Her Dying Breath (37 page)

Nick started to respond but clamped his mouth closed. She had her answer.

“I think you’d better leave.” She gestured to the disgusting baggie and piano wire. “And take that with you.”

What was she going to tell her boss? She had to finish the story.

But she couldn’t work yet, not when Nick’s masculine scent still clung to her body and sheets and…when she wanted him again, even though he’d betrayed her.

So she shoved him toward the door, struggling to hold back the tears until she’d slammed it shut and locked it behind him.

Nick’s stomach knotted into a fist as he drove to the cemetery. He had hurt Brenda.

Fuck. He hadn’t meant to reveal that he knew anything about her past, but the shock of Bullock’s phone call, the anonymous tip the night before, the evidence Seven had left at Brenda’s, and the fact that he’d just slept with her and poured out his soul had triggered him to lash out at her.

She hadn’t deserved it.

He wanted to go back in and apologize and pull her back into bed with him. For the two of them to forget this case and concentrate on making love again.

But that wasn’t who he was.

He was a lawman.

He had to chase the leads wherever they took him.

Dr. Bullock and Jake were waiting for him at the graveyard when he arrived, Jake’s face as grim as his. “It took some time to get the paperwork in order,” Jake said, “but under the circumstances the judge readily agreed.”

A team was in place to exhume the grave, had already placed a tent around it for privacy purposes. The extra coffin was waiting in the hearse in case they needed to transport the remains to the medical examiner’s office for an autopsy.

“I requested the medical records on Mom and the baby,” Nick said. “But apparently they couldn’t be found.”

“What a surprise,” Jake muttered as he gestured for the team to begin digging.

Nick and Jake grew quiet, each of them turning inward as the gravity of the situation settled in.

All their lives, they believed they’d lost their mother in childbirth, and that the baby hadn’t made it either. A little girl that they’d never met or known.

And now she might be alive.

“There is a coffin,” one of the workers said a few minutes later, his shovel hitting stone.

“Let’s pull it up,” Nick said.

Jake crossed his arms, his anger as palpable. Had their father lied to them all these years? Was their baby sister really alive?

B
renda scrubbed herself in the shower, desperate to erase Nick’s scent from her skin.

She was such a fool.

She’d fallen in love with him, and he’d dug into her private past. Tears blurred her vision, and she doubled over as a sob escaped her.

He knew that she’d been at the sanitarium.

Knew her deepest, darkest secret, that she’d had a breakdown, an identity crisis.

She soaped and rinsed her hair, closing her eyes as the tears fell.

Was that the reason he’d questioned her about that phone call tip? Had he thought that she was so emotionally unstable that she’d actually resort to murder?

No…

Memories of him kissing her flooded her. Surely he hadn’t made love to her with those doubts in his mind.

No, he hadn’t made love to her. Any emotions were all in
her
mind. To him, he’d simply had sex.

Maybe he used women all the time.

The shower water was turning cold, so she flipped it off, grabbed a towel, and dried off. She yanked on her robe, then combed her hair and stared at her face in the mirror.

Bruises from the accident still discolored her cheeks, her eyes were puffy and red from crying, and she looked…haunted.

As she calmed, the conversation she’d overheard between Nick and his brother echoed in her head. Nick had been talking to Jake about his sister. But his sister was dead.

Or at least they’d thought so. Did they now have reason to believe that wasn’t true?

Why did Seven contact you?

Originally she’d thought it was to gain publicity for the crimes.

But had she planned to frame Brenda all along?

And if so, why?

Her head was swimming.

Her reasons must have to do with that sanitarium…

For years, Brenda had tried so hard to block out her stay there, but she needed to remember.

Maybe Seven thought Brenda had abandoned her, like everyone else in her life had.

Was she exacting revenge against her by setting her up for the murders?

Nick stared at the empty grave in shock.

Jake squatted down to examine the small coffin. “Fucking unbelievable.”

“But why?” Nick asked. “And what the hell did he do to her?”

“Good question,” Jake said as the ME shook his head in disbelief. “He could have given her up for adoption when Mom died.”

“Because he didn’t know how to raise a girl?” Nick said aloud.

“Hell, he didn’t know how to raise us,” Jake said.

A million scenarios ran through Nick’s head, none of them pleasant. “I hope he did give her to a nice family.”

“I don’t believe that, and neither do you,” Jake said. “The blood work tells the story.”

