by Kaylea Cross
She held on to the broom she’d grabbed as the first possible weapon she could think of and inched toward him. When she reached close enough, she poked him in the side. He didn’t move.
Whoever he was, he was well built, had seen either plenty of physical labor or regular exercise. He had a well-proportioned body she might have been tempted to paint another time and place, under different circumstances. He hardly looked ready to be painted just now.
His face was swollen and bloody, like the rest of him. An arrangement of open cuts formed patterns on his skin, accented with burn marks, blue-black spots, and welts. Three of his fingernails had been ripped off; the rest were packed with blood and dirt.
A gust of wind hurled snow through the front door. When he didn’t stir even from that, she lifted the broom a few inches and pushed the door closed behind him.
“Who are you?” She didn’t expect an answer, and he didn’t give any, just lay where he’d fallen—skin and muscles and dirt and blood.
No, he shouldn’t be painted, she thought then. He was a completed work of art already—a human canvas painted with violence. Some people equated art with beauty. She knew, better than most, that wasn’t always true.
His chest rose slightly.
Oh. She didn’t know if she should be scared or relieved.
She had to call the police. Her lungs shrank. If she called, she would have to explain finding him.
At least he was still alive. Explaining a corpse in her house would be even more difficult. She stared at the slow rise and fall of his chest, backed up a few steps to grab her tartan wool throw from the couch, and draped it over him. “Here.”
His lips were grayish blue where they weren’t too dirty to see the color. She had no idea how long he’d been out there, but long enough for hypothermia, apparently.
She backed away again, still holding the broom, all the way to the kitchen phone. But once she got there, she hesitated.
The cops didn’t like her. They hadn’t forgiven her for Dylan; nobody in Broslin had. But if she didn’t call, the man would die, and she couldn’t handle another lost life on her tally sheet. Dylan’s death had about broken her.
Don’t think about Dylan now.
She leaned the broom against the wall but kept it within reach, and grabbed the phone to dial 911.
“My name is Ashley Price. I need an ambulance and the police.” She gave her address. “I found an injured man on my property. I’m an artist. I was out looking for a place to paint.” She’d told the captain that. She needed to keep her story consistent.
“How bad is he hurt?” the dispatcher asked.
“He lost blood. Unconscious. I think hypothermia too.”
“Are you keeping him warm?”
She could hear the keyboard clicking on the other end. “Yes.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No.”
“He doesn’t have any identification on him?”
“He was—He’s naked.”
A small pause from the dispatcher, then, “All right, ma’am. Help is on the way. Please stay on the line.”
But as Ashley glanced around, she caught sight of the easel up in the loft and her painting still on it. “I can’t. I need to put more blankets on him.” She hung up and ran for her last dreaded creation.
She wrapped up the damn thing, then dragged it out to the garage, and hid it behind the others. Was that good enough? Would the police look there?
She stood staring at the pile for a moment, unsure what to do, unable to think of a better hiding place. Panic rose in her throat. She swallowed it. They had no reason to search her home, no reason to think she was involved in any of this. She hadn’t done anything.
But she would have to destroy that painting. She had to get rid of all of them. Just not at this moment. She didn’t have the time. She couldn’t allow the cops to catch her in the process.
So she locked up the garage, then rushed back into the house and piled more blankets on the man, and could hear the sirens by the time she finished. She lived only a few miles outside Broslin.
She skirted the man to open the door, happened to glance at her feet as she stepped carefully around him. Streaks of mud covered her legs, and blood where the frozen brush had scratched her skin. How was she going to explain why she’d been out there barefooted?
She dashed into the laundry room, grabbed the first pair of knee-high socks she could find in the basket, and was yanking them on as cars pulled up her driveway outside.
Act normal. She hurried back to the door to open it. Just act normal.
“Miss Price.” Captain Bing hiked up the steps first.
Tall, trim, and somber, he was married to his job, from what she’d heard. Local gossip had it he’d lost his wife to murder a few years back, a murder he hadn’t been able to solve. That had to grate on a man like him.
And he grated on others in return, which didn’t bode well for her.
“Captain.” She stepped back to let him in, her heart slamming against her rib cage so hard it hurt.
Two younger officers came up the stairs behind him, a couple of EMTs in the back. He didn’t pay them any attention, his gaze snapping to the body.
He squatted next to the unconscious man and swore, reaching for his radio. “Officer down. I repeat, officer down. It’s Jack.” Then he glared at her, black thunder on his face. “What the hell happened here?”
A cop? She stared. She didn’t know this one. He hadn’t come around with the rest last year.
She scrambled for something to say, but the paramedics shuffled her out of the way before she could answer.
Captain Bing herded her toward the kitchen. “Where did you find him?”
“At the back of the property, not far from where we talked.”
One of the other policemen, Joe, she seemed to remember the name, loped over. He had the lean body of an athlete, different from Bing’s more built strength. He didn’t have any shadows in his eyes yet, hadn’t been on the force for long. He’d just started back when they’d lost Dylan.
“Joe, you go out with Miss Price,” Bing ordered.” She’ll show you where she found Jack. I’m staying with him.”
She didn’t dare leave the cops alone in her house.
