Sins of the Storm (3 page)

“What were they after?” he pressed, ignoring the way she was looking up at him.

“Jack—”

He put a hand to his thigh and squeezed. “Do you have any idea what that man could have done to you?” And finally all those hard edges pushed through, and he could see her again, staggering backward. “If I’d been just a few seconds later—” He broke off and swore softly. “What were you thinking going after him?”

“Jacques.” His name. That was all she said, soft and aching, a whisper, just like moments before. No attempt at explaining—or defending. She skimmed a finger along his cheekbone. “You’re bleeding.”

The words came at him like a bucket of unexpected water, and for a moment all the questions fell away, leaving him looking down at her, at the way she played her index finger along the dull throb of his cheekbone. “A branch,” he muttered.

Her expression softened, but he wasn’t sure if she smiled, or frowned. “I didn’t mean to get you hurt.”

No. She never meant for the consequences to happen.

But they always did.

To the east the sky flashed and he could see her clearly, the secrets in her eyes and the moisture of her skin—the way he still held her arms as if this time he didn’t know how to let go—and the scrapes along her wrists, where she’d caught herself when she fell.

With detached deliberation, he released her and moved away. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

This time the twist of her mouth was definitely a frown. “No,” she said quietly. “You can’t.”

“Damn it, Camille—”

She stepped into him and pressed a finger to his mouth. “You’re going to have to trust me on this, Jack. Is that so hard to do?”

H
e hadn’t answered.

Over an hour after Camille checked into the Bayou Breeze motel, she could still see the hard look in Jack’s eyes as she’d waited for an answer.

In the end, the silence had told her everything.

Jack couldn’t trust her—not anymore.

After a warm shower, she slipped into a large 49ers T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, then climbed onto the bed and sat on her knees, opened her carry-on luggage.

It was all there, safe and sound inside, completely untouched by the man who’d stolen her laptop. The man may have gotten her hard drive, but she had a backup. Several of them, actually. One was in San Francisco, locked in a safe-deposit box. Some called her paranoid, but Camille knew the value of caution.

With hands that no longer shook, she reached for the leather portfolio and pulled apart the Velcro, lifted out the notebook. Kneeling on the faded floral bedspread, she flipped open the cover and felt the rhythm of her heart deepen as she looked at what she’d written three months before.

She’d been planning, dreaming, far longer.

Sins of the Storm

by Cameron Monroe

She didn’t have her computer, but she didn’t need a keyboard to write. Or remember. Flipping past the notes and questions and plans, she found a blank page and started to write.

Tomorrow she would go to the bank. There was a very real chance the safe-deposit box was still there. Her mother hadn’t known about it. None of them had…not until Camille had asked her mother to retrieve several books from storage.

Once her father had loved to read to her. It had been their special time. He’d stretch out his legs and put his arm around her, pull her close.
Once upon a time,
he’d always begun, even when those words were not printed on the pages.

But then, it had always been the stories not found in any book that she’d loved best, myths and legends drenched in hope and secrets and blood. Betrayal.

By the time she was twelve, she’d outgrown story time. But one night she’d walked into her room and found him sliding a book onto the shelf. He’d turned with a forced smile and muttered some kind of excuse—an excuse that had held for twenty years, until Camille had let herself go back to that night—the last night of her father’s life—and remember what she’d made herself forget.

In the book tucked next to a stuffed lamb, she’d found several slips of paper. One contained a safe-deposit box number, and she’d wondered. She knew her brother had found a key taped under the kitchen table. But they’d never known what lock the key opened.

Until now.

With only the soft light of the bedside lamp, Camille poured everything out on paper, documenting her first impressions of Bayou d’Espere fourteen years after leaving.

When she glanced up again, the clock told her over an hour had passed. Dropping the pencil, she opened and closed her fingers—and saw the envelope.

Small and white, it lay on the floor just inside the door. And before she went to it, slid her hand inside her T-shirt to preserve possible fingerprints and carefully broke the seal, the sight of her name typed on the front told her the contents would be like all the others.

She opened the envelope anyway, and read the five words:

Stop while you still can.

