One Last Breath

by Lisa Jackson

  Mick refused to give up on DeGrere. And though others in the department thought DeGrere might be good for it, too, no one could get any traction. Mick had left the department for a lot of reasons, but his immediate superior’s remarks about Mick’s “bull-headed resistance to a full investigation,” had been the icing on the cake. Bullheaded resistance? He’d been trying to nail the perp, for God’s sake.

  And now DeGrere was going to be set free. Even after bragging to a cell mate about his part in the attack. Not that the snitch was reliable. The man was a con who knew the system, having been in and out of jail. He was a guy who would do anything to get out of prison, a problem which was only complicated by the fact that DeGrere was known to stretch the truth more than a little himself. An argument had been made that it was just bravado talking, good old Petey DeGrere spewing yet another lie to elevate himself within the shady circles of the prison community. And that argument still stood.

  “DeGrere’s our man,” Mick said.

  “I agree,” Shanice said. “No one wants to nail his skinny ass for this as much as I do.” She’d been chasing leads on the assault ever since she’d learned of it, five years ago. She’d known Aaron Stemple, who had been killed at the wedding. He’d transferred to her high school their senior year and he’d been a shy kid in a dysfunctional family. His older brother had been a juvenile delinquent and petty thief, his father a criminal who’d been in and out of jail, his mother having bailed on the marriage when he was a kid, and he’d ended up murdered at his step-sister’s wedding. Shanice had felt bad about that. Aaron hadn’t deserved to die so young, so violently. Her heart still turned cold at the thought of it. She’d been his secret girlfriend in school and had willingly lost her virginity, well, really handed it over, to him one glorious summer night. She wanted to know who’d killed him. Maybe as badly as Mick wanted to find the assassin as well.

  And DeGrere had been in the area when the assault on the wedding had gone down, but before a case could be built against him, he’d been picked up for another charge and sent to prison. Though Mick believed DeGrere was a hired gun for someone else, there was no evidence. If DeGrere had been paid for the shooting, he’d kept the money somewhere safe and hadn’t had a chance to spend it before he ended up behind bars.

  If, as Mick believed, DeGrere was the shooter, why had he chosen the Bastian wedding as the venue? Who was he really trying to kill? More than one person? DeGrere wasn’t the most stable guy, but he had no personal motive to try to harm the Bastians that could be discovered. Mick’s feeling about DeGrere was more gut instinct than dogged police work; he could admit that. But DeGrere had committed crimes for payment in the past, and he’d been near the wedding site on that day, and he’d bragged about the shooting to his cellmate, whether Seattle PD believed him or not . . . it all just fed Mick’s and Shanice’s suspicions.

  But if DeGrere’s motive was money, what was the person’s who’d hired him? Who was the intended victim, or victims?

  Mick and the other Seattle PD detectives had initially floated the idea that Rory Abernathy was the target since the shooting started soon after the first notes of the Bridal March, but nothing had ever materialized from that theory. They also considered that the bullets were meant for Aaron Stemple. Though there was no video footage outside Rory’s room—it was learned afterwards that cameras weren’t working on several of the hotel’s floors—Aaron had been caught racing along the outside walkway toward the ceremony from the bride’s room’s general direction. It was postulated that he’d seen something or someone or knew of the shooter, but he was killed before he could explain why he was running, and to date no correlation to the theory had been found, either. Though Mick was sure the answer lay with Pete DeGrere, the lack of hard evidence had thwarted an indictment against DeGrere, and the investigation had subsequently stalled.

  But now DeGrere was being set free.

  “I’m going to find him, talk to him,” Shanice said determinedly. “Maybe shake something loose.”

  Mickelson looked at her over the tops of his readers and fixed her with an icy glare. “Be smart,” he said, as if he’d ever followed that advice himself when it came to DeGrere. “Go easy.”

  “Always.”

  He gave her that I-know-better stare. “I’m serious. We want to put him away forever.”

