The Girl Who Survived(88)

It was tempting. She was tempting. And she knew it. That was the thing with her, she was mercurial, hot one minute, ice cold the next, sweet and warm and oh-so-sexy, until she stabbed you in the back. That’s what kept him interested he’d decided long ago. She always surprised. And intrigued. Even as a girl barely in her teens, Brittlynn had a dangerous side he’d found fascinating.

Tonight he wasn’t into any of it. And her plan of lying for him might not work. It could blow up. So far, she’d had his back, for twenty damned years. But she’d been desperate and fourteen, still a girl really, and now she was a woman in her thirties with her own mind, her own agenda.

But he didn’t want to piss her off. He said, “Look, I’ve got to do this.”

“Do what? Run?” she accused, pouting now, her lips pulling into a tight little bow.

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“So what if the police come here?” she asked as he reached for the door. “What should I say?”

“Tell them the truth: You don’t know where I went and when I’ll be back.”

“What if they want to know about the night that all those people were killed?”

“I don’t think you want to do that,” he said. “You were a kid then, you’re not now and you might be considered an accessory.”

“But you swore you didn’t kill anyone,” she said, her eyes rounding as she thought she might be an accessory to murder. He saw it in her expression, her doubts.

“I’ll be back,” he promised, and paused long enough to brush a kiss across her temple. And then he left, the lie still hanging in the air between them as the door slammed shut behind him.

*

The night had been short. Too short.

Thomas pedaled his stationary bike as if his life depended on it, faster and faster and faster in his makeshift gym in his garage. Breathing hard and sweating like the proverbial pig, he kept at it as his muscles began to ache in protest. A towel was draped around his neck and he stared at a flat-screen he’d mounted over his workbench. But he wasn’t watching the news as the anchors and reporters went on and on about the coming storm and traffic conditions. It was all just background noise over the steady hum of the bike and the pounding of his heart. Instead, his thoughts were turning as fast as the wheels of the bike. He pushed himself, his legs pumping even harder, the bike’s wheels spinning madly while he was going nowhere. Much like the damned case, he thought.

He’d stayed up past midnight with the old files, making notes trying to tie the murder of Merritt Margrove to the massacre twenty years earlier. He’d always believed that Jonas McIntyre was guilty, that he’d slaughtered his family in a wild rage and deserved to rot in prison. Now, though, Thomas had doubts, at least some doubts.

And the case was getting to him. He usually slept like a log, but when a case was eating at him as this one did, his subconscious always interrupted his sleep and played nasty games with him. Last night, Thomas had spent five fitful hours tossing and turning, his dreams vivid. Images of dead bodies, all brutally slaughtered and dripping in blood, had interrupted any slumber he’d hoped to find. He’d finally given up trying to get any shut-eye, thrown on his sweats and worked out his demons in his home gym, which was really the second bay, the space that Daphne’s car had once occupied.

On his forty-minute ride, he’d learned the Portland Trail Blazers had lost their third game in a row, plans for construction of a new I-5 bridge over the Columbia between Portland to the south and Vancouver, Washington, to the north were once again stalled, and another winter storm with “blizzard-like” conditions was on its way, bringing with it what looked like a white Christmas for most of the state.

As a commercial for a local car dealership came onto the screen, Thomas hit his goal of forty minutes and climbed off the bike. He swiped at his face and dropped to mats he’d placed over the floor, positioned near the furnace.

He’d left it as it was for a while, until he’d learned that she was moving to Austin, Texas, to be with a guy she’d met online. Then he’d decided he couldn’t stand the void of that bay with its oil stains from her vehicle still visible. The emptiness had been a constant reminder of what he’d lost.

Stopping himself at that thought, Thomas finished his routine, fifty curls, a hundred push-ups and then a plank that he held until his entire body trembled. Afterward he wiped the sweat from his face.

He hadn’t lost Daphne, he reminded himself. The simple truth was that he’d practically pushed her out the door. She’d accused him of having a mistress in the form of his job, told him she couldn’t compete with his obsession with his work and was tired of trying. There had been tears in her eyes and his as she’d hit the accelerator and backed her Honda out of the garage on August morning three years ago.

She’d never looked back.

He still remembered the shimmering heat rising from the driveway, the leaves of the saplings she’d planted two years earlier already dried and falling, the lawn brown. He’d stood on the front porch and heard the garage door rolling down and landing with a final clunk just as she’d thrown the garage remote out the open window of her Honda. It landed with the sound of plastic scraping against asphalt, then skated across the street as she’d driven around the corner and out of his life.

Angry with himself, with her and the whole damned world, he’d retrieved the shattered remote.