Where Evil Waits (26 page)

L
UKE RELEASED
K
ARA, STARTLED
by his own admission, even more rattled by her assumption that anything—even Collado—could tear him away from her. Jesus Christ, he’d made love to her for a good portion of the night, and he’d done it as Luke Mann. No bogus identity rolling her around in the sheets, no lies or ruses or false promises between them. It had been the most real night of his life and he was terrified of how much he wanted to repeat it. Again and again. Maybe indefinitely.

And it surprised him to think of Aidan: He wanted to tell Aidan who and what he was. That urge had tapped at his conscience all day, and the significance of such an impulse didn’t escape notice.

He was in deep.

But none of it mattered if they didn’t catch the son of a bitch named Alexander.

Luke closed his eyes, and the image of Kara’s face imposed on a dead woman’s body rose up to haunt him.
Fuck off, Feds. She’s mine.

No way.

Hogan paused at the door after he spoke, then came up
behind Kara. Luke might have herded him back out of the room if the look on his face hadn’t stopped him.

“What is it?” Luke asked.

“I just talked to the lab serving Panola County, Mississippi. They didn’t get much out of that cornfield where Penny Wolff was found, but they did get this: stonedust.”

Luke frowned. “Stonedust?”

“It’s crushed stone that’s used in construction. As a foundation or between pavers or bricks—”

“In the middle of a cornfield?”

“Exactly. They found it in small amounts, sprinkled. The pattern based on where the wheels were makes it look like maybe it was in the van when he dragged the body out.”

“We may be looking for a landscaper or construction worker, then. That would explain the bodybuilder physique.”

“It doesn’t explain his money or time, though,” Hogan said. “He seems to have plenty of both.”

“So, why would a man of leisure have stonedust in his truck?”

“Horses?” Kara asked, and they both looked at her. “Stonedust is used in horseback riding arenas.”

Hogan peered at her. “Horse stalls are covered in stonedust?”

“Not the stalls, where horses sleep, but in arenas, where people ride and jump. It’s harder than river sand or mulch or sawdust, so it provides a stable surface for the horses.”

“Horses,” Luke said, thinking it through. “You said you haven’t owned a horse in a long time.”

Kara shook her head. “Not since Guapa died when I was fifteen. But I know about stonedust footing. My father
always insisted on six inches of it in the indoor arenas. He would have the stable hands drag it every damn day to keep it soft. Sometimes he’d actually check the depth with a ruler.”

The hairs on the back of Luke’s neck stood up. “What about barbed wire? Did your father use that on the ranch?”

She straightened. “Not a lot. It’s frowned upon in his circles. But there was some. It was used out in the farthest pastures.”

Luke looked at Mike. “You’re the psycho expert. Are we looking at someone from that far back? Someone from her childhood?”

“It’s a pretty fucking big grudge,” Mike said. “It could have that sort of staying power. But it doesn’t make sense that this whole thing started only a year ago if it’s someone from your childhood. Where has he been in the meantime?”

Kara moved back to the table, picking up the artist’s rendering of the man named Alexander. She studied the drawing, shaking her head in tiny movements, and Luke could see her shift gears from the people in her professional and personal lives whose names she’d been sifting through to the people she’d grown up with. He could almost see her try to superimpose images on the one in her hands.

“Who were the people in your life, Kara?” he asked. “Think about social acquaintances, people from the horse breeding world, maybe your father’s circle of friends. Think about staff—you said there was a staff at the ranch. Think about people your age or just a little older—”

She gasped, then went still, staring at the man in the picture.

“Kara?” Luke said, coming to stand beside her. Hogan followed.

“There was this guy… but—” She shook her head. “This could be him. But it’s been so long.”

“Who was he?” Luke snapped. “Christ, Kara. Who?”

“His name was Sasha. I don’t remember his last name. Something Russian. His parents were immigrants; I remember that. His father worked in the personal stable and his mother—” She paused. “I never really knew his mother but I think she worked in the kitchen. I remember a woman there who had an accent. She helped me with algebra homework once. I remember being surprised she knew it.”

