The Obsession(122)

“Just let me know if you’re not in the mood for me to cop a feel.”

She laughed, then brought the carrots back to slice for steaming. “You’ll be the first. Excellent florets and carrot peeling. You’re both dismissed from duty if you want to take the dog out or whatever. You’ve got about thirty.”

“Did you come over on your bike?” Mason asked Xander.

“Yeah.”

“I wouldn’t mind taking a look at it.”

“Sure.” Xander led the way out the back and around. “Just so you know, the landscape crew starts tomorrow. Early.”

“Define early.”

“By seven. Maybe a little before.”

“As early as or earlier than the bang-and-clang crew inside. Oh well. I wanted to say I feel comfortable working out of Seattle, coming over a couple times a week, because you’re going to keep an eye on her. And I didn’t want to say that where she could hear me.”

“I got that. I feel more comfortable knowing she can dislocate some *’s shoulder. And still.”

“Still. I don’t know a goddamn thing about motorcycles.” Head angled, Mason studied it. “Except it looks impressive.”

“Okay.”

“Both women were taken in town, so I have to consider that, for now, as his hunting ground. But Naomi’s his type, and she shops and banks and has business in town. She’s the sort he looks for.”

“I got that, too. I’m going to be here every night. We play this Friday at Loo’s. I’ll make sure she comes, and make sure Kevin and Jenny stick with her until we close.”

“If I can be here, I will be. She’ll be careful, but I believe this guy works fast, takes his target quickly.”

As he spoke, Mason studied the house as if looking for security breaches.

“No defensive wounds on either victim. They didn’t have a chance to fight back. Anybody can be taken by surprise, even if they’re careful, even if they’ve studied martial arts and self-defense, so she’s going to have to deal with not having as much time alone as she likes for a while.”

“She’s doing all right with people around.”

“Better than she imagined she would, I’ll bet. She doesn’t know you’re in love with her.”

Saying nothing, Xander held Mason’s steady gaze.

“I’m going there because she’s the most important person in my world. We lived through a nightmare you never come all the way out of, because he’s sitting in a cell in West Virginia. Our mother wasn’t strong enough to keep living on the edge of that nightmare. Naomi found her—came home to pick something up on lunch break from school, and found her, already cold.”

“I know—at least some of it. I looked up what I could after I figured out about Bowes. And I found the piece she wrote back then, for the New York Times. I didn’t want to hit a sore spot by accident, so I read what I could find. I’m sorry about your mother, man.”

“It put another hole in Naomi. Me? Sure, I lived with it and through it, but I’m not the one who saw firsthand what our father had done. I’m not the one who helped pull a victim out of a hole in the ground and half carry her through the woods. I’m not the one who came home from school and found our mother dead by her own hand. Naomi has no degree of separation. And she might deny it—would,” he corrected, “but there’s a part of her that doesn’t see herself worthy of being loved.”

“She’d be wrong about that.”

“Yeah, she’d be wrong. We had counseling, we had the uncles, but no one else has those images of what our parents did, to themselves, to others, to us, in their head the way she does. So there’s a part of her that doesn’t think she’s capable of loving outside of me and the uncles, or worthy of being loved.”

“Well.” Xander jerked a shoulder. “She’ll have to get used to it.”

The simplicity, the carelessness of the remark, made Mason smile. “You’re good for her. That irritated me a little when I first came into it, saw that. I’m pretty much over that now.”

“Did you run my background?”

“Oh yeah, right off.”

“I’d have thought less of you if you hadn’t. I’m never going to hurt her. That’s bullshit,” Xander said immediately. “Why do people say that? Of course I’ll end up hurting her. Everybody does or says something stupid or petty or acts like an * sometime and ends up hurting somebody else. What I mean is—”

“I know what you mean, and I believe you. So, are we good?”

“Yeah, we’re good.”

Mason held out a hand; they shook.

Then he studied the bike again. “How about you let me drive it?”

Considering, Xander rocked back on his heels. “Have you ever been on a bike before—at the controls?”

“No. But I’m an FBI agent, I should know how to drive a bike. Right? What if, in the pursuit of a criminal, I had to hop on a motorcycle, and due to lack of knowledge and experience, said criminal escaped justice? None of us would feel good about that.”

Amused, Xander unclipped the helmet. “Okay.”

“Really? Are you serious?” And beaming like a boy on Christmas morning, Mason took the helmet.