Winter’s End: Winter Black Series: Book Nine

by Stone, Mary

  Because I was special.

  Special.

  So very special.

  And now I’d failed.

  I’d failed to fulfill the mission. I’d failed to bring about Winter’s end. I’d failed it all.

  Broken Nose was talking to me. I could hear his voice and I could even hear the words, but they didn’t make sense. Would anything ever make sense again?

  I wasn’t sure.

  Because I’d failed.

  Failed.

  Failed.

  In the end, I shut down as Broken Nose tried to get me to answer questions, and my attorney tried to get me to not talk, and I wondered why Winter didn’t come to see me. She’d left me again.

  It was too bad really. I had a surprise I was saving just for her. Something she wasn’t going to like, but then Harlots never did like the truth, did they?

  Maybe soon.

  Soon.

  36

  Winter sat in the passenger seat of Noah’s truck while he drove. She was watching the sidewalk slide past as the streetlights flashed over the windshield. She could feel Noah’s concern for her, and though it was sweet, she didn’t really want to talk just then. The two or three times he’d tried to pry her from her shell, she’d answered with single syllables and kept her face resolutely pointed toward the passenger window, staring at closed shops and the fading lights of the city as they headed home.

  Home.

  It had become an interesting concept. She’d scrubbed the mirror clean, the last message she’d gotten from Justin was gone, but her memory placed it there every time she stepped into the bathroom. She’d taken a shower after cleaning the apartment, and the steam from the hot water had fogged up the mirror but didn’t cling to the letters she’d scrubbed for so long.

  Justin’s threat had reappeared, written in steam. She guessed it would take time for the oils to wear off the mirror. It would take much longer for the oils to wear off her.

  The papers she and Autumn had so carefully gathered had been shoved back in the box, in no particular order and without regard to their condition. The more she’d found about Bill’s family, the less she wanted to be a part of it.

  Bill Black had been a good man. She had to remind herself of that now. He’d been kind and gentle. She was still proud to call him “Daddy,” and there were probably others like him somewhere in that family tree, but she had no more interest in finding any of them.

  Arthur was just as bad as Kilroy, though if Arthur had killed anyone, he’d gotten away with it. She flashed on Arthur’s wife, Lynn. Even if he hadn’t killed her with a blow, the abuse Winter had seen in her vision lay the poor woman’s death directly at his feet.

  That box Arthur kept with Lynn’s picture in it was so typical for a bully or a sociopath it was almost cliché. That he loved Lynn was as obvious as the fact that he had driven her to an early death.

  Kilroy was from that family. The Preacher. The mass murderer who killed people for being immoral, as if killing wasn’t the ultimate in immorality.

  Then there was Justin. True, Kilroy had mistreated Justin, it probably wasn’t a genetic predisposition to violence, but by all accounts, Kilroy’s father had been a right bastard to his son too. If anything, their bloodline carried a legacy, if not a genetic one. Winter was well rid of the chains of that part of the family. Even though their blood wasn’t hers, it was a little too close for her comfort.

  She sighed and looked at the clock. It was too late at night to call her grandparents. She made a mental note to call them in the morning and thank them for raising her.

  Noah pulled silently into the parking lot next to their building. She shook herself to get her mind back on the business of getting out of the truck and back into her life. The dumpsters the tenants used were just behind the corner, out of view. At least one of them contained a printer box full of copies of old family records.

  Everything that hadn’t been taken for evidence but had looked like Justin might have used it or pawed at it had been tossed or taken to the cleaners with specific orders to remove any smells or dirt that might or might not be in the fabric. She had cleaned him out of her life as much as she could and still felt like it wasn’t enough.

  They walked to their apartment in silence, the way they’d ridden in the car. The broken trim around the door still looked ugly, but the deadbolt had already been replaced. The building manager had promised he would fix and repaint the frame within the next day or two.

  Winter wished that everything broken could so easily be fixed.

