"He just says he was already dead, but you wouldn't let him stay that way."
"I should have left him alone," she said quietly. "I could tell it was hurting him when I questioned him. He... said to me once that I'd given him hope. And then he said he'd been better off without it. Hope caused him pain. Hope reminded him of all he'd lost."
"If it hadn't been you, he'd have focused his anger and frustration on someone else. He was a bomb waiting to detonate. Sad, but there it is. There was no malice in what you did. "
"But there was thoughtlessness. That's a form of malice."
"Lose the hair shirt, Jillian, You didn't do anything wrong. Smith was a lost cause."
She heard anger in his voice. And she hurt enough and was just tired enough to feel anger of her own. Suddenly she needed answers to a different set of questions. "What about you? What about us? Are we a lost cause, too?"
For a moment, he looked wearier than she felt. What that moment didn't say he did with his next words.
"I've got to go."
And just like that, he was gone.
Nolan slouched in a chair on the aft deck of the
EDEN,
his ankles propped on the rail, his hand wrapped around the neck of a half-full bottle of scotch.
The moon hung like a damn china egg as it worked its way slowly from east to west across the Southern Hemisphere. He lifted his bottle in salute.
Bad egg. Rotten egg. Yoke's on you.
God, he was funny. And the scotch tasted great. Goddamn great. Even if it wasn't as smooth as he remembered. Even if it didn't numb nearly as fast as he needed it to.
Even if it couldn't make him forget how Jillian had looked lying in the grass after Smith had attacked her. She'd been broken and bleeding and so close to gone that his hands still shook at the memory.
But he'd still managed to get good and piss-faced drunk.
Hoo-fuckin'-aah!
The booze was all he wanted now.
It was all he needed.
Yup. Him and Glen. Together again. A fricking family reunion. Making the rest of the world go away. A world where there was a woman who looked at him through clear green eyes that told him she believed he was more than he was. More than he was capable of being.
Will had known better. Will had known his worth. He wasn't worth shit. Not at crunch time.
Tears streamed down his face. Just like Nelson, Will was dead. Dammit, why hadn't he come to him? Why hadn't he let him help?
And Jillian ... he'd almost let her die, too.
He lifted the bottle, swallowed deep, wiped the tears away from his cheeks with the back of his hand. Gone. The one woman who had ever mattered was gone—and he'd made damn sure to see to it she stayed that way.
But at least she was safe.
She was safe.
Please, God, let her always be safe.
And please, let him stay drunk forever so he could forget that look on her face. The one that said, /
love you.
The one that said, /
need you.
The one that brought these fucking wimpy-ass tears to his eyes and proved what a poor excuse for a man he really was.
24
Nolan came to thirty-odd hours later.
The sun burned through his closed eyelids like lasers. Vultures circled overhead. He cautiously cracked open an eye. OK. Not vultures. Gulls. With a little luck they'd have been vultures. A sure sign he was dead. He'd be out of his misery then.
But dead didn't hurt this much. He was pretty sure of that.
He shifted in the deck chair, groaned at the stiffness in his limbs, and struggled to a stand.
And promptly puked his guts out over the side of the boat.
Where he'd gone wrong, he told his sorry self as he stumbled down the companionway steps into the cabin, was that sometime during the past two days he'd stopped drinking. He eyed the remaining full bottles of scotch sitting on the counter in the galley and gave a thought to repeating the drill. Just for the hell of it.
But heart and mind didn't come to terms with the idea any more than his stomach did. So he hit the head, showered the stench off his body, shaved two days' worth of beard, then brushed the sour taste from his mouth.
And all the while thought about Jillian.
Would he ever stop thinking about Jillian?
Moving like an automaton, he reached into the freezer for the chicken casserole his mother had made and left for him.
While it defrosted in the microwave, he made coffee and dressed.
By noon, he'd kept food and coffee down and, nursing a bitch of a hangover, thought about Smith, tucked away in jail where he couldn't hurt her ever again.
Smith. It had been so obvious. And yet he'd missed it.
So obvious.
Standing at the aft deck rail, fortifying himself with more coffee, he realized that notion had started working on him somewhere between his "poor little drunk ole me" routine and his morning gut spill.
Something wasn't right. Something about Smith. He couldn't get a bead on it, but something was off-kilter.
His gut—-what was left of it—kept telling him there was more to the story. He should have questioned Smith that night at the Breakers after he'd attacked Jillian. But he hadn't been firing on all cylinders then, any more than he was now, for that matter. All he'd been able to think about was Jillian. The blood. God, the blood.
He shook himself away from the memory. Got it back together. And did a rewind of the series of events leading up to the attack. He couldn't pinpoint why, but something besides the residual effects of the booze he'd practically mainlined into his system was eating at him.
Personal. From the beginning, he'd seen the threats to Jillian as personal. Messages on her home phone—an unlisted number. Messages on her e-mail—again, someone close to her who knew her address. And the nursery rhymes. How in the hell did those fit in? And how did they tie in to Smith?
The more he thought about it, the more questions he had. Smith lived in a dump of a motel. No computer. Little money. Fewer resources. From what he'd gathered reading Jillian's interview transcripts, watching the videos, the guy couldn't even get a library card. His accessibility to a computer and a printer was slim and none.
And how did he always know where she was going to be— like at the police chief's press conference and at Mar-A-Lago?
Nolan felt his pulse kick up a couple of beats.
Personal.
