Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (21 page)

The next evening,
Riley was in the kitchen just starting to fix dinner for herself and April when
she heard the front door open.

A familiar,
Spanish-accented voice called out, “Where is she? Where is my sweet
muchacha
?”

Then Riley heard
April yell happily, “Gabriela!”

Riley hurried to the
living room where she found April and Gabriela hugging each other. Gabriela’s
suitcase was on the floor near the door.

“Gabriela!” Riley
said. “I didn’t expect you home until tomorrow.”

“You didn’t think I’d
stay away after all that happened, did you?”

Riley understood.
Yesterday she had called Gabriela, who was still visiting her family in
Tennessee. Of course Riley had told her what had happened with April. Gabriela
was family, and Riley wouldn’t think of leaving her out of the loop. Riley
shouldn’t have been surprised that Gabriela had hurried back as soon as she
possibly could.

“You go get
unpacked, Gabriela,” she said. “I’m fixing dinner.”

Riley headed back
into the kitchen. As much as she loved Gabriela’s cooking, she liked to switch
places with her to cook once in a while. And she was sure that Gabriela could
use a break after her trip.

It had been a long,
emotional day. Early in the afternoon, Riley had taken April to Dr. Lesley
Sloat’s office. First, Riley had talked alone for a while with Dr. Sloat, who
had explained her therapeutic approach to her. Riley immediately took a liking
to the short, stout, warm-hearted woman. She felt so grateful for the help with
April’s post-traumatic stress. She shuddered to think what her daughter must be
going through.

Then Dr. Sloat had
talked with April alone for an hour. April had seemed to feel much better after
the session had ended.

On the way home,
April had said, “Your friend Dr. Nevins really came through for us. Dr. Sloat
is going to be great to talk to. She has a way of making me see things I couldn’t
figure out on my own.”

Now, washing
vegetables in the kitchen, Riley felt glad that Gabriela was back. She was a
calming, comforting, and loving presence in their lives. Riley wondered what
she would have done without her through their recent difficulties.

April came into the
kitchen and started helping her mother.

“You know what this
means, don’t you, Mom?” April said. “Gabriela coming back, I mean.”

“I don’t think so,”
Riley said.

“It means you can
fly right back to Phoenix and get back on the job.”

Riley was startled
by the suggestion.

“But I just got here
yesterday,” Riley said.

April laughed a
little as she chopped up some celery.

“Look, it’s not like
I’m not glad you’re here,” she said. “But you’ve got a bad guy to catch. And I’m
going to be fine. I can get to Dr. Sloat’s office by bus. And if I get shaky, I’ve
got her number, and she says I can call her any time. And with Gabriela here,
well …”

Gabriela had just
stepped into the kitchen doorway.

“Your
hija
is
right,” she said. “April and I can handle things here.”

Riley felt a surge
of panic. April and Gabriela were both right, of course. She no longer had any
excuse not to return to Phoenix. But to her alarm, she still couldn’t seem to
make a decision.

What’s the matter
with me?
she
wondered.

Then she remembered
something else Mike Nevins had said …

“You keep right
on thinking that you should be able to do the impossible. Why is that, do you
think?”

In a flash, Riley
knew the answer to that question—or at least where and how to find an answer.
She collapsed into a kitchen chair, her tears finally flowing hard.

Gabriela and April
huddled close to her, trying to comfort her.

“Mom, what’s wrong?”
April asked.

“I know where I’ve
got to go,” Riley said through her tears. “I know who I’ve got to see.”

Rain was pouring
down hard the next day as Riley wended her way up into the Appalachian
Mountains. The dirt roads were deep with mud, and the driving was rocky and
rough. The disagreeable weather mirrored her feelings. Her rare visits to her
father were never pleasant.

Still, she knew in
her gut that this visit was necessary. The drive was taking her into more than
just a mountainous wilderness. It was taking her into the very heart of her
self-doubt. It was a part of her soul that she needed to look into without
flinching. Otherwise she might never shake off her indecision and uncertainty.

Besides, she found
the rain oddly refreshing. It was certainly a change after the dryness of the
hot Arizona air. And the surrounding forest was still lush and green. The first
frost hadn’t yet hit to turn the leaves.

The rain showed no
sign of letting up as she pulled up to the little cabin. Her father had bought
this place and some surrounding acreage when he retired from the Marines.
Generally speaking, visitors weren’t welcome here. He didn’t even have a phone
or a computer to communicate with the outside world, although he sometimes got
news during his occasional visits to the nearby town.

She opened an
umbrella and rushed toward the door. She knocked—not that she expected anyone
to answer or to welcome her inside. That just wasn’t her father’s way. But she
heard someone coughing inside the cabin.

She opened the door
and stepped inside. The single room was warm and dry, heated by a wood-burning
cook stove. Grizzled and stooped, her father was seated on a stool, skinning a
dead squirrel. Several naked squirrel carcasses were piled up next to him.

