Bone Deep (21 page)

“And you!” The chief stabbed a finger in Paul’s face. “I should haul your ass—pardon my French, Miss Jill—to jail. You crossed the line, mister!”

“We have nothing to hide, chief.” Paul held his hands up surrender style. “Do what you think you have to do.”

They were alive. That in itself was a small miracle. The front door and rear entries of the Manning home had been fully engulfed. He’d thrown a chair through one of the large front windows, creating an escape route.

Too close for comfort. That’s what it was.

Kate Manning’s home was completely destroyed. The fire department had gotten the flames put out, but other than the still standing brick, the house was gutted. The second floor had collapsed into the first.

“Well, that fire didn’t start itself,” the chief accused. “If I find one shred of proof that you’re involved in this clear cut case of arson, you’ll wish you’d never set foot in this town, Dr. Phillips.”

His control slipped. Paul leaned in close to the shorter man who just wouldn’t let it go. “Bring it on, Chief. I’ve already told you we have nothing to hide, can you say the same?”

Difficult as it proved, Paul walked away, ushering Jill down the drive and to the Land Rover. They’d both been through enough today. He didn’t want her exposed to anymore of the chief’s groundless accusations or the suspicious looks of all the rescue personnel who’d showed up to save the day.

He and Jill were walking away.

That wasn’t supposed to have happened. Paul couldn’t shake the feeling. They were supposed to have died in that fire. The fire marshal would find evidence of arson all right. A high-powered accelerant had been used. Probably the same one used to burn that small body the chief wanted them to believe was Cody. An accelerant of that caliber was the only way the house would have become so widely engulfed before the smoke even reached the basement. Particular attention had been paid to the front and rear entrances. A trail of fire had run from the front door to the staircase. The arsonist hadn’t wanted the smoke or flames to warn them until it was too late to escape.

His plan might very well have worked had the textured privacy glass in the front door not shattered. The sound had echoed down those basement steps like a rifle blast.

They were safe. That was all that mattered. The chief and his arson investigation could go straight to hell.

“Jillian!”

Standing in the vee of the Land Rover’s open passenger door, Jill turned to see who had called her name. Paul went on instant alert. Whoever it was, he wasn’t happy. Her name had been uttered sharply, vehemently. A politician, Paul determined when the man got a little closer. Five hundred-dollar suit and enough arrogance to provide hot air driven energy for a small country. Recognition flared.
The mayor.

Paul had to physically restrain the urge to punch the older man when he marched right up to Jill, his face red with rage, and started ranting.

“You’ve gone too far!”

“Mayor Hammersly,” she said, acknowledging his presence and ignoring his accusation.

“We were just leaving,” Paul cut in. “As you can see, we’ve had a bad day.”

Hammersly glowered at Paul, then pointed that cutting gaze at Jill. “This is enough, young lady,” he warned. “How dare you come back to this town and try and tear down all we’ve built. Your daddy would be ashamed of you.” He harrumphed. “What am I saying?” He glared at Jill even harder. “He
was
ashamed of you and those ridiculous antics of yours. Always getting into trouble... running off to Ole Miss and thinking only of yourself. You’re a disgrace to your family... to this town.”

Fury whipped through Paul. He moved in, forced Hammersly back a step, as he got between the man and Jill. “I don’t think you want to say anything else.”

“Just ask her, if you don’t believe me,” he hurled the words at Paul, too blind or too stupid to be afraid. “Ask her how she hurt her daddy all those years ago.”

“I said, shut up.” Paul reached for him, his fingers itching to wrap around that scrawny neck, to squeeze until the bastard shut the hell up.

“No.” Jill tugged at his arm. “Please, Paul, let’s just go.”

Obviously having come to his senses, the mayor stumbled back a couple of steps. “Tell him, Jillian. Tell him how you drove your daddy into an early grave. Maybe you want to do the same thing to your mother.”

“Get in the car and wait for me,” Paul said, his throat so taut he could scarcely speak. At the moment he didn’t care if he spent the rest of his life in prison, this guy was about to eat his words.

“Please, Paul,” she pleaded. “Take me home.”

