Keepsake (34 page)

“Let’s just take down all the information,” Lieutenant Flack interrupted. She was trying to make peace. “We can all insult
each other later, okay?” She looked at April. “You say you got a good look at his face? You’ll be able to identify him from
a mug shot, you think?”

“I think so, yes.”

“We’ll get out the books. I know you’re tired, but I’d prefer you do it now, while the image is fresh in your mind.”

“All right,” April said wearily.

“You’re probably not going to have this guy in your
rogue’s gallery.” Blackthorn said. “God knows how many people he’s killed, but he’s probably never been arrested.”

“You never know,” Janice Flack said evenly. “This was not your typical professional hit. This guy was in close enough to get
his hands dirty.”

“Why didn’t he shoot me?” April asked. “He had the gun.”

“It was supposed to look like an accident,” Blackthorn said. “Once Kate showed up, that became impossible. If he shot you,
there was no way. He was probably under orders not to proceed in the event that something went wrong.”

“But everyone would have known it wasn’t an accident!”

Blackthorn glanced sourly at O’Brian and his partner, Murphy. “If it’s not provable as homicide, these folks don’t get too
interested.”

“Hey, look, buddy, we got more cases than we can handle already, so don’t give me that crap,” O’Brian said. “You got one little
problem to solve and you devote your whole day to it. Me, I gotta load of stiffs, with more coming in every couple hours,
and the boys upstairs with the bean counters are keeping track of how many of those cases I clear, and how fast. I don’t have
time for this shit.”

“If the guy was smart he’d have killed you anyhow, in spite of his orders from whoever hired him,” Flack said. The homicide
guy’s ranting seemed to have no effect on her whatsoever—she remained focused on the matter at hand. “If he’d thought it through
more carefully he would have realized this. We can presume that whatever reason existed for wanting you dead still exists.
It’s going to be a lot harder for them now, though. You’ll be on your guard. The perp should have acted while he had the chance,
accident or no accident.”

“You’re right,” said Blackthorn. “I’ll be protecting her now.”

“Hope you do a better job than you did with the lady in Anaheim,” O’Brian said.

Christian de Sevigny paced the small hospital room where Kate lay unconscious. A fractured skull, the doctor had said. A concussion,
of course. But she should come out of it okay, they’d assured him. It didn’t look too bad; she should wake up.

What if she didn’t? Oh, God, what if…?

Her head was swathed in bandages and her face looked so pinched, so small. It seemed as if the blow had caused her to lose
several years of her age and she was eight again, or nine. So small, so delicate. Lying there so still.

Over her bed, the monitors beeped away. The video screen showed the waves of the electrical activity in her heart. Jumping
numbers registered her pulse rate—the vital sound of her child’s heart.

The bullet had cut a shallow furrow through hair, skin, and the surface of her skull. It had not penetrated her brain. If
it had been an inch lower she’d be dead.

As he watched the monitor the years were swept away and he remembered standing beside Miranda in her gynecologist’s office
all those years ago, listening in astonishment as the doctor used an ultrasound monitor with a microphone to transmit the
static racing that was the unborn baby’s tiny heart. He remembered thinking that that beating would be going on uninterrupted
for another eighty years or so—that’s how strong it had sounded, how indestructible.

The body that had sheltered and nurtured that tiny beating heart was lying still beneath the ground. And today—
the sound that had seemed invulnerable—the sound that he’d always figured would go on in the world long after he was in the
ground, too—had nearly been silenced forever.

It’s all my fault.

It was as if a curtain had been torn away and he was able to see clearly for the first time in years. This was what it had
taken. He looked at his daughter and felt the tears gathering in his eyes. This.

No more. No more.

Enough is enough.

It ends here.

“It’s over, Charlie,” Isobelle said.

He blinked noncomprehendingly. “What?”

“I don’t want to see you anymore. We’ll work something out at the office. It will be hard for a while, I’m sure, but it will
get easier as time passes. I’m sorry, but this is the way it has to be.”

She had invited him over. She would have preferred to break off with him by phone, but that seemed too cowardly. He’d accepted
the invitation eagerly, clearly anticipating many kinds of pleasures, although considering what had just happened to April
and Kate, she couldn’t believe he was so insensitive.

