Shock Waves (7 page)
“I’ll never forget the sky,” she said. “So sharply blue it hurt to look at it, stretching on forever.” Like an endless swath of sapphire velvet, she remembered thinking. The familiar ache rose up in her chest, curled like a vise, constricted. “Only a few clouds.” Floating aimlessly. Foolishly. “Those big fat, fluffy puffs of cotton Grandma called shape-shifters.”
“Shape-shifters?”
“Magical.” Mystical. “The kind you could stretch out on the grass and stare up at, let your mind drift. I might see castles and dragons, but those same clouds would shift shapes for you, and in them you’d find something altogether different.”
His gaze took on a slow burn. “What would I see?”
A sailboat. That was the first image that came to her. Tall and powerful, with its sail billowed out by a blast of wind, barreling across the sea of the sky. “You tell me,” she said instead. She felt her voice pitch low, didn’t understand why. “What do you see when you look into the sky?”
Did he even look?
Abruptly he turned from her, toward the oval window, to the night beyond. The stars, once so intense and vibrant and plentiful, now blurred into faint swirls of distant light. Clouds whizzed past them, not the shape-shifting kind, but a dense mist that somehow seemed sinister.
“I don’t see anything,” Ethan muttered, and deep inside, Brenna felt a little protest rise up.
“When was the last time you looked?” The question slipped out before she could think better of it, and in the silence that ensued, seconds passed before she realized she was holding her breath.
Slowly Ethan turned to face her. She didn’t need him to speak to know his answer, the truth glowed in his eyes, the same faraway look he’d had when speaking of his grandfather. “When I was a kid I saw sailboats.”
This time when her breath caught, it was for a very different reason.
Time hung there between them, elongated, stretched to the breaking point. Silence drowned out the silky hum of the jet engine, the low murmur of the guards talking up front. Instinct demanded that she look away from Ethan, break the moment, but curiosity refused to let her. The man … fascinated her. In so very, very many ways he reminded her of Dave, but in other ways he was unlike anyone she’d ever met.
Touch her, and it will be the last mistake you make.
She recoiled from the memory, the dream, the strobe-light image of Ethan running down the beach, shouting. Of the woman, her torn white sundress flapping in the breeze. The surging, crashing wave of red. The flash of white.
The darkness.
“Brenna?”
She blinked, focused on the angles of his harshly handsome face, absorbed the sight of him now, sitting inches from her, with his eyes all concentrated and glowing, whiskers darkening his jaw.
Alive.
“What?”
“Are you o—” He broke off the question, launched another. “Why was Detective Brinker at your grandmother’s funeral?”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or clench her fists in frustration. For a moment she’d successfully ripped away something between them, that invisible barrier Ethan used to hold himself apart from others. The doubt that had throbbed between had vanished, and he’d been just a man, she just a woman, comparing notes from a simpler time.
Now the prosecutor waited.
“Because,” she answered quite simply, quite honestly, “he held himself responsible for her death.”
But simple was never good enough for men like Ethan Carrington, and he immediately dug for more. “Why?”
Brenna looked away from him and stared down at her hands, her nails short and unpainted, her fingers curled against her palm. When she opened them, she knew she’d find small crescents dug into the flesh, deep and red, rimmed by bloodless white.
Two years. Two years since the lies and the betrayal, the consequences. The aftermath. Two years since she’d held a gun on a man she’d once trusted, a man who stood before her naked and leering, laughing. Two years since she’d raced through the night, run from her car and onto the porch, burst into the house, the darkness, knowing even as she did that it was too late. That she was too late.
Two years since her world had caught up with her.
Two years since she’d quit living.
“When I was growing up, I had a knack for finding things.” Back then, it had seemed like a game, an adventure. A gift. Only later did she learn the truth. “Stuffed animals, jewelry, neighborhood pets.” She closed her eyes, drifted back in time. “My grandmother had a cat. She was a tiny little white angel, with slanted green eyes and little pink ears … only problem was she was deaf. One day we couldn’t find her anywhere—calling wouldn’t work—and realized she’d managed to get outside. Gran was sick with worry. Little Elsie was completely defenseless. We looked and looked and looked, and then I had the strongest feeling to venture out back to an old abandoned shed. Inside I found a broken floorboard, and down below, little Elsie sat, cold and scared and shivering.”
Brenna opened her eyes but didn’t look at Ethan. “I’d never been inside it before that day. I didn’t even know it was there.”
Nothing. Just silence, the thick, heavy kind that spoke a language of its own.
“When I was seventeen a girl in my class disappeared.” Gretchen. A cheerleader, a beautiful, precocious, I-can-take-on-the-world blonde. “That night when I went to bed, I saw her. By the river. Tied to a tree, bleeding and beaten. But alive.”
“You saw her?” Ethan repeated. “Don’t you mean you had a nightmare?”
Brenna forced a breath, refused to let herself slip too far away. “I went to the cops, told them what I’d seen, told them they had to get to her fast or it would be too late.”
“And?”
“They laughed, thanked me ever so politely and told me to leave crime solving to the professionals.” Bitterness squeezed from her throat, tightened her voice. “It was ten days later that they found her by the river, tied to a tree, dead of excessive blood loss.”
Ethan swore softly. “What happened then?”
“They brought me in for questioning.” The memory sickened. “Put me in one of those interrogation rooms and spent the next several hours throwing heinous scenarios at me. That I was jealous. In need of attention. That I’d staged the whole scene—that I’d brutally assaulted my classmate—just so I could play hero and lead the cops to her.”
A moment of silence passed before Ethan said anything. “Look at me, Brenna.”
She didn’t want to, but slowly she did.
