Long Road to Mercy (Atlee Pine, #1)(10)

She had been of little help to the police. And by the time she arrived home, the case had grown cold.

Pine had gone on with her life. Her parents had divorced, principally because of what had happened that night. Both only in their midtwenties, they had been drunk and high and had never heard an intruder come into their home, eventually falling asleep while one daughter lay grievously injured and the other was spirited away by the nighttime invader. They each blamed the other for that.

And, in addition to that, the primary suspects had been her parents. One cop in particular thought that Pine’s father, drugged out and stoned, had gone into his daughters’ room and taken Mercy, killing her and disposing of her body somewhere.

And though both her mother and father had passed a polygraph and Pine had said that her father wasn’t the man who had come into the room that night, the police really hadn’t believed her. The town quickly turned against the Pines and they’d had to move.

After the divorce, Pine had lived with her mother, enduring an existence forever changed by Mercy’s disappearance.

As Pine had grown older, her life had seemed aimless, her ambitions nonexistent. She felt no purpose in anything. It seemed her only goal was to simply underachieve at everything. She had already started drinking and smoking weed. Her grades were for shit. She got into fights, suffered detentions, and got busted by the cops for underage drinking. On numerous occasions, she’d even shoplifted stuff. She didn’t care about anyone or anything, including herself.

Then she had gone to a county fair and, on a whim, had decided to have her fortune told. The woman in the little tent had been dressed up with a turban and veils and colorful robes. Pine had remembered smirking at all this, certain it was a sham.

Then the woman had taken hold of her hand and looked down at her palm. But her gaze had almost immediately returned to Pine’s face.

The woman’s features exhibited confusion.

“What?” Pine had asked in a disinterested tone.

“I feel two pulses. Two hearts.”

Pine had stiffened. She hadn’t told the woman she was a twin. She hadn’t told the woman anything.

The woman looked at Pine’s palm more closely, feeling along a line on the hand.

Her brows knitted.

“What?” Pine asked again, this time totally focused.

“Two heartbeats, certainly.” She paused. “But only one soul.”

Pine had stared at the woman, and the woman had stared back at her.

“Two heartbeats and one soul?” said Pine. When the woman nodded, she’d asked, “How can that be possible?”

The woman had said, “I think you know that it is more than possible. You know that it is true.”

From that moment on, Pine had pushed herself relentlessly at everything she had attempted. It was as though she were trying to live two lives instead of simply one. To achieve for her sister, to accomplish what Mercy never had the chance to do on her own.

Her physical size, natural strength, and athleticism had led her to be a star sportswoman in high school. She played basketball, ran track, and was the pitcher on the state championship softball team.

Then on a dare she had joined the boys’ football team in the weightlifting room and discovered that she could lift more than many of them. That was when her passion and drive and ferocious ambition had been focused on the barbells. She had risen like a rocket onto the national scene, winning trophies and acclaim wherever she went.

Some billed her as the strongest woman, pound for pound, in America.

And then she had gone on to college, where she had tried, and failed, to make the Olympic squad.

By a single kilo, about 2.2 pounds.

The feeling of failure, not really for herself but actually for her twin, had been paralyzing. But there was nothing she could do about it except move on.

Next up was the world of the FBI, her career, the only one Pine believed she would ever have.

And in that career, she had always consciously steered herself west, because out here, in the great open spaces, some of the worst predators on earth hunted for their victims. She had read about them all, researched them all. She had grown so good at profiling, in fact, that she had been offered a slot at the Behavioral Analysis Unit 3 at the Bureau. That unit investigated crimes against children.

She had declined. She did not want to profile monsters, though technically there was no such position as a profiler at the FBI. That was a myth perpetuated by popular culture.

Instead, Pine wanted to put her handcuffs on these offenders, read them their rights, and watch as the justice system put them in a place where they could never hurt anyone again.

This future for her had been ordained the moment Mercy’s forehead had been last thumped by the finger, and by the man saying, with chilling finality, “moe.”

And that was where her life stood, until six months ago.

Then, a friend who knew something of Pine’s history suggested that she try memory reconstruction through hypnosis.

She had heard of the process, because the Bureau had undertaken it with some of their cases with mixed results. It was a controversial subject, its supporters and critics equally vocal. And Pine knew that the procedure had led to false memories conjured and innocent people harmed as a result.

Yet she had nothing to lose by trying it.

After Pine’s multiple sessions with the hypnotherapist, Daniel James Tor had finally emerged from deep within her subconscious, like a sadistic beast climbing from its hellish hole into the blast of daylight.