The District

by Carol Ericson

  “In a way, it was my imagination, but he willed it. I didn’t conjure him up.”

  “What was the warning?”

  “He didn’t speak. It was a feeling, a sense.”

  His breathing slowed down. He could make sense of this. “Obviously, you’d think he was warning you, he and your sister. The warning manifested itself in this vision.”

  “You’re trying to explain it away in practical terms, but it was more than that. His warning chilled me, much more than my sister’s words over the phone.”

  “If someone appeared to me out of thin air, I’d be freaked out, too.”

  “It was different than that.” She uncurled her body and raised her arms to the sky as if trying to bring him back. “It was something about our legacy, our heritage.”

  “You know that already, Christina. This is your father’s coven that’s being hunted down, your coven.”

  She shook her head. “They’re coming for me. They must be coming for me.”

  He took her trembling frame in his arms, to hell with her deception. “We know that. If we didn’t know that after the car aiming for you two nights ago, we knew it after the attack on you last night, which is why you shouldn’t be wandering the streets by yourself—even if you are a big bad FBI agent with a big bad weapon. I should’ve never allowed it.”

  She heaved a sigh and spoke into his shoulder, her words muffled. “That would’ve gone over real well with me.”

  “I should’ve gone with you.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  He reached into his pocket for his phone and held it up. “Remember the GPS trackers?”

  “I’m glad we have those, even though I wasn’t in any danger from my father.”

  “Let’s get you back to the hotel. You’re in no condition to walk back. Your body hasn’t stopped shaking since I found you.”

  He called a taxi and made Christina sit on the wall while they waited. A couple trundled up the sidewalk toward them.

  The woman asked, “Is this the right way to Coit Tower?”

  Eric pointed ahead. “You’ll start seeing signs on that next block. Just keep walking uphill and following the signs.”

  They thanked him and continued their trek.

  A taxi pulled up to the curb and Eric gave him the name of their hotel.

  By the time Christina got back to the room, her color had returned to normal and her eyes had lost their glassiness.

  Was she losing it? Was the strain of this case too much for her? Too personal? He could relate to all of that.

  “I want you to lie down.” He pulled the covers down on her bed. “I’ll get you some water.”

  She hooked her finger around the straps of her sandals and pulled them off. She hopped onto the bed—the same bed where he’d made love to her, claimed her again as his own. The same bed where he’d discovered he had a daughter.

  He ran a hand across his head while crouching before the fridge. He had all the time in the world to be mad at her for that. Now wasn’t the time.

  He poured her a glass of water from the bottle and put it on the nightstand. “Drink.”

  She took little sips of the water and leaned back against the pillows. “I must be in some incredible danger for him to make an appearance like that. I felt such dread when he was communicating with me.”

  “I thought you said he didn’t talk to you. How was he communicating with you?”

  She tapped her head. “With my mind.”

  “Okay, you lost me.”

  “It’s the same way those...others communicate with me.”

  “The killers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come this one, I mean, why aren’t you getting any feelings from this one?”

  “I’m not sure. It doesn’t always happen. I just felt the evil at the base of that tree at the crime scene for Nora.”

  “Have you tried?” He stood by the window, as far from the bed as he could get, and folded his arms across his chest. “I mean really tried?”

  “You know I don’t do that.” She crossed her legs at the ankles and tapped her feet together.

  “But you know how. You told me one time your father tried to give you some tips, and then your mom charged in and put a stop to it all.”

  “My father has imparted some bits of advice to me.”

  “You never tried it out?”

  “I did, not in any official capacity as an agent investigating a case, but as a silly teenager and a curious college coed.”

  “And?” He’d uncrossed his arms and braced his hands on the back of a chair. The air hung heavy between them, and he held his breath so as not to disturb the energy.

  Christina had stopped tapping her feet. Looking at her palms spread in her lap, she said, “It scared me.”

  “Because of what you saw? The feelings?” He couldn’t imagine Christina afraid of much. Of course, she’d been afraid to tell him about Kendall.

  “It’s hard to explain. It was like an onslaught of feelings. Vivi always told me for her it was like grasping at wisps of gossamer and if she tugged too hard, the feeling would go away and she’d have to start over. It was nothing like that for me. Once I opened those doors, I had a hard time slamming them shut.”

  “Maybe your powers are greater than Vivi’s. Just like members of your coven are using their powers for evil, you could use yours for incredible good.”

  She snorted and fell over sideways on the bed, breaking the spell. “I always got the feeling before that you thought my gift was baloney most of the time...not that you weren’t supportive because you were.”

  “Maybe I’ve had a change of heart these past few days. Obviously, people believe in witchcraft enough to kill over it, to attack law enforcement. They must be fighting over something.”

  Christina drew her knees to her chest in a fetal position. “I’m not ready to put myself through any of that. Let’s solve this case the good, old-fashioned way—good detective work and boots on the ground.”

