Hard Silence (14 page)

“You aren’t weird. You’re rare. And you’ve had a rough day. Evan gave me a rundown. Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“You were. Working.”

“And you wanted to prove you could do it on your own,” he groused. “Abby, I’m not judging you. Ever. This is a lot to do alone.”

“What if I screw him up?” she whispered. “What if I make him like me?”

He leaned back and looked into her eyes. “Then he’d be a smart, self-sufficient kid.”

“Who can’t have a normal conversation.”

“You do well with me, and with him,” Jeff said. “And this goes both ways. What if I fuck him up? I’m going to worm my way into his life and then go home.” He held her steady. “He’s not afraid to be up there alone?”

“Not if Tug is with him, and he keeps his hatchet under the mattress.” She interrupted his objection. “It’s so dull it’s a club, but it makes him feel safe. Did he wash up and brush his teeth before he went to sleep?”

“The kid has a hatchet in his room, and you’re worried about hygiene. He brushed his teeth, but we forgot about his hands.” He kept hold of her to delay the argument. “As far as I know, no one has ever died from snot. Are you sure about that book? Maybe his nightmares have something to do with the werewolves and vampires.”

“His dreams are about real monsters.” She curled closer, content to be quiet and warm—until her worries bubbled to the surface. “I don’t know what to do about his diet. The only vegetable he’ll eat is French fries.”

“Kids eat crap, Abby.”

“He can’t live on fries. He even turned his nose up at peanut butter and jelly. He hates it here.”

“Use strawberry jelly. He likes that best. And he doesn’t hate it here. He’s just fallen asleep telling me all the things he’s
helped
you with this week.”

“It was a disaster,” she admitted.

“He’ll learn. You just have to keep explaining it.”

“I can’t,” she said as she wiped her eyes. “God, I hate being like this.”

“How about notes?” he asked. “We can put scoops in the different feed bins so he can measure things correctly. And we’ll put a list of chores on the fridge.”

She nodded. “I’ll get everything together.”

“And I’ll replace the light in your darkroom.”

He fixed her workspace and they put the horses in the stable before retracing the steps necessary for every chore. Jeff held the flashlight while she printed simple instructions Evan could read on his own and put all the tools he’d need within reach.

By the end of it, she sat with him at the kitchen table, exhausted but relieved. “How did you know to do this?”

“My mother was...distracted after my father’s death. I ended up taking care of my sisters much of the time.” He winked. “I can do a mean French braid, too. Have you called Tracy Hoover about the gallery show?”

She shook her head. “There isn’t enough time in the day. And I can’t leave Evan alone while I’m in the darkroom.”

He took her hand. “Why don’t I take him tomorrow? We’ll come back here after school and do chores until you’ve finished for the day.”

Abby sagged in her chair. “Thank you.”

“I have an ulterior motive,” he purred as he leaned closer. “I like seeing you smile.”

He never moved from his chair as he kissed her, and he didn’t touch her except for holding her hand, but the kiss made her languid and boneless just the same. Her lips clung to his, and she clasped his hand, using it to anchor her in place.

“What are we doing?” she asked when he lifted his head.

“Fucked if I know,” he whispered. “But I think I like it.”

Chapter Thirteen

In this morning’s news...the body of Steve Peacock, a fixture on the poker circuit, has been found in West Texas. Foul play is suspected. Sources say the FBI has been called in to investigate and that it may be related to a string of cross-country murders.

Wallis stared at the television, hovering the sweetener packet above the grapefruit on her plate, feeling the paper yield under her fingers.
Damn.

Steve. Her first high-roller husband, a step up from the cardsharps and hustlers, who’d been a step up from the weekend gamers who spent most of their energy on their nine-to-five jobs.

Steve, who’d introduced her to Hale and then refused to move aside when she wanted someone better.

Steve, who’d fought so hard to live he’d almost defeated her.

“What is it, duchess?” Hale asked as he came into the kitchen.

