Читать онлайн книгу «Telling Secrets» автора Tracy Montoya

Telling Secrets
Tracy Montoya
As an experienced search-and-rescue tracker, Alex Gray had solved his share of mysteries.But beneath his cool Lakota demeanor, Alex was running from his own dark secrets…including a traumatic family history that connected him to a killer. Now someone from his past had returned to play a deadly game. And only one woman could help him…Sophie Brennan knew that Alex was the key to stopping the string of murders plaguing the Washington mountains. But as the authorities questioned her credibility, she had to resist the almost mystical connection she shared with Alex. For hiding in the shadows, someone was waiting to silence her whispered warnings…forever.



Telling Secrets
Tracy Montoya



www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This one’s for Kim and Sharron, for regularly talking
me down from the writer’s ledge. It’d be lonely on
my freaked-out planet without you two.
And to Gail, Eileen, Lisa, Lena and Sandy for great
critiques and even better margaritas.

Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue

Chapter One
Alex Gray didn’t know the woman who was staring so intently at him from the far side of the Bagel & Bean coffee shop. All he knew was that she made him nervous, in a not-so-good kind of way.
“Sabrina,” he murmured to his longtime tracking partner and fellow member of Port Renegade’s Search and Rescue team. “You know her?” He indicated the woman with a slight tilt of his head—subtle, if he did say so himself.
Sabrina Adelante took her customary latte from the barista and turned toward the redhead seated several feet away from them. The woman swiftly jerked her head to look out the window, but not before Sabrina had seen her watching them.
“I don’t.” Sabrina took a careful sip of her latte and considered the woman over the lip of her cup. “But she seems to know you.”
Swallowing his reflexive denial, Alex pretended to be absorbed in reading the specials on the chalkboard over the woman’s head while he checked her out once again. She was pretty, in a non-knockout kind of way, her most standout feature being the brownish-red and undoubtedly natural curls that she’d piled atop her head. A few had escaped to frame her oval face, emphasizing a delicately pointed chin and a pair of large dark eyes. She may have had the looks to blend in with the crowd, but he had to admit, there was also something about her, something that made him sure he would have remembered her if they’d met before. Especially those eyes—when she’d been staring at him, it was as if she knew…everything, all of his secrets, his darkest thoughts, down to the bone.
Her head swung around, and he was caught again by her dark gaze. This time, she didn’t look away.
“Ah, crap.” Alex spun around and headed for the door. Anything to get away from that too-intense woman, because he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out why she was so fascinated with him. That definitely wasn’t a casual “hey, you’re kinda hot” stare, and anything else probably meant trouble.
Sabrina pushed out the door a few seconds later, her hands wrapped protectively around her latte, likely trying to leach warmth out of the cup as the cold air hit her. Port Renegade, Washington, never got all that much sun, but the November day was even grayer than usual, with the sharp biting feel of an impending storm in the air. “So what was that all about? Should I be on the lookout for some guy with a shotgun who wants you to make an honest woman out of his daughter?”
He raised one gloved hand, the stiff outer fabric of his waterproof parka making swishing sounds as he moved. “Swear to God, I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
Sabrina took a careful sip of her coffee while glancing back toward the shop. “Well, better start running, Casanova, because she’s coming outside.” She leaned forward, straining to see through the gray-sky glare on the shop’s front windows. “And she looks seriously unhappy.”
A smattering of snowflakes started to fall, the light, airy kind that looped and danced in the air like miniature pixies before they finally hit the ground. Alex watched them as he curled his toes into the cushioned soles of his hiking boots and quashed the urge to bolt. Whatever she wanted, he’d let her have her say, and then they could both move on. Even with his obscured view of her through the glass double doors, he could see she wasn’t much over five feet tall. He could take her.
Another Bagel & Bean customer strode past him, a little too closely, and Alex shifted his weight to avoid getting pushed over. The man yanked the door open, and there she stood, still aiming that scary-intense look right at Alex. She didn’t even seem to notice when the man jostled past her, obviously feeling an urgent need to get some caffeine into his system.
She wasn’t rail thin—probably about a size twelve or fourteen—but she had the most amazingly small waist, emphasized by a fitted green sweater, from which her generous hips flared in a way that practically invited a man to put his hands on them and hold on. As the door closed behind her, Alex could see she’d left her coat hanging on the chair she’d just vacated. But that didn’t stop her from heading his way, an expression of firm resolve on her face, acting as if the cold didn’t bother her in the least.
Once she got within a couple feet of him, however, she planted her boots on the wet cement walkway and sucked in her cheeks, her expression morphing into something less confident. In fact, it was almost a wince, as if she expected him to get angry at her mere presence. But why the hell would he be angry? He’d told Sabrina he’d never met this woman before, and up close and personal, he was still positive that was true. But the way she reacted to him threw him, all the same.
They stared at each other for what seemed like a very long time, playing a strange mental game of chicken. Naturally competitive, Alex dug his heels in and refused to be the first one to speak. Behind him, Sabrina muttered something under her breath, and he heard her hiking boots clunk across the pavement as she moved a polite distance away. When the silence had stretched out for too long, his natural concern drove him to finally break it. “Are you okay?”
Her hand floated up to toy with the neckline of her sweater. She had the most perfectly shaped rosebud of a mouth, dotted with the occasional freckle like the rest of her pale skin, and it turned upward in a small self-deprecating smile. “Sorry. I just—” Covering her mouth, she cleared her throat. “Are you a tracker?”
Lacing his gloved fingers together, he cracked his knuckles, buying some time before he answered. Sabrina and he were on Renegade Ridge State Park’s lead search and rescue team, a group that had gotten lots of media attention locally and nationally both for their rare dedication to old-fashioned footprint tracking and the resulting successful searches for lost hikers. He loved his job, and it wasn’t beneath him to play up the details of what he did to try to impress a woman here and there. But he never knew how to react when people seemed overly starstruck by the idea—something that tended to happen when the local cable access channel reran the series of interviews they’d done with the trackers a little over a year earlier. “I—”
“Do you find missing people?” The intense look was back, telling him she definitely wasn’t an admirer.
“Yes,” he replied. “You didn’t lose someone in the park recently, did you?”
“No.”
The tension that had suddenly built up in his body drained away at her denial, leaving him feeling half relieved that there wasn’t a lost hiker in need of rescue and half disappointed that he wasn’t going to get called in on a search this morning.
But though he waited, she didn’t volunteer any further information, instead becoming strangely preoccupied with tracing the square toe of her impractical, clunky black boot along a crack in the sidewalk. Living in the mountains and doing what he did for a living, he’d made it a habit never to go out without a pair of shoes he could run and climb in. With that gigantic heel on hers, he wondered how she could even walk.
“Okay, do I know you?” he tried again.
“No. Not even slightly,” she said to her shoe.
“Thennnnnnn, can you tell me what this is about?” This was like trying to get his ex-girlfriend Trina to tell him what he’d done to make her angry—on way too many occasions. Hence the whole ex-girlfriend thing. This woman didn’t look like a drama queen like Trina, but you just never knew….
“There’s a trail you’ll be on today,” she blurted out suddenly. “It’s beautiful—runs by a two-tiered waterfall with a small fence at the bottom where the water pools and a really tall pine tree on the far side.” She finally made eye contact with him, making circular motions with her hands. “The path there makes a loop.”
Her eyes were pretty, a deep, dark blue, not brown as he’d originally thought, which reminded him of the ocea—Focus, dude. “Sounds like Dungeness Falls.” He cleared his throat and focused.
“Okay.” Her eyes flicked to the ground and back up at him. “Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.”
