Chapter 7
Zoe hadn’t been really aware she’d been holding her breath until she felt herself letting it go and exhaling.
“Yes.”
Since he’d read the autopsy report, Sam obviously had his proof and he knew now beyond a shadow of a doubt that, however much she’d resisted doing it, when he’d pressed her about it, she had told him the truth. What that meant was technically, she was off the hook because Sam knew she hadn’t lied to him.
But where, exactly, did that put them?
Did he, despite his apology to her just now, hate her for having been the one who had made him aware of the harsh truth? Did finding out the woman he’d been noble enough to agree to marry had tricked him cause Sam to become even more bitter, more emotionally withdrawn than he already had been before Celia’s deception had come to his attention?
Damn you, Celia, why did you have to mess with Sam? Why couldn’t you see what your lie would do to him? You ruined his life. He’s never going to trust anyone ever again.
He’s never going to trust me.
But the simple truth of it was her sister had always been self-centered. She had only been concerned about the way things would affect her, not how they affected anyone or anything else. She certainly never worried about her selfish actions having any kind of consequences.
And now Sam was going to suffer for her sister’s thoughtlessness. And indirectly, because of the way it affected him and made him feel toward everyone in general, Celia’s cheap trickery would affect her, as well.
Trying to come to grips with the present situation, she didn’t realize Sam was asking her something until he was almost finished with the first sentence.
“Why did she do it?” Sam asked her suddenly out of the blue. “Why did she lie like that? Make me believe I had gotten her pregnant?” he questioned angrily. “She really had me going, made the room look like a hurricane had hit it that night she alleged I had sex with her.”
He remembered how depressed he’d been that night when he came to see Celia. He’d never taken a life before, but that criminal had given him no choice. He found himself staring down the barrel of a gun and there was only a split second to make up his mind. A split second to choose to live—or to die.
He chose to live. And the criminal had died that night.
But it had still felt awful.
He’d had no one to talk to that night, so he had come to Celia because they had been seeing each other casually. And that night, he made an even bigger mistake. He drank too much. He’d done it to pass out so he could just get away from his thoughts, his guilt. But obviously he hadn’t fallen asleep the way he’d thought.
Or so Celia had claimed.
And now, now he’d found out it had all been a lie and he’d passed out just the way he’d thought he had. The way he’d wanted to.
Did that make him a fool? Or just an easy target? Either way, he didn’t feel good about it.
He should have known better and trusted his gut.
* * *
He looked so miserable, Zoe felt for him. Sam didn’t lie and so he couldn’t understand why anyone would lie. He especially couldn’t seem to fathom why someone would go through the trouble of lying to him.
But Celia’s reasons weren’t all that hard to understand. “Because she knew you wouldn’t marry her under normal circumstances, but if you thought she was carrying your baby, she was confident you’d step up and do the right thing. And she was right,” Zoe concluded.
“Why would she want me to marry her?” he asked again. “Celia didn’t love me.” He realized that now. Anyone who would resort to the kind of tricks and tactics Celia had didn’t do something like that out of love, just out of some sort of selfish motive.
No, but I do, Zoe thought. Out loud, she told him what he wanted to know.
“Celia loved money and she loved looking down on people. Being married to a Colton would have allowed her to do both. In exchange,” Zoe added on quickly, “she’d be a good wife.”
Sam frowned. “You don’t believe that,” he said to her flatly.
“No,” Zoe was forced to agree with a sigh. “But I could hope.”
Sam laughed shortly as he told her, “Hope doesn’t get you anything—except frustrated.”
Oh, God, she wanted to take him into her arms, to comfort him the way someone would a child who’d had their heart broken, but she restrained herself. She knew he wouldn’t react well to physical comfort like that. He just wouldn’t allow it. Thanks to Celia, Zoe thought darkly, Sam had only gotten further entrenched into that isolated world of his.
Celia hadn’t deserved to die the way she had, Zoe thought, but she hadn’t deserved to have a man like Sam in her life, either.
“Well, that’s all I want to say,” he told her, bringing his reason for coming to the library to seek her out to an end. “I’d better get going.”
She couldn’t just let him leave this way. The thought pulsed through her brain. Concerned, she acted before she could think to stop herself.
Catching hold of Sam’s hand as he started to leave, she held on to it to keep him from walking out.
The look he gave her demanded an explanation. She really didn’t have one to give him. Not one he’d understand at any rate.
“Are you going to be all right?” she finally asked, nearly tripping over the words.
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he repeated what he’d already said to her a moment before. “I’ve got to get going.” And then, in case that wasn’t enough for her, he added, “I’ve got a serial killer to find.”
He was right and she was standing in his way. He’d already taken time out of his day to come to apologize to her. She couldn’t show her gratitude—or her understanding—by detaining him this way.
Zoe released his hand.
Sam walked out without looking back.