  “That’s what I do.” He dug his finger into his chest.

  “We still need to find out why these four particular people were singled out for murder. Okay, they were all members of the same coven, but whoever is committing these murders is not going to be able to track down every member of this coven, especially if they start going into hiding like my sister did.”

  “Do you think if the cops questioned the victims’ families, they would’ve revealed the coven connection of their family member?”

  She answered, “Probably not to an outsider. Maybe the family members didn’t make any connection between the murder and the victim’s coven activity. The cops didn’t know the right questions to ask and hadn’t linked the other victims to the same coven.”

  “But we do know the right questions to ask.” Christina rolled from the bed and collected the four case folders from the desk. She returned to the bed and sat cross-legged on the edge, the folders stacked in her lap, a legal pad on top of them. She handed him the first folder. “Family members.”

  “This is Olivia Dearing, the one that doesn’t have a connection to the coven.”

  “That we know of.”

  “Right.” He flipped through the pages. “Her parents live in Vancouver, wealthy, reclusive.”

  “Is a transcript of the interview there?”

  “Yeah. Maybe we should split them up two and two.”

  “You know what all of these victims do have in common?”

  “Hmm?” She didn’t look up from her pad of paper.

  “They’re all only children.”

  “Really?” She glanced up. “Do you think that’s significant?”

  “It’s a commonality. It’s not too unusual for the younger two, but when the older two were b
orn it was less common to be an only child.”

  She jotted something down on her pad. “I think we should look at everything. It’s down on my list.”

  Thirty minutes passed and Eric dropped the folder and stretched. “I can’t believe we’re in here working on a Sunday.”

  She rolled her shoulders. “It’s safe.”

  “Safe? You’re not afraid to go outside now, are you?”

  “I meant,” she said, wagging her finger back and forth between them, “it’s safe between us. If we have our work to concentrate on, we can forget the rest of what’s hanging over our heads.”

  He broke his pencil in two and chucked it across the room. “I just don’t get why you didn’t tell me.”

  “If you could’ve walked out on me last night, left the hotel and never looked back, is that what you would’ve done?”

  “And turned my back on my daughter? Never.” His jaw tightened. “I resent that you’d even go there with me.”

  “You turned your back on me two years ago.”

  “You seem to have a habit of playing fast and loose with the truth.”

  She gathered her hair into a ponytail and tossed it over one shoulder. “I didn’t lie to you back then, Eric.”

  “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t think to ask the woman I was dating and falling in love with if she happened to have a case file on my father.”

  “What does it matter? It was a fascinating case then and it’s a fascinating case now. I didn’t tell you about my notes because I was self-conscious about my interest in the case. I’d always been self-conscious about my interest in serial killers. My mom basically accused me of being a freak. I didn’t want to hear that from the man I loved.”

  “Can’t you understand how I felt when I found out? It was ten times worse that you’d been hiding it from me, and then Lopez was there suggesting you were planning to write a book. Our relationship felt like a sham.”

  She looked down at her fingers pleating the bedspread. “It was never a sham. I just felt like it was one of the many coincidences in my life that I happened to wind up on a task force with you. If we hadn’t hit it off, if we hadn’t fallen in love, that would’ve been the end of it.”

  “But we did and we did, and that’s when you should’ve told me about your little obsession, and then it became a pattern because you neglected to tell me about your pregnancy.”

  She covered her face with her hands. “I’ve gone over it a million times. I’ve regretted it a million times, but I can’t wave a magic wand and change it.”

  “I can’t wave a magic wand and erase all my feelings of resentment that you kept me from Kendall, and worse, kept her from me.”

  She shoved one of the files off the bed. “So, we work.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck where it felt as if every muscle was knotted. “I’m going to get some food, and then I’m going to follow your example and hit the gym. I finished the report for the P.D. and Rich.”

  She waved at him. “Knock yourself out.”

  * * *

  HE DIDN’T QUITE knock himself out, but he got in a good workout, and then walked through the double doors of the gym to the pool where he slipped into the bubbling hot tub.

  He adjusted his position so that the jets hit his lower back. Had he really made it so difficult for Christina to tell him about her pregnancy?

  He’d made it clear to her that he never wanted kids. Now that he had one somewhere out in San Miguel, that claim sounded ridiculous and childish. But how was Christina supposed to know he’d do a one-eighty when confronted with the certainty of fatherhood?

  He had his fears about his ability to protect a child, and working the kidnapping task force for the Bureau was supposed to put those fears to rest.

  Instead Noah Beckett happened. He’d lost that boy, and although the official report deemed that loss a function of FBI policy, his failure had hollowed out his soul.

  That’s where he was when Christina got pregnant.

  Could he blame her for not telling him in that moment? He didn’t even know now what his reaction would’ve been then.

