Raven's Cove - Jenna Ryan (6 page)

“Phoenix,” Jasmine reminded and saw his lips twitch.

“It’s also possible that one of Wainwright’s subordinates has decided either to rise up and avenge his boss’s death—unlikely—or make it appear that Malcolm’s still running the show in an effort to pump fresh blood into the rapidly crumbling business.” He rested his shoulder on a post, kept his expression bland. “Your turn, Sergeant. What and why?”

Boxman shook his head. “Crocker got in touch with me.”

“Crocker’s incommunicado.”

“Sent me a text yesterday just the same.”

“What did it say?”

“Verbatim? ‘Trouble brewing in Raven’s Cove, Maine. Daniel at risk. Go.”

“Crocker’s Daniel’s contact,” Rogan told Jasmine.

“I guess he got wind I was heading up to Vermont to visit my sister while my ex and her Lady Macbeth lawyer plot my financial demise. Guess he knows, too, that since Daniel’s no longer top of the most-likely-to-be-offed list, he could bend the rules and ask me to take a detour, make sure things were kosher with his charge. I figured what the hell, so here I am, doing a favor and getting double-teamed by a dog and a shadow cop.”

Did she believe that? Jasmine wondered. More to the point, did Rogan?

She couldn’t tell, but one thing was certain, she’d had enough of the wind and rain for one night. If it was still night.

A glance at her cell put the time at 12:05 a.m., five minutes into the witching hour in a town where legends ruled and ravens sacrificed feathers to convey death messages.

Securing her blowing hair, she glanced at Rogan. “Can we take this inside? I assume Daniel’s not here or you’d have mentioned it.”

“He’s not here. Is there a hotel in town?” Rogan asked Boxman.

“There’s a house with rooms. Birdwoman of Alcatraz runs it. I met her earlier tonight in a bar called the Raven’s Perch. House sits on a cliff on the east edge of town, but if you decide to crash here instead, we could always make it a party.” He offered a wicked smile. “It’ll be like old times, minus the irritating nits.”

Nits, Jasmine recalled, was his term for anyone who adhered too closely to the rules. Like Rogan, Boxman preferred to fly solo. Unfortunately, as far as she knew, he’d never been allowed to do so.

It took her a moment to identify the sensation settling over her as disappointment. Did that mean she’d wanted to be stranded with Rogan? Alone? That she hadn’t really come here to find Daniel? “Do I even want to know?” she muttered in disgust to herself. Catching Rogan’s eye, she summoned a smile. “Tired.”

He held her gaze for a moment, then set a hand on her back and steered her toward the door.

Maybe Boxman’s presence was a plus, she mused. Because one touch from the man behind her, and her good sense was already threatening to fly out the window.

Rogan passed a flashlight over her shoulder. “Boxman’s checking the backyard sheds for a generator.”

On the threshold and resigned, Jasmine played her beam over stack after precarious stack of newspapers, magazines and books.

She moved with care along the narrow pathways. “Trust me, this is Daniel’s idea of organized.”

“A pack rat with a system, huh?”

“It was one of our many differences. My mother was, for lack of a better term, a collector until the day she flew off on her retirement adventure. I spent my childhood learning to appreciate the value of empty space.”

“So it makes sense you’d marry a man who’d fill it up again.”

“Or bury the secret in his parents’ basement until we got back from our honeymoon in not-sunny Spain. Within days, a moving van carrying half a million books showed up on our doorstep, and it occurred to me there might have been one or two questions I’d neglected to ask.” Angling her beam upward, Jasmine sighed. “Like how many journalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

Rogan perused the overflowing phone desk. “You trusted Daniel to be truthful. Be glad he didn’t have a deeper, darker secret stashed in that basement.”

She didn’t realize he’d left the desk until she felt his knuckles graze her cheek.

“You smell like tropical flowers, Jasmine. I’ve never figured out which ones, but I’ve always thought I’d be able to pick you out of a crowd by your scent alone.” Easing her hair aside, he bared her neck. “Do you want me to make Boxman disappear?”

Did guns have triggers? “I don’t think…” she began, then caught her breath as he kissed the sensitive spot below her earlobe.

“I’ve missed you, love. You’re in my head every night when I try to sleep.”

