Brown and de Luca Collection, Volume 1

by Maggie Shayne

  She nodded. “Thank goodness we have you to lean on, Mason. I honestly don’t know what this family would do without you.”

  “You’d be fine.”

  “I’m serious.” She handed him the post-dinner coffee she’d made, and then took her own cup to a chair near the bay windows that overlooked her spacious back lawn and garden. There was still a wealth of flowers in autumnal colors, gold and russet and burnt orange. A few decorative scarecrows and Indian corn on drying stalks had been placed strategically. Angela really did have a touch.

  “I asked you this once before, Mason, when your father died, and you made me promise never to bring it up again, but…”

  He’d known this was coming, had expected it. “I’m not leaving my job, Mother.”

  “Eric has left us. You’re the man of this family now, and we need you, Mason. If you should be cut down in the line of duty, we—”

  “You would be fine.”

  She stared into her cup and shook her head. “We would dissolve.” Then she took a sip and let the topic die. “We need one last trip to the lake house. To close it up for the winter.”

  “Halloween weekend?” he asked. “Like always?”

  She nodded, sighed. He had a subject he wanted to bring up, but he hated upsetting her. It took so little, and he was sure his request would be more than enough, but he didn’t have a choice. “Mother, I’d like to spend some time in Eric’s room.”

  Her head came up fast, and she blinked in horror. “For God’s sake, why?”

  Since he couldn’t tell her why, he just said, “He was my brother. I miss him. I want to know why he…did what he did.”

  “Well, you won’t find any answers to that question in there. He was a happy little boy when he lived at home. If anyone’s to blame for his depression, it’s that Marie. She never understood him the way I did.”

  He lowered his head so she wouldn’t read his complete disagreement in his eyes. His mother had understood less about his brother than any of them. Even Marie had known something was off about her husband. She’d told him as much at Eric’s bedside, when they’d all gathered there to say their goodbyes.

  “I need an hour. Alone. If you can’t handle it, I can come back another time, when you’re out, or—”

  She set her cup on its saucer and got to her feet. “It’s fine. Take as much time as you need.” Then she left the room, moving through the big dining room and into the kitchen. She always handled dinner on her own. Sent the maid home by four to get out of her hair, as she put it, and then took care of the meal and the ensuing cleanup solo. She would never let anyone help, himself included, and certainly not Marie, who she’d always seemed to think of as competition in some weird, twisted way.

  He looked at the clock. It was already nine, and he had more to do tonight. But for now, this was his top priority.

  * * *

  By a quarter to ten I was falling asleep with visions of my mini-date with David Heart replaying in my mind. He was interested, and I knew I should be, too. It was about time I entertained impure thoughts about someone besides the stubborn cop with the secrets behind his eyes. You just didn’t get involved with a guy who had secrets. It was a bad idea. Maybe almost as bad an idea as dating your cornea donor’s brother, which was just as bad an idea as dating the cop who was investigating your missing brother and refusing to tell you what his brother—your cornea donor—knew about the case or how he knew it.

  Mason Brown was a secretive, cagey character. I didn’t want to pursue anything with him. And the fact that he didn’t seem to like me very much had nothing to do with it.

  Okay, yes it did. What the hell was wrong with him? I was a perfectly acceptable-looking female specimen, mostly sane, with a steady job and a luscious income. What was his problem, anyway?

  “You were thinking about David, remember?”

  Yeah, David. Blond, blue-eyed David. Interested David.

  I shouldn’t have told David as much as I did. What the hell was I thinking?

  I fell asleep thinking about that, and petting my dog and letting her soft snores be my lullaby. Myrtle was on the passenger side of my bed, her head on my pillow like she was trying out for human. Her weight on the blankets made it impossible for me to pull them at all, so I’d learned to tug them mostly to my side before letting her plop down. She was like a sack of lead. Solid.

  So I sank into oblivion, and then I was there again. In that same fucking horror movie. There was a dark room with concrete walls and floor. It smelled like a basement. There was a man lying on the floor, with duct tape wrapped around his head, covering his mouth, and heavy chains leading from his wrists to rings driven into the wall.

  I was looking at him. I couldn’t see myself, only him, and the absolute terror in his eyes. I felt excited by that fear. Turned on, horny, call it what you will, but I was feeling it. All wound up, like I was about to get it on with Mason—or maybe David. No, definitely Mason. Like we’d already worked our way through a solid half hour of steamy foreplay and I was squirming to go.

  But dream-me wasn’t hot for sex, I was wound up for what I was about to do. It was time. I felt it, knew it, like knowing when it was time to eat. A hunger gnawing at a part of me that wasn’t my stomach and wasn’t my libido. It was a dark hunger.

  The man on the floor looked up at me. I saw his eyes, his pupils growing bigger in the dim room as I moved closer to him. His chains rattled as he skittered backward into the corner and cowered. He would have crawled into the wall if he could. He was muttering behind the tape. Please, please, please, I thought, but it could have been anything.

  I felt the hammer in my hand, its rubberized grip giving beneath my fingers as my grip tightened around it. I moved closer, and my feet briefly caught my attention. I was wearing boots, black boots with silver buckles. A man’s boots.

