Authors: Lyn Gala
Brady shook his head. “It’s all in bits and pieces, flashes
like these pictures.” With a grimace, he brought his fist down on the bathroom
counter, punching it hard enough that it sounded like something cracked. Either
Brady now had a broken hand or she had another repair to make. “I can’t
remember anything helpful. I’m a fucking cop, so why can’t I come up with one
helpful clue here?”
“Hey, it’s going to be okay.” He looked at her and Paige had
to admit that sounded a little stupid. Normally, she called someone else in to
deal with victims while she secured the perimeter, interviewed witnesses and
called detectives when she found anything interesting. “That was a stupid thing
to say, wasn’t it?”
Brady leaned against the counter and hung his head. “Yeah,”
Brady agreed. “It was.”
“We will get through this.” Paige was uneasy and overly
aware of the fact that he was very attractive and very half-naked. With his
bloodstained clothes off, he looked more like Brady than a murder victim, but
having Brady in her bathroom in nothing but a pair of boxers was not really all
that comfortable. However, it seemed rude to not offer some sort of reassuring
touch.
He went to turn just as she went to rest a comforting hand
on his shoulder and somehow she ended up with her palm resting against his
chest. His hard nipple pebbled under her fingers and she sucked in a fast
breath as she pulled away. “Sorry. Damn, I guess I should sign myself up for
one of the harassment classes,” she joked as she backed out of the room.
“No, it felt good,” Brady said. “Different.”
“I’m not your type, so I’ll just go get you that towel.”
Paige fled, horrified that she had done that. Brady had been attacked and she
had not only touched him, but then joked about his type. She didn’t need one of
the harassment classes—she needed the whole sensitivity curriculum again.
“Paige!” Brady called as he followed her. Even his boxers
were streaked with blood with a huge tear over the right hip. “Don’t run.”
“I’m just getting a towel,” Paige said as she reached the
front closet and buried her head in it. She needed a little time for the
embarrassment to fade and the blood to leave her face.
“No, I mean literally. Don’t run.”
Paige pulled her head out of the closet and looked at him.
“What?”
His hand was fisting the edge of her bookcase. “Don’t run.
It makes me feel funny when you run.”
Suspicious now, Paige turned to look at him. “Funny how?”
“Like I really want to chase you,” he admitted. From the
visible flinch, he didn’t want to admit it, but she gave him credit for having
the balls to confess the truth. She wasn’t as thrilled with the idea that he
wanted to chase her.
“Are we talking about chasing me in a way that would make me
press sexual harassment charges or in a way that would make me bleed?” Paige
glanced at her closet, looking for anything heavy enough to make a good weapon.
She had an old hand weight that would hurt like hell if she could get in a good
swing.
“Can I plead the fifth?” he asked. While Paige felt a flash
of fear, she also noticed how miserable Brady looked. He might be feeling a
need to chase her, but he didn’t want to.
“You try anything and I’ll knee you hard enough to make your
balls swell up like melons,” she warned.
Brady looked up at her in surprise. “But—”
“But nothing. You try it and see what happens. You guys. You
think if you’re taller and bigger that you’ll win the fight. But I’m older and
meaner and I’ll bet on old and mean any day of the week.” She grabbed a red
towel out of the closet and just about threw it at him. “Here. Since we don’t
know whether the sun is going to kill you, I’ll go get the duct tape out of the
garage. And Brady….” He caught the towel and looked at her in surprise. “Don’t
walk around my house half-naked. You’ll scare the chickens.”
He was still blinking at her in confusion as she turned and
walked away, very careful to not run. She made it to the garage door without
looking over her shoulder, and when she turned to check, Brady was gone from
the hallway, so hopefully he’d gone to get cleaned up.
“Well, that was interesting,” she told herself as she headed
through the laundry room and out into the garage. She’d grown up in farm
country where the coyotes used to come in and try to grab the chickens and
cats. Paige had a love-hate relationship going with those clever little
predators. Sure, she’d chase them away from the farm stock, but sometimes she’d
lie on the hill at dusk and watch them go after feral cats or squirrels or
mice.