“What?”
“Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.” She ducked her head again and mumbled, “Don’t ask me how I know that.” After imparting that strange bit of wisdom, she pivoted back toward the coffee shop, obviously wanting to make a quick escape. He stopped her by grabbing her elbow—gently, so as not to scare her, but firmly enough to keep her from bolting.
“What does that mean?” he asked. “What kids?”
“Generally speaking, all of this will make sense later.” The strange half smile was back. “Unless I’m wrong, and then it’ll just be embarrassing. But right now, that’s all I can tell you.”
“I don’t have kids.” Frustration and confusion warred for dominance inside him, and he tightened his grip on her arm. She probably was a drama queen after all, what with the cryptic messages and the big, pretty, I’m-so-lonely-come-save-me eyes. And all he knew was that he needed to stay far, far away from that type. History showed that he didn’t do well with drama queens. “And could you please make sense for maybe five minutes? How do you know who I am? What kind of message is that?”
Now the smile was gone, replaced with the look of someone who’d had her puppy kicked too many times, which made him feel like a huge jerk. But then again, that was what drama queens did. They manipulated you into feeling sorry for them, and then—BAM! They hit you while you were vulnerable, just so they could fight and make up.
But instead of hitting him, literally or figuratively, she reached down and calmly peeled his hand off her elbow. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.” With that, she headed back inside the coffee shop, leaving him to wonder at her bizarro-world way of holding a conversation. Pulling his Mariners ball cap out of one of his jacket’s oversize pockets, he jammed it backward over his head and turned toward his truck, hoping that getting her out of his sight would exorcise her from his brain.
But, of course, he had no such luck. As he slogged across the parking lot to where Sabrina was waiting for him, he found that any attempt to turn his thoughts away from the woman, her strange words and her cartoon-character eyes proved futile. She’d gotten stuck in his craw, and he wanted her out of his craw and as far, far away from it as possible.
Sabrina reached over and opened the driver’s-side door for him, making a big show of shivering and chattering her teeth once he’d gotten inside.
“Sorry. I know you’re cold.” He got in and started the truck, cranking the defrost to clear the windows, which were nearly covered by a thin layer of moisture.
“I thought you might be a while, so I got your coffee.” As soon as she’d handed him the small paper cup she’d been holding, she rubbed her bare hands vigorously together, then replaced her gloves. “By the way, you are so going to hate me.”
“Okay, enough with the mysterious commentary. Just tell me straight what’s going on.” It took a major effort not to snap at her after she’d been nice enough to get the drink he’d forgotten, but his words still came out sharper than he’d intended.
Sabrina reared back in surprise. “Whoa, Mr. Grumpy Pants, who tied your boxers in a knot this morning?”
He sighed, leaning back in his seat and taking a sip of his coffee, which was already lukewarm from waiting in the frozen truck. Of course, Sabrina had also probably sucked all the heat out of it with her perpetually icy hands while he’d entertained the crazy woman in the parking lot. “Nothing.” He made an effort to bring his voice back to a normal conversational tone. “So why am I going to hate you?”
She tried to smile at him, but it quickly turned to a toothy grimace, as if she expected him to start shouting at her once he figured out what the hell she was talking about. “Because I forgot to tell you that we have a bunch of fifth graders coming out to the park today to learn about tracking, and you get to take them on a hike.”
“Excuse me, your what hurts?” he asked calmly.
Sabrina completely ignored the sarcastic non sequitur. “I’m sorry, Al, but Jessie is mapping out the road closures for the winter with Skylar, and I promised Aaron I’d take Rosie in to the doctor today. She has a virus she can’t shake.” Aaron was Sabrina’s new husband of six months, and Rosie was his teenaged daughter—who, come to think of it, hadn’t been coming around to watch her stepmother work as often as usual lately. The girl was fascinated with tracking.
“She okay?”
“Yeah, just a fever and a nasty cough. We think it might be bronchitis, but I don’t want to put off taking her in.”
The truck finally warmed up, and he took that as a cue to turn on the windshield wipers to finish clearing the windshield. “No, don’t do that. I can take the kids around, no problem.”
That earned him a real smile from Sabrina as she clicked her seat belt into place. “You are fabulous, and I adore you.”
“I know, but we must never speak of this again. Aaron would be mad at me, and I might have to kick his ass to defend myself,” he said, referring to her husband, a police detective and good friend.
“Right.” Sabrina laughed, holding her gloved hands in front of the heater vent. “Poor kids, they probably didn’t expect snow today. Well, as you know, they’ll want a demonstration from the big, bad search-and-rescue tracker, so I left some footprints last night down by Dungeness Falls for you to read for them.”
He froze, his coffee cup floating a couple of millimeters from his mouth. “Say that again.”
“I left some tracks down by Dungeness Falls.” Narrowing her eyes, Sabrina pivoted in her seat to face him, reaching back to pull her long black ponytail over her shoulder so she could finger the ends. “Alex, you’ve been acting really stran—”
He didn’t wait to hear the rest of her sentence, instead bolting out of the truck and heading for the shop. His breath coming out in heavy puffs from the cold, he shoved through the doors, barely noticing as he clipped a heavyset man balancing a cardboard tray filled with steaming cups in both hands. The man grunted a “Hey!” at him, but Alex just muttered an apology and kept moving, darting around the closely set tables to the one in the back where she’d been sitting.
She was gone. Jacket, coffee cup, all gone.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
She’d known. She’d known he was headed to Dungeness Falls today, and she’d known about the kids on the field trip before he had. He pushed back through the shop and headed toward the parking lot once more, nearly upsetting the same Weeble-shaped man he’d almost toppled a few minutes earlier—dude sure didn’t move fast. Once outside, he searched like a madman among the cars sitting in the small parking lot, looking for signs of telltale curls or a too-intense stare as he ignored Sabrina’s shouted questions. But the woman wasn’t there anymore. And he didn’t even know her name.
Smacking his palm against the nearest car hood, Alex blew out a frustrated breath, still scanning the parking lot, even though he now knew it was a hopeless cause. He’d just spotted the footprints her ridiculous clunky boots had made in the thin layer of snow that now coated the ground, and they led to a parking spot that was now empty.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
What the hell was he supposed to do now?

Chapter Two
“So even though it’s snowing, you can still see a slight depression in the snow where our mystery woman left tracks,” Alex called out over an excited group of fifth graders. About ten of them hung on his every word, bumping heads every time they bent down to see something he had to show them on the ground. The rest were pretty much touch and go—sometimes he captured their interest, and other times they got distracted by something shiny. But all in all, they were a pretty decent group of kids. He liked fifth grade—they were old enough to have an interesting conversation with, but still young enough to be dazzled by his tracking brilliance. Not that he’d tell Sabrina that—she still thought he was doing her a giant favor.
He started walking backward, beckoning to the group to follow him. “Here you’ll notice our subject started veering off the path.” He gestured toward a smattering of tall grasses, some of which were bent and broken. “Plants don’t crush themselves, so you can see something’s been here. Since the footprints we’re following seem to have disappeared off the path, looking for broken vegetation is the next best thing.”
“Oooh, that’s so cool!” said one gum-chomping girl as she pushed her trendy red glasses up higher on her nose, smiling brightly.
He laughed softly. “Be careful. That’s how I got into this business—I thought tracking was cool. But it’s also exhausting and sometimes cold, wet and nasty.”
“But you get to save lives. That’s awesome,” she responded.
True. And that was the best part, finding lost hikers and bringing them home.