Nick nodded, then raked a hand across the mounds of twigs and debris that had blown across their mother’s grave. A bone-deep ache stole his breath. “If he lied about our sister, maybe he lied about Mom, too.”

Jake shaded his eyes with his hand. “At this point, we can’t believe anything he said. We’ll have to exhume her grave to find out.”

Nick agreed, grateful Jake had had the foresight to obtain a warrant for both graves in advance. Memories of his childhood years tortured him, though, as he watched the gravediggers start working on his mother’s grave.

All those times his father had abused him, verbally and physically—if his mother was alive, had she known and allowed it to happen?

He’d assumed that his father had hidden the episodes from her when he was little. In fact, he had only been two when she died, and barely remembered anything about her. Except her sweet smell, like some kind of perfumed powder, and her tender, soft voice as she sang lullabies to him before bedtime.

He remembered talk about a new baby, and one night touching her big belly and feeling a movement as the baby kicked.

But the next night he woke to her screaming and remembered blood, and his father had rushed her to the hospital.

When his father returned, he was alone.

The wind had been howling that night, the screen door slapping against the frame as the Commander told them their mother and the baby were gone.

After that, the Commander became a monster.

Now, the ominous sound of the shovel scraping away dirt and rock reverberated in the tension-filled air as the men heaved dirt off the grave and threw it into a pile to the side.

Jake stepped aside to phone Sadie, while Nick watched. He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that his mother might be alive. If she was, where had she been?

With his sister?

Somehow, he couldn’t imagine the woman with the sweet scent and soft voice standing by and allowing her husband to abuse her children as the Commander had.

He couldn’t imagine
any
mother allowing that kind of abuse. Yet he knew that it happened. He’d seen it on the job. Heard stories that still shocked him, made him wonder if there was any good left in the world.

The wind swirled dead leaves around his feet, then voices shouted as the steel casket came into view. They all stood back as the machine lifted the slick gray coffin and maneuvered it to the ground beside the grave.

Jake returned, his gaze meeting Nick’s, full of unspoken questions, as the men pried the lid of the coffin open.

Brenda needed to talk to her source at the hospital. Maybe she could fill in the missing pieces in Brenda’s memory.

Jake had pushed her to reveal her source’s name during the investigation into Walt Nettleton’s death. But Brenda had promised to keep the woman anonymous, to protect her.

She dialed the number from memory. If she’d programmed the name into her contact list, anyone, especially the police, could have gained access to it, and Brenda refused to endanger her.

The phone rang a half dozen times, then rolled to voice mail, and she left a message. “The Slaughter Creek Strangler killed the senator’s son. I think she’s trying to frame me. Please call me.”

The clock struck ten, and she frowned. Ron Stowe’s funeral was at two o’clock. She had hours before then.

Taking a chance that her source might be at work, she quickly dressed for the funeral in a black dress, then, deciding that Ron would have liked a little color, added a red scarf. She grabbed her phone and purse and drove to the sanitarium.

A storm was brewing outside, the wind hurling debris across the winding road as she climbed the mountain. Headlights from an oncoming car nearly blinded her, and she braked, hugging the side of the road, her earlier accident flashing through her mind. The car raced on, leaving the deserted stretch of road pitch-dark.

When her parents admitted Brenda to the hospital for treatment, she’d been angry and resentful. She’d also been plagued with awful dreams about who her real mother could have been.

Sometimes she imagined that a rich teenage actress had given birth to her, and was now famous and living in Hollywood. Other times she thought maybe her mother had been raped and couldn’t stand the sight of her. And sometimes she imagined that her mother had wanted her desperately, but that she’d died and was watching her from heaven.

But then there was the recurring dream about the homeless crackhead.

Come on, baby girl,
a voice inside her head whispered.
Just crawl in this alley and we’ll hide for a while. We’ll find something to eat when the restaurant closes down.

That
had
been a dream, hadn’t it?

Because the crackhead reminded her of the woman in her other nightmares. Especially the one in which she was four, living on the streets with this woman.

An image of a particular nasty day flashed back. It had been pouring down rain and freezing, and Brenda’s head was stuffed up. One minute she was cold, the next burning up.

The woman was tall, rail thin, had scraggly brown hair and hollowed-out eyes. Her skin was an ugly yellow color, and sores covered her arms and face.