Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10)(10)

Jacob yanks me into the parking lot, close to a vehicle that isn’t his own. The night wind hits my bare arms, my sweaty brow. Then, finally, thankfully, what I’ve been planning on, waiting for …

I turn, and in a move of sheer beauty, projectile vomit all over Jacob’s newfound friend.

“Jesus Christ!” The man leaps back.

It doesn’t save him. Seven days of starvation followed by three hours of binge eating. I lurch forward and hit him again, a thick stream of barely digested food.

Crowds gather. People gasp. I barely notice, falling to my hands and knees, dry heaving onto the warm asphalt. My stomach cramps painfully, sour bile gathering in the back of my throat. I’ll pay for this. Oh, in a million different ways.

But right now, the man’s eyes widen with disgust. Then he turns and hastily walks away …

Jacob has his games. But I have my rebellion. He might always win in the end. But I’m not completely broken yet.

“All right, all right,” Jacob announces to the milling people. “Girl never could hold her beer. Come on, now, not the first time any of you have seen someone puke outside a bar. Move along.”

He grips my arm. I’m shaking uncontrollably, too weak to even stand.

But the not-quite-stranger is gone. The immediate threat is over.

Which leaves me with just Jacob.

“You did that on purpose!” he growls low in my ear.

“I had to. The thought of leaving you … Please. You’ve been gone for a week. I just want to be with you. Only you.”

He narrows his eyes, studies me hard.

“Bitch,” he says, but there’s no heat left in his voice.

He pulls me to standing. I lean against him heavily. After a moment, his arm goes around me.

And for one more night, I survive.

—

SIX YEARS LATER, Cambridge, Mass. I’m still standing in the kitchen of my apartment. Images of the murdered husband’s face appear, disappear, reappear, on the TV across the room. Followed by snapshots of his wife, the outside of their home, miles of yellow crime scene tape. I’m shaking. As hard as I shook that night, so long ago.

Now, I fist my hand and force myself to focus. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Jacob is gone. Jacob is dead. Jacob can never hurt me again.

The man on TV, Conrad Carter, I never saw him after that night. And now he’s dead, too. More power to his wife.

Except that so many thoughts hit me at once, I have to grab a chair for support.

It takes me a bit, but I finally get my legs to move. I retrieve my cell from the coffee table. I make a single call.

“Samuel, it’s me. You know how I said I’d tell you about my time with Jacob once and only once, and then I’d never speak of it again? I lied.”





CHAPTER 4


    EVIE


IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN THEY take me to the police headquarters. I have a brief impression of a monstrous glass building; I think I’ve seen pictures of it on TV. The officer leads me through a vast lobby, then through a warren of hallways. First stop, fingerprints. I was never printed the first time. Ironically enough, it’s my job as a schoolteacher that finally put me in the system. I had to have a background check to chaperone field trips, after-school activities. I’d been nervous then. What if they ran my prints and the previous incident—“nothing but an unfortunate accident,” my mother whispers—popped up for all to see? You’ll be fine, Conrad had kept telling me. You were just a kid; no charges were even filed.

In the end, that’s what saved me—no charges were filed, meaning I had no criminal record, versus a sealed juvie record, which could come back to haunt a person later.

After scanning each fingertip into the digital machine, the uniformed officer—Bob, someone calls him—leads me to a clinical-looking room where a woman in a lab coat swabs both my hands with some kind of substance, then uses a metal file to remove scrapings from beneath my nails. “I’m going to require her clothing,” she informs the officer, who nods as if this is no surprise.

If they’re taking my clothes, what does that leave me with? But no one bothers to tell me, and I can’t bring myself to ask.

I’m tired. The shock, adrenaline, something wearing off. Mostly, I feel like a pregnant woman, up way past her bedtime and deeply self-conscious that it’s not just me the police are arresting, but my unborn child.

I haven’t even met my baby yet, and I’m already filled with so many regrets.

Upstairs. A new floor with miles of blue carpet. I don’t get a chance to look around. My escort leads me straight to a small room with two chairs, one table, and a mirrored wall. Interrogation, I realize, and can’t help but think it looks much nicer than the rooms you see on TV. Then Officer Bob dumps me in the chair, releases my left wrist from the handcuff, only to attach the bracelet to a ring on the table, and any positive impressions I have of the room are over.

Officer Bob exits. At least I still have my clothes, I think, then move my free hand to rest on my rounded belly. As if that can protect my baby from what will happen next.

The door opens. An older gentleman with thinning brown hair walks in. He’s wearing a brown-and-gold-flecked sports jacket over a light-blue shirt. Pleated khakis; the kind that went out of fashion a decade ago, and yet are still favored by people of a certain age. He has a nice face. Serious, but not harsh. Never the bad cop, I think, more like the stern father figure.