“Are you Native American?” a boy bundled in a puffy purple jacket and a Minnesota Vikings stocking hat interjected. His voice was partially muffled by the yellow-and-purple scarf someone had wrapped around the lower half of his face, dark brown eyes peering over it. It wasn’t that cold, but some parents couldn’t be too careful when it came to their children.
“Yes.” Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Alex’s teeth clicked together in an involuntary jaw clench as he waited for the inevitable question.
The boy pulled the scarf off his face, clumsily, as his hands were encased in some hard-core ski mittens. Alex felt the tension leave his shoulders when he noticed that the boy’s skin was slightly tanner than that of the Caucasian children in his class. “I’m Ojibwa, from Minnesota. We’re not trackers. Is your tribe?”
“Thank you. I have a lot of people assume that I’m a tracker because of some mysterious Native American power.” He smiled at the boy, who grinned back in understanding. “I’m Oglala Lakota Sioux, but I grew up off the reservation. And no, the Sioux aren’t trackers, to my knowledge.” He’d been six when his mother had moved off the reservation with her only child, so he didn’t actually know a whole lot about the Lakota except for the few things Anna Gray had told him through the years.
The girl with the glasses raised her hand, so high and straight above her head, her tummy stuck out with the effort.
“Yes?” Alex waved at her so she’d feel free to ask her question.
“Where did you learn to track, then?” Her hand remained in the air, even though he’d already called on her.
“I took a class as a college student from the park rangers here to fulfill a phys ed requirement when I couldn’t get into weight training, and I liked it so much, I designed my own semester abroad to Botswana to study tracking and desert survival with the Kalahari San.” At their puzzled looks, he added, “You might know them as the Bushmen. They’re tribal people in Africa, and their tracking skills are legendary. As luck would have it, the group who took me in were also brilliant teachers. I came back here to do a mountain-tracking apprenticeship, and they hired me.”
After fielding a few questions about his Africa experience and telling them how he learned to always keep his tent zipped in the Kalahari—to keep the hyenas out—Alex headed down the trail once more, showing them how to spot the sign indicating where his coworker’s trail continued.
It wasn’t until he heard water rushing through rocks that he felt the first pangs of uneasiness.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
But that was where the trail led. Across the water. And a successful field trip meant following the tracks around the entire Dungeness Falls loop, at the end of which one of the park rangers would be waiting with a picnic lunch to tell them about Renegade Ridge’s history and point out some interesting sights.
What had she been warning him about? Should he just ignore her? Was she an overprotective parent who’d decided to be spooky and weird about her fear of having her child near water? Was she insane?
Maybe she was insane. An insane bomber who had rigged the bridge over the falls to explode once they set foot on it.
Ah, hell. Now he was being insane. But he also couldn’t just ignore her. If any of the kids under his watch got hurt because he ignored Ms. Batcrapcrazy’s warning, he’d regret it for the rest of his life. He should have just called the police and had them sort this out, but now it was too late. He was in charge of a group of thirty-odd fifth graders, and he alone had to decide whether they were going to cross the water in about fifteen minutes.
Pulling the radio off his belt, he brought it up to his mouth. “Hey, kids, here’s how we communicate with the ranger station during a search,” he said brightly. Probably too brightly, judging from the confused look one of the chaperones had just shot him. Toning down his Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood smile, he depressed the talk button with his thumb. “Base, this is tracker one-B, over.”
A burst of static, and then came, “Roger that, tracker one-B, how can we help you, over?”
“I need you to patch me over to Sabrina’s cell phone, over.” He hoped that Sabrina, who had set the tracks he and the schoolkids were following, had taken her phone with her on the way to her stepdaughter’s appointment.
“Hey, Al, what’s up?” Sabrina asked, never having been one for radio protocol via cell phone. “Uh, over.”
“Bree, I’m just about to cross Dungeness Falls. Did you see anything strange up here when you were laying these tracks last night, over?” Naturally, none of the kids were distracted at the moment, and all were hanging on his every word. Thirty pairs of eyes widened when he asked about “anything strange,” and then the kids started whispering excitedly among themselves. Great. Now he’d scared them all. Their parents would be overjoyed.
“No, Al. Everything was pretty normal. What in particular are you looking for, over?” she responded.
“Nothing. Never mind.” Without so much as an over, he clicked off the radio and returned it to his belt. “Okay,” he said to the kids, “let’s head around this bend to the falls, and you can all stop and take pictures if you want.” He didn’t know how many of them, if any, would have cameras, but he figured that sounded plausible. While they were resting, he’d head up the trail next to the falls and check out the far side of the bridge. And if he saw anything remotely threatening, this was going to be the world’s shortest field trip.
After leading the students to the lookout point near the falls, he told them to fan out so they could all see the spectacular rush of white water as it plunged down a steep, rocky incline to spray into a pool at the bottom. The falls weren’t particularly tall—maybe twenty feet or so—but they were beautiful.
Reaching across the fence to run his palm through the cloud of fine, cool mist at the foot of the falls, he scanned the crowd to make sure they were all busy oohing and aahing. Then, after a word to one of their teachers, he headed up the trail. With long, quick strides, he made short work of the switchbacks leading to the top of the falls, then jogged along the path beside the upper part of the Dungeness River until he reached a small wooden bridge.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
Resting a hand on the smoothly sanded pine of the guardrail, he looked across. The path curved just a few feet after the bridge into a dense stand of Sitkas, dripping moss and low-hanging branches obscuring his view. Whatever it was that the mystery woman had wanted him to keep the kids away from, he couldn’t see it from this side. So, did her message mean that it was all right for him to go across the water alone?
Curiosity. One of these days, it was going to get him killed. But today, he didn’t figure that a cryptic message from a strange curly-haired woman was going to accomplish that feat. He made his way to the other side of the gurgling stream of water and thumped his boot emphatically on the dirt path once he reached the other side, mentally daring said curly-haired woman to come and get him.
She didn’t. So he kept going.
A few minutes later, something large and white—a bright, pristine white that didn’t occur naturally in the forest—caught his eye a few yards off the path.
“She probably left you a body, champ,” he muttered under his breath. “You think she’s cute. Therefore, she must be a wack-job.” For some reason, he’d always been like a magnet for that type, and it was starting to get old.
Small twigs and leaves crackled under his feet as he left the path and made his way through the undergrowth. Batting a low-hanging branch out of his way, he squinted at the white object, hoping its brilliance would suddenly make sense, that its presence would be something perfectly innocuous.
He pushed through the last of the tall weeds and bristly shrubs in his way, and the thing was finally visible. And what he saw there chilled him to the bone.
“Holy—”
Backing away slowly, Alex pulled his radio off his belt once more. “Base, this is tracker one-B, over.”
“Tracker one-B, this is Base. What’s your twenty, over?”
“About one hundred yards above the falls on Dungeness.” He was nearly overcome by an overwhelming urge to get out of there as quickly as possible. That or throw up. But he had a job to do, and no one else was up here to do it. “I need you to call the police, and get every park ranger you’ve got to block off this trail.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, still unable to believe what his eyes were telling him.
“Alex, are you okay?” Skylar, the search-and-rescue coordinator slipped out of her usual radio-speak. He’d blocked off trails before, for less grisly reasons, but she’d obviously become alarmed at something she heard in his voice.
“Yeah, just—” He took a deep breath. “Skylar, I’ve never seen anything like this. Just call the police. I’ve got to get those kids away from here.”

Chapter Three
“Authorities are seeking this woman, wanted for questioning…”
Sophie Brennan jerked forward in her seat when she saw the composite drawing flash up on her television, which then sent her fumbling in between the couch cushions for the remote. Once her hand closed on the thing, she hit the button to turn up the volume, not taking her eyes off the face on the screen.
