Nate cursed, his feet frozen in place.
He could go inside and try to beat the truth out of Walter, which would probably land him in jail with no assurance that the older man actually knew who was responsible for killing his son. He couldn’t risk leaving Ellie alone.
So what next?
With a grimace, he headed for the gate.
He’d been bluffing when he’d claimed he’d contact his FBI buddies for information on the clinic. He didn’t want to take advantage of his old friends.
But there were still his brothers to tap.
It didn’t matter if he was taking advantage of them.
They were family.
* * *
It’s late morning before I can at last return home. Stepping into my shower I turn it on as hot as it will go, allowing the water to wash away the blood even as I savor the events of the day.
It’d all been so simple.
I’d followed Dr. Booker to his house and slipped in behind him, hitting him in his skinny ass with a cattle prod. Of course, I’d never used one before, so I had it set on maximum voltage. The good doctor had pissed his pants and careened across his room filled with frou-frou antiques. His flailing arms sent them crashing to the ground before he landed in a heap on the Persian carpet.
He wasn’t out for long, but it offered me the chance to get him securely bound with duct tape I found in the garage. He wasn’t much of a threat. Like all of my enemies, he was a pathetic coward at heart, but I didn’t want any mistakes. Not when I was so close to my goal.
I adjusted the prod. I wanted pain, lots of pain, but I didn’t want him passing out. Our time together, after all, was limited.
Waiting until he was able to form coherent words, I urged him to talk about the past. I wanted him to confess the truth. To reveal his sins.
He cried. He told me he’d been forced into making terrible choices. Boo-hoo.
Next, he’d moved on to the bargaining stage. He’d offered me money. And drugs. Finally, he promised to help me destroy the others.
There truly was no honor among thieves.
In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that there is no honor among the human race. Including myself.
We are all selfish. Greedy. And liars.
To ourselves and others.
Once I was sure that he accepted that death was in his future, I laid aside the prod and pulled out the knife that he’d helpfully had in his kitchen. It was big and sharp and it fit my hand as if it’d been made for me.
The drug overdoses had been fine for Daniel and Mandy, but the doctor’s sins couldn’t be washed away so easily.
He was special.
I didn’t want a peaceful end. I wanted blood.
I’d moved toward the groveling weakling, and made my first slice. It was awkward and shallow, but the dark red liquid spilled down his face, dropping to the carpet.
Splat. Splat. Splat.
My heart swells with awe.
It’s beautiful. Lovely, lovely death.
I slice again. And again.
At the time, I don’t think of the tedious details. Like disposing of the body. Or returning home without anyone seeing the gory stains that cover me from head to foot.
All that matters is the knife as it arcs through the air, sending droplets of blood raining around us.
Only later will I concentrate on the next move in my intricate game.
I smile, the warm water of the shower pouring over me.
One stone. Two birds.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ellie and Nate stood near the treeline at the edge of the cemetery. A hundred feet away a large crowd huddled around a plain coffin as it was being lowered into the ground.
A shudder raced through Ellie. It had nothing to do with the brisk breeze that tugged at her black dress and tumbled her loose hair over her face. The afternoon sunlight was warm enough to chase away any chill. It was the pulse of dread that throbbed in the air. As if some dark premonition had settled over Curry, shrouding them in fear.
Or maybe it was just her.
She gave a small shake of her head, instinctively pressing closer to the man at her side.
“I think the whole town is here,” she said, her gaze skimming over the horde of mourners.
A part of the reason she’d decided to attend the funeral was because she was afraid there wouldn’t be anyone there. And of course, to keep an eye on her father and the other men connected to Hopewell Clinic.
She’d only had a couple minutes to discuss Nate’s meeting with Walter Perry, as well as reveal her tense confrontation with her father, but neither she nor Nate had doubted that the men would be standing at Barb’s graveside.
They held a secret that might very well have been the death of her father’s onetime secretary. As well as Daniel and Mandy.
That secret would most certainly lure them to her graveside.
“Barb was born and raised in Curry,” Nate pointed out in low tones, his arm circling her shoulders. “She probably knew everyone in town.”
Ellie grimaced. When Barb had gone to jail for driving without a license, she didn’t have one friend to call and bail her out.
“She might have been raised with these people, but none of them would talk to her when she was alive.”
“Death erases a lot of sins,” Nate said dryly. “And there are probably a lot of people here because they’re scared.”
She turned her head, studying Nate. He looked even more gorgeous than usual in his charcoal slacks and chunky ivory sweater, but she didn’t miss the muscle twitching in his clenched jaw or the fact that she could actually feel the tension vibrating off him.
Over the past twenty-four hours he’d gone from full-alert to DEFCON 1.
“Scared of what?” she asked.
“What do you suppose Curry’s death rate is?” Nate asked. “One a month? Maybe two. And the people who die are old or have been sick for a long time. Suddenly there’ve been four people dead in a matter of days.” He turned his head, glancing toward the mound of dirt that now covered Daniel. “Three of them under the age of thirty. The town is searching for answers.”