He watched her through those penetrating eyes, but the dark green depths didn’t burn with prosecution as they had before. Instead she found the embers of a horror she knew better than to trust. “They were doing their job. You know that, don’t you?”
The jab of pain was quick and efficient. “I know.” She knew it now and she’d known it then. To the cops her warning looked more like a confession.
“You weren’t arrested?”
“Not enough evidence.” But not for lack of trying. “After that it was hard to go back to school. Gretchen was dead, and suddenly I was a freak. The crowd she ran with never believed my story.” Never missed an opportunity to intimidate and harass. “Thank God we graduated a few weeks later.”
“Is that when you met Brinker?”
Brenna shook her head. “That was later. He was working on a case, the disappearance of a professor at the local college I was attending.” Stick to the facts, she reminded herself. Recount the story without the crippling emotion. “It was the same thing all over again—I had a dream and saw Professor Little, knew she was still alive.”
Ethan’s gaze narrowed. “So you went to the police?”
“I didn’t want to.” God, how she’d wanted to erase the dream, the knowledge, but every time she’d closed her eyes, she’d seen her professor, alone in a cellar, desperate, and she’d known she had to try. “The detective I talked to blew me off, patted me on my head like a good little puppy dog and sent me on my way, but another detective caught up with me outside.”
“Brinker?”
“Brinker.” And instantly she’d known he was different. There’d been a strength to him, not ugly and twisted like the first detective, but brimming with integrity and compassion. “He listened to me. He asked questions, took notes.” The emotion she’d been fighting swarmed her throat, thickened her voice. “Twelve hours later he found Professor Little, badly beaten and repeatedly raped, but alive.”
Ethan’s mouth flattened into a hard line. “He believed you.”
“He believed me.” Moisture stung the back of her eyes, but she refused to let it fall, refused to let this hard, unyielding man know how much it hurt just to remember. “We worked together for several years after that. Mostly missing children, one serial killer just getting started.”
“What went wrong?”
The question startled her. “What?”
“Something went wrong,” he repeated. His voice was softer than before, warmer, and deep inside she had to wonder if it was a ploy. “I can see it in your eyes.”
Instinctively she blinked. “He was assigned a new partner. Adam Gerritson.” She didn’t need to close her eyes to see him as he’d been that first day, all tall and well built, with a deep gold
“The suburb slayer,” Ethan muttered.
The sound of the press’s nickname, after all this time, was enough to unleash the horror. Her stomach churned. She turned toward Ethan, saw the memory etched in his face. “You remember the case.”
The lines of his face tightened. “I wouldn’t let my sisters go grocery shopping alone until that bastard was caught.”
Brenna fought the surge of warmth, the glimpse of Ethan Carrington the man, the protective brother, the son who loved his family so deeply he was willing to shed his own blood to preserve theirs.
“I woke up one night with this cold certainty drilling through me. I’d seen the killer. Knew where to find him.” The slippery slope beckoned, but she resisted, knowing if she let herself go, even an inch, this time she might never claw her way back. “I tried to reach Dave but got Adam instead. I gave him the information, and he promised to check things out.”
“Did he?”
“I thought he did,” she said. “For three days I fed him information, and for three days he lied to me.”
Ethan muttered something unintelligible under his breath. “What happened?”
For two years she’d worked hard to lock the memory away, somewhere deep, somewhere safe, somewhere it couldn’t destroy on a daily basis. Now it slid through, cold and dank and slimy. “I was with Adam when this horrible sensation washed over me. It was like the world had just stopped spinning, like everything had slammed to a halt.” A cruel, punishing halt. “And I knew. I knew something horrible had happened.” That’s when she’d pulled the gun. That’s when she’d demanded the truth. “I was too late,” she whispered. “Too late.”
“Damn it, Brenna,” Ethan growled, and with his free hand grabbed a blue blanket from the seat pocket in front of him and draped it over her body. The warmth was immediate, but nowhere near as intense as the press of his fingers to her jaw. Slowly he turned her face toward his. “Too late for what?”
She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to see the strength in his face, the juxtaposition of hard lines and impossibly soft lips. The glow in his eyes that she foolishly wanted to label compassion.
”
Too late for what?” he asked again, and this time his voice, the subtle urging in it, crushed her resolve. She lifted her eyes to his face and almost drowned.
“I ran.” Her voice cracked on the words, the memory. She wanted to run now, not to or from anything, just to run, change things somehow, undo the past. “Home. To Grandma.” But even as she’d leaped from her car, she’d known it was too late. There’d been a stillness inside her, a vacuum she’d never experienced, like the lifeless, empty confines of space. “There was blood on the porch.” And the house had been cold, unnaturally cold for a gorgeous spring day. “She was in the kitchen, on the floor in front of the stove.” Blood, so much blood. “There was a fresh blueberry pie,” she whispered. Her favorite. “Untouched.”
Against the side of her face, Ethan’s fingers, so big and strong, inched higher. “I’m sorry.”
Brenna tried to bring him into focus, but saw only her grandmother sprawled on the kitchen floor. “The bastard got her. He knew I was on to him and got her before we could get him.”
Ethan’s mouth twisted. “He was a cop, wasn’t he?”
Brenna felt the glow move into her eyes, the hatred stream through her body. “Adam had told him about my visions over beer, and he realized we were closing in.”
“He killed Brinker’s wife, too.”
“On the same day,” she confirmed. “Hoping to teach us a lesson, force us to back off.”
Ethan’s hand fell away. “Brinker shot him dead three hours later.”
“Dave was never the same man. Never forgave himself for trusting his partner, never forgave himself for relying on Adam to pass on crucial information.”