  And then the hunger that wasn’t quite hunger pulled me back to the cowering, whimpering man, and I drew my arm back and brought the hammer down. He screamed and cringed, and I only struck a glancing blow, the hammer sliding down one side of his head. It made a groove in his skin from above his left ear down to the ear itself, tearing the top part of it almost off. His cries were like an animal’s now, not even human. I brought the hammer down again. Oh, yeah, this was what I needed. Right on target. Dead center, top of the head, a direct hit. The hammer cracked through his skull and sank deliciously into the meat of his brain.

  I had to yank it hard to get it free, but it came loose with a splat of goo that hit me in the face. I smiled.

  He was jerking now, still pressed against the wall, arms still up, trying to protect himself, but the sounds he made had risen an octave, and there was a lot of gurgling behind them. I kicked him with my black leather boot so he fell face-first to the floor, then stepped on the middle of his back to keep him there. His arms and legs were slapping up and down on the concrete, like fish out of water. Enough of this. I brought the hammer down for the killing blow, right to the back of his head.

  Another satisfying crunch, more splattering brains, and then he didn’t move anymore. Turning the hammer in my hand, I noticed my black leather glove for the first time, and I saw the hair on my wrist between the edge of the glove and the cuff of my shirtsleeve. There was a tattoo on the inner part of my wrist. A crude blue peace sign. A peace sign. That was funny as hell.

  I rolled him over with the toe of my boot, so I could see his face. His eyes were closed. It’s so much better when they stay open. His face was streaked and spattered with his own blood and brain matter, and his bright blue Legalize Love T-shirt was soaked in it.

  He was a mess. And this was not the fun part. I never enjoyed the cleanup as much as I enjoyed the kill. That was why I usually left someone else to take care of it.

  What the fuck does that mean?

  I sat down on the floor, close to him, and
smoked a cigarette, enjoying the afterglow, because I had enjoyed the hell out of this kill. And as I sat there, the I that was not me seemed to be staring straight at the I that I was. And very softly, the I that was not me spoke, and he said, “I see you watching. Pretty soon I’ll get to you, too.” And then he laughed and laughed and laughed.

  CHAPTER 10

  I opened my eyes slowly, and every part of me went cold as the sick, twisted dream returned full throttle and I realized the deliciousness I’d felt in the dream wasn’t my own. And more. He’d seen me.

  He knew!

  Everything in my stomach tried to escape all at once.

  I flung myself out of the bed, stumbling into the bathroom, and made it to the toilet before I lost it all, and then I knelt there, shaking, pushing my hair off my forehead, reaching up to flush.

  “What the fuck is happening to me?”

  A cold nose nudged me in the rib cage, and I lowered a hand automatically to Myrtle’s head.

  Call Mason.

  Right, and give him more evidence that I was crazy.

  Come on, Rache. You need help on this. Who the hell else are you gonna tell? Something’s happening to you. You need to tell somebody.

  I got myself up onto my feet. No easy task, with my knees still roughly the consistency of grape jelly. I ran water, rinsed my mouth, washed my face and decided fuck it, I needed a full-blown shower. I cranked on the taps, then headed back to my bedroom for something clean to put on.

  I looked at the clock and saw that it was only 10:38 p.m. Had that dream really only lasted half an hour?

  If you call him right now, he’ll probably still be up.

  Sinking onto the edge of my bed, I picked up the telephone. I’d called Mason enough times in the past couple of weeks, both on his cell and at the police station, to know both numbers by heart. I dialed his cell and waited while it rang.

  * * *

  Mason was on a mission. He began to systematically dismantle his brother’s childhood bedroom in search of…something. He didn’t know what he was looking for—some explanation about why Eric had become the monster he had, when he’d started to change. Or if he’d changed at all. Maybe he had always been a predator and had just been very good at hiding it.

  But he didn’t hide it. Not really. Everyone knew something was wrong with Eric. He’d never had friends, never fit in at school, always seemed cut off, walled up, unemotional. He’d seen it, Mason realized. He just hadn’t known what it was.

  No one had.

  So he started with the bed, stripped off the covers, the sheets, the pillowcases. He turned the pillows over, squeezing and feeling for any odd lumps inside. Then he removed the mattress and ran his hands over every inch of it, followed by the box springs.

  He put everything back together, of course—had to. He couldn’t let his mother know what he was doing in there. After he finished with the bed he started on the dresser, removing every item from every drawer, and then the drawers themselves, looking underneath and inside them, then under and behind the dresser itself. Nothing.

  He was just getting started on the closet when his cell phone chirped, and he grabbed it automatically. “Brown.”

  “Mason? It’s Rachel.”

  His frown was automatic, but reason followed only a heartbeat later. She sounded wrong. She sounded scared. She did not sound like sarcastic, cocky Rachel de Luca.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m that obvious?”

  “Your voice is shaking.”

  “Shit.” There was a pause, a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can do this on the phone. I don’t suppose you could come to my place—no, never mind, that’s stupid. It’s after ten-thirty.”

  “I’m up. Whitney Point, right?”

  “Yeah. Keep going past the dam where we met. It’s two and a half miles out that road, on the left. I’m the only house out here.”