“What do you remember about
him
?” Mike asked.

“Her son? I didn’t know him,” she said, sounding distant. Mike pulled out his phone and typed something into it. “He was older than I, but not a lot. He played baseball for a while.”

“An athlete, then,” Luke said.
Strong.

“I remember being surprised when I learned who his father was. He was so opposite Sasha—thin and gentle. He didn’t speak much and I always thought it was because his English wasn’t good, but there was a rumor that he was a genius. The kids sometimes teased about it—” She stopped, looking embarrassed. Luke recalled her saying that she hadn’t liked that life, having people all around her all the time she barely knew, waiting on her. That’s why she had no housekeeper and had raised Aidan to mow his own lawn.

Mike eased up beside Luke. He held out his phone and Luke looked at the screen. He’d accessed the name “Sasha.”
A unisex name, orig. eastern and central Europe. Used primarily as a diminutive form of Aleksander or Aleksandra…

Jesus Christ.

He crossed to Kara and took both her shoulders. “Sweetheart,” he said, “when was the last time you saw him? What happened the last time you saw him?”

She looked up, and the look on her face almost knocked Luke back a step. The color leeched from her cheeks.

“Holy God,” she said. “It’s him.”

K
ARA’S BLOOD ICED OVER.
Sasha.
She looked at the picture in her hands again but suddenly couldn’t focus on it; it wouldn’t stay still. Her hands were shaking.

“Why do you think it’s him?” Luke asked. He was in her space, his fingers closing around her upper arms. “What do you remember?”

“My fifteenth birthday. He was there.”

Luke winced. Agent Hogan hovered behind him. “What happened?”

She swallowed and pulled from Luke’s hands, needing to move. The weight of both agents’ eyes bore down on her, along with the chilling, sudden certainty that Sasha’s eyes had been on her lately, too.
Sasha. Sasha.
She couldn’t recall his last name, or that of his mother and father. But she remembered something he’d said to her once: He told her the reason she didn’t know him was because he was invisible to her.

He was right. He’d been out there for the past year, watching her, sending her gifts,
killing people.
And she couldn’t see him.

TRUTH.

“Kara,” Luke said, bringing her back. She collected the memory in bits and pieces, trying to put them together.

“I had a party. It was… extravagant.” Another occasion for Willis Montgomery to put his wealth on display to the world. “My father hosted this huge barbecue for a couple hundred of my closest friends,” she said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm. “His friends and business associates. He hired all the makings of a carnival. There were events all weekend long, but seven of my friends were invited to stay for the whole week. They were each assigned their own horse for the week and we camped out in the stable…” She stopped, realizing that probably didn’t sound very appealing to most people. “Our family stable was like a four-star hotel. We weren’t exactly ‘roughing it.’ ”

“It doesn’t sound like the kind of birthday you’d like,” Luke observed.

“I wanted my father to take me golfing,” she said, and managed a smile. “He’d spent every Saturday for as long as I could remember at the golf course, and I always thought if I could golf, then maybe he’d want me arou—” She stopped. Tears collected in her throat. Where the hell had those come from?

She closed her eyes.
Sasha.

“Sasha was helping his father in the stable, I guess… He’d been away from home for a year or two and had come back, and he was this sort of grown-up bad boy.”

Luke’s frown deepened. “Did you have a thing for him?”

“No. I didn’t really even notice him. My only
thing
was for Andrew.”

“Andrew was at the party?” Agent Hogan asked.

“Yes. He came every summer with his dad to breed their mares.” She blushed. “That’s where it all started for us, I guess.”

“At a party where Sasha met Andrew.”

She wrapped her arms over her torso. “Maybe,” she said, closing her eyes. It all flooded in. The foolish dare, the teasing, the frightening few moments she spent in the tack room with Sasha Ro—“Rodin,” she said. “That’s his last name.”

Hogan scooped up his laptop, opened it up on the back of a big armchair, and stood behind the chair, simultaneously listening to Kara while typing. Luke urged her on.

“You haven’t said anything yet that would have caused a grudge seventeen years old.”

