Stranger on Raven's Ridge (11 page)

Raven heard a faint rasp of sound and a second click. Then a man’s deeper voice said simply, “Jason....”

Chapter Eleven

She’d come to Raven’s Cove prepared to open a clinic at Blume House. Now there were dead people hidden on the property, a former cop masquerading as a fanatical reverend, and a faceless crime lord killer lurking in the shadows. Thanks to Weasel, they might have a snippet of Johnny Demars’s voice, but as clues went, Raven didn’t think it was much.

From the grass near the woods, she watched another vanload of people bump their way onto the site. “We should do what Riese did and rent out rooms at the house. We’d make a fortune. If Demars turned out to be one of the guests, maybe the evil that inhabits the walls would infect him.”

“It’s more likely Demars would infect the walls.” Sitting on the step up to Reverend Alley’s Romany-style RV, Aidan replayed Weasel’s cassette tape. “Gaitor wants to stay there tonight.”

“Does he know about the walls?” Raven continued to sift through the hit man’s belongings. So far she’d unearthed seven gleaming knives and two boxes of ammo. “This guy was seriously sick. The carving knife Steven used to cut his ropes was so sharp it slashed his wrists. I had to put four stitches in each of five lacerations.” After which she’d splinted a fractured arm, wrapped a sprained ankle and treated a poked eye. “I’ve also been thinking about the kid we heard on the tape,” she continued. “If it was Jason having a phone conversation—more than likely—he sounded like a very troubled adolescent.”

“He sounded angry as hell.”

“The way a kid might sound if he thought his father had engineered his mother’s death.”

“Murder’s quicker than divorce.”

“Thanks, but I’ll take the papers. Do you think Demars killed her?”

“I don’t know. The kid was definitely upset.”

Raven reached into Weasel’s backpack. “Upset is a state of mind for an adolescent. It’s like a rite of passage. Except in Jason’s case, he didn’t pass so much as detour down a rockier path... Oh, yuck, men’s boxers.”

A faint smile touched Aidan’s lips. “That’s an awfully puritanical reaction for a physician, Raven.”

“Fine, let’s switch jobs. I’m sure there are plenty of other disgusting things in here.” Warier now, she peered inside before she pulled anything else from the pack. “I’d rather Gaitor stayed with Rooney.”

The smile that reached up into Aidan’s dark eyes excited a rather lovely jitter in her stomach. “I must have missed the segue from Weasel’s boxers to your great-grandfather.”

“You’d have to be in my head—which you wouldn’t want to be right now—to understand. My thoughts are bouncing around like a rubber ball. Suffice to say after everything that’s happened today, I’m worried about Rooney. Steven will be there, but someone else should stay at the cottage as well. I called Grandpa’s cell phone while you and Gaitor were plotting your cop strategy. He flatly refuses to go and visit my aunt Vera in Bangor during Ravenspell.”

With his forearms resting on his knees, Aidan hit Play again. “What about Fergus?”

“Why would he want to visit Aunt Vera?” She smiled when his eyes came up. “Kidding. I thought maybe Fergus had gone AWOL now that his cover’s been blown. Did he admit to the break and enter at Emma’s apartment?”

“To me, yeah. Gaitor doesn’t need to know.”

“You can extend the omission to Rooney. By the end of Ravenspell, it’ll be a man-size raven who did the deed. Okay, so that puts Fergus and Steven at the cottage and you, me and Gaitor at Blume House.”

“No, that puts Gaitor at Blume House, and you and me here.”

She stared. “You want us to hide in a tent? With heavy rain threatening, no locks on the flap and, oh yes, Johnny Demars out for blood?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of Gaitor’s RV, but if you prefer to sleep on the ground, I’m game.”

“This from the police lieutenant who spent six, no sorry, seven undercover nights sleeping in a gross Milwaukee warehouse in the middle of July, and whose face I barely recognized when he walked through the door, unshaved, unshowered and under the ridiculous impression that I’d be so deliriously happy to see him that I’d be willing to make out on the kitchen floor, pre-cleanup.”

“It was the hall floor, Raven. We didn’t make it to the kitchen.”

“We did eventually.” She used a magazine from Weasel’s pack to fan her suddenly warm cheeks. “I think this conversation derailed somewhere along the line.”

Setting the recorder inside the RV, Aidan stood and started across the grass toward her. “I wouldn’t say that. Hard ground, hard surface.” Reaching down, he snagged her hand and with an easy tug brought her to her feet. A smile grazed his lips. His eyes held steady on her face. “You might want to consider the wisdom of waving that porn magazine in my face.”