“They’ve said it looks like rain for the weekend,” Wallis replied as she sprinkled the sweetener over her fruit.

An FBI investigation into a string of murders. Three murders didn’t make a string, and three states didn’t make it cross-country. Unless they’d tied all of them together. And if they’d done that, it was because her bitch of a daughter had opened her fucking mouth.

“If that happens, I guess we’ll just have to spend more time indoors,” Hale said as he sipped his coffee. “Or maybe we could catch a plane back to the Bahamas and celebrate our anniversary early.”

It would be four months early, and the second time this year they’d celebrated their anniversary with the wild extravagance Hale insisted on. She’d finally found a husband who treated her exactly as she deserved, someone who made her think maybe it was time to stop climbing higher and enjoy the view. She’d begun to think maybe he was her last husband.

And now that dream was ruined.

That girl had always been a nuisance, and she was
still
causing trouble. And troublemaking brats needed to be punished.

Wallis sliced the grapefruit spoon into the citrus pulp. “Maybe we could go to Vancouver, or Whistler. I’ve always wanted to see the Pacific Northwest.”
Especially with enough money in my pocket to see it in style.

“I hate snow.” Hale shivered and smiled. “You know that.”

He had such a pretty smile. She was going to miss it.

“Then let’s go to the Bahamas and live it up, baby.”

* * *

Jeff shambled into the kitchen, yawning, scratching, and squinting in the early morning sun. Cass handed him a cup of coffee.

“Why are you up this early?” he croaked.

“I have to open the office today. What about you?”

“It’s Evan’s first day back at school after everything. And summer school at that. We’re putting him on the bus this morning, and then I’m going over to the State Police Headquarters in Hastings to talk about their new lab.”

“Be sure and comb your hair,” she said, grinning, “or they’ll throw you in the drunk tank with the rest of the bums.”

“Smart-ass,” Jeff grumbled as he walked down the hall toward his office, combing his fingers through the tangled strands.

After a week of reviewing the first section of the training manual, he finally felt comfortable sending it to the supervisor at Quantico. After that, he sent his outline on new evidence procedures to Trish, his senior tech in Chicago. She would let him know if he’d forgotten anything. He scrolled through his email, seeing her name over and over—she certainly let him know about everything else.

An email from Tom Beckett, the social worker at the VA, stood out in the sea of fbi.gov addresses. Sipping his coffee, Jeff read the invitation to come lecture to Tom’s students at the college in Hastings, who were studying deviant behavior. That could fun. He’d loved being in front of a class last year. One lecture wouldn’t put him behind.

Bob had emailed to tell him the marriage license requests were processing, and that reminder dragged him from the computer to the board of victims’ remains. The files that arrived earlier in the week had revealed what he’d thought—seventeen years of letters. It had also revealed something he hadn’t expected. Each set had been sent from a different city: Atlantic City, Reno and Tunica. All the cities he’d flagged for the victims’ gambling and for marriage license searches. It tied them all together.

The easiest solution was that the tipster, the beta daughter, was mailing them to those cities first and then they were being forwarded. It was old-fashioned, a technique used when people wanted their Christmas cards sent from Bethlehem or their Valentines sent from Romance. And it was damned hard to catch—the postal workers would never remember seeing the exterior envelope. It would have been thrown away. He’d asked Bob to alert them for new letters anyway.

Sure work was managed, he turned to Abby’s profile.

I hate being like this
. Those words had torn at him as much as her tears. He could still feel her shaking when she’d fallen into his arms.

“Having coffee with your girlfriend?” Cass teased from the doorway.

He ignored her. “Do you remember when we locked Jan in the closet?”

“How could I forget? Mom was pissed, and Jan didn’t talk to us for a week. Why?”

“I think someone locked Abby in one.”

His sister sat next to him. “Jeff?” Her sober tone caught his attention, and he turned to see her kind eyes, so like his mother’s. “Why do you like this woman?”