He kept coming back to that. From the beginning, he'd thought—hell, he'd
known
these attacks were personal. Her penthouse that she'd since pulled in markers to have refurbished had been destroyed. Her clothes. Her bed. Everything but the kitchen. The one room in the place Jillian could have cared less about.
Personal.
Smith might have seen her as a threat to his personal space, might not have liked it that Jillian had invaded it, but he could have simply disappeared rather than endure her probing questions if he really wanted to avoid her. Why kill her?
Nolan felt a jolt of memory that damn near sent him to the floor. A date—one he'd seen on Jillian's interview transcripts as the date she'd contacted Smith to set up their first interview.
Christ. Jesus H. Christ.
The date was several days after she'd received her first threat. Which meant that Smith couldn't have sent it.
Heart pounding like a sledgehammer, he snagged the Mustang's keys from the counter and headed for the docks at a run.
"Smith says he'll see you," Detective Laurens said as he led Nolan down a maze of hallways, then nodded for the guard to unlock the door to the bank of cells. "Don't know why. He hasn't said a word since we booked him. Keep it short, OK? I don't want his PD screaming foul."
Nolan waited in an interview room, agonizingly sober, wondering what he was going to say, what he was going to do, when he finally saw Smith. Murder and mayhem came to mind, but that wouldn't solve anything. He wanted some answers. If only he knew what the questions were.
He looked up when the door opened. Smith, dressed in an oversize jailhouse jumpsuit, walked in looking lost and defeated. And Nolan knew he'd been right to come here.
This was not a man. This was a lost shell of a man.
And that, Nolan realized in that instant, was part of what had bothered him all along.
He recognized lost when he saw it. He understood it; at least he thought he had, until he looked deep in John Smith's eyes.
This was a man who was beyond lost. This was a man who was absent of strength, of purpose, of any emotion strong enough to prompt anything as violent and feeling as a death wish—let alone carry one out.
There wasn't enough left in him to sustain the kind of hatred required to kill.
"You weren't in this by yourself, were you?" Nolan asked, his pulse spiking because he knew, he just knew, there was more to the story.
Smith's eyes lifted slowly. Nolan saw recognition before Smith shifted his gaze to a spot at the middle of Nolan's chest. And said nothing.
"Who told you to hurt her?"
Smith swallowed, blinked, then met Nolan's eyes. "She should have left me alone. She shouldn't have asked so many questions."
Nolan fought the urge to jump across the table and wrap his hands around the man's throat and choke an answer out of him. Which would net him exactly nothing.
"You've been through a bad time," he said, settling himself, settling Smith. "Jillian wanted to help you. See if she could find someone who knew you. Family... friends. Someone who could give you back your identity."
"She ... she made me—" Smith stopped, exhaled a breath that came from the depths of his empty soul. "She made me want that. To want... you don't understand. You can't understand. Wanting is too painful."
But Nolan did understand. He wanted. He wanted Jillian. Wanted her so much it hurt like hell. "So, you decided to kill her."
"I did not decide. It just made sense."
"Who said it made sense?"
Smith glanced up again, then away, then seemed to reach a decision. "Mary."
Nolan's breath caught.
Mary.
The name had spilled off Smith's lips, part prayer, part hatred.
"Mary?" Nolan repeated, amazed at the calm in his voice when he felt as revved as a rocket inside. "She's someone special to you?"
"She is just... Mary. She knows things."
"Things?"
A long hesitation. "She knew that Jillian Kincaid was a bad person. That she had to be stopped."
Nolan needed to be careful here. He needed to be precise. "Mary told you to kill her?"
Smith's shoulders sagged a little more. He tipped his head toward the ceiling, world-weary, worn, and beaten. "Mary has been hurt, too. She understands. So ... I tried. I felt I owed her. She said she cared for me. She spoke to me when no one else would. She got me the job at the hotel."
Nolan had to physically restrain himself from jumping out of the chair. "She sounds like a good person," he said, practically choking on the words.
Smith shook his head. "No. Not good. Just like me."
"Yet you tried to kill Miss Kincaid. Because Mary told you to."
"Yes. She said Jillian Kincaid deserved to die."
Nolan fisted his hands together on the top of the table. "Was she there? That night? Was Mary there?" He had to ask... even though he had a sick feeling he already knew.
Smith nodded.
Nolan closed his eyes, steadied himself. "Tell me about Mary. Tell me what she looks like."
With stilted words, Smith described Mary to him.
Gezus God.
Nolan shot out of the chair. Pounded on the door. Yelled for the guard. When he burst through the door, Laurens came running.
"Christ," Laurens said when Nolan told him who really wanted Jillian dead.
Nolan's hands were surprisingly steady as he dug his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed the hospital while he ran for his Mustang.
"Shit!" He swore when he found out Jillian had been released at ten that morning.
He hit Jillian's penthouse number on his speed dial. She answered on the second ring.
"Tell me your parents are with you."
"Nolan? Is that you? "
"Jillian, are your parents with you?"
"No," she said, sounding confused. "They left a few minutes ago."
Shit.
"Call security. Tell them not to let anyone up to see you."
"Nolan? For God's sake! You're scaring me. What's this about?"
"Just call security. No one is to get up to see you, understand? I'm on my way over."
"Then we'll have a party."
"What are you talking about? Who's there?"
"No one. Yet."
Then she told him who was on the way over.
His throat constricted to the size of a very thin straw.
Calm. Stay the hell calm.