternoon I smelled you," she said, and the words were coming faster now, harder. Darker. "But you didn't answer when I called."

Cain's jaw went tight and he looked away, toward a clump of Spanish moss. But sweet Mary the image wouldn't fade, the picture of her wrapped in a towel and realizing someone was in her house.

"I went into my office and found my laptop on, critical files deleted. My case folder was empty." She paused, swallowed. "I tried to call the police, but there was no dial tone. I ran for my mobile phone, but stopped when I saw your keys on the back of Grandpappy's recliner."

Where he always put them. "My keys were stolen that morning. So was my car."

Her eyes met his, showed him a hell he'd never imagined. "Then I heard you whisper my name."

And the setup had been complete.

"I spun around," she said, never looking away, never blinking, just staring into his eyes as if he could make the memory and the aftermath go away, as if he could make it all better, like he'd once promised he would. "But it was too late."

His imagination seized on what she didn't say, assaulted him with all the ways it could have been too late. "Did you see a face?"

"No, just a candlestick."

Something inside of him went cold and dark. He told himself not to do it, to keep his distance and continue taking her statement like a jaded cop so far removed from decency and humanity that nothing fazed him. But he stepped toward her anyway, felt his hands lift and his fingers settle against the side of her face, the way he'd once touched that butterfly in what seemed like a different lifetime. The butterfly he'd killed.

"It was dark when I came to," she whispered. "I was alone in an old shack. It was dirty and smelled like death."

And he'd been throwing back a beer because she'd stood him up.

"My ankles and wrists were bound, but I was able to work the rope, get free."

Like he'd taught her during one of the many self-defense lessons he'd insisted upon.

"I saw the keys on a table and lunged for them, made it out the door before someone tackled me from behind. We struggled. He had a knife and he was big. Strong."

The truth glinted there in her eyes, the devastation of what had been running through her mind as she'd struggled for her life. "Like me."

"He wore a ski mask and just kept slashing at me," she said in a robotic voice that sickened him. "I kicked and thrashed, got my elbow into his nose hard enough that he let go of me long enough for me to get my feet and run to my car." A single tear spilled over. "Your car was parked beside it."

Against the side of her face, his hand stilled. "Jesus, God—"

She backed away and wrapped her arms around her middle, ran her hands along the bulky sleeves of his jacket. "I made it onto the highway, but he was right behind me. It was so dark that night, foggy. I could barely see two feet in front of me."

He could take it from here. "You went off the road."

"Hit a tree at full speed then slammed into the bayou."

"Your car was found two weeks later." Submerged in the water.

"I was thrown, came to sometime later and started wandering. That's all I remember until I woke up in a clinic. I'd been found with nothing, no purse or ID. They had no idea who I was, only that I'd said one name over and over, and begged them not to call the police."

His eyes met hers. "Because I was the police."

Somewhere in the swamp a heron cried, and another answered. "I was scared," she said. "There wasn't a single part of me that didn't hurt. I didn't know what to think or who to trust."

Not even herself.

"It killed me," she whispered. This time it was she who moved, she who curled her hands around his upper arms. "Because despite everything, the newspaper articles and your arrest, my own hazy memories, I still loved you. Still wanted you."

Just as he still wanted her. He staggered away from her and curled his hands into tight fists, recoiled from the stricken look on her face—and from the truth. It ripped through him anyway, with a violence that charred everything inside him.

For eighteen months he'd lived without her. There'd been only memories and nightmares, the chilling questions that followed him everywhere, the even more chilling knowledge that he'd failed her. That because of him she'd hurt and she'd suffered. That when she'd needed him, he hadn't been there.

But sweet God, for the past four days everywhere he turned, the truth stared back at him, and laughed. Because all that time she'd been alive.

"That's why I came back," she whispered, and her voice broke on the words. "I made myself go to the bad place, told myself it was the only way I could protect myself. But the first chance I got, I ran straight back to you."

He went still. He should hate her. He knew that. But when he looked at her now, at her huge dark eyes and pale soft skin, the strand of tangled dark hair caught against her mouth, like some idiotic masochist all he wanted to do was touch. And taste. And take.