Raven's Cove - Jenna Ryan (12 page)

Her breath rushed out on a bemused laugh. “I’m going insane. I really am. My mind’s painting pictures of Snow White even though there’s a better-than-even chance that a peeping killer was standing at this very window last night, in a house where an innocent man’s throat was slashed a few short hours ago.”

“Best guess for the murder’s between 5:00 and 7:00 a.m.,” Rogan revealed. “I’d put it closer to seven, myself. Morning was cold, but the dining room where Cutless died is directly over the deputy’s hot room. Floor was warmish,” he added, then stepped in front of her and raised his gun. “Someone’s out there.”

“I thought I saw a shadow.” She looked over his shoulder. “I hoped it was a deer.”

“Deer don’t wear gray leather.”

Lowering his gun, he slid his fingers around her neck and covered her mouth with his. “Stay away from the window and don’t make any noise.”

Momentarily mesmerized, she shook herself free. “What? No. Are you crazy? What if gray leather turns out to be a Düsseldorf college student, and peeping killer materializes out of a hidden passageway while you’re gone?”

“Boris—”

“Is downstairs.” She waved his backup piece. “Maybe still in the house, maybe not. Screw waiting in the spider’s parlor. You taught me to shoot at the safe house. How and where to hit, how and when to miss.”

“I had a feeling those lessons would come back to haunt me. Okay, together, but we find Boris, and he watches your back.”

Once a cop, she thought, but nodded and let him lead the way.

They descended quickly and extinguished their flashlights in the foyer. Jasmine relied more on prayer than sight to cross the floor without breaking an ankle.

Boris responded to her quiet call. Rogan got the door.

The rusty hinges couldn’t be helped. Her pounding heart? Well, she was the only one hearing that sound, so she’d have to live with it, breathe through the fear that fueled it and, please God, help Rogan catch the person responsible for so many deaths.

Tendrils of fog curled like snakes around the porch and wound up the trunks of nearby trees. Skeletal fingers probed the higher limbs. An owl hooted, and somewhere behind them, water plopped from the roof to the ground.

All in all, the perfect setting for an evil spirit on the prowl for a lost soul. As for the more corporeal man in gray leather, did he realize he’d been spotted, or was he still lurking on the grounds?

At a cue from Rogan, Jasmine knelt beside Boris. “Intruder,” she told him and indicated the deep woods. “Show us where.”

The dog’s ears pricked. He sniffed the air for several seconds, then caught a scent and growled softly.

“Keep him close to you,” Rogan cautioned, “in case we get separated.”

She gestured for Boris to bring up the rear.

The darkness moved in sync with the fog, swirling into clouds that blotted out everything. It twined around the trees and created monsters grotesquely enhanced by the deepening shadows.

Hansel and Gretel sprang to mind now. But only until a twig snapped and a large bird shot out of the underbrush.

Boris’s ears went flat. Rogan glanced right as more twigs cracked and the bushes shifted noisily.

“Stay here,” he said to Jasmine. “I’m serious. I don’t want to fire at the wrong person.”

She had no chance to respond. The bushes that had trembled briefly shuddered as someone, presumably the man in gray, took off.

One blink and Rogan was after him.

Jasmine heard the man thrashing through the underbrush. She considered running to Blume House because she knew Boxman would be there snoring like a grizzly bear by now. But leaving Rogan out here alone seemed wrong somehow.

As the thrashing receded, woodsier sounds took over. A chipmunk darted from one side of the path to the other. A larger animal followed. At her side, Boris emitted a long growl.

“Not our problem,” Jasmine said. But the racket that ensued when the animals decided to have it out didn’t exactly calm her nerves.

A gunshot two hundred yards away stopped everything, including her heart. A cry of pain preceded another shot.

The dog looked up at her. Someone shouted. Two more shots thwacked off or burrowed into something.

Jasmine glanced at the trees, then at Boris. “Go,” she ordered. “Help Rogan.”

He bounded off, leaving her alone in the dark and wishing she had four legs herself.

No more sounds reached her, no cries or gunshots or barks. Even the animals had gone quiet.

Reaching for her phone, she punched Boxman’s number. Of course, he didn’t answer. The man snored like a bear and slept like one, as well.

She was dropping the cell back into her pocket when it signaled an incoming text.

Her skin went cold. Her brain and her pulse blipped.