Another shiver raced through her body. Would she ever be warm again?
“Yeah, me too,” she muttered.
His gaze returned to the group gathered around the open grave. “And then there’s the inevitable sightseers.”
“Nate,” Ellie breathed in protest. Curry might have the usual nosy neighbors that filled every small town in America, but they didn’t take pleasure in death. “That’s just ghoulish.”
“I’m not judging them, it’s human nature,” Nate insisted. “In fact, I had an aunt who attended at least three funerals a week.”
Her eyes widened. Was he joking? Sometimes it was hard to tell with this man.
“Three a week?” she repeated.
“Yep.” He kept his voice pitched low so it wouldn’t carry. Not that anyone would hear him over the droning sermon from the pastor. The man hadn’t known Barb, but that didn’t stop him from offering a full-throated lecture on succumbing to temptation. Or had he moved on to the evils of the flesh? Hard to tell. “She’d get up in the morning and look through the obituaries in the paper. If there was a service nearby, she’d put on her favorite black dress and pearls and call my mother to drive her to the funeral parlor.”
Ellie had never known any relatives beyond her parents, but she couldn’t imagine having an aunt who went to random funerals. Her father would have locked her in the wine cellar.
“No one tried to stop her?” she asked, genuinely curious.
He looked confused by her question. “Why would we? It gave her a reason to get out of the house and socialize.” He shrugged. “She met her third husband at a wake.”
She swallowed an inappropriate laugh. “No way.”
“She did.” Nate lifted a hand in a solemn pledge of honesty. “Uncle Benny. You’ll meet him at the annual Fourth of July picnic.”
She waited for the panic to thunder through her. She had no interest in happily ever after. Not with any man. Right?
But the only emotion she could pinpoint was an unexpected tingle of anticipation.
Ridiculously, that was more unsettling than the more familiar reaction.
“I’m not really into picnics,” she told him.
He smiled. Did he sense her inner conflict? Probably.
“You’ll love this one, I promise,” he said. “Fried chicken. Potato salad. Apple pie. Cold beer.”
“And Uncle Benny?”
He nodded. “Plus a hundred other relatives.”
It was disturbingly easy to imagine a holiday in the Marcel home. The comfortable ranch house in the suburbs of Chicago. The laughing children who would spill into the backyard to pester the men who would be gathered around the barbecue. And Nate’s mother, supervising her kitchen as she glanced out the window to smile with pride at her sons.
A normal family who loved one another despite their differences.
“Can’t we wait on the whole family meet-and-greet for a while?” she demanded.
He studied her wary expression, then without warning, his lips twitched. Did he suspect that her unease came more from her strange yearning than any fear of his family?
“How long?”
“I don’t know.” She cleared her throat. “Five or ten years.”
“No way. As soon as they find out you’re staying at the ranch they’ll start descending on us,” he warned, giving a swooping motion with his hand. “Like locusts.”
Ellie’s vision of a happy family-gathering transformed to one of buzzing insects chasing her around Nate’s ranch.
“Then don’t tell them,” she urged.
“My mother’s psychic. She probably already knows.”
He wasn’t helping. “Does she also know that I’ll be returning to my own house once it’s repaired?” she demanded.
His smile widened. “We’ll see.”
With a shake of her head, Ellie returned her attention to the crowd that was beginning to scatter. Like ants scurrying from a disturbed nest. They might have their own reasons for attending the funeral, but each of them was in a hurry to be away from the graveyard.
“I think it’s over,” she murmured, taking a step forward as she caught sight of her father making a beeline for the Rolls-Royce he’d left parked on the road in front of the cemetery.
Nate reached out to grab her arm. “Wait.”
She sent him an impatient frown. “I want to speak with my father.”
He leaned down to speak directly in her ear as the various citizens of Curry rushed past them.
“Let’s see what happens.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Trust me.”
Frustration twisted her gut as her father turned his head, his gaze searching the crowd until he found her. His expression was unreadable as he crawled into his car and drove away.
He was up to something.
She was certain of that.
“Nate.”
“I got this.” Clasping her hand, he led her through the trees to his truck, which he’d left parked on a narrow dirt path.
Together they climbed in the vehicle and he fired the engine, turning onto a gravel road that led away from town. Ellie frowned, pulling on her seat belt as they bounced over the ruts.
“Where are we going?”
Nate kept his gaze on the road, his hands clenched tight on the steering wheel.
“I don’t think your father is headed back to the motel.”
Ellie parted her lips to demand exactly where he thought her father was going, only to snap them shut as they were almost bounced off the road as they hit a truly impressive pothole. Nate’s precious vehicle was as smooth as a log wagon under the best circumstances. Now it felt like they were on a cheap carnival ride.
She wanted his concentration fully focused on keeping them out of the ditch.
They continued on the back roads that went from bad to worse. Ellie clung to the door handle, studying the empty prairie that gave no clue to where they were or where they were headed. Since moving to Curry, she hadn’t spent much time beyond the outskirts of town. She went to work. She went home. And if she traveled, it was to Tulsa or Oklahoma City.