“What the hell does that mean?” he snapped. “Just because she’s—”

“My question has nothing to do with her. Why do
you
want to spend time with her?” She took a deep breath. “If it’s just to solve the mystery of what made her this way, or to help her, then you’re doing both of you a disservice.”

He frowned at her. “When did you get so smart?”

“When you weren’t looking. And my minor is social work.” She grinned. “It’s a good fit for a teacher, just in case.”

Damn, she was a good kid. “Do you want me to answer your question?”

She shook her head. “I just want you to know the answer.”

The alarm on his phone blared an annoying techno-jingle. Disoriented and deafened, it took him a good minute to remember how to turn it off. Once he did, he drained his coffee. “I have to get ready. See you after work.”

There was no such thing as a quick shower anymore. It took twice as long to rinse the shampoo from his hair and then get the conditioner through it, and then he had to dodge the bottles as they clattered to the floor and rolled against his ankles.

Wet strands slapped his back as he dried, and rivulets of water trickled down his body, requiring him to dry again. His neck itched. With a sigh that was somewhere between comforting routine and resignation, he set to work trimming his beard. Sliding his hair behind his ears quickly degenerated to shoving into place and then to knotting it into a ponytail.

This had begun as a way to flaunt tradition while he wasn’t tied to an office. Then it had become a useful way to hide what he was thinking. Now it took too long to be presentable, and the man in the mirror was almost unrecognizable.

Dressed in a sport shirt and jeans, with to-go coffee and his wet head cold in the breeze, Jeff drove down the hill and parked at the mouth of Abby’s driveway. She and Evan were already waiting by the road. The little boy looked like he’d stepped out of a department store window, and his backpack was almost as big as he was. Both of them looked terrified.

“Hey, dude,” Jeff crowed as he slipped the pack from Evan’s shoulders and picked the boy up to mock wrestle, leaving him wrinkled, untucked, and with messy hair, but grinning.

Abby nailed him with a stern stare and reached for the boy, but Jeff took her hand and stood next her, whispering, “Leave him be, and hug him now.”

“But the bus—”

“It’ll embarrass him, Ab.”

She knelt next to Evan and hugged him. “It’s school. You’ve done it every day. Same school. Same kids.”

Jeff took his turn, and Evan almost strangled him. The kid smelled like shampoo, soap and toothpaste, but he was still way too thin. Jeff would bet his paycheck that his backpack was half-full of lunch.

The bus rumbled up the road, and he pulled Abby away from Evan and to the car. “Let him do it alone.”

She shoved her hands in her jacket, Jeff put his hands in his pockets, and they watched their boy hoist his pack and lunge up the steps. He wobbled and shuffled to a seat near the back and next to the window, but he didn’t look out at them as the bus pulled away.

“Why did you mess him up?” Abby asked as Jeff walked around the car and opened her door. He waited until he was behind the wheel to answer.

“Because he looked like a nerd. No one’s judging you by whether his shirt is tucked in.”

“Will he be okay?”

“Yep,” Jeff said as he dodged the ruts in the lane. “I talked to the school resource officer on Friday. Why don’t you fix your driveway?” His phone rang, and he grimaced an apology for the interruption before he answered. “Hello?”

“We have a problem,” Bob said.

“Hate to hear it,” Jeff hedged as he opened Abby’s door. “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

“Coffee?” Abby asked when he disconnected the call. “Since you drove me home.”

He wanted to, but Bob was waiting with a problem. And Eric Freeman was expecting him to solve an argument. “Yeah, a whole fifty yards. That was really difficult.” He winked. “I have to work today.”

She nodded and waved goodbye as she backed away, but her smile faltered. He couldn’t shake the feeling that she was disappointed, and he couldn’t help but like it.

After navigating Abby’s treacherous driveway, Jeff dialed Bob as he caught the highway toward Hastings. “Okay, boss. What’s up?”