  “Half hour, maybe a few minutes longer.”

  “I’ll make coffee.”

  * * *

  I felt like an idiot, like a stereotypical helpless female calling on a man for help over a nightmare. But I knew—way down deep, where you know the things you don’t really know you know—I knew this was not just a nightmare. I knew, somehow, that what I’d seen had been real.

  So I got off the phone, turned on every light in the house and damn near had a heart attack when I saw headlights moving slowly away along the road. Like someone had been sitting out there just outside my gate, watching the house, until the inside lights came on and scared them off.

  Right. Or maybe like someone was out doing some end-of-season night fishing and driving past my place on their way home. Get a grip already.

  I took my damn shower and washed the vomit out of my hair, and I brushed my teeth to the brink of obsession. I put on plush pajama bottoms, gray ones, big cushy socks, and the softest T-shirt I owned, and then I grabbed a little brown felt blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders like an old-lady shawl. Comfort. Every bit of it was for comfort.

  Myrtle was content to snooze on the bedroom floor as long as she could feel me tromping around, in and out of the bathroom, but as soon as I stepped into the hallway to go downstairs, she was up and plodding after me.

  Stairs were not her friend. Being a bulldog, she carried most of her weight up front, head and shoulders big and broad, tapering to a little bitty butt. Her front legs were shorter than her hind ones, making her very prone to going ass over elbows down a flight of stairs. I reminded myself about that and waited for her at the top, then walked down slowly so she could descend in her preferred manner: with her head bumping up against the backs of my calves on every step.

  We reached the bottom, and she sighed in relief and headed for her favorite downstairs spot, the round, plush doggy bed close to the fireplace. It didn’t occur to her that the gas flames wouldn’t be turned on at that hour, so I went over and hit the switch for her. She deserved comfort, too.

  Yeah, you might just be spoiling her a little bit here.

  Fuck you, voice in my head. She’s blind, for God’s sake.

  Yeah, I suppose you’re right.

  I left Myrtle there to soak up the heat and headed into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. Mason was ringing the doorbell before it finished brewing.

  Nervous as hell for some reason I couldn’t name, I went and opened the door, met his eyes and wished I hadn’t. He was too damn good-looking. I hadn’t even come close in my pretransplant mental picture of him. I’d envisioned him hot, but not gorgeous. The guy was good-looking like Clooney was good-looking. Like Jackman was good-looking. It was above and beyond just garden-variety hotness, and it knocked me off my game a little bit every time I saw him.

  So I looked away as I stepped back and waved him inside, and I let myself feel him instead.

  He was curious. I got that from the silent way he entered and the touch of his gaze as it took me in, head to toe, then swept the room, my living room. I heard him sniff the air.

  “You just paint this place?”

  “Yeah. You like the color?”

  “It’s…vivid.”

  “I like vivid. After twenty years of black, vivid is a good thing.”

  “I imagine it is.” He still hadn’t said he liked it, though.

  What the hell do I care whether he likes it or not?

  I led and he followed, and I waved a hand toward the crackling fireplace, where Myrtle was snoring like a hibernating bear. “I’ll get the coffee.”

  “Cream and two sugars,” he called.

  He didn’t have to tell me that. I remembered from our lunch, because I was apparently paying way too much attention to the guy. I could not for the life of me recall what David had put in his coffee a few hours ago.

  I went and fixed us two
cups, and by the time I returned he was all comfy in a big plush chair and bending over to stroke Myrtle’s head. I brought his coffee to him. He took the cup from me with one hand, and lifted up a white bag with pink-and-orange lettering that wafted the luscious scent of donuts at me.

  “How did I not smell those before?” I reached into the bag and pulled one out without looking. Score. Boston Cream with chocolate frosting.

  “You were upset. You ready to tell me why yet?”

  I heaved a sigh, paced to the chair that matched his except for being a darker shade of brown. His was caramel. Mine was chocolate. I sat down and bit into the donut to give myself time to construct a sentence that wouldn’t sound like the disjointed ravings of a lunatic off her meds. Washed it down with a long drink of just-right coffee and nodded just once.

  “I’m pretty sure the guy in the Legalize Love T-shirt is dead.”

  I kept my eyes on him when I said it. He was good at hiding his reactions, though. His hand twitched a little. I saw the ripples in his coffee, but aside from that, he was still and his expression didn’t change. There were about three beats before he said, “And you know this because…?”

  “I saw it. In my sleep.”

  This time his reaction was obvious. He relaxed a little. “So it was a dream.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you think it was, then?”

  He was watching my face intently, and I reminded myself how alike we were. We both read people not by what they said or how they looked, but by everything they didn’t say and everything they hid.

  I met his eyes because I wanted him to know I was being straight up here, and if we were anything alike, he would know that’s what steady, solid eye contact meant. Look at me all you want, I was saying. Read me and know I’m telling the truth.

  His eyes narrowed a little, refocused. He got the message.

  “I was asleep, and I saw the blue T-shirt guy. He had shackles on his wrists, and he was lying on a floor, chained to a wall, with duct tape over his mouth. I think he was in a basement. Scared shitless, too.”