“You won’t need me.” She swallowed as nerves shot through her. “Turn right at the corner, a hundred feet maybe before you get to the next intersection, you’ll see my tracks in the snow. The spot is by the creek a few hundred yards in, next to a six-foot rock. It’s the only boulder on the property. Can’t really miss it.” She held her breath.
Bing narrowed his eyes as he looked at her but then nodded, and Joe took off.
“Seen anyone else nearby?” The captain pulled out a notebook and a pen. He had a thing about taking meticulous notes. She remembered that.
“No.”
“When did you find him?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. Maybe twenty.”
“Why didn’t you call sooner?”
“I didn’t have my cell phone with me.”
He flashed her a look full of suspicion. He’d probably be happy if he could make her pay at last, for anything, since she hadn’t had to pay for little Dylan. He’d made it clear how he felt about that. He was fourth-generation local, his family deeply connected to farming.
He didn’t like outsiders coming in, buying up land, then letting it go to seed. He’d let her know that as well. He had a bleak opinion of city folks, all of whom he viewed as having come here specifically to give the locals grief and cause trouble.
When she’d been involved in the death of the child of one of his friends, Ashley had shot straight to the top of the captain’s shit list. She did her best to stay out of his way, give no excuse for as much as a speeding ticket. And she’d managed until now.
He looked at her dirty, bloody fingers. “How did you find him, exactly?”
She crossed her arms to hide her hands. “Saw some disturbed ground. Saw the corner of the shower
curtain.” She swallowed. “I thought maybe someone was burying garbage on my land. When I tugged on the plastic, a hand came out.”
“What were you doing out there?”
“I was looking for a good spot to paint. I painted the creek before.”
Her response stopped him for a second. He seemed unsure how to ask an insinuating question about that. Then he found his footing. “Do you know Jack Sullivan?”
She glanced at the unconscious man by her front door. The paramedics were loading him onto a gurney, an IV bag hooked to each arm.
“No.”
“You still live alone?”
“Yes.”
“Any visitors in the last couple of days?” He was taking notes.
On what? She hadn’t given him anything. “My father and my daughter.”
“Seen anyone around, back in the woods?”
“No.”
“Have you seen or heard anything suspicious at all earlier, anything out of place?”
She shook her head.
“And you just went out there to look at trees?” He seemed to have a problem with that part of the story.
“It’s like—” She grasped for an artsy explanation that would discourage further inquisition. “Paul Klee said that when he was drawing, he was just taking a line for a walk. Works the other way around too. Sometimes my lines take me for a walk.” A walk straight to hell.
He wrote the name Paul Klee in capital letters, then tapped pen to paper.
She opened her mouth to tell him he didn’t need to worry about Klee, but then changed her mind. If Bing wanted to run the Dutch artist who’d been gone for almost seventy years through the system, let him.
“Anything else you want to tell me at this point?”
“I already told you everything.”
He huffed, watched her for a long moment, his eyes, the color of burned sienna, narrowing. “All right. I’m going to see what Joe found out there. I’ll be back in a while. You stay right here.”
She knew that tone. The captain blamed her for all this. She couldn’t bear the thought of more interrogations to come. If her father found out…
The thought about stopped her heart.
Her father couldn’t find out. Whatever she had to do, she had to keep her new batch of troubles secret. She had to find a way to clear her name and make this all go away, and she had to do it in a hurry.
* * *
Jack Sullivan saw the bright light again. This time, he wasn’t about to march blindly ahead. Screw the light. With superhuman effort, he willed himself awake. His eyelids going up felt as if someone was dragging sandpaper over his eyeballs. It hurt to breathe.
“Welcome back, Jack.”
Bing’s face swam into focus.
“Captain.” He cleared his throat, then tried for something better than the weak whisper. “What happened?”
“Do you know how much paperwork I have to fill out every time one of my men gets injured?”
He blinked at the hospital room around him—white walls, green sheets, strange-looking medical equipment—and wrinkled his nose at the smell of iodine. “I’ll try not to make a habit of it. I’m fine.”
“You might think differently when the painkillers wear off,” the man said in a voice that leaned toward gentle. Not something Jack had heard from Bing before. He had to be dying.
He tried to sit up. Couldn’t. What the hell?
“Take it easy, son.”
Nobody had called him son in at least a decade. And Bing wasn’t yet forty. They had less than a decade between them. Oh, hell. He had to be in even worse shape than he’d thought. Pain stabbed his side. He’d been hurt, badly, but couldn’t remember how.
Bing leaned forward, the chair creaking under his weight. Not that he was fat by any measure, but solidly built with muscle. He put in his share of time in training at the station’s gym. He required his team to keep in shape and would never ask anything of them that he himself wasn’t prepared to do. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Jack forced his mind to focus. “Going out on an anonymous call. Suspicious activity reported at an abandoned farmhouse.” At first he’d thought drugs. Then he’d gotten there and saw that chunk of bone.
Memories flashed across his mind suddenly, a horror movie on fast-forward. His teeth clenched. “It was Blackwell.”
Bing went still. “You think too much about the man. You were in a lot of pain. Your mind came up with—”
“Blackwell,” he said again. “I had time to make positive ID.”