  Shanice’s smile was cold. Mick was warning her to rein in her emotions, to think with her head, not her heart, to tread lightly so they could take the jerk-face down and not make the same mistakes he had.

  Yeah, right.

  “I got this,” she said, standing. Then with a sly grin added, “Trust me.”

  As she breezed out of the room she was half-certain she heard, “I wish I could,” muttered under Mickelson’s breath, but for once, she let it go.

  * * *

  The address Jacoby had provided belonged to Maude Sutter, and when Liam introduced himself, she was nothing but gracious, even asking him in and offering him iced tea, which he’d declined. She’d smoked a cigarette on the back porch and admitted to not only knowing Kent Daley but confiding that they’d been “a couple,” for years. But that was as far as Liam had gotten. As for Daley, he didn’t appear to be around. No sign of him, at least not that Liam could discern.

  Maude said not one word about Rory Abernathy or Heather Johnson, and no matter how many ways he’d asked about her, the answer had always been the same. “I don’t know anything about her, other than what I read in the papers. What was it? Five years ago or so?”

  Nor would she say much about Kent either. When Liam had pressed, she’d stubbed her cigarette out in a tray positioned on a wicker outdoor table and leaned in close enough that he could smell the lingering smoke that clung to her. “My relationship with Kent is very private and we both have pasts that . . . well, we just don’t talk about. You don’t reach our age without accumulating baggage. But we feel, or at least I do, that the past is in the past and that’s where it’s going to stay. Now, I don’t think I can help you anymore.” She’d stood and waited.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Daley.”

  “I would, too. When you see him, let him know.” She’d smiled at him and he’d reluctantly gotten to his feet and followed her as she’d led him through the house to the front door. But as they passed by the stairs, he’d spied a tiny pink sock on the landing.

  “You have any visitors lately?” he asked, plucking the cotton stocking from the stair at his eye height and holding it out to her.

  She didn’t so much as blink, just held his gaze as her fingers curled over the tiny scrap of clothing. “Always someone, it seems,” she said enigmatically. “Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  He could have been rude and pushed it, but he’d sensed she wasn’t a woman who could be bullied. She’d been steadfast in her denials. And she’d been alone; he’d sensed the house was empty. Kent Daley obviously hadn’t been in the house, nor had Rory, but the little sock was a clue. Liam would bet that Rory had been there with her kid—probably a daughter—but had been spooked and taken off. Daley, too, maybe.

  So he was back to square one, and as he drove south toward the border on his way back to Portland, he felt more than a little bit of disappointment. He’d really thought he might see Rory again, that this would be it, his quest at an end. That he’d finally be able to confront her. Demand answers for questions that had festered for five years. But as the miles rolled beneath the tires of his Tahoe, he realized it wasn’t going to happen now, maybe ever. He could chase down Kent Daley but wasn’t sure that would help, either. Rory clearly wanted to stay missing. That was something he’d learned years ago, though he still persisted for reasons that seemed less clear-cut as time went on. It was time to forget her. Go through the legal motions of divorcing a missing person. Give up this endless chase.

  He’d told himself the same thing countless times.

  He needed to heed his own advice.

  “Forget her,” he said aloud, yet his hands tighten
ed on the steering wheel, almost of their own accord. He needed to know what had happened. What was the shooting about at the wedding? Why? Why had someone opened fire on his family? And what did it have to do with Rory?

  He switched lanes and increased his speed, plagued by the same questions that had dogged him since that terrible day.

  Stella had always insisted he was the target, that Aaron had just gotten in the way. In his mother’s twisted mind, she was certain that Rory had only married him for his money, then had tried to kill him off so that she could inherit his share of the family fortune as well as collect on a healthy insurance policy in which she was named Liam’s beneficiary.

  Liam had dismissed that theory immediately. If Rory had really wanted to kill him, which he didn’t believe for a second, why go to all the trouble and risk of hiring an assassin like DeGrere for a very public and bizarre shooting? Why not just quietly take him out sometime later into their marriage?