“Hi, Daddy,” she
said.

He didn’t look up
from his work. She didn’t expect him to. He had just made the initial cuts and
was pulling the pelt off of the carcass. Ever since she’d hunted with him as a
little girl, she’d admired how he did that. He made it seem as smooth and
graceful as helping a lady out of her coat on a dinner date.

He coughed loudly
for a moment. Riley found it a strange sound coming from him. She couldn’t
remember him having been sick for a single day in their life together.

When he got control
of his coughing, he said, “You came back in a hurry.”

Riley understood
what he meant. The last time she’d come to see him was a couple of months back,
in July. Before that, more than two years had gone by without her making any
attempt to contact him. And of course, no attempt at contact ever came from
him.

Riley sat down,
making herself as comfortable as she could on an uncomfortable wicker chair.
Her father coughed again. He looked paler than the last time she was here—maybe
a little thinner too. His hair was just slightly longer than the marine-style
buzz cut he’d always worn.

“Are you sick,
Daddy?” she said.

He chuckled grimly. “You’d
like that, wouldn’t you? Nothing would make you happier than to see me helpless
and sick and at death’s door. No such luck, girl. Not this time.”

Riley felt her jaw
tighten and her whole body tense up. This visit was turning ugly even faster
than the last one.

“So what kind of a
case are you working on these days?” he asked.

“Pretty much the
usual,” Riley said, finding herself dropping into his cold, detached manner of
speech. “A serial killer out in Arizona. Murders prostitutes.”

“Arizona, huh?”

He slit the squirrel
down its abdomen and started to pull out its entrails.

“Scrawny little
bastard,” he grumbled.

The smell of
squirrel guts wafted across the room toward Riley. She remembered it well. It
wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t as bad as a decomposing human corpse.

“You’re a long way
from Arizona,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Riley didn’t reply.
Her back stiffened.

“Don’t tell me,” he
said in a snarling half-cough, half-chuckle. “Things got the best of you. You
went AWOL. You’re wondering whether you’re cut out for your line of work. Yeah,
I felt that way in ’Nam from time to time. I never ran away from it, though.
Deserting’s frowned on in the Marines. Guess the Bureau’s a little more
lenient. Spoils you.”

Riley emotionally
braced herself. It was time to open up to a man who had no concept of what
openness might be.

“A lot’s happened
since the last time I was here,” she said. “April got captured by the last
killer I took down. She almost got killed.”

“April?” he asked
with a grunt.

“My daughter. Your
granddaughter.”

He coughed a bit
more. “Oh, yeah. How did she cope with it? Did she turn into a shivering ball
of helpless fear?”

Riley felt pleased
at what she got to say in reply.

“No. She helped me
kill him.”

Her father tossed
the skinned and gutted squirrel into the pile and started to work on another
carcass.

“Good girl,” he
said. “You ought to bring her around one of these days. I’d like to meet her
sometime.”

Not in this
lifetime,
Riley
thought.

Her father kept on
talking.

“So now you feel all
guilty. You think maybe you’re in the wrong line of work. You want to be a good
little mother raising a good little girl. Shit. You know what I’ve got to say
to all that.”

“There are monsters
out there, Daddy,” Riley said. “I took her into a world of monsters.”

He started to laugh,
but his laughter broke down in coughing.

“What a load of
crap. You think you’re up against a monster in Arizona? A man who kills
prostitutes? You’re not dealing with a monster. Hell, you’re not even dealing
with evil. You’re dealing with what folks call
normal.
This killer of
yours—when he’s not killing, he’s a good man, a pillar of the community, a good
husband, a good father. The opposite of me—and the opposite of you.”

Riley knew, from the
profile she herself was putting together, that he wasn’t altogether wrong. But
that didn’t answer anything.

“If he’s so good,
why does he keep killing women?” Riley asked.

Her father stopped
cutting the squirrel in mid-knife stroke. The question seemed to interest him.
He looked Riley straight in the eye.

“Why do you keep
killing men?” he asked.

Riley felt as if she’d
been plunged into a freezing lake. It was a good question. It was an important
question. It was exactly the question she’d come here hoping to have answered.

“You’re a hunter,”
her father said, still holding her gaze. “What folks call normal—it would kill
you if you tried living it too long. Truth is, it kills everybody, all that
goddamn
normalness
. It’s not natural, it’s against human nature. Makes
folks crazy with boredom. Makes them kill for no reason at all. Now, you and
me, we’ve got our reasons for killing. We’re good animals that way. We know who
we are. These killers you hunt down and kill—they just don’t have the proper insight.
They don’t know themselves. They get all out of control.”

He continued to hold
her gaze.