Answer it,
she ordered herself. They’re words, not bullets.

Sucking in a deep breath, she opened the anonymous message. A single short question appeared.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?

She stared at the words for a long moment. Only one name made sense. Daniel…

She got no further than that. Where there’d been nothing, the fog and the darkness suddenly exploded. A man concealed within them reached her before she could react. With a guttural sound rumbling in his throat, he rammed her face-first into the trunk of a large spruce tree.

Chapter Ten

Astonishment, fear and confusion jumbled together, momentarily paralyzing her. But only until her survival instinct kicked in and allowed her to respond as Rogan had taught her at the safe house.

Her cell phone flew into the night. Didn’t matter. Jasmine used her elbow on the man’s midsection, then twisted around before he could get a proper grip.

There wasn’t much to see, but she knew from his outline where all his vulnerable body parts resided.

She aimed for the crotch, felt him prepare to deflect her knee, then switched it up and planted the heel of her hand in his Adam’s apple.

Choking out a curse, he stumbled back. She whipped up her gun.

“Don’t!” His voice was a raw bullet of sound.

One hand came into view, then the other. Both were empty.

“I’m not going to hurt you. Swear. I saw you move and thought you were someone else. Don’t shoot.”

Did she recognize his voice? She wasn’t sure. Her breath heaved in and out. “Who are you?”

He stepped toward her, just close enough for her to make out a familiar set of features.

Her arms dropped. “Well, God.” Unfortunately, that was all she got out. A swish of leaves preceded a foggy black blur as Boris leaped for his throat.

The attack seemed like a signal for chaos to erupt. Arms flailing, the man staggered sideways and fell. Boxman crashed in from the rear with Riese several strides behind him.

“Boris, no!” Jasmine ran past Boxman, who’d missed his tackle. “It’s Victor. It’s only Victor.”

Clearly juiced, Riese shouldered a heavy baseball bat. “Are you hurt?” she demanded while Jasmine hooked her fingers through the dog’s collar. “Rogan called Boxman and said he should come up here because the guy shooting at him turned out to be a student who scared himself so badly when he saw Rogan that he tripped over a log, put a bullet in his friend’s arm and broke his own foot.”

An overtaxed Boxman wheezed at Jasmine from his knees. “You get any of that?”

“Enough.” Still restraining Boris—Rogan had obviously sent him back to guard her—she inched toward the fallen man.

“Are you okay?”

“Will be,” he rasped and spit to the side. “When I can swallow again.”

Something wasn’t right, her instincts warned.

Boxman wore a belt light that emitted a glow broad enough for her to see Victor’s features, and even to identify the silver stud he habitually wore in his left ear. Same face, same hair, same stud. And yet…

She studied him until it struck her. “You have stubble.” Curious, she skirted him. “You’re anal about shaving, morning and night. Why the change? Are you undercover?”

“No, I’m not undercover, and there’s no change. I recognize you, Jasmine, but I don’t know you any more than you know me. I’m not Victor. I’m his twin brother, Cyrus.”

* * *

C
OULD THE SITUATION GET MORE
bizarre? Jasmine wondered. More tangled? More surreal?

Here she was in an off-the-map town with Rogan, Boxman and now Victor Bowcott’s twin brother, Cyrus. And where was the one person who should have been with them but wasn’t? No longer in jail thanks to former deputy Wesley Hamilton-Blume. However, if she was right about the origin of the text message she’d received that night, Daniel was alive and plugged into the situation.

As far as she could tell, no one really knew what anyone else was doing, yet all were understandably suspicious of the people and circumstances around them. It therefore made perfect sense for the entire group, plus Riese, to gather at a seedy dockside bar called Two Toe Joe’s for a question-and-answer session that might or might not bring them onto the same page.

They sat at a table in the back on chairs that wobbled, under lights that had to be Thomas Edison originals. Across the smoky room, a man as old as Methuselah winked at them. Jasmine positioned herself between Rogan and Cyrus. Riese took a seat on Boxman’s right.

Rogan opened the conversation with the question on everyone’s mind. “Why are you here, Cyrus, and not your brother?”

Shielded blue eyes returned his stare. “I intercepted a text message a couple days ago from a guy named Crocker. He said people were dying all over the country, but the heart of the problem might be in Raven’s Cove, Maine, where Daniel Corey’s been living under a new identity. He suggested that I, or rather Victor, pay Daniel a visit before whoever’s doing the killing decides to come after me. Again, me being Victor. So here I am.”