Headlights slanted across the rain-slicked highway. For almost two hours Jack had walked the grounds of Whispering Oaks, searching and inspecting. He’d moved his car and circled back, stood in the shadows. Waiting.

For the man he’d chased into the woods to sneak back, Jack told himself. For answers.

For her.

Now he took the substandard road with the same brutal deliberation he’d once taken the skies over Iraq, navigating a sharp curve with life-and-death precision.

The simple cross on the far side of the road served a stark reminder that not everyone had the same ability. Once pristine white, now it was weathered, faded. The riot of day-lilies didn’t seem to care. They kept right on blooming—

He crushed the memory and crossed a defunct drawbridge, accelerated. As a kid—

He crushed that memory, too. Because to remember anything from his childhood was to remember her.
Camille.
And to remember was to see her as she’d been then, with freckles and pigtails and jeans rolled up to her ankles, following him and Gabe around the swamp.

Those memories, of the girl she’d been, were not how he needed to think of Camille. He needed to remember her the way she’d been tonight, the woman who’d slipped back into the town under the cover of darkness, who’d chosen to visit Whispering Oaks at night, who’d gone to great effort to conceal her car.

It didn’t take great deductive reasoning to realize she’d not wanted to be found—especially by him.

Jack took another wicked curve, but the images, the questions, persisted with every mile he destroyed. She shouldn’t have been at Whispering Oaks. She shouldn’t have been the one to take the bait. He’d floated the rumors himself, about the boxes in a locked room at the plantation—but he’d never specified what they might contain.

He’d been much more interested in who would come looking.

But he’d never expected
her.

Now, Christ…now.

She wanted him to trust her. She’d stood there as if not a freaking day had passed and asked him to trust her, despite the fact she’d refused to tell him one word about what she was doing there in the middle of the night. Or where she’d been.

Once that wouldn’t have mattered. But she’d been a kid then, and he’d loved her like the little sister he never had.

The woman he’d found tonight—tall, dressed in black with rain-slicked hair and secret-clouded eyes—was a stranger.

For fourteen years they’d looked for her, and for fourteen years Marcel Lambert had gloated. She’d been the only link between him and a murder the coroner had labeled suicide, and with her out of the way, Lambert had basked in the small fortune he’d amassed as a renowned restaurateur.

Poor little Camille,
he’d pretended to lament.
Think her recklessness finally caught up with her?

Jack clenched his hands on the steering wheel.

Any word on poor Cami? I heard they found a body in the Everglades.

On a hard turn right, he accelerated toward his house, but Lambert’s words stayed with him.

You’d think if that girl was alive, she’d have come home by now….

But that had been before a prostitute had been murdered and before Lambert emerged as the prime suspect. Before he’d been so certain that his plan to destroy Camille’s brother would succeed that he’d confessed everything.

Before the judge had granted bail anyway.

That Camille would resurface now, with Marcel Lambert, the man she maintained murdered her father, facing trial—no way was that a coincidence.

Frowning, Jack turned into his driveway just as his cell phone started to ring.

Dark blanketed the small central business district. After midnight, no pedestrians walked the sidewalks. The streets were still, quiet. Even the diner sat empty, its doors having closed over an hour before.

Jack scanned the turn-of-the-century storefronts, looking for any sign of activity, a shadow, motion…anything.

Farther down, the blur of red and blue flashed like a tacky neon sign. The traffic light turned red, but Jack kept right on going, completing the twenty-minute drive to the savings and loan in just over ten.

The crowd didn’t surprise him. Word traveled fast in a small town—and late-night calls had become far too common.

Hank DuPree, a twenty-four year veteran of the sheriff’s office, greeted Jack as he walked inside. A tall man with the haunted eyes of a Vietnam vet, Hank breathed and bled law enforcement. But he’d never wanted to be the one in charge.

Beyond him, the door to the vault hung open. The bank manager stood in a wrinkled suit, watching deputies sift through the mess on the floor. And the bad feeling Jack had been fighting from the moment he’d found Camille standing in the shadows wound deeper. “What do we have?”

“In and out in less than five. Looks like the perp knew exactly what he was after.”