Although her mind wanted to haze, she held tight to her last thread of reason. “Night turns to day, Rogan, every time. Moon and stars vanish and take you with them into the great unknown. The only time I knew you’d be there without fail was at the safe house. And even then I understood why you were training Boris. You’d leave, he’d stay, and that would be the end of it. It’ll be the end again when this mess we’re in now is sorted out. I’m not going to live my life on a carousel that you come to and go from whenever a situation requires your attention.”

Rogan didn’t push her, but he didn’t move away, either. “What about Boxman?”

“What about him? He’s here, we’re here, and our reasons all seem to be rooted in the growing possibility that Malcolm Wainwright didn’t die in that helicopter crash.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, God.” Suspicion at his cryptic tone had her turning to look. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He ran a light thumb across her cheek. “Boxman said Daniel’s contact sent him a text message yesterday.”

“And you don’t buy that because…?”

“Crocker’s dead, Jasmine. His throat was slashed. I found his body in the trunk of his car two days ago.”

* * *

I
N THE TWELVE YEARS HE’D
been a cop, Rogan hadn’t given a second thought to lying. It came with the territory, and most of the time that territory was a cesspool. So why did he feel like slime for not telling Jasmine the whole story?

She’d figure it out eventually, or see it for herself. In a town the size of Raven’s Cove, how could she not?

With annoyance beginning to rise and no answers in sight, he jogged to his truck, traded guilt for mistrust and moved on to Boxman.

Was the sergeant searching for a measure of off-duty glory, or something else entirely? Time would tell, he supposed, but with the stakes high and Jasmine’s life on the line, he didn’t plan to give anyone, cop or civilian, much rope.

The storm appeared to have taken root on the coast. Lack of light and power made it difficult to follow directions, but he reached his destination at last, parked and settled in to wait.

He’d left Jasmine sleeping at Daniel’s cottage. Boxman had grumbled, but agreed to spend the night in his camper. Boris would ensure he didn’t change his mind.

The passenger door opened while he was once again contemplating Jasmine’s feather. A man climbed in, soaked and cursing.

“Piece-of-crap night.” He started to rub his wrist, then flapped it forward instead. “Take us down to the water. Fishermen don’t care if the lights are powered by gas or electric. All they want’s the drink.”

As Rogan shoved the truck in gear, his companion sniffed once. And again. Then he grunted out a breath. “You brought her with you, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Why?”

“Someone threatened to kill her. Slowly. He left that as a token.”

The man beside him sighed when he spied the feather. “You were right, then. Except now we’re talking local legend, or the borrowing thereof, to do the same job to Jasmine that’s been done to the others.”

“Daniel has two feathers.”

“And just how would you know that unless you’ve been talking to him? And if you have, you might’ve mentioned it before I spent half of this hellish night slip-sliding around town—and I mean that literally as you’ll see when and if the sun ever comes out—trying to locate him.”

Ignoring the question, Rogan pointed his truck down a steep hill. “Any luck?”

“None. Far as I can tell in my extremely limited time here, no one’s seen him for two days.”

Rogan wasn’t surprised. “He called Jasmine tonight, told her about his feathers and suggested she contact someone she could trust.”

His companion snorted. “Contact someone she could trust before, once again, his meddling got her killed. Bastard’s probably gone into hiding.”

“Odds are.”

“Could as easily be dead.”

“Also possible, but only if the killer’s working with a partner, which I doubt. That feather wasn’t on Jasmine’s door when she got home from work.”

The man pointed. “See that shack near the piers that shoot out from the dock? It’s called Two Toe Joe’s. Place smells like piss. Beer tastes like it. The oldest geezer on the planet parks his bony ass there every night. You got questions about legends and feathers, he’s your man. But you gotta keep his cup full, or his vocal cords dry up.”

Rogan parked, slid out and pocketed his keys. “You learned all that in one night?”

“What can I say? I look and sound like an old salt. Makes me a kindred spirit. Good thing, too. With a couple exceptions—the geezer being one of them—folks around here mostly avoid strangers.”

Rogan found that interesting, but again not surprising given the insulated nature of Raven’s Cove. It might have a legend, but as far as he could see, no one had thought or bothered to exploit it.