Porn?

She glanced at the nearly naked cover model and couldn’t suppress a laugh. “My God, how is any of this even happening? I’m trying to talk myself out of jumping you in the middle of a campsite—a setting that’s a thousand times crazier than our kitchen, okay, hall floor, and instead of diffusing the situation, I whip out a red flag and wave it at a hot, Black Irish bull.”

On the water beyond the high ridge, a low peal of thunder rumbled through the evening sky.

“Lose the magazine, Raven,” Aidan said, and curled his fingers around her neck.

It was July in Milwaukee all over again, she realized. It was heat and hunger, deprivation and desire, tangling together and making the rest of the world melt away.

More thunder sounded in the distance. She sensed motion, caught a few murmuring voices, but all she really heard right then was the blood pounding like a war drum in her ears.

An almost uncontrollable urge to press herself against him, center to center, swept through her. She wanted to feel his arousal, and know that, like her, he was skating on the edge of his control.

True, no one directed that control better than Aidan, but no one lost it better, either. He could snatch the ground out from under her long before her mind caught up. Didn’t matter though, because he’d be right there to catch her and take her to that place where sensation ruled and everything else was just a hazy detail.

With a smile blossoming and her body already reacting, Raven let the magazine flutter to the grass. “You know this isn’t Milwaukee, right? Not a floor in sight.” She hooked her fingers in his waistband, brought her mouth temptingly close to his. “Tell me Gaitor’s already packed and gone, Aidan. Lie to me, if you’re sure he won’t be back for an hour or more. I want to know we’ll have time to...” Leaving the rest to his imagination, she caught his lower lip between her teeth and simply savored the taste of him.

The fingers around her neck tightened. The gleam in his eyes deepened. “Does this mean you’ve gotten to wherever it is you need to be so we can have sex?”

She rubbed her hips against his jeans. “Why, Lieutenant McInnis, you put that so sweetly. So like a man. We’re apart for a few short years, you reappear out of the blue, and suddenly it’s all about sex. Call me a romantic prude—” she teased him with a kiss to the side of his ear “—but I prefer to think we’ll be making love.”

The last word was nothing more than a smothered syllable as he covered her mouth with his and went straight for the heat.

Need spiked in every cell of Raven’s body. Sliding her fingers up into his hair, she held on and let herself ride the fiery lust into the deeper emotional well that fed it.

She wanted him, desperately, but somewhere in her muddled mind, she knew that none of what she wanted could happen out here.

“Aidan...” Dragging her mouth free, she made herself breathe. “We can—but we can’t. Not on the grass.”

“Okay. In that case, Gaitor’s packed and gone.”

“For an hour, right?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, you two, take it inside.” Steven’s dry comment was accompanied by a sharp rap of knuckles on the top of Raven’s head. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a life-and-death drama playing out here. Not to mention dozens of people in the vicinity.”

Aidan kept his eyes on Raven’s face. “Not for long if they’re smart. It’s going to rain.”

“Good. Maybe that’ll cool you off. Hope so, because we’ve been summoned to Blume House for a ghostly retelling of both the Raven’s and Soldier’s tales. I have the guest list in my hand, and you’re on it.”

Plastering a genial smile on her lips, Raven swung to face him. “This was your brilliant idea, wasn’t it?”

“Only the Blume House part. Rooney wanted to do it at Two Toes Joe’s bar, and I’m not in the mood for green beer.”

Aidan held Raven firmly in front of him—which both amused her and helped diminish some of her animosity toward Steven. “How many people?” he wanted to know.

“Twenty-eight—the precise number of bodies that can be squeezed around the banquet hall table.”

“
Bodies
being the operative word.” Aidan’s gaze swept the area. “A gathering of Blumes is not a good idea at the moment.”

Steven’s smile was benign. “Yes, I mentioned that to Rooney, several times. Raven can tell you how effective my warning was.”

Because fat raindrops were beginning to fall and Aidan was as recovered as he was likely to get, Raven began collecting Weasel’s belongings. “Maybe we can make Grandpa see reason.” Cinching the pack closed, she tossed it to her cousin. “Tomorrow’s the night of the Reenactment, right?”

“Unfortunately.”

“He can tell the tales then, set the mood for it. Is he at home?”

“Get serious. It’s almost six o’clock. He’ll be at Two Toes Joe’s by now.”