The second an animal spotted them and started running, the
whole pack of gangly legged coyotes would be up and after it. Some genetic
coding made them chase anything that ran.
She supposed it was those same genes that made their dog
Chloe chase the cars that drove by on that old dirt road. Chloe knew she wasn’t
ever going to catch a car, but she just couldn’t stop herself from chasing it.
She’d come home with her tongue hanging out and her face gray with dust and
she’d throw herself down in the shade of a pine tree, but when the next car
came, she was up and running again.
Unless Paige was missing something, Brady had something like
that in him right now. If someone ran, he was going to want to run them down.
She was trying hard to not think about what he’d do if he caught that person,
but growing up around those coyotes, she couldn’t ignore the truth. Fact was,
part of Brady was a hunter now, even if he hadn’t killed. And part of him knew
that and hated it.
Walking over to the workbench, she grabbed the duct tape and
then spent a second just wondering what the hell she was doing. It might be
that Brady could control himself. It might be that he was changing and the more
he changed, the more he became like those coyotes—a prisoner of genetics and
instincts that defined the world as predator and prey. “What the hell am I
supposed to do?” she asked the universe.
She was a simple woman with a small life. Some people might
have a problem with that, but she liked having a small life. She got her hair
cut three times a year and never did her nails. While others killed themselves
chasing promotions and degrees, she did her job, did it well, came home and
enjoyed cooking and reading and just having time to do a whole lot of nothing.
She’d earned that and now the universe was having the world’s biggest joke at
her expense by giving her an interesting life.
Pasting on her most supportive expression, Paige headed for
the bathroom. She was just going to have to pray for some sort of inspiration
because she had no idea what the hell she was going to do now.
Chapter Three
Paige looked around the apartment, her stomach rolling.
Dark, congealed blood stained the carpet and spilled over
onto the kitchen, where it made an orange inkblot against the yellow linoleum.
The glass coffee table had shattered and the pieces sparkled like diamonds in
the ugly gray carpet. Blood was smeared across one arm of the couch, and the
wall behind the broken television had a huge streak that looked like someone
had been cut open and then shoved up against the wall.
If she didn’t know that Brady was at her house, she would
have looked at this and decided that he was dead. Actually, he was dead, but
she would have assumed he was a more permanent sort of dead. No one could bleed
this much and survive. A jar of change had been thrown against the wall and
shards of curved glass and dimes and quarters glimmered. Paige wondered if
Brady had tried to use it as a weapon. If so, it hadn’t worked. A
crescent-shaped break in the wall suggested the jar had hit it rather than any
of the suspects.
She swallowed the bile that tried to climb up her throat. No
one deserved to die like this, but she felt a personal sort of failure that she
hadn’t been here for her partner when he needed her so much. Logically, she
might not have been able to save him, but he shouldn’t have died alone. Not
like this.
It was too late for her to do anything about that, but she
could help him now. Maybe. Paige looked around and tried to look at the crime
scene like a tech or detective might. She knew that most murders came out of
arguments and this looked like one hell of a fight, but Brady said he’d been
jumped.
The area around the front door took the least amount of
damage, just a few smears of blood. Maybe Brady was restrained or dead by the
time they dragged him out. The fact was that she couldn’t process the scene
without help. Short of finding a giant pentagram with an arrow pointing toward
the killers, she didn’t have the training of a detective.
Up until this point, she’d never wanted to be the one in
charge of an investigation—she hadn’t wanted the stress of watching an
investigation fall apart and people die. She hadn’t wanted to carry that guilt
because she knew how much damage guilt could do to a person. And now she was
feeling the guilt anyway because she didn’t know how to help Brady.
Glancing at the clock, she realized that she was running out
of time. She should be at the station soon. If she didn’t call this in now, she
was going to have a hard time selling the story that she’d come over to pick
Brady up for work. Heading into the bedroom, she grabbed a pair of jeans and a
couple of shirts and rolled them into a tight bundle before tucking them into
the bottom of her messenger bag and then pulling out her cell phone and dialing
the dispatch’s direct number.
