Skin Walk (A Lacey Fitzpatrick and Sam Firecloud Mystery Book 2)

by Melissa Bowersock

  “That makes sense,” Lacey said. “This incident was apparently never addressed, never resolved. Just swept under the rug. That leaves a lot of words unsaid, a lot of feelings unexpressed. I would guess both of them carried old, buried regrets.”

  The waitress brought their lunches. Lacey had a turkey sandwich with fries while Sam had ordered a chicken Caesar salad. She grabbed the ketchup to douse her fries, but before she could do that, Sam snagged a couple of them. He gave her a lopsided grin and saluted her with a droopy fry just before he bit into it.

  “So when did you decide to request the police records?” he asked as he picked the croutons out of his salad.

  Lacey shifted uneasily in her seat. She couldn’t read any emotion into his words. “I don’t know; sometime on Thursday after we talked to Lou.” She glanced up at Sam. “I know I disregarded what you said. And I also know this is not just a case. It’s your family. I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of someone digging into their family closet and rattling the skeletons. I figured if there was nothing there, then there was no harm done and I probably wouldn’t have told you at all. But since there was something…” She trailed off. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.” He pinned her with those black eyes. “It was stupid of me to even suggest that we not follow every line of thinking; I know that now.” He dropped his eyes and took a bite of salad. “I’m still learning how to do this whole investigative research thing, all the things you’ve known how to do for years. This was a good lesson for me.”

  Lacey peered at him from beneath her lashes. “So you’re not mad at me for going behind your back?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Although I’d like to think you could trust me, tell me anything, but I realize I made it more difficult for you by being so close-minded.”

  “I do trust you,” she said in a quiet voice. “But if I get a hunch about something, I’m going to follow it. I know this case is different because it’s out here on the res; it’s your home and your family. But I’m still going to follow every lead, chase down every clue. And I’m still not going to back down just because there might be some danger involved.”

  Sam regarded her quietly, chewing thoughtfully. Finally he returned his attention to his lunch. “Yeah, I get that,” he said. “Like I said before, I guess I’ll never have a shrinking violet for a partner.”

  Lacey grinned at him. “You wouldn’t like it if you did,” she said.

  He laughed. “No, probably not. I guess we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing.”