* * *
After he and the other people in the department had checked out all the calls that had come into the precinct regarding the so-called Alphabet Killer, Sam found himself no further along in the case than he already had been. Though he hated to admit it, he was still hovering around square one.
None of the calls had panned out, none of the so-called sightings had borne any fruit. Moreover, he and the department knew as much about the killer as they knew before, which was zero. There were precious few cameras throughout their small town—civilization hadn’t quite caught up to the good people of Granite Gulch yet. Consequently, there was no video feed to pore over and no candid shots of the killer popping up in the places people swore they’d seen him.
Sam dragged his hand impatiently through his hair. He had no description whatsoever to work with. The only thing he had at all was a “type.” They were hunting some obsessive-compulsive nutjob who killed women in their twenties who had long dark hair.
Not exactly a breakthrough or game changer.
* * *
“Why?” Sam asked, looking at the other faces who were gathered around him in the small living room of his brother Ethan’s house. Because Ethan was the only one of them not in law enforcement, that somehow made his place neutral ground. Sam didn’t know why that was important, but it felt right to him, so he’d asked the others to come here.
Because he trusted no one outside of himself and his siblings, he had turned to them for help rather than the people he worked with at the Granite Gulch PD. Currently, he was using his siblings as a sounding board.
Since it was part of their sworn duty, the law enforcement agents at the Granite Gulch police department were bound to search for this killer who was roaming about in their midst. But even so, they just didn’t understand what was at stake here the way his brothers and sister did.
And, as they sat here now, Sam could almost read his siblings’ minds.
That’s what came of having gone through so many of the same things together, he thought. They’d all suffered the heartache of discovering their father had killed their mother. Because of that terrible incident, they were forcibly taken from their home and split up, exiled to different foster homes, where for the most part, misery and isolation was waiting for each of them.
They had also all experienced the shame of being known as the offspring of a deranged serial killer, a man who took his revenge on his older brother over and over again by killing strangers who looked like Big J. Big J’s sin had been to buy him out of his share of a ranch.
Rootless and unlucky, Matthew failed at everything he tried his hand at—except for his killing sprees. He was painfully successful at that.
But even that finally came to an end. Caught, he’d been sent to jail. But his children continued to pay for his sins by going from foster home to foster home until they all aged out.
Only then did they finally come together, choosing to live in close proximity to one another in the town that had witnessed their shame, and, eventually, had watched them rally to win back their place in the sun.
What they had endured, together and separately, made them closer to one another than they would ever be to another living human being.
And now, Sam hoped, maybe, just maybe, if they put their collective heads together, they could come up with a solution and find this killer whose behavior seemed to so closely mimic their father’s MO.
“You know,” Annabel ventured, “if the old man wasn’t still in prison, I’d say this was his work.”
“We’re sure he’s in prison, right?” Ethan asked, looking around at his brothers for confirmation.
Ethan’s was a special burden because he had been the one who had come home early from school to find his mother dead by his father’s hand. And he had been the one who had run all the way to a neighbor’s house to tell them what had happened. Their mother’s body was gone by the time the police got to the house—the old man had buried it somewhere—but it was because of Ethan that their father was eventually connected to the string of bizarre bull’s-eye murders and sent to prison.
“Yes, we’re sure,” Trevor answered. He’d placed the call to the prison himself, as had, he felt it safe to guess, at least some of his brothers.
“You know,” Ridge, who at twenty-nine was part of Search and Rescue during his work hours, spoke up, “they say this sort of thing can actually be in the blood.” He glanced around the room, gauging his siblings’ opinions. “They think it might be passed on from one generation to the next.”
“So what are you saying?” Sam challenged. “That the killer is one of us?”
“No,” Ridge quickly denied. None of them had seen Sam this edgy before. But then, these were extenuating circumstances, since the last victim had been Sam’s fiancée. “But we’re not all here,” he pointed out. “One of us is missing.”
“You mean Josie,” Trevor said grimly.
“Yes.” None of them had seen their youngest sibling in over six years, when at the age of seventeen, she had just dropped off the face of the earth, apparently by choice. “I hate to say it, but think about it,” Ridge reluctantly pressed. “She’s the only one who refused to have anything to do with the rest of us for no apparent reason. She even insisted the social worker tell us she never wanted any of us to get in contact with her. And then, a year before she ages out of the system, she just disappears.” He paused and looked at the others. “Tell me that’s not strange.”
“I thought she ran off with that guy who asked her to marry her,” Annabel said, bringing up the long ago incident.
Christopher, who had decided to make his living as a private investigator because he lived better by his own rules than having to obey the rules and regulations imposed by faceless superiors in some law enforcement agency, frowned as he recalled that time frame in Josie’s life.
“You mean the one who dumped her and then was seen going around town with his new girlfriend? Some girl with long dark hair and a killer figure?” he further recalled.