She couldn’t even fathom it. Tears sprang to her eyes because even while her brain couldn’t believe it, her heart told her the shocking truth. “It was a game we were playing,” she said, and everything inside her turned cold.

“A game,” he repeated.

“Truth or Dare.”

Sasha didn’t understand. A stupid game of Truth or Dare and his father was acting crazy. On eggshells all night, waiting to see if Kara Montgomery was going to spill the beans about her stupid little game, waiting until the party had ended to go and have a private talk with Old Man Montgomery himself. That was a first. As far as Sasha knew, his father had never spoken to Willis Montgomery.

But that night, he did.

And the next day, the Rodin family left Montgomery Manor.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

T
RUTH OR
D
ARE,”
L
UKE
said, his blood running cold. Mike’s posture stiffened, too: This was it.

“We were in the arena waiting for the horses to be saddled. Evie started the game, just killing time. But—”

She stopped and Luke could tell her mind was taking her somewhere she hadn’t been in a long time. Somewhere she didn’t want to go.

“It started out just killing time,” Luke said. “How did it end?”

She closed her eyes and Luke couldn’t tell if it was horror or shame or difficulty remembering that drew her features tight. But after a moment, she looked at him. “It ended with me hitting Sasha.”

Luke hiked up his brows. “Why?”

“Andrew embarrassed me—and made me mad. He was asked in the game which one of us he wanted to be with and he chose Evie. I thought he liked me and when he chose Evie, I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide. So I did the next best thing: I took a dare on the next question, trying to show him up.”

Luke’s mind started going bad places. “Go on.”

She walked the length of the rug and back. “They dared me to play ‘Seven Minutes of Heaven’ with Sasha. It’s a game where—”

“I know what it is,” Luke said, and his mind grew even darker.

She swallowed, looking back and forth between him and Mike, who stood listening as intently as Luke but probably with a clearer head. Hopefully. Luke’s was beginning to cloud with emotion.

“I went with him into the tack room.”

“Tack room?” Mike asked.

“The storage for tack—saddles, bridles, crops. It was huge, so we also stored other things there. Feeding and cleaning supplies, bags of stonedust and bedding, riding apparel—” She stopped short and her face went sheet white. “Coils of barbed wire.”

Luke stopped breathing. “What the fuck happened in there, Kara?”

“He wanted me on my knees. He tried to make me—”

“Son of a bitch.”

“But I didn’t. I played along just long enough to catch him off guard. Then I got my hand on a riding crop and I hit him and I ran out.”

“That was it?” Mike asked. “You ran away from him?”

“What do you mean,
That was it?
” Luke was furious but Mike held up a hand.

“I mean, did something else happen? Something more than a guy getting blue-balled by a cute girl?”

“I went into that tack room with him. I accepted the dare: seven minutes. I didn’t think much could happen in that amount of time, and I was more interested in showing Andrew up than anything else. Until I got in there with him, I didn’t realize the extent of what he thought we’d do.”

“You’re defending the bastard,” Luke said.

“I’m not,” she snapped. “I’m acknowledging that I wasn’t blameless. And that I agree with Agent Hogan: It wasn’t a big enough deal to make him punish me by killing people seventeen years later.”

“I didn’t exactly say that,” Mike said. “I’ve known people to kill because of a perceived slight in words. I’ve known people to kill for a forty-dollar speed ball. Given the right circumstances, it doesn’t take much.”

“What are the right circumstances?” Kara asked.

“A personality disorder or some emotional hardship, probably with his father, combined with physical or emotional stresses—”

“A fucking asshole with a naïve fifteen-year-old girl in front of him,” Luke injected.

Mike said, “You’re a real insightful dude, you know that, Mann?”

Luke crossed to him. “What I know is that you’re standing there trying to paint a picture of a personality while that personality—whatever the hell it is—is out preparing to strangle Kara with barbed wire. I don’t much care
why
he wants to do it. I only care about stopping him.”

“Then shut up and let Kara tell us how he’s going to do it.” He went back to Kara. “Was that the last time you saw Sasha Rodin?”