“Reminds me of a
saying. ‘In a mad world, only the mad are sane.’ Can’t remember who said it.
But it’s true, and that’s you and me all over. Mad people in a mad world full
of people who’ve got no reason to be sane. We’re the only folks who’ve got any
idea what’s really going on.”

He lowered his eyes
and stared at the floor, speaking almost in a whisper.

“You’ll go back to
work. You’ll head back on the next plane you can catch. I know it. You don’t
have a choice. I never gave you a choice. I raised you right, to be a hunter.
Wish I’d done as well by your sister, but it’s too late to fix that.”

Riley felt like she’d
gotten an electric shock. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever
mentioned Wendy. It seemed uncanny, because Riley had been thinking of her a
lot lately.

“Maybe I didn’t
treat her right,” he said.

“You used to hit
her,” Riley said.

Her father grunted
and nodded slowly. “That’s what I mean. I only hit her with my hands. Bruised
her up a little on the outside, that’s all. Didn’t hit her deep enough. I knew
better by the time you were growing up. I never laid a hand on you. I hit you a
lot deeper than that. You learned. You learned.”

He coughed for a long
time now. Riley could see that he was very sick. But there was no point in
trying to talk to him about it.

When his coughing
passed away, he said, “I’d ask you to stay for some squirrel stew. But you don’t
want to hang around with a mean old bastard like me. You’re ready to get the
hell out of here.”

He was absolutely
right, but Riley didn’t say so.

Instead she said, “I
don’t hate you, Daddy.”

“You’re either lying
or you’re a fool,” he said.

Riley bristled at
this.

“What the hell’s
that supposed to mean?”

“It means just what
I said. If you don’t hate me, I didn’t do my job right.”

He coughed some
more. He seemed very ill. Riley wanted to pity him. But she wasn’t going to let
herself do that. He’d really made her mad.

Sarcastically she
said, “Well, while we’re on the subject of the ‘job’ you did, maybe I should
thank you. I learned a lot from your example. I learned everything there was to
learn about how
not
to be a parent.”

“Stupid,” he said. “You’re
probably raising that girl of yours to
love
you. She’ll grow up weak.
You’ll live to regret it.”

“What do you know
about regret?” Riley snapped.

“Not much. And I’m
proud of it. You ought to be grateful, you whiny little bitch.”

By now Riley had had
enough. She’d put up with this kind of abuse all her life. She’d never fought
back. All she’d ever done was walk away. The time for walking away was over.

She stood facing
him, too close for either of their comfort.

“Do you have any
mirrors here, Daddy? I’ll bet you don’t. You wouldn’t like what you saw.”

“And what might that
be?”

“A coward. A sick,
frightened little man who never had the guts to love. A man who bullied little
children instead of men his own size.”

His eyes twisted
with fury. He raised his open hand and swung it hard at her face. She deftly
deflected the blow with her wrist.

“Go ahead, try to
hit me,” she said back, defiant. “You can’t anymore. I’m stronger than you now,
Daddy. You can’t touch me ever again.”

With a roar of rage,
he reared back, then launched a punch at her face. Riley reached up and caught
his fist with her hand, holding it in her own viselike grip. She took a step
toward him.

She snarled, “Try
that again, and I swear to God, I’ll kill you where you stand.”

Now his mouth curled
into a malicious grin. Riley felt an icy chill. He was loving this. Her hatred
was what he lived for. It was all that he had left to call his own.

But she refused to
become like him. She wasn’t going to waste her hatred on him.

She loosed her grip
on his fist and shoved it away. She looked him squarely in the eye.

She said again, “I
don’t hate you, Daddy. I refuse to hate you, no matter how hard you try.”

He looked wounded
now. He hadn’t looked wounded when she’d said that before. What had changed?

He believes me
this time,
she
thought.

After all, it was
the most hurtful thing she could possibly say to him. She’d taken away his most
treasured possession in the world.

Riley turned and
walked away. Just as she opened the door to leave, she heard him yell one more
thing.

“Never trust a man
whose kids don’t hate him.”

Even for her father,
it seemed to her like a cynical thing to say. But she wouldn’t respond to it.
She stepped outside and shut the door behind her. She didn’t bother to open her
umbrella. The rain felt good. She just stood there on the front stoop and let
it pour all over her.

The visit had turned
sour, just like she’d expected. Still, it had served its purpose. She
remembered what Mike Nevins had said to her.

“I’m not sure you
can get through this without some kind of emotional catharsis.”

Her father had given
her that catharsis. And now she even had rain to complete the cleansing.

No doubt about it,
her father was sick. But if he wasn’t going to reach out for help, or even
admit he was sick, there wasn’t anything for Riley or anybody else to do. She didn’t
have to see him ever again. And she sure as hell didn’t plan to.

She felt like
herself now. And for the first time since she’d started working on this case,
she felt the palpable presence of the killer. And he wasn’t the least bit like
her.