Raven pulled out her iPhone. “You should talk to him, Aidan. Stubborn cop to stubborn old man. What?” she said when he snorted out a laugh. “It could work.”

“Yeah, and a good fairy might show up to transform Johnny Demars into a bird. Don’t hold your breath on either count, Raven.”

“Dialing,” she said, and handed him her cell. “I’ll take over if he becomes a wall. And it’s a spirit, not a fairy.”

Grinning, Aidan walked away.

She swung back to her cousin. “You know we should be discouraging Rooney’s habitual drinking, don’t you?”

“Joe’s bar is his second home, Raven. He can still beat most of the locals at darts, and that’s after he’s had three or four mugs of
tea.
” Steven waved irritably at a wasp. “FYI, Sylvie’s cool about today. Freaked, but cool. Uh...” Pausing, he lowered his free arm. Weasel’s backpack slipped from his fingers.

Raven glanced back. “What is it?” Unsure, she frowned. “Steven?”

Still not moving, he dropped his gaze to his left shoulder. Something glistened on the front of his jacket. His face was pale when he brought his eyes back to hers. “I think I’ve been shot.”

* * *

“I
T
WAS
A
WARNING
,” Aidan said four tense hours later. “A statement of what Demars can do and how effortlessly he can do it. Don’t react to him, Raven,” he cautioned when she folded her arms and glared through the windshield of Rooney’s Jeep. “It’s what he wants—to piss you off and terrify you at the same time. Give in to either, and you give him the upper hand.”

She slanted him a dark look. “I kind of think he already has that, don’t you?”

“Not as much as he thinks, no.”

“Because we’ve got his voice? The name of his son, probably spoken by him? I think the odds are in Demars’s favor, Aidan. He could have killed Steven.”

“But he didn’t. He also went for the younger, stronger target, rather than Rooney, who wouldn’t have fared as well as your cousin. Think cat and mouse. That’s the game Demars is playing.”

“And apparently winning.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Demars can’t have been happy to discover that a man he’d relied on for years could no longer be trusted to carry out a proper hit. Worse still, Johnny had to pull the trigger on Weasel himself.”

“If he actually did pull it. What about your ‘big guy’ insurance policy?”

“I haven’t forgotten him.”

“But?”

“No but.” He flipped the windshield wipers on high to combat the rain that fell in angled sheets from a pitch-black sky. “Our dead informant told Gaitor that one of Demars’s preferred shooters was strictly a rifleman. We know he wasn’t referring to Weasel, so that only leaves the big guy, and Weasel wasn’t shot with a rifle.”

“Did it occur to you that Demars might have more than two hit men?”

“Informant said he’s gone with the favored two for a lot of years.”

“Aidan, your informant’s been dead for four of those years. However—” she held up her hands “—in the interest of positive thinking, I’m willing to accept your theory. There’s no ‘big guy’ in Raven’s Cove.”

“At the risk of winding you up again, that’s not quite what I said.”

“Fine, whatever, I’m done. Like Weasel, Steven was shot with a 9 mm semiautomatic in order to frighten and anger me—and possibly because Demars wanted to get us back for the fact that Weasel had to be taken out. So here’s how Steven and I arranged things. Steven, Rooney, Fergus and three burly local males will be sleeping at the cottage tonight. Gaitor and two equally burly fishermen will be up at Blume House and, as before, you and I will be in Gaitor’s RV. When he wasn’t swearing at me before the anesthetic kicked in, Steven told me that Rooney had five RV and trailer hookups installed after the last Ravenspell. Please tell me, because I wasn’t paying attention earlier, that Gaitor nabbed one of them.”

“He’s a man of the cloth, Raven. Of course he’s hooked up.”

She grinned. “Okay, let’s say Gaitor’s disguise has more than one benefit and get back to the subject of death, because if by some miracle Demars doesn’t kill me, I can pretty much guarantee Steven will.” Tucking a leg up, she turned in her seat. “Should we leave Raven’s Cove, Aidan? Just take off and make Demars come after us? I’d rather he shot at me than at members of my family.”

“He’s made his statement, Raven, and had his criminal version of fun. Games aren’t his thing. He’ll be loading up for real next time.”

“Oh, well, that makes me feel much better.” She glanced skyward as thunder shook the road beneath them. “Adding in the horror show sound effects—nightmare complete.”

“You’ll feel less threatened when we’re inside, eating the pizza Emma gave me while you were busy with Steven.”