KILLING ME SOFTLY (36 page)

Her eyes went even darker. "It wasn't like that—"

"Is that why you went to law school?" he pressed. "To hang fellow attorneys out to dry?"

"Gabe, please, you have to listen to me."

Once, the desperation thinning her voice would have disturbed him. Now he ignored it. "There never was a shipment, was there?"

"Gabe—" she said again, but this time she made the mistake of touching him. She lifted a hand to his forearm, like she'd done so many other times.

Everything inside of him went stone cold. "Alec died because of your game," he said, looking first at her hand, then into her eyes. "He
died
. And his blood—" He took the hand she'd put to his arm and turned it over, exposed her palm. "It's right here."

"No." It was barely more than a whisper.

"I saw you!" he realized. "At the warehouse, just before it blew. I saw your car … just didn't realize whose it was until today."

"It wasn't about you," she said. Hand still turned over and exposed in his, she looked up at him. "We had to find the leak."

He dropped her hand. "It's not me."

"I know that." Her voice was sad. "But someone close to you is."

He didn't want to hear anymore. Didn't trust himself to look at her one second longer. Knew better than to analyze the twisted mess boiling inside him.

"Go to hell," he whispered, ignoring the fact that her stricken gaze said she was already there.

Val looked nervous.

Renee set down a cup of hot black tea and shifted on the formal sofa, felt a dull pang of guilt. Val had been a gracious hostess from the moment she'd arrived, welcoming her into her home and offering refreshments, but her smile had been strained and her eyes guarded.

The two women now sat across from each other, and though the conversation was casual, Val's posture in the lovely antique wing chair was stiff.

She was uncomfortable, Renee realized. She also knew why. The two women had been friends once. They'd shared martinis and manicures, shopping trips and secrets. Renee knew Val was a smart woman. She no doubt realized Renee had not invited herself over to discuss the weather in Barbados. Renee was a reporter. Val knew that. It didn't take great deductive powers to realize Renee wanted something from her.

Renee uncrossed her legs then recrossed them, searched for the right words. She couldn't just blurt out the real reason she'd come. Val would be as defensive as Cain had been.

Cain.
God
. He'd told her to let it go, that there was no way Gabe was involved in the attempt on her life. But Renee couldn't do that. The idea had settled under her skin like an invisible splinter, and until she found a way to extract it, there was no way to ignore it.

All this time they'd been looking for a dirty cop, someone who'd sabotaged the investigation into organized crime by feeding critical information to
Oncle
. Informants had been executed. Sources of information had dried up like creek beds during a drought. Her brother, quietly cooperating with the police, had been murdered.

And an innocent man had taken a long, hard fall.

Now Renee had to wonder. She knew Cain was innocent, and deep in her bones she believed Alec was, too, despite the rumors to the contrary. Travis had believed the real culprit could be found closer to home.

Gabe was an assistant district attorney—and Cain's cousin. He had access to everything his cousin did…

"Where's Gabe?" It was a Saturday. Two suitcases sat across the room. "He's not working is he?"

Val's cup clanked as she set it down. "I'm afraid so."

"That's too bad," Renee said as casually as she could. "I was hoping to see him. Something big going on at the D.A.'s office?"

Val bit down on her lip and stared at Renee, glanced nervously at the door. "Have you heard something?" she asked, and this time she sounded scared. "Is that why you're here?"

Renee uncrossed her legs and leaned closer, hoped Val couldn't hear the frenetic pounding of her heart. The rush of adrenaline almost made her sway. "What would I have heard?"

"Nothing," Val said. Agitated, she stood. "I just…" She hesitated, looked at Renee with the same searing intensity she'd once looked at Savannah. "Ever since you showed up, strange things have started happening. I mean, Alec is dead and now Gabe is—"

Very slowly, Renee came to her feet. This time she did sway. "Gabe is what?"

"You should never have come here," Val said. Renee watched her fiddle with a silk floral arrangement, and knew her instincts had been right. Val knew more than she was saying.