The M.O. matched the break-ins at the library and the historical society; late night, targeted. “What this time?”

With an odd little smile, Hank lifted his hands, revealing a stack of old documents and photographs. “Now that’s where it gets interesting, Sheriff…”

Two decades later, Camille could still hear the snarled words, could still feel the way her heart had pounded. Kneeling on the bed, she clenched the pencil and kept writing, let the words flow….

Camille came awake hard, her body drenched with memory and perspiration. Sucking in a sharp breath, she rolled toward the clock and realized she’d fallen asleep. The notebook still lay beside her, the pencil in her hand. But the first strains of sunlight slipped through the curtains.

“Camille, answer me, damn it!”

She swung toward the door, realized what had awoken her. Not a gunshot. The slam of a fist.

Jack’s fist.

At six-twelve in the morning.

“Damn it,
’tite chat.
” He growled the words with another urgent knock. “Open the door!”

’Tite chat.
The nickname he’d given her as a child—Cajun for little cat—did cruel, cruel things to her heart.

Forcing the calm she’d never mastered during those dark, broken years after her father’s death, she slipped from bed and walked to the door, laid her hand against it as she pushed up to the peephole—and saw him. Saw Jack. His eyes were narrow, focused, the lines of his face tight. He’d yet to shave. He’d yet to—

“Fils de putain,”
he muttered, pivoting toward the front office.

She fumbled with the dead bolt and the chain, yanked open the door. “Jack—”

He stopped and turned, pivoted so violently she took an instinctive step back. “Camille.”

Her heart kicked hard as she saw the gun in his hand. “What’s going on?”

With a quick survey of the truck and SUV-cluttered parking lot, he closed in on her. For the first time she noticed the uneven hitch to his gait. And something inside her stilled. He fought it, hid it, but it was there, the faintest trace of a limp.

From Jack.

She’d heard about the bomb, but she hadn’t realized…

He took her hand and led her back into her hotel room, shut the door and turned the bolt.

And deep inside, fascination tangled with dread.

He shoved the gun into his waistband and squeezed his thigh, gave her no time to prepare. She’d imagined this so many times, imagined what the years had done to him, what
Iraq
had done…what it would be like to see him, to touch him.

But nothing prepared her for the reality of facing a man who bore virtually no resemblance to the boy she’d once vowed to love forever. His jeans may have been faded and his black button-down wrinkled, his jaw unshaven, but that’s where the deception ended. There was a hardness to him now, a veil of isolation that hovered like mist on a cold damp day.

“There was a break-in at the savings and loan,” he said, and though his voice was calm, quiet, she knew. Without any further explanation, she knew why he’d come to her, what he thought.

She also knew he was right.

“Live Oak?” She tried to sound only mildly curious, but inside, frustration scraped. She should have password protected the file, damn it. It had been the last one she’d accessed. All someone needed to do was open her word processing program.

It was all there, her notes and theories, questions. Plans.

“Just after midnight,” Jack confirmed.

Somehow she kept her expression blank. Somehow she kept the hot frustration from consuming her. He was a cop, she reminded herself. He was just doing his job, knitting the pieces together in search of a coherent picture. “Did he take anything?”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think it was a
he?
”

Because it had been a man who stole her computer. “Just a guess.” Turning toward the automatic coffeemaker, she reached for the small pot. “From what I’ve read, most bank robbers are.”

“I never said the bank was robbed.”

She stilled, forced herself to turn toward him. He stood less than two feet away, with that unsettling stillness all cops had, watching her through eyes darker than she remembered. Harder. And any illusions she’d harbored about him not knowing—or at least suspecting her involvement—crumbled.

“You asked me to trust you,” he said. “But I can’t do that,
cher…
not until you start trusting me.”

The slow bleed stunned her. It wound through her chest and tightened, made it impossible to breathe. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Yes, you do.” He eliminated the distance between them in two quick steps and reached for her, put his hands on her arms and pulled her toward him, not roughly the way a cop might manhandle a suspect, but with an intimacy that heated her blood. “Goddamn it, if you’re in trouble again, you need to tell me. If someone is trying to hurt you—”