  “Wow.” Noah whistled appreciatively as he walked in the door. “This looks amazing. You cleaned this place down to the shine.”

  “It helped,” Winter confessed as she stripped off her jacket. “I had a lot of nervous energy I needed to burn off.”

  Noah walked up behind her and placed his hands on her hips. He was being so careful with her, and she leaned back into his chest. It almost felt like her home again. Almost.

  “Noah…” Her gaze was on the big window that faced the stars and a velvet sky. Their reflection in the glass was faint, ghosts against the starry night. “Can we get a tree?”

  “A tree? Maple?”

  Winter laughed, the picture of a maple tree in their apartment striking her as funny. “A Christmas tree, dufus. It’s nearly Christmas, you know?”

  His arms wrapped around her from behind, and he set his chin on her head. He hummed a little in his throat and kissed her hair. “Of course. We’ll pick one out tomorrow. How about that?”

  “I’d like that.” Winter closed her eyes. “I couldn’t do it, you know?”

  Noah froze a little, but he didn’t stop holding her. Waiting her out.

  She studied their reflection, glad she couldn’t make out his eyes. “I couldn’t talk to him. Not yet. It’s been…too rough, too emotional. I needed…I need time, time to adjust, to be able to talk to him as a sister and not an agent.”

  “That makes sense,” Noah murmured into her hair, “and you’re tired. You’re exhausted.” As if to prove his point, his mouth opened with a jaw-cracking yawn.

  Winter laughed at him, but found yawning to be contagious. “Now you’ve got me doing it.” She smacked his arm playfully as she broke free of his grasp. “Get to bed, you.”

  “Me?” Noah brought a hand to his chest in surprise. “I was saying you’re the one who needs the rest.”

  Winter hopped from one foot to the other. That nervous energy was back. “I don’t know if I could sleep right now. My mind is going in a hundred different directions at once.”

  “Because you didn’t talk to Justin?” Noah asked, his face serious now.

  “No. I mean, yes, but no.” Winter shook her head and rubbed at her eyes, hating the tired burn when she had so much energy. “I didn’t talk to him because I’m too tired to face him the way I want to. It’s just…with all the crap that we all went through because of him, because of the investigation, the collapsing church, the strain it had on you, on Bree, on Autumn…” She stopped and shook her head. To her ears it all sounded crazy. Like too much. “The toll it had on me physically and emotionally is intense. I’m too tired to sleep.”

  He bobbed his eyebrows. “I could suggest a way to burn off some energy.”

  She bobbed her eyebrows in return. “I like the way you think, then I’ll take a Benadryl to make sure I stay conked out. My thoughts are racing, but I know I’m tired.” She put her hand on his arm. “I’ll be in in a bit,” she told him and headed for the bathroom.

  “Wait…collapsing church? You mean literally collapsed? I thought it had already fallen when you went in. Do you mean it fell while you were inside?”

  “I’ll tell you later!” she called over her shoulder as she closed the door. She stood in the bathroom staring at her reflection warily. The words on the mirror danced through her memory.

  She stripped, took a quick shower, brushed her teeth, and got ready for bed. Normal things. At least they felt normal, natural. She had
n’t felt that way for days. She swallowed a Benadryl and walked into the bedroom where Noah was waiting under the covers for her.

  She climbed in, and Noah immediately reached for her, wrapping his arms around her, spooning her naturally. She snuggled into his embrace. Without a word, they made love with an urgency that appeared to surprise them both.

  They both needed it. Needed each other. Needed to remember that nothing else mattered when it was just the two of them like this, this close.

  “Tell me more about this collapsing church,” Noah said after the sweat had dried on their bodies and their breathing had grown even again.

  Winter grinned, rolling over to face him. “You really don’t want to know…”

  “Try me. I think I do.”

  In the end, she told him about her adventure and how she came by the deeds in an old desk in the basement. Noah snorted in amusement at her and Autumn, interrupting her narration to agree with Autumn’s assessment. “No, you’re definitely Lucy in this case.” He lifted up on one elbow when she told him about the church falling in on itself.