“Steve Peacock, older guy, well over six feet, went missing about six years ago. They found the body in Palo Duro Canyon last week. Same M.O. as your girl. And.” Bob drew a deep breath. “The press found out about the connection. It broke on several stations this morning.”

“Shit. How? Why are they interested at all?”

“He was some high-roller poker player. And one of the local cops couldn’t wait to brag that they had an honest-to-god serial killer in West Texas.”

“Fuck,” Jeff snarled.

“I’ll see that fuck and raise you another. There is no record of Abe Snyder or Ray Finch being married.”

But they’d clearly been married. Everyone knew about their wives. “So either they were common-law spouses,” Jeff thought aloud, “or they got married overseas.”

The accomplice had upped the ante. She’d targeted richer husbands with higher profiles, and had exotic weddings. She’d obviously gotten tired of living on the edge of society. Which should have made her easier to catch, but she’d chosen another old-fashioned dodge.

“Which leaves us with a global search,” Bob grumbled. “I’ve got Amanda checking the popular destination wedding sites, but it’ll be slow going with the international jurisdictions.”

“Can you do that? Just assign your wife stuff?”

“I’m not going to lose my best analyst just because I married her. We’ll call you if we find something.”

* * *

It was past noon when Jeff returned from Hastings and drove through Fiddler to pick up lunch at Herb’s. Sitting at the drive-in speaker, he watched his fellow diners. Teenagers from the high school crowded into cars, secretaries checked their watches to make sure they didn’t exceed their lunch hour, mothers wrestled with small children.

“Hey there, handsome.”

Jeff looked over his shoulder and up into the gleaming smile of Charlene Anderson, who looked like she was prowling a catwalk instead of a lunchtime drive-in. “Hey yourself. What’s up?”

She handed him a flyer. “Drumming up last-minute business for the charity bachelorette auction and dance on Saturday. You should come. Your sister signed up this morning.”

Of course she had, and he should probably go and make sure Cass didn’t scandalize the entire town. “Do all the single women come?”

“Abby has volunteered to take photographs through the whole thing,” Charlene said with a wicked grin. “It’d be great if someone could get her to dance.”

“That wasn’t—”

“Bye,” Charlene called as she walked away.

He scowled at the brightly colored sheet of paper and noticed the neat logo printed in the corner. Abby had designed it. She would work every minute leading up to the party, all the way through it, and then start over the next morning. She shouldn’t work so much.

And that shouldn’t be why he’d ask her to dance.

He slid the notice into his passenger seat and reviewed the menu before he pressed the order button. “Number three, with cheddar cheese, and a Dr. Pepper, please.” He saw the last item on the menu. “And a veggie burger with fries and an iced tea.”

“We’ll have that right out,” the voice crackled through the speaker.

Looking for a distraction, Jeff surveyed the notices board on the restaurant’s outside wall. Little League Baseball sign-ups had started. He remembered the spring rituals of showing up at the field on Saturday morning and meeting the dads/coaches, tryouts for positions, first practices and pizza afterward, playing catch in the yard with his dad.

Jeff walked to the board and lifted a form from the basket, considering it carefully. Evan should play, but he didn’t want to be the reason the kid avoided sports later.

The carhop walked out the door and to his car, frowning at the empty driver’s seat. Jeff returned and dropped the form on top of the dance flyer.

“Twelve dollars, sir,” she said, her smile wide.

He pulled out his wallet. “If I wanted sporting goods without going to Hastings, where would I go?”

“The dry goods section of the grocery store, in the basement.” Her ponytail flipped and bounced as she turned her head and pointed to the sign dominating the middle of the block.

“Thanks,” he said as he handed her the money. “Keep the change.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jeff turned from the highway onto the road toward home. Gloves, bat, balls, burgers, drinks, paperwork, his jacket and his notes from the Hastings lab visit all shifted and slid against the leather, threatening to tumble onto the floor. They did it again as he bumped through Abby’s washed-out driveway.