He shook his head as if what she was saying to him was making no sense. “Isobelle, I don’t understand. What do you mean, it’s
over? I’m in love with you!”

“I’m sorry. I warned you not to fall in love with me. I never promised you anything, Charlie. I told you not to get too dependent
on me.”

“You’re the one who’s dependent on me!”

Jesus—is that what he thought? No wonder she’d been
getting so many alarming vibrations. “That’s your fantasy. That’s what you want me to be. You want to take care of me, I know.
You want to protect me.” She was trying to sound gentle but firm. She didn’t want to give him even the slightest hint of hope.
“But I don’t need that from you—or from anyone—and it’s vital that you understand it.” She poured all her convictions into
her voice. “I run my own life and I take care of my own problems. I always have and I always will. I don’t want anyone meddling
in my affairs. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but I’ve warned you before.”

“Look, I know you’re upset about your niece getting shot and all that,” he said. “The killer’s on the loose again, and that’s
scary. And that’s why you need me. You need me to protect you. My God, Isobelle, next he could come for you.”

“This has nothing to do with that.” She could hear her voice shaking.

“Of course it does, Isobelle. It has everything to do with that.”

She turned her back on him. Her stomach was churning. How had her life turned so crazy? When Rina had been alive it had been
hard, yes—the fights, the misunderstandings, the competition, the struggle for power. Working with Rina had never been easy,
either for her or for Charlie, despite his seeming good nature. But it had been easier than this.

“Please leave, Charlie.”

There was a long silence. Then, “There’s someone else,” he said heavily. “You’ve got another lover, don’t you?”

She didn’t think of Justin that way. Justin was a good friend. He’d given her something that she’d desperately needed, and
in the process he’d helped her make up her
mind. But Justin—his dungeon, his toys, his body—had been the instrument, not the cause.

“This has nothing to do with anyone else except you and me. I can’t see you anymore. Our relationship isn’t working. It’s
you and I who are alone responsible for that, so please don’t go looking for outside causes.”

“But why?” His voice had turned plaintive, perhaps even a little scared. “I love you, I’d do anything for you, please, Isobelle,
don’t do this to me!”

“My God, I don’t want a man who would do anything for me,” she said, impatient now. “I want a man who respects himself more
than that. I don’t want an obsessive man, a man who tries to mind-read, who thinks he knows what I need and desire, and acts
accordingly. Don’t you understand? You’re suffocating me.”

She regretted the words as soon as they were out. Dammit, she thought, would she ever learn to think before she blurted things
out?

He was shaking his head. He looked as if he were about to cry. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I just can’t believe you
could think such things about me. I love you. Damn you, doesn’t that count for anything?”

“It counts for a lot. It makes me very sad and regretful. But it doesn’t change my mind. You’d better leave.”

He reached out for her, trying to embrace her. Isobelle retreated, but he followed her, seized her around the waist, wrapped
one arm around her shoulders. She made an involuntary sound—she was a little sore back there. Charlie looked into her face,
his brow furrowed, then without warning, ripped at her blouse.

“No!” she cried, enraged that he would attempt such a thing. But he persisted, pulling the light summery fabric down over
her shoulders to reveal the thin faint marks that lingered there. She should have waited to confront him. In
a few more days all traces of her session with Justin would have been gone.

“I can’t believe it!” he shouted. “You let somebody do that? You let somebody dom you? Who is he? Who is he, dammit, I’ll
kill him!”

“Get out,” she said. “Get out now, Charlie, or I’ll call the police.”

He slapped her. Right across the side of her face. She staggered and nearly fell.

“Get out,” she said, her voice icy with her effort to control it. “Get out of here and don’t ever come back. We’re through,
you son of a bitch.”

He left, cursing and slamming his fist into the wall. Isobelle locked the door behind him and went into the living room. Shaking,
she dug out a cigarette from a pack she hadn’t opened in days and lit it. As she inhaled deeply nightmare images filled her
head. He had hit her. Her ears were still ringing with the force of his blow. Until recently, she would never have dreamed
that Charlie Ripley could be capable of violence, no matter how upset he was.