  “Next haunted church,” he said harshly, his eyes dark with concern, “you wait for backup.”

  “Deal.” Winter laughed. Noah settled and held her tightly. It felt good. They hadn’t been able to be like this in weeks. She missed the closeness, but as soothing as his arms were, her mind was still too active to sleep. “Noah.” She whispered his name, not wanting to wake him if he was asleep.

  Noah grunted, but the inflection went up at the end, like a question.

  “Is it my fault? Justin being like he is? Should I have…could I have done something different that night when my parents were killed? I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. I snuck out that night and was in the middle of sneaking back in while they were being killed. If I’d stayed home, then maybe I could have done something to save them. Save him.”

  He held her more tightly. “Or you would most likely be dead. You were only thirteen years old, sweetheart. You might be a badass now, but I’d suspect you weren’t very badass back then.”

  She smiled, thinking about how she looked at that age, all elbows and knees, and not an extra ounce of fat on her skinny body.

  She grew serious again. “I can’t help but think that Justin is messed up because of me.”

  “That’s because kids take on all the guilt of their families.”

  Winter snuggled into his chest, remembering how this big strong man had taken on the guilt of his failed family too. It was under very different circumstances, but guilt was guilt all the same.

  Noah raised himself up again, but somehow managed to hold her tighter. “You’ve seen a lot of traumatized kids in this job, we both have. I defy you to take the memory of any one of those children and tell that hurting boy or girl that it was their fault. That’s just cruel.”

  Winter nodded and felt a tear run down her nose. She wiped it away angrily.

  He kissed the next one away. “Tell me what you remember about Justin before that night.”

  “He was a hellion.” Winter laughed a little, knowing he was trying to distract her, and letting him. “He was always the troublemaker. He got into absolutely everything. Did you know he had this stuffed giraffe that he carried with him everywhere? Its neck was broken and its head flopped every which way.”

  Winter yawned as she spoke. Surprisingly, the tension in her body eased, both from the strong arms around her and from the Benadryl beginning to take effect. Somewhere in the night, between stories of a small boy she once knew, sleep crept in and claimed her. Noah still holding her was the last thing she remembered till morning.

  37

  “All rise!” With that formal command and everyone in the courtroom coming to their feet, the arraignment of one Justin Black began.

  Aiden, sitting in the front row of the spectator’s box, stood, and the entire press corps stood up behind him with the sound of a small avalanche. The only one in the court not standing was Justin himself. He was locked into a chair at the side of the courtroom.

  The prosecuting attorney looked smug. Thanks to the feds, he had a relatively simple job. Justin’s fingerprints and DNA were everywhere at the crime scenes, his RV had yielded an expensive necklace that could be traced back to Sandy Ulbrich, and his video was practically a confession. Aiden didn’t even figure this to go to trial.

  He hoped, even as his gut churned in warning that this wasn’t going to be as clean-cut as it appeared.

  After the arraignment, the defense would probably try to bargain for life in prison and avoid the death penalty. If it were anyone else, Aiden would have welcomed such a verdict for someone who had done the things Justin had done, but what that would do to Winter made him willing to take a plea deal.

  The judge entered and pounded the gavel, signaling the court could sit again.

  “Before we begin,” he shot a hard look at the observation area, “I want to caution the ladies and gentlemen of the press. I have you here under some misgivings, and in order for this court to indulge the members of the fourth estate, I will insist on decorum. I will have no outbursts or shouted questions, upon penalty of each and every one of you being evicted from this room or held in contempt. Is that quite clear to you all?”

  He waited until the heads behind Aiden began nodding. It was like watching a schoolteacher scold three-year-olds, and Aiden felt a little better already. Maybe this wouldn’t become a media circus after all.