It wasn’t until Nate was halting in the shadows of an old barn that she managed to get her bearings.
Nate switched off the engine and together they climbed out and crept around the side of the barn. Halting at the corner, they peered across the road at the field where Daniel and Mandy’s bodies had been dumped.
Within a few minutes a truck and three cars were pulling to a halt at the side of the road.
“Neville. The Mayor. My father. The sheriff.” Ellie named the men as they stepped out of their vehicles. As a group they moved through the open gate and into the field. It was too far to know exactly where they halted to huddle in a small circle, but Ellie suspected that it was near the crumbling foundation where the Hopewell Clinic had once stood. She frowned as she realized there was one missing. “Where’s the doctor?”
“Good question,” Nate said, sending her an approving glance. “He wasn’t at the funeral.”
“Could he be responsible for what’s been happening?”
He tilted his head to the side, as if running the theory through his brain.
“He’s familiar with Curry and has a connection to Hopewell Clinic.”
“Along with the board members,” she added.
“It’s possible that he blames one or more of them for causing the fire that burned down his clinic.”
“Or he burned it down and is warning the others not to talk.”
They shared a grimace. The theories were lame.
They both knew it.
Nate turned his attention back to the group of men who looked like they were sharing an animated conversation.
“Damn. I hate this flat countryside. There’s no way to get close enough to overhear them,” he groused.
Ellie grabbed his arm. He was stubborn enough to try and find some way to sneak toward the group.
“It looks like they’re arguing,” she said, watching her father point his finger in the face of the sheriff. She recognized that finger-pointing. Colin Guthrie was chastising the man for having failed to fulfill his expectations. Something he’d done to her on a regular basis. “This has to have something to do with the clinic,” she continued. “Otherwise there would be no reason to meet in this spot.”
“It seems the most logical conclusion, but without proof we need to keep our options open,” he warned.
“You sound like an FBI agent,” she muttered, her hand tightening on his arm as Walter turned from the group and stomped toward his vehicle. “I think the meeting is over. Should we follow my father?”
Nate shook his head. “Let’s go back to the ranch. I want to call my brother.”
She hesitated before following him to the back of the barn and climbing into his truck. There wasn’t any point in trying to confront her father again. Not until she had proof he was involved in something nefarious.
They waited in silence until the group across the road had driven away. Only then did Nate reach down to turn the key. A wise choice. The engine coughed and sputtered as if it was on its deathbed before it finally roared to deafening life.
Resisting the urge to tell him he needed to shoot the truck and put it out of its misery, Ellie instead concentrated on his decision to return to his ranch.
“Why do you want to call your brother?” she asked as they returned to the back roads to avoid the departing men.
“I want to see if he can discover any info on the mystery child who was found.”
Ellie sent him a startled glance. Nate had made it clear that he didn’t believ
e Walter’s explanation, but it seemed an odd time to focus on the random newspaper clipping they’d found in Barb’s envelope.
“Do you think it’s connected to what’s been happening?”
“I don’t know.”
There was an edge in his voice that warned he was on his last nerve. She sympathized. It felt like they were blindly floundering for the truth that remained just out of reach.
It was exasperating.
“Okay.” She used her best lawyer voice. Whenever she was stuck on a case, she would clear her mind and start over from the beginning. “Let’s try to piece together what we do know.” She held up one finger. “First, Daniel either overdosed or was murdered and tossed in Neville’s field.”
Nate released a slow breath, visibly relaxing his clenched muscles. “Perhaps after he was hired to slash your tires,” he added.
“Yes.” Ellie wrinkled her nose. She’d almost forgotten Nate’s suspicion that Daniel had been paid to harass her. “So his death could be because he’s the son of Walter Perry or because he could name who’d hired him.”
“A few hours later someone calls the sheriff’s office to report the body,” Nate said.
Ellie nodded. They needed to know who made that call. It seemed hard to believe that someone stumbled across it in the remote field. But why would the killer call? Especially after they’d tried to make it look like an overdose?
Just another layer of confusion. She swallowed her frustration.
“We know that Tia was being followed,” she continued. “And that Mandy was being pestered by vandals.”
“It could have been the work of the killer or someone who was hired to continue the harassment.”
She shivered. “Like the rats on my patio.”
“Exactly.” Nate slowed to a crawl, turning onto the main road that would lead to his ranch. “We also know that all of you are the children of the board members of the Hopewell Clinic. Daniel. Tia. Mandy. And you.”
She didn’t have to add that two of them were already dead. It hung in the air with a heavy sense of dread.
“Next, Barb contacts me,” Ellie continued, resisting the sudden urge to glance over her shoulder. Whoever might be hunting her was a master at lurking in the shadows. He wouldn’t be obliging enough to follow her in broad daylight. “But she dies before she can say more than that people are in danger.”
You Will Suffer Page 24