Her face.
“…in a bizarre murder that witnesses say could have been the work of a satanic cult.”
Okay, now that she hadn’t seen coming.
Her phone started ringing, but she just turned the volume up even higher, deciding to let the machine answer the call.
“The name of the victim and cause of death have not been released by the Port Renegade Police,” the newscaster said cheerily from her position off-camera, Sophie’s face still getting more than its share of screen time. “But a police spokesperson did confirm that the body was discovered around 9:30 this morning by a search-and-rescue worker for Renegade Ridge State Park.”
Sophie leaned toward the TV and squinted at her likeness. The nose was wrong, but other than that, they’d pretty much hit the mark. Which meant that her busybody neighbors were probably going to start calling the sheriff’s office any minute. God, someone had died. You’d think she would’ve known that.
“One witness who asked to remain anonymous said the body was covered by a white sheet and had been stabbed in the chest in a circle-and-cross pattern. Sources say the wounds were consistent with ritual murders.” Finally, the news channel took that awful drawing off the air, focusing on the newscaster’s face, which was framed by a bright blond helmet of hair. “Expert Marvin Wynter, author of Free Your Mind! Deprogramming Former Cult Members, is here to talk to us,” the reporter said. “Marvin, could this be the work of cult killers?”
The camera cut to a man in his fifties, with shifty little eyes and a thick beard. “Why, yes, all of the signs are there—”
Not waiting to hear the so-called expert pontificate further, Sophie hit the mute button. One didn’t need to be psychic to see that the guy was nothing but a fearmonger.
But as for the rest of the broadcast…She sat back against the couch cushions and grabbed a throw pillow to hug to her chest, trying to process what she’d just seen. She hadn’t thought for a minute that her warning to Alex Gray, search-and-rescue tracker extraordinaire, would result in a police sketch of her plastered on the evening news. And in her wildest dreams she hadn’t thought it would lead to a murder victim.
But it did, and it had. So now what?
Her pulse pounding in triple-time, she realized that the most rational option was to turn herself in to the police before someone else did—if she still had time. A Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Washington–Port Renegade, Sophie was pretty much the stereotypical impoverished grad student, so she lived in an inexpensive but nice and secure apartment complex to save money. Unfortunately, the reason that said apartment complex was such a steal when it came to rent was that it catered to an elderly clientele, and anyone under the age of retirement seemed to stay far, far away from it. So while that meant she could tap into the considerable wisdom of her elders just by wandering down the hall to see who was using the fitness room, it also meant that she was surrounded by more than her share of ladies and gentlemen of leisure who were bored out of their minds—and filled in the gaps in their daily schedules by keeping close watch on the goings-on around them. She’d bet the Port Renegade PD had had at least fifty calls from her neighbors ratting her out in the last five minutes alone, bless their hearts.
Okay, so she could wait for the police to come to her, she could go to them, or…
Or. She could go find Alex Gray and explain herself. After their meeting, she’d found it easy enough to unearth information about him—he’d been involved in so many public rescues of hikers lost in the state park, his picture was plastered across several issues of the Port Renegade Tribune-Herald’s online archive. Finding his house would be a snap.
Now there was a brilliant idea. She’d already weirded him out in a big bad way this morning at the Bagel & Bean. If she approached him again, he’d probably either run away screaming or have her arrested on stalking charges as well as brought in for questioning. Surely going to find Alex Gray had to be one of her worst contingency plans ever.
Then why wouldn’t the idea leave her alone?
She was saved from answering that question for herself when the phone rang again. She got up and padded in her stocking feet to the kitchen area of her apartment, where her phone sat. A glance at the caller ID told her it was her mom, and as much as she loved her mother, she just couldn’t deal with her right now, so she let the machine pick up.
“Sophie?” her mother’s voice rang out in the silent kitchen. “Sophie, why aren’t you answering my calls? I know you’re there—you’re screening me again, aren’t you? Sophie, your face was on the evening news. The police want you brought in for questioning! Sophie, what’s going on? Are you okay? Call your mother once in a while, all right? I’d like to know why my kid is being questioned about a murder. I’m so worried about you. Okay. Call me. I don’t know why you don’t carry a cell phone—” Beep!
Finally, blessedly, the machine cut her mother off. Sophie touched a button to erase the message and headed for her front door. If she didn’t get out of here, guilt would eat her alive until she called her mom back, and she didn’t want to do that until she’d gotten herself out of this mess. Kate Brennan worried enough as it was.
Pulling her black midlength leather jacket on, she zipped it up and wrapped a long scarf around her neck. Where to—police, Alex Gray or undisclosed hidden location? Undisclosed hidden location, Alex Gray or police?
Grabbing her keys off the little hook near the door, she peered through the peephole to make sure no one was lurking in the hall. Reasonably confident that she could make it to the stairwell to the parking garage without being accosted, she exited her apartment, locking the door behind her. A leaden weight seemed to settle in the bottom of her stomach, reminding her that for better or worse, she was inextricably tied to a murder. And what she did now could help the investigation or throw it way off track—or get her in some serious trouble.
Maybe she was in serious trouble no matter what she did.

TRY AS HE MIGHT, ALEX COULDN’T erase the disturbing sight of that sheet-covered…thing from his mind, no matter how many times Sabrina and Skylar asked if he was all right, no matter how many mindless South Park reruns he went over in his head, no matter how many times he closed his eyes.
He’d been inside the ranger station since the morning, after he’d gotten the schoolkids safely back on their bus without them being any wiser. He’d told their teachers he’d seen a bear, and the field-trip chaperones had been only too happy to clear on out rather than risk having one of their charges eaten by errant wildlife. And then, after leading the police to the body, he’d come back to the station and had answered questions: Sabrina’s questions, Skylar’s questions, the park rangers’ questions, the police detectives’ questions. Over and over and over again, further embedding the images in his brain. And they were horrific.
When he’d gone up the falls, he’d found a body. But not just a lost hiker or a suicide, as was usually the case on the rare occasions when someone died in the parklands. No, this person had most definitely been murdered, but unfortunately, the killer hadn’t left it at that.
Somewhere between the hours of 6:00 last night and 9:30 this morning, someone had constructed a stone altar, laid the body on it and covered it with a sheet. Then, just to make things nice and scary for the poor schmo who ended up finding the victim, they’d stabbed an upside-down cross pattern through the sheet and into the victim’s chest. The cops Alex had led to the scene had told him that the stab wounds had been inflicted postmortem and that the victim had most likely been strangled, but if that was supposed to make him feel better, it didn’t.
The police had long ago finished gathering evidence from the scene, and even though it was past time for him to go home for the day, Alex remained inside one of the ranger station offices, sitting at a desk with his head in his hands, waiting to see if he could be of any more use to…anyone. Anything rather than go home and be alone with his thoughts.
Someone had died. Within a mile of the ranger station, and no one had heard or seen or suspected a thing.
No one except the woman he’d met outside the coffee shop that morning.
He’d given her description to police, and they’d said they’d put an APB out on her to bring her in for questioning. Had he met a murderer? And if so, didn’t it just figure that she’d randomly choose to torment him with clues about her crimes?
A knock at the door brought him out of his thoughts. “Come in,” he called, and Sabrina popped her head through the door.
“Alex, there’s a woman wearing a very large pair of sunglasses outside. She’s asking to speak to you.” Sabrina narrowed her eyes, glancing quickly behind her. “I think it’s that woman from the coffee shop.”
Of course. Right on cue.
Feeling more exhausted than he could remember, he planted his hands on the desk and pushed himself wearily to his feet. “Seriously? You call the police?”
