Cold Image

by Leslie A. Kelly

  He snorted. “Think again. You might not have felt ’em, but I guarantee every bare piece of skin on your body got chomped tonight.”

  “Oh no.” Her hand moved of its own volition to scratch at her neck. She supposed he had them in the same place since she’d uncovered his skin with that clumsy haircut.

  Once they reached the main road, the car moving much more smoothly on the blacktop, she felt her heart kick into a slower rhythm. Tonight had been one of the most frightening and exciting of her life. She’d vacillated between tension, fear, nervousness and awareness, back and forth, back and forth. It hadn’t been merely because of the atmosphere, and the company. They had been trespassing on a property that was, she believed, a murderer’s hunting ground.

  “So, how bad did it get for you?” she had to ask, breaking the silence.

  “Not bad.” He didn’t look over, but she heard a chuckle in his voice when he added, “At least you rinsed your mouth out before you kissed me.”

  She cleared her throat. “I believe that was mutual.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Shut up. I meant, how bad was it with your…thing.”

  He knew what she meant. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it does.”

  A brief hesitation, then, “Eleven total.”

  Far more than she’d suspected. Her fingers gripped the steering wheel. “Were they all awful? Like the first woman?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “That would probably make it worse.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Jesus. “Was there anything recent? Like boys from the school?” Not Isaac. Having seen her brother’s picture, he would have recognized him and told her. Still, others had gone missing, too. Some might have been runaways; some, she was certain, had never left that blighted property alive.

  “No.”

  Relief warred with disappointment. She didn’t want to think of students being murdered at the place their parents had left them. Part of her, though, had hoped he was seeing clues every time he froze at attention to, as he’d said, honor the dead.

  “The asylum?”

  “Three. The second wasn’t murder.”

  She didn’t want to envision the causes of brutal, accidental death—or suicide?—on the grounds of a mental hospital. “That leaves…”

  “Prison camp.”

  “Oh no,” she whispered, casting a quick glance at him. His head was back, his eyes closed. Although his big body was sprawled, not one inch of him looked relaxed. Tension stiffened every muscle. She had to wonder how he let go of it at the end of the night.

  “I’d thought—hoped—that since it was so long ago…”

  “You and me both. No such luck. Can’t imagine how many there would have been if I saw the ones who quietly starved to death or died of dysentery.”

  Kate didn’t want to imagine it. What must Derek’s life have been like living with this? She’d treated enough patients with PTSD to know how memories bit at the mind, tearing away the chunks where peace and calmness lived, until it seemed only darkness remained.

  “How did you find out about this, well, I’m not going to call it a gift? It’s a curse, really.”

  “I don’t discuss that with anyone. Especially not a doctor who likes to psychoanalyze people when they least expect it.”

  Oh. She thought she’d already experienced the firm, taciturn Derek Monahan. But that had been icy, and completely forbidding. He had thrown a wall around himself, she could feel an almost physical chill. The accusation stung—she really hadn’t been trying to peel him apart professionally and had been asking merely out of curiosity. But her question had obviously been enough to bother him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried.”

  He didn’t respond. In fact, he closed his eyes and crossed his massive arms over his chest, not saying another word as she drove back toward town.

  Kate mentally kicked herself. She had picked at a scab, dug into a wound, by asking a simple question. That told her all she needed to know about the weight Derek Monahan was carrying in his memory, in his heart. She only wondered if he would ever be ready to put that weight down. And might she be the one who could help him do it? She’d worked with injured soldiers carrying mental scars before. Derek seemed so much like them, though she suspected his scars ran deeper than most.

  She wanted to ease his pain, not only because he was helping her, but because she already liked him. She was certainly drawn to him. So maybe, while he was working to help her find out what happened to her brother, she could help him finally let go of some demons.

  Even though she suspected the demons Derek Monahan carried in his mind and his heart were ones he hadn’t earned in a typical war…but on the battlefields of crime and murder.

  Derek was so used to hiding his past and defending his memories, he often reacted harshly when anybody asked questions he didn’t want to answer. Some moments were so dark, so ugly, he didn’t want to revisit them himself, much less invite anybody else into any let’s-talk-about-the-past scenarios. Still, during the silent ride back to the parking lot where they’d met earlier tonight, he couldn’t help regretting how gruff he’d been with Kate when she’d asked what must have seemed like a relatively simple question.

  The fact that it was beyond complicated wasn’t something she could have known. He should have realized she wasn’t being intentionally intrusive, considering what they’d been discussing. Besides, tonight’s excursion had earned her lots of question-asking points. Kate had been in the muck, ignoring snakes and alligators, falling into mud and slime, walking for hours, trudging for miles, and she had done it with determination and grit. He didn’t know many other people who would have stuck it out after they’d sunk into the first six inches of bog.

  During all of that, a new, unmistakable trust had arisen between them.

  Trust. And more.

  He’d been attracted to the doctor at first sight. Once he’d gotten to know her, he’d appreciated her intelligence, and admired her dedication to her brother. Tonight, after the nightmare they’d shared in a realistic impersonation of hell, he also had enormous respect for her strength and her courage.