  Stella, bullheaded as always, had stuck to her guns, telling him often enough that the only reason Rory hadn’t collected on the insurance was because her plans had gone awry and Liam had survived.

  He shook his head and twisted on the radio, trying to find a decent station, giving up when all he could find was country music or rap. As he snapped off the radio, he thought of the terror of those heart-stopping moments when bullets rained down on them. Automatically, he rubbed his thigh, thinking of the wounds he’d sustained in the attack, as if the pain still persisted. It didn’t. At least for the most part.

  Was it possible, after all, that Aaron Stemple had been the target? Liam had floated that idea at a family barbecue around his parents’ swimming pool, and his mother had snorted her disgust. “Why?” she’d demanded, pouring herself a glass of wine from a chilling bottle of Chardonnay on the serving cart parked near the arborvitae hedge, a living, green wall that offered privacy. “Why go to all the trouble and danger to attack him at the wedding?” Liam had been seated at the table a few yards away from his mother, his gaze on the aqua water and his sister’s young children, Landon and Estella, as they’d splashed around and laughed and shrieked, their arms in floaties. “Did he have any enemies?” Stella had asked, eyebrows arching as she sipped from her glass.

  Liam admitted, “I don’t know.”

  “We all have enemies,” his father had cut in. “I didn’t get rich making only friends.” Geoffrey had been seated in his wheelchair, which he’d rolled to the table, positioning himself in the shade offered by the striped umbrella. Sunglasses covering his eyes, he’d stared out at the pool and the splashing children. Vivian, stretched on a lounge chair beside her husband, Javier, had flapped a bored hand at them.

  “Don’t talk about it,” she called.

  “Well, I don’t think they were after Aaron Stemple,” his mother had said in that freezing way of hers that cut off all conversation.

  Bethany had been there that day, and she reached under the table to link her fingers with Liam’s, as if to somehow reassure him, while Stella, in that Stella take-control way of hers, changed the topic of conversation and began nattering on about a new variety of roses she wanted to plant in the coming year, a subject that had bored the hell out of everyone there but had effectively shut down all talk of the assault at the wedding.

  Now, at the border crossing into Washington, the cars were idling and Liam suddenly wanted the trip over, to get back to his life—his job, his upcoming marriage to Bethany and a future with children, where the tentacles of the past couldn’t reach him.

  Of course, that was unlikely until the mystery of who had attacked the wedding party was solved. Maybe Pete DeGrere, maybe not. Whoever he was, the shooter had fled, leaving his rifle behind, an unregistered weapon that, as far as the police had been able to determine, had never been used in another crime. An older model, it could have been bought and sold a dozen times. Untraceable. Not a fingerprint on it—wiped clean. Nary a hair caught in it. And there had been no cameras in the parking garage, or any on the hotel property that had caught a clear image of the perpetrator. Though the police had been careful about everything they said, Liam thought they were working on the theory that Aaron had been the target, too, or perhaps Rory, who was supposed to be on his arm. That theory had initially gained credence from the bloody wedding dress left at the scene and the fact that Rory had disappeared. Maybe the shooter, waiting for Rory, had developed an itchy trigger finger and had shot Aaron before she appeared. But why hadn’t she shown up? Had she been tipped off? Waylaid by the killer? Why was there blood on her dress? It was too bad the hotel cameras hadn’t all been working. She’d just disappeared. Escaped the bloody scene and never returned. Not a text, phone call, or any goodbye. She’d just vanished.

  His lips tightened. She had to have had an accomplice to escape so completely, and if so, then logically she had to be guilty. But why? Stella assumed Rory had been after the Bastian fortune. Had she hired a sniper to . . . what? Take out his entire family? His father, mother, brother, sister, and himself, so that she could inherit? That idea had been posed enough by his own family to surface again in his mind, but it was ridiculous.

