“But a murderer?”
“Don’t know.” She eats some more of the cake, for which I’m grateful; the slab is the size of Rhode Island. “The woman we talked to out in the sticks? At the big house?”
“You got the video?”
“I got a double murder,” she says grimly. “And the camera hard drive’s gone.”
“Killed how?” I ask.
“Shot,” she says. “Up close and damn personal. Autopsies are pending, but that’s how I read it, anyway. If I had to guess from the scene, she was surprised in the shower, killed in the kitchen, and dragged out into the trees. Husband was either home or got home, and he was shot in the back of the head. Totally surprised, looks like.”
“Jesus.” She just nods. “Kez—that’s four dead, one missing.”
“Five dead,” she says. “If you count Tommy Jarrett, which is starting to look more likely all the time. That’s a whole lot of bodies dropping way too fast.” She sighs. “Maybe the TBI’s the right agency for this one. I don’t have the resources, and Prester’s not well and isn’t about to admit it.”
“But he’s okay?”
Kez licks some frosting off her fork while she thinks. “At his age, I’m not so sure. I wish he’d get himself checked out, honestly. If something happens because he’s being a stupid, stubborn man, I’ll kick his ass.”
“More likely bring him soup,” I tell her, and she shrugs. “I don’t have much on my plate at the moment—”
“Aside from your stalker problems?” Kez has a point. I was thinking caseload.
“Well, I was trying to avoid that for a little while longer,” I say, and sit back. We’ve demolished the cake by this point; like all diners sharing a dish, we’ve left a little strip in the middle of the plate. No-man’s-land. “You’re right, though. I should be focusing at home.” And on getting back there. It’s time for me to start the drive.
“Anything you can do from there, I’ll gladly accept,” Kez says. “But I don’t want to put you or the kids in more danger either.”
“What about you?” I ask her. “With Javier off to training, Prester not his best, you don’t have any backup. I’m worried about that, Kez. Whatever’s going on—”
“It’s not clear yet that the murders at the house had anything to do with the car in the lake. Easy to suppose that, but we don’t know what these folks were into, or who they were into it with. I saw a Belldene car up on that road.”
That stops me. I’d considered that the woman who’d promised us video might have been in the drug business. It could make a lot of sense, and it might explain why they turned up dead, nothing to do with Sheryl’s case. “Even worse,” I say. “You think the Belldenes won’t pull the trigger on you if it means protecting themselves? They would. They might even get away with it.”
“Not if Prester has anything to do with it. And that’s my problem, Gwen. Not yours.” Kez goes for the last bite. She’s going to need the energy. “Got to bounce. You go home and take care of the ones you love, okay?”
“Kez?” I draw her direct gaze with the seriousness of my tone. “I love you too. And I don’t want you left vulnerable out there.”
“Damn, girl, I’ve got the whole Thin Blue Line on my side,” she says, and acknowledges the irony of that with a quirk of her lips. “Well. It is pretty thin. But they’d put on the black armbands and give me a nice send-off. That’s some comfort.”
It’s no comfort at all to me, but I keep that to myself.
I head home, and arrive to relative calm . . . or so I think. Lanny and Connor are playing a video game and body-slamming each other to try to throw each other off; I settle them down and go look for Sam.
I find him in the office. He’s just . . . sitting. When he looks at me, I feel my steps slow in response. It isn’t that I know that look, but I don’t like it. At all. “Sam? What is it?”
For answer, he holds up an envelope. One glance at it, and I know what it is. My heart drops.
It’s the letter I received. The one written by Melvin, delivered posthumously. The sight of it makes my mouth go dry, my knees weak. I don’t like that Melvin still sparks this physical revulsion in me, but it’s also more than that. It’s fear. Not of Melvin, not anymore . . . Fear that he’s still got the power to destroy something I love even if he’s six feet underground.
Sam says, “Why didn’t you tell me?” His tone is as hollow as a struck bell. “I saw it in the drawer.”
“I was going to, and then this thing with the flyers—”
“Gwen. You had plenty of time to tell me.”
He’s right. I did. I kept it from him because . . . I don’t know why I did, really. It felt private. Horribly personal. I didn’t want to worry you is the first thing that I think of saying, but I don’t, because it’s disingenuous. There’s something about receiving letters from my dead ex-husband that makes me want to keep them to myself, and I know that isn’t right, or fair.
And I know it’s wrong when I jump to the attack, but I still do it. “You went through my drawer?” My words are sharply pointed, and they draw blood. Sam sits back in his chair, staring.
“I needed staples, and that isn’t the point. Gwen.”
I’m instantly sorry, and I know I’m wrong. Damn, I wish I could flip a switch and turn off this darkly aggressive streak I have, just be different, but I have to work at it. Hard.
But after counting to five, I finally try. “Sorry. I—you caught me by surprise with it, and when it comes to Melvin, I still have places that aren’t really healed. You know that, right?”
He nods. “I’ve still got some sore spots there too. Maybe more than sore.”
“He’s not your rival, Sam. In any way.”
I know, as soon as I say it, that I’m wrong, and I see it flash in his eyes. He leans forward and looks at me intently. “I wish that were true, but Melvin’s still here. He’s standing here right between us. Can’t forget him if he won’t go away. You have to let him go, Gwen.”
He’s absolutely right. And it’s the scariest thing I’ve done so far, it feels like jumping off a cliff into the dark, but I take the envelope and letter out of his hand. Then I walk over to the crosscut shredder and feed it in. Watch it chewed to random bits. Utterly gone.
Turns out that wasn’t a cliff. It wasn’t even a fall. It was easy. I feel a strange surge of release and wonder, like stepping out into the sun after a long, long darkness.
I feel Sam’s hands on my shoulders, Sam’s warmth at my back. He kisses me gently on the side of the neck. “Thank you,” he says. “I know that was hard.”
“It wasn’t.” I thought it would be. I thought it would hurt, or be terrifying, that there would be some kind of consequences for the action. I’ve been bracing myself for a long, long time. Treating Melvin Royal like a threat even when he’s gone.
Treating him like junk mail feels astonishingly like freedom.
“You’ve still got the address it came from?” Sam asks.