Reunion in Death (In Death #14)(62)

"And?"

"Never told anybody." He shifted, set his jaw. "Night before my wedding, that would be six years ago last month, she called me. Said she wanted to give me her best wishes. But it was the way she said it, like she was, beg pardon, telling me to screw myself. And how she knew I'd be thinking of her on my wedding night, because she'd be thinking of me. How maybe she'd come see me sometime, and we'd talk about old times. I knew she was in prison. It shook me up a little, but I didn't see the point in telling anybody. I was getting married the next day."

"Has she contacted you since?"

"No, but this past Valentine's Day I got a package. There was a dead rat inside. Looked like it'd been poisoned. I didn't tell anybody about that either. Just got rid of it. Ma'am, I was sixteen. We just rolled in the hay for a couple months one summer. I got a wife, a son, a baby on the way. What the hell does she want to mess with me for after all this time?"

...

"He rejected her," Eve told Roarke when they were back in the car. "She went after a boy her own age, and he stopped wanting her before she stopped wanting him. Then his mother stood up to her. Two slaps. Intolerable."

"If she'd been a normal girl, that would have crushed her temporarily. Then she'd have moved on. Instead, she decided to seduce her stepfather. Older men, like her father, were more easily controlled, more inclined to see her as flawless."

"It was more than seducing him. It was using the sex to crush him, and her mother. To punish and to profit. She hadn't worked up to killing yet, but it was only a matter of time. Why damage when you can utterly destroy? She got what she wanted from that, but still couldn't forget that rejection."

She couldn't remember what it felt like to be a fifteen-year-old girl. Small wonder, Eve thought. She'd never been a normal teenager. And neither, it seemed, had Julianna Dunne.

"Calls him on his wedding night," Eve went on. "She's careful what she says in case he reports it, but she says enough to know he'll be upset, shaken up, and that he won't be able to stop himself from thinking about her on his wedding night. Plant the seed,"

"What are you going to do about him?"

"He's worried enough about his family to work with the locals. He's going to talk to Parker as well, and my impression is Parker will go the extra mile with ranch security. I'll talk to the cops down here, make sure they're doing their job. Then I'll do mine and find her."

"Then we're off for New York now?"

She stared out the window. "No." Then shut her eyes. "No, we'll go into Dallas."

CHAPTER 13

When the Dallas skyline swam into view through waves of heat, it triggered no memory inside her, but instead brought on a vague puzzlement. It had the towering buildings, the urban sprawl, the jammed spaces. But it was so different from New York.

Age, she realized, was part of it. All of this was young when compared to the east. Brasher somehow, but without the edge. Dallas was, after all, one of so many settlements that had grown into towns, then towns that had boomed into cities, long after New York, Boston, Philadelphia were established.

And the architecture lacked the fancy fuss found in the older buildings of the east that had survived the Urban Wars or been restored afterward. Here the towers were sleek and gleaming and for the most part unadorned.

Blimps and billboards announced rodeos, cattle drive tours, sales on cowboy boots and hats. And barbecue was king.

They might as well be driving on Venus.

"There's more sky," she said absently. "More sky here, almost too much of it."

Sun flashed blindingly off steel towers, walls of glass, the ringing people glides. She pushed her shaded glasses more securely on her nose.

"More roads," she said, and could hear the steadiness in her own voice. "Not as much air traffic."

"Do you want to go to the hotel?"

"No, I... maybe you could just drive around or something."

He laid a hand over hers, then took a downtown exit.

It seemed more closed in, with the blue plate of the sky like a lid over the buildings, pressing down on the streets jammed with too many cars driving too fast in too many directions.

She felt a wave of dizziness and fought it back.

"I don't know what I'm looking for." But it wasn't this abrupt sense of panic. "He never let me out of the goddamn room, and when I... after I got out, I was in shock. Besides it was more than twenty years ago. Cities change."

Her hand trembled lightly under his, and his own clamped on the wheel. He stopped at a light, turned to study her face. It was pale now. "Eve, look at me."

"I'm okay. I'm all right." But it took a great deal of courage to turn her head, meet his eyes. "I'm okay."

"We can drive to the hotel, and let this go for now. Forever, if that's what you want. We can drive straight to the airport and go back to New York. Or we can go to where they found you. You know where it was. It's in your file."

"Did you read my file?"

"Yes."

She started to pull her hand back, but his fingers closed tight. "Did you do anything else? Run any searches?" She asked.

"No. I didn't, no, because you wouldn't want it. But it can be done that way if and when you do."