“Yes. His family left Montgomery Manor. We never saw them again. I always thought it was because he was afraid I might tell someone what happened that day. You know, rich man’s daughter accuses employee of rape.”

“And you didn’t?” Luke asked, although he knew the answer. Kara would have tried to handle it on her own. God knows, her father wouldn’t have been a shoulder for her to cry on.

“No. I just ran out and left Sasha there, and all the kids were waiting and giggling and wanted to know what happened, and we made a pact not to tell anyone. It would have shamed my father.”

“Jesus,” Luke said, and she looked at him, as if trying to make him understand.

“I was embarrassed, too. And Andrew… Later, he told me he’d only named Evie in the game because he was hoping to make me jealous. It became a joke. We dated for the next two years and when I became pregnant, we married.”

Mike set aside the laptop and walked over to Kara. “If that was the last time you saw Sasha, something else must have happened that set him off. Something that simmered for all these years. What did he say, what did he do?”

She frowned, trying to think. “He was bitter about his life, and jealous of mine.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He told me that he’d been at Montgomery Manor longer than I had and that I was probably born of someone as low a class as he was.”

“I don’t understand,” Mike prompted.

“I was adopted. It happened when I was an infant, so it’s the only home I know, but Willis and Nina Montgomery aren’t my blood parents.”

“And Sasha knew this?”

“Everybody knew it. My mother and father threw the party of the century the day they brought me home. The first of many.”

“Okay,” Mike said, and Luke kept his eyes on Kara. She was speaking of her childhood in general as if it had no lasting legacy, but he knew it must.

Kara went on, the memories now seeming to fall
into place. “Sasha told me Andrew only flirted with me because my father and his were in business together. He called me ‘princess’ and ‘rich bitch’ and referred to Andrew as Pretty Rich Boy.” She stopped, seeming wearied by it all. “My friends and I put him in a position where the class system seemed alive and well. Hell, at Montgomery Manor, it
was
alive and well. My father treated the staff like lower-class citizens and if Sasha’s family felt that, then maybe that’s how this started.”

A class issue, a crush on a rich girl. It was the stuff of dramas throughout history, but it didn’t seem enough for Luke.

“Is there anyone from the party that you’re still friends with?” Luke asked. “Someone who might remember more than you do?”

She thought about it. “Evie and I lost touch pretty soon after that. Gosh, I don’t know where Anthony went after college.” She paused, trying to think of the other people who had been there, but something she’d just said reached out and grabbed Luke by the throat.

Evie. Anthony.
“Who else?” In some ways, the thought was laughable. In others—Jesus.

“Jessica Morrow was there,” she said. “She Facebooked me a year or so ago, so I could probably reach her. And I think she’s still in touch with Matthew. I don’t know about Megan. She went to Europe after col—” She stopped, realizing what she’d just said.

“Evie,” he prompted. “Was her name Evelyn?”

Her face went slack. “Anthony…”

Mike moved in: “Tony Fietti.”

“Oh, God,” Kara said.

“Who else?” Mike said, and Luke handed her a piece of paper.

“Write them down,” he said, trying to keep her busy and calm. “Write down the names.”

She did, her hands shaking, and gave the list to Mike.
Andrew, Evie, Anthony, Megan.
And names they hadn’t heard yet:
Jessica, Matthew, Laura.

Mike took the list, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “He’s killing people who were at your party—people of the same name.”

“What the fuck for?” Luke asked.

“I don’t know. But I can tell you this: We’re gonna find out that those gloves and the tiger-eye ring and the watch you received belonged to people with these names. Evelyn’s sister said they felt like they were being watched for weeks before her murder. He’s identifying targets with the right name, and killing them. Collecting gifts from them to send to you.” He narrowed his gaze at her and Luke couldn’t help putting his arm around her. She’d gone as stiff as blown glass and looked just as fragile.

“You said it was summer when this happened—when the mares were bred,” Mike said. “When is your birthday, Kara?”

Her breath hitched, and Luke could see her thinking through the past few days, which had somehow all run together.

“Today,” she said, so softly Luke could hardly hear her. “June twenty-third.”