  Attraction. Admiration. Liking. Respect.

  All of which had led to that kiss. Oh, Jesus, that wild, dirty, sexy kiss that was completely in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person, but had felt more right than anything else in his life right now.

  He didn’t know what was going on with him—or with them. But he did suspect his anger at himself for kissing a client might have made him a bit more terse than necessary.

  “Sorry I bit your head off back there,” he muttered, not opening his eyes.

  “It’s okay. I was being nosy.”

  “No, you were asking a normal question that went along with the conversation.”

  “It’s a question you don’t like to answer.”

  “Correct.”

  “Okay. Enough said.”

  He waited, feeling the car speed up as they hit the highway. That was much better than the dirt one through the woods, or the potholed back road leading to the school. But physical comfort didn’t eradicate the guilt he still felt at acting like such an asshole to an exhausted woman covered in bug bites and mud.

  “I shouldn’t have immediately thought you were trying to shrink me again,” he muttered.

  “Well, I suppose I sometimes do that instinctually, but I really wasn’t then. I was just walking along in the conversation field without realizing I put my foot on a landmine.”

  “Good word for it.”

  “Conversation?” she asked, her voice light, almost teasing.

  He opened one eye and glanced at her, at first wincing at the visual reminder of what a mess she was, but also noticing the quirk of her lips. She was trying to lighten things up and change the subject.

  He should let her. He really should. But they were dancing around it now, coming close to a truth he didn’t talk about. Ever. Frankl
y, though, given the way he and Kate were connecting, mentally, physically, he suspected it would come up again. It suddenly seemed simpler to throw the truth out there rather than have to revisit it all over in the future.

  “The first time it happened was when I was twelve.”

  Her long, greenish fingers tightened on the steering wheel. She said nothing.

  “It was—” horrific, insanity-inducing, heartbreaking—“bad.”

  She didn’t ask the obvious questions, posing no who’s, where’s and why’s. But she did ask a very important one. “Was anyone there to help you deal with it?”

  “My Dad’s best friend. He was a rock for me, even after my grandmother brought me to live in Georgia. I’m still close to him and his family.”

  “That’s good that he….” Her words were cut off by a quick, shocked gasp as something apparently occurred to her. “It was your parents, wasn’t it?”

  He should have known she’d be smart enough to quickly figure that out. “Yes.”

  She finally took her eyes off the road and glanced at him. “I’m so sorry, Derek.”

  “Me too. They were pretty spectacular people.”

  Her hand left the steering wheel and dropped onto his, which rested on his thigh. She squeezed tightly and then let go. The touch was simple and brief, a nonverbal reminder that he wasn’t alone. While he didn’t necessarily need it, having long come to grips with what had happened to his mother and father, he appreciated the thought behind it.

  He waited for her to ask for more information, like how they’d died. She asked nothing, obviously waiting to see if he wanted to share any details or not. For some reason, with this woman, in this moment, in the darkness and the silence, he did.

  “They were murdered at home when I was at school.”

  She flinched. Remained silent.

  “My dad was a prosecutor and made a lot of enemies. Somebody he put away got his conviction overturned on a technicality. He, his brother, and a friend came to my parents’ house and staged a murder-suicide. I guess they were stupid enough to think there would be no retrial if Dad wasn’t around. Mom was just a side casualty.”

  A tear tracked down her cheek. In the low lights from the car’s dash, he saw it drop unheeded, one silent reaction to what he’d said.

  “Abe, my father’s best friend, came with the cops to pick me up and tell me. I wasn’t supposed to go into the house, but I did anyway.”

  “That’s the first time it happened? You saw your parents…dying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good God.”

  He wondered if she’d ask more questions, like what exactly had happened to them—stabbing and hanging—how he’d reacted—coming as close to insanity as a kid ever could—when it had happened again—in a parking lot of a grocery store in Atlanta a month after he’d moved there with his grandmother and aunt.

  Instead, she asked, “Was it like now? A sort of recreation?”

  “Yes. Exactly like it’s been every time since.” He drew in a deep breath, and slowly exhaled through gritted teeth. “I knew right away they’d both been murdered. The bastards who did it weren’t very smart and left evidence behind. The cops would have figured it out anyway. At the time, though, I thought that was the reason I started seeing these things—because I had to be the one to clear my father’s name and help catch the people who killed them.”

  A slight nod, and then, from the darkness, came her soft whisper. “Maybe it was.”

  He glanced at her, wondering what she meant.

  “You say the killers left evidence behind. That could be true. But you and I both know strange things happen during police investigations.”

  She had a point. He’d seen a lot of weird cases while working with Extrasensory Agents, including the police screw-ups with a murdered kid case Aidan had worked on a few years back. Kate knew that too, given how hard she’d fought to get somebody to give a shit that her teenage brother was missing.

  “Plus, there was your father’s position in the community.”

  “What about it?”