Bing sat up straighter, stared at Jack for a long moment. “They got some DNA from under a couple of your fingernails, but it’ll be a while before the results come in. Do you know if the FBI has DNA on him?”
“They don’t.” Adrenaline spiked through him. If they gained enough DNA, if it matched to something in the database…
Bing rubbed his hand over his knee as he watched him, that look of doubt still in his eyes. “Do you remember enough for a sketch? I can have someone here in ten minutes.”
Jack shook his head. The images that had come back to him were only of the lower half of his own body, a cement floor stained with his blood, Blackwell’s boots. He gritted his teeth. “He kept me blindfolded. But he talked about the others.” The bastard had taunted him while he’d tortured him.
“I might recognize his voice.” That he wasn’t sure he would killed him. But there’d been a fan rattling the whole time, pushing the heat of the woodstove around the torture chamber. And his mind had been in a haze of pain, not exactly on full speed. “How long was I gone?”
“Three days.” The captain’s jaw clenched. “We were looking for you. Harper and Chase never went home. The rookies too. We were looking for you every hour of every day.”
“I know. That kept me hanging on.” A small cough sent stabbing pain through his midsection. “He knew who I was. He had a trap set up.”
The captain swore, which was usually the worst of his temper. He was, for the most part, pretty even-keeled, not the type who got off on tearing his men down just to show who was boss. Although, at the moment, he didn’t look too happy with Jack.
“I told you being obsessed with a serial killer was a dangerous hobby,” he snapped.
He had. But Blackwell went way beyond a hobby. This went back to Shannon. But nobody needed to know that.
Machines beeped around them, various hospital noises filtering in the open door as Jack thought of all the people he’d looked for in the past, the ones he hadn’t found in time. He figured Bing might be thinking the same. Except now Jack knew exactly how those victims had felt, what his sister had gone through before she’d died fifteen years ago.
Bile rose in his throat. “How bad is the damage?”
Bing waited a second before he answered. “Nothing to come crying to me about. Four broken ribs, blood loss, some internal bleeding, some burns, hypothermia, and a concussion, some nancy-ass lacerations barely worth mentioning. I pretty much figure you’re only here to get out of mandatory overtime.”
“When are they letting me out?”
“Some frostbite here and there,” Bing went on. “I’m going to overlook it this time, but you’ve got to stop parading around buckass naked. You’re scaring well-meaning citizens.” He kept his tone as light as his words, but concern filled his eyes.
“I want to get on the case as soon as possible.” Jack drew a shallower breath, testing if that might circumvent some of the pain. Not really. “You think you could pull some strings for me here?”
“We’ll take care of Blackwell.” The captain gave him a hard look.
Jack hardened his own gaze. “Blackwell is mine.” He’d been after the man for most of his career. He wouldn’t allow himself to think how close he’d come to having him.
“You’re lucky to be alive. One of the broken ribs punctured your lung. If the Price woman hadn’t been there, we’d still be looking for your body.”
Price woman. For a second,
he didn’t understand; then more memories trickled back. The grave. There’d been a woman—a possible connection. He knew Blackwell now as he’d never known him before, and with an actual lead… “I want this case.”
“Your body, Jack.” Bing surged to his feet, his voice tinged with anger and exasperation. “Do you understand what I’m saying? You were that close.”
He’d been closer than his captain thought. He remembered that light, the floating feeling, the out-of-body sensation. He remembered someone being there with him on the other side, how he had reached out to that presence. But it hadn’t worked. Apparently, he hadn’t been ready. The pain had returned. Then he saw the woman.
The Price woman. “I want to talk to her. She has to be in with Blackwell. How would she know where to find me? He sent her to check on me. Or she got nervous.”
Bing shook his head. “She’s a damn artist. I’m not saying I like her, but she’s not a criminal. You have to stop thinking about this. You’re on medical leave. And you’re officially off the case.”
Jack swore a blue streak.
“Forget Blackwell, dammit,” Bing growled, but when he continued after a moment, he lowered his voice again. “You’re losing perspective, Jack. I’m telling you this as a friend.”
He had no friends. All he had was his badge and his mission to see Brady Blackwell dead. “You have to keep an eye on the woman for me.”
Until he got out and he could do it himself. She would lead him to Blackwell. In his mind, she was all tied in with the pain. He’d about died of it on the trip from the woods to her house.
She hadn’t looked like much—disheveled, hair plastered to her head, wet from the snow, eyes wild. She’d smelled like paint. And just thinking of paint made his body pulse with pain all over again. He felt the blood run out of his head. He drew a slow breath to steady himself as he blinked.
“Dammit, Jack—”
“What do we have?” he cut Bing off. “Doesn’t being half-dead earn me the right to some answers?”
A bleak look settled on the captain’s face. “The DNA, if the lab can make it work. A generic el cheapo sheer shower curtain with no other fingerprints than yours and Ashley Price’s. Shoe-print casts, size twelve, men’s. Pattern not in the shoe-print database. But we have a fair idea of the shovel used to dig the grave; standard-issue army-entrenching tool, triangle tip, one side serrated.”