  “Is it?” he could almost hear his mother say as he was allowed to cross back onto U.S. soil. “What if everything went wrong? The shooter missed and Rory, realizing she would be a suspect, quickly covered her tracks and ran? She had to have an accomplice, of course. How else would she get away without a trace? Hmmm? And if she had an accomplice, she had to be guilty.”

  His fingers gripped the steering wheel more tightly as he drove into Washington and envisioned his mother, sipping from her stemmed glass, the expensive Chardonnay catching in the sunlight, Stella’s eyebrows arching over the tops of her sunglasses as she made her well-honed point.

  He didn’t believe Rory was guilty. Didn’t want her to be guilty. But his mother’s insinuations lived beneath his skin, making it impossible for him to completely dismiss them. There was a reason for the shooting. And maybe it did have something to do with Rory. That much he would allow.

  * * *

  “Charlotte?” Rory said, glancing over her shoulder to the car seat where her daughter was nodding off. “Are you hungry?”

  No response.

  Maybe that was good.

  Charlotte was sleeping and had been since before the border crossing. Now they’d driven halfway across the state of Washington, heading toward Oregon. She would have liked to stay in Seattle, but there was a chance someone would recognize her, someone from her past. The chances were slim, but she needed to drive as far south as she dared, to put distance between herself and Point Roberts. Fleeing to Oregon wasn’t safe in that Portland was Liam’s hometown, a place where his family lived, but few of them would recognize her on the off chance she was spotted. She didn’t intend to stop. No, she would sweep through the city and continue south to Salem, where her mother had ended up. Fifty miles south of Liam’s home, it would be a safe haven for a few hours before she continued toward California. San Francisco sounded good, or even farther to Los Angeles or some smaller city in between.

  “How about McDonalds?” she said over her shoulder, trying to rouse her child. “For breakfast . . . or, I guess, lunch?” Since they’d escaped from Maude’s town house in a hurry, Charlotte hadn’t had a bite. Nor had she eaten much the night before. Rory bit her lip and waited, casting glances into the rearview mirror. The little girl just wasn’t like herself. “I can run through the drive-through and get you a McMuffin?”

  No response.

  “Sausage? Or maybe pancakes? You like those.”

  Still nothing. Not so much as a flicker of an eyelid.

  “Charlotte?” she said a little more sharply.

  The girl’s little lips moved, but she didn’t wake.

  With one eye on the mirror, Rory glanced ahead and saw the signpost indicating she was within thirty miles of Portland. Good. Or was it? Her phone buzzed and she answered quickly, expecting her mother as, just after crossing into the U.S.,
Rory had called and hung up rather than leave a message. Darlene knew the number.

  “Hey, finally,” she said and switched into the slower lane.

  “You called me?” Darlene asked, and there was always that hint of worry in her voice. It brought tears to Rory’s eyes, but she blinked them back quickly as she held the phone to her ear and scanned for cops. She couldn’t afford a ticket now, and being on a cell phone was like waving a red flag if she passed any police cruisers tucked into their hidey-holes along the freeway. Wouldn’t that just be the worst? Forced to try to explain herself, to either lie and use her fake ID, or admit that she was Rory Bastian, the missing bride whose disappearance was connected to a murderous assault on the wedding party?

  She put the cell on speaker and set it in the cup holder. “I’m in the U.S., darn near the Oregon border. Heading your way,” she said. “I think Liam found me.”

  “What?” Darlene asked, shocked.

  Quickly Rory filled her in, talking fast as she realized the damned phone was nearly out of juice. “. . . so I need a place to lie low.” The Columbia, a huge river that separated Washington from Oregon, came into view and traffic thickened.

  “You could stay with me—”

  “No, no. Not your house. God, no. That’s the first place he’d come looking, but maybe a nearby motel? Or something, I don’t know, about ten or twenty miles from your place?” The more she thought about it, the more she thought some distance would be a good idea. “Like maybe in Albany? Or Eugene—”