  “Works for me,” she said.

  ~~~

  When they got back to the house, Carson and Griff were throwing a football back and forth in the front yard.

  “Uncle Sam,” Griff called. “Come play with us.”

  “Gimme a minute,” Sam said as he climbed from the car. “I’ll be right back.” He and Lacey went inside and found more football there. Gabe was stretched out on the couch watching the Packers and the Vikings. Roxanne was folding laundry at the table. Both turned and looked expectantly at the investigators.

  “Any luck?” Gabe asked.

  Sam and Lacey grinned at him. “Yup,” Sam said.

  Gabe immediately picked up the remote and dialed down the sound on the TV. Roxanne came and pushed his legs down off the couch so she could sit next to him.

  “What happened?” she asked eagerly.

  Sam nudged Lacey. “You tell ‘em. I’ll go play catch for a couple minutes.”

  Lacey took a chair and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees.

  “It was Sylvia,” she said.

  She could see the shock and surprise in their eyes.

  “Nineteen ninety-two,” Roxanne said. “We were twelve. Remember when I said that somewhere around that age Sylvia became very disdainful of men?”

  Lacey nodded. “Yes, I do. That could have been why.” She briefly recapped the sequence of events as Lou had told them: the rape, the reversal, the cover-up.

  “My God,” Roxanne said. “Do you know how that must have felt to her? Being pressured to deny it? Total betrayal by her family. Total disregard for her feelings, for the violation.” She shuddered. “And she was only twelve. How awful.”

  “It’s sad,” Lacey said. “But not that unusual. I’ve seen many instances where a family will sacrifice one member to maintain the image of the family as a whole. It’s a kind of a clan instinct: putting the best interests of the group above the individual.”

  “It’s no wonder she’s so cynical,” Roxanne said. She looked over at Gabe. He nodded, his eyes dark, and laid his hand on hers.

  “So it kind of makes sense to me that she might gravitate toward something to level the playing field,” Lacey said, piecing it out as she formed the words. “I mean, look at it this way: she was pretty powerless for most of her life. Powerless against her older, stronger cousin, then powerless against her parents and the family pressure. Maybe, at some point, she decided she needed to try something different to get control of her life. Sam told me that people turn to witchcraft to gain power. Maybe she thought that was the only way for her to get hers back.”

  “That does make sense,” Sam said. Lacey turned in her chair to see him standing behind her. She’d been so wrapped up in her reasoning, she hadn’t heard him come back into the house. He took the chair beside her. “I just wonder why it took her twenty-four years to do it.”

  Lacey shrugged. “Maybe it just built up to a boiling point? I don’t know.” She looked over at Gabe and Roxanne. “Are you aware of any crisis in her life, in her family, recently?”

  They looked at each other, but then shook their heads. “Can’t think of anything,” Roxanne said.

  “I don’t remember hearing Mike say anything,” Gabe said. “But then we don’t really talk very often. Before yesterday, we hadn’t seen them in months.”

  Something tickled Lacey’s mind. She sorted through the jumbled memories of the party.

  “But you told them Sam and I were coming for a visit, right?” she asked Gabe. “And you showed them the newspaper article about us working on the case in L.A.?”

  Gabe shook his head slowly even as he pondered the questions. “I don’t think so. No, I never mentioned it to them. As I said, I haven’t even seen them in ages. The time just gets away, you know.”

  Lacey turned to Sam. “Didn’t Lou say Gabe showed her that article?”

  “Yes, she did,” he confirmed.

  “Oh, Lou, yeah, I remember that,” Gabe said. “I ran into her at the store and showed her. It wasn’t really a news clipping. Sam had told me about it and I found it online, showed her on my phone. I thought it was pretty cool.” He grinned.

  “But you never told Sylvia or Mike?” Lacey asked to be clear.

  “No.”

  “That’s weird,” she said.

  “Why?” Sam pressed.

  Lacey stared down at the floor as she pulled together the pieces in her mind. “A short while after Felicity and Sylvia showed up yesterday, Felicity came to me. She said she’d originally thought Sam and I were dating, but Sylvia told her we were working together.” She raised her eyes to Gabe. “If you didn’t tell her, who did? How did she know?”

  No one knew. The other three traded confused glances.

  “But there’s something else weird,” she said. “When some of us women sat here together eating, Felicity asked me about the cases Sam and I worked on. When I mentioned the Fairfax Stalker case—the one you showed to Lou—Sylvia didn’t know anything about it. Matter of fact, it really made her blood boil to hear about it. So if she didn’t know what we had done in the past, hadn’t read the article, how did she know we were working the case here?”

  Sam had been silent, but now he spoke up, and anger tinged his voice. “I wonder if she’s been keeping tabs on Grampa. He lived closest to where our cousin was killed. In any of her shapeshifter guises, she wouldn’t be noticed. An owl, a coyote. No one would think twice about seeing those out in the desert.�
�

  “And she came here, to my window, as an owl that first night,” Lacey said. “We’d just gotten back from Ben’s, and you had just walked the death scene.”

  Sam nodded. “She had to know that if anyone might suspect anything, it would be Grampa. And if she was out there then, and saw me walking, she’d know exactly what we suspected.”

  Lacey thought back to that uncomfortable discussion among the women. Now she knew why Sylvia got so enraged over the Fairfax Stalker case. Young girls raped and murdered. Young girls, between eleven and fourteen. She’d been twelve when she—

  “Oh!” Lacey sat up suddenly and snapped her fingers. “Sylvia got absolutely livid hearing about the Stalker case. I mean, any woman would, especially a mother, and especially a mother with a daughter.” She stared around at the others, demanding their full attention. “She said her daughter just turned twelve a couple months ago.”

  The pieces clicked into place. She could see it in their eyes.

  “Do you think she was worried about Rachel?” Roxanne asked. “Worried our cousin would…?”

  Lacey looked to Sam, then to Gabe. Neither seemed to have an answer.

  “I would tend to doubt it,” Lacey said. “He didn’t really fit the profile of a chronic sexual predator. And if he’d been active all these years, I don’t think he’d have gotten away with it for so long. I’m thinking it was more like what Lou said, a stupid mistake. But…” She paused, piecing it out. “It could be that Rachel’s twelfth birthday was the trigger for Sylvia. She’d kept all her rage inside for twenty-four years. When her daughter turned twelve, it may have brought all that old pain and fear and anger to the fore again. And that awful feeling of powerlessness. That could be the moment she made the decision never to be powerless again.”

  The four sat in silence for a moment, each processing the theory in their own way. Lacey poked it, prodded it, but in her mind, it held. They had the motivation, they had the plan, the build-up—the curse of confusion—they had Sam’s understanding of the way the murder actually occurred.

  And now they had the murderer.

  She raised her eyes to Sam and found him staring at her. He nodded slowly but certainly.

  “So now what?” she asked softly. “How do we prove it? How do we bring her to justice?”

  Sam’s eyes glittered like black diamonds. “I think I know,” he said. “But let me think about it.”