She nodded. “Of course. I don’t want to lose her, but what if she’s dangerous? Maybe you shouldn’t go out there.”
“If she’s that dangerous, she would have come in here, guns blazing.” Then again, the murder victim had been a healthy male in his fifties who’d outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. If she’d managed to take him down, she might be more formidable than she looked. The thought didn’t stop him from heading for the door. “I’ll stall her,” he said to Sabrina. “You tell the cops to hurry.” Someone had to keep her occupied until the police arrived, and he wasn’t going to send out Skylar or Bree and cower behind them.
He pushed through the ranger-station doors and headed outside. In the dimness of the parking lot lights, he could barely make out a lone figure standing next to a small gray compact car, a fringed scarf wrapped around her hair. Just as Sabrina had told him, she wore a pair of sunglasses so huge, they looked like they’d eaten half her face. As he approached, she got in her car, leaning over to open the passenger-side door in an obvious invitation.
Once he’d climbed inside, pausing briefly to scan the interior and make sure she didn’t have a tranq gun hidden on the floor somewhere, she unwrapped the scarf from around her head and took off the ridiculous sunglasses. And yes, indeed, it was her—the woman from the coffee shop. The insane woman from the coffee shop whose bizarre message had led him to the body of someone who’d died in a way that no one should.
“What do you want?” His words were harsh, and he didn’t feel the least bit sorry for her when she flinched at his tone.
She licked her lips, and he was close enough to her to see the light dusting of freckles on her face. The curls that he’d thought were mostly brown had taken on a fiery reddish hue in the light of the setting sun. “My name is Sophie Brennan, and I wanted to apologize,” she began. “I had no idea what I told you this morning would lead you to…what you found.” She shifted her weight slightly in her seat, so she was leaning away from him as if she were afraid. He scowled at the thought that he would have frightened her—he wasn’t the one sending people to find murder victims.
“What I found was a body,” he said, trying to keep himself from shouting at her. “And you knew something was there, across the bridge. You mind telling me how?”
“I don’t—” She flipped her palms upward, blinked a couple of times and then let her hands drop to her lap once more.
“Look,” Alex said, trying another tactic. “My coworker’s husband is a cop. He can help you, if you just tell us what you know.” He didn’t know why he’d offered her even that much protection. But then again, now that he was face-to-face with her, it was difficult to picture her as the one who’d performed that grisly killing. This quiet, somewhat shy woman with her too-intense eyes didn’t seem like the type to murder someone and then carry out some bizarre ritual with their remains. Plus, the victim had been a big man, and she barely cleared five feet. Strangulation? He didn’t think so.
Or so his gut told him. Then again, lots of people’s guts had told them Ted Bundy was an okay guy, before the whole being-outed-as-a-serial-killer thing had happened.
She shook her head emphatically. “I don’t need help. They won’t find any evidence on or near the body that ties it to me, because I had nothing to do with that murder.” Folding her arms, she looked him straight in the eye then, her deep blue gaze solid and seemingly filled with the naive belief that her proven innocence was a sure thing. “Look.” She took a deep breath, then continued. “I’m a little psychic. That was why I talked to you at the coffee shop.”
“You’re a little what?” Now that he hadn’t seen coming. “How can you be a little psychic? Isn’t that like being a little rich, or a little dead?”
She gave something between a snort and a laugh. “Not in my case.” With that, she pulled off the leather gloves she wore, squeezing them in one of her now-bare hands. “Basically, I’m a really bad psychic.”
Now it was his turn to laugh.
“I don’t get visions, I don’t see dead people, I don’t even hear little voices in my head,” she continued. “But sometimes, I just get this big, nagging sense that I have to say something or do something. It doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, but it’s like an itch I can’t scratch.” She stopped squeezing. “I saw you in the coffee shop, and I just had to talk to you.”
He shook his head, opening his mouth to reply and finding that he had nothing to say to that.
“Ummmm…” She swallowed. “I mean, I felt like I had to tell you something. And when I finally got up the nerve to approach you, that thing about the kids and the water just came flying out.” She fluttered one hand in front of her like a butterfly to illustrate, then pulled it back, curling both hands around her gloves so the leather squeaked slightly. “I had no idea if I was right about what I told you until I saw the news tonight.”
“Great.” It sounded so far-fetched, but something in him almost believed her. She seemed so sincere, so…normal. But there was nothing normal about a ritualistic murder in a state park. And there was nothing normal about warning someone not to take children near the place where a dead body waited. “You know the police think you might have something to do with that murder, right? And your defense is you’re a psychic who sucks?” He leaned back in his seat, stretching his arm across the ridge between the door and the window. “Sweetheart, I don’t have to have my own 1-900 line to know that that isn’t going to get you very far.”
“Then why haven’t you called the police yet?”
Just then, a wailing siren sounded in the distance, growing louder with every passing second. Oh, yeah, if she was what she said she was, she sure had the “who sucks” part down if she hadn’t seen that one coming.
“You did call them. Before you even got in the car.” She dropped her gloves and whirled around, clutching at the door handle and looking very much like a trapped rabbit—soft, scared and completely clueless as to what to do next. “I’m such an idiot.”
A police car careened into the parking lot, lights flashing, only to be followed by another. And another.
Several more skidded to a halt around the parking-lot exit, forming a haphazard line that would prevent any cars from going in or out. Their respective sirens blended together into one shrieking, cacophonous alarm, somewhat muffled inside the closed doors of the car.
“I didn’t think I warranted this much effort,” she shouted at him.
“Get out of the car, and put your hands in the air!” a tinny voice outside blared through a bullhorn.
She yanked the keys out of her car ignition and shoved them in her pocket. “You slept with a woman named Penny last month,” she said suddenly to the windshield.
“Wha—” How could she know that? Penny lived in another state and had claimed to have no friends in Washington when she’d visited on business.
“She has a blog, and she’s very, very peeved at you.” Sophie sighed, and her shoulders dropped in defeat. She switched off the car’s headlights. “See? I’m awful. I wish I could throw some secret or something that only you and your dead aunt Polly know at you, but I can’t. All I know is that when it’s really, really important, sometimes words come to me that are meaningful to someone else. I’m not a murderer.” She opened the car door and raised her hands as she got ready to exit the vehicle.
“And I don’t know why, but I’ll see you again,” she shouted over the noise that had grown significantly louder since she’d opened the door. “This murder is connected to you in more ways than you know. And I think I have to help you with something.” She rolled her eyes, her body half in, half out of the car. “Although why I would help a guy who thinks I’m a satanic cult killer is beyond me.”
With that, she got out, heading for the cops waiting for her with her head held high, and leaving him to wonder at the strength of her seemingly unshakable conviction in her innocence.
And how, with a seemingly random comment, she could have hit on the fact that he had a dead aunt Polly.

Chapter Four
Alex’s stomach rumbled as he pulled his pickup into his driveway, an insistent reminder that it was well past dinnertime. Good thing he’d stopped on the way to get a sandwich, or he might have wasted away to nothing trying to conjure up a meal out of a half-eaten bag of Fritos and a case of beer. If memory served, he’d been putting off grocery shopping for too long.
The police had questioned him only briefly about his conversation with Sophie Brennan, but somehow, time had gotten away from him as he’d filled in his coworkers, who’d all wanted to know the latest on why one woman warranted a major sting operation.
All signs pointed to the fact that said woman was somehow connected to the grisliest homicide Port Renegade had seen in decades. But murder? Ritual killings? He wasn’t a go-with-your-gut kind of guy, preferring to deal with hard evidence, like footprints and broken plants. But from the little he’d observed of Sophie, he didn’t think she had it in her.