“Wait, say that again,” Ridge requested, coming to attention on the sofa.
Christopher looked at his younger brother. At thirty-one, he was older than all of them, except for Trevor. “Killer figure?”
“No,” Ridge said slowly, trying to reconcile the thought that was occurring to him with what he would prefer to believe. “You said a girl with long dark hair.”
“Yeah, so?” And then Christopher’s eyes widened as he realized what Christopher was leading up to. “Hey, you’re not saying—?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying,” Ridge confessed. “But that description just seems a little too close to the description of the killer’s last three victims to be a coincidence.”
“You think it’s Josie?” Trevor asked incredulously, joining in.
Ridge knew he didn’t want it to be Josie, but he also knew they couldn’t close their eyes to that being a possibility.
“I don’t know what to think,” he said honestly. “I’m saying it’s one possibility.”
“One far-out possibility,” Sam retorted, clearly disagreeing with that speculation.
“Okay, there’s one way to clear it all up,” Ethan said to the others. “We need to find her so we can ask her what she’s been doing with herself for the past six years since she dropped out of sight. Hell, who knows, maybe she’s in some convent, atoning for the old man’s sins.”
But some of the others hadn’t moved on from Ridge’s suggestion.
“A female serial killer?” Christopher questioned. His dark eyes swept over his siblings. “We’ve been looking for a man.”
“Maybe we need to rethink that, too,” Ridge suggested.
“No, it’s not Josie,” Sam adamantly insisted. “She’s been through a lot, but I refuse to believe she’s turned into a serial killer.”
“For what it’s worth, I agree with Sam,” Annabel told the others.
“I do, too.”
The soft female voice had everyone turning around to see that Zoe had come out of the small room just off the living room and was now crossing the room to join them.
The first thing she was aware of was the way Sam was looking at her. He seemed both bewildered to see her there and somewhat annoyed she had invaded the space intended only for his family.
“What are you doing here?” he wanted to know, his voice far from friendly.
Now wasn’t the time to fade into the shadows, although she really wanted to. She had to speak up for herself or she would never earn at least Sam’s respect, if nothing more.
“I heard you were all getting together to pool your resources and see if you could come up with a way to track down the serial killer,” she said, looking from one face to another. She quickly glossed over Sam’s, afraid the recrimination she might see there would have her freezing. “I thought since the killer’s last victim was my sister, I should be part of this discussion, too.”
The answer didn’t satisfy Sam. “How did you find out where we were going to be?” he demanded.
Zoe pressed her lips together, feeling it wasn’t her place to tell him the name of the person who had given her that information. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.
“I just did,” she answered quietly.
That only seemed to annoy Sam more.
“I told her,” Annabel said suddenly, speaking up. When Sam looked at her accusingly, she told him what Zoe had already stated. “I felt since Celia was the last victim, Zoe had a right to know where this investigation was going.”
“She could find out the same way everyone else does, through the news broadcasts—or the internet,” Sam snapped, deliberately ignoring the fact that Zoe was in the room. Seeing her was a painful reminder he couldn’t trust anyone out
side of his own siblings—and now he was beginning to wonder about that, as well.
“Let it go, Sam,” Trevor told him. “Zoe’s already here and maybe she’s right. The last victim was her sister and also your fiancée. That unofficially makes her part of the family, as well, and as a member of the family, she has a right to be included in this.”
Zoe flashed a grateful smile at Trevor as Sam bit off, “Almost part of the family.”
“Don’t quibble over words, Sam. It’s beneath you,” Ridge told him, joining in on the defense. “Zoe knew Josie back in the day. Maybe she has a helpful opinion on all this.”
“I already gave it,” Zoe reminded the Search and Rescue officer quietly. “I agree with Sam. Just because Josie was rejected by her boyfriend in favor of a woman in her twenties with long dark hair wouldn’t automatically turn Josie into a serial killer. Besides, why now? Why would she wait all this time before going on this killing spree?
She looked around at Sam’s brothers and sister. “You all knew your sister before any of this ever happened. Do you think she would be the type to turn into a cold-blooded killer?”
Ridge shook his head, frowning. “I wouldn’t have said Josie was the type to sever all ties with her brothers and sister, either, but she did.”
Zoe wasn’t ready to accept the situation was so black and white. “Maybe there were extenuating circumstances that made her behave the way she did,” she pointed out. It pleased her that she saw Sam grudgingly listening to her.
Zoe thought of Celia. Everyone had thought of her older sister as this wonderful, beautiful-looking girl, but Celia was deceitful and conniving and she had been from a very young age, using her looks to always get what she wanted. She thought nothing of manipulating people. And she bragged that she never felt a shred of remorse when things went her way.
“Not everything is always the way it looks,” Zoe insisted.
Colton Copycat Killer Page 8