  ~~~

  FOURTEEN

  The evening was given over to very normal family pursuits. Lacey helped Roxanne fix dinner, and afterward, Roxanne spent some time with the boys going over homework. Sam took his phone outside and called his kids. Everyone, Lacey guessed, was feeling especially grateful for having good kids—safe kids.

  She and Gabe sat in the living room and watched a bit of news. A robbery in Flagstaff, a car crash on I-40 that closed down the freeway, the storm approaching from the Pacific. As problematic as the items were, they still seemed benign compared to the sequence of events the group had been following. Without realizing it, Lacey gave out with a heavy sigh.

  Gabe reached for the remote and turned the sound down to a low level. “Some week, huh?’ he asked her with a lopsided grin.

  “You can say that again,” she murmured.

  “Bet you never thought you’d be doing this when you teamed up with my little brother, did you?”

  Lacey returned his smile with a rueful one of her own. “Never,” she said. “Crooks and murderers I can deal with okay. But this…” She spread her hands to take in everything around them. “This is something else.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said. “L.A.’s going to seem tame after this.”

  “That’s for sure.” She let her gaze roam over Gabe’s face. Very like Sam’s, perhaps a bit fuller, not quite so stoic. The similarity brought a question to mind. “So do you have… talents like Sam’s? Abilities?”

  “Nah. Stuff like that gives me the heebie-jeebies. I think our mom made sure of that. I was the first born, so I think she tried mightily to impress Christianity on me.”

  Just then Sam came in through the back slider, slipping his phone into his jeans pocket. As he ambled over to join them, Gabe tossed a question at him. “Isn’t that right, little brother?”

  “What?” Sam asked as he settled into a chair near Lacey.

  “Mom tried to instill us with her Christianity. Me more than you. I think she finally decided you were a lost cause.”

  Sam considered that. “Probably.” He angled his head toward Lacey. “I refused to go to church after I was ten or eleven. Told her my church was outside in the desert, out with Grampa. She didn’t like that, but she gave up trying to force me to go to hers.”

  Lacey smiled ruefully at the image. “Must have been tough for her, battling age-old traditions. How about your dad? Did he support her? Did he go to church?”

  “Nope,” Gabe said. “I think she gave up on him before I was born. He never argued with her or blocked her from doing what she wanted, but he wasn’t having any of it for himself. He told me once he wished he’d fought harder to give us Navajo names, but I guess at the time, it just seemed easier to let her name us.”

  “Are they family names?” Lacey asked. “From her side?”

  “Purely biblical,” Gabe said. “Gabriel? Samson? I’m just glad she didn’t name either of us Jesus.”