Trouble was, he believed her story about being psychic about as much as he believed that little green men were going to visit him tonight and take him into space for sinister experiments.
Grabbing the slender plastic bag containing his sandwich and chips off the passenger seat, he exited the truck and retrieved his mail from the squeaky outdoor box next to his driveway, shoving the few thin envelopes and solicitation postcards into the oversize right pocket of his parka before heading for his front steps.
A few years back, through some hard-core savings and wise investments, Alex had managed to parlay his park-employee salary into a down payment on a house in the mountains. The house itself was a butt-ugly three-story block of brown siding that looked like a Jawa sandcrawler from the original Star Wars film. But inside, it was a little piece of heaven, with cherry hardwood floors that seemed to glow from within and a huge stone fireplace to match an equally huge kitchen. The entire outer wall of the master bedroom was a series of windows that looked out on the snow-capped peaks of the Olympics. But what had really sold him was the sweet deck overlooking an enormous tree-lined backyard.
Trouble was he hadn’t yet had time to get much in the way of furniture, for the deck or the house, but one of these days, he’d fix that.
Once inside, he threw his jacket on the nearest milk crate and tossed his baseball cap and jacket after it. Shaking the sandwich out of its skinny bag, he sank gratefully into the one piece of quality furniture he did own—a dark brown recliner—which faced the love of his life—a fifty-two-inch wide-screen HDTV hooked up to stereo surround sound. A man had to have his priorities.
He kicked back his weight; the recliner’s footrest popped up, and Alex had everything he needed in life—a dinner he hadn’t made, a comfy chair and the sports update on channel seven. Actually, if he had telekinetic powers and could float a beer from the refrigerator to his tragically empty hand, life would be complete. Maybe he should ask Sophie Brennan if her Jedi powers extended to levitating objects….
Stop it. Thinking about Sophie Brennan was only going to get him into trouble. Big, fat, crazy-girlfriend trouble. Why he was a magnet for that type, he’d never know, but the sooner he forgot her, the better. No thinking about Sophie Brennan. No hitting on Sophie Brennan. No nothing on, near or around Sophie Brennan.
Although he had to wonder what was happening to her down at the station. Maybe he could just call—
With a hiss of disgust, Alex cut off that train of thought, concentrating instead on a search-and-rescue mission for his TV remote, which had apparently become lodged inside the chair somewhere. He’d managed to extract it and turn on SportsCenter when the doorbell rang.
And all he could hear in his head as he went to answer the door was the last thing Sophie Brennan had said to him: I’ll see you again. This murder is connected to you in more ways than you know.
Displaying a superhuman amount of self-control, Alex opened the door, discovering not Sophie standing behind it, but Sabrina and her husband, Aaron. Bree hadn’t changed out of the waterproof winter gear she’d worn to work, and Aaron still had on a suit, which told Alex that this couldn’t be good.
Her arms wrapped tightly around her body, Sabrina glanced at the sandwich in his hand. “Oh, wow, you haven’t gotten a chance to eat dinner yet? We’re sorry to bother you so late, Alex.”
He stepped back, inviting them in with a casual motion of his head. “You’re not bothering me.” He gestured to Sabrina to take the recliner and swung a chair from his dining-room set over for Aaron. Although he could have sat in one of the chairs, as well, Alex decided to choose between the worn bean bag squatting in front of the TV or one of the handy, all-purpose plastic milk crates that dotted the floor plan of his house—he opted for the latter, kicking it over a few inches into optimal conversational position. “Beer?” he asked them both, seeing as that was about all he had to offer them at the moment.
“Sure.” Aaron shed his coat and draped it over the back of the chair before sitting down.
“None for me, thanks,” Sabrina added.
Once Alex had returned with two cold Thomas Kempers from the fridge, he handed one to Aaron and sat down. “So, what’s up? Not that I don’t appreciate the visit, but you both look like this is more than a friendly house call.”
Sabrina glanced at Aaron, who leaned forward, resting his elbows on his parted knees. “You’re right, Al. I wanted to talk to you about the murder victim you found today.”
Suddenly, Alex wished he’d chosen the bean bag—the mere mention of the day’s events caused what had remained of his energy level to plummet, and he just wanted to sink into the bag’s nubby softness and forget everything that had happened today. Including and especially the people in his living room, friends though they were. He reached up and rubbed one of his eyebrows. “My talking to your colleagues for more than my entire work shift didn’t give you the information you needed?”
“Alex—” Sabrina began.
“Sorry.” Just because he’d had a crappy day didn’t mean he had to take it out on them. “I’m just tired. Hungry. And freaked out.”
She moved up to the edge of the recliner, so she, too, was leaning toward him. The two of them looked like a pair of shrinks waiting for him to tell them about his childhood. “No, Alex. It’s just…” She flung her hands in the air and turned to Aaron, clearly growing exasperated. “Tell him.”
Aaron took his cue. “The county medical examiner hasn’t had a chance to look at the body yet, but from the look I got, it seems like our guy was killed with a garrote. No blows to the head, gunshots or anything that would handicap him—someone strong and stealthy came up behind him and slipped a cord around his neck.”
Like he needed to hear that before he’d had a chance to finish his sandwich. Damn cops. “You think he might have been immobilized somehow? It did look like some sort of cult got a hold of him.” Alex looked down at the floor, tracing the grooves between the wood planks with his gaze. Anything to avoid picturing what he’d seen that morning.
“Maybe. But we didn’t see any ligature marks on his body. M.E. can tell us for sure.” Aaron took a swig of his beer, then leaned back in his chair, resting one ankle on the opposite knee. “But as for it being a ritual murder, I don’t think so.”
“Pretty much all reports of satanic-cult murders in the U.S. have turned out to be something completely different,” Sabrina chimed in. “There are no documented cases of a satanic cult murdering anyone, ever. Just lots of mass hysteria. There’s a report that came out of SUNY–Buffalo awhile back that investigated nearly 12,500 instances of so-called satanic activity and concluded there was no evidence such cults even existed.”
Alex narrowed his eyes at her.
She shrugged, a sheepish smile spreading across her face. “You learn some interesting things when you’re married to a police detective.”
“Ah.” He took a drink of his beer. “But what about the stab wounds?”
“The cross and circle?” Aaron asked. “Inflicted postmortem, judging from the amount of blood. And they mimic a murder that took place in Ohio a couple of years ago—a priest was convicted of killing a nun, and he tried to make the murder look like a satanic killing. In this case, someone wasn’t being that creative.”
“But why?”
Sabrina started moving around in her seat, first tucking her legs under her, then shifting around until she was in a lotus position. She drummed the back of her right hand against her leg for a few seconds, and then her feet went back on the floor. And since he’d known the woman since they’d gone to high school together, he knew that her fight-or-flight mechanism was kicking in big-time. Whenever the going got tough, tough Sabrina got moving. And if she couldn’t move, she’d dance around in place until she could move.
And from where he sat, she was moving like crazy right now.
He set his beer on the floor with a thud. “What?”
She examined her thumbnail, picking occasionally at the cuticle. “There’s more about what the police found on the body. Besides the manner of death, the garrote, there was other thing that didn’t match the Ohio murder.”
He was really growing tired of this. “Garrote, sheet, stone altar, stab wounds. What else do I need to know?” He turned to Aaron, appealing to the man’s sense of decency to put him out of his misery and just spit it out already. “You’re my best friends, but I’m about to shake you both until one of you starts talking. What didn’t match?”
“Something was placed in the victim’s hand, probably by the killer,” Aaron said quietly. “A crow feather.”