Unwilling to cause her more pain, he turned his back on the bastard and rounded the hood. He settled behind the steering wheel and slammed the door. Forcing his complete attention on getting the hell out of here, he pulled away from the curb and eased through the emergency vehicles parked this way and that on the cul-de-sac.

They didn’t talk as the dying embers of the Manning house faded into the night behind them. There was nothing to say. They were alone in this... had no proof of their beliefs and no one on their side.

“Paul.”

He glanced at her, an ache starting deep in his chest. Her cheeks were smeared with soot, tears clearing a path through the dark smudges.

“Yeah.”

“These conclusions you reach, are you always right? I mean, if you really try.” The little hitch in her breathing tugged at his heart. “I need to know... if you’re right this time.”

For the first time in his entire life he was genuinely afraid for someone to know the whole truth about him and it had nothing to do with avoiding the media or exposure to some scam. He didn’t want her to look at him any differently. To see the freak he had been accused of being by his peers and the media.

“I... I need you to be right,” she murmured, the misery in her voice tearing him apart one tiny piece at a time.

“I have a heightened sense of recent memories made by others, especially the deceased. I refuse to call it anything else.” He hadn’t meant the words to sound so harsh, but his chest felt ready to implode. “I pick up on some things from the living, but I’m better with the dead.” He exhaled slowly, deeply. “I’m right most of the time. When I really try.”

She appeared to consider his answer for a time. “Then, when you said my sister murdered her husband, you were fairly certain? You... saw it?”

Another not so easy to answer question. “I didn’t see her do it. I
felt
her do it.”

Her sharply indrawn breath made him flinch. He didn’t have to look to know she’d just recoiled physically.

“How do you cope with those feelings?”

To his surprise there was no accusation in the question. No pity... no horror. Just concern. He looked at her this time. A long, lingering look that forced him to come to a near stop in the street.
I don’t
, he didn’t say, which was the truth. He hid from it, locked it out. Sometimes he tried his level best to drown it.

“I...” He forced his gaze back to the road and his right foot on the accelerator. “I keep it turned off as much as possible. But to answer your question, yes, I believe Kate killed her husband.”

Silence stretched between them. It wasn’t a bad kind of silence... not wrought with building tension or unspoken censure... just a quiet time to slowly assimilate those things which were simply too big or too overwhelming to accept all at once.

“So,” she began again as they rolled into Paradise proper, “when you said my nephew was alive... somewhere, you feel that with the same certainty?”

He braked for a red light and rested his gaze on hers. “Yes. I believe he’s alive.”

Slowly, as if fearing the wrong move might trigger some terrible chain of events, she showed him the photograph she’d been clutching since escaping the burning house. The streetlights and dash lights provided enough illumination for him to make out most of the detail.

“This is where he is,” she said with complete certainty.

He studied the small village in the photograph, then the label that dubbed it
A Safe Place
. His gaze settled on hers and that same certainty moved through him. “You know where this place is?”

“Sort of. See that bald spot in the forest on the mountainside?” She pointed to the photograph. “I know where that is. From there I should be able to find this village.”

A safe place
.

“She told us,” Jill said, hardly believing it could have been so simple. “Kate told us she took him to a safe place.”

Paul leaned across the seat and kissed her cheek. “We’ll find him.”

He would not let this woman down. Whatever it took. Whatever it cost.

~*~

Showered and changed, Jill had calmed down considerably since the confrontation with the mayor. She’d even managed to go over everything that had occurred with her mother while Paul delved into a search on the Internet. He’d said he had more research to do. She’d also tried to call Cullen Marks again to give him an update, but, just like last time, he was unavailable. Jill was more than a little perturbed at his evasiveness. Another attempt to reach Connie had failed as well. She couldn’t sit around waiting for either of them to call her back, she had to do something. If she closed her eyes or stopped long enough to think those hateful words taunted her.

You drove your daddy into an early grave
.

Some small part of her had believed that all along, the accusation had hovered over her like a dark cloud all these years. But hearing it out loud from someone else was so much more painful. As raw as the memory was, it was done... she couldn’t change the decisions she’d made any more than she could change the ones her father had made. She had loved him, still did. But he was gone. Her mother, on the other hand, was still here. Maybe if she could make her see... but even after her detailed explanation, Claire Ellington remained skeptical.