  The two brothers exchanged looks and wry chuckles. It sounded to Lacey like a running joke between them.

  Gabe shrugged. “I’m sure she was doing what she thought was best for us,” he said. “Trying to raise us right, trying to protect us from the heathen devil.”

  “No doubt this case would convince her she was right,” Lacey said.

  “No doubt,” Gabe agreed.

  Lacey let her gaze drift to Sam. He was watching her, his dark eyes unreadable. She wanted to ask him what his plans were, how they were going to bring Sylvia to justice for what she had done, but she hesitated. Roxanne and the boys could emerge any time.

  Sam might have read her mind. “We have to put an end to this,” he said quietly, “and not just to redeem our cousin. This kind of dark power is addictive; people who use it sink into it deeper and deeper, crave it more and more. It’s very literally like the Dark Side in Star Wars. It seduces and controls. As long as she’s made this deal with the devil, she’s a danger to anyone and everyone. Our family, Ben, even her own family.”

  Gabe, listening intently, nodded to his brother slowly. Lacey saw his full agreement for what Sam was saying.

  Sam swiveled his eyes back to Lacey. “And we have to do it the Navajo way.”

  Lacey felt a chill crawl up her spine. Sam’s glittering dark eyes, his quiet but insistent voice, all put her on alert. This was not going to be a textbook police procedure. This was not going to be due process. This was going to hark back in time, hundreds or even thousands of years, to the old ones, the old ways. She swallowed down any arguments she might have had.

  “All right,” she said, realizing as she said it that she had no idea what she was agreeing to. Sam had said earlier that he hoped she could trust him. This was the time. “What do we need to do?”

  Sam reached over and took her wrist, checking her watch. “I need to go talk with Grampa. Just to make sure I know what the hell I’m doing.” He smiled, but Lacey could tell that he was dead serious.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I won’t be long. You stay here.”

  She opened her mouth to protest but the thin, compressed line of his lips warned her not to bother. “All right. Do you want to take my gun?”

  He actually considered that. While Lacey thought that surprising reaction should have comforted her, the opposite was true. The fact that he was considering it, that he thought it might be necessary, unnerved her.

  “No,” he said finally. “I don’t think I’ll need it. But thanks.” He stood up. “Brother, can I borrow your truck?”

  “Sure.” G
abe fished the keys out of his pocket and handed them to Sam. “Be careful.”

  “Oh, I will,” Sam said. He nodded to Lacey. “Be back in a bit.”

  ~~~

  Lacey tried her best to relax, to lose herself in the comfortable routines of Roxanne and Gabe and the boys, but she knew she was only kidding herself. She sat through a half hour sit-com, her eyes on the TV screen but her mind registering none of it, then took her phone outside to check messages. When she returned, she drifted into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. Roxanne had herded the boys down the hall for bedtime baths and Gabe had switched the TV back to the evening’s football game. Lacey thought about zoning out in front of the TV again, but instead just leaned against the kitchen counter and stared out the window.

  She was immensely relieved when she saw headlights slew across the front yard and heard the truck’s tires crunch on the gravel driveway. She wanted to run outside, but reined herself in to wait impatiently until Sam came through the front door. As he closed the door behind him, his eyes swept the front rooms, finding her in the kitchen. He tossed the keys to Gabe. Then he addressed them both, their expectant stares, but his eyes were on Lacey.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “We’re going to Sylvia’s. We’ll end it there.”

  ~~~

  FIFTEEN

  Lacey awoke at the first hint of movement in the house and got up. There was no point in trying to sleep any more. She’d awoken almost every hour during the night. Her body seemed to vibrate with jangled nerves. It was better to be up and moving.

  In the kitchen, Roxanne was admonishing the boys to eat their cereal before it got soggy, but they were more interested in kicking each other under the table. Gabe was downing a cup of coffee and shrugging on his coat. Sam sat amid his blankets on the couch, still rubbing sleep from his eyes.