  “This is the arraignment of,” the judge picked up some papers and began reading, “Justin Black, also known as Jaime Peterson. The charges against the defendant are six counts of murder, four counts attempted murder, grand theft auto, kidnapping…”

  Aiden wondered about that one. Then he remembered the woman Justin had killed to get her car. She’d fought him, and he’d pushed her into the vehicle and taken off with her. He’d gone a half mile before tossing her dead body from the car.

  “…armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, breaking and entering, aggravated assault…”

  The number of charges were astonishing. By the time the judge finished, there was murmuring in the press behind him. The judge shot them a warning glance and hit the gavel once, and they subsided.

  “Counsel for the defense,” the judge peered over his glasses at the attorney, “how do you plead?”

  Aiden exhaled a breath that had grown stale in his lungs. Finally, the horror of The Preacher was done. A guilty plea, a negotiation and it would be over.

  “Not guilty by reason of insanity, Your Honor.”

  The press exploded behind him, questions and opinions and shock registering at full volume. Even the gavel couldn’t quell the commotion that simple response created. The judge glared them down, and when they wouldn’t hush, he ordered the courtroom cleared. The bailiffs had their hands full of yelling reporters. The families of Justin’s victims were, if anything, louder and less inclined to be escorted out.

  The prisoner was hauled to his feet, penguin-walking in the chains that bound him. They would keep him in the courthouse jail until the judge resumed the hearing after the chaos was over.

  In the middle of the confusion, Justin caught Aiden’s eye and smiled.

  And Aiden had a terrible, terrible feeling. The little bastard was going to get away with it.

  * * *

  Autumn was waiting in Aiden’s office when he returned. She’d helped herself to some of the Bureau’s coffee and spent her time paging through a file. It was a very poor breach in protocol to occupy the man’s office when he was out, but she was a well-known fixture at the Bureau by now, and given her closeness to Winter, they were likely granting some leniency.

  She wondered how that looked to his colleagues. A woman waiting in Aiden’s office might seem a little…familiar. Maybe even a little proprietary. She glanced up from the file and looked at his empty chair. She could do worse than a man like him. Aiden was a handsome man, smart, capable.

  There was a history there,
but if the past few days had taught her anything, it was that clinging to the past was a fool’s game. She smiled at the empty chair and thought about the man who sat there. The question was, what did she want? She was only just starting to figure it out. He might fit nicely into her future. It might be worth it to find out for sure.

  The past was past.

  She went back to the file, flipping through it when she heard a minor commotion from the main area where frazzled agents and support staff fielded phone calls and cursed the endless stream of paperwork that comprised the FBI. It was like a moving disturbance in the ordered chaos of the place.

  Aiden was back, and as he walked into the area, men and women called to him, stood to fist-bump or high-five. Aiden was a sort of celebrity, and the men and women were all smiles as he passed. He was the hero of the day, the man who’d caught Jaime Peterson.

  Aiden’s expression was anything but heroic. He took their accolades in good stride, but his face had a very set expression. He was frustrated. Autumn could feel it coming off him in waves. She rose and waited for him to arrive, frowning in concern.

  He brightened considerably when he saw her standing there and slowed as he entered the office. “Well, hello.” He slipped off his coat and hung it up.

  “Happy holidays and all,” Autumn said, her smile widening as the tension eased out of his shoulders when he saw her. He was instantly more relaxed. It felt good to brighten someone’s day just by being there. It also felt good to have someone be that happy to see her.

  “To you too. I see you’ve found the eggnog.” He pointed to the coffee cup in her hand.

  She laughed at his joke and set the cup on his desk. “You seem to be in a mood.”

  He waved it off and came to sit next to her instead of behind his desk. “I got thrown out of the courtroom. Did you hear about Justin’s arraignment?”

  “Yes, insanity. I’m not so sure it’s not a legitimate argument. At any rate, I’m about to find out. I’ve asked the DA and they’re finding no conflict of interest being Winter’s friend, so I’ve been assigned to analyze Justin’s mental health.” She held up the file she was carrying, which was filled with Justin’s medical records and assessment so far.