Everything stopped. Time, his breathing, his heart. From far, far away, he could hear Sabrina talking to him but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Blindly, he reached for his beer bottle, and when his fingers touched the cool, slick surface, he closed his hand around it and brought it up, taking a long, long swig out of it. But even alcohol didn’t dull the pain blooming in slow motion inside his chest.
He inhaled sharply, glad to find that his lungs were still working, and forced the world back into focus. “A crow feather?” He knew that the redundant question wasn’t going to magically make them give him a different answer, the answer he was hoping for.
Something in his reaction had Sabrina on her feet. She crouched down beside him and put her hand on his arm. Then she nodded. “Just like when Wilma Red Cloud was killed.”
Another time, another place. Another murder that had happened years ago, on a reservation in South Dakota. A murder that had changed his life and had nearly wrecked his mother.
He’d forgotten. He’d made himself forget. He and his mother never talked about that time—even when he was a kid and had tried to get her to talk about it, she’d refused. And she’d been right; some things were best left in the dark.
Until, that is, they forced themselves out into the open again.
Crow carrier.
Clutching the bottle, so slick with condensation it nearly slipped out of his fingers, Alex shook his head sharply. Focus, don’t think. Just focus. Don’t feel. “So you think this might be tied to…” Say it.
But he couldn’t say it, so he just looked up at his friends, hoping they couldn’t see that he was drowning.
Sabrina rubbed his arm, her eyes wide with something he didn’t want to name. “Your father? Al, I’m so sorry, but that’s exactly what we think.”

“EXCUSE ME, CAN I HELP YOU?”
Alex clenched his teeth and stifled a groan as yet another elderly resident of the Sunnyside View Apartments tapped on his truck window. With the pad of her index finger still pressed against the glass, the woman peered inside, actually moving her head around in circles as she scanned the cab’s interior.
According to Aaron, Sophie had been released hours ago because, as she’d predicted, the police had had no evidence to tie her to the murder in the park. So here Alex was, sitting outside her apartment complex, having gotten here on a crazy impulse with no plan as to how to get her to spill her guts. But she’d known about the body, and if she knew that, then she probably knew something about his father. Once he figured out the best way to approach her, he wasn’t leaving until he’d gotten the information he needed.
But first, he had to get through Sophie’s neighbors, who were all significantly older than she, and apparently took their personal security very seriously. At least five Sunnyside octogenarians had trundled out in the last ten minutes to ask him what it was he wanted, who he was there to see and how long he planned to wait before he went home. Now that resident number six had arrived, he knew he had to figure out his plan sooner rather than later. Obviously Sophie’s neighbors weren’t going to give him the five damned minutes of quiet he needed to calm down and get himself together.
He tried to smile at the woman outside his truck, but his face felt tight and uncooperative. “I’m just waiting for someone,” he finally said, knowing full well that she wasn’t going to just nod and walk away.
“Oh?” She clamped her hand around the top of the glass, so he couldn’t roll it back up without crushing her knobby fingers. “Who are you waiting for?”
He clenched his fingers around the steering wheel, half-tempted to wrench the thing off, just for some kind of release. “Sophie.”
“Sophie who?” She leaned in closer, her beady eyes and half of her gray perm filling up the space between the window glass and the top of his door.
“Sophie Brennan.”
The woman seemed to consider that for a moment. “Sophie never has gentlemen callers, especially after nine o’clock. I’d know about it. What’s your name? Where do you live? What makes you think she wants to see you this late? The poor girl has her weekend study group tomorrow morning, you know.”
“Ma’am, I’m not a gentleman caller. I’m just—” He yanked the keys out of the ignition, pausing when he couldn’t think of how to finish that last statement. What was he? And more importantly, why couldn’t he have just walked up to Sophie’s apartment right away, instead of lurking out here and rousting the blue-haired brigade? “Wait a minute. Who are you? Where do you live? Because you can’t be building security.”
“Millie Price. And I’m not going to tell you where I live.” She backed away from the window, raising her chin—all the better to slant a superior look at him. “You might be a rapist.”
Oh, for the love of— “I’m not a rapist, ma’am. I’m a park ranger.” He sighed. “I’m here to talk to her about my father.” There. Just enough personal information so that maybe the woman would sense she’d crossed a line and back off already.
“I’m going to need to see some ID.”
He pushed the door open and jumped out of the truck cab, his boots crunching into the snow. She reared back, clearly affronted, then fished her hand into the pocket of her lumpy light blue winter coat. Pulling out a pair of reading glasses, she settled them on her face and tilted her head so she could peer over the rims at him. Was it his imagination, or was an old lady who dressed like a Smurf actually getting all up in his face?
“Ma’am, with all due respect, I’m not here to see you. I’m here to see Sophie,” he said. “And unless flames start shooting out of her apartment or you hear screams from behind her door, the rest is none of your business.” With that, he brushed past her and headed for the building’s front gate.
He heard her scurry along close behind him. “I’ll have you know your presence is every bit my business,” she huffed. “I’m the Sunnyside Neighborhood Watch captain, and you, sir, are a loiterer.”
He felt a hand clutch at his parka. Mustering up the last of his patience, he turned to face her. “Look, Torquemada—”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Price,” a soft voice interrupted from a few feet away. And when Alex looked up, Sophie Brennan was standing underneath a nearby streetlight, her arms crossed over her chest against the cold night air. Again, she wasn’t wearing a coat, and instead of the clunky black shoes she’d had on earlier that day, she wore a pair of thick suede and cork Birkenstock sandals over her socks. Her face looked flushed and her eyelids heavy with sleep, as if she’d just tumbled out of bed and directly into the parking lot, pausing only to slip on yet another pair of inappropriate footgear. “I know him. Your work here is done.”
Sophie delivered that last without the faintest trace of irony, for which he had to hand it to her, but it didn’t seem to cheer Millie any. Clutching the lapels of her puffy blue coat with both hands, the elderly woman harrumphed at him and lumbered off like a grouchy bear that had had its supper stolen. It occurred to him that though he’d read the word plenty of times, he hadn’t ever actually heard a human being harrumph before.
Once Millie was safely out of earshot, he focused his attention on Sophie, who rarely if ever had gentlemen callers, especially at midnight. And he felt an absurd urge to brush away the snowflakes that were falling gently onto her hair. Either that or wrap his arms around her and lose himself and all the pent-up anger and frustration and confusion he felt in her. He immediately squashed that jacked-up impulse—there was a reason he was here, and it wasn’t to put the moves on a woman who was basically a stranger to him and possibly connected to his murdering fugitive of a father.
“One of my neighbors told me a guy about my age was hanging around outside,” she said. “I thought it might be you.”
“Of course you did. You’re psychic.” He wiggled his fingers at her sarcastically, pretending to shoot lightning bolts out of the tips.
“And you are poorly socialized and have awkward people skills.” With that, she turned away from him and headed down the brick walkway toward Sunnyside’s front gate, her heavy sandals slapping down the path, leaving tire-tread patterns in the thin layer of snow.
“I need to talk to you,” he called out after her.
Without turning, she unlocked the gate and pulled it open, causing the wrought iron to creak mightily on its hinges. Just when he thought he was going to have to make a run for it and muscle his way in after her, she turned and held the gate open. He jogged toward her, needing no further invitation.