With the storm still venting its fury, they jogged through the rain to a wharfside bar not much better lit than Daniel’s cottage after Boxman’s discovery of a puny generator in the toolshed.

Twenty pairs of eyes turned when they entered. “Second visit to this sailors’ toilet in one night,” his companion muttered. “Gotta be a record that’ll stand for a good decade.” Raising a hand at the bartender, he headed for a table in the back.

The plank floors were sticky, the air foul, the walls covered with old nets, stuffed ravens and damaged lobster traps.

With more ravens inside them, Rogan noted and fought a grin. For what it was worth, the place had atmosphere.

“Rooney’s over there.” His companion gestured through smoke and a layer of something resembling dirty fog. “Send a mug to his table and we’ll go from there.”

“A mug of what?”

“Whiskey.”

Rogan cast the other man a look, but said nothing. Without appearing to, he eyed the cloudy beer that was plunked in front of him. “Send a mug of his usual to the old guy next to the woodstove,” he told the stone-faced server. He debated, then figured what the hell and swallowed a mouthful from his glass.

“Horse urine,” his companion remarked. “Gotta be.”

No argument there, Rogan thought. He let his eyes roam. “Doesn’t matter how you try to connect them, the feathers and the most likely suspect don’t jibe.”

“Sure they do, or could. Wainwright or his avenger is trying to throw everyone off the scent.”

“By using a little-known legend from a town where the person who should be his prime target has been living for eighteen months. Obviously, the killer knows Daniel’s here. Run the scenario. Daniel calls Jasmine to warn her. He gets cut off, but from her end rather than his. Now she has one feather to his two. Means our killer’s threatening his ninth victim before he’s disposed of his eighth, a man who should have been his primary target from the start. Why?”

“Well—why not?”

Rogan smiled, kept his eyes moving. “You’re convinced the guy wants to hurt anyone and everyone who played a part in Wainwright’s takedown, including, but not limited to, Daniel.”

“What’s wrong with that idea? Sure, it’s not Wainwright’s style, but you and me agree he went up in smoke with his prison pals. Does it necessarily follow that his whatever you want to call him—successor, avenger—is going to do the same thing the same way he’d have done it?”

“No.” But it didn’t feel right. And where did Boxman fit in?

An uneven clomping sound penetrated the hum of gravelly voices and someone’s eerie fiddle. When the smoke and mist parted, he saw a mostly toothless old man with a big black mug beaming at him.

“Name’s Rooney Blume,” the man announced in a tone that sounded as papery as his skin looked. “My nose tells me you represent the law. Gift you sent tells me you got an interest in our legend.” At a nod from Rogan, his smile spread to ghastly proportions. He clomped closer, lowered his thin body onto a chair. “Well, then. My great-granddad times seven was among the first to settle in this town.” He eased his already empty mug forward. “Year after he got here, the evil came on him, and he started killing folks. Until one night he went to bed a man. And woke up a big black raven.”

* * *

T
HE MAN WHO WATCHED
J
ASMINE
through the cottage window hadn’t needed to follow her here. He’d known Rogan would bring her. Flies to the spiderweb, and it made no difference to him how many of them got tangled up and died. Only Jasmine mattered. Beautiful, long-limbed, raven-haired Jasmine, with her jewel-green eyes, her soft, soft skin and…

His muscles tightened as his body responded to her. He suppressed the heat with hatred. She wouldn’t do this to him, would not cost him his control, or anything else, ever again.

He was done with suffering. It was her turn to feel pain. To watch the life she’d been given slip away. To die.

Cold rain pelted him. His fingers curled. He wanted to do it now, while his fury was at its peak. But she only had one feather, and he had to see it through properly.

From feathery start to blood-soaked conclusion.

Chapter Six

The safe house, located twenty miles north of San Francisco, was foggy inside and out. Costello, the most experienced officer, was running the show, or so the handbill read, but Boxman challenged him at every turn and Victor Bowcott tended to direct his questions at Rogan.

The female cop, Carla Prewitt, ignored what she called the “big-boy ball games” and followed whatever advice suited her best.

Rogan prowled the floor like a restless wolf. Behind him, Victor and Donald Dukes played draw poker. Costello tapped his feet to Ravel on a tinny MP3, Boxman sulked and Carla studiously painted her nails.