"But I'm so glad you did," Val said, looking up. That's when Renee saw the gun—and felt the room start to spin. "Savannah."

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

"
T
hat's it,
monchou
. That's it." Crouched beside an old duck blind with his camera angled toward a cypress, Cain watched a female anhinga dry her wings. The brown-and-white bird stood on a decaying tree trunk and flapped her wings, spraying off water that quickly dissipated into the gray fall mist.

He adjusted his aperture setting and snapped. The graceful bird froze, glanced his way, took flight.

Cain pushed to his feet and watched the bird soar, knew that she had the potential to become Miss November in his next calendar. Lifting his camera, he snapped a shot of her silhouetted against the hazy sun. Then he swore viciously. Because no matter how many pictures he took, he couldn't stop seeing Renee as she'd been that morning, kneeling at the spot where her brother had died. Her quiet words haunted.

She'd suffered. Her body, yes, but more than just the physical, it was the emotional scars he'd seen that morning, the same shell-shocked look he'd seen countless times as a cop from women whose only mistake was falling in love with the wrong man. He'd taken their statements, urged them to think with their heads and not their hearts, knelt beside their lifeless bodies while behind him their children cried.

Sometimes there were no warnings. Other times there were. It was those situations that had always incensed him, made him wonder how a woman could stay with a man she didn't trust. But God help him, now he knew. Uncertainty and love didn't cancel each other out. They could live side by side, scraping and twisting, tangling, until it was impossible to discern one from the other. Just like love and hurt could.

In the end, it was the dichotomy that destroyed.

Frowning, he lifted his camera and searched for another target, but there was only Renee as she'd been that morning, gazing at him with through eyes huge and dark and bruised, as though
he
was the one who'd driven the knife into
her
back. Every time he saw her, the woman who'd betrayed him faded further, replaced by the woman who'd walked through hell and back to reclaim her life. The shadows in her eyes offered chilling testimony to the nightmare she'd endured, the heinous tug-of-war between faith and doubt that had shattered the woman she'd once been. But there was strength, too, and courage, more raw and gut-twisting than he'd seen from the majority of his brothers on the force.

On a cruel rush of adrenaline he turned from the increasingly bloodred sky and slung his camera strap over his shoulder, heard his boot crunch down on a pile of twigs. His heart pounded with an urgency he hadn't felt since the night he'd run through the swamp searching for Savannah. Because God help him, she'd more than just endured. More than just survived. She'd come back to him. Against all odds and every scrap of cold logic, she'd defied the conventional wisdom that would have granted her the chance to start over fresh. She'd ignored the cesspool of evidence against him, which had given her the power to make sure he was locked away for a long, long time, and she'd come back to him.

He, in turn, had walked away.

Behind him the cry of the anhinga echoed through the swamp, but he no longer cared. There was only Renee, and the insidious knowledge of what he'd done to her.

Awareness came slowly. First there was peace. Her body was relaxed, her mind drifting like clouds on a lazy summer day. But then came the pulses of confusion. She didn't remember going to sleep, couldn't place whether it was day or night.

Alarm flickered next, bringing with it the realization that her body wasn't relaxed. It was heavy. And her mind wasn't drifting. It was racing—reeling.

Memory slashed in last, and on a horrific rush she squinted against the shadows. The room wasn't small and dark and dirty, and the scent wasn't of death and decay. The surface on which she lay wasn't hard and damp. And her head didn't throb like it always, always did when sleep took her back to the night she'd almost lost her life.

There were shadows in this room, but only because of the plantation shutters closed to all but a few streaks of sunlight. The scent was of apricots. Beneath her was a soft bed.

Renee swallowed against a cottony throat and blinked against the haze, brought the room into focus. And the woman. She sat in a straight-backed chair near the bed. In her hands was a gun.

"Feel better now?" she asked.

Renee pushed against the lethargy, but the bindings at her wrists and ankles impeded movement. "V-Val…"

The woman she'd considered a friend stood. "It's been a long time," she said, moving to the side of the bed. There was a gleam in her eyes Renee had never seen before, a malevolent light that made her blood run even colder. "It was so nice of you to stop by this afternoon. You saved me a bit of trouble."