They walked into the center courtyard of the building, which was built like a giant doughnut. Apartments circled about ten stories into the air, completely surrounding the courtyard. Besides some landscaped areas that were going to need replanting soon, the interior of Sunnyside View boasted a small swimming pool, a large brick sunning area and a staff nurse who, according to the sign by the door marked with a red cross, was on call 24/7. He wondered what someone Sophie’s age was doing in a place like this. He wondered what connection someone like her had to his father. He wondered why every instinct he had told him Sophie Brennan was a good person, when she obviously was hiding some sinister connection to the one human being he hated in this world. And all of that wondering made him want to shake her until she abandoned this psychic garbage and just told him the truth.
He followed her into an elevator, and she pressed the button for the eighth floor. An uncomfortable silence stretched between them as they watched the numbers slowly tick upward, until, finally, the doors opened and they both spilled gratefully into the hallway. As soon as they were inside her apartment, he sprung.
“Jack Runningwater.”
“Excuse me?” A small, confused line appeared in between her eyebrows as she made her way toward the cheerful yellow kitchen that sat in the far corner of the apartment.
“Jack Runningwater. I’m playing word association with you—that’s your game, isn’t it?” He followed close behind, watching as she fished two glasses out of one of the cupboards. “What does that name mean to you?”
She was silent for a moment as she filled both glasses with ice water from the beat-up refrigerator’s dispenser; then, she shook her head. “Absolutely nothing,” she tossed out casually. Too casually, in his opinion.
He paced to the far side of her kitchen and gripped the counter with both hands. Pushing off it, he turned to stalk toward her. “Sophie, it’s late, and I’m not in the mood for games,” he said quietly as he closed the space between them. Anger wasn’t an emotion he entertained very often, so he tried one last time to rein it in, to keep the discussion civilized, even when everything he’d been through years before suddenly felt raw and immediate. “Just tell me what you know.”
Picking at the soft V neckline of her pale green sweater, she stared at the floor, her eyes unfocusing slightly as she considered his words. She appeared to concentrate for a few seconds, and then she looked up. “I don’t know anything. I’m sorry, is it supposed to mean something to me?” Her words were soft and polite, too proper for his taste, too gentle for what he was feeling.
“Yes, princess, it’s supposed to mean something. You know that as well as I do.” He knew he was coming on too strong, knew he was probably frightening her, but the confused and angry fog that had enveloped him since Sabrina and Aaron had visited him earlier that evening had wrapped around him once more, and now he was going up and down this emotional roller coaster on autopilot.
She pushed one of the water glasses she’d filled across the counter toward him. “Alex,” she said calmly. “Why don’t you sit down, and drink some water, and you can tell me what you know. Then maybe I can hel—”
Lunging forward, he slammed his palm against the counter beside her, causing her to shrink abruptly away from him. “I’m not asking you to do your pretend psychic thing. You know something,” he hissed. “You know him.” It had been so long since he’d thought about his father—he hadn’t expected it to hurt anymore. But it did, and the more he spoke to her, the more that anger bubbled up to the surface, causing him to lash out at her.
Her deep blue eyes were no longer sleepy—in fact, they looked almost afraid. Of him.
Ah, crap. It wasn’t like him to try to intimidate anyone, much less a woman who was so much smaller than he was. And if he hadn’t been so desperate for the truth, he might have tried the more effective and less jerk-like method of charming the information out of her first, before attempting the caveman approach. His anger lifted as suddenly as it had come, and he straightened, fully intending to back away and apologize.
That was before she pulled out the barbecue fork.
He didn’t know where she’d gotten it from, but before he’d even registered that she was moving, she’d braced one hand against his chest, and the other held a large, two-pronged fork mere millimeters from his left eyeball.
“Uh, Sophie…”
“That’s Princess Sophie to you.” Her hand was as steady as an oak tree, and she didn’t look even remotely scared of him anymore. Though her voice hadn’t risen in volume, she looked like a woman who’d put a fork through his eye if she had to. “And for your information, I don’t know a Jack Runningwater. I have never met a Jack Runningwater. I have no idea why you keep throwing that name in my face, though I really wish I did, because I’m a naturally curious kind of person.”
Still holding the fork in place, she took her hand off his chest, glaring at it briefly as if it had touched him without her permission. “But what I do know,” she continued, “is exactly what I told you before—that the murder victim you found is connected to you somehow, you’re in danger and I have this nagging feeling that I should stay close to you, because I think I can keep you safe. The problem is, I want to stay close to you about as much as I want to stick this thing in my own eye.” She waved the barbecue fork at him, then tossed it on the counter with a clatter, a look of mild disgust twisting her pretty mouth. “Now, I think you were just leaving.”
He nodded, backing away so she’d see he wasn’t a threat. “I’m sorry.” He felt small and really stupid after that speech. Belatedly taking his baseball cap off his head, he ran his hands through his short hair. He didn’t know why, but he suddenly wanted her to know he meant that apology. “You know, I almost believe you’re not lying to me,” he said. It was the closest he could come to admitting that she might not be the monster he’d created in his head.
She looked him straight in the eye. “I’m not lying to you, Alex.”
He took a deep breath. If he wanted the truth, he needed to speak it himself. “But I don’t believe you’re psychic.”
“Then believe this.” She moved near enough that he could count the freckles dusting her nose, smell the scent of flowers coming from her hair. She might not be psychic, but somehow, in some definitely-not-his-type kind of way, she was magic. And he so didn’t want her, of all people, to be magic. “I am not a danger to you,” she continued. “I have no ill will toward you, and I would do anything, anything I could to prevent something bad from happening to you.”
Then she reached out and closed her hand around his arm. He opened his mouth, but no words would come out.
And she gasped.
Without stopping to think about the advisability of his actions, he let his gaze drop to her lush pink mouth, knowing exactly what she’d felt the minute she’d touched him. “What, Sophie?” he murmured.
“I don’t know what it is about you—” She stopped, licked her lips.
That was funny, because he didn’t know what it was about her, either. He moved closer, breathing her in, mesmerized.
“—that makes me suddenly compelled to say some really bizarre things….” She shook her head, backed away, and whatever it was that had flared up just then dissipated as the space between them grew. Her expression flattened, and she was clearly back to business; the only hint of what had just happened was the faint blush left behind on her cheeks.
“Never mind—I’m going to leave that alone for a little bit.” Her eyes grew slightly unfocused as she reached up and rubbed her temple. “Humor me for a minute. Who is Jack Runningwater?”
The name was like a blast of cold water in the face. He had to get out of here. She was beautiful, and she wasn’t his usual dim-and-too-skinny type, and she probably had a voodoo doll of him somewhere in her apartment that she’d bewitched. He was angry at her. He didn’t trust her. He did not, could not, be even the slightest bit attracted to her. For God’s sake, she knew something.
“Tell me,” she urged.
He didn’t want to, feeling the old shame he always experienced whenever anyone drew a connection between him and Jack Runningwater, but he knew he should, given that he’d been firing the name at her like a rain of bullets earlier in the conversation. At the very least, maybe revealing some of his cards would get her to inadvertently show some of hers. “Do you remember when Wilma Red Cloud was killed?”
She nodded, the line between her eyes returning as she obviously struggled to recall the details that had been splashed across newspapers and on the evening news so many years ago. “The first female tribal president of the Oglala Lakota. We read about her in school. Wasn’t she murdered—”
He nodded, cutting her off. “Strangled by a man from her own tribe. No one knows why, though they suspect he was jealous, or angry that a woman was in such a powerful position.” He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the scuffed linoleum on her floor. “I have it on good authority he was just a no-good drunk.”
Her expression cleared as she made the connection. “Jack Runningwater. That’s the man who killed her.”
“I was six,” he said, not acknowledging her revelation. “I don’t remember much about him. I just know one minute I had a home and a family, and the next, my mother was dragging me off the reservation and halfway across the country.”

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