The Girl Who Survived(132)

“Ooooh. Bad,” he said, but fought a smile.

“I know. Too far,” she said.

Tate remembered the gore, the headless corpse and the money, thousands of dollars—twenty thousand in blood-splattered bills—next to the torso. Cash that had been stashed and stolen and was now evidence. Blood money.

He changed the subject. “What about Faiza Donner? Was she on Jonas’s list of people to get even with?”

“Who knows? The last I heard she and her boyfriend have hired Alex Rousseau to help them get their hands on the rest of the estate. Roger Sweeney has some connections through an old bandmate to the entertainment business. He took a flight to LA on the day Walter Robinson was killed and met with some TV personality who wants to do another movie on the case.” When she gave him a look, he said, “I got a call from a reporter who asked about it.” The reporter, of course, was Sheila Keegan, who was still hounding him, reminding him that he owed her. He smiled as they walked outside, where the wind blew his jacket open and icy snowflakes caught in his bare head. Maybe finally he’d actually pay his debt.

After all, it was Christmas.

And they were both alone.

“What’re you doing for the holiday?” he asked his partner as he slid behind the wheel and she, adjusting her knitted hat, slid into the passenger seat.

“Ooh, it’s complicated. I get together with my ex and his family. For my son’s sake. You know, my boy’s got some issues.” He waited. “They’re emotional mainly and seem to be improving with medication and . . . and it helps when his dad and I get along, so we do. For Jamie’s sake.” She threw Thomas a glance. “What about you?”

“I’m working tonight.”

“And after?”

“We’ll see,” he said. “I’ll get along.”

But he didn’t mention Sheila Keegan as he drove Johnson back to the station to pick up her car.

That was his little secret.

And it was best to keep it that way.





EPILOGUE


Twelve Months Later

December 24th



Kara walked out of the meeting and flipped up the hood of her jacket. Rain was falling from a deep, gunmetal-gray sky. The forecast was for a wet and gloomy holiday. “No white Christmas this year,” the weatherman had said when she’d turned on the news this morning.

Perfect.

Enough with the snow for the holidays. Maybe someday she’d feel differently about it. But not this year.

She climbed into her vehicle, a five-year-old Subaru Outback she’d settled on the year before, and drove through the city streets, strings of lights glowing brightly, storefronts painted with snowmen and Santas or Nativity scenes all the while touting end-of-the-year sales. Christmas and commercialism. Never far apart.

Better than Christmas and massacre, she told herself, then angry at her thoughts, turned on the radio and caught the tail end of “The Little Drummer Boy” before the first notes of “Silent Night” wafted through the speakers. “No! she said aloud. Not now. Probably not ever. She switched the channel to some hard rock from the 70s.

“Dream On,” by Aerosmith.

Slightly better.

No, a whole lot better.

And in her warped opinion, more soothing.

She was probably in the minority on that one, but she didn’t care and drove along the river, the water nearly black as it reflected the dark, moody clouds overhead. It had been a long year. She was still hounded by the press, and there were details of the trust and estate that hadn’t been quite settled, but a new attorney was working on it, a lawyer in his forties, all business, all by the book, about as far from Merritt Margrove as one could get. He was also working with the insurance companies in dealing with the aftermath of the accident in the mountains a year earlier. Thankfully Sven Aaronsen had pulled through after a month in the hospital and several months of physical therapy. Now, she’d heard, he was driving again, even though his blood-alcohol level had been elevated at the time of the crash. And hers—under the limit as far as she knew, but still she felt responsible. She would do right by Aaronsen, but for now, the insurance companies were still haggling it out.

She parked in a space on the street in front of Tate’s building, let herself in and was greeted by Rhapsody, who, as usual, raced down the steps, barking and leaping and generally going out of her mind. “I missed you, too,” Kara said, ruffling the dog’s coarse fur before Rhapsody escaped, running up and down the stairs crazily until Kara reached the loft.

Tate was at his table/desk and kicked out his chair as she appeared. “Hey,” he said with a smile, whirling the chair to face her. “How’d it go?”

“It went. Pretty good.” She peeled off her jacket and noticed the Christmas tree in the windowed corner of the loft, her first in years. She felt at home here, with Tate. She’d crashed a year ago and never left, even going so far as putting her Whimstick house on the market. Soon, she would list the house in the West Hills of Portland. Now that Faiza and Roger had moved to sunny southern California to chase after the Hollywood dream and Kara was the legal owner, she wanted to get rid of it. Once her childhood home, now an albatross around her neck.

She sauntered up to Tate, fished into the front pocket of her jeans and dropped the coin on the table near his laptop. “One year sober,” she said.