"I don't understand."

Val lowered a hand to the side of Renee's face and gently stroked the hair from her eyes. Her touch was obscenely soft. "I always wondered what happened to you," she said in an odd singsong voice. "Why your body wasn't found." Her fingers stilled against Renee's cheekbone. "Sometimes I would dream of you. You would rise from the swamp, dripping and decaying, and come toward me, staring at me through vacant eyes."

"It was you," Renee whispered, and the realization punished. She'd been blind to Val. They all had. She'd been like wallpaper in Gabe's life, something that was there but that no one ever paid much attention to. "All this time it was you."

"And no one suspected a thing," Val said, clearly pleased. "It's the curse of being a woman, always overlooked and underestimated. But it's also the gift."

Renee struggled to connect all the dots with lines that didn't make sense. All the seemingly innocuous conversations, little choices that shouldn't have impacted so many lives, the little lies. Val had always seemed clingy, almost desperate to hang on to Gabe. Renee had always thought it a little pathetic.

Now she realized her friend's cover was downright brilliant.

"Gabe loves you," she whispered, and her heart hurt for him. Thinking he might be responsible for all the deception had been hard, because she'd always thought of him as a stand-up guy, with a core of integrity that ran a mile deep.

"Yes," Val agreed. "I worked hard to make sure that he does."

"This will kill him."

Val smiled. "Only if he finds out."

Which Val had no intention of happening. Which meant she had no intention of letting Renee live to tell him.

"You weren't supposed to die, you know," she said with a wistful smile. "At least not that night anyway."

Renee's mind raced. She was in Gabe's house. He had to come home at some point. If she could keep Val talking— "What was supposed to happen?"

"Your brother took something from me. Something important."

"The Goose…" She'd heard the rumors, the whispers Cain had refused to verify that her brother managed to steal one of the small electronic devices that had brought the gaming industry to its knees.

Val's expression turned dead serious. "I want it back."

Renee's heart kicked hard. From the look in Val's eyes, she more than wanted it back. She
needed
it back. "That's why you abducted me. You think I know where it is."

"I know you do," Val said. "You're his sister."

Renee stared at the woman who'd fooled them all, tried not to see her as she'd been almost two years before, when she and Cain and Gabe and Val had shared drinks at the Golden Pelican. Adrian had come over to them. He'd flirted with Val, told her that if he wasn't already in love and if Gabe wasn't her almost fiancé, he'd make a play for her himself.

Only a few weeks later she'd had him executed.

The rage built like a vicious force within her. "My brother would never have said anything that would endanger me."

Val ran her hand along the barrel of her semiautomatic … silencer already in place. "That remains to be seen. He was quite proud of the fact he'd hidden what he stole from me someplace where no one would ever think to look."

"Then what makes you think I know?"

"We gave him a choice. He could return what he stole, or you and Saura would die."

Renee cringed.

"So he relented. He said he'd return it, we just had to let him retrieve it." Val's eyes went hard. "He went, but I had someone follow him. He drove to a wooded area that bordered a swamp. Then he started to walk."

Lying there on the bed, Renee went very still. Cain had been right after all. Adrian had gone to his death alone and of his own volition. "I don't understand. Why would you kill him before he could return the Goose?"

Val's expression twisted. "Adrian got foolish, thought he could outmaneuver his tail. He circled back, tried to take him from behind. But my man was faster, took him out before your brother could so much as blink."

Renee closed her eyes, saw the soft bed of leaves where her brother had fallen—and died.

"We searched the area," Val added. "But came up with nothing."

With his final breaths Adrian had tried to communicate something—not the name of his assailant, Renee now realized. But something else. Something more important.

Cain … Evan … Lynn.

"…checked it out," Val was saying. "According to some of his friends, Adrian used to go duck hunting in that same area. He and your dad." Her smile was slow, confident. "You're his sister. If anyone would know what he was doing out there, where he was going, it would be you."