What had Charlie said a couple of weeks ago:
April Harrington won’t last long, I promise you. She’ll be gone in a blink, and Power Perspectives will be ours.

What would the police say, she wondered, if she told them
that?

“The worst of it is, I did what he ordered me to do,” April said. “It was like a dream. I couldn’t believe it was happening.
I knew he’d come to kill me but I didn’t believe I would die.”

“I know,” Blackthorn said.

The crime scene techs were still working on her apartment so he’d taken her back to his place after several
hours with the police, then Marty over at FBI headquarters. She was exhausted, and more rattled than he’d ever seen her.

“And now that it’s over, it’s all getting fuzzy. As if I can’t quite remember, somehow.” She looked at him, her blue eyes
alarmed. “I remembered when I talked to the police. Why can’t I now? Is this some kind of stress reaction?”

He nodded. “Don’t worry about it. Our bodies are wiser than our brains at times like these.”

“I remember his face,” she said and shuddered.

“You’re probably one of the few people who has seen it and lived.”

She looked puzzled again. “I have images, but it’s as if my linear memory is shot. You know? I know some of the things that
happened, but I can’t seem to clarify the exact order. It’s all confused.”

He said nothing. He’d dealt with enough trauma victims to know that what she was feeling was entirely normal. There was no
way to stop her from trying to sort it out. He’d urged her to take the tranquilizer that the doctor had prescribed to calm
her, but she had refused.

“I think I resisted at one point, and so he forced my head down into the bath water. I couldn’t breathe, and it was just like
people say—I felt total panic because all I wanted to do was breathe, but I knew that if I opened my mouth all that dirty
bath water would rush into my lungs and I’d be dead. And then it didn’t matter and I didn’t care and I was just about to do
it anyway because my body was screaming at me to breathe, to breathe… and he let me up. After that I think I did whatever
he told me to do.”

“Anybody would have.”

She looked at him. “Not you.”

“Yes, me.”

“No. You’re strong. You would have resisted all the way.”

Blackthorn pictured himself drunk with a bottle and laughed shortly. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. I’m not so strong.
Sounds to me as if you showed a couple minutes of weakness, that’s all. Then you kicked his ass, you and Kate.”

“Kate,” she whispered. Tears popped into her eyes.

He held her. “She’s going to be all right, hon. She’ll be fine.”

“I thought she’d left. I was sure of it. I still don’t understand what she was doing, pretending to leave, then hiding out
in the kitchen.”

“Spying on you, probably. You know how kids are. Or maybe she knew something was wrong.”

“He shot her. She’s just a child. He—”

“Ssh. Stop replaying it. You both survived. In fact, the two of you were really something. He had a gun, but you drove the
asshole off with your bare hands.”

“He got away.”

“We’ll get him,” he assured her. “He fucked up. He’s dead meat.”

She looked at him. “You sound so hard.”

“I’m harder than you know.”

She nodded, then her eyes slid away again.

“I need a shower,” she said a few minutes later. Then as if hearing her words for the first time, she shuddered. “No,” she
whispered. “No, no, I can’t.”

“You’re cold. Come, I’ll carry you to bed.”

“I feel dirty. I want to wash—but how, after that happened… I never want to get into a bathtub again.”

He lifted her unresisting body and carried her into his own small bathroon, the one with the stall shower. He set her down
and reached into the stall and turned on the taps.
The crime techs had worked her over earlier, taking scrapings from underneath her nails and going over her entire body with
a laser, looking for evidence. He wasn’t sure how much of it she remembered. Maybe she had blotted it out just as she had
the details of the attack itself.

“No, please,” she said as he urged her toward the shower. “I can’t, I can’t.”

He slid his arms around her and kissed the side of her throat. “I’m here. I’m not leaving you. You don’t have to do a thing.
Trust me, my darling, trust me.”

She pressed her face against his neck. Slowly, she nodded.

With slow careful movements, he stripped off the bathrobe he’d given her and let it pool beneath their feet. He caressed her
and told her she was beautiful. The steam from the shower was already beginning to warm up the bathroom. He pulled off his
T-shirt and shucked his jeans.