The army of cops that showed up for her officer in trouble
call overwhelmed the small apartment complex, and Paige retreated to the shadow
of a half-dead pine that was shedding brown needles. The morning was cool and
dew made the world look slick and gray as she watched clouds crawl across the
sky.
She needed the help to find Brady’s attackers, but she still
felt strange hiding the truth from the department. She’d learned to trust
police pretty early in life, back when her father hadn’t been able to really be
there for her, and now she was hiding things from them.
Of course, if she told them that Brady had been turned into
a vampire or a zombie or something, they were definitely going to find a very
small padded cell for her. Maybe he was an alien. Aliens might make more sense
than zombies. Then again, the simplest solution was that she’d totally and
completely lost her mind and she was imagining all this. She wasn’t taking that
off the table yet.
The captain’s car pulled up and Paige watched him head into
the apartment. Most of the uniforms had been exiled from the apartment and they
were either knocking on neighbors’ doors or talking in small groups, but the
few that had wandered her way she’d warned them off with a curt “Not now”. So
most were interviewing the neighbors.
An older man with a terrier was talking Alex’s ear off, but
Alex didn’t seem to write much in his notebook. Two women whispered and clung
to each other in exaggerated grief and a blonde woman in business clothes stood
in the shadow of the carport, frowning at the apartment and ignoring Veronica
Lee. The captain was only inside for a few minutes before he came out, his gaze
sweeping over the area until he saw her under the tree. He spoke to a couple of
uniforms at the top of the stairs and then he headed toward her.
“Silver? Are you okay?”
“Sir, I found his apartment like that.”
Captain Foley moved to sit on the chain draped between two
concrete posts so cars couldn’t drive up onto the landscaping. “So you didn’t
see anyone?”
She shook her head. “Was he having trouble with anyone?
Arguments?” Foley asked. “Any rumors of trouble, even something small enough
that you dismissed it?”
“Not that he said to me,” Paige said. “Everyone likes him.”
Captain Foley nodded and looked over at the apartment. “Not
everyone. Someone picked his lock, so this wasn’t a push-in.”
Paige sucked in her breath. So Brady was right—they’d been
waiting for him. This wasn’t a random attack—someone had targeted her partner.
“Any idea who? Is there any evidence?” Paige held her breath as her chest
tightened in anticipation. She just needed a clue so she could do something
other than stand around like some fucking worthless statue. Pigeons were going
to start crapping on her soon.
“You can’t work this, Silver.”
Paige shook her head. “I’m not looking to work it, Captain.
I just want to help or to know what’s going on or something. He’s my partner.”
The captain looked at her sadly. She understood that look.
She’d learned it when she’d seen her mother die and the police on the scene had
looked at her with this pity every time she’d asked to see her mom. She’d hated
the pity then and she hated it now. The captain sighed. “You saw how much blood
was in there.”
She nodded.
“If it’s his blood—”
“I know,” Paige cut him off. “There’s too much, but I can’t
assume he’s gone,” she said, not pointing out the fact that she knew he wasn’t
gone because the last time she’d seen him, he’d been taking the world’s longest
shower in her bathroom. He was dead, but he wasn’t gone. She was definitely
feeling like the stranger in a very strange land.
“None of us are assuming that. We’re working this as an
assault and kidnapping. We’re pulling resources off the taskforce for this.
It’s our first priority.”
“The taskforce?” Paige’s stomach twisted with guilt. After a
lifetime of trying to avoid guilt, she was getting buried in an avalanche of
the stuff. “But the rapist is out there. We can’t let the case go cold.” Paige
wanted to find who had killed Brady, but not at the cost of more deaths. This
rapist was a sadistic bastard, and even if he wasn’t technically setting out to
murder his victims, his methods were brutal enough that more women would die if
they couldn’t catch him.
“We’re not letting either of these cases go cold. But right
now I just need you to tell me what happened last time you saw Ross.”