  “The whole thing could have embarrassed people who would want the investigation hurried, kept quiet, and cursorily done. I’m sure his boss, the mayor, and other elected officials, wouldn’t want a lot of light shone on a murder supposedly committed by a D.A.”

  Undoubtedly.

  “It’s entirely possible they would have brought pressure to rush things, and that nobody would have figured it out. Which means it’s also possible you were given this ability because you were the only one who could be sure the truth was discovered.”

  He couldn’t say a word in response to that, merely turning her words over in his mind.

  As a twelve year old, he would never have considered such a thing. Now? Well, shit, of course it could have gone down that way. It probably wouldn’t, but it could have. His father might still be branded a killer, his mother a victim of her own husband. Not likely…but any chance of that happening was too much for Derek to even imagine.

  Which meant the cross he’d borne for twenty years was one he would not have put down, even if he could. It was entirely worth it, not merely for all the people who had come after them, but especially for his parents.

  “Jesus, Kate,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  He swept a dirty hand through his hair. “Nobody’s ever said that to me before.”

  This woman who he’d known for less than a week was the first to get right to the dark kernel of uncertainty deep inside him where all the twisted shit from that day still lived. The first to realize he might actually need to look at what had happened from a new perspective.

  The first to give him real peace about it for as long as he could remember.

  The enormity of that was almost too much for him to comprehend right now.

  “Maybe it had to come from an outsider,” she said.

  And from a psychiatrist?

  No, he didn’t think that was it. The key was this woman, whose experiences lined up in so many ways with his own. As a kid, she’d been introduced to a psychic ability she’d never expected. She’d seen war, violence, and death. She’d experienced the deep, personal loss of someone she dearly loved. She fought for justice and was willing to do whatever it took to make sure whoever killed her brother was held accountable.

  So yeah. He somehow suspected Kate Lincoln was the only one who could have gotten to the heart of him, the very core, at least as quickly as she had.

  Falling silent, she kept driving, knowing either from her profession, or from her own traumatic experiences, that some things didn’t need to be talked about any further. Nobody else he’d told had ever let it go and not dug in for details. Nobody else had ever known that’s what he needed for them to do. Not until Kate.

  Derek’s heart—which Julia had once accused of being two sizes too small—thudded in his chest, pumping blood in a frenzied race throughout his body. It took him a few seconds to realize why.

  There was something else he had to add to the list of things he felt toward Kate Lincoln. The list began with attraction and had ended with trust. To those, and the liking, and the respect, he had to concede, there was now more.

  Gratitude.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Professor Andrews? Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Eli didn’t usually open up his mouth and speak to any of the instructors here without being forced to. Every student quickly learned it was better to remain quiet, out of sight equaling out of mind. You never knew when you’d say the wrong word and set one of them off. Andrews seemed like a good guy, but he was still a Fenton professor. Approaching him was a risk.

  His teacher glanced at the clock. “You only have four minutes until your next class.”

  Eli gulped. “It’s right next door, sir.”

  “All right. What is this about?” he asked as he wrote on the old-fashioned blackboard.

  “Uh…it’s about Of Mice and Men.”

  From behind,
Andrews looked like he relaxed a little. It was as if he’d been expecting Eli to ask something else. Maybe he’d anticipated questions about Charlie, or the other missing boys. He’d bet Headmaster Fenton had threatened jobs if anybody talked about it.

  “You did a fine job on your book report, Eli.” Andrews put down the chalk and turned around to face him.

  “Thanks.”

  “I take it you liked it better than The Grapes of Wrath?”

  He wrinkled his nose. They were reading Steinbeck this term. Yuck. But at least he wasn’t as bad as Melville and that stupid book about the whale, which they’d tackled last fall.

  “It was okay. East of Eden was my favorite.”

  “Of course it was. East of Eden is every teenage boy’s favorite. Sex, scandal, betrayal…”

  “What’s not to love?” Eli asked with a grin.

  The professor actually smiled back, like they were a normal teacher and kid, in a normal school, in a place that wasn’t this place. Then the moment disappeared. Andrews remembered where he was, and his face fell back into that stiff expression.

  “What did you not understand about Of Mice and Men? I thought your report was very thorough, and you correctly captured the theme and subtext of the novel.”

  Eli scuffed his feet. “Well, sir, I was thinking. I’m kind of like George.”

  The professor nodded in interest, but he didn’t interrupt.

  Releasing a deep breath, Eli went on. “And Charlie, he was kind of like Lennie. I mean, big and nice, and a little slow, and people didn’t understand him.” Eli had wracked his brain to figure out how to bring up this topic with one of the grown-ups here. The recent reading assignment had seemed like a good opening. “Anyway, I’m wondering, if I’m George, and Charlie is Lennie, do you really think he woulda run away without saying anything at all to me?”

  “I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you.” Andrews went to his desk and began stuffing papers into a folder. “You should go. I have to get ready for my next class.”

  By shoving all his paperwork away? Yeah, right. Eli was getting to him, making him uncomfortable. Knowing that gave him the courage to go on. “Do you see what I mean, though?”