  He puffed out a breath and slid farther into the pool of water until it bubbled around his ears.

  She kept the secret for two years. If they hadn’t been thrown together on this case, how much longer would she have kept the secret?

  He submerged his head and sluiced back his hair when he surfaced. He rubbed his eyes and Christina appeared before him, waving her arms.

  “I thought you’d gone under for good.”

  She had her clothes on instead of that sexy black one-piece she’d shimmied into the other night. Must be here for business, not pleasure, but then what did he expect?

  He hitched his elbows on the deck of the hot tub and hoisted himself up. “What’s up?”

  “I got a call from Libby.” She held out the phone. “She wants us to come by her shop.”

  “Isn’t it late?” He’d had dinner, alone, put the finishing touches on the report, alone, and had worked out, finishing up here, alone. “It has to be close to ten o’clock.”

  “She lives behind her shop. She sounded anxious. There’s something she wants to tell us, something she discovered.”

  “She couldn’t tell you over the phone?”

  “She was afraid, same with a text. She wants to tell us in person.”

  He groaned as he rose from the hot tub, steaming water running off his frame. “I was hoping this hot, churning water would wash away my stress and make sleep a little easier tonight.”

  Her gaze followed his hands as he plucked the wet board shorts away from his body. Even one suggestive look from her could get him hard.

  He snatched his towel from the back of a chair and bunched it in front of him as he dabbed his chest and stomach.

  “Have you been having trouble sleeping?”

  “Yeah, well last night wasn’t exactly restful.”

  “If you hadn’t stormed out of my room, we could’ve...”

  “What?” He snapped the towel at his back. “Gone round and around about why you thought it was such a good idea to keep Kendall from me?”

  “I could wear a hair shirt.”

  “I don’t want you to keep apologizing, Christina, or even do penance, although you could probably make a hair shirt look good, too.”

  She clapped. “A joke. I got some humor out of you.”

  He dropped the towel in the laundry bin. “I was serious.”

  * * *

  CHRISTINA PACED BACK and forth in her room, waiting for Eric to shower and dress. That alone was torture—imagining him naked in the shower.

  He seemed to be bending a little. Could he understand now why she didn’t tell him at the time of the pregnancy? The way he looked after his team had lost that boy, finding out he was going to be a father might’ve sent him over the edge. He never would’ve accepted fatherhood at that point in his life.

  Could she have told him last year when he resurfaced after South America? Yes. That’s when she should’ve contacted him. She’d messed up big-time.

  He tapped on the door between their rooms. “I’m ready.”

  She opened the door and looked him over from head to toe. “You clean up nicely.”

  “Maybe we should just take the car tonight since we probably won’t have any trouble parking.”

  “It’s Sunday. There are still going to be people out for dinner.”

  “Yeah, but not as far down as Libby’s shop.”

  “Sure, I’ll drive.”

  They left the hotel and crossed into the parking garage. She pulled into traffic and headed to the Haight-Ashbury district.

  There was still a buzz on the street, but Eric had been right. The people and traffic thinned out as they maneuvered towar
d Libby’s bookshop.

  Christina found a metered spot on the street about a block from the alley and backed into it.

  As they turned up the alley, shuttered windows and dimmed lights greeted them. Even the colored lights that lined the alley were snuffed out.

  “Looks like everyone closes up on Sunday night.” Eric glanced at his watch.

  “I texted her while you were getting dressed to let her know we’d be here shortly.”

  “Did she text you back?”

  Christina pulled her phone from the pocket of her sweater. “No.”

  “Hope she didn’t take off or lock up. If so, I just wasted a bunch of quarters and a good night’s sleep.”

  Christina tried the door handle and it twisted. “She’s still here.”

  She shoved the door open, and the bells announced their arrival to the dark shop.

  “Libby?” she called out, and the books and shadowy objects seemed to swallow up her voice.

  Eric nudged her inside and closed the door behind them, setting off the bells again into a merry song at odds with the stillness of the store and the looming shelves that seemed to threaten any intruders into their domain.

  Eric called out. “Libby?”

  “Maybe she’s in her apartment in the back.”

  Christina dove into her purse for her little flashlight and flicked it on. She aimed it in front of her and crept toward the counter.

  “Careful. Don’t trip.” Eric put his hand on her hip.

  She lifted the barrier that extended from the counter to the wall. “Her place is behind the counter. Libby? We’re here.”

  Eric stumbled against her. “Where are the damned lights?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe they’re in the back.” She reached out and swept aside the beaded curtain that separated the store from the back area. The beads clacked and swayed.

  Christina swept the mini flashlight across the cluttered room, its tiny beam picking out boxes of books and overstuffed chairs with items stacked on top of them.

  Eric whistled. “I hope she doesn’t live in this room.”

  The beam of the flashlight wavered at an oblong opening across the room. “Looks like there’s another area back there.”