Resting her forearms on the table, Jasmine arched curious brows. “If the message was meant for Victor, why isn’t he here instead of you?”

“I told you, I intercepted the text.”

“Meaning, he hasn’t seen it?” Rogan asked.

“Not unless someone sent the same message to my phone.” Cyrus did a flip-flop with his hands. “We were barhopping after our grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party. Phones ended up on the table. Last call came, lights went down. I took his cell, he took mine. Message arrived in the wee hours. By the time I opened it and figured out it wasn’t meant for me, Victor was heading back to San Diego. He’s in the final stages of a very long, very involved undercover sting operation that he swears is going to be his last.”

Jasmine recaptured his attention. “There’ve been seven murders—eight, if you count Chief Cutless’s—in just over six weeks. Don’t you think you should have contacted your brother? After all, it’s his life that’s in danger.”

Cyrus stuck his chin out and didn’t look friendly doing it. “He’s tied up, Jasmine. He’s also a by-the-book kind of guy, whereas I, being a former cop rather than an active one, am not.”

Unfazed by his attitude, she leaned in for a clearer look. “You and Victor must drive people crazy. I’ve never seen such identical twins. I mean it. You could be your brother.”

“No, I couldn’t.” Frowning, he sat back. “Look, being an ex-cop has its advantages here.” He stabbed a stale pretzel at Rogan. “Way I see it, you have limited scope when it comes to tracking suspects. Gotta do it by the book, am I right?”

“Generally, yeah. But there’s the book, and there’s the book.”

Meaning, his book was a lot thinner than most, Jasmine reflected. “Cyrus, being in San Diego won’t save Victor’s life. None of the victims except Ian Cutless were killed in Raven’s Cove.”

To her amazement and, she had to admit, horrified admiration, Cyrus hoisted his mug and took a long swig of the greenish beer with gritty black things in it that Boxman had shoved away and Rogan hadn’t even bothered to order.

“As we speak,” he said, “my three-minutes-younger brother is living a junkie Baja, California, lifestyle and only reporting in sporadically. One wrong contact could blow his investigation to hell. Since I’d rather he not wind up there, I’ll leave the undercover work to him and deal with the lateral problem in my own way.”

“That way being to impersonate him,” Rogan said. “Now, as the murderer would see it, there are four of us here from the safe house.”

Riese blew out a gusty breath. “Man, this is Agatha Christie come to life.”

“With a dollop of Stephen King tossed in to keep the creep factor at max.” Unable to quell her amusement, because all the men wore such serious expressions, Jasmine nudged Rogan’s arm with her shoulder. “Cyrus is wearing gray leather, Lieutenant. Doesn’t that make you just a little happy?”

“Delirious,” he agreed, but slid her that slow half smile she loved and draped an arm around the back of her chair. “One thing, Cyrus. You said you thought Jasmine was someone else when you jumped her. Who did you expect her to be?”

“You tell me. I was poking around fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes before hell exploded, and I saw two guys dipsy-doodling in the woods. They had guns and, it looked to me, like a damn good buzz on.”

“Uh, right. About that.” Riese attempted a smile. “My German students wanted to try their hands at big-game hunting, so I, um, kind of told them about my cousin’s gun shop.”

Incensed, Jasmine shoved Boxman back so she could see her. “They wanted to hunt—what’s here and big—moose? And you told them where to buy the weapons to do it? To shoot Bullwinkle?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I told them the biggest things they were allowed to shoot were rabbits. My cousin needs the business. He’s putting his girl through business college. And I never told them to go out after dark drunk.”

Boxman snickered. “Got what they deserved, then, didn’t they? The one who took a header over a log shot his buddy in the arm and broke his own ankle. Picture it. The guy’s sprawled on his back when he spots Rogan in the fog, wearing black and carrying an even bigger gun than his. Uh-oh, maybe he’s seeing the possessed raven of death everyone’s been talking about. Better shoot the bastard just in case.” The snicker became a snort. “Man, is there anyone living in or visiting this town who doesn’t have ravens on the brain?” He jerked an impatient thumb. “Rogan, why’s that old fossil across the room waving his mug at you?”