“Mother, don’t you understand what this means?”

Claire sat on the sofa in the family room, purple bruises across her forehead. She looked distraught rather than relieved by Jill’s revelations.

“But the body. I identified the...” Her voice quivered. “We have to come to terms with Cody’s death, Jillian. Denial won’t do either of us any good.”

Jill took her mother’s hand in hers. “I’m trying to make you see this whole thing is wrong. We can’t trust anything we’ve been told. We don’t know what set off this chain of events but the chief is covering up something. We can’t be sure that’s Cody’s body. We only have the chief’s word.”

Her mother looked away. “That’s just too unbelievable. I refuse to listen to such nonsense. You’re grasping at straws.”

Calm
, Jill told herself.
Stay calm
. “Mother, this is what Paul does. He knows the truth. I know the truth. My God, what about Benford Chemical and all those dead children?”

Claire shook her head. “Benford Chemical was a long time ago. People try to put nasty business like that out of their minds. I don’t know what you mean about the dead children. I’m sure we don’t have a higher child mortality rate than any other town.”

“But we do,” Jill said gravely. “I checked.”

Her mother’s gaze snapped to hers. “You must be mistaken.”

Jill shook her head. “I’m not mistaken. Whether you choose to believe it or not, it’s true.”

Claire paled, looked away once more.

The idea that her mother was hiding something niggled at Jill. “What is it you’re not telling me? You begged me to forget this investigation. What is it you know that scares you so badly?”

Claire shook her head. “I can’t talk about it. Please don’t ask me to.”

Tension stiffened Jill’s spine. “At least tell me this much, are you keeping quiet because you’re afraid?”

Claire’s gaze collided with hers. “I’m terrified.”

~*~

The search box appeared on the screen and Paul typed in: Josef Mengele.

A few seconds later dozens of subject lines filled the screen. He selected the first: Josef Mengele, The Angel of Death. Words jumped out at him... Hitler’s henchmen... hideous crimes against humanity... willfully and with bloodlust. Twins were the focus of his madness. They were rescued from the NAZI gas chambers only to fall victim to a decidedly crueler fate.

Twins were selected and placed in special barracks. Auschwitz offered Mengele unlimited specimens where twins could be studied at random. One could serve as a control while the other endured the experiments. Experiments included injecting blood samples from one twin into another twin of a different blood type and then recording the reaction. The injection of dye into the eyes of several twins to see if eye color could be altered. If the twins died, Mengele would harvest their eyes and pin them to the wall of his office.

Isolation cages housed twins who were subjected to a variety of stimuli to see how they would react. Castration, sterility. The removal of limbs and organs without the use of anesthetic were performed routinely. Injections of infectious diseases to see who would succumb and who would not and how long it would take. Why did this one live and that one perish? Ultimately the corpses were dissected.

Paul stared at the screen, no longer seeing. A cold hard fist of fear had taken hold of his gut. Though cruder and much less humane, these experiments bore a striking likeness to those he’d read about in Manning’s files.

But Manning was in to far more than Mengele had been able to do in his time under the Hitler regime and with the knowledge and equipment available. Genetic alterations, cloning. One of Manning’s favored experiments zoomed into vivid focus in Paul’s mind. Cannibalism in the womb. He quickly typed those words into the search box.

When identical twins were conceived, one fetus was destroyed invivo. After absorption occurred, the surviving twin was then studied to see if a higher cognitive ability resulted. Stronger physical attributes. A heightened sense of survival... heightened senses period.

Paul closed his eyes and banished the words from his mind. Manning was all that Josef Mengele had hoped to be. He’d secretly carried out hideous experiments for years right here in Paradise. The whole town had been bought and paid for with the promise of offspring. In exchange for the promise of heirs the citizens who had made the original deal would take the secret to their graves. No one would ever know. Manning had the perfect setup. An entire town as his lab. Only something went wrong. Kate found